Love in Action

‘The fear of appearances is the first sign of impotence.’
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The doorbell rings a tinny peal of grief from the house. They stand silent then are ushered in from the cold streetlit night by groping and gloved hands. Faces reeling grossly, cheeks ruddy with rouge or drink, young men and women mimicking famous Russians, faintly astounded by the presence of one another; the long and hard light shearing amid the gambol. Jake thinks he recognises some of the men, although it is hard to tell behind the fake beards and the spectacles. There is Tolstoy for sure, knee-high boots, peasant clothing, effulgent air of the messiah about him, white and wiry beard tucked beneath the belt and sprucing out of the flies like a disarrayed merkin.
Anna looks across at him, unsure and dazzling. Jake climbs into her eyes in the few naked moments they dilate, and the truth is there to see that he is going out, and, before she can close the steel over herself, before her pupils have adjusted to the burning lights and the smiles and the sweet and heady swell of men and drink, he knows that she is willing herself away and into a restlessness and a level of feeling he has ceased to provide.
He gets her in the lounge quickly and by now the slate is over her eyes and the moment of vulnerability has gone. Listen, he tells her, don’t get muddled by all this newness. It’s heady and it’s new and I don’t want you getting hoodwinked.
Hoodwink, she says, the word foreign in her mouth, what is hoodwink?

He remembers the day they first met when she had interested him suddenly, wordlessly, all at once1; her, a fifteen year old girl sitting in his classroom, head angled, pencil between her lips. She was tall for her age, well-boned, defined, athletic. Pinned into a large pair of school-shoes she gawped up at him doe-eyed, utterly in his care, the swan of her little heart thumping good blood around her breast.
Jake had recently moved to the city to teach English and Anna had just arrived from St. Petersburg on a boat with her father who had, according to her, recently made killings in the market for minerals. Anna’s parents had divorced and her father had wanted to get away from it all, the bad blood, the contempt, the endless guilt, had wanted to unfind himself. And Jake had been in the same boat too, running, getting out, wriggling free and innocent from another city and another school. Anna told Jake, much further down the line, when they were themselves coming undone, that she had originally wished to stay with her mother but it hadn’t been allowed because mamulya had become, they told her, skhaz. Crazy.
At first she was silent in his classes, fearing the language, but she could read well, and Jake often asked her to read aloud from texts so the words were there for her and she wouldn’t have to worry. He saw a willingness in her. Wading amongst a flow of rucksacks and coats, the steady mass of short life sphinctering through double-doors and fire-exits, he caught her spoor; a fan of fair hair, a long white neck, two heliacal earrings, turning and folding in shadow and light2. That first day in September they were both new, not just to the school but the city. Anna stood outside the school gates at the end of the day, the other children gone, coaches and buses pulling out into the rain, traffic clearing.
Are you okay? Jake asked her. Is someone coming to get you?
Someone? she said. No.
Do you know your way home?
Home? she said. Where is this home?
Walking her back up the drive he wanted to hold her hand and tell her not to worry, that she was the fire of his life3, that they would find their way, that she wouldn’t get lost with him there.

He reminds her of this. You were petrified of getting lost that day, he says.
What is this day?
When we first met. Do you remember?
Yes, she says slowly. But is two years ago. Long time.
Is two years ago, he says. Me love you.
Anna looks at him and blinks. A shadow moving behind him grabs her attention. She turns back, a ringlet of russet hair falling out of place. He is still winded by her when she is like this, petulant and devastatingly beautiful.
Light of my loins.

