Wilderness realised he could set his clock by Kostya. If not always punctual, then predictable. He was at the White Nights when Wilderness walked in.
They had dinner together. The tourists milled around. Most of them seemed to prefer being outside with a good chance of seeing the northern lights, but there weren’t half as many as there’d been in June. Lapland was about to enter the temporal equivalent of no man’s land.
Kostya had stopped looking around. He might even have relaxed.
They talked about their childhoods—Wilderness took the attitude that the KGB were rubbish if their file on him hadn’t mapped out his ragged years in Stepney and Whitechapel—and talked freely … of death and poverty and theft.
All the same, he was struck by the contrast. Throughout the starvation years, the purge years of the 1930s, Kostya had led the privileged life of the child of a high-ranking party member—no holes in his trousers, no shortage of shoes and, above all, no father to beat the living shit out of him on a whim. First in Leningrad and then in Moscow, as the great purge, the Yezhovshchina, left the Party looking gap-toothed and moth-eaten and the survivors moved inward and upward. His mother’s career prospered under the patronage of Krasnaya, and as long as Krasnaya was safe so were Kostya and his mother.
“If we had a god, Krasnaya would be my godmother.”
Wilderness did have a godmother. He just couldn’t remember who it was. Some aunt out in the wilds of Essex? One of those pinafored, flour-dusted, hairnet and safety pin, needle and thread old gypsies out beyond Epping? Certainly no one as glamorous—was that the word?—as Krasnaya. He could still see that poster in his mind’s eye. One of the London galleries had included it in an exhibition of Soviet art about ten years ago. Along with all the miners, factory workers and tireless peasant harvesters—pick-axes, hammers and sickles—there was the warrior goddess with baby and Fedorov machine gun. The unflinching gaze of Krasnaya, her eyes locked onto infinity and the promise of an attainable, socialist future. And the boy in the crook of her left arm—no more than three or four, his eyes equally unflinchingly looking out at the observer.
If a Frenchman had painted the poster Krasnaya would have had one breast, or possibly both, exposed. But this was Mother Russia.
When they’d finished their meal, Kostya put a folded newspaper on the table—yesterday’s Paris Herald Tribune.
“Enough for ninety-six. Can you manage ninety-six?”
“I think so. Sales going well, are they?”
Kostya said nothing to this, but, thought Wilderness, if he’s trying to kid me they’re all given away in Rayakoski in the interest of boosting morale among the Ivans, silence will not work. He’d bet on half the bottles finding their way to Leningrad or Moscow, to the tables of the privileged, the “class” to which Kostya belonged.
“I think we can,” he said. “We’ll land at noon. On the dot.”
After Kostya went up to bed, Wilderness hung around outside till midnight to see if he came out again. He didn’t, but by midnight Wilderness was fed up waiting and went to bed anyway, none the wiser as to what Kostya was up to. It occurred to him to come straight out and ask him. But there was something of the hermit crab about Kostya. One alarming note, one wrong word and he’d be back in his shell.