‘Let’s stop for a moment,’ says Alexey.
Lev obeys. The car engine shudders and dies. I smooth down my summery frock, which sticks to the back of my legs as I step out of the Mercedes. I am not dressed for trekking through bramble. The mushrooms beneath my feet make a crunching noise as I go closer, and now the object in the man’s grasp begins to take shape: it’s nothing more than some kind of kitchen rag or cloth, compressed into a ball.
Nature is reclaiming all of this, the land, the village, the villager, but it will never have that rag.
‘Good day to you, friend,’ says Alexey. ‘We’re looking for Otrada. Could you help us? Direct us from here?’
The old man’s eyes are filmy with cataracts. He gestures for us to follow him inside, keeping the rag-ball stowed beneath his arm.
The interior of the cabin is cramped and dismal. One corner is overflowing with Orthodox icons and candle stubs; pushed against another is a thatch-covered bag of dirt that I suspect to be a bed. Beside the long, silent stove stands a slanted table, and beyond that is a pyramid of food jars not unlike Mum’s own collection. Their pickled contents appear monstrous, the white sweet onions like human eyeballs, the gherkins like foetuses.
‘There is nobody at Otrada any more,’ says our host.
‘But could you help us find the way?’ says Alexey.
‘There is no way.’ The old man’s voice sharpens. ‘Not in, not out.’
Alexey gives a small sigh.
I look down at the table, at what appear to be some old letters. Dear Kirill Vladimirovich, begins the one on top. The smell of wet earth is beginning to eat at my good humour. I glance through the window, impatiently, towards the car.
And then I smell something else.
Charcoal.
Zoya is here. But no matter how I trawl my memory, I can’t think of anything that matches the smell. What’s coming to mind is entirely foreign, shaky and blurred as it takes shape: it’s not a memory at all, but the image of a house. Not a house, only a lifeless shell, its remaining walls in the grip of greedy vines. Behind these ruins lie blackened fields, a few weeds sprouting through, and looming beyond, a white-birch forest, the trees stripped of bark, like people stripped of …
Until now, Zoya was never able to make me see anything besides my own memories; anything beyond the borders of my own life. This is different. I’ve never been to this place. I’ve never stood amongst this charred wreckage.
I turn around. My mouth feels funny. ‘Did Otrada burn down?’
‘What was that, Rosie?’ asks Alexey.
‘Did it … did the house burn down?’
The old man’s pupils grow large in my direction. It doesn’t help him see me. ‘Take this,’ he commands, and lets the ball droop from his hand. The rag is so ratty, so disgusting, that it can’t shake itself loose. He says, louder now: ‘Take it, take it!’
I don’t know what else to do besides take it.
He opens his mouth and I think he’s going to ask for it back but instead, he sings. He sings a line from a famous wartime ditty that Mum was always fond of, ‘The Blue Kerchief’, and then he sings another, another. Somewhere in there, beneath the leathery skin and the cataracts and the dementia, is someone who desperately wants to do more than sing. I can almost hear that person screaming from within.
As he warbles on, the only thing I can think with any certainty at this moment is that the cloth he has just handed me is not blue. It is in that no-man’s-land of colour. Too long faded.
‘Alright,’ says Alexey, ‘thank you for your hospitality—’
The old man whirls on him. ‘I know who you are! Don’t think I don’t!’
Alexey’s face goes as grey as the rag.
The old man spits and crosses himself. His eyes roll back in his head. Then he stops. A smile appears on those crusty lips, so vacant it is almost sinister. Whatever chance there may ever have been is gone. He has withdrawn to the refuge he has found for himself in his mind.
The sky is a resplendent, radiant purple, heralding the romantic stretch of evening before the light will fade and turn this village into a graveyard. Alexey finally admits defeat. We’ve driven, we’ve hiked, we’ve even got briefly lost. We can’t find Otrada. It’s in the forest somewhere, and not on any map, he says tiredly, and he closes the one I gave him, the one from Mum’s notebook, and tucks it into a pocket. The Mercedes growls as Lev forces it back onto a cratered path, the wheels catching, the gears grinding. Alexey does not say another word.
After some forty minutes of driving, I can tell he has gone to sleep. We are still a ways out of Moscow.
‘Are you OK?’ Lev asks, from the front seat.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, and regret it. I’m not fine. That’s just the British layer of me talking; the top layer. It’s one thing for Zoya to force me to remember things, but what happened in that cabin was a worse violation. She grabbed hold of my mind not to pull out something old, but to shove in something new.
‘Will we take another trip to see your GRU colonel next weekend?’ asks Lev.
‘You could tell he’s GRU?’
‘I was in the Moscow OMON. Until a few months ago.’
I glance at him, but he’s still facing the road. The OMON? They’re crowd control. Riot police. Part of the repressive machinery of the Soviet state, designed to keep the people down and at arm’s – or better yet, sniper’s – length. I know them only by reputation: the ‘Black Berets’. It’s all anybody would want to know.
‘Your friends are too,’ I say. ‘When we met at Red Square.’
‘Former colleagues.’
‘You quit?’
‘I’ve been temporarily reassigned,’ he says, a little sourly. ‘To this.’
To me, is what he means. ‘Why?’
‘Why did you visit the colonel?’
Fair enough.
We’re on the motorway now. The noise, the traffic, can just about replace conversation. I don’t have to say anything else. We can leave it at that impasse, at the same line I always draw on this subject. Lev tries the radio, managing to snag onto a recording of Swan Lake. The orchestra is approaching a climax.
As it does, as the notes spill like a river over a collapsing dam, everything just spills out of me too.
‘My sister and father were killed in 1977,’ I say. ‘By a man named Eduard Dayneko. He was a sniper working for a mafia bratva. All his previous victims were criminals.’ I look down at my hands. They’re clenched into fists. ‘He murdered my family execution-style.’
‘Your father wasn’t a criminal?’
‘My father was a schoolteacher. I’m sorry to tell you all this, I …’
‘You don’t need to keep saying sorry.’
We’re almost back in Moscow, and night is falling. The less I see, the more I hear: the clanging of tram bells, the honking of lorry horns, the shouting pedestrians, the barking dogs. But I feel calm, balanced against the noise and activity of the city. I released a valve, speaking out loud about my family. Some pressure must have lifted.
‘I was involved with someone, a journalist,’ he says. ‘She was using me to get information on my superiors in Internal Affairs. She was exposed. Our relationship ended. Now I am here. Out of the OMON until the Ministry can decide whether I’m trustworthy.’
‘It’s not too bad, I hope.’
‘It was a light punishment.’
His eyes meet mine in the rear-view mirror. I rally a smile. When I think of the OMON, I think of them as one being, one entity. They are always faceless and featureless, behind their shields and balaclavas. It’s strange to imagine them as individuals. As people.
What will Zoya show me, now that she can show me anything? Where will it end?