When she turned sixteen, and it was okay for her, they lay in his bed after, cosseted in the single duvet, four feet poking out the end, and listened to the rain softly fall. Going back on it she could not achieve what he had, could not stir herself up to meet him where he was. Her chest had not dampened, her legs had not quivered, and there was no tremor in her voice when she asked for a towel so she might go to the bathroom. But for him, ploughing blindly on, groping, heaving, fighting himself more than her, fighting the awful heights he’d begun to scale early, there was nothing but the wet and soundless ascent. He had adorned her with his love, the pearls on her chest, the handmarks on her back, and she had taken it all more or less, smiling up at him with a measure of understanding and pity. No pulsating or wide-eyed giddy shaking, no o-o-o-ohs. Where was the blood, the red terror? He told her that when it rained, like it did on that first day they met, she seemed to him like an echo, fading and reappearing, as though she hadn’t yet decided whether she was leaving or staying. Going or coming.
He held onto her and dreamed chromatically. But her eyes opening would always bring him out into the silence and the darkness that hummed in his ears. What am I doing wrong? he wanted to ask. How can I be better? But the nature of her body under the sheets, the way it remained hidden, exposing itself at metrical and horrific intervals, warned him off. It was sleepless politics, and the coldness of it was like a war.
Jake had a print of a Rothko, Chagall’s I and the Village which Anna hated, and Kandinsky’s On White II. He told her to be on the lookout for semiotics; codes, signals, things written deep into art.
Look for the patterns, he said. You might have to lose yourself and you might have to give a lot up but you must stay alert for the patterns.
They went to the gallery on the university campus where Anna eventually wanted to go and he pushed her to posit meanings and interpretations of the various works. If he could not get to her in bed where it was hot and sickly then he could get to her here, in the cool and ventilated forums of galleries and museums, where it was his mind doing the work, his raging intellect.

Probably Rothko enters, his wrists lathered in ketchup. Outside, the night is like one of his paintings; the clouds and the ground and the less dark sky in between. A big black cat enters through a window and scraps with Pavlov’s inflatable dog, puncturing the PVC. Angrily, the dog is tossed to one corner of the room where it whimpers airily to a slow and drawn-out death.
These disguises are awful, Jake says.
This is the one who did the picture on your wall?
Who?
The one with all this blood.
Maybe.
I think I have read somewhere that this one is impotent.
Which one? he replies, startled, covering up.
This one with blood on wrists.
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that is correct at all.
I ask.
You will not.
Excusing me! She begins to rise from the sofa but Jake is at her side, leading her through the door. Probably Rothko, lighting another cigarette, sits wearily in the grooves they’ve made on the sofa, and rubs the bridge of his false nose.
Jake and Anna stand to one side and pick up the drift of circling conversation.
Molotov bounds from room to room asking for someone.
That isn’t real petrol in that bottle, is it?
Where is Anatoly?
He’s asking for Golytsin.
The spies are all huddled in the shadows.
You won’t find them.
I think the point of them is that they’re not to be found.
I saw the Cambridge Five smoking at the back of the garden.
Someone asked them to leave on account of the fact that they haven’t come as Russians. One of them says, Burgess I think, effeminate chap with a drink problem, in spirit we have. In spirit we have come as honorary Russians.
They have come disguised as disguises.
Has someone come as Anna Chapman?
There were meant to be six of them, I think. Have I got that right?
Open that bottle and let me smell it.
I think if someone has come as Anna Chapman then this overall is a good thing for the party.
I think the point of them is that they’re the Cambridge Five.
Anna listens to the conversation smiling. She tosses her hair. The talking has Jake worried. He gets outside of the din and attunes himself to the shadows, the deep and hollow recesses of the house where moony gorgon eyes appear. There is someone there, he is sure of it, an immense presence hulking in the penumbra, all beard and lapels and bats and cloaks, watching him, watching her. Drawn towards it, Jake shuffles forward uncertainly, peering, before something stops him.
What?
A fragile image, pooled in a small glory of tallow light, suddenly smoked through with the zeal and intent of murder and doings, of capped and dusky Russian skulkers, Raskolnikov4, Dolokhov5, Onegin6, bootstrapped to centuries of blood and snow, leering in through thresholds and points of liminality, to come, winked in knifelight, for his Anna.

