He joined the new underground. He told himself that he could do better fighting on the inside, secretly, from a position of privilege. But in the end, this was only a new way of running from the truth. He should have publicly cut ties with the Party. He should have screamed until his throat tore, the way he once did.
Instead he kept running.
He doesn’t know who found out what he was doing, or who turned him in to the OGPU. His trial was only fifteen minutes long, and nobody bothered to explain how he had ended up in the prisoner’s dock. Valentin confessed readily to his crimes because he was ashamed, ashamed of all those years he’d spent running. Always running. Still running. Yes, now he sees—
The road he ran along has led him here, to this place.
There are only two seasons in Solovky. At summer’s end the last ribbon of daylight disappears, and winter begins. The years pass, but Valentin is losing all concept of time. He can no longer recall images from home. All he sees when he closes his eyes are the dead, lying in ditches. Snow blindness, is what the others call this, with irony. The real snow blindness.
Dear Tonya, he writes, but sometimes he cannot even remember her name.
Dear …
Wait …
Please …
One day he is packed onto a transport ship that sets sail from Solovky into the nothingness of the surrounding waters. He sits in the cargo hold with his head between his knees. The prisoners around him claim that they are headed not for home, but for the White Sea Canal. But there is no such thing as the White Sea Canal, others protest.
There will be.
In this new place, wherever it is, whether it exists or not, the winter storms are so overpowering, so pervasive, that even when the weak paraffin lamps are lit or a storm briefly lifts, Valentin still sees and hears nothing. The only thing he knows is that he is dividing into parts: One part is filling wheelbarrows, stumbling through ice floes, subsisting on gruel and foul water. The other part is pulling away. Try as he might, he cannot reunite these two halves of himself. It is such a complete separation of mind and body that he is losing hold of both.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rosie
Moscow, July 1991
I wake up feeling much better. Normal temperature, clear head, tear ducts intact. I want to get my mind off Eduard Dayneko, to let his explanation marinate, so I try the next book on Alexey’s list, a history of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. It is dull and dry. I miss the Countess’s memoir.
But it is in this book that I see the name Valentin Andreyev mentioned, the young man from the old newspaper cut-out. And not only that, the image itself: Valentin Andreyev addresses a crowd in Revolution Square, May 1921.
I jot down some notes. Valentin Mikhailovich Andreyev, born in St Petersburg in 1896. In 1906, he encountered the radical writer Pavel Katenin. Under Katenin’s tutelage, the young Andreyev became prominent in the revolutionary underground in his own right. Following the Bolshevik victory in 1917, Andreyev married Katenin’s daughter, the pianist Viktoria Katenina; two years later, he returned from the Civil War to a hero’s welcome; in 1924, he was stripped of Party membership and exiled to a new kind of penal colony in the Solovetsky Islands, in the north. In the White Sea.
The first stirrings of the Soviet Gulag.
Valentin Andreyev was never seen or heard from again.
In the central knoll of Dzerzhinsky Square is a tall, imposing statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, original head of the Bolshevik Cheka. Behind Iron Felix, above the traffic going around in circles, looms the infamous Lubyanka. The home of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, it is made of a soft-yellow sandstone. It looks pretty benign.
‘Raisa Simonova?’
A man with an impressive moustache waves to me as he approaches. This must be David Antonovich, from the human rights organisation Memorial. He told me on the phone that his mother died of exposure in Kolyma, in eastern Siberia, as part of a logging brigade, while his father was shot at Butovo. Unmarried, childless and highly educated, David Antonovich has dedicated his life to the memory and recovery of victims of political repression, particularly under the Stalinist regime.
Both his parents were processed here, in the Lubyanka.
Across the street, David shows me the Solovetsky Stone, a rock that made an arduous journey from the Islands all the way here to central Moscow. Its placement last year was organised by Memorial, in honour of the lives lost in the camps. It is small, unremarkable, sitting atop a slab of granite.
Yet it stands out against the Lubyanka.
We head down Teatralny. David tells me about the research he does, the material he goes through. He’s seen his own father’s prisoner file, a plain manila folder containing a photo and a few interrogation records. Name card, prisoner number, stamp in the corner. The full archives of the Lubyanka are not yet public, but Memorial hopes they will continue to open up.
‘It’s hard to cross the line, between the Soviet Union and the camps,’ says David. ‘Every time we do, each of us, we fear to vanish into the ether. I’ve stood where you are now, Raisa. On the line.’
I do feel a bit wobbly. ‘No one’s ever found anything on Valentin Andreyev?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ says David. ‘Only as much as you’d find in any history book. He was arrested right here in Moscow. He’s believed to have died in the Solovetsky Islands. But who can say? So many records were destroyed in the decades to follow. So many people fell off the map.’
Alexey’s said something similar to me, about people disappearing. Lost to history.
But what about people reappearing?
What if Valentin Andreyev was sent into exile, and Alexey Ivanov came back?
I still have trouble reconciling Alexey’s placid, room-temperature personality with the act of smashing a framed photograph, but it has to be him. So clearly, something about the picture set him off.
Did he somehow know Tonya?
Could she be the woman he’s trying to find?
I assumed Kukolka was a long-lost love, family member or friend, and that any reunion would be joyful. But it could equally be that he wants to confront her. Or even harm her.
Oh, blimey, am I turning paranoid? Have I spent too long in Soviet Russia?
‘Viktoria Andreyeva, Valentin’s wife, gave a few magazine and newspaper interviews late in her life,’ says David. ‘I can see what I can get my hands on, if you’re interested.’
My thoughts must show on my face. David gives me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. ‘Some people say that the north is white because it’s made of human bone,’ he says. ‘You’re not the first to wish those bones could speak.’
My memory of seeing Alexey’s advert in Oxford is clear. I ducked into a cafe one afternoon to avoid a hailstorm. While waiting it out, I glanced at the public notice board, and I couldn’t believe it. This would be my way into Russia, if I could nab it, and it’d be undoubtedly fascinating, three months with Alexey Ivanov. I stepped back, ecstatic, but I also felt a quiver go up my spine. The chill from outside, maybe, or a runaway hailstone in my jumper. I shook it off. But what was it? What did I feel at that moment that I’ve refused to feel ever since?
What if I’ve had it the wrong way around this whole time? What if I didn’t choose this job at all?
What if he chose me, because I look like her?
Lev shows up just before supper, having spent the afternoon at his parents’ dacha. He watches from the doorway as I try to make pelmeni how Mum used to make them when I was little. At the end she’d add flourishes, sprigs of garlic and sour cream. I never gave it a second thought until she began making nothing but sandwiches.