Faber Lunchtime Shorts | Sebastian Barry's A Russian Beauty

L u n c h t i meS h o r t s S e b a s t i a nBa r r y ’ s ARu s s i a nBe a u t y

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A Russian Beauty Sebastian Barry

I don’t remember her name, but she was very beautiful.

I have to admit to a certain amount of uncertainty in general about this story, because not only were the most important parts of it only told to me, and I didn’t witness any of the main events, but it was told to me many years ago. And as everyone knows, stories shift in the mind as the years go on, they are infected by dreams, altered as the poor mind turns in its cradle of bones.

Though she wasn’t my type, as they say, she was very beautiful even at forty, and she must have been achingly beautiful in her heyday.

Beautiful the way a model of the seventies would have been, because she was a model of the seventies. Not in London, but in Russia.

I don’t remember her name, not because she made no impression on me, indeed I have thought of her and her story a thousand times since the early nineties; but because it has simply vanished. So maybe I can call her Nadia.

She was my translator while I was lecturing at the Gorki Institute.

That sounds quite grand, or at least romantic. But it didn’t turn out that way. It was just me blithering away to an oddly buoyant bunch of students that looked more like schoolchildren than anything else. But they were strange years in Russia and everyone was undernourished.

You’d be lucky to eat anything palatable. I ordered chicken one day in a café, and what came to the table may well have been chicken one time, but now it looked like roadkill. Like a chicken that had been run over a few times, and left to lie in the ditch of a road; and in the rain at that.

I looked around and the Russians were tucking into similar plates of chicken. They ate like grateful wolves.

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Sebastian Barry In those days there was absolutely nothing in the supermarkets. You went into the supermarkets and there was just nothing; to Western eyes at least. Maybe the Russians could see things on the shelves that I could not.

It was terrifying.

But there are many different kinds of terror. There is the terror such as we had ourselves in the North of Ireland; there is the terror, the interior terror of incest and child abuse. There is the terror of shifting memory. There are a million terrors that go with life. Even a leader that professes to be fighting terror, sometimes is himself causing terror. It must be a sort of human background music. From terror we come and to terror we must return.

At a party in Moscow though, the editor of a famous Russian journal said to me that we were all children in the West. We hadn’t endured one tenth of what they had in Russia. We were babies in history. I thought of the Irish famine and the general history of oppression, the First World War and the second, and so on, but I said nothing; she needed it to be true and maybe it was.

Nadia herself took a very bleak view of Russia and Russians. She said Stalin had killed everyone of any worth. He had left only the sick and the mad, she said. It was a phrase that stuck with me, of course. The sick and the mad. At first I thought she was excluding herself, the way she said it, as if maybe she had miraculously come through, not sick and not mad. But of course I was wrong. Not mad, maybe.

Nadia was married, or lived with, a famous film director. He was about thirty years older than herself. He had made a famous film in the fifties with Innokenty Smokdunovski, the great Russian actor. They lived in a better than most apartment in Moscow. She brought me there once. Her old film director was like one of the Irish poets I had known years before, rather grizzled and bad tempered and appealing, called Arthur Power, who had been a friend of Joyce. I thought maybe he was Arthur in a new guise, which was comforting. Arthur was long dead.

At any rate, they lived there together, he on the glory of the fifties, she on the glory of the seventies, when she had been a famous model – the most beautiful of them all, her husband said. Oddly enough he had the same family name as one of Stalin’s henchmen, but no relation, apparently. It is hard in a country to know what names are as common as Smith or Murphy. You know the way Americans sometimes ask, do you know Pat Murphy in Dublin? As if there were only a few. The Pat Murphys of Ireland are legion.

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A Russian Beauty The door of their flat was fortified with steel. It had been recently done. Nadia said that they lived in terror of the new gangsters that were roaming about. If they thought you had anything of value, they would break down your door, kill you, and take what they wanted, and no one would ever catch them. It was dangerous in Russia in those times to possess anything, or have the reputation of possessing anything.

By that time there really was no one to catch them. The army was being fed in their compounds, but the police were suffering somewhere in their offices and barracks. It was the time just before Yeltsin stormed the Russian White House with his tanks. I saw that happening on the television news back home in Ireland later, and wondered about Nadia.

Hoped better times were coming for her. But maybe she didn’t have any better times left.

