On her way home to Klim, she stopped by an old mansion house in what used to be Basseynaya Street, a writers’ hive since the time of Dostoyevsky. A little girl who was brushing snow and excrement in the square courtyard directed her to staircase C, “third floor on the right, yes she’s there, she nearly never goes out…” Daria offered a dry biscuit, receiving a startled glance in exchange. The child stuffed the prize into her clothes. Daria edged through a half-open door into a hallway lined with bookshelves. Dusty volumes were piled one on top of the other, abandoned, sprawling, and, she guessed, decimated by the needs of the stove. A pale man with a cough pointed her to a door. The apartment smelled of manure, but the hum of a sewing machine could be heard and a gas ring with a saucepan on top was alight in a recess of the passage. Daria knocked at the left-hand door. “Come in?” The ceiling was tarred by smoke. Good pieces of mahogany furniture from the time of mad, murdered Czar Paul were buried under rancid clothes, broken-backed books, crumbs of food. The writer Anna Lobanova, looking paler and more creased than she remembered her — altogether a shriveled old woman — lay on the bed under a rug, holding a bound book between hands encased in gray wool. “Oh! Who are you?”
Daria said, “You might remember me, we met, years ago… Permit me to give you these.”
The white hair had lost its sheen but the eyes lit with childish avidity. The visitor pushed vials, ashtray, and candle stump aside to make room on the bedside table for some biscuits, a pack of cigarettes, and a jar of American vitamins.
“Thank you very much,” Anna Lobanova said with a broad smile. “It’s my legs, you know, what with no food — first-degree malnourishment — and the cold… You in the army? Can’t quite place you.”
“Think back. We met several times at Illarionov’s in Moscow; I was with…”
Daria stopped short in discomfiture, with a name on the tip of her tongue that must on no account ever be pronounced, a presence-absence that did not exist. It had been crossed from the record of the living and the dead: D. “Indeed,” the writer filled in quickly, lashes fluttering with the same embarrassment, “perhaps, perhaps… Hardly knew Illarionov, of course…”
Daria adopted a casual tone to say, “I’ve not read anything of his for ages. I have so little time for reading! I did like his style… An extraordinary stylist, don’t you agree? Any idea of what he’s up to, these days?”
The old lady’s face hardened with hostility and alarm. Her gaze became clouded and at the same time more piercing. The effect was so incongruous that Daria understood: Illarionov was now beyond the pale as well. Anna Lobanova said, “Oh, I’ve heard nothing of him for years… Never interested me. It’s wrong of you to like his style, it was mannered and reactionary… Yes, I don’t mind calling it what it was. Counter-revolutionary.”
Silence divided them. Daria was taking it in — no more Illarionov. The man, the work, both gone: the name, to be erased from memory. Should she make her excuses and go? Leaving the other sick with foreboding…
“I read your play at the front. The Heroic Children.”
“It’s not by me.”
“Sorry, I meant A Tale of Red Children…”
The writer would not be drawn out. Her silence seemed to shout: Clear off! You’ve nothing to say to me, why should I trust you! Daria lied: “I thought it was rather powerful…”
The old lady stared straight ahead. The skin around her mouth was pursed into wrinkles; the aquiline nose remained plump, but only because of the unhealthy puffiness of the flesh. The mouth looked like a stitched wound. It added up to a noble profile, made ugly by sourness and morose affliction. Anna Lobanova pulled off a glove, fished under the rug for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke through her nostrils. At last, unwillingly, she spoke.
“I disagree with you there. A Tale of Red Children is terrible, a complete disgrace. Who ever saw children like those!”
“Surely,” mumbled Daria, “the main episodes were true to life…”
“Documentary authenticity has nothing to do with literary creation. Didn’t you read the reviews in the Literary Gazette? Bochkin pulled it to pieces and Pimen-Pashkov wiped the floor with them. So there we are. Nor did you read my open letter to the editor, I take it. In which I said that Bochkin and PimenPashkov were justified in their opinion and that it was a piece of agitprop garbage. Subjectively honorable, objectively detestable.”
Daria wanted to laugh, but felt inhibited by Lobanova’s prickly solemnity.
“A writer is a craftsman who must be able to recognize a botched job.”
“And what are you working on now?” Daria asked, in order to change the subject.
“Not very easy to write, with these clumsy gloves and swollen joints… I’m working on a novel about Berezina in 1812… I don’t understand the youngsters of today. Mine grew up in another era.”
“How are they?” (She felt idiotic saying this.)
“My son was killed at Smolensk. No news of my daughter or the grandchildren…”
A small voice shrilled behind the door: “Auntie Aniushka! The soup’s boiling!” “Then turn off the gas!” the writer called back tartly. Daria offered: “Shall I bring you your meal? I’d like to do something…”
“Nothing for you to do. I’m very well where I am.”
“I work for one of the staff services… I could get you evacuated, perhaps a kinder climate…”
“No. I’m not leaving this city, or my books and papers.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t. You can’t.” Lobanova relented a fraction. “You’re too young.”
There was nothing to say. This room embodied the utter extinction of all things. Lobanova chewed emptiness between her soft gums and said, “I never read the papers anymore. They annoy me. Think we have a chance?”
“Haven’t you heard, we’re saved? They’ll never take Leningrad…”
As Daria talked on, Lobanova listened with inquisitorial attention. Don’t even think of lying to me. I know so much. I smell out falsehood and I despise it. I need no consoling pieties to help me either die or live. I need good reason, at its just measure! She must have been satisfied, because she nodded approvingly once or twice.
“May God hear you!” she concluded, with a wry grimace. “You’re no airhead, I’ll give you that. Women have come on a great deal since the revolution… Now leave me alone, I’m tired.”
Daria stood up, buttoning her sheepskin uniform cloak. “So there’s nothing that you need? Or that I can do?” “No, nothing. But thanks for your visit! A bad play earning me a good visit… That’s nice… And after, there will be room for great literature, real literature.”
After us…
Daria asked affectionately, “How old are you?”
“Sixty-two… But I plan to go on working for at least five years. We writers receive good rations. And so we should. Someone has to defend the brain…”
Out of the blue, Daria thought back to Illarionov, whose name could not be spoken, to D (in a small tan café in Paris), to some of the dead. Killed: worse than dead.