The Poets' Wives (19 page)

‘No, no, they must survive but if they strip the tree then the winter will be hard, the sorrows deep.’

He is a man with no superstitions who now sees signs and portends in everything.

‘Perhaps you could write something about the tree,’ she suggests.

‘No, no,’ he says, shivering. ‘Hasn’t poetry brought us enough trouble?’

‘They can’t find fault with a poem about rowan berries,’ she tells him, thinking about the member of the Writers’ Union who suggested that if only he had kept on writing poems about flowers and bees then he would never have found himself in this position.

‘But the berries are red,’ he says as he looks at her and suddenly smiles, ‘and they will surely say they stand for blood or something else that is counter-revolutionary.’

She smiles in return but it is false. Bringing the trouble on themselves was how many others liked to see it, so if only they had been good citizens and kept their heads down then supposedly everything would have been all right. That is what they tell themselves just as they publicly insist that no one is ever arrested without due cause no matter how incredible the charges might seem. So there are saboteurs and plotters hiding in every nook and cranny of the state whose only aim is to sow the seeds of its destruction. Look at how they confess their crimes, they say, when the guilty realise they have been found out. But she doesn’t believe any of it and knows that right from the start he too was marked out, even before he had written what they didn’t like. There’s something in this new breed of creatures that is able to recognise both their own sort and those who can never be. So whether it was his independence of spirit, his deep affinity for the poor and suffering, or just his stubborn and seemingly wilful reluctance to conform to anything other than his own vision of himself, he was never destined to survive. She knows that if he hadn’t written the poem they would have found some other reason to arrest him.

She looks at the brightness of the berries and thinks of those who with such avidity grasped the prizes that were on offer to the compliant and the state servers. So now they have their apartments, their country dachas and are given access to what is denied to the masses. But as the sun makes her squint again she remembers Nikita’s songbirds silent in their cages. A bird flutters around the berries, its beak pecking rapidly, before flying off again to the hospital roof. They will never sing now that they have given up their souls. They have chosen their own cages. She puts her arm on Osip’s shoulder and wonders whether he will ever write again. They would see it as their greatest achievement and yet even abstaining is not permissible because it is taken to signify the malcontent, the skulking subversive with counter-revolutionary tendencies. The bird wants to come back for the fruit but is mindful of their presence. There is a hospital attendant who watches them from a window above and another who indulges in regular journeys back and forward across the courtyard makes little effort to disguise his surveillance.

For the moment at least he appears calmer and when it starts to get a little colder she leads him back to the ward. He walks slowly, is less straight-backed than is his normal posture and looks as though the winter of old age is already settling deep in his bones. So how would Olga feel if she could see him now? Would she have followed him into exile? She knows the answers and takes pride in them. Of all the women she is the only one to stand at his side, a side that only death will make her leave.

The ward seems bigger and emptier than before – she guesses the building was once a grand house and in places there are still traces of decorative plasterwork and marble. From time to time she hears the whispering scurry of mice behind the wainscot. Perhaps once this very room was a place of music and dancing. She strains to hear some distant echo that surely lingers deep in the room’s memory but it resists the reach of her imagination. As she tries to get him comfortable on his bed she sees how his eyes have started to rove randomly about the ward as if its strangeness is being seen for the first time but as always they return to the clock. He is still staring at it when some hours later a doctor comes to check on him. It is not the doctor who dealt with him after his attempted suicide but one who is younger and gives the impression of wanting to be faithful to her job as she examines his arm and adjusts the sling, even though her white coat is stained in places and there is a wide tear in the hem of a sleeve. Perhaps she preserves the tear as a counter to potential charges of bourgeois elitism. Perhaps she merely has no needle and thread. Then she stands at a little distance from the foot of his bed.

‘If you try to harm yourself again they will strip you and put you in a cell. Do you want that?’ she asks and she sounds as if she’s speaking to a child.

He shakes his head in reply and stares at her empty-eyed. She turns away and asks, ‘How long has he been in this state?’

‘It started on the journey here. After he had been released from the Lubyanka. What is wrong with him?’

The doctor blinks and says nothing for a second before she answers, ‘They all arrive like this. If you’re lucky and you take close care of him it will pass.’

Then she is gone, her white coat melting silently through the dark seam of the opened door. The night is coming on but no one has brought them anything to eat and she is too frightened of leaving him to go in search of food. There is a kerosene lamp in the corner but no fuel or matches so what light there is comes from the barred windows that are spaced above their beds. He slips into a fitful sleep disturbed by sudden jerks and quivers. She wants to try and calm him with the press of her hand but doesn’t touch him in case he thinks it is the touch of a guard or executioner. She lies on her bed and watches him, helpless to give anything that will still his mind’s turmoil. A brooding intensity of loneliness settles on her and she can’t shake it off. Together she felt she could bear most things but now it’s as if he’s journeyed to some distant place where she is unable to follow.

She needs to find food for them and tries to convince herself that if she can get him to eat something then it might help restore him. In the corridor she realises that there is nothing to be found in the hospital – everywhere is shut. And even if it wasn’t so, no one is willing any more to make even the simplest decision until it has been approved by someone higher. She must go out of the hospital and try to find someone willing to sell her what she needs. A dread of him waking and finding her gone makes her hurry in the direction that seems to have the most people and activity. There is a bakery on a corner but its door is barred. She enters a narrow warren of streets but every step takes her further away from him. And then there is a voice in her head that she refuses to recognise as her own, telling her that she is not exiled, that she can make her way to the station and take a train to some place beyond the misery of this moment. She has the money the women gave her before they left Moscow. And then the voice tells her that he is drowning and in his desperation he will pull her under the water so why not cut herself loose and who would blame her if she saved herself? In a back street she stops at some type of inn and suddenly feels dizzy with the voice swirling its insistent thoughts.

