Denikin was coming; Denikin was advancing; Denikin the murderer, the Jew slayer, the tyrant who took no prisoners, slaughtered those who surrendered, hanged civilians . . . Or Denikin the liberator, the avenging angel, restorer of truth and justice . . .
South of Moscow and held by the Reds since the start of the civil war, Oryol had escaped the worst of the fighting. But now the Whites were moving north from Ukraine and the city was in their path.
Oryol trembled. But Sergei and Zina had each other, and their closeness shut out the horrors of the world. New life was swelling Zinaida’s belly. The future would be with them and with their child.
Anton Denikin was a lucky general. He had led the tsarist army’s successes and avoided the defeats. The Western allies gambled on his luck and supplied him with half a million rifles. The Bolsheviks sent the fearsome Leon Trotsky to counter his advance, but the Whites were in the ascendancy.
War rumbled and threatened; Sergei and Zinaida barely noticed. He wrote little, but felt no guilt. She grew larger. He looked after her, shared her joy.
‘I was too young when I had my son, Yuri,’ he said. ‘I didn’t appreciate what a thing it is to have children. I won’t make the same mistake this time!’
They had been together for almost a year. Sergei said it was their Halcyon year, the happiest of his life, when Aeolus the god of wind had unleashed raging storms to batter the world but had cocooned the two of them in a magic space of peace and love.
Denikin’s White Army
Marienhof continued to write. Letters that began affectionately but ended with caustic barbs.
‘Are you sure you’re happy out there in the sticks, Seryozha? Don’t you miss the big time? How do you spend your days – dreaming your life away? Watching shadows on the wall?’
Sergei sent good-natured replies.
‘I am doing fine, Anatoly. Don’t worry about me. It’s good to be off the merry-go-round.’
There was jealousy of Zinaida in Marienhof’s messages. He reproached Sergei for abandoning the merry band of boys who were the Imagists. How could he love a woman more than he loved his friends? He made it clear that he thought Zinaida was to blame for their estrangement.
Sergei didn’t rise to the bait. His letters remained cheery and affable. He was sad that his closest friend and mentor had taken against the woman he loved.
Vexed by Yesenin’s insouciance, Marienhof sent him a shellac disk of the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin singing the folk ballad ‘Stenka Razin’. Sergei listened to it on the gramophone at Zinaida’s parents’ house. The message was in the lyrics. He hid the thing away so Zinaida would not see it.
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
On the first is Stenka Razin,
With his princess by his side;
Drunk and proud in marriage revels
With his beauteous young bride.
But from his crew there comes a murmur:
‘He has quit his sword to woo!
One short night and Stenka Razin
Has become a woman, too!’
Stenka Razin hears the murmur
Of his discontented band
And his lovely Persian princess
He wraps about with his firm hand.
His dark brows are drawn together
As the waves of anger rise
And the blood comes rushing swiftly
To his piercing deep black eyes.
I will give you all you ask for,
Head and heart and life and hand!
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Far across the distant land:
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have ne’er seen such a present
From the Cossacks of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In our band so free and brave,
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave!
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chorus
To the place where beauty lies . . .
Tatiana Yesenin was born at midnight in the Oryol maternity home. A blackout imposed because of the advancing White forces meant there was no electric light, but there was no mistaking the blond curls that were the mark of the Yesenin family. Sergei hugged the woman who had brought him such joy.
The weeks after Tatiana’s birth were difficult. Zinaida was young. The arrival of a child was an upheaval. The baby was pampered; Sergei spent much of the day peering fondly into her cradle. Zinaida felt disoriented and alone.
She spent more time at her parents, seeking the stability of a life in which she herself had been a child, unburdened by responsibilities.
Sergei spoke to Zinaida’s father, who reassured him. It was a natural reaction, he said. His own wife had been through something similar when she gave birth.
Zinaida recovered her equilibrium. They resumed their life together and neither noticed – or at least, mentioned – the subtle changes in them. Sergei never said he had felt slighted by Zinaida’s flight to her parents. She never said that his evident love for Tatiana seemed a dilution of his love for her.
No one spoke of it, but there was an undercurrent in their relationship that had not existed before. The threat of the Whites arriving in Oryol no longer felt quite so irrelevant. The hectoring of Marienhof no longer so easily dismissed, by either of them.
Zinaida found the record. She played it on her father’s phonograph and knew at once what Marienhof had intended.
