Adrayman in an oak wagon offers me a ride to the square. On cloudy days, not much light, I still look young.
“Where are you going?” he says.
“To the prison.”
“What for?”
“My son,” I explain.
“Arrested?”
“For the second time.”
“What’s he done?”
I’ve made him nervous. “His mother’s a poet.”
“Is that so?” He flicks the reins; his horses shiver. “Maybe I know you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, really, what’s your name?”
“Akhmatova.”
He looks at me. “Anna Akhmatova?”
“Yes.”
“I was sorry to hear about your husband, Miss.”
“Thank you. This will be fine.”
Outside the prison, women in black shawls stand one behind the other.
“Come to the tavern with me,” says the drayman, trying to be cheerful. He pats the wagon’s seat. “You can sit here under the feather blanket while I buy you a beer.”
I thank him for the ride.
“I’d like to hear a poem.”
I smile, shake my head, then take my place in line. The walls are scratched and gouged. The woman in front of me turns and asks, “Can you put this into words?”
I tell her, “I can.”
______
Women whisper that they bleed beneath their skirts. In Petersburg the men, in a hurry, won’t listen. Instead they hear a clamor of crows, the bell of the gray cathedral. Irritable, quiet, I pass through their rooms, dreams replacing dreams all night.
Lena, I ask you again: Who can refuse to live her own life?
Lately I’ve dreamed of you as a child in your long white dress, trampling the wild-onion dirt in the hills above town. “He looked at me funny, Anya.” “Well, his brother touched my hand.” “Does Father pull your drawers down when he hits?”
When we were small I refused to wear white dresses so that people could tell us apart.
In one of my dreams Mother’s talking again about the city of Kitezh, saved from the Tartars by prayer. “It was lifted straight into Heaven, just beyond those hills,” she says. “On days when the fish are still and all the mud has settled to the bottom you can see its reflection in the lake. Each man had a wagon. Their wives raised many, many children.”
You follow her pointing finger to the tip of one bald peak. Softly, to me: “She’s telling it wrong.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t saved. It was just a city of brides. Their husbands had gone to war.”
“What happened?”
“The Tartars raped and murdered all the women. Left only bones.”
“How do you know this?”
“Riga” – a girl in our school – “told me.”
Mother buttons her sweater. “It’s getting colder. Let’s go home now.” She takes my hand.
Rubbing your arms in the mist you warn me, “One day, Anya, we’ll live in Kitezh.”
______
Dry snow, candlelight mirrored in a stranger’s dining room window. First course (served in silver dishes by a dour maid): roast duck with apricots, cranberries, a light Gewürtztraminer. Next, mushrooms in lobster sauce, cream gravy, Jarlsberg cheese. Coffee and chocolate for dessert.
Afterwards we sit by the fire. The rug is soft and warm.
“I could treat you to meals like this every night,” says my host. He ships vegetables and fruits around the world, acres and acres of foodstuffs.
“And what would I have to do to earn them?”
He laughs. “Nothing. Enjoy yourself.”
I shake my head. “I did enjoy this evening. I’m glad you invited me.”
I’d seen him at the market earlier this week, supervising a dozen crates of Jonathan apples unloaded from a Dutch steamer.
“I’m not the first to ask you,” he says.
“I’m comfortable living by myself. Choosing my friends.”
“And your lovers? There must be several men.”
I smile.
“Poor bastards.”
“I don’t lie to them.”
“Food’s going to be scarce in the coming months-the army will need it. I can help …” he says.
“Thank you, no.”
“Tell me then.”
“What?”
“How do men kiss you?” He lifts my chin. “Tell me how you kiss.”
______
Lev is thin. Black bread and sugarless tea. I appeal to the authorities on behalf of my son, but my voice, in chorus with dozens of other women, is indecipherable. Day and night in the dank pine waiting room, the smell of mercurochrome, swabbed across the corns on our feet.
I’ve been a bad mother. When Nikolay first proposed marriage (he was cocky as a prince), I told him I hadn’t the patience for courtship; I wanted to sit by the Neva, reading Hamlet.
“So you want to be a poet,” he said. “What are you going to write?”
“I don’t know. Whatever interests me.”
“Pretty odes on wind chimes or cats?”
“Of course not. Why are you being so hateful?” I turned toward the river and opened my book.
He shook my shoulder. “Have you ever heard rifle fire? A young soldier moaning and clutching his guts in a field? My God, Anna, what do you know of the world?”
“Enough to tell you no,” I said. “Leave me alone. Go be a man.”
