The Secrets We Kept (33 page)

He was all apologies when he arrived late at Little House. “All is forgiven on your birthday,” I said, helping him off with his coat.

He joined our friends in the sitting room and I brought out another bottle of the Château Margaux I’d purchased on the black market, reasoning that Borya’s seventieth birthday made a fine excuse to crack open the brown suitcase. I’d also purchased a high-necked red silk dress—the finest I’d ever worn.

We ate and drank and Borya held court as in old times. He was in high spirits. He’d begun writing again and told everyone about his new project: a play he was tentatively calling
The Blind Beauty.
He laughed and smiled as he opened his presents and telegrams from well-wishers around the world. I watched him from across the room, warmed by the light he radiated, a light rekindled after all that time languishing in the dark that had settled over us both. It was the same glow that had first attracted me to him so many years earlier.

Our guests stayed late into the night. When they finally left, Borya made a show of begging them to stay. “Just one more glass,” he said, blocking the coat rack.

Once we were alone, Borya sat back in his big red chair, holding an alarm clock given to him by Prime Minister Nehru, who’d voiced his support for
Zhivago.
“How late everything has come for me,” he said. He put the clock down and reached for me. “If only we could live forever like this.”

I held on to that night. How healthy he’d looked on his birthday, how happy. But his light began to dim almost as quickly as it had returned.

His appetite went first. He began accepting only tea or broth when he came to dinner at Little House. He complained about leg spasms that kept him awake at night and a numbness in his lower back that made it hard to sit.

Exhausted, he had trouble concentrating on his play and couldn’t respond to the hundreds of letters that still came to him. His bronze complexion faded to a bluish gray, and his chest pains became more frequent.

One night, as I was cooking mushroom soup, he came to Little House with his unfinished play, pleading for me to take it for safekeeping. He looked so sickly I told him he must see a doctor immediately. “Tomorrow, Borya. First thing. How could your wife not see…”

“There are more important matters.” He held up the play manuscript. “If something were to happen…This will be your insurance. Something to support your family when I’m gone.”

When I told him he was being dramatic, he pushed the play into my hands. When I refused it, he broke down and sobbed. I rubbed his back to calm him, shocked at the feeling of his spine underneath my hand. It both repulsed me and filled me with a new tenderness, the kind reserved for an ailing parent. I promised to take the manuscript. He straightened and took me in his arms, kissing my cheek and neck. We retired to my bedroom, eager to shed our clothing, to feel our skin against each other’s, his skeleton against my flesh. At the beginning of our courtship, I’d always kept the lights on, pleased with his seemingly never-ending surprise at my body. Now, so many years later, I turned off the light.

I hadn’t known it would be our last time. If I had, I wouldn’t have rushed it. From the bedroom, I could hear the soup boil over onto the stove, so I moved my hips in the way I knew would cause him to finish.

After he dressed and went home, I dined alone. It would be the second-to-last time I’d see him alive.

The last time, I almost didn’t recognize him. He was an hour late for our meeting in the cemetery, and when he approached, I first took him to be a stranger. He walked so slowly—his footing unsure, his back bent, his hair uncombed, his skin even paler. Who was this old man coming through the gate? As he approached, I hesitated before embracing him, partly because I was afraid of hurting him with my touch, but, shamefully, more because I realized in that moment that my lover was gone for good. This was not him; how could it be?

Sensing my hesitation, he stepped back. “I know you love me. I have faith in it,” he said.

“I do,” I assured him. I kissed him on his chapped lips as if to prove it.

“Do not make any changes in our life, I beg of you. I couldn’t live through it. Please, do not return to Moscow.”

“I won’t,” I said, squeezing his hand. “I’ll be right here.”

We parted after making plans to see each other at Little House that night. He never came.

It was his heart. Like Yuri Zhivago, it was his heart in the end. Throughout his life, when confronting illness, Borya was always melodramatic, convinced his end was near. But this time, he remained unconvinced his latest ailment would prove fatal. Bedridden, he wrote me that this setback would pass, that he’d be up and finishing his play any day.

He wrote again the next day, saying they’d moved his bed downstairs to more easily care for him and that it pained him to be so far from his writing desk. He said not to worry, that a nurse had come to live at Big House, and his dear friend Nina was visiting daily. He also asked that I not come, saying his wife had warned against it.
Z, in her foolishness, would not have the wit to spare me. But if things worsen, I’ll send for you.

Days passed, and when I didn’t receive another letter, I sent Mitya and Ira to Big House to report back. They saw a young nurse coming and going, but the drapes had been drawn, so that was all they could tell me.

Another day passed. I still hadn’t received word from him, so I went to Big House myself, convinced Zinaida was keeping my letters from him. It was early evening and a light was on in his study. Who was upstairs? His wife? One of his sons? Were they going through his books and papers already? Would they find my letters hidden inside his books, or the flowers I’d picked, pressed between the pages? When he died, would there be anything left to mark our time together? When the study light shut off, I began to cry.

The young nurse exited the house. She was a pretty girl, and I felt a stab of jealousy knowing she was the one bending over his bedside, spooning broth into his mouth, holding his hand, telling him everything would be okay. She looked startled when she saw me standing on the other side of the gate. “Olga Vsevolodovna,” she said. “He said you would come.”

“Has she no decency to let me see him?” I asked. “Or is it he who does not want me to come?”

“No.” She looked toward the dacha. “It’s that he can’t bear for you to see him.”

