Life continued on its quiet way, as though on tiptoe at twilight, and despite the lack of money, the material scarcity, and Mikha’s deeply hidden shame for renouncing his former existence, daring and vivid, domestic happiness brightened their 150-square-foot room, and everything seemed larger than life, like the best films, like his favorite lines from Pasternak:
Shadows lie upon
the glowing ceiling.
Crossed hands, crossed legs,
Fates entwined.
Two small slippers
clatter to the floor,
and tears of wax drip
from the lamp onto the dress.
Just around the corner, a three-minute walk, was Potapovsky Lane, where Pasternak’s last love, no longer young and gone to fat, who had done time in the camps for this love, and her daughter, who had also been imprisoned for complicity and knowledge of the affair, stopped into the same bakery or grocery store that Mikha shopped in. When he saw them on the street, he would whisper to Alyona: “Look, there’s Ivinskaya, there’s Ira Emelianova, she went to our school.”
Alyona turned around to look—she saw a heavy older woman wearing too much makeup, without a trace of her former beauty, in a tattered coat. Could it really be her? Was it possible? And to think that at one time she had been compared to Simone Signoret.
Alyona and Mikha exchanged glances: we live not in nature, but in history … And Pasternak walked down this very lane twenty years before. And one hundred fifty years ago—Pushkin. And we are walking down it, too, skirting the eternal puddles.
* * *
In the spring, in the middle of May, something unexpected happened. At two in the morning, the elevator door banged shut, then the doorbell rang four times—the Melamids’ ring. Mikha and Alyona, sleeping in each other’s embrace, startled awake simultaneously. Through their confused, nighttime stupor, they thought: They’ve come!
They hugged each other more tightly, pressing together their cheeks, their breasts, their knees, bidding farewell with their whole bodies, and got up, pulling on their clothes. The bell—four rings—resounded again, but this time less urgently. Now they embraced again, this time not saying good-bye, but expressing hope that misfortune would pass.
Hand in hand they walked down the communal corridor toward the front door. Mikha opened it without asking who was there. Instead of three, four, five security thugs, they saw a small girl in a green silk dress, with a thick braid of hair as coarse as a horse’s tail hanging over her shoulder. They recognized her immediately.
“Ayshe! Ayshe!”
The Tatar girl they had met in Bakhchisaray, daughter of Mustafa Usmanov, hero and leader of the banished Tatars, was standing in the doorway. Only she was now no longer a small girl, but a young woman. “Come in, come in! Why didn’t you call? We would have met you at the station…”
A small suitcase, a cloth-lined basket, her gloves fall to the floor. “Don’t take off your shoes! In our room, you can take off your things in our room. Why didn’t you call, how many years has it been? Yes, four, five, at least, you have a daughter; and we do, too! We have a daughter, too. You got married, yes, tell us, tell us everything! Tell us…”
“I couldn’t call. I was too scared. They arrested Father. He has a good lawyer, who told me to come to Moscow. He said I needed to find Academician Sakharov, so that he would write a letter. But how can I possibly find this Sakharov? The lawyer said we need foreigners to make a fuss about it, on the radio, or however they do it there. From America! It’s urgent—Father has shrapnel in his chest, and if it moves, he’ll die. And our Tatars are all quarreling. Father is a Communist. Although he was expelled from the Party ages ago, he still keeps talking to them about Lenin. And those evil devils will destroy him in jail! The lawyer sent me—you need to leave immediately, he said, otherwise your father won’t survive until the trial…” And she cried through her garbled words, and her tears were as blue as her eyes, and fell thick and fast, like the tears of small children.
“Ayshe, don’t cry, please. There, now, don’t cry…”
* * *
There was an extra place to sleep in the room on a folding cot, if her head was pushed right up against the wall under the windowsill, the table was shoved about eight inches to the side, and the child’s high chair was put away. They drank some tea, put Ayshe to bed, and went back to sleep themselves for another two hours. Mikha got up at seven, and by eight he was already at work.
He called Ilya from work to say that they needed to meet. Where? Same place as always. Milyutin Park, in other words.
“You mean she’s at your house right now?” Ilya asked, frowning. “That’s dangerous. Someone’s sure to be shadowing her. You have to move her somewhere else.”
“No, that’s impossible. That night in the cemetery, in Bakhchisaray … And Mustafa is a remarkable human being. What will be, will be. Can you find Academician Sakharov for me, Ilya?”
“Give me one day,” Ilya said.
Ilya’s circle of friends and acquaintances was enormous. He even boasted a bit about the variety of his connections, and joked that if you didn’t include the Chinese, common laborers, and peasants, he knew everyone in the world, either personally or through someone else. That’s exactly how it was with Academician Sakharov. A certain Valery, an old acquaintance of Ilya’s, worked closely with the academician: both of them were members of the Committee for Human Rights. After a few phone calls back and forth, Sakharov agreed to meet with Ayshe.
Three days later, Mikha took her to Chkalov Street. They walked the distance, since it was twenty minutes by foot from their house to his.
The whole way, Ayshe couldn’t stop trembling. Her head ached from agitation and worry, and she broke down in tears when they were at the door. While Mikha was trying to comfort her, the door opened, and an adolescent carrying a garbage pail asked them who they wanted to see. When they told him, he let them in, and asked them not to slam the door behind them.
From that moment on, everything that happened seemed to Mikha and Ayshe to be completely improbable. Ayshe even began thinking that someone had played a trick on them. A thin, ordinary-looking man in an old cardigan, who did not in the least conform to their idea of an academician, received them sitting on a bed in a small, cluttered room. Ayshe was hiccuping so strongly after her bout of tears that Mikha had to tell the whole story of Mustafa himself, beginning with their first acquaintance in a hotel in the city of Bakhchisaray.
The academician—or the impostor who called himself an academician—listened attentively, nodding, his head inclined forward. He made a few replies that revealed a detailed familiarity with the case, noted down the name and surname on a scrap of paper, then offered them tea.
They moved into the kitchen, where a middle-aged woman in thick glasses was presiding.
An old woman in a soft cap was sitting in a corner, and the adolescent whom they had met when they arrived took a glass of tea and a few cookies, then disappeared into the dark corridor.
Ayshe touched the cheap teacup decorated with polka dots and said frankly what had been on her mind for the past half an hour:
“Andrei Dmitrievich, I could never have imagined that academicians lived so modestly.”
Mikha blushed from embarrassment. What a country bumpkin!
The older woman in glasses laughed:
“My dear child, only academicians who write letters in defense of exiled Tatars live like this!”