Читать книгу Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago - Anna Pasternak - Страница 13

Six months after their first meeting at the Novy Mir offices, when Olga introduced Boris to her two young children, it was clear their love was incontrovertible. Both were obsessed by each other, consumed by an irresistible power of attraction. After Boris met Irina and Mitia that April evening in 1947, he was more forcefully drawn to Olga than ever. Yet this was further complicated by his heightened awareness of the pain and trauma he was awakening for them all in betraying Zinaida. ‘Boris suffered immensely from the ramifications of his romantic decisions,’ reflected Irina.

When the children were tucked up in bed that spring night, Boris sat with Olga in her tiny bedroom until midnight, the two of them alternating between elation at the strength of their passion and fevered despair at the practical reality of their situation.

Boris told Olga that he was tormented by his feelings for her and for his own family in Peredelkino. That every time he returned to Zinaida after walking with Olga in Moscow, when he saw his ‘no longer young’ wife waiting for him, he was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood abandoned in the forest. He just could not get out the words that he had rehearsed over and over about how he wished to leave her. Boris tried to break free of his deep emotional and ardent attraction to Olga that night in her apartment, confessing his relentless guilt towards Zinaida. He explained to Olga that she had nothing to do with his indifferent feelings towards his wife. He had lived unhappily with Zinaida for the previous ten years. He admitted that he had known within the first year of marriage to Zinaida that he had made a fearful mistake. Astonishingly, he confessed that it was not really her he liked but her husband, Genrikh, whose talents he revered. ‘I was so captivated by the way he played the piano,’ Boris said. ‘At first he wanted to kill me, the strange fellow, after she left him. But later on he was very grateful to me!’

Boris spoke with such anguish to Olga about the drama of the break-up of his first marriage and the ‘hell’ of his domestic set-up with Zinaida, that there was no question of Olga doubting him and his motives towards her. Of course he wanted more than anything to pursue a great love affair with her, but he could not envisage how he could disentangle himself from yet another marriage. As he stood at the door to leave her, the night folding in behind him, he told Olga that he felt that he had no right to love. The good things in life were not for him. He was a man of duty and she must not deflect him from his set way of life – and his work. He added that he would look after Olga for the rest of his life. An honourable promise, considering they had not yet consummated their relationship.

After Boris left, Olga could not sleep. Restless, she kept going to the balcony, listening to the sounds of daybreak, watching the street lamps grow dim under the young lime trees of Potapov Street. At six in the morning the doorbell rang. Boris was standing there. He had gone to his dacha at Peredelkino by train – unlike Yury Zhivago, who galloped to and from his true love – then come straight back and walked the streets of Moscow until dawn. Olga was wearing her favourite Japanese dressing gown, decorated with little houses. She pulled him towards her and they embraced in silence. Both knew that regardless of the complexity of the situation and the potential destruction caused by their ardour, they could not live without each other.

The next day Olga’s mother took the family on a trip to Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo on the outskirts of Moscow, where there was an eighteenth-century house surrounded by sweeping parkland. Boris and Olga were left to spend their first night and day together ‘like newlyweds’. Olga took great pleasure in ironing Boris’s crumpled trousers for him: not the most romantic of acts, but Boris being Boris, he was ‘jubilant’ that they could live like a married couple for this twenty-four-hour period. To mark the happy occasion, he inscribed a small red volume of his verse for Olga: ‘My life, my angel, I love you truly. April 4th, 1947.’

From the moment that they became lovers, Boris and Olga were inseparable. He would come to her apartment every day at six or seven in the morning. Spring that year turned into a hot summer: the lime trees were laden with blossom, the boulevards seemed to have the fragrance of molten honey. They were completely in love, able to exist on little sleep, fuelled by the adrenalin of desire, excitement and yearning. Boris wrote a poem called ‘Summer in Town’, about this time. It became one of Yury Zhivago’s poems in Doctor Zhivago.

Conversation in a half tone.

With a flurry of haste

The whole sheaf of hair

Is gathered up from the nape of the neck.

From under the heavy comb

A helmeted woman looks out,

Her head thrown back

With all its plaited hair.

Outside, the hot night

Promises a storm,

The passers-by scatter,

Shuffling home.

Brief thunder

Echoes sharply,

And the wind stirs

The curtain at the window.

Sultry

Silence.

Fingers of lightning

Search the sky.

And when the dawn-filled,

Heated morning

Has dried the puddles in the streets

After the night rain

The centuries-old, scented,

Blossoming lime-trees

Frown

For lack of sleep.

As the affair between the besotted writer and Olga intensified, tensions escalated between Olga and her mother, Maria Kostko. For while Olga and even little Irina were excited that a poet of Boris’s calibre had entered their lives, Maria was vehemently against the union. All she wanted was for her daughter to find the emotional and financial security of a suitable third husband. ‘It is impossible, unthinkable, unjustifiable to have a relationship with a married man,’ Maria repeatedly reproached Olga. ‘We even have the same age, him and I.’ It must have been doubly alarming for Maria that her daughter was not only embarking on a relationship with a married man but such a famous and controversial figure. In her eyes this would have been akin to Olga signing her death warrant, given the frequency and ferocity of arrests. She had good reason to fear, for Maria had direct experience of Stalinist repression, having spent three years in the gulag during the war. Worse, the betrayal had originated close to home: it was believed that her second son-in-law, Alexander Vinogradov, had tipped off the authorities, saying Maria had ‘slandered the leader’ in a private conversation about Stalin in their home. It is thought that part of his motive was to get his mother-in-law out of their crowded apartment. A lawyer revealed to Olga that there was indeed a letter of denunciation from Vinogradov towards her mother in Maria’s police files, a revelation that caused fearful rows between Vinogradov and Olga before he died in 1942. Subsequently Olga learned that the camp where her mother was being kept had suffered enemy bombing; prison order had broken down and prisoners were dying of hunger.