The shock of the deaths of Andrei and Victor on that sultry July day in 1914 was a blow that so numbed the Shalakov family that, for a time at least, they were shut both from the seething intrigues of the city and from the increasingly dangerous concerns of the world at large. The tragedy was hardly to be comprehended. During that tense and scorching summer such violence had become alarmingly commonplace in St Petersburg; but how could it happen that two quiet, law-abiding men could be ridden down in cold blood, slaughtered where they stood, with no compunction and for no reason? As the city lay in an all but exhausted, heat-induced torpor beneath copper-coloured skies and the drift of smoke from vast fires that blazed like omens of evil to the north in the forests of Finland; as rumours flew; as one report followed fast upon the heels of another concerning the assassinations in Sarajevo, the righteous anger of Austria, the threat to Russia’s ally Serbia, the Shalakovs mourned, confused and isolated by shock and by grief, their personal tragedy overshadowing for them all the significance and hazard of outside events. But not for long could this hold true; for as they grieved Europe moved, slowly and steadily, towards bitter conflict. On the day that the crowds gathered on the streets of the city to cheer their country’s official entry into the communal mania of a war that was to encompass the world, Varya was lying, as she had for days past, in a darkened room in her sister’s home overlooking the Fontanka, deep in the drugged sleep that was her only refuge from terror and an unventable fury that those around her understandably mistook for inconsolable grief. The touching and spontaneous demonstration of the following day outside the Winter Palace, when ten thousand people fell to their knees, the national anthem lifting from ten thousand throats, at the sight of their Tsar and his family upon the palace balcony, was reported to her by an excited Margarita – the first of the family to realize that momentous happenings were afoot and to recover her equilibrium enough to want to partake in them – but made no impression. Even when, some days later, her son Dmitri received his papers as part of the country’s mobilization for war the fact barely registered with Varya. Victor had dared to leave her, alone and defenceless. The foundations of her world had been swept away; the structure that was left was fragile indeed, and Varya had little or no time for the troubles of others, large or small.
A wave of patriotic fervour swept the city; the name that had been proudly borne for two centuries was abandoned, judged to be too Germanic. Whilst Varya slept and her family woke to realize the enormity of the events which had overtaken them, St Petersburg overnight became Petrograd. The clamour of protest that during that sweltering summer had come so very close to the articulate roar of revolution for the moment died, smothered, as a flame might be smothered, by the blanket of need to unite in common cause and against a common enemy. Almost the entire Opposition in the Duma, with the exception of the Social Democrats – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, sworn enemies though they were – declared its support for the Government and the war. Mother Russia was threatened; as always, her sons and daughters would defend her to the death. The streets filled with endless columns of soldiers, khaki-clad, stoic-faced, marching to the stations where waited the long requisitioned trains that would carry them to the front to face the enemy. Beside them often walked the wives, the families, the mothers and the sisters, tear-stained and valiant, wishing their menfolk ‘Godspeed and a safe return’, and blessing their Little Father, the Tsar.
Meanwhile, those that had kindled the flame of revolution that had come so close to causing an inferno now bided their time, tended the spark that still glowed, and waited.
Whilst poor bemused Dmitri, torn so unexpectedly from his little family, remained, for the present, in Petrograd for training, Sasha was one of the first to go to the front. A combination of ill luck and bad management saw him on a train south just three weeks after the declaration of war. Margarita, dressed in a becoming new outfit for the occasion, was at the station to see him off. Quite overcome by excitement she cried prettily, noted with pleasure that her husband was beyond doubt the most handsome of the young officers waiting to board the train, and assured him and herself that the newspaper just that morning had prophesied that the war would last no longer than six weeks. She then visited her mother and Aunt Zhenia, enjoying, in the absence of much interest from her mother, the sympathy of her aunt, before going home to her toy theatre with its new cast of dashingly uniformed men and their brave and valiant women.
Sasha, wrapped in unusual silence in a corner seat of a carriage that had turned immediately into a vodka-drinking card school, sped south-west, towards East Prussia, and a place called Tannenberg.
He had not known that such terror existed; had he known, would certainly never have believed it to be endurable. The anticipation was bad enough – the night before his first action he lay awake, exhausted with fear, his stomach like foul water, his head throbbing from the vodka with which he had vainly attempted to drown the abject and degrading terror that he found himself, to his disgust if not to his surprise, entirely incapable of controlling. And then, harrowingly, he found that the reality of battle was worse than the worst of his imaginings. After the first brief experience of coming under fire he knew with certainty that he would never be able to face it with the courage or fortitude – or the sheer bravado – that so many others showed. Before, during and after action, in his flinching imagination he died a thousand times, and horribly. He simply did not have it in him to endure the nightmare in which he found himself. He hated it all, from the bottom of his soul; the barbaric, earsplitting noise of the bombardment, the wicked, slicing chatter of the machine guns, the snipers’ bullets that sang like vicious insects about his head, searching, he always felt, for bone and for blood; the truly awful effort entailed in leading his men out of the comparative safety of their bunkers and trenches into the field of fire, the field of death, that awaited them, and him. And – almost the worst thing of all – he knew beyond doubt that they knew it, these men whose lives were entrusted to him; they recognized his cowardice – for that, undoubtedly, was the only name he knew to put to it – and despised him for it, some of them openly. Yet not even that humiliation could stiffen his backbone; he could not face the carnage, the dreadful threat of death; could not harden himself against the madness and the suffering around him. During the first deceptively successful push into East Prussia – successful only because German arms and efforts were at that moment concentrated upon Belgium and France on the Western Front – Sasha found himself in the field, leading men for the first time. On the second day the non-commissioned officer walking beside him was obliterated by a shell, nothing left of the living man, whom in fact Sasha had detested, but ragged and bloody flesh and bone and one boot, ridiculously all but undamaged, the foot still in it. Sasha leaned from the saddle, gagged and was sick. Again and again he was sick. A young officer with whom he had been drinking the night before caught at his horse’s reins, hauling him along beside him; ‘Ride, Sasha, ride on! Don’t think of it.’ But how could he not? Then, and later in nightmares, until other, far worse images took its place? He found himself incapable of courage, even of the spurious kind that showed itself in the recklessness, often vodka-inspired, of many of his young fellow-officers. Friends died about him, and his fear, his terror of death, grew like a cancer within him. It was worse still after the initial advance – characterized from the start by a military ineptitude that on occasion amounted to crass stupidity – ground to its inevitable halt; for then, slowly and relentlessly, the reinforced German army led by Marshal Hindenburg outwitted and divided the Russians and began to push them back – back across those rivers, through those same fields and forests for which so many men had needlessly died, and in which the bones and the ruined flesh of man and horse still lay, stinking, half-buried in the churned and defiled earth like so much discarded offal. Sasha was haunted by the thought of pain, hag-ridden above all by the fear of dismemberment, of becoming one of those screaming wrecks who shrieked their lives away in the blood-spattered hospital tents or in the night-dark horror of no-man’s-land, too far from friend, too near to foe, to be helped with a kindly bullet or blade.
