Forget the Empire State Building. We took the lift up from the artist Leibransk’s apartment, walked along a narrow corridor, pipes thick on the walls, and stooped out a low exit into the wind, Moscow -7 degrees and autumn upon us.
My host and I walked out into the sunlight and the buffeting to see the view: the river winding in lazy loops, the domes of cathedrals, the headstone shapes of apartments in the clear sky. I stood there in that pale cold light and I thought about the snow maiden. I felt she stood right there beside me.
I’d just read of her in Leibransk’s hand-painted book. He wanted $US1,000 for a copy.
In the States, Leibransk had a cult following. In Moscow, his apartment was cold, sparse and decorated with hand-sewn body parts in velvet and embroidery (he was once a doctor). A foot long sperm, in corduroy, drooped over the arm of a chair.
Leibransk had made time for my visit. He thought a foreign journalist would be rich with American dollars. He’d passed his book to me expectantly and I’d turned each tissue-protected page, the words of his poetry so delicate and cold, beautiful like the clear wind that pulled at us later, up above. The pages decorated also with images of body parts.
My host had to explain I was a poor foreign journalist. I looked up, saw disappointment still the features of Leibransk’s face. I remembered the woman on the bus the night before, how she struggled up the aisle to reach the doors at her stop, hopeless against the incoming tide of travellers, and the doors slamming shut. She had that same look of acceptance, something beyond disillusionment.
I folded the book shut. There was something in it that burned so intensely of that grief and acceptance; I wished, I told him, that I could buy it.
Leibransk made us a coffee and shared a cream pastry between the three of us. Later we walked together down snow-freshened footpaths to the subway. In perfect, cultured English he asked after my wife, my family. We found we had sons the same age. We stood side by side in the heated, jammed subway, whooshing through the empty spaces, underneath the Motherland.
Back home, the paper I work for has put my lead story, much altered, on page three. That night when I try to tell Claire about it, she lies with her back to me. I even hear myself, what she calls my whining, creep in. She knows, she knows the effort I put in. And yet this rigidity.
I stop, sigh loudly. I think again that freedom thought—imagine being single, imagine not this burden of trying to share with another human being.
Still, I am disgusted at myself sometimes, the expectations I have of her; how I want her to be the perfect mother, and not just to Robbie.
I look at Claire again. The skin on her cheek is still smooth over the roundness of her bone, yet her hair has greyed above her ear. There’s a vulnerability there; it reminds me of how protective I once was of her. I reach out and touch her face.
“Claire?”
She turns to me and in her eyes there is some burden, something now spilling over.
“I want to move out,” she says. “Me and Robbie. I want a life of our own, without you.”
Claire moves out while our flat is for sale. Claire and Robbie. She is all packed so efficiently, our belongings neatly divided, accounts drawn up. I realise she has probably been planning this a long time. While I imagined the treat of singleness, she was making lists.
Robbie at fourteen has a dark fuzz of moustache on his upper lip; the hairs soft, long and incongruously black on his white skin.
He asks me again—“Dad, do you want a coffee?”
I am working on my laptop in front of the TV. There is a belief that men do their best thinking about writing while they are shaving. I prefer the news and current events; something about the awfulness of the world unfolding while I struggle with a sentence.
Robbie puts the cup down on the coffee table in front of me. His sweatshirt rides up his outstretched arm, showing the large knobs of his wrist bone, the slightness of his forearm and again that soft black hair lying against his skin.
He is growing, his body stretching at all angles. The nine-year-old Robbie I used to wrestle with has disappeared.
Claire knows this Robbie better. I would hear him laughing with her in the kitchen, his voice sometimes still swooping. He is unfinished, I think to myself.
“Thanks Robbie,” I smile up at him. I think maybe I should talk to him about shaving. Is this a father’s job? I know I wanted my father to keep right out of it.
“Do you want something to eat Dad?”
“No, I’ve got to finish this. You help yourself though.”
Moscow...I am trying to capture in a paragraph the sight of Lenin’s body laid out in a room like a funeral parlour, only with bouncers.
There’s a rattling; that new packet of chocolate biscuits I bought being opened in the kitchen. I wait, my fingers poised above the keys.
Silence, and the vision of that luminous body again. When my host and I got outside we walked down the length of graves behind the Kremlin, and there were bouncers there too: soldiers in long woollen coats guarding the dignity of the dead.
The biscuit paper rattles again. Maybe it was a mistake asking Robbie to come for the night. Deadline night of all nights. I shouldn’t have listened to Claire.
“You right there Robbie?”
“Yeah. I’m going to bed now Dad.”
“Okay. Night.”
My host said there were rumours that Lenin’s body looked so good after all these years because men who looked like him kept disappearing at regular intervals.
How to mention that? I take a long suck of coffee.
Damn TV. I get up to turn it off, slopping my cup in the process, only the noise doesn’t stop. It’s coming from down the hall.
