The Poets' Wives (21 page)

‘That would be most satisfactory to all parties,’ he says, smiling and standing again before stretching his arm out in a vague but expansive gesture. When he smiles his face takes on a boyish quality that makes her think of how everything that happened to Osip accelerated his journey into old age. She remembers him on her arm on their expedition to Moscow in search of money and help, hears again the laboured wheeze of his chest that accompanied the tired shuffle of his steps.

She is no longer a young woman and that makes it harder to live a life that is constantly moving from place to place. As she walks to her class she is more confused than she normally allows herself to be and the self-indulgence feels dangerous and with the potential to cause her to veer off her chosen course. Is it possible she could find herself a more permanent nest in this town that sits on a river and which seems content to let much of modern life flow quietly by? She is no longer a young woman and there will be few more offers. So what is it he sees in her? She can’t believe he is enamoured by her beauty – perhaps he seeks a companion in his old age, a replacement for the wife he lost in the war. And what is it she wants? She has never even considered taking up with someone else, knowing that they would fall short of the man she loved. But if love can be set aside is the possibility of coming to an agreement with someone who is kind to her, and whose career would preserve her ability to teach and live in some unfamiliar comfort, something to be dismissed lightly?

As always she works the students hard – she isn’t interested in being their best friend or making their life easy. And there are sharp words for the indolent or those who fail to understand that in language important meanings can be damaged by slovenliness. In the middle of the day she eats on her own in the grounds of the college and doesn’t feel the need to share the time with her colleagues. When she has finished and before afternoon classes begin she goes to the library and returns the books she has borrowed and searches for something new. There is little in English except a few copies of Dickens and she has read all of the available titles so she contents herself with borrowing a copy of Turgenev’s
A Nest of the Gentry
. She never reads poetry because she’s frightened of what she’s read seeping in amongst the lines that she needs to preserve like tares amongst the wheat.

The memory of what she carries inside her keeps her focused through the afternoon and stops it dragging. At the end of classes she packs her satchel and the dictations the students have handed in for marking. If the day still retains enough heat after her evening meal she will sit in the garden and mark them. She smiles at the realisation that in her present life this represents a small pleasure. When she walks back to her lodgings she takes the path along by the river once more and so avoids the crowded town streets and their layering of dust that waits as always for some breeze to stir it into mischief. She misses Moscow and the life she once had there, misses the concerts and theatre, the endless evenings given to readings and debates about books. The river seems to flow more slowly than in the morning but there are still men fishing on the far bank. Some giant logs, escaped she imagines from the timber mills upstream, float lazily by, a temporary resting place for small birds.

After her meal that she takes at the kitchen table with her landlady who babbles on with the indefatigable enthusiasm of someone who has had no one to talk to all day, she decides it’s warm enough to sit outside with her marking but is still able to hear the arrival of Anatoli Lebedev. She isn’t surprised but doesn’t know if what she feels is pleasure or irritation. She keeps her head in her papers even when she senses that he has come to the back door of the house to watch her. It feels already that he is approaching the time when he will say something to her and when that moment comes she must know how she will answer. It would be easier if only he tried to exert pressure on her, exploit the leverage of his position, because then she would know him unworthy but instead all he has done so far is wait patiently and when the opportunity arose show her a polite kindness that appeared not to require any form of return. It is true that in some ways, such as now, he likes quietly to observe her but it feels like it shares nothing with all those other creatures who have spied on her. So to whom does he report each night except his heart and despite everything else that rattles round her head she is conscious of being flattered.

‘So I see you are still working hard,’ he says as he steps into the garden.

She stands up as if she is aware of him for the first time and because it shows appropriate respect but he tells her to sit and apologises for disturbing her.

‘And are they producing good work?’ he asks, peering at the papers.

‘Some do, some are a little slower to grasp what they need to know.’

She is suddenly conscious of the absurdity of being with someone to whom she has shown nothing of her real self. She feels like an impostor but because she has acted as this new person for so long wonders if the old one still exists except in her memory.

‘It’s a lovely night,’ he says and then gets embarrassed and flounders into silence.

She takes pity on him by simply agreeing and then as he shuffles a little she realises that he’s working up to saying something and as she stares at the papers she’s still to mark doesn’t know whether she wants him to or not.

‘Would you like to take a walk along the river?’ he asks, pulling himself up straight and finding the courage that she presumes he has in abundance.

It will be better if she goes with him and saves him the pain of failure under the prying eyes of his aunt who is already peering through the glass.

‘Give me a minute to put these papers away and get my shawl,’ she says as she slips quickly past him into the house where she almost collides with his aunt who is too slow to retreat from her vantage point. In her room she places the papers in her satchel then sits at the end of the bed. She tries to calm the pulse of her breathing then puts on the shawl and before she goes back to the garden allows herself the briefest of glances in the small mirror that hangs behind her door.

They walk against the river’s flow along a beaten path that seems to crumble to dust under their feet. Their shoulders brush from time to time but he doesn’t give her his arm or try to touch her in any way and instead channels his concentration on pointing out the different types of water fowl and birds that skim the surface. Little clouds of insects spiral up from the water and scavenging birds dive in amongst them. Then they talk about inconsequential things and she feels the urge to stop him and say, ‘I am Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of the poet,’ and stare at his face to see how quickly he registers the full significance of those words. If he were to shrug and say it didn’t matter then he would deserve another medal pinned to his chest. She knows she can’t risk telling him but can’t go on either being someone other than the person he thinks.

