“I was wrong. It’s my execution that the whole world will watch.” He raked his hands through his hair. “Am I what they say I am? A narcissist, someone who thinks—no, believes—fully believes, that he has been chosen for this task? That I’m fated to spend my life attempting to express what’s in the hearts of men?” Borya paced frantically. “The sky is falling, and I sought to write instead of building a roof to protect myself and my loved ones. Has my selfishness no bounds? I’ve sat at my desk for so long. Is it true I’m out of touch? Could I even know what is in the hearts and minds of my countrymen? How could I have gotten it all so wrong? Why go on?”
“We go on because that’s what we have to do,” I told him. Before I could get another word out to calm him, he launched into his plan.
“It’s all too much. I won’t wait for them to come for me. I won’t wait for their black car to arrive. I won’t wait for them to drag me out into the street. To do to me what they did to Osip, to Titsian—”
“And to me,” I added.
“Yes, my love. I’ll never let them. I think it’s time we left this life.”
I took a step back from him.
“I’ve saved them, you know. The pills. I’ve saved the Nembutal I was given the last time I was in the hospital. Twenty-two. Eleven for each of us.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. Boris had threatened to kill himself before. Once, decades earlier, he even drank a bottle of iodine when his wife, before she was his wife, had refused him. He’d confessed to me later that he’d only sought her reaction, not his actual death. But this time, something in his voice, how he remained calm, made me think he might be serious.
He reached for my hand. “We’ll take them tonight. It will cost them dearly. It will be a slap in the face.”
Mitya rose to his feet. He was now taller than I, and almost as tall as Borya. Mitya, gentle Mitya, looked him in the eyes. “What are you talking about?” He looked at me. “Mama, what is he talking about?”
“Leave us, Mitya.” I said.
“I won’t!” He reared back as if he might hit Boris.
For the first time, I realized that his was no longer the hand of a little boy, but of a young man. A well of guilt filled my chest. All these years, I’d put Borya first.
“Nothing will happen.” I let go of Borya’s hand and took my son’s. “I assure you.” I pulled a fistful of kopeks from my pocket and asked him to get more petrol for the fire.
He refused to take the money. “What is wrong with you? With both of you?”
“Take it, Mitya. Go and get the petrol. I’ll be right along.”
He grabbed the money and left, looking back to warn Borya with his burning stare.
“It will be painless,” Borya said once Mitya was gone. “We’ll be together.” All this time, he’d been pretending the roaring whispers of condemnation weren’t upsetting him—that the microphones we suspected were planted in his house and mine were something to laugh about, that the negative reviews had no merit. He’d been focusing on a speck of white light at the tunnel’s end that, with the latest blow from the Writers’ Union, had faded to black.
And he believed I’d follow him—that I’d take the pills, that I didn’t have the strength to go on alone. At one time, I might not have. In fact, I might have been the one to first suggest it. But not now. Now I could go on. I would go on. They could put him in the ground, but not me.
I told him it would just give them what they wanted—that it was a weak man’s move. I said they’d gloat over their victory of the dead poet, the cloud dweller Stalin never finished off. Borya said he didn’t care about any of it as long as the pain would stop. “I can’t wait for their darkness to befall me. I’d rather step into the dark than be pushed,” he said.
“Things are different now that Stalin is dead. They won’t shoot you in the street.”
“You haven’t lived through it as I did. You didn’t see them pick off your friends, one by one. Do you know what it feels like to have been saved when your friends were murdered? To be the one left behind? They will come for me. I’m sure of it. They will come for us.”
I asked him to wait one more day, saying I wanted to say goodbye to Ira and Mama, that I wanted one more sunrise. In reality, I had one last plan—and if that plan didn’t work, I knew he might still be talked off the ledge. And if that didn’t work, I knew another sun would come up anyway, and I’d go on. It’s what Russian women do. It’s in our blood.
* * *
—
I found Mitya at the tavern near the train station, a small can of petrol at his side. I told him I’d never leave him. By the look in his eyes, I knew he didn’t believe me. I wept, telling him I was sorry, so sorry, and he told me he forgave me. But I could tell he said it only to get me to stop crying.
I asked if he’d accompany me to Fedin’s dacha—step one of my plan. He agreed, reluctantly. We left the tavern and trudged up the muddy hill.
I knocked at the door of the grand home of the newly anointed chair of the Writers’ Union, built from large logs stacked atop each other. No one came, so I knocked again. Fedin’s young daughter answered. Without invitation, I barged in. Mitya waited outside. Just as Katya was saying her father wasn’t home, he appeared.
“Make us some tea, Katya?” Fedin asked his daughter.
“I don’t want tea,” I said.
Fedin’s shoulders rose, then fell. “Come.” I followed him into his office, where he sat, swiveling in a leather chair. Looking like a snowy owl on his perch—with his white hair, his high widow’s peak, his arched eyebrows—he gestured for me to sit across from him.
“I’ll stand,” I said. I was so tired of sitting across from men. I got right to the point. “He will kill himself tonight if something isn’t done.”
“You mustn’t say such a thing.”
“He has the pills. I’ve delayed him, but I don’t know what more I can do.”
“You must restrain him.”
“How? It is you and the rest of the Central Committee who have done this.”
Fedin rubbed his eyes and straightened his back. “I warned him this would happen.”
“You warned him?” I shouted. “When did you warn him?”
“The day he won. I went to his dacha and told him myself that his acceptance would force the State’s hand. I told him, as a friend, that he must turn it down or face the consequences. Surely he told you of this.”