‘Yeah, yeah. Why?’
‘You’re crying.’
‘Oh. It’s just that—’ I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand, but it doesn’t help. ‘You know you asked why I’ve been avoiding Mum’s notebook recently, well, see, I had this hope, this idea that my papa might have actually written these stories, that I was going to crack this cipher of his, and somehow – hear his voice again—’ Now I can barely speak through my hiccupping. ‘But now I know he didn’t write them. Now I know. Papa couldn’t have and he didn’t, and it was stupid to begin with, because this isn’t what encrypted messages could possibly look like, and now it’s like I’ve lost him all over again. He’s dead. My father’s really dead. He didn’t leave me any secret message from beyond the grave. He’s dead.’
Lev puts the notebook down and takes me into his arms. At some point, I’m not sure when, I stop crying. Back in England I never cried. Now it seems like it’s all I do.
‘The handwriting’s the same,’ I say unsteadily, pulling away. ‘I can barely read it, but I can tell.’
He considers this. ‘Yes, I see it,’ he says. ‘But wouldn’t that be a good thing? If it were code, you have two samples of it now. That would make it much easier to break, to understand.’
My breath shudders in my chest. ‘I think you were right.’
‘Right about what?’
I often have this feeling when I’m working on a problem, right when it seems almost impossible to solve. You look up from endless pages of figures, from dead ends and futile attempts, and instantly you see that the solution is there, in front of you, but you have to reach for it at just the right moment, in just the right way, or it slips past, and the problem is impossible again.
‘My father used to tell me that a code is only a cover,’ I say, feeling for the words. ‘Like snowfall. These stories are another kind of cover. They’re hiding something, but there’s still a way to go beneath. You said that you could see the original words, the ones that were erased?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Because,’ I say, ‘I want to exhume them.’
PART THREE
The Boy and the Waves
In a faraway kingdom, in a long-ago land, a boy was swept out to sea. The waves carried him further and further, until he was so far from the shoreline that he could not see it any more. He did not know if it was still there. He did not know if he had already drowned. He began to weep. Hush, said the waves, and we will help you, since you have made us stronger with your tears.
Hush, and we will carry you home.
The waves kept their promise, but when the boy stepped onto land again, he was already an old man. He did not recognise anyone, even his own family, and they did not recognise him. He went back to the waves and he shouted at them: You’ve brought me to the wrong place. This isn’t home. And the waves replied: Home is not a place.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Antonina
Moscow, spring 1938
The Interrogator does not believe her. His job is not to believe anyone. He leans back, long enough that Tonya wants to squirm in her chair, but she remains demure, lowers her eyes. The Interrogator’s office is cosy, intimate. They have been meeting like this for half a year, and every detail to the meetings still feels staged, purposefully added. A radio broadcast plays in the background, describing the latest machinations of Hitler, the German Chancellor. The hallway outside thrums with life.
They are in the Lubyanka building, headquarters of the NKVD, Soviet state security, the most recent incarnation of the Cheka. The Lubyanka sits on busy Dzerzhinsky Square. Stop a moment, people often say, to have a drink at the corner-tavern, or to admire the bowl of Vitaly’s central fountain. Take one last look around, before you go inside.
The season has not yet turned. People hurry home from work dressed in their warmest wools, with their earflaps pulled low. Darkness drips down from the sky, settles in over the city by late afternoon, and the cobblestones are quickly glazed with frost, though there may not be any cobbles much longer. Many streets have already been asphalted to accommodate an increasing number of automobiles, like the Black Crows of the NKVD, though they only come out at night. Nocturnal hunters.
Tonya, heavily pregnant, walks carefully. There is a specific route she takes on the way back from seeing the Interrogator, just past the cafe that has recently opened, past the mouths of the new metro stations, all lit up from the inside. She’s never tempted to use the metro. That light may be blinding, but you are still going underground.
On the way, she worries.
Five years ago, in 1933, Viktoria Andreyeva arrived at Otrada looking for her. Viktoria’s news was astonishing: Valentin had come home. No, he’d been smuggled home, via Pavel Katenin’s contacts, in secret, from the White Sea Canal, where he had spent two years, well past the end of his original sentence.
Eight years of hard labour, in total.
Viktoria had broken down, been reduced to tears, explaining how difficult it was to cope with Valentin’s bizarre, erratic behaviour, his sudden, volatile temper, his memory loss, his long periods of something she called blankness. Her father had secured new identity papers and medical treatment, but none of it was making much difference, and Pavel’s latest ideas for helping Valentin were beginning to concern Viktoria. Untested medications. Experimental treatments. Surgery. Meanwhile, the only thing Valentin ever said clearly was Tonya’s name – and an intricate and precise set of instructions for finding Otrada.
The very instructions Tonya had given him the day of his arrest, in 1924.
Viktoria wanted to return to Leningrad, so Tonya agreed to move to Moscow. She brought fifteen-year-old Lena with her, of course. They took over Viktoria’s apartment and Tonya found a job at a residence home for children. Lena enrolled in school and helped take care of her father. In the first year, Valentin was much as Viktoria described.
It took time, energy, tears, but eventually he recovered.
Almost.
It wasn’t their presence that helped him most, if she’s being brutally honest with herself. It was the rediscovery of his politics. Pavel Katenin is the only other person in Moscow who knows that Valentin is here – except for the few people Valentin is in contact with, unofficially. There is a quietly burgeoning anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin resistance here in the capital. Tonya doesn’t dare to take Valentin away from it, because he is finally healed.
Almost.
It was sustainable, once, living like this. But the atmosphere has shifted over the past year, now that Stalin has begun arresting, persecuting, executing, members of the Old Bolshevik Guard, of which Valentin is one; purging the Party and the country. The danger remains hidden, but it is palpable. Like the baby that Tonya carries.
If the NKVD arrest Valentin a second time, it will be for good. He will not make it back again.
Tonya locks up from the inside. Click-click-pop-clack. Like a symphony. ‘Hello?’ she calls out, and her voice bounces back. It’s in the echo that she hears her own fear. She never hears it at the Lubyanka. ‘Where are you?’
The door to the kitchen opens.
‘Back at last,’ he says. Valentin drops a kiss to her forehead, soft as cricket-legs, his hands coming to rest on her distended belly. There is a Maternity House up Leontyevsky that Tonya will have to visit in just over a month, an ugly brick building with a sign like a foghorn: in-patients. Valentin will not be allowed in; should probably not show his face in public much anyhow.