“Home is here. With me and Mitya.”
“And Boris.”
“Yes. Boris too.”
“For now.”
Before I could say another word, Ira got up and started back toward the cottage. I sat on the bench alone, watching the station manager sweep the platform clean.
* * *
—
By summer’s end, when the children needed to return to Moscow for school, Borya worried I’d also leave. “I’ll be alone again,” he complained, on the brink of tears. I enjoyed it, and willed his tears to fall. And when they did, I felt a sudden shift of power. I liked the feeling, and didn’t tell him for weeks that I’d already decided to stay, even if it meant I’d see the children only on weekends. I’d always known I’d stay; I just wanted him to beg.
Ira had her things packed two days in advance of their leaving, but Mitya put it off until an hour before their train was to leave. Each item I folded and placed in his suitcase, he removed. “Mitya, please,” I said.
“Where’s your suitcase?” he asked.
“You know you are going home to Moscow.”
“But you said this was home.”
“There is no school here. Don’t you want to see your friends again? And Babushka?”
“Where’s your suitcase?” he asked again, his eyes welling.
I soothed him by kissing his forehead and promising he could take his pet frog Erik—the only one to survive the summer—back to Moscow if he promised to take very good care of him.
* * *
—
The children left, and I stayed in the glass house until late autumn. It wasn’t insulated for winter, so Borya ultimately got his way. I moved to another small home, even closer to Borya’s. We called it Little House, and his dacha Big House.
I took great pleasure furnishing Little House, hanging up my curtains, laying down thick red rugs. Most of my books had been confiscated and were rotting in some damp storage room in Lubyanka, so Borya restocked my library, even building the bookshelves himself.
When all was finished, I happily gave Borya the grand tour, making sure to point out our bed, our table, our shelves. “We’ll build our garden right there come spring,” I said, pointing out the window that faced the yard.
Every space Borya and I inhabited became ours. If I said it wasn’t easy to put my old life in Moscow out of mind as well—my children, my mother, my responsibilities—I’d be lying. Once, I overheard Mitya accidentally call my mother Mama, and instead of feeling like a betrayal, it felt like a relief.
That winter was so far from my days spent in darkness. Friends came, and the readings of Doctor Zhivago started up again. Every Sunday, Mitya and Ira and our friends would take the train in from Moscow. We’d dine, then Borya would read, I the hostess at his side once again.
* * *
—
The novel was almost finished. Borya worked at a furious pace, as he had when we’d first fallen in love. He’d write in Peredelkino in the mornings then walk to Little House. I’d help edit and retype in the afternoons.
Zhivago was ever present, especially as he neared its completion. If you asked him about the weather or how he’d enjoyed his dinner or whether he thought aphids were the reason his summer squash had withered on the vine, he’d find a way to bring the conversation back to the book. Sometimes he’d even dream of Yuri and Lara. “They are as clear to me as anyone living,” he said. “It’s as if they once existed and their ghosts are speaking to me.”
But as Yuri and Lara were ever on his mind, Big House was ever on mine. He wrote there. He ate there. He slept there. She cooked for him and mended his socks. She watched television there. She played cards with the neighbors on nights he was gone. She nursed him when he had a headache or upset stomach or fretted about his heart.
She entered his study only to clean and never interrupted his work. She created the perfect conditions for his writing. Although he never told me, I believe that’s why he stayed. At the time, I told myself it was his obsession to finish the novel that kept him there.
I wondered whether they slept together. I didn’t think so, but still, the thought was an ink spot on a white tablecloth. What would they look like intertwined? His long, lean torso pressed against the folds of her belly. His strong hands lifting her breasts to the position they once occupied. Part of me wanted it to be true. In a strange, twisted way it reassured me he’d still want me when I was old. Once, I asked whether they did still sleep together, and Borya assured me it had been years. “How many?” I asked. “Did you sleep with her while I was gone?”
“Of course not. We are not that way anymore.”
“Did you sleep with anyone?” I asked. “I’ll understand if you had,” I added, though I didn’t mean it. He told me I had nothing to worry about, that my place in his life was forever cemented. That he kept company only with Lara during my absence.
And still I persisted, still I pushed. “No one?”
* * *
“He’s dead,” Borya said over the telephone.
I tightened my grip on the receiver. “Who is dead?”
He groaned as though he had stomach cramps. “Yuri,” he finally got out.
Tears came to my eyes. “He’s dead?”
“It’s done. My novel is complete.”
I arranged for the manuscript to be edited, retyped, and bound with a leather cover. I went into Moscow to pick up three copies from the printer and carried the box back on the train, the weight of Borya’s words heavy on my lap.
He was waiting for me at Little House. When I handed him the box containing his life’s work, he held it in his hands for a moment, then set it down and spun me around the room. We danced without music. As we spun, I saw myself in the oval mirror, and I, too, looked happy—but as a mother looks after she’s given birth: elated and exhausted, happy and pained, peaceful and at the same time terrified.
“Perhaps it will be published,” Borya said.
I thought of Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov sitting at his large desk inquiring about Doctor Zhivago. I thought about the State’s obsession with what he had written. But I said nothing.
* * *
—
I scheduled meetings with every literary magazine, every editor, every publishing house, anyone who might publish Zhivago. I went alone to speak on Borya’s behalf. When pushed to describe his work, defend it, or even promote it, he felt he couldn’t. “It’s as if my own words are lost somewhere between putting them to paper and seeing them in print,” he told me.