‘Hello, beautiful,’ he called. ‘Ti takaya krasivaya.’
Lydia felt Alexei bristle but nevertheless she looked up into the cab of the truck and gave the driver an answering smile. ‘Dobriy vecher,’ she responded. ‘Good evening.’
‘Want a lift?’
She let the question hang in the air and felt both men alert to her answer. Alexei still held her hand on his arm but made no attempt to speak, looking deliberately straight ahead at the cart being manhandled out of the way.
‘Nyet. But thanks anyway.’ She gave the driver a slow sideways glance and heard him laugh delightedly.
He leaned down in his cab and brought up something small in his hand, which he tossed out the window to her. It arced between them, spiralling and twisting, until Lydia snatched it out of the air with her free hand. It was just a metal disc, no bigger than a coin but polished to perfection, with the name Kolya engraved on it. The driver waved to her and drove on over the cabbages, leaving them with a belch of exhaust fumes and a long blast on his horn.
‘I bet he keeps one of those in his truck for every girl he passes,’ Alexei muttered, and it amused Lydia to see he was irritated by the little gift. She twirled the flat disc between her fingers and the last rays of sunlight turned it to fire.
‘It’s an omen,’ she laughed and swept off her ugly hat, letting her hair leap free.
She had learned about omens from Chang An Lo; how the gods sent them as a sign. Westerners had lost the skill of recognising them, but Chang had taught her how to feel for them with her fox spirit.
‘Lydia, there’s no such thing as-’
‘Of course there is.’ She spun the gleaming disc. ‘See the fire in it. It matches me. Don’t you see? It means I’m meant to be here. The omen burns so bright, it shows we’re destined for success. ’
Alexei had stopped in the middle of the street and was staring at her, disbelief written all over his face. But she didn’t miss the laughter in his eyes.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘shall I tell you my idea?’
‘The answer is still no.’
Lydia stood alone in her bedroom in the hostel, her limbs too stiff and unyielding to let her curl up on the bed and seek refuge in sleep. It was as if they took orders now from Alexei instead of from herself. She heard his words still rattling round inside her skull with a persistence that drove her to fret at the hat in her hands, pulling threads out of it when really what she wanted to do was pull threads out of Alexei.
The answer is still no.
That’s what he’d said, over and over again. ‘I will not allow you to go wandering off on your own. The answer is no.’
Her plan was straightforward, simple really. While he and Popkov spent the next few days or weeks – however long it took – combing through the detritus of the back streets, prodding and poking at it to find the weak points, she would return to the railway station and endeavour to buy a ticket to travel back the way they’d come, in the direction of Selyansk.
‘Why?’ he’d asked, eyes narrowed. ‘What would be the point of that?’
‘To travel past the prison camp’s Work Zone again.’
Alexei had exhaled sharply through his teeth, a low whistling sound she noticed he made only when caught off guard by a sudden strong emotion. It should have warned her.
‘You see,’ she rushed on, ‘I might be able to find a way to pass a message into the camp. Now we know that these trains carry prisoners in transit as well, I might find a way of contacting one and…’ She slowed the words to make him listen, she knew her brother hated disorder. ‘He might seek out Papa… Jens Friis,… and tell him he might…’
‘That’s a lot of mights.’
She felt a flush rise up her cheeks. ‘You and Popkov might not have success in bribing officials, who might just chuck you both straight into the prison camp instead, leaving me stranded here on my own. That,’ she’d said, snatching her hand away from his arm, ‘might happen. And then what?’
They were standing in the narrow street outside a house whose shutters hung on broken hinges, its roof patched unevenly. Darkness was beginning to roll down the centre of the road in long, strange-shaped shadows, a straggle of horse-drawn carts trundling along behind them.
‘Lydia.’ He did not attempt to retrieve her hand. ‘We must all three of us take care. Listen to me. I cannot do my task here properly if all the time I am looking over my shoulder, worried about what antics you’re getting up to.’
‘Antics?’
‘Call them what you will, but can’t you see that I have to be the one who asks the questions to-’
‘Why? Because you are a man?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s not right.’
‘Right or wrong doesn’t come into it, Lydia. It’s the way it is. You are ranimaya just because you are a woman, and-’
‘What does ranimaya mean?’ She hated asking.
‘It means vulnerable.’
‘Well I think maybe the Communists have got it right.’
He studied her face with such concentration that she almost turned away.
‘And what exactly,’ he asked, ‘do you mean by that?’
‘That Communists give women greater equality, they recognise us as…’
A tiny child, impossible to tell whether girl or boy and with a mop of greasy curls and mucus encrusted under its nose, abruptly materialised at Lydia’s knee. Round, brown eyes stared up at her with the moist hopefulness of a puppy’s, but when she smiled at the child it tottered backwards and stuck a filthy thumb into its mouth.
‘We’re becoming a spectacle,’ Alexei murmured.
He released a long, exasperated sigh which annoyed Lydia, and glanced further along the street to where a man was propped against a windowsill, smoking a pipe. His eyes, behind a pair of spectacles bound together with black tape on the bridge of his nose, were observing them with quiet interest. Alexei took hold of Lydia’s upper arm and tried to propel her forward, but she refused to move. She pulled away from him and squatted down on the pavement in front of the child. From her pocket she extracted a coin, took the grubby hand that wasn’t otherwise occupied into her own, and wrapped the little fingers around the rouble. They felt as cold and slippery as tiny fish.
‘For something to eat,’ she smiled gently.
The child said nothing. But the thumb in the mouth suddenly popped out and ran down Lydia’s hair, past the side of her jaw and on to her neck. It was repeated twice. She wondered if the child expected the strands to be hot like fire. With no sound the curly creature turned and waddled with surprising speed towards an open door three houses away. Lydia rose to her feet and rejoined her brother. Side by side but no longer touching, she and Alexei continued up the street at a brisk pace.
‘If you hand out money to every filthy urchin we stumble over in the streets,’ he muttered, ‘we’ll have none left for ourselves. ’
For a long while they walked on in stiff silence, but just when they passed the park once more, where the wind was still chasing its tail and pursuing the sheets of newspaper, Lydia suddenly snapped, ‘The trouble with you, Alexei, is that you’ve never been poor.’
At the hostel they parted with few words. It was one of the new buildings, deprived of any iron scrollwork, faceless and totally forgettable. Others like it were springing up throughout the town to house the expanding workforce, but it was clean and anonymous which suited them both.
In the entrance hall someone had hung a large mirror, flecked with black age spots like the back of an old man’s hand, and in it Lydia caught sight of her and Alexei’s reflection. It took her by surprise, the image of the two of them. They both looked so… She struggled for the word, abandoned thinking in Russian and settled for so inappropriate. With a jolt she realised they didn’t blend in at all. Alexei was taller than she’d realised and, though his heavy coat was right in every respect and the way his gloves were patched on two fingers was perfect – she suspected he’d purposely torn and then sewn them up himself – nothing else about him fitted in with the dreary little entrance hall. Everything here was plain and utilitarian, whereas Alexei was elaborate and elegant, even when clothed in a drab overcoat. He was like that wrought ironwork outside, carefully crafted and irresistible to the eye.