Before and During E-Book

Vladimir Sharov

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 573

Beschreibung

Fantastical excursions into Russia's past with Tolstoy, de Stael and Stalin

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Content

Title

The Author

The Translator

Before and During

Copyright

The Author

A historian of late-medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952) is one of the most distinguished and uncompromising novelists of the post-Soviet period. The publication of Do i vo vremya (Before and During) in Novyi mir in 1993 led to an unprecedented rift among the editors of that celebrated journal. Undeterred, Sharov has continued in his distinctive groove, writing an ongoing commentary on Russian history, philosophy and the sacred texts. He disputes the characterization of his novels as ‘alternative histories’: ‘God judges us not only for our actions, but also for our intentions. I write the entirely real history of thoughts, intentions and beliefs. This is the country that existed. This is our own madness, our own absurd.’

Sharov lives in Moscow and is the author of eight novels, including The Rehearsals (1992), The Raising of Lazarus (2002) and Back to Egypt (2013). His books have been translated into several languages, including French, Italian and Chinese. Before and During is his first book to appear in English.

The Translator

Oliver Ready is Research Fellow in Russian Society and Culture at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin , 2014) and, from contemporary fiction, The Zero Train (Dedalus, 2001; 2007) and The Prussian Bride (Dedalus, 2002; Rossica Translation Prize, 2005), both by Yuri Buida. He is Russia and East-Central Europe Editor at the Times Literary Supplement.

This translation is based on the edition of Do i vo vremya published by Arsis Books in 2009, with minor modifications made in agreement with the author.

I first set foot in this hospital in October 1965 – the eighteenth, if I’m not mistaken. They weren’t supposed to keep me in. The plan was for a certain Professor Kronfeld to see me privately and choose a set of pills to match my particular ‘profile’. From the metro I followed a diagonal path, as instructed, across wasteland and unfenced building sites; the path was well-used and the previous night’s snowfall so well-trodden that here and there it had turned to ice. You couldn’t imagine anyone living here: foundation pits and uneven piles of concrete slabs immediately gave way to vegetable depots, garages, warehouses. The once navigable Yauza flowed nearby, the railway line passed right through, and everything else had just clotted around.

This shortcut should have been a twenty or twenty-five minute walk, but I’d been going for more than half an hour and the street I needed was nowhere to be seen. The path was narrow, slippery, and of course I was walking more slowly than usual, but still, it was high time for it to end. I wasn’t prepared to walk like this for ever, in fear of falling, like a clown on stilts. I was tired and annoyed with myself for not taking the other route, the easier one. What was I doing trudging from one warehouse, one job site to another, when I could have skirted them all along two broad streets that were swept and kept safe for walking? Convinced I was lost, I cursed myself mercilessly; I was almost in tears. The situation hardly warranted such a reaction, but I was on my way to a doctor, to a mental hospital; I didn’t know what he’d say to me, what fate held in store. I was a bag of nerves. If only I hadn’t cut it so fine, if only I’d given myself enough time to take the longer, more reliable route, not this uneven, uncertain path.

But God exists. There I was, wandering blindly among the garages, doing my best to avoid the potholes and the mud, when suddenly the ground, and the path along which I was walking, and this whole half-built labyrinth, and even the snow, all gave off the scent of vanilla and fresh hot bread. Ahead, a stone’s throw away, was the bakery I’d been told to look out for. Apparently, it was on the same street as the hospital, three buildings before it.

The scent of vanilla is the scent of my childhood, the scent that surrounded me when I was conceived, brought to term, brought to life, the scent of my mother, my grandmother, our house, of all that was good and kind in my life. I spent my first six years on Pravda Street, not far from Soviet Hotel, famous for its gypsies to this day, and right opposite the huge ‘Bolshevik’ cake factory. That was where the smell came from, and I’ve always been convinced, for as long as I can remember, that the reason the factory bears its proud name is that this is what the Bolsheviks were like: soft, rich, sweet.

My mother was terribly fond of chocolate. Her fingers were long and slender, her nails painted violet, and when, over a cup of coffee with one of her numerous lady friends, she took a diamond or turret-shaped chocolate from a brightly coloured box, the effect was beautiful. At three I discovered that these chocolate selections were produced by the ‘Bolshevik Girl’, a different factory, and this made my mind up once and for all about the Bolsheviks, men and women, and resolved that vital childish question of where they came from and how they were born. My picture of the world was complete.

We all know how durable the first impressions of childhood are: even after university, as a grown man and a seasoned journalist, whenever I was asked to write about the Bolsheviks I couldn’t help making them out to be soft and tender, then I’d tie myself in knots trying to revise what I’d written, but to no avail – they never came out as they were meant to. It’s hardly surprising: I was still living in another world, and there, it seemed, I would remain. Thanks to those Bolsheviks, I was taken for a bit of a fool at the paper, though I was liked well enough. Needless to say, my sketches could never be published in their original form, but they had one undeniable quality: the heroes were described with a love and a tenderness so genuine that our old newspaper hounds openly envied my sincerity, which, alas, would dissipate the moment someone tried to improve my text.

I knew this couldn’t go on forever: it was hardly fair that someone else had to do my work for me, and a couple of years later I resigned. It was a painful step; I loved everything about the paper, the very smell of it, and anyway, I had nowhere else to go. By then I’d accumulated a vast quantity of unpublished sketches and stories, and I slowly drifted about – a bit of freelancing here, some hackwork there – in search of publications that might find my view of life congenial. In the end, there was probably only one place I could find them, and find them I did, by returning with my Bolsheviks to my childhood, to the place where they and I both came from.