“Robbie?”
He is sitting on his bedroom floor, his back against the wall, right where his bed used to be, till Claire took it away.
He’s even beyond caring, the noise he makes; it’s past stopping. And the mucous he wipes from his nose with the back of his hand. He doesn’t look at me. His shoulders hunch up and down with his chest.
“Oh God, Robbie, I’m sorry.” I stand there helpless in the face of his crying. “I meant to, damn, you know I’m sleeping on the floor too. I meant to buy you a bed.”
Into my room, an armful, the biggest duvet, pillows and the Woolrest. I make a bed for Robbie on his bedroom floor. He lays his head on my own pillow, still hiccupping.
I sit on the floor beside him. My hand reaches out to touch his arm.
“We’ll go tomorrow and you can choose a bed. A double one if you like, now you’re older. You and me shopping, eh Robbie?”
I look down on Robbie’s head. His hair is dark, like mine. On the back of his neck is the pattern of hairs I remember from his babyhood; how soft they were, like fingerprint signs on his skin.
“I was working on my Russian article, Robbie. I don’t think I told you I met an artist there. A man named Leibransk.”
Robbie’s arm shudders under my hand. He takes another gulping breath.
“He wrote this story, Robbie. Leibransk. I read it in a book there. Do you mind if I tell it to you?
“Once, long ago, Robbie, there was a snow prince and a snow maiden, all made of ice. And one day, they came upon a mound of snow in a clearing in the forest. From the mound grew two red flowers, entwined.
“Curious, the snow prince and snow maiden began to dig, down through the layers of snow. They found two bodies. A young maiden lay dead with her foot caught in a bear trap and a young man lay on top of her, as if to protect her.
“The snow maiden wished to carry on and let the snow re-cover them, but the snow prince wanted to understand why the young man would not save himself. The snow prince took his icicle knife and he slit each body open at the chest, where the roots of the flowers grew. From inside each cavity he lifted out an organ, as red and fresh as the flowers.
“‘I want to feel what it is that brought them to this,’ he said. ‘I want to become like a man with a glowing heart and be there for you when you need me.’
“The snow maiden thought how it would be to have someone love her with a love even beyond death. She agreed she would meet the snow prince the very next morning in the clearing, both as mortal humans.
“That night while she studied her face in the moonlit river, the snow maiden trembled to think what would become of her when she became mortal. Instead of staying beautiful, she would in time grow old and withered, and what would the snow prince think of her then, with all his talk of love?
“So the next day when she came to the clearing, she was still made of snow, only there was the snow prince, irreversibly made man.
“The snow maiden fled the forest and thereafter lived on a high hill, keeping away from the trees she loved and the forest clearing forever.
“The snow prince lived his life as a man and in time became old and one day he fell and lay dying alone on the footpath.
“The beautiful snow maiden on her hill saw the old man stumble and fall, as she saw everything, and the knowledge grew inside her that this was her own snow prince. She ran wildly, stumbling downhill until she reached him. She knelt on the footpath and turned his face to see hers.
“And when she saw his eyes, she felt such love for him that the ice of her cracked right through, and she became at once an old woman dying, and laid her body alongside his. With the last of his strength the snow prince held her close to protect her.
“Just before darkness fell, a beggar woman with her baby in her arms came down the street. She stopped at the snow-covered mound in front of her. She thought two red flowers grew from the snow, but when she picked them, they turned into rubies in her hands. She put them in her pocket, pulled her shawl warmly round her child, and carried on.”
“Robbie, are you okay?”
He’s asleep, one arm over his head, shielding his face. I pull the quilt up to his shoulder and wonder how it is I remembered my deadline but not the bed.
Sometimes I am just body parts; every part with its job to do, not least of all my hand (which holds the pen).
When snow fell in Moscow, I watched from my fourth story window. The sky was dark, just past twilight, and the flakes suddenly appeared as I looked up.
They swirled and danced: they were like ideas with no ambition. I watched them over the scraggly tomato plant growing on the windowsill, and the Formica table with the bottle of vodka my host had left for my headache.
Somewhere between my window and the ground, the flakes melted. The mud, the cracked footpaths, the long grass and the leaves blown about by the wind missed the snow’s gentle forgiveness, its uniformity.
I turn away from Robbie, mounded there in my own duvet. In my bedroom there is one remaining blanket. I take it into the sitting room. Stories unwritten, half written, pushed aside with my pen and book, the article on Lenin superfluous.
I lie down with the thin blanket and listen out for Robbie’s ragged breathing. I think I hear it calming, shifting to something deeper. My own chest lifts and falls.
I think of snow covering me, smoothing out my shape. I think of all those layers of white, of frozen crystals encasing me.
I think of what it would take: someone digging under the snow, finding the right spot and with just the right pressure, feeling the body slit through. The heart cavity opened. The heart there flowering, not just a body part, one that kept me moving.