HARRY BINGHAM

The Lieutenant’s Lover

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Russia, 1917

One

Two

Three

Germany, 1945

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Epilogue

9 November, 1989

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

DEDICATION

To my beloved N.

‘All shall be wellAnd all shall be wellAnd all manner of things shall be well.’

Mother Julian of Norwich

RUSSIA, 1917

ONE
1

Misha always remembered the moment.

Weeks of war had passed without fighting, just orders to advance, followed almost immediately by orders to retreat. And then one night, on another interminable journey in a troop train, it happened.

It was long past midnight. The train slowed and stopped. The little country platform filled with food vendors selling hot tea, boiled beef, rye pancakes. Misha clambered out to get some clean air and pace the stiffness out of his legs.

As he walked up and down, it began to snow. Small flakes at first, so light they hardly seemed to descend. But within minutes, the flakes had grown into big white feathers. They still seemed to fall so slowly that they were hardly coming down at all, but the ground quickly spread with white. Misha liked the snow, and went on pacing just as before. All around, sounds became softer, rounded, muffled.

Then a new vendor came onto the platform with a bundle of papers. There was a sudden eddy of excitement, men shouting, commotion. And Misha was caught up in it. Acting by some automatic instinct, he’d reached in his pocket for a kopeck or two and snatched a newspaper from the pile. And there, under the lamplight and the falling snow, he had read the headline:

‘BOLSHEVIKS SEIZE POWER IN PETROGRAD. WINTER PALACE STORMED.’

That was all. There was a full article beneath the headline, one part fact, three parts sensational speculation. But Misha didn’t read a word of it. He didn’t have to. He was the son of a wealthy industrialist and landowner, at a time when owning industry and land had become suddenly dangerous.

The Tsar was overthrown. The workers had taken over.

Misha knew that his world had changed, utterly and for ever.

2

Tonya too remembered the moment.

The water butt on the landing had been frozen over, but at this time of year the ice wasn’t yet thick. A couple of axe-blows was enough to break the surface, and she’d filled the enamel jug, feeling it grow suddenly heavy as the water rushed in. She carried it through to the apartment beyond the landing.

In the living room, a cast-iron stove leaked heat and smoke in equal measure. The room was dim. In the corner by the stove, a man sat and watched Tonya enter and shrug off the thick coat which she wore over her nurse’s uniform.

‘Not working, Father?’

He grinned, showing a mouth that held just four teeth, and not one of them a beauty. ‘Why work? It’s the revolution.’ Pleased with his answer, he repeated the word, dragging it out, giving a final kick to the final syllable, revolutsya, revolutsy-a.

To begin with, Tonya had ignored him. There was the fire to stoke, water to boil, soup to make, her elderly grandmother, Babba Varvara, to care for. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but then again as his excuses for not doing his job as a railwayman were innumerable, she didn’t care much either.

But then the old man had nudged the table. There was a newspaper lying there. Tonya remembered picking it up almost angrily, irritated at the interruption. And there it was, in simple words, black on white. The Winter Palace was stormed. The Tsar was captured. The workers were in control.

For a moment, perhaps only a second, Tonya remembered thinking that this must be good news. She was a worker, wasn’t she? If their class was victorious, then things would get better wouldn’t they? She looked back at her father, who grinned again. His mouth was like a black hole thumbed into the dark grey shadow of his face.

‘Revolutsy-a,’ he repeated, nastily. ‘Revolutsy-a.’

The word was ominous, and it sounded like death.

TWO
1

Misha had stood beneath the lamplight, reading and rereading that headline, ignoring the snow that fell continuously on his arms, head and neck. And then, after perhaps twenty minutes of shocked thought, he’d jerked his head up. It had become obvious that his time in the army was over, that it was his duty to desert, to seek out his family, to see that everyone was all right.

Nothing had been easier. He’d simply walked down the platform, away down the track out of the lamplight. He’d sheltered there in the bushes till the train whistled and moved off, taking his commander and fellow soldiers with it. When day had come, he’d wound a dirty bandage around his head and darkened it with blood from a dead pigeon. Going back to the railway station, he’d barged and begged his way onto the first train that came along. It had taken three weeks to cross the country. He’d had to evade the military police, to bribe guards, to walk long distances wherever the train services had completely stopped working. But he’d done it. He’d come home to Petrograd, the city of his birth.

The family home, a big mansion on Kuletsky Prospekt, stood in front of him. At first glance, nothing had changed. The great sweep of steps was still there, the iron railings, the glittering expanse of windows. But something was wrong. The lanterns on either side of the front doors were unlit. A narrow pathway had been trampled through the snow on the steps, but the snow hadn’t been cleared, nor had sand been scattered to avoid slips.

Feeling strange, as though in a dream, he approached his own front door and stepped inside. The moment that his foot crossed the threshold, he knew that the world, his world, had changed for ever.

The old house, once grand and silent, was aswarm with people. There were families, families of workers, in every room. The house was occupied and carved up like any tenement block. In the drawing room, where countesses had once danced, crude wooden partitions chopped the room into three. A stove burned smokily in the fireplace. A washing line hung over the marble mantelpiece. There were beds, and not even beds, mere piles of straw covered over with dirty sheets heaped up around the walls. Misha noticed a woman, dressed in black, grinning at him as she stirred a cooking pot. Around her neck she wore what looked like a gigantic diamond, and he realised that the room’s chandelier had disappeared, its crystal pendants stripped and scattered. He stared at her in shock, until she began to cackle. He walked abruptly on.

In every room, it was the same. It wasn’t like a tenement block, it was worse. The great house had never been intended for more than a few occupants and its plumbing and drainage were overwhelmed. The stairway had become a urinal. Pails of faeces were slopped from windows or just left slowly freezing for the next person to deal with. The house rang with arguments, songs, whistles, babies howling, children yelling, neighbours bickering.

Misha entered every room in turn. Nobody stopped him or told him to leave. He recognised nobody. Nobody recognised him. No servant from the old days, no groom or footman, certainly not his father, mother or sisters. He felt gathering dread. On the ground floor, nothing. On the first floor, also nothing. The second and third floors were likewise empty of any trace of his family or staff. As he climbed to the fourth and final floor, a floor once reserved for servants, he was convinced of the worst.

At the top of the final flight of stairs, the corridor branched off in two directions. One corridor looked and smelled like everything else in the house: the same ill-dressed, chattering horde. The other corridor was different. Its mouth was blocked off by a makeshift barricade: a door torn from its hinges, behind it a wardrobe, an ebony chest, a silk damask chaise longue, a card table, a bookcase. There was a gap barely big enough for a human to pass through. Misha stared at the ridiculous fortification in astonishment, and sudden joy. He put his hand to the torn-off door, knocked loudly and began to squeeze through.

He was just sucking in his belly to get past an awkwardly placed chair leg, when there was a sudden movement in the half-dark beyond. A hand grabbed him and yanked. He tumbled forwards. There was the click of a pistol being cocked and a shouted warning.

‘Easy, easy,’ said Misha, speaking as calmly as he was able.

Further on down the passage, a door swung open releasing some daylight into the gloom. Turning slowly, Misha looked up. The family’s old coachman, Vitaly, recognised his master and pulled his pistol away in a flurry of apology. One of the ladies’ maids had been standing behind Vitaly with an antique carbine. She too dropped her weapon.

‘Mikhail Ivanovich! Mikhail Ivanovich!’

‘Vitaly! Thank God. Mother, is she—?’