Ten years have now passed since the time when editors were only too glad to publish me in Pioneer’s Truth, Bonfire and, especially, Tiny Tot. Those first books which are read to children at home, in the crèche, at the nursery, are mine, because they contain my own childhood, kindness, tenderness, because my Bolsheviks are like mummy, kind, tender mummy, and children love these stories and want to hear them again and again. Then, like everyone else, my readers grow up, discover the world, realize that communists weren’t always kind and soft, but their love for them remains. I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of; I wrote honestly, and I wrote what I thought, even if now, perhaps, my stories look a bit naïve.

My little books about Lenin eventually made my name, and shortly before the story I’m about to tell I suddenly received two very flattering offers. Offers I could never have dreamt of earlier. Many years before, while still at university, I wrote my thesis on the wonderful French writer Germaine de Staël. I’d continued to collect material about her and even dropped off a proposal for a book about her at Young Guard Publishing House, for their series Lives of Remarkable People. Nothing came of it, of course. But just recently, when I’d forgotten all about it, Young Guard sent me a letter declaring, amidst a flurry of obeisances, that, if I hadn’t changed my mind, the publishing house was ready to sign a contract with me: the book on Madame de Staël had already been scheduled.

A month later to the day (I had only just got started on the project), Politizdat invited me to contribute to Fiery Revolutionaries, an equally popular series. It was mentioned, moreover, that my reputation was so irreproachable that the choice of both hero and era would be left entirely to me. Well, so much for grand plans – these past three years I haven’t written a page, and but for the royalties from reprints of earlier books I’d have had nothing to live on.

*

The hospital grounds were extensive. Buildings in different styles and different, though faded colours were grouped haphazardly around a large central flowerbed, which now, at the end of autumn, was covered with yellow, patchy grass already sprinkled with snow and the remains of flowers planted in clumps. The building to which I was headed, a recent prefab, stood directly opposite the gates, and I reached the sixth floor in good time. I needn’t have hurried. Kronfeld was busy on his ward round, which had been held up by a ministerial commission, and a nurse told me that it would be at least an hour before he could see me. Thereupon the door to the ward was shut, and I was left alone in a small, bright space, almost like a conservatory, that could equally have been a corridor or an ante-room.

I felt trapped: I couldn’t take the lift or the stairs. The window looked out on to the Yauza, which at this point was extremely narrow; its embankment – a high granite wall – all but blocked the water from view. The parapet had recently acquired a cushion of snow, and the arm of a floating crane protruded from the depths beyond, like a well sweep. I stood and watched, convinced that any moment now it would start bowing, or at least turn, but it never did.

I’m only forty-five, but after a head injury three years or so ago – I slipped on ice near a bus stop and fell – I began having blackouts. Two or three times a year I’d leave home and not come back. My family would go from morgue to morgue, queue up in police stations, be told they’d never see me again, but then, after several weeks, sometimes months, I’d eventually turn up, whether in a detention cell somewhere in the South (since childhood I’ve been drawn to the South, to the sea), with no papers or money, having been arrested for vagrancy, or in one of the local psychiatric clinics. Usually I’d be badly cut and bruised after another beating at the hands of policemen or hospital attendants (I was told I could be troublesome, even violent in that state), or of nameless companions on my wanderings (how I wished I could see myself, at least once, at such moments). Then I’d be laid up in bed at home for weeks at a time, but I’d always recover in the end: I have a strong constitution. Even my memory would return, though at first I could remember neither my Christian name nor my surname.

For the time being, then, everything came back to me, and I found it neither hard nor painful – as if I were unspooling a length of thread. I could see how much my mother and aunt enjoyed talking to me, recalling what had happened, and once again I felt like a child whose recovery after a serious illness fills everyone around him with joy – how nice to see him get better. But the outlook was bleak: according to the doctors, people like me ended up murdered by criminals or crippled so badly they never walked again, while a third group – the police tried to avoid having anything to do with us – would go missing for a year or more; and above all, after each new episode my memory would be slower and less likely to recover until, in the end, complete amnesia beckoned. It was this terrifying prospect that had brought me to the hospital to see Kronfeld.

On the other side of the door, in the ward, a new drug was being tested, a drug said to have a radical, even miraculous effect on the circulation of blood in the brain (my illness was directly linked to the fact that many vessels had been damaged by my fall and the blood no longer flowed through them). This new medication was my lifeline: I understood that. And yet that hour, hour and a bit, of waiting for the ward round to finish was torture. I hadn’t really been there all that long, forgotten in the ante-room, and it wasn’t really so frightening – lifts came and went, people kept flitting past behind glass doors, I could have called out, asked someone to open up, even, if it came to it, shouted, and the doctor would have interrupted his ward round and come – but I’d worn myself out to such an extent over recent months that I had no strength left.

For the first year or two I put a brave face on my illness and even managed to see the funny side, joking about the cathartic benefits of memory loss: all the scum and dross was being washed away, leaving me pure again, like a babe. And in fact, that’s precisely how it was. Besides, I was having a far easier time of it than many with similar problems; I recovered my memory quickly enough, with no loss of intellectual function. Perhaps I had my mother to thank – every day she fed me endless vitamins – but whatever the reason, my thinking was unaffected. In short, life, even after my fall, was perfectly tolerable, but then, all at once, exhaustion set in. I found myself waiting for the next episode, the next attack, trying to anticipate it, feeling ever more scared; a few months like that and I soon reached breaking-point. The doctors said I mustn’t tire myself out, and I did whatever they told me to do: reined myself in, freely acknowledged that this or that was too much for me, that I hadn’t the strength, until I suddenly realized: I’d become an old man.

