The noise had also awoken my neighbors, who joined me outside on their balconies and yelled for them to shut up. The men dressed as women looked up and laughed. One pointed in my direction. Then they linked arms and sang even louder.
Why do you spread wide your talons,
Over my head circling low?
Or do you sense prey beneath you?
Raven black, I am not yours!
“You can’t tell from up here,” Mitya whispered, “but they’re wearing wigs. Bad ones. One has lipstick smeared across his mouth like a clown.”
Take my shawl, now stained with red blood,
To my darling, dearly loved.
Say to her that she is free now:
To another I am wed.
“Crazy drunks,” Ira said. She placed her hand on my shoulder. “Come inside, Mama.”
* * *
—
“Nothing will be enough for them,” Borya said after I told him what happened. “I’ll have no peace until I’m in the grave. I’ve already penned a letter to the Kremlin, asking for your permission to emigrate with me.”
“You asked them before you asked me? What if I don’t want to go?”
“You won’t?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I haven’t sent it yet.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“I can’t leave without you. I’d rather be sent to the camps.”
“What about my family? What would they do?”
He told me we’d find a way. What I didn’t know was that he’d already discussed the matter with his wife. He didn’t ask me the same question he’d asked her until she’d told him she’d never leave, and while he was free to go, she and their son would have to denounce him once he was gone. “You understand,” she’d told her husband.
The following day, he told me he’d torn up the letter to the Kremlin. “How could I look out another window, in a foreign city, and not see my birch trees?” he asked.
It was his stand: not to let them drive him from his home.
I should have known that leaving was never a real option for him. In spite of everything, he’d be lost without Mother Russia. He could never leave his trees, his snowy walks. He could never leave his red squirrels, his magpies. He could never leave his dacha, his garden, his daily routine. He’d rather die as a traitor on Russian soil than live as a free man abroad.
* * *
They banned Borya from receiving mail, cutting off one of his only lifelines to the world. Shortly after, letters began appearing under my apartment door. Some were stamped, some not; some had return addresses, some not. Each morning, Ira and I would bundle the letters, wrapping them in butcher paper like cuts of meat. We’d take the train to Little House, where Borya would be waiting to read them. I had become his postmistress.
He received letters from Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Prime Minister Nehru. He received letters from students in Paris, a painter in Morocco, a soldier in Cuba, a housewife in Toronto. His demeanor brightened as he opened each envelope.
One of his most treasured letters came from a young man in Oklahoma. The man wrote of his recent heartbreak and how much Doctor Zhivago had touched him. The man had addressed his letter to Boris Pasternak, Russia, in a small town outside Moscow.
Borya took his time replying to each, his soaring handwriting covering page after page in purple ink. He wrote until his hand hurt, until his back ached, but he refused to dictate his replies when I offered to help. “I want my hand to touch theirs,” he said.
But he received other letters too, letters to which he did not respond. Letters from detractors, letters from the State, letters meant to intimidate. Despite his renouncing the Prize, they wanted to see the cloud dweller brought back down to earth. They wanted him on his knees. They wanted him to grovel, to bow down. He would not, but neither would he confront them. His inaction was seen as weakness, both by those watching the affair unfold from afar and by me.
If he wasn’t going to do something, I would. I couldn’t wait for them to come to my door.
I met with the head of the authors’ rights division of the Writers’ Union, Grigori Khesin, an old contact of mine from Novy Mir.
He barely listened to me as I stated Borya’s case, and when I was finished, he said there was nothing to be done. “Boris Leonidovich is no