The Poets' Wives (25 page)

‘It’s all right,’ she says to them all. ‘I bring you no trouble. No trouble, I promise.’

In a gesture that contains no sign of conviction he invites her inside while he still checks the stairs and she enters a tidy room that compensates for its basic furnishing with a neatness and sense of order. A glass jar containing bluebells sits in the middle of the table. There is a small picture of Lenin on one wall but none of Stalin. She is invited to sit at the table but when she brings out a notebook and a pencil he tells her that he doesn’t want anything written down. Willing to agree with any condition he might impose she slips them away again and accepts the tea his wife offers her. She tries to break the ice by complimenting them on their apartment but it evokes little response and they continue to look at her with ill-concealed suspicion.

‘Osip has been cleared of the charges that sent him to the camps,’ she tells him and shows him the letter from the Prosecutor’s office. ‘And the source of whatever you tell me now will never be revealed.’

He stares at the letter and looks at her and she understands that the word of a stranger must count for little to a man who has endured and survived the worst the camps could offer and she can tell that despite his condition he is a true survivor. It’s something in the undiminished blue of his eyes, the way he sits straight-backed on the chair. And his hands that hold the letter are strong, strong and impeccably clean. She already knows that he’s not a talker and is glad of it because too often she’s had to meet with those whose versions of their encounter with Osip were garbled mishmashes of dates and places, spun out on endless tales of what they half-remembered and what they possibly imagined. And who is she to blame them when the camps destroyed any accurate concept of time and so many other human faculties? But from this survivor she already expects more and she reminds herself that he was a physicist in his former life and lets herself hope that she is talking to a man who still maintains some of the disciplines required by that profession.

‘So when did you first meet Osip?’ she asks but he holds his hand up to silence her, then wordlessly signals to his wife and she responds by getting a coat and with a simple bow of her head to their visitor leaves the apartment. He raises himself to his feet and for a second she thinks he too is about to go but he presses down on the splay of his fingers and then goes to a dresser and turns on the radio. It’s a mixture of folk songs and martial music. Then he sits opposite her again.

‘Things might be better now,’ he says, ‘but who can tell when the former things might return? I want to live my life for as long as possible. My wife’s never heard the truth about the camps although she asks often enough. What good would it do? Better in this world to know as little as possible. And are you sure you want to hear?’ He stares at her with unblinking eyes and she simply nods in reply and hopes that he can see that she too is strong.

‘I met your husband, the man they called ‘‘The Poet’’, in September
1938
on the transport train. I had been brought from Taganka, Osip and others I think from Butyrki. We travelled east to Vladivostok. The journey was bad but stepping into the transit camp for the first time was like stepping into hell. None of us could have imagined it even in our nightmares. It was badly overcrowded, conditions you wouldn’t keep animals in, lice everywhere, but because the weather hadn’t turned people hadn’t yet started fighting for places in the barracks. Even then there were people dying – some from disease, some because they simply gave up and chose not to live another day. And there were fights, I never saw such fights as I saw in the transit camp – a man could get his throat cut for a few crumbs of bread. The politicals weren’t supposed to be in with the criminals but they hadn’t sorted that yet. The most physically able were moved on to Kolyma to work on construction. Osip wasn’t ever going to be one of those.’

He pauses and looks at his hands before saying, ‘Right from the start he wasn’t well.’ Then he pauses again, this time for longer.

‘He had a weak heart,’ she offers.

‘He wasn’t well in the head,’ he tells her.

She nods to show she understands and that it’s all right for him to go on.

‘He had a problem with food – he thought they were trying to poison him and often he ended up giving food away. He had,’ he hesitates again, ‘a simple nature. People could take advantage of him. And already he looked like an old man. We all ended up looking like old men but he was old from the start. But he interested me and I talked with him, got to know him, and understood he had something that others didn’t. But he also wandered about too much and drew too much attention to himself just by being different. To survive in the camps firstly you need to want to more than anything else and despite everything you have to endure, to be single-minded about what it takes to survive and never draw attention to yourself. Be as close to invisible as possible – that’s what’s required. You understand?’

He stops, raises himself from the table again and goes into another room where she hears him spitting. Even the strident music coming from the radio can’t block out the wheeze of his chest as he returns.

‘I’ve never spoken to anyone about these things. It feels strange.’

She knows he still wants to cloak himself in invisibility, that it is only this in which he feels safe. She wants to tell him that they need voices who will be witnesses to what was done but she says nothing that will discourage him from telling her everything he knows.

His words are chosen carefully and he has no need for elaboration or stories whose purpose is to aggrandise himself or present himself as a saint. And there are times he calmly tells her of things he saw and had to do because his survival depended on it and he recounts them without either shame or pride. And she knows he’s telling her both about Osip and himself, the words released for the first time. When he pauses she pours him a glass of water and his hand shakes a little as he drinks. She looks at the little bunch of bluebells and thinks of all the unmarked graves, a whole generation swallowed up by the tundra. She is suddenly struck by the intense beauty of these most simple of flowers, the deep richness of the blue, even the green stems in the water. Her eyes hold them, for a moment oblivious to everything else until he continues speaking.

‘They wanted workers to go outside the camp to clear ground. I volunteered and took Osip with me. Strange to volunteer for work but it was worth it to get out of the camp that every day grew more crowded and into air and space that wasn’t polluted with every conceivable disease and human weakness. We moved a few stones about and he made a joke about his book of poems being called
Stone
. Was that really what it was called? I remember thinking it was a strange name for poems.’