I was still just about clinging on when several people dear to me passed away all at once, dying such lonely deaths that it was as if I were the only person they had. This human solitude, this obligation I now felt to remember them all, almost to rescue them all, was too much, and I cracked. I was found somewhere beyond Tula, at a station, mugged and beaten to a pulp, and it was a month before I was identified and brought back to Moscow.

It took me another six months to recover: my kidneys had been damaged, albeit not too severely, and the doctor who’d treated me all through my illness and knew me better than I knew myself said that at first, after this latest episode, I didn’t want to come back, didn’t want to remember. I’d lost so much that now I just wanted to remain as I was, without memory. Previously, he said, I’d been an incorrigible optimist, as if all this were nothing serious, some misunderstanding, but now he could see that my brain had adapted, as it were, to the illness, learned to take advantage of it, to make itself at home in it, and treating me would be far more difficult, because I myself was no longer on his side. And there was something else. I understood that pills would not be the end of the story, that sooner or later, unless someone killed me first, I’d end up on a dementia ward, hardly the nicest place in the world. I suddenly took in the prospect that the doctors had been dangling before me for some time: senility, and soon – for that was precisely where my illness was headed. Previously, the notion of ‘me among the morons’ had merely served to amuse me, and I’d even used it to amuse others. I was only forty-five.

Now, in touching distance of my hospital bed and with nowhere else to go – I’d forced myself to come here, after all – I suddenly understood that step by step I was becoming someone to whom you could do whatever you wanted. Yet only recently, until the last attack, none of this had scared me: neither the hospital, nor complete dependence on attendants and doctors, nor even death among old men enjoying their second childhood. Oblivion was all I’d feared. Memory was my sore spot and I feared only that which was directly linked to it. It was the most I could manage.

I suppose that right from the beginning of the illness, from the very first attacks, my life had begun to close in on itself, to turn backwards. I increasingly valued that which had already happened, which I had already lived through. Memory had become the centre of my world, and I would lose it so quickly, in a flash, that it resembled nothing so much as death. Death was waiting behind me, not in front of me, and almost instinctively I too set off in that direction – back, to the past. This about-turn, this redirection of my life backwards, upstream – something which had become ever more obvious both to me and to those close to me – was not, as I initially feared, an empty and pointless repetition of what had gone before. For whatever reason, perhaps because I was coming at it from the other end, this life was completely different and completely different things mattered in it. I discovered almost immediately that so much of what I’d lived through I’d lived through provisionally, without joining the dots, with no real comprehension or appreciation. But now it was all coming back to me.

This was, of course, a lavish gift. For a good few years I drew from it day in, day out, and it never diminished; in fact, it grew, and there were times when I almost rejoiced at my illness. My doctor was right: I’d adapted, got used to it, accepted it with barely a murmur. And yet, something within me still longed for a return to ordinary life, a bulwark of sorts, and it was there that the idea was hatched – perhaps it was my doctor, knowing the reasons for my breakdown, who prompted it – that I didn’t actually need my memory, that I could just as well do without it (the months or more I’d spent in a state of oblivion had shown me as much), but I should, and above all, still could, preserve the memory of those whom only I had known or, at any rate, whom only I was prepared to remember. In real life the shoots of altruism are not so numerous for me not to have seized on this idea: the duty I had to remember all these people, to prolong them, at least for the duration of my own life. It became the banner under which I continued to fight my illness. There was also one other story from the distant past that played its role here.

*

When I was twelve, I took communion for the first time – on May 3, my name day. A week or so after this event, an event I still fondly remember in its every detail, I happened to hear a conversation between my father and one of his friends about a recent article on the subject of Ivan the Terrible’s ‘Memorial Book of the Disgraced’. I remember how astonished I was by the very idea, the very possibility of such a Memorial Book. For thirty years a human being murders other human beings without compunction and now, on his death-bed, he begins to recall them and to set aside a certain amount of money for prayers in their memory. Some he recalls himself, others are recalled by his accomplices, but there are many, needless to say, they can’t recall: they didn’t even know their names when they killed them. And so, Ivan leaves money for monks to remember even those whom, as he writes, “You know Yourself, Lord.”

The night after that conversation a strange thought occurred to me: a man can kill another man, even an innocent, sinless man, precisely because there is such a thing as Resurrection, because there is someone to recall and resurrect the victim. And I suddenly understood another thing, too: death is a return to God, a return after long and difficult trials, after responsibility and freedom of will. Father always liked to talk to me about such things, ever since I was seven. It was like returning from adulthood to childhood, or even to the maternal womb, as if such a return were really possible. And above all, for the Lord nothing was in vain, nothing vanished, nothing was lost, and He wanted the same for us too, as people.

That was the conclusion I drew from the Memorial Book, but why, and for what possible purpose, the memory of each victim should remain on earth, why their names should have been recorded, instead of simply saying about all of them equally, “You know them Yourself, Lord,” was beyond my understanding, and to some extent still is. At the time I merely thought, “Will we really all remain here? Will we really not burn in the flames or drown in the waters? Is it really impossible for us, too, to be killed off for good?”

By the time I’m describing, I’d already loved Christ for many years, for as long as I could remember, and, strange though it sounds, my love for Him did not remotely interfere with my love for Lenin. I can’t name the exact year when I first learned about Christ, learned of His sufferings and martyr’s death, but I loved Him at once, loved Him with all my soul, my flesh, my blood, my thoughts, and it seemed to me that this was how it had always been, that I’d always known Him and loved Him, and that He had always been with me.

Since then I’ve heard many sensible arguments about the impossibility of loving Lenin and Christ at the same time (it’s either one or the other), about how Lenin himself didn’t like, and even hated, Christ, and that Christ, were He to have met Lenin on His way, would hardly have taken a shine to him either. But that’s their business, and it shouldn’t even concern me. Laugh all you like, but I really do love Lenin and I really do love Christ, and I believe Christ, just as I believe Lenin, and I thank God for giving me this gift of love, and for giving me that other gift – the gift of analysing, changing my mind, asking why I love him, and does he deserve my love anyway? – to a much lesser degree.

