I am a widow, Fabiana thought, and if I go home, I will return to my parents’ apartment with nothing. I’m not a young widow either; I’m in my thirties. I entered the marriage with nothing and I came out with nothing, and I am precisely the same. Ippolito did not change me an iota. I just have his name, the memory of his punches on my skin – and Russia. It’s the things I have seen out here that have changed me.
She sighed, and had turned back to her poetry book, reading Foscolo’s ‘I Sepolcri’ – on the subtle line beween life and death, and how out of this desolation can burst a hymn to life and love, and the sweetness of illusions – when Il Primo stirred. Rewarding herself with a handful of cherries and a slice of black Borodino bread, she reviewed her work. The operation had not been difficult. She was good at the suturing. She was strong too, and unembarrassed by his naked body. When a man was so ill, it was like caring for a child or a pet. The cut on his forehead was a scratch on which a native doctor had spread a sticky poultice that may have helped it seal itself. Perhaps Il Primo was a Cossack, yet the ankles and thighs were chafed from riding, suggesting he was new to life in the saddle. His face and body were black and blue with bruising, and he had been struck with whips and blunt objects. Perhaps he wasn’t one of Mandryka’s torturers but one of their prisoners? Either way he was lucky. His head wound had not fractured his skull; the bullet in his shoulder had missed all his major organs and muscle groups. He had been beaten but he had escaped, and he’d been just strong enough to ride away. Plus his horse had waited with him, instead of bolting and dragging him across the countryside, something that killed more men during cavalry engagements than the slash of sabres.
‘Chiunque tu sia, sei fortunato,’ she said aloud. ‘Whoever you are, you are lucky.’
The man opened his eyes and looked right into her face. His eyes were an unusually bright blue with yellow speckles in the middle.
‘No one… who knows me… would call me… lucky,’ he said in a whistling wheeze in hesitant Italian.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ she said strictly in Russian. ‘Please rest. I don’t want you to spoil my hard work.’
‘Strict!’ he said, falling asleep again. Italian words, he thought, Italy – what memories of happiness he had, of Maxim Gorky’s villa in Sorrento. It had overlooked the Bay of Naples. He recalled one particular night when he and Gorky had sat out in the heat and talked past midnight. Plates of pasta were brought out and consumed, and more bottles of wine. They talked of politics, books and revolution, and love of course, making toasts. The old writer told him stories of his life on the road as a penniless tramp, of his first fame as a writer, of the fighting in Moscow in 1905, his respect and friendship for Lenin, and how he had been disappointed in his dictatorship and gone into exile. They had spoken of Russia as the cicadas chirped, and jazz played on the gramophone. Benya was still young then, in his twenties, learning his craft as a writer, and had been dazzled to know Gorky, to sit with Babel and others. He had learned Italian, drank espresso every morning, made love to Gorky’s Sicilian maid every afternoon, and in the evenings joined the little commune of Russian writers and their mistresses. My God, the food, the mountains, and the beauty of the women! Then Stalin had persuaded Gorky to return to Moscow, tempting him with flattery, with a mansion and an endless allowance. Benya visited the house and there was Gorky, his mistress and his son, living in an art deco palace that had become a magnificent prison full of secret police spies. But Gorky still read Benya’s stories, correcting them himself, and published them in his journals, and he had introduced him to the Party grandees in the Union of Writers. ‘Write about war if you get the chance; war is all life distilled to its essentials,’ Gorky had told him before he died. ‘It’s the grit in all of us.’
When the Spanish Civil War started, Benya, hungry for ‘the grit in all of us’, every writer’s ideal material, rushed to Madrid. His despatches to Pravda recounted his adventures at the front, and the irony of being a frail Jewish writer amongst fanatical killers. Once, on the Madrid front, he had even seized a rifle and fired at the Fascists, just for the thrill of being alive and so close to death. During the fighting on the Ebro, he had learned to ride and galloped out with the soldiers, afraid and yet so thrilled that he was where it mattered, at the hot stope of war and life, where every man who cared about the struggle wanted to be.
And then the Terror started in Russia. There were show trials and famous Bolsheviks were being executed but Benya never seriously considered staying in the West; he was Russian and he was sure his soul would wither abroad. Besides, back in Moscow, the secret police would surely never touch him. But when he got home, he found they were arresting many of his friends: writers, officials, actors, and their wives and families, and they never came back. Eight Grammes in the head or the Camps, that’s what they got. Benya wrote a few articles in praise of Stalin, just to be safe, but then, so sterile was the atmosphere, he dried up altogether, and couldn’t write a word.
The Head of the Writers’ Union called him into his office one morning and sat him at the T-shaped desk under the obligatory portrait of Stalin.
‘So, Writer Golden, how is the book coming along?’
‘I haven’t started yet—’
‘Listen carefully, Writer Golden. Last week Comrade Stalin said, “Why doesn’t this Golden write anything on Spain? On our fighters there? Where’s the book?”’
‘Comrade Stalin said that? He knows I exist?’ Benya didn’t know whether to be flattered or terrified.
‘Comrade Stalin reads everything, and that includes your articles. Comrade Stalin understands literature and, now Gorky is dead, he takes an interest in you. I don’t need to tell you this is an honour, but that wasn’t all Comrade Stalin said. “Is Golden on strike?” he asked. “Is he holding out on us?” When Comrade Stalin makes such a joke, he does so for a reason. Well, the Party demands that you produce some work now. So I’m sending you to the writers’ resort at Sukhumi for three months. Don’t come back without a book!’
Hailed by critics as ‘vivid, grotesque and sensual’, Benya’s Spanish Stories had been a bestseller in Russia and beyond. The Head of the Writers’ Union called him back: ‘Comrade Stalin enjoyed the book but he noted it was more emotional than political.’ He checked his notebook. ‘He grinned and said: “This scribbling Casanova cares more for skirt than war…”’
Benya was confused: ‘Is that praise or isn’t it?’
The Head of the Writers’ Union smiled lugubriously, relishing the power Stalin had delegated to him. ‘Take Comrade Stalin’s comments to heart, Citizen Writer.’
II
Benya awoke. He didn’t know where he was. It was so humid that the drugs and heat anaesthetized him into a trance that was deeply pleasurable and he felt he could sleep forever. He saw a chair and a nurse sitting there, not looking at him but facing away, reading a book. It was a scene of exquisite langour. And then she reached up and took off her white nurse’s cap and started to pull the clips out of her hair. It was copiously thick and when her dark brown locks fell around her ears and down her neck, he could almost smell its sleek sweetness.
He watched how her hands reached down and took a strand of hair and plaited it, and then reached for another… Hands, fingers stretching, gathering the thick tresses, holding them, weaving them through and starting again, time and again. He watched for a very long time and he thought it was the most beautiful thing. It was almost hypnotic, the rhythm of it, the delicacy, the repetition, the concentration, the thickness of the nurse’s hair and yet its exquisite fineness, and the scent of skin and sweat; he was observing a delicious ritual that soothed and delighted him. He plunged in and out of sleep; sometimes he heard his own voice speaking and realized that he was delirious but always rapturous, and each time he opened his eyes, the nurse was still there, sometimes reading, other times combing through her hair, and each time it transfigured him into someone else in another, kinder place.