‘You didn’t show me this,’ she said.
‘I didn’t want to upset you.’
‘If you genuinely were paying no heed to what Marienhof tells you, I would have had no cause to be upset. The fact that you hid the record means you are tempted by what he says – part of you does want to go back!’
They made up. But as with all such arguments, a trace remained. And traces accumulate.
Sergei said, ‘We . . . I . . . might have to go to Moscow . . .’
‘I wondered how long it would take you to say that,’ Zinaida said. ‘I’m surprised it has taken you so long . . .’
‘Don’t be angry, Zina. It’s for my poetry. I need to get back in touch with things . . .’
‘If you are returning to Moscow for the sake of your art, I won’t stop you. You are a great poet. But if you are going because that man is mocking you and making you feel bad about the life you have chosen, that would be a mistake. We have our happiness. And now we have the baby. Don’t sacrifice such a rare thing, Seryozha. Don’t go back to a life that will torment you . . . and probably kill you!’
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to go to Moscow – and if you don’t want me to go – I shall stay.’
That night in bed, they heard the White artillery on the outskirts of the city.
Refugees from the White advance poured into Oryol. The Reds hesitated between manning the guns and packing their bags. The peasant traders who had kept the population supplied with food had not been seen for a week.
Zinaida’s parents told her she should leave for Moscow while she still could, but she was reluctant.
‘I hate Moscow. I am worried for Sergei if we go there. I don’t want him slipping back into the brawling and the drinking. His so-called friends have taken against me. They’re trying to turn him away from me. I fear they may succeed . . .’
They left two days before the fighting began. Sergei, Zinaida and Tatiana Yesenin caught the last train for Moscow before the White Army seized Oryol and Denikin announced that his next target would be the capital itself.
White victory parade, Oryol
Marienhof had said he would come to the station. They hadn’t been in Moscow for a year and it would be the first time he and Zinaida would meet. Marienhof was charming.
‘Where will you be staying?’ he asked. ‘You are welcome at Bogoslovsky Lane. Kusikov and Shershenevich will be delighted. And I’m sure our little collective can provide the communal crèche facilities the Bolsheviks are demanding everyone set up nowadays.’
Zina squeezed Sergei’s hand.
‘I think we need somewhere else,’ he said to Marienhof. ‘I have a family now, Anatoly. I’m not going back to my old life.’
‘Then there are the rooms at the old Poets’ Union,’ Marienhof said. ‘The Bolsheviks are “recasting the nature of art”, or so they tell us. They’re about to set up their own Soviet Writers’ Union or some such thing, but in the meantime we still have the premises and possession is nine tenths of the law.’
The rooms were Spartan, without heating. Winter came early. When they threw their overcoats on the back of a chair, the snowflakes on them didn’t melt. But Zinaida was adamant they must be independent. They would put up with the hardship; it was only temporary; they would find something better.
Marienhof invited them for dinner and Zinaida agreed it would be churlish to refuse.
‘I can’t tell you what to do or how to live your life, Seryozha,’ she said. ‘But I know that man is trouble. Will you keep your dealings with him to poetry and business matters?’
The evening was a pleasant surprise. Marienhof was a good host, the attic on Bogoslovsky Lane was heated now, and Kusikov and Shershenevich were delightful. All three were genuinely pleased to have Sergei back. He was the most successful and most widely read of all of them. His collected poems had drawn praise from Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik Commissar of Culture. Trotsky himself was said to be an admirer.
On the way home, they wrapped Tatiana in shawls and furs. Winter had bitten, temperatures dropped. On Myasnitskaya, outside Perlov’s Tea Rooms, stray dogs were picking at a dead horse. Death had drawn back its lips to reveal a smile of white teeth. A Siberian Husky was tearing at its flesh. A passing cabbie lashed out at it with his whip and the dog pulled its snout out of the horse’s belly with annoyance. Its white, handsome muzzle was covered in blood from ear to ear, like a red mask from a carnival.
Money was short. Zinaida’s parents had kept them for a year and continued to send cash when they could. But Moscow prices had risen as the capital’s food supplies dwindled. Sergei and Zinaida decided that one or both of them would need to start earning.
Sergei met Marienhof for lunch. The inexplicable mystery of the Russian soul, Marienhof said, was that even when Russians are starving, when their apartments are freezing and they have bartered their grandmother’s silver for firewood, they will still set money aside for art.