But he didn’t have to finish. His mother, Emma Ernestovna, a woman of forty-two, but more stately, more queenly than her age, came rushing out. She was dressed as no one these days was dressed: a long gown in violet silk, fur-trimmed at the neckline.

‘Misha, my boy!’

She ran to him, her hands out for him to kiss. He kissed her as she wanted, then embraced her properly, kissing her on both cheeks. He didn’t let go, but asked the questions that drummed inside him.

‘Father? Natasha and Raisa? Yevgeny?’

Yevgeny, Misha’s six-year-old brother, answered the last question by emerging from somewhere like a bullet and hugging his legs.

‘Hello, Yevgeny. You’ve grown,’ Misha said, hoisting him up.

His mother watched distractedly. ‘Yevgeny, yes, he’s here. Natasha and Raisa, bless them, in Switzerland – we think – it all depends on the trains – I haven’t had a telegram – we should have had a telegram – what do you think? – Your sisters, really…’

‘I’m sure they’re fine. No telegrams would have come through anyway. And Father?’

‘Your father?’ She spoke the words as though struggling to remember someone she’d once known. ‘He’s very well. He’s in Zhavalya. On business. Urgent business. He must have been detained. He’s in Zhavalya. He must be. He wouldn’t leave us here like this.’

Misha listened to his mother, hearing her words and not hearing them at the same time. Zhavalya was the family’s country estate, about two thousand kilometres east of Moscow. But Misha knew his father wasn’t there. He couldn’t be. Not now, not in winter, now with revolution surging around the capital city and his family unprotected.

‘In Zhavalya?’ he said blankly.

But he didn’t mean anything by his question. He knew the answer. If his mother were telling herself this lie, then it could only mean that his father was dead. That the dominating industrialist, the man of business, his distant but not unkind father had been murdered. And in that same moment, literally from one moment to the next, Misha realised that his childhood was over. He had become a man, the head of the household.

Everyone now depended on him.

2

Pavel was gone.

Kiryl, Tonya’s father, either didn’t know where his son was, or more likely wouldn’t say. But the boy was just fourteen and delicately built. Two winters ago, he had caught typhus, at the same time as their mother had died of it. He had survived, but only just and Tonya knew she couldn’t let him wander the streets, out late and alone. She put on coat, hat, gloves and scarf.

‘I’m going to look for Pavel,’ she said. ‘We can eat when I get back.’

‘Comrade citizen Pavel, you mean,’ said her father.

Tonya ignored him and hurried out. A thin snow was falling, but nothing substantial, just tiny round specks flung around in a piercing wind. Her father’s last comment could have meant nothing at all, just another one of the old man’s jokes, but it had possibly been intended as a clue. She hurried through the streets, feeling her breath beginning to freeze on the brim of her cap.

After walking for twenty minutes, she came to the intersection of Sadoyava Triumfalnaya and Sadoyava Karetnaya. There was a large building with a broad fanlight over a lighted porch. Outside there was a pile of logs, guarded by a soldier with a rifle.

‘Is this where the meeting is?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Inside. It’s been going two hours already.’

‘Those logs…?’

‘… are red logs. For the Petrograd Soviet.’

The soldier might have meant his answer, or he might just be getting ready to haggle. Tonya thrust her hand in her pocket and brought out a lump of sugar as big as her fist. It was damp, grey and sticky, but good currency all the same.

‘I’ve got sugar.’

The soldier shook his head. ‘The logs belong to Comrade Lenin. You need to ask him.’

Tonya stuffed her sugar away, unbothered by the rejection. In this strange new world, money was no longer reliable. In a city where food and fuel were desperately short, Tonya now always carried something with her, in case she came across a good opportunity to trade. Most times she failed, sometimes she got lucky. It was just a question of being always ready to try.

She went on into the building. Down in the basement, there was a meeting of the Borough Housing Commission. At the front of the room, there was a kind of podium, planks stretched across wooden egg crates. The podium was dominated by a speaker, hatless and wearing an unbuttoned leather jerkin. The man caught sight of Tonya as she entered. She knew he’d seen her, because his eyes fixed on her, but there was no change in his voice or posture. His presence commanded the room. He was strikingly good-looking with dark curly hair, worn shorthand a lean, handsome, intelligent face. The only bad feature he possessed was a nose that had been badly broken. Though still narrow, it bent sharply where it had been struck.

The man, Rodyon Leonidovich Kornikov, was Tonya’s cousin and a rising star in the new Bolshevik administration. He fixed his eyes on her, then directed his glance deliberately across the room, before bringing it back to her. He never stopped speaking for a second. His sentences came out perfectly, without mistake or hesitation. Tonya looked over to where the man had indicated. Pavel was there, his eyes shining unhealthily, his coat unbuttoned like the man on the platform. Tonya pushed her way across to him.

‘Pavel! You’ll freeze.’

The boy, a fourteen-year-old, began buttoning up almost as soon as he saw his sister; and he let her adjust his hat and scarf. But he still kept his eyes on the platform where Rodyon was winding up.

Tonya turned her attention from Pavel to her cousin. Rodyon spoke of the necessity of establishing revolutionary principles ‘from the first winter on; from the worst slum outwards’. The broken nose in his perfect face served to draw attention to his handsomeness, adding something mesmerising to his features. He finished speaking, to a scattering of applause.

Pavel turned to his sister.

‘Wasn’t he good? When I’m older—’

‘When you’re older you can go out on your own. Right now, you need to stay warm.’

Pavel shrugged. His eyes still shone as though fevered. Rodyon barged through the crowd towards them, stopping in front of Tonya.

‘Comrade!’

‘Rodya! It’s all very well for you to march about like you don’t feel the cold. You should think about Pavel. He copies you.’

‘He will be a good citizen one day. Enthusiastic.’

‘If he doesn’t catch his death first.’

Rodyon smiled. He had perfect teeth, white and even.

‘Well, comrade,’ he said to Pavel. ‘Your sister’s right. You should stay warm too.’

The boy nodded.

‘Are you all right for things? Food and everything?’

‘We don’t have any wood. We’ll have nothing at all to burn by the end of the week.’

‘You have your allocation of course?’

‘If it comes. Last time there was nothing.’

‘That can’t be helped. You can’t rebuild a house without knocking down a wall or two.’

‘They’re not walls. They’re your precious comrade citizens.’

Rodyon smiled. He was an important man, the Housing Commissar of the Petrograd Soviet.

‘I can’t help you. Everyone’s in the same situation.’

Tonya shrugged. She hadn’t actually asked for help, but didn’t say so.

‘But if you want… Uncle Kiryl is still a thief, I suppose?’

Tonya nodded. Her father, Kiryl, worked on the railway and stole coal. An accomplice threw shovelfuls off the train as it entered the station. Kiryl collected the bits up in a sack and sold it on the black market. ‘He only gets vodka and tobacco. He wouldn’t even think of bringing the coal home.’

‘But still, you have things to trade.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then come with me on my tour of inspection tomorrow. You never know what you’ll find in these places once owned by the bourgeois.’

‘Thank you.’

He shook his head. ‘No thanks and no favours. When we have things running properly, you won’t be short of logs.’

He held Tonya’s eyes one last time. Rodyon was a long-time Bolshevik, with two spells in prison to his credit. His nose had been broken in a brawl with police and he was rising fast under the new regime. He had also, for the last two years, been paying careful court to Tonya. He had been constant and, in his way, generous, but Tonya never quite knew whether he was sincere. She wasn’t sure if she was his only girl, or if Rodyon would ever lose his heart to a woman. He seemed too self-possessed for that, too important.

