Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  Strange are the Ways

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Interlude: 1909-1911

  Book Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Interlude: 1913-1914

  Book Three

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Interlude: 1918-1925

  Epilogue: Summer 1928

  Copyright

  THIS IS FOR TONY,

  WITH ALL MY LOVE AND MANY, MANY THANKS.

  Book One

  St Petersburg, 1908

  Chapter One

  ‘I shall go insane. You hear me, Anna? Quite insane, I tell you.’ The words held a determined edge of agitation. Distractedly Varya Petrovna Shalakova applied a scrap of lace, cologne- soaked, to her forehead. Her soft-skinned and still pretty face puckered in child-like distress. She closed her eyes. ‘Anna – I have a migraine coming on, most certainly I have. It had to happen, of course – all this trouble, all this fuss – it really is too much. Anna, darling – where is my Phenacetin?’

  Anna, standing in the shadows by the window, her back to the room, turned, repressing sudden exasperation. How had she ever expected her pretty, senseless mother to survive these last stages of the move from Moscow to St Petersburg without a final and convenient migraine? ‘I’m afraid the Phena tablets are packed with the other medicines, Mama. You gave them to me yourself. Please don’t upset yourself. It’s all right. The last sledge has arrived, and the things are being loaded. Papa is down there – he has everything under control.’

  The small lace handkerchief fluttered again, faintly. ‘Oh, I’m sure he has – well of course he has – but such a fuss! Lenka!’ The light voice took on a sudden sharp petulance. ‘Do sit up straight, child! How many times must I tell you? You slouch like a stable lad! You’ll get a hump!’

  Yelena, slumped in an armchair, her nose as always buried in a book, scowled ferociously but nevertheless shifted a little in the chair and after a fashion straightened back and shoulders.

  Anna turned again to the window. Fine snowflakes whirled in the grey, still air and flew into the glass, clinging for a moment before reluctantly melting into beaded moisture on the outer window pane. Beneath her in the courtyard the foreshortened figure of her father, stocky, brisk-moving, fussy-looking even at this distance, organized with obvious shortness of temper the late-come sledge. Two goods vans were well and truly booked, there was time and more than time to get to the station; but Victor Valerievich Shalakov was not a man who cared to have his well-laid plans disrupted. Anna, watching him, the sounds from below shut out by the heavy double windows that had as always been fitted for the winter, felt a mild but quite genuine twinge of sympathy for the tardy sledge-driver. Even she, always his acknowledged favourite, knew the sting of her father’s tongue. The thought brought a too-familiar pang of unease and unhappiness. Her own recent battle with him, so stubbornly fought, so predictably, demoralizingly and utterly lost had left a scar still too raw to probe. Her rage at her father had been unnerving. The simple faiths and certainties of childhood upon which her life until now had been founded had failed her. Blind trust had been betrayed. Shying from the thought, she lifted her head sharply, looked out through the whirling haze of snow across the spires and domes that gleamed azure and gold, the endless snow-blanketed rooftops of Moscow. Holy Moscow. Little Mother Moscow. The city she loved, and was about to leave. She blinked, suddenly and rapidly.

  Behind her, her mother’s voice rose again, the edge of complaint setting Anna’s teeth on edge. She leaned her forehead against the cold glass.

  The eighteen years of Anna Victorovna Shalakova’s life had been spent in Moscow, a city that had for centuries been the very heart and soul of Russia until, a mere century and a half before, the upstart St Petersburg – a city European in a way that a Byzantine Moscow with her roots firmly planted in the Middle Ages never could be – had ousted her.

