Stanislav’s cheeks burn pink and a tear slips from his eye, as though he is melting under the warmth of his father’s touch, but he doesn’t say a word.
Bald Ed has stationed himself proprietorially at the side of Valentina’s chair. “Now, Val, come on!” (He calls her Val!) “I think it’s time you told that ex-hubby of yours the truth. He’s bound to find out sooner or later.”
Valentina ignores him. Holding my father’s eyes, she slides her hands around her breasts and down over her belly. Pappa quivers. His knees start to tremble. Dubov reaches across and places a large meaty hand on his thin bony one.
“Kolya, don’t be a fool.”
“No, I’m not the fool, you’re the fool. Whoever heard of a baby carried for eighteen months! Eighteen months! Ha ha ha!”
“It matters not who fathered the child, but who will be the father to it,” says Dubov quietly.
“What did he say?” asks Bald Ed.
I translate.
“Yes it does bloody matter! I’ve got rights. A father has rights, you know. Tell them, Val.”
“You no bebby father,” says Valentina.
“You no bebby father!” chimes Pappa, a mad look in his eyes. “I bebby father!”
“There is only one answer. The baby must have a paternity test!” says a cold voice from the doorway. Vera has slipped in so quietly that no one heard her arrive. Now she steps forward into the room, and moves towards Valentina. “If there is a baby at all!”
She lunges forward to feel Valentina’s belly. Valentina jumps to her feet with a shriek. “No! No! You cholera-sick eat-bebby witch! You put no hand on me!”
“Who the hell is she?” Bald Ed turns on Vera and grabs her by the arm.
Dubov steps forward and folds his arms around Valentina’s shoulders, but she brushes him off and makes for the door.
In the doorway she pauses, reaches deep into her handbag, and takes out a small key on a fob. She flings it on the floor, and spits on it. Then she disappears.
Twenty-Six. All will be corrected
“So who do you think is the father? Eric Pike or Bald Ed?”
I am in the top bunk, Vera is in the bottom bunk, in the room that was formerly Stanislav’s room, before that, the room where Anna, Alice and Alexandra stayed when they visited, before that the room that Vera and I shared as girls. It seems in a way amazing for us both to be here, yet in another way the most natural thing in the world. Except that Vera used to have the top bunk and I used to sleep down below.
Through the thin plasterboard wall we can hear the low murmur of male voices in the next room as Stanislav and Dubov catch up on eighteen months of separation. It is a gentle, companionable rumble, punctuated by loud bursts of laughter. From the room below comes the intermittent sound of Father’s long rasping snores. Mike is in the front room, uncomfortably curled up on the two-seater sofa. Fortunately he had quite a lot of plum wine before he went to bed.
“There’s someone else,” says Vera. “You’ve forgotten about that man she stayed with right at the beginning.”
“Bob Turner?” The idea had not crossed my mind, and yet now that Vera says it, I remember the fat brown envelope, the head leaning out of the window, the way Father crumpled. “That was more than two years ago. It couldn’t be him.”
“Couldn’t it?” says Vera sharply.
“You mean she kept on seeing him after they were married?”
“Would that be so surprising?”
“I suppose not.”
“One would have thought she could have done better. None of them seems very appealing. Really,” Vera muses, “she is quite attractive, in a sluttish way. Then again, it is one thing to sleep with that kind of woman, quite another to marry her.”
“But Dubov married her. And he seems a decent sort of guy. Dubov still loves her. And I think she really loves him-the way she came rushing over as soon as she knew he was here.”
“And yet she abandoned him for Pappa.”
“The lure of life in the West.”
“Now she thinks with this baby nonsense she can weasel her way back in with Pappa-he’s so obsessed with the idea of having a son.”
“But imagine, abandoning the love of your life for Pappa, and then finding out he isn’t even rich. All he has to offer is a British passport-and that paid for by Bob Turner. Don’t you feel even just a little bit sorry for her?”
Vera is silent for a moment.
“I can’t say I do. Not after the incident with the Dictaphone. Why, do you?”
“Sometimes I do.”
“But she pities us, too, Nadia. She thinks we’re stupid and ugly-and flat-chested.”
“The thing I can’t understand is what Dubov sees in her. He seems so…perspicacious. You’d think he could see through her.”
“It’s her boobs. All men are the same.” Vera sighs. “Did you see the way Bald Ed ran after her? Pitiful!”
“But did you see Bald Ed’s car? Did you see the way Pappa and Dubov were gazing at it?”
“And Mike.”
After Valentina left, Bald Ed rushed out into the garden calling “Val! Val!” in a pathetic whine, but she didn’t even look round. She slammed the door and drove off in the Lada leaving a cloud of acrid blue engine smoke swirling in the garden. Bald Ed waved his arms and ran down the road after her. Then he jumped into his car that was parked out on the road-it was an American ipsos-style Cadillac convertible, pale green, with fins, and lots of chrome-and chased her through the village. Father, Mike, Dubov and Eric Pike all stood at the window and stared as he drove away. Then they all got stuck into the beer I had brought back. After an hour or so, Eric Pike left, too. Then they got out the plum wine.
“Vera, you don’t think Pappa could be the father? Men of his age have been known to father children. He did talk about it himself at the beginning.”
“Don’t be silly, Nadia. Just look at him. Besides, he was the one who raised the issue of non-consummation. I think Bald Ed is the most likely candidate. Just imagine being related to a man called Bald Ed!”
“I expect he has another name. Anyway, if Pappa divorces her, we won’t be related.”
“If!”
“You think he could still change his mind?”
“I’m sure of it. Especially if he convinces himself the baby is a boy. Conceived by oral sex. Or through some kind of Platonic exchange of minds.”
“Surely he couldn’t be so stupid.”
“Of course he could,” says Vera. “Look at his track record so far.”
We chuckle smugly. I feel close to her and far at the same time, stacked up above her in the dark. When we were children we used to share jokes about our parents.
It must be at least three o’clock in the morning. The rumbles from next door have stopped. I am almost drifting off to sleep. The darkness is comfortable, enfolding. We are so close that we can hear each other’s breath, yet the shadows cloak our faces, as in a confessional, so no expression or judgement or shame is revealed. I know there may never be a chance like this again.
“Pappa said something happened to you in the camp at Drachensee. Something about cigarettes. Can you remember?”
“Of course I can remember.” I wait for her to continue, and after a while she says, “There are some things it’s better not to know, Nadia.”
“I know. But tell me anyway.”
The labour camp at Drachensee was a huge, ugly, chaotic and cruel place. Forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, conscripted to boost the German war effort, communists and trade unionists sent from the Low Countries for re-education, Gypsies, homosexuals, criminals, Jews in transit to their deaths, inmates of lunatic asylums and captured resistance fighters, all lived cheek by jowl in low concrete lice-infested barracks. In such a place, the only order was terror. And the rule of terror was reinforced at every level; each community and subcommunity had its own hierarchy of terror.