An Unquiet Heart

December 24th, 1918. In his memory, the evening glowed; the Pegasus suffused in beauty, the smoke from a hundred cigars the perfumed incense attendant on the mystery of the moment.

Then, something that hadn’t happened for a long time; a poem swam up from his youth, from the years before the wormwood lodged in his throat.

He looked up and didn’t know where he was. He saw the mouths moving, the plates rattling. But he heard nothing.

He scanned the room. That must have been the instant he glimpsed her. A pair of eyes in the crowd; nothing more.

He was searching for the next poem but not finding it. He didn’t know what was happening; his mind never went blank.

I believe. I believe – in happiness!

I believe the sun yet shines, that rays

Of daybreak like a crimson book of prayers

Proclaim the joyous news. And yes, oh yes,

I believe – in happiness.

Ring out! Ring out, you golden land!

Rage on, you wind, still fierce and unabated!

For blessed is he who with fondness celebrated

The sadness of your lonely fields, your hope forlorn . . .

Ring out! Ring out, you joyful, golden Russia!

Ring out and sweep us on!

Was it the intensity of her look? The gaze that held him was for him alone. Her flickered, conspiratorial smile? A spark had passed between them. The lips that said she understood him and wished to know him? The intelligent, serious beauty directed so openly, so knowingly at him?

Sergei made an effort to address the room, to encompass the poets, the spivs, the tarts. But his eyes returned to her. And when they found her, she was looking at him.

At the end of the evening he hurried from the stage. Well-wishers, critics and drunks held him back. When he freed himself, she was gone.

He ran to the lobby. He asked Marienhof if he had seen the beautiful girl with the radiant eyes, but Marienhof shrugged, ‘There are so many of them . . .’

He found her in the corridor, where fans congregated, waiting for autographs or inscriptions. He signed, shook their hands, watching her always, worried she would leave.

‘Zinaida Raikh, Delo Naroda. May I ask you some questions? It’s for the arts pages . . .’

It was the last thing he’d expected. A journalist. From a newspaper he barely knew.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Delo Naroda, “The People’s Cause” – what sort of paper is that?’

‘Political. Like every paper nowadays,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I do the culture section. I keep out of the politics.’

She asked him the expected questions – How long had he been a poet? Whom did he admire? Where did he come from? Then the unexpected ones – What was his favourite colour? Was he superstitious? Was he married?

‘It sounds like you’re interviewing me for the society pages – if society pages still exist . . . No, I’m not married,’ he said, glossing over the fact that he was, ‘and I’d better say my favourite colour is red, hadn’t I?’

‘It’s not me we’re interviewing here . . .’ Then, after a pause, ‘A year older. Tell me what you’re working on . . .’

Sergei spoke about his writing, about his connection with the Imagists, his previous incarnation as a peasant poet, his views on Futurism and the other literary schools vying for precedence in post-revolutionary Russia.

‘We should do something about politics,’ Zinaida said finally. ‘Can I say you are a fervent believer in the ideals of the revolution?’

‘I don’t want to write something if it isn’t true,’ she said. ‘If not the revolution, what can I say Sergei Yesenin believes in?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps my problem is that I don’t believe in anything . . .’

‘Really?’ she said, surprise in her voice. ‘How can someone believe in nothing? I don’t see how that could be possible.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can write that I believe in poetry . . . You can write that poetry for me is not an act. That it is real and true. That it is my life!’

He felt deflated. Had she wished to see him only for an interview? He realised he had not asked for her address.

He found the number for Delo Naroda and rang the editorial office. The voice that answered sounded like a policeman. The People’s Cause had been shut down.

Later, an envelope was delivered to the Pegasus Stable. It contained an apology from Zinaida. The newspaper’s demise meant her article about him would never be published, she said, but she enclosed a draft of what she had written:

Great poetry has the power to capture your heart; the greatest seizes us without revealing how it does so. We may glimpse devices of craftsmanship, skilful juxtapositions of words, onomatopoeia or rhymes that tug at our emotions. These are the outward signs of the artist’s grace. They are the jewels and adornments worn by a beautiful woman, but they are not the essence of her beauty. That lies within.

Though we may not know why we surrender to a poem’s beauty, yet we can describe the effect it has on us. And the closer we come to understanding the emotions we experience while under its spell, the closer we feel to the noble mind behind it.

As in love, so in poetry.

