The Girl from Junchow

by Kate Furnivall

  “Well, tovarishchi, why on earth would I want to go with you?” he asked easily. “I’m busy now. Another time maybe.”

  He took a stride away down the corridor but didn’t turn his back on them. To his surprise, instead of snapping at his heels like a pack of wolves eager for the taste of flesh, they just stood there by the main door looking perplexed. Four more steps along the tiles and he pushed open the bathroom door.

  “Of course, comrade,” the tall coat in the front of the threesome said politely. “When would be convenient?”

  Alexei stalled, hand still on the door. Convenient? Since when did OGPU do anything at your convenience? He released the door, moved back along the corridor, and studied the intruders more closely. They were no older than himself, around midtwenties, one short and plump, the others taller and leaner with identical mustaches. All had eyes that made him nervy.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “We met last night.” It was one of the tall figures who spoke.

  “Last night?”

  “Da. Don’t you remember me?”

  Then it came to him and he cursed his starved brain for its sluggishness. The mustaches. Of course, just like the man they called pakhan with the droop around each side of the mouth.

  “Of course I do. Tell me, how is he today?”

  “Better.”

  “I’m glad. Send him my good wishes for his recovery.”

  “He wants to see you.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.” The man paused and added reluctantly, “If it is convenient. He asks whether you would come to eat bread with him.”

  Alexei laughed with relief, a good strong belly laugh that made the threesome shuffle uneasily.

  “Da,” he said. “Tell him yes.”

  BREAD AND SALT.

  Alexei accepted the piece of black bread on the tray that greeted him as he walked into the apartment and dipped it in the bowl of salt. In Russia bread and salt represented much more than mere bread and salt. They meant hospitality. They meant welcome. On bread and salt you could live. Beside them on the tray stood a shot glass filled to the brim with vodka. He picked it up, knocked it back in one, and felt it burn the cobwebs from his stomach.

  His mind kicked into gear and he looked around with interest. The apartment was an odd mixture of old and new. On the walls hung hefty oil paintings in elaborate frames, all portraits of different men. Sharp observant eyes gazed out at him from each one. Family portraits? Could be. For a moment Alexei recalled the severe paintings of his own ancestors that used to line the grand staircase in the villa in St. Petersburg and frighten him as a child. At least some of these looked as if they knew how to smile. The furniture, in contrast, was new and utilitarian, a plain bleached pine that looked at odds with the paintings, but everything was clean and there was no curtain dividing the large living room into separate quarters.

  “This way, pozhalusta.”

  Alexei followed the plump one of the trio into a corridor and to a heavy door with an ancient brass handle that looked as though it might have come from somewhere else. Somewhere like a church. The soft-looking knuckles knocked.

  “Da?”

  “Pakhan, I have the comrade from last night.”

  “Come in, damn you.”

  They entered a room that belonged to a man with a passion. Though the curtains were half-closed, a strip of sunlight lay dim and dusty in the air, exposing the contents of the room. Wings seemed to flutter, feathers flashed scarlet, eyes gleamed corn yellow. The place was full of birds. Alexei blinked but the birds didn’t move. They were all stuffed. Exquisite masters of the air trapped under glass domes and doomed to pose on mossy branches until their feathers blackened and turned to dust. With a jolt Alexei pictured his own father, Jens Friis, trapped, penned, ensnared for so many years, unable to fly.

  “Welcome, friend.”

  The words were a deep rumble. They issued from a large four-poster bed that was adorned with mulberry-red drapes and long white bolster pillows piled up like snowdrifts. Sunk deep in the middle of them was the pale puffy face of last night.

  “Good morning, comrade. Dobroye utro,” Alexei greeted him cheerfully. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

  “I feel like I’ve been kicked by a bloody camel,” his host grimaced, causing his mustache to writhe like something alive.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Pakhan has his usual pills,” the young man at Alexei’s elbow volunteered, “but he is too stubborn to let us call a doctor.”

