Only Anastasia knew about us and, therefore, the extent of my deprivation. But she wasn't here to comfort me, depriving me even of this satisfaction. Losing the one person needed to talk to about the tragedy of the loved one was beyond all bounds of reasonable unfairness.
Yet I also knew I was bearing not the "cruel injustice" of my plaints, but the just deserts of my personality. When / had abandoned her, she took the normal, healthy course instead of whining, proving even more conclusively that when the mess ended, this whole woman who stood on her own two feet was worthy to be my wife.
I also understood that my expectation of her to cheer the conquering hero on his return from the month-long disappearance was only the most absurd manifestation of the cold-heartedness that from the beginning had kept me from thinking of how she felt, what she wanted. This was somehow connected to my diminishing desire for her before the break, just because she was so loving and available. I was good enough at poses to attract an Anastasia, but too self-serving, too sadistic in "love play" to provide what she needed after the dazzling start.
But this too was a pose. For I worked to describe my contrition eloquently to myself—therefore to her—in the same cause of winning her back: "It's not that I wounded you; I don't deserve
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you." Yet I hoped the very confession would make her beHeve the contrary. I was on an old cycle that led me to mocking deception whenever I played at attaining the real, real truth about myself. Instead of fading away in accordance with my own knowledge of my unworthiness, I convinced myself that this recognition enabled me to make her happy now. This was me in a slicker disguise.
Meanwhile, I clung to my hurt, seeking wisdom even in radio ballads, elevating an amateur Bing Crosby's "I can't live without you" to the paragon of understanding. "Why did you leave me before I felt I could tell you the truth?" I strained for solace in every sloppy ditty, opening myself to the other broadcasting messages. Two hundred million tons of steel at the end of the Five-Year Plan? Splendid, Comrades; how can I help? I must do something to join the rest of honest hardworking humanity.
She was ignoring my telegrams now. Each ring of the telephone in the common room jolted me because it might be her returning one of my calls, then harder because it wasn't. I had to record my supplications on paper.
Notes from a Twelfth-Story Window
Dawn. I just noticed the pattern of the formal gardens at the approach to the University complex. Kindly covered by snow, the outline nevertheless reveals itself at this height, like old trench lines seen from a plane. The garden is as stiff as a Central Committee declaration, but I used to want the flowers to grow well this spring to please Anastasia when she stood at my window. So she'd have the aesthetic pleasure — and seeing her, Fd have mine.
The wind whistling out there; I think: I know that sound, Anastasia listened to it with me. Anastasia 's with me, she hears the wind. The laundry grinds my buttons to powder — and I catch her sweet, scolding "snip off, sew on, save sorrow." . . . And a line that keeps repeating: "Give us this day our daily bread."
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But why didn 'f / tell you this? That I love you for your shoulders in your ''Monday" suit? Your one and only smell, your biting into an apple as if it's the last on earth. For the cut of your jib — which I've written in English because some day you'll understand.
Do you know it's Anastasia I need? The round warmth that gives me beauty and peace; the woman who's so much more human than anyone Vve known.
A radio program for children playing. "And don't forget, gang, that LENIN (sigh) loved Pushkin. Throughout his revolutionary life, Lenin found time to refresh himself with this greatest Russian poet." Violins, followed by one-two-three, Comrades: the usual morning exercises.
Yet Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was what you said. Lyric, honest, perfect. I don't understand how inspired works like this are shown while the censors grind far lesser unorthodoxies into sausage meat. We must talk about this. About why these rare films are released that probe life as few Western productions can, implicitly demonstrating that no word the Party ever uttered has any relevance to the important truths. Now I hear there's a new one by your Vasily Shukshin about a criminal — can you believe it? — who ends tragically for all the wrong ideological reasons.
Can it be we won't see it together? Here it is again, my burden. I try to carry it silently, but the more I concentrate on a "neutral" subject and approach its inner meaning, the closer I veer toward you, my inner meaning. And one more plaint. You promised you'd save the new Cherry Orchard for me, but friends tell me you've seen it with someone else. Perhaps mine is a feminine jealousy. But didn't you too like changing roles?
You reminded me of my stupid remark to Chingiz while we were crossing the stream, and it stung. I wanted to tell you that, and why. But I fell into an old despair of mine that no one can ever get to the full truth about anything. I tried to limit the hundred background causes so that we could discuss the principal ones of what had gone wrong on the walk — and with
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us. But I kept being overwhelmed by the larger, philosophical problem of everything being interdependent, then gave up because of the impossibility of a truly honest explanation.
You asked me why I was silent. I answered that I couldn 't tell you. Because I didn't want to lie, or play the hero with sham profundity. My very need for a completely truthful exchange with you was the undoing.
So my motives were okay in that case — unlike now, when I'm making precisely the kind of half-truth justification I avoided then. But no justification can possibly exist for my cursed month "away." Only an inadequate explanation: I was so certain of our perpetuity that it never occurred to me you might think it was the end. Why didn 't I come to put my arms around you, tell you that you were dearer than ever? That's what I was thinking the entire month — and the paradox is, I was learning how from Anastasia. . . .
Roommate Viktor is actually readingThe Kreutzer Sonata. He's not sure whether he's angry at himself for wasting the time, or proud for persevering; whether to be appalled at or applaud Tolstoy's prerevolutionary misogyny. The better I know him, the less there is to talk about because we can't agree on a single sentence. But he's wonderfully kind in his way. Seeing me up during the night, he worried. He thinks the winter's too much for me.
Have you any idea how wretchedly empty this building is without you? "Since you were gone/My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone." And all the more because I imagine how I left you alone in your dormitory.
The things we did in bed, those things, were beautiful because honest. Hemingway was wrong: it happens only once in a man s life. Dear Anastasia, "love" evokes your image.
Now the Pravda summary on the radio, the editorial ending with the line about "continuing and intensifying the struggle," which I interpret in my own way with respect to Citizen Anastasia Serigina. I haven't told you how my thoughts of you consume me. The important thing wasn 't love but trust. And opening up to the true and beautiful in life. That's what you gave me and what mustn 't die. If you believe I exaggerate it may be
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because you're younger, you haven't had time to see the dreariness of everything else.
But whatever happens, I thank God for your beauty. He must make you happy — with me if possible, without if not.
Incidentally, I still haven't told you that story about the emigre who first taught me Russian.