We had, in the apartment, an official document, a charge sheet, dated 8 May 1973, which cited a crime under Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code of circulation of fabrications known to be false which defame the Soviet state and social system.
My father was taken first to Butyrka Prison, from there to the Serbsky Institute on Kropotkin Lane in Moscow for one year; and from there to Oryol Prison, two hundred miles south-west of Moscow, from where his body was retrieved in the autumn of 1974 after he succumbed to the effects of a prolonged hunger strike.
Strangely, I couldn’t recall the first time I saw the charge sheet. But reading it must have made me able to connect my father with specific places, with psychiatric hospitals and prisons. I looked at it, sometimes, as a teenager. But as I got older I didn’t; I had essentially memorised it, anyway. My mother and I never spoke about the charge sheet or the circumstances of my father’s death, and rarely about him at all. There was nothing to say beyond the things we already knew, and so we left him as a silent presence, a fully formed absence, inside our apartment.
But at any time, a word could have an association without my knowing what it really meant, such as Anya talking often about over there, about wanting to leave. The threat of her absence always had its own form and I felt it lodged somewhere, even though I didn’t know what her absence would look like or when it would happen. Yura had still had no luck getting an exit visa, and often the talk among our group would turn to the idea of leaving the Soviet Union. At the Sukhanovs’ for dinner one night in the winter, Yura told us the story of a Jewish scientist who had obtained an exit visa and gone to the United States, and who had then returned for a short visit to Moscow. Yura seemed in awe of the man.
The scientist’s friends said it was like he had disappeared for good, said Yura. So when he came back for a conference, people looked at him as though he’d returned from the dead. No one could see, they couldn’t even imagine, where he might have gone.
Yes, said Anya. The West or anywhere abroad, over there, always seemed to be a place that didn’t quite exist. A made-up place.
But now, said Yura, now things are different. There are more openings, people can see footage and photographs of places, there’s more contact with other countries.
Exactly, said Anya. And we should all be allowed to see those places for ourselves.
I didn’t say anything. I had grown up wishing that I didn’t have to have a secret life, a hidden history, and now that a life without secrets had arrived I had no desire to leave my city, my country. The question of Anya leaving was a mostly unspoken but noticeable presence between us, like a small stone carried around. It gave an uneasy edge to our relationship. I felt a sort of veil between us, sometimes—I could still see her, she was still with me, and at times I could push it aside and she’d seem content. Other times I sensed that she had pulled it down again and saw a world on her side of the veil that did not include me.
CHAPTER 16
Each night at the dacha a glowing orange sun and a weak pearly moon hung together in the sky. I spent a week of ageless evenings on the long seat in front of the dacha, although Vera Sergeyevna next door warned me, with her babushki superstitions, not to leave the chair out overnight. Careful, she said, you should know that moonlight destroys furniture. But still I lay listening to the summer sounds of insects, tree shivers, creaking wood. I was so tired by the end of each day, but it was the kind of fatigue that brought only difficult, disturbed sleep.
My routine began in the morning, brewing tea and eating bread, usually standing at the front window, as if the trees and sky gave me some regularity. At least I knew the beginning of each day. I would write a bit, drink more tea, stand again at the window, then go back to the desk. The phone never rang. The windows rattled if it was windy.
Oblivious to whether they wanted me there, I kept returning to the neighbours’ house. Vera Sergeyevna would make tea and we’d sit in her kitchen snacking on fruit or sunflower seeds. Sometimes she asked how my writing was going. She always had the radio turned on in the kitchen and I once mentioned something about seeing Popov’s grave in St Petersburg, and how he had invented the radio.
Ah yes, Popov, we know him well, she said, smiling. I was just a girl when the radio arrived in the countryside. Like a voice from heaven! But there was something terrifying about it.
I nodded, drank my tea. I knew that a nationwide radio network had been installed under Stalin. The Ministry of Ideology was behind it—their goal to enter the home, mind and heart of every person, so it was said. Even the radio, like my city, seemed tarnished by old violence.
The neighbour would come in after a morning outside, short of breath, his checked shirt coming untucked from his trousers. We would chat about nothing in particular—the weather or the city or the children. The slow, easy conversation had something warm about it, like summer, green and softly breezy.
I had a theory that the neighbour knew more about those dead roads than he let on. Perhaps he’d already been there but didn’t want Vera Sergeyevna to know. An image formed in my mind, like a still frame from a movie, of the neighbour standing on the concrete edge of an unfinished road, holding a bottle of samogon. It was nearly dark, and he was just standing because there didn’t seem to be anything more to do after arriving at such a place. My head was full of those kinds of still images which never went anywhere.
I talked more than usual when I was with the neighbour. It was something about his manner; as though he belonged to another place, a time separate from my present life, so that I somehow knew anything I said wouldn’t leave the dacha boundaries.
Early one afternoon the neighbour and I went walking in the forest. For some reason I hadn’t ventured in there yet; I’d kept to the road to the beach, the produkti and the station, or the yard bordered by the wall of trees.
A bit further, a bit further, said the neighbour.
The trees huddled closer together the deeper we went. The air cooled.
We had a conversation about Moscow. He’d been there once. When he started talking about it I felt not so much longing as a pained admiration for the city. The neighbour mentioned the main sites, well known to anyone. Dzerzhinsky Square. Detsky Mir toyshop. GUM department store. Red Square. The Arbat. We stayed pretty late, sitting on a fallen log until early evening, nearing the end of the bottle. At some point the neighbour asked me what I was writing about, or maybe he asked me who I was writing about. And so I told him about Anya and her father, and more or less what had taken place in Moscow. I couldn’t decide if the slow process of remembering and writing down felt less taxing than to suddenly, upon being questioned, state so briefly the things that had happened.
So they’re both gone now, he said. The girl and her father.
Yeah, I said, taking a shot, then eating some pickles the neighbour had brought with him. Both gone. But it’s hard, when you go to write about something like this. There’s no before when you know what happened. Time is just there, all at once. Linearity is a lie.
Just write it, my boy, said the neighbour. Start anywhere and just tell what happened.