  “Go away, Igor. You’re annoying me.” But it was said with a fond smile that belied the words.

  “Pakhan, I don’t think . . .”

  “Go.”

  Igor glanced at Alexei.

  “Don’t worry,” the older man insisted, “this person has not come here to do me harm. Have you, comrade?”

  “Nyet. Of course not.”

  “Good. Leave us then, Igor.”

  The plump face creased with concern, and Alexei had the feeling the young man did not much appreciate being dismissed as if he were a schoolboy. Nevertheless he left with no further objection, just shut the door a shade harder than was necessary.

  “Come over here, my friend.”

  Alexei approached the bed. It struck him as a strangely intimate act in the presence of a stranger and he became aware of the smell of the bedsheets, the blue veins bunched at the base of the aging throat. A closer look disclosed a man considerably frailer than the voice he chose to use. Strands of gray hair were scraped severely back from his face, which despite being fleshy had sunk in on itself, falling into crevices, crowding around the dark eyes.

  “I’m not dying,” the sick man announced gruffly.

  “I’m glad to hear it. But it’s your friends on the other side of that door you need to convince, not me. They’re out there whittling your coffin right now.”

  The man laughed, a great guffaw that had him rubbing his hand on his chest, as if it pained him under his nightshirt. “What’s your name, comrade?”

  “Alexei Serov.”

  “Well, Alexei Serov, you don’t look much like a guardian angel to me but I thank God for putting you in that street last night, especially when I had dismissed my companions for the evening.” His mouth twisted in a grimace. “This experience will teach me to avoid brothels in future.”

  Alexei sat down on the chair beside the bed and smiled. “Our paths crossed, friend. I was there at the right time. Now you’re safe with your friends, so get well again.”

  “I intend to.” He held out his hand to Alexei. “Accept the sincere thanks of Maksim Voshchinsky.”

  Alexei shook the hand. It felt surprisingly firm in his, and he respected the strength of will that made it so. But his eyes were drawn to where the sleeve of the nightshirt had ridden up and the muscular forearm lay briefly on view. What he saw there slowed his heartbeat. A fleeting glimpse, that was all, before Voshchinsky withdrew his hand once more, but it was enough to tell Alexei this was someone to keep far away from.

  Voshchinsky’s hooded eyes conducted a slow inspection of Alexei’s appearance. “Most people as dirty and ragged as you, Comrade Serov, if you don’t mind my saying, would have had my watch in their pocket, my wallet in their hand, and left me to die alone on the ice.”

  Alexei rose to his feet. “Not everyone is like that,” he said with a polite bow. “But you must rest now. Don’t tire yourself. I am happy to see you are recovering well. Comrade Voshchinsky, I wish you good day.”

  He walked to the door, eager to be out of this room with its winter light glinting off a multitude of glazed staring eyes. The sound of the man’s shallow breathing followed him.

  “Wait.”

  Alexei paused.

  “Comrade Serov, are you in such a rush to be elsewhere?”

  “Nothing stands still in life, my friend.”

  The gray head nodded again, lolling slightly on its neck as though it were too heavy. “I know.” He smiled,
a brief forgiving twitch of his lips. “Especially when you are young.” Sadness rustled like dry leaves in his words, and the fingers of one hand slowly opened and flexed on the sheet, an unconscious movement as if trying to grasp at Alexei. Or maybe at life. “But I am not ready to see you go yet.”

  “You have your friends.”

  “Yes, that’s true. They are good friends. I can’t complain. They do what I say.”

  With a quiet click Alexei opened the door. Outside on the polished boards stood the three men, and at the sight of him in the doorway all three took a step forward. They wanted to know what had been said in there, but in that moment when he could have walked away, back to the fleas and the prospect of never seeing his own father again, he felt a shift within himself. Through his own arrogance on the bridge in Felanka he had lost everything that would open the doors to set Jens Friis free. But now he couldn’t allow himself to walk away from the strange room with the dead birds and the sick man. This time he must swallow the arrogance. Bend the knee. Take the risk.