She felt suddenly uncomfortable with him and looked away. But logs were logs, and if Rodyon could help her get some, then she would certainly do as he suggested.

‘Till tomorrow then,’ she said.

3

Misha made changes.

He made them fast, over the tears and protests of his mother and the servants. He began with the barricade at the mouth of the corridor.

‘It has to come down. Now. You think the red militias will be stopped by a chaise longue and a couple of armchairs? Nonsense. It has to come down. Vitaly, come here. I want you to dismantle this thing. That horrible old wardrobe is no good for anything. We can use it for firewood. Those other pieces you can share out among the others.

‘Next the windows. They’re hopeless. They need fixing properly. We don’t have any putty, of course. But how do you make putty? It’s chalk and oil, isn’t it? Linseed oil. I saw chalk in Yevgeny’s room. We’ll use that. Seraphima, do you know where we can get linseed oil? If we can’t get the oil, ordinary flax seeds will do. We can press them for oil. And in the meantime, curtains.

Do we have any fabric? No? Then use the hanging in mother’s room—’

‘The tapestry, Misha! No! It’s French, you know. Your grandmother—’

‘It’s thick and it’s heavy. It’ll do. Use the carpet too if you have to.’

And on it went.

The fireplaces were useless, so Misha stole some empty oil cans and turned them into stoves. He dismissed the servants. He exchanged the ebony chest for a sackful of millet flour, which would see them through winter. He made an inventory of their remaining valuables and concealed them beneath the floorboards.

But problems remained.

Firewood was the worst. They had terribly little, and decent firewood seemed almost impossible to obtain. And the next thing was his mother. She couldn’t adjust to the new conditions. She was always sick with one thing or another. It wasn’t just physical illness, it was a sickness that penetrated her soul. Misha was certain that if he couldn’t find a way to get her into a place of safety, then she wouldn’t survive. Yevgeny too was having his childhood stolen. It seemed clear that the best thing for all of them was to escape Russia, to make their way to Switzerland to join Natasha and Raisa there. But how to do that, with no money, no friends, no help …?

It was as he was thinking about that precise problem one evening that inspiration came to him.

He had gone, as he had done often enough already, over to the glass cabinet and taken out a bundle of papers: his father’s papers that his mother had managed to salvage. He turned the papers in his hand. Although only a few months old, they seemed as ancient as Egyptian papyrus. Stock certificates. Title deeds. Bank statements. Holdings of land. Everything represented by those papers had been swept away, almost literally overnight. On the top of the pile, there was a coloured picture postcard of General Kutuzov, the victor of the Battle of Borodino a hundred years earlier and a particular hero of Misha’s father. It was odd seeing the card. It was almost as though these stock certificates and the struggle against Napoleon both existed in the same far distant past.

But as well as certificates of ownership, the bundle contained letters from lawyers, accountants, brokers. And a persistent theme ran through them. From about February 1917, his father seemed to have started selling assets. Stocks, bonds, land, anything. There were no huge sales. The country was at war with Germany and Austria, after all. It would have been impossible to sell up completely, even if he had wanted to. But there was a steady stream of sales and yet no evidence from the bank statements that his savings accounts had increased by even a rouble. And yet there were hundreds of thousands of roubles involved. Though Misha had reviewed the papers a dozen times already, he was struck by a sudden thought.

‘Mother? These papers. Where did you get them?’

‘Oh, your father’s study of course. Where else?’

‘Where in his study? His desk? His cabinet?’

‘Oh yes. His desk, the cabinet. Luckily we had the keys. But we had to work fast. One day, we had everything, the next it was a knock at the door and this horrible young man with a leather coat telling us about the new decrees.’

‘You had the key. Who else?’

‘Oh, your father, silly! How else could he have opened them?’ Emma Ernestovna laughed out loud.

‘His secretary, I suppose?’

‘Leon? I suppose.’

‘And how did you happen to have one? Did he give it to you?’

‘Oh no, not me. Why should I have a key to his cabinet? Maria Fedorovna, the housekeeper, had a set of keys. That cabinet! Japanese lacquer. So nice, but the polishing!’

‘Maria Fedorovna had a key, did she?’

Misha’s mother said something in reply, but he was no longer listening. He felt a sudden shock of excitement. Because it was inconceivable that his father would have left his most important documents in a place where a servant could have access to them. It was almost as if the bundle that his mother rescued had been a decoy to draw attention away from the real ones. Misha jumped up.

‘Excuse me.’

He ran out, down the corridor and downstairs. His father’s study had been on the ground floor, behind the drawing room, a place of high bookshelves, cigar smoke, polished wood and leather. Of course, it wasn’t like that now. Two families had been allocated the room, and seemed to fight bitterly over the use of every square inch. A china pisspot tucked behind a curtain constituted the hygiene arrangements. A trail of slops led from there to the nearest window. But that wasn’t what caught Misha’s notice.

What caught his eye was a grey steel safe, bolted and cemented into the wall behind the panelling. The safe had only been exposed when the room’s inhabitants had begun ripping up the panelling for firewood. The plaster around the safe had been smashed off. Misha could see the pale marks where sledgehammers had struck. But the safe had withstood the assault. Steel bars protruding from the side of the safe were deeply set into the masonry. Misha had never known of the safe’s existence. Its sudden exposure reminded him of what his family must have been through in those first weeks of revolution, before his arrival home. No wonder his mother was in a state of collapse. Anyone would be.

He looked up, snapping himself out of this unhelpful change of thought. Both families, fourteen or fifteen people in all, were staring at Misha, grinning. They knew who he was, as did all the occupants of the house. An old man, a grandfather spat in the fireplace and cackled, ‘Come to say goodbye, eh?’

‘I’m looking for logs. You don’t have any, do you?’

The old man wasn’t deterred. He nodded back at the safe. ‘They’re coming to take it away next week. They’re going to put a tractor in the yard out there, run chains in through the window, then bang! Out it comes. It’s full of gold, they say.’

‘When are they coming?’

‘Tuesday. Wednesday. Who knows?’

That gave Misha three days, maybe four. Except he didn’t know the codes and he wasn’t a safe-breaker.

4

Tonya went with Rodyon the next day.

The Petrograd Soviet had issued a stream of housing decrees, making bold statements about minimum space requirements, light requirements, heat requirements, water and sewerage requirements. It was Rodyon’s job to see those decrees were implemented, or at least not wildly breached. All morning, Tonya watched him stride around his domain, backed by a flurry of lesser officials. And he did stride. He seemed to fly through his duties. Those with surplus space were reprimanded, spare rooms reallocated, disputes settled.

And, Tonya noticed, he was fair. He never victimised the rich. He dealt with them the same way as he dealt with everyone. And he lived by the standards that he set others. Like everyone else, he was thin and hungry, and Tonya could tell from his clothes that he slept in them for warmth.

All morning, they strode around. Tonya didn’t find any opportunities for barter. She didn’t know why she was here. She felt cross with Rodyon for wasting her day.

‘I thought you were going to help me find logs,’ said Tonya, when they broke for lunch.

‘Yes. But first I wanted you to see this.’

‘See what?’

Rodyon turned to her, his handsome face with its broken nose.

‘People grumble because our revolution hasn’t delivered the promised land overnight. But how could it? For centuries, the bourgeois have exploited the workers. For centuries, the landowners have stolen from the peasants. It will take many years to put that right. And that’s why it’s important not to lose a day.’

