‘Um—’
‘Alexey Ivanov will be away a lot,’ he says, stringing together his longest sentence thus far. ‘He was worried about your security. A young girl. Alone in Moscow. With poor Russian.’
‘My Russian’s not poor, it’s rusty,’ I say defensively. ‘I’m a native speaker. And I’m twenty-four. I don’t need a childminder.’
He shrugs.
‘You mean to say you’re my bodyguard? Is that what you do professionally?’
‘No,’ he replies, stone-faced. ‘It is not.’
He wants me to stop talking. Stop asking questions. I pin my gaze back on the tapestry. There’s a prickle along my arms. This restaurant has air conditioning and ice water. Two things I’ve never encountered in Moscow before.
I want to stop asking questions. I want not to have to sit here, drenched in a cold sweat, but if I go back to England now, it’ll be the same as it always has. This is the only way to stop thinking about that man and how he killed Zoya and Papa, in less than the time it took for me to run from the bedroom I shared with Zoya into the living room. How that man looked right at me, with his slate-grey eyes, and I believed that he was going to kill me too, but he didn’t. He just left me standing there, in a widening pool of blood.
The tangy aroma of it filled the whole room, filled my lungs to capacity. I’ve never breathed it out.
It’s only when we’re back at the apartment that Alexey informs me and the driver, whose name is Lev, of the sleeping arrangements. I had assumed Lev would go home for the night, but apparently part of his job description is to live here. Alexey assigns me the roll-out sofa, which he claims is more comfortable, while Lev can take the cot by the living-room door. I’m so knackered that I start laughing. This is what he meant by sorting the housing?
Lev looks over at me, his eyes narrowed, and offers to sleep outside, but I can’t banish anyone into that cheerless hallway.
So, after a late-night tea, I am in bed, if this sofa can be called a bed, lying rigid as a plank, with a complete stranger only yards away. He’s so silent that I could easily forget he’s there, but I can already hear the whisper of insomnia in my ear.
It can make you feel like you’ll never sleep again.
I lean over to turn on the lamp.
‘You need something?’ asks Lev.
Maybe he can’t sleep either. The light flickers as I rummage through my bag. ‘No, nothing. Oh – before I forget, I know Alexey’s said he’ll be out of town Saturday.’ Where are those bloody sleeping pills? ‘I also need to make a quick trip. Just out of Moscow. There’s no reason for you to come. You can have the day off.’
‘I’ll drive you.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I can take a taxi.’
‘Why waste the money,’ he says. It’s not a question.
The lamplight dies. The driver gets out of the cot and switches on the overhead light. Half past midnight, according to my wristwatch. Tick. Tock. Tick. The pills are in hand. I’m about to tell him he can turn it off again when something begins to bloom in the air.
The briny smell of the Black Sea.
The Black Sea at Sochi is the only place my parents ever took me and Zoya on a family holiday. Papa liked to tell us how the water of the Sea is unusually oxygen deficient. Almost nothing can live down there. But almost nothing decomposes, either. Buried treasure. Shipwrecks. Bodies.
No one survives but the dead.
Zoya.
Twice in the same day. This has never happened before.
In Sochi, Zoya and Mum would always collapse in the hotel bed after a day on the beach. Once, over the sound of their snoring, Papa dug out his textbooks and said to me: Look, Raisa, how would you approach this problem? And what about this one? I was only five, six years old maybe, and I retorted that I didn’t want to do maths, not again. I wanted to be snoring too. Why didn’t he make Zoya do this? And weren’t we supposed to be on holiday?
I don’t want to be like you when I grow up, Papa!
There are the people who only see the surface, Papa said. And then there are the people who can see beneath. You know how beautiful it is when it’s just snowed, back home?
So what, I replied, petulantly.
The snow is only a cover, Raisochka. It hides the dirt, the pavement, the rats, the rot. It hides the bodies, the gravestones, the history, all the things people must pretend do not exist, so that they can live. Every time you look at snow from now on, you remind yourself: there’s something else there. Something I cannot see.
But, Papa …
You’ve got the knack for this, he said. Just not the discipline. That is where I come in. I’m going to show you something else, now. It’s a puzzle. A cipher. And you are going to break it.
To go beneath.
‘You should get some sleep.’
The memory splinters. Lev says it again, bluntly. I’ve dropped the pills back into my bag. I need them even more now, to blot out these images, to stop Zoya. Impatiently I dump the contents out on my lap. Passport. Wallet. A few loose coins. A scrunchie.
Mum’s notebook.
It’s open just a hair, to that first, unnerving page: A Note for the Reader. I pick it up, intending to put it away safely, but the feeble light in this room somehow brings out the writing within. I hesitate. At worst, one of her stories would be a distraction; at best, it might actually help to lull me to sleep. Mum always meant them as bedtime stories. They used to be bedtime stories. Before the drinking.
I did promise her.
‘Would you do me a bit of a weird favour?’ I ask.
‘What?’ says Lev, unmoved.
‘Would you read one of these stories to me? They were written by my mother. They’re quite short.’
He shifts his focus to the notebook. ‘You can’t read Russian?’
‘I haven’t used cursive since I was a kid.’ I stand up, reach it out to him. ‘The first page took me an hour.’
‘Fine. Why not.’ Lev takes it and opens the cover. ‘“These stories should not be read in order”,’ he recites, impassively. ‘Should I start with the first one?’
‘It doesn’t—’ I stop short. ‘Let’s just do what it says.’
The Wedding Veil
In a faraway kingdom, in a long-ago land, a girl wore a wedding veil so thick that she wasn’t able to see the man she was marrying. The wedding was pretty. There were feasts and songs and a crown was raised over her head. The couple were feted with bread and salt, and the girl’s single plait was undone. Everything was coming undone. People she didn’t know fussed and clucked about her, and she was taken everywhere: from the bathhouse to her bedroom and then to the church, but still she couldn’t see what she had married.
Until it was too late.
CHAPTER FOUR
Antonina
Petrograd (St Petersburg), summer 1916
Dmitry is present for tea today. He even sits in a chair beside her, instead of remaining at the escritoire. He smiles, a smile that blends in with the silver-blue wallpaper; Tonya cannot really tell which way it is going.
‘I’m neglecting you, my Tonyechka,’ he says. ‘I was away so much. And now I am here, the board is keeping me busy something terrible. There’s strife at the factory. There may even be a strike.’
‘I’ve heard that the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions are at odds,’ Tonya says, absently.
He gives her an odd look. ‘I didn’t realise you were so au fait, my dear.’
‘I only know from Kirov’s wife,’ she says, referring to the brazenly political spouse of one of Dmitry’s acquaintances, holding her breath through the lie.