But the sirens didn’t sound and the train didn’t even stop for an unexplained twenty minutes outside Leninsky Prospekt, like it usually did.
That evening as they walked over the bridge back to the Kremlin, weighed down with the paintings and a new secret, the cold wind continued to blow and the first few flakes of snow fell from the black sky.
Chapter 19
Misha sat up all evening waiting for his papa to come home. He had an awful squirming anxiety in the pit of his stomach and kept prevaricating about what he was going to do. Should he just go to bed and say nothing? Should he accuse his father of betraying his mother? After all, they had come for her but not him. What had that envelope full of money that he had found in the cupboard been for? Misha wasn’t really sure how much he wanted to know about what had happened.
The Spasskaya Tower clock chimed through the quarter-hours. He tried to read but could not settle to anything. Eventually he began to doze. The door clicked and he woke with a start.
‘Papa,’ he called.
‘Misha, you are still up. You have school tomorrow. Your mama would never have allowed this.’
Yegor Petrov came into the room. He was looking drawn. ‘Did you to go Meshkovo?’
Misha nodded. ‘Papa, I couldn’t destroy those photos. I have brought them back. They’re of Mama, aren’t they?’
Yegor just nodded. In his mind Misha had been through the scene many times and he had imagined his papa shouting or even hitting him. He never expected this. His papa took the photos from him. ‘I will burn them,’ he said softly. ‘You know what would happen if anyone found them.’
Yegor sat down on the sofa and rubbed his tired eyes. Then he went to the drinks cupboard and pulled out a bottle of vodka and poured himself a shot.
He drank it in a single gulp and then poured another. Misha waited uneasily.
‘You should know the truth, I suppose,’ said Yegor.
He took a further slug of vodka and beckoned for Misha to sit beside him.
He turned on the radio and as one of Tchaikovsky’s concertos played quietly in the background he began. He spoke in the kind of cautious voice people used when they talked about forbidden things in cafes and parks.
‘Mama has an interesting history. One that the Party would not approve of. When Zhiglov said she is still alive, I didn’t want anyone to find out any more about her than they already know. They might want to punish her even more. That is why I sent you to destroy those things.’
‘Your mother was born into a noble household, Misha. Imagine. She was one of them! Don’t look so shocked. It’s not that bad. She wasn’t a countess or a princess or anything. Her mother – your babushka, who you never knew – was one of the servants. She had an affair with the Count in his Moscow mansion. He was a navy officer. Look, that’s him in the photograph with her.
‘He didn’t cast her out when he discovered her condition. Indeed he made sure your grandmother and her baby were well looked after with a nice apartment in Arbatskaya and a monthly income. He used to visit your grandmother frequently when your mother was tiny. Not long after, Aunt Mila was born. There they are in the photo with their father and mother. He took an interest in them both. Anna had letters from him telling her she and Mila were the most beautiful girls in Russia, and that he would always be there to look after them. She used to keep the letters with the photographs and piano certificates. But Mama always worried about these things. The letters were the most obviously incriminating evidence so they had to go in the stove. How she cried when she had to do that.
‘The Count paid the fees for them to be sent to a good school. They made up a story about their father being killed during the Russo-Japanese War. He paid for piano lessons too. Look at her there at the piano. She was a beautiful young woman, wasn’t she? I can’t tell you how much Anna missed being able to play. I only heard her once – when we were staying at a hotel on our honeymoon. She played exquisitely – Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, all from memory. But that was a reckless thing to do. This was in 1920. There were people giving her funny looks and whispering. It taught her to keep quiet about her ability. For a woman her age, it was too much of a clue that she had had a bourgeois upbringing. Now, with music schools for talented proletarians, it’s OK, but those sorts of accomplishments in a woman of your mother’s generation made you very suspect. You were probably a non-toiling element, a class enemy.
