Good.
Aron picked him up. The boy’s breathing was calm and even as he was carried out of the chalet, across the grass and over to the far end of the garden, where a low wall ran alongside a narrow dirt track.
Aron stepped over the wall and on to the track. His car was parked a short distance away in the darkness. Keeping one arm around the boy’s back, he opened the boot and gently placed the thin body inside.
Then he closed the boot and turned around to visit the boy in the next chalet.
There ought to be room for two boys in the boot, and the third one could go on the back seat. There was no danger of suffocation — they wouldn’t be going far.
It was eleven thirty now.
In an hour, Aron would be back here on the coast for his final encounter with the Kloss family.
The New Country, 1960–80
Aron carries on seeing Ludmila, when she is not away because of her work. He misses her, of course, but he is more balanced now, a middle-aged man quietly working for the KGB. He has a new car, a white Volga.
It is slightly easier to travel now. The Soviet Union has opened up, slowly and cautiously, after the death of Stalin, and no one comes knocking late at night any more. Political dissidents are interrogated and imprisoned, but there are no longer any quotas involving thousands of class enemies. Aron’s gun remains in its holster.
There are, of course, memories of the past, among both the hunters and the hunted, but no one talks about them. There is an old Soviet saying: ‘Let he who mentions the past lose an eye.’ People may no longer believe in a future paradise, but they want peace and quiet.
Mila continues to work as a nurse, but one particular job has made her ill. In the autumn of 1960, she travelled south, was away for several months and returned with fear in her eyes and a terrible cough. She has been coughing ever since, a dreadful rasping that is worst at night. And when she does manage to get to sleep, she sometimes wakes up with a start, screaming.
Aron doesn’t ask any questions. Either Mila doesn’t want to tell him what happened, or she’s not allowed to, and that’s fine. He has secrets of his own.
They get engaged in May 1961 and marry the following year. Not in God’s name, but in the name of the state — a dignified, low-key ceremony at the Central Registry Office.
Aron and Mila can now move in together, but Vlad’s tiny apartment is not suitable. A recently renovated two-room apartment is waiting for them on Petrovka Street.
Aron never thought he would be someone’s husband but, at the age of forty-three, that is exactly what has happened. He just wishes that his mother and his sister, Greta, could see him now.
In time, they have a child, a daughter who is born in 1972, when Mila is thirty-eight years old. She is a much-longed-for baby, because Mila has had two miscarriages. Aron wonders if this is related to her illness.
The night before the child is due, Mila finally tells him what happened twelve years earlier. She tells him about the mass grave in the desert steppes that no one was allowed to talk about.
She even had to help with the digging. ‘Everyone had to dig,’ she says.
‘A mass grave?’ he asks. ‘Who’s buried there?’
‘The engineers.’
And Mila tells him about the rocket launch on the great plain to the east of the Aral Sea, in October 1960. The night when her lungs were destroyed.
‘I was at the hospital, several kilometres away, but we still felt the impact of the shockwave. At first, we thought it was the rocket lifting off, as planned, but that wasn’t the case... We had no idea how badly prepared everything was, how those in charge ignored safety regulations in order to stick to the timetable.’
Things had become more and more hectic before lift-off, with the generals hassling the engineers. It was late at night, everyone was tired. So in the end it went wrong, very badly wrong. A short circuit in the system meant that the second-stage engines fired too early, detonating the fuel tanks below the first-stage engines while the launch pad was still crowded with people.
‘The rocket started up without warning,’ Mila says. ‘It began spewing flames in all directions, then the fuel tanks exploded. A burning cloud billowed up into the night sky, and the whole launch pad was covered in fire... It annihilated those who were standing nearby and rolled like a burning wave towards those standing further away. They couldn’t escape.’
Mila had been spared the sight of the firestorm, when many of those trying to run away got caught on the barbed-wire fence surrounding the area and turned into living torches.
But she saw everything afterwards. Everything.
‘I went with one of the first fire engines to the scene of the accident to see what I could do for the injured on the spot and to arrange transportation to our hospital. We worked for several days among the smoking wreckage of the rocket and bodies charred beyond recognition. But we weren’t allowed to say a word about the accident afterwards. Not a word. All the dead were hidden in a mass grave.’
Mila falls silent, then starts coughing. She coughs for a long time.
Aron sits by her bed, attempting to comfort her, but she shakes her head. ‘It’s indescribable... You wouldn’t understand, you’ve spent your whole life sitting behind a desk... Have you ever seen a dead person, Vlad?’
At first, Aron doesn’t say anything, but then he begins to speak. ‘I haven’t spent all my time sitting behind a desk. And I have seen people die.’
‘Have you?’
Aron nods. He could spend several days telling Mila about the ‘black work’ he used to do, but instead he chooses to tell her about what happened one cold spring after Vlad had accompanied Major Karrek to Moscow. It was April 1940; Poland had fallen and it was the year before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
‘I was a soldier and I was given a special task,’ Aron says. ‘It began with a train journey away from the biting winds of the city, travelling inland with an NKVD commando of trusted men from the prisons in Moscow and Leningrad, handpicked by Major Karrek. He was my commanding officer, and had a great deal of power. He led a unit that reported directly to Stalin.
‘“We will be working in the darkness,” Karrek explained to us. “Black work.”
‘No one on the train told us where we were going, and we knew we weren’t allowed to ask questions.
‘The railway line was newly laid. It stopped somewhere between Leningrad and Moscow, in a huge, gloomy forest.
‘We got off the train and were transported further into the forest in trucks; eventually we arrived at a very basic barracks next to an extensive prison camp. I had seen high fences before, but behind this fence I could hear foreign languages which I think were German and Polish — even though we were definitely still in the Soviet Union.
‘On that first evening, Major Karrek changed his clothes. He put on leather gloves and dressed like a butcher, with a thick leather apron straining over his big belly to protect his green uniform, from his neck right down to his boots.
‘He gave us a short talk:
‘“We have been given an important task to carry out,” he said. “We are going to shoot dogs that have been captured. A great many dogs... to ensure that they do not escape and tear our children limb from limb.”
‘Our black work was carried out indoors at night, next door to the camp, in a freshly dug cellar that was soundproofed with sandbags and logs.
‘There were no desks. No one recorded proceedings.
‘Comrade Karrek had brought special guns for the job; they were made by a German manufacturer — Walther. My role was to be in charge of the weapons, to be constantly at the ready with reloaded magazines.