Zinaida nods. She takes his plate and washes it in silence.
* * *
—
Boris sits at his writing desk. From the wicker basket at his feet, he takes the pages he wrote the day before. He frowns and strikes through a sentence with a fountain pen, then a paragraph, then a page. He pulls out a fresh sheet of paper and attempts the scene again.
The desk had belonged to Titsian Tabidze, the great Georgian poet and his dear friend. In ’37, during the height of the Purge, Titsian was taken from his home one autumn evening. His wife, Nina, had run into the street, chasing after the black car in her bare feet. When they charged him with treason for committing anti-Soviet activities, Titsian named his favorite eighteenth-century poet, Besiki, as his only accomplice.
Boris has imagined many times what happened to Titsian after the black car took him away, believing that if he doesn’t imagine his friend’s fate, Titsian will have suffered alone. He often tells himself there’s still a possibility his friend is alive, but Nina gave up such hope long ago. When she gave Boris her husband’s desk, she told him he must continue Titsian’s good work. “Write the great novel you’ve dreamed of,” she told him. Boris accepted Nina’s gift, but he never felt worthy of it.
Titsian wasn’t the first of Boris’s friends to have been taken. Boris often pictures them at night, when he can’t sleep, running their fates through his mind one at a time. There is Osip, shivering in a transit camp, knowing his end was near. Paolo, walking up the steps of the Writers’ Union and standing still for a moment before putting a gun to his head. And Marina, tying the noose, then throwing the rope up over a ceiling beam.
It was well known that Stalin had enjoyed Boris’s poetry. And what did it mean to have such a man find kinship through his words? To what had the Red Tsar connected? It was a hard truth, knowing he no longer owned his words once they were in the world. Once published, they were available for anyone to claim, even a madman. And it was even harder knowing he’d been struck from Stalin’s list, the madman having told his minions to leave the Holy Fool, the Cloud Dweller, alone.
Boris hears the muffled chimes of the downstairs clock strike eight. Olga’s train arrives in three hours, and he’s yet to write a single word. The scene that flowed so easily the day before now refuses to appear.
He began Doctor Zhivago almost ten years earlier, and although he’s made much progress, he still wishes he could go back to the days when the novel first came to him, when it was still pouring from some untapped pool inside him. It had felt like finding a new lover—the obsession, the infatuation, his thoughts on nothing else, his characters infiltrating his dreams, his heart weightless with every new discovery, every sentence, every scene. At times, Boris had felt it was the only thing keeping him alive.
Shortly before Olga’s arrest, the authorities had pulped twenty-five thousand copies of Boris’s Selected Works. When he couldn’t sleep, Boris would often imagine his words dissolving into the milky slush.
The increasing censorship, in combination with his lover’s arrest, inflamed Boris to finish Zhivago. He’d retreated to the country to write but found himself unable to. This block provoked an anxiety that felt like needle pricks across his chest. Eventually the needles became knives, and he soon found himself confined to a hospital bed. He’d had a heart attack, and there, with tubes hooked up to him and a bedpan by his side, Boris wondered who would inherit the desk Nina had given him. Would Titsian’s desk be passed down to one of his sons? Or perhaps to another writer? Or would someone take an ax to it for firewood, to keep his widow and children warm when he’d failed to? They could add his unfinished novel to the pyre.
Boris recovered from his heart attack in time to witness the end of an era. Stalin was dead and Olga would return to him. Things could go on as they had before.
Boris goes to his standing desk, thinking the change in posture will inspire movement in his pen. But it doesn’t. He looks out the window. The sun slants across the lower half of his garden and he estimates Olga’s train will arrive in two hours. He must leave within the hour to be on time to meet her family. He watches a small flock of ducks land in the yard and begin picking for worms in the newly upturned earth.
Boris neglected the garden for those three years that Olga was in Potma. The first spring after Olga was taken, Zinaida took it upon herself to clear the weeds for planting. Boris had been out on his morning walk when Zinaida began the task, and when he returned to the dacha, she was halfway through cutting the net of weeds with pruning shears. He’d called out to her to stop, but she pretended not to hear him. He opened the gate and ran into the garden. “No,” he insisted, taking the shears from her hand.
Zinaida dropped to her knees. “The world hasn’t stopped,” she cried out. “It’s here. It’s right here!” She yanked a fistful of weeds from the earth and threw them at his feet.
Zinaida never attempted to clear the weeds again, and each time she passed the garden she refused to even look at it. Soon the garden became so overgrown that even Boris had trouble deciphering its original perimeter.
That is, until Boris read Olga’s postcard and saw the date: 25 April. That very afternoon, he spent hours turning up the newly thawed earth with a shovel. The next day, he burned the leaves and weeds in a small fire at the edge of his property and filled a wheelbarrow with rocks that had migrated into the garden. He fertilized the soil by burying a few trout a meter deep. He repaired the wooden bench that had fallen into disrepair. Sitting on it for the first time in three years, he mapped out which crops he’d plant and where. First red kale and spinach. Then dill, strawberries, currants, gooseberries, and cucumbers. Then squash, potatoes, and radishes. Then onions and leeks. After solidifying his garden plans, Boris began contemplating what Olga’s homecoming would entail.
Three years earlier, Boris couldn’t have imagined a world without Olga at its center. And although there was never a day in which he hadn’t thought of her, the longing he felt lessened over time, and he’d begun to appreciate how simple his life had become. How he no longer felt the guilt of lying to his wife, the embarrassment of people talking, of Zinaida’s knowing but never addressing the matter. He no longer felt the anxiety that came with Olga’s many changing moods, and the helplessness he felt in not being able to give her everything she demanded.
After that day in the garden, Boris went back and forth on the reasons to stay with Olga and the reasons to distance himself. Without Olga, he’d never experience the same highs he had when next to her, but he’d also avoid the devastating lows. He’d never feel that same burning desire, but he’d also not be subjected to her fits, her threats, her moods.
During these equivocations, Boris read a piece of Onegin’s Journey and wrote Pushkin’s words on a scrap of paper. He’d looked at the lines for days, contemplating whether to throw it away or include it in his novel.