‘She told me about her background before we married. Of course I was shocked but I wasn’t going to betray her. Her father, the Count, was an interesting man, to be sure. You know, he was an officer aboard the battleship Potemkin – one of the officers who sided with the mutineers during the 1905 revolution. Your mother borrowed that name for herself. He was sent to Siberia by the Tsar for his pains, where he lived in a grand house with his servants. Not the sort of exile you’d expect these days, where you count yourself lucky to be sent to a work camp rather than a mine.
‘Well, he came back eight years later, just before the war began in 1914, and even though he had tuberculosis, which he’d caught in exile, he went to fight the Germans. He survived the war and he joined the Whites in the Civil War. Mama had lost touch with him during the war but her mother told her just before she died that she thought he was killed fighting the Revolutionary Guards at Tsaritsyn. I might have even fought against him myself.’
Misha was beginning to feel really upset. ‘But it’s not Mama’s fault her father was an aristocrat,’ he said. ‘Didn’t Comrade Stalin himself say you can’t punish the children for the sins of their parents?’
‘Misha, you are old enough to know that what people say and what they do is sometimes quite different. Look what happens to the families of the soldiers who surrender to the Nazis. When Yakov, the Vozhd’s own son for Christ’s sake, was captured this summer, even his wife Yulia and their two children were arrested and sent to prison. So close relatives of aristocrats who fought for the Whites – like your mama and you – they would be the lowest of the low. Come on, you have seen enough of your fellow students being unmasked to know this.’
Misha sat there boiling with anger. His mother was everything a good communist should be. She was totally dedicated to her students. She had been his inspiration when he volunteered to teach the factory workers. There was nothing snobby about her, like those sad old matrons you saw with their china cups and black lace dresses, having furtive conversations in cafes. Mama was everything that a new Russian should be. Her life, her political consciousness, had been ‘remoulded’ by the Soviet Union. But evidently that was not enough to save her from the NKVD.
‘This country has gone rotten from the inside,’ said Misha softly. ‘Papa, how can you continue to serve a man who is responsible for the very worst of it?’
Yegor snapped. ‘We do what we do to keep alive, and keep our family alive.’
Misha waited for him to calm down.
‘Why did you never tell me what you knew about Mama?’ asked Misha.
His father took Misha by the hand – something he had not done since he was ten or eleven. ‘Misha, children who have noble blood are pariahs. They are not allowed to go to university. You were always the brightest of our children. Wouldn’t it have been terrible if you had had to leave school because Mama had noble blood? The less anyone knew, the safer you would be.’
Misha could barely contain his disgust. ‘What a stupid waste,’ he said. ‘What a ridiculous waste of people’s talents. The children of these people don’t deserve punishment, any more than the wives and children of soldiers who have been captured.’
All at once, that familiar look of stark terror returned to Yegor’s face. ‘Misha, never, never talk like that, not even to your own papa,’ he whispered. ‘You may be young but they will take you away and you’ll be shot if anyone hears you saying such things.’
It was then that Misha realised his papa was as terrified of Stalin and Beria as everyone else. A man who could imprison his own son’s wife and children would
think nothing of ordering the liquidation of an old comrade.
‘So what do you know about Mama’s arrest?’ asked Misha. ‘Why did they take her and not you? I still don’t understand why she was arrested. Was it her background?’
‘No, it wasn’t that. Mama said things . . .’
‘What things? Who to?’
‘To the Vozhd. She picked her friends unwisely. I will tell you. Swear you will never repeat it . . . When we first came to live here, Mama made friends with a couple, the Usatovs.’
Misha remembered them. They were the couple who introduced the Petrovs to fine wine. The husband, Grigory, was a naval attaché at the Kremlin. Misha could picture him clearly in his uniform. There weren’t many navy people at the Kremlin and Grigory really stood out. Vera always arrived with presents – usually a book for Viktor and Elena and some chocolate from the foreign provisions shop for Misha. Vera and his mama would sit and chat for hours over coffee.
