meet him, I was late and he was early. He said he didn’t mind, that he’d gotten to Pushkinskaya Square an hour early and had enjoyed watching one pigeon after the next take their place atop Pushkin’s bronze statue, like breathing, feathered hats. When I sat next to him on the bench, he took my hand and said he hadn’t thought of anything else since meeting me—that he couldn’t stop thinking about how it would feel to see me approach and sit down next to him, how it would feel to take my hand.
Every morning after, he’d wait outside my apartment. Before work, we’d walk the wide boulevards, through squares and parks, back and forth across every bridge that crossed the Moskva, never with any destination in mind. The lime trees had been in full bloom that summer, and the entire city smelled honey sweet and slightly rotten.
I’d told him everything: of my first husband, whom I’d found hanging in our apartment; of my second, who’d died in my arms; of the men I’d been with before them, and the men I’d been with after. I spoke of my shames, my humiliations. I spoke of my hidden joys: being the first person off a train, arranging my face creams and perfumes so their labels faced forward, the taste of sour cherry pie for breakfast. Those first few months, I talked and talked and Boris listened.
By summer’s end, I began calling him Borya and he began calling me Olya. And people had begun to talk about us—my mother the most. “It’s simply unacceptable,” she’d said so many times I lost count. “He’s a married man, Olga.”
But I knew Anatoli Sergeyevich did not care to hear that confession. I knew what confession he wanted me to write. I remembered his words: “Pasternak’s fate will depend on how truthful you are.” I picked up the pen and began again.
Dear Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov,
Doctor Zhivago is about a doctor.
It’s an account of the years between the two wars.
It’s about Yuri and Lara.
It’s about the old Moscow.
It’s about the old Russia.
It’s about love.
It’s about us.
Doctor Zhivago is not anti-Soviet.
When Semionov returned an hour later, I handed him my letter. He scanned it, turning it over. “You can try again tomorrow night.” He crushed the paper into a ball, dropped it, and waved at the guards to take me away.
* * *
Night after night, a guard would come for me, and Semionov and I would have our little chats. And night after night, my humble interrogator would ask the same questions: What is the novel about? Why is he writing it? Why are you protecting him?
I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear: that the novel was critical of the revolution. That Boris had rejected socialist realism in favor of writing characters who lived and loved by their hearts’ intent, independent of the State’s influence.
I didn’t tell him that Borya had begun the novel before we met. That Lara was already in his mind—and that in the early pages, his heroine resembled his wife, Zinaida. I didn’t tell him that as time went on, Lara eventually became me. Or maybe I became her.
I didn’t tell him how Borya had called me his muse, how that first year together he said he made more progress on the novel than he had in the previous three years combined. How I’d first been attracted to him because of his name—the name everyone knew—but fell in love with him despite it. How to me, he was more than the famous poet up on the stage, the photograph in the newspaper, the person in the spotlight. How I delighted in his imperfections: the gap in his teeth; the twenty-year-old comb he refused to replace; the way he scratched his cheek with a pen when thinking, leaving a streak of black ink across his face; the way he pushed himself to write his great work no matter the cost.
And he did push himself. By day he’d write at a furious pace, letting the filled pages fall into a wicker basket under his desk. And at night, he’d read me what he had written.
Sometimes he would read to small gatherings in apartments across Moscow. Friends would sit in chairs arranged in a semicircle around a small table, where Borya sat. I’d sit next to him, feeling proud to play the hostess, the woman at his side, the almost wife. He’d read in his excited way, words toppling over each