by Gill Paul
On the way back to the cabin, she stopped at the hardware store in Indian Lake to ask the owner’s advice on winter-proofing her cabin. Now she had spent so much time and effort on repairs, she didn’t want to arrive next spring to find it had fallen apart again.
‘You’ve applied the weatherproof varnish,’ he said, frowning in concentration, ‘and it’s not leaking anywhere?’
‘Nope.’
‘You could fit some shutters or board over the windows,’ he suggested. ‘Do the eaves have enough overhang so that water from the roof runs off clear of the walls?’
Kitty nodded. ‘A good six inches.’
‘And what’s drainage like around the cabin? You want to avoid water pooling round the foundations.’
She frowned. ‘Actually, there is an area to the side where a puddle forms after heavy rain. What should I do about it?’
‘Easy. Dig a trench to let it run off.’
That made sense. Kitty thanked him and headed back to the cabin to start digging. With the edge of her spade, she marked out a channel that led from the hollow of the puddle down towards the lakeshore some fifteen feet away. The ground was mushy from the rain of a few days earlier and her spade cut cleanly through, only snagging on tree roots and mossy undergrowth.
She would miss Lake Akanabee. Maybe I’ll bring Tom here in the spring, she thought then added mentally, all being well. She’d like to show him this magical place. Perhaps they could hire a boat and explore the coves. Did that mean she had forgiven him? She never thought about Karren Bayliss now, so she supposed she had.
All of a sudden her spade hit something hard. She assumed it was a rock and tried to dig around it but a foot along the hard object was still there, about three feet below the surface. She cleared some of the earth above it and realised her spade was hitting a wooden crate that was about two feet wide. Had Dmitri buried it? Perhaps it was a treasure chest containing family heirlooms. Kitty was excited, wondering if she was about to solve the mystery of her great-grandfather’s later life.
She kept digging along the line of the box, which was longer than she had expected. It lay on a slope so she had to remove more soil at the upper part than the lower. When she had worked about six feet along there was a cracking sound as her spade pierced an area of rotten wood. She used the blade as a lever to prise open a corner of the box and bent to peer in. There was something yellowy-white, round. Suddenly a scream burst from her lungs as she realised there was a human skull staring up at her. She’d uncovered a coffin.
Kitty ran indoors, irrationally terrified, as if the skeleton might be pursuing her. Her voice was trembling as she dialled the number of the police station and told them of her grisly discovery.
‘Someone will be there within the hour,’ she was told. ‘Don’t touch anything in the meantime.’
Kitty couldn’t face waiting on her own for an hour with a dead body outside. She rang Bob’s cellphone, told him what she had found and asked if he could please come over to wait with her.
‘Be right there,’ he said. ‘Pour yourself a stiff drink.’
She took his advice and poured a glass of Chardonnay, then stayed indoors, her heart pounding, until she heard Bob’s outboard approaching the jetty ten minutes later.
‘It’s over there,’ she gestured from the porch, and as soon as he tied up the boat, he went to have a look.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he called. ‘Course it could have been there for decades. Maybe it dates from before Dmitri’s time.’
‘I hope so. I hope we’re not about to find out my great-granddad was a murderer.’ Kitty tried to speak lightly, but she felt choked with worry. Had someone from Dmitri’s past caught up with him? Had there been a fight that went too far and he was forced to hide the evidence?
When the police arrived they tied plastic ribbon around the area and erected a tent over the coffin. She and Bob sat on the jetty drinking wine and watching as a forensics team arrived and pulled protective suits over their clothes.
You’re probably not going to be able to stay here while they investigate,’ Bob said. ‘You’re welcome to our guest room.’ He gestured to his house on the other side of the water.
‘Thanks, but I’ll probably stay at the vacation park. I expect they’ll give me a deal this late in the season.’ It would feel spooky to sleep in the cabin, even after the coffin had been taken away. That skull would haunt her dreams.
