‘Time to get off, Alexei.’
‘Right,’ he said, but continued to sit there.
She didn’t yell or shout or tell him he was a lazy bastard, which is what he half expected. Instead she bent down, smiled into his eyes as she positioned her arms under his armpits and straightened, scooping him up with her. He was embarrassed. He had a feeling he probably smelled.
‘I didn’t sleep at all last night,’ he explained.
‘And how many days ago did you last eat?’
‘I don’t know.’
It made him sound stupid. She held his hand and led him off the tram. The air outside was crisp and bright and it startled him.
‘Alexei,’ Lydia said, ‘how did you get in such a mess?’
‘I’m not sure. I got lost.’
‘Well, let’s see if we can find our way home, brother. Without getting separated this time.’
She laughed as she threaded his arm through hers. It gave him hope.
He rolled into bed with one thought flickering through his head: he hadn’t told her about the vory v zakone. But before he could open his mouth to do so, the flickering died out and he had no idea what the thought had been. His eyelids sank as if dragged down by lead weights. It was black inside his head and he liked it that way.
He slept. His dreams were so busy it seemed that he was dead to the world for a whole month, but each time his eyelids lifted a crack, Lydia was sitting by his bed wearing the same brown cardigan. It had to be all the same day. At one point he heard raised voices but he had no interest in them and drifted back into the blackness, unsure whether the sounds were in his head. Then a door slammed. That was real.
He dreamed that a tattooist’s vibrating needle plunged right through his chest wall, penetrating his lungs, and he began to drown in his own blood. He choked violently. A hand stroked his forehead and he slept again. But there was something he needed to say. It was sticking spikes in his brain.
Lydia sat and watched her brother. He’d slept for hours, though she could scarcely call it sleep. More like running a race with eyes tightly shut. His body was never still, eyelids twitching, legs scrabbling, arms flailing. His teeth clenching and unclenching, releasing sounds that belonged to a dog. She learned to place a hand on his cheeks and whisper words to drive out whatever demon had dug a hole for itself inside his head. When the door opened and Liev Popkov stumbled into the room, she knew he would not be best pleased.
‘Hello, Liev,’ she smiled up at him. ‘Look who’s here.’
‘Dermo! Shit!’
‘He was on the steps of the Cathedral. I told you he’d be there one day soon.’
‘Shit!’ he said again and walked over to her bed, scowling down at Alexei with his one black eye.
‘Let him sleep,’ she said.
‘Skin and fucking bone, that’s all there is to him. And he stinks like a horse’s arse.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I was sure the bastard was dead in Felanka somewhere.’
Lydia looked up at him, shocked. ‘You never said.’
He grunted.
‘I’ve said he can stay here.’
Popkov snorted. ‘No, he can’t.’
‘Damn you, I say he can.’
‘Nyet.’
‘What do you expect me to do? Throw my brother out on the street?’
‘Yes. He can’t stay.’
‘Why not?’
‘He doesn’t have a resident’s permit, so he’ll bring the police down on our necks.’
She forced down the hard lump in her throat. ‘We can get him one on the black market.’
Slowly Popkov turned his shaggy head, beard first, and glowered at Lydia in the chair. ‘You would use the few good roubles we have left? The ones we need to spend on finding Jens Friis. You’d use them on this worthless piece of shit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ha! Then you are not your father’s daughter.’
Lydia leapt to her feet. ‘Take that back, you dumb Cossack.’
He stood immobile in front of her and she knew he would take back nothing. She slapped his stubborn chest hard with the flat of her hand and he caught her wrist, held her until she was quiet. His big scarred face leaned down to hers and she could see the creases in it deepen.
‘ Lydia, my little friend, you must decide what it is you want. Use that clever mind of yours. Who is it you have come here to find?’
He released her wrist, lumbered out of the room without a glance at Alexei, and slammed the door behind him.
Lydia sat quietly again in the chair. But this time she didn’t sip her tea, even though her throat was burning. Instead she forced herself to handle the words Liev had thrown in her lap, to turn them endlessly round and round the way a potter turns his wheel. Who is it you’ve come to find?
Who is it? Who?
My father. It’s my father I’ve come to find, Jens Friis. The words sounded faint inside her head so she repeated them out loud.
‘I’ve come to find my father, Jens Friis.’
But voices dragged at her mind. Sharp as fingernails on a windowpane. She sank her head into her hands, burying her fingers in her hair as if she could tease out the lies from the truth among the tangle of its strands. She heard a low whimper. She looked around, surprised, expecting Misty to crawl out from under one of the beds, and she was horrified when it dawned on her that she had made the sound herself.
A hand touched her knee. For a moment it startled her. With an effort she came back into the room, into the present, and realised it was her brother’s hand she was staring at. Strong fingers, blue veins snaking deep under the skin, a scar on one knuckle, a long crimson scab down the thumb. But dirty nails, grimy skin. Not the hand she remembered.
‘Alexei,’ she smiled at him. ‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’
‘Are you all right?’
She widened her smile. ‘More importantly, are you all right?’
He nodded. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look fine.’
‘I just need something to eat.’
‘You’ve certainly slept a long time.’ She patted his hand and rose to her feet. ‘I’ll go and heat some soup.’
She was aware of his eyes on her as she left the room, but when she returned with a tray of soup, a chunk of black bread and a slice of Malofeyev’s smoked ham, he said little, just a polite ‘Spasibo.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and she let him eat in peace, but when he’d finished she rose from her chair and joined him.
‘Take care,’ he said with a crooked sort of smile, ‘I probably have fleas.’
‘Looking at the state of you, I think they’re more in danger of you than you are of them.’
He smiled and she caught a glimpse of the old Alexei in it.
‘Tell me what happened to you, Alexei. I waited for you in Felanka for weeks but you didn’t come and I thought you’d left me behind. Gone off on your own.’
He frowned. ‘You are my sister, Lydia. How could you think I would do such a thing?’
Guilt, thick and sticky, rose in her chest. She picked up his hand and held it between her own, resting them on her knee. ‘Because I’m stupid,’ she shrugged and was relieved when he smiled. ‘So where did you go?’ she asked.
He took a breath. She waited, watching the tension in the tendons of his neck, and after a long silence he told her. About the attack on him by prison guards in Felanka, the drowning in the black choking waters of the river and then finding himself on a barge.
‘I lost our money, Lydia. Every bloody rouble of it.’
‘Even the ones hidden in your boots?’
‘Even those.’