‘Why me? Why did you want me to see it?’

‘Why you?’ Rodyon smiled and his smile turned his face back into an enigma. ‘Because it’s important for everyone to understand. Especially young people. Especially intelligent ones. Especially ones with sparkling eyes and—’

He moved his hand towards her face. Instinctively Tonya drew back and he managed to convert his gesture into a cousinly pat on the shoulder. He smiled as though to laugh away his last sentence, and she smiled as though she accepted his dismissal of it. She felt confused and her confusion made her uncomfortable. She liked Rodyon; liked and admired him. He was a man with power in a world where power mattered. But Tonya still never quite knew where she stood with him. She’d had men – boys really – in love with her before. But then she’d known that love was love. The boys had been goofy with it, soppy with it, angry with it, overcome with it. But it seemed as though nothing would ever overcome Rodyon. He seemed to be a man who could never be mastered.

Rodyon finished his bowl of gruel with a grimace.

‘Well then, comrade citizen, let’s find you logs.’ His voice sounded harsh.

The next house was a big mansion on Kuletsky Prospekt. And there it was the same thing. Arrangements were checked, papers filled, orders given, disputes settled. In one room, bone cold even in the middle of the day, a steel safe was cemented into the wall, the marks of sledgehammers and crowbars fresh in the surrounding plaster.

And on the top floor, Rodyon whispered to Tonya. ‘Your bourgeois await. How you deal with them is up to you.’

The family concerned – a mother, a small boy and a young man about Tonya’s age – were living in two rooms of a former servants’ attic. Rodyon flashed through his interrogation, purposeful and disciplined. Only this time, his usual fairness had been replaced by something harder. Rodyon’s questioning had a cruel edge to it, a hint of the police cells. The young man, the son, answered for the mother. Tonya could see that he was taken aback by Rodyon’s attitude, but he nevertheless kept his cool. After fifteen minutes, the questioning turned away from the matter of housing.

‘There is a safe downstairs.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are aware that the contents of that safe belong to the Petrograd Soviet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what is inside?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know the codes?’

‘No.’

‘You’re telling me that your father didn’t tell you?’

‘I was away in the army. Before that – well, he thought I was too young, I suppose.’

‘You are aware that theft from the Petrograd Soviet is a serious offence?’

‘Of course.’

The young man smiled bitterly. And in that smile, for the first time, Tonya saw the revolution from the point of view of the former ruling class. This young man’s family had lost all its worldly goods, its enormous house, and now here he was being accused of stealing the things that had once been his. She was struck by his calmness, impressed.

‘Do you have any documents that relate to your father’s previous concerns?’

‘Yes.’

Without being asked the young man got them out and handed them over.

‘Why weren’t these submitted earlier to the proper authorities?’

‘I didn’t know they were meant to be.’

‘There were decrees issued and posted. It is the responsibility of every citizen to inform themselves and—’

‘I was in the army. I wasn’t in Petrograd.’

‘No matter. You were in the army. What about now?’

‘No, not any more. I was wounded…’

‘You have a demobilisation order from an officer in the Red Army?’

‘At the time it wasn’t the Red Army and—’

‘Movement orders?’

The interview lasted another couple of minutes: unrelenting, hard, hostile, tough. The business with the safe was brought up again. The young man insisted he knew nothing of it. Rodyon again reminded him of how seriously ‘theft from the Petrograd Soviet’ would be regarded. He meant either prison cells or the bullet, and the young man smiled grimly in acknowledgement.

And then it finished. Rodyon swept on out of the house, down onto the street, to the next house and the next and the next. But he left Tonya behind him, peering through the half-open door, listening to the silence.

5

Misha was about to bend down to check the stove, when he realised that the door out onto the corridor wasn’t closed and that the space outside wasn’t empty. He straightened. There was a girl there, dark-haired and serious. There was something very still in her manner, and something remarkable in her stillness. She was still in the way that a white owl is, or a deer grazing in snow. But there was also something watchful about her, untrusting. She didn’t come or go. She didn’t speak. She didn’t even glance away when she saw Misha looking at her.

‘Zdrasvoutye,’ he said. ‘Good day.’

‘Good day.’

She didn’t move.

‘If you want to come in, then come in. But close the door, it’s getting cold.’

She nodded, smiled briefly, and came in.

‘Well?’

‘I was wondering if you had things to trade?’

‘That depends. What do you have to sell?’

Her hand went into her pocket and came out with a lump of grey sugar and a pack of tobacco cut in half across the label. She held them out, but even as she did so, she must have seen that neither the tobacco nor the sugar were likely to go far in that house. Her mouth twitched. ‘Nothing. Just rubbish.’

Misha looked at the proffered goods and listened to the girl’s description of them with a grave face. Without changing his expression, he said, ‘Rubbish, hmm. We don’t have much call for that here. But perhaps we could find some garbage to exchange.’

He kept a straight face and looked directly at the girl. For just a second or so, she reflected his own expression: serious, unsmiling. Then his words got through some barrier, and she burst out laughing. She stuffed her goods away with a blush.

‘You want logs too,’ she said, gesturing at the feeble pile of birch wood next to the stove. ‘So do I.’

‘So does everyone, it seems. There are no wooden fences left any more.’

‘I know where to get logs though,’ said the girl. ‘Proper ones. Seasoned and everything. The peasants bring them in from the country, but they don’t dare come all the way into town because of the police. Only their prices are high. They don’t accept rubbish.’

Misha stared at the girl. The Housing Commissioner had only just left, seemingly leaving this strange girl washed up like driftwood on his doorstep. Could she possibly be a police spy? The girl read his thoughts.

‘Don’t worry about the commissioner. He’s gone. And anyway he’s my cousin. He brought me here, because he thought you might be able to… I mean he thought… I don’t really know what he thought.’

Misha hesitated, then decided to accept what she said. He plunged into the chest which contained those valuables too large to go under a floorboard. He came out with a china figurine, Meissen porcelain touched with gold leaf. It was very fine, very white, graceful.

‘Would this do, do you think?’

The girl gasped. Misha realised she had probably never seen anything so fine. He gave it to her to hold and look at. She turned it over reverentially, in silence. Her eyes were greenish, with a slightly eastern slant to her eyelids. Though entirely Russian in the way she looked, her eyes gave her a hint of something more exotic, a dash of the Tartar.

‘Well?’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘And would a peasant with a cart full of logs think so?’

She nodded. ‘Of course. They’re not short of food, logs or anything like that. Things like this … well! It would fetch a lot.’

‘Good. And if you had something other than rubbish to trade, you’d be happy to show me where to go?’

She nodded.

Misha grinned a huge and delighted grin. He had numerous problems, of course; all of them important. How to get his mother out of the country. What had happened to his father’s money. How to get inside the safe. But of all his concerns, his most pressing was firewood. Typhus was endemic in the city. Bad food and cold weather would turn it into a killer. His mother was certainly at risk. He dived into the chest again, and pulled out a second figurine. He tossed it into the air and caught it.

‘One for you, one for me. Is it too late to go there now?’

The girl looked at him and at the china doll in her hand. She was wide-eyed, disbelieving. ‘For me? Really?’

‘If you show me where to go.’

She nodded. ‘It’s too late now. We have to go first thing. It’ll be a long haul back anyway.’

‘Do you have a sledge?’

She shook her head.

‘Really,’ Misha tutted, ‘a pocketful of rubbish and no sledge. I can get one, though. Tomorrow morning then?’

She nodded.