Only one thing clouded my love for Christ during my childhood: the thought that I was too young and too untouched by sin to keep turning to Him, though I wanted to do so constantly, that I shouldn’t even pray too often, since by doing so I was depriving other people of Him, people far worse off than me. I knew there were many such people, far more than there were cheerful and happy ones, but my own childhood contained so little evil and grief that I couldn’t really understand those unfortunate souls whose one hope was Christ, and the person who helped me, strangely enough, was Ivan the Terrible.

Every day after that conversation about the Memorial Book, sometimes many times a day, I would imagine his death, or rather play it out in my own mind. I would picture this dreadful man on his death-bed, repenting of his deeds before God, understanding that his victims were innocent. He’d be crying, begging God for mercy and forgiveness, confessing, donating money for the memory of those he murdered, while himself realizing perfectly well that the scales could not be balanced. He’d been granted only one ability in life – to work evil, to kill thousands upon thousands. Resurrecting even a single one was beyond him.

How much would he have given now to save at least one of his victims? At the very least, he’d have renounced his right to kill without a second thought – but alas! For the first time ever he sees himself in all his foulness, in all his sin, and it’s like a celebration: of his own repentance, of faith in God and fear before Him, before His might. There’s humility here, and trepidation, and not because he fears eternal damnation – at first, perhaps, he does not even think of it –but simply because he understands the full greatness and righteousness of God, and his own complete worthlessness.

I pictured Ivan’s torments to myself very vividly, with great relish, and these inventions, I suppose, were what I understood by Christianity; at any rate, they were the most striking feature of whatever I knew about faith at that time. Ivan’s prayers and appeals to God were more colourful and more convincing than my own, and when I prayed it was usually not for me, but for him, and often in his name. I enjoyed it and believed that I, a child, a pure soul, would save him, rescue him from Hell, but there was also another, more important reason: the idea had lodged itself in my mind that repentance was commensurate with sin, and to the extent that I could not compare with Ivan in evil, nor could I compare with him in repentance and faith.

These childhood prayers left their mark, of course, and, I dare say, more than a mark. They’ve kept their hold on me to this day. Even now, when, setting out on this labour, I stop to consider what to call these notes of mine, the first thing that comes to mind is that Old Russian genre, the Lament. What follows, I expect, will also be a lament, a lament for people I knew and loved. For people who, sad to say, died before their time, leaving nothing behind except in my memory. And when I go too, so will my memories. Not one of their lives fell into place; in none of them was there much love, joy or, at times, even meaning; and not one of these people accomplished much while they still could. We like to say that a peaceful death is granted only to those who’ve fulfilled themselves – they hadn’t. They went through agony before dying and departed in sorrow. Dying, they felt hard done by, disgraced, cheated. So, in memory of my childhood, I have every right to call this my own ‘Memorial Book of the Disgraced’.

*

The first person I want to include is Nikolai Petrovich Pastukhov, a former public prosecutor in Moscow. We met about seven years ago, on the road. We were both on our way back from Kiev to Moscow, travelling first-class in an unbearably hot two-berth compartment. The train, as usual, was running hours behind schedule, and with nothing better to do we finally got talking as we were nearing Moscow. Pastukhov had a friend, dead for some years, who’d also been a prosecutor. They’d studied and risen up the ranks together, neither trying to get ahead of the other; they’d treated each other like brothers, as Pastukhov put it, and the older they got, the closer they became. That friend – his name was Savin – had got married, second time round, to a woman twenty years younger than himself.

‘Her father was in trade, was falsely accused and received almost the maximum sentence. But Lena, his daughter, made a nuisance of herself, and the case ended up on Savin’s desk. The girl was nothing short of heroic: she wasn’t even eighteen, there wasn’t a penny in the house, all their property had been confiscated, and she’d been told by every half-competent lawyer that there was nothing they could do (her mother had died giving birth, so her father was the only family she had). Savin immediately warmed to her. Important people were mixed up in the case, and helping her was no simple matter. But together they almost rescued him. They got his sentence reduced first to five years, then to three, in time for the next amnesty, and then, just a month before the amnesty, he died. Heart failure, the girl was told, but Savin learned through his channels that he’d been beaten to death by his cellmates.

‘Lena lived only for her father, to save him, to bring him back; now, nothing mattered. Up until the day when Savin finally made up his mind to propose to her, she hadn’t left the house for two months. He’d fed her like a nurse, even cooked for her. Lena had no one but him, and he was a loner himself; in short, she agreed. They’d known each other for about eighteen months, more than enough for Lena to grow fond of him – she was a kind, affectionate sort of girl – and there was something else as well: he was the same age as her father, and even resembled him, or so Savin told me (I never saw Lena’s dad). It seems unlikely she loved him to begin with, but she loved him later and loved him deeply – there’s no doubt about that.

‘They had a good life together – surprisingly good, in fact – until the last two years. He already sensed that he was seriously ill, though he didn’t know the cause, or how long he had left. He understood, of course, that he’d die well before her, but what suddenly mattered to him most was not what sort of wife she’d been to him, but how she’d live without him once he’d died – this beautiful young woman (he only ever thought about her now in this peculiarly detached way). Savin, I believe, was overwhelmed by the thought that he’d be gone and Lena would remain. I’m sure he often wondered who she’d sleep with and who she’d marry, but that wasn’t the point; he didn’t intend to get in her way, he just needed to know how she’d get on without him and how any of this was possible: her still here, and him gone.

