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The town clock strikes midnight as I unlock the door to my cottage. I fling some logs on to the kitchen fire and remove my boots, scattering melting snow across the flags. The ceiling is adorned with Eleanor’s cooking herbs; a sprig of zveroboy brushes my hair.

I sit in my chair by the fire, sinking into the hollows my body has moulded over the years. From the mantelpiece, the Czar’s portrait watches me. Eleanor lays a fresh flower by it every day, just as she once attended church to light a candle. A glass of kvass soothes me with its heat. This is my routine; even if I am late and exhausted, I cannot go to bed, the tinnitus of the day shrill in my mind. I need to slough off the uniform and reclaim myself. As I relax, my exhaustion untumbles. I sink into a sleep that lasts only minutes, for a dream-memory of walking through the woods and seeing the wolf jolts me awake. The yellow of the creature’s eyes merges with the fire, so that I cannot tell if I am in the real world or that of fancy, and my heart beats so fast that I think I might be having a heart attack. Raisa: Enemy of the State. I bury my head in my hands. Just as my life has become steady and content again, she returns, a force of chaos.

But I recognise that is a lie. If life has been steady, it has also been grey. Every day, the same routine: waking in the gloom, pulling on my uniform, receiving orders, giving orders, 222enforcing laws, conducting interrogations, until I’ve felt as though I am barely human, a mechanism in the machinery of the Czar. An impotency has afflicted me of late; I’ve watched my wife’s hands on my body without a corresponding sensation. The moment that Lieutenant Zabotin announced Raisa’s name, my body became thrilled with heat. In the woods too, it was there, that pulse of life in my body, every cell singing Raisa, Raisa, Raisa.

 

Our love affair lasted three months. At the end of our first tryst, she murmured into my chest that I should visit her in two days’ time. For a portrait, she added with a shy smile.

Two weeks passed, in which I told myself that I could not be my philandering father’s son; it was my choice whether I inherited his mistakes; I knew Eleanor deserved better. But there was a sense of growing inevitability as I walked across the town to Raisa’s flat, as if I always knew I would return, and had only delayed it. As I entered the building, I found myself running up the flights of stairs as the practising viola player screeched louder and louder.

—Back again? Managed to drag yourself away from your wife, did you?

The paintbrush in her hand flicked up; a slash of crimson paint seared my cheek. When I stuttered protest, a tube of green was squeezed into my hair. —Now you look like a sprite, she said, glaring at me.

I grabbed her wrist and kissed her. She yanked her arm away, slapped me, then kissed me back. Angry sex became soft lovemaking; fire subsided into sighs and sweetness.

—It was meant to be, Raisa said later, dreamily, propping 223herself up on one elbow. —Wasn’t it? Our meeting at the gallery, I mean. Doyla brought you to me, Doyla led both of us outside for a cigarette.

—It is true that if you had come out for your cigarette break just five minutes later, I might have been on my way home, but …

—But you think it was random, she laughed, for she was getting to know me by now. —You think it was chance.

I stroked her cheek.

—My mother was a woman who believed in destiny. My father was always cheating on her, lying to her, but she thought their marriage was ordained, and so she never escaped as she should have done. She was imprisoned by the idea of fate.

Raisa gave me a consoling kiss.

—Still, for us, those five minutes made all the difference …

I kissed her back, ready to be persuaded of anything. From then on, I would visit her whenever I could, closing the shop early, telling Eleanor I was attending a concert.

Sin is a shock in its debut but becomes casual with habit. The moment I walked into her room, I was a different man. We made love for hours, the Czar’s portrait turned to face the wall. I would play banned records at the quietest volume, the whispering music competing with the practice of the viola player. We danced to Debussy, her cheek against my chest, my fingers in her hair. We dared to discuss the Czar, the confusion about whether the new policies were his work or his advisors’, whether he was a good but naive man or a sadistic dictator. We debated Communism: my idealism clashing with her cynicism. She declared that the economy was on the verge of collapse; I argued that it was merely undergoing a transformation. That 224fifteen-by-fifteen-feet square began to feel like a place of sanity while the outside world, with its directives and rumours, became increasingly unreal.

Eleanor, meanwhile, cleaved to the simple story that the Czar was benign and wise. I felt my wife had lost her dimensions, so pronounced was her fear of the state; I did not blame her, but I missed the woman I had courted.

Raisa asked me to tell her the story of Eleanor.

(—Is she pretty? she asked, and I replied, —A little.)

When I said that Eleanor was a kind woman, Raisa’s face darkened, and so I simplified our story to broad brushstrokes. I explained that I had needed a loan to set up my music shop and that her father was the local usurer. In our courtship, I found that I loved Eleanor more when I was away from her; together, our affair felt uneasy, complicated, as though I had not fully grasped what we shared. I wrote a list of pros and cons, analysing whether I ought to propose. There were more pros, and so I proposed. We spoke of the future all the time. Of how happy we would be in our music shop, of the children we would bring up. Eleanor spoke of me as though I was a responsible and upright man, a version of me I admired but did not recognise. I wondered if she was bringing out the best in me, or if I was simply playing a role to please her. I could not understand why she did not see my shadow side, the side that wanted to burn down the Czar’s castle and hang every aristocrat.

—I can see it, Raisa laughed.

—I know, that’s why I like you so much.

I did not dare add that perhaps Eleanor could not see it because she had such a good heart. 225

When you fall for someone, their backstory evokes a jealousy for the twenty, thirty years they have lived without you, for all the people who knew them first, for the places they have visited without you, for the lover who took their first kiss. Such blanks are filled with stories – often varnished, played with the damper pedal pressed down. It takes time to detect the patterns in your partner’s stories, the eternal return of their flaws and their strengths. When you are able to see past the persona they present to the world, you discover the raw selves underneath. Intimacy requires time.

