The Girl from Junchow

by Kate Furnivall

  She sidestepped that one. “Tell me.”

  “Its vast wasteland is being tamed. There are grand new road schemes and railways, factories and mines of all kinds, massive organized timber haulage. Even complete new towns are being built from scratch. It’s”—he paused for the right word—“thrilling.”

  She blinked. That wasn’t the word she’d expected from him.

  “Thrilling?”

  “Da.” He abandoned his cigarette in the black onyx ashtray as if it encumbered his thought process. “Everything we dreamed of when we fought the tsar’s troops thirteen years ago outside the Winter Palace is coming true. The Communist ideals of equality and justice are being turned into reality right in front of our eyes, and it breaks my heart that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself is not alive to see it.”

  She couldn’t look at him. At the belief in his eyes. Instead she concentrated on the slender stem of her glass, as fragile and breakable as Papa’s back in that labor camp. A nerve pulsed in her jaw and she placed a hand over it.

  “Comrade Malofeyev . . .”

  “Call me Dmitri.”

  “Dmitri.” She smiled and flicked a stray lock of hair from her cheek. For a second she was distracted by a smartly dressed man and woman at a table across the room. Both staring at her. She looked away. Was it her clothes? Was she so obviously all wrong in a place like this?

  “Dmitri, if I were searching for someone else, as well as for the Chinese Communist I mentioned earlier, someone in Moscow, would you be willing to help me find this person?”

  He studied her carefully, his gaze alighting on each part of her face, even on her throat as she swallowed, and she knew she’d just leapt onto the stepping-stone right in the deepest part of the river.

  Twenty-six

  FOG ROSE FROM THE MOSKVA RIVER. IT SLUNK IN long tendrils across the road, sneaking up to front doors and unexpectedly swallowing people whole when they emerged from their homes into the street. Sledges slid into it and vanished.

  Alexei stood still. He had no desire to move. He felt like a ghost, barely there, a lone figure caught between reality and nonreality. Each time he heard footsteps on the broad steps leading up to where he was propped against the stone pillar of the cathedral’s entrance, his breath quickened with expectation. This time it was real, not a figment of his exhausted mind.

  A woman drifted out of the white layers of moist air rising toward him. He held out a hand to her, but she veered away abruptly and he realized she thought he was a beggar. The streets were full of them. She had heavy black eyebrows and thick ankles, he registered that much. Not Lydia after all, then. Nor Antonina, whose ankles were slender, the bones beautifully carved. He yearned for her touch now to rid him of this deadness. His eyes closed as the cold crept with sharp fingers through his thin jacket and into his blood, making it sluggish and stubborn, painful as it pushed through his veins.

  It was past noon. Long past. 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 moist 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 loss of its stone solidity at his back. Is that what worshippers would feel, the loss of solidity, of belief?

  He walked slowly around the outside of the great towering building till he came to the Moskva River 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 the river 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 dearly 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 of air he could rest at last and dream again of galloping through the autumn woods beside his father.

  Twenty-seven

  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, burrowing into eyebrows, yet despite the cold and despite 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 gray 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 around her mouth etched deep after eight years hard labor 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 labor camps. They routinely devoured more protein in one week than they’d previously had sight of in a whole year. Stalin was feeding them 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 when Stalin and Kaganovich and Colonel Tursenov had finished picking their brains 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 toward 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 her 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 Zone in the forest, 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 an intersection. The streets of Moscow were full of strange unexplained sounds, unfamiliar to him, noises that fifteen years ago when he had last roamed its sidewalks 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 leapt 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 for himself. 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 as they sat on the metal benches that lined both sides of the black interior. The music faded and a murmur of loss pushed its way out between Jens’s 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 with light little taps on his wrists as if to waken them, and then the fingers curled around 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.

  Twenty-eight

  WHEN LYDIA EMERGED FROM THE RESTAURANT, she didn’t even notice that it was raining. The fat drainpipes that ran down the fronts of Moscow’s buildings but stopped a meter above the level of the sidewalk, 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 sidewalks turned to sheet ice. Lydia had learned to tread carefully. An umbrella suddenly materialized 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 call 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 honored, 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 color 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 inquire though? Please?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t elaborate.

  “Thank you.”

  At that moment his black car drew up at the curb.

  THE CAR 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 the newspaper kiosk that was 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 onto 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 forward toward 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 the tempting display 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 run-down 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 splendor in smart resta
urants 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 that had 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 gray 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 and 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 recognize any . . .”