After Fohn’s broadcast, Lom and Maroussia went back down with Elena Cornelius and her girls to their apartment. The air-raid sirens were wailing again in the distance. They could hear the muffled crump of falling bombs.
‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with us,’ said Maroussia. ‘For tonight.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Elena. ‘No. I’m glad.’
The two of them, Elena and Maroussia, made a soup. Cabbage. An onion. Kvass. While they worked, Lom picked up the newspaper that Elena had brought with her from the Count’s room. He skimmed idly through the account of the attack on General Secretary Dukhonin’s house: the brave defence mounted by his guards and a passing militia patrol; the fall of Dukhonin himself in the struggle; the death of the firebrand convict Josef Kantor and all of his murderous gangster squad.
Lom read and reread the sentence. It didn’t change. Kantor was dead. He had led the attack on Dukhonin and died in the ensuing gun battle.
Kantor was dead.
He read the story to the end. Chazia had made a speech about a renewed determination to rid Mirgorod and the Vlast of the disease of anarchic nationalist terrorism and those who harboured it. There was nothing more about Kantor. In the rest of the paper there was almost no mention of the war and the enemy coming towards the city. It might have been news from a year ago. A decade. Except that Kantor was dead.
Lom sat and nursed the news of Kantor’s death like a wound. This was new disaster. Lom’s thread into the Lodka; his plan–if it was ever a plan, not just a half-baked impossibility–was shredded. He would have to start working at it all over again. And war was come. The city burning.
‘Maroussia?’ he said at last.
‘Yes?’
‘You should see this.’ He held the newspaper towards her, folded open at the page. Watched her read it twice.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘OK. So that’s that.’ She put the paper down and started laying the table.
When they had finished eating and Lom had helped the girls clear away, Elena Cornelius brought out a box and put it on the table. It was made of a reddish fibrous wood, heavy and roughly made, the size of a large book, with a tight-fitting lid. The lid was covered with carvings of leaves and intertwined curling thorny stems.
‘I’ve been saving these,’ she said. ‘I brought them with me when I came to the city. I want to have them now.’
She took off the lid. Inside was a heap of dark shining fruit. Berries of purple and red. Wild strawberries, blackcurrants, raspberries. Elderberries, night-blue, luminous, as fat and fresh and full as the day they were picked. Other berries Lom didn’t recognise.
‘Here,’ said Elena, offering the box to the girls. ‘These are from the forest. I’ve kept them twenty years. There used to be more. The box was full when I came to Mirgorod. Your father and I had some, when each of you were born.’
Galina hesitated.
‘Go on,’ said Elena. ‘They’re good to eat. I promise.’
‘But… they’re for celebrations.’
‘I want us to have them now.’
When the girls had taken a couple she pushed the box over to Maroussia and Lom.
‘You too. Please.’
Lom took a single elderberry and put it in his mouth. Burst it against his tongue. The fruit was fresh and sharp and sweet, with a slight taint of resin that was not unpleasant but made the juice taste dark and wild and strange.
‘It’s a property of the tree,’ said Elena. ‘It’s a kind of red pine: the breath of the wood keeps things fresh, not for ever, but longer. There was a giant called Akki-Paavo-Perelainen who used to come every autumn to our timber yard. He would always come just before the river froze, riding a great raft of red pine down the river. He gave me this box, and I carved the lid.
‘That was the year my father was accused of crimes of privacy, and they made us leave the yard and the house. We weren’t allowed to take anything with us. Not a thing. Not even our name. They said our family was dissolved. Relations annulled. My father was to be called Feliks Ioannes, my mother was Teodosia Braun, and I was Elena Schmitt. I remember my mother shouting at the official, “She is my daughter. It is a fact of nature. Nothing you say can change it.” And the man was saying to us over and over again, “Your thoughts and your strength belong to the Vlast, just like the rest of us.”
‘They let us carry on living together for a while, in a room above a shop in the town. When we got there it was filthy. Disgusting. Every surface was covered in some kind of sticky grease, and the blankets smelled of illness. The day we moved in my mother set about cleaning it, and my father sat in a chair by the window, smoking, not saying a word. I sneaked away and went back to our old house. I broke in through a window and I just walked from room to room. Just touching things. While I was there some men came, and I had to hide in my bedroom. I heard them in the corridor. One of them pissed on the wallpaper. I heard it splashing on the rug. When I got away from the house I brought this box away with me, the only thing I had left from the old life, and when I came to work in Mirgorod I brought it here. These are the same berries Akki-Paavo-Perelainen gave me. You can’t hang on to things for ever. Let’s finish them now.’