Three knocks. Before him at the door stood Rosa Zander bundled in military-style greatcoat. Coiled lazily around her neck, a lemon-coloured scarf, a brazen dash of colour for a place where red seemed the sole permissible complement to grey.
“I’m here to collect you.” Harry sucked in his lower lip, the air squeaking between skewed front teeth. “Picnic. Remember?” She held out a silver fur hat with flaps hanging down the sides. “It’s an ushanka,” she said. “Made of rabbit.”
Taking it with a wary smile, he felt his fingers sink into the silk-smooth fur. There he was again on the meadow, the wretched creature throbbing in his hands, Joseph chiding him for being sa blimmin’ soft.
“Suit me?” he asked, placing it on his head.
She ignored his fatuous invitation to flatter.
“And you’ve got your propusk, right?”
He hesitated, then drew out of his pocket the card his father had given him.
It was the first time he’d examined it. There, gazing back at him, was the Soviet Harry, sullen and resentful; beside the picture, a number and a stamp that read Executive Committee of the Communist International.
“My face – alright, yeah – but someone else’s name.” He remembered how Zander had addressed his father at the station. “Who the hell’s Harry Probert?”
“It’s your Lux name,” she snapped. “Speares died last night.”
“I don’t feel dead,” he said, thrusting his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat.
“Oh, one day, when you’re a star of the Comintern” – Her lips twisted into a smirk – “Just maybe you can become plain Harry Speares again. That’s how it works.”
A high price to pay, he thought.
Brow folding into deep furrows, she muttered something about security. But not his kind of security – not air pumps, jacks, ventilators.
“Thing is, we don’t want fascist spies out there” – she pointed vaguely to the world beyond the Soviet Union, of which he reckoned she knew so little – “knowing the real names of people in here. Dangerous for us, and for family back home.” She drew a finger across her throat.
“Are you serious?”
She barged past him into his room.
“Understand, Harry, they hate us out there – have to. Because it’s our duty to history to destroy them.”
He waited for her to laugh, to mock her own flight of self-importance; but no.
“And exactly how long have you had this… duty?”
She sat on his bed. The life Rosa described was so far from the humdrum of Kitchener Lane. Early years in London with her communist German parents, then the move back to Hamburg in the 1920s.
“Along came Hitler. We were double enemy. Communists but also dirty Jews, so they called us.” She spat out the dirty Jews bit. He didn’t think he’d met anyone Jewish before. Yet another layer to the geology of Rosa Zander. “Jewish friends, relatives, beaten up, murdered, even. My mother, she saw the Nazis would own Germany. So we left, came here.” Her lips trembled; for the first time, he saw tiny fissures in that stone.
Harry had read about Gestapo brutalities and seen newsreels of the storm troopers marching with their flickering torches; but it was all ink on paper, celluloid ghosts. Here now before him was a victim of that other world, in the flesh, to touch. Could he, one day, become such a victim?
Harry pulled on his coat and gloves and tied the ushanka flaps under his chin. He was ready for Moscow – almost. It would always be almost.
They turned right out of the Lux into a broad gorge cut not by the ancient streams that forged their narrow passage through the slate of Abercorys but by torrents of humanity jostling between the towering banks of Gorky Street with its shops and cafés.
Absent in this tide: the well-groomed builder, the fresh-faced farm worker and the steely soldier who had beckoned to him from the walls of the Lux. Ragged workhands and stooped old women hauling heavy bags vied with their elbows for right of way with privileged officials sporting clipped moustaches and fedora hats. None of the excuse mes or beg pardons expected in his native land at the slightest hint of physical contact, but also no sign of offence taken, anywhere.
Only now in the bullying wind was he coming to his senses. He noticed Rosa’s brisk, almost imperious bearing, how the crowd seemed to part at her approach: chin up, unswerving stride. When a drunken-looking man failed to step aside, she turned her shoulder and bundled him into the gutter.
“So, what is it, this… picnic we’re going to?”