She gazed down at the figurine in her hand and put it down gently on the table beside the stove. ‘You keep this,’ she said abruptly. ‘Until tomorrow. You shouldn’t…’

‘I shouldn’t what?’

‘You shouldn’t give people things like that. Not until you know that they’ll give you something in return. You don’t know me.’

‘But I trust you. If you’d taken the figurine, you’d have come back tomorrow anyway, wouldn’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Well then.’

‘But that’s not the point.’

‘Isn’t it?’

She didn’t answer, just turned to go. She had her hand on the door and was about to leave, when Misha stopped her. ‘Wait! I don’t know your name.’

‘Lensky.’

‘I can’t call you Lensky.’

‘Antonina Kirylovna Lensky.’

‘Antonina Kirylovna,’ said Misha with a very pre-revolutionary bow, ‘I’m Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich.’

‘Mikhail Ivanovich, comrade.’

‘Till tomorrow then.’

‘Till tomorrow.’

6

Tonya arrived early the next morning, just as Misha was bringing the sledge around to the front of the house. It was dawn, or just a few minutes after.

They started off quickly. The empty sledge ran so easily on the icy upper layer of the snow that it seemed weightless. At turnings, it bucked and slid sideways like a boisterous colt. Going down hills, even shallow ones, it began to run so fast that on two occasions Misha and Tonya fell backwards into it, steering and braking with a boot heel. Misha laughed out loud for pleasure.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘This is. It’s fun, isn’t it?’

‘It won’t be so much fun on the way back, pulling this thing full of logs.’

‘All the more reason to enjoy it now.’

Tonya shrugged and for a few moments they tramped along in silence. Then Misha spotted a side street that dropped in a long curve to a secondary road below. His face twitched. With a quick glance sideways at Tonya, he put out his foot and toppled her backwards into the sledge. In the same swift movement, he pulled the sledge around and directed it to the right, down the hill. The sledge quickly leaped forwards, picking up speed. Misha jumped in next to Tonya, who, apart from a single shout of surprise, had said nothing.

Misha had his foot out, ready to guide the sledge, but where possible he let it find its own direction, banking steeply on the mounds of grey snow.

‘This isn’t the right way,’ she said.

‘We’ll go left at the bottom and pick up our road again.’

Tonya kept her face set forwards. ‘You’re going too fast.’

‘All right then, I’ll brake.’

Misha jabbed his foot out and deliberately kicked a spray of fine powdery snow high into the air. The sledge swept into the spray, spattering them. At first Tonya didn’t smile, but then she too thrust her leg out and kicked up a miniature snowstorm. And then they were both at it, wrestling each other like brother and sister, kicking snow everywhere, letting the sledge plunge recklessly downhill. When they got to the bottom, the sledge struck a big drift lying transversely across their path and the nose plunged in, stopping them abruptly and showering them with yet more snow.

They lay in the bottom of the sledge, laughing, getting their breath and looking up at the piled-up clouds above.

‘Antonina Kirylovna?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I call you Antonina?’

‘You may call me comrade Lensky.’

Misha looked at her. Her face flickered with a smile, though she was doing her best not to show it. ‘Very well. Comrade Lensky?’

‘Yes, comrade Malevich?’

‘May I reprimand you, comrade, for fooling around in the snow when your revolutionary duty is to escort the bourgeois to market.’

‘You are right, comrade. I believe my political education must be at fault. I will endeavour to correct my thinking.’

They got up and brushed themselves clear of snow. Misha had taken his hat off and tossed it behind him into the sledge. Somewhere during their tumultuous descent, his hands had got muck on them, and he briskly washed them in a drift of cleanish snow, as matter of factly as if the drift had been a basin of warm water. Tonya watched him, finding him strangely exotic: this former aristocrat now living in bitter poverty; this tall young man, an outcast from the new Soviet system, laughing and joshing with her, the daughter of a lowly railway worker. Young and fair-skinned as he was, Misha only barely needed to shave daily and Tonya felt herself older than him, much older even, though she guessed their ages must be almost the same.

‘Very good, comrade Lensky.’

‘If you please, comrade Malevich.’

They started off again, pulling the sledge, mostly in silence now, though the silence was very different from the way they’d started. After walking for an hour and a half, they got to the railway halt where the peasants brought their produce. There was everything there: food, logs, tobacco, vodka, sugar, meat. Tonya was right. The peasants faced none of the shortages of the city where food and fuel were concerned. Misha wished he’d brought more than just the figurine to trade.

Tonya insisted on handling the haggling process herself. She played her hand perfectly, showing little interest in the stacks of firewood, making little clucks of disappointment when she noted sticks that were too thin or poorly seasoned. At the same time, she allowed the peasant women to handle the two figurines, never for long, but always for long enough for them to admire the extraordinary workmanship that had gone into them. Tonya didn’t want Misha with her as she bargained, and she waved him away into another part of the slushy yard. He found a man, a former teacher, with nothing to sell except a stack of books on mathematics and engineering. Misha longed to buy them. The books seemed like a glimpse of a possible future, a future of quiet studies and a reputable profession. But Misha had nothing in his pockets and he had to disappoint the man. Meantime, Tonya had fixed on a particular peasant woman, and soon the bargaining began, swift and sharp. A deal was made, and Tonya came over to Misha, waving her hand at an enormous stack of logs.

‘Those,’ she said.

‘Those? All of them?’

Tonya nodded. ‘It’ll take two trips. You’ll have to take one load back by yourself while I wait here. I won’t let these logs out of my sight, or they’ll try to cheat us.’

Misha nodded. He thought of pointing out that Tonya must therefore trust him to return later with the sledge. But he said nothing. They stacked the logs on the sledge and tied them down. Tonya had somehow seen Misha’s desire for the books.

‘You want those?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to study. I think I’d like engineering.’

Tonya shrugged, approached the man, and struck a bargain. Misha thought she’d used her lump of sugar and a half-pack of tobacco, but he wasn’t sure. The man leaped away, as though hurrying to preserve his good fortune. Tonya dumped the stack of books on the sledge.

‘There.’

‘Goodness! Thank you! You didn’t have to… How can I…’

Tonya brushed aside his offers of repayment with a cross shake of her head. ‘Why do you owe me anything? If you don’t tie those books down, you’ll lose them.’

Misha tied the books down next to the logs.

‘You’ll need to go fast. My place is a mile or two further than yours.’

‘As quick as I can.’

He set off. The way back lay slightly uphill and even though the snow had a good icy crust, the slope and the rutted surface caused innumerable problems. Misha’s arms and back were already sore by the time he arrived back in Kuletsky Prospekt. He unloaded the logs, getting Yevgeny and his mother to carry them upstairs. Then he headed back to Tonya, who had been waiting four hours by now, but who looked as immobile and impassive as if she’d been waiting four minutes or four years.

‘Comrade Lensky.’

‘Comrade Malevich.’

Without much further talk, they loaded up and began the long journey back. The roads had thawed a little, making the pulling conditions worse. It was heavy, dogged labour, even with Tonya helping. Once a soldier challenged them to produce the right documentation for their load. Tonya didn’t even bother to pretend to justify herself. She just swore at the soldier, using deliberately coarse, proletarian expressions. Misha had never heard a girl swear before. And though the soldier swore back, he didn’t try to stop them.

‘You put him in his place,’ said Misha.

‘Did it shock you?’

‘No. Yes, maybe. The way people speak and so much else seems to have changed these days. But I’m pleased we didn’t have to stop.’

