by Ian Whates
“Do you think there’s any chance they abandoned her? That she was left at the station intentionally, I mean?”
“Perhaps. Kids don’t clam up overnight without a reason. This little girl is physically fine, so either she’s seen something that’s scared the wits out of her or she’s been unhappy over a long period.”
I don’t often encounter silence in the course of my work. Normally it’s the children who are missing, the adults who are left behind. Adults in pursuit of lost children are voluble, angry, terrified, often irrational and sometimes hysterical but rarely silent. The little girl sitting on the divan in the box room off Clara Brivik’s kitchen was so quiet it was uncanny. Observing her for the first time, I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that she was not human at all but some new kind of being, a creature who saw everything yet said nothing, the world’s conscience.
Clara had clearly done her best to make the confined space as bright and comfortable as she could – I noted a red-and-white chequered quilt cover, a bedside shelf with books and a wooden solitaire set, a glass snow dome containing a cleverly worked miniature model of the Angara dam – but for all the animation she showed, the child might as well have been walled up inside a prison cell.
“Hi,” I said. “You must be Rae.” Clara had left us alone, which was against the rules, but in spite of her tact my own voice still sounded false to me, sterile and plastic, bordering on sinister. The girl stared straight ahead, hugging her knees. It was difficult to tell if she even registered my presence.
She had a tiny gap between her front teeth. For some reason it was this detail, more than any other, that brought the reality of her situation home to me.
She was alone. Suddenly and without warning I found myself thinking about that first winter after the bomb, when Aunt Svet and I were living at Svet’s uncle’s dacha with no idea of what the future would be like or what it might hold. I remembered mornings in February, gaunt icicles casting shadows from the eaves in the eerie blue snow-light, the realisation, which took longer to pierce my consciousness than you might imagine, that the bomb had erased my past. My mother, our apartment, the gold-rimmed coffee cups that had been a present from my father’s sister Maroussia, who lived in Paris – these things were gone forever, leaving nothing but the dacha, the grubby houses along the potholed road that led to Grabinski, and Aunt Svet.
I loved Aunt Svet like a second mother before the bomb. Now she seemed distant and, like the icicles, unutterably cold. Glittery in her misery, her chilblained fingers brittle as the frost-rimed twigs we scavenged for firewood.
I was eight years old.
“I want to help,” I said to the girl. “I’m here to try and help you find your mummy.”
Rae shook her head. The movement was slight, but unmistakable. I drew in my breath. She was saying no, but did she mean no, I don’t want you to or no, that’s not possible?
I stayed with her for another half hour, playing with the snow dome and babbling bright, meaningless sentences in the hope that she might respond but she remained silent and immobile on the bed. She did seem calmer, somehow, or at least I imagined she did, but I knew that was probably just wishful thinking.
GATHERING INFORMATION ON the children’s home fire was actually easier than I had anticipated. Facts have often proved hard to come by in this country, and I was prepared to face a multitude of obstructions when I began delving into what happened at the Maria Davidova children’s home on the night of May 7th 1969, especially as Milena is a navy town, where secrecy and concealment are bred into the bone.
As things turned out, it was quite the opposite. A man named Pil’nyak, who had managed the orphanage’s finances for many years, set up a charitable foundation in the wake of the tragedy, with the aim of building a new hospital and children’s asylum on the site of the outdated facility destroyed in the fire. As his own contribution, Pil’nyak compiled a memorial album detailing the history and background of the Maria Davidova. The book included a number of essays and tributes by local writers, and also copious appendices, listing the names, ages and circumstances of admission of every child who had been in residence at the time of the fire.
There were twenty-four fatalities in all. According to Pil’nyak, if it hadn’t been for the courageous actions of certain members of staff there would have been more. One housemistress suffered severe burns to her upper body when she stayed behind to help a child – twelve-year-old Mitya Tolstoi, who had an amputated leg – to safety through a downstairs window. The house porter, Anatol Dub, organised the evacuation of the second floor dormitory before returning inside the burning building to rescue twins Liza and Vera Ismailov. Liza had become trapped in a smoke-filled stairwell, and Vera refused to go anywhere without her sister.
Pil’nyak’s memoir catalogued many such acts of everyday heroism, the kind of life-affirming anecdotes that always surface in the aftermath of any disaster. But there were other stories too, stories that did not end so happily. More than a quarter of the resident children died, many of them in terror and still desperately trying to escape. Two members of staff were killed also, overcome by the effects of smoke inhalation.
One death in particular seemed to stand out, perhaps because the child in question shouldn’t have been in the Maria Davidova at all. Ten-year-old Orel Zneyder was the son of a prominent and vehemently outspoken New Socialist. Miryam Zneyder had been remanded in custody on trumped up embezzlement charges, and was forced to put her boy into care as a result.
The charges against Zneyder were eventually thrown out, and she was returned to the regional duma on an increased majority. In the meantime, Orel’s death had become a local scandal. There were even those who suggested that the fire at the children’s home had been arson, a deliberate act of reprisal against Zneyder and her pro-secession stance. The story was compelling, and tragic, but it was only when I read that Zneyder had grown up in the Auchinschloss district of my own city, just a two-stop tram ride from our old apartment, that I became convinced that I’d found the lead I was looking for: that the girl in Clara Brivik’s box room and the tragic Orel Zneyder were somehow connected.
“There’s a link here somewhere, I know it,” I insisted to my girlfriend Paula. My collection of newspaper clippings and photocopies and computer printouts was beginning to take over our apartment. Paula is used to my hunches, but I knew this one must have sounded bizarre, even to her.
“How can there be, Nellie? The boy died in 1969. That’s thirty years ago, in case you’d forgotten. This Miryam Zneyder would be a pensioner by now. If she’s even still alive, that is.”
“She’s alive. She still lives in Milena. I’ve tried calling her but all I get is her answer phone.” I paused. “She wrote a book about Helen Messger. Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“Strange how? There must be dozens of books about Messger. What’s one more?”
I fell silent. What I wanted to say was that it seemed an odd coincidence that the same Miryam Zneyder whose story featured in a newspaper clipping discovered in the possession of an abandoned child just happened to have a connection with the city where that child was found. But of course Paula was right, too. The pianist Helen Messger was one of the bomb’s most famous casualties. People are still fascinated by her, even today.
“I’d be careful if I were you, Nellie.”
That’s what Paula always says when she thinks I’m about to do something stupid. In the case of Miryam Zneyder, I could only imagine that she meant I was letting my obsession lead me onto unsafe ground. The last thing the poor woman needed was some idiot blundering into her life like a wrecking ball, awakening memories of what was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to her and all in the name of a quest that was doomed to fail.
What Paula said made sense, but I couldn’t let go. There was something here, I felt certain of it, and apart from anything else there was Rae herself.
She was behaving so oddly. I kept coming back to what Clara Brivik had said, about c
hildren who had witnessed something terrible and how it might affect them.
A fire in a children’s home would have to be one of the worst traumas a young person might experience. Bad enough to rob them of their power of speech?
If that child had seen a friend die, I thought probably yes.
WHILE I WAS waiting for Miryam Zneyder to respond to my phone messages, I went to interview the couple who had found Rae at Vasilievsky Station and called the police. Alec and Silvia Ostrov lived on the northern edge of town, out beyond Karl Marx Park, where the rents stay low because of the persistent rumours of nuclear contamination. The Ostrov house was a wooden shack, standing by itself in a patch of muddy gravel at the end of a short unmade road. A backdrop of birches and derelict tower blocks completed the scene.
Only Alec Ostrov was in when I called. A beanpole-thin man with sticking-out ears and lank, shoulder-length hair, he spoke with a slight stammer, his watery blue eyes flicking nervously from side to side. Logic put him in his mid-thirties, not much younger than me, but his hunched posture, together with the shabby carpet slippers he was wearing when he came to the door, made him seem much older.
I gave my name and showed him my ID. “I telephoned, remember?” I said. “Is it okay if I come in?”
“My wife isn’t here,” said Ostrov. “She had to go to work.” He shot an anxious glance over my shoulder then finally stood aside to let me pass.
“What does your wife do?” I asked. The door opened directly into the main living room. The shack’s woebegone exterior had led me to expect the space inside to be equally grim. The reality was a surprise, comfortable and interesting-looking. There were books everywhere, overflowing the plank-built unit that had been constructed for them, piled on the table by the window and stacked in haphazard columns along the base of the wall. A large divan was covered with an embroidered woollen blanket, and the old-fashioned tiled corner stove gave off generous heat. My eye was caught by a picture on the wall behind, a small gilt-framed oil painting of a woman’s face. It was painted in browns and ochres, yet still light seemed to stream from it, as from the faces of the saints, illuminated by candles, on a carved iconostas.
It was a lovely thing. I wondered how the Ostrovs had come by it.
“Silvia’s a nurse,” Ostrov said. “At the Metropolitan. Would you like some tea?”
“I’d love some.”
“I’ll make it.” He stepped around me and into the next room, presumably the kitchen. I glanced furtively at the books and papers littering the table. Most of them, their pages covered with complex-looking diagrams and mathematical formulae, were unintelligible to me. There was also a battered copy of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey in the original English.
“I work in probability,” Ostrov said. “The science of chance.”
I jumped back from the table. I hadn’t heard him come back into the room – the slippers, I suppose – and his sudden reappearance startled me. He was holding out a mug of tea. I grabbed at it, glad of something definite to do. “Numbers aren’t my strong point, I’m afraid.”
“Mathematics has as much to do with feeling as understanding, in the end. Most people are too afraid of looking stupid to find that out. That’s what this book is about really, at its heart.” He touched the faded green covers of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. “Have you read it?”
“No.”
“You should.”
I was surprised at the change in him. The insipidness and the timidity were gone, replaced by a hard-eyed enthusiasm that bordered on the aggressive. I took a sip of tea, almost burning my mouth in the process. The wooden shack, the dusty novels, the brilliant zealot – it was starting to feel like something out of Dostoevsky.
“What can you tell me about Rae?” I said.
“Rae? Oh, you mean the little girl.” I had expected my abrupt return to the subject in hand to wrong-foot him, to jolt him back out of his comfort zone. It did not. “We saw her standing outside the station buffet. Silvia and I, I mean. The one by the main entrance. She had a red coat on. I remember that because Silvia nudged me and said she looked like Little Red Riding Hood. We thought she must be waiting for someone. We were meeting Silvia’s mother off a train, only the train was late and then when it arrived she wasn’t on it. Silvia was worried at first, but when we went to the booking office there was a message saying that she’d caught the next one. We decided not to bother going home, to have a meal in the buffet instead. When we got there we saw the little girl in the red coat, still standing outside. Silvia asked her if she was lost but she wouldn’t say anything. Silvia said we should call the police and I agreed.”
He spoke clearly and deliberately, as if he were delivering a statement or recording a lecture, and indeed I’d seen an almost identical statement already, in the photocopy of the original that Lyuba had recently given me to add to the file. It didn’t mean that Ostrov was trying to hide anything, necessarily. It was more likely that he’d just repeated the story so many times it was beginning to sound like a script. This is a common problem when it comes to witnesses, and a good part of my job is to persuade people to think back – not to the last time they gave their statement, but to the events they’re describing.
It’s the little things, the forgotten things that I’m hoping to recapture. The details that have been discarded because they don’t appear to fit with the bulk of the story.
They can be vital clues.
“How did she react when the police came?” I said.
Ostrov hesitated. “I don’t know, really. I don’t think she had much idea of what was going on. A policewoman took hold of her hand and the girl let her, as if it didn’t make any difference to her what they did. She just kept staring ahead, like a sleepwalker. It was as if she weren’t really there, somehow. As if she were seeing something none of the rest of us could see. I found it quite eerie.”
“Eerie?”
“Like something in a horror film.”
“What did your wife say?”
“She said the kid was probably scared. Scared to death, she said, left all alone like that and during the rush hour, too.” He paused. “I didn’t say so to Silvia, because I know she gets upset over children, but I thought the girl was more than just scared. She reminded me of something that happened to a university friend of mine. He was in an accident as a child – his school bus drove off a bridge and fell into a river. He was ten when it happened. He told me he didn’t remember feeling frightened at the time, that from the moment the bus left the road until he was dragged onto the riverbank it was like watching the whole thing play itself out on a cinema screen. He could see the river bottom through the window, because the coach’s headlights were still on, still working. There was a shopping cart down there, he said, bright silver, and something twisted and tangled in weeds he thought might be an old bicycle. He remembered feeling angry about that, because he and his friends liked to swim in the river, during the summer months especially, and he hated the thought of people dumping their rubbish there. It was dangerous, for a start. He knew a boy who’d almost been drowned when his foot became trapped in a sunken mattress.
“It was only afterwards that he felt scared,” Ostrov continued. “He said he couldn’t understand what was happening to him. The excitement and uproar over the tragedy soon died down, as they were bound to do. My friend was back in school a fortnight later. Life went on as normal, or as normally as it could when half your classmates were missing. Their desks and coat pegs sat there, empty – they would not be filled again until the autumn, when the next crop of younger children came up from the year below. My friend found himself looking at those empty desks more and more often. Sometimes, in the middle of a maths class say, he would feel his throat tightening and his arms and legs grow heavy as scrap metal. He would look out of the classroom window and imagine he saw water rising. Even five years later he was still having nightmares, terrible dreams in which a great wave overwhelmed him and from which he awoke with his heart
racing and his lungs burning. The dreams only began to ease off when he went away to college.”
“Away from the river, you mean?”
Ostrov shrugged. “Yes, maybe.” He hesitated. “But that’s what the little girl looked like, do you understand me?”
“As if she were remembering a nightmare?”
“As if she were still seeing something awful in her mind’s eye. She wasn’t scared of where she was, or what was happening, because something even more frightening had already happened. Something she couldn’t forget, even if she tried.”
As if she were still seeing something awful in her mind’s eye. Ostrov’s words, or at least the sense of them, coincided almost exactly with Clara Brivik’s.
“Is there anything else you remember?” I said to him. “Anything at all?”
“I don’t think so. Her coat was too big, that’s all.”
“What do you mean, too big?”
“It was almost on the ground. And the shoulders were too bulky. She was lost in it. You know how kids like to dress up in their mother’s clothes? The girl looked like that.”
I didn’t see how this could matter, but at least it was something, a detail no one else had mentioned so far. I noted it down.
“Who’s that in the picture?” I said to Ostrov as I was leaving, nodding my head towards the oil painting behind the stove. It really was beautiful. I realised I would be sorry not to see it again.
Ostrov glanced quickly towards the painting and then looked down at the floor. “No one I know,” he said. “I came across it by chance, in one of those lost-and-found stores by the Universitetskaya tram stop. They’re all gone now. That woman looks exactly like my mother. I thought it was interesting, the coincidence.” He cleared his throat. “My mother was killed in the bomb.”
Mine too, I could have said, but I didn’t. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to cancel out his story with one of my own.