“A Lux tradition – chance for everyone to get together in the snow. Have some fun.”
“Communists like fun, do they?”
“Parties are life in the Lux. We eat too much, drink too much,” she said with the glint of a smile. “We talk too much, and… well, you’ll see.”
Harry gazed up at a huge portrait of Stalin hanging from a colossus of a building. All swept-back black hair, heavy brows and dark eyes.
“Life has become better, comrades. Life is more joyous,” said Rosa, reading off the Leader’s words from the hoarding.
He reeled sideways from the impact of a string bag of potatoes.
“People don’t seem that joyous.”
She seized his arm and pointed at a black van heading towards the Kremlin, ordering him in that schoolmarm voice to read the gold Russian letters on the side.
The van slowed, giving him a chance to save face.
“SHAM-PAN-SKO-YE.”
“Yes, champagne! How’s that for joy?” They’d banned it after the revolution, she said. Bourgeois elitism. He reasoned that, whatever bourgeois elitism was, it must be something bad. “But now Stalin’s signed our directive 1366.” It sounded to him, again, like something to worry about. She slapped him on the back. “Cheer up! Means champagne’s legal again. Not for the aristocrats, of course. They’ve all” – she scattered them with a sweep of her arm – “gone.”
“And now it’s the workers popping the corks, right?”
“Same with my favourite music: jazz. Used to be banned. American decadence.”
He put a finger to her lips.
“Don’t tell me… So now it’s the cry, the tortured cry, of black American slave workers” – he thrilled to his own inspiration – “rising up against their capitalist masters and, well – ”
“See? You’re thinking like a communist already!”
He could never really be sure if she was joking. He so wanted to feel easy in her company. He wanted to sink his fingers into that tight bun, ease out the pins, and watch her hair fall down around her shoulders. He wanted to run his fingers across her face as she’d done with him the night before, wiping away the soot; but he was haunted by that sense she was here just to dissect and weigh him, to take him in hand, the instrument of some higher power.
They waited for the trolleybus at Pushkin Square, where Russia’s lamented poet, cast in iron, snow-crowned, seemed to stare in bewilderment at the world changing around him. A circle of cranes dipped and swung like carrion birds over the jagged remains of what must once have been a large and magnificent church. Harry stamped his feet against the cold, unnerved by Rosa’s smiling silence.
Across the way, the new was already showing through: the modernist grey-stone headquarters of the government newspaper, Izvestiya, with its rolling neon headline display proclaiming the new age. It was 1937, and it was the future.
Moscow Metro Construction Six Months Ahead of Plan, ran the proud neon boast. Leningrad Tractor Factory Declares Solidarity With Global Workers’ Struggle.
They climbed onto a trolleybus, passing from dry, icy cold into the warm, sweat-sour damp of crammed bodies, and eked out a place to stand at the back.
As the trolleybus moved off, Harry nudged Rosa and pointed to a figure loitering by the driver. There he was, that waif he’d glimpsed the night before in the glow of the roadside brazier, wearing the same battered, padded worker’s jacket and cloth cap, cigarette clamped between his teeth.
“Shit!” said Rosa.
The boy, a redheaded girl at his side, began talking to one of the passengers, a portly, grey-haired man who shook his head slowly and looked down at his shoes.
“Just watch and learn, Harry,” she whispered.
A brief silence between them, then the boy said something else. The man dug into his pocket and handed something to the girl. She nodded and deposited it in a cloth bag. When people gave to the poor, they usually smiled, a kind of appreciation of their own generosity. But this man did not – nor did the next man, nor the next, as the two worked their way along the line of passengers, swaying like pirates with the pitching of the trolleybus.
Their progress seemed to stop when one man, in spectacles, with the pummelled face of a boxer, rammed his hands deep into his pockets and looked away. It was then Harry saw the gleam of the knife that the boy lifted in jerking motion towards his victim’s cheek. Resistance crushed, a wristwatch surrendered, they moved inexorably towards Harry and Rosa.