  Anna did not want to leave Moscow. She did not want to live in Petersburg: purpose-built, grand and gracious city of the Tsar. She loved the narrow, cobbled streets of Moscow, the bustle and excitement of her markets, the tolling of her bells, the tumbled variety of her buildings, the magnificence of her ancient Kremlin, the almost barbaric brilliance of her domed and gilded cathedrals and her old, spired churches. The pride of her ancient and sometimes terrible heritage. It was ironic that for all the fuss being made in the room behind her, for all her mother’s petulance and Lenka’s sulks, she, Anna, was the only one of them who truly hated the thought of the move the family were about to make. Mama from the first had been, insomuch as the words could ever be used about Varya Petrovna, unflaggingly enthusiastic; not least because it provided her with a chance to flout the will of her overpowering father-in-law – blessedly dead at last in his ninetieth year – against whom in life she had never dared to stand. Predictably, for Varya St Petersburg offered a will-o’-the-wisp glamour, a chance to be associated, however tenuously, with the great and the powerful of the land, a chance to share in the good fortune, always corrosively envied, of her elder sister Zhenia, already happily settled in the city. A chance above all to marry off her three girls to greater prospects than were to be found – or so she thought – in provincial, mercantile Moscow. Only the actual bother of the move itself had brought on this fit of the vapours; an affliction that could by no means be described as unexpected, but was no less irritating for that since it had been Anna who had, over the past weeks, taken most of the responsibility for the arrangements. As she almost always did when faced with her mother’s vague and maddening inability to cope with anything beyond the complexities of the latest fashion or a gossip over glasses of tea with her friends. Lenka too, awkward, bookish Lenka, a year younger than Anna and usually her devoted follower in all things, had on this occasion shown a subversive tendency to think for herself. ‘But Anna, the University in Petersburg is famous! When you persuade Papa – and I know you will! – think of it! St Petersburg! The very centre of all that happens in Russia!’

  When you persuade Papa.

  Anna looked down into the courtyard and the small, cold knot of anger and resentment tightened once again, a twinge of almost physical pain. What made Lenka so blithely sure that she, Anna, could persuade their father to allow them to attend the women’s courses at the University? When her own dream, her own triumph, so short-lived, so apparently little valued, had been shattered by the man’s adamant refusal to allow her to take the once-in-a-lifetime-chance that had been offered – that she had worked for and won – when she had gained the music scholarship? She heard again, as she so often had in the past weeks, the cold, horribly unexpected words, relived again her own disbelief, the rise of totally ungovernable rage as understanding had filtered into her bemused mind. ‘You didn’t think I could do it, did you? You didn’t bother to stop me trying for the scholarship because it simply didn’t occur to you that I was good enough to win it! You were humouring me
! You thought you’d get your own way without having to do anything, without my blaming you! Well, I do blame you, Papa! I do! And I’ll never forgive you! Do you hear me? Never!’ Under normal circumstances Anna would have trembled to speak to her father so. But she had been beside herself with fury and with disappointment; this opportunity, so coveted, so urgently and exhaustingly worked for, had been against all seemingly insurmountable odds and competition hers. She had been offered the chance to study under one of the greatest violinists in Russia, the chance to discover and explore the worth of her own talent, always so deeply doubted. And curtly and out of hand her father had refused her. With neither debate nor discussion and so far as she could see with no understanding whatsoever he had crushed all her fragile, newborn hopes. No daughter of Victor Valerievich Shalakov would so demean herself and her family. To possess the talent to bring pleasure to friends and family in the decent privacy of their homes was one thing; to perform in public was, in Victor Valerievich’s eyes – and in the eyes of many others of his kind – only one step from harlotry, and a short step at that. He would not allow it, and there was an end. The anger and outrage that each had felt at the other at what both had considered a betrayal, a rejection of understanding, had all but fatally damaged a relationship that had always been remarkably if undemonstrably close.

  And now Lenka, with the old, unquestioning faith, had convinced herself that Anna could persuade their father to allow them to study at the University in St Petersburg.