An officer came to take her statement and get her cell phone number. ‘You can move back in a few days,’ he told her. ‘It looks as though the body’s been there a while. Don’t worry – you’re not under arrest.’ He laughed.
Kitty and Bob glanced at each other. It felt disrespectful to joke. She packed some clothes, food and her laptop into a holdall then drove to the vacation park. The cabin they directed her to had heating and hot water and she ran herself a hot bath that evening, the first she’d had in months. She was very shaken by the discovery and couldn’t stop wondering who might be buried at Dmitri’s cabin. Any explanation she could think of involved criminality.
Did Dmitri have enemies? Is that why he lived in such a remote spot? Had he killed one of them in self-defence? Did his children know about the murder? Is that why they were estranged? Her phone lay on the table and she wished she could just dial home and discuss it with Tom. She couldn’t predict what he would say but knew his opinion would be worth listening to. She missed him terribly.
One thing was for sure: whoever buried a body at the cabin had not wanted the death to be discovered, and Kitty couldn’t think of an innocent reason for that.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Brooklyn, June 1934
When Dmitri wrote to tell his sisters that he was emigrating to America, Vera’s husband Alex replied, asking if he would care to represent their carpet company in New York. They had just begun to export Ottoman rugs to America but felt they were being exploited by the agent they used, and Alex would be delighted if Dmitri were to take over the role. He knew enough about the business from the two years he had spent working for them in Constantinople.
Dmitri was not remotely interested in being a carpet import merchant but he would need money to establish his family so it seemed a useful temporary solution. He could not expect to make a living from journalism commissions on this new continent. His spoken English was more or less fluent now but when he tried to write in English, the words would not flow. He could write business letters but could not think imaginatively in any language but Russian.
He and Rosa found an apartment in Brooklyn, and enrolled the children, now aged eight and nine, in school, while Dmitri set up an office for the carpet import business. His editor at Slowo had given him a letter of introduction to a New York publisher called Alfred A. Knopf, who was said to favour Russian and European literature, but he felt nervous about making an approach and kept putting it off.
‘Dmitri, I did not fall in love with a carpet salesman. I fell in love with a brilliant writer. You must be true to yourself,’ Rosa coaxed. ‘Besides, I’m sure you will find that this Mr Knopf has already heard of you and will be happy to meet.’
Dmitri wasn’t convinced. ‘What will he say when I tell him I don’t write in English?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know how publishing works but if I were in his place, I would introduce you to a good translator.’
Dmitri agonised over his letter to Alfred Knopf, then watched the mailbox for days until an envelope arrived with a Knopf logo on it.
‘Look!’ he showed Rosa, unable to contain his excitement. ‘They have a Russian wolfhound in their logo. It’s like a sign. It’s meant to be.’
‘Open the letter, you dunderhead,’ she laughed. ‘I want to hear what it says.’
‘Mr Knopf would be delighted to meet you at 3pm on the fourth of October in his office in the Hecksher Building at the corner of 57th St and Fifth Avenue,” Dmitri read out loud, before grabbing Rosa for a hug and twirling her around.
The Hecksher B
uilding was a modern skyscraper, almost like a cathedral with its pointed steeple on top, and the vast lobby decorated in Art Deco style. Dmitri gave his name to a receptionist and sat down feeling ridiculously nervous: what if he was told he would never be published in America, that his books were not good enough for their sophisticated readers, that he had been fooling himself to think he had any talent?
He hardly had to wait five minutes before he was taken up in an elevator and shown into Mr Knopf’s office. A short dark-haired man with a thick moustache and an extremely elegant suit came bounding across the room and enveloped him in a bear hug.
‘I’m Alfred,’ he grinned. ‘I’m honoured to meet you, sir. The Boot that Kicked is one of the bravest pieces of work I’ve ever read. Come, sit down. Can I offer you a drink? I have Russian vodka.’