“Just don’t look him in the eye, Harry.”
Harry was not so much frightened as excited by this rogue, his face tanned as if he were immune from Russian winter, his blond hair trailing across a dirt-tracked forehead.
The crush parted, forming a passage for the boy as he edged towards them, singing a soft, haunting melody.
“Ignore it,” whispered Rosa. “Just a silly Russian folk song about a silver birch tree.”
“Sud-BA!” said the boy, doffing his cap in mock deference. (Our destiny). “Reckon we met before, through glass, right?” He spoke English with a strange nasal twang Harry struggled to pin down. “And now here’s us, like old friends.”
“Praps you could put the knife away… friend?” said Harry.
“Oh, just a kinda theatre prop.” He slid it into his coat pocket and patted it.
They stood now, the three of them, face-to-face. Passengers craned their necks to watch.
With a sigh, Rosa began to empty her pockets as the others had. Foreign bank notes, some roubles, a phial of perfume.
The youth raised his hands as if he himself were at knifepoint.
“Stop now, ma’am! I only rob Russians – and, anyway, we’re neighbours, goddamn!”
“He’s no neighbour of us, Harry. Just a thief and a murderer.”
“Cruel words, ma’am. Just doin’ my job survivin’, same as you.”
The trolleybus jolted to a halt, sending Rosa slamming into the boy. He closed his arms around her in a protective gesture, and she reeled back, eyes simmering with fury.
“And where did you get English like that?” she said, as if presenting more damning evidence for the prosecution.
“American, actually. A long and lovely story I’ll tell you one day, ma’am.”
“And stop calling me ma’am.”
“My apologies,” he said, then added, with enough spite to match any knife thrust: “comrade.”
The doors opened. The girl leant out of the front door and raised her hand, declaring the way clear, then exited. The boy stepped backwards onto the pavement. Looking up at them, he bowed low, took his hat in his hand, and made a sweeping gesture with his arm, serf to master.
“Chyest imyeyu, the honour is all mine. And the name is Vova.”
The doors closed.
The robbers’ departure unleashed angry muttering among the passengers. They fixed their gazes on Rosa and Harry as if they were complicit, having been spared the fate everyone else had suffered. But no one, it seemed, dared tangle with a foreigner.
“He’ll end in front of a firing squad like all the other scoundrels,” said Rosa. “And I won’t weep.”
“I thought you communists were supposed to stand up for the Vovas of this world?”
“Sometimes you must be harsh.”
“You sound like the Great Leader.”
“And don’t call him Vova!”
“That’s what he called himself.”
“Give him a name, and you make him real.”
“Seemed real enough to me.”
He was learning how to needle her.
“Well, he’s not – not… part of this world. Lives in a shady quarter behind the Lux.” She drew out the word as if naming a vile disease: “The Bakhrushinka, we call it.” Just as he’d put a name to the Nep Block, so now he had a label for the sprawling maze he’d seen beyond it, from his window. “Gangs of orphan children.”
“Orphans? Why so many orphans?”
“And they’re everything the Lux isn’t. They’re killers, thieves, anti-communists.”
He enjoyed the sense of igniting her righteous passions.
“Well, maybe we could just go take a look – ”
“Go there, Harry, and you say good-bye to me. I won’t protect you – from the criminals or from the Party, if they find out.” In a way that sounded like a threat, she added: “And they will.”
They travelled on in silence, Harry reflecting on Vova, puzzled by the hatred Rosa felt for this “unreal” youth.
The trolleybus turned off the avenue at Mayakovsky Square, laboured along the Garden Ring, crossed the curved iron span of the Crimea Bridge and stopped before the archway entrance to Gorky Park.
Rosa linked her arm with his as they walked down a central avenue sliced into deep snow. The park teemed with happy Muscovites – children throwing snowballs; flirting couples sitting on benches eating ice creams; a poet standing on a box reciting in dramatic, booming tones; and a pair of youths hunched earnestly over a chessboard. All so far from the visions of misery he’d been fed in newspapers at home. Teasingly akin to his father’s description of paradise.
