by John Boyne
‘But haven’t you heard anything? Has no one spoken to you and told you when we might—?’
‘Zoya,’ I said quickly, interrupting her and looking around to ensure that no one was listening, but it was too noisy for anything she said to be overheard. ‘We cannot talk of that here.’
‘But I can’t take it any longer,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Every night it’s the same thing. Every day I worry about whether we will survive to see another morning. You have friends now, Georgy. You are important to them. If you could only ask them—’
‘Zoya, be silent,’ I hissed, my eyes narrowing as I glanced around quickly. ‘I’ve told you. I know nothing. I can ask no one. Please … I know how difficult it is, but we cannot talk about these things. Not here.’
Arina shifted in my arms and looked up at me sleepily, her eyes half open, her mouth working slowly as her tongue flickered across her lips, her expression changing to ensure that both of us, mother and father, were still here to protect her. Zoya reached forward and kissed her forehead, smoothing the palm of her hand across her hair until the child returned to sleep.
‘Do you ever think we came to the wrong place, Georgy?’ she asked me, her voice quiet and resigned now. ‘We could have gone anywhere when we left Paris.’
‘But it’s everywhere, my love,’ I replied quietly. ‘The whole world is caught up in this. There was nowhere we could have escaped it.’
My mind drifted back frequently to Russia during those long nights in the shelter. I tried to imagine St Petersburg or Kashin as they might exist after twenty years away from them and could not help but wonder how they were surviving the war, how their people were coping with this torture. I never thought of St Petersburg as Leningrad, of course, even though the newspapers referred to it as the Bolsheviks’ city. I had never become accustomed to Petrograd either, the name the Tsar had inflicted on it during the Great War, when he feared that its original title was too Teutonic for a great Russian city, particularly when we were engaged in a war of boundaries with his German cousin. I tried to imagine this man Stalin, about whom I read so frequently, and whose face I distrusted. I had never met him, of course, but had heard his name discussed in the palace during the last year – along with those of Lenin and Trotsky – and it seemed curious that he had been the one to survive and rule. The reign of the Romanovs had come to an end in an outpouring of repugnance at the autocracy of the Tsars, but it seemed to me that this new Soviet leadership differed from the old Russian empire in little but name.
Although I thought of them infrequently, I wondered how my sisters were coping with the war, whether they were even still alive to endure it. Asya would be in her mid-forties by now, Liska and Talya in their forties. They were certainly old enough to have sons – my nephews, who might be fighting on the Russian fronts, laying down their lives on European battlefields. I had often longed for a son and it hurt me to think that I would never know any of these boys, that they would never sit and share their experiences with their uncle, but this was the price I had paid for my actions in 1918: banishment from my family, eternal exile from my homeland. It was entirely possible that none of them were even alive any more, that they had grown old childless or had been murdered during the Revolution. Who knew what retaliation might have been visited upon them in Kashin, if news of my actions had reached that small, hopeless village.
Three bombings in particular had a great effect on my family. The first was the partial bombing of the British Museum, a place I considered a home of sorts. The library was left mostly intact, but parts of the main building were destroyed and subsequently closed down until they could be repaired again, at some unknown date in the future, and it grieved me to see such a magnificent building brought to this.
The second was the destruction of the Holborn Empire, the cinema that Zoya and I had frequented on many occasions before the outbreak of the war, the place I associated almost entirely with my Greta Garbo obsession and the night that my wife and I had spent two hours lost in images and memories of our homeland during Anna Karenina.
The third was the most devastating of all. Our neighbour, Rachel Anderson, who had lived in the flat next to ours for six years and had been a friend and confidante to Zoya and a grandmother of sorts to Arina, was killed in a house in Brixton, where she had been visiting a friend, when they had failed to get to an air-raid shelter in time. Her body was not discovered for more than a week and in the meantime her absence had already left us fearing the worst. Her loss caused each of us great suffering, but most particularly Arina, who had seen Rachel every day of her life, and who had never known what it was to grieve before.
Unlike her parents, who knew only too well.
First, there were a series of letters, none of which contained any information that could possibly be considered important, but I translated them anyway, and looked for hidden meanings among the idioms. They were dated from over a year before and included details of troop activities which would have been long over by the time I sat down to render the Russian alphabet into English; most of the men whose movements had been directed by these letters were dead already. I worked carefully, reading each note from start to finish in order to get a clear sense of their meaning before deciding how to decipher them. I wrote in a neat, clear script on white vellum paper which was provided for me by the War Office, using a black fountain pen of excellent quality which had been laid on the table before I arrived, and when I was finished, at almost the precise moment that I laid the pen down, the door opened and he stepped inside.
‘The mirror,’ I said, nodding in the direction of the glass which ran the length of one wall. ‘You were watching me through it, I suppose?’
‘Yes, Mr Jachmenev,’ he replied with a smile. ‘We like to observe. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘If I minded, I wouldn’t be here, Mr Jones,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if you made a great secret of it, anyway. I could hear you talking in there. It’s really not very secure. I hope you don’t use it for more important people than I.’