Tonya made a ‘tsk’ noise, as though Misha had said something wrong, and they relapsed into silence as they continued. Tonya’s house was further than she had said and it was almost dark by the time they reached her yard. Misha was very tired now, but said nothing about it. They unloaded the sledge. The logs had become wet on the journey and were now starting to freeze.

‘Do you want me to carry them up for you?’

‘No.’

‘A good day’s work.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you want…’ Misha began, then stopped. If she wanted, then what? Misha knew where the peasants congregated now. He wouldn’t need her help again, and without things to trade – things such as he still had and she didn’t – the girl wouldn’t have much reason to go back there.

‘If I want, what?’

‘Nothing. Only … where do you work?’

‘The hospital. The Third Reformed. I’m a nurse.’

‘I see. And your father works on the railway, I think you said.’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Nothing, only I need a job.’

‘Well you can get work anywhere, can’t you? I don’t think you’d be much use as a nurse.’

‘No, but the railway appeals.’

‘Well then. Go to the railway.’ Tonya picked up an armful of logs. She stacked them in the crook of her arm, piling them until they were tucked high under her chin.

‘You’re sure I can’t help?’

‘I’ve been carrying logs all my life, comrade Malevich. For me, today wasn’t an adventure.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Misha picked up the reins of the sledge and began the slow trudge home.

7

He got home, weary but satisfied.

His satisfaction lasted approximately one second from the moment he threw open the door to their rooms.

His gaze fixed first on his mother, silent and white-faced – then Yevgeny, the same – then on two soldiers in the corner by the window, holding their rifles in front of them like walking sticks. A third man in a tie and a dark coat waited on the opposite wall. He had a revolver at his waist. There was total silence.

Misha broke it.

‘Good evening,’ he said.

‘Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich?’ said the man in the tie.

‘Yes.’

‘Come with us.’

‘Come? Why? Is this an arrest?’

The man didn’t bother to answer. Emma was frozen in her chair by the stove, eyes terrified, too scared even to cry. Misha saw Yevgeny, his ‘little comrade’, clutching his mother as though it was his job to comfort her.

‘I’ll be fine, Mother. This gentleman only wants to ask some questions. I’ll be home soon.’

Perhaps or perhaps not. He knew he had no way of telling. With the man in the tie leading the way, the soldiers pushed Misha out of the door, then led him downstairs into a waiting car. There were two more soldiers in the vehicle, also armed. Still no one spoke.

The car, lurching dangerously on the uncleared roads, crept through the city. It was dark now and from his position, seated in between two soldiers, Misha had a hard job working out where they were going. Lamps flashed by in the darkness. The soldiers in front muttered inaudibly between themselves. Once, they hit a patch of ice and slid sideways into a drift. Two of the men had to get out to help push the car out again, while the driver turned in his seat and stared at Misha with unreadable eyes.

After twenty-five minutes they stopped outside a large building somewhere near the centre of town. The building had two large iron lanterns burning outside and a pair of armed guards just inside the doorway. Misha thought he could see a sign reading ‘Ministry of Economic … but he didn’t have time to read the whole sign and wasn’t certain of what he’d seen anyway. He was thrust through the doorway and was marched at speed up a broad turning staircase and along wide, ringing corridors. They stopped at a door. One of the soldiers knocked once, got an answer, then shoved Misha through.

The room was around a dozen feet square, with a grey striped rug over a parquet floor. One wall was covered by a dark wooden unit, cupboards on the bottom, glass-fronted shelves above. The shelves were mostly empty, except for a few rows filled by books with titles like Report of the Commission into the Iron and Steel Industry 1912. The only other adornments were a map of Russia and a portrait of Karl Marx.

Behind the desk sat a man, formal, neat, wire-rimmed spectacles over a beaky nose. The man wore a carefully trimmed beard and a look of mild busyness. A second man stood on the opposite side of the room by the door, so Misha couldn’t look at them both at the same time. Misha was given a low stool and told to sit.

‘Malevich? Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich?’

Misha confirmed his identity with a nod. Then it began. Questioning, intense and repetitive, constant and intrusive.

He was asked about everything. Things that mattered, things that didn’t. Things to which they must already have known the answers, things that it was impossible for anyone to have known. Misha’s time in the army. His purchases on the black market. His father’s business dealings. The conversion of Kuletsky Prospekt into workers’ accommodation. Their various small breaches of the housing decrees. His acquisition of logs that day. His contacts with other members of the old regime.

Mostly the questions were asked by the man at the desk: a functionary, not a policeman or a soldier, one of a new breed of Bolshevik bureaucrats. Whenever the man at the desk had had enough, he took a sip of water, a sign for the other man to take over for a spell. Nobody offered Misha violence, but they hardly needed to. The disparity in power in the room was so extreme that a kick or a punch would have been almost an anticlimax. The man with the wire-rimmed spectacles never raised his voice or varied the pace of his questions or took notes. But he never relented. He never gave time to pause. If Misha’s answer to a question ever varied by even a half-shade of implication, the man burrowed away at the variation until it seemed even to Misha as though he’d been caught in some barefaced lie.

Round and round the topics came.

Misha had been dealing ‘enthusiastically’ on the black market. Could he deny it? Was he not aware that there were official allocations of goods, that black-market speculation was tantamount to stealing from the workers? Misha had acquired logs in this way. He admitted it, did he not? What other items had he bought illegally? The man ticked off a list of items on the tips of his fingers as Misha made his confessions.

But through it all, Misha began to sense the man was play-acting. He couldn’t be interested in a few minor black-market dealings. Everyone in Petrograd used the black market. Misha’s strongest feeling was an odd one. He felt sure that Tonya must have betrayed him: that the housing commissar had brought her to do a job, that she’d done it, that he’d been its victim. He felt oddly, deeply wounded. He felt taken in and tricked.

The questioning turned off in another direction. Misha answered as best he could. There was something hypnotic in the rhythm of question and answer. To break the spell, Misha looked at the books on the shelves. Analysis of International Trade from the Baltic Ports 1898–1914. Prussia, Austria and Russia: An Enquiry into International Capital Transactions. The books were as dull as anything Misha could imagine, but they were also used. One or two books lay out on the desk. Others had small paper bookmarks sticking out of them. Misha guessed that he’d seen the sign right as he came in, that he was now in some kind of economics ministry. And in that case, this man, with his private room, his substantial desk, his black telephone, his air of importance, was no minor functionary. Misha guessed he was dealing with a Bolshevik official of some seniority. And in that case, there was only one possible topic of interest to him: namely, Misha’s father’s business dealings in the months before his arrest and murder.

Misha realised this and felt relief glowing through him. He knew nothing of his father’s business. He could answer truthfully and not be caught out. His answers became fuller and franker. Once, in an answer to one question he began talking about the coal mines his father had owned down in Zhavalya. The man listened to him with a thin smile for a few minutes before interrupting.

‘Your father didn’t own those mines. He sold them in October 1916.’

‘No, no, I’d have known if he’d done that,’ said Misha, sincerely.

‘He mortgaged them in June with the Petrograd Savings Bank, then sold his remaining interest in October to a consortium of fellow bourgeois. Please confirm the amounts of the relevant transactions.’

‘No, no, you have that all wrong,’ said Misha. ‘Those mines, they were on the estate in Zhavalya, they were his most important…’

The man took some papers from a drawer and threw them across the desk. Misha caught them and read them, stunned. The documents were obviously genuine. A brief note written in his father’s writing confirmed it absolutely. And the papers confirmed precisely what the man had been saying. Misha was dumbstruck. If his father had done as these documents suggested, then he must have sold virtually everything he’d owned. And the money had gone somewhere. But where? In the middle of a world war, it had hardly been safe to transport valuables out of the country. And as for anything inside the country, the Bolsheviks had confiscated all physical assets and they’d devalued or rendered worthless everything else.

