The Russian Jerusalem Read Online Free

Russia. They are still far from Moscow but some bombardment can be heard at a distance. If Tsvetaeva hears, she gives no sign.
    Near the ramp leading to the boats, a girl of three or four begins to cry. Snot runs from her nose. She is pale and probably feverish. Her mother gives a glancing blow to the side of the child’s head and the wild crying dwindles into sobs.
    It was like the blow of a friendly bear. Animal. No cruelty in it, Tsvetaeva observes without rancour, remembering her own mother; that narrow passionate woman who had driven her to excel so harshly. With words. Contempt. The only reality in her childhood was her mother’s ferocity. For a moment, Tsvetaeva remembers the high ceilings, parquet floors and potted plants of the House on Three Ponds Lane and can hear Chopin played on the grand piano. Another world. And an unhappy one, she remembers, thinking of those endless music lessons she endured, the way she was refused writing paper. The loneliness between her parents. And her mother’s last words: ‘I only regret music and the sun.’
    Her own gifted daughter, Alya, became her playmate, her accomplice, her nurse; a loving acolyte, a poet, an artist. There were whispers in the houses of rich friends about the way she exploited her. Alya was willing. Too willing. Until, suddenly … but Marina cannot bear to remember the first sullen rebellion. The shift in domestic loyalty. Marina ponders her own selfishness in putting poetry before every other duty. A wickedness like the sin of her imagined Marusya, who loved her Vampire so much she fed her whole family to him. Now Alya is in a labour camp. Her thoughts recoil from that pain.
    Not that she had any illusions that she would find happiness in her homeland when she returned from France. She followed Seryozha out of Russia, when he escaped to the West after the Civil War. She followed him back when he had to run away from France as a spy. She remembers writing: If God performs this miracle and leaves you alive, I will follow you like a dog. Twenty-one years later, in Vanves, she wrote, bitterly: And go I shall, like a dog.
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    After so many years in exile, she no longer recognises her native city. Everything in it has changed too much. The poplars around her childhood house are long gone. When she runs to one-time friends, begging help, most are reluctant to see her. Ilya Ehrenburg at least meets her, but his eyes are hooded and blank, his mind filled with other disasters. Ehrenburg – Ehrenburg, who had given up his own attic so that she and Alya had somewhere to stay in Berlin, who brought her the first letter from Boris Pasternak – Ehrenburg hardly registers her presence. All his attention is swallowed by the German threat.
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    Strangers. She has so often been a stranger. In Prague where her slatternly ways were despised by the house-proud émigrés, or in Paris where her poverty made her a beggar to rich friends. For all the hardship, she survived through her poetry. Now once again in Moscow, her own city, she knows herself unwelcome. Dangerous, too, because her husband is in prison, and her daughter in the Gulag, and people are afraid to be with her. All she needed once was a bedside lamp, a notebook and a little silence. She could enter a world of dreams and fairy tales and write as if under a spell. Now she has not written a poem for nearly two years.
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    It is no longer clear why it is worth staying alive.
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    Suddenly there is a little rustle among those waiting for the boat. They have recognised someone notable, and they part to let him pass. Tsvetaeva turns to see Boris Pasternak coming towards her. The crowds give way respectfully. They know his handsome face. It is unmistakeable. Many of them know his poems. She lowers her own head as he comes up to press her hand. A quick goodbye? What else? He does not invite her to join him in his dacha at Peredelkino. Even to come was brave, she knows that but, when he