The Poets' Wives (17 page)

‘I know your husband was arrested.’

The words are frozen motionless, so suddenly real that she can almost touch their coldness, but she lets her face register nothing and does not answer.

‘It’s what they say,’ the girl adds, as if trying to justify what she has said.

‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip,’ she tells her but when she turns to leave, she feels a hand clutch her arm.

‘Please. I meant no harm. I understand.’

She wants to slap her, to tell her that she can’t understand, but instead she pauses because now she needs to know what if anything is the consequence of this knowledge. The young woman takes her pause as an indication that she is willing to listen but instead of speaking points to the little store that is in the corner of the stairwell. She opens the door with a clearly practised stealth and beckons her in. She hesitates. Nothing feels right any more but she enters. There are bundles of shovels for clearing the winter snow, their blades rusted but white-speckled; brooms and buckets and an untidy pile of heaped logs lolling at an angle. Open pipework lattices the walls and some of them are lagged with old sacking. The girl closes the door behind them, holding it open just long enough to put her eye to the narrowed seam of outer light. A small high window allows a shadowy smear of daylight to define the cluttered basement space. It suddenly feels like a game that she doesn’t want to be playing, a game where the forfeit for losing is not yet fully known.

‘We come here sometimes,’ she says as she sits on a broken remnant of a classroom desk, its wood stained with blots of black ink and carved with initials.

She doesn’t want to know this, she doesn’t want to know who it is that comes or what they do. Doesn’t like the way this student feels able to include her in her secrets. All her focus is now on how she will extricate herself from this situation. And there is a sudden fear that somehow her own fate is in danger of being bound to the emotionally fragile state of this young woman whose cheekbones still glitter with the traces of her tears.

‘Tell me now,’ she says to the young woman and she inflects her voice deliberately with a teacher’s impatience.

She sees the girl’s hesitation, her stalling for time in the way she pushes her hand through the untidiness of her hair. So she nods at her, signalling her to start. Leaves fritter and whisper against the thick glass of the window then blow elsewhere. Already she knows that what she is about to be told is of consequence but she can find little in her that cares about the girl, thinking only now of how it will affect herself and what danger it might bring. The girl hesitates again and then the words tumble out and she cries again when she has finished.

So she has a boyfriend whom she loves dearly and who treats her better than anyone has ever done. He is the son of someone important in the local Party. She has met both his parents and they have also treated her well. Her own parents have perished bravely in the war. Except they haven’t. Instead, at the start of collectivisation, her father was exiled as a kulak to Arkhangelsk and her mother had fled with her to distant relations who had conspired to keep their origins hidden. As a teenager Frida has simply invented a new identity for herself and thrown herself into it with all the vigour she could muster, joining the Pioneers and then gaining admission to the Komsomol. But now she has received an anonymous letter that threatens her with exposure if she doesn’t break off her relationship. She thinks it’s from someone jealous of her newfound love, even someone who sees him as quite a catch and wants him for herself. She doesn’t know how this person has found out about her background – she has never told anyone, not a single soul.

The type of story she’s just listened to is not unknown to her in its essential form. All over the country people reinvent themselves constantly. Some earnestly try to erase all the details of their previous life, seek especially to banish any present trace of affiliations to those who have proved themselves enemies of the people. Some will blissfully contradict what they publicly earlier declared was their passionate belief; disown even their wives or husbands. The individual concept of self is now built on shifting sands, destined to move in parallel with wherever prevailing winds might blow. So what now must she say to this young woman who faces the loss of her love? She looks up at the small window and remembers the one above the interrogator’s head, the glimpse it briefly afforded of far-off sky.

But already she knows she has no answer to give. There are spent matches on the floor. The room has been used as a smoking den.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, then turns to go.

‘What must I do?’ the young woman demands as she stands and holds out a hand towards her in a gesture of entreaty.

‘Do you love him? Truly love him?’

‘With all my heart.’

‘Then there’s nothing can be done except to hope that he loves you equally,’ she says and she shakes her head to try and stop the futility of further questions. ‘I hope he does. And if he doesn’t then you’re better off without him.’

And then she opens the door and climbs the stairs and walks quickly along the corridor to the small room that has been provided for her in return for the duties she carries out in supervising the dormitories. She has no more thoughts for the young woman except that if it comes to her drowning she hopes she does so without pulling anyone else under with her. Her position has been too hard won and she is not yet ready to search out another bolthole.

She kicks off her shoes and curls herself under the blanket that she persists with for the little warmth it provides despite its coarseness that scratches the skin. She makes herself small in the bed trying to generate as much heat as she can muster before slowly stretching her limbs into the colder spaces. She tries to remember what it is like to sleep with someone close whose warmth and words could shut out the outer world. Her hand moves to her face and she remembers how when she’d return after they’d been apart, even for a few short hours, he’d touch it, tracing its contours as if he was restoring her to his memory.

Did he carry her face bright and sharp to the very end? Did it linger, a print on the tips of his fingers? Or did all the things he had to see blur her image into a shadowed vagueness? She tries to remember his touch in hers as she lets her fingers linger on her skin. Never the most beautiful face in the world. Not like Olga’s, not even for a second. She sees her now in all her youthful beauty, the dark wave of her hair – dark like the young woman on the stairs – and the shiny jet of her eyes. It was when she nearly lost him, the closest they ever came to separation, and there are times when she wonders about the course her life would have taken if she had. He treated her badly during that period and there is part of her that still smarts at the humiliations she had to endure. Only her packed suitcase sitting on the kitchen table brought him to his senses, shocked him into a realisation of what she was prepared to do.