  “He’s resting,” Alexei announced. Then he entered the bedroom once more and softly shut the door behind him.

  “So?” It came from the bed.

  “You say your friends do what you say. Because I saved your life, would they do what I say? Would they owe me that?”

  Voshchinsky frowned, a wary pucker of his heavy eyebrows. Alexei returned to the chair and sat down.

  “Maksim,” he said, “you have many friends.”

  He lifted the man’s hand in his own, touched the veins that ran like serpents under the skin, and slid the nightshirt sleeve up the forearm. Underneath it writhed more serpents, black ones. Two of them slithered around the base of the slender skeleton of a birch tree, their eyes red, their fangs sharp as knife blades. Beneath them written in elaborate italic script were the three names: Alisa, Leonid, Stepan.

  “A fine tattoo,” Alexei commented.

  Maksim Voshchinsky touched the trunk of the tree lovingly with the finger of his other hand. “That was my Alisa, the mother of my sons, God rest her soul.”

  “Maksim, we must talk. About the vory.”

  The sick man’s eyes narrowed and his voice grew rough. “What do you know about the vory?”

  “They are the criminals of Moscow.”

  “So?”

  “And they wear tattoos.”

  Thirty-five

  LYDIA STOOD ON THE STEPS OF THE CATHEDRAL of Christ the Redeemer in the thin sunshine. The Moskva River slid past, boats bobbing on the molten silver of its surface, and she’d counted twenty-two of them in the hour she’d been waiting.

  “Alexei,” she murmured, “I can’t wait any longer.”

  She’d really believed it today. That he would come. When she said to Liev, “My brother will be there,” for once she hadn’t been annoyed by his big laugh because now she knew for certain that Alexei had received the letter she’d left in Felanka and that he wanted to see her again. It had lifted a dead weight that lay in her stomach as solid and cold as the tomb-stones in the cathedral’s crypt. She was alone on its wide steps. No one loitering in the street or slowing their pace as they walked along the sidewalk. Everyone seemed to be going about their own business as normal: an elderly man with a fat dog in tow, a young woman with a net bag and a child hanging off each hand. Lydia studied the street intently. It was hard to shake the chill of being observed.

  After twenty minutes she had convinced herself that no one was watching her, but even so she intended to take a circuitous route across Moscow. First in one of the horse-drawn carriages, an izvozchik with the horse still wearing its summertime hat, its ears peeking up through the plaited straw like curious weasels, then a tram, an intricate weaving through shops, in and out of side doors, another tram, another shop, a final quick desperate dash on foot. Then the park. She had it all planned.

  LYDIA HAD RUN THE LAST STRETCH AND HER HEART WAS SOMEWHERE in her throat. She made her way along the path, everything around her so piercingly bright that she had to narrow her eyes against the sunlight. On each side of the path stretched pristine lawns dressed up in lacy layers of snow. Ragged edges marked the boundaries between paths and lawns as if the black earth were peeking out from under its white blanket like a sleepy mole to test the temperature outside. Lydia hurried her pace. She couldn’t see him.

  She had entered the park from the Krymsky bridge end, but Chang An Lo might easily approach from a different direction. She kept turning her head, searching. Years earlier the site was just one big scrap heap for old metal where scavengers used to prowl at night and stray packs of dogs scraped out dens, but the site had been cleared and flattened first for the Agricultural Exhibition and then in 1928 turned into the Central Park of Culture and Leisure.

  She couldn’t see any sign of culture, but people were certainly taking advantage of the leisure. The sun had tempted them out into the crisp cold air, well-swaddled figures strolling arm in arm and children scampering like kittens, released from the confines of their cramped living quarters. One athletic-looking man was kicking a ball to five young boys, all dressed in Young Pioneer uniforms with Communist-red scarves, flashing bright as robins on the snow. Such an ordinary sight, a father playing with his children, yet Lydia felt a sharp tug of envy and hated herself for it, for that weakness she couldn’t seem to free herself from.

