Sixteen members of staff lived full-time on the estate. They all slept in wooden cabins, similar to mine, apart from Josef and Karl, who lived in the big house. There were the two housekeepers – bossy women who were always in a hurry, permanently scowling. One of them was called Nina and she had it in for me from the start. She used to carry a wooden spoon in her apron and whenever she got the chance she would clout me over the head with it. She didn’t seem to have noticed that we were both servants, on the same level, but I didn’t dare complain. I have a feeling that she hated working for Sharkovsky as much as I did. The only trouble was, she’d decided to take it out on me.
Then there was Pavel, about fifty years old, short, twitchy, always dressed in whites. He was very important to me because he was the chef and it was his cooking that I would be tasting. I’ll say this for him, he was good at his job. All the food he prepared was delicious and I was given things I hadn’t even known existed. Until I came to the dacha, I had never eaten salmon, pheasant, veal, asparagus, French cheese… or even such a thing as a chocolate éclair. Pavel only used the very best and the freshest ingredients, which were flown in from all over the world. I remember a cake he made for Maya’s birthday. It was shaped like a Russian cathedral, complete with gold-leaf icing on the domes. Heaven knows how much he was given to spend.
I never got to know Pavel very well, even though he slept in the cabin next to me. He was hard of hearing so he didn’t talk much. He was unmarried. He had no children. All he cared about was his work.
The staff included a personal trainer and two chauffeurs. Sharkovsky had a huge fleet of cars and he was always buying more. Six armed guards patrolled the grounds and took turns manning the gatehouse. There was a general maintenance man, who was always smoking, always coughing. He looked after the tennis court and the heated swimming pool in the conservatory. I will not waste time describing these people… or the gardeners, who turned up every morning and worked ten hours a day. They are not really part of my story. They were simply there.
But I must mention the helicopter pilot, a very quiet man in his forties, with silver hair cut short in a military style. His name was Arkady Zelin and he had once flown with the VVS – the Soviet Air Force. He neither drank nor smoked. Sharkovsky would never have put his life in the hands of a man who was not utterly dependable. He was always on standby in case his master needed to get somewhere in a hurry, so he might spend weeks at the dacha between flights, and once the helicopter had been tied down there was little for him to do. Just like Maya, he read books. He also kept himself fit, doing press-ups and running around the grounds. Sharkovsky had a gymnasium as well as the pool but Zelin wasn’t allowed to use either of them.
Zelin was one of the few people who bothered to introduce himself to me and I was quick to let him know about my old love of helicopters. He piloted a two-bladed Bell 206 JetRanger with seating for four passengers – Sharkovsky had ordered it from Canada – and although I wasn’t allowed near it, I often found myself gazing at it across the lawn. Escape was too dangerous to consider, but even so, in my wilder moments, it sometimes occurred to me that the helicopter might be my only way out. I couldn’t hide in it. I’d have been spotted at once unless I crawled into the luggage compartment and that was always kept locked. But maybe, one day, I would be able to persuade Zelin to take me with him – if he was flying alone. It was a foolish thought but I had to keep some sort of hope alive in my head or I’d go mad. And so I stayed close to him. The two of us would play Durak together, the same game that I had played with Dima, Roman and Grigory. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them. But as time went on, I thought about them less and less.
One other member of the staff was important to me. His name was Nigel Brown and he was English, a thin, elderly man with straggly ginger hair and a pinched face. He had once been the headmaster of a prep school in Norfolk and still dressed as if he worked there, with corduroy trousers and, every day, the same tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Zelin told me there had been some sort of scandal at the school and he had been forced to take early retirement. It was certainly true that Mr Brown never talked about his time there. Sharkovsky had hired him as a private tutor, to help Ivan and Svetlana pass their exams. Other tutors came and went but he lived at the dacha permanently.
All the staff met every evening. Just as I had thought, the brick building which I had seen beside the cabins was a recreation room with a kitchen and dining area, where we ate our meals. There were a few battered sofas and chairs, a snooker table, a television, a coffee machine and a public telephone – although all calls were monitored and I wasn’t allowed to use it at all. After dinner, the guards who weren’t on duty, the chauffeurs and sometimes the chef would sit and smoke. Mr Brown had nothing to say to any of them but perhaps because I was so young, he took an interest in me and decided for no good reason to teach me English. It soon became a personal project and he took delight in my progress. It turned out that I had a natural aptitude for languages and after a while he began to teach me French and German too. Most of the languages I speak today, I owe to him.
While he taught me, he drank. Maybe this was what had led to his downfall in Norfolk, but at the start of each lesson he would open a bottle of vodka and by the end of it I could hardly work out what he was saying, no matter what the language. By midnight he was usually unconscious and there were many occasions when I had to carry him back to his room. There was, however, one aspect of his drinking habit that was useful to me. He was not a cautious man and under the influence of alcohol he didn’t care what he said.
It was Nigel Brown who told me what little I knew about Sharkovsky.
“How did he make all his money?” I once asked. It was a warm evening about six months after I had arrived. There was no breeze and the mosquitoes were whining beneath the electric lights.
“Ah, well, that’s all politics,” he replied. We had been talking in English but now he slipped back into Russian, which he spoke fluently. “The end of Communism in your country created a sort of vacuum. A few men stepped in and he was one of them. They’ve sucked all the money out of your country, every last ruble. Some of them have made billions! Mr Sharkovsky invested in companies. Scrap metal, chemicals, cars… He bought and he sold and the money flowed in.”
“But why does he need so much protection?”
“Because he’s an evil bastard.” He smiled as if was surprised by what he had just said but decided to continue anyway. “Mr Sharkovsky is connected with the police. He’s connected with the politicians. He’s connected with the mafia. He’s a very dangerous man. God knows how many people he’s killed to get to where he is. But the trouble is, you can’t go on like that without making enemies. He really is a shark.” He repeated the last word in English. “Do you know the word ‘shark’, Yassen? It’s a big fish. A dangerous fish. It will gobble you up. Now, let’s get back to these irregular verbs, past tense. I buy, you bought. I see, you saw. I speak, you spoke…”