The German advance picked up momentum. Two entire Russian army corps surrendered. Their General, helpfully, committed suicide. The Tsar and his Administration pontificated, from well behind the lines. In Sasha’s section – and not only there – the ordered retreat became a rout. Sasha abandoned his men who had been ordered to defend a heap of stinking rubble on a totally indefensible mountain track, and fled openly at last, urging his tired horse away from the merciless guns and bayonets, the marching feet and the grim, battle-hardened faces, away from the threat of death, of mutilation. He was fortunate that he was not alone. One man’s panic-stricken collapse hardly showed in an army in full retreat. He joined a party of Guards officers who, cut off from their units, were making for the railway. Nothing was left of the early Russian successes; weeks of carnage had gone for nothing. The Tsarist army had lost three hundred thousand men.
The Russian forces were regrouping, overrunning a small town the name of which Sasha never bothered to discover. The title of this nameless, faceless shambles of a place in which he found himself did not concern him; he had one obsession, and one only. And within hours of arriving in the chaos of a fragmented and for the moment defeated army, dirty, hungry, and determined, he had located the salvation for which he looked.
General Alexis Nicholaev Sevronsky had known Sasha from childhood; indeed it had been in the drunken company of the General’s son that Sasha’s brother Grigor had met his end. It had been Alexis Sevronsky who had secured for Sasha his inappropriate captaincy in the Preobrajensky, one of the Tsar’s own crack regiments of Guards.
And the General was here, in the chaos of the retreat, making concise and efficient arrangements to evacuate himself and his staff to his distant cousin the Grand Duke Nicholas’s general field headquarters, known as Stavka, in Baranovici, in the safety of the middle of the Byelorussian countryside, well away from any further uncomfortable prospect of action. Sasha went to him ready to beg; in the event such a self-betrayal proved unnecessary. In an army in which who you were and who you knew had always counted for more than military valour, knowledge or experience, the General was more than happy to add the son of his old friend to his personal staff. The boy was a handsome lad, a good hand at the card table and a splendid rider; what else could one ask? Brusque messages were sent to Sasha’s commanding officer, another old friend of the General’s, and the deed was done. Within twenty-four hours Sasha Kolashki was on a train heading north to safety, carrying within him a quite ferocious determination never to approach a field of battle again. Despite the defeat in East Prussia the news from the south and from Poland was good. The Allies were holding in the west. Confidence was still strong; Britain, France and Russia between them would defeat the Hun in weeks, then they could all go home and get on with their lives. Until then, Sasha had contrived to ensure his own safety.
Margarita heard the news of her husband’s new appointment in a letter that arrived some few weeks later, and was far from displeased about it. To be attached to the personal staff of a General related to the Grand Duke Nicholas himself sounded very grand indeed; she wasted no time in spreading the news. The first hard frosts of the winter had arrived; the snow would not be far behind. The river slowed, muddily, and froze, the icebreakers crashed upstream to keep the waters open for as long as possible. By the time Sasha’s letter came the optimism that had invested the city had dissipated; no-one thought any longer that the war would be over before Christmas. But then, reasoned Margarita, with all those poor young men being killed at the front, and with Sasha having access to the ear of a real live General, who knew what might happen? There was nothing like a war to advance a young soldier’s fortunes, even she knew that. She studied newspaper pictures with care and designed several bright new uniforms for her favourite tiny cardboard character.
Dima, home on a short leave before being sent to the front, shook his head at his wife’s question. ‘No, my love. I won’t be home for Christmas. Don’t set your heart on it. Go with the others to Aunt Zhenia’s. Or perhaps to Sofia Petrovna’s?’ This last was spoken hesitantly.
Natalia, at the sound of her mother’s name, shook her head. ‘She doesn’t like the children, Dima, you know she doesn’t. She says they make her head ache.’ Calmly she ironed, folded and packed, as if her heart were not breaking, as if the joyous secret she had kept from her husband had not become a lead weight upon her spirit. At her feet little Natasha played, fair-haired and blue-eyed as her Aunt Margarita, whilst at the table solemn Nicholai doggedly attempted the intricacies of a simple wooden jigsaw puzzle. Dima watched his small, composed, brown-haired wife helplessly. Since childhood he had loved her; there were no words to tell her how much. And as for the children –
He bent and picked ’Tasha up, throwing her in the air, making her squeal. Natalia stopped for the briefest of moments, watching them, then she turned her back, busying herself again. ‘I truly don’t know what you do with your socks, Dima – do you chew them to produce such holes?’
