Дэвид Салой - The Innocent

The wedding party was held in the officers’ mess of the NKVD headquarters. General Reshetov sent flowers. Of Aleksandr’s family, only Ivan was there – a high-spirited seventeen-year-old wearing a suit for the first time. He and Nikita Stepanovich, who had just qualified as an engineer from the Urals State Technical University, were his witnesses.

They lived first with Irina’s parents. A fractious period, but one which time has endowed with a sort of purity, a prelapsarian shine. It was not until two years later that they moved into the flat on Malyshev Street – he is looking at a photo of Irina standing outside it, some time in the late thirties, shielding her eyes with her hand. Their room had a marble fireplace, the flue stuffed with old newspaper, and a long squat radiator under the window, which in winter emitted sullen heat and the smell of scorched paint. He sees them on their first night there, half-undressed in the laughable luxury of their own space; he is teaching her how to play chess – how to set out the pieces, how each piece moves, the significance of the king.

IT WAS – WHAT? A week, ten days, since you had left. It seemed like much longer. I lived through that terrible week moment by moment, and only as I drove out to the smoggy suburb did I understand what a torment it had been. A state of permanent enervation. There was no variation in it, only the same few thoughts and feelings, turning like a sluggish whirlpool. Eventually, there was nothing I would not do to escape it. Sleepless, undernourished, nearly losing my mind, I pushed the service Pobeda through the quagmire of autumn.

Nikita’s house was an odd thing, wasn’t it? A little low house surrounded, first, by a picket fence – within which there was that sad, sooty garden – and then by the huge structures of the steelworks. Towering smokestacks. Pipelines. Slag-heaps. Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. That’s how it is in my memory though.

Fine rain was falling that morning. The house was streaked with wet soot, and its windows were veiled with the stuff so that the light inside was dim and dirty. We stood in the parlour, in that light. There was no one else there. The family were all at work or school. I told you, for the umpteenth time, that nothing had happened, whatever Nikita might say. It was true that I still sometimes went to see her. She had written to me. She was lonely. I felt sorry for her. I went to see her. That was true … It was all very familiar.

And then I said something else. Something I had not envisaged saying. Not for a second. I said, ‘I think I might be in love with her.’

Silence.

Quiet pattering on smutty windowpanes.

It was a moment that would have been unimaginable only a few months earlier. I think you were shocked. Though you had never accepted my protestations of innocence, I suppose you had hoped they were true. And they were. That was the point.

You sighed – a spontaneous open-mouthed sigh, almost a sob – and there was another of those long silences, in the middle of which the lifeless objects of the parlour – the maid’s mattress, the table, the black iron taps – seemed to take on a more intense existence. There were moments when I was intensely aware of them, and moments when I was not aware of them at all, as if we were standing in a pale void. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Suddenly you shouted, ‘Why do you think you can come here and talk to me like this?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry …’

‘Stop saying that!’ You were in tears now, shouting at me. I’ve forgotten what you said. I was in shock too, wondering what I had done. Words are deeds. And then you were wiping your eyes and saying, ‘I think you should leave now.’

‘Irina …’

‘Please, leave.’

With trembling hands I started the Pobeda, and spent the next hour taking wrong turnings, not knowing where I was, more and more lost in that smoking volcanic landscape. I don’t know how I spent the next ten hours. I met Zalesky on the stairs in the twilight. He was on his way out. ‘You alright?’ he said, looking worriedly into my tear-stained eyes, which he would not have been able to see very well in the murky light.

I tried to smile. ‘Yes. Fine. You?’ He was in uniform. ‘Working nights?’

‘The whole week,’ he said. ‘It’s messing me up.’

‘Well …’ I did not know what to say. I felt no sympathy for him. ‘You’ll get a few days off at the end of it.’

‘Yeah, just when I’ve got used to it.’

I went upstairs and lay on the divan for a while.

Then I went out again.

Irishka, I want to tell you something now. Something that has weighed on my mind all these years. It’s important that I tell you. That evening I went to see her. It was as if a sort of darkness had opened in front of me. I don’t know how else to put it.

I went to see her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, when she opened the door. Her face was swollen. She had been asleep. She was not expecting me. I slumped down on the sofa, still in my wet coat.

‘You look upset,’ she said.

‘I am.’

‘Why?’

I did not tell her about our meeting. I never told her much about us.

She went to the kitchen. While she was away I listened to the rain on the window, or something like that. The food was from the ministry store. I said I didn’t want any. Instead, I quoted Hamlet, the original bourgeois nihilist! I said, ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!’ She knew the lines – knew them so well in fact that she joined in from ‘seem to me all the uses of this world!’ You would have laughed at us, Irishka. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I said, laughing. ‘That I feel like Hamlet. It’s shameful.’

It was late. The electric light sank to an orange glow and then went out. I was still there, on the sofa, and the rain was still siling down in the street, so she said, ‘Do you want to stay the night?’ I had never stayed the night until then. No, I had not. Every night since you went to Nikita’s, I had slept, or not slept, on my own on our divan.

‘Well …’ I said.

‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ said her voice in the dark.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well …’ I sounded doubtful.

‘You’ll get soaked.’

‘Yes. Okay. Thank you.’

I was slowly unlacing my shoes, when she said, ‘Did you look at my journal?’

‘No.’

‘None of it?’

‘No.’

I took off my shoes.

‘I wrote some terrible things in it,’ she said.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

I did not know what to say. Finally I just said, ‘‘night,’ and lay down on the sofa with my overcoat on top of me.

It was totally dark. For a few minutes I heard her moving around, undressing, then the soft squeak of the bedsprings, then only the sounds of the rain. It seemed that nothing would happen that night – and if nothing happened that night, it seemed unlikely that it ever would. I was pleased. Truly. All the stress of the previous few hours – of the previous few weeks – immediately sank away, like water out of a sink. I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep. And I did sleep, though the sofa was lumpy.

Irishka, I woke to find her sitting there with her hip pressing against my leg. She seemed to be sitting sideways, looking down at me. The rain had stopped. The silence was intense. For a few moments I did not know where I was. I had been dreaming something, and seemed suddenly to have woken. I don’t know how long she had been sitting there, or how long I had been asleep.

‘I know you looked at it,’ she whispered.

Somehow, in the otherwise total disorientation of waking, I immediately knew what she was talking about. ‘Yes, I did,’ I said.