A small café in the town offered us a traditional lounas and we took a chance and sat outside, swaddled in overcoats and scarves as the waitress brought us warm plates of salted fish and seed potatoes, replenishing our hot drinks whenever they ran low. As we watched, a group of children ran past us and one of the boys pushed a smaller girl over, sending her toppling backwards into a mound of snow with a terrified scream. Zoya sat forward, prepared to remonstrate with him for his cruelty, but his victim quickly recovered herself and took her own revenge, which brought a satisfied smile to her face. Families passed by, on their way to and from a nearby school, and we settled back with our thoughts and our memories, peaceful in the knowledge that a long and happy relationship negates the need for constant chatter. Zoya and I had long perfected the art of sitting silently in each other’s company for hours on end, while never running out of things to say.
‘Do you notice the scent in the air?’ Zoya asked me eventually as we finished the last of our tea.
‘The scent?’
‘Yes, there’s a… it’s hard to describe it, but when I close my eyes and breathe in slowly, I can’t help but be reminded of childhood. London always smelled to me of work. Paris smelled of fear. But Finland, it reminds me of a much simpler time in my life.’
‘And Russia?’ I asked. ‘What did Russia smell of?’
‘For a time it smelled of happiness and prosperity,’ she said immediately, without needing to pause to consider it. ‘And then of madness and illness. And religion, of course. And then…’ She smiled and shook her head, embarrassed to finish her sentence.
‘What?’ I asked, smiling at her. ‘Tell me.’
‘You’ll think me foolish,’ she replied with an apologetic shrug, ‘but I’ve always thought of Russia as a sort of decaying pomegranate. It hides its putrid nature, red and luscious on the outside, but split it in two and the seeds and arils spill out before you, black and repugnant. Russia reminds me of the pomegranate. Before it went rotten.’
I nodded but remained silent. I had no particular feelings about the scent of our lost country, but the people, the houses and the churches that surrounded me in Finland reminded me of the past. These were simpler notions, perhaps – Zoya had always had a greater tendency towards metaphor than I, perhaps because she was better educated – but I liked the idea that I was near home again. Close to St Petersburg. To the Winter Palace. Even to Kashin.
But how I had changed since I had last set foot in any of those places! Glancing in the mirror as I washed my hands after our lunch, I caught sight of an old man staring at his reflection, a man who had been handsome once, perhaps, and young and strong, but was none of those things any more. My hair was thin and wispy, pure white strands clumped together at the side of my head, revealing a liver-spotted forehead that bore no resemblance to the clear, tanned skin of my youth. My face was thin, my cheeks sunken, my ears appeared to be unnaturally large, as if they were the only part of my physiognomy not in retreat. My fingers had become bony, a lean layer of skin covering the skeleton beneath. I was fortunate in that my mobility was not suffering as I had often feared it would, although when I awoke in the mornings it took much longer now before I could muster all my strength and resources to drag myself from our bed, perform my ablutions and dress. A shirt, a tie, a pullover every day, for my life from the age of sixteen had been constructed on formality. I felt the cold more and more as every month passed.
At times I thought it strange that a man as old and ravaged as I could still command the love and respect of a woman as beautiful and youthful as my wife. For she, it seemed to me, had barely changed at all.
‘I’ve had an idea, Georgy,’ she said as I returned to our table, wondering whether I should risk sitting down again or wait for her to rise.
‘A good idea?’ I asked with a smile, deciding on the former, since Zoya herself showed no sign of standing.
‘I think so,’ she replied hesitantly. ‘Although I’m not sure what you will think.’
‘You think we should move to Helsinki,’ I said, predicting what she was about to say and laughing a little at the absurdity of the idea. ‘Live out our final days in the shadow of the Suurkirkko. You’ve fallen in love with Finnish ways.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head and smiling. ‘No, not that. I don’t think we should stay here at all. In fact, I think we should keep going.’
I looked at her and frowned. ‘Keep going?’ I asked. ‘Keep going where? Further into Finland? It’s possible, of course, but I would worry that the travelling might—’
‘No, not that,’ she said, interrupting me, keeping her voice clear and steady as if she did not want to risk my refusal by appearing overly enthusiastic. ‘I mean we should go home.’
I sighed. It had been a concern of mine when we set off from London that this trip would prove too much for her and she would regret her decision to leave, and long for the warmth and comfort of our familiar Holborn flat. We were not children any more, after all. It was not easy for us to spend so much time in transit.
‘Are you feeling ill?’ I asked, leaning forward and taking her hand, searching her face for any signs of distress.
‘No worse than I was.’
‘The pain, has it become too much for you?’
‘No, Georgy,’ she replied, offering a small laugh. ‘I feel perfectly fine. Why do you say that?’
‘Because you want to go home,’ I said. ‘And we can, of course we can, if it’s what you really want. But we have only four days remaining of our trip anyway. It might be easier to return to Helsinki and rest there until it’s time for our flight.’
‘I don’t mean go back to London,’ she said quickly, shaking her head as she looked towards the children again, playing noisily in the mounds of snow. ‘I don’t mean that home.’
‘Then where?’
‘St Petersburg, of course,’ she replied. ‘We’ve come this far, after all. It wouldn’t take too many hours more, would it? We could spend a day there, just a day. We never imagined that we would stand in Palace Square again, after all. We never thought we would breathe Russian air. And if we don’t go now, when we are so close, we never will. What do you think, Georgy?’
I looked at her and didn’t know what to say. When we had decided to undertake this journey, there had undoubtedly been a part of both of us that had wondered if this conversation would arise and if so, which of us would suggest it first. The idea had been to come to Finland, to go as far east as the weather and our health would allow, and to look into the distance and perhaps to make out the shadows of the islands in the Vyborgskiy Zaliv once again, even the tip of Primorsk, and remember, and imagine, and wonder.
But neither of us had spoken aloud of travelling the last few hundred miles to the city where we had met. Until now.
‘I think…’ I began, rolling the words slowly over my tongue uncertainly before shaking my head and starting again. ‘I wonder…’