He smiled wryly from behind his daughter’s uninhibited giggles. ‘The food we get, I might as well.’
It did not occur to Dima to complain. Like so many of his countrymen he was a fatalist; like all of them, he was a Russian. He did not want to leave his home, his much-loved wife and family, but his country called and he must answer. It had always been so. The needs of his small family must be submerged beneath the needs of the larger family that was his country. The Tsar, father of his people, asked it. These past weeks had not been so bad, stationed as he had been close to St Petersburg – Petrograd as it now was, though he could never remember to call it so – but the time had come now for him to leave. So leave he must, and it did not occur to him to question that. He bent to stand his small daughter upon unsteady legs. Last week an agitator had appeared in the camp; leaflets had been passed from hand to hand, the man had appeared and disappeared, talking to small groups, whispering, inciting. Dima supposed he must be a brave man; for certainly he would have been shot had the authorities caught him. In the end there had been no need; the men themselves had tired of him and taken it upon themselves to throw him in the river and leave him to freeze or to sink. A separate peace with Germany, he had preached. The overthrow of the men who perpetuated this filthy war; a capitalist’s war, nothing to do with the needs and lives of the workers; a war to preserve the rich and their riches, a war fought with the blood and the guts of the underdog to keep the underdog down. Dima had understood not a half of it. Things were as they were, and that was it. He needed no upstart Bolshevik to tell him that he was closer to a German worker than he was to his own officers; how could that be? A German worker was a German; Dima’s officer, however young, however arrogant, was a Russian, and the argument ended there. He swung his young daughter onto his shoulders and galloped clumsily about the small room. Natalia ducked her head and ironed a shirt for the second time, rubbing with painful vigour at nonexistent creases. Nicholai scowled beneath lowered brows at both of them, then diligently applied himself to his jigsaw.
Christmas came, and Christmas went, the first of the war, subdued and quiet. The Tsar in his wisdom had banned all sales of alcohol for the duration of hostilities; not an edict to which many paid much heed, except in public, but one that certainly affected the more common places of entertainment. The first, fragile successes of Russian arms were celebrated privately, and with a confidence born of a lack of understanding. In the field, though it had yet to be fully demonstrated, the Tsarist armies were ill-equipped, ill-led, and ill-founded. All that the Tsar of All the Russias had to expend was men, souls counted in millions. And, for the moment obedient, those souls fought like demons, and like demons were destroyed in the fire.
Varya was living, more or less permanently, at her sister’s house on the Fontanka. Nanny Irisha, with the far from princely sum provided for her in Victor’s will, had been pensioned off to her somewhat reluctant family in a village near Moscow. Strange, she had bitterly informed anyone who would listen, were the ways of God. Seraphima had been given simple notice to quit.
Delicate and lovely in her mourning – for black, as she knew, suited her well – Varya, with drooping head and bravely held back tears, tyrannized the household. Wartime shortages notwithstanding, her delicate appetite must be tempted. Frail and desolate as she was, she could not be expected to take part in the bandage-rolling sessions that Zhenia organized, nor the fund-raising activities, nor the hospital visits. Her indisposition however did not prevent her from holding court with friends and family in Zhenia’s small private sitting room, that Varya with steely enterprise had taken firmly and indisputably as her own. She held always a delicately-embroidered, lace-trimmed handkerchief, snowy white, with which to dab at her still-lovely eyes each time the names of ‘my precious, martyred Victor’ or ‘poor dear Andrei’ could be produced, or when bewailing – as she did at length and with pious resignation – her poor widow’s lot.
Lenka, inevitably, was the first to lose patience with her.
‘Mama, for heaven’s sake! Anyone would think that Papa had got himself killed just to spite you! It’s been seven months! There’s a war on! I know it doesn’t make it any easier, but people are being killed all the time!’ Why not Donovalov? The thought was never far from her mind. Please, God, make him die. The thought was as automatic as a ‘bless you’ after a sneeze. ‘Don’t you think you should try – just try? – to go back home, to manage the shop – at least to attempt to pick up the threads? You’ll never feel any better while you sit here doing nothing but brood and eat those damned chocolates!’
Zhenia, sitting behind her sister, a heavy woollen balaclava taking shape beneath her competent hands, cast a wryly amused glance at her niece but held her tongue.
Varya lifted a pale, affronted face. ‘Brood, child? Whatever can you mean? My health is not good, that cannot be denied – but then what else could be expected in the circumstances?’ The pretty handkerchief fluttered, dabbed. ‘But brood? I don’t think that’s at all a nice word to use to your poor mother, do you? It does smack so of self-indulgence.’ Her eyes, sharp and clear, lifted challengingly to her daughter.
Lenka sighed, and looked away.
The long lashes drooped, triumph hidden. ‘Of course, if I felt for a moment that I were a burden, if I felt there were no room for me here –’ She turned her head a little, veiled gaze still on Lenka, but inclining head and body towards Zhenia.
On cue, resignedly, Zhenia shook her head. ‘Of course not, Varushka.’ The words, despite effort, were brusque. ‘Don’t be silly. There’s a home for you here for as long as you like, as you well know. Didn’t you ask Mischa the self-same question just yesterday?’ It was a small barb she could not resist. ‘Lenka dear,’ she added, mildly, ‘do you think you could persuade Tonia to put down that pretty thing she’s taken a fancy to? I wouldn’t normally mind, but it is Faberge, and a particular favourite of Katya’s.’