Perhaps it is anger that makes her feel a gradual warmth creep into the bed as she remembers the simpering Olga swanning around the apartment without a trace of embarrassment or shame, staking her claim in the most vulgar manner and without a single word of rebuke from him. She should have packed the case sooner, forced him to make his choice instead of standing by while they blatantly conducted an affair. But he was besotted and although he never said it, there was somehow an unspoken sense that he was entitled to this relationship. Did he think the title of poet gave him permission to sleep with another woman in such a brazen way? He wouldn’t even deign to talk about it, with Olga continuing to appear at the apartment at all hours of the day and night as if she had established formal rights to residency.

As she remembers her own misery during this time she thinks of the young student on the stairwell and regrets that her words have sounded harsh. She thinks of going back but rejects the idea. Perhaps there comes a time when all love requires a sacrifice which no one else can help with. Whether or not to accompany Osip into exile was not a question she even had to consider – she would have gone to the ends of the earth for him because she knew the possibility of no other life except in their love. She thinks again of his expression of utter shock when he came back unexpectedly and saw her packed case. How strange is fate – if he hadn’t returned so soon after going out because he had forgotten something, she would have gone. She imagines him calling her name in the empty apartment and it returning to him unanswered. Would he have tried to find her or simply fallen forever into the willing arms of Olga? She will never know but what she does have is the memory of his words pleading with her to stay, the welter of words that expresses his need of her, the promise to throw Olga over for good. She would have liked it more if there had been some recognition of the hurt he had caused her and there is a part of her that wonders even now as she pushes the scratch of the blanket away from the bare skin of her arm whether what he needed most at that moment was the care she gave him, her understanding of the poetry and the work that needed to be done. He insisted she listen while he broke it off on the phone so that even in his rejection of his lover she was made subservient to his will.

If the doubt still lingers there is no trace of it when she thinks of what their life became, what bond between them was established and strengthened. But her pleasure at the memory of it also edges into bitterness at the knowledge it has been taken from her, that the path which stretches ahead is a solitary one. So now there is only the coarseness of a blanket in a tiny bed in a tiny room in a remote provincial town to protect her from the loneliness of the night that she thinks of as starless and over-arching. They knew the reality of love even before he was cast out and then arrested so it was much more than just a case of the danger in which they found themselves forcing them together. And they didn’t cling together in fear even in the final years – he wasn’t capable of existing like that, never living his life like some withered leaf waiting for winter’s final blast. Despite it all he went on finding limitless pleasure in the simplest of things – sunlight on water, frost on a snowed tree, the early-morning song of a bird. And his deep enjoyment of people who lived uncomplicated lives and who could contribute a folk song or a verse of some old poem they had learned as a child never left him.

And slowly, steadily, she becomes close to the poetry itself until it almost feels as if it’s being breathed through her. He composes in his head and generally there is a surge of restlessness as he frames into words the poem that somehow already exists. She watches him walk – sometimes outside in the winter street, sometimes around the space in which they live – sees the relentless flow of his concentrated energy, his lips moving, and readies herself. She must do nothing now that will be a distraction, so she holds herself still or lies motionless on the bed. And then he speaks the poem and she transcribes it, trying to keep up, trying not to have to query a word, or a spelling, trying not to mishear even when he’s rushing or whispering. So the poems come on to the page through her hand and her eyes are the first to see them born. And she comes to believe that she is more than just a scribe but somehow part of the moment and it feels sometimes as if the poem is water entrusted into her hand to carry and she must not spill even a drop. Only when it is finished does he come and look, standing at her side and resting a hand lightly on her shoulder, and she feels and shares his sense of intense curiosity at what has been formed there in black ink.

Only the love poems, the ones written for Olga, are not written in her hand but they exist on paper with the other manuscripts. She wishes it were not so but their existence can’t be denied or disowned so when the time comes and they are forced to organise the original copies of all the poems and think how best to preserve them, they splay out on the table between them. They stare silently at the pages and then he reaches out his hand and gathers them to him and tells her he will destroy them. She grabs him by the wrist and tells him these too must be preserved. She ignores the flush of embarrassment flooding his face and insistently prises the pages from his hand, smooths away some of their bruises. He gets up from the table while she carefully places them in sequence and stands with his back to her as if he won’t allow himself to look at them any more, then lights a cigarette and the smoke is a blue gauze of unwanted memory garlanding his head.

So these too are preserved and stored in the memory. And to ensure they haven’t slipped away they must be silently repeated – over and over – in the lonely moments before sleep or when walking in the streets where the cleared snow decays into blackness like rotting teeth. And yes sometimes they feel like a scourge and she is tempted to let them go, to see them gently slip away, but something stronger prevents her. There is only one poem she has destroyed and expunged from her memory, and she has done that out of love for him and not herself, a poem he wrote in a moment of fear because he hoped to save his life, even though it was already too late, and which would bring hurt to him if future generations were to read it. It worries her that perhaps there are other copies of it that some day will emerge and be used by those who seek to destroy his name. Everything else must be preserved, even these love poems that are hooked on the bitterest barb of memory.

It is the memory of the pain that love can bring that makes her push the blanket away from her and get out of the bed. She looks at her face in the small mirror with the cracked lacquer frame. She isn’t ageing into beauty in the way that is the late blessing of some women. She never had the looks of Akhmatova or even Olga so perhaps she should be glad that at least there won’t be time’s cruel fading, the journey that renders the mirror’s unwelcome truth sharper with each passing day. If he were to touch her face now would it feel different to the one he knew? He will never come back to her – she will never know where his body is buried or be able to visit it. So life decrees that he walks through a door, there is the sound of a lorry’s engine and then she is never to see him again. Perhaps, she tells herself, some good thought can be found in that there was no breach in love, that they were separated at the time when it was at its most intense.