230

Четыре

Dawn feebles the sky as I leave for work in the morning. I think I see the wolf standing sentinel by my cottage, but my exhaustion is so extreme that I am not certain if he is real or hallucination. We march down the street, rifles banging against our backs. There is the occasional flicker of a curtain at a window, a child’s frightened face peeking out: our power is dependent on everyone hoping that they will be the saved, while the curses fall on their neighbour.

A few days before I lost her, Raisa began a new series of paintings called Your Majesty. This exhibition, she said, would honour and celebrate the Czar. She was doing both the right thing and the wrong thing; I could not have borne it if she had been arrested, but I could not bear this turn in her artwork. She began painting with mechanical hands and dead eyes. Her portraits normally contained a detail of herself somewhere – her profile in a reflection, her hands at the forefront – but now Raisa was erasing herself from the work entirely. I was afraid that she might be seduced by the Czar’s rule, that I might lose her to him, just as I had lost Eleanor.

The gallery owner rejected the new works, declaring their propaganda admirable but their quality poor. He asked whether she could paint something more feminine, adding that politics was a subject for men. Raisa flew into a rage and declared that 231she would report him. She never did, but it was the end of their relationship. There was nowhere else she could exhibit; more and more galleries were closing down.

—What should I paint? she wept. —How should I live?

I spoke without thinking; I too was very tired:

—Well, you could move on from your art, do something different.

She gazed at me as though I was a stranger. Realising that I had thrust a knife into her heart, I backtracked.

—Of course, you must practise your art … Ignore them all.

I set aside the jealous feeling that I was not enough for her, held her tight and whispered:

—Paint whatever you like, and even if only I see it, it will still mean something.

Sensing her withdrawing, I changed the subject.

—Eleanor keeps remarking on my absences. Perhaps it is time to tell her the truth.

It would be a great sacrifice: it would mean the recalling of her father’s loan, the complete collapse of the record shop and my life. But I believed it was worth it.

Raisa pursed her lips. —A mistress is always valued more than a wife, she said.

—I thought we were on the same page. I thought you said we were meant to be.

—I shall never marry. Men’s genius will always be nurtured by women, but men are not made to do the same in turn.

The next week, I found her flat empty. Some half-painted canvases had been left behind. Her old feather boa lay ragged across the bed. A bloodstain on the floorboards sent a chill through me. 232

I knocked on door after door. No, she had not left a forwarding address. One of her neighbours thought she might have fled to Ruthenia, another to the Motherland.

 

A fever befell me. Fury sweated through my skin in sheet-soaked nights of love and hate. She should have confided in me. She had always been so elusive. You can always move on from your art. That look in her eyes. Perhaps I had been losing her for weeks, for months. She was a woman who needed to be deciphered. Even in our rows we had rarely addressed the real issues, veiling them with silly fights: a missing paintbrush, a composer she failed to appreciate.

Eleanor nursed me with tenderness. Every so often, when she was bringing me soup, or soothing my forehead, I would reach out and clutch her hand, squeezing it tight in silent apology. I realised that our life together – right down to the hearty meals she was feeding me – was the result of her father’s generosity. As my body healed, a resignation came over me, and I shrunk the love affair down to a minor chapter in the story of my life. I read Tolstoy: Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. I was not the person I wanted to be. From now on, I decided, I would be governed by reason, not passion; I would be practical and wise.

And so I gave up the lease on my music shop. There was a severe threat of revolution and the army was expanding across the People’s Guard: commissars were being appointed, the CRG recruiting. I applied to join. During the early days, when we were paying daily visits to random houses for interrogations and slowly breaking down families into tearful fragments, a 233panic filled me that I would not be able to see this job through, that to do my duty would force a terrible change inside me.

