The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

  “The peasant continued cutting back his horse’s food. Each week the peasant boasted to his neighbor about the savings he had made on his horse’s food that week, and each week the neighbor continued to warn him of his, the horse’s and his family’s imminent demise if the peasant persisted in his folly. One day, the peasant approached the neighbor with more string than ever suspended from his sausage fingers dangling in the breeze. He cried out triumphantly to his neighbor, ‘Still working, and this week I gave him no food!’

  “With the money he had saved on the horse’s feed, he drank throughout the night, celebrating. When he woke the next morning, the horse was dead. Two weeks later the Revolution came to the village where the peasant lived, horseless, with his family beside his neighbor and his family and their healthy horse. When the revolutionaries got to the peasant’s house, they found him shouting at his wife, a knife in the hand where once the string had been, his children cowering in the corner. They had first seen the neighbor next door with his wife, children and his horse, and now they saw poverty and desperation in the peasant’s home.

  “‘Did the bourgeois kulak next door reduce you to this, Comrade?’ they asked the peasant.

  “‘Yes,’ the frightened peasant answered. ‘Yes, he always mocked me, said I was crazy and that I would have a miserable end.’

  “The neighbor was immediately arrested for being a bourgeois kulak, dragged out of his house and shot in front of his wife and children. Immediately after the execution the peasant was given his dead neighbor’s horse.

  “The peasant was of course overjoyed, falling over himself to praise the revolutionaries. He quickly had his children singing revolutionary songs and before too long was himself a member of the Party. Such was his zeal and his genuine peasant origins that he was taken to the capital and paraded as a fine example of the modern citizen, an agrarian peasant who had seen the virtue of the Revolution.

  “He became well known throughout the Party and was rewarded with higher and higher appointments until finally he was appointed commissar in charge of literature. One of his duties was the allocation of grants and stipends to poets and prose writers. It was said that for years he could be heard exclaiming in drunken exaltation down the corridors, ‘Still working, and this week I gave him nothing!’”

  Madeline had her eyes on the road. The trees were rushing past. We were nearing the lake.

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “Well, it’s a story but—”

  “Yevtushenko never told you that story.”

  “No, well, he didn’t tell it directly to me but—”

  “How can you lie like that?”

  “Oh, Maddy . . . It’s a . . . it’s a story.”

  “You lie to yourself.”

  “Maddy, let’s not argue.”

  But we did. She did. She shouted at me in an increasingly shrill voice. She sounded hysterical. I heard her but could not make out her words. It reminded me of birds in the country first thing in the morning. She drove faster and shouted louder till neither of us could see the trees for the wood. There was not a trace of the young woman for whom I had written that poem so long ago. The person in the driver’s seat would have been unrecognizable to that young woman. We had come so far, too far and I, wanting to go back, began reciting:

  “Let us go then, you and I

  When the evening is spread out against the sky”

  But she did not join in as she once had.

  “Let us go then, you and I . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  I began repeating it.

  “Let us go then, you and I . . .”

  Nothing.

  “Let us go then, you and I . . .”

  She stopped the car abruptly so that it jerked forward after the engine had stopped. We were as close to the lake as the car could go. Madeline leant over to the backseat, opened the mouth of the empty canvas bag with an outward stretch of one hand and scooped up the kittens with her other hand. She moved so quickly. The side of her body touched my face. I could suddenly smell the perfume she used to wear so long ago. She was wearing it again. She handed me the canvas bag with the kittens inside and reached over me to unlock the passenger door. Then she spoke.

  “So go, then.”

  “What?”

  “Put them out of our misery.” She pointed to the lake.

  “In the lake?”

  “Drown them.”

  “Oh no, no, Maddy. I can’t.”

  “It’s best,” she said, leaning over me and opening the door. “I can’t keep them and they won’t survive out here.”

  “I can’t. Maddy, I can’t.”

  The kittens mewed from inside the bag.

  “Will you go!” she shouted, pushing me out of the car.

  I fell out of the car, standing only to trip over a fallen branch. The kittens spilled out of the bag, scurrying in different directions. I tried to catch them, grabbing hold of one at the expense of the other two, going after another and losing the first. Madeline shouted something but I could not make it out. Very quickly I had lost all three kittens. They ran and I ran. I ran and ran. Towards the lake. I heard the car pull away. The kittens were gone and so was Madeline. All I could hear was the sound of myself: my breathing, running, heaving. There was dirt in my mouth. I had fallen, cut my leg, a ridiculous man facedown in the dirt beside Lake Eildon, crying to myself.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table.

  The sweet features of my personal failings, once just hinted at, had grown too pronounced for her.

  Was she crying, too, in the car? Now I am sure that she was not. But, waking tranquilized in someone else’s pajamas in the permanently makeshift psych ward of that tiny hospital, I still had not realized, despite what had just happened, the extent of her contempt for me.

