The Russian Jerusalem Read Online Free Page A

leaves, her face is disappointed.
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    Loneliness.
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    She was most lonely in the dacha in Bolshevo which was Seryozha’s reward for service to the State. Once unimaginable. Now acknowledged freely. A pleasant Moscow suburb. Her daughter Alya was there, happy with her new man, Mulya. There was a married couple, recruited by Efron in France. But she was alone, surrounded by believers in the new Soviet order. All of them reportingback to the NKVD. Everyone a willing spy, even Alya and Seryozha.
    Until they took Alya and one of her friends for interrogation . Then Seryozha was taken, on Alya’s testimony. Her mind draws back from that memory, but the pain of it colours her thoughts. Further back. Farther back.
    She remembers the Civil War famine long ago, bartering for pig fat and millet in the countryside. She wasn’t brought up to trade. She bought a wooden doll she didn’t want and only succeeded in giving away three boxes of matches. The Red Army was everywhere. They ripped open featherbeds for jewellery. Back in Moscow, she and Alya dragged a sledge over the snow to return used bottles for a few kopecks. They left Irina tied to a chair for her own safety. She was too young to understand, and little children get used to anything. Tsvetaeva has tried for a quarter of a century to forget her pretty voice singing, ‘Maeena, my Maeena’. And that when put in an orphanage, Irina died of starvation.
    All her sexual passions failed miserably and, if she thinks of them, it is fleetingly. There was the poet Sofia Parnok, with her Jewish face as handsome as Beethoven. Marina once showered her with bracelets and gold chains, but that was long ago. She had never known such physical pleasure as she found under Parnok’s fingers. But in Paris she heard of her death without much emotion. And when she was told, on this return to Moscow, that Parnok forgave and blessed her as she lay dying, she felt nothing. And what of dapper Konstantin Rodzevich who abandoned her for an ordinary woman and drew her greatest poetry from her in Prague? Under his hands her body arched with pleasure, but to be loved in return was something of which she had not mastered the art.
    Another memory flickers into life. Seryozha in a tilted trilby hat, his underlip heavy as Ehrenburg’s or Mandelstam ’s– two other Jews, after all – but not so slack. Green eyes under bushy eyebrows. The lines cut deep in his cheeks, like a Hollywood cowboy. A handsome man, working as a film extra.
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    The light has not yet gone, but the raids on the outskirts have already begun. The only windows are covered with strips of Sellotape to keep glass from flying when they shatter. She sees the pathetic barrage balloons in the sky. The Germans will take Moscow, as they took Prague and Paris, she says. They are her first words aloud, matter of fact, without resonance. No one answers her.
    She does not say: My husband is in prison. My daughter is in a labour camp. I don’t know what’s happening to them.
    Or: I have spent the last two years looking for a hook.
    Even as I experience her desolate thoughts, I am aware of my own separate body. Unseen. Solid. Still breathing. Dressed in the clothes of a more comfortable era. I am suddenly ashamed of my old claim to resemble her. Her situation has always been so much more extreme than mine. All we had in common were desperation, a wild eccentricity, the long marriage, a sick husband, both of us working like a horse between the shafts to keep the family going. People found the stench of her flat repellent, especially the layers of grease in the kitchen. I had less excuse for my own disorder. Now she was a lost creature. Did I dare approach? She had been my Virgil, into the Russian twentieth century.
    â€˜Marina Ivanovna?’ I begin, sitting next to her on the hard floor. It is late afternoon, but Moscow in August is hot, and there is little oxygen in the crowded room.
    She peers at