She would sit on his bed in odd socks, a trail of down on the shins, smiling oddly at the English titles of Russian novels. Things would not work for him. He knew it well. The words he wanted to say to her fell flat, so he took her into the great novels he had studied and loved at university, the texts of her own nation, Eastern tomes peopled with crying fathers, in the hope that she’d place him there as a kind of arbiter between the real and fictional world, a man whose passions for her took better articulation in the mouths of other men.
She read all of his books thirstily, drank them down, ingested them into the pit of her stomach, the hard cold place where her Russia was most obscenely felt. Why not we study these in class? she said. So much better.
Jake asked her about it. Where are you from really? The snow? The oblasts?
But she wanted to talk about the novels. These men, I tell you. I have read. These men, they are not same as they are in real world. Always so ready with words, and precious, even with fire in heart and belly. And they love right, even with injury and pain, they love well, like big man, much love, and always big and hard like no man in real world, till you are screaming and fighting with book for him to come, come like strong man, getting deeper and deeper, and love so hard against all these others. But no, they are men written by men, like great fantasy of themselves, and no one here I can find like them.
He thought about this at school the next day. Giving her these novels had been a type of suicide; inadvertently he had somehow managed to posture up to the incomparable. He knew that having Anna was a fear for him, that if she left him or went away then he wouldn’t just be grieving for the death of their relationship but for the books as well. Once she had gone then the novels were lost too, the giants who had written them, because although she hadn’t found him inside the covers, he had seen her, he couldn’t help himself. She was his Sonya7. He had extracted her from the pages. His Lolita, his Anna.

He goes off to fetch drinks from a table of samovars and jugs. The kitchen is becoming busy now. Women enter in ushankas, blundering downhill on the cant of their heels, their bare limbs a whirligig of beads and flesh. A party of Bolsheviks stand over trays of kringles and blinis and pelmenis, their greatcoats chuckling on their shoulders as they eat. The statesmen are there too, as are the revolutionaries, standing in a solemn line holding grenades or cigars. Three Stalins. There are rumours of a competition, a who-looks-most-like-Stalin game, but they don’t much look up for games, all three of them, standing there like waxworks, stern and quietly brutal.
Jake pours them both a paper cup of kvass and helps himself to two bottles of beer. Opposite him two white eyes glare out of a space-helmet. Poyekhali!8 they say. He nods, smiles, but the cosmonaut’s eyes are not smiling back, and they look very serious and white, so Jake turns back to look at Anna where she stands on the other side of the room. A small group of men have gathered round her, each one nodding and laughing. He can see that she knows eyes are on her, and as she laughs, he observes, even from this distance, her little boyish face flush a shade deeper, a confident knowing behind her eyes. She is growing out of herself, swelling, engorging, too big now, far too much for him to hold on to. The secret of her is out. Have you heard? someone says, there is an actual Russian here.
She is as much an emblem of her country as The Kremlin or St. Basils, and she holds herself similarly, a great beacon drawing all the energy of the room towards her. She looks over, not at him, but at a large shadow seguing somewhere behind his back.
She already has her own drink, a glass of red wine, which she holds awkwardly. He has never seen her have wine before, only vodka or beer, and she drinks it badly, cupping a hand to her chin as a few drops run vampirically from both corners of her mouth. He watches along with all the others; the chemise pleats and the finical body sighing inside, the glass moving to and from her wet mouth, the long and hairless legs disappearing up the selvage of her dress. Going up, up, up, the whole room going up.

She left school for college after her GCSEs and they could be less cautious about seeing one another. She stayed nights over his house, telling her father she was with school friends, and watched TV from his bedroom floor, cross-legged and agog in her little pink pyjamas, two pale hands trembling above her lap, tongue lolling out from her mouth. He pushed bottles of vodka and beer towards her, beckoning her on, but the television was always in the way, and she sipped half-heartedly while he stood from the shadows and watched. Not having her at school freed Jake up but he was worried about the people she might see now he was not there to watch over her.
They listened to the weather from his bed, knees in the backs of knees and flaccid arms. His small nakedness bucking whitely from the sheets.
You not love me, she told him, you love my country. If I was not Russian girl would you come for me?
He picked her up and sat her on his lap. You’re for me, Anna. You’re a good girl.
Sometimes, she said, I cannot tell whether is mute or very loud.
The television?
Everything.