Heavily Lenka turned. Varya averted her eyes from her daughter’s untidy bulk. ‘Tonia,’ Lenka said, sternly, but with a caressing note in her voice that was used for no-one but this first-born daughter, certainly never to her small, placid son, ‘put it down, little one. It’s very fragile.’
‘I won’t break it.’ The child, thin as a rail, freckled and with a mop of marigold hair that her Aunt Anna, had she ever seen her, would have recognized, scowled.
‘I know. But Aunt Zhenia thinks you will.’
Adversity, Zhenia reflected ironically, had taught Lenka little of tact.
‘And since it’s hers, I suppose you should put it down, don’t you?’
The child, still scowling ferociously, replaced the gleaming crystal thing upon the table, but reluctant to leave it she clasped small hands behind her back and leaned forward, studying it, rapt.
‘What is it?’ Lenka asked. And, as she so often had been, Zhenia, watching, was struck by the rapport between these two. The look on Lenka’s face, whose very structure was lost now in rolls of fat, was intent, almost hungry, as she watched the spare, small figure of her daughter.
‘It’s a little tree. It has apples. And golden pears.’
‘And a little bird.’ Relenting, Zhenia set her knitting aside and went to join the child. ‘Would you like to hear him sing?’
‘Yes.’
Zhenia waited, glancing at Lenka.
Lenka said nothing.
‘Yes what?’ Zhenia asked, mildly.
The child lifted her small, pinched face. The wide pale eyes held an intelligence – no – Zhenia groped for the word – an awareness far beyond her years, ‘Just yes,’ she said, flatly. And would, Zhenia knew instinctively, have sacrificed tree, bird and life itself before she said more.
‘That child,’ Varya said, clearly and coldly, ‘has the manners of a peasant.’
Zhenia was winding the tiny golden key.
‘What a pretty thing.’ Margarita who, bored almost to tears, had been standing by the window looking down onto the frozen canal, wandered across the room, her interest caught. ‘Fabergé, you said?’
‘Yes.’ Zhenia was watching Tonia. The child stood, still and intent, listening to the sweet trilling of the bird, her rapt face free of its usual fierce scowl. ‘Lenka, I swear your little Tonia is getting more like her Aunt Anna every day!’
The effect on the child was startling. She threw back her head like an animal suddenly challenged. Stepped back from Zhenia and Margarita. Turned fiercely to her mother.
‘No, Tonia,’ Lenka said. ‘You’re nothing like your Aunt Anna.’
There was an odd and indisputably awkward silence. Only Margarita was apparently unaware of it. ‘That reminds me,’ she said, almost absently, still watching in fascination the tiny jewelled bird that warbled so musically, ‘I have a letter. From Anna. I keep forgetting to tell you. It came last week.’
‘Last week.’ Zhenia looked at her in exasperation. ‘Last week? Is it too much to hope you’ve brought it with you?’
‘Of course I have. Well, at least –’ Margarita was scrabbling in the small wrist-bag she carried. ‘Ah, yes. Here it is. Would you like to hear it? It doesn’t really say much.’
Zhenia picked up the little tree, clicked it to silence with a sudden sharp movement, and placed it back upon the table. ‘Yes, Margarita. We’d like to hear it.’
Margarita shook out two pages of flimsy paper. Screwed up her eyes a little. Read rapidly and with little emphasis.
Dearest Rita. Love to you and to everyone. How I miss you all in these bad times. It’s dreadful, isn’t it, with the war taking so many lives, not to be able to speak, to clasp hands, to reassure each other? I pray each day for Sasha and for Dmitri. I trust they both are safe.
She might, from her tone of voice, have been extending her sister’s greetings and hopes to a flock of chickens.
Lenka shifted heavily in her chair, the smallest sarcastic smile twitching at her lips. No-one, not even Anna, could bring themselves to pray for Donovalov.
I keep abreast as much as is possible with what is happening there with you. Guy has a contact in the Embassy in London – a very kindly man, Count Boris Stelyetsin – who keeps us informed, and of course the papers here keep us in touch with our allies in this war against the German aggressors. There were pictures the other day, of a patriotic march upon Nevsky Prospekt. I have to admit that it was such a shock to see that familiar street that a tear came to my eye. I searched and searched to see if any of you were there, though I knew as I did it how silly I was being!
For ourselves, sadly, the news is not good. Guy’s health is slow to improve – if I were honest I would admit that it does not improve at all. I have taken on most of the responsibility for the business, which is no trial I assure you, and keeps me busy, which is a blessing. There’s war work as well of course though down here in the country, where we spend a good deal of our time, that seems at the moment to consist of little but what the vicar’s wife calls ‘our little sewing bees’ and a constant speculation as to where and when the first Zeppelins will raid. I and Robert (our gardener, a dear good friend) are very busy destroying our extravagant and pretty flower garden in order to plant vegetables. I hope you there in the city (isn’t it strange to think of dear Petersburg as ‘Petrograd’? I can’t seem to get used to it at all!) won’t be subject to too many shortages if this beastly war drags on?
Darling Rita, I hope all’s well with you. Sasha seems to have done well for himself – Boris says that to be at Baranovici with the Grand Duke is to be at the very heart of the Russian war effort. In England the spirit is very good, though no-one now thinks it will be easy. But we will prevail, our two countries together, and then your loving sister Anna will be back to kiss your cheek and hold your hand and laugh as we used to. Much love to all the family – is there any news of Katya? I haven’t heard from her for months. Is she with you in Petrograd, or has she gone with Jussi to Finland? – and please give Mama a hug and a kiss from me. I know how difficult a time it’s been for her. Tell her I’ll write very soon. Love too to Lenka, and to the children, and to Dmitri, ’Talia and their small brood. Just think, a whole tribe of children who’ve never met their Aunt Anna! Pray God the war ends soon and we can be together again.