Only the sight of a team of old ladies buckled over and hacking with iron bars at the ice trodden down by the merrymakers so much as hinted at a harsher side of this life.
Harry stopped, arms folded, admiring the white marble figure of a naked female holding an oar upright in one hand, the other resting on her hip.
“Our Girl with an Oar,” she said, resting a hand on her own hip. “You ever see such a beautiful, naked woman in your funny Abercorys?”
“No handsome naked men, either, in my funny little Abercorys.” He looked away, mortified by the flicker of a smile that seemed to indicate disdain rather than humour shared.
A bemedalled old man smiled to him from a food stall. Gambling on his Russian, Harry ordered two of whatever he was keeping wrapped in grease-stained newspaper, and to his delight, he was understood. Rosa took his offering with an approving nod and opened it out.
“You know me well, Harry.” Nothing could be further from the truth. “Mutti always treated me when I was little, with a ponchik, a doughnut.”
Two mysteries, it seemed, now combined in a single word, ponchik: one a curious waxen disc clinging to a door, the other the indulgence of a kind-hearted mother who, though absent, seemed ever-present. Rosa turned away and began waving to a group walking from the direction of the Crimea Bridge. Armon’s barrelling laugh was instantly recognisable, counterpointed by a squealing man’s voice he heard for the first time. Children pelted each other with snowballs and wrestled in the powdery drifts. Bringing up the rear was Joseph, struggling with a heavy bag.
The group slowed to a halt and gathered around Armon like soldiers about a general. He clapped his hands to declare the start of the festivities.
“These are good times, my friends!” he said, pointing towards that communist golden future. “We have all seen war, and that’s why we here fight to end all wars.” He turned to Joseph and held out his arms. “Am I right, Comrade Probert?”
Joseph’s face, flushed enough from the slog across the park, radiated pride at Zander’s public benediction, and at the chance to address this pious gathering.
“There we were in Arras, British and German brothers, trying to cut each other’s throats,” said Joseph, his speech slurring slightly. “Who knows, maybe I ’ad you in my sights one fine day, Comrade Zander?” Laughter spurred him on. “Aim, pull that trigger – or move on to the next man.”
“Thank you that you moved along that time, Comrade Probert!”
“Maybe I didn’t?” Joseph said, with a nod to the leg that Armon trailed so much more markedly in the snow.
“Or maybe I was just so stupid to walk at the backside of a horse.”
The group exploded in obedient laughter that erupted into cheers as Grisha, the burly, red-uniformed doorman, arrived lugging bags laden with food, bottles and skates. Rosa began directing the younger comrades to lay out blankets in the snow and set up tables for the food.
Squinting in the low winter sunlight, Harry caught the thin shadows of skaters, their blades flashing like sabres as they slashed along the ice track by the Moskva river.
“There,” said Rosa, dropping a pair of skates at his feet. “Know what to do with these?”
Harry nodded a defiant yes as a small woman with thick black curls hurried up to them. Rosa kissed her on both cheeks and introduced her as Russian Oksana: “Now you won’t go stealing my oldest friend from me, Harry, will you?”
Oksana had the charm of seeming impressed by his attempts to speak Russian as he helped her on with her skates. Otlichnik, she called him, to Rosa’s amusement. Top of the class.
Moments later, he was speeding across the ice, Oksana holding one hand, Rosa, the other, threading between the other skaters, a frosty wind rising from the river lashing tears across his cheeks. Light bulbs strung out like creepers above the ice track glowed crimson in the dying light. At the end of the strip, Harry pivoted and swung around, pitching the girls, shrieking, into a mountain of shovelled snow.
Oksana struggled breathlessly to her feet.
“Who taught you to skate so, otlichnik?”
“Well, I had a wonderful geology teacher… and he had a daughter.”