When Jake gets back to her she is speaking to one of the men, a younger more handsome manifestation of Anton Chekhov, replete with pince-nez and bow tie. Problem for me, she is saying, is relationship with God; Dostoevsky think he can talk with Him, and Tolstoy think he is Him.
Jake wonders where on earth she picked up such a wayward notion; not from him. But of course Anton finds it hilarious, his face toothily contorting with false laughter.
Anna accepts her drink without looking at him. He puts both bottles on the sideboard and stands there ridiculously, waiting for her, surveying the room.
Laughter. Girls move awesomely, puzzled by the weight and intimation of their own movements, addled by a sudden command of transit, of being able to come in and out. He watches them mesmerised. Much attention is diverted from Anna to the two entering tennis stars, Kournikova and Sharapova, as they lope blondely in. But it is a trick; Anna is real and there and vibrant, and the other two are gaudy caricatures, walking insinuations, too fogged and obfuscated beneath the platinum dye and the make-up. It’s a no-contest, it’s over; Anna has the light, is who she is, and wins, game, set and match.
Maria and Anna K find their way to the other side of the room with all the other girls and indeed Jake can now see that the girls are stood apart from the men. There is much appraising going on; subtle gestures, captious glances, gaping laughter, bodies bent double, a kind of forced easiness in everything that doesn’t come out right. Limbs move in semaphore, a gushing primal urge takes over, everything seen now is seen sidelong and back through history, back to when cavemen hunted and fucked and fire was new and fierce in the night. The men on one side splanch their shoulders and breathe deep in their chests and the girls on the other bite their lower lips and bend their knees. He sees how it is a type of war, all this valuation and recognition, and how, although the forces are aligned opposite one another, the fighting is very much amongst themselves and in their own ranks.

He would pick her up from college Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, standing like a refugee at the gates, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his face mawkish and divided between the cold slats. Anna, in there with her ideas and her distant notions while he was on the other side, the outside, peering in across the iron divide.
Sometimes they went back to his house and ate or else they sat in a café, staring at one another over cups of coffee and a crossword. We will take you out, he said. We will take you out so you will see that this is England and it is your home.
I won’t leave, she said.
When it rains. It’s when it’s raining I can see you leaving. I know it9.
She smiled warily.
They took the train up to London for the day. He felt that Anna needed to see herself in the part of England that did all the work, to see that she fitted and that they could make it there, where history was in the flagstones and where birds were wise. He took her to the parts of the city that could only be London so she could see firsthand that there was nowhere else for her. He felt that if she broke the frailty of England, that if she saw in it anything other than complete refinement and distinction, saw beyond the sheen into the sinking Thames and the kitchen sinks and the sink estates, then he was gone too, because, for her at least, he was England, and if she saw it how he knew it could be seen then she was gone, then she would turn in on herself, defect.
It was early December and a light snow drifted down through the Christmas lights and the sky was heavy and close. Shoppers persevered amongst the bustle, bundling through the vast and severe traffic of London life. He took her to Somerset House so she might see the views of the Thames from the Georgian terraces, but the snowdrift and the clouds brought a roiling dank slate down on it all, so instead they stood peering out into the gloom and the cold and the city somewhere beyond. The Catacombs were closed for renovation and the fee to enter the Cortauld Gallery was too high, but, much to Anna’s joy, they did find a makeshift ice rink around the courtyard fountains where a gyre of slow-moving skaters reeled before them, gloved hands and little girls in tights and serious looking City men with their papers tucked beneath their arms. They booted her up and sent her out onto the ice where she emerged, steady at first, but then gradually faster, until she was strumming her long limbs around the courtyard, breezing in relief across the fountains and the gardens and the house itself.
Jake stood from the steps and watched her go. A few of the City men tried to catch up with her and go arm in arm round the rink but she was too fast for them, too much to go with. They tried to cling on, scrambled to keep up but she was always moving away and out of reach, going calmly towards the shadows of the portico and into the dark where she couldn’t be had. The skaters continued to go round. No birds and snow falling very softly. The silent weight of everything. Anna emerged back out onto the ice, scarves and breath and hair and life streaming out behind her. He watched and while he watched he understood that this wasn’t very like England at all.

