The Concubine's Secret

by Kate Furnivall

  It was gone noon. Long gone. He forced his eyelids open in case he missed her. In this fog she might pass three feet from him and not know he was there. He tilted his head back but the golden domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer had ceased to exist, stolen from sight by the dank air and something fluttered on the edge of his thoughts. Something about this church. He’d read something. That was it. It was going to be blown up. Involuntarily he stepped away from the pillar as if it were about to explode, but immediately felt the absence of its stone solidity at his back. Is that what worshippers would feel, the loss of solidity, of belief ?

  He walked slowly round the outside of the great towering building till he came to the River Moskva at its back, where the water flowed in ripples of steel. It looked so hard, so substantial. He started to cross the bridge that spanned it but had to stop halfway because the muscles in his legs were shaking with exhaustion. He leaned on the parapet and was aware that he had disappeared. This close to the river he was wrapped in a cocoon of fog, invisible and unknown.

  It didn’t matter, Lydia wasn’t coming. Had she lied to him? No. He shook his head. She didn’t lie to him in the letter, he was certain. Either she had left Moscow - with or without their father - or she was unable to make it to the church. Whatever the truth, he couldn’t help either of them now, not Jens Friis, not Lydia. But he missed her, missed her laugh and her stubborn chin, and the way she knew exactly how to get under his skin. And her moments of unexpected gentleness, he missed them more than ever now.

  The journey to Moscow had cost him dear and stripped him of everything, both physical and mental. It had taken all his strength to get here, walking for weeks without end, no food, losing track of time. He leaned his head over the bridge and stared down at the cushion of thick white air that hung just below him. It looked tempting. On that soft pillow he could rest at last and dream again of galloping through the autumn woods beside his father.

  27

  The group of prisoners stood alone in the central courtyard behind heavy studded doors. Nine men, three women. In the back of a truck, sheltering out of the bitter wind, two soldiers watched over them, unseen in its dark metallic interior with rifles across their knees, cigarette smoke warm in their lungs. Outside snow fluttered down in spinning spirals, settling on hats and shoulders, yet despite the cold and the tall gloomy buildings that loomed over them, blocking out what little winter light filtered down, each of the prisoners was smiling.

  It was always the same. A day free from the rattle of locks. No jangle of keys, no interminable grey corridors that led only to more locks and more keys. Anticipation prickled their skin. It reminded Jens of when he was a young man in St Petersburg, standing in the stable courtyard waiting for the carriage to arrive to whisk them away to the summer palace for the day. Well, today wasn’t an outing to any palace. Far from it. Just to a gigantic hangar in a well-guarded field surrounded by dense forest. Not that he’d ever seen the forest here, but he’d heard the wind in the branches, the sigh of wooden limbs as they flexed and shivered. It was a sound he’d listened to a million times in the forests of Siberia, a sound as familiar as his own breath.

  ‘Jens.’

  ‘Olga,’ he smiled. ‘No need to be nervous.’

  ‘I’m not nervous.’ She said it breezily. ‘It’s the noise of the wheels I hate, that’s all, as they drive over rough ground. Like bones being crushed.’

  Olga was a skilled chemist, no more than forty but she looked older, the lines round her mouth etched deep after eight years’ hard labour in a lead mine. Her body was fleshless, stick thin, and she complained of stomach pains whenever she ate her meals. Here in this prison they were decently fed, a world away from the labour camps. They routinely devoured more protein in one week than they’d previously had sight of in a whole year. Stalin was feeding them up the way a farmer fattens a pig before slitting its throat. To get the best out of them. Stalin wanted the best out of their brains.

  The prison doctor declared that Olga’s pains were all in her mind and he might be right. Guilt, Jens believed, guilt was eating her up each time she pushed a forkful of food past her lips, because her daughter was still out there in the lead mine where bones were regularly crushed under rockfalls.

  ‘I hate going in the truck,’ Olga muttered.