Margarita was reading very rapidly now, scant interest in her voice.
Much love and God’s true blessing on you all, Anna.
Briskly she folded the paper.
Varya’s pretty handkerchief flickered. ‘Poor Anna.’
‘Why is she poor?’ Margarita’s mouth was set in a small, sulky line. For some reason the letter from her sister, with its breath of events and concerns beyond the snowlocked confines of war-constricted Petrograd, had unsettled her. This reading had produced again, as it had when first she had read it, a small, indefinable stirring of restless resentment that she found herself hard put to explain. ‘Why is she poor?’ she asked again.
‘In a foreign land. Far from her family, her home. And at such a time!’ Varya was indignant.
‘England, surely, is her home now?’ Zhenia, used to her sister’s irrational outbursts, pulled upon the bell cord. ‘We’ll take tea, shall we? Of course it’s her home. She doesn’t sound unhappy.’
‘Of course she does! She’s missing her family! It’s apparent in every line she writes!’
‘We’re all missing our families.’ Zhenia stood, collectedly tidied her knitting. ‘It’s part of the burden of war. Even having Katya just such a short distance away in Finland is a far greater worry than it normally would be. It’s strange. War seems to have made distances greater. And bonds more loving.’
Lenka shifted her bulk in the armchair. Her face was expressionless. Margarita had wandered back to the window, stood looking out, taking no further part in the conversation. She had a photograph at home, that Anna had sent her, of her sister’s house in the place called Sussex. A rambling, pretty house, not grand like a palace nor forbidding or romantic like a castle, but a small, flower-set jewel of a house, a dacha in a lush, tree-filled countryside. And they had an apartment in London, overlooking the city’s river Thames. London! And she’d been to Paris. Several times! And to Florence, and to Rome – poor Anna indeed!
‘Trust Anna,’ Lenka said, ‘to be able to worry about us all at a very great and very safe distance.’
‘Of course she’s worried about us!’ Varya failed entirely to hear the heavy sarcasm in Lenka’s voice. ‘Of course she is! What better daughter, what better sister, could anyone ever have asked for than Anna?’
Adages about absences and fond hearts, Zhenia thought, wryly, could truly have been coined for Varya.
Inconsequentially, tired of the conversation, noting only the grating sound of her sister’s voice, so familiar and so wearing, Margarita found herself wondering suddenly if Lenka knew of the visits that Pavel Petrovich Donovalov had taken to paying to the tiny apartment behind the Liteini Prospekt. The recollection brought the usual small tremble of unease. The man had the strangest eyes. He sat, drank tea, asked after Sasha. Asked all the time after Sasha. But that wasn’t why he came. She knew it. No man came to that apartment simply to ask about Sasha. And for every second he was there those awful eyes watched her. Made her feel – she lifted her head sharply, pushing the thought away.
‘What better sister indeed?’ Lenka asked, quietly.
‘I still think,’ Zhenia said, moving her chair a little closer to the stove, clearing a space around the samovar for the tea glasses, ‘that your little Tonia is her very image. Varya, don’t you remember Anna at that age?’
The small, tinkling crash arrested them all. Tonia stepped back, hands clasped firmly behind her back.
With a sharp cry Zhenia stepped forward, dropped, shimmering striped skirts billowing about her, reached out a hand, withdrew it.
The tiny bright shards of crystal glittered upon the carpet. The little bird lay still and silent.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tonia said, expressionlessly. ‘I dropped it.’
Katya moved, for what seemed like the hundredth time, from the dark window to the stove and then, within a moment, back again, plain woollen skirts swishing about the tiled floors. ‘You’re sure he said today?’
‘Today. He said today.’ Kaarlo sat apparently unconcerned, the inevitable knife, needle-sharp, in his hand, paring his nails. His dirty stockinged feet were lifted to the warm stove.
‘Then where is he? Where in the name of God is he?’ All day she had contained herself, all day she had told herself to remember the circumstances in which Jussi travelled, not to pin her hopes on that one laconic message. Today, he had said; but that could mean tomorrow, or the next day, or – chilling, unthinkable thought – never. ‘Where is he?’ she repeated, urgently, more to herself than to her companion.
Kaarlo shrugged. ‘Could be anywhere between here and –’ he caught himself, glanced at her ‘– and the coast. At least we know he got across the ice. Don’t worry. Jussi will make it.’ His reassurance was not personal, bore no warmth. It was a statement of fact. In Kaarlo’s eyes the day that Jussi failed would be the day the world collapsed and burned to a cinder.
Katya stood for a little while longer looking out into the darkness.
‘Draw the blinds,’ Kaarlo said. ‘Close the shutters. You’ll draw their attention.’
‘I’d rather put out the lights.’
The young man moved impatiently. ‘Put them out then. But don’t stand there like a bloody beacon attracting every sodding Russian soldier within miles to the door.’
Without comment she extinguished the lamps. She was beyond responding to his provocation. She took her stand by the darkened window again, renewed the litany that ran in her head like weary feet on a treadmill. Dear God, let him be safe. I’ll give anything, do anything, just so you make him safe.
Please. Don’t take him from me. I’ll do anything. Anything. I’ll go to church – I’ll build a bloody church. With my bare hands. But please! – don’t let him come to harm.
‘Is there tea?’ Kaarlo asked.
‘In the kitchen.’ She did not turn. Her voice was calm.
He muttered something.