Great poetry lifts us out of our workaday life. It excites and sharpens our faculties. We become more receptive to the world, perceive our fellows with greater understanding and deeper sympathy.

The whole adventure of life on earth gains in moment, precariousness and beauty. Living becomes sweeter, more vital than we had ever thought. We feel ourselves in the presence of extraordinary possibilities.

I experienced all these things last night when I heard Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin recite his poetry at the Pegasus Stable on Tverskaya.

Z. N. Raikh, Delo Naroda, Moscow

Sergei turned over the page and his heart leapt – she had included her address.

Zinaida’s review was a love letter. Sergei longed to respond in kind. He wanted to write about the feelings she had stirred in him, about his joy at discovering someone who felt things as deeply as he did – someone with a sensibility comparable to his own.

Dear Poet,

If you are at such a loose end, we had better meet for tea. You can find me at Perlov’s Tea Rooms on Myasnitskaya Street tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock.

Zinaida

Perlov’s Tea Rooms were a Moscow institution. Everyone knew their glittering facade with its Chinese dragons and gilded pagodas. These had been added in 1896 to impress the Chinese High Ambassador, whom Sergei Perlov was courting in a bid to win the licence to import China tea. The ambassador had paid his compliments, enjoyed Perlov’s hospitality and signed a deal with his main competitor.

Perlov’s hard luck touched the hearts of Muscovites. They flocked to drink his tea. Having survived the privations of war and revolution, the tea rooms continued to thrive, a relic of the past overlooked by the new regime.

Sergei found her in the jade room. Its mirrored walls and steaming samovars, the noisy chatter of the customers and the uniformed waiters darting back and forth gave the place an air of imperviousness to time and the world. It eased the awkwardness between them.

Zinaida spoke about losing her job without bitterness. It was one of those things that life throws at us; worse things were happening in the world; we need to keep a sense of proportion.

‘But don’t you think life has changed?’ he said. ‘Life in general, I mean. When we were young, there were duties and obligations to people and institutions we regarded as permanent. We respected the monarchy, believed in the Church, honoured our parents and our country. Life had a solidity that made it easier to accept when bad things happened. Now everything seems to have been swept away. It’s as if we were children led by grown-ups, but the grown-ups have turned tail and run.’

‘Yes,’ Zinaida said. ‘And I can tell that all those changes have upset you. I can feel it in your poetry – that sense of being adrift in the world. But don’t you think we can find meaning in ourselves? I mean, we can replace the outside certainties with certainties from within . . . I’m expressing it badly, but we need to decide things for ourselves now – now that others have stopped doing it for us. It seems to me that we can find guidance in our own hearts, in the natural decency we all have within us . . .’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘We can’t rely on others to tell us how to live our lives. But we can rely on human goodness – goodness that will triumph over the chaos and the disintegration, goodness that will make everything all right.’

They parted with a tentative kiss. Zinaida’s kindness, her transparent integrity, and the evident interest she took in him and his concerns had moved him. She had faith in people. She sensed there was a way forward, a life beyond the doubts and the sorrow.

He couldn’t work. He could think of nothing but the magnificent woman who had come so wonderfully into his life. He pictured her day and night – black hair, high cheekbones, tender brown eyes glowing with empathy.

He found himself on Pokrovka Street on a morning of sharp January cold, ice crystals flitting like fireflies in the reluctant sunshine. He was on Basmannaya, approaching the old German Quarter before he realised what he was doing.

In a rutted side street in the bakers’ district, he stood at the door of her block. Children playing at ice battles were rolling snow into shapes that grew to Teutonic Knights and Russian princes, belligerent Father Frosts with birch-branch lances and pebble eyes.

A dog yelped in the yard, seeking attention. Sergei heard the longing in its bark. He heard things he hadn’t heard before; saw life around him that years of introspection had hidden from his gaze.

The cold felt good on his skin. The morning sun, low in the sky, sent its rays into the cracks and broken bricks of the facades. A mouse, bloated with winter fat, peered from a gap at the base of the wall then scurried back in.

Standing in this street, on this morning, he felt a barely containable joy. It was fortune enough. He turned and ran.

On Nikolskaya Street he overtook a group of Red Guards. They were marching out of step. An officer was shouting orders, but the men went their own way.

At Varvarskaya Square, a building with foreign lettering on it was being requisitioned by the police. Sergei watched as an elderly gentleman in a black frock coat was pushed out of the front door into the street, remonstrating in a language that was not Russian, pleading to be allowed back in.