  ‘Just imagine that you are in a horse carriage,’ Jens urged, ‘trotting down the Arbat to take tea at the Arbatskiy Podval café. That would put a smile on your face. Cakes and pastries and sweet strawberry tarts and—’

  ‘Mmm,’ murmured a younger woman nearby, ‘plum tart with cream and chocolate sauce.’

  ‘Annoushka, you never think of anything but food,’ Olga scolded.

  ‘Food is comforting,’ Annoushka confessed. ‘And God knows we all need comfort in this place.’

  ‘If you keep eating the way you do, you’ll soon be too fat to fit in the truck,’ Olga teased.

  It was true. Annoushka did eat a lot, but so did most of them. They’d been starved for too many years to let even a crumb remain uneaten on a plate. Like squirrels, they hoarded nuts for the winter that was sure to come again one day soon, once Stalin and Kaganovich and Colonel Tursenov had finished picking their minds clean. Behind them the truck’s engine started up, the noise of it rebounding off the high courtyard walls, and a plume of black exhaust billowed into the chill air. The two soldiers in the back jumped out and held open the rear doors.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Elkin called out from among the huddle of engineers and strode towards the truck. He was eager to be gone.

  The others followed at varying speeds.

  ‘Friis, everything had better damn well work today,’ an elderly unshaven prisoner grumbled as a young mechanic hoisted him up into the back of the vehicle.

  ‘It will, old man. Have faith.’

  ‘Faith!’ Annoushka said, stamping her feet on the cobbles while she waited her turn. ‘I’ve forgotten what that word even means.’ She beckoned to Jens and Olga. ‘Come on, you don’t want to get left behind. Today’s a big day.’

  Olga shivered as she tightened the scarf around her neck and was helped by Jens to pick her way across the slippery courtyard.

  ‘Close your eyes on the journey and think only of the day your daughter was born,’ Jens murmured, and felt her hand tighten gratefully on his arm.

  It wasn’t often they were all together like this, though it was happening more frequently now as the project neared completion. Most of the time they worked in isolation in their separate workshops, with messengers passing between them with blueprints and reports. So when they did come together there was always a sense of celebration - but today of all days Jens saw nothing to celebrate.

  There were no windows in the back of the truck. The moment the rear doors clanged shut the prisoners were plunged into darkness as thick as tar. Jens placed his hands on his knees and closed his eyes. He knew exactly what to expect and braced himself, concentrating on breathing steadily and making no noise. The blackness started to crush him as soon as the truck began to rumble its way into the street. Slowly and relentlessly the blackness descended, squeezing him, pressing down on his skin, slithering under his eyelids however tightly he held them shut. His tongue was wrapped in its sticky coils and his lungs felt as though they would collapse under its weight. He sat still. Shallow breaths. His heart rate battering his ears.

  It hadn’t always been like this. He used to enjoy the dark, relish the privacy it granted in the overcrowded barrack hut in the forest Work Zone, but too many weeks in the camp’s cramped and unlit solitary confinement cell had robbed him of that. Now the darkness was his enemy and he fought his war in silence.

  The truck stopped but it was only a junction. The streets of Moscow were full of strange unexplained sounds, unfamiliar to him, noises that fifteen years ago when he had last roamed its pavements had not existed. Engines and klaxons, exhaust pipes and factory sirens. But now out of the surrounding darkness, as the truck waited in the street, one noise le
apt into his head and brought a faint smile to his lips. It was music. Unmistakably an organ grinder. The tinkling notes dragged into his head a memory that elbowed its way through the bleak tunnels. Of a time when, with his four-year-old daughter, he had watched a black-skinned organ grinder.

  He had learned long ago to block out all thoughts of the past, to live moment by moment, but the knowledge that his own daughter was out there searching for him broke down all the rules he’d made. He could feel it now, Lydia’s tiny hand tucked warm and safe in his, hear her laughter as she fed peanuts to the organ grinder’s tiny monkey. Its wrinkled little face had enchanted her and she had enchanted him.

