Yuri stretched back in the upright chair, trying to relieve his ache of concentration. Yes, he decided, answering his own questions. He’d looked for an answer in the letters and he’d found it. What had happened to his parents was the other sort of destruction that war caused. Except that they had not been destroyed. His mother had made an understandable mistake and when she’d realized it she had returned to his father and lived out her life with him.
There was not much correspondence left. Yuri leaned forward again, reading the letters in sequence, tracing his father’s recovery and recuperation against his mother’s frequent assurances that she would care for him – ‘my duty’ was an often-used phrase – not immediately aware until there was a reference to his father’s promotion within the intelligence service that the letters now were no longer wartime-dated but afterwards. And then he became aware they marked another separation, this time his father’s promotion through what had by then become the KGB. There was a posting to Tbilisi in Georgia, and again in Karaganda in Kazakhskaya.
There was only one letter left, from his mother to his father, and Yuri frowned at it, recognizing from the date another gap between those from his father’s travels. And made further curious from its origin, the maternity clinic at Bakovka.
‘The pain has gone now,’ she had written. ‘I don’t know for how long but I am to summon them if it gets too bad again, as bad as it was when you were here. I know I said it then but I want to say it once more, because I am frightened.
‘I am sorry. I tried and I failed. I am ashamed and I beg your forgiveness, as I have so often begged your forgiveness in the past, always to fail again. We know the reasons: that they will always exist. That I am weak…’
Momentarily Yuri looked away, uneasily, forcing himself to go back to the neat, precise script. ‘I have always loved you, in my way. I only wish, my darling, that it could have been a different way, a complete way. Like it could have been. But wasn’t allowed to be. This has to be the last time I hurt you: could there be any way worse, than how I have hurt you this time?
‘He doesn’t know the truth. His knowing before you is unimportant. I owe you that, at least. I want this to be finaclass="underline" we’ve talked and cried too often for there to be any words or tears left although I am crying now. You were always more tolerant of my tears than Victor: always more tolerant about everything.
‘The doctor who gave me the injection said he thought it was going to be all right. I want it to be all right – to be easy like I’ve always wanted everything to be easy – but I am very afraid that it won’t be. So very afraid. Weak, in every way.
‘I know you promised, when I asked, but I did not believe you. If anything should happen – the anything we could not talk about – please try. You were so close once and could be again: if I were not between you, as I’ve always been between you, would there really be any reason to go on as enemies? If that anything of which I am so frightened happens there will have to be a meeting between you, after all. You will have to tell him, if I can’t. Ask him to be kind: he can be kind and good, you know. He saved your life when he could have let you die, didn’t he? Ask him to protect whoever is inside me, against the truth about me.
‘There is more I want to write, and will, but the pain is coming back and so I will stop, until they make it go away…’
The letter ended there, unsigned.
There was no blur of emotion, no feeling at all. Yuri felt empty, hollowed out, trying to comprehend it all. It had not ended with the war, as he had imagined. His mother had remained with his father – ‘my duty’ – but continued the relationship with Kazin. Which would have been easy, with his father’s necessary Second Chief Directorate postings, throughout the other republics. The reason, most probably, that she had not accompanied him. Always more tolerant. Could it really have been that his father loved his indecisive, weak mother so much that he had been prepared for all these years to tolerate a menage a trois rather than lose her completely? Yuri, so undecided about love himself, found it difficult to believe but it was the only explanation from the letter that lay before him.
His father… Yuri abruptly stopped the further reflection, moving to a fuller understanding. The man might have tolerated it, Yuri thought – clearly had tolerated it – but he had extracted his own bizarre revenge from them both.
The words and phrases forced themselves into Yuri’s mind. He doesn’t know the truth, not yet was the first. And then the second: There will have to be a meeting between you. And perhaps the most telling of all. You will have to tell him if I can’t. Except that Vasili Dmitrevich Malik had never told anyone that the child born to his lawful wife in the Bakovka maternity unit that June day in 1965 had been the son of Victor Ivanovich Kazin.
And then the final, complete awareness engulfed Yuri. Victor Ivanovich Kazin, who had hated and tried to destroy him, had been his real father. Whom he, in turn, had put before a firing squad in Lefortovo.
Yuri destroyed the letters and the photographs in a demolition brazier on a Bronx reconstruction site, two days later, and from a public call box there telephoned Caroline at her apartment on 53rd Street, talking over her surprise that he was back so soon.
‘One question,’ he said.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘How much do you love me?’
‘More than I have ever loved anyone: could love anyone, ever again,’ she replied simply. When he didn’t immediately reply, she said: ‘Why?’
‘I needed to know,’ he said.
‘Are you coming home?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m coming home.’
Epilogue
Natalia Levin arrived at Kennedy Airport blinking her nervousness, her even more uncertain grandmother beside her. They both gazed around expectantly for her parents and became more disorientated when they were greeted instead by Votrin, the Ukrainian who had liaised the letter exchange with the Americans at the UN. There was special immigration dispensation, through which he accompanied them, and immediately beyond the luggage reclaim he handed them over to David Proctor, who said to Natalia: ‘Welcome to America, Miss Levin. Your parents are waiting.’
‘Where?’ she demanded at once, her English heavily accented.
‘Somewhere safe,’ said Proctor, in familiar assurance. ‘You’ll be with them soon.’
The FBI supervisor did not lead them further out but back into the airport complex, where the helicopter waited, its engines already started. ‘Quicker this way,’ said the man.
The sun hurt Natalia’s eyes, so she put on darker sunglasses and squinted behind them, not trying to see whatever it was they were overflying. Beside her the old woman, who had never been in a helicopter before, said: ‘I’m frightened.’
‘Not long now,’ promised Proctor.
It wasn’t.
The family, Galina leading, ran from the Connecticut house before the rotor blades settled and had to be restrained from getting too near, too quickly. Levin cried and Galina cried and Natalia cried and the old woman cried, hugging each other and kissing and then hugging more, holding each other at arm’s length as if they were unable to believe what they saw.
Petr joined in the embraces, but more controlled, and he didn’t cry, either.
Eventually they turned, Natalia encompassed between her mother and father on either side, and started to make their way back inside the house. But Petr hung back.