‘Yes, that’s what it was called,’ she says, her voice shaking a little because in that moment it feels as if she is standing once again beside her husband, so close that she can almost reach her arms out through the years. And with those hands she wants to strip him of the tattered rags he wears, dress him in love just as she was by Vasilisa Shklovski. Wants to take him from the bareness of that wooden bunk in some forsaken barracks full of disease and suffering and bear him away in the arms of her love, carry him high so there is no wire can stop him escaping to a world that exists forever beyond their reach. And let him see these bluebells, find the words to tell their story to the world and she will write the words on her heart. Let him breathe the air. Let him see these flowers. Let him live.

‘Later the weather changed, the rains came and then with them an outbreak of typhus. Prisoners got locked in their barracks and then those who were ill were placed in quarantine. Some used to believe that no one ever came back from quarantine. I got it but bluffed it out at first and then was taken first to quarantine and then to the infirmary. When I recovered I heard Osip was dead. I don’t think it was typhus but no one knew for sure. Perhaps his heart just gave out.’

He shrugs his shoulders as if to say that’s all he knows before he adds, ‘It’s not easy for you to hear but it was best for him. It meant he didn’t have to suffer any more, didn’t have to know what was waiting for him in Kolyma.’

She makes herself sit as straight-backed as he is then thanks him for everything he has told her and for the kindness he showed Osip. She asks a few simple questions and then understands as he grows restless that it’s time for her to go – she has no wish to inflict memories on this man for any longer than is necessary. She takes a deep breath and then stands. There is nothing she can give him except her thanks and he has that already so she shakes his hand, holding it for a few seconds longer than is normal.

Then as she releases it he signals her to sit and says, ‘There is one more thing. You might wish to hear it.’ He hesitates until she nods her permission for him to continue. ‘There was a group of criminals in one of the barracks who had marked out their own territory as was the custom but they weren’t a bad bunch as criminals went. They’d barter and exchange news and although they stuck together they weren’t violent – I think they were just as frightened as the rest of us. I got to know some of them. One night I was invited to join them and because I hadn’t a single thing worth stealing I went to where they’d holed up and when I went in Osip was there. There was an upturned barrel and on it a candle and some white bread, bread like no other I’d seen in the camp, and Osip was reciting his poems to the sitting circle of men. They listened in silence and sometimes when he’d finished a poem they’d call for him to deliver it again. And when he spoke I never before, or after, heard such a silent listening in the camps. It stays with me. He was a great poet, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, he was, he was a great poet.’

They sit in silence for a few moments then as she rises he also levers himself up from the chair and going to the dresser opens a drawer and lifts out a sheet of newspaper. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing and then decides he’s going to show her some story but instead he lifts the bluebells out of the glass jar and wraps them in the paper.

‘For the grave you don’t have,’ he says as he hands them to her.

Then she thanks him again and she is gone, taking the stairs and making herself think, not of death and an unmarked grave, but the light of a candle in the darkness, a loaf of white bread and the sound of poetry. It gives her something to hold on to even now when she knows all the rest. And when she steps out into the street she tilts her face up to the light and lets the strengthening sun touch it the way he used to touch it when they’d been apart.

Soon her residency permit will expire and she will have to leave Moscow again. There won’t be much for her to pack, she thinks as she sits in the apartment and inspects its contents once more. Her eyes linger on the bluebells that she’s placed on the small table beside her bed and which give the room its only brightness of colour. There are still things to be done, phone calls to be made. Surely they must come for the poems soon and give them back to the world. She will phone Surkov yet again and see what progress has been made by his committee that is supposed to be reviewing the situation. Not much, she guesses, and believes that there are those who are still determined to block any publication. Perhaps Osip is still too great a reminder of what was done and will always prove so. But she will not let it go, not let the poems sift and spill like sand through her hands. She has carried them this far, she will carry them further if she needs to. And of course they will be happy for her to disappear once more out of Moscow – the further the better as far as they are concerned. No one wants a constant witness to past failures haranguing them at every opportunity – some of the things she has said to the apparatchiks in the past few months would have sent her hurtling to the camps in previous years.

She lights another cigarette. She has started to smoke too much but allows herself this one indulgence. As always there is the low murmur of life from beyond the thin walls of the apartment block. Indistinct and fragmented it exists as a permanent hum in the ears, peaking into consciousness only when a baby cries or voices are raised in one of the constant disputes over the communal areas. She must find a new place to live and be settled before the winter comes. Already her body is complaining of its weariness, telling her of its reluctance to set out once more towards an uncertain destination. Has it been life’s cruel joke that her name means hope? It’s a question to which she never knows the answer.

But it is hope and her memory that must not fail her now, not after coming this far. She sits on the only seat and watches the evening light drifting gently through the window. Is it part of the plan for a great new world that insists they must live high in the sky like birds in little nest boxes? She stands and goes to the glass. Soon she will need to start the preparations for her journey but not just yet. They truly believed they had silenced everyone, cut or bought their tongues. One more thing about which they were mistaken and how it must fill them with the very fear in which they dealt. For now there are living tongues in the skulls of the dead and they will speak for all the nameless, voiceless ones who were swept into the abyss. There is nothing they can do to stop them. She understands this at last because whatever happens, whatever they do, there will always be those who will not hide in silence. And she has resolved in the days since hearing the circumstances of Osip’s end that she is going to be her own voice, as well as the preserver of his, and write her story that is also his but also hers alone, write it for those who are still to come and who must know the truth of what was done.