Julie Himes - Mikhail and Margarita

Reading it reminded her more sharply of its dissipation.

They’d taken risks in being together. She remembered a midsummer’s party at Nadya’s parents’ farm. She hadn’t planned to attend, but he’d insisted; even if they couldn’t be together he wanted to be able to see her in that landscape. She remembered Nadya pretending not to know; or perhaps fortifying herself against it. And she, likewise pretending. She remembered their embrace, the pressure of the other woman’s arm against the back of her neck. Their speaking of some childhood memory they shared as though they were actually talking about that. Osip approached them then, greeting her, slipping an arm around his wife’s waist. Margarita blushed and he beamed, as though it was his doing. All seemed dangerously transparent. Later, when his visits to her apartment came less frequently, she sensed in him a recalculation of these risks.

She remembered him telling the story of a former lover who’d burned his belongings. He described looking down from his apartment one morning and seeing the clothes he’d left with her, the books, a notebook, a few gifts, aflame in the street. He smiled as one who was mildly perplexed, yet not sufficiently bothered by the mystery to give it more thought.

“I would never do such a thing,” said Margarita.

His expression was of muted skepticism. How could either of them know of what she might be capable under these unexplored circumstances?

“Why did she hate you so much?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” He responded as if the thought itself was exhausting.

How was it that this man who could not commit a lie to the page found it so easy to lie to her?

Several months later, she would ask why he didn’t simply break it off with her. Why not say the words. Say that he didn’t want her anymore.

He ran a finger up the length of her thigh. Of course he wanted her, he said. He looked amused at her misery. Who wouldn’t want this, he said, trying to push his finger through the fabric of her undergarments.

She shoved him away and he got up to leave.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

He’d rather invite her hatred; he’d rather she set fire to his possessions. Somehow it was easier this way. Somehow he could go on writing poems about love.

The child awoke in the night crying and out of the darkness his mother took him in her arms and chided him. They were only fireworks after all, she told him. She called them “sticks of fire” and he could make no sense of her words and the sounds from the street below their apartment. He breathed in her sour smell. She rocked him, shushing, saying you are not a baby over and over, but the rippling booms were muted by her arms and chest and he thought for that night perhaps he would be a baby and he clung to her and allowed himself to cry a little longer in order to keep her there. She seemed to know this and she kissed him on the head and promised him sweets to eat in the morning.

The next day, the table was set for a party and small cakes decorated with red sugar were distributed among the plates. He was told it was Comrade Stalin’s birthday and he must make a special wish for their leader’s health and happiness. He thought about this as he ate his cake while the grown-ups talked and he kicked the table leg absently until his mother told him to stop. He listened to her speak of his uncle who lived in a distant town called Magnitogorsk. He’d been recently promoted. A sprinkle of sugar fell on his arm and he licked it and his skin was smeared with red. He licked it again and the smear widened.

A photograph of Comrade Stalin hung between the bookcase and the doorway. After the meal, he stood below it and studied it carefully. Their leader’s gaze extended over his head, surveying their room with an expression of concern. Behind him, his own father was telling a joke to some neighbors who’d joined them for their meal. The boy knew the ending well though he didn’t understand its meaning. He pressed his hands together and concentrated on the face on the wall as if he could fix it there.

“I wish you health and happiness,” he whispered, echoing his mother. But deeper, in thoughts he couldn’t shape with words, he wished to be encompassed within the Great Man’s expansive concerns; he wished to be included in his gaze, as his mother’s arms had held him before, and remain therein his child forever.

Letter writing to their nation’s leaders had become a bit of a pastime for the average Soviet citizen. They wrote when they’d been unfairly passed over for a promotion or when the goods store in their district was lacking in a certain item that was apparently in healthy supply in the town where the writer’s cousin lived. They wrote about their lack of living space in comparison to a particular neighbor, usually a person of questionable background (the wife’s brother had been a priest or a kulak or a count at one time), who they suspected was reporting more occupants than who actually lived there. They wrote about the hooligan youths that lived in the alleyway alongside their building and harassed their mother on her way to the markets—there must be a work farm for them somewhere, some canal that required digging. They wrote about the policies their government had most recently applied, providing their own opinions as to their potential workability and success, with suggestions for alternative methods that should be considered. The recipients of these letters varied from deputy heads of various ministries to committee members to the Secretary General himself, and despite the awesome bulk of these communications, citizens were encouraged to write them. It was a means for the government to determine the outlook of the people; and aside from the large and unwieldy network of informants that it used, it was its only means. Indeed, it wasn’t uncommon for a new policy to be launched then shortly revoked following this kind of appraisal of the public sentiment. It was never clear with a new initiative who had been its author until it was found to be unpopular and summarily pulled back—in which case it was nearly always the idea of some mid-ranking bureaucrat who in short order was found to have some blemish on his record explaining his grotesque lack of affinity for the Soviet people and resulting in his disappearance from the political stage.

