Zoya tried to jump in once, by saying, If that’s true, Papa, why don’t you write music?
One day I’ll try, he said. I like to try new things. New mediums.
You could even put a code in it, said Zoya, sensing an opportunity to please.
Yes, he said, looking straight at me. I could.
A code.
‘Hello? Hello!’
The soar of a crescendo, the climax, and then, as discreetly as the chords began, they fade to nothing. I feel the weight of the present moment settling back onto my shoulders, the way it does after I’ve watched a long film.
‘Is anyone there?’ Akulina Burzinova barks.
‘Pardon me,’ I say. ‘Yes, I can come to you.’
I lean over to grab the pen, to take down her address. My cup of tea tips over in front of me, spontaneously, just off the rim of the stool, splashing on my bare feet. The lukewarm liquid dribbles between my toes. Akulina is telling me she lives in a peripheral suburb just barely in Moscow. Just barely. Just barely. I must have just barely touched the cup.
Unless Zoya can now move physical things—
No. No. She can’t. That’s not possible. I click my pen, bite my lip. I take down the address. Click again. No.
Zoya was my sister, my only sibling. No matter what, I loved her, and I believe that she loved me. I wish she hadn’t died.
But at the same time, I also wish she would.
Through the slits of alleyways, I glimpse a few playgrounds and open spaces, but nothing that tells me where to go. If Lev is as lost as I feel, he isn’t showing it. He stays in the background, blending too well into the silent high-rises, the dark tower blocks, that dominate this neighbourhood. I step into a puddle, less than two inches of water. It feels like more. I may never find my way out of this monolithic sprawl.
‘There must be somebody to ask for directions,’ I say uselessly, looking down the street, but there’s only kids, kicking at some discarded tyres. Too young to know. Too young to be playing alone. The breeze picks up a chill somewhere and nicks at my thin coat. I feel small, straitjacketed into the passages between these lofty buildings.
Is this how Zoya feels, in the afterlife? Is this what she does? This endless circling? No street signs, no identifying marks? No people?
I button up my jacket as high as it goes.
We are an hour late by the time we find Akulina Burzinova’s door, steel and spray-painted with obscenities. There are several doorbells, none of them marked. The door opens, revealing a grey-haired woman whose face is a road map of grooves and ridges. She is chewing on something, a repetitive, almost maniacal chewing, a cow with a cud.
‘I saw you coming from my—’ She stops. She is staring at me with green eyes set deep in their sockets. ‘You,’ she says. ‘You’re the girl who called me?’
‘I’m Raisa. Thank you so much for meeting with me,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry we’re late.’
‘Not too late,’ she says. ‘Come in.’
The lobby of her building is stuffy and dingy. Akulina shakes her head at the rows of postboxes as if she finds the whole lot unseemly. We ascend the stairwell, with Akulina coughing every few seconds, moving like she’s in pain. A calico-coloured cat is keeping watch at her open door, and its tail loops around my ankles as I go by.
‘By the window is best,’ she says, leading us into her living room. ‘I breathe better.’
The cat follows, watchfully. I peek out the window to see the streets below, those deflated tyres, the heaps of rubbish, looking different from above, sparkling in the sun. When I was down there, I couldn’t perceive any light at all. Lev is right behind me, taking a look for himself, and I duck quickly beneath his arm, remembering too well the heady moment between us the other day. The way he smiled. The way my stomach plummeted.
I present Akulina with a box of chocolates, tied up with ribbon, and she nods, her jaws still working. I should have brought chewing gum.
Akulina invites us to sit on her sofa. She’s prepared more than the usual smattering of Russian hospitality fare: breads and rolls and biscuits with jam. She disappears again to fetch drinks. The cat stretches out by my feet, its tail tight as cuffs around my calf. I sit with my back ramrod straight.
This is her. The Countess’s daughter. We are about to take tea with Imperial nobility.
Akulina is absent for a noticeably long time. By the time she returns, I feel jittery. She takes the armchair. Her cough is a hard, brassy rattle. ‘You said this was about my mother,’ she says. ‘You should have told me the truth.’
I feel Lev tense up beside me.
She coughs some more. I feel like I might have something lodged in my windpipe too. I await an explanation, but she only goes back to chewing. Her whole face is coming unhinged.
I take a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure what you—I’m a research assistant to a historian. He’s interested in your mother’s memoir. Specifically, where the original was found. In somebody’s basement?’
‘It was mailed to me,’ she says coolly. ‘A few years ago.’
‘Mailed? You mean in the—’
‘In the post.’
‘By whom?’
‘Whomever found it, I presume.’ Akulina spits something into her hand. A piece of toffee. ‘I thought maybe, after the book was published, I’d hear again from this anonymous donor, but I never did.’
‘Forgive me for asking this,’ I say, trying not to sound cynical, ‘but if you received the manuscript in the post, anonymously, how could you know it was genuine? And not a forgery, a fake? Your mother being a relatively well-known figure of the Civil War—’
‘Because,’ she replies, matching my tone, ‘they sent my mother’s necklace along with it.’
‘You mean the silver one? The cross?’
‘The cross was a locket. Inside there was an inscription. My mother showed me, once. Perhaps one could fake a memoir, though I don’t see why anyone would. But there would be no faking that necklace. And the part about someone’s basement, that was just the publisher’s idea, you see. Books are always being found in basements these days. It is a selling point. Makes it seem like the material was hidden on purpose. Maybe illegal or illicit.’ Akulina clears her throat. ‘Have you read the whole memoir?’
I’m still taking in everything she’s said. ‘Yes. She was a beautiful writer—’
‘She was a terrible mother.’ Akulina pauses, and then, calmly: ‘After the revolutions, when my brother and I were still only children, she began to work, to conspire, against the Bolsheviks. I begged her to stop, for our sake. It was dangerous. But she did not stop. She was eventually arrested. I thought she was so, so selfish. I vowed never to forgive her.’
The cat leaps into my lap, pinioning me in place.
‘But now you have?’ I ask.
‘The memoir helped me to understand her. My mother had a great, impossible love. I myself have experienced the same. And some women are just not meant to be mothers. Again, I am among them. So the two of us, we did have some things in common, in the end. I also realised, for the first time, how it must have been for her, belonging to a world that ended in a heartbeat with the October Revolution.’ Akulina speaks without reservation. ‘Thus I am grateful to the person who sent me her writing and her necklace.’
‘How did your mother die?’ I ask, and then wince. I already know; it’s in the editor’s foreword to the memoir. I’ve been thrown off balance by our conversation. I’m not thinking straight.