Nineteen twenty-four was the year the Pegasus Café folded. It had struggled since Yesenin and Marienhof fell out. Sergei’s absence abroad meant the club lost one of its biggest attractions. Customer numbers dropped.
The death of Lenin marked a change in society. Lenin had pushed through the New Economic Plan, relaxing the state’s dictatorship, reintroducing elements of capitalism. It was the NEP that had created the new entrepreneurs, the garish, self-advertising spivs whose spending power had kept the Pegasus going.
With Lenin gone, only Bukharin championed the NEP. Stalin, Trotsky, Kalinin and Kamenev were against it. Communist orthodoxy reasserted itself. Things got tougher, private enterprise harder. Stalin would wait a few years before he formally abolished the NEP, but the speculators felt the wind blowing and drew in their horns.
Marienhof invited Yesenin to a meeting to sort out the accounts. Yesenin refused to go. Shershenevich thought he was jealous of the happiness Marienhof had found with his new wife. The problem with Yesenin, he said, was that he had built himself a fantasy world, pinned to the narrative of his poetry’s lyric hero. It had become more real for him than the real world. He lived in it, drawn along by its logic.
‘All of Yesenin’s poems are so closely connected with his life,’ Shershenevich wrote, ‘and his life is so connected with his poetry that I cannot say which results from which; whether because something happened to him in his life he has affixed it in a poem or, because he has written lines in such a way, he adjusts his life to fit his verse. My fear is that Yesenin will sacrifice himself to the role his poetry has marked out for him.’
Sergei arrived first, anxious, excited. Perlov’s had been nationalised. The upper floors were now communal flats; a single room for a family, regardless of numbers; shared kitchen and toilet. Lenin said communal living was a principled rejection of private property, a repudiation of the bourgeois nuclear family. In practice, it was a nightmare. Feuds broke out, possessions were stolen, murders committed. Neighbour spied on neighbour. Mistrust was rife.
Perlov himself had died. His family had gone abroad. Their descendants would get the building back only seventy years later. In 1924, the Chinese mouldings and statues were crumbling; windows were taped over; the waiters no longer wore waistcoats. But there were waiters! Tea drinking had seen off war, revolution and years of upheaval. Only the ground floor still operated, but it held a special magic for Sergei. He sat at the table, looked around, got up again, went to comb his hair in the bathroom.
Perlov’s Tea Rooms, 1924
The last time they were here, Zinaida had cursed and stormed out. How he wished they could be back in those years of passion, of jealousy and affection, love and desire. He saw her walk in and stood up.
‘No smashing the teacups!’ he said.
A shadow of a smile warmed him. ‘She loves me . . . She loves me still . . .’
‘So?’ she said. Half enquiring, half challenging.
‘So – hello . . .’
‘Yes, hello . . .’
Across the table. Her eyes. The hours they had sat like this, hours that had entwined their souls, such that no separation could undo them.
‘Sergei Alexandrovich . . .’ The prim form of his name; trying to be distant. ‘Sergei . . .’ Softening.
‘Yes? – Zinochka?’
She shook herself.
‘Really! Your sense of entitlement knows no bounds!’
‘Zina . . . Zinaida . . .’
Her name on his lips sounded like a poem.
‘You want to tell me something?’
‘I want to tell you a lot of things.’ He lowered his eyes. ‘I want to tell you that I never realised until now, when I am feeling it myself, the extent of the hurt I caused you. I hurt you; I miss you. It has made me understand how much I love you . . .’
She was not a calculating woman. But he was handing her all the cards.
‘I don’t know how you can say that, Seryozha. You left me in the most brutal and callous way imaginable. You broke all your promises. And now you want to meet me for a cup of tea, probably so that you can tell me about your travels round the world with another woman . . . with a hateful, stupid American who should have no part in our lives . . . whom you should never have let come between us . . . Can you not see how cruel it is?’
‘No, Zina. You’re wrong—’
‘I’m not wrong, Sergei! You’re indulging your own feelings, without thinking about the effect it might be having on me. It’s time you stopped thinking about yourself and thought a bit more about those you are hurting! You gave up the love we had. That was wrong; so stupidly wrong!’
He reached for her hand, but she pulled away.
‘Zina! My Zina—’
‘I was your Zina—’
‘Don’t say it! Say you love me! Tell me you still love me!’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you love me! I couldn’t bear it if you say you don’t! I think you love me still!’
She looked at him.
‘I love you,’ she said quietly. ‘But I love Meyerhold, too.’
Emotions collided. Immeasurable relief that Zina still cared for him. Immeasurable jealousy that another man should have a claim on her.
‘Come and see me, Zina! Come to me! We can be together. I want it . . . and you want it. I know you do!’
‘How can I see you without losing my self-respect . . . what little of it I have left? After all you’ve done to me, all the pain you have caused me!’
She stood up. He leapt to his feet after her.
‘Don’t close everything off, love! At least say you’ll see me again . . . for tea . . . Just as we have today . . .’
She turned. Looked at him. Nodded.
Their lovemaking was like coming home from a long absence in frozen foreign lands. The contours of her body were in his memory; he knew how to caress, how to elicit that unthinking, immersive confluence of flesh and thought known only to lovers of the truest metal; 1924 was their summer of hope.
