The Russian Jerusalem by Elaine Feinstein Page B

composed, in part by Olga – who has received hints from Soviet authorities about what would play best – and in part by Ariadne Efron, Tsvetaeva’s daughter, now returned from the Gulag. They cobble together a letter to be sent to Khrushchev.
    Pasternak glances at it briefly and signs without fuss. He does not see it as capitulation. It is simply not important. No more than the Nobel Prize is important. All that matters is to stay in Russia and to write poems.
    As November comes, with snow piled high against the tree trunks, he is not unhappy. The sun glitters on the ice. He pads over the snow to call on a friend, breathing sleety air into his bronchitic lungs without complaint. He has lived a charmed life, he reflects. Why has God been so kind tohim? He cannot understand it, as he remembers so many less fortunate. Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva. And a list of others. ‘I am not worthy,’ he often mutters. He rarely sees Akhmatova these days.
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    His hero Doctor Zhivago travels at the end of his book towards the Botkin Hospital where Pasternak spent three months after a heart attack a few years earlier. Zhivago never reaches it.
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    Pasternak thinks no more of suicide. Death will come soon enough.
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24  Joseph
    Europe below us, water and stone,
    falling like Venice into the sea. A young
    man with ginger hair stands alone,
    on Pushkin’s parapet, with shoulders
    like a footballer, his forehead slant.
    â€˜What are the things you remember, 
    Joseph?’ Tsvetaeva whispers tenderly.
    â€˜Your words, Marina.’ ‘But from your own life?’
    â€˜Just now I thought of sliding happily
    over the snow to school as a little boy,
    my head already filled with Russian poetry,
    my fists ready for a playground battle.
    When did I first learn I was Jewish scum?
    It was long before my wife
    refused the name of Brodsky to my son.
    Well, in America, my new homeland,
    my books, my bed sheets, and an unchained door
    bewildered those who could not understand
    I only cared for poetry and talk.
    So I was rude, almost a boor; perhaps
    that’s why they liked me in New York.

    Here, with only a candle for company, I wonder
    how it was I took their honours as easily
    as I picked Chinese dumplings from a trolley.’

25  Arkangelskoye 1964
    It is a White Night in the far north, an evening with the sun yellow on the horizon, and a strange euphoric light which bleaches the firs and marshes.
    An old train, with its windows barred and boarded up, its compartments packed, is transporting prisoners from the Kresty Prison in Leningrad to the far north. It stops at Konusha, a station in the southern sector of the Arkangelsk region, and a group of exiles – including a red-haired young man with a high forehead and powerful shoulders – are taken out unceremoniously.
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    The young man is Joseph Brodsky.
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    The village has no more than fourteen huts, all of them in pale wood. People who live there work on a State farm, their tractors scraping off topsoil which rests on granite. The land is being ruined by the new methods of farming.
    Brodsky is taken to a hut at the very edge of this cluster of houses.
    He has been sentenced to five years hard labour but he is used to manual work. He left school at fifteen and worked in a factory and a morgue before hauling instruments for geological expeditions in the far north. Half taiga. Half tundra. These jobs were his university. He is prepared for vodka made out of wood alcohol; an empty store which sells only loaves of bread and cans of foul-tasting fish. He makes friends with his neighbours, though at first they are suspicious of him.
    And what does he remember now of Leningrad? The ceilings in the great houses collapsed. Their windows shattered. Inside, furniture and books burned for warmth. Between the shrapnel-pitted walls and the grey-green façades, the streets are empty.
    To him, Leningrad is the most beautiful city in the world. His