She had been very popular and in demand in her heyday, and of course her husband was a celebrity. Somehow or other he had managed to assuage the various regimes, from one leader to the next, without wholly compromising himself. He was not a radical, and he was not a collaborator. He was just a living man, an artist, and liked the peaceful life.

One time they were in Italy together. It was an embassy dinner of some sort, which embassy I don’t remember, perhaps even the Russian embassy itself in Rome. One of Brezhnev’s sons was there, or maybe his only son, I don’t recall. It was only recently I read that Brezhnev’s family was often accused of feathering their nests while their father was in power, especially his daughter. But whatever embassy it was, it was inclined to honour his son, and he was the guest of honour at any rate.

There were place-settings assigned, with the names of everyone there that Rome night, and at the last minute there was a change of plan. The places were all changed about and as it happened Nadia found herself sitting in the chair that had been first assigned to Brezhnev’s son. So, everyone set to, I suppose, and ate their dinner, and talked – that old lost talk of the seventies.

One of the curious coincidences about all this was that one of the reasons I had come to Moscow to lecture to the Gorki Institute was that it would give me a chance to see Innokenty Smokdunovski – now quite an old man – on stage at the Moscow Arts. He had played in Dublin and I thought he was one of the greatest actors alive. And wanted to see him acting again. But that is neither here nor there. Apart from the fact that it sort of bound me to Nadia’s husband; if not spiritually, then at least 305

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Sebastian Barry at the level of the ordinary weave of things, how things answer things and are plaited into things in that mysterious and yet quite common way.

The last morning I was with Nadia she was showing me her favourite church in Moscow. It was a part of a monastery. It was evening, a yellow light sat in the winter trees. Moscow for an Irish person was like a skating rink. An Irish person was always in the wrong shoes and had to walk very slowly and carefully, like an aged man.

There were a few old women begging at the door of the church.

A different yellow light seeped out of the open door, the yellow of candles, bare bulbs, and golden icons. Yellows mixing in the air outside, and the desperate, terrifying hands of the old women outstretched.

Nadia had reached the portal of the church, but suddenly she stopped and leaned against the old stones. For a few moments her eyes looked as old as the old beggars, older, ageless.

Are you all right? I said.

Yes, yes, fine, she said, please, give me a moment.

Are you unwell? I said.

I am unwell, she said.

Maybe something you ate? I said, thinking of the chicken.

Yes, she said. Yes. Something I ate.

Then she told me her story under the darkened church wall.

Some years ago she had gone to her doctor with severe pains in her belly. He had prescribed various remedies, but it had done little good, and the pains persisted. Then her husband brought her to a very famous doctor. I don’t remember his name of course. The famous doctor gave her a diagnosis that astounded her. Terrified her. She wept for three days she said.

I wept for three days, she said.

The diagnosis he gave her was poisoning. Not food poisoning, but a very particular poisoning used by various secret departments of government. It would be a slow-moving poison, maybe of many years, in order to put the victim at a distance from the poisoners, but that would more than likely kill the victim – like a long-distance rifle shot, only different. Could she remember, he asked her, any instance in her life when she might have been put in the way of such poison?

She went home to her husband, she said, and told him. He held her in his old arms and they racked their brains together.

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A Russian Beauty Then it occurred to him. The dinner at the embassy in Rome all those years before. Brezhnev’s son, and the change of places at the last minute. Her in the place meant for him.

You would have eaten the food originally meant for him, her husband said.

They went back to the famous doctor and told him and he shook his head gravely, the way doctors do in all languages and countries when the news is as bad as it can be.

Probably then —, said the doctor, naming a particular poison. It was a poison known to be used by the KGB itself, but also other foreign secret services. Brezhnev’s son perhaps was as opportunistic as his sister, I don’t know, and anyway there are always a thousand reasons for doing away with people in power, or near power. Actually, she said, the famous doctor was visibly upset, because he remembered her from her heyday – he may even have been sweet on her, she thought, when she was a beautiful girl in the magazines of Russia.

What was the prognosis, I asked her, suddenly feeling, under that church wall, that I was not only asking her, but asking the whole country, because we in Ireland are accustomed to personify Ireland by the shape and face of a beautiful woman.

What was the prognosis?

It will get worse and worse, she said, but very very slowly, and then I will die.

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