Upstairs, I grope for the telephone, smear it as I start to dial. The operator puts me through.
‘Hello?’ Richard picks up.
‘It’s me. It’s me.’
‘Hi, Ro,’ he says affectionately. ‘Wasn’t expecting to hear from you today.’
‘Richard, I—’
‘Sorry, Dad’s just got here,’ he says. ‘We’re off to London. I have to dash. Could we do tomorrow rather? I’ll—’
The line is dead. The connection from here to Oxford has always been uneven. It hardly matters, because it’s not Richard’s reassurances or even somebody to talk to that I need. What I need is a reminder that I can reach out and touch something of Rosie’s anytime I want. That I haven’t been sucked into the vortex of my former life so fully that I may never get out again.
Raisochka …
Zoya’s never said my name before.
This isn’t happening. None of this is happening.
‘Go away,’ I say, to the empty foyer. ‘Please – I don’t know who you are. But please, just leave me alone—’
Raisochka …
‘Be quiet!’ I pick up the telephone, handset and all, and throw it at the far wall. ‘I can’t do this any more! Go away! Go!’
Everything is quiet. I drop to my knees and retrieve the phone. Thankfully it’s still intact. I open the door to the kitchen, my headache screaming. I make myself a cup of tea and drink it while it’s still too hot and begin to feel even worse. Because of all the vomiting, maybe. I have to lie down. I pull out the bin and I’m about to dump out the tea leaves when I notice something in the rubbish.
The photograph of Tonya. Crumpled up.
Tonya. I’d forgotten about her. Eduard Dayneko has always had that effect. Of obliterating everything else. I grab the bin and overturn it, shake it all out. Bits of glass fall like beads. This isn’t the result of dropping the frame. Somebody took a hammer to it. Destroyed it, physically, with violence.
There’s another photograph trapped in the debris.
I sink to the floor. This picture is made of a weaker material, cut out of newspaper it looks like, and it shows a young man addressing a huge crowd from a high, street-side balcony. He is striking, starkly handsome. It must have been hidden in the frame, behind Tonya and the children. I can’t think where else it could have come from. I can’t really think at all.
Valentin Andreyev, Moscow, 1921, reads the caption.
Valentin Andreyev. I don’t know the name, but there’s definitely something familiar about this fellow. Not in the way that Tonya is familiar; a subtler, subliminal way. The line of the jaw? The ridge of the brow? Just how he looks in a dark suit and tie? The quality of the photograph isn’t too high, but that’s how imagination can take over. I can almost make out one voice above the crowd, a voice trying to change history, cutting through all other sound …
Just like Alexey’s.
Alexey, the only other person besides me and Lev who knew about this frame – and who has been alone in the apartment since.
He must have done this.
But why? And who would do something like this?
I need to sweep all the glass back into the bin. I need to clean up the tea leaves. I still need to lie down, but I can’t even move. I feel something on my cheek and hear a sound and then realise that it’s me. Crying, even though I never, ever cry. I’m crying all the tears I didn’t cry for Papa and Zoya, the tears I didn’t cry when Mum and I arrived in England, the tears I didn’t cry when I heard my mother was dead. They’ve become backlogged, like orders at a restaurant, and now they’re all coming at once. They might never stop.
I lie on my side, pretending to be asleep. Lev and Alexey are back. I can hear them talking in the foyer, Lev saying he thinks I’m not feeling well, Alexey expressing concern.
Tomorrow Alexey leaves on a four-day trip to Novosibirsk. More lectures, more talks, more pages in the literal book of his life. Here he is, The Last Bolshevik, for all the world to see.
I turn over and blink up at the ceiling. The Last Bolshevik is short. Alexey never gives any glimpse into his life before he was arrested, yet that life must have been derailed. Nor does he describe how he felt when he got the news that he would be sent to the White Sea Canal. He supplies readers with the visceral details of his existence in exile, the day-to-day, the difficulty of mere survival in a place never meant for humans, and his writing is lyrical. It carries you along.
But this evocative picture only serves to distract from what’s not there: he, himself, the person.
Where is he, in his own book?
Alexey Ivanov’s façade is charismatic and compelling. No doubt it’s one he cultivated over time, and no doubt it represents some part of him, maybe the part he most wants to be, but it’s a façade nonetheless. Whoever he really is, it’s still lurking.
Or else he destroyed it, the way he did that frame.
‘Ah, you’re awake.’
I sit up slowly. My face feels brittle from all the crying. When Lev hands me a glass of water, I have to force myself to take a sip. It’s flat and sour as lime, Moscow tap water, but it washes down the remnants of my nausea.
‘How did you leave it yesterday with Dayneko?’ asks Lev.
I tell him everything: the tattoos on Dayneko’s arms, the dolls he thought were mine, the reason Papa and Zoya died. The more I turn it over, the less sense it makes. Maybe Eduard Dayneko killed my father in a jealous rage during a heated confrontation. A crime of passion. I might believe that. But why Zoya? A professional hitman, accidentally murdering a teenager? It doesn’t feel right. And it’s not like he was afraid of leaving witnesses. He left me alive, after all, daughter or not. He left the lady who let him into the building perfectly alive.
Why? Just to be cruel? To be neat?
‘You have what you wanted,’ says Lev. ‘You know why he was there.’
‘Yes, but now I think …’ My cheeks feel warm. ‘I want more.’
‘Like what?’
‘His story was like – disinformation. Like he’s headed me off at the pass. I feel even further away from the truth.’
‘You care a lot about the truth.’
I thought I’d used up all my tears by now, but apparently not. I may have busted a pipe yesterday behind my eyes, and I’ll just keep on leaking.
‘My whole family is dead,’ I say forcefully. ‘The truth is all I have left!’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘So yes, I do care, and I’d do anything to get it!’
A pause.
I press a hand against my forehead. I’m burning up. ‘Sorry for shouting.’
‘That’s not shouting.’
‘It is in England.’
Lev smiles.
‘I want to look at my mother’s notebook of stories again,’ I mutter. ‘I want to investigate my theory. About my father. And a code. Can you teach me to read cursive? I have to break down the letters first—’
‘You’re running a fever so high that I can feel it from here,’ he says. ‘Get some more rest. Everything else can wait.’
I am hot, but also cold, a sensation of cold that penetrates down to the bone, and then I feel something – someone – tracing a circle around my elbow. You’re delirious, Ro, I tell myself, you’re imagining things, feeling a fingertip, Zoya’s fingertip. She used to do this when we were children, just before she’d scream into my ear to wake up, Raisa, wake up right now!
It’s got stronger here in Moscow, my fear of her.
Zoya has also got stronger.
In England, it was like she lived in her world and I lived in mine, and sometimes they overlapped and sometimes they didn’t. But now she’s here, in mine, all the time. She’s present. She could be sitting on the other end of the sofa, playing with her hair, chin resting on her palm. Zoya, with her short and sarcastic laugh. Zoya, with her impatient sigh: Hurry up, Raisa. Stop doing that, Raisa. I’m busy, Raisa, go play on your own!