  From the outside the building is spacious; yet, from the inside, the walls creep up on you. They crept up on me. So did Hugh Brasnett. Hugh’s bed was two away from mine. He was the young man, not much older than Andy, whom I had seen earlier lying on his front trying to fit his face on the Department of Health logo on the pillowcase.

  “Who is Mandelstam?”

  “What?”

  “Who is Mandelstam?” he repeated.

  “Mandelstam was a Russian poet. Why do you ask me that?”

  “Was? Is he dead?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You were calling for him.”

  “When?”

  “Before. When you came in. Before they gave you a shot.”

  “Who gave me a shot?”

  “She did,” Hugh said, pointing at a young woman I had to lean forward to see out of the doorway. Her name was Sarah. She was a nurse and I learned later the younger sister of Neil Mahoney’s wife. If a field mouse could be an attractive young woman, it would look like Sarah.

  “He’s awake now,” Hugh called.

  She put down whatever she was carrying and came to sit down on my bed.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Okay. A little—”

  “Confused?”

  “Well, yes, but I was going to say . . . embarrassed.”

  “Who’s Mandelstam?” Hugh interrupted.

  “You’re Madeline’s husband, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “My brother-in-law, Neil, is her manager.”

  “Her manager?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought . . . Wasn’t it Madeline’s family’s property?”

  “Yes. That it was. That it is.”

  “Who the fuck was Mandelstam?”

  Hugh was so bored that interrupting us seemed the best thing on offer. So I found myself in the psych ward of a tiny rural hospital telling a disturbed but not unintelligent young country boy about the life and times of Osip Mandelstam. And Sarah, whom I had expected to leave us, stayed where she was and listened.

  “Osip Emilievic
h Mandelstam was born in Russia, of Jewish parents, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Educated in St. Petersburg, he had the misfortune of being unable to do anything at all with himself except write some of the finest poetry his country and perhaps the world has ever known.”

  “Why is that a misfortune?” Hugh asked.

  “Because Mandelstam was writing in a place that valued poetry so much that a poet could be arrested for a single poem. Many lesser poets were arrested, exiled and sometimes killed for their writing, even the ones who made a religion of attempting to curry favor with the regime. And Mandelstam was tempera-mentally incapable of this sort of thing.

  “I was only in a childish way connected to the established order;

  I was terrified of oysters and glanced distrustfully at guardsmen;

  And not a grain of my soul owes anything to that world of power,

  However much I was tortured trying to be someone else.”

  “That was beautiful,” Sarah said.

  “How do you remember it?” asked Hugh.

  “I’m . . . a poet,” I said, and then, turning to Sarah, “If you’re Neil’s sister-in-law, you would probably know that I’m not a farmer.” Sarah smiled uncomfortably.

  “We’ve never had a poet here, have we, Hugh?”

  “Really,” I said, looking around at the blue, pink and green pastels surrounding me. “That is surprising.”

  “What happened to Mandelstam?” Hugh asked.

  “He recited a certain poem, an epigram, privately, in front of five people whom he must have regarded as his friends, and the rest is, as they say, history.”

  “What happened?”

  “It is said he was in Pasternak’s apartment, Boris Pasternak, who wrote Doctor Zhivago. He was there one night. Mandelstam, bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view, recited a very short poem which sealed his fate. It’s hard to believe he didn’t know the danger he was putting himself into, and yet, if he did know, it is even harder to understand why he did it. But one night, in May 1934 I think it was, after he had been laughing and talking for hours with his wife and their friend, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and an irritating translator, a pesky hanger-on, there came a knock at the front door of the Mandelstams’ apartment. It was by then one o’clock in the morning, and before opening the door his wife announced quietly, ‘They’ve come for Osip.’ They had been expecting this.

  “The men of the secret police always wore the same civilian overcoats so that people were never in any doubt as to who they were. Perhaps this was the intention. That night there was no doubt who they were. There were no introductions, not even a cursory check to see if this was the Mandelstams’ apartment. With a practiced skill they quickly went past his wife without touching her, and suddenly Mandelstam’s tiny apartment was filled with men in overcoats checking their identity papers and efficiently frisking them for concealed weapons.

  “Of course, Mandelstam had no weapons. He was a poet. He only had words, and after showing him a search warrant the secret police went tearing through their drawers, looking for Mandelstam’s words. One of the policemen took time out from the search to advise the civilians not to smoke so much, producing a box of hard candy from the pocket of his uniform trousers and offering them some.

  “The search continued all night. The secret police, the NKVD, as they were called, made two piles of Mandelstam’s papers, one on a chair, one on the floor. When the translator, like a frightened primary-school student, asked permission to go to the toilet, they contemptuously let him go home. Without any particular malice they kept walking over the papers they threw on the floor. The sun had already risen by the time they left the apartment. They took only forty or so sheets of paper—and Mandelstam—with them.”

  “Why were they contemptuous of the translator?” Hugh asked.

  “He was an informer sent there to make sure the other three didn’t destroy any manuscripts before the knock on the door. The NKVD always had contempt for their stooges.”