  She moved on through the park, past the lily-of-the-valley electric lights, losing confidence with each step. This was all wrong. The park wasn’t at all what she’d anticipated when she put it forward as a meeting place. She cursed her own ignorance. She’d imagined there would be trees and tangled undergrowth, offering privacy and shadowy nooks where two people could speak without being observed, but the Central Park of Culture and Leisure was still new, with wide empty stretches of grassland and flowerbeds barren under the snow, the trees freshly planted and no taller than herself. It didn’t take her long to see that Chang An Lo was not here.

  The realization slid as sharp as ice into her skull. She closed her eyes, the fingers of sunlight almost warm on her lashes. Think, think.

  Where are you, my love?

  She breathed quietly. Letting loose her thoughts. When something in her mind unknotted, she knew she’d been looking for the wrong thing. Slowly she retraced her steps, scanning the ground this time instead of the Muscovites at leisure, and she saw the sign when she was back where she’d started. She smiled and felt a whisper of wind ruffle a strand of her hair. The sign was a tiny pile of stones, so small it was barely noticeable. But Lydia knew. Knew without doubt. When she and Chang had been separated in China, they had left messages for each other in a place called Lizard Creek, and those messages had been buried in a jar beneath a cairn of stones. This, she realized, was her new Lizard Creek.

  She crouched down and scrabbled at the stones. The miniature cairn had been placed in a corner of one of the flowerbeds where the soil was not so compacted under its skin of ice. It broke up quickly under her fingers and she found a small fold of leather. Inside it lay a slip of paper. In delicate black script were written the six words: At the end of Semenov Ulitsa. Six words that altered her world.

  She glanced around quickly, but nothing had changed. A young woman wheeling her bicycle, an elderly couple throwing crumbs like confetti for a flock of starlings whose wings fluttered an oily black in the sunlight. Lydia piled the small cairn back together, rose to her feet, brushing her fingers on her coat, and slipped the paper deep in her pocket. Her hand wouldn’t release its grasp on it but lay there, curled around it. She started to walk at a steady pace along the path once more but her feet wouldn’t wait. They picked up speed, lengthening their stride, and before she could stop them, they were running.

  SEMENOV STREET WAS NEAR THE RIVER. SET IN THE SOUTHERN part of the city, it might have been transplanted straight out of one of the villages Lydia had viewed from the train on her journey across Russia. The houses were simple, a jumble of wooden one-story buildings tilting at different angles un
der patched and mossy roofs.

  The road was nothing more than a mix of potholes and dirt, but today it was bustling with people. A street market filled up most of the walkway, goods displayed on mats thrown on the ground. One stall boasted neat rows of secondhand boots, each one molded to the shape of the previous owner’s life, jostling between displays of paper flowers and buckets of rusty metal clamps and washers. None of the traders had licenses. If the police turned up to check on them they would melt away faster than ice on the tongue. Lydia was thankful for all the activity. She slid unnoticed along the street.

  “Apples? Good clean apples?”

  “Nyet.”

  A woman had thrust a shriveled yellow apple under her nose. She was tempted, as she’d not eaten since a mouthful of the kasha she’d cooked for the boy this morning. The woman looked thin and tired under her headscarf, but then so did everyone else. It was the way things were. Two woven baskets stood at her side, apples in one, nuts in the other, both protected from the cold by a woolen shawl draped over them. A handful of the better samples lay on top to tempt passing trade.

  On impulse Lydia snatched up two of the apples and handed over ten kopecks from the dwindling supply in her pocket, before she darted off down the road to where it came to a dead end. Beyond it lay a wild bushy stretch of commonland that nestled in a lazy loop of the Moskva River. It looked as though it would be marshy in the spring, which was probably why it hadn’t been built on, but right now the ground was hard as iron and covered with brown spiky grass that pushed up like fingers through the glistening snow.