There is a small boat with a discoloured and ragged sail that looks like a crumpled page torn from some old book and from its bow boys dive into the water, their entry marked by shouts and sudden splashes of white and the boat left rocking behind them. They pause under the light-blotched canopy of some overhanging trees and she knows that he is going to speak to her. In front of them is a thick cluster of rushes, their furred heads heavy with the fecund weight of the season. She has to stop him because she is confused and there are voices in her head that she doesn’t recognise and because she feels all the conviction that exists at her core and which makes her who she is in danger of slipping away with the steady flow of the river.

‘What happened to Surkov?’ she asks.

The question throws him and as he looks across the river she sees immediately that he is uncertain of what he should say.

‘Why do you ask about Surkov?’

‘I’m curious, that’s all. Sometimes I come across things that obviously belonged to him.’

‘That should all have been cleared,’ he says and his voice is edged with an irritation she hasn’t heard before. ‘What did you find?’

‘Some books, a sketchpad, a few photographs. Not much.’ Already she is regretting mentioning it.

‘Shall we walk a little further while we still have the light?’ he asks and as if answering his own question sets off. ‘I’ll have someone clear the things in the morning if you show them where to find them.’

She follows a step behind and knows not to ask any further questions. It is a few minutes before he speaks again but some of the tension lingers in his voice.

‘Surkov was guilty of anti-revolutionary activity. He wrote some foolish, dangerous articles and circulated them to a secret cabal of students he had organised, taking advantage of their impressionable minds.’

‘He was discovered?’

‘One of the group reported him. We informed the authorities immediately. It was quite a shock to discover that such a thing had happened in the college. It had to be stamped out right away.’

When he looks at her she nods in what he must take to be her agreement but which is instead a silent affirmation of her own understanding. So she tells him it is getting a little cold and that she wants to finish her marking before tomorrow so that she can return the papers and go over common mistakes while it is still fresh in the students’ minds. She has been a fool momentarily borne off course by vanity and the unaccustomed and almost forgotten pleasure of kindness.

‘Although we discovered Surkov’s activities in time there is a view from above that the Director has grown lax, relaxed his vigilance, and that a younger man is now needed to fill the post.’

He doesn’t need to say any more. So exposing Surkov as a traitor, as well as the resulting discrediting of his boss, has enhanced his career and is now being laid out in front of her like a dowry. She wants to tell him more than ever but for a different reason than before that he is out walking with the wife of a so-called traitor. He stops briefly to point out a heron nesting in the rushes and then they walk on towards her lodgings. At the door he shakes her hand formally. The moment has slipped away from him but as he bows and takes his leave she knows that he will make other moments. She watches him walk away, his broad shoulders a little stooped with failure. When she enters the house his aunt is waiting for her and looks at her in a way that suggests she has been anticipating an outcome so she too is to be disappointed.

In her room she sits once more on the bed and glances around, one of the better places she has known. But it was a foolishness and while she is embarrassed by that sharpening consciousness she is also aware of a lingering sadness. The road stretching ahead of her is solitary and she must accept that now and live within both the freedom and confines of herself. There is no other way and she finds a new resolution in that knowledge. And all that is left is the work that she has to do so she finishes marking the remaining dictations, each mistake she finds underlining her own.

On an almost empty night train that rattles through an invisible landscape she sits with her head angled to the glass. Out there in the blackness stretch new uncertainties of place and sustenance. Her case is safely ensconced in the luggage rack and the compartment is empty except for an elderly couple and a young sailor whose canvas bag has an accordion attached to it. She looks at the dozing couple whose white-haired heads rest against each other and she feels a little envy at what has endured for them. She will never know if love changes over time, never know if it’s strengthened or rendered weaker by the passing years. Everything sifts through her – the flow of the river, the drawings in the sketchbook, the garden she sat in during the evening sun. She moves her face closer to the glass but sees nothing except the reflection of the inside of the carriage. Her hand touches her hair – slowly greying now, coarser to the touch – but hers will be the only hand to know its feel. She tries to summon the memory of his touch again, the feel of his fingers tracing the contours of her face, but struggles to realise it, almost as if it hides from her somewhere in the unknown expanse of darkness.

The old man snores a little and his mouth falls open but their angled and balanced heads remain undisturbed. Osip made no demands on her future life, extracted no foolish promise of faithfulness, and although they talked about it only briefly, she knows he wanted nothing more from her than that she should go on living and find what happiness she could. Nor did he ever obligate her with the preservation of the poems – this was her resolution alone and the vocation that now gives her life purpose.

The train hurries through the night slowing but not stopping as it passes through stations. Another name on a map, another new start. She grows too old for it but has no other choice. Always moving, never stopping long enough for her to come to the attention of the authorities. Trying to find teaching posts but willing, as she has done already, to turn her hand to anything, whether it meant working in a factory or labouring at some job that if nothing else served to numb the mind. She rubs the window in the vain hope of clearing even a fleeting glimpse of the world outside but it leaves nothing other than the squeak of the glass and the momentary smear of her fingers. Perhaps the darkness will never be cleared. Perhaps outside the window there is only the night’s unrelenting emptiness. The young sailor looks at her briefly then turns his eyes away again as if he hasn’t registered her. She finds a pleasure in that. So let her be invisible, a small stone hidden at the side of the road while history passes her by on its reckless rush to wherever destiny beckons. Perhaps Osip was right and they should leave the clamour of the great cities and take refuge with the peasants who endure as they have done over the centuries.