‘Later, when he already knew he had cancer and a year left to live – eighteen months at most – there was only one thing he could talk about: what she’d do once she’d buried him. Everything else was secondary, and even the thought of his own death would only occur to him now as the precondition for her separate life. He spent his last months hastening his own end, refusing all medication except painkillers.

‘His wife knew what he was thinking, of course, and Savin seems to have succeeded in infecting her with his madness. At any rate, whenever I went to see them Lena was just as incapable of talking about anything else and kept trying to persuade me that Savin was wrong to want to know what would happen to her later, and that if he started following her every move from the other side it would make her life impossible, intolerable: how can you live a normal life when your ex-husband – your dead ex-husband, at that – is constantly spying on you?

‘So he was already dead for her as well, and she too was living that future life; she even spoke about him in the past tense. Only when I came by to visit Savin did she remember he was still alive and set about trying to win my support. She was always on edge, though superficially her behaviour was reasonable enough; you could see how careful she was with her words, how keen she was to make a favourable impression. She’d tell me she’d been a good wife to him, loyal and caring, that she’d never once betrayed him, even though he was a difficult man and twenty years older. But the moment he was dead and buried, her obligations towards him would cease: you could hardly expect her to go on living for him and him alone. She insisted that I, his very best friend, explain this to him and convince him that he was wrong.

‘I’d tell her that Savin was dying, that he had only weeks left to live, that you can’t explain anything to anyone on their death-bed, that it would be disgraceful to talk to him about this now; he’d die and she could do as she pleased. But Lena wasn’t taking much in any more. She’d tell me who she would sleep with, what offers she’d had: trips to the Caucasus, fur coats, precious jewels – all true, of course; she was beautiful, after all. Once she even put her arms round me, kissed me on the lips and drew me to the sofa, when Savin was wide awake and the door to his room stood open. I don’t think Lena had opened it on purpose, or that there was any kind of plan here: him not yet dead, and her sleeping with his friend before his very eyes. It was all much simpler than that – she’d long ceased to think of Savin as a living being, much less a man, and she wanted to buy me off, bribe me to ensure that he didn’t get in her way after he died. Lena, of course, already hated him – as a dead man, I mean – but he still loved her, reached out to her, kept trying to take her hand and wouldn’t let go. He wasn’t really asking her for anything; perhaps he just wanted to know, as a father (for he wasn’t just a husband to Lena: he’d taken the place of her dad as well), how she’d get on without him.’

At that point, the train stopped once more. I asked Pastukhov: ‘And then what? She was right, wasn’t she? And even if she wasn’t, you could hardly force her to lie down next to him in his grave.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘and the first thing Lena did when Savin died was to draw up her will, saying that she should be buried in a different cemetery entirely, next to her mother.’

In Moscow, Pastukhov and I continued to meet regularly, if infrequently. I saw how attached he’d become to me, how offended he was if I didn’t call or drop in, and this became especially obvious during his last year, after he retired. Yet the thought of how much I meant to Pastukhov never even crossed my mind. I could see he was lonely, since the only name that ever seemed to come up in our conversations was Savin’s, yet for some reason I was completely convinced that he’d remained on close terms with his old colleagues. Then, one morning, I got a call from Pastukhov’s ninety-year-old mother, who told me that he’d suddenly died overnight.

This took my by complete surprise, and I recall the bewilderment in her voice as well. She just couldn’t understand it: hardly ever been ill, thirty years her junior, retired – so much life still ahead of him. (Those may not have been her exact words, of course, and there was certainly no irony in them, just surprise.) I started bumbling away in reply, when she suddenly said that I was his only friend and that even when he was dying the only person he talked to her about was me, and the only people he ever mentioned were me and Savin – and Savin, of course, was dead.

She also told me that Pastukhov had named me his executor, so she was obliged to hand over his papers to me and leave me to it. At the time I just couldn’t believe that Pastukhov had no one else in the world, but the funeral put an end to my doubts. There were seven of us: his mother, myself, a trade union representative from the office where he’d worked and paid his Party dues, and four trainees from the same place to carry the coffin.

After that first conversation on the train about Savin’s wife, her name often cropped up during our subsequent meetings. On two or three occasions, when something unexpected happened in Lena’s life and Pastukhov didn’t know what to do, he came to me for advice and we’d have a long chat. All in all, I had a pretty good idea of the shape her life had taken since Savin’s death. I knew, for example, that a few days before Savin died, Pastukhov had given his word not only to help Lena and do everything he could to see that she was comfortable, but also to keep Savin up to date with her life. Every week, at a regular hour, Pastukhov would make a special trip to Savin’s grave.

Then the visits to the cemetery suddenly ceased, or at any rate became rare and non-compulsory. When Pastukhov suddenly arranged a meeting with me for the precise day and time when he used to see Savin, I asked him why. He said that for several months already he’d been going to Savin only on anniversaries and only for his own sake; after all, everything he’d promised Savin was happening anyway, without him. Six months before this conversation he’d told me that Lena was happily married, that her husband treated her like a queen. He was in trade, just like her father, and Lena felt happy to be among her own crowd; he hadn’t seen her looking so beautiful for years. Pastukhov was clearly pleased and even relieved to have carried out this part of Savin’s will: Lena was comfortable.

That time we got talking about trade and the corruption that was plaguing it from top to bottom. The trials of the directors of Moscow’s largest food stores were already into their second year, and Pastukhov, who was involved in the investigation, knew all the ins and outs. He was extremely pessimistic about the whole affair: it was impossible not to steal if you wanted to survive, but the worst thing was that the most competent people were all at the top – lock them up and everything would fall to pieces. As a result, far more would be lost than was being siphoned off now. He mentioned that Lena’s new husband was also mixed up in one of the cases, though only a little. He was one of the competent ones, and he didn’t actually take all that much for a man in his position, so it was unlikely he’d end up in jail. But Pastukhov would help him just in case, in memory of Savin; what’s more, he’d do so with a clean conscience, because in our lousy conditions Lena’s husband did more good than harm.

