Borodin was ordinarily a mournful man but Jones’ question seemed to sink him even deeper into despair. “Not good. Not good here. Worse there. My younger brother Ralf was a Social Democrat in Germany in charge of the party’s youth wing. Times were tough, the Nazis were fighting them in the streets, sending thugs into their meetings, threatening them with violence. But Ralf, he was a brilliant organiser and always sunny. ‘The Nazis will never hold power in Germany,’ he always used to say. He was a much more optimistic man than I.”
“And then?”
“Then the Comintern announced that the Social Democrats were in fact ‘Social Fascists’ and urged the Communists, the KPD, to devote their energies to the destruction of the moderate left. So last year, in ‘31, in the Prussian regional election, the Nazis joined forces with the KPD to beat the Social Democrats. In other words, Mr Jones, that guy” – his eyes flicked once more to the portrait of Stalin on the wall – “is doing his best to help Adolf Hitler take power. The switch by the KPD is destroying the resistance to the Nazis. They’re growing stronger by the day.”
Borodin fell silent. The melancholy of the night closed in on them. On the tables, the ruins of the banquet stood: empty bottles, dishes licked spotlessly clean. On the dance floor, couples danced to a slow, moody number, somehow adding to the sense of failure of the two men at the table.
“Ralf wasn’t just a young politician,” Borodin went on. “He was also a journalist. He got a scoop. Published it on the front page of the Social Democrat youth newspaper. It was a great story, the text of the Comintern letter to the KPD, ordering them to side with the Nazis against the Social Democrats. Two days later, he fell from his window. Suicide was the official verdict. One police officer, a decent man, came to my mother and told her in confidence that they had a snout who said it was murder, that it wasn’t the Nazis but those loyal to…” He stopped talking and nodded, once more, at the oil painting of Josef Stalin on the wall. “The future, Mr Jones, belongs to the Reds and the Browns.”
The band played a fatuous song about love and hope. Jones waited for it to end.
“One more question. Where’s Evgenia?”
“I suspect she’s with Mr Duranty, Mr Jones. Good night.”
As Borodin got up and left, Jones lowered his eyes and sank deeper to the embrace of Madame Vodka.
The curtains had been left wide open from the night before and his room was now bathed in a ghostly white light. Jones got up to see a world transformed. Snow smothered abandoned churches, houses, railings, trees with a thick carpet of white turning pink where the rising sun hit it head on. Bent figures trudged below him, bleakness in motion, leaving their tracks in the snow.
One hundred feet away stood Lenin, one arm outstretched, his coattails flapping in an iron wind, all of his upper surfaces coated in snow. A woman in black, pitifully thin, carrying an infant, walked up to the statue and knelt before him. She lay the baby down at Lenin’s iron feet and crossed herself over and over again. It was the strangest of gestures in that place and time – and, upon seeing it, Jones’ mouth ran dry. He desperately needed to drink some water but he couldn’t leave the window.
A GPU officer on the far side of the square started shouting at the woman, roaring with all the power of his voice – but the woman in black ignored him, then unwrapped the baby from its clothes. Only now did Jones realise that the baby was dead. She laid the naked infant down before Lenin and stood up and crossed herself again and again. The officer started running towards Lenin, followed by four or five more soldiers, and still she crossed herself. The soldiers were one hundred yards from her…
Fifty…
Thirty…
The scream – an animal’s cry – ripped through the quiet of the morning,. The GPU officer reached the woman and, facing her, put his arms around her with a tenderness that astonished Jones. It was then that the screaming stopped. A truck hurried up to the statue and braked sharply, spilling out more GPU troops. The officer led the woman to the truck and helped her climb into the back of it. Then he returned, picked up the dead baby and carried it to the back of the truck, where it was taken by someone else. All of this completed, he walked round to the cab and got in and the truck drove off.
A town square mantled in snow, people hurrying to and fro to get out of the cold. Lenin looked on, unmoved. Apart from the woman’s tracks in the snow and the shallow dip where the baby had been placed before the statue, everything was as before.
Breakfast was a banquet. Inside a Plaster of Paris swan lay a nest of hard-boiled eggs, slivers of roast beef, plates of bacon and ham, caviar, sturgeon, salmon, trout and something hideously ugly with sprouting barbels Jones didn’t recognise. Around this there was so much more: fruits and berries, bread and curls of butter, vodka, champagne, burgundy, tea, coffee.
Jones sat down at the table where the other journalists were at trough. Natasha and Evgenia were here too, Professor Aubyn and Dr Limner seated on their own at a side-table. A waiter hovered like a hummingbird close by, until Jones – with a harshness out of character – shooed him away. Pouring himself a black tea, he said, “So, did you see it?”
Duranty was toying with a spoon, dipping into a soft-boiled egg with one hand, a glass of vodka nestled securely in the other, “See what, Little Owl?”
Something about the coy mockery of Duranty’s remark stung Jones. “Did you see the mother dump her dead baby in front of the Lenin statue? Did you see it?”
Dr Limner looked up and studied Jones. Professor Aubyn seemed oblivious. Knives and forks clattered on porcelain for a second or two, then fell quiet. Someone coughed. Then there was silence. Pale-faced, Jones repeated his question word for word, taking undue care lest he stumble. “Did you see the mother dump her dead baby in front of the Lenin statue?”
Nothing.
“Did you see it?” snapped Jones.
Duranty’s spoon dug deeper into his soft-boiled egg, scooped out the yolk, then tucked it into his mouth before replying. “No, we didn’t see it,” he said. “Sounds like you had a nightmare, old boy. My advice, Little Owl, better go easy on the sauce.”
Natasha sniggered. At another table, Borodin and Oumansky started to bicker noisily, turning heads keen for distraction.
Jones got up to return to his room. Unsteadily, he walked the wrong way, towards the kitchen – until a humbug of waiters put him right. Turning, he walked back past the table where Duranty smiled into his soft-boiled egg. On the stairwell, waiting for him, was Evgenia. As she brushed past him, she stopped.
“Daliwch eich tafod, ffwl.” She was talking in Welsh, the words spoken so quietly they were on the edge of hearing. “Daliwch eich tafod neu byddwch yn difetha popeth. Cofiwch fod popeth a ddangosant i chi yn gelwydd. Popeth.”
“Hold your tongue, fool,” she’d said. “Hold your tongue or you will spoil everything. Remember that everything they show you is a lie. Everything. ”
She hurried past him, back into the breakfast room.
Chapter Six
Christmas Eve, 1932 and outside his window at the Hotel Lux the whole of Moscow was shrouded in white. Inside, Jones crouched over his Olivetti typewriter, holding a glass vodka full to the brim and staring at a blank sheet of paper. The woman in black walked across the blank sheet, laying her dead baby in front of the Lenin statue. The scene haunted him, a nightmare that would suddenly run in his mind’s eye in broad daylight.
Through the window he could see a little park, draped in white. From nowhere, a tabby cat trotted through the snow, making Jones’ mood a touch less annihilatingly bleak. He hadn’t heard of or seen Evgenia for two and a half months. He went to the gramophone and put on Eric Satie’s Gnossienne No 1, a Christman present to himself that he could barely afford. The melancholy of the piano notes soothed him. He couldn’t explain why.