We slipped and staggered together like drunks down the steep, narrow footpath to the river. No one seemed to have seen us go; if they had, I doubt either of us would have been able to run. Within a few moments we were out of sight of Serafima’s huts. A few more and we were in a little copse leading down to the river. The trees were like huge swaddled peasant women beneath their layers of snow. We crept beneath the skirts of one and pushed ourselves in among the brushwood. From this place we looked out onto the glittering river and waited. Slowly, slowly, I felt my heart calm and the dizzy, sick sensation seep away. We didn’t talk.
I don’t know if it was hours, or minutes before Sister Serafima appeared quietly on the path, leading an old donkey with a blanket on its back.
‘The Cheka seem to be on their way. I suggest you keep away from the road. At the edge of the park, by those firs, there is a path running north. It will take you back to the river – we are in a huge curve here, do you understand? Follow the river until you see the railway bridge. There you can climb up to Kotly station, on the Moscow Circular railroad. Let Dusya go when you get there – she will come home by herself. Here, this is all I can give you.’ She pressed a little parcel wrapped in a cloth into my hands. ‘Forgive me if I ask you one thing.’ She looked hard at me. ‘Is it his child?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I’m glad. Very glad. Go with God, my children…’
Dusya waited while I mounted her in an awkward side-saddle and Pasha took the rope; and then she slowly, carefully stepped out along the path. Her neat little hooves made no sound on the narrow animal tracks. Light sparkled and snapped around us and the air tasted like iced leaves. Apart from one deserted road, there was no sign of human life, no building, no chimney – just the blank curves of the snowy forest. I had not been out of the city for over a year – a year and a half, since we were at Mikhailovka in the summer of 1917, and we played blind man’s buff in the twilight… Dusya’s warm, comforting back moved beneath me and the baby was calm. Pelyagin was obviously after us, but all I could feel was weariness. The sun was sinking in the sky when we finally saw the railway bridge. I dismounted Dusya and we let her go: we didn’t want anyone to see her at the station. She looked at us for a slow moment, blinked, and turned for home.
‘Just a moment,’ murmured Pasha. ‘Before we enter the station, I think we should decide on our plans. We may not be able to talk openly there.’
After the warmth of the day, the woods were full of dripping and the occasional ‘flump’ of melted snow sliding from the branches. We turned our faces to the last sunshine.
‘The only course for you now is to go abroad. I’ve heard the Estonian border is open at Narva. We must get to Petrograd and then find out how to make the rest of the journey.’
‘And you? What about you?’
‘I will accompany you as far as you wish me to, of course. Then I suppose I’ll continue my work at Narkompros.’
I stared at him. ‘But you’ve impersonated a Cheka official – you’re in danger too.’
‘I doubt Sister Serafima would identify me.’
His expression was stony, a look that I would not have recognised on him a couple of years ago. Weakly, I changed the subject.
‘How will we get tickets to Petrograd? People wait for weeks to get them…’
‘Volodya might be able to help us. But we shouldn’t spend a minute more than we need at Gagarinsky Lane. I’m willing to bet Pelyagin’s men will have been round to tell the neighbours to report our return.’
We waited in the woods for the next train, a goods vehicle that we managed to scramble aboard. We sat on the running plate until it arrived just outside Paveletsky station in Moscow at six in the evening. I was very cold, very tired and my belly seemed to be growing heavier and more uncomfortable each moment. Until then I had given little thought to the birth, but now it suddenly filled my mind. I had little more than a month left. I wanted to beg Pasha to promise he would stay with me at least until the baby was born, but he looked so grim I didn’t have the courage to raise the subject.
‘Perhaps we can rest somewhere?’
‘If you want.’ Outside the station we found an old woman with a little card saying simply ‘Bed’. She took us to her room, in the basement of an old apartment building, and showed us the bed she meant – her own. We lay down and covered ourselves with our coats and she sat on a chair, keeping a close eye on us. At some point I woke in the night and found her trying to undo my shoelaces. I pushed her away but she clung on for a while, glaring at me reproachfully. Finally she let go and sat back down again.
During the hours of night Slavkin’s hands, with their long, pallid, Orthodox fingers, appeared in my dream. His gentle manner with the old ladies, his smile. ‘Guardian angels’, he remarked once to me, ‘are a scientific fact.’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ I said, laughing.
‘Yes, a fact! They are the electric current that guides us, unknowing, through our lives… towards one decision, away from another. On what do we base our decisions? Most of them spring from an instinctive response, very few are based on logic. And yet we make good decisions much of the time. Like animals, we have a natural instinct for the electromagnetic currents of the Universe.’
We left before dawn and walked up to Gagarinsky Lane to collect our passports and a few belongings. I shoved the surviving IRT papers into a couple of boxes and, in return for the last of our food supplies, the metalworker’s wife agreed to deliver them to the British Embassy. Volodya, miraculously, managed to obtain tickets for us that evening, to travel under false papers as a Communist Party member and his wife, going to take up a post in Petrograd. Once in Petrograd, we took turns all day to queue for tickets to Narva. The train left the following morning on a twenty-four-hour journey, much of which was spent stopping, starting and crawling into sidings for hours at a time. Around midnight, our compartment fell silent and I finally plucked up the courage to speak to Pasha.
I put my lips up against his ear and whispered as quietly as I could.
‘I wanted to ask… I mean, I don’t want to press you… but I wondered if you would mind very much if I asked you to marry me?’
A pause.
‘I didn’t know whether I should ask you, what with the – the matter of the baby, and of course marriage itself is utterly bourgeois, against both our principles. I quite understand if you refuse…’
He still said nothing but I could feel him pulling away from me.
‘No, I’ve started this all wrong. Wait, please, it’s nothing to do with Revolutionary principles. You’re right, of course I loved Nikita – we both love Nikita, we will never stop loving him. But I made a mistake. I misunderstood what love felt like, do you see? For whatever reason – I don’t know why – I thought of love as something difficult, something I should suffer for.’ I swallowed hard, floundering. ‘I – I didn’t realise I loved you, because it was just so easy, and warm, and good…’
He tried to speak, but I was determined not to be interrupted. ‘The fact is, now I know that I love you, I have to say so. I can’t let you disappear, and I’m terrified that when we get to the border they might not let you through, or they might take me off somewhere separate, or… or who knows what they might do to you, don’t you understand?’ I was gabbling by this time and my voice was rising. Suddenly I felt his finger on my lips.
‘Sh. No – no.’
‘No?’ My voice rose to a squeak.
‘No, I don’t mind marrying you, my darling love. You absolute idiot. And also no, I don’t care about the matter of the baby, and it’s not against my principles. And no, I am not going to disappear. I didn’t think you wanted me to come with you…’