He nodded and gave me an apologetic shrug before taking a seat in the corner of the room and reading my pages carefully. He was wearing a different suit from the one he had worn in the library on the day he first introduced himself to me, but it was of equally good quality and I couldn’t help but wonder how he was able to purchase it at a time when rationing was so strict. Mr Tweed, Miss Simpson had called him on that first afternoon. Mr Jones, he had introduced himself as a little later, offering no first name, a most unusual overture which implied that this was no more his real name than Miss Simpson’s more fanciful offering. Not that it mattered. Whoever he was made no difference to me. After all, he wasn’t the first person in my life who was pretending to be someone they were not.
‘Your suit,’ I said, watching him as he scanned my sentences, his expression changing from time to time as he drifted between approval and surprise.
‘My suit?’ he asked, looking up.
‘Yes. I was just admiring it.’
He stared at me and the corners of his mouth turned up a little, as if he was unsure how to take the remark. ‘Thank you,’ he said, a note of suspicion in his tone.
‘I wonder how such a suit is available to a young man. In these difficult times, I mean,’ I added.
‘I have a private income,’ he replied immediately, the speed of his response suggesting to me that he didn’t care to discuss it. ‘These are very good,’ he continued, stepping over to sit at the table beside me. ‘Very good indeed. You’ve avoided the mistakes that most of our translators make.’
‘Which are?’
‘Translating every word and every phrase exactly as they appear on the page. Ignoring the differences in idiom from language to language. In fact you haven’t translated them at all, have you? You’ve told me what every letter says. There’s a keen difference.’
‘I’m glad you appreciate it,’ I said. ‘But perhaps I can ask you something?’
‘Of
course.’
‘Your Russian is obviously as good as mine is.’
‘Actually, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said with a smile, ‘it’s better.’
I stared at him, amused by his arrogance, for he was a good fifteen years younger than me and sported an accent which implied that he had been schooled at Eton or Harrow or one of the other exclusive schools which made young gentlemen out of the sons of wealthy fathers. ‘You’re from Russia?’ I asked in a disbelieving tone. ‘You sound so … English.’
‘That’s because I am English. I’ve only been to Russia a few times. Moscow. Leningrad, of course. Stalingrad.’
‘St Petersburg,’ I said quickly, correcting him. ‘And Tsaritsyn.’
‘If you prefer. I’ve been as far west as the Central Siberian Plateau. As far south as Irkutsk. But that was purely for pleasure. Once I was even in Yekaterinburg.’
I had been looking back down at the letters as he spoke, enjoying the sight of Russian characters again, but at that word, at that most terrible of words, my head snapped up and I stared at him, examining his face for anything that might betray his own secrets.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I was sent there.’
‘Why Yekaterinburg?’
‘I was sent there.’
I looked at him and felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety coursing through my veins. I couldn’t remember when I had last encountered someone so entirely in control of their emotions; a young man who never perspired, never lost his temper and never said anything which he was not absolutely sure that he wanted to say.
‘You have only visited Russia,’ I said finally, for it seemed as if he was not going to speak again until I did.
‘That’s correct.’
‘You’ve never lived there?’
‘No.’
‘But you believe your Russian is better than mine?’
‘Yes.’
I couldn’t help but laugh a little at the absolute certainty in his tone. ‘Might I ask why?’
‘Because it’s my job to have better Russian than you,’ he said.
‘Your job?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is your job exactly, Mr Jones?’
‘To have better Russian than you.’
I sighed and looked away. The conversation was utterly pointless, of course it was. He wasn’t going to tell me anything that he didn’t want to. It would be simpler if I just waited for him to talk instead. He would say the same things, regardless.
‘But having said that,’ he added, lifting the letters once again and scattering them across the table, ‘your Russian is excellent. I commend you. I mean it’s not as if you’ve had anyone to practise it on these last twenty years, is it?’
‘Haven’t I?’
‘Your wife, of course,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But you don’t speak Russian at home. And you never speak it around your daughter.’
‘How do you know what I speak at home?’ I asked, feeling my temper begin to rise a little now; I hated the fact that he seemed to know so much about me. I had spent twenty years trying to protect my family’s privacy and now this boy was sitting next to me telling me things that he should never have known. I wanted to know how had he discovered them. I wanted to know what else he knew about me.
‘Am I wrong?’ he asked, sensing my annoyance perhaps and softening his tone.
‘You know that you’re not.’
‘And why is that, Mr Jachmenev? Why don’t you speak your own language around Arina? Don’t you want her to know her heritage?’
‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘You seem to know everything else about me.’
Now it was his turn to smile. We sat there for what felt like a very long time but he said nothing in reply, simply shook his head and nodded.
‘Really very good,’ he repeated, tapping his index finger on the bundle of letters. ‘I knew I’d found the right man. But I think next time we might offer you something a little bit more challenging, don’t you?’