Things weren’t so simple, though. Pastukhov was a stickler for rules, a real fanatic, and having to break the law for Savin’s sake, having to hush up this case without any justification at all, did not appeal to him in the slightest. True, Pastukhov and the trader were getting on wonderfully at that point – just as they had at the beginning of their acquaintance. During the first few weeks of Lena’s new marriage, Pastukhov was a frequent guest at their home, as if in the place of her father; once, the three of them even made a trip to Savin’s grave together, but Pastukhov’s relationship with Lena soon took a turn for the worse. It’s not hard to see why: she knew all about the obligations he’d taken on towards Savin, and having to see this man day in, day out, while he followed you and squealed on you, was hardly pleasant. She insisted many times that her husband kick Pastukhov out of their home, but the trader seemed to know that he might need Pastukhov one day, and quickly changed the subject.

Pastukhov told me that he’d let him in on all the circumstances relating to Savin’s death just as soon as he and Lena had got together, but I can’t imagine the trader immediately agreeing to help, and certainly not of his own free will. Essentially, Lena had begun a completely different life since their marriage, and the only person who could supply regular reports about this life for Savin was him, her new husband. Pastukhov spent a long time trying to make him understand how crucial it was for him, Pastukhov, that his closest friend’s request be carried out, trying to persuade him that Savin was entitled to this, as Lena’s first husband, and that it was only right, by any moral criteria, that a dying man’s last request be heeded. But the trader refused to understand him, was deaf to every argument, and merely repeated that he knew how much he owed Pastukhov, that he was ready to go to great lengths for his sake, but that he wasn’t prepared to share the intimate details of his married life with an outsider.

At a certain point, Pastukhov – in whose apartment the conversation was taking place – miscalculated and pressed him too far. After leaving him, Lena’s husband, who was virtually teetotal, hit the bottle and had to be escorted home. He spent half the night swearing and calling his wife a ‘slut’. ‘Do you know what your police chums want from me?!’ he yelled at her, before breaking down in tears; after all, his friends had warned him never to welcome a prosecutor into his family. She was crying too, kissing his hands, saying that she would tell Savin everything herself, that they wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone, and that there was no need for him to be scared of Pastukhov – he wouldn’t dare do a thing. She managed to reassure him, and he fell asleep.

She really did start going off to the cemetery on her own, but then Pastukhov said that she shouldn’t, that it was hard on everyone, and that he felt sorry for Savin in particular: why did he need to know how much she hated him? This conversation took place just before Pastukhov went away on holiday, so it was only much later that I found out that Lena’s husband, on hearing from her that Pastukhov would be the one visiting the grave again, gathered his things and left without a word. Lena thought that was that, and about time too. She was tired. But two weeks later – Pastukhov was still away on holiday – the trader came back: he was madly in love with her and realized he couldn’t leave her, come what may.

Returning to Moscow, Pastukhov found a broken man, ready to agree to anything. He explained to me once that this is what happens during investigations as well: the accused breaks down all at once, the moment you pierce his shell in that one and only spot; the shell disintegrates and before you sits a man literally begging to confess.

‘He was scared I might have him locked up, of course,’ said Pastukhov. ‘He’d known that before as well and he’d acted bravely enough then, but now he’d realized he couldn’t live without her and that if he was put away he’d lose her, so he got scared. It was really her who broke him, not me.’

And another thing: he’d suddenly begun to understand Savin. After all, it was the same situation – he’d be gone and she’d remain. Pastukhov told me that the phone rang the moment he walked through the door and he immediately guessed who it was. After saying hello, Lena’s husband told him he’d been calling every hour for the last day, and then, plunging straight in, started telling him all about Savin, repeating what Pastukhov himself had said earlier, only putting it better. That Savin had made a woman of Lena, and nothing would ever change this fact, whatever happened afterwards. That Lena and Savin had lived an entire life together, which couldn’t be crossed out just like that, at one stroke. That he understood now what Savin meant to Lena, and Lena understood what Savin meant to her, and that from now on he would stop encouraging her when she pretended that there had never been anything between them. Naturally, he would visit the cemetery conscientiously, but the reason he was calling now was to discuss the urgent matter of what he should say to Savin, so that Savin and Pastukhov would permit him ‘to carry on enjoying Lena’.

‘What do you think?’ he kept asking. ‘Is it worth me telling Savin about this or that?…’

‘You could hardly discuss such things on the phone,’ Pastukhov told me, ‘so the next day he came round and we went through it all in detail.’

Much later, I asked Pastukhov whether he’d checked up on Lena’s husband. Three times, he said, though there was no real need: they were still meeting up regularly and it was obvious from his behaviour that their agreement was being honoured in full.

‘Once you’ve broken a person,’ Pastukhov would say, ‘they’re no longer capable of lies, only of trivial deception. They have a constant urge to confess, whether or not it’s appropriate, and they’re only too ready to bare their souls to the first person they meet. It would seem that he himself told Lena about his visits to Savin’s grave (until then, she’d been convinced for some reason that I’d left them in peace). What’s certain is that one way or another she discovered that her husband was informing on her and she wasn’t about to forgive him. She thought of breaking up with him – Lena knew her own worth and could easily have found someone no worse and no poorer – but by this point Savin or me (it amounts to the same thing) had begun to frighten her, and she’d realized she couldn’t get rid of us just like that. Her husband knew this too, knew that in a sense we were saving Lena for him; but it wasn’t so much that he felt indebted to me, more that he could no longer do without Savin. He complained to Savin about Lena, sought his sympathy, got everything off his chest, and felt better for it afterwards.’

