‘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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rosie
Moscow, July 1991
I make a new cup of tea and drag one of the kitchen chairs into the foyer, next to the stool. I can’t imagine that the daughter of a countess could actually be living somewhere in this city, but when I call Moscow Information, the operator gives me a phone number for Akulina Burzinova. With a name like that, it’s unsurprising that there’s only one. I rotate the dial carefully. My tea sits, long steeped, and I’m just about to hang up when somebody picks up. She has a crackly voice, a log on a fire. I tell her that I’m a historian’s assistant, researching her mother’s era, and would she be willing to answer some questions about the memoir?
‘If you can come to me,’ Akulina says, with a harsh cough. ‘I don’t travel.’
That’s when I hear it.
A laboured rendition of a classical piano concerto. Tchaikovsky’s First. Not coming from any room in the apartment, not through the walls or from the stairs outside, not down the telephone wire. Just there, like I’m sitting in the orchestral pit of Moscow’s Symphony Hall.
Zoya.
She can make me smell things, see things and hear things now. None of my senses are safe.
I am not safe.
‘Ms Simonova?’
This was my father’s favourite piece of music. He used to play it on the wine-stained keys of our upright piano while Zoya would put her hands over her ears, moaning that the music was too depressing, too old, too wordless. Mum would be in the kitchen, humming along, smiling as she waited on the ukha, Papa’s favourite oily fish soup, because classical music was the one place where my parents’ interests touched, like the meeting of two electrical wires. Papa would later ruin the mood over supper by launching into his monologue about how music was only mathematics, and Mum would get upset: How can you say that, Antosha! Music is art, it’s beauty, it’s nature, it’s life! And Papa would say that all those things were only mathematics too, and then they would stop arguing, but the silence would always be worse.