Again and again, Misha’s thoughts returned to the safe in his father’s old study.

It was obvious that his father kept his most valuable possessions in there. And Misha knew that the Bolsheviks hadn’t yet gained access to it. Why hadn’t they just put dynamite to the hinges and blown it apart? Presumably because they suspected that what lay inside might be vulnerable to the blast. Not gold then, but papers.

Misha kept his knowledge secret, but he felt the interrogation was becoming increasingly formal, increasingly pointless. Misha didn’t have the answers the man needed. The man was becoming increasingly sure of it himself. The man asked again and again if Misha cared to remember any communication from his father he had hitherto chosen not to mention.

‘No. For heaven’s sake, I’ve been away in the army for a whole year. He sent letters of course. I’ve kept them. They’re back in the apartment. I can show them…’ Misha stopped, realising that the apartment was probably being searched as they spoke. ‘Well,’ he ended lamely, ‘you’ll see, there’s nothing there.’

Then suddenly, the phone on the desk rang loudly. The sound was immense: a landslide of noise. The man poked his wire-rimmed glasses higher up his nose and answered it. He spoke a word or two and listened. Then he nodded, said, ‘Good, very well,’ and hung up. He looked at Misha.

‘You’re right. There was nothing there.’ There was a short pause. No one moved. Then the man waved a hand at the door, tired but almost amused. ‘Comrade Malevich, you are free to go.’

8

Misha was taken home by the same car, the same driver that had brought him. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the eastern sky, but the city was still dark enough that all Misha could really see was the brightly lit channel carved by the car’s headlamps. The streets were severely iced and the car had to move slowly to avoid skidding.

They stopped at Kuletsky Prospekt.

‘Thanks,’ said Misha.

The driver shrugged.

Misha entered the house and closed the big door behind him. Something seemed wrong. He felt a draught on his face that he didn’t recognise. The hall, never warm, seemed unnaturally cold. From no motive that he could put a name to, Misha, instead of going directly upstairs to his frightened mother, moved across to the room that had been his father’s study. He opened the door as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake the families that would be snoring within.

Only he was wrong. There was no one there. The entire back wall had been ripped away. One whole side of the room was open to the night air and the snow. A light snowfall had drifted into the room itself and lay in a fine dust across the carpet and the mantelpiece. In the half-light of early dawn, the room glowed silver.

Misha stepped further on inside, hardly breathing. In the yard behind the house there stood a pair of tractors. A pair of thick iron chains ran from the yard into the room, and lay across the floor like a pair of giant metal snakes. A sentry stood in the shelter of one of the tractors, smoking a cigarette and looking the other way.

So that was it. The Bolsheviks had traced his father’s asset sales and hadn’t been able to locate the proceeds. And they, like Misha, suspected that this safe held the answers. Having failed to extract any answers from Misha that night, they’d rip the safe out in the morning, then blast their way into it.

Misha had never been close to his father, but he felt his presence in the empty room. His father had been powerful, distant, authoritative, dominant. It was almost impossible to believe that his life could be ended so simply, that his life’s work of turning one sum of money into a very much larger one could be ended by a pair of tractors and a few sticks of dynamite. Misha felt his father’s ghost, hovering in silence, watching the scene with the grim acceptance of a man who knows he’s been bested.

To the right of the safe, and still, ridiculously, in its old position, was an oil painting depicting the 1812 Battle of Borodino, in which Russian troops under General Kutuzov had halted Napoleon before Moscow. The painting was neither especially good nor especially valuable, but, for the dead businessman, it had symbolised everything important about the Russian spirit. The painting had always been referred to just as ‘the 1812’, as though the date said everything that needed saying. Misha remembered the picture postcard that had come with his father’s papers, amused at the coincidence.

Outside in the yard, the sentry threw away his cigarette, turned his face to the room, then yawned.

Misha froze. The light was growing now and he could see the sentry as clear as anything. Inside the room it was darker, but still barely inky. Misha pressed himself against a wall, hardly daring to breathe. It was crazy for him to be here, crazy and dangerous. He should go upstairs at once, home to his mother. He should leave this safe and all its contents well alone.

The moment lasted a few long seconds, before the sentry turned away again, back to his post by the tractor. Misha realised that it was the machinery that was being guarded, not the room. The safe was a safe, after all. And he didn’t go upstairs. Not yet.

He turned back to the painting. The familiar old picture, lined with the faintest powdering of snow along the horizontals of the frame, seemed to jog a memory. In his father’s last letters, he’d kept referring one way or another to the defeat of Napoleon. Perhaps it was his way of reading the disasters that lay ahead and reminding Misha that the Russian spirit would triumph in the end. Treading as quietly as he could, Misha walked up to the picture. A cavalryman on his horse held his sabre high above a cowering Frenchman.

The 1812.

Then Misha got it. In a sudden tumble of insight, he understood it all. Of course his father had been afraid for the future: the asset sales had been proof enough of that. And who could his father trust with his secrets except Misha, his eldest son? But Misha had been away. Letters directed from a Petrograd seething with revolution to a front line crumbling under enemy attack was hardly the most secure form of communication. If Misha’s father had wanted to communicate something of the highest importance, he might well have felt the need to use coded language.

And this was the clue: so simple, so utterly simple. The postcard had been another clue. His father’s references to the defeat of Napoleon had been yet another.

Misha guessed that this safe would unlock like other safes. He would have to turn its hundred-numbered dial clockwise to a particular number, then anti-clockwise to a second number, then again, and then perhaps again. But there was nothing to say that the numbers couldn’t be the same, or repeated.

Misha went to the safe and put his hand to the cold metal of the dial. It moved as soon as he touched it, surprising him. He steadied himself. Outside the sentry was still there, still smoking. In the old picture, the cavalryman still reared, sabre raised over the beaten Frenchman.

Misha turned the dial. Clockwise to eighteen, then back again to twelve. Then again. Then once more. 18, 12, 18, 12, 18, 12. The dial was marked with small black lines on the outside, with numbers marked 0, 5, 10 and so on. In the poor light of the room, Misha had to examine the dial carefully to make sure it was clicking to a halt on the right number. When he reached the last digit, he felt a jab of disappointment. Perhaps he had been foolish to hope, but there was no sound, no sharp click of release. The door didn’t gape suddenly wide. Misha half-stepped away. He remembered his mother upstairs and felt guilty at not having gone directly up. But just before leaving, almost as a gesture of farewell, he put his hand to the door and pulled.

It swung open in total silence.

There was a small packet of jewellery and some papers. Misha put his hand inside and took them all.

THREE
1

The train nosed in, then stopped. Men began to uncouple the long chain of carriages. A short but massive man in a waist-length coat and a flat cap began to bellow instructions in a continual torrent. Half the time, the orders made no sense. The man shouted things like, ‘Lift it up – up – no up, you wet dishcloth – well, down then if it doesn’t go. Down!’ He didn’t make it clear who he was addressing or what he was talking about. His face was bright with anger, and he had a tic in his upper lip. The man giving the orders was comrade Tupolev and he was Misha’s new boss. It was spring.

Tupolev dealt with some other workers, then approached Misha.