‘Make it yourself,’ she said, crisply.
She remembered, suddenly, the first time she and Jussi had made love. Turned restlessly, walked to the stove again, stood looking at the pretty shining tiles that surrounded it, colourless in the darkness, yet gleaming in reflected light.
Walked back to the window. Jussi? I hope you’re listening, in that daft head of yours. I’ll never forgive you if you let yourself be killed. You hear me! I’ll haunt you. Oh, Lord! Even in such extremity, amusement lifted at the nonsense of such a notion. I’ll force you to haunt me. There! You won’t enjoy that, I promise you!
‘Where’s the blasted tea?’
‘Where the blasted tea should be. In the blasted box on the blasted table.’
She remembered other times, other lovemaking, beside the lake. In the lake. She remembered their bodies, shining and cold and slick with water. She remembered too the blithe and happy St Petersburg nights, after their return to the city, before the coming of war had blighted everything and catapulted Jussi still further into this dangerous game he insisted on playing. She remembered the graceless deceptions, the shared laughter, and above all the love. The silly, astounding, frightening love. She had not known it was possible that one’s whole happiness, one’s very life, could rest in the hands of another. Jussi, you stupid, brainless idiot of a man – where are you? She couldn’t trust him to take care of himself, that was the problem. The stories Kaarlo had told! By God, she’d kill him – if he walked through the door at this minute, she’d kill him!
In the deserted street beyond the window, beneath the low overhang of the eves of one of the painted wooden houses, the shadow of a shadow moved, cast a goblin shade upon the snow for a moment and was gone. She narrowed her eyes, trying to probe the darkness. Kuopio lay in uneasy silence beneath its winter shroud. At the outbreak of war all pretence that Russia was not an occupying power had been abandoned. The Finnish Parliament – the Diet – had been summarily dismissed. Russian troops had been billeted everywhere. The Tsar’s Secret Police were suddenly much in evidence. Finland’s own young men had not been mobilized into the Russian armies, for their Russian masters did not trust them, and with good reason. Yet these same young men were not, on the whole, to be found at home twiddling their thumbs; some indeed were not to be found at all. Under the darkness of the bitter northern winter a secret war was being waged. Shadows slipped through the silent forests, in ones, in twos, in threes; the swish of skates was heard upon the misty, frozen lakes and rivers. Ski tracks appeared and were blown away before morning. Bridges fell. Trains were derailed. The odd Russian soldier, unwise enough to wander the apparently deserted forest alone, disappeared. Information was passed, quietly, from ear to ear beneath the very noses of the ever-suspicious Russians. Letters were sent, and cryptic telegrams, many from Stockholm where so many Finns had friends and relatives; it was natural, was it not, to communicate with such in times of trouble? Jussi had made three trips to Stockholm in the past four months, taking the perilous but apparently well-organized route across the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia, slipping through the Russian guard at night and striking out across the white wilderness of frozen ocean to Sweden. She did not know the purpose of these trips, though recently she had begun to suspect, and neither Jussi nor any of the others had chosen completely to confide in her; she was, after all, a Russian still. Jussi’s light-hearted declaration that what she did not know could not worry her did not fool her; the one thing she had had to come to terms with very early in their life together – the one thing that, tartly and with clarity, her sister-in-law Elisabet had taken quite unnecessary pains to point out to her on their return to St Petersburg – was that his love for his country would always outweigh his love for her. That particular passion was too long-held to be superseded by another. He would die for her, she supposed, if it were necessary; but not as readily as he would die for his country. It was a knowledge with which she lived day and night, a constant companion, a crow perched heavily upon her shoulder waiting for any chance to peck at her brain.
And now, today, he was due back, back at her side, safe for a few short weeks.
But he had not arrived.
A glimmer of light caught her eye. She leaned forward. Lit by guttering torchlight a patrol of Russian soldiers was coming down the road towards the house. They looked huge, great bears of men in their greatcoats and fur hats, their heavy boots trampling the fresh fall of snow. The winter windows were in; she could hear nothing. Tensely she stood and watched them come. Their long rifles were slung across their shoulders, collars were turned up; grotesque shadows stretched and capered upon the snow.
Kaarlo appeared at the kitchen door, silent and watchful.
On they came, a dozen or so men, straight towards the house.
Her hands were cold, and clenched to fists. When she tried to relax them she could not.
Even as they trudged on past the house, without so much as a glance in the direction of the window where she stood in darkness, she still could not hear anything. The double panes, as always, worked well, keeping out sound as well as cold. She took a breath, her first for several long seconds. And then she saw it – again, a shadow amongst shadows – a movement, sensed rather than seen – a fleeting glimpse of a tall, familiar figure, hunched and shapeless in fur.
‘He’s coming,’ she said, nervelessly calm. ‘He’s gone round the back. Open the door, Kaarlo.’
Moments later he was there, in the room, cold-flushed, very much alive, grinning, shaking off the frozen furs, his arms about her, cracking bones, before she could exclaim at the bloody gash on his forehead, the dirty, reddened bandage on one of his hands. She clung to him in total silence, feeling him, breathing the scent of him, her face crushed against the filthy shirt, hearing his heartbeat, wanting quite simply never, never to let him go. She heard the quick exchange, in their mother tongue, above her head between Jussi and Kaarlo, understood a little – for difficult as it was she was learning his language – cared nothing in that moment for what they said. Until this moment she truly had not realized how very much she had feared for him. Dear God, was that what happened? Was it to become worse each time?
‘Well, chicken, what’s this?’ Gently he put her from him, looked down into her face. ‘Tears?’
‘Of pain,’ she said, collectedly. ‘You nearly broke my back, you great clumsy Finn.’
