Yes, she said, Misha had an interesting and difficult life.
She asked me to wait a moment, went to another room and returned with a small pile of loose notepaper.
You hear of people leaving papers behind when they die, she said. And those of us still here have to grapple somehow with the job of working through or sorting out those papers. Well, in Misha’s case what he left were maps and his classroom notes. Yevgenia Fyodorovna sat down, holding the papers as she spoke.
A lot of men play chess, it seems, when they retire, she said. In the courtyards of the apartments here you see them all the time—she waved a hand—sitting there, facing one another across a table. And in the gardens and parks around Patriarch’s Ponds, too. But Misha preferred walks. He didn’t want to sit there playing chess like the old Bolsheviks, as he said.
She held up a map, very worn, crinkled but soft in the way of well-handled paper.
This one, said Yevgenia Fyodorovna, Misha drew himself, shading in all the dark spots—see there, and there—to mark the areas where the Great Fire of Moscow wiped out most of the city last century, in 1812.
The map showed, in black-shaded masses on the paper, how three-quarters of the buildings in Moscow were lost.
And Misha told me about the different accounts of who was to blame for the fire. How some said the invading French, under Napoleon, were responsible for setting the city alight when they arrived. Others said that it was actually the Russians who did it, when they knew the French were coming. The scorched earth method, he said. When people set fire to their own land. Killing the city to save it from invasion. But many Russian historians hated that theory, saying we would never carry out such an act of suicide on our own city.
Misha was fascinated by the history of the fire. First he would read and research, then make his markings on the map, and set out on his walks, seeking out the old borders of the city, as though he might somehow find a trace of them there, even though there was probably nothing left to see.
Yevgenia Fyodorovna stood up slowly, as though with pain, went to one of the high wooden cupboards over the sink and brought out a packet of sweet biscuits. Gratefully I ate three of them. The food eased my nerves, somehow warming me too, though I hadn’t known I felt cold.
At some point, Misha decided to add a second layer to his original map. It would be a layer that showed the world beneath all of us, he said, the hidden, buried world, which he could now make visible.
I thought of my own conversations with Mikhail Sergeyevich, and his meeting with the man who explored the underground and met people resident in that world. We were in Gorky Park at the time. They live down there, Pasha, down in that reversed world, Mikhail Sergeyevich had said to me. Almost as if they are people from the past who lost their way many years ago and can’t live or die, they only keep on walking beneath Moscow.
Yevgenia Fyodorovna said she felt it was time she had a rest, but that I might come again to visit, if I wanted to talk to her again. Here, you can have his maps, she said forcefully, as if purging herself. Take them, she said. I’ve had enough of papers for three lifetimes. And take these pastries, I have too much food here, and clearly you need some, Pasha.
CHAPTER 31
I arrived in St Petersburg alone in the winter of 1993. When I moved there, to my apartment by the gulf, it was as though I was walking outside, never to go inside again. I barely read a thing. I didn’t care what was going on in the country, didn’t care for the bland movies and music from the West, the bad novels, the overflow of brand names and things and labels and nauseous varieties of every object or food.
I did not bring many relics with me. I left things behind at my mother’s: a photo or two and my beloved books, and newspaper articles on the Memorial Society, its petition for a monument, and the demonstrations on the Arbat. But I wouldn’t have been able to say with any certainty what I had thrown away, or what I planned to throw away and perhaps kept out of longing or to protect against forgetting. In the end there was so much forgetting and I had come to fear its potential contagion, its incubation in the heavy smog-mist in Moscow, breathed in, or picked up on the soles of shoes in the caked ice and dirty snow.
We only have the photographs that survive, just as we only have the memories we remember. A choice was made by someone, or some part of us, or by circumstances.
After a few days in the new apartment in Primorsky, which felt sparse and grey, cramped in a different, soulless way to my childhood concrete block in Moscow, I walked through the city. It was freezing. At first my walks usually took me along the gulf or from one edge of Vasilyevsky Island to the other. The steely, flat, purplish water was so wide, perfectly poised in a tenuous balance—just a little wave and it would overflow. As I ventured further into the city centre, I got lost so many times, as though Petersburg was determined to hide herself from me. I’d only been there once before, with Oleg in 1989.
Canals crosshatched the city. Bridges arched over them, connecting footpaths and boulevards. Something about a city riddled with water, it seemed colder than landlocked Moscow. I thought of those stories about the city just after the revolution. Aristocrats threw their swords into the Neva River, breaking the ice and hiding the evidence of their identities beneath the freeze. I wondered if Mikhail Sergeyevich knew that. His death was raw in those first months in Petersburg.
Then I started to take elektrichka suburban trains further out, to dilapidated suburbs where I’d wander for hours. I saw people begging or selling on the streets, it was hard to tell which.
I went outside. Often I walked till the late hours. The sky’s was a darkness I could deal with. I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else: before and after, death and life, sea and self. Being out there—in towns where I spoke to no one, in green deserted parks, along the edge of the gulf’s water—allowed me to turn inwards. It reflected the silence I felt in me. I wanted to be outdoors for good. Yes, I went outside.
Before I left for St Petersburg, Oleg had given me a copy of one of Shalamov’s books. I thought of that night on Solovetsky Island when Oleg quoted Shalamov, so fluidly his quotes were like breathing. I believed, says Shalamov’s narrator, I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that provided the will to live. I checked myself—frequently—and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.
The trip to Leningrad in 1989 was fresh in my mind when I first arrived in 1993. There were certain flashes, scenes of the city, shades of past moods, that followed me. I remembered walking through the city by myself, staying with Ivan and Susanna, who I should’ve contacted but didn’t, and I remembered the gaping skies, Solovetsky, the sea bathed gold, Vasily’s fires at the water’s edge.
I sometimes spent time with Yura and his girlfriend Piia, who eventually became his wife. She was a quiet, kind woman with long dark hair always tied in a high ponytail. Their gentle routines, their generosity and shared meals, somehow both increased my sense of isolation and eased a pain somewhere in me.
Oleg and I exchanged a few letters, and I called my mother sometimes, but I detached myself from them, because they were Moscow to me, just as Anya had been. Or maybe also because they were a reminder, for me, of what I hadn’t done, and my failures were amplified by their efforts, their work and the constant struggle that had been their lives. I was lonely but never really wanted company.