Jake follows her and Anton out into the corridor and up the stairs. Putin sits on the newel blackbelted in his judo garb, his chest exposed revealing awns of greying hair. He nods solemnly to them as they shuffle past. Gopniks10 line the walls, whitefaced and dangerous in their Adidas tracksuits and their trainers.
Alright boys, Anton says to them.
Nothing back but blank faces and gel and fair hair and earrings. One of them purses his lips and spits on the floor. Another looks out bloodshot behind a wall of drink. The earthy drift of kief rises up the stairs with them as they go. At the summit two young men come up astounded from a bag of glue. As Anna steps over them the hem of her skirt rides up to show a rictus of pale flesh.
In one of the bedrooms a small crowd has gathered round what is most likely Botvinnik and Spassky playing chess. The light is poor and there is smoke in the air and the sweet smell of wine and something else in the room. A large man in pyjamas and slippers lies sprawled across a sofa reading a book.
That’s Oblomov11, Jake says, but Anna doesn’t hear. She leans in slowly, awfully, to Anton, murmurs a few words, places a hand on the lapels of his coat, and laughs lightly. When she pulls away Jake notices one single strand of hair cling to the black wool of Anton’s shoulder. The something else in the room is coming from the two bustling shapes beneath the sheets on the bed behind them. As Anna turns to confront this, Anton glances over at Jake to see if he has understood it right, to make sure he hasn’t got this wrong12.
The cat from downstairs now sits crooning on the windowsill, haloed by a fat moon. Dilating almond eyes transfixed on the chess game. Uncanny, says Anna. Is famous one from Bulgakov13, one with Browning gun, one with great love of Browning gun and chess.
Anton misses the allusion, claws at the vision of the cat by the window, tries to fit it somewhere inside him, but it doesn’t work. Anna waits a moment, sees the struggle in him, and moves away to the game where Trotsky points out to her the flaws in Spassky’s opening gambits with his ice pick.
Anton looks over. What happened there? his face says.
The cat sidles off and Jake goes over to the window. Moths tizz against his reflection in the glass. He lifts up the latch and they ride on in, breaking madly for the light and the light guttering on and off and on and off as they flit round it. One moth gets drawn to the naked glow of a candle and catches fire and buzzes a bit and drops to the candle-holder in a little cairn of ash. The ancient cry of the city comes from the concrete and the shingle in shoals and cars banshee down West Street in the shadow of the clock-tower where it stands erect, blackbacked gulls cawing like lovers from the dials.
The bedsheets heave and swell in the stroboscope, each sudden burst of light promising to breach some horrific and monstrous being into the world. A pair of legs swing from the roof
outside. Jake leans out of the window to catch the heel of a boot as it comes back towards him, but he can’t raise himself up high enough. He tries again, standing on tiptoe, thrusting his body further out into the night, stirring himself up to meet the kicking legs. Still the boots are just out of reach. He presses himself hard against the wood of the sill, straining now, urging himself higher and higher. The trick, he knows, is to straighten up in one long and fluid motion14. Above him one leg extends rigidly then begins its slow pendulous descent towards him. Half-out in the night, fingers extended, something stops him.
What?
The house living and breathing, the cardiac thump of speakers in the walls, the great funk of the city, the sudden and awful awareness he has of his body being at once both in and out, both there and not there. He must force himself back into the warm place where Anna is.
But when he gets back there is a change. Voices are raised and everyone more or less has a problem. Jake thinks for a moment that he has done something wrong, that perhaps he should not have opened the window. But the bad feeling is in the centre of the room, where people are gathered round the game. Chess-pieces are rising slowly in the air, tumbling and rolling among a zoetrope of contorted faces, knights and royalty and the clergy careening above the table with dust-motes and strands of hair and curlicues of sweat or vodka. It is a very deep rush in the room and there are no words but hands reaching over hands and red tongues and jaws baying and the pitch of the room is drilled with something very old, something timeless, the monster beneath the bedsheets, or the fighting by the chess game, or something else, something momentous yet less perceptible, like the forming of potholes or of wet ground cracking, an increase in surface tension, shingle displaced on the shoreline15. All this happens very quickly and then doesn’t happen at all. Bodies stand off and chairs are taken again and there is a feeling of simmering calm, jackets and fancy-dresses smoothed out, small talk resumed.
What happened there? Jake asks.
The legs stop swinging outside and an upsided head smiles or frowns in through the window. No one knows, it says.