About a week in, I found myself heading out to Bohemia. I broke into her flat; it was haunted by the chill loneliness of a deserted place. The feather boa was now missing and the bloodstain had faded. I lay on the floorboards and thought that if I had ever really known happiness, it was here, with her. How had I seemed to her? Like a man making empty promises, the greedy cliché who wants both a wife and a lover? Was the state responsible for our end, or was it in fact my fault? Did I deserve love?

I told Eleanor that I wanted to resign from my job as a soldier.

—It is the best job in the world, serving the Czar, she chided me. She told me to give it time.

When a yukuri is not played, the strings grow brittle, the wood grey, the bird melancholic. It also needs to be fed five hermit beetles a day. I sold it for ten rubles. Circumstance required that I withdraw, that I put the part of me called Jaimus into the centre of my heart and seal it away. I drank with the soldiers in the tavern, smoked with them and grew quiet, hoping for better times.

 

—MISS RAISA FLORENSKY, YOU ARE HEREBY ARRESTED ON THE ORDERS OF THE CZAR. YOU MUST SURRENDER YOURSELF TO THE CRG AT ONCE.

So this is where she has been living all along, just three miles from her old flat: a single-storey building at the worst end of Bohemia. Fyodor bangs on her door again. 234

—MISS RAISA FLORENSKY, THE CRG ARE HERE ON THE ORDERS OF THE CZAR. WE DEMAND ENTRY.

The wind sings through the tree by her house. It picks up snow from the guttering and expels it on to the ground. Fyodor’s boot kicks against the door. Sergei joins him. Soon, her door is left in fragments, spikes of wood breaking underfoot as we enter the building.

The first thing I am conscious of is that forgotten scent. I kept a few tatty stolen feathers from her boa after we first met, but soon the scent of my pillow was infused into them, my body’s sweat cancelling hers out. Here, the scent is sharp. Raisa is in the air molecules: paints and turpentine and rose and cigarettes. My uniform feels like paper, as though it will unfurl and slip away from me, leaving me naked. Lanterns swing, spotlighting features of her front room: the stacks of canvases, a chair, a table. The hanging of that picture; the position of her paints, in rainbow arpeggio: it is all so Raisa. The picture is torn down; the paints are flung across the room. A cry from upstairs. I think: They’ve found her. I go into the corner and I retch on to floorboards.

—Too much samogon, brother? Radomir pats me on the back.

Sergei and Fyodor call down for support. A narrow staircase. Boots like gunshots. A pain in my heart so fierce that it hurts to breathe.

In the bathroom, there is a bath half-filled with scarlet water. There are canvases floating in it, their colours aborted. In the bedroom, there are canvases on the walls, stacked on the dresser. They are all of one man, in different moods, different colours: in the woods, in a valley, a man surrounded by howling wolves, blowing a kiss. 235

—Hey, they’re all portraits of you, Sergei says to Radomir. My fists curl – she had multiple lovers? Then I realise that Sergei is joking. I scan them and still my shock.

They are all of me.

The paint is still wet on one of them, and when I press my finger to it a smear of colour is left on my skin.

Fyodor announces that the pictures need to be taken away with care for their preservation, for they represent a dangerous man. Her lover. Her accomplice. Her partner in crime. They will analyse their records and identify him. When I gaze at them, I see me without a beard, with a kind face and soft eyes, and I realise how much I have changed in just three years. When Fyodor asks me if the man is at all familiar to me, I nearly break down.

Local homeless men and women are ordered to follow us back to the CRG headquarters. We are told that they will be offered food in return for any information on men who have been sighted entering or leaving her property. At the Minoboron hut, I watch her paintings being unloaded. The procedure unfolds just as I expect it to. Within a few hours, there are several reports detailing how her artwork expresses hatred for the Czar; the man, they say, is one Raisa desires to be his successor. A diary is invented (or did they find one?), where Raisa has outlined plans for his assassination. Unfortunately, the code she used veils her accomplices, but we are told that they must be tracked down at once. Tomorrow, a fresh manhunt will begin. 236