‘They were not a good choice for friends. In early 1940 Grigory was arrested as a Trotskyite spy and two weeks later the NKVD came for Vera too. Your mama was convinced she was entirely innocent. She told me Vera was a dedicated communist to her soul. So Anna went to plead with the Vozhd to let her go. Mama knew Comrade Stalin liked her. But she pushed her luck too far. I think he thought she had come to seduce him when she asked to speak to him in private. She told me he was very frosty with her when he realised why she wanted to be alone with him. As soon as she told me what she had done, I knew it was only a matter of time before they came for her. I thought they would come for me too. I was surprised when they only took her.’
‘Why didn’t you try to save her? ’ asked Misha, trying to keep the anger from his voice. ‘You were Stalin’s old comrade. Didn’t you save his life? Surely he must listen to some people . . .’
Yegor Petrov sat up very straight. Misha could see a blood vessel bulging in his bald head.
‘Misha, your mama was arrested for trying to save someone she cared about. I couldn’t risk leaving you on your own. Who would have cared for you?
‘I did manage to do something for her. Just after I discovered she had been arrested I paid three thousand roubles to one of Zhiglov’s comrades in the NKVD to get her sent to a work camp that wasn’t going to be the death of her. I heard nothing more about it. Zhiglov’s contact disappeared not long afterwards, so I never knew if she was sent to an easier camp. In fact, I never knew until the other night whether or not they had just shot her. But maybe that is the best three thousand roubles I ever spent.’
The envelope of money. Misha felt an overwhelming relief, mixed with shame for ever having suspected his father.
Yegor spoke again, his own sadness tinged with anger. ‘Your mama should have known better. I witnessed several people trying to intervene on behalf of a friend or relation. You know what happened? Nothing – if they were lucky. But plenty weren’t. Morozov’s wife, remember her? She tried to get the Vozhd to release her brother. Dressed up in her best cocktail frock, flirted with him all night . . .’
He pulled a finger across his throat.
‘And that fool Leonov, who I used to work with, addressed the Vozhd as Iosif Vissarionovich. Stalin hates overfamiliarity. He came out of that meeting shaking like a leaf. Disappeared a week later. I wasn’t going to jeopardise my life and your future on a fool’s errand. Look at me, Mikhail.’ His voice was trembling. ‘Look at me.’
Misha met his father’s intense gaze.
‘You would have been put in a children’s home. Or you might have been arrested along with me. They would have sent you to a penal battalion, Mikhail. You would have been slaughtered by the Nazis when the war broke out . . .’
Misha realised, like never before, how fortunate he had been to have his father to protect him.
‘I have survived for five years in this snake pit. And I have provided a good life for you. Hardly anyone in the country lives better than us. And until your mother went we were all happy.’
Misha was blushing with shame and staring at his feet.
Yegor began to speak very quietly. ‘I have seen it all. The Party elders who tried to convince Stalin to slow down, the ones who tried to stop the famine in Ukraine, the ones who thought we had come too far too quickly . . . good communist men and women, who had given their whole lives to the Soviet cause. They all thought they had the stature and authority to speak openly, in the spirit of communist brotherhood. They all went. All of them shot in a squalid basement somewhere, begging for forgiveness sometimes. Yes, I heard reports of their executions. I think he let me listen deliberately, to remind me to stay in line. We have created a monster, Mikhail. I am the monster’s servant and I know the rules. Which is why you and I are still alive. Did you ever stop and think who lived in this apartment before us? I heard stories . . . I’m surprised they don’t come to haunt us.
‘All of us in that office know what it feels like to lie in our bed, listening to the knocking on doors and praying it would be your neighbour and not you. The scuffles on the stairs, the screaming children as their parents were manhandled away. I spend my life trying to prevent that happening to you and me. I don’t even know what they charged your mother with. Something utterly ridiculous. “Spying for the Germans. A factory saboteur, a wrecker. An enemy of the people . . .” Complete fantasy. Alice in Wonderland.
