‘Oh,’ I say, unable to conceal my surprise. ‘I should contact the publishers then?’
‘I already did. It was given to them by Natalya’s daughter. Her name is Akulina Burzinova. She lives here in Moscow. I want you to go in person and talk to her.’
Why? is what I want to ask, but his voice is too bland, his expression as burnished as the book’s cover. He’s not going to tell me.
‘I’m off.’ Alexey smiles at me. ‘I have to be out of town this weekend, I think I mentioned.’
Lev reads aloud again from Mum’s notebook, this time without asking. Tonight’s story, ‘The Silver Queen’, is about a queen who wore a magical silver necklace that enables her to live for ever. Without it, she would die. The tale is short, and though this too goes without asking, neither of us are ready to fall asleep afterwards. The night feels too soft, too summery, like we should be having drinks by the river, smoking, even though I don’t smoke. Laughing, even though I don’t do that too much either.
‘You know Koschei the Deathless, the fairy tale?’ asks Lev. ‘This story, with the necklace, it reminds me of it.’
Every schoolchild in Russia has heard of Koschei the Deathless, the immortal who stores his life in objects, who gets up to nasty tricks, stealing women, slaying rivals.
‘My mother liked to tell her own version of Koschei,’ I say. ‘He falls in love, or something.’
‘You don’t enjoy these stories,’ he says. ‘I can tell. Why are we reading them?’
‘I promised her I would. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy them, it’s that … you know, what’s the point?’
‘The point of what?’
‘Of stories. Fiction. Fantasy. Mum was always reading novels, daydreaming, making things up. She preferred to spend all her time in this world that was fake. That’s probably another reason she didn’t like The Last Bolshevik.’ I lie back, playing with my scrunchie. ‘Because it was true.’
‘Maybe you’re interpreting too literally,’ Lev says. ‘The stories could be allegorical. Perhaps she is writing about real ideas or even real people, and not about monsters and queens.’
‘Maybe. But Mum wasn’t a subtle person. I think her stories were mostly for entertainment. For escape.’
‘She chose her words with care,’ he points out. ‘I see many places where it looks as if she erased the original word she used and wrote another.’
‘That really doesn’t sound like my mother.’ I wrap the scrunchie back around my wrist. ‘Erased? It’s in pen.’
‘Only the first page,’ he says. ‘The note to the reader.’
I go silent as he switches off the light. Pencil. Mum didn’t often use pencil; the rubber erasers made her eyes itch. Some kind of allergy.
‘I used to be an avid reader,’ says Lev, neutrally. ‘In school. Before I joined the military.’
My eyes have adjusted enough to the darkness that I can find him across the length of the room, see him sitting up on the cot, back against the wall, looking away. I know now that he’s twenty-seven years old; that he’s spent the last nine years in the military, the last five in the Moscow OMON. What did he do most days, I wonder? Climb through the windows of burning buildings? Tear down barricades with his bare hands?
I already know the answer. He did whatever he was told.
Years ago, here in Moscow, my family had an elderly neighbour who collected samizdat, illegal dissident material circulated by the anti-Soviet underground. Sometimes, when Zoya and I were home from school, he would share it with us. Poetry, novels, even diaries. And though I was too young to understand most of it, I gleaned the message that emanated from his every pore: there is them, and there is us.
Lev is one of them.
In the year 1895, Natalya, future countess, is an awkward and socially stunted six-year-old, with – in her words – carrot-red hair and a breathy lisp. Her only friend is a little boy whose parents attend a party at Natalya’s home one day, who joins her in hiding by the stairwell. That year, Natalya’s already frail mother dies of consumption, and her father hastily remarries. Her new stepmother is an opium-addled woman who hosts raucous salon parties and desperately wishes to get into the good graces of the Imperial Family. Natalya comes into her own, over the years. No longer awkward, she discovers by late adolescence that she’s in love with that first friend, no longer a little boy. Her stepmother, getting wind of this, responds by arranging a union with the much older, twice-married Count Burzinov.
It was not out of weakness that I gave into my stepmother’s wishes. It was out of fear.
I could not confess my feelings to the man I loved.
Natalya’s most cherished possession is her mother’s silver Orthodox cross, which she wears on a necklace. Given her relationship with her stepmother, I can understand why she would cling to this small piece of her birth mother. To the idea of a parent she lost, and a life of which she must have felt robbed.
I’m no countess, but I feel a sudden camaraderie with her.
The next few chapters of the memoir deal with her family life. The Count is a dreary man. They rapidly have two children. Natalya, though she loves her children, is bored and unfulfilled by motherhood. She throws herself into the whirlwind of St Petersburg society, and finds herself empathising with her stepmother, of all people.
It is when everyone else’s attention is upon us, that we can forget the one person whose head we fail to turn.
She is bitterly lonely. Natalya struggles to connect with her children, in particular her daughter Akulina – the two of them are very different – while the Count’s health declines. She takes lovers, but she never stops longing for her friend. He has no romantic interest in her, and I start to suspect that this unattainability is partly why she focuses all her intense feelings on him.
She doesn’t know how to be loved back.
Lev comes in as I’m reading. He’s just dropped Alexey off at a train station.
‘Something to drink?’ he asks. I nod.
In the summer of 1914, there is an unwelcome if foreseeable turn of events: the man Natalya loves finally marries someone else.
His new bride was the most ornamental-looking creature you will have ever seen.
But there was something in her eyes that I did not trust.
I was reminded that rare diamonds are kept behind glass not only to preserve them, not only to prevent thievery.
Also because they are cursed.
I read on until I reach 1918, the start of the Civil War, which forces Natalya to wake up to the reality of what is happening in Russia. All this time, she has been firmly convinced that the Tsar or his brother would be brought back as a constitutional monarch; now she seems frightened. She joins the effort to aid the White Army, which eventually lands her in prison, and here the memoir reaches her present moment: it is 1920. The Countess is writing out of a jail cell in Bolshevik-controlled Petrograd. She has negotiated with the guards for various favours, including paper. They don’t treat her badly, but she has just been told she faces execution.
They have taken my belongings, my children, my home, my freedom.
I have nothing but the silver cross around my neck.
When they take that, they will have killed me.
A silver necklace that she will wear until death.
Like in ‘The Silver Queen’, the story of Mum’s that Lev and I read just last night.
Another coincidence?
I look up and Lev has returned. I explain as best I can: first the map of Popovka, and now this. In a way, I prefer when things are obviously wrong, blood everywhere and your mother sobbing and the police shouting and the shoe-prints of a mafia killer all over the apartment.