Two hours later they were still talking about literature, history, politics and the quirks of human nature, and although Dmitri was viewing the world through a vodka haze, he knew he had found a kindred spirit. They both liked Tolstoy and Gorky, Kuprin and Bunin; they both feared political extremes, whether to the right or the left; they both loved dogs.
‘Whatever you decide to write next, I want to publish,’ Alfred said before Dmitri left. ‘Let me know when you are ready to deliver and I will find you the best translator in New York. And if you want an advance, you need only ask.’
When Dmitri walked back into the evening sunlight, he felt a sensation he had not felt for a long time. Even though he was in a foreign country, it was like coming home.
Dmitri marvelled at Rosa’s ability to become part of a social group in no time at all. He’d arrive back from the office to find the kitchen of their Brooklyn apartment full of women chatting while their children played in the communal yard outside.
‘Where did you meet them all?’ he asked, after they had dispersed to their own apartments.
‘Oh, in the grocery store, outside the school gates, you know …’ She waved her hand airily.
There were invitations to pot luck suppers, Thanksgiving dinners, Fourth of July celebrations, and summer cook-outs, with the children always included. They weren’t people Dmitri would normally have picked as friends but they had enough in common to pass a pleasant evening. He often watched Rosa as she mingled at a social event and wondered at her ability to thrive in this new society yet still retain her sense of self. As she aged, she had never toned down her quirky style; if anything her clothes had become more colourful in this new country and she still had boyish short hair. Dmitri bought her a Singer sewing machine for her fortieth birthday and she was able to run up new frocks with lightning speed, often making garments for friends as well.
He knew she missed her family and that it had been a big wrench for her to cross the ocean to this new continent, but she never once complained. Nicholas and Marta were learning English faster than expected, and already spoke with American accents. They liked Superman and Flash Gordon comics and each had their favourite baseball teams. All would have been well, Dmitri thought, except that he couldn’t seem to get started on a new novel. The strong feelings that had inspired his earlier works just weren’t there. Perhaps it was because he was content. Did he have to be miserable to write?
In 1936, they moved to Albany, 130 miles north of New York City, where Dmitri was able to afford a three-bedroom house with its own spacious garden, and within months Rosa had made a brand new circle of friends. Her mother and sister arrived later that year, their immigration sponsored by Dmitri, and they moved into a house a few blocks down the same street. Nicholas and Marta were delighted and often ran to visit their grandmother, for reasons Dmitri could never understand. He found her cold and unfriendly but the children seemed to adore her.
Sometimes Dmitri sat back and watched his children and wondered who they were. When they were little it had been easy to see what motivated them because the emotions were on the surface: ‘I want that toy and Nicholas is playing with it’; ‘I’m exhausted and really need to sleep but I’m fighting it in the hope of getting another story’. But now, as they entered their teens, they had become independent people who had learned to tell fibs, to have secrets, and to rebel against his authority.
‘Count yourself lucky: my father would have horse-whipped you for that,’ he told Nicholas, who was sobbing after receiving a clip round the ear for using coarse language.
‘Your father sounds like an asshole!’ Nicholas shouted through his tears, and Dmitri couldn’t help but admire his courage as he dealt out a punishment with the flat of his hand on bare legs.
Rosa never hit them but Dmitri knew he had to protect them from their own impulsiveness so they didn’t get into trouble when they were older. He would never beat them with a whip, as his father had beaten him, but every child needed chastisement to keep them in line, for their own sakes.
Hitler’s invasion of neighbouring countries and the outbreak of a new war only twenty-one years after the last tipped Dmitri suddenly and emphatically into depression. He couldn’t believe that no lessons had been learned from the mass slaughter of the trenches. He couldn’t understand why no assassin slipped through the cordons that surrounded the Führer to end the world’s misery. He was anxious that he would no longer be able to support his family if naval blockades prevented the import of rugs. Suddenly, he could see no happiness in the life that had previously seemed so sunny; it was as if a shutter had come down that made everything dark and hopeless. Men were intrinsically evil the world over, from the Red Guards who had slaughtered the Romanovs to the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung who were shipping Jews and Communists off to live in segregated ghettos.
