‘In the madhouse
Crush your palms,
Smash your forehead against the wall,
Like smashing your face in a snowbank…’”
“I remember that one. It’s to Galanskov,” Edik said.
“Here’s another one. Listen.
‘Brush the bliss of half-sleep from your cheek
And open your eyes until the eyelids cry in pain.
The filth and whitewash of the hospital—
A volunteer’s flag of your captivity.’”
“I know that one, too. It’s to Dimka Borisov. How do you know her poems so well?”
“I heard her read her poems twice at my father-in-law’s house. And I memorized them. She seems rather gloomy and unapproachable; but her poems are full of tenderness. I can’t say I liked her as a person. But she writes the kinds of poems I would like to have written myself.”
* * *
They decided that Mikha would go to Natalia and ask her for some new poems.
Then Edik remembered about some high-flying intellectual from the philosophy department at Moscow State University. He could write an article about contemporary American science fiction.
The third part of the magazine was a large section entitled “News.” And there was plenty of it. A large number of independently thinking people first whispered in corners among themselves, then spoke half out loud, and, finally, went out and joined demonstrations, protesting ever more boldly and conscientiously. They were detained, tried, sentenced to prison, and set free again, and life was full of daily events that people found out about from one another, or from Western radio stations: everyone picked up some bit of news or other.
Along with the human rights activists, there were also the Crimean Tatars who had been expelled from Crimea twenty years before and now wished to return; Jews who demanded the right to emigrate to Israel, from which they had been expelled two thousand years before; adherents to many kinds of religions; nationalists, from Lithuanians to Russians; and many others. All of them were at odds with the Soviet authorities. And things were happening at every turn.
Edik was not a member of any particular group. He considered himself to be an objective journalist, and his point of departure was that society had to be informed about what was going on. Mikha was prepared to facilitate this in every way he could.
Suddenly, they realized it was already past one in the morning.
“Where’s Zhenya, I wonder?” Edik said. They were not in the habit of keeping tabs on each other, but they usually told each other of their whereabouts.
Mikha gasped, then set out for home in haste. It was too late to get public transport. A chance trolleybus took him to Rachmanovsky Lane, where a herd of trolleybuses converged to spend the night. He ran the last twenty minutes home. Alyona was asleep, and didn’t ask Mikha to account for himself.
* * *
Life rolled along steadily and pleasantly. After Aunt Genya’s death, her old room crammed with dusty junk and bric-a-brac seemed to have dissolved into oblivion. In the new room that took its place, everything was clean, white, and new. Alyona’s drafting table, with Whatman paper clipped to it, stood next to the window. She was about to graduate from the graphic arts department, and her graduation project was to illustrate Hoffman’s fairy tales. A wide, intricate border with Masonic motifs wound about the margins of every page.
Instead of the weekly watch at the boarding school, Mikha’s days, from morning till night, were now filled with any number of activities. He was surrounded by new acquaintances. Their most frequent visitors were Edik and Zhenya. Although Zhenya was plain, her mouth was full of infectious laughter (though not many teeth), and she was an attractive, sweet person. Alyona, to Mikha’s delight, would smile weakly at Zhenya’s straightforward jokes. The four of them became good friends, and often spent time at one another’s houses, talking and drinking tea and wine.
Alyona seemed to come to life, to awaken. Her usual expression—like a child just getting up from a nap who hasn’t quite decided whether to laugh or cry—became more defined: not yet laughing, but certainly not crying. She even became more responsive to Mikha’s conjugal expectations. Since they had gotten married, Alyona had seemed even more unavailable than before, when she would now and then come to him in Milyaevo without being asked, and stay overnight, tender and complaisant.
In their married state, things seemed to get in the way, each obstacle more awkward and absurd than the one before. Either their sexual activity wound her up so much that she couldn’t sleep afterward, or, on the contrary, it wearied her so much that she couldn’t get up in the morning and would have to sleep the entire day.
It was, most likely, a slight sexual pathology—perhaps a consequence of traumatic premarital experiences. Feeling desirable, sought after, an unattainable object—this was for her the epitome of pleasure in sexual relations. She hungered perpetually for affirmation of Mikha’s ready desire, and was adept in the subtle art of keeping her husband interested and aroused, but avoiding sexual contact. The less frequently Mikha was able to indulge in the full-fledged conjugal rite, the sharper and giddier were his feelings for her.
As Alyona became more inaccessible to him, love raised him to unprecedented heights of feeling. In a secluded nook of his consciousness, he was constantly at work writing poems. He had long before stopped sending her love poetry, which Alyona had greeted with a set mouth. That didn’t prevent him from writing it, however.
Love is the work of the spirit.
Still, the body
Does not hold itself aloof from it.
A hand resting in a hand—
What joy!
For degrees of spiritual fire
And the white heat of corporeal passion
There is a single scale of measure.
Among the new friends who were always coming around to their “grown-up home” sans parents, which was moreover in the center of town, were admirers of Alyona. When men would show up, she grew animated, sitting up straight and smiling vaguely. Mikha felt fresh pangs of male jealousy; Alyona experienced a complex satisfaction. Their home began to exhibit all the hallmarks of a literary salon: the canonically prescribed love for the hostess, tea drinking, cakes and cookies, conversation about art, reciting the latest poetry, and guest lecturers on intellectually stimulating topics. In this way Alyona reproduced (with allowances for another generation) her parents’ home, but with more refined tastes.
* * *
At about that time, traveling through Russia came into vogue. Backpacks, canoes, trains, risky hitchhiking, spending the night in tents or in abandoned villages—Ilya, of course, was the first in their group of friends to experience all this. He adored these trips and often went without any companions, returning home with rarities fit for a museum: books, icons, objects of peasant life. He made friends in far-flung parts of the Russian north, Central Asia, the Altai.
Mikha never joined Ilya in his travels; he would never have left his aunt for long while she was still alive. Early in the spring of 1967, two young couples—Mikha and Alyona and Edik and Zhenya—seized by a new passion for traveling, went to Crimea for the first time, to Koktebel. The genre of their journey was a pilgrimage—to the grave site of a poet Mikha revered.
It took them two days and nights to get to Feodosia. There was still snow on the ground in Moscow. In the morning, as they journeyed southward, they passed through warm rain, having already gone through floating remnants of snow, and through fogs and mists. After midday, entering another climatic zone, through the train window they observed roadside willows up to their knees in water, with swollen joints and straining branches. In Feodosia it rained on them again—gray and pearly iridescent. They got on a bus and, bumping and jostling all the way, continued on to Planernoe—where the poet Maximilian Voloshin had lived. The landscape—smoky, quivering, milky, and opaline—riveted their gaze. Columns of trucks were coming toward the bus from the other direction. They were excavating one and a half million tons of Koktebel sand, urgently needed for the purposes of the national economy. But what the travelers didn’t realize was that before their very eyes the treasure of the ancient shoreline was being destroyed. The people who might have realized this were almost all gone by now.