And with that he stepped outside our hut, leaving my sisters staring at him in awe, my mother looking as scared as she had ever been, and my father counting his money.
I forced myself to sit up even further and as I did so, I could see through the door on to the street beyond, where a yew tree stood, in full flower, strong and thick and hearty. But something was not quite the same. A great weight appeared to be swinging from its branches. I narrowed my eyes to identify it and when I finally focussed, I could do nothing but gasp.
It was Kolek.
They had hanged him in the street.
1979
IT WAS ZOYA’S idea to make one final journey together.
We had never been great travellers, either of us, preferring the warmth and security of our peaceful flat in Holborn to the exhaustion of holiday-making. After we left Russia, we moved immediately to France; once there, we spent a few years living and working in Paris, where we married, before settling ultimately in London. When Arina was a child, of course, we made our best efforts to take a week away from the city every summer, but it was usually to Brighton, or perhaps as far as Cornwall, to show her the sea, to allow her to play in the sand. To be a child among other children. But we never left the island shores once we arrived. And I thought we never would.
She announced her idea late one evening as we sat by the fire in our living room, watching as the flames diminished and the black coals hissed and spat for the final time. I was reading Jake’s Thing and set the book aside in surprise when she spoke.
Our grandson, Michael, had left half an hour earlier after a difficult conversation. He had come for dinner and to tell us of how his new life as an acting student was progressing, but all the joy of the evening had been swept away when Zoya broke the news to him about her illness and the spread of the cancer. She didn’t want to keep anything from him, she said, although she didn’t want his sympathy either. This was life, after all, she suggested. Nothing more than life.
‘I’m already as old as the hills,’ she told him, smiling. ‘And I’ve been very lucky, you know. I’ve been closer to death than this.’
Of course, being young he had immediately looked for solutions and hope. He insisted that his father would pay for any treatments that were necessary, that he himself would leave RADA and find proper employment to pay for anything she needed, but she shook her head and held his hands in hers while she told him that there was nothing that anyone could do, and there was certainly nothing that money could do either. This thing was incurable, she told him. She might not have many months left and she didn’t want to waste them searching for impossible cures. He had taken the news badly. Having spent so many years without a mother, it was natural that he hated the idea of losing his grandmother as well.
Before leaving, Michael had taken me aside and asked me whether there was anything he could do for his grandmother to ease her comfort. ‘She has the best doctors, right?’ he asked me.
‘Of course,’ I told him, moved by the tears that were pooling in his eyes. ‘But you know, this is not an easy disease to battle.’
‘She’s a tough old bird, though,’ he said, which made me smile and I nodded.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, she is that.’
‘I’ve heard of people that find a way to beat it.’
‘As have I,’ I told him, not wishing to offer him any false hope. Zoya and I had already spent weeks arguing over her decision not to seek any treatment but to allow the disease to work its way through her body and take her when it was finally bored of her. I had tried everything I could to dissuade her from this path, but it was useless. She had simply decided that her time had come.
‘Call me if you need me, all right?’ Michael had insisted. ‘Me or Dad. We’re here whenever you need anything at all. And I’ll stop by more often, OK? Twice a week if I can manage it. And tell her not to cook for me, I’ll eat before I get here.’
‘And insult her?’ I asked, chiding him. ‘You’ll eat what she puts before you, Michael.’
‘Well… whatever,’ he said, shrugging it off, running a hand through his shoulder-length hair and presenting that lean smile of his to me. ‘I’m here, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not going anywhere.’
He has always been a good grandson. He’s always made us proud of him. After he left, Zoya and I both confessed that we had been moved by his thoughtfulness.
‘A trip?’ I asked, surprised by her suggestion. ‘Are you sure that you would be able to manage it?’
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Now, I could, anyway. A few months from now, who knows?’
‘You wouldn’t prefer to stay here and rest?’
‘And die, you mean?’ she asked, perhaps regretting the words as soon as she said them, for she caught the expression of dismay on my face and leaned across to kiss me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. But think of it, Georgy. I can sit here and wait for the end to come, or I can do something with whatever time is left to me.’
‘Well, I suppose we could take a train somewhere for a week or two,’ I said, considering it. ‘We had some happy times on the south coast when we were younger.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of Cornwall,’ she said quickly, shaking her head, and it was my turn now to feel regret, for the name inspired memories of our daughter, and in that direction lay grief and madness.
‘Scotland, perhaps,’ I suggested. ‘We’ve never been there. I’ve always thought that it might be nice to see Edinburgh. Or is that too far? Are we being too ambitious?’
‘You can never be too ambitious, Georgy,’ she said with a smile.
‘Not Scotland, then,’ I said, imagining a map of Britain in my mind and looking around it in my imagination. ‘It’s too cold there this time of year anyway. And not Wales, I think. The Lake District, perhaps? Wordsworth country? Or Ireland? We could take a ferry over to Dublin, if you think you could manage it. Or travel south, towards West Cork. It’s supposed to be very beautiful there.’
‘I was thinking further north,’ she said, and I knew by her tone that this was no idle conversation, but something that she had been considering for some time already. She knew exactly where she wanted to go and would settle for nowhere else. ‘I was thinking of Finland,’ she said.
‘Finland?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why Finland, of all places?’ I asked, surprised by her choice. ‘It’s so… well, I mean, it’s Finland, isn’t it? Is there anything to see there?’
‘Of course there is, Georgy,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It’s an entire country, like anywhere else.’
‘But you’ve never expressed any interest in seeing Finland before.’
‘I was there as a child,’ she told me. ‘I don’t remember it very much, of course, but I thought… well, it’s as close to home as we could get, isn’t it? As close to Russia, I mean.’
‘Ah,’ I said, nodding slowly and considering it. ‘Of course.’ I pictured the map of northern Europe in my head, the long border of over seven hundred miles that stretched the length of the country, from Grense-Jacobsely in the north to Hamina in the south.
‘I’d like to feel that I was close to St Petersburg once again,’ she continued. ‘Just one more time in my life, that’s all. While I still can. I’d like to look into the distance and imagine it, still standing. Invincible.’
I breathed heavily through my nose and bit my lip as I stared into the fire, where the last of the coals were turning to embers, and considered what she had asked. Finland. Russia. It was, in the most literal sense of the phrase, her dying wish. And I confess that the idea excited me too. But still, I was unsure of the wisdom of such a journey. And not just because of the cancer.