  The truck jolted over potholes, shaking its passengers on the metal benches which lined both sides of the black interior. The music faded and a murmur of loss pushed its way out between Jens’ lips, hollow and barely audible. A sigh? A groan? A bastard attempt at both. At neither. The precious memory was fading.

  Fingers touched his. They brushed along the bones of his hands then tapped lightly on his wrists as if to waken them, and then the fingers curled round his own, holding them tight. Stayed like that. It was Olga. She was seated opposite him at the back of the truck. He lifted one of her hands to his lips, inhaled the familiar chemical scent of her skin and kissed it gently.

  28

  When Lydia emerged from the restaurant, she didn’t even notice that it was raining. The fat drainpipes which ran down the front of Moscow’s buildings, stopping a metre above the level of the pavement as if someone had run out of metal before finishing the job, were spewing water in ferocious fountains over the feet of passing pedestrians. At night the water would freeze. That’s when the pavements turned to sheet ice, and Lydia had learned to tread carefully. An umbrella suddenly materialised above her head, black and shiny, held firmly in a steady hand. Only then did she register the rain.

  ‘Spasibo, Dmitri.’ She smiled up at him. ‘And thank you for my lunch.’

  ‘It was a pleasure. I enjoyed the company.’

  They stood close in the enforced intimacy of the umbrella’s canopy, so close they could smell each other’s wet coats. For a moment their eyes locked and Lydia didn’t know what to say next. He seemed totally at ease, unconcerned by either the rain or the silence between them, still that intense look in his eyes as if he could see things she couldn’t.

  ‘Well, my office next, I suggest.’

  She was cautious. ‘Will your contact ring back?’

  ‘He’d better.’ He laughed and twirled the umbrella.

  ‘He knows someone in the Chinese Communist Party?’

  ‘That’s his job.’

  ‘Very well then. I’ll come to your office if I may.’

  ‘I’d be honoured, comrade.’

  He was laughing at her. Yet she didn’t mind, even though he was wearing an astrakhan hat that obscured his red hair, making it harder for her to trust him. The hair colour was a kind of bond between them in some strange way.

  ‘And the other man I asked you about?’ she reminded him.

  ‘Ah, that’s a different matter altogether. Much harder. You must understand, such information is not . . . available. Even to people like myself,’ he added.

  ‘Of course. Will you enquire though? Please?’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Thank you.’

  At that moment his black car drew up at the kerb. The door was opened and she scuttled into the back, out of the rain. Malofeyev leaned in and she noticed his face was faintly flushed. ‘One moment,’ he said, ‘I want to buy a paper.’

  She watched him approach a newspaper kiosk set up beside a shoeshine boy touting for business. Malofeyev said a few quick words and returned to the car with a copy of Rabochaya Moskva, Moscow’s own newspaper, tucked under his arm. He jumped on to the seat next to her, shaking himself like a wet dog, and tossed the umbrella on the floor.

  ‘It’s cold in here,’ he said, lifting a fur rug from beside him and draping it over her knees, and his own, as the car pulled into the stream of traffic. ‘Better?’

  ‘Spasibo.’ She tucked her hands into its warm folds.

  Malofeyev leaned towards the driver, who sat silently in cap and uniform. ‘My office, comrade.’

  Then he stretched back comfortably against the leather seat and gave Lydia another quick inspection, as if he thought she might have changed in some way.

  ‘Do you like Moscow?’

  His question caught her unawares. She felt her heart beat faster. She continued to stare out at the tall pastel-painted buildings of Tverskaya Street as tempting displays of food in the windows of Eliseevsky Gastronom slid past, while in the small side streets, where children played on sledges, the shops were bleak and empty. Elegant apartments rubbed shoulders with rundown communalka. It was a city of separate villages where the elite were pampered and the poor went hungry, where ration cards were designed for the proletariat while men like Malofeyev dined in splendour in smart restaurants and grand hotels.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I like Moscow very much.’

  ‘I’m glad. One day Moscow will be more advanced than any other city. The doma kommuny, the huge communal blocks of rooms, will teach people how to live their lives collectively, and Moscow will become the symbol for future socialist societies.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, it is, I promise you. So tell me why you like this city.’