They stood windbattered on the esplanade digging at a polystyrene tray of fish and chips, wooden forks wielded like weapons. The sea rolled out past the pier into the sound.
She nodded her little head at it. What is out there, you think?
France.
She stopped chewing. No.
What do you mean?
Cannot just be France, is not like a road that is just way to France.
Jake shrugged.
If I get boat and go like crow flying in straight line I come to land of France?
Correct.
Wooden boat, with oars?
You’re skhaz.
Canoe, with paddles?
There has to be a way to get everywhere, Anna. Going away isn’t just a thing that you can close your eyes and be there. You have to move across something.
Mid-December she flew back to Russia to spend Christmas with her Mother. He begged her not to go and when he knew she would go he begged her to come back, to not forget him. Don’t find yourself over there, he said. Your place is here, with me.
She came back to him changed, slightly altered in a quiet and ephemeral way. And when he asked her where she’d been and what she’d done she said that it wasn’t a matter of seeing and doing but of feeling and about knowing where she had to be, where her home was. She told him to be quiet about it and she told him to get off. She had to know where her home was so she could get back to it someday and that was up to her and wouldn’t be discussed.

Anna goes from one side of the house to the other and now, as she sees Jake emerge from one doorway into the hall, she begins to head back again, moving west to east, hurdling a surf of jackets and rolling limbs. The walls are lined with various canvas prints from the Rorschach test. Jake half observes them and the disappearing Anna, he has one eye on each; the sashaying, farewell plaits of her dress drifting across the brink, always moving away and out of reach, and then the ink-blots, the melting, dripping, sticky wads, the emptied loads massing on the print, merging into forms of bats and faces and cloaks.
He rounds in after her, stepping over the threshold, and arrives in what must be the master bedroom and of course it has to fall apart here, in full view of the bed and the unmade sheets and the shadows that the overhang makes on the fringes of the room. Now the disguises appear eerily real and the people in this room are unmistakeably the people they’re meant to be. Jake surveys the turning faces. No longer can he see, behind the eyes, a laughing knowing, a kind of shared jollity, a passive who-have-you-come-as glint. The real ones are all in here. There is no hilarious self-deprecation now, no irony. Instead, there are cold and right stares that belong to old eyes and older griefs.