A crowd had gathered. Flustered and humiliated, the foreigner dropped his spectacles. He bent down to search for them and the crowd laughed. Someone shouted abuse.

The Red Guards, who had entered the square from Varvarka Street, halted to see what was going on. Sergei was close enough to catch the smell of tobacco and vodka on their breath. The man beside him lifted his rifle and fired in a single, practised movement. Blood gushed from the foreigner’s neck.

The world was frozen in darkness, but a fire had been lit with the power to thaw his heart.

‘You have opened my eyes,’ he wrote. ‘You have illuminated my days and freed my dreams. I cannot describe what thoughts and hopes I have experienced since we met. May I see you, Zina? May I tell you honestly everything that is in my mind?’

A reply arrived. He tore open the envelope. He saw that it ran to several pages, but its tone puzzled him. She wrote of feelings, but not her own. Instead, she wrote of the emotions of a dead woman, now resurrected in a play.

I believe I have a gift for it. I have been rehearsing a play, in which I play the role of Harriet Taylor. Do you know her? Or her husband? He was an Englishman called John Stuart Mill and he wrote about philosophy. The Bolsheviks like him because he denounced autocracy and embraced a sort of socialism. The play is about love.

John was remarkable, but Harriet was his equal – equal in intelligence, equal in talent, equal in sensibility. When they meet at the start of the play, she is twenty-three – our age! – and a great beauty. She has ‘large, dark eyes, not soft or sleepy; with a look of quiet command in them’. They fall in love, but Harriet is already married. She does not wish to betray her husband, but her attraction to John is so overwhelming that they begin an affair. And they truly love each other. This is what she writes after their beautiful night of lovemaking:

I feel as though you have never loved me half so well as last night. I am glad you said those things to me. I am happy that you have. No one with any fineness and beauty of character but must feel compelled to say all to the being they really love. While there is any reservation, however little, their love is imperfect . . .

John’s friends try to tear him away from her. They circulate malicious gossip to ruin their relationship. But John prizes Harriet so highly that he turns his back on society and gives up his position in the world.

When Harriet’s husband falls ill with cancer, the prospect of his death opens the possibility of her and John finally being able to marry. But Harriet suffers terribly during her husband’s illness, both from the horror of what he is going through, and also – I think – from the guilt she feels at the way she has deceived him. She writes some bitter letters to John:

The sadness and horror of nature’s doing exceed a million-fold all the attempts of the poets! There is nothing on earth I would not do for my husband and there is nothing on earth that can be done. Do not write to me!

When Harriet’s husband dies, and she and John are free to live as man and wife, John’s mother and sisters disown him. He accepts even that sorrow because of the strength of his love for Harriet, and she loves him in return.

‘There has been so much more pain than I thought I was capable of,’ she writes, ‘but Oh! How much happiness now!’

They have seven years of bliss together, and when Harriet dies, John is overcome by inconsolable grief. ‘The spring of my life is broken,’ he writes.

On her grave – in Avignon in France, where she had died as they were travelling through Europe – he has an inscription carved.

Her great and loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, powerful, original and comprehensive intellect, made her the guide and support, the instructor in wisdom, the example in goodness, as she was the chief earthly delight, of those who had the happiness to belong to her. Were there even a few hearts like hers, this world would already become the hoped-for heaven.

For the next fourteen years, until his own death, he lived in Avignon close to her grave because he could not bear to be parted from the woman he loved . . .

You may wonder, dear poet, why I have written of this at such length. It is because I am excited at the prospect of playing such a remarkable woman. And because I am in awe of the mark that love can make on our lives.

Your Zinaida

She asked him not to see her before the performance. She wanted him to come as an impartial spectator, she said, so he could give her an objective account of the play.

The production was in a converted basement. The audience shivered in the unheated space. The staging was awkward and it seemed as if the playwright had simply given the characters long extracts from diaries and letters to read to each other. The deficiencies made it hard for him to judge if Zinaida’s performance were good or bad. He suspected she was a little amateurish.

But nothing of that mattered. He saw the beautiful, radiant being behind the costume. This was the woman who could haul him from his hell of despair.

She came to him afterwards, still in her make-up, with her hair held back under a scarf. The flawlessness of her beauty made him tremble.

