The person who opens up is a smiling young woman with a severe, scraped-back hairstyle and huge doe eyes, or perhaps the eyes are only the effect of the hair. ‘Valya, hello,’ she says, kissing Valentin once, twice, three times on the cheeks, before turning to Tonya. The smile turns slim, hanging by threads. ‘And who is this? You didn’t say you were bringing anyone.’
‘This is Tonya,’ he says. ‘Tonya, meet Viktoria Pavlovna.’
‘Vika will do,’ says the stranger brightly. ‘How nice to meet you. Valya has not said a thing about you.’ She laughs. ‘Well then, come in! I have slippers enough for everyone. Do you want … ?’ Her gaze drops.
Tonya looks down too, searching for whatever mistake she has already made, and then she realises that Viktoria is staring at her reticule, her sterling-silver bag, engraved with birch branches. In the same hand she still clutches Anastasia’s fancy, floaty handkerchief, the gold glinting obscenely against the drab background of everything around.
‘Perhaps you would prefer to keep on your shoes,’ says Viktoria.
‘Vika,’ says Valentin, an almost inaudible word.
‘I will take the slippers,’ says Tonya. ‘You’re very kind. I have also something for you, that is, as thanks for your hospitality, only a small—’
‘Keep it,’ says Viktoria, and this time there is no denying the coldness. ‘There’s no need for that here.’
A wooden folding table is brought out to what appears to be the main room of the apartment. A soup with a shaky mound of lard in the middle is passed around, and they share spoons. Gamely Tonya lifts a spoonful of soup to her mouth. It has a grainy texture that reminds her of bathwater. All around her there is heavy-handed political discussion; names and dates are flung back and forth like insults. In Dmitry’s circles, people never speak of politics in these tones, and in Popovka, nobody knew how.
Tonya has picked up from the conversation that Viktoria is the daughter of the well-known writer Pavel Katenin, while Viktoria herself is a classical pianist. It is not just penniless workers who believe in the Bolshevik cause.
‘Which writers do you enjoy most, Tonya?’ Viktoria asks her, leaning over.
Tonya is about to answer honestly, but then she thinks of her copy of Eugene Onegin, with its stiff, starchy pages, its velvet-bound covers. Of course Valentin’s friends do not read Pushkin for pleasure, as she does. She knows precisely what they read; she has tried her best to comprehend it. Marx. Chernyshevsky. Radishchev. Lenin. They must find Pushkin soppy, slobbery, romantic mush by comparison. Weaker than the soup.
‘Will you not read to us tonight?’ Viktoria presses, and Tonya realises she’s not given any reply.
‘I’m afraid I’ve never read to others before,’ she says, flushing. ‘We didn’t have reading circles, back home. Though people would tell stories around a table like this. Fairy tales and fables, mostly,’ Tonya adds, seeing more heads turn her way. ‘I am from the country. From Tula.’
‘The country,’ someone remarks, with the disdain of any of Dmitry’s friends. The country. Like it is an infectious disease.
Tonya has the fleeting feeling that she may never belong anywhere.
‘You must tell us one,’ says Viktoria, pointedly.
Beneath the table, Tonya turns the beaded handkerchief in her hands. She has heard countless stories told around countless hearths. And over the past few months, she’s begun to have a few half-formed story ideas of her own, silvery spiderweb strands, though she’s yet to commit any to paper. Why shouldn’t she tell a story? Why not try, in a setting like this, custom-made for such an endeavour? Expectant faces, sceptical strangers, a breathlessness in the air?
‘In a faraway kingdom,’ she says, relying on this well-worn phrase, ‘in a long-ago land …’
As she speaks, she sees their faces change, but how she can’t say.
‘A princess lived in a palace by the sea, far from the city, far from the …’
Their silence is smothering, and in it, her mind is suddenly clear. What has she done, coming here? What has she hoped to prove, to herself, to Valentin? She is everything that these people despise most. Everything that they hope to destroy. She has upended their evening with her intrusion, her ignorance, her country-ness. Too humiliated to continue, Tonya stands up, her chair scraping. She brushes away someone’s question, another’s concern, an offer for another drink, and she catches a toe on a chair leg as she breaks out of the room.
She halts just outside the door, breathing hard, trying to regain her composure.
Let her go, she hears someone say, Viktoria maybe. Why would you bring someone like her, Valya? Who’s next, one of the grand duchesses?
Someone like her.
The words are chilling. Tonya grips the splintery wooden rail of the stairs as she goes, confused by how badly she feels.
Valentin catches up to her downstairs.
‘It’s getting late,’ she says, her hand already on the door. ‘I’m tired.’
‘Too tired to say goodbye?’
Outside, the night sky is bright and glowing. There is no cover in this city, nowhere to hide. Tonya looks back and forth at the intersection of traffic, still busy with late-night revellers. Valentin stays a distance away from her, and she resents him, resents him because before it was only imaginary, and now she knows what it is like to be with him, knows what it is like to be the one he looks for, in those crowds.
How will she be content with fantasies now?
‘I didn’t know you told stories,’ he ventures.
‘I don’t,’ she replies, curtly. ‘As you could see.’
‘My friends were rude to you.’ He hesitates. ‘I’m sorry. They are wary of strangers.’
‘Have you never taken anyone along to meet them before?’ She regrets the question at once. It is bourgeois of her to ask this. Possessive. Base. Tonya herself is married, and no matter how Valentin may speak of the future in his speeches, there is no future for the two of them.
‘No,’ he says simply. ‘Come, milaya, I’ll walk you home.’
When their love affair first began, they were meeting only once a week, and they would depart together, surreptitiously, from the Liteyny Bridge. Only by the stairs leading down to his room would he turn to her, that smile of his balanced on his perfect lips. But soon they were meeting twice a week, and soon after that every other day, and by now they no longer even arrive at those slippery steps. It has been nearly half a year. Nowadays Valentin pulls her down some back alley, some lonesome byway, and his hands find her garter and he whispers against her hair and she buries her cries in his shoulder. Afterwards she has to shake off her skirts and ravel her shawl like a ribbon.
Sometimes, as she’s walking home on wobbly legs, Tonya remembers Mama’s cautionary tales, about boys like him, about girls like her. Of the diseases, pregnancy, broken hearts, tears, bitterness, but most of all—
Imagine that you are a pair of white gloves, Mama would say, pulling one of her gloves between her hands, too far apart. Any stain that falls on you becomes part of the fabric. No matter how much you wash, you will never be pure white again. And if the stain seems to fade on its own, it’s because it’s sunk into the thread; because it’s gone even deeper.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rosie
Moscow, July 1991
I stand at the rail of Alexey’s balcony. The night is warm and sultry, and the dazzling spray of stars reminds me of the time Mum took me to watch a Guy Fawkes celebration by the Thames. She was holding a bottle of something as pungent as insecticide; back then I didn’t know what it was. She was smiling a lot. Too much. It hurt to look at her, so I looked up instead. The fireworks lasted for some half an hour, and then they stopped, and when they did, it was like I was seeing darkness for the very first time.