‘I heard of men who had raised up factories from bare fields, tortured into admitting they deliberately sabotaged their own machinery. Men who had built great steel works . . . tortured until they confessed to throwing artillery shells into their own blast furnaces. Bizarre crimes, not even barely plausible. Insane.’
‘But, Papa, we hear about the Trotskyite wreckers and imperialist spies almost every day at school. Surely some of it must be true?’
‘Most of it is a fairy tale, Mikhail. Was your mother a wrecker? Was she a Nazi spy? She’s no different to the others. They were just more important. More known to the people. We have failed the people. The Revolution has gone sour.
‘My son, I want you to understand why things are as they are. I want you to survive.’
Chapter 20
The next morning Misha left the apartment to be greeted by an oppressive grey sky and biting northerly wind. There was no snow but he could taste the chilly moisture in the air and hoped the downpour would hold off until he reached his school.
The news on the radio had been bad. There was no talk of any victories or advances, or the Hitlerites being driven back, only ‘heroic defenders’. And the towns and cities the radio announcer mentioned were getting closer to Moscow by the day.
As he walked through Cathedral Square, a strange smell crept into his nostrils. The nearer he got to the Borovitskaya Tower, the stronger it became. It was the sort of unsettling odour you noticed in a really cheap second-hand clothes shop or market stall – a dense fug of unwashed clothing and unwashed bodies.
As Misha walked through the tower gates and out on to the bridge, he was confronted by an extraordinary sight. The street was clogged with a great swathe of exhausted, filthy people. There were old men with straggly beards, babushkas of all shapes and sizes, and wan little children, blank faces staring into nothing. Misha realised at once they were fleeing from the approaching Nazi army.
Some of the crowd carried their possessions in handcarts, others looked as if they were wearing all the clothes they owned. Most had their heads covered in scarves or blankets. A lucky few had an emaciated donkey or horse, to drag a cart stuffed with tottering belongings.
What unnerved Misha was their utter silence. There was the clop of hooves, the trundle of wheels, and the shuffling of thousands of feet, but clearly no one here had energy to waste in conversation. They exuded a misery that was almost palpable.
He heard the honking of geese and instinctively looked to the empty sky, then realised the geese were there among the crowd, close by him, being driven in a small flock by a little boy with a stick. Their honking set off other farm animals
among this ragged procession. Cattle began to low and sheep bleated pitifully.
Here and there uniformed men and women directed the flow, and as Misha looked over Lebyazhi Lane up to Ulitsa Mokhovaya he could see no end to this stream of people. The Militia and the army personnel were hardly needed to keep order, they were just there to direct them wherever they were going. Everyone seemed too worn out to be angry or violent. Misha guessed they would be heading for the Highway of the Enthusiasts, the road east out of Moscow to the distant Ural Mountains and Siberia. He wondered when these people had last eaten and guessed they must be starving.
He ran immediately to his apartment and raided the refrigerator and pantry, coming back laden with a canvas bag filled with bread, dried meat and apples. Standing at the edge of the crowd he handed out his provisions to whoever he thought looked most in need. At first his offerings were snatched away with barely a word but then, as the crowd began to realise what was happening, there was a mad scramble that knocked him flat on to the cobblestones and saw his bag and its contents spilled on to the floor, and the remains of the food snatched away. It reminded him of the time his family were set on by a flock of gulls when they had laid out a picnic on the banks of the Dnieper.
Misha had cut his hand in falling and he hurried again to his apartment to wash the dirt away. As he ran his hands under the bathroom tap, the Spasskaya Tower on the north-east wall of the Kremlin struck one o’clock and he realised with mounting anxiety that he was going to be late for school.
He took a route through the back streets to avoid the great stream of people and passed several small factories and workshops that were bustling with activity. As he glanced through windows and open warehouse doors, he could see men and women dismantling machinery and packing whatever they could into crates and boxes. It seemed like the whole of Moscow was getting ready to flee.
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