to manage the first.
And so, one night in late summer, he started to imagine their story. But this effort of imagination was so strenuous, and consumed so much passion and empathy, that it drained his entire life-blood away.
Part Two
Chapter One
Forty weeks before. A hotel. Morning.
As so often in hotels, wakefulness crept up on him from the window. He stared at the curtains for a moment, trying to work out from them which hotel he was in. They told him nothing, not even the city. But he could still recall precisely his dream of a few moments before.
He turned his head. Rovena’s hair, spilt over the pillow, made her face and bare shoulder look even more fragile than usual.
Besfort Y. had always thought that women’s smooth necks and graceful arms were the sort of things that could be used as tactical weapons in war, as decoys by opposing armies.
Fragile, as if he could break her in his arms and master her easily: that is how Rovena had looked twelve years ago, when, for the first time, she had come out of the bath to lie beside him and conquer him. Her breasts were small, like a teenager’s, and strategically important in the battle. After them came her belly, the next snare. Below this, dark, threatening, marked by the dark triangle, lurked the final hurdle. And here he was defeated.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, he lifted the quilt and, as he had done dozens of times before, looked at her belly and the site of his surrender. It was surely the only place in the world where happiness could be found only in defeat.
He covered her up again with the same gentleness and looked at his watch. It was nearly time for her to wake up. Perhaps he still had time to tell her his dream before it faded irretrievably.
How many times, he said to himself, had they repeated all this in one hotel or another, without being entirely sure what “all this” was.
In his dream he had been eating lunch with Stalin. This seemed entirely normal, and it even made no particular impression on him when Stalin’s face alternated with that of a high-school classmate, a certain Thanas Rexha.
“My right hand has gone numb. It’s been like this for four days,” Stalin said to him. “You sign these two treaties for me.”
While he was signing the first treaty, he wanted to ask what it was about. But the second was quickly put in front of him. “It’s secret, but take a look at it if you like.” He felt no eagerness to read the text, but still, more out of a desire to please than out of curiosity, he glanced through the second treaty. It was extremely complicated, with knotty passages that apparently contradicted each other. He remembered again Thanas Rexha, who had given up high school after twice failing the history exam about the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact on the eve of World War II.
What a crazy dream, he thought. It had continued, but he could not remember how. His eyes wandered from the curtains back to Rovena’s face. Her eyelids were still closed in sleep, but fluttered slightly like a swallow in distress. Normally he got up before her, and whenever he studied her sleeping face, he thought that a woman who is loved opens her eyes in a different way to others.
But Rovena did not wake, and he got up and went to the window in the anteroom, a long way from the bed. He drew aside the curtain slightly and looked stonily at the street, where yellow leaves were falling.
Abstractedly, he listed the names of hotels where they had slept: Plaza, Intercontinental, Palace, Don Pepe, Sacher, Marriott. Their lights glittered palely, blue, orange, crimson. Why was he calling these hotels to mind as if looking for help? And why did they hurry past?
He felt a chill round his shoulders and turned to enter the bathroom. That same soft light glowed below the mirror. It came from her toiletries, her perfume, comb, creams, which had no doubt acquired something special over the years from contact with her face.
Among their sweetest moments had been the times when she had sat on the little white throne next to the bath and washed herself. Under the surface of the water, the patch of her bush would continually change shape, grow fuzzy, ambiguous.
“What are you thinking about?” she would ask him, lifting her eyes from her own body to look at him. “Will you go out for a bit while I get ready?”
He would lie on the bed waiting, and listen as she sang familiar tunes softly to herself.
The night before, they had repeated this ritual almost exactly. But this had not prevented him from thinking again what he had said to her on the street: “Something is not the same as before.”
Rovena was still asleep when he emerged from the shower, without even that clear expression on her face that generally preceded her awakening. Her cheeks and forehead were dull. He remembered when she first arrived, years before. She had sat down, after a sleepless night, as she explained to him later, with the glitter that was fashionable at the time clinging to her cheeks, like the crumbs of dreams. She had looked him straight in the eye to tell him what she had been thinking about on the way: the words of a French song, J’ai tant rêvé de toi.
He had never heard such a natural and direct declaration of love.
I will love you all my life. Yours desperately. He had attached words to that first meeting, like the glitter on her cheeks, that he knew had not been spoken or written until later.
Again, as if looking for help, he thought of the late-night bars with their tiny lights and resonant names: Kempinski, Kronprinz, Negresco. “Oh God, how happy I am with you,” she had said. “Only you bring me this happiness.” He thought he had never properly appreciated these words of hers, but reassured himself with the thought that this was what always seemed to happen in this world.
A fresh gust of wind sent the leaves scurrying round the steel lamp posts. Not just something, but nothing is the same as before, he said to himself.
He had said these words to her as they approached the hotel, and her eyes had quivered, as if she had been found out. “Well …” she said. Then suddenly she collected herself. “That’s not true for me,” she hastily replied. “Not at all.”
She repeated what she had said, but her words, instead of reassuring him, pierced his flesh like nails. “Not in my case. Maybe in yours.”
“Not for either of us,” he replied.
He thought she was awake and he turned his head abruptly, suddenly remembering how his dream about Stalin had continued.
There were just the two of them again, this time at the Novodevichy Convent. It was barely possible to walk through the tightly packed cemetery. Stalin held some flowers in his hand, and seemed to have spent a long time searching for his wife’s grave.
He thought, just wait till he orders me, “You lay the flowers. My hand is stiff.” But Stalin was angry. His eyes were icy. At least don’t let me be there when he overturns the headstone and screams, “Traitor, why did you do this to me?”
He could almost read Stalin’s mind. So you complained about my crimes? If you had been truthful, you wouldn’t have left me alone. To create havoc. Alone on these steppes. In this horror.
Конец
