18

Jean

‘Are you insane? Sneaking out on your own like that, running all kinds of risks, and for what?’

Father was at his desk with his head in his hands. He looked like a child who hasn’t been able to resist doing wrong: shamed to have been caught, but still defiant.

I stopped. I took a deep breath. I was right to be angry. I loved this man. I had no one else. He shouldn’t have been hiding from his security men and going off alone. But it wasn’t doing any good raging at him. He appeared … well, I took a more careful look … just exhausted, maybe, but greyer and more wrinkled somehow, too. Old.

‘She was a neighbour,’ was all he said. ‘I owed her that respect, sharik. I can’t stop being a human being altogether, just for the sake of politics.’

He looked up cautiously. I knew, from the use of that childhood pet name, ‘little ball’ – I’d been fat, apparently, as a toddler – as well as from his timid glance, that he’d sensed I might soften and was trying to appeal to my affection. He wanted me to shrug and smile and say, Oh, well, let’s put it down to experience.

‘Did you at least leave a note, like I always tell you to?’ I said, less harshly, but still not letting go of my anger altogether. ‘Like Kutyopov’s, only with proper information?’

When General Kutyopov had disappeared, the police detectives had only had one clue to follow. There’d been a note in the diary in his desk, saying he was worried about the secret agent whom Skoblin had him down to visit that morning. But Kutyopov had written no more about where the meeting was supposed to be, or who the agent was. And Skoblin then told the police that the man, who, he said, must have been a double agent, had disappeared, leaving no trace. No wonder the investigation had got nowhere.

When Father took over the job, he’d made it the organization’s policy that he and all future White military leaders should be properly guarded. Much more reluctantly, he’d also made me a private promise: that, if he were ever to go out alone, in some emergency, he would leave a detailed note of where he was going, whom he was meeting, and why. He didn’t like the idea. He wasn’t a detail man. But I’d insisted, and he’d given in.

Or had he? Looking at him now – at the lowered eyes, and the tired skin – I could see, without waiting for his answer, that, no, he hadn’t left any notes yesterday.

‘Father,’ I said reproachfully as he shook his head.

‘Look, nothing bad happened,’ he muttered, letting his head droop on to his arm. ‘I was a fool. I took five minutes of freedom. I won’t do it again. There’s no need for distress.’

But when I let my footsteps take me round to his side of the desk, and put an arm round his shoulder, I could see his cheeks glistening.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, indistinctly. ‘I’m just tired. All those celebrations, earlier this week. They take their toll.’

Awkwardly, I gave him a sideways Cossack embrace. I could hear this was more than just tiredness. He’d never said anything that suggested discontent with his life the way ‘five minutes of freedom’ had sounded, just now. I’d never seen tears in his eyes before.

This first glimmer of understanding that Father might, just possibly, also feel trapped in the role Fate had picked for him to play was baffling, because he was completely absorbed by his life at ROVS – wasn’t he? He didn’t have time for friendships outside this apartment – did he?

But if he was so happy, why had he wanted to go to the funeral of the American woman upstairs?

I squeezed his shoulder harder. ‘I don’t want you kidnapped,’ I said.

The next thought that came to me displaced Father’s cigar smell altogether. Another scent came into my nostrils instead: the elusive half-flower, half-innocent perfume of the American grand-daughter, with her lovely face, her painful naïveté and her foolish quest for a man called Yevgeny. Maybe, I was thinking, she hadn’t been so wrong. And I’d been rude. Maybe – the idea surprised me, but wasn’t displeasing – I should apologize.

I tried the girl’s door, one floor up, before leaving. But the housekeeper said Mademoiselle had just popped out in the car.

That evening, after I’d woken up, and the old nurse had brought me a cup of tea and a rusk on my divan, and got me to wheel poor Katerina Ivan’na – which is what she went on respectfully calling Father’s wife, even now, when the poor woman was long past recognizing any of us, or appreciating her respect – out on to the balcony for some fresh air, I went to pick Father up. But first I tried the girl’s bell again.

Her new-world enthusiasm had jarred on me, but maybe that said as much about me as it did about her? I’d wanted to think of her as a spoiled American heiress, refusing to take no for an answer, but she was better than that. She was just trying to carry out the last wish of an elderly person whom she’d loved and wished to know better. She was trying to show respect. And what was wrong with that?

I rang three times. There was no answer.

After I’d waited a long time, and not much liked the thoughts crowding into my head – pictures of her out dancing with smug Americans in the smoke and jazz and crush of Zelli’s – I pressed Father’s bell instead, and drove him home.

When I’d left him on the balcony, next to Katerina Ivan’na, I went out for the night in the taxi, but as I did so I looked back up. There they were, on the balcony. He had an arm around her shoulder, and he was staring at the sky. His cheeks were wet.

She’d been gone for years. She couldn’t walk or talk. She couldn’t die, either. Poor Katerina Ivan’na. Poor Father too, I thought. He looked after her so carefully. Why had I never thought how lonely he must be?

He could so easily have been close to the American woman, I thought. I couldn’t help hoping, suddenly, that he had found love up those few stone steps from his office, on the first floor.

It was nonsense, of course, what that girl had been saying about her grandmother thinking that Father might need protecting. After all, he had me. But how I wished now that I’d agreed to read the letters she’d talked about – because it now seemed possible that they might show me whether, if there really were some flesh-and-blood Zhenya in the American woman’s life, it was Father.

I’d try her bell again in the morning, I thought, as I opened the taxi door.