Once the serfs were enough, but without them it is always hungry.
The walls shiver as she enters. Tonya put Lena to sleep hours ago, but she hears noise from the rosewood room, once her family’s private drawing room. It must be Sasha. That room is his preferred place to relax, read and smoke, and the stewed-prune scent of his makhorka tobacco is strong.
‘I was getting concerned,’ says Sasha, as she shuts the door behind her.
‘I was by the lake.’ Tonya drifts to the window, draws one curtain. ‘I had a visit today from someone I used to know. She informed me that Valentin Andreyev is dying. I must go now, to the capital, if I wish to see him.’ She ignores the heartbeat that starts, skips over. ‘I don’t know whether I’ll have the courage to tell him about Lena. But I must try. I must say goodbye.’
‘If you wish to go, you should.’
‘With the travel, it won’t be the simplest trip.’
‘Would you take Lena with you?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, what it would be like. And Lena, you remember how she was after Fedya. She’s so afraid of death.’ She hesitates. ‘I could leave her here with you. You know how she’d love that.’
‘I can stay however long you like.’ He rises to join her at the window. ‘It means a great deal that you trust me enough.’
Tonya does trust him. She believes that his wife ran off, took their child with her. She has seen his tenderness, the way his large fighter’s hands soften when he handles his animals, whom he openly prefers to people. And Lena adores him. He’s the only father she’s ever known. Lena speaks of the one who gave her her hair, the one who is far away, the way she speaks of princesses. Once they were true. Now they are only pretend.
‘There’s something I have to show you,’ says Sasha. ‘I found it in the forest.’
Tonya has been with Sasha for four years, long enough to know anyone all the way through. But maybe that’s the problem. ‘In the forest?’
‘I think I saw someone.’
He sounds so grave that Tonya laughs. ‘Did you kidnap them?’
‘I wish I had.’ He picks up a rumpled-looking sack that was balanced against his chair, and he reaches both hands in at once, like he’ll need both to grapple with this thing, and as soon as he withdraws the contents, she lets out a short, cut-glass cry.
‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ asks Sasha.
She has, in the toy emporiums of Petrograd, but not quite like this—
‘One of the villagers must have left it out there to scare you,’ he says, and she knows that he will be asking his Chekist friends to pay a visit to Popovka, and what that visit will entail. The brutality of the Cheka towards the villagers doesn’t bother him the way it does her. After the way the village has treated the two of us, Tonya, why do you care what happens to them?
For the first time, Tonya may agree.
It is a small porcelain doll. Sasha brushes aside the thick yellow hair, sweeps up the spider-leg eyelashes with his finger. Its eyes are black.
It is a doll that looks like her. That was made to look like her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rosie
Moscow, July 1991
Eduard Dayneko has chosen a hole-in-the-wall, a place where the seats are pale and plasticky and a tape player on the counter is chewing up a cassette. There are piles of dirty dishes on every table. I am suffocating in second-hand smoke. After Dayneko waylaid us the other day at the Vernissage market, he said it would be better for him to meet me today, like this, to talk properly.
Today Lev is out on an errand with Alexey. I always needed to do this alone.
Dayneko pushes a plate of ungarnished pelmeni, dumplings, across the sticky tabletop. They look like a nest of bird’s eggs.
‘So you still have the doll.’ He rolls up his sleeves, revealing a vivid landscape of tattoos. ‘But no, it’s not my handiwork.’
Sweat slides down both sides of my face. Every night for the past fourteen years I’ve gone to bed with hatred for the man sitting in front of me stewing in the pit of my stomach. Determined not to become Mum, determined not to fall into her self-medicating, self-immolating haze, I’ve held on to that hatred. It’s spread to every part of my body by now, disseminated through my bloodstream, and I feel a rush of it as we look at one another. He wants this to be civil? Does he think the passing of time has rinsed away any of the blood he spilt?
‘Why did you leave it?’ I ask bluntly.
He leans over and saws through one of the pelmeni with his knife, as if he thinks the reason I haven’t started eating is that I can’t use the cutlery. In my mind, that man has always been fixed in time. Like the people he’s killed, he never ages. But now that he’s closer than ever before, I can see that the real Eduard Dayneko has an age. Fifty, maybe. Fifty-five. Threadlike lines sprout from the corners of his eyes. His hair runs grey at the crown.
‘I left it for you,’ he says, putting down the knife.
‘Me?’
‘You’re my daughter.’
I hear myself laugh. That’s impossible.
‘Katya and I were having an affair,’ he says. ‘One that had lasted almost twelve years, by that time. You’re my child.’
I turn away and I see sudden sparks of light, going off like cherry-bombs. This is the man who murdered my sister and my beloved father. Two innocent people. He murdered Mum too, it just took longer. We don’t share a bloodline.
We can’t.
‘I didn’t intend to kill anyone, Raisa,’ he says. ‘If I had, you wouldn’t have seen me. No one would have seen me. I was there to demand that Katya finally make a choice, between her husband and myself, and I brought the doll because I didn’t know what her choice would be. I wanted you to have something from me. Either way.’
‘But why a doll?’ I say groggily.
He looks surprised. ‘Katya told me you collected them. I saw your collection myself, in the apartment. Many times.’
What he saw was her collection. And it means he was in our apartment. Many times. I blot my face with my serviette. I can feel a terrifying migraine looming at the edges of my consciousness.
‘I didn’t know she would be away that night. Visiting friends, or whatever it was. When I arrived, there was a confrontation with your father, and …’ He sighs. ‘Your sister ran in. It got out of hand.’
Out of hand, he calls it.
‘It was a tragedy, Raisa.’
A tragedy.
He’s making it sound like something that happened on the news. To other people. Something that we could both walk away from. I can’t walk away from it. But I can’t go on sitting here at this moment, either. I stand up, and then I’m grabbing my bag, I’m shoving my way out of the restaurant, pushing through the humidity and the smoke and the other patrons.
Outside, in full view of several horrified onlookers, I begin to vomit.
I heave and gasp until there’s nothing left, and then I run. I don’t know this area very well, but I run like I’m being chased, and people give me flummoxed glances as I go past. They must think from my clothes and my panic that I’m a foreigner. That this is my first summer in Russia. But it’s not.
I lived eleven summers of my life here. I’m still living that last one.
Into the metro. Down the escalators. Underground. I can’t stop, or I might start thinking, and if I start to think, it might start to make sense. What he’s said might start to feel true. The migraine is a vindictive one, pinching me at the temples as I reach Alexey’s building. I cut myself on the keys trying to open the door. It seems that Alexey and Lev aren’t back yet, so at least I won’t have to explain why my clothes are covered in vomit, why there’s blood on the stairs, why I can’t even take a breath.