It isn’t until he’s on Olga’s street that he makes up his mind to see her. He slowly ascends the five flights of stairs, holding the handrail as he climbs. At each landing, he tells himself he will see her for only a moment, just a moment, to tell her what he told Ira in the park. She deserves to hear it from him, he tells himself when he reaches her door. He steadies his heart by pressing his hand to his chest. He takes a deep breath before he knocks, but she opens it before he can raise his fist. It has been seven years since they met, and three since he’s seen her. She’s aged twofold in that time: her blond hair, half-tucked under a headscarf, looks as dull as straw; her curves have straightened; wrinkles now radiate from her mouth, across her forehead, and from the corners of her eyes; her skin is marked with sun spots and unfamiliar moles.
And yet he falls to his knees. She is even more beautiful than before.
Boris no longer questions what to do. He rises and kisses her—and she lets him for a moment, before stepping back. Olga retreats into her apartment but leaves the door open. Boris follows, reaching for her embrace. She holds out her hand to stop him. “Never again,” she says.
“Never again?” he asks.
“Will you keep me waiting.”
“Never,” he says. “Never.”
CHAPTER 7
The Muse
The Rehabilitated Woman
THE EMISSARY
How many times had I imagined our reunion? Pictured Borya waiting, hat in hand, looking up the tracks? How many times had I thought of that first embrace? Rubbed my arms and squeezed my shoulders while lying alone on my bunk to simulate how it would feel?
Three and a half years had passed since we shared a bed, and we didn’t waste time. His touch shocked me. It had been so long since I had been touched. We came together like crashing boulders that echoed across Moscow.
After, I laid my head down on his chest to listen to the beat of his heart. I joked that after two heart attacks, he had a new rhythm. “And your teeth.” His large, yellowed teeth with the gap in the middle were now gleaming white porcelain.
“You don’t like them?” he asked. He closed his mouth, and I used my pinky finger to pry it open again. He pretended to bite it.
* * *
—
He held on tighter, not letting go as easily as he had before. He didn’t want to leave my apartment except to write and sleep. In my absence, he’d moved full-time to his dacha in Peredelkino, which, in the years I’d been gone, had been expanded with three new rooms, gas heat, running water, a new clawfoot tub. While I was living in the barracks, he was living in a retreat in the woods most Russians could only dream of.
After Potma, I asked freely and without guilt for him to share his good fortune—money for clothing, books, food, school supplies for the children, a new bed.
There were other things too.
He left all business pertaining to his writing to me: the contracts, the speaking engagements, payments for his translation work. If an editor called for a meeting, it was I who would attend. I became his agent, his mouthpiece, the one people went to if they wanted to get to him. I finally felt as useful to him as Zinaida was. But instead of cooking and cleaning, I was the person who ushered his words out into the world. I became his emissary.
Almost daily, I’d take the train from Moscow to Peredelkino and we’d meet in the cemetery. We could be alone there to discuss Zhivago or just sit together. Our only company was the occasional widow or widower carrying plastic flowers, or the caretaker, who usually stayed in his shed smoking cigarettes and reading. Sometimes I’d bring small pieces of meat wrapped in a cloth napkin for the two large dogs who’d greet me at the iron gates.
Our place was on the sloping hill in the unused part of the cemetery. If the weather was pleasant, we’d sit on one of my scarves spread out on the grass.
“I want to be buried here in this very spot,” he told me more than once.
“Don’t be morbid.”
“I thought it romantic.”
Once, as we sat in our place on the hill, Borya spotted Zinaida walking up the main road toward their dacha. She looked like an old woman—walking slowly, her hair covered in a plastic babushka, both arms laden with shopping bags. She paused, set down the bags, and lit a cigarette. I sat up to get a better look. Borya gently pushed me back down.
That summer, to be closer to him, I rented a house across Lake Izmalkovo, a thirty-minute walk from his dacha. Borya wouldn’t live with me, but it would be a place of our own, a place for a new start.
The children took one bedroom, and I made the glassed-in veranda mine. Mama mostly stayed behind in Moscow, saying the country was only good in small doses.
How I loved that glass house. How the roots of the poplars made natural steps leading up to my door. How the veranda was all light, and how I could see Borya approach along the path while lying in bed.
But when Borya first saw the cottage, he scolded me, saying a glass house offered no privacy when the whole point of my moving closer was to afford us more. That afternoon, I took the train into the city and bought red and blue chintz. I spent the evening making drapes that would convert my room of light into a den.
That summer was hot. Wild roses erupted in pockets of reds and pinks along the path and the skies opened up with daily thunderstorms. The glass walls of my room condensed from the trapped heat. I cracked every window, but it brought little relief. Borya and I sweated through my sheets, and I joked that we could turn my bedroom into a greenhouse and grow tropical fruits like mangoes and bananas. Borya didn’t think it funny. He hated that glass house.
But Mitya loved the glass house, just as I did. He took to country life quickly, spending his days traipsing around the forest, bringing home plants and rocks and frogs in his pockets. He made a home for his frogs in a tin bucket filled with grass and pebbles and the top of a mayonnaise jar, for water. He wiped mud underneath his eyes and fashioned a bow and arrow from a stick and string to become Robin Hood.
Ira was another matter. She refused to play with her brother, having grown out of such games while I was gone. She complained about being stuck inside the tiny cottage all day while her friends were back in Moscow. “There’s nowhere to even get ice cream here,” she said. When I made her plombir ice cream with fresh mint from Borya’s garden, she spat it out. “Tastes like dirt,” she said, pushing the bowl away. “Give it to your patron.”
I scolded her for speaking ill about Borya, and she got up and left. When she didn’t come home that evening, I went to the train station and found her sitting on a bench, alone but for the station manager sweeping his broom.
“I wanted to go home,” she said. “But I didn’t have any money.”