I went to the desk at which I’d written during the summer. I was disappointed; I had been sure that coming back to the dacha would begin a course of rest, of decent sleep at the very least. I thought about Moscow, the dead there. Not all the pain and horror and loss began with us; much of it came through the past to the time we called the present. Perhaps those emotions not born with us were among the most vital and we didn’t know it; maybe to forget past pain was tantamount to a grievous, criminal blindness. When there were breaks in the thread of the past coming to us, if our understanding was severed in some way, by denial or silence or a loss of knowledge, surely we would meet consequences somewhere. I wondered if I’d ever write anything else.
I lay down back in bed. At the first sign of grey light, while Sonya slept peacefully, I left the house and walked to the beach. I needed to see the gulf again. I thought of Sonya, her body naked now under the blanket, bare on the sand the day before, how natural she looked there, running easily over the sand, the gentle white skin on her upper thighs moving soft, loosely.
I daydreamt about spending winter at the dacha, with Sonya, though there was no way I could afford to stay so long. I imagined the dacha locked in the absolute silence of snow. Even the birds and moths would be buried until the sun finally uncovered them, their damp and fragile wings, at some later time.
I went through the forest towards the coastline. It was a bright wintry morning, just after dawn.
I walked along the compacted, icy tracks, over snow and spiky knots of twigs towards the beach. An old jeep was parked at the top of a small hill, where the forest floor gave way to sand and the eventual path to the shore. Snow coated the sand. Three or four men, a dog, the remains of their campsite fire, came into view. One of the men raised an arm in a vague gesture of greeting; the others stared. The dog ran over, barking but unsure. The man who had waved came over and took the dog by the collar. On his arm was a large tattoo of a bird among twisted branches and a woman’s name. As his arm tensed, holding the dog’s collar, the bird seemed to move. It was a strange sight of beauty on the man’s rough red skin, and I thought it looked trapped, on that ugly muscle.
I passed by the campsite and watched thin grey smoke trails rise like the ghosts of tree branches from the remnants of the fire. The air had the uncertain silence of isolation. I stood for a moment, struck by the sudden contact with those strangers who had appeared like nomadic wanderers braving the onset of winter and who had woken to another day, slowly tended their fire and blinked tiredly out at the early dew, unsure whether they had yet made it through.
I continued walking, over the small rise that was the threshold from forest to sea. Sand fell around my feet as I descended towards the water.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First to my parents and my sisters: if there’s one thing writing teaches me, it’s that the most powerful things I feel can’t be written. So I’ll just say—thank you for every day and everything.
Much love and thanks to Angela Keating for a deeply treasured friendship; to Maya Klauber, my sister in New York and friend through all pain, and to the Klaubers—who show me that family can be anywhere. Thanks to Myles and Linda Ashton for your love and support. Thanks and love to my Nonno, Alfonso Rossi: vale, I wish you could have been here for this, and to dear family Luigi, Maria, Eleonora and Maurizio Rossi.
Thanks to my dear writer friends: Angela Savage, Rosey Chang, Jen Anderson, Sophie Torney, Nancy Chen, Brian Lance, Alyssa Watson, Kathy Merrell, Beverley Eikli and Kellie Flanagan. You all continue to inspire me. Thank you Hugo Bitte and Kseniya Melnik for advice on the earliest draft and for telling me to keep writing. Thanks to Rob and Sam for always encouraging me and inspiring me with your lives. Thanks to great friends Leif Louwen-Skovdam, Ally Richardson-Siemon, Alexandra Haydock, Olivia Yelland, Nicole Buss, Kylie McDermott, Alexandra Adams. Thanks to Ed and Tina Kasparek in Connecticut—I’m so glad to have met you.
Much love and thanks to my Oxford family: Simon Mee, Junyuan Xue, Leanne Tse, Lyndsay Stecher, Judith Weston, Norihiro Yamada, Alex Moran, Lennart Garritsen, Mikołaj Barczentewicz, Nate Jingze Niu, Fabian Baumann, Kusha Baharlou, Adam Lapthorn, Julia and the Brouard family, Kris Palmieri, Saskia Läubli, and too many more to list here. Thank you University College for being home and the place I began to research this novel. Thank you Catriona Kelly for your encouragement, wisdom and incredible knowledge of Russia past and present. Thanks to Robert Horvath in Melbourne for sharing your deep knowledge of Russia and particularly the dissident movement. Thanks to Ekaterina Polyakova for a warm welcome in St Petersburg and to Elena Cherkasova for your patience over many Russian lessons while drinking coffee on Swanston Street.
Thank you to Monash University and the Literary Studies program for ongoing support, particularly from Ali Alizadeh, Marko Pavlyshyn and Chandani Lokuge. Thank you Adrian Jones at La Trobe University for your infectious enthusiasm about Russian history and your support over the years. Thanks to all my teachers, I value your work so much. Thank you John Sutton for my first Russian history classes; Branka Shallies and Bernadette Noonan for sharing a love of literature. Thank you to Bill and Jane O’Callaghan for friendship and support. Thanks also to the Yale Writers’ Conference for a great ten days in 2014. Thanks to everyone at the Trading Post at Mount Macedon, Ben Oost and Phil Holgate in Woodend, and to many more locals—our small town community means a great deal to me.
And finally, enormously, to all those involved in The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award: thank you to the late Niels Stevns for establishing and funding the award, and to his son Alan, who continues his father’s admirable legacy of supporting the arts. Thank you to the judges, and to Allen & Unwin for taking me on, for having faith in the manuscript, for encouraging me. Thanks particularly to Ali Lavau for incredible insight, advice and encouragement, and to Annette Barlow, Christa Munns and Henrietta Ashton.
I gratefully acknowledge the use of the following texts and translations: Elena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters (translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Vintage Books, 1993); Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected essays (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986); Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Penguin Classics, 2007); Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (first published as ‘The Dream of a Queer Fellow’ in A Writer’s Diary, 1877; this translation by Kenneth Lantz, 2009); Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A memoir (translated by Max Hayward, Modern Library, 1999); Viktor Nekipelov, Institute of Fools: Notes from the Serbsky (translated by Marco Carynnyk and Marta Horban, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980); Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit (translated by Robert Chandler, The Harvill Press, 1996) and From the Notebooks of Andrei Platonov (translated by Alex Miller, Encyclopedia of Soviet Literature at sovlit.net); Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Monument’ (translated by Catriona Kelly in Russian Literature: A brief insight, Sterling Publishing, 2001); Alexander Radishchev, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (translated by Leo Wiener, Harvard University Press, 1958); José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (translated by Giovanni Pontiero, The Harvill Press, 1992); Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (translated by John Glad, WW Norton & Co., 1980); Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four essays (translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, University of Nebraska Press, 1965); Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An experiment in literary investigation (translated by Thomas P. Whitney, Harvill Press, 1975).