But time was something we had so little of, and so I shared my biography with frank eagerness, while Raisa’s past remained a mystery. I knew nothing of her parents, her education, her upbringing. I knew only that there was a previous lover, a man who had encouraged her to fall in love with him before confessing that there was another woman. How I hated the man, feeling that I was being punished for his sins. The longer I knew her, the less I felt I knew her.

I did not dare say I love you out loud, but I said it in my heart a hundred times: when she laughed her crazy wildcat laugh; when she stretched my mind by arguing with my politics, such that we nearly came to blows; when she fed stray cats by the flat; when she made love to me with my face clenched between her palms or clawed my back with her nails.

 

The fire is dim. The thought of rising and dressing for bed seems an Olympian task. In less than three hours I will have to join the CRG troop invading Raisa’s house. I would declare 226sickness, but that would involve the loss of my day’s pay and a fine, and Eleanor would never allow it.

I force myself up. The pots and pans around me reflect the back of my head. Ageing reverts our scalps to the ones we had as babies. My father was entirely bald by the age of forty-five.

Through the window I see a slice of moon and the gleam of yellow eyes. The wolf has followed me home.

 

The eighteenth of March 1925 was the turning point. I walked to her flat in a pitch of anxiety. The ruble had fallen to a new low; my customers had dwindled to barely one a day; my meals with Eleanor had shrunk, such that one loaf of bread had to last us three days. The CRG had visited me again. In my mind, the list of the banned composers formed a drumbeat: Debussy, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Roslavets, Mosolov, Lourié. I longed for Raisa’s sympathetic outrage. My hand curled delicately around the eggs in my pocket: a luxury stolen from a bird’s nest.

When I arrived, I found Raisa sitting limp in front of her canvas. She was beginning work on a new piece. Even the eggs did not lift her spirits.

—Paint my portrait, I said, feigning cheer, attempting to brew up some coffee from a concoction that appeared mostly birch bark. —You never did paint me, I added, the hurt flaring in my voice.

She put down her brush with a sigh; I consoled her with a kiss.

Our lovemaking was frantic, as though we were both alcoholics drinking from the same bottle, passing pleasure back and forth in a race to oblivion. I grabbed one of her cotton rags, and 227tied her to the bed before I entered her. Afterwards she lay there staring at the ceiling, and said:

—I think the CRG have taken Aleksei, the viola player. I haven’t heard him in days.

She rose and went to her beloved canvas.

—Have you ever painted your mother? I asked her. I was still hungry to coax out details of her past.

—She is away at present, Raisa replied, shrugging. —Last I heard, she was teaching in the mountains.

—Teaching? I challenged her.

—I believe so.

—But last week you told me that your mother worked as a trapeze artist in the circus … Your stories don’t add up! What are you, a spy?

I could hardly believe I had spoken the words. She laughed.

—Oh yes, I’m a spy. That makes everything easier. If half of us are Ruthenian spies, then we can pretend it’s all their fault, this mess, we had to make our laws because of them.

—I’m sorry, I said, suddenly meek. I attempted to take her in my arms, but she remained limp, then broke free and returned to her canvas.

We both needed space to calm down, I told myself, and so I had a wash, scrubbing myself using the thin slither of soap that we were still eking out. When I came out, the stove was cold, the plates empty. Raisa had broken the eggs and streaked their yolks into her paint.

—This is ridiculous. Now what are we supposed to eat?

—I plan to begin work on a portrait of Scriabin soon, your favourite.

—Yet you have never painted me. 228—Well, I need sombre subjects, she said, lighting a cigarette. —You have an upbeat attitude; you are the young idealist.

—Oh, for God’s sake, I said, snatching the cigarette off her, angered by the narcissism of her melancholy, her belief that she was the only person in the world experiencing such depths of suffering. —I find life just as hard as you, I just seem to be able to put on a more stoical front.

She looked shaken.

—I don’t think it is all a front. I love your fortitude.

In moods of greater resilience, Raisa would mother me. But today she needed me to be her contrast, not her mirror, and I could not. All I could think was: We’re all fucked.

Raisa remained still at her canvas; she was applying white paint on top of white paint.

—It’s a portrait of motherhood, she whispered.

She would not elaborate any further. I held her against my chest as she sobbed and said that the people would not stand for all this much longer, that everything would soon be all right.

 

I rise and open the door of the cottage a crack. The wolf stops one sazhen away. I do not dare move. I want to gain his trust, and I have the curious sensation that he is seeking to gain mine. He comes so close that his fur brushes my skin. Then: the gentle lick of his tongue on my hand. I laugh out loud in relief. I open the door wider. Sensing movement, he retreats.

—What are you doing, Jaimus? Eleanor appears, face crumpled with sleep. —Close the door; come inside!

In bed, we cuddle up for warmth. When I close my eyes, I picture Raisa painting a naked self-portrait, her smile provocative. Eleanor notices my arousal; I stiffen in embarrassed 229guilt. How is it that Eleanor is more classically beautiful than Raisa, yet she does not envenom me in the way that Raisa can? Yawning, she sighs that she is too tired.

I yearn to rise, wipe the dust from my gramophone and listen to Mosolov and Scriabin and Roslavets and Debussy, and all the others I shared with Raisa. The thought brings tears to my eyes, and I realise that I have in fact been crying for many months, tearless tears that have only now found form and expression. But I will not rise, will not put on the record, resolving to maintain my abstinence from music. For if I listen and allow its beauty to penetrate my heart, then how can I wake in the morning and wear my uniform and mouth the commands of the Czar? I cannot face the confines of a cell. I cannot allow Raisa to destroy the life I have, even if it is a silent, pathetic affair. It is all I have left.