The following day he took a holiday train to France with six other young army recruits. Three weeks later I heard he’d swallowed a vial of strychnine. For nearly a day he lay unconscious in the Bois de Bologne before a young couple stumbled upon him. Three times he threatened suicide, twice I refused to marry him. But it turned out he was right.
A witness to one’s time, Lena. What else is a poet but that?
When Lev was born (October, mild and warm) I discovered how little I possessed of the simple love by which people live day to day. Working for each other, eating together under the same roof. Nikolay spent half the year hunting in Abyssinia. I read my poems, shouting over drunks, in bars.
Our son grew up in his grandmother’s house, eighty kilometers east of here. I didn’t even visit.
______
“I want to see Kitezh.”
“Don’t.” I pleaded with you to put your skirt back on, and to come away from the lake.
“Mother’s wrong.”
“Please, Lena.”
“Someday …” You gazed at the waves.
“We can make our own city,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“In the sky. Or under water.”
“With nasty boys?”
“And rich, spiced food.”
You smiled, pulling on your socks. “All right, Anya, you start.”
______
A priest stops me outside the prison. “Good woman, come pray with me.”
“I’m not a good woman,” I tell him. “Besides, there’s no one to hear.”
Five or six rabbis also wait outside the gates.
“Of course there is. We each have an angel –”
I laugh. “I’m a descendant of Eve, Father. Read your Bible.” I lace my boots up tight.
“No forgiveness for those who won’t seek it!” he calls after me.
______
In the bars, men sat at my table and swore they loved me. We discussed art about women, women as artists. One night Mikhail, a painter friend of mine, said, “Feminine beauty is an imperative.” He couldn’t afford oils; I often gave him lipstick to mark his large canvases. “It tugs at my hand when I pick up the brush.”
“Romantic nonsense.”
“No no,” said another. “It’s the serenity I’m interested –”
I slapped the table, spilling beer. “Listen to you. All of you. Have you ever really seen a woman?”
“We’ve offended poor Anna.”
“Here, have another glass,” the men said.
“You don’t even begin to know –” I pulled a cigarette from a pack and leaned toward a white candle stuck in a bottle’s mouth.
“A toast to Anna,” Mikhail teased. “A magnificent, fearsome woman.”
“Listen to me –” I said.
“To Beauty.”
“To Art.”
“And to bed.”
______
For many years after you’d gone (ripples flattening out; gas pockets in the mud, the sulfurous steam; bats whirring in the bushes) I resented you. And Nikolay, volunteering for the front, leaving me alone here in Petersburg. Even when the Bolsheviks murdered him I felt nothing but rage for my husband. Lev had just turned ten. I was drunk and loud each night in the Wandering Dog.
______
“The wasteland grows.” For a time, early in our marriage, Nikolay liked to puff himself up and quote European philosophers, to impress me.
“What do you do on these hunting trips when you’re not hunting?” I asked him once. “Play cards? Go to brothels? What do men do on their own?”
“Why?” he said.
“I want to know, that’s all.”
“We drink. We laugh. We talk.”
“What about?”
“Money. Philosophy. Your friends at the Dog aren’t the only ones with thoughts in their heads.”
“What kind of philosophy?” I asked.
“The future, the world, that sort of thing.” He pulled off his boots. I massaged his feet. “The other night at dinner, Peter was telling us that Nietzsche – Peter’s favorite – has a wonderful definition of mass violence – or, as he calls it, the True Twentieth Century.”
“What does he say?” I asked.
“‘The wasteland grows.’”
“That’s it? ‘The wasteland grows’?”
“He wrote it in 1880 – or ’90, something like that. Before the war. Before Verdun, the Somme … he was a prophet.”
Nikolay never noticed the paradox until I pointed it out. “Waste makes barren, limits, opposes growth,” I said. “How can a wasteland grow?”
He stared at me.
Years later, cleaning out his things, I understood the answer. The wasteland grows, spreads like a swamp, if we forget to remember.
______
When the Wandering Dog burned down, the poets and writers of Petersburg scattered, each like Lear without his kingdom.
Cigarettes, candles, amorous dancing – an accident, said the police. “Wild bohemian artists,” they called us. “Pimps and whores.”
Most of my friends stayed silent or quietly left. Now I sit by the Neva and wonder what they’d say about our city? Flat, white buildings, haphazard construction, the squalor of the market. Increasing numbers of soldiers on the streets. All this talk, from travelers, about the Reich’s frightening power in Germany.
The wasteland grows.
______
“She’s famous. Why doesn’t she say something on our behalf?” “It’s because of her fame that her son is in jail.” “She’s no better than the rest of us.”
