Dear Anatoli,
I woke to the sound of my daughter wheezing. My dear Ira. They say she helped me conceal foreign money, and now she sleeps in the bunk across from mine. She is ill. A fever. They’ve allowed me to stay with her until she shows improvement. But I don’t want you to worry, Anatoli. She’s fine. I’m fine. I just thank God they left my Mitya alone. At least there’s that.
Although I last wrote to you so many years ago, I’ve never stopped writing. Letters composed in my head while I bathed. Letters composed when I could not sleep. Letters penned somewhere deep inside myself. But now I can no longer keep the words from coming out.
I traded knit socks for this pen and paper. I want to purge what is inside me. Now, where was I?
I wonder where you are. Why were you not the one to meet me at Lubyanka and continue our late-night chats? Have you been replaced? Have I been? Do you ever think of me? Does my name ever cross your lips? Perhaps you stayed away this time because I am older now than I was before. Perhaps my company was more pleasing then.
The first time, I was pregnant. I lost my baby. Now I am older and becoming infertile, the man who fathered my unborn child buried. Time is a terrible thing.
I have been here before. And yet, in a way, I never left.
The ink on my sentence has dried. I will spend the next eight years at this place—the first three alongside my daughter, an innocent. I suppose I always knew they would find the money, or at least say they had.
It is March 1961, month three of our sentences, and our surroundings are still a blanket of white, the horizon gray. It is night, and I write under a gas lamp turned so low I can only see the paper in front of me and the shadow of my daughter’s slender back as she sleeps on her side under two woolen blankets—one of which is mine.
Earlier, Ira and I worked at the pit digging a new latrine. Her hands are blistered and cracked and she can barely lift the pick, so I dig harder and faster. I don’t say it aloud to anyone, but part of me has missed this work—putting the shovel to the earth, stepping on it with both feet to penetrate deeper, exposing the soil underneath, dark against the white snow.
I am exhausted, and yet I do not want to sleep until this story is told. I’m pressing the pen harder now. It is fading. I think the woman who is wearing my socks lied to me for the trade; the pen’s ink is almost gone. There is so much more to write. Maybe the rest of this letter will be written in the indentation the pen’s tip makes in the paper. Maybe you will have to read it like braille.
As it is, my story no longer belongs to me. In the collective imagination, I have become someone else—a heroine, a character. I have become Lara. And yet when I look, I don’t find her here. Is that how they will know me when I’m gone? Is that the love story they’ll remember?
I think of Borya’s own ending for his heroine:
One day Larisa Feodorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.
But Anatoli, I am no nameless number. I will not disappear.
EPILOGUE
THE TYPISTS
In the winter of ’65, Doctor Zhivago premiered on the big screen. We went together. Some of us were still at the Agency, but most had left by then. A typist’s shelf life isn’t very long. New typists came and went. Many men had risen through the ranks, and some of us had too. Gail had even been awarded Anderson’s position after he died of a heart attack while accompanying his teenage daughter to a Beatles concert at the Coliseum.
We’d married, or not. We’d had children, or hadn’t. We were all a little older—fine lines appearing when we smiled or frowned, our figures no longer quite the lithe young things we used to hide behind our desks.
It was good to see each other. The last time had been at a wedding in ’63. After the Zhivago mission, Norma left the Pool to pursue her master’s in creative writing at Iowa, and around that same time, Teddy began to pursue her long distance. They got hitched once she’d graduated, and Teddy left the Agency for a job at another secretive company just down the road from Langley: Mars, Inc. The wedding was an informal affair held at the outdoor dance hall in Great Falls Park with a barbecue reception and chocolate fondue fountains donated by Teddy’s new employer. His parents seemed aghast, but the rest of us had a great time. Henry Rennet was not there, and no one missed him. After Norma tossed her bouquet—which Judy expertly dodged—Frank Wisner gave a toast to the happy couple. It would be the last time we’d see our old boss; he’d take his life two years later, in the fall of ’65, just before Zhivago’s premiere.
Hugs and cheek kisses were exchanged outside the Georgetown Theater, its neon sign bathing us in a red glow. Tickets were purchased, and while we waited in line for refreshments, Linda showed us photos of her twin boys sitting on Santa’s lap at Woodies and Kathy pulled out snaps of her Hawaiian honeymoon. We talked about how much we wished Judy could’ve made it. She’d moved to California to become an actress, and although she’d yet to hit it big, she did land a bit part on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
We took up the entire third and fourth rows of the Georgetown. The lights dimmed and popcorn and Raisinets were passed around as the newsreel played, showing footage of America’s military escalation in Vietnam. Those of us still at the Agency remained stoic as the camera panned to show downed planes, burned fields, and collapsed roofs. They knew more than those of us no longer at the Agency, and those of us on the outside knew better than to ask.
When the theater went dark and the music started, a few of us exchanged looks and hand squeezes. And when Lara appeared on the screen in a white blouse and black tie, sitting behind a desk, we all thought the same thing: Irina. Actually, it was Julie Christie. But still—her hair, her eyes. It was our Irina on that screen.
We got chills when Yuri first saw Lara from across the room. We sniffed back tears when he told her goodbye for the first time. We held out hope that the movie would depart from the book and end with Yuri and Lara living in that country house until their dying days. And even though we knew it was coming, we let the tears flow when they said goodbye for the last time.
As the credits rolled, we dabbed our eyes with our hankies. Doctor Zhivago is both a war story and a love story. But years later, it was the love story we remembered most.
* * *
—
Three years before the Kremlin lowered its Soviet hammer and sickle and replaced it with the Russian tricolor, Doctor Zhivago came to the Motherland for the first time—legally, that is. Gail sent us a postcard from her trip to Moscow. The postcard was an advertisement for Sotheby’s Bidding for Glasnost ’88 auction, and her note said our novel was everywhere. The following year, Pasternak was reawarded the Nobel, his son accepting the Prize on his behalf.