As Rosa and Oksana exchanged a conspiratorial smile, a loud cheer rose from the Comintern children close by. Like a pack of wolves dashing through the snow, they converged on a woman leading by the hand a small girl in a red woollen hat. With a light tap on the bottom, she sent the girl racing off, arms outstretched, towards her friends, who fell upon her, kissing and hugging her.
The adults watched with a look of frozen unease. Shoulders slumped, the mother traipsed towards them. No joyful embraces, no kisses offered here. None, it seemed, expected. Just one brief, tender hug. From Juan.
“I saw her, that little girl,” said Harry, easing off his skates. “Outside the Nep Block.”
“Klara Borak,” said Oksana. “Sweet child.”
This time, he would insist on an answer.
“And who exactly lives in the Nep?”
Rosa spoke like someone embarking on a long and tedious chore.
“It’s for families to live in, just a short time, waiting – when the father is sent away.” She seemed to recoil a little at Harry’s unyielding stare. “Relocated.”
“You mean” – he sensed it was already too late to abandon the word – “arrested?”
The two women exchanged bilious looks, as if the uttering of the word was disrespectful.
“What happened to Klara’s father; it’s not so often,” said Rosa. “Sometimes they move a comrade away from the Lux. If there’s… well… something…” She seemed to drift off.
“If there’s things to be regulated,” said Oksana, firmly.
Things regulated. How far, he wondered, dare he go in assailing these battlements of code and evasion? He needed to know, for the sake of a father so sure they would never wield the sword over their own flesh and blood.
Rosa seemed irritated by Harry’s bewildered silence.
“Then, Harry, when the thing is…”
“Regulated?”
She scowled.
“…they usually get dispatched. I mean, to a new assignment.”
He watched as Klara’s mother moved hesitantly between her old friends, odd words exchanged, strained smiles. A nod. Move on.
“And in the meantime,” said Harry, “everyone avoids that poor woman. Best not get too close. And, anyway, she’s safely shut away in the Nep Block, right?”
Rosa raised her chin like a boxer, parrying the accusation of weakness.
“Irma’s intelligentsia like me, Harry. But she’s cracked. Sees everything so grey-in-grey.”
“And who exactly took Klara’s father away?”
“In the Lux we call them Sosyedi, the Neighbours,” Rosa said, as if describing some fast friend who might pop round for a cup of sugar. And indeed, they did live around the corner.
“Formally the N-K-V-D,” said Oksana, spelling it out with great solemnity.
Joseph had uttered those initials as something warm and reassuring, like the ARUFC, the Abercorys Rugby Union Football Club.
“Some call them Cheka or the Chekists or the Blue Caps,” said Rosa. On account of the cornflower blue crowns of their peaked caps. “Bluer than any blue.”
How many names could this beast have?
“The newspapers back home don’t have much good to say about your NK – ”
“Don’t listen to propaganda, otlichnik!” said Oksana. “There were difficult days, maybe, once upon a time.” That sounded like the start of one of his father’s fairy tales.
Rosa began telling the story of Klara’s father, Anton Borak. A Czech communist: a good man, no saboteur, no spy. She paused. Her face darkened.
“But in the Lux, we always have to wonder.”
He blinked back the snowflakes that clung to his eyes and blurred his vision.
“Wonder what?”
“Don’t be naïve, Harry. That’s what spies do. They make you trust them. Take Trotsky. Stalin’s loyal friend. Then it turns out – the devil – he was spying for the English.”
Another acid wisdom no doubt imbibed with her mother’s milk, Harry thought.
“So, can I ever trust you, Rosa? Or can you trust me?” As he spoke, mischievous high spirits soured to unease. “And if I do make you trust me, does that mean I’m a – ?”
She prodded him in the chest and scowled.
“This is no childish game.”
The space had grown around Klara’s mother as erstwhile comrades peeled away. She stood now, a single dark dot, a full stop, on a sheet of snow-white paper.
