‘To talk? Is that all? You frightened me for a moment with your coolness.’ He laughed and sat on the bench beside her. He let just his arm touch hers, no more. ‘So what is it you want to talk about?’
‘I want to talk about… the Dyuzheyevs.’
He stopped breathing.
‘You know the name?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘When I asked before, you claimed you didn’t.’
‘I lied.’
‘Why would you lie about it?’
‘Because… oh Sofia, I don’t want to think back to those times. They’re… over, locked in the past. Nothing can change what happened back then.’
In the silence that followed in the damp hut, Mikhail had a sudden sense of things slipping away. Just the same as that day so long ago in the snow, when his life slipped out of his icy fingers. Not this time, not again, he refused to let it happen again. He stood up quickly and faced her, and was shocked to see that despite the heat and their passion, her skin was bone white.
‘Why are you doing this, Sofia? What are you trying to get out of me? Yes, I knew the Dyuzheyevs. Yes, I saw them die. A day etched into my brain in every detail, however hard I try to forget it. So I’ve answered you. Now leave it, my love, leave it alone. Whatever your connection is with that dreadful day, don’t drag it in here.’
He dropped to his knees on the wooden floor in front of her. The mound of blonde curls at the base of her stomach was barely a breath away, but he gazed only at her deep blue eyes that looked so wretched.
‘Sofia,’ he whispered, ‘my Sofia. Don’t do this.’
‘I must.’
He sat back on his heels and stared up at her.
‘I love you, Sofia.’
‘I love you, Mikhail.’ Her eyes shimmered in the narrow shaft of light.
He gently brushed a thread of moisture from her lip. ‘Very well, my sweetest, what is it you want?’
She didn’t speak. Her throat attempted to swallow but failed, and he waited. Their breathing sounded loud in the silence. Only when she dragged her eyes away from his face towards the small square of daylight outside did the words come.
‘Anna Fedorina is still alive.’
They were dressed and in the house. Mikhail had lit a cigarette but had forgotten it. It burned fitfully in his fingers.
He was angry. Not with Sofia, but with himself. Something that happened sixteen years ago should not still have this power over him. They’d said little more after Sofia’s announcement.
‘Where is she?’ he’d asked.
‘In a labour camp in Siberia.’
He’d sunk his head in his hands and uttered a long moan, but when eventually he looked up, she was gone. He pulled on his clothes and hurried to the house, fearful that she would have left, but no, she was sitting in his chair, face composed, eyes calm. Only her skin was the colour of rain, a strange translucent grey that held no life in it.
He stood in the middle of the room and stared down at the half-built model of the bridge on the table. ‘It’s the Brooklyn Bridge,’ he said flatly. ‘In America. It spans the East River between New York and Brooklyn.’
‘I thought it was the Forth Bridge.’
‘No.’ He frowned. Why was he talking about bridges? ‘The Forth Bridge is cantilevered, this one is a suspension bridge.’ He ran a finger along the top of one of the towers, picking out the intricate woodwork. ‘An amazing feat of construction in the 1870s. Fourteen thousand miles of wire holds it together and each cable has a breaking strain of twelve thousand tons. Its main span is five hundred metres and…’ Slowly he shook his head from side to side. ‘What was I thinking? That one day I could become an engineer again instead of a miserable factory manager? I was a fool.’
With a sudden jab of anger he hammered his fist down on top of the bridge, bringing it crashing down in a thousand pieces as each miniature girder sprang apart.
‘Mikhail!’
‘I’ve been living in a dream-world,’ he said sourly and swept the mess on to the floor. ‘I thought that I could rebuild the past, I could create a new family with Pyotr and you and that one day my dedication to the State’s demands would win me the reward of a job that I could love again.’ He placed his foot on one of the replica masonry anchorages lying on the floor and crushed it. ‘No more dreams.’
‘Why should knowing that Anna is alive destroy your dreams? Is your life so unbearable without her?’ Her eyes were fierce. ‘She still loves you.’
‘Loves me! She should loathe me.’
‘Why? Because you never came for her? Don’t worry, she knows you tried. Maria told her when she went to the apartment in Leningrad.’
‘She saw Maria?’
‘Yes. That was where she was captured. But Maria showed her the name and address you’d written down, so that’s why I came here to Tivil, to find you.’ She paused, her voice briefly unsteady. She studied her hands and tapped the two scarred fingers against her knee as if reminding herself of something. ‘Anna loves you… Vasily. She always will, till her dying breath.’
Mikhail strode across the room, seized her wrists and yanked her to her feet. As he stood there holding her he knew he’d lost her. Something deep inside him started to haemorrhage.
‘I’m not Vasily,’ he said coldly.
He felt her go rigid, but he couldn’t stop now.
‘Vasily Dyuzheyev knifed my father to death that winter’s day in 1917 on the Dyuzheyev estate. My father was the soldier in charge of the patrol, but my contribution to the massacre was twice Vasily’s. I shot his mother and I shot Anna Fedorina’s father in cold blood.’ He shook Sofia, shook her hard. ‘Now tell me,’ he demanded, ‘that she loves me. Now tell me… that you love me.’
It took them time, knot by knot, to untangle the truth. Again and again they came back to Maria to discover that she lay at the heart of the confusion. Mikhail was pacing back and forth across the room, hands dragging through his hair, trying to rip his skull apart. He could scarcely bear to look at Sofia. She was hunched in his chair, knees up under her chin, arms wrapped round her shins, eyes dark and impenetrable.
‘You say Maria told Anna that Vasily visited her twice. That he wrote down the name Mikhail Pashin with an address in Tivil and the Levitsky factory. But that wasn’t Vasily. That person was me. And according to your talk with Maria’s sister-in-law, the second man was Fomenko. You see, I only went to see her once.’ Mikhail recalled the day. The tiny apartment, stiflingly hot, and the white-haired woman so eager to please and so painfully damaged by the stroke. ‘I had no idea she believed I was Vasily Dyuzheyev. I’d been searching for her for years.’
‘Why?’
Mikhail stopped pacing. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Because I killed the child’s father. I wanted to find Anna Fedorina and do what I could to make amends for what I’d done to her family. I discovered that her mother had died years earlier and that the woman with her was her governess. But…’ he spread out his arms in a gesture of despair, ‘both vanished off the face of the earth. It was a time of chaos and disappearances were common. The civil war started and normal life became… impossible.’
‘Mikhail,’ Sofia asked quietly, ‘how old were you when you shot Svetlana Dyuzheyeva and Doktor Fedorin?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Only three years older than Pyotr.’
Mikhail shuddered. ‘I was so like him at that age. So totally convinced that Bolshevism was the universal truth that would cleanse the world. All else was lies.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I stood shoulder to shoulder with my father that day and mowed down the idle bourgeoisie like rats in a barrel.’ He turned his back on Sofia. ‘Why torment ourselves? You cannot despise me more than I despise myself for what I did. And the ultimate irony is…’ he gave a bitter laugh, ‘that all this time the boy who cut my own father’s throat that day has been living right here beside me in Tivil. Aleksei Fomenko turns out to be Vasily Dyuzheyev under another name.’