‘I don’t understand,’ he says. The smile is gone.
‘I would have gone to you,’ she says. ‘I chose you.’
‘You wrote that letter – the poem.’ His voice is low.
‘I didn’t write it,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t even know what letter you mean. But I don’t need any poem to be able to tell you, Valya, what it is I feel. You once said we would all live two lives, and you were right, for it started then, this life, in which I love you as I have never loved anyone, and never will. You asked why I came, why I’m here – that’s why. I came to be with you.’
He stands, his shoulders moving slightly, as if he will leave, but he doesn’t.
Tonya stands too.
She cannot believe she is doing this, cannot believe she has found the courage. She goes up to him and reaches for his hand.
They have never held hands before.
He turns halfway.
I have never stopped thinking of you …
She isn’t sure which of them says it. He lowers his head, lets his mouth sweep against her cheek, skim her skin. He goes no further. He held her like this once before, years ago, on a tram that was so full of people it seeped at the corners like a rolled pastry. Money and tickets were making their way over the passengers’ heads and the tram thudded hard, propelled her forward, tipped her into his arms. He did not quite let go.
It was the moment she first understood how he felt. That when he looked over the masses, she was the only one he saw.
They say goodbye outside the station. Valentin has said he will come to Otrada after he is finished in Moscow, and of course it is better that Tonya returns alone first, so she can talk to Sasha, so she can prepare Lena. Yet all of a sudden, without any good reason, she wants Valentin to travel on with her. To come with her now. Never to leave her side again.
‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘The person I’m meeting is taking some risk.’
‘But there’s something else I must tell you,’ she says wildly. She hasn’t yet mentioned Lena, thinking that it would be better done at Otrada, when his mind isn’t on his unofficial business, but now she will. Now she’ll do anything to keep him here. Without even knowing why.
‘I gave them my word,’ he says patiently.
‘I just don’t know if you can have both—’ What is she saying? What does she mean? What is this furry feeling up and down her arms, like something has just brushed her by?
‘Can’t live two lives, you mean?’
‘Be serious, Valentin!’
‘I’m more serious than I’ve ever been.’ Valentin takes her hands, turns them over, smiles at her. ‘We’ll be together soon. Nothing will keep me from you. And you’ve recited the directions to Otrada so many times now, I feel I could make the trip there in my sleep.’
‘Alright.’ She feels something wet, filthy, on her eyelashes. ‘But promise me—’
‘I promise, milaya. I’ll be there. Just wait.’
The sky is white. A few gulls circle the clouds, but they only remind her of the jackdaws. He kisses her lightly at first, then deeper, harder. Another promise. Valentin was always full of promises, she thinks now. As he walks away he looks over his shoulder. Wait for me, Antonina, he mouths, and she musters a smile. The sun has come out at last. The light reaches her, staining everything it lands on, even her hands as she presses them against her face, holds everything in. She does not let the tears fall.
To Tonya’s surprise, Sasha doesn’t take the news hard. Long farewells mean needless tears. He says he will always remember her, and that maybe he will now move to a new town, to a house by a wide river, just as he always wished to do. Lena, however, is violently upset to learn that Sasha will not be coming by any more, and remains gloomy for days.
Valentin’s arrival will surely help.
Tonya waits, waits some more. She waits for a week, two weeks, three. Nobody comes. She goes to Kalasy to post a letter. Nobody comes. The day a courier finally drags his sorry wagon-cart into the relay station, she is already there waiting. She has grown accustomed to waiting.
There is a letter for her. Valentin has changed his mind, she thinks. He doesn’t want her.
But it is not from Valentin.
And now you will know how I felt.
Fair is fair, darling.
Until the day we meet again –
Natasha.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Valentin
Solovetsky Islands, White Sea, summer 1925
The orders have come from the deputy chief: the prisoners will dig holes in a straight line. They will carve out a highway with little more than shovels. Five hundred thousand cubic yards of excavations.
The smell of the nearby Black River is salty and putrid. The mosquitoes are the size of a human hand. A swampy mist hangs across the valley, and the guards shout at one another through it. The prisoners sit in the convoy, waiting for their tools.
‘I’d like a spade,’ grumbles the man next to Valentin.
Valentin is handed a spade. He offers it to his neighbour, who has been given a pick, and the man’s mouth falls open.
‘Think you’re better, do you?’ he snarls. ‘Think you’re not like the rest of us?’
Valentin knows he is just like everyone else. Like everyone else he will work as sweat oozes from his body, as those mosquitoes drain his blood. Like everyone else he will cut logs and stone and level mountains by hand to make a road that starts nowhere and goes nowhere. He is just like everyone else even though he was a commissar, a communist, even though he knows Joseph Stalin personally. Even though he has been a Bolshevik since they were the smallest and unlikeliest of all the parties in Russia.
Valentin does not consider himself lazy or idle. He took well to factory life as a youth. He still likes working with his hands. But this is not work. Prisoners often drop to their knees, die in the ditches, rot away there, and two months later, when the Black River Valley project is abruptly called off, it is not sand or logs or earth or rock that forms the unfinished road.
The Solovetsky Special Purpose Labour Camp is known as Solovky, and also by its acronym, SLON, which happens to mean ‘elephant’. Valentin likes this play on words. He misses words. He writes at night in the barracks, by the faithless glow of the sixteen-watt bulb that swings creakily overhead. He keeps short notes, like a diary. Yesterday: Planted trees along the central avenue. Fifteen hours. Today: Woodcutting. Eleven hours.
He also writes letters. Dear Tonya, he writes, please wait for me, and then he rips it up, and starts again. Dear Tonya, I will survive, I swear that I will come home—
Everyone knows these letters are never sent, even if they are collected. There is no meaning to anything that happens in Solovky. Many prisoners do not even know why they are here. They are told they will be reforged, reformed, remade, into proper Soviet citizens. Most never get the chance. They are beaten to death by the guards. Murdered for their rations. Left to die if they cannot keep up with the others.
Newcomers to the camp sometimes know who Valentin is, and call him the Trotskyist. Leon Trotsky has fallen completely out of favour. It’s a crime just to have known the man. Valentin argues that it’s not possible to have been a Bolshevik in 1917 without having known Trotsky. They all fought together. They were all on the same side.
But there are no sides. Not in Solovky.
There was once a monastery here on the Islands, which only reminds Valentin of how he lost his own faith. In the Party, in Lenin, in the true socialist revolution. When he returned to Piter from the Civil War, he learnt of the Red Terror, of the widespread repression, the execution of old friends. And he found himself face to face with the reality that the Party had betrayed its own ideals. The October Revolution had not overturned society. The proletariat would never rule.