‘Malevich. Those carriages. They’re late. They’re required immediately in the port railway. Immediately! Those carriage bodies… Well! They’re in a rotten state! But, you understand, we have to fix them up. You do. Not that you’d understand. An aristocrat. Anyhow. That’s the way it goes. Yes!’

‘You would like me to take charge of repairing those carriages for immediate return to the port railway,’ said Misha, calmly translating his boss’s nonsense into logical order. ‘Yes, comrade.’

Misha knew what he was about. In the four months he’d been working in the Rail Repairs Yard, he’d made himself indispensable. He’d learned metalwork from the older craftsmen. He could work a lathe and a welding torch. He could forge, cast, bore and weld. Each night he read the engineering books that Tonya had bought for him, and his understanding grew. The men turned to him sooner than Tupolev. He had become the yard’s inventor, organiser and inspiration.

He reviewed the string of carriages.

They were mostly boxcars, wooden boxes on wheels, which would be easy enough to sort out. But along with the boxcars, there were half a dozen grain hoppers too, open steel bins on wheels that looked as though they had been dipped in the sea and left to rust. Their upper halves were in a terrible state. Their wheelbases were so dilapidated, that only about half the wheels still functioned.

‘Those hoppers,’ said Tupolev. ‘Well, really!’

Misha examined them briefly, about to recommend them for the scrapheap. Then something caught his eye. A flash of white paint, so badly peeled that it was hard to make out. But the script was Latin not Cyrillic. Misha cleared away some grime from the surface and made it out: LAHTI-HELSINKI. These grain hoppers travelled to Finland, a distant world now, all but inaccessible, and one that was out of reach of comrade Lenin’s murderous hand. Misha felt a sudden lurch of excitement, a cold wash of adrenalin. His hand shook very slightly as he wiped it clean on his trousers.

‘What do you think, comrade?’ asked Tupolev, examining him narrowly. ‘I can see – well, really, the state of them!’

Misha got a grip over his feelings, and replied normally. ‘These hoppers. They’re for the port railway, you said?’

‘The port? No. For Vyborg. The Vyborg line. Don’t tell me what I said, you exploiter! You want to scrap them, I expect, but—’

‘I’ll mend them.’

Tupolev was taken aback. He might be a fool, but he knew the basic technical side of his job well enough. These hoppers were all but useless and he knew it. ‘Mend them! Mend…’

‘After all, they’ll be needed for the harvest. Just think how angry the comrades in the Export Bureau will be if they can’t—’

Misha never finished his sentence.

From the far end of the rail shed, there was a thundering crash and a loud scream, abruptly terminated. A few moments of total silence followed, succeeded by the shouts of men as they ran to the scene. Misha sprinted over, aware that Tupolev was lumbering on after.

It soon became clear what had happened. A carriage had been raised on the yard’s only usable winch. The winch hadn’t been properly secured, and the carriage had come plummeting down. A man lay on the tracks underneath. The man wasn’t from the repairs yard. He wore an ordinary railwayman’s uniform and a bottle of vodka lay smashed to smithereens beside him. The man must have been dead drunk inside one of the carriages. He must have woken up and climbed or fallen from his compartment. Then, when the winch broke, he’d ended up trapped.

Misha pushed through the knot of people. The man was still alive, but his arm and foot were trapped and he was bleeding fast. Unless he was extricated quickly, he could easily die from loss of blood.

‘See?’ Tupolev was shouting. ‘Inattention and slovenliness! And there’s too much vodka drunk all round, I’d say. Oh yes!’

Misha threw himself down beside the trapped docker and peered in through the steel wheels in order to try to gauge how to release the man. He stared a few moments, then rolled back into a sitting position.

‘We need to lift the carriage. That winch is still usable, it’s only the loading pin which has sheared off. You, Feodorov, go and find a pin. Volsky, get up the ladder to the drumhead and clear the old pin. Andropov, go for a doctor. Run!’

Tupolev was still shouting too, but people followed Misha’s instructions in preference. Tupolev stood clenching and unclenching his fists by the injured man. His whole air was that of a man worried about a delay in his schedule. Misha continued to direct proceedings, feeling the hammer of excitement, the vital importance of speed.

Six minutes later, the winch was ready. The carriage began to sway off the ground. The docker, a man prematurely aged by drink with just four teeth left in his filthy mouth, was unconscious now. Unconscious and dying. And still trapped. Though the carriage was no longer pressing down on him, his arm had become caught between the wheels. The only way to release it would be to climb under the carriage and ease it clear.

Misha checked the winch. Feodorov had found a new loading pin, but it was far too small for the weight of the carriage. At any time, the whole thing might come thundering down, killing anyone who might be underneath. Tupolev brought his huge bulk close to the trapped man.

‘Right now, comrade, one big heave and it’ll all be over.’

He was about to heave, when Misha snapped at him.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool, you’ll tear his arm off. Stand back.’

Swallowing once, aware of the carriage’s precarious weight looming above him, Misha rolled beneath it.

Under the wheelbase, it was much darker than Misha had expected and for a moment he could see nothing except a knife-blade of pale sunlight between the carriage rear and the ground. Then the carriage’s underbelly began to be revealed in a series of gleams and dull reflections. Misha could see the man’s arm, badly broken and cut, but not, it seemed, beyond hope. Misha began to tease the warm flesh clear of the metal. There was blood everywhere, splashing on Misha’s face and disturbing his view.

There were shouts from outside; something to do with the winch. Misha worked as fast as he could. He thought he’d done it, then found the man’s arm still immobile. He was panting with the effort and the danger, when he realised that it was only the man’s coat which still held him.

‘A knife,’ he shouted, ‘get me a knife.’

An eternity later, or so it seemed, a knife was slid in to him. He cut the fabric of the man’s coat and the man flopped down like a dead fish.

‘You can pull him out now. You can—’

Then it all happened too fast to recall.

The injured man was hauled out so quickly he seemed to shoot out of sight. There were screams from up above. The carriage lurched down. Misha rolled sideways to escape. There was another sharp movement, dark on dark. Then something seized hold of Misha and he felt a violent, irresistible tug, dragging him sideways. He struck his head on something dark and cold.

Then that was all: darkness and silence.

2

It was in darkness and silence that Tonya hurried from the hospital.

Her father, that drunken fool, had been badly hurt – numerous bones broken, a lot of blood lost – but he would be fine. He was much luckier than he deserved. The ambulance men said someone had risked his life to rescue him and Tonya felt she needed to go and thank his saviour.

She got to the Rail Repairs Yard – a giant shed which squatted like a massive dark beast over the rail lines that led into it. There were a few lights on inside, but the shed was so huge that the few points of light only emphasised its size and shadows. She splashed up the muddy track that led to it and found a door cut into the wooden sides. Beyond the door, there was an office with a lamp lit, but nobody to direct her. From beyond a thin partition wall, she could hear the noise of a busy industrial site: engine noise, men shouting, the ringing of metal on metal. She explored further. She tried one door, found it locked, tried another. The door opened, she came into a passageway, pressed on a bit further, then found another door which opened right out into the railway yard itself.

The sudden change of scale was momentarily daunting. The shed was wide enough that eight railway tracks could enter it side by side. It was long enough that ten railway carriages could be accommodated end to end. And it was high enough that the roof seemed to disappear off into darkness. Though electric bulbs hung down from the roof girders, they did little to illuminate the enormous space.

A man, short but powerfully built, saw her and approached.

‘What, comrade? Looking for your husband, I expect. You’ll have to wait. Party work. I’m sorry, but it’s really no good.’