I just stared back at the nurse.

“He’s sick, very sick. Skin stretched over bones, and without his false teeth now. He says he’s afraid you’ll no longer love him if you see him in that state.”

“Rubbish. Does he think me so superficial?” I turned my back on the nurse and the house.

“He’s told me how much he loves you. It’s embarrassing how he goes on about it.” She lowered her voice. “With his wife in the next room.”

The nurse said she had to catch the train into Moscow, but she promised to keep me updated if he took a turn. I remained at my post. Around midnight, when I hadn’t come home, Ira and Mitya brought me tea and a thick blanket.

My presence outside Big House did not go unnoticed. Zinaida would look out the window through a part in the curtains, then quickly close them.

I kept vigil outside the gate for days, getting updates from the nurse. He’d had a heart attack, and the only thing they could do was keep him comfortable. I pleaded with her to tell Borya I was outside, that I needed to say goodbye. She said she’d pass on my message.

When cars carrying journalists and photographers joined me at my post, I knew my vigil had turned into a death watch. I left and returned wearing my black dress and veil. Hours passed. I wore a path in the new spring grass with my pacing.

And still he never let me in.

Only after he was gone was I allowed inside Big House. Zinaida opened the door without a word and I rushed past her to his still-warm body. They’d just cleaned him and replaced the bedsheet, but the room still smelled like antiseptic and shit.

We were alone for the last time. I held his hand. His face looked like a sculpture, and I imagined the death mask they’d soon make of it. The last weeks, I’d attempted to prepare myself for what it would be like; but it wasn’t anything like how I thought it would be. The air hadn’t changed, my heart kept beating, the earth kept spinning, and the realization that everything would go on, that the world was ever ongoing, felt like a horse’s kick to the chest.

As I held his hand, I could hear talk of the funeral arrangements in the adjacent room. I told myself this would be the last time we’d ever be alone together. I kissed his cheek, straightened the white sheet, and left.

I had no body to tend to, no funeral arrangements to make, no reporters to ward off. All that was left to me was to remember.

I thought of the first time he reached for my hand, how I had no idea my body could vibrate from the inside out. I thought of him reading me early pages of
Doctor Zhivago,
how he’d pause at the end of each paragraph, anxious to see how I was responding. I thought of the afternoons spent walking Moscow’s wide boulevards, how I felt the world expand each time he looked my way. I thought of the many afternoons making love, and the many nights he said he didn’t want to leave my bed.

I also thought of him leaving my bed after I’d begged him to stay. I thought about pulling in to the train station after my three years at Potma—how, when I saw he hadn’t come, I felt like turning around and going back. I thought of the many times he told me it was over and the many terrible things I said to him in response. I thought of his oversized ego in his prime, and the diminished man
Zhivago
had left behind.

They dressed him in his favorite gray suit and laid him in a box of virgin pine. I waited outside his dacha while Panikhida was offered inside. The great pianist Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter played in Boris’s music room, his notes drifting out the open window.

The music ended and they carried his coffin out and paused near his beloved garden. I stood beside Borya, opposite Zinaida: his widow and his almost widow. I wailed, and Ira and Mitya held me up by my arms. But Zinaida stood there, silently, with grace.

The procession filed down the hill and up to the cemetery to the grave site Borya had picked out for himself, under three tall pines. His death notice in the newspaper was but a line or two, and yet they came. Hundreds, maybe thousands, followed the coffin. They were old and young, neighbors and strangers, workers and students, peers and adversaries, factory workers and secret police dressed as factory workers, foreign correspondents and Muscovite reporters. All had gathered around Borya’s final resting place; the one thing they had in common was that they’d all been changed by his words.

They made speeches and recited prayers, and I stared into the open coffin, which was covered in wreaths and branches from lilac and apple trees. From the back, a young man cried out, reciting the closing stanza to Borya’s poem “Hamlet”:

But the plan of action is determined,

And the end irrevocably sealed.

I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:

Life is not a walk across a field.

By the last line, others had joined in. Then a man announced, with booming authority, that the funeral was over. “This demonstration is undesirable,” he said, and motioned for two men to bring forth the coffin’s lid. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and kissed Borya’s face one last time. I was moved aside and the lid was secured. People protested the abrupt ending but were silenced by the sound of hammers driving nails into wood. Each crack of the hammer made me shiver, and I pulled my coat tighter.

As they lowered his coffin into the earth, chants of “Glory to Pasternak!” rose up and carried across the crowd. I was reminded of the first time I first saw him read so many years ago, when his fans could not stop themselves from finishing his poems before he did. How I sat in the balcony, hoping he could see me through the bright lights. How he did see me, and how my world was forever changed.

I wouldn’t see Zinaida again after the funeral. She did her best to erase me from his history, and her family took on the same cause after her death. I fought it for years. But could I blame them? I knew what they called me, what rumors persisted. And even if I was forever branded an adulteress, a seducer, a woman after money and power, a homewrecker, a spy, I was content knowing at least Lara would survive me.

On the morning they came for me for a second time, two and a half months after Borya’s death, I was sitting in my dark kitchen sipping tea. I’d brewed it too bitter for the third day in a row.

I heard the slow churn of gravel under tires, and I didn’t need to get up to know a black car was making its way down my drive.

I finished my tea and put the cup and saucer in the sink. I thought of Ira, still asleep in her bedroom—how she would later see the teacup with a brown ring and have to wash it, knowing it was mine, and that I was gone.