‘Oh… Good.’
We started laughing weakly in the dark, and trying to stifle our laughter, which had the result of mild hysteria.
‘Oh, shut your gobs!’ snapped the market trader squashed beside us. ‘You’re shaking the bed up like a bloody blancmange!’
That didn’t help. It was some moments before I could compose myself. Then Pasha whispered in my ear, ‘Let’s do it now, then, shall we?’
‘What?’
‘Get married.’
‘Oh! How?’
‘We each say our vows to the other. I, Pavel Aleksandrovich Kobelev, take you, Getrude Freely—’
‘Gertrude Adelaide.’
‘Really? I didn’t know. How delightful. Gertrude Adelaide Freely, as my beloved wife. I vow to love you, care for you, kiss you, and always tell you the truth, till death us do part.’
‘And not to disappear.’
‘And not to disappear. Now you.’
‘I, Gertrude Adelaide Freely, take you, Pavel Aleksandrovich Kobelev, as my beloved husband. I vow to love you, care for you, and always be truthful, till death us do part.’
‘And to kiss me. You can start that now.’
We kissed, in the darkness, all the way to the border.
Finally we were told to disembark. At the checkpoint they kept us waiting for hours, searching through the mound of luggage that our fellow travellers were carrying. My stomach began to ache so painfully that I was convinced that labour had begun. I begged them to let me get to the hospital in Reval. The young customs officer looked alarmed, and went to consult his superior.
‘Go on,’ snapped the senior officer, jerking his head. ‘Get out of here. We’re not a crèche!’
Holding hands, Pasha and I walked across the bridge over the muddy, turgid Narva river and into Estonia.
We were married for the second time in Reval (or Tallinn, as it had just been renamed). The city was battered by civil war itself, but to us it seemed the epitome of peace. Its shops were magically stuffed with goods, and in the streets people strolled about and appeared not to be thinking about food at all. With our last funds we bought ourselves clothes and visited the barber. I remember the delicious luxury of lying back in the barber’s chair, only the snippety-snip of the scissors breaking the silence, the previous months falling away from me as each long curl landed on the floor. We bathed ourselves carefully in the digs we had taken near the station and dressed in our new clothes, like children going to First Communion. Outside the Guild Hall we bought a bunch of snowdrops from an old woman. Half an hour later, we emerged with a marriage certificate.
The Kobelevs had friends, perhaps even distant cousins, the Rauds, who had an estate south of Tallinn. I hadn’t met them, but before the war they had been frequent visitors in Moscow and Pasha had visited their estate as a child. We sent a telegram on our arrival, and the next we knew, several days after our wedding, was Mark Raud himself arriving at our door in a pony-trap, embracing us both, and insisting we eat the picnic he had brought with him from the estate. A big, stern figure, he stood over us, hushing us while we ate.
‘Now get in the trap,’ he ordered, ‘and you can tell me the news of the family while we travel. I want to get you back to Jarvekula straight away. I am sorry to say such a thing, but you look terrible, my children. Never mind, thank God the war is over in Estonia, at least. You will have your baby here, my dear.’
The year was just tipping over into spring; every day the ground dried out a little more and the buds swelled. The Rauds, kind, generous people that they were, housed us for almost six months. Like all women waiting for their first baby to be born, I could not quite believe that an entirely new person was about to arrive in the world. I was scared – not so much that our living conditions might have affected her (I could sense how healthy she was inside me), nor of the birth itself, but of the great burden of sorrow that she would immediately have to shoulder. Yet when, in the middle of April, she emerged – you emerged – tiny and hairy-eared as a little wood sprite, with large, serene, dark eyes, I saw that my fears were quite irrelevant. We called you Sophia – for Sonya, and also for the calm wisdom that you seemed to exude. You immediately knew what to do, eating, sleeping and looking about you with lovely solemnity. I was tired, of course, in the first months, but now my little Sophy was here, the terrible events of the past year seemed somehow to make more sense.
In September we packed up and sailed for Paris, after exacting a promise from the Rauds that they would visit us soon. You were by then a solid baby with creases on your wrists and a throaty little laugh and Pasha had, at last, tracked down his parents. We had heard nothing from them more recently than November 1918, when they had left Russia for Marseilles. As a last resort, Pasha wrote to put an advertisement in the Figaro. A week later, to our amazement, a boy came up the track to Jarvekula with not one but three telegrams in his hand, all from Mr Kobelev. The first: ‘Dearest children we are in Paris stop your mother Liza Dima all well stop send news.’ The second: ‘Dears come immediately I will wire funds Bank of Estonia.’ The third, simply: ‘All to meet boat Calais.’
Before we left, we decided to tell Pasha’s father about Sonya by telegram. We felt it was better that he break the news to the others gently, before we arrived. There was a part of me that dreaded seeing them; again and again I saw poor Sonya lying on the divan in the study, glassy-eyed, while I tried to feed her broth.
The thought also struck me now, as it had signally failed to do when Pasha and I were signing our marriage certificate at the Guild Hall, that the Kobelevs might be less than pleased at their new daughter-in-law and their not-quite-granddaughter. Pasha and I agreed on an official line: we had had a Communist wedding in Russia, but having lost our papers in our hurried exit from Russia we’d decided to formalise our situation in Tallinn. It went without saying that you were his daughter.
My beloved Sophy, you’ve already learnt so many shocking and terrifying facts about your birth in these pages that perhaps the date of your birth will hardly matter to you; yet all these years, you know, I have held a little private celebration for you in mid-April, a private thanksgiving for my daughter accompanied by a plea for your forgiveness at having deceived you. All your life you have celebrated your birthday a month late, in mid-May; this began when we sailed out of Estonia. We could not risk his parents counting up the months and wondering how you could have been conceived when Pasha was still in the Crimea.
We came down the gangplank at Calais into a sea of waiting, anxious faces. I was carrying you, Pasha was heaving our suitcases; he was shaking with emotion. Where were they? And then – Liza. I saw her before she saw us, a tall, pale girl of sixteen, her expression reserved, chewing her lip – and suddenly she caught sight of her brother. She let out a piercing scream, and jumped in the air, blazing with joy. Beside her Dima began to wave and shout – ‘Over here! Over here!’ And pushing forward, Mr Kobelev, barely taller than his son, grey-haired, beaming and crinkling up his eyes which were already full of tears and his wife beside him… It was more than we could do to say anything at all; we embraced each other, round and round, and you smiled so sweetly at your grandparents, your aunt and uncle, and as your grandmother laid her cheek against your silken baby head, she let out a terrible sob, and said, ‘Sonya.’
We stayed with them in Paris for some weeks, until everything that could be said had been said; we told them everything, only keeping from them the truth about your father for your sake as well as for my own. The story of my ideals and my actions seemed too strange and confused for them to understand; maybe I couldn’t make sense of them to myself, either. It was a relief for me to edit out those months when I loved Nikita and when I would have done anything to make him love me.