He picked up the shovel and started to cover the body of Dmitri Malofeyev with black Russian soil. He did not mention that wolves would claw open the grave before dawn marked it with the light of day.
They washed each other. Chang loved the touch of her hands on his skin and the sight of her flaming mane spilling over her naked shoulder blades. Together they soaped away the dregs of the day’s dirt, from their minds and from their bodies, and afterwards they made love. They didn’t hurry, exploring and caressing each other, teasing tender places and tasting the curve of a neck, the hollow at the top of a thigh, the arch of a foot, the hardness of a nipple.
It was as though they were discovering each other all over again, at the end of a day that had changed something between them. He relearnt the exact sound of her moan when he was inside her and the way she whimpered when he slowed to long, rhythmic strokes, her fingers digging at his back as if they would scoop out his heart. When finally he lay with his cheek flat on her stomach, sweat salty on his tongue, he must have fallen asleep because he woke suddenly and sensed that Lydia had moved. She was kneeling beside him on the bed, moonlight painting her hair silver. Lying across her palms was his knife. She had removed it from his boot.
‘It was you, wasn’t it, Chang An Lo?’
He felt a rush of blood through his veins, but he lay totally still.
‘What was me?’
‘In the forest.’
‘Of course it was. We were there together. I helped you bury your-’
‘No.’ She turned the blade over and over in her hand, the way she was turning over her thoughts, touching a finger to the unicorn carved into the ivory handle. ‘You know what I mean.’
Her hair hung round her face, shrouding it in secretive shadows.
‘Yes, Lydia, I know what you mean.’
‘In the forest with the soldiers. Four of them dead.’
He listened to her breathing. It was fast and shallow.
‘I could not bear to let you die,’ he answered.
‘So it wasn’t Maksim Voshchinsky watching our backs?’
‘No.’
‘How did you know where I was?’
‘It wasn’t hard, you are part of my heart. How could I not know where it was beating?’
But she would not be put off. ‘Tell me how.’
‘You mentioned to me that you were going out in Voshchinsky’s car. It was not hard to guess where you would be heading.’
‘So you knew? Already knew where the complex was that my father works in?’
‘I have a companion who is as capable of tracking trucks as any Muscovite vor.’
‘Kuan?’
‘No. A good friend of my heart named Biao.’ He removed the knife from her grasp and placed it to one side. ‘You must take care, my love. Beware of betrayal. Too many people know what you are doing.’
‘Except my father.’ He heard her pause and release a long, low sigh. ‘Jens Friis doesn’t know.’
With an abrupt movement Chang sat up and brushed Lydia ’s hair from her face. Her pupils were huge as she looked at him, her mouth alive. Firmly she pressed him back on the bed and moved on top of his body, her hands flat on his chest.
‘My love,’ she murmured, ‘how do I thank you for my life?’
‘By keeping it safe.’
As her hips started to move, he yearned to take her away from Moscow. From her father, from her brother, from the woman with the dead husband. From herself.
51
Snow had fallen overnight and transformed the prison into a creature of beauty. Its roofs and windowsills, its courtyard and even its stone seat, all glittered under the early morning floodlights like pearls on a wedding dress. Jens hated it. Such hypocrisy. How could something so ugly inside look so exquisite? He trudged the circle, single file, head down, no talking. Snowflakes settled on his eyelashes and melted down his cheeks like tears. In front of him Olga’s small figure stumbled and for half a second he held her elbow to support her. It felt as fragile as a sparrow’s wing.
‘No touching!’ Babitsky yelled.
Jens muttered under his breath, ‘One day soon, Babitsky, I swear I’ll come and touch you.’
‘Jens,’ Olga whispered behind her glove without turning round, ‘don’t. The brute isn’t worth it.’
‘He is to me.’
He hadn’t told her that the big man shot dead in the courtyard the day before was his friend. That in the golden days of the Tsar they had sat up all night playing cards together in the stables of the Winter Palace, that they’d fought each other over a girl, arm wrestled for a horse. That they’d bound each other’s wounds and saved each other’s lives. No, he hadn’t told her any of that. He picked up his feet on the white carpet that was smothering the tramp of boots, as if the prisoners were no longer real. Transparent and soundless. Ghosts of a past that was gone. How could he have imagined that they would ever fit into this real Soviet world again? He must have been mad.
He lifted his face to the falling snow and squinted up past the yellow prison lights to the black clouds beyond, where the moon and the stars lay buried. Out of reach. He thought about his daughter for ever out of reach and again felt that dull ache in his chest that, until the letters started arriving, he’d learned to strangle at birth with a simple click of the mind. But now it wouldn’t go away. It was stuck there, as though someone had hammered a nail into his heart and left it there to rust.
So engrossed was he in his thoughts that when the iron gate to the courtyard swung open, growling on its massive hinges and letting in the rumble of early traffic noise, he didn’t look up. There would be no more letters, he was certain of that. Dimly he was aware of the horse jingling its bridle, of the baker grumbling about the cold, of the rattle of metal trays and the enticing aroma of freshly baked bread. But still he couldn’t bear to see beyond their compound.
‘Jens.’ It was Olga. A quick whisper. ‘Look.’
He glanced at her and then through the fence, and saw a girl. She was holding a tray of pirozhki on her head, walking into the building. All he caught was a glimpse of her long straight back, of the way she picked her feet up in the snow as daintily as a cat. A dismal brown hat. A flash of flaming hair at her collar.
‘ Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!’
‘Keep walking, Prisoner Friis,’ a guard growled.
Only then did Jens realise how twelve years in labour camps had trained his tongue. His screams had been silent, exploding only in his head.
‘Move, Friis!’
He moved, one foot in front of the other, making it look easy. Ahead of him Olga glanced over her shoulder at him, eyes worried. ‘Look,’ she whispered again and nodded quickly.
He needed no telling this time. Across the whole width of the courtyard, a distance of more than forty metres, the small door into the side of the prison stood open. His attention fixed on it. Suddenly she was there again, swinging the tray in one hand as if she hadn’t a care in the world, slender and supple in the way she moved. He recognised her even after all these years. A delicate heart-shaped face that made him want to cry. It was pale except for a livid bruise near her mouth, and she had her mother’s full, sensual lips. She was good. No hint of a glance in his direction.
Instead she gave a guard a half smile, patted the horse, cast a look at the stone seat, walked over to the back of the cart and only then let her gaze drift towards the prisoners and to Jens. Their eyes met. For a heartbeat she froze. As he looked at her something cracked inside him and he almost hurled himself at the mesh fence and howled her name. He wanted to feel the touch of his daughter’s fingers on his own, to kiss her young cheek, to discover the mind behind the large, luminous eyes.