Rosa did her best to buoy him, remaining her cheerful self and asking nothing of him except his presence. He felt guilty that he had been such a poor choice of partner for her: he had spent their first ten years hankering after another woman, and now he was nothing but a dead weight, who found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. His adolescent children irritated and exhausted him: Marta was too interested in boys for a girl of her young age and when he confined her to her room, she would climb out the window; Nicholas never missed an opportunity to argue with him. Everything he said or did was wrong, as far as his kids were concerned.
Once America entered the war in both Europe and the Pacific, Dmitri sank to new depths of depression and stopped going to work. There seemed little point, since they had only occasional shipments to process. Alex continued to wire money, and that made Dmitri feel useless – a grown man who could not support his own family – but he could not afford to refuse it. He spent his days poring over the newspaper or listening to reports of the war on the radio and often did not bother to change out of his pyjamas. He was too old to fight, and of no further use to the world.
Sometimes he took Tatiana’s diary from the old brown suitcase where he still kept it, the one he had brought with him from Istanbul in 1922. When he read her descriptions of those last days in the Ipatiev House, it reminded him once again of his failure to save her and made him feel more useless than ever. In the evenings he drank until he passed out or made himself sick, then suffered the following morning. After a night out drinking in Berlin in the old days, he’d felt no more than a little stuffy-headed but now hangovers wiped him out. A symptom of age.
Up till then, Dmitri had caught the train to New York once or twice a year to have luncheon with Alfred Knopf. They were always convivial occasions at the city’s great restaurants – the Waldorf, Barbetta, the exclusive 21 Club – and the meal would last from twelve-thirty through to four or five in the afternoon, by which time copious quantities of alcohol would have been consumed and Dmitri would have to stagger back to Grand Central to catch the train home. Alfred’s secretary would telephone three weeks in advance to arrange these luncheons, but when she rang in March 1942 to set a date Dmitri told her he would not be able to make it.
‘Mr Knopf will be disappointed. What reason shall I give?’
‘Just say that I can’t condone the e
xpenditure at a time when the world has gone mad. I’m sure he will understand.’
An hour later, when Alfred rang personally, Dmitri refused to take the call. Rosa closed the kitchen door but he could hear her explaining that he was depressed about the war because it brought back too many memories from the past. She promised she would persuade him to telephone and set a new date for luncheon once he felt up to it.
The following week a van pulled up outside their house and a deliveryman knocked on their door.
‘I have a gift from Mr Alfred Knopf,’ Dmitri heard him say to Rosa. He got up to look out the window and saw a Borzoi, a Russian wolfhound, just like the one on the Knopf logo. It was black with a white undercoat, and had the bounciness of a puppy. He felt like crying that the American publisher should care enough to send such a thoughtful gift.
Rosa called for him and he walked out to the porch and crouched to look at the pup. It was a beautiful animal, with intelligent eyes set in a small head, the exquisite curve of the haunches giving that famous silhouette, a coat that felt like silk. It was a boy, he noted. The pup licked his face and he felt just a fraction of the ice within him begin to thaw.
‘Malevich,’ he said. ‘I’ll call him Malevich.’
Dmitri was not the kind of man who had many friends: Malevich had been his closest friend during the last war, and Alfred was his closest during this. He wrote to express his undying gratitude and promised he would be well enough for that luncheon soon.
It was a turning point in more ways than one: Dmitri now had to go out twice a day to take Malevich for walks, and during those walks he began to analyse his depression and attempt to understand it. Was it some kind of affliction, like measles, that clogged up brain function? Why did everything bad come to the forefront, so that activities he had previously enjoyed no longer held any pleasure? What was the weight that caused his feet to drag, that made it too much effort to brush his teeth or comb his hair? It was lack of hope, he realised. Somehow any hope for the future had been extinguished, but Malevich’s uncomplicated enjoyment of life had brought back a flicker of light.