With all that was going on, it was strange he noticed it at all. A few metres from the festive gathering stood Joseph talking to the blonde woman he’d seen comforting a crying girl in the kitchen that first day. Odd. Theirs was not the happy, relaxed conversation of the others. They were angry with each other in a way two people who’d just met didn’t get angry. They were, he thought, intimately miserable, as if alone in a dimly lit room.
Armon lumbered like a wounded bear across the snow, waving his arms, yelling at the children around Klara. “Komm!” One by one, they drifted from her, some giving her brief, furtive hugs; then, like a swarm of migrating birds united in their intent, they burst into a run that arced back towards the picnic.
Klara, like her mother, now stood alone, another dot on a clean white sheet. It all seemed so very brutal but somehow agreed upon. Head bowed, Klara sauntered towards her mother, kicking at the snow.
*
Irma Borak looked up, eyes watery in the icy breeze. Her smooth complexion put her in her thirties, though the short-cropped hair was already steel grey.
“I saw you from my room,” said Harry, taking a place next to her, leaning against the wall that abutted the river. “Outside the Nep Block.”
She drew her arms around her daughter and looked away along the frozen river.
“Your number?”
“203.”
Behind him, the blades of the skaters gouged the ice with the whoosh of a butcher’s cleaver.
“Two – hundred – and three.” She said it like she was announcing a lucky lottery number. “That was us, wasn’t it, Klara? Until they took Pappy away.” He remembered again the splinters of wax on the frame of their door, the remains of one of those ponchik ‘doughnut’ seals. “Took our room, just like that. Bastards.”
She seemed as indignant about the room as about her husband.
“If there’s anything I can do…” Harry offered.
Her smile made him feel foolish.
“Whatever could little 203 do for the wife of an enemy of the state?”
She recalled her happier times. Lecturing on Norse mythology at a university in England.
“Ever heard of Valhalla, dear 203?”
He looked away, already tiring of lectures.
“It was a heavenly palace, five hundred and forty doors.” She moved her arms like she could see it before her, almost in reach. “Marble columns, walls of gold, the ceiling clad with golden shields.”
It was, she said, to Valhalla that the spirits of Norse heroes ascended after they’d perished in sacred combat. By day, they hardened their spirits and bodies for a final apocalyptic battle. By night, they drank mead and feasted on roast boar.
He recalled Rosa’s talk of her own communist warriors feasting in their 300 rooms as they plotted the Old World’s destruction and the creation on its ruins of their golden future.
“Then the Lux is like a communist Valhalla, you’re saying?”
She coughed learnedly. She was a lecturer safe again in a wood-panelled study in England. “So goes the legend, 203: demons will descend upon the warriors from all points of the compass.” Harry looked away at the darkening sky, irritated now by this theatre. “And the sun and the stars will vanish from the heavens.”
She leaned, drawing her arms tight around her daughter, and smiled at Harry as if to say you might think I’m crazy, but…
“All is destroyed so a better world can rise,” she said, oblivious to a young skater stumbling and crashing headlong onto the ice before them. “Or maybe it’ll be the end of all things. Which version’s your choice?”
The voice of Armon, harbinger of this twilight of world revolution, boomed across the snow. “Probert! Komm!”
Irma paused, squinting into the low sun. He could see the wild frailty Rosa held against her. But he was awed by her scholar’s vision of the Lux.
“Beware the lustre of better worlds, my darling 203.” She looked him in the eyes with a sadness he felt was more for him than herself. “Believe me, the blood flooding the Moscow streets will spill into the Lux. Already has. Just, no-one wants to see it.” She pointed towards the merry Comintern crowd. “See how they drink champagne and they laugh.”
Harry felt his face sting with the wind driving up from the river.
She took his arm and whispered in his ear: “Find a way to hang on to the real world – or this Valhalla will swallow you like it did us.” She patted his cheek like a lover bidding farewell. “Now go.”
When Harry got back to the assembly, he turned, and his gaze slid along the string of hanging lights that bathed the river embankment crimson. He fancied he glimpsed in the mist a small figure in a red hat, the curved grey iron girders of the Crimea Bridge closing around her like giant manacles.