‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘She is very upset. She has enrolled on a course to become a speech therapist for children with learning difficulties, and all because of you, Louie Eeyoreovitch. You restored my daughter to me and now you are my brother to whom I will be eternally in debt. However, duty dictates that, for reasons of State security, I must confiscate the photo. As recompense I make the exhibits of this the former museum available to you. It is my belief that you will find the answer to your quest here in the dust.’
I placed my fingers on the dossier and twisted it round to face me.
‘Vanya’s case is very sad,’ said Pyotr. ‘Twice he was denounced and sent to the camps. And the years in between were worse: he was captured by the Germans in Stalingrad and spent two years as a prisoner-of-war eating bread made of floor sweepings and leaves. When finally he returned to Hughesovka he did what he had to in order to survive and this meant taking employment in the criminal fraternity. His life was heading for the abyss, but then a remarkable transformation occurred. He was engaged to assassinate a woman for reasons that are now lost and, by all accounts, he fell in love with her face presented to him down the sniper scope of his rifle. He sought out the girl, paid off the people who wanted her dead, and proposed. How could she refuse the gallant man who had forborne to shoot her because he was so struck by her beauty?’
‘This much I know. He married Lara and Ninotchka was born, and then he was sent to a labour camp.’
‘Yes, of course, you are anxious to learn the truth behind this great mystery. You have come a long way and desire to know how it was that the spirit of Gethsemane Walters could inhabit the body of a little girl here in Hughesovka in the mid-fifties. Please, sit.’
I took my place at the table and chinked glasses with Pyotr and Calamity and tried to keep the impatience from my face.
‘It is indeed a very strange story,’ said Pyotr. ‘You see, not long after Vanya was sent to the camps there was an outbreak of diphtheria in Hughesovka and Ninotchka fell ill and died. And for reasons known only to her, Lara kept this terrible news secret from her husband. It is not hard to imagine her motives. She intended no doubt to spare Vanya the extra suffering. The camps along the River Kolyma were infamous, everyone knew that a spell in the gulag was the worst fate that could befall a man or woman and of this the worst of the worst was to be found in Kolyma. Lara must have thought that the extra burden of this evil news would have been too much for her husband’s poor heart to bear. She didn’t tell him, and thereby though acting from the most honourable of motives she constructed a trap that ensnared her. Because what was to happen when Vanya came home? It must have preyed on her mind a lot during those years. She found work as a cleaner in this museum. Then one day a strange event happened. They had just taken delivery from Mooncalf & Sons of some traditional Welsh furniture which would form part of a reconstruction of a typical nineteenth-century peasant’s cottage. And in a Welsh dresser they found some curious items: a bottle of dandelion and burdock, a tin of corned beef, and a child’s colouring book. One evening, a few days later, as Lara was mopping the floor she found a little girl hiding in the basement. This girl was Gethsemane, who it seemed had been hiding in the Welsh dresser and inadvertently shipped from Wales to Hughesovka. The streets of Hughesovka in those dark lean days shortly after the war were full of waifs and strays – so many mothers and fathers who went to war and never returned. It was a common thing to find a poor shivering half-starved child hiding in the warm museum at night. The girl was about the same age as Ninotchka would have been had she lived, and looked similar. Vanya had not seen his daughter since shortly after her birth; suddenly Lara saw a way out of the trap she had built for herself in the lie she told Vanya. She decided to adopt Gethsemane, to pass her off as Ninotchka and deceive her husband.’ Pyotr paused and refilled our glasses for the fourth time. He raised the glass and held it to his lips without drinking, lost for a moment in contemplation. ‘But of course there was a problem. The child stubbornly refused to accept the name of Ninotchka and not unreasonably insisted that she was called Gethsemane and was from Wales. And so, Lara invented this astonishing story about the imaginary friend in order to dupe her husband when he returned from the camps. “My darling, something very strange has taken place. Last week I gave our little daughter a Welsh doll from the museum and now she has acquired an imaginary friend from Wales called Gethsemane. I thought it was charming at first but recently the imaginary friend seems to have taken her over. Our daughter no longer answers to the name Ninotchka and insists that I call her Gethsemane. Yesterday she told me I was not her real mummy and asked for a strange dish of lamb and cheese called caawl. I am at my wit’s end, whatever shall we do?” What a completely brilliant and totally crazy idea! Who knows whether such a subterfuge could ever have hoped to work? But Fate was not kind to the ingenious Lara. Shortly after Vanya returned home Dame Fortune inserted another player into the scene: Laika, the first dog in space. Gethsemane was fascinated by Laika and spent entire days glued to the collective TV set. Laika, the sweet yapping mongrel, staring out at us from her goldfish-bowl helmet, her eyes bright pools of trust for the masters who had put her in this strange contraption, and who had only ever shown her kindness . . . Laika sitting wearing a soiled nappy stencilled with the motif of the glorious Soviet Space Command. But as you know, Laika died up there above the clouds. Of heat exhaustion, they said. When news of her death broke, Gethsemane was inconsolable, and Vanya, unable to take the tantrums of his daughter, hit the bottle. He took to beating his wife, perhaps in some deep dark recess of his heart he blamed her or suspected that she had – in some way he was unable to divine – been responsible for the terrible turn of events that had so ruined his happiness. One night, he hit his wife a little too hard and that was that. He found himself behind bars for murder and the girl was taken into care. There the truth slowly emerged. It would have been a trivial story but for a twist to the tale that assumed dimensions of State security. Laika, you see, had been recruited for her heroic role during the visit to our town of Premier Nikita Khrushchev. A stray was presented to Khrushchev during a visit to Hughesovka and he in turn presented it to the Space Programme. But it turned out that the puppy belonged to Gethsemane and had followed her from Wales by the same route; no doubt by following the scent. Imagine it! Laika, the national hero, the pride and joy of our nation and proof to the world of our technological and moral ascendancy over the United States, was not a Russian dog as we assumed, but was Welsh. The puppy of Clip the sheepdog, now housed in your museum on Terrace Road. For the sake of our national honour all traces of this fact were duly expunged from the historical record.’
‘What became of Gethsemane?’
‘I do not know. In the fifties, after they started emptying the camps, there were many people moving to and fro across our vast land; so many fates and tragedies. Who knows where she ended up? She may be dead but there is no reason to suppose it. I like to think she is still alive, that she journeyed along the same railway line to Vladivostok that her father took before her and that somewhere along the way, perhaps some insignificant wayside halt, she got off the train. Perhaps there she found a man and a home and had children of her own; perhaps there she found that most ardently coveted of treasures, human felicity.’
‘How did Natasha know I was travelling on the Orient Express with the photo?’
‘Mooncalf told us, of course. There is a substantial reward available for information leading to the acquisition of these photos. We do a lot of business with Mr Mooncalf. He is a great man.’