Kirill’s at the granary and Tonya knows, just knows, that Sasha has chosen this moment, that he wanted to catch her on her own.
Relatively, of course, for Nelly is there, pricking away at the shawl that nobody needs.
‘People talk about you,’ says Sasha. He glances at Tonya and she catches herself thinking that his eyes are luminous. There is an impenetrable aspect to his face, but he isn’t murderous looking. He doesn’t seem like someone who came across his wife and a neighbour against the wall of a cowshed, the cows lowing only yards away, masking their gasps. Someone who had a scythe and a flash of rage so fast that the pair had no time to make another sound, of pleasure or pain.
Tonya dusts specks of potato off the table. ‘There’s not much to talk about in Popovka.’
Nelly makes the closest thing to a laugh Tonya has heard from her in weeks.
‘I often think of leaving,’ says Sasha.
‘Where would you go?’ Tonya asks.
‘I’d like to live in a house by a wide river. I have some cousins in Saratov.’
Saratov. Saratov is on the Volga, that mighty river that divides this country into east and west. Valentin spoke often of the city, the birthplace of many famous radical writers and revolutionaries. There is a rich black soil unique to that region, was what he said, the richest soil known to man. In such fertile earth, anything can grow, even a cause as unlikely as ours. All it takes is a single seed.
But that was always the way Valentin explained things. Turned simple facts into poetry. Twisted them.
‘We will live, we will see,’ Sasha answers, obliquely. He reaches for his hat, as if this was all he ever planned to say. ‘The Chekists are interested in Otrada,’ he adds. ‘They’re searching for a place they might requisition for their own … purposes. Do you wish for me to direct them elsewhere?’
‘Why would they listen to you?’ she says crisply.
‘I’ve helped them with a few things.’
‘Then tell them to leave Otrada alone.’
A corner of his mouth lifts in a smile. ‘I shall.’
When Sasha has gone, Nelly begins to reel in the shawl. She finally breaks her monkish silence: ‘You should stay away from him.’
‘Why?’ asks Tonya loudly. ‘Because the village hates him?’
‘Because there’s something wrong with him. You can tell just by looking. He’s cold-blooded. Inhuman.’
‘He helped bring Lena into the world. He can’t be evil.’
‘He murdered his wife!’
‘Did he?’ Tonya snaps back. ‘Was her dead body dragged through the village? She and her lover disappeared, Nelly. For all we know they ran off together.’
‘Leaving behind her child? That was the first baby he delivered, you know! And where is the child now? Nobody knows. No one has seen the boy in years. A lot has happened in Popovka, Tonya, since you flitted off to the capital!’ Nelly is shouting. The windows are rattling. ‘But you think you can just come back, swan in, win everyone over—’
‘I’ve done no such thing! They loathe me!’
‘They don’t loathe you, you idiot. They envy you. Desire you. You are still a princess and always will be. And what has it been like for me, all my life, to stand beside you? Can you begin to understand? I was happy when you left! I wish you’d stayed away for ever!’ Tears stream down Nelly’s face. ‘Everyone knows Kirill was in love with your mother. If he can’t have her, why not you? Our little Kukolka?’
Silence.
Lena drops her new toy and begins to cry.
Nelly returns to the shawl. Tonya is left shaking. Kirill’s affection is familial, there is no question of anything else, but she feels exhausted, bruised. Tonight her sleep will be fraught and fleeting, and tomorrow she will be out on those fields again, feeling the gaze of the village on her back, hotter than the low-lying sun.
Nelly has fallen asleep, and Tonya is fixing a hole in Nelly’s panyova. She tugs on the thread, pulls it through. Every so often the thread breaks. Tonya remembers that just after their betrothal, Dmitry took her to the fields to watch the village folk at work. Instead of sunflower nubs to snack on, he said, she would have Antonovka apples and plums. Instead of the stink of her own sweat, she would have perfume water from Paris. Instead of country dress, she would have ball gowns to rival the Tsaritsa Alexandra.