Savin was only too happy to share the pain and hurt which Lena dispensed so freely, and their bond grew stronger with each passing day. There was one period, though, when the trader overstepped the mark. Lena had begun to cheat on him. She’d always been a free spirit, blind to convention, and the need to have an independent life, hidden from her husband and Savin, had developed into an obsession – a way of trying to save herself and of getting away from the pair of them. It would seem that she consciously acted in such a way as to make it exceptionally unpleasant for them to encroach on this separate life of hers. Yet, despite her various subterfuges, her husband soon learned the details of her adulteries, and on one occasion he even walked in on her and her lover. Armed with all this intelligence, he’d go straight off to Savin and tell him every last detail, however sordid. He evidently wanted to intimate that the only person being betrayed here was Savin, while he was neither here nor there – just a private detective.

‘The trader quickly acquired a taste for surveillance. Detective work, after all, is terribly addictive: who doesn’t want to get to the bottom of what others are doing their damnedest to hide from you? And anyway, he wasn’t doing this for himself, as it were, but for me and Savin,’ said Pastukhov, ‘and this, of course, resolved many ethical dilemmas.’

He carried on like that for two months or so, and then (without Pastukhov even needing to step in) suddenly came to his senses. At bottom, Lena’s husband was a decent enough man and he soon realized he was out of line; whatever he called himself – a locum tenens, a temporary replacement, or just a pleasure-seeker – she wasn’t just cheating on Savin, she was cheating on him as well. But the key point was this: he and Savin really were drawing closer and closer year by year, needing each other more and more, and to say that he had become an extension of Savin (I’d heard Pastukhov say similar things) would not, I believe, be a great exaggeration; they really did seem to have merged into one.

There’s no doubt that for Lena’s husband this outcome was nothing short of providential, but it wasn’t clear whether he himself understood this, and now, when Pastukhov had died, I was alarmed by the thought that he would waste no time in destroying everything. I was scared – very scared – that it would fall to me, as the executor of Pastukhov’s will, to try to prop up the construction he’d built through blackmail and threats. This was the last thing I wanted; I’ve always tried to avoid responsibility, always been unable and unwilling to tell people what to do, and besides, I was already ill by then, so I probably wasn’t up to it anyway. And there was one other thing troubling me. Despite all his efforts, Pastukhov had failed to get Lena to rewrite her will and agree to be buried with Savin. So this, too, might fall to me, and I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to talk her into it.

Just as well, then, that Pastukhov appeared to know my limitations as well as I did: stuck to the bulging envelope containing Lena’s husband’s file was a note addressed to me requesting that the envelope be destroyed, since it was no longer required, and, furthermore, that it not be read, barring exceptional circumstances (this last phrase was underlined). And indeed, Lena’s relations with her husband did not seem to change with Pastukhov’s death; in fact, nothing changed at all. He continued, at any rate, to make weekly trips to Savin’s grave.

I’m fairly certain that Pastukhov knew all too well how durable the edifice he’d created would prove: it was precisely the durability and stability of this strange love triangle that must have led him to the thought that there was in all this something exceptionally important and just. So important that it could justify both his own violation of the law and the fact that Lena and her husband were, beyond all doubt, deeply unhappy people. He thought that here, perhaps, one could find the key by which to understand the mutual obligations of husbands and wives, the law which imparts equilibrium and harmony to their relations. Pastukhov was very influenced by the fact that he’d never been married, so he had no personal stake in the matter and, as befits a lawyer, could take a calm, impartial, independent view of all these questions. He saw things from the outside – the only way of seeing them as they are.

Similar justifications of his right to formulate a law on marriage – often very subtle ones and, as far I could tell, technically irreproachable – were to be found all over Pastukhov’s papers and I anticipated that he must have carried most of his work on the law to completion. All I discovered, however, were a few not especially original propositions. Still, it wasn’t hard to grasp from them what Pastukhov wanted. He clearly believed in life after death, though for him it played a subservient, dependent role. People continued to watch us from there, and especially the life of their family, which absorbed them, touched them and moved them just as much as before, but they could no longer influence it in any way.

That being the case, Pastukhov thought, the dead possess one inalienable right: to know. Nothing, however bad or good, should be concealed from them. He also wrote that the first marriage is sacred, that those who enter into it, whatever may happen to them subsequently, ought to be buried in the same grave when they die; then, interrupting his text, he mourned the fact that he would not be able to ensure the same for Savin. He recognized that a widow’s rights should not be limited, but he thought that if a woman was aware that her husband knew the details of her life and that she would be lying next to him after her death, she would restrain herself. And that was about all.

Sorting through Pastukhov’s archive, I was expecting revelations, perhaps because, in fact almost certainly because, I felt guilty towards him – we met up far too rarely. Needless to say, I was disappointed by what I found. Only later, after quite some time, did I realize how little Pastukhov actually wanted: all that mattered to him was that I, or somebody, knew what he’d been thinking about and then went on thinking about it for themselves and remembered him. The whole point was that the labour had only been started; the dots were not yet joined. All he’d wanted to do for the time being was to bring me into his game, to explain its rules, its laws, and then we’d have sat down together and started discussing the details, thinking and talking it over. We’d have taken our time, gone into everything thoroughly, as the gravity and importance of the topic required. He didn’t even mind this labour being put on hold, for years and years, because for as long as the labour was not completed I would keep remembering. And there was something else: he loved Savin.