The experience of being Russian in London between 1939 and 1945 was not an easy one. There were many evenings when Zoya recounted stories to me of how, purchasing food in a grocer’s or butcher’s shop where she had been a customer for years, she was stared at with mistrust the moment her request betrayed her accent; of how the portions of rationed meat passed across the counter were always slightly smaller than those handed to the English women in front and behind her in the line. Of how the bottle of milk was always closer to its use-by date, the bread always a little more stale. Whatever friendliness and sense of belonging we had built up with our neighbours over more than twenty years among them, however much we thought we had assimilated ourselves into their country, seemed to dissipate almost overnight. It didn’t matter to them that we were not German. We were not English, that was all that counted. We spoke differently, so we must be agents of the enemy, dispersed into the heart of their capital in order to discover their secrets, betray their families, murder their children. All around us was the stink of suspicion.
Whenever I stopped to read one of the propaganda posters that were liberally scattered around the walls of the city – CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES; YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’S LISTENING; BE LIKE DAD, KEEP MUM – I understood why people stopped their conversations whenever they heard me speak and why they turned to look at me, their eyes opening wide as if I was a threat to their well-being. I began to hate speaking in shops or cafés, preferring to point to whatever I wanted and hoping that I could be served without the need for conversation. And when we were not avoiding the bombs in the air-raid shelters, Zoya and I spent every evening at home together, where we could talk freely without having to endure the intimidating stares of strangers.
Towards the end of 1941, I found myself walking home one evening with my spirits particularly low after a long and difficult day. The wife, daughter and mother-in-law of my employer, Mr Trevors, had been killed the night before, when Mrs Trevors’ family home had been struck by a single bomb, dropped by a Luftwaffe aeroplane which had veered wildly off course. It was the worst luck imaginable – theirs was the only house in the street which was in any way damaged – and Mr Trevors had been distraught because of the tragedy. He’d wandered into the library in the late afternoon without any of us noticing and a short time later, I heard loud cries coming from his office. When I went inside, the poor man was seated behind his desk with an expression of utter devastation on his face, which changed to tears and howling when I attempted to comfort him. Miss Simpson followed me in a few minutes later and surprised me by taking full charge of the situation, finding whisky from I knew not where to settle his trembling, before taking him home and offering what little friendship he would allow at such a terrible moment.
Still unsettled by these events, I did something entirely out of character as I made my way home, stepping into a public house in desperate need of alcohol. The place was two-thirds full, mostly older men who were beyond the age of enlisting, women of all ages, and a few soldiers in uniform, home on leave. I barely gave any of them a second glance and walked directly to the bar, leaning up against it, glad for what little support it offered.
‘A pint of ale, please,’ I said to the barman, who was unfamiliar to me, despite the fact that this was as close to a local pub as Zoya and I had, but then we had rarely set foot in there.
‘What was that?’ he asked, his tone confrontational as he narrowed his eyes and looked at me with barely disguised contempt. It was difficult not to be aware of his thick arms as he wore the sleeves of his shirt rolled up towards the biceps, the suggestion of a tattoo peeping out from beneath the cuffs.
‘I said I’d like a pint of ale,’ I repeated, and this time he stared at me for ten, perhaps twenty seconds, as if he was considering whether or not to throw me out into the street, before finally nodding and walking slowly towards one of the pumps, where he poured a long draught into a glass, heavy with foam, and set it on the counter before me.
‘Isn’t that a bitter?�
� I asked, knowing full well that it would be better if I simply left the bar and went home. Zoya usually kept a few bottles of rationed ale hidden in a cupboard somewhere for emergency moments such as this.
‘One pint of bitter,’ said the barman, holding his hand out. ‘As requested. That’ll be sixpence, if you please.’
Now it was my turn to hesitate. I looked at the glass, the beads of perspiration clinging invitingly to the side, and decided that this was not the moment to protest. The hum of conversation around the room had already lessened, as if the other patrons were hoping that I might do something, anything, that would provoke a fight.
‘Fine,’ I said, reaching into my pocket and placing the exact change on the counter. ‘And thank you.’ I took my drink and sat down at an empty table, picking up a newspaper that a previous customer had left behind and scanning the headlines.
It was mostly war stories, of course. A series of quotes from a speech that Mr Churchill had given the afternoon before in Birmingham. Another that Mr Attlee had offered in support of the government. Short articles about bombings and the names of some of the people who had been killed, their ages and occupations, although nothing as yet about Mr Trevors’ family; I wondered for a moment whether they would figure in the reports the following day or whether there were too many people killed to list them all. It was probably bad for public morale, anyway, to list the names of the dead every day. I was about to start reading a piece relating to a sporting event that barely interested me when I noticed two men walking down from the other end of the bar and sitting at the table next to mine. I glanced up – their drinks were half finished and I suspected they had been there for some time – but turned immediately back to my newspaper, unwilling to engage in conversation.
‘Evening,’ said one of the men, nodding at me, a fellow of about my own age with a pale complexion and rotten teeth.
‘Good evening,’ I replied, in a tone that I hoped would discourage further dialogue.
‘Heard you at the bar, ordering your drink,’ he said. ‘Not from round here, are you?’
