After a long moment the neighbour went on to speak of how, in recent years, things had gone fairly well for his children, and his son whose children were here for the summer, had purchased the dacha the previous year. Their daughter had taken a job with a foreign company in St Petersburg, which paid in dollars not rubles, and so they had all survived the fearful inflation of the past decade.
So perhaps breaking with the past has been good, he said, though his expression was still sombre. Yet these days, it seems that things are worse for most people. I sometimes wonder whether it was better before, with the USSR. Back then, you didn’t see old babushki begging at corners in Leningrad like you do now. You didn’t hear stories from neighbours who can’t afford a funeral bus to take their families and the coffin to the cemetery on the day of a funeral, travelling together like the old ways.
He stood watching Vera and the children. But yes, he said. Yes, I think I’ll come visit you in Petersburg, Pasha. Write the story down.
I gave the neighbour my phone number and he said he’d call me to arrange a meeting in the city. At the end of the day, the neighbour and Vera Sergeyevna packed the car and I waved goodbye to the family as they drove out along the dusty road into Repino and back to Petersburg. Again I was alone.
My thoughts shifted to the city. I felt uneasy about returning, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. I liked the dacha. If I could, I’d just remain there. I’d found my timeless place. In fact, I wasn’t even sure of the time. I had misplaced my watch somewhere along the way from St Petersburg to the dacha.
I lay on the seat in front of the dacha, drinking the remainder of the beer I had bought at the produkti, and fell asleep for a few moments, wishing on the edge of sleep for the warmth of a girl next to me, the weight of her on my chest. The garden sweated, the white night hummed.
CHAPTER 17
As winter thickened, the walls of the Sukhanovs’ place seemed to close in. Perhaps more people were coming at that time of year—the snow had arrived as if for good—craving the alcohol, heat, inspiration of the tiny confines of the apartment. There was a strong sense of need and energy buzzing through the rooms.
Yura’s story on Jewish exit visa restrictions had been published, and he’d received a good response: letters of thanks from others in the same position, and he was quoted in news articles about refuseniks, those unable to leave the Soviet Union or attain decent academic positions within it. When I’d first met him, in the stairwell of Bulgakov’s apartment back in the summer, Yura had been quite despondent, feeling hopeless about his situation. Since his article had appeared, he seemed a man transformed. His mood lighter, he joined us often for drinks and was eager to talk about politics. And he seemed less intent on leaving Russia. He kept thanking me for suggesting he write a story in the first place, and though I didn’t feel I had done much to help him, his excitement fuelled my own support and hopes for glasnost.
Meanwhile, Ilya was still all about the music, and his band was gathering a strong following in Moscow, holding concerts in clubs or apartments. He organised a semi-regular night at the Sukhanovs’ apartment to play new songs to a small group there.
Not everyone believed in glasnost—some thought Gorbachev weak, too scared to really bring Stalin’s name down once and for all, or just as power hungry as every other leader we had known, wary of giving the Memorial Society too much leeway.
When a Memorial Society member, Dima Yurasov, was arrested, the doubt could be felt drifting through the room at the Sukhanovs’. The KGB were waiting at the airport, we heard, when Dima returned from the north after giving lectures on the Stalinist repressions. From the kitchen I heard someone yell, Glasnost is a joke, and the sound of a glass shattering, though I didn’t know if the two were related.
My own writing wasn’t going very well. I worked full time at the library, and at night, if I wasn’t distracted by concerts, Sukhanov’s weekend gatherings, or spending time with Anya, I would try to work.
In me was a whole history that I longed to convey, but there was a strange halting, as if time had gathered, become confused, causing a blockage, a sense of inertia. I couldn’t really explain the nebulous space between my boyhood horror, that edge-of-knowing awareness, the heavy silence, and my present understanding of the facts in the press, in the open now.
It was similar to the feeling I had when I tried to describe for Anya the apartment of my childhood. Physically, it was the same as it appeared now, but in other ways it was so different. Back then that apartment reflected my internal reality: just like me, it held the secrets unspoken outside. But by 1988 that reality was out in the streets, out there in Moscow. And it was so difficult to convey what that shift meant, or what really happened with that change. It made me feel unsteady, uncertain, because I couldn’t write about what was so important to me.
I grew dissatisfied, easily irritated. I started walking by myself, ridiculously long distances. One day I thought about going to the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, where my father had been taken. But instead I found myself suddenly diverting, following some other course through the city.
I had read in one of Viktor Nekipelov’s books, Institute of Fools, of his encounters with others in Serbsky who were, like him, clearly of a sound mind but who had feigned madness because confinement in the psychiatric ward was thought to be better than imprisonment in a Gulag camp.
Although it had been constantly in my mind, I was never sure if I’d actually been inside the Serbsky Institute. It was true that I had memories of being inside an asylum, though the memories didn’t extend to the building’s exterior, so I could never be sure which hospital it was. All I could remember was the ward where my mother and I went to see my father. I wanted him to stop smiling, because his face scared me; the creases around his eyes looked unnatural, so many wrinkles, and his mouth contorted as though grimacing. Only as a grown man did I understand that it was probably the combination of fatigue, medications and horror that had made him seem much older than the thirty-something he would have been then.
It occurred to me that going to the actual place where he, my father, had been held for a time—for two months of psychiatric evaluation in the seventies—was unlikely to help me in my writing. It seemed the more I came into contact with knowledge, with information, with tangible experience, such as standing on the very road the truck or car he was put in would have driven down, the less close I felt to him. Perhaps keeping him in the space of my childhood memory, where I didn’t know many details but had intense bursts of feeling, was more real than the facts and figures I could find through research, or even the understanding I gained by talking to Mikhail Sergeyevich about what it was really like inside.
Anya and I still spoke about our plans to write something together, but in the meantime we were working on separate things. I had one story published in early 1989, which felt like a tiny salvation after months of nothing. And so I decided to stick with writing short stories for the time being. Anya had grown close to Lena, Sukhanov’s wife, and became interested in working on film and TV editing. In early 1989 she got a part-time position at the TV station where Lena still worked as a sound technician.