*

The second person I want to enter into my Memorial Book is Vera Nikolayevna Rozhdestvenskaya. She was the wife of my grandfather’s brother – if there’s a shorter way of saying that, I’m afraid I don’t know it – and three years ago four volumes of her memoirs fell into my hands. At the time it didn’t even occur to me that she might still be alive, or indeed anybody else from their generation. Not long before then I had, for very specific reasons, begun taking an interest in the history of my family, its origins, occupations, character. This happened shortly after the death of my father and, as I now see, was an attempt to appropriate, along with the rest of his legacy, everything that tied him to his relatives. My father’s death had snapped thousands of lines and bonds, suddenly cutting me off from the past.

My father, when he was alive, never said much about his childhood, his father, his mother, or his relatives in general. Sometimes this would annoy me, and I’d badger him to tell me about this or that, though on the whole I understood that he was simply looking out for me: so many dreadful and unforgivable things had happened, and I was only a child. I’ve no doubt I’d do exactly the same if I had children, but when he died and when, after the funeral, I began to understand my new place in the world – his place, essentially – and make myself at home there, it turned out that I was a kind of impostor. There wasn’t even anyone to tell me who I was or where I’d come from.

For a long time all efforts to establish anything concrete about my family led nowhere; either there was a conspiracy or it really was the case that no one knew anything about it. I’d unsuccessfully interrogated all my distant relations (all my close ones had already died), everyone I thought might know something, when suddenly I got a phone call from a second cousin of my father. She told me about a certain Vera Nikolayevna Rozhdestvenskaya, still with us: if anyone knew about us, it was her, and if I wanted, she could try speaking to Vera Nikolayevna’s daughter to arrange a visit. There was only one problem: Vera Nikolayevna had been in poor health recently and it would be hard to make conversation with her. Three days later this aunt called back, dictated the address to me and said they were expecting me the very next evening.

Between Kurskaya and Taganskaya metro stations, on the side of the Garden Ring closest to the centre, on sunken ground behind a big block of flats used by scholars – there were stairs leading down – was the five-storey Khrushchevera prefab I needed. My aunt had described both the route and the major landmarks in great detail, and with total accuracy, but I still managed to get lost and arrive half an hour late. I was met at the door by Vera Nikolayevna’s daughter, Anya, and an old, affectionate collie called Nastya. After making my apologies, I learned that this was the fourth building in which they’d lived, all four of them situated on one and the same spot. First, there was a log hut here, then a large building also made of wood, then a stone house for the clergy of the two nearest churches, and now the prefab from which they were currently being evicted – only they had no desire to leave their neighbourhood and this was already the third year they’d been holding out.

Anya told me all this while I was still taking off my coat and shoes; then she showed me through to her own room and started bemoaning the fact that her mother had been ill since the summer and found it difficult to be around strangers, or indeed anyone she didn’t know well. I could see that Anya regretted having invited me over and didn’t know what to do about it. Frankly, this was the first time I’d ever found myself in such a situation. Getting up and leaving without even seeing Vera Nikolayevna seemed stupid, although it wasn’t hard to guess the nature of her illness: Vera Nikolayevna was almost certainly senile, and why my aunt hadn’t just told me straight out, without resorting to euphemism, was beyond me.

Anya and I seemed to understand each other without words: no sooner did it occur to me that Vera Nikolayevna was senile than she immediately abandoned the subject of abstract ailments and, almost guiltily, rushed to say what a wonderful memory her mother used to have, like many in the family line. Besides, Mama, like her own mother, had been brought up to keep a diary from the age of five, to record every little thing, every single day. So she never forgot anything, never lost anything; whatever she’d live through stayed with her.

When, three years earlier, Mama turned eighty, she decided to write her memoirs, and for some unknown reason Anya gave her support to the idea, although it was clearly a bad one. After all, the diaries had survived, and any unmediated impression is inevitably fresher and more sincere than a memory that’s been polished and touched up. But she only realized this later; at the time, she strongly encouraged her mother, who managed to write four whole volumes before falling ill. It was these volumes that devoured her memory. Her family eventually noticed that no sooner did Mama write down some episode or other from her life than she immediately forgot it, or rather, she remembered it very vaguely, as if through a haze.

‘It makes sense, I suppose,’ Anya explained. ‘Everything that hadn’t ended up in the diaries was stored in Mama’s head, and she knew that it would all just die if she forgot it, or, if you like, wouldn’t even be born; but now she had no need to remember anything.’

Then Anya started telling me what a hard and terrifying life Mama had had, but she’d kept her dignity and managed to bring up three daughters single-handedly. It was obvious that Anya loved her very much, that she was proud of her and was afraid I’d ruin everything. I was an alien presence in their home, capable, in a matter of hours, of wrecking everything they’d been through, their whole life together. From the outside, nothing would change, yet, were Anya to look at her mother even once through my eyes, everything would become false and insincere. For me, the visit had become completely pointless: Vera Nikolayevna was in no fit state to tell me much, and in any case four volumes of memoirs were much more valuable than any conversation. I was just about to ask for them, when Anya suddenly decided that her love for her mother should not fear being tested: she got up and said in a firm voice that we’d kept her waiting long enough.

After all I’d been told, the impression Vera Nikolayevna made on me was very favourable. She was slim, straight-backed and, despite her eighty years, there was no mistaking her breeding. Before me sat a truly beautiful old woman, whose only flaw, most visible when she threw back her head, was a large, dangling goitre. At first, I didn’t even realize she was unwell.

I was introduced and welcomed very warmly, like an old friend. Anya served tea and brought in a beautiful pie which, as she stressed more than once, had been baked by Vera Nikolayevna herself in my honour. She was always trying to say nice things to her mother, and wanted me to follow suit. So I praised the pie after every mouthful; and actually, it was perfectly edible.