Shershenevich laughed when Yesenin told him he needed the flat. He asked if it was for a woman and Sergei nodded. Shershenevich moved back to Marienhof’s apartment on Bogoslovsky Lane.
At first, Zinaida would come for an hour. Later, she would stay a morning, an afternoon. She thirsted for him. And he was attentive, infinitely responsive to the signals in her eyes, her lips, her limbs. Afterwards, when they lay in each other’s arms, she tried to put it into words. ‘It’s as if you know in advance what I want from you. It’s as if you feel it from the inside.’
Sergei felt the same, but didn’t say it. When Zina spoke of bliss and beauty, Sergei would grunt and smile. His reticence made her laugh.
‘I have never felt so close to another person,’ she said.
‘I am the luckiest man,’ he replied. ‘I threw my life away. You have rescued me.’
He celebrated the joy of happiness regained in a cycle of poems, ‘A Hooligan’s Love’. It grew into a narrative of closely worked lyrics, alive with redemption and autumnal passion.
You lit a pale blue fire, and I forgot the world.
I sang of love, and for the first time knew its truth;
No longer sought the madness, drink and brawls,
The headlong flight in which I sank my youth.
God’s meadow in me grew to shameful seed,
I swallowed women, booze and poisons.
God grant that with you now to take my part,
I’ll break the hold of old soul-strangling notions.
Let me gaze into your face,
Drown in the vortex of your golden-hazel eyes.
And tell me you no longer love the past,
That you renounce the other who for your presence sighs.
. . .
For your beauty, for your touch, for your blessing,
This hooligan gives his thanks and praise.
Forever bows his head, swears love, obedience,
And writes your glory on the page.
If thou art near, I’ll leave all behind,
Renounce the world, the call of fame.
All I need is to kiss your hand, your lips,
And hear you call me by my name.
I shall be with you when the trumpets call,
I’ll sing your love, I’ll glory in its truth;
And curse the madness, drink and brawls,
The headlong flight in which I drowned my youth.
. . .
As all life fades, then so fades mine;
I’ll die, if die we must.
But kiss me to the end of time,
Cradle me in your lust,
So that in our pale blue dreams,
Sincere and free and shorn of shame,
You may say, ‘I am forever yours
Till death calls us by our names.’
Life’s joy is the froth on my champagne,
It flattens, then it’s gone.
So drink, my love, and sing the truth,
That on this earth we live just once.
Zinaida timed her visits to avoid being seen, made sure she gave her husband plausible explanations. Sergei hated caution. He wanted to tell the world of their love, wanted her to have it out with Meyerhold.
‘I can’t stand it that you are going back to another man,’ he said each time she left.
‘He is my husband.’ Zinaida said. ‘Now you see what I had to endure – the jealousy, the loneliness – while you were with your American bitch.’
The sun rose early, picking out the curls of dust from the street sweepers’ birch-twig brooms, glancing off the Kremlin domes, anointing the bends of the Moskva River with its haze of silver incense. Sergei rose with the sun. He loved that hour in which the city shakes itself, idly preparing the day, setting out its stalls, raising its blinds, dropping off its bundles of newspapers, thinking how to spend God’s summer.
His days were ruled by Zinaida’s schedule – when she could see him, when she had to be back at the theatre or accompany Meyerhold. He hungered for her presence. He wanted her always, resented those who kept her from him.
Meyerhold’s theatre was preparing for its autumn tour, two months travelling, first to Minsk and Kiev, then east as far as Vladivostok before returning through the Central Asian republics. Sergei tried not to think about it. Two months without her. Did she not realise it was impossible? She spoke offhandedly about the itinerary, the hotels, the repertoire. Some of the plays they were taking were standard pieces. Zinaida had performed them many times. But there were new works to try out on the provinces before bringing them to the capital. She disliked them. They made her nervous. She had told Meyerhold as much . . .
‘Don’t go, Zina! I beg you, don’t go!’ Sergei couldn’t bear to hear her talk of being away from him.
‘But, love, this is what you put me through when you went off with Isadora.’ She felt a tremor of satisfaction. ‘Just wait for me, Seryozha. Two months – it will be a proof of our love . . .’
The thought of Zinaida leaving kept him awake at night, tormented him by day.
He said he would kill himself if she went. She told him not to be so silly.
‘Of course you won’t kill yourself. It’s only for two months.’
He said he couldn’t bear her being with another man.
‘But I have to go. Meyerhold is my husband. He’d be suspicious if I refused. Not going would be a betrayal.’
‘But you’re betraying him already!’ Sergei said. ‘You’re betraying him just by being here with me!’
‘That’s different . . .’
‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘how can you even speak of betrayal? I am the man you love, not Meyerhold! The only betrayal is not to be with the man you love. It’s a betrayal of yourself!’
The departure of Meyerhold and his troupe was a public event. Sergei couldn’t even see her off; there would be journalists at the station. Zinaida had told him it would be better if he stayed away.
The next day, he read the newspapers, looking for photographs of Zinaida, but found none. The headlines were about Meyerhold, full of praise for the genius who had revolutionised the revolution’s art. He stuffed them in the bin. The flat was cold, his day unsweetened by the anticipation of love. There would be weeks of this. It was barely lunchtime, but he opened a bottle.
There was a knock at the door. He couldn’t stand the thought of Shershenevich offering him consolation. He didn’t answer.
The knock came again. He rose unsteadily and unfastened the latch. It was Zinaida!