The women’s hushed voices echo beneath the pine wood ceiling. Lev lies, in a half-stupor, on the cold cell floor. I cup my palms beneath the spigot in the courtyard, run quickly back into the prison, but by the time my hands reach his lips there’s nothing left to drink. “Lev, Lev …”
Fame is so much water.
Today I can’t afford both dinner and a beer. I buy a squash, hurry home and toss it in a pot on the stove. Start some tea.
Early in the morning the men arrived …
They came at dawn.
At dawn they came …
While the kettle whistles I write this sentence, tear it apart, make it again, slightly new.
______
Polonius, to Hamlet: “What do you read, my lord?”
“Words words words.”
______
A visitor from the West.
“I’m afraid I have only boiled potatoes to offer you,” I tell him.
“No no, nothing for me, thank you.” He settles uncomfortably into my armchair. Pillows stretch across the floor. Your picture, Lena, in a silver frame on my desk.
My guest’s card (he helps me with the English) reads: Mr. Alfred Weller, First Secretary in the British Embassy in Moscow. He has requested this meeting with me out of admiration for my work.
“You’ve just returned from Paris?” I say.
“Yes. I have news of some of your friends.” His Russian is awkward; I stop him and ask him to repeat. “Aleksander Halpern, Pasternak, Shileyko – they’re all doing well. Modigliani has become quite famous since he died.”
“Really! When I knew him he’d dig and dig in his pockets and never make the price of a drink.” We laugh. Mr. Weller watches me closely. His eyes are small; he hasn’t much hair.
“They’re very concerned about you, your friends. Every day we hear more rumors out of Germany. War seems inevitable.”
The tenant below noisily unlocks his door. We glance at the walls.
“Would I be any safer in Paris?”
“At least you’d be among friends. You could publish.” He stares appreciatively at my ankles.
“I couldn’t leave Petersburg now. Old habits and all. I can hardly bring myself to say its new name. Leningrad. Cold and official.”
“Do you have any recent work I can take to your colleagues in Europe?” asks Mr. Weller. “They’re eager to see what you’re doing.”
I turn on my desk lamp. “As a matter of fact, I’ve just started a long poem – the first in nearly a year. It’s dedicated to the women who wait with me outside the prison.”
“Yes, I heard about your son. I’m sorry.”
I glance at the page. It isn’t about my son. Truthfully, I haven’t thought of Lev in days. “Do you find me attractive, Mr. Weller?”
He fidgets with his coat. “Of course,” he says softly.
“Don’t.” I read him the first lines of the poem:
At dawn they came to take you away.
You were my dead, I walked behind.
In the dark room the children cried,
the holy candle gasped for air.
I ask him, “Can you follow the meaning?”
“Yes,” he says.
“These words, these little scribbles, Mr. Weller, are all that matter to me. More than your admiration. More than the prison. Or my son.”
“You don’t mean that.”
I sit. “Sometimes … sometimes after working I feel that way.”
“Then by all means come to Paris – where your poems can be seen.”
“I don’t approve of emigration.”
He makes a little gesture with his hand. “If you’ll forgive me, Miss Akhmatova, I think your stubbornness is misplaced. It’s all very well to die for one’s country –”
“Dying.for one’s country is easy,” I tell him. “Dying with it is another matter entirely.”
______
“We have to make it easy for people to walk,” you said.
“Light and shade. Cool spaces for babies.”
“I’m not going to have any babies.”
“Oh, Lena, of course you will.”
“If it’s a boy he’ll grow up and leave you. Girls you never get rid of.”
“I’m not going to live with Mama all my life.”
“She’s a stupid woman,” you said.
“No she’s not.”
“Wrong about everything.”
“Like what?”
“Everything.”
“See, you can’t say.”
“She shouldn’t let Father hit her. And the lake. She’s wrong about the lake.”
“Riga’s the one who doesn’t know anything.”
“The streets have to be wide enough for horses and carts. No automobiles. Absolutely no automobiles.”
“Maybe one or two?” I said.
______
I walk in a field of factory ash with only my shawl and a hairful of snow. My books have been burned in the square.
This morning Lev’s face is bruised, his lips are chapped and torn.
“What did they do to you?”
A dry cough. “Stop it, Mother.”
“Don’t strain. Quietly.”
He lifts his face toward mine. “They put a bag on my head. A bag of water. When they kicked me, my nose and throat filled till I thought I would drown. I couldn’t stop choking.”
I stroke his sweating back.
“Who was it?” he says.
“What are you talking about?”
