He chuckled softly. "Ah, well, that is not my secret at all. It was my wife's doing. This chair was always my father's chair at our home in Perm. When he died, it became mine. I took it with me everywhere. Then we were sent here, and I thought I'd lost it forever, but somehow — and she never told me how — my wife found a way to get it. All the way from Perm! Can you imagine? We were deportees! Two winters in a row, it was almost turned into firewood, but it always survived. Like me. When I go, I swear it will die too… only my weight, pushing down, gives it a reason to go on."
He was lying to me, of course. In the past five minutes, he'd probably told me five hundred lies: lies knitted together in his mind like the intricate steps of a peasant dance. And I couldn't blame him. Why should he trust me? Why would he trust anyone, but especially a foreigner who arrived out of the blue with the story I'd told? To get over his suspicion would be equivalent to climbing Mount Everest. And now, after that drive, having gone thirty-six hours without any sleep, I wasn't sure I still had the energy. But perhaps that was the key… perhaps the secret I searched for, like a forgotten dream or memory, would only come to me when I'd ceased trying to recall it. In any case, when I began speaking again, I had no particular purpose; my remark was purely conventional, ut-J tered only to keep the ball rolling. I said, "Your wife sounds like a very remarkable woman."
"She was. Of course, she has been dead many years. She died the year before the Great Patriotic War — and you mustn't say you are sorry, for it was a blessing to miss so much that was horrible. Only now I regret that she's not here, just to talk." He smiled then, and his right hand dove under his blankets, bringing forth a small framed photograph, which he then held out to me. "She was very beautiful, as you can see."
In fact, what he gave me wasn't a photograph, but something earlier; a tintype, even a daguerreotype. The frame was heavy, conceivably silver, and the picture itself was sealed behind a sheet of thick glass and an oval matte. The picture was a portrait, the subject being a darkly beautiful woman in three-quarters profile. The antiquity of the image itself and shifts in fashion — she wore a black, high-necked dress and her dark hair formed a single thick wave on one side of her face — made it impossible to feel certain about her age, but I would have put her in her thirties. Her beauty was striking, and very Russian; if you needed someone to play Tolstoy's Natasha, this sharply featured woman with enormous dark eyes might be a good choice. And yet it was not her beauty in itself that now made my hand tremble. Rather it was a strange, ethereal quality, part aristocratic aloofness, part shyness, which, once seen, was quite unmistakable. Placing the photograph carefully on the old man's lap, I reached into my coat and brought out my wallet. I'd carried two of Travin's photographs with me: one of Georgi Dimitrov picnicking with the good North American comrades, the second of May Brightman emerging from her home in Toronto. This was the photograph I smoothed out, and laid by the first.
"If this is your wife," I told the old man, "then this must be your daughter."
20
If I'd known the message I was carrying, I might have delivered it more carefully; or I would have tried to. But I'm not sure, in fact, if that was possible. In those strange circumstances — in the glow of two kerosene lanterns, enclosed by the aura of this old man in his chair, dancing back and forth between past and present, truth and falsehood, and with the photographs of the two women lying between us: in such circumstances, my announcement was nothing short of a miracle. And miracles aren't led up to; they simply happen.
Strangely, I think the effect was the same on both of us. Transported beyond bewilderment, disarmed beyond confusion, we were equally amazed. Shastov's face moved through a dozen expressions, settling on none, and when he finally tried to speak, he couldn't; I suppose forty years of the unutterable-was lodged in his throat. So, in the end, I did the talking. I told him everything; about Brightman, about May, about what had happened. At a certain point, I mentioned her name and it was then, for the first time, that he cried: May, virtually the same word in both English and Russian, had been the name he and his wife had given their child. Brightman had kept it. The tears began trickling down his cheeks; and, as he wept, it seemed to me that his tears were as much for his wife as for anything else — she had suddenly been brought back to life by that photograph, only to die once again; and, once again, without knowing that her daughter was safe. In the midst of hope, hopelessness. After that, there didn't seem to be much more to say. So I waited. But then I reminded myself that this was a Russian house, and Russian homes always have one solution for grief. In the back wall of the place, beyond the light from the lamps (we still awaited the witching hour of six), there was a door that led into a kitchen. It was a small, bare room, the floor strewn with sawdust. A Dutch door, opening over a table and sink — for preparing the animals' feed — gave onto a lean-to shelter with a wooden trough that was filled with black, rotted straw. An iron stove with a fire burning stood on the far side of the room. To give the old man more time to recover, I added a log and stoked it up, then found vodka and glasses in a small cupboard and returned to the front room. He'd got himself back together. When I gave him the vodka he drank it straight back, then held his glass out for more. I poured, and this time he sipped.
"Dear God. You will think us so wicked."
"No. I don't think that, Mr. Shastov."
He shook his head. "You will think she was wicked to do it and that I was even more wicked — the husband — to let her."
"Why did she want to?"
One of the lamps sent an oily curl of soot into the air. Bending forward, he turned down the wick. Then, taking another sip of the vodka, he wiped at his eyes with the edge of the sheet.
"You must understand," he said, "we had a baby in Perm, when we were first married. A baby boy. But he died almost at once. My wife was grief-stricken and swore never to have any more. And she didn't. People here in the village used to say that I must treat her like a saint, or the very devil, but in truth it was her doing — she was always so careful. But then she thought that was all finished, that she couldn't have any more, and shortly after, she became pregnant. I was glad. Honestly, I was glad. Even here — even as we were living here then — I wanted a child. But she was very upset; I think, once, she tried to end it. There was a woman in the village… yet it didn't work, for the child came. It almost killed my wife, however. She was too old. The child was all right, but my wife knew that she was going to die, and if she died, how could the child live? There was no milk here… there is almost none now… you see? That's why she wanted to."
I could see it. In that hut — in that light — so near the canal and its graveyard of anonymous bones — I could believe desperation without any limits. "Yes… so she thought—"
"She asked me to let her save the child's life. She said she knew people who would take her, look after her. If she lived through the winter, then fine, our little girl would come back, but if she died, or if I died, the child would go on. I was frightened. Because she didn't tell me who these people were — she wrote a letter that she wouldn't let me read. But she grew weaker and weaker… it was clear what was happening… To have refused her would have killed her last hope. So I let them come and they took the baby away. Not long after, she died and then the war came — I always thought that my wife had seen the war coming, and I told myself she'd been right. She was dead, and whatever might happen to me, at least our daughter was safe."
"Who were the men?"