Come on, Zoya. Come on …
She’s there. I know she is.
I believe in you now. I do …
She can hear me.
Raisochka, she says, and for the first time since her death, Zoya fills the room with her smell – the smell of that two-in-one Ivushka shampoo that she used day and night, that came in a squat glass bottle and foamed like it was rabid, always using so much that the rest of us had to skimp – and as she does, I am bursting with childish yearning for the sister I didn’t quite have. Mum was the ballerina, but Zoya might as well have been. She was always higher than my arms could reach.
I could reach her now, if I wanted. She is real.
Which way do I go, Zoya? I was wrong, thinking I could do this. I don’t know if I can do it at all. I don’t know anything. I’m not sure of anything. I need you.
But she’s already gone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Antonina
Leningrad (St Petersburg), spring 1924
The trams run slowly, the streets have few cars or carriages, and there is a hush over the city. Where there were once bustling basement shops, a grocer’s, a baker’s, a watchmaker’s, there are only darkened windows, empty railings. It feels late, even though it’s only midday, as if the city is already asleep.
Tonya turns onto a smaller boulevard and checks the address that Natalya gave her. Yes, it’s this one, four storeys high, charcoal-grey granite, adorned with balconies. The gate to the courtyard hangs open. Her pulse is galloping. Many of the homes of the Imperial elite have been butchered since the Revolution and turned into communal apartments; she knows this, yet she still can’t fathom that Valentin would live in a building that looks like a palace.
‘You there,’ someone calls out from a low balcony, ‘who are you for? The bell’s broken!’
‘Valentin Andreyev,’ she says, squinting.
‘Be right down!’
He must live here after all. Tonya paces as she waits. She is plagued by the suspicion that all this is Natalya Burzinova’s trick: that of course Valentin doesn’t live here, of course he isn’t dying. She hopes it’s so. Natalya and her games. The Countess must be bored, everyone thinking she’s dead, no one calling her by her title any more—
There is little light inside and no way to tell where this stranger will take her. They climb the formal staircase. The man talks as they go, saying that the whole top floor formally belongs to the playwright-poet-writer Pavel Katenin, but he has moved to Moscow. It is now being inhabited by Comrade Andreyev and his limpid-eyed wife. Comrade Andreyeva plays piano like a goddess, he enthuses.
Tonya had forgotten about Viktoria, about the famous father. She keeps trudging upward, step after step, the marble banister icy beneath her hand, wondering how high the Katenins have risen by now. Above all these other families. Above all the darkness.
The woman who opens Valentin’s door has the narrow face of a borzoi. ‘Can I help?’ she says briskly. Hands on hips. You can always tell a servant by the hands, Mama used to say. So coarse they cannot feel a feather in the palm.
But Valentin would never employ a servant.
‘Does Valentin Andreyev live here?’ Tonya stutters.
The woman clomps away. She returns quickly, says that Valentin is in. Tonya is guided to a sitting room. There is a chaise longue in the middle, surrounded by other decorative chairs. Shelves line the wall above the fireplace, each one studded with porcelain pieces. The wall hangings are spring-green silk, and the carpet is woven with wreaths.
It’s a room that belongs in the house on the Fontanka.
Tonya’s hands begin to shake: the old nervous habit. She sits on them. When she looks up at the doorway, she feels her face go rosy.
Valentin is standing there.
‘Tonya,’ he says, like he’s pulling her name through a loom. ‘It’s really you.’
Her mouth goes dry. She stands too, unevenly, wringing her hands behind her back. She prepared for this moment, rehearsed, just as he used to. She used to envy him his confidence, that he could speak to a thousand people, but it can be harder to speak to one person alone. Nothing emerges, not a single word. All that she sees, thinks, knows, is the sight of him.
His hair is shorter than she remembers, without that slight curl, and he has a brush of shadow along his jaw, a line or two in his face. He has grown into more than just the boy Bolshevik, but he still has that air of unspent energy about him. Of dreams unfulfilled.
Something floods her, something horribly familiar.
They stare at one another. His gaze cuts her resolve to ribbons, tells her that he has thought of her too, before this; that he has forgotten nothing. That he carries their history with him, just as she does.
‘The Countess—’ she attempts.
He says nothing.
‘Natalya Burzinova,’ she says. It’s strangely difficult to breathe. ‘She told me …’
‘There are no more countesses in Russia,’ says Valentin.
His voice is calm, but contains an undercurrent of – what? Dislike? Scepticism? The wish that she’d never shown her face here? Her eyes search his and just as she’s thinking she has erred, inexcusably, that she should not have come, he smiles. Her stomach lurches. She knows how she still feels, how she has always felt; he knows it too. It was never the brightness of White Nights that made her feel vulnerable, naked, raw. It was only him.
Valentin isn’t unwell at all. He has never looked better. Tonya recalls Natalya’s sudsy face powder, the lips like bread crust, the white hair snaking through the red. The Countess must have been driven mad, years ago, by the presumed loss of her children; that is the most generous explanation one can think of for this bizarre rigmarole.
Valentin takes a seat on the ottoman across from her, pours a drink for them both.
‘So you thought I was on my deathbed?’ His tone is casual, the words tossed.
She sinks lower into the chaise longue. ‘I feared it.’
‘What was it that you came to say, if I were?’
She holds back the answer, tries to exhale through it. ‘I saw a photograph of you, a few years ago,’ she says instead, hearing the whiff of desperation in her own voice, ‘on the cover of Krasnaya Gazeta.’
Valentin yields to the change of subject. ‘Revolution Square in Moscow,’ he affirms. ‘That was when I’d just come back from the war.’ He leans back with a sigh. ‘I don’t make speeches any more.’
‘What do you do?’ she asks politely, her heart thundering in her chest. Look at him, as if no time has passed at all! Dressed down, collar up, button askew, still looking the part of the factory worker, the revolutionary, even if they’re sitting in an apartment with silk hangings and porcelain novelties and a servant in the background, flapping about like a bat. He is the Valentin she knew, only he now belongs, somehow, to somebody else.
The reminder is prickly, painful. She pushes it away.
‘Officially, I work for the People’s Commissariat of Education,’ he says.
‘And … unofficially?’
‘I oughtn’t to say.’
‘Why not? Have you become a counter-revolutionary?’
She meant it to tease, to sound carefree. Valentin lights a cigarette in response, cups his hand around it. The smoke obscures his face, makes her eyes water, but his expression is one she recognises. She’s seen it turned on her too many times. Here he is again, never content with the status quo, always dreaming of the next impossible thing. Don’t, she wants to cry out, don’t. He will make her want impossible things too.