And Mama, yes, it is a modest house! Two storeys only. Your good Bolshevik heart would rejoice at its simplicity...
'- so if it would be possible,' he concluded, 'for us to take up some of your time, we would be very grateful.'
He transferred the satchel uneasily, from hand to hand. He was conscious of the snow settling in a cold clump on his back, of water trickling from his scalp, and of O'Brian at the foot of the steps, filming them.
Oh God, throw us out, he thought suddenly. Tell us to go to hell, and take our lies with us: I would if I were you. You must know why we're here.
But all she did was turn and shuffle back into the room, leaving the door wide open behind her.
KELSO went in first, and then O'Brian, who had to duck to get through the low entrance. It was dark. The solitary window was thickly glazed with snow.
If they wanted tea, she said, setting herself down heavily in a hard-backed wooden chair, then they would have to make it themselves.
'Tea?' said Kelso softly to O'Brian. 'She's offering to let us make her tea. I think yes, don't you?'
'Sure. I'll do it.'
She issued a stream of irritated instructions. Her voice, emanating from her buckled frame, was unexpectedly deep and masculine.
'Well, get the water from the pail, then - no, not that jug:
that one, the black one - use the ladle, that's it - no, no no -she banged her stick on the floor ' - not that much, that much. Now put it on the stove. And you can put some wood on the fire, too, while you're about it.' Another two bangs of the stick. 'Wood? Fire?'
O'Brian appealed helplessly to Kelso for a translation.
'She wants you to put some wood on the fire.'
'Tea in that jar. No, no. Yes. That jar. Yes. There.'
Kelso couldn't get a handle on any of this - on the town, on her, on this place, on the speed with which everything seemed to be happening. It was like a dream. He thought he ought to start taking some notes, so he pulled out his yellow pad and began making a discreet inventory of the room. On the floor: a large square of grey linoleum. On the linoleum:
one table, one chair and a bed covered with a woollen blanket. On the table: a pair of spectacles, a collection of pill-bottles and a copy of the northern edition of Pravda, open at the third page. On the walls: nothing, except in one c&rner, where a flickering red candle on a small sideboard punctuated the gloom, lighting a wood-framed photograph of V. I. Lenin. Hanging next to it were two medals for Socialist Labour and a certificate commemorating her fiftieth anniversary in the Party in 1984; by the time of her sixtieth, presumably, they couldn't run to such extravagance. The bones of communism and of Vavara Safanova had crumbled together.
The two men sat awkwardly on the bed. They drank their tea. It had a peculiar, herbal flavour, not unpleasant -cloudberries in it somewhere: a taste of the forest. She seemed to find nothing surprising in the fact of two foreigners arriving in her yard with a Japanese video camera, claiming to be making a film about the history of the Archangel Communist Party. It was as if she had been expecting them. Kelso guessed she would find no surprise in anything any more. She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day death would come for her, and she would not find that
surprising either, and she would not care - not so long as He trod in the proper places: 'No, not there. There...'
WELL, yes, she remembered the past, she said, settling back. Nobody in Archangel remembered the past better than she did. She remembered everything She could remember the Reds in 1917 coming out on to the street, and her uncle wheeling her up in the air, and kissing her and telling her the Tsar had gone and Paradise was on the way. She could remember her uncle and her father running away into the forest to hide when the British came to stop the Revolution in 1918 - a great grey battleship moored in the Dvina and runty little English soldiers swarming ashore. She played to the sound of gunfire. And then she remembered early one morning walking down to the harbour and the ship had gone. And that afternoon her uncle came back - but not her father: her father had been taken by the Whites and he never came back.
She remembered all these things.
And the kulaks?
Yes, she remembered the kulaks. She was seventeen. They arrived at the railway station, thousands of them, in their strange national dress. Ukrainians: you never saw so many people - covered in sores and carrying their bundles - they were locked in the churches and the townspeople were forbidden to approach them. Not that they wished to. The kulaks carried contamination, they all knew that.
Their sores were contagious? No. The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution. Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them. And so what happened to the kulaks?
It was like the English battleship. You went to bed at night and they were there, and you got up in the morning and they were gone. The churches were all closed after that. But now the churches were open again - she had seen it with her own eyes. The kulaks had come back. They were everywhere. It was a tragedy.
And the Great Patriotic War, she remembered that - the Allied ships moored out beyond the mouth of the river, and the docks working all day and all night, under the heroic direction of the Parry, and the fascist planes dropping fire-bombs over the old wooden town and burning it, burning so much of it down. Those were the hardest times - her husband away fighting at the front, herself working as an auxiliary nurse at the Seamen's Policlinic, no food in the town and not much fuel, the blackout, the bombs and a daughter to bring up on her own...
ALL of this, of course, took much longer to extract than the printed record would suggest. There was a lot of banging of her stick and doubling-back and repitition and meandering, and Kelso was acutely aware of O'Brian fidgeting beside him and of the snow piling up and muffling the sounds outside. But he let her talk. Indeed, he kicked O'Brian twice on the ankle to warn him to be patient. He wanted to let her come to things in her own time. Fluke Kelso was an expert at this. This was how the whole business had started, after all.
He sipped his cold tea.
So you had a daughter, Comrade Safanova? That's interesting. Tell us about your daughter.
Vavara prodded the linoleum with her stick. Her mouth turned down.
That was of no consequence to the history of the Archangel Regional Party.
'But it was of consequence to you?'
Well, naturally it was of consequence to her. She was the child's mother. But what was a child when set against the forces of history? It was a matter of subjectivity and objectivity. Of who and whom. And of various other slogans of the Party she could no longer fully remember, but which she knew to be true and which had been a comfort to her at the time.
She sat back, hunched in her chair.
Kelso reached for the satchel.
Actually, I know something of what happened to your daughter,' he began. 'We have found a book, a journal, that Anna kept. That was her name, wasn't it? Anna? I wonder -can I show it you?'
Her eyes followed the movement of his hands, warily, as he began to unfasten the straps.