HER fingers were spotted with age, like the book itself, but they didn't tremble as she opened the cover. When she saw the picture of Anna, she touched it hesitantly, then her knuckle went to her mouth. She sucked on it. Slowly she brought the page up level with her face and held it close.
'I ought to be getting this on camera,' whispered O'Brian. 'Don't you dare even move,' hissed Kelso.
He couldn't see her expression, but he could hear her laboured breathing and again he had the odd sensation that she had been waiting for them - for years, maybe.
Eventually, she said, 'Where did you get this?'
'It was dug up. In a garden in Moscow. It was with some papers belonging to Stalin.'
When she lowered the book, her eyes were dry. She closed it and held it out to him.
'No. Read it,' he said. 'Please. It's hers.'
But she shook her head. She didn't want to.
'But that is her writing?'
'Yes, it's hers. Take it away.
She waved the book at him and wouldn't rest until it was safely put back in the satchel. Then she sat back, leaning to her right, one hand covering her good eye, stabbing at the floor with her stick.
ANNA, she said, after a time.
Well. Anna.
Where to begin?
Truth to tell, she had been pregnant with Anna when she married. But people didn't care about such things in those times - the Party had done away with priests, thank God.
She was eighteen. Mikhail Safanov was five years older - a metallurgist in the shipyards and a member of the Party's factory committee.
A good-looking man. Their daughter took after him. Oh yes, Anna was a pretty thing. That was her tragedy.
'Tragedy?'
Clever, too. And growing up a good young communist. She was following her parents into the Party. She had served her time as a Pioneer. She was in the Komsomoclass="underline" she looked like something out of a poster in her uniform. So much so that she had been picked for the Archangel Komsomol delegation to pass through Red Square - oh, a great honour, this - picked to pass beneath the eyes of the Vozhd himself, on May Day 1951.
Anna's picture had been in Ogonyok afterwards andquestions had been asked. That had been the start of it. Nothing had been the same after that.
Some comrades had come up from the Central Committee in Moscow the following week and had started asking around about her. And about the Safanovs.
And once word of this got out, some of their neighbours had started to avoid them. After all, though the arch-fiend Trotsky was dead at last, his spies and saboteurs might not be. Perhaps the Safanovs were wreckers or deviationists?
But of course nothing could have been further from the truth.
Mikhail had come home early from the shipyard one afternoon in the company of a comrade from Moscow -Comrade Mekhlis: she would never forget his name - and it was this comrade who had given them the good news. The Safanovs had been thoroughly checked and found to be loyal communists. Their daughter was a particular credit to them. So much so that she had been selected for special Party work in Moscow, attending to the needs of the senior leadership. Domestic service, but stilclass="underline" the work required intelligence and discretion, and afterwards the girl could resume her studies with good words on her file.
Anna - well, once Anna got to hear of it - there was no stopping her. And Vavara was in favour of it, too. Only Mikhail had been opposed. Something had happened to Mikhail. It pained her to say it. Something during the war. He had never spoken of it, except once, when Anna was talking, full of wonder, about the genius of Comrade Stalin. Mikhail said he had seen a lot of comrades die at the front:
could she tell him, then, if Comrade Stalin was such a genius, why so many millions had had to die?
Vavara had made him rise from this very table - she struck it with her hand - and go outside into the yard for his foolishness. No. He was not the man he had been before the war. He wouldn't even go to the railway station to see his daughter off.
She fell silent.
Kelso said quietly, And you never saw her again?'
Oh yes, said Vavara, surprised at the question. They saw her again.
She made a curving motion with her hands, outwards from her belly.
They saw her again when she came home to have the baby.
SILENCE.
O'Brian coughed and bent forwards, head down, his hands clasped tight in front of him, his elbows on his knees. 'Did she just say what I thought she said?'
Kelso ignored him. With great effort, he managed to keep his voice neutral.
'And when was this?'
Vavara thought for a while, tapping her stick against her boot.
The spring of 1952, she said eventually. That was it. She got through on the train in March 1952, when it was starting to thaw a bit. They had had no warning, she had just turned up, with no explanation. Not that she needed to explain anything. You only had to look at her. She was seven months gone by then.
'And the father.. . ? Did she say...
No.
A vigorous shake of the head.
But you guessed, didn~you? thought Kelso.
No, she didn't say anything about the father, or about what had happened in Moscow, and after a while they gave up asking. She just sat in the corner and waited for her term to come. She was very silent, this new girl, not like their old Anna. She wouldn't see her friends, or step outside. The truth was, she was scared.
'Scared? What was she scared of?'
Of giving birth, of course. And why not? Men! she said -and some of her old fire returned - what did men know of life? Naturally she was scared. Anyone with eyes in their head and a mind to think would be scared And that baby didn't give her an easy time, either, the little devil. It sucked the goodness out of her. Oh, a proper little devil - what a kick it had! They would sit here in the evening and watch her belly heave.
Mekhlis came by sometimes to keep an eye on her. Most weeks there was a car at the bottom of the street with a couple of his men it.
No, they didn't ask who the father was.
She started to bleed at the beginning of April. They took her to the clinic. And that was the last time they saw her. She had a haemorrhage in the delivery room. The doctor told them everything about it afterwards. There was nothing to be done. She died on the operating table two days later. She was twenty.
'And the baby?'
The baby lived. A boy.
THE arrangements were all made by Comrade Mekhlis.
It was the least he could do, he told them. He felt responsible.
It was Mekhlis who provided the doctor - an academician, no less, the country's leading expert, flown up specially from Moscow - and Mekhlis who arranged the adoption. The Safanovs would have reared the child themselves, willingly -they asked to do so: they begged - but Mekhlis had a paper, signed by Anna, in which she said that if anything happened to her, she wanted the baby to be adopted. She named some relatives of the father, a couple named Chizhikov.
'Chizhikov?' said Kelso. 'You're sure of that name?'
Certain.
They never even saw the baby. They weren't allowed inside the hospital.
Now she was willing to accept all this, because Vavara Safanova believed in the discipline of the Party. She still did. She would believe in it until the day she died. The Party was her god, and sometimes, like a god, the Party moved in a mysterious way.
But Mikhail Safanov no longer accepted the doctrine of infallibility. He was set on finding these Chizhikovs, whatever Mekhlis said, and he still had enough friends in the regional Party to help him do it. And that was how he discovered that the Chizhikovs were not fancy Moscow folk at all - which was what he had expected - but were northerners, like them, and had gone to live in a village in the forest outside Archangel. The whisper in the town was that Chizhikov was not their real name. That they were NKVD.
By this time it was winter and there was nothing Mikhail could do. And then one morning in early spring, while he was still looking out each day for the first signs of a thaw, they woke to solemn music on the radio and the news that Comrade Stalin was dead.