of it. The last weeks, I’d attempted to prepare myself for what it would be like; but it wasn’t anything like how I thought it would be. The air hadn’t changed, my heart kept beating, the earth kept spinning, and the realization that everything would go on, that the world was ever ongoing, felt like a horse’s kick to the chest.
As I held his hand, I could hear talk of the funeral arrangements in the adjacent room. I told myself this would be the last time we’d ever be alone together. I kissed his cheek, straightened the white sheet, and left.
I had no body to tend to, no funeral arrangements to make, no reporters to ward off. All that was left to me was to remember.
I thought of the first time he reached for my hand, how I had no idea my body could vibrate from the inside out. I thought of him reading me early pages of Doctor Zhivago, how he’d pause at the end of each paragraph, anxious to see how I was responding. I thought of the afternoons spent walking Moscow’s wide boulevards, how I felt the world expand each time he looked my way. I thought of the many afternoons making love, and the many nights he said he didn’t want to leave my bed.
I also thought of him leaving my bed after I’d begged him to stay. I thought about pulling in to the train station after my three years at Potma—how, when I saw he hadn’t come, I felt like turning around and going back. I thought of the many times he told me it was over and the many terrible things I said to him in response. I thought of his oversized ego in his prime, and the diminished man Zhivago had left behind.
* * *
—
They dressed him in his favorite gray suit and laid him in a box of virgin pine. I waited outside his dacha while Panikhida was offered inside. The great pianist Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter played in Boris’s music room, his notes drifting out the open window.
The music ended and they carried his coffin out and paused near his beloved garden. I stood beside Borya, opposite Zinaida: his widow and his almost widow. I wailed, and Ira and Mitya held me up by my arms. But Zinaida stood there, silently, with grace.
The procession filed down the hill and up to the cemetery to the grave site Borya had picked out for himself, under three tall pines. His death notice in the newspaper was but a line or two, and yet they came. Hundreds, maybe thousands, followed the coffin. They were old and young, neighbors and strangers, workers and students, peers and adversaries, factory workers and secret police dressed as factory workers, foreign correspondents and Muscovite reporters. All had gathered around Borya’s final resting place; the one thing they had in common was that they’d all been changed by his words.
They made speeches and recited prayers, and I stared into the open coffin, which was covered in wreaths and branches from lilac and apple trees. From the back, a young man cried out, reciting the closing stanza to Borya’s poem “Hamlet”:
But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.
By the last line, others had joined in. Then a man announced, with booming authority, that the funeral was over. “This demonstration is undesirable,” he said, and motioned for two men to bring forth the coffin’s lid. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and kissed Borya’s face one last time. I was moved aside and the lid was secured. People protested the abrupt ending but were silenced by the sound of hammers driving nails into wood. Each crack of the hammer made me shiver, and I pulled my coat tighter.
As they lowered his coffin into the earth, chants of “Glory to Pasternak!” rose up and carried across the crowd. I was reminded of the first time I first saw him read so many years ago, when his fans could not stop themselves from finishing his poems before he did. How I sat in the balcony, hoping he could see me through the bright lights. How he did see me, and how my world was forever changed.
I wouldn’t see Zinaida again after the funeral. She did her best to erase me from his history, and her family took on the