I should have got to know her better when she was alive. Maybe then I would know what she wants from me now. But we were never close, as children.
In our neighbourhood there was a playground where every piece of equipment was made of metal, the slides, the hoops, the bars. I often wanted to stop, to play. Zoya never did. She always had to go meet friends, or eventually, some new boy. She’d tell me to play on my own. She’d run off and I believed I saw it in her too: something metal. My sister, underneath the winning smiles, the glowing skin, the glossy hair, was made of metal.
Tick, tock, tick, tock, says my wristwatch. I’ve switched off all the lights, but I can’t make anything go dark: that husk of a house, the grasping vines, the naked birch. I pull my blanket higher, wishing I could pull it over my head.
‘Can’t sleep again?’ asks Lev, shattering the silence like glass.
I had no idea he was awake too. He can stay so still for so long. Like some kind of animal playing dead. ‘It’s always rubbish being haunted, but especially at night.’ I pause. ‘My sister’s name was Zoya.’
‘Not too common,’ he remarks. ‘Like Raisa.’
‘My mother named us. She liked to stand out.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Names are just labels.’
‘But they can have a lot of power.’
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
‘I think Zoya wants me to uncover the truth,’ I say thinly. ‘To understand what happened the night they were killed.’
‘Or else she wants to keep you from it.’
I can’t tell whether he’s being serious. ‘I think she knows that if anyone is going to figure it out, it’s me.’
‘Are you a detective, in England?’
‘A PhD student. I study codes, encryption.’ I eyeball the ceiling. ‘My father was an amateur cryptographer. He trained me to perceive unusual patterns, breaks, pieces of a puzzle, and how to move them around, hold them in my head, put them back together.’
‘That does sound convenient for solving mysteries.’
‘Yeah, but as a result, I’m often bothered by tiny things. Patterns that don’t matter. Or that aren’t even there. I’ve become hypersensitive, I suppose.’ I make a face, even though I know he can’t see it. ‘Maybe that’s why Zoya chose me, to communicate with, because I’d be the one to sense her. But also she knows …’ I pause, and then a bit hoarsely: ‘I’ll never give up. There’s an answer, to what happened to my family, and I’ll keep going until I have it. However long it takes.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I see now why you don’t believe in coincidences.’
I turn my head. I shouldn’t burden Lev any further. I’m here to purge myself of my past, not poison others with it. And he must have his own demons. No one ends up in the OMON by accident.
Besides, it’s not just Zoya’s interference that’s keeping me up. It’s not even the map, or any ‘coincidence’.
I might not have read History, and I know this isn’t a normal research project, but something about my role as Alexey’s assistant feels off. Alexey still isn’t telling me much, and bar today, he’s barely been around. My note-taking on generic textbooks, meanwhile, is obviously just faff. Alexey lived through all the things in those books. He doesn’t need my help understanding them.
Why does he need me at all?
‘Hey,’ says Lev, ‘do you want me to read you another story? From your mother’s notebook?’
The Great and Terrible Monster
In a faraway kingdom, in a long-ago land, the townspeople were afraid of a monster said to live underground, in the sewers. They whispered to themselves of his hunger, his cruelty, how his teeth were like needles and his eyes as yellow as yolks, how his fingers were sausages, his fingernails meathooks.
One day the monster burst out of the gutters and began his rampage. He seized and slaughtered. He was worse than the people had feared, because he did not look the way they had feared. He looked like one of them. He did not have meathook fingernails or needles for teeth. When the king’s soldiers came to defend the city, they did not know whom to kill. So the monster was free to do as he wished, and everything that the townspeople had ever prophesied came true.
That was when a woman who lived in the town murdered her husband.
She stabbed him with a knife and threw him over a bridge and into a river. Her husband’s body disappeared into the water, and she thought of how, at any other time, she wouldn’t have been able to get away with it. But now, even if he did resurface downriver, he would do so alongside a hundred other blubbery corpses. Dukes and duchesses, schoolmistresses and ship merchants, cheesemakers and undertakers.
He would be one more body that no one would notice.
CHAPTER NINE
Antonina
Petrograd (St Petersburg), spring 1917
The servants have stripped Tonya’s bedroom bare. Her furniture is removed, her shelves, her vases, even the rose-oil lamps. The only things left are a chamber pot and a few books, for entertainment. Didn’t she always enjoy Eugene Onegin? The doors to the balcony are now locked too. Olenka brings newspapers and meals on a tray, but Tonya eats so little and vomits so often that even if she did make it out to the balcony, the wind might carry her off.
She reads Eugene Onegin at night, reads aloud until her lips are so dry that they crack.
My whole life has been a pledge to this meeting with you …
She must get a letter to Valentin. She knows she can’t appeal to Olenka. But perhaps if she threw a letter into the street, a stranger might come upon it, might find some sympathy for her. She could write around the margins of Eugene Onegin if she only had a pen. She will use her own blood, if that is all she has.
Dmitry still takes tea with her, every day at four, only now the tea service is brought into her boudoir. Every day Tonya falls at his feet.
‘Just the balcony,’ she pleads. ‘I need the light!’
‘It’s almost summer,’ he says. ‘It’ll never be dark at all then.’
‘No, please! Please, I beg of you!’
But he only sips his tea and smiles. Then he leaves, and she claws at the door behind him. She shreds the skin off her hands, vomits, falls asleep in her own stomach bile, but it hardly matters. By now she has not had any bath, let alone a perfumed one, in weeks. She is sticky and sour, her hair as matted as wool.
At some point the family doctor drops in and pronounces her hysterical. Dmitry mentions Tonya’s nightmares and the doctor recommends no more books or newspapers. They will only cause further mental disturbances.
Every day, Tonya screams until she loses her voice. There is not very much left to lose. Perhaps that is why the balcony is locked. Perhaps Dmitry thinks she would jump.
Tonya’s only permitted visitor is the Countess Burzinova. Natalya has defied the doctor and brought news of the outside world: there is now a Provisional Government ruling Russia, one that contains many of the same ministers and officials as the Imperial regime. The Countess doesn’t sound perturbed, merely intrigued, that Nicholas and the rest of the Romanovs have been banished to the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo.
Tonya sits up in bed, rubs at her puffy eyes.
‘The only reason you bemoan your current situation, darling,’ says Natalya, ‘is because you haven’t seen enough. Better to be comfortable, if – controlled – than to be free, and struggling, starving, selling yourself for a loaf of bread. You are a hand-fed lapdog who dreams of hunting elk in the wild, Tonya, who has no notion of what it takes to survive.’
Tonya blows out a strand of hair, breathes it back in.
Natalya sighs. ‘Well, Dmitry’s mother is on your side.’