‘I’ll be back soon, malishka,’ he crooned and soothed her unruly hair, the mirror image of his own. ‘Just a couple of weeks.’ All the lines of his face melted into a wide smile for her and he kissed her forehead. ‘It’s work,’ he said. ‘I have to go to Paris. But if your mother doesn’t come downstairs soon, I’ll have to go to the station without you.’
‘No!’ she’d wailed. Waving goodbye to Papa was a ritual.
‘Listen,’ he said to comfort her, and held his watch to her ear.
The tick, she could suddenly remember the sound of the gentle tick. Its voice was a soft whisper that enchanted her, so that her eyes grew wide and her heart-shaped face became absolutely still as she concentrated.
‘It talks,’ she breathed.
‘Here, feel it.’
He placed it in her hand, filling the whole of her palm, and she was astonished at the weight of it.
‘It’s gold,’ he explained.
She studied it carefully, the intricate engraving, the filigree work as fine as one of her hairs, and when he turned it over and opened the back she was entranced by the movement of the tiny cogs. This was where it hid its voice.
‘I thought you had a train to catch, Jens.’
It was her mother’s voice, teasing him, holding a hand out as if her skin could not bear to be without his touch for a moment longer. Her dark hair danced loosely around her shoulders, just the way he liked it. Papa stood up straight and tall, and Lydia watched it happen. Just as it always did. Papa would come home grumpy or impatient or weary and then he’d lay eyes on Mama and it set something alight inside him. It burned away the grumpiness and the impatience and the weariness.
Her mother gently removed the watch from her grasp and gave it back to Papa, murmuring, ‘She’s too young to play with it.’ But Papa gave Lydia a secret smile and winked at her. And then everything was a rush and a bustle and they were at the station, full of sounds and smells, shouts and mountains of luggage. And tears. Lydia realised that this was where adults came to cry. Papa hugged them, kissed them and climbed on to the train, calling out last words from the open window as it hauled itself down the track in a giant bellow of steam. Something red. She pulled at the memory but it was hazy, yet she was sure she could recall something red. And then it came to her. A red handkerchief fluttered from his hand, up and down, until it became no more than a tiny spot. Like a tiny speck of blood.
Mama was crying, dabbing at her tears, but Lydia refused to. In Papa’s pocket the cogs were still turning. The cogs of time, little teeth clinging to each other and moving the hands of the watch. The cogs would bring him back to her. She clenched her tiny fists and listened to their voices ticking inside her head.
The Work Zone was still there.
It hadn’t moved.
That had been her fear. That they’d have gone. Packed up their saws and their axes and their timber wagons, and transferred to another part of the forest far away from the railway line. She shivered but it wasn’t from the cold in the rail carriage, it was with relief. She felt the golden hairs rise on her arms and she leaned her forehead against the icy pane of glass as if it brought her closer to him. Outside the landscape was flat as the glass and frosted with patches of snow. Large swathes had been completely stripped of trees, so that rocky stretches were now visible, shifting the colour of the terrain from a thousand shades of green and russet brown to an unrelenting battleship grey.
Had that happened to Papa too? That shift to Soviet grey? She rested the fingertips of one hand on the window, averting her eyes from the monochrome uniforms that surrounded her.
Papa, I’m here. The cogs have brought me to you. The wheels are turning.
Lydia rose to her feet and yanked on the leather strap so hard the train window slid all the way down with a clunk. The rush of freezing air wrenched her breath away and an outburst of moans and complaints scrambled around her.
‘Shut that window!’
‘It’s fucking freezing.’
‘Are you out of your mind, girl? My bollocks are falling off!’
She scarcely heard the outcry. Every scrap of her attention was focused on the terrain as the tips of the watchtowers slid into view far in the distance, tiny grey matchsticks against a crisp blue sky. At first she could make out no figures labouring on the edge of the forest. Her heart slumped in her chest, but as the train billowed its way along the track it swept past a huge stack of pine trunks which lay on the ground like dead people’s limbs. Lydia had assumed the timber was floated downriver somewhere, the way she’d seen it done in China, but no. Not here anyway. This small mountain of tree trunks was clearly intended to be loaded on to flatbed wagons and hauled into the timber yards by rail.
Lumbering along the flat terrain at a painfully slow pace, still distant but heading in the direction of the dead limbs, a wagon was approaching loaded with another consignment. Lydia struggled to count the number of miniature figures yoked to the transporter, but it was too far away. She blinked and counted again. There had to be at least twenty. Her eyes fixed on them and wouldn’t let go.
‘Comrade.’ It was the man in the suit, her watch-companion. This time his voice was curt. ‘Close that window, pozhalusta.’
Still she didn’t hear. He touched her elbow to gain her attention and made as if to rise to perform the job himself, but before he could do so Lydia pulled from her shoulder pack two small scarlet bundles. Each one consisted of a headscarf tied in a knot and inside lay something of weight.
‘Look here…’ The suit was losing patience.
She’d seen a working party of prisoners up ahead, just four of them, no more than a few hundred metres away from the track. They were digging with spades, shifting rocks it seemed, maybe clearing a path for the wagon. Lydia snatched off the red scarf that was around her neck, leaned out of the window as far as she could and waved the vivid smear of material at them. Back and forth, back and forth, to gain their attention.
Pozhalusta, she breathed, please look up.
Smuts from the engine smacked into her face. The figures were coming closer. Not one of them looked up from his shovel. Don’t they want to see human faces at the train windows? Is the sight of freedom too painful to contemplate? One hundred metres. It was as close as she was going to get. She drew back her arm and hurled one of the scarlet bundles out of the window. As it arced through the trembling air like a bright red bird, she watched the men closely and emptied her lungs in one long banshee shriek. Not one of them looked her way.
Don’t they hear? Or don’t they care?
The red bird landed on the edge of a rock, rebounded and fluttered to rest on an open stretch of ground, where it fell against the stump of a tree and nestled among the dead roots. No, no, no. Lydia’s mouth gasped open and her tongue was stung by ash from the engine.
‘Stop that, comrade.’ This time it was the man who’d been asleep under the cap. He was awake now all right, alert and angry. ‘What you’re doing is against the law. Stop that right now or-’
‘Or what?’ A young loose-limbed soldier, who up till now had been sitting quietly next to Lydia and whom she had given barely a glance, unfolded himself from his seat and stood behind her. ‘Or what?’ he repeated.
A chuckle rippled around the other soldiers and one warned, ‘Don’t cross him, comrade. He’s our boxing champ.’
Lydia raised the second bundle ready to throw.
‘Allow me?’
The soldier was holding out his big-knuckled hand, palm up, and waited with a polite smile on his face. Lydia noticed his nose had been recently broken and the bruise had spread to a muddy yellow. She hesitated for no more than one turn of the wheels, then entrusted the little parcel to him and edged back into her seat to allow him room. He grinned at her, tossed his army cap on to his seat, pushed his broad shoulders through the window as far as they would go and took careful aim. He launched the red bundle with a grunt of effort.