‘Now you have witnessed me performing,’ she said, ‘just as I witnessed you. Our spheres are different, but we are equals.’

She had prepared a supper of cold meat. At the door to her apartment building, Sergei told her how he had stood there three weeks earlier with the intention of knocking, but had felt so happy that he had run away.

‘So happy that you had to run away!’ She laughed. ‘Really? They say women are strange, but I think men are stranger – or perhaps it is poets!’

They sat across the table from each other, looking each other in the eye then looking away, trying to discern what the other might be thinking, trying to express and then to disguise the joy they were feeling.

Zinaida told him her story. She had been born in Odessa in 1894, one year earlier than him. Her father, Nikolai, an engineer of German descent, had been active in opposition circles in his youth. He had served time in exile and in tsarist jails, but had fallen in love with a Russian noblewoman.

Anna Viktorova came from a distinguished family, who insisted that her young suitor renounce his Roman Catholicism and convert to Orthodoxy. It was the 1880s, a decade of change, and they turned a blind eye to Nikolai’s political views.

Zinaida grew up in a cheerful home with devoted parents, whose love of music and art, respect for the life of the mind and liberal views helped imbue her with a contemplative outlook on life and a personality that remained for the most part levelheaded and optimistic.

Nikolai had continued his political activism. After the 1905 revolution the family were exiled from Odessa to a town on the Moldavian border. Zinaida’s oppositionist views, inherited from her father, got her expelled from school. She went to university in Kiev, where she joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and in 1913 was sentenced to two months in prison. Unable to continue her studies in the south, she had moved to St Petersburg and enrolled in a free university similar to the one Sergei had attended. Her SR connections had helped her find work on the party’s newspaper, Delo Naroda, which had sent her to interview the young poet everyone was talking about . . .

Sergei laughed. ‘Talking about me, are they? So tell me – what are they saying?’

Zinaida smiled and shook her head. ‘I shan’t tell you. You are already far too proud of yourself. I don’t want to make your head any bigger than it is!’

‘You said I was strange,’ he said, ‘because I ran away from your door. Well, perhaps I am strange. I ran away because I sensed the intensity of the happiness that lay before me. Just standing there filled me with such joy that it made the prospect of being with you seem impossibly, overwhelmingly wonderful. And now that I am sitting with you, here at your table, I realise I was right . . .’

‘Seryozha,’ she said. ‘I have felt the same about you, since I came to see you at the Pegasus club. I had read so much of your poetry that it seemed I knew you already. But when I saw you there on stage, my heart filled with such emotion . . . You were such a mass of contradictions – handsome and strong, yet sad and alone; writing poems of such beauty, yet filled with self-loathing. I listened to you reading your verses about death and despair in the city, and I couldn’t reconcile the self-hatred of the poetry with the physical and spiritual nobility of the poet. You seemed such a young boy, so irresistibly attractive in his unhappiness and pain that I wanted to hold you and love you forever!’

Outside, the bells of the Cathedral of the Epiphany, not yet silenced by the Bolsheviks, struck midnight. They spoke passionately; joked, laughed, surprised themselves with views shared or opinions divided. They were discovering each other, delighting in the other’s responses. By the time the night lightened above the rooftops, they had known each other forever.

Each ached for the other’s body, but neither wished to be the first to say it. Sergei slept on the couch. When Zinaida shook him awake, the room was filled with daylight. He stared at her with such puzzled wonder in his eyes that she laughed out loud. When he told her how beautiful she was, she covered her face with her hands.

‘Infinitely, wonderfully beautiful! A beauty so deep and natural. Others have superficial beauty, but yours comes from within. It starts deep inside you and bubbles to the surface like the mineral spring of . . . Évian-les-bains . . . Well, no, that’s wrong because Évian is flat . . . so let’s say like Borzhomi, or—’

He broke off, amused by his own sleepy incoherence. Zinaida said she would make some tea. There was nothing for breakfast, but they could try later at the old market to see if any traders had turned up. When she returned with the tea, he had ordered his thoughts.

‘You are beautiful now,’ he said. ‘And you were beautiful last evening when you came off stage in your costume and greasepaint. It was a different sort of beauty. You know what the poet Baudelaire said about women and make-up? “When a woman uses make-up to disguise the blemishes on her skin, she rises above nature, transforms nature, she becomes magical and surreal . . .” ’

Zinaida laughed. ‘And there was I thinking it was just to cover up a few freckles! If you like it, I’ll be sure to use it . . . although, it isn’t easy to get nowadays. The Bolsheviks have closed down the cosmetics firms and turned them into soap factories for the Red Army – not that you’d notice from the smell of them on the trams and buses! Brocard, Rallet and Coty have been sent packing back to France. I sometimes think it’s unfair that women are expected to wear make-up, while men can appear however they want . . .’