  “But . . . who was Nadia?” Sarah asked in the voice of a child, as if embarrassed by her need to know.

  “Nadia? I didn’t say anything about Nadia.”

  “You did before,” Hugh said. “When you were out of it.”

  “Who was Nadia?” Sarah repeated.

  “Nadia is the name Mandelstam called his wife, Nadezhda. What did I say about her?”

  The two of them looked at each other.

  “What kind of woman was Nadia?” Sarah asked.

  My mouth was dry. This impromptu lecture on Russian literature was even more bizarre than the events leading up to my hospitalization. I thought for a long while about Mandelstam’s Nadia.

  “Her every thought was about him. If not for her, we would not know him. She saved his manuscripts. She wrote letters to him when he was imprisoned, letters she knew he had little chance of receiving. But she wrote them anyway. She would have known they were beating him, starving him, freezing him, but still she wrote to him. She wrote, You came to me every night in my sleep, and I kept asking what had happened, but you did not reply. That was in the last letter she ever wrote to him.”

  None of us spoke. It was left to someone else to break the silence.

  From another room someone looking for assistance called, “Excuse me.” Sarah stood and straightened herself up before leaving the room.

  “Do you think . . . you’re Mandelstam? Is that it?” Hugh asked.

  “No. I don’t think I’m Mandelstam. That would be too easy for them, Hugh. I’m not Mandelstam. I don’t think I have his talent, his feeling for language. I don’t live in his times. I don’t have his life. I don’t have his . . .”

  Sarah came back in. There was someone to see me. It was Andy. He took a couple of tentative steps. I watched him see me there for the first time. He moved his sunglasses and car keys from one hand to the other.

  “This is my son, Andy.”

  Hugh looked at Andy and Andy looked at Hugh. I wondered what was uppermost in my son’s mind. Was it the humiliation of seeing his father in a psychiatric ward? Or was he thinking that Hugh and I had already had a conversation that transcended any he and I had ever had? If he was thinking this, he was right. But whatever he was thinking, he nodded politely to Hugh, told me he would be waiting at reception and then left me to change back into my dirt-ridden clothes in front of Hugh.

  Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that so many of her contemporaries, whether they had been imprisoned themselves or not, were extremely well “prison-trained.” They knew instinctively how to seize what she called “the last chance of being heard.” Hugh went back to the Department of Health logo on his pillow until I had my pants on, but then, when he turned his attention back to me, I could see that he was sad, sadder than he had been throughout his introduction to Mandelstam.

  “I think I might like to be a poet. What do you think?” he asked me quietly.

  “I think you’re well on your way,” I said as we shook hands. As I walked out I heard him begin the poet’s business of keeping himself company: “I was only in a childish way connected to the established order.” He said it quietly. There was no one else there.

  Sarah and Andy were deep in conversation as they walked towards the gates, and I, not wanting to add to the wretchedness of the circumstances of their meeting, lagged behind them. A slightly older, slightly attractive, slightly qualified young field mouse of a woman had to explain to a strong and unpretentious young man from out of town that she did not really understand what his father was doing in the dirt beside Lake Eildon or why he cried without shame in between lengthy monologues about a Russian poet and his wife. All she could tell him is that his father could go. Andy and I said good-bye to her. Then he turned and thanked her. When he put his hand on my back, new tears came to me, small ones suggesting that I might be all right. He still had the four-wheel drive and he opened the door for me.

  “Are you right to go, then, Dad?”

  “‘Let us go then, you and
I . . .’”

  Neil had taught me to drive a tractor. Both of us did our best. In spring, early summer and early autumn we waited for rain. He taught me to mend a fence as well as anyone, but my stretches did not always hold firm. Occasionally cattle would stray. Once Neil had found two of the cows in the shed at the back of our house. He had been repairing something for Madeline. I don’t know what it was. Things around the house used to break. She would discover them and he would fix them, all without my knowing. She would talk to him about finances, the farm’s, his, and ours. Sometimes I would come in and they would be going over the books with a cup of tea or a beer in summer.

  It was nothing, he said, but I could sense that he pitied me. I knew he was double-checking everything I did. As uncomfortable as we were around each other, I could not fault his effort around the property. He could not have taken greater care of everything if it had all been his.

  After a while I got used to him checking my work. I got used to working on my own too. Sometimes I would see him in the distance and wave. Perhaps he was shortsighted, or else it was just that men on the land did not wave, just as men on the land did not have pet names for particular cows. There was one we had for a time, one with a long, angular face, that seemed a little aloof. I called her Garbo. It did not catch on.

  Andy had built a wooden partition in the shed and was living there. I suspected this bothered Neil, who would have felt his access to the shed somewhat restricted by Andy’s presence. He liked to be up early and would often start in the shed, cleaning things. I never knew exactly what he was cleaning. The tractor, the pitch-forks, the saws. Once Andy saw him cleaning the gun. I heard them talking. Andy had stumbled out of bed on hearing him.