  ‘I love its energy. It’s unpredictable. I like its new monumental buildings and,’ - she smiled as the car swept past a Chinese laundry with a picture of a shirt on its signboard and two Chinese women with broad faces and smooth skin chattering to each other on the front step - ‘I like its trams.’

  He laughed and shook open the newspaper. She liked the way he gave it his full concentration. It meant she could be alone with her own thoughts while he read the Rabochaya, so she almost missed it: his sudden intake of breath. Cut off abruptly. Without appearing to hurry, she turned her head to look at him and saw that his attention was focused on an inside page.

  ‘What is it?’

  He appeared not to have heard.

  ‘Something important?’ she asked.

  He raised his grey eyes and the way he looked at her made her blood pulse beneath her skin. ‘Important to you, yes.’

  She withdrew a hand from under the fur rug, rested her fingers on her chin to hold it still. ‘Tell me,’ she said quietly.

  ‘It seems your timing is impeccable.’

  She waited.

  ‘It says here,’ he rustled the paper, ‘that a delegation from China has arrived in Moscow.’

  She could hear her own heart stop. He held out the paper for her to inspect the front page.

  ‘See,’ he said, ‘there’s a photograph. There’s to be a reception for them this evening. In the Hotel Metropol. Take a look to see if you recognise any . . .’

  She reached for it and blinked hard. Six blurred figures in a grainy photograph. Her eyes scanned each face hungrily but the one she was searching for wasn’t there. Her heart started up again, sluggish and painful. At first she thought that all the figures in the photograph were men, each one dressed in a heavy cap and bulky padded coat, but as she studied them in detail she realised that two were female.

  ‘Do you recognise any of them?’ Dmitri asked.

  She started to shake her head but stopped. ‘Possibly. The one on the end.’

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘Da.’ High cheekbones, determined dark eyes, cropped hair. She was sure it was the Chinese girl she’d seen with Chang An Lo last year in Junchow. ‘I think I saw her at a funeral once.’

  ‘Does she also know this Chinese Communist you are trying to contact?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Something in her voice must have alerted him because his mouth grew solemn, his eyes gentle. ‘Too well, perhaps?’

  Lydia could find no response. Too well, perhaps.

  ‘Let me see.’ He took the paper from her hand and studied
the names printed under the photograph. ‘Tang Kuan. Is that her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She would know where he is?’

  ‘She might.’

  There was another pause. A horse-drawn wagon piled high with barrels lumbered dangerously across their path and the car had to brake harshly.

  ‘Don’t look so distraught,’ Dmitri said.

  ‘I’d like to ask her myself tonight.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the Metropol.’

  ‘No, Lydia.’

  ‘Don’t let’s go through this again, Liev. Dmitri Malofeyev has invited me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s my only way of finding out where Chang is.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t want to argue with you, Liev.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just saying no over and over isn’t going to convince me.’

  ‘No. Or I’ll break your skinny neck.’

  ‘Now that’s a much more persuasive argument.’ Lydia stomped off to the communal kitchen. She heated up a pot of potato and onion soup which she’d made the day before, and returned tight-lipped to their room. Elena was looking out the window and Liev was slumped in the chair, knocking back vodka straight from the bottle. She put the bowl of soup on his lap.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Popkov announced.

  ‘No, of course you can’t.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘No, don’t—’

  Lydia was going to say No, don’t be absurd. Look at you. But she stopped herself in time. It was the expression trapped in his black eye that silenced her. It was dull with fear and she knew it wasn’t for himself.

  ‘No, Liev,’ she said gently, ‘you can’t. Malofeyev is only obtaining an invitation for himself and me. Anyway you would be too . . . conspicuous. You’d draw attention to us.’

  Popkov grunted and turned his back on her in the chair. End of conversation. She wasn’t sure who had won.

  ‘What will you wear?’ Elena asked to break the silence. Lydia was grateful to her.