  Anna pushed a wiry lock of sandy hair from her forehead, looked unseeing into the swirling curtain that drifted across the rooftops. Perhaps, she thought, with a faintly cynical detachment that surprised herself, her sister wasn’t so very wrong after all. Perhaps having imposed his will upon her over the music scholarship Papa would give way on this? She had had the feeling on more than one occasion that he had regretted, if not his decision, then the high-handedness of its implementation and the coolness that had fallen between them because of it. In his own stiff-necked way he had even attempted to make amends. It was certainly true that he had agreed with no argument to the idea of their sharing their cousin Katya’s tutor when in St Petersburg. And – she turned her head, looked to where a battered leather violin case was propped in an empty chair – he had given her the violin. As a peace offering, which it undoubtedly was, though he would have died before admitting it, it had not worked. No instrument, however exquisite, however valuable in both sentimental and real terms, could make up for what he had taken from her; but as a straw in the wind perhaps it did not bode too badly for Yelena’s own dream, held just as passionately Anna knew as had been her own. And Lenka could not speak for herself; her relationship with her father was such that if she so much as drew breath in his presence it could provoke irritation and rebuke. Awkward with most people, occasionally it had to be said almost to the point of rudeness, Lenka all too often became sullen and worse than tongue-tied when faced with the father who so clearly and openly disliked her. For all of their young lives Anna had stood as spokeswoman and champion to her younger sister.

  ‘And Nina Pavlova says we’ll all be murdered in our beds – the terrible riots –’ Varya Petrovna’s voice again, plaintive as a child’s. ‘The streets ran with blood so they say – a dreadful thing, dreadful!’

  ‘Oh, Mama!’ It was Lenka, of course, who could not hold her tongue. Anna lifted exasperated eyes to heaven. Dmitri, third of the four Shalakov children and the only boy, was sitting cross-legged beside his mother’s chair, absorbed in a puzzle, oblivious to what went on around him; Margarita, at thirteen years the youngest child and only true heir to her mother’s good looks, stood in dreamy and single-minded contemplation before a mirror, playing with her hair. Yelena’s voice was edged with irritation. ‘That was all over ages ago – three years or more! You know it! Anyway, it was certainly no worse in Petersburg than it was here in Moscow! And at least now we have the Duma – a parliament of sorts – some say for the people in government.’

  ‘The people? Government? Flying in the face of God!’ Varya Petrovna turned her head a little, away from this incomprehensible daughter of hers. ‘God will punish them. You’ll see. Rita, dear, come to Mama a moment – your hair is really most dreadfully untidy – I don’t know what Papa will say if he sees you in such a state.’

  Margarita turned from the mirror, came obediently to her mother and sank prettily down beside her. Varya reached into a small crocheted bag and produced a comb. ‘That’s right, a little closer, my dear. Lenka, hand me that ribbon, would you?’ She turned back to Margarita. ‘Such lovely hair. A pity to let it tumble loose.’

  Her youngest daughter smiled sweetly and hid her irritation. She knew well the effect achieved by the artless loosening of her thick golden mass of curls about her heart-shaped face. ‘Seraphima didn’t have time to do it this morning, Mama.’ The lie tripped as easily off her young tongue as would the truth. It was one of Margarita’s many undoubted advantages that she had never allowed herself to become enmeshed in the inconvenient net of absolute honesty. What Margarita wished to perceive of the world she perceived; and within minutes of reporting it so to others often quite genuinely came to believe it herself.

  ‘That girl’s as idle as the winter nights are long.’ Varya expertly twisted the rope of hair, fastened it securely with the ribbon, and with gentle fingers brushed back the golden wisps that fell upon the wide, fair forehead.

  Margarita stayed beside her, pulling the long plait over her shoulder, winding the curling ends about her finger. ‘Mama, when we get to Peter—’ she pronounced the word ‘Pitta’ in a studied and casually affected way that made Anna cast her eyes to the ceiling and turn back to her contemplation of the scene in the courtyard below. Lenka, hunched once more over her book, uttered a small snort of pure derision that earned her an icy glance from her mother. Margarita, as always airily indifferent to her sisters’ reactions to her pretensions, continued with no break in the flow of her words. ‘—Won’t you please persuade Papa that I’m old enough to share Cousin Katya’s tutor with the others? It really isn’t fair —’ a favourite phrase that brought the barest twitch of a smile to Anna’s lips ‘— that I should have to go to that boring Gymnasium. Mama, please?’