‘The company is set up?’ Kaarlo was saying.
Jussi was looking at Katya with clear, pale, searching eyes. ‘It’s set up,’ he said, almost absently. ‘Yes.’
‘And – the raw materials? The consignments are getting through all right?’
‘Of course they are. I told you they would. Our friends are nothing if not efficient.’ The steady eyes had not moved from Katya.
‘What happened?’ Kaarlo asked.
‘What?’
‘Your head, numbskull. Your hand. Did you cut yourself shaving?’
‘Ah. No. A skirmish, that’s all. Nothing serious.’ He smiled a very little. ‘Not for us, anyway.’ Jussi lifted a dirty hand and touched Katya’s face, a fleeting, almost tentative touch. ‘Kaarlo. I have a suggestion.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Go.’ The bright, tired eyes, turned suddenly to his friend, took the edge from the word. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll hear everything then, I promise. It’s been a very long day. It’s been several long days as a matter of fact. I need rest.’
Kaarlo pushed himself away from the wall. Dark eyes flicked sardonically from Jussi to Katya and back again. ‘Rest,’ he said, straight-faced. ‘Yes. I can see that.’
‘Out, Kaarlo.’ Wearily Jussi reached for Katya, rested his face for a moment on her soft hair. ‘Someday I’ll do the same for you.’
For a moment longer the other man stood, then he shrugged and reached for the filthy sheepskin jacket that had more than once tempted Katya to a bonfire. ‘Unlikely,’ he said. At the door he paused. ‘Just reassure me,’ he said. ‘All’s well?’
Jussi’s look was level. ‘All’s well. I promise you. There are still –’ he paused ‘– reservations. No, Kaarlo!’ The other man had turned, hands outstretched. ‘I’ll not discuss it tonight! Tomorrow. Tomorrow will do.’
‘The separate peace shit?’
Tired, exasperated, Jussi ran his hand through too long hair, dirtied and tangled by the wearing of his battered fur hat. ‘Yes. Of course. Be reasonable. They have to try.’
‘And us? What about us?’
Calmly Jussi let Katya go, stepped towards his friend. ‘We are where we always were, Kaarlo.’ A long arm shot out, a bloodstained, grimy hand gripped an equally grimy collar. His smile was wide and friendly. ‘Suomi is the nut in the cracker. The cheese in the mouse trap. The scorpion – under – the rock.’ As he spoke he propelled the other man, twice his bulk if not as tall, into the kitchen. ‘Any help we might receive –’ he paused by the table to pick up Kaarlo’s hat and set it gently upon his head ‘– will not be because we are lovable, nor because we deserve it, nor because there is a just God in his heaven, but because we are useful. And at this moment –’ he pinned the unresisting Kaarlo to the wall beside the back door, let go of his collar to button his coat ‘– it is our good fortune to be, potentially, more useful than ever before.’ He stepped back. ‘Off you go, Kaarlo. And pray for our Little Father the Tsar. Pray harder than you’ve ever prayed for anything. Believe it or not in that precious, stubborn, stupid man lies our salvation. Now, out!’
Grinning, Kaarlo quite deliberately reached up and ruffled Jussi’s already wild hair, not avoiding the crust of blood that split the hairline. Jussi could not prevent himself from flinching away. Kaarlo bunched his fist, crunched it none too gently into the other man’s chest. ‘Till tomorrow, then.’
‘Till tomorrow. And remember – pray for the Tsar.’
Kaarlo’s reply, perhaps fortunately, was beyond Katya’s grasp of the language.
‘One day,’ she said quietly into the silence after the door had shut, ‘I’m going to feed rat poison to that man.’
‘He’d thrive on it.’ Jussi turned. In the comparatively bright light of the kitchen she could see now just how awful he looked. There were deep shadows beneath his eyes and at least a day’s growth of beard on the lantern jaw. The, weal upon his head showed dark, the skin blue-black about it.
Ignoring the turning of her heart Katya surveyed him with lucid exasperation. ‘What in the world did I do,’ she asked the ceiling, thoughtfully, ‘to deserve this?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Must have been something pretty bad.’ Neither made a move towards the other. Yet as their quietly smiling eyes met a warmth filled the simple room about them, as close and as intimate as a touch.
‘Look at you.’ She took two small, graceful steps into his arms, laid her head very lightly upon his chest, her lifted arms about his neck. ‘I wouldn’t give you houseroom if I weren’t married to you.’
She felt his laughter, through his body. Felt his exhaustion too.
‘I suppose I must award the returning warrior the prize he most desires?’ She tilted her head to look at him.
His arms tightened about him. ‘Sounds reasonable. Even promising.’
‘It’s a shame it’s so small.’ The tone was innocence itself.
He waited, refusing to rise to the bait.
She cupped his rough chin in her two still-soft hands. ‘The sauna,’ she said. ‘You’re a Finn. I’d go so far as to say that you’re the most Finnish Finn it’s ever been my misfortune to come across. Surely the first thing any good Finn would want under the circumstances is a sauna? It’s ready. It’s been ready all day.’
For the barest moment he allowed her to suffer. Then he bent to kiss her. ‘Second,’ he said. ‘The sauna comes second.’
They made love on the couch beside the stove; not fiercely, as she had so often imagined in his absence, but in a manner that suited the tenderness, and in Jussi’s case, the exhaustion, of the moment. It was a slow and lovely act of joining; lying in the darkness, Jussi’s head a dead weight upon her breast, the reflections of the snow-world beyond the window glimmering upon the ceiling, Katya found her face wet with tears, her emotions such a tangle that she could not herself discover if they were of happiness or of sorrow.