As for the letter writers themselves, one can only guess what particular satisfaction they took in penning their observations, complaints, concerns, and advisements. It is perhaps notable that the vast majority of the population had only a few years earlier been living in small towns and villages; indeed in the minds of most Soviets, despite massive translocations to urban areas, the world was still small and accessible, and because of that, malleable. They could imagine their leaders collecting their mail from their boxes just as they did; sorting through their letters, coming upon the one they’d penned and reading it straightaway with great interest. The fact that replies were rarely given didn’t matter; they preferred their leaders stay occupied with the administration of the country, yet if a certain policy was dismantled, or a particular person disappeared in the night, our letter writer would pound his chest among his friends and say, yes—that was him, that was his doing.

Bulgakov began to think of it savagely as the Mandelstam letter. He had decided to take a dispassionate approach; cool intellect would have the greater appeal. By no means would he mention the poem. He thought to point out how poorly it served the government to place its writers under lock and key, how free thinking fed creativity, which fueled innovation which would be the engine of Soviet success on the world stage. Which all sounded well and good, he thought, but needed to circle back to the specifics of Mandelstam’s detainment. He went through many drafts, and when he read them with the impassive eye of a Party Leader, the unspoken arguments for keeping the poet incarcerated seemed stronger. He referred to their greater humanity, to their superior compassion, to their modern outlook—old-world leaders might put their writers in front of firing squads; but they—champions of the new age, they would instead allow for dissent, even welcome the discussion, for they were beyond the need for bullets to enforce their way. Indeed, if their way was best, such things were unnecessary.

He’d lost count of the different drafts, holding his head in his hands. He added a final paragraph, in desperation it seemed—Writers by their nature love their country but if their countrymen no longer have affection for them, then perhaps the better answer is to allow them to emigrate.

He sensed the danger in those words—the suggestion of self-determination. Where the pen had come to rest, a blot of ink began to spread across the page. It would require rewriting again.

He’d not heard her enter. Margarita looked as though she’d wandered into a forgotten gallery of a museum near closing. When she saw him staring she blushed, caught in the act of her trespass. “It was open,” she explained. She lifted a hand to a book on a bookshelf.

“You’ve become quite famous,” she said. “Everyone is talking—did you know?”

He suddenly wished to discard all of the drafts. “Wonderful,” he said. He tried to sound unaffected but she seemed to see the distress in his face.

“Everyone admires you,” she said. “You stood on principle. Many agree with what you said.”

“And someday they will be happy to donate a jar of jam on the behalf of whatever remains of my family,” he said.

“No doubt,” she said lightly. She refused to fuel his self-pity. “How is the letter coming?”

He gave it to her. She read it twice then handed it back. She’d resumed her expression of general encouragement.

“Well?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I’m sorry—I thought you were a better writer.”

“I am a better writer.” He scanned the page himself.

“It’s not particularly convincing.”

“I’m trying to appeal to their logic.”

“Because it was their logic that led to his arrest in the first place?”

“Perhaps I’m not the one to write it,” he said. He dropped it on the table, glaring at it where it lay.

“You are the one.” This was a sad truth it seemed she was forced to explain. “You loved him. No one else will write it better.”

Was it true—was he the best Mandelstam had? He should have left behind a better friend for this.

“Would you really leave?” she asked. “Those last lines.”

“I wasn’t writing about myself,” he said.

Though perhaps he had been. He’d considered it before, in moments of frustration. He imagined himself in a Parisian cafe, scribbling on a roll of pages, foreign words darting over his head. Their country harbored many artists writing freely. Here was another with a strange accent. This one who pined for his Russian coffee. Who had to count out his coins so carefully.

Then what—he could write but would they read? Were his concerns too parochial, too Russian in their nature? Would they be relevant in another land? He could imagine his work being met with tacit interest, himself a passing phenom even. His audience would be curious about his world. They would then go home with glad relief that it was not theirs. In a foreign place, his words would fall on stone. They’d not last a fortnight.

But to write freely!

Her expression was of one who both questioned his motivations and easily understood them. He could see a kind of calculation taking place, a loss in some measure of trust.

“Leaving is complicated, isn’t it?” he said.

She turned to go and he was taken by a sudden sense that the room would become difficult to bear once she’d left it.

“Please don’t,” he said. “You’ve just arrived. Would you like some tea?”

She hesitated over his books. “No.” This was drawn out, as if she was making her decision as she spoke. “I should probably go.”

“You don’t have anywhere you need to be.”

“You don’t know that,” she said with mild surprise.

“Some coffee then?”

“No, no thank you.”

“Vodka?”

She smiled a little. “It’s not about the beverage.”

He got up and guided her to the chair. “Well, I’m certain it’s not me,” he said.

She took the offered seat, still amused. “Tea would be nice, I suppose.”

He turned to a low metal cabinet where his wife had kept tea and various other utensils safe from mice. He hadn’t opened it since she’d left. The door gave some resistance and he looked inside as one who might find something possibly unpleasant. He got on his knees and began to go through it. This could take some time.