Nadya Plevitskaya looked anxiously at her husband.
He was mumbling to himself, as he did increasingly often these days. Any minute now, he’d start wagging his finger reprovingly at the dashboard of his car. She’d caught him at that several times in the past few days.
He’d always been quiet, but she’d liked it better before he’d started this odd, wordless, grunty swelling he did now, all the time – as if all the pent-up things he’d never quite said, but spent years thinking, were about to come pouring out. It made him look a bit mad, she thought.
Partly just to stop him, she touched his hand. He jumped, and then he turned and smiled at her. A great, big, absentminded smile, as if he had more important things in mind.
‘On Wednesday,’ she said, and she couldn’t stop the slight shake in her voice.
‘Do you remember it all?’ he asked. He sounded sharp, like a schoolteacher talking to a lazy pupil. ‘It’s very important.’
She gave him a devil-may-care grin, hoping to reassure him. ‘Ach, all that: of course I remember. I create your alibi, by acting. He’s right – it will be easy for a woman like me.’
‘Tell me again,’ he insisted. ‘Just in case.’
She knew every step, of course. But she humoured him and ticked them off anyway.
‘Early morning: pick up the nasty little Peugeot – less conspicuous than the Cadillac – in case something goes wrong and we need to make a getaway. Then drive to the corner café on rue du Colisée.
‘At nine o’clock, have breakfast together, for an hour, and talk noisily, in the most visible place we can find on the terrasse, greeting anyone we know and saying we are having a day off together.
‘Soon after ten o’clock, drive on to Monsieur Epstein’s boutique. We both say hello to him. You have a newspaper in your hand. You look a little impatient, and say you’re going to sit outside in the car and read the paper while I try on some new stage clothes. “Men!” I say, and roll my eyes. Monsieur Epstein laughs. We get going. No one sees that you aren’t really sitting outside reading the paper. You’ve driven away …’
She didn’t mention where her husband would have gone, or what he would be doing by then. She didn’t want to think about that part. She was happier concentrating on her role.
‘Meanwhile, I’m still at Monsieur Epstein’s, trying on every expensive dress in the shop. Sometimes I walk outside, and say I want to show one to you. I talk, loudly, out there, so they can hear me through the window. “Darling,” I say, “do you like me in gold?” or, “Chéri, do you think this one is too décolleté?” and then, “Oh, really? I’ll ask Monsieur Epstein what he thinks then.” Of course Monsieur Epstein thinks you’re still there. And I spend the rest of the morning there, going in and out, “talking” to you.
‘Then, not before one o’clock, I finally choose two dresses, for a combined value not exceeding three thousand francs, and sign for them myself and ask for them to be delivered to me at Ozoir. The cost will be reimbursed, on production of an appropriate receipt, by …’
She paused, suddenly imagining herself buying a gold Epstein dress on a Soviet expense account, then wearing it on stage while her admirers cheered.
‘Kolya … Kolyen’ka, I will actually get to wear those dresses, won’t I?’ she asked wheedlingly. ‘Afterwards?’
Skoblin nodded. As if that mattered, she could see him thinking. But then, he never had understood anything about performing.
‘And then you come and pick me up, at quarter past one, and we go together to the railway station to join the rest of the delegation seeing off General Kutyopov’s daughter to Brussels,’ she finished quickly. ‘As far as anyone knows, we’ve been together all day.’
He nodded. He looked reassured, for now, but she knew it wouldn’t last. He’d ask her to go through it all again several more times before bed.
‘That wasn’t what I was going to ask, actually,’ she said, pouting. The house was coming into view now – over the fence, a graceful tracery of birch twigs and small fluttering leaves. (He kept talking about leaving it and moving into a flat in town, once he was boss. He never asked whether she wanted to leave her little courtyard behind.)
He raised an eyebrow. ‘What, then?’
‘I wanted to know, what happens if it all goes wrong?’ she asked as the car slowed. ‘No one talks about that.’
He glided to a halt. Without emotion, he answered, ‘We go to the Soviet embassy. We ask for the crab salesman. They take us back to Moscow.’
Plevitskaya hadn’t expected the idea of Moscow to surge into her mind with so much nostalgic force. The fresh smell of cucumbers and snow filled her nostrils, and her head swam with visions of little lopsided yellow-stucco houses piled up around churches with golden cupolas up and down the seven hills; of bright snow under a blue sky; of the faint cries of children skating on the Clean Ponds or squabbling happily over creamy round vatrushka cheesecakes or climbing on the Pushkin statue, and the jingle of harness, and the bells ringing …
‘God forbid,’ he continued, just as calmly.
He would say that, Plevitskaya thought, without rancour. He hadn’t been interested in anything but Paris for a long time.
But she wouldn’t be sorry to see Moscow again.