“In your apartment.”
“When?”
“‘As long as she entertains men in her apartment,’ they said …”
He closes his eyes. His long black hair comes off in patches on my hands.
______
Not, not mine: it’s somebody else’s wound.
I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground.
Whisk the lamps away …
______
“Bowls,” Mikhail said in the bar one night. “Jars. Glazed china plates.”
“Even the word ‘containers’ is a conceptual burden placed on women,” I said.
“You take yourself too seriously, Anna.”
“I object to not being seen.”
“Men create these images in order to praise women, don’t you see that? Angels. Swans. Damp, dripping caves –”
“You might as well be papering a wall, to hide what’s underneath.” I snuffed the candle to punctuate the point.
“Delilah with her scissors …”
______
Just after we married, Nikolay and I traveled to Paris. I remember thinking, “These streets have leaped from my mind,” I felt so at home. I imagined the city of Kitezh looked something like this: women walking freely, laughing, in their light skirts and stockings.
In his quiet room Modigliani sketched me in pencil, the slender lines of my neck shading off into plumes.
One afternoon on my own (Nikolay and I had already grown restless in each other’s company) I walked through a refurbished neighborhood on the Ile de la Cite. The sky had been dark all day; as I passed a laborer setting buckets of brown paint in the window of an unfinished apartment, hail began to patter the awnings. The laborer invited me inside. The apartment, he said, had once housed happy men, but they had all gone.
“Where did they go?” I said.
He seemed not to hear. “Where are you from? You don’t look French.”
“Petersburg.”
“Ah, the noble peasant. High plains? Sheaves of wheat?”
“Well …”
He laughed, and tapped my finger. “A very pretty ring. Do you have any children?”
“No,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment, busying himself with his rags.
“My wife is in the clinic, expecting our first child,” he said finally. “Twenty years old, my wife. I’m quite a bit older, as you can see.”
As he spoke he cleaned his brushes in a little can of turpentine marked “Flammable.” His hands were long and explosive.
“I haven’t gone to visit her.”
A piece of hail, like a heavy crystal wine glass tossed at the sill, tipped a half-empty bucket onto the waxed wooden floor. The man didn’t move. Brown paint seeped into the cracks beneath the carpet; his child waited in a place without color.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“All these years. I didn’t know a woman’s body could be so huge.”
______
“Hippogriff, mermaid, manticore,” Mikhail said. “Siren, sister, witch.” Words words words. Crumbling wall, paper (a floral design) sagging to the floor, stretched across the rug like a dress dropped in haste. The naked animal herself out the window, on the canvas, trembling at the edge of the page. To a nunnery, in a winery, passed out on the dirt. Container and contained. In Pushkin’s land.
______
Mr. Weller requests another chat. On the phone I tell him no. “The Party’s asked me to write a poem praising Stalin.”
According to all reports, he says, the Germans are murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews.
“Why the Jews?” I ask.
He doesn’t know.
My days are a series of nonmeetings. Admissions of nothing. The roomer below is afraid to meet me on the stairs.
______
“Brick towers.”
“No no, Lena, wood.” I laughed and pulled your hair.
“Brick is solid, Anya. We want our city to be solid.”
“Well, my city’s going to be pretty and smooth. Lots of wood. And copper.”
“I’d rather be safe.”
“Wood’s safe.”
“Not from fire.”
“There won’t be any fires in our city. We’ll run them out of town.”
“We’ll have the best firehouse in the world.”
“With six gray horses.”
“And three fat men.”
______
The bats we discovered as children still squeal inside the cypress trunks. Remember how they frightened our aunts?
The day you finally went looking for the city of Kitezh, Mother and her sisters sang hymns from the Bible. As minnows rose in the shallows near the trees they praised God’s love to me. “You have the gift of words, Anya,” Mother said. “Use it for His glory.”
Father and Uncle Svetan basted the calfs hind legs: shallots, crackling butter. “Are the children hungry?” Uncle Svetan asked.
“Where’s Lena?” said one of the aunts.
“I thought she was with you.”
“No, she – Oh my Lord.”
They gathered at the water’s edge, in knee-deep mud (gas pockets popping all around them), trying to call you back. The meat began to burn.
This evening I can’t see the lake: no moon. But I know where it is. I can hear it. The news from Paris is bad. Men say, Lena, that all of Europe may fall to the German attack. Russia, too, perhaps. My friends urge me to join them – next month they’re sailing to America – but “someone,” I write Shileyko, “has to be a witness.”