  Her mother, who a moment before had been totally absorbed in her most beautiful child, sat back in her chair, long fingers to her forehead. ‘Margarita, please! As you well know this is your father’s decision. It isn’t kind of you to ask Mama to interfere with matters that are not her concern. Mother of God!’ The lace handkerchief had appeared again, fluttering before her face. ‘Anna, what in the world is happening down there? Are we never to leave?’

  ‘They’re nearly finished. They seem to be having some trouble with the hatstand.’

  ‘Gymnasium?’ Yelena’s quiet voice came as close to amusement as it ever did. ‘Are you sure you have that right, Rita dear? I thought you had to pass an examination to get into the Gymnasium? A real one, with questions and answers and things.’

  Margarita, turned now from her mother’s eyes, stuck out a long, furious tongue as far as it would go.

  Dmitri’s dark, slanting eyes flickered between them and he giggled under his breath.

  The ghost of a smile lit Lenka’s sallow face.

  Margarita fairly glittered with temper, a becoming colour lifting in her cheeks.

  ‘Anna, it’s getting cold in here, fetch me the blue shawl, would you?’ Varya put narrow white hands to her face. ‘I really shouldn’t allow myself to chill, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Mama.’ Anna moved the violin case and lifted the shawl that lay across the back of the chair.

  ‘And that’s another thing, Mama.’ Margarita’s aggrieved tone unconsciously matched her mother’s so exactly that it might have been an echo. ‘Why is Anna allowed to have her violin on the train with her when I had to put my theatre in that beastly box? I’m sure it will be damaged.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Rita.’ Briskly Anna cut across her mothe
r’s reply. ‘I told you, your precious theatre is perfectly safe. I supervised its packing myself.’ She walked back to the window, peered down into the yard. ‘There, that’s it from the look of it. The sledges are gone. Papa’s coining up. It must be nearly time to go.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ Her mother stood, brushing nervously at her skirt, flicking at the immaculate lace of her collar. ‘The coats, Anna – and the hats and shawls – they haven’t been packed?’

  Anna shook her head, patiently. ‘Oh, of course not, Mama! Seraphima will bring them when we’re ready.’

  ‘And our things will be safe on the train? The people at the station know where they’re supposed to be going?’ She had asked the same question at least a dozen times.

  ‘They will be on the same train as we will, Mama! I’ve told you and told you! Papa has hired two goods waggons – he’ll make sure that they’re hitched to the right train, don’t worry!’

  ‘Well.’ Victor Valerievich Shalakov, his wide-shouldered, substantial figure still dressed in fur-lined shuba with a tall fur hat upon his dark head, stood at the open door. ‘At last we’re ready. I think it best that we get to the station as early as possible. Anna, you’ll get everyone organized?’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’ Anna reached for the bell. ‘Nanny Irisha and Seraphima are waiting in the kitchen. Everything’s ready.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it exciting?’ For one moment reverting to the child she actually was as opposed to the sophisticated young woman she liked to imagine herself, Margarita twirled into the middle of the room, calf-length skirts lifting and flying about her. ‘I’ve never been on a train all night before! And Petersburg! Petersburg! I’m certain it’s going to be wonderful!’

  Even Lenka’s lips twitched to a small smile at her young sister’s sudden and infectious enthusiasm. ‘Going hunting for a handsome prince, Rita?’

  Margarita tossed her head, heavy plait swinging. ‘And why not? Just because you spend your life with your nose in a book and couldn’t care less if you look like somebody’s kitchen maid doesn’t mean I have to be the same! Why shouldn’t I hope that St Petersburg will be wonderful?’