Sometimes, still, all these years later, she dreamed of Russia. Not of Moscow, as it happens, and not of any of the sleigh-bells-in-the-snow, storks-on-the-rooftops daydreams she filled her music with, either. This was a real dream – always in the same place, in the same forest, in that first war, the one against the Germans, in that somewhere on the south-western front that was tattooed into her brain, where the leaves were just beginning to drop from the trees overhead and there was a rumble of death somewhere up ahead. Milling back and forward from the front line were people going off or on duty, or to hospital, and trucks and carts grinding back and forth. Her husband – the long-ago husband of those days, whose face these days, after years of her later marriage to Skoblin, she barely recalled – was up there, in the fighting. He came back, once every couple of days, exhausted, stinking, sunken-eyed, to sleep. She’d cancelled her singing engagements – for she had singing engagements, even with a young child, in wartime – to be with that man. She wasn’t going anywhere unless it was with him. Why would she? They were a family. She didn’t think it was foolhardy staying near the front, whatever anyone said. She knew enough about life to know you clung to the happiness that came your way, and stayed near your man. There was food, for the moment. And she was sure that she and the child were safe here in the rear, anxious though everything might always be …
Until the moment the dream starts, that is. Until the day they’re not safe. Until the morning the greenish twilight of the woods explodes into strange, streaming, roaring, red-white hellfire, and everywhere she turns there are crackles and hisses and branches breaking off and fire. She can hear Yevdokia the housekeeper whimpering somewhere behind, with men shouting and jeering in foreign tongues. There’s only one thing on her own mind – getting herself and the little one away. So she’s running across the yard, panting – how is her breath so loud? – to snatch the child. The child’s in the outhouse. Or he was. But now there’s no outhouse any more, just a roiling midden where the log cabin used to be, and broken logs scattered everywhere, and, much later, a noise to break your head apart. And then she’s just running, running, running, in and out of trees and over roots, and there’s nothing else except that blood-rhythm, going on forever, and the tree-trunks: not her, not the child, just the thud of her feet on the pine-needly forest floor, heels, toes, heels, toes, and her breath. She doesn’t know where the child has gone. Even when they creep back, much later, there’s just a burning house, beyond saving. Yevdokia’s mauled body. The splinters of the outhouse. The thickset stink of the uncovered shit pit, buzzing with flies. But no little boy. No trace.
All these years later, she’d still wake up whimpering from that dream, feeling for his little lost body, as bereft each subsequent time as she had been in that first naked moment as, in one awful dawn after another, she reunderstood her child’s absence.
It was brutal, this pain: always had been, always would be; although over time she’d managed to banish it, mostly, to the realm of sleep. It was an entirely different order of feeling from the soft, fuzzy, faint nostalgia she still sometimes also experienced, remembering the husband of those faraway days, who’d had soft blue eyes (or had they been grey?) and who’d been sent off to a different camp by his commanding officer with no time to grieve, then killed in the war soon afterwards. Once both son and husband had gone, her rage against the monstrous lack of feeling of the commanding officers, mixed up with her grief, had pushed her, in the war that came immediately after the one against the Germans, to go defiantly out singing for the rebellious Reds. The Reds all had their grudges against the power that had abused them, those righteously angry men, just as she did. Why not go out and cheer them along with her voice? She’d been so wild with fury and loss, back then, and had nothing to lose. She was alone. Sometimes she’d almost hoped an enemy bullet would carry her off.
But there’d been no merciful oblivion. She’d been captured, not killed. And, in the White camp where she’d been held, she’d been astonished to find herself fêted as the exotic darling of the camp, adored by the very type of officer she’d blamed for her tragedy, because, as it turned out, for them, she and her voice and her fame added up to a symbol of the old glory days they were vainly fighting for. And slowly, agonizingly slowly, she’d finally wept for her loss in the arms of her White jailor, Skoblin, who’d become her last husband and life companion. Fate had ended up carrying them both, with their separate griefs for all that had gone, along with all the other survivors – each of them mourning one private lost thing or another that no one could either share or escape – away to this place of exile in Paris.
But time and happenstance hadn’t stopped her remembering her real home in Russia.
If she could only go back to Russia, she sometimes thought, she could follow the trails that had been impossible in wartime, scour the orphanages, trawl the schools, interrogate the priests; and somehow, miraculously, she might find herself running towards him, her child turned handsome young man, a man whom she’d recognize at once, with her arms out, rapturously smiling, racing into that embrace she held perpetually in mind.
Just being back in Russia – and Moscow, even if it hadn’t ever been quite home, was the jumping-off point of Russia, the place where power now was and where her friends in high places would be found – might be the start of making it all come true. Even now, all these years later, when she was fifty-three. Her husband beside her was consumed by his ambition; she understood this. She understood it not because she wanted her singing career back, though that would be nice, but because of her own secret but consuming ambition to do the impossible: turn back time, go home, and find her lost son.