‘Sir,’ she says, in a strange, froggy voice, ‘Antonina Nikolayevna does not wish to see you ever again.’
‘Just get a message to her from me,’ he says. ‘Please.’
‘I have been told to inform you, sir—’
‘Told by whom?’
Wordlessly the girl produces whatever she had been fumbling with behind her back. Not just her hands, but a piece of paper torn from personal stationery, with Tonya’s initials embossed in the corner. Only two lines are written upon the sheet:
I loved you; maybe the love in my soul has not faded away
But let it not trouble you any longer
It is from the famous poem by Alexander Pushkin. Tonya’s favourite. Valentin looks from the lines to the frayed-looking maidservant and back to the lines again. Whatever he is feeling right now, whatever this agony is, it is new. There is no word for it, and Valentin always has the right word for everything.
Words have often been all he has. And now he is left with nothing.
‘A girl like that only wants what she can’t have,’ declares Viktoria. She is faced away from him, peering into her looking glass, tying her tawny shoulder-length hair into a knot. ‘You should have foreseen this. You can’t have honestly thought she would live in a basement!’
But he had. Valentin had convinced himself of something impossible, because all around him the impossible was already occurring. The promise and the glory of revolution had blinded him; he’d let himself believe he could have everything he wanted.
‘She was seeking a diversion,’ says Viktoria, turning around. ‘And you make a good one.’
‘I should get home, Vika.’
‘I meant it as a compliment,’ she says. ‘I understand why she wanted you. You are—you are the ideal to which the rest of us aspire. I need a piano and all my years of practice to move people the way you do.’
He stops to consider her. Viktoria is smiling at him in a way that he once would have given anything to see. When he first saw her, he was only ten years old, and she was an unfathomable fifteen. Three years later, watching her perform, dazzled by the sight of her fingers flying over the keys, he decided he would one day woo her, perhaps even win her. At sixteen, when Viktoria, herself age twenty-one, came home from a tour of Europe, Valentin blurted out his feelings. She turned him down with such gentleness that he can still conjure the embarrassment of it, if he tries hard enough.
Now he is twenty-two, and he has not thought of her that way since.
‘Why don’t you stay over tonight?’ she says lightly.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I should probably be alone.’
One morning Viktoria’s father, Pavel, is waiting outside Valentin’s door, his cane already poised to knock. The pepper-haired Pavel cuts a clean and respectable figure, and when he removes his hat and looks squarely at Valentin, his voice, too, is clean and calm.
‘I have to talk to you, boy,’ says Pavel.
‘I’m on my way out,’ says Valentin, but half-heartedly. Valentin owes Pavel everything and can refuse him nothing. As a ten-year-old Valentin had just run away from his uncle, a notorious drunk, and he’d been sleeping in a box by the wharf, pickpocketing to survive. Pavel was there handing out political pamphlets and poetry to the sailors and street-sellers. He took Valentin home, fed him, clothed him, taught him, found him a factory job. Introduced him to the underground.
‘Vika’s told me what’s happened with the girl,’ says Pavel. ‘But you’ve disappeared on us. You still have your duties, Valya, your responsibility to the cause and to your fellows. And to me.’
Your life begins here, Pavel said then. You are in. And if you are in, you are in for ever. You will do anything for us, and we will do anything for you.
‘It’s good that this has happened,’ says Pavel. ‘At your tender age. Now you know better.’
‘It was a mistake,’ says Valentin flatly.
‘A companion for the life you’re going to lead, boy, had better be one of us.’
‘I understand.’
‘Good.’ Pavel motions with the cane for Valentin to come close. The older man’s embrace is firm. ‘Mistakes or not, you’re my son,’ he says. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
‘Thank you,’ says Valentin, a slight crack in his voice. He grips Pavel hard in response. He was reborn, after meeting the Katenins, after joining the Party. But he remembers that he had another family once, a mother with warm eyes and a babushka with wrinkled hands; remembers growing up with them in an apartment with so many cockroaches that he often mistook those bugs for the ceiling. He knows that he used to be somebody else, someone other than a Bolshevik, someone with things to say that were not rehearsed.
With Tonya, he was that someone again.
He doesn’t know why it felt like that, with her. He doesn’t know how. But Valentin does know this: he may never be rid of the past, but nor can she, or anyone, bring it back. Tonya, in the end, is nothing more than any other petty bourgeois. She will have to pay. They will all have to pay.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rosie
Moscow, July 1991
I compose a letter to Richard that is full of deft little touches. I explain how our resident cockroaches frolic in the cocaine-like powder that is meant to kill them. How the electrical voltage meltdowns are more reliable than the current. How the supermarket meat runs like it was just sluiced off the animal; how the cashier uses an abacus to calculate my total. I can imagine Richard, wonderful Richard, reading this, smiling, enjoying the glimpse into daily life in Moscow. But it is a superficial, touristy view. I could send a blank postcard of Red Square. It would have the same effect.
But what should I write instead?
I’m being haunted.
I read and reread my words. I gnaw on my pen until the cap falls off.
‘Ready to head out?’ Alexey pokes his head into the kitchen.
I turn the paper over. ‘Yup, let’s go.’
I awaken to feel a soupy wind in my face, the open car windows letting in a puzzling mix of aromas: pine trees and wildflowers, wood-tar and petrol. I must have fallen asleep on the motorway, because we already seem to be crossing the precise spot where the city and the country meet. As we drive on, the undergrowth thickens, throttles the landscape. The trees are taller, packed together.
Lev manoeuvres the Mercedes down the potholed lanes with disregard, one arm dangling out the window as he smokes. The road is degrading into an unpaved path. Alexey indicates a turn, and the car shrieks in protest as Lev pulls it up short.
The first sign of human habitation is a small log cabin, but it seems long abandoned. The door hangs off its hinges. Planks of wood are missing from the frame and porch rails. A noisy family of sparrows occupies the roof, and something dashes by, a blur of brown. More cabins appear, further down the way, all in the same state, a tableau of decay.
‘These villages often die off, as young people move to the cities,’ says Alexey.
The so-called village has a prying stare, even without eyes. I edge away from the window. Mum had quite a few stories that took place in the countryside, but her idea of rural Russia was troikas and teahouses, silver bells and painted windowsills. Like a massive Christmas gingerbread display. There was always a manic quality to these details, like she knew it was too much, but she just couldn’t help herself.
‘There’s somebody there,’ notes Alexey.
An old man is seated in a rocking chair on one of the porches. The chair moves, back and forth, to and fro. He cradles something in his arms, too straight, the way you might hold someone else’s baby. He turns and I see that his face is sallow, saggy with time. He might be younger than Alexey, but he has aged worse.