Yet here she is, fixing a hole in a panyova because it is the only thing she can fix.
Kirill comes in and sits by the shrine. Tonya can tell how troubled he’s become. It’s not only his beard that is now crested with white. Also his hair, the look in his eye. He doesn’t say anything as he lights a candle to the saints.
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine.
‘I’ve stayed too long,’ says Tonya quietly.
‘You don’t have anywhere else to go,’ Kirill says, his eyes now closed.
‘I do,’ she says. ‘I’m going home.’
Tonya senses that something awaits her in her nightmares, only the figure of Mama is always blocking the way.
I am dreaming, this is only a dream, she reminds herself, as she approaches Otrada from the back, through the orchards, just as she does every time. Ducking the branches. The veranda is up ahead. Dream-Sery is by her ankles, purring so low it is only vibration. If Tonya goes closer, she will see Mama; she already knows that.
Tonight she tries something else. She goes around the rotunda, towards the conservatory.
The door to the conservatory is open. Dream-Sery follows her inside, though the real Sery never wandered into this glass house. Once filled with Papa’s exotic flowers, it was steamy, sickly-sweet all the year round. There are no flowers in here now. The ground is covered in ivy. Papa did not grow ivy. The ivy has climbed the walls, strangles all the beams. It is still growing even as Tonya stands there watching it.
Someone is coming into the conservatory through the other entrance, from within the house.
It is a girl, a young girl, with white ribbons in her plaited hair. With a dullish sense of horror Tonya sees that the ivy covers the girl, too, but from the inside, like darkened veins. Showing through the skin.
The girl looks at her.
Help me, she says to Tonya, but as she opens her mouth, the ivy slithers out.
Tonya begins to scream.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Valentin
Southern Russia, 1919
They are leaving behind the plain, parched grasslands of the steppe. No more peasants plod by leading scrawny livestock by the nose; no more shaky caravans pass, heaped with too many belongings. Here the land has not yet been ravaged by occupation and conflict, and here it has a shape: hills and furrows and shallow valleys that distinguish it from the flat, unbroken sky.
In the late afternoon they make an encampment atop a small hill, and Valentin stops to survey a Russia he has never known.
‘What are those white things over there?’ he asks the man beside him.
‘Chapels,’ his fellow prisoner replies, looking at him strangely. ‘Do you want to know what that blue line is, too?’
The line is a river that snakes up another hill, between a sprinkling of wooden houses. Valentin stands still, lets the wind blow against him. His feet and legs are coming back to life. He feels heavy and flushed. A horsefly buzzes by his ear, and he looks over to where the other war prisoners are sitting, their faces chalky with dust, just out of range of the campfire’s warmth. A jug of water is being passed from hand to hand. Valentin’s throat feels lined with that same dust. He is always thirsty now. He could drink that whole river beyond and not quench it.
‘Something you’re trying to see out there, brother?’ the other man asks wryly, the emphasis on brother a mockery of the way the Don Cossacks address each other.
Valentin shakes his head. A sound begins to rise, above the scuffling of the horses’ hooves, the agitated swarming of insects. It is the White officers, singing again. How many times can they sing the same folksy ballads of Maria and her true love? How many times can he hear them before his ears start bleeding? But the singing is over quickly tonight, and they have begun to make elaborate, impassioned toasts: The greatness of the Tsar! The glory of the empire! That prima ballerina onstage three years ago, her pale, slender neck!
The smell of honey from the bird-cherry trees; the sight of home in the corner of one’s eye from around the curve in the road …
Valentin wipes something wet from his cracked lips. He is crying. What little hydration he still has, he is wasting on them, on the enemy, but he can’t help himself. He can envision it too, that world, in all its decadence, an obscene mask of beauty obscuring the ugly, steaming, seething masses below, and in the middle of it all, himself and—
Tonya.
The toasts are turning to curses, the drunken cheers to indignant anger. Home is no longer there, not as it was, because the peasants have looted the estate; the bird-cherry trees are a smoking ruin. The Tsar has fallen.