They were across from one another, not talking, waiting for their train inside a platform-café. A table sat in between them and something was always in the way, Jake thought, always dividing them. Their train was delayed due to a fatality on the line, some hysterical woman who’d left nothing of herself save a small red handbag16. It was cold.
Why you not have car? Anna said, sulking.
Come here.
No.
Let me get you another drink.
She sat cross-armed, lips tight.
Don’t be like that, he said. What is going on, what is happening this weekend?
The ghost of a smile passed across her. I have party, she said.
You have party?
Melissa, girl I tell you of, she goes to party this weekend and I go too.
Where?
She made a face.
Whose party is it?
It is Russian party for people of university doing literature. For end of term. I am told, Anna you go because you will see everything we think of your country and there is to be vodka and food. I say back, I will go to see how Russia is in this land of yours and how much you will have it wrong. I expect very much it will be all babushkas and ushankas.
They hurtled across the girders and the ballast now warm in their carriage, the patchwork fields and the shortshadowed cattle17 passing to their left. Stations approached then receded back in time. They stopped at one and someone Jake knew got on. A small, stiff man who walked with a fuss. Bald head, stubble, two tiny eyes windowed behind a pair of thick glasses. Jake recognised the suit, the ink stains barely visible on the right sleeve which he knew to look for. A former pupil had been suspended for making them. Jake felt a cold wave rising in the pit of his stomach.
Anna, who had yet to speak since boarding, eyed him curiously. What wrong? she asked.
Can we go? We need to go. Jake stood and hoisted Anna up from her seat and scuttled off down along the carriage and into a vacant toilet.
What we doing in here? Who that man? Ticket inspector? But we have ticket. Jake, we have ticket.
Shut up, Anna.
He peered out of the toilet, back through the door, and into the carriage where the man who had recently got on was taking his seat.
It stinks in here. I go back out.
Not that way, said Jake, leading her away from the first carriage and toward a pair of new seats.
Why? Who is that man, Jake? And I not going anywhere till you tell me.
I used to work with him.
Where? At last school.
Yes. At last school. I got in trouble there and he chaired a disciplinary hearing.
A what?
A meeting where I was fired.
Anna looked confused. Why?
Why what?
Why you in a meeting where you fired?
I don’t want to go into it, it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t the truth. C’mon.

Tchaikovsky and The Five arrange themselves around the sound system like tin gods, their veined and liverspotted hands working in the air, summoning up the strings and the woodwinds and the percussion with their raised batons18. Steinware and ceramics shake on the window sill and the headboard rattles against the walls. Outside it has started to rain.
I cannot tell, Anna says when he gets to her, whether is mute or very loud.
Ivan the Terrible watches from the oriel, stroking the bloodied point of his staff, the rain streaking down behind him. Finally what has been in the shadows and the depths of the house comes out, comes dreadfully out into the light of the room, a great yawn screaming across the sky, a smooth fluttering, like batwings in a lantern or the day lengthening over fields. Rasputin. Horribly, manifestly, evidently Rasputin. All virility and lascivity there in the sleek, almost gaitless movement he makes across the room. Tall and bearded, facets in his eyes, hung, famously endowed; the fighting, fucking, praying, mad monk Rasputin, there and a problem to be faced in this and every bedroom.
Anna’s head turns. I see this one earlier, she says indicating Rasputin, who was on his way over, signing the cross with one hand and touching himself with the other. I see him in the lounge when we arrive and then in the kitchen as well. This one is the monk Rasputin.
Yes.
I can tell him anywhere.
Jake can see that Anna is disturbed. Not in a good way for him, not in the way that means they can finally leave, but in an excited way, with a look that he’s never seen, one that has never gone on him, a look that leaves her defenceless, that burns down the slate she’s put over her eyes, that leaves her naked, so he can see into her, all the way in, where she is hot-headed and breathless and mad with lust for all this history heading her way.
The two-tined beard, slightly shorter on one side, stops just before him. Jake looks up into it, around it. The creases in the face and the deep sad eyes. An authentic heaviness, a kind of quiet register in the features that sit timeworn and weathered on his face. The cloak he wears reminds Jake of the canvases outside in the hall.
Anna and Grigori face one another, nothing in the way now, nothing dividing them but Jake. There is a quiet going on for a long time. Jake cannot bring himself to look at Anna, cannot pull away from Grigori to gaze across at her, because he knows what’s waiting for him and when he does it, when he finally looks over to where she stands giving herself up in eyefuls to this man, this riveting, hard monk, he knows that it’s over and it’s up, he knows she’s gone, that she will not be coming back.
The music stops or the rain gets louder. It’s either very loud or the rain is coming fast or else the moment itself, all the hurting in Jake, spills out into a new noise, one that’s never been heard before. A tearing down the middle of him, a ripping up, an image of the night ahead for Anna, the raging, the gripping, the juddering, the o-o-ohs.
She will not look at him, could not, nothing is forcing her eyes from Grigori. And then the inevitable Russian, the terrible soft-hard sounds, the guttural utterances, the minimal pairs drifting from a part of the throat unknown to the west; two-hundred-and-fifty years of gradual compilation arriving at this exact moment, the harsh and brutal exclusion from a conversation Jake could only be thankful not to understand.