Inside there is raucous laughing and arguing. What sounds like a violin is starting up in a high-pitched screech. She remembers the cheap blue rings they bought and how he lost his and how she broke hers and asks herself if this was an omen and whether love itself can be so easily severed and sent spinning into some hidden corners from where it can never be retrieved. Already, however, she knows the answer because it is only in their love that she finds herself complete and only in his life is hers lived fully. The voice that was in her head sounds now like the voice of the interrogator, asking the same type of questions, insidiously trying to make her abandon all the things she is sure of in exchange for admission to some supposedly better life. There can be no better place, she tells him, than with Osip, sharing the way he sees the world, feeling the freedom that exists in their private words and the words she commits to paper. Even now in this place of interrogation and fear she knows she has the strength to turn her eyes towards the sky above her questioner’s head.

She pushes open the door of the inn and inhales the smell of smoke and male sweat and understands at once that this is a place where people come to forget their troubles not to offer help to a stranger. The fire in the corner and the kerosene lamps flick shadows over the huddled groups who sit on narrow benches around roughly-hewn tables and as she stands in the still open doorway she sees how the light reflects in someone’s pince-nez, on a raised glass.

‘Close the door, woman!’ a voice shouts. ‘Either come in or get out.’

She hesitates and another voice invites her to come and warm herself at his fire with the promise that he’ll ‘put some colour in her pale cheeks’. She asks herself what it is she wouldn’t do if it helped them and she doesn’t know the answer any more. A burly barrel of a man she assumes is the owner approaches her, looks her up and down in a demeaning way then asks her what she wants. Over his shoulder a thin-faced woman, possibly his wife, looks at her with suspicious eyes. Her hair is covered by a headscarf in peasant style but it has slipped back on her head and black locks push out from under it.

‘I need food. I have money to pay for it.’

‘Are you a working girl?’ he asks with a sneer. ‘You don’t look the sort.’

‘I’m Nadezhda Mandelstam,’ she wants to say as she draws herself proudly straight but instead merely shakes her head and tells him again that she has money, then as she turns and looks at the curious faces staring at her regrets what she has just said.

‘You’ll find no food here, but if you want a drink we’ll sell you that,’ he says as if he’s just lost all interest in her.

‘This isn’t the place for you,’ the woman she takes to be his wife says to her. In her hand she’s holding a jug of some indeterminate liquid. But her voice isn’t harsh and so fired by her need she quietly says again, ‘I have money.’

In reply the woman takes her by the arm as if ushering her impatiently outside but whispers, ‘Go round to the back in five minutes,’ and then with a theatrical flourish slams the door shut after her.

The alley is dark. She passes a man urinating and he makes a crude joke. And then it dawns on her that she has been a fool and in the shadowy narrowness of the alley what she is most likely to encounter is robbery and not help and she has delivered herself into their grasping hands. But just as she turns to go a door opens and in the narrow seam of yellow light stands only the thin-faced woman. She hesitates then walks towards it, her fingers tightening their grip on the money nestled deep in her pocket. The door opens wider and she is beckoned into a small room that has bottles and chairs stacked in it. On the table under a cloth sits what she assumes to be food of some sort. The cloth is removed in the style of a magician doing a trick and then she pays wildly over the odds for some stale bread, cheese and a few thin slices of dried meat. The woman inspects the money with greater scrutiny than her customer inspects her purchase and when she’s satisfied pockets it somewhere inside her apron.

‘You’re not from around here,’ she says and her face is unable to disguise its curiosity.

‘We’re passing through.’

‘So where are you staying?’

‘The hotel near the station,’ she says but the initial hesitation makes the answer unconvincing even in her own ears and so she gathers up the miserable bundle that has cost too much and turns to go.

‘If you wanted to work, I can arrange it,’ the woman says. ‘You’re not going to turn many heads but there’s something about you an educated man might like. We get all sorts.’

She stops herself from thanking her then hurries the length of the entry towards the brighter lights that mark her way home to the hospital. She has already been gone too long and prays that Osip has been sleeping soundly in her absence. When she returns an orderly insists on searching the bundle but seems content to establish that it contains nothing of danger or of potential use in a suicide attempt. But the search and the questions delay her yet more so it is a great relief when she enters the ward to see that he is still in the bed where she left him. The relief however is short-lived because he refuses all her attempts to feed him and continues to fall in and out of shallow and disturbed sleep. As the hours pass he grows more agitated, calling out until he wakens himself, jerking upright in the bed, and he’s pointing at the clock and declaring that they are coming for him at nine o’clock. At nine o’clock they’ll come and drag him away to some secret place and there they’ll take his life without another moment’s hesitation. She tries to calm him, cradling his head, but nothing she says or does makes any difference and each tiny movement of the clock’s hands serves to tighten his paranoia.

He insists they’ll come for him at that very hour. It’s the appointed time and all the necessary documents have been signed. There can be no pardon, no commutation of the sentence. Then for a short while he calms and his eyes turn from the clock to look with curiosity at the patterned shadows cast on the opposite wall. They form a trembling frieze and it seems to lull him but when eventually they fade he falls into a renewed fervour. He begs her to go to the window to see if the rowan tree still has its berries. He shouts out random answers to unknown questions and sometimes he presses a protective hand to his face as if blows are raining on his head. She thinks of calling for the doctor but knows it would be useless and that if they were to see him in this extreme state there would be a chance that they would lock him up in some asylum with those who are mad.