When they were at the table, the young family started giggling. Antonina Naumovna noticed that Ilya had tossed a little ball of bread onto Kostya’s plate, and Kostya sprinkled salt on his, as if by chance. Olga sat there with a dumb grin on her face, screwing up her eyes … Ilya ate two pieces of the cake. He licked the cream off the top, like a cat. And he ate up the rest of Kostya’s. And he sucked on his spoon. Disgusting! Afanasy shouldn’t have allowed them to move in. Let them fend for themselves; they’ve had it far too easy in life. And a spiteful dry tear clouded her eye …
Olga’s poor parents couldn’t imagine what on earth this unprepossessing suitor was up to, why the typewriter keys clattered ceaselessly into the night, and why he always had to rush off, abandoning the peaceful luxuries of the dacha. But Olga knew: she was the one who typed all the anti-Sovietism from the onionskin paper. Granted, Olga was not entrusted with any sizable texts. She had neither the speed nor the skill for that. She opted for the poetry, most often Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. She considered this to be a kind of community service. The thick books were passed on to more dexterous typists, who were paid for the work—either Galya Polukhina, a girlhood friend, or Vera Leonidovna, a professional typist.
Sometimes Ilya delivered the pages to his friend Artur, to be bound, and sometimes he distributed them just as they were. Artur made lovely volumes of poetry covered in chintz. Books of a religious nature were bound appropriately—in leatherette or plain calico. It wasn’t easy to pin him down, though. He forgot about what he had agreed to do, and when it was expected to be finished. Ilya made a living from samizdat. Contrary to most of these other heirs of Gutenberg, his intellectual contemporaries, he felt no moral qualms about material compensation. He expected to be well paid for his time and effort, and he invested his earnings in his photography and his expanding archive.
What an abundance of poems there was! What lyrical abundance! Never before nor after had there been such a time in Russia. Verses filled the airless space, and themselves became the air people breathed—albeit “stolen air,” in the words of Mandelstam. The Nobel Prize, it seemed, was not the supreme literary honor. Rather, it was the honor of being printed and read on these dry, rustling pages, crudely typed or handwritten, full of misprints and errors, sometimes barely legible—conferred on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and, finally, Brodsky.
“Our high-school literature teacher, Victor Yulievich Shengeli, is someone you ought to meet. You’d really like him. He hasn’t taught for a long time, though. He works in some museum—trying to escape notice.”
The Soviet authorities persecuted the unemployed, including those whom they themselves banned from official employment. The “parasite” Joseph Brodsky had already been released from exile in the village of Norenskaya, but no one could have anticipated that fifty years hence, a memorial room would be established in the local library in his name, and that a down-at-the-heels woman in her waning years would show people around, calling the tour “Brodsky in Norenskaya.”
Olga became more and more adept at translation. She had studied French at university, and Spanish at night school. She picked up Italian as well, studying it on her own in the commuter train on the way to and from the dacha. She made connections, and was sometimes asked to translate film scripts, a task she was very good at. She did other forms of moonlighting—writing research papers, patents. Her earnings were meager at first, but they grew steadily. These jobs were all “unofficial,” of course—officially she was registered as a research assistant, like Ilya. This was a front used by many people at the time.
After the death of his former father-in-law, Ilya found someone else who would register him as an assistant. For Olga, he found an old professor willing to take her on as a secretary. They both joined some sketchy labor union that seemed tailor-made for people trying to evade the Soviet authorities.
At the dacha, Ilya rigged up a darkroom in the broom closet next to the bathroom. He ran a pipe from the WC into the broom closet, just as he had done back in his school days, and performed his magic there during the nights. Afanasy Mikhailovich didn’t notice a thing, since he bathed only on Saturdays. The rest of the week he never so much as glanced at the bathroom or the broom closet.
What happy years they had together! Ilya divorced his first wife. Eventually, without much fuss or bother, he and Olga got married. Olga devoted herself to him heart and soul. Everything he said or did was fascinating and unprecedented: samizdat, photography, travel—he adored the Russian Far North, the Central Asian south, and often set out for the back of beyond. Sometimes he took Olga and Kostya along with him.
Once they took a trip to the region around Vologda—to Belozersk and Ferapontovo. Kostya remembered this long afterward as a magical journey. Everything that happened, every hour of every day, stayed in his memory like a movie he could watch at will—how they went fishing in a rowboat, and slept in a hayloft; and how they climbed the scaffolding surrounding the monastery and he nearly plunged to his death, only Ilya grabbed hold of his jacket just in the nick of time and saved him. And the horribly amusing story of the bee that he ate along with a piece of homemade jam pie, and how Ilya fished the pie right out of his mouth, and then plucked the stinger deftly from his lip.
Olga had other memories: of the vanishing frescoes of the icon painter Dionysius, the crumbling monastery, and the slow, somnolent beauty of the north, which, from that very first sunset, shimmering and pellucid, she recognized as her true home.
It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents’ ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs. Now she was overcome by a new and heart-wrenching love for this austere, impoverished north, where her father had been born. Her heart leapt to her throat when she watched the late-evening sun sink into the big lake, and saw how the crimson sky gradually gave way to silver, and how this silver spread over everything else, in turn—the fields, the water, the air. This greenish-silver hue was also a revelation of this journey, and it was Ilya who first noticed it, and spoke of it.
* * *
During these years the general ensconced himself in his workshop for good, leaving it only rarely. Olga’s mother was afraid of losing her position at the magazine, but no one tried to remove her: she was a Party-hack writer, a real bigwig.
When Kostya started school, they moved to the Moscow apartment and Antonina Naumovna began staying overnight at the dacha more and more often. The official automobile went back and forth twice a day, nearly every day—dropping her off and picking her up again.
When they had been together ten years, their marriage started to falter.
Ilya became nervous and importunate: his playful effervescence changed to gloominess. At the beginning of 1980 he announced to Olga that they would have to leave the country. They had been talking about it for a long time, but only in a perfunctory way. Suddenly, out of the blue, Ilya started treating it as a matter of grave urgency.
“I’ll request an invitation for the whole family. If you don’t want to come with me, we’ll have to get a divorce.”
“Of course I want to go with you. But think about it—Vova will never let Kostya leave, if only to spite me. When he turns eighteen it won’t be an issue any longer; we won’t need Vova’s permission.” Olga thought Ilya was being unreasonable and demanding. They hadn’t left ten years ago—what was the big hurry now?
Ilya insisted and kept trying to rush things along. Olga met with her ex-husband to discuss it. It was no go. Vova proved to be as intransigent as she had anticipated. It even surprised her how mule-headed he was. He flatly refused to let her have her way, and even gave her a piece of his mind.