It was Akulina who found the map of Tula, hidden at the back of a drawer in one of the bedrooms, with Tonya’s home town circled upon it.
‘They thought you’d been shot by the Cheka,’ Tonya says. ‘People were singing about you in the streets of Petro—of Leningrad. How you were a symbol of the old empire.’
Natalya’s free hand finds her silver necklace, closes around the cross. ‘The Cheka let me go,’ she says. ‘We struck a deal. They wanted money. I thought it would make things – easier, if people believed me dead, and they were very happy to oblige.’ She makes a soft, guttural sound. ‘I looked for Little Fedya and Akulina. I looked everywhere.’
‘Akulina’s travelling now, in the east,’ says Tonya. ‘But we get occasional letters from her. I’ll give you the latest address we have.’
‘What about my Little Fedya?’
Tonya hesitates. ‘Fedya never fully recovered from his time at the orphanage. The conditions there, as Akulina described them to me—’
‘Never recovered? What do you mean?’
‘He died two years ago.’
Natalya’s hands fall into her lap. ‘I see.’
You don’t see, Tonya wants to respond. You don’t see that it isn’t 1916 any more, and I’m no longer Dmitry’s Fabergé egg of a wife. You don’t see that you can come at teatime if you like, can bring yourself back from the dead if you like, but you can’t bring everything back.
‘It was painless,’ says Tonya. It is a lie. She’s not even sure why she says it; perhaps she gained too much practice lying to Natalya, years ago. ‘He was at peace.’
‘You’re good to have taken in my children,’ says Natalya. ‘I’ll return the favour. I promise you. Fair is fair.’
‘That isn’t necessary.’
The door to the parlour opens, and Lena comes in, moving as she does, like a gust of wind. She places the tray on the table and claps, long dark hair swinging, the large bow hanging.
‘I’m Lena,’ she says, sounding thrilled. ‘Do you want tea? Are you a princess?’
Natalya lifts a teacup, and Lena pours. ‘I’m not the princess,’ says Natalya. ‘What lovely dark hair you have. How different from your mother’s.’
‘I got it from my father,’ chirps Lena.
‘And where is your father, Lena?’
‘Far away,’ Lena says simply. ‘But I have never met him either, so don’t feel sadly.’
‘I won’t,’ says Natalya. ‘Aren’t you charming. Come back once more before I go, will you?’
Lena beams and flies back out of the room, dashing down the hallway, footsteps quickening, disappearing.
‘She’s got Andreyev’s eyes, too,’ says Natalya. ‘More luck her. I assume he doesn’t know?’
Tonya pours her own tea. ‘It’s not a secret. He went away to the war; I’ve not had any word since.’
‘I see my opportunity to return your kindness,’ says the Countess. ‘I had a recent and unexpected encounter with Valentin Andreyev, in fact, in Leningrad. He isn’t well, Tonya. He had a bad bout of typhus during the war, it seems, which weakened him. And now – you know how the winters are up north.’
‘He is ill?’ says Tonya evenly.
‘You should go straightaway, darling, if you have anything to say to him.’ Natalya waves the cigarette holder in Tonya’s direction. ‘Perhaps about his daughter? You will not have another chance.’
The moment that follows is peaceful. Too peaceful, like the eye of the storm. Akulina said, when she and Little Fedya first showed up at Tonya’s door, that the Cheka executed Natalya Burzinova over a ravine. They sprayed her with bullets, buried her in a mass grave. Only they didn’t do it, it seems, with enough bodies piled on top to keep her from climbing back out.
‘Thank you for letting me know, Natalya Fyodorovna,’ says Tonya, deliberately keeping to the more formal address of first name and patronymic.
‘Call me Natasha,’ is the airy reply. ‘We’re equals now, aren’t we?’
It is only hours later, when the Countess is long gone and Lena is helping to set the table for dinner and the jackdaws are landing on the sills, that Tonya realises she failed to ask why Natalya had come all the way to Otrada in the first place.
At night the lake between the birch and pine forests is misty, the fog as thick as dust. The water dances against Tonya’s bare feet, feels like a cat’s tongue.
Love should not be a frenzy, Mama said once. One of the few times Mama looked right at Tonya as she spoke. You will know real love by how quiet it is. How it grows over time, every day a little bit more, a little bit stronger, without anyone noticing, until it’s all you can see, like the White Nights of St Petersburg. Until it is just a fact of life.
Why hasn’t Tonya fallen in love with Sasha?
Sasha was there the day that Little Fedya died. Lena, not quite five years old, spent hours crying in Sasha’s embrace, vowing that she would never let anybody else die, ever, in the world. She’d grow up and find a way to end death. Nobody, never, and don’t all of you believe me? You believe me, don’t you? And Tonya said yes, but people spout all kinds of nonsense when someone is dying, like how after Mama died people said that Mama was finally going to be with all her half-formed babies.
Just before the boy passed, Sasha was at his bedside, and Little Fedya was saying, I’m so scared, please don’t let me die, and Sasha said: Have you ever dreamt of being a sailor, Fedya, of steering your ship up the Neva and into the Baltic and seeing the wide, wide world out there? That’s all dying is. That’s exactly what it is.
It was a beautiful turn of phrase, and the way he said it, Tonya knew it wasn’t his.
It was someone else’s. Maybe he’d read it somewhere. Heard it. Stolen it, requisitioned it, just as the Chekist brigades do, the ones with which he is still so friendly, even now. Sasha often speaks in idioms, phrases, quotations. Tonya finds it a harmless habit, even an endearing one. He is full of pithy provincial wisdom. But on that day, with Little Fedya slipping away in front of them, she hated that he had none of his own words. That he was not actually saying anything.
And shame burnt low in her belly, because she was comparing him to Valentin.
Tonya has been at the water so long that her feet have gone numb, but she doesn’t move. The Countess might try to find Akulina in the vastness of the east. But Tonya remembers that the night they lost Little Fedya, something went missing from Akulina too, something that had always been there before. Something that would be buried the next day alongside her brother, in a coffin that was already much too small.
Akulina cannot be found. Not by Tonya, not by Natalya. Not by anyone.
Finally Tonya rises from the bank. She has made up her mind; she made it up the moment his name was spoken. She only had to sit here long enough to be able to admit it. Mama never liked it out here, once tried to forbid Tonya from coming. Mama used to say there are no waves, no tide, in such lakes as these. Only the currents people make for themselves.
The moon burns like a gas lamp in the sky. Tonya takes turn after turn until the stone lynxes of Otrada are visible, poised atop the black gate-pillars. The symbol of her family. The guardians of the estate, keeping the dangers out, or holding the dangers in.
She stops at the willow tree avenue to look at the house from the front. It glows blue by starlight, for the floors, the roofs, the window treatments, the fretwork, are all carved out of birch. Close-grained wood, Tonya knows now, that is not really suitable for making whole houses. Maybe that’s why the villagers used to say that Otrada was like the bloodsucking ticks out in the forest. A living, breathing thing, looking for a host.