They were in his bedroom getting ready and drinking He had an open book face down on his bed, leaf-covers spread. Anna picked it up to look at it. Ivan Goncharov, she said aloud. Oblomov.
Jake turned from the mirror. Have you read it?
No. I only read what you give.
There was silence. Outside the trees moved in the wind and a child laughed.
Jake…?
Yes.
You don’t need to be coming this evening. I have said now many times. Is not for you.
I’ll be fine. I don’t want you going without me.
Okay, but is not for you.
Silence.
Jake…?
Yes.
What are you wearing?
I am going as a Cossack, a soldier. This is called a beshmet. I have the sword, the shashka. It is here somewhere.
And this now going on your head…?
Is a fleece hat. Who are you going as?
I go as me because already I am Russian girl.
Yes you are.
Anna found the plastic sword down the back of his bed. There was a dent in it and when she held it in her hand the blade wilted and slumped.
Jake…?
Yes.
Do you love me?
Of course, very much.
Really…?
He turned to look at her sitting on the bed, the shashka bent in her little hands. Absolutely I do. He could not take his eyes from the sword and the borrowed words came stumbling out. But love in action is a hard and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams19.
They scuttled along the pavements, heads turning to watch them pass, two lovers arm in arm, navigating this now well-known city, the cols and the alleys and the bungaroosh20 on the palms of their hands. He told her as they went that the etymology of bungaroosh came from the colloquial verb bung, meaning to put something somewhere hastily and without care.
They stood outside the house and checked themselves. Two slats of light through the door and muddled faces beyond, distorted in the chevron veneer. I have forgotten my sword, Jake said without emotion. Must have left it in the bed.
Anna stretched forward, one foot in its little shoe resting on the step, the selvage of her skirt raising itself just, and rang the doorbell.

APPENDIX

1. “We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.” (Dostoevsky, F, 1991, Crime and Punishment, translated by Mcduff, D, Penguin Classics.)

2. “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” (Tolstoy, L, 1995, Anna Karenina, translated by Maude, L & Maude, A, Wordsworth Classics.)

3. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” (Nabokov, V, 2000, Lolita, Penguin Modern Classics.)

4. Raskolnikov: Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky, F.

5. Dolokhov: War and Peace, Tolstoy, L.

6. Onegin: Eugene Onegin, Pushkin, A.

7. Sonya (Semyonova Marmeladov), Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky, F.

8. Poyekhali! (Off we go), Yuri Gagarin’s first words as his capsule Vostok took off in the first manned orbit of Earth.

9. “’All right. I’m [Catherine] afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.’” (Hemingway, E, 1999, A Farewell to Arms, Random House.)

10. Gopniks: Slang Russian derogatory term used to describe a young, white male member of the lower class in Russia.

11. Oblomov: Oblomov, Goncharov, I.

12. He [Romero] looked at me [Jake.] It was a final look to ask if it were understood. It was understood alright. (Hemingway, E, 2000, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Random House.)

13. Anna is referring to Behemoth, the large black cat in Bulgakov’s The Master & Margarita.

Joe Banfield 25 Love in Action

14. “He [Dick] was on one knee; the trick was to straighten all the way up in the same motion with which he left his kneeling position. (Fitzgerald, F, S, 2011, Tender is the Night, Random House.)

15. Paterson, D, 1997, The Scale of Intensity, from God’s Gift to Women.

16. “…exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her [Anna], she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car…” (Tolstoy, L, 1995, Anna Karenina.)

17. “Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle” (Larkin, P, 2001, The Whitsun Weddings, from The Whitsun Weddings, Faber & Faber.)

18. “Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton.” (Hemingway, E, 2000, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.)

19. “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” (Dostoevsky, F, 2003, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Mcduff, D, Penguin Classics.)

20. Bungaroosh: Composite building material.