Later she bathed the nasty cut on his head and tended the wound on his hand. He brushed aside her questions. While he took his sauna at last she cooked fish in creamy egg sauce, checked on the pan of ternin maito that baked gently in the oven, filling the air with its spicy cinnamon smell.
‘God in heaven. I leave a Russian termagant and come home to a Finnish housewife.’
She turned. He leaned in the doorway, dressed in a shabby bathgown, the shaggy, too-long hair damp and clinging to his head, his fair skin flushed and shining. His face was full of amusement.
‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘I’m a Countess, remember? I’ve had three maids and five footmen preparing this feast all day. They were going to wait at table too, but I decided you were too disreputable to be seen. One must always put on a show for the servants, you know. Your head’s bleeding again.’
‘Is it?’ He put an absent hand to his forehead, winced a little as his exploring fingers did indeed come away stained with blood.
‘Sit down. I’ll plaster it for you again. It’s that damned steam. I’m sure it must be awfully bad for you. Almost certainly thins the blood.’
He sat down, flinched a little beneath her brisk ministrations.
‘Don’t say it. As a nurse I’d make a good vet. Kaarlo’s already told me.’
‘What else has Kaarlo told you?’
The movement of her fingers stilled for a moment, then busied again. ‘Not much. You know Kaarlo.’ She stepped back. ‘Jussi – you have to trust me, you know. Sooner or later.’
He smiled, very gently, put out his hand to link his fingers with hers. ‘Yes. I do know. But later, Katya, later. For now, can we not simply enjoy the moment?’
She leaned to kiss him lightly. ‘And the food. I’ll murder you if you don’t enjoy the food. I’ve been practising for weeks. It’s the only thing I can cook.’
‘I’m starving. I’ll eat anything.’
‘Really?’ she smiled, sugar-sweet. ‘How very flattering. I find that I wish I’d cooked you whaleblubber. I’ll bet you didn’t get that in Stockholm?’
They made love again later, upstairs beneath the sloping eaves in the big, comfortable bed that Katya had dressed with the crispest and prettiest linen she could find, and this time their loving was fierce, savage and not in the least light-hearted. Afterwards Jussi lay for a very long time, sprawled across her, so still that she thought he must have gone to sleep where he lay; but at last, with a long-drawn breath he rolled off her, onto his back. She felt him stretch, settle himself into the feathers of the mattress with a sigh that was almost a groan of pleasure. His hand reached for hers and she took it, holding it lightly with both her own, resting upon her breast. Silence settled about them. His breathing was regular and quiet. But yet she knew he was awake.
‘Jussi?’
She sensed his hesitation, the temptation to feign sleep. ‘Yes?’
‘You haven’t been to Sweden, have you?’
His stillness held a different quality now. He withdrew his hand, gently. ‘Yes. I have.’
‘But not only to Sweden.’ It was not a question.
The bedclothes rustled a little as he moved. ‘No. Not only to Sweden.’
She waited, but he said no more. ‘It’s Germany, isn’t it?’ she asked at last, very quietly. ‘You’ve been to Germany.’
She felt movement again, saw the faint pale oval of his face in the darkness above her as he leaned on his elbow to look at her. ‘Yes,’ he said.
There was a very long silence.
‘Katya,’ Jussi said, ‘listen to me. We’ve tried the others – you know it. We get sympathy. Understanding, even. We get words. Kind words. Soft words. But we get no help. Both Britain and France agree that Finland should be independent; but they’ll do nothing – nothing! – about it. They’ll not move against their ally, nor do anything to weaken Russian arms. Very well; we understand that. But this is our war too. And in war, friends and allies are where you find them. Katya, a whole generation of our young men have never served in the Russian army; we have no training, no military skills, no weapons. The Germans have agreed – are on the point of agreeing – to raise, arm and train a battalion. A battalion of young Finns. To come back to fight for Finland. For her independence.’
‘But, Jussi! – the Germans? We’re at war with the Germans!’
She saw the faint movement as he shook his head. ‘No, Katya.’ His quiet voice was grim. ‘We are not at war with the Germans. The Russians are at war with the Germans.’ He lay back upon the pillows. There was another long silence. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ he added, at last, softly. ‘And I will use any weapon he puts into my hand.’
‘The “company”,’ she said. ‘The – “raw materials” that Kaarlo spoke of?’
We are negotiating under cover of a company set up in Stockholm. The raw materials are the men we’re smuggling across the ice to Sweden, and thence to Germany.’
Later still, lying wide-eyed in the darkness she said, ‘Why did you say the Germans are on the point of agreeing? Has something held it up? Was – was this what Kaarlo meant – a separate peace? Between Russia and Germany?’
‘Yes.’ She could tell from his voice that despite his exhaustion he was no nearer sleep than she was herself. ‘If the Germans could close down the Eastern Front with separate peace negotiations they could concentrate their whole might upon the Western Allies. Until he loses all hope of that the Kaiser won’t risk the Tsar’s good will by arming insurgents behind his back.’
Katya thought of Dmitri, of Sasha, of other young friends and relatives under arms in far places. ‘And is it likely to happen?’
‘A separate peace? No.’ Jussi’s voice was positive. ‘No, Katya. While the Tsar lives the war will go on. And Germany will arm and train our Finnish Battalion. I’m certain of it.’
‘And – this battalion will fight? Fight against the Tsar’s army?’
‘Yes. The battalion will come back to Finland and will fight.’
‘And – you’ll be a part of it.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Yes. Of course.’ She echoed his words in a soft, desolate voice.
He reached for her, drew her to his shoulder, stroked her hair.
It was a very long time before either of them slept.