‘Well, you don’t need to, my dear,’ she said. ‘You have one of those faces that women always fall for. I think it’s time for you to tell me about your history with women. Mine with men is hardly worth mentioning – a couple of boyfriends at university, but nothing serious. I suspect things are different with you . . .’

‘I have had women,’ he said. ‘Never anyone who meant much to me. But I need to tell you something – when you asked if I were married, I said I wasn’t. In fact, I married a woman five years ago. We were both young. I had a child with her. I haven’t seen her for a long time . . .’

‘I don’t want an affair,’ she said. ‘That’s not enough for me. I want more than that.’

The winter had been cold. There had been little snow and what had fallen was ground into the streets in rutted furrows, as hard as marble, black with soot, littered with detritus. In the beleaguered, dispossessed city, the freeze had kept disease at bay, but temperatures rose in early March and the babushkas shook their heads. The mercury clambered to minus ten, minus five, then close to zero. The bacilli stirred as the snow fell. It came in sudden, blinding waves, smacking the ground with sodden flakes that lay, uncertain whether to live or die. Rain followed, grey sheets of tumbling water, turning the earth to a no man’s land of rancid mud. The lice sensed the warmth. The first cases of typhus appeared.

Sergei went to the church where he and Anna were married. The facade had been defaced, statues and crosses smashed. A bell lay in pieces, flung from the tower where the barrel of a machine gun now kept watch. A sentry challenged him. Sergei asked if the church was still functioning.

‘Yes, comrade,’ the man replied. ‘Functioning nicely. Horses in the nave, cavalrymen in the aisles. Anything else you wanted? Not a believer, are you?’

When Zinaida wrote to ask why she hadn’t heard from him, he replied that he was ‘trying to put things right’.

‘I need to tell you that there have been bad things in my life,’ he wrote. ‘I have seen bad things, done bad things, and bad things have been done to me. I have seen men shot before my eyes; I have jostled the corpses of the drowned, drunk wine with the holy starets who thought he could save Russia, and broken bread with the royal daughters he helped send to their deaths. I have abandoned my home and my family. I want to put things right, Zina. Wait for me.’

Sergei went to the Kitai Gorod Registry. A red star had replaced the tsarist eagle. In the vestibule, a crowd of petitioners was waiting for identity papers or residence permits, one or more of the myriad documents the regime was constantly introducing to keep tabs on a sullen population it had reason to mistrust.

The faces ahead of him had the expression of disoriented hopelessness that had become Moscow’s norm. Without the right papers and the right stamps, you could be shot by a patrol. The process of getting them fostered fear and a lucrative trade in bribes for the registry officials. Was this the Revolution’s paradise?

It took him five hours to reach the front of the line. A registrar with a red armband beckoned him forward.

‘I need a copy of my marriage certificate. My wife and I have been separated for years. We won’t be getting back together. I need to talk to her about a divorce – it will free her . . . and free me.’

‘You’re way behind the times! Marriage certificates, divorce settlements – that’s all gone out the window. Didn’t you know? The Bolsheviks don’t hold with bourgeois marriage. It’s free love now, comrade.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Sergei hesitated. ‘I want to do this properly. I want to do the right thing by Anna. And I want to reassure someone else, someone very close to me—’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You don’t need a certificate, like I told you. But I might be able to produce one for you – one that proves you’re divorced good and proper; one that’ll keep your new lady happy. I can do it, but it don’t come cheap.’

‘I don’t have any money on me,’ Sergei said. ‘I can go and get it from the Pegasus . . . from my employment station . . .’

‘That’d be well too late, comrade. The queue’s out the doors and there’d be someone else on duty by the time you got back. Nah – I like the look of your jacket, though . . .’

‘When you see a beautiful view, do you wonder if I would like it?’ Sergei wrote to Zinaida. ‘When you hear music, do you wonder what I would make of it? When you read a book, do you understand it through the prism of us? I do. I love your mind; I love your body; I love your soul. Come with me, Zina! Come with me, away from this dreadful city!’