Bats echo in the hills. I walk back to town. Two soldiers with rifles on their shoulders leave a house by a darkened side door. Someone’s crying in the kitchen; I duck down the street. A young woman carrying a child in a burlap sack sniffs around the empty market stall where I’m hidden. Rotten peach halves. Scattered apples. She scrubs the dirt, hands a grapefruit rind to her baby.
“No,” the child protests.
“Eat, eat.”
Fresh graves and bread crusts end another day of commerce.
______
Lev will be released in ten days. The prison official smiles at me. “No more guests?”
“No,” I say.
“The Party, I understand, was quite pleased with your tribute.”
A young wife, waiting for news of her own, squeezes my hand. Across the room, other women – tired mothers – glare at me.
I stop by the market. Cabbage is all I can afford and still have the price of a drink. Tucking the small head under my arm I treat myself to a beer in a tavern not far from where the Wandering Dog once stood.
In the apartment, still holding the cabbage, I fluff my pillows, straighten the Modigliani in its cracked brown frame. My eyes have faded a bit. With a towel I dust the table before setting the cabbage down.
From my window I see draymen returning from the fields, milk cans clattering, empty, in their wagons. Children menace each other with sticks. A couple of soldiers pass in the street. “Keep me company tonight?” one yells up at me. His friend laughs and bumps into two old women, knocking the frailer one to the ground. She spits. The soldier scolds: “Watch where you’re going. Crazy old bitch.”
The world will never want us. I know this. I’m going to tell everyone.
______
“Did you love my father?” Lev slouches over cabbage and boiled potatoes. His second day home – too weak, until this evening, to speak.
“I felt sorry for him. Would you like another potato?”
“Yes. Why? What made him so pathetic?”
“He wasn’t pathetic. I never thought that. It’s just that he wanted – what? To be a great man, I suppose. First as a philosopher, then as a husband, a hunter, a soldier. He used to tell me, ‘I was born for these things.’”
“Was he really a traitor?”
I stack our plates on the counter. “He was killed because of his poetry.”
“That must have increased its value.”
“His spare style, the Bolsheviks said, ‘betrayed our rich Russian culture.’”
“And you?” The color has returned to Lev’s cheeks; his back still aches. “Don’t you want to be great? A great writer?”
“Yes.”
“So I should feel sorry for you?”
“The way I see it, people’s judgments are beyond my control. Your father couldn’t accept that.”
“I suppose I’ve helped your career.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jail. Your loneliness. Your terrible suffering – all that.”
“Hush.”
“I’m sure you’ve written about it.”
“No.”
“Then you will. It’s too good to pass up, eh? And who knows – a poem here, a poem there, perhaps I’ll wind up in prison again.”
I dry my hands. “I’m sorry, Lev. I never intended my work to affect your life this way.”
“But it has, hasn’t it? Maybe I should get myself killed. Then you’d surely be great. The Great Akhmatova.” He stands, painfully. “Where was she until I wound up in jail?”
“You knew where I was. You could have come to me.”
He tosses his cup onto the pile of dirty plates. The cathedral bell rings once, twice, twice again.
______
A small steamer’s anchored in the river. On board, dozens of young soldiers, crisp in their belts and boots; crates of fruit. Women clutch rosaries near the now-empty market, whisper prayers, wave at the boys as they pull away in the boat.
“I hear that your son is home again.”
I nod to the woman beside me.
“Thank God. You’re very fortunate.”
“Yes,” I say. “I am.”
______
Such grief might make the mountains stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells …
______
This evening it’s clear to me, Lena: Mother was wrong. What we see in the lake is not a reflection of Kitezh, but the city itself. Marble columns, cobbled streets, fish rounding corners, quick as light.
The True Twentieth Century: I’ve finally lived to see it. I drop my shawl on the bank, remove my shoes and skirt. The water is cold. Pinnacles, vaulting, an Ogee arch. Stained glass, crockets engraved with ball flower designs. Rotting wood. Straight ahead, a white gate: is this the way in? You can tell me.
Yes, I hear you whisper. Or maybe it’s the water swishing. Louder now, yes: Closer, come a little closer …
Here I am. My lungs begin to ache. No, I think. Closer, Anya, come this way …
No. My place is with the dying, not the dead.
I surface, catch my breath. My skirt, a purple patch, waves to me from the shore.
______
In town, merchants fold their awnings. I shiver, shake back my short wet hair. A light goes out in a window. This is how the world ends: acquiescent, Lena. Peaceful. No help needed from us. I sit by the Neva and laugh. My pretty fool, my lovely foolish home … I’ve forgiven everyone. You’ll be my angel now.