‘I don’t understand it. Poetry won’t save you from hunger; music doesn’t heat the stove. Yet we Russians need it as much as we need food. It’s to do with the way we view ourselves – we may be repressed and downtrodden, but the knowledge of art means we can look ourselves in the eye . . . Which is great for us, of course!’ he laughed. ‘The authorisation we got from Lunacharsky to set up our own press has been a godsend. What have you got that we can print, Seryozha?’
Sergei ran through the poems he had written over the last year. There were love lyrics, poems of the city and the village, some political verse. ‘And there are a couple of quite personal things,’ he said. ‘Regarding you and Klyuev.’
‘Unlikely to be complimentary then,’ Marienhof smiled. ‘You’d better read them to me.’
‘All right. I’ll start with Klyuev:
My love for you is gone;
You grieve that we should part.
The paintbrush of the moon
No longer stirs the lyre-strings of my heart.
You both love and hate the star
That fell upon your brow.
You spread your love too far;
You are homeless now.
The one you wait for in the night
Has passed your door again.
Your door keys, song-rubbed bright,
Have rusted in the rain.
You shall no longer sing the sun
Or heaven in your window bound.
Like the windmill’s sails you turn and turn
But stay, forever, shackled to the ground.’
Sergei sighed. ‘Quite harsh, I suppose. But I’m a different person now. I’m not the man who lived with him. I needed to draw a line. And he has written terrible things about me. Did you see his poem comparing my verse to the burnt-out ashes of a plague fire in the steppe? He blames you for debauching me; says you have stained my gift with coffee and nicotine. Yet he still refers to me and him as a couple, with poetic offspring whose voices will echo down the years. He curses me and I curse him. But there is always a sort of love that remains.’
Marienhof nodded. ‘Relationships are like that. What have you written about me?’
‘Not about you; it’s a poem I’ve dedicated to you. Something dear to me. It’s called “Forty Days Mourning”, an elegy for the Russia we loved that is dying:
‘It sounds, it sounds, the fateful trumpet!
What are we to do? How then should we live
On the highway’s muddy haunches?
Soon the hoarfrost will bleach
The village and the meadows with its quicklime.
Nowhere can you hide from death,
Nowhere escape the clutches of your foe.
There he is! There he is with his iron belly,
Stretching out his fingers
To squeeze the throat of the steppe!
The old windmill pricks up its ears.
The silent bull, scenting trouble in the fields,
Wears out its tongue against the iron ring.
On, on, on rides the frightful herald,
Smashing through thicket after thicket.
All of us long for the chirping of the frogs
Under the hay; but oh! electric sunrise,
Blind grasp of belts and smoke-stacks,
Behold how the steel fever shakes
The wooden belly of our peasant huts!
Did you not see
How, across the steppe
Vanishing in the lake fogs
With iron nostrils snorting
On cast-iron hooves the train now thunders?
And behind it
Through the endless grass
In a carnival of despairing haste
With thin legs tossing up to its head
Gallops a red-maned colt?
Dear, dear, ridiculous foal!
Where does he think he’s dashing?
Does he not know the steel beast
Has crushed the living horse?
Does he not know that
All his racing through the fields
Will not bring back the time
When a nomad tribe would trade a pair of Russian beauties
For a stallion?
Now, a thousand pounds of horsemeat
Buys a locomotive.
Devil take you, stinking guest!
My song will not make its peace with you.
When folk stand and gawp,
Their mouths set in tin-plate kisses,
I, like an ancient sexton, will sing
An alleluia for my native land.’
Sergei had promised Zinaida he would not drink. He reached across the table and poured himself a glass of wine.
‘It is my greatest work, Anatoly. I dedicate it to you, because you are my greatest friend.’
The adrenalin of reciting and the rush of the wine loosened Sergei’s tongue. He couldn’t stop himself. He spoke of Zinaida’s beauty, her emotional wisdom, the marvellous gift of love she had bestowed on him, the profound changes she had made in his life. Far from discouraging him, Marienhof smiled and poured more wine. By late afternoon, they were drunk and elated.
It was only as he walked home that Sergei began to worry he might have talked too much. The shared intimacy of the conversation had led him to touch on things about his life with Zinaida that should have remained unspoken. Marienhof was a fine fellow, but he didn’t know how to keep a secret.