‘Let’s go into the village,’ comes the furious cry.
The mood of the prisoners shifts. They know what this means; what will happen. They will be gathered up, too many to a wagon. Human cargo. Down in the village they will be locked in barns and left to suffocate in the miasma of horse manure while the Whites storm somebody’s home. Whatever they find, whoever they find, they will take.
The sound of one child screaming will be louder than all the warring armies of Russia put together.
Valentin shuts his eyes. He gropes for a thought, a line, a philosophy that will comfort him, but all that comes to mind tonight is that countryside and the light wind that swept through, brushing up against him, out of nowhere, carrying her touch with it.
His throat begins to itch, especially at night. He no longer participates in conversation with the other prisoners. Their number include locals, stragglers, deserters; they are all tired of war. Many recall seeing their home villages burnt by the Whites, their wives and daughters raped, their Jews and Tartars beaten to bone. Others claim the Red Army does all these same things.
Valentin wants to defend his side. The Reds act out of principle. If there is violence, it is the necessary kind. In the annals of history, centuries from now, the rightness of the communist cause will be obvious to all. The past cannot be allowed to defeat the future!
But he is too thirsty to speak.
Valentin has been a prisoner since last winter. Before his capture, he was a commissar of the Red Army, tasked with boosting morale amongst the peasant conscripts in his regiment who did not identify with the Reds or even with Russia herself. He failed in this.
He had never failed before.
The prisoners sleep most nights out in the open now, because of an outbreak of what the bivouac officer calls the flu. The longer he spends out here, living like the nomadic hordes of the steppe, looking up at that canopy of stars, the more that failure weighs on him. The more he loses his bearings. The more he wonders how he came to be here in the first place.
The more his throat hurts.
The local flu is typhus, they say. Valentin is quickly transferred to the special barracks, and cannot go haul loads on the railways with everyone else. Nobody seems to know how many recover from typhus. Maybe the people who do know are all dead.
He fights a high and hungry fever for weeks, in the care of a nurse with a foreign accent. You are in Samara, she explains. East of the Volga. He doesn’t even remember crossing the Volga. He suffers delirium, visions, convulsions. His lucid moments grow fewer and further between. The nurse’s voice sounds like someone playing on the frets of a balalaika. Sometimes he thinks he hears the men to either side of him plotting over his head their escape from these barracks, from Russia altogether: past the bridge, into the village, onto a stolen horse …
He is trapped in the space between night and day. Between. Valentin did not even believe in the existence of between, before. Only in the one and the other. In opposites. In opposition.
Valentin.
He suddenly feels a cool hand on his hot forehead. He sees Tonya in front of him, her white shawl tied over her hair, like a halo. The moon rises above her head, and when she smiles, he cannot tell if she is standing in the light, or if she is the one to give light. If she is all the light he has ever known.
‘Take a bite. It’s kefir.’ The nurse is waving a spoon in his face. ‘I’ll write to your sweetheart, lad, if you tell me how. Her full name …’
Valentin coughs, gags on the syllables. The image is fading. He wants to run after it, catch up to it, but his feet are leaden. You cannot chase light, anyway. You cannot even hold it.
It is too late.
‘Tonya,’ prompts the nurse. ‘You’ve been asking for her.’
No, he tries to respond, my wife is called Viktoria. My wife and I share a joint calling. My wife is the woman I love – but even as he thinks it, shapes it with his lips, he knows that it isn’t true. Maybe it didn’t matter before, that he doesn’t love her. It didn’t matter the day they married, when they went down to the Registry Office and Viktoria was on his arm saying how perfect they were for one another, how much sense this made; and there was no arguing with that, nor with her happiness on the way home. He cares for Viktoria. He wants her to be happy.
But if it didn’t matter then, it matters now, now that Valentin is going to die.
I’ve made a terrible mistake, he tells the nurse, but he only hears a murmur of sympathy in reply, a whispered promise, maybe in Russian, maybe in her native tongue: It’ll be over soon, lovely lad.