Barton wiped her plate clean with a corner of toast and patted her mouth with a napkin. Then she looked at her watch.
‘Philby goes up to Broadway twice a week,’ she said. ‘Normally it’s a Tuesday and a Friday. He always takes the train to and from St Pancras. I’d normally be talking to The Watchers about keeping an eye on the wretched man but, in this instance, I doubt that would be appropriate.’ She carefully folded her napkin and laid it beside her plate. ‘I’m very glad I asked you to go up there, Tam. I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed.’
She got to her feet and thanked Moncrieff for lunch. Moncrieff held her gaze. The Watchers were responsible for surveillance.
‘A pleasure,’ he said. ‘Just one question. Is this you asking me? Or Guy?’
Barton looked down at him. A ghost of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. Then she was gone.
10
SUNDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 1941
Bella felt at home with Yuri from the moment she stepped into the suite of rooms behind the church. The evidence of the life he led was everywhere: the desk beneath the curtained window where he worked; the bookshelves, all of them full, with yet more books in seemingly random piles on the woodblock floor; the framed prints hanging on wall after wall, most of them in charcoal, dense black strokes capturing figures at prayer, or public speakers in front of huge crowds, or kids swimming in the river, all of them his own work. And dominating everything, hanging on the back wall beside the door that led to the rest of the accommodation, the broken figure on the cross, his head on his chest, his flanks latticed with blood, the crudest nails driven through the beautifully grained wood of his open palms.
‘No one has stayed here in years,’ Yuri told her. ‘I’ve forgotten how to be polite. I’m afraid you’ll have to fend for yourself.’
He showed her the tiny alcove beyond the door that served as a kitchen, the open wicker basket where he kept his bread, the shelf in his one cupboard cluttered with salt, and gherkins, and three kinds of paprika, and the jars of pickled fish and vegetable he ate most days. She was welcome to the smallest of the bedrooms, an empty space without a single item of furniture, and if she was very lucky Larissa might soon turn up with a mattress and a couple of blankets. There was only a single standpipe in the bathroom, alas, but he’d read somewhere that the British owed their empire to cold water and Christianity, and he had plenty of both, so he hoped she’d be very happy. In the meantime, she was to make herself at home and only talk when she felt the need. He’d lived with silence most of his life and appreciated its many blessings.
Bella was enchanted. She was no stranger to silence either, but the conversational challenge of a man like Yuri was irresistible. Back in the room where he worked, she sat cross-legged on the floor, still huddled in the Army greatcoat, wanting to know more.
‘You’re a priest,’ she said.
‘My father. My father was a priest.’
‘That’s impossible. Priests aren’t allowed to marry.’
‘My mother died. I never knew my real father. Maksym looked after me. My mother and I were living in the countryside. She got tuberculosis. She coughed her life away. Maksym was the priest who buried her.’
Maksym, she thought. What a lovely name for a priest.
‘You had brothers? Sisters?’
‘No. Just me. I was three years old.’
‘And Maksym could deal with that?’
‘Maksym treated me like a book, treasured me, studied me. We learned together, which was fun. Here. I’ve got something to show you.’
Yuri opened a drawer in the desk. Moments later, he slipped something star-shaped from an envelope and gave it to Bella. It was made of stiff grey cardboard, carefully painted.
‘You see the icon? The Mother of God?’
‘Yes. What’s it for?’
‘You take it carol singing as a kid. It’s Xmas time. You go from house to house in the village. Now turn it over.’
Bella did what she was told. Now she was looking at a five-pointed Soviet star, emblem of the Revolution.
‘Clever,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is remember who lives where.’
‘Exactly. The wrong household, the wrong side of the star, and no one gives you money. In those days we thought it was a game, everyone did, then everyone started dying and it became difficult.’
‘Tell me how.’
Yuri said nothing. He wanted the cardboard star back. He weighed it in his hand and turned it over several times. Then his gaze returned to Bella. Deep-set eyes, almost black.
‘Lenin wanted our bodies, our souls, and our grain,’ he said. ‘But Stalin was worse. When the peasants started hiding the grain, it was war. He put everyone in giant farms and sent the city kids into the countryside. They beat our bodies, ignored our souls and stole every last sack of grain. When the farmers protested, he told them to answer to the Proletariat. No one had any idea what that meant but it never seemed to matter. In their name, we were invited to starve. That was one way of dying. The others were quicker. In this country, believe me, it paid not to be either an intellectual or a peasant. Maksym was both: by training an intellectual, by nature a peasant. The Russians took him away one morning and I never saw him again. He probably died two deaths, poor man, though Stalin will have to answer one day because God will see to that,’ he glanced towards the figure on the door and crossed himself.
‘And you?’
‘I survived. They called it the Holodomor. You speak Ukrainian? Holod, hunger. Mor, death. Work it out.’
‘Death by famine?’
‘Exactly. Maksym once called it the silence of the bells. The churches were all closed. The Bolsheviks had torn the heart out of the countryside. There was nothing left to eat because they’d stolen it all and so you followed your neighbours onto the road, as they followed theirs. If you still had a cow, you took her, too, but that was unlikely because the Russians had either thieved the beast or you’d already eaten it. If you were lucky, you ended up at a railway station, but you’d need a sense of humour because you had no money for tickets and in any case the trains never stopped. We walked in the end, station to station along the track. We ate weeds, dandelions, anything we could find. The best stuff grew beside the rails themselves where all the shit comes out when the trains go by, but you never cared. Stalin’s feast? Did you ever hear the expression?’
‘Never.’
‘When things got really bad, people started eating the dead. The Russians told us to look on the bright side. At least we had plenty of choice.’
He said he ended up in Kyiv. The famine had reached deep into the city. People were dying of hunger in the street. Collection teams were paid in bread and sworn to silence. Thousands of bodies were buried, always at night. Once, at the Lukianivske Cemetery, all the staff were arrested and shot as counter-revolutionaries, in case they bore witness. If you saw ravens next morning, black angels in the sky, you knew that bodies were still unburied, some of them probably the staff from the cemeteries. At that time, he said, people were so hungry they were pouring water into burrows made by field mice to wash out the stored grain.
‘Can you believe that?’ he said. ‘Bolshevik field mice? Furry little revolutionaries? Stealing our grain?’
The thought drew a wry smile, and he rocked back and forth on the chair, lost in memories. Then his eye drifted to a weighty black tome open on the corner of the desk, and his hand reached out to flick through the pages.
‘This was our new Ukrainian dictionary,’ he said. ‘A scholar called Skrypnyk spent years compiling it, here in Kyiv. This was after the war. It was a new start for a new culture, a Ukrainian culture. It meant we could write to each other in our own language. Then the Russians got hold of it and seized as many copies as they could find. And you know why? Because it relied on too many pre-revolutionary sources. In other words, it was a threat to the regime. They were the barbarians at our gate. What worried them most was us having our own language, our own customs, our own paintin
gs, our own music, our own culture. They even dropped the Ukrainian letter “g” by state decree because it brought the language closer to Russian. Can you imagine that? The heroes of Petrograd frightened by a single letter? By an innocent curl of ink? That was traitorous. Writing the old “g” could put you in a prison cell. Crazy people. Crazy times.’
Bella, wary of stretching Yuri’s patience any further, retired to her cell of a bedroom and lay on the floor, her head pillowed on her folded arms, glad of the warmth of the greatcoat. A thin, grey light filtered through the grubby window. The wind was beginning to stir in the trees that ringed the church, bringing with it the growl of battle, less distant now.
She tried to sleep, a hopeless act of denial, drifting off into a netherworld of memories sieved from the last few weeks. By far the most comforting took her back to the Glebe House, waking up with Tam dozing beside her, creeping downstairs in the half-light of dawn, prowling around the big kitchen, the flagstones cold beneath her bare feet, while the old kettle danced on the range. The longer she stayed, the easier it was to imagine being there for ever, a permanent part of this implacable man’s life. What would she like to change around the house? And how would he react?
Back in the bedroom with tea, she’d linger by the bed for a moment or two, looking down at his sleeping face. She loved touching him. She loved how hard his body was, how spare, the sheer strength of the man, his limitless appetite for the steepest paths up the surrounding mountains, and most of all his assumption that she would match him step for step. This, she’d realised early on, was key to the unspoken bond between them.
Tam Moncrieff, to her quiet delight, had no time for weakness, for hanging back, for not committing. He took life in his mighty stride and expected her to follow. Was this something they taught you in the Royal Marines? Did it come with the green beret and the gruff humour of the men around you? Matthew, the boyfriend she’d lost in Spain, had been very similar – high expectations, limited patience – and she relished the challenge that men like this threw down.
Tam, of course, was older, wiser, but still the prisoner of the pace he set for himself. Physically, and in a thousand other ways, she knew she didn’t disappoint him, and the more time they spent together, the more prepared he’d been to lower his defences and take a proper look at the person she really was. Bella understood the solitary life only too well, the necessary thickness of the walls you lived behind, but as their time in the mountains came to an abrupt end, she’d detected something new in their relationship. She’d managed to surprise him, perhaps by surprising himself, and for that she was glad.
She woke up to find Larissa and Yuri at the door. Larissa had found a mattress from somewhere, and Yuri had helped her carry it in from the car. Bella struggled to her feet.
‘Here?’ Yuri had gone. Larissa was pointing to the very middle of the room.
‘Over here, please.’ Bella preferred the corner furthest from the door. Larissa smiled at her choice.
‘You want a little privacy? I don’t blame you. It’s the least a woman deserves.’
Woman? There were no mirrors in this house, not even in the cupboard that served as a bathroom, an absence Bella welcomed as a blessing. She was helping Larissa tug the mattress into the corner. Then she left to reappear shortly afterwards with an armful of bedding, and a pillow. There was even a sheet.
The bed made, Bella asked her what she looked like.
‘Who?’
‘Me. You put me to shame. You look fine. You look wonderful. Am I allowed to say that?’
Both women knew it was a lie. Larissa had a face made for sculpting, full of depth and character, but just now she looked exhausted. The darkness under her eyes spoke of days under pressure and nights without sleep.
‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘But I look the way I feel.’
‘Tired?’
‘Resigned. Things are crazy just now. Nothing’s safe anymore. Someone broke into my car, stole everything they could lay their hands on, found my camera, and stole that, too. It was a Leica. It was precious to me.’ She shook her head, then stepped a little closer, cupping Bella’s face with her big hands. ‘We should take our pleasures while we can, my child. The new look suits you.’
*
Afterwards, Larissa insisted she had to go. A thousand appointments to keep while people still had the freedom to move around. A million calls to make while the telephone exchanges were still working. Three major articles for tomorrow’s edition before supplies of paper ran out. Bella, still straddling her, said no.
‘We need to talk.’
‘About?’
‘This,’ Bella gestured at the space between them. ‘And about Yuri.’
‘This? You mean us?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Larissa was frowning. Maybe she doesn’t understand the question, Bella thought. Or maybe her busy life is full of encounters like these, opportunities seized, pleasures shared, clothes retrieved, then the plunge back into real life. Whatever the truth, Bella needed to find out.
‘You fuck other people a lot?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You don’t? And does it matter if I’m lying?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘That’s nice. Kiss me.’
Bella ducked her head and did the older woman’s bidding. She loved the warmth of her hands against the bareness of her scalp, her eager tongue, how frank she was, and how inventive.
‘Yuri.’ Bella had sat up again. ‘Why do they leave him alone? He’s a priest’s boy. He lives in a church. He’s a writer, an intellectual. He hates the Russians and he doesn’t seem to care who knows it. Why doesn’t that put him in the Big House?’
‘You like him?’ Larissa wiped her mouth.
‘I admire him. I think he’s brave. Or maybe reckless. More to the point, he’s my guardian, my keeper. But the NKVD know everything. Yuri should have been dealt with by now, arrested, tortured, liquidated. Just tell me why that’s never happened.’
Larissa gazed up at her.
‘He has protection,’ she said at last. ‘Someone who looks after him, keeps him safe.’
‘And who might that be?’
‘You’ll know him.’
‘I will? I do?’
‘Yes,’ she reached for Bella’s hand. ‘Who helped build the Metro? In Moscow?’
Bella frowned. Work on the showpiece Metro had started years ago, way before her arrival in Moscow.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘A little man. Even shorter than Stalin. They call him Stalin’s Liubiimchik.’
Liubiimchik. Pet. Bella finally got it.
‘You mean Khrushchev?’
‘I do. You’re a clever girl.’ She gave Bella’s hand a squeeze. ‘Khrushchev is almost a Ukrainian. He was born just kilometres from the border. Stalin sent him back here from Moscow, appointed him Party Leader, gave him a nice place to live, a huge dacha on the river, told him to sort the city out. He plays the local Vodzh and the Russians do his bidding because he has the ear of Stalin and everyone knows it.’
‘He’s here now?’
‘No. His family fled in July. He was in Moscow the following week. He found Stalin at his command post. He said the man was a wreck, couldn’t believe what was happening. Khrushchev’s tough. It pays to be very careful with Stalin, but he told him exactly the way things were going down here. Problems with food, with weapons, with ammunition. Stalin pulled himself together and promised to do something about it and sent Khrushchev back. The little man makes a difference. He knows how to shout. What he lacks in education he makes up for in every other way. If he was a dog he’d be nipping your ankles. Yap-yap.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I’ve interviewed him. Five times. That way we got to know each other a little. My paper has the biggest circulation in the city. When Khrushchev wants to send a message, he alw
ays asks for me. I like him, if that matters. He can be crude, he can bully you if you let him, but for a little man, he has a huge spirit.’
‘And Yuri?’
‘It’s complicated. After the Revolution, Khrushchev worked in the Donbas, with the miners. They loved him. He was their kind of guy. When he got married, that first wife of his died of typhus. Her parents wanted her buried, but Khrushchev was busy being an atheist because that’s what the Revolution demanded. And so Khrushchev had her body passed over the fence of the cemetery, because that way it avoided the church itself but still got buried. It was a clever solution. He was a politician, even then.’
‘And Yuri?’
‘Yuri was a child,’ Larissa smiled, and then nodded towards the door. ‘He told me just now how curious you were, how many questions you had for him. So maybe you should be asking about the priest.’
‘You mean Maksym?’
‘Exactly. Maksym was the priest waiting for the body in the church. He was ready to give the wife a proper funeral. He was affronted, and so were the wife’s parents, and that was a problem for Khrushchev, who was still very young. But it doesn’t end there. Yuri became a writer. He was fascinated by the miners in the Donbas and he was determined to tell their story. I think he saw himself as Emile Zola, but he’ll never admit it. His books began to appear. The writing was good, everyone said so, but the Party didn’t much like them and when copies were seized from the bookshops, Yuri took his case to Khrushchev, who was in charge by now. Khrushchev still had a soft spot for the Donbas. He doesn’t read books, but he likes people who put up a fight, and Yuri was one of them. And so the books became available again, but only if you knew who to bribe.’ She smiled. ‘Khrushchev has never stopped being the politician. He understands the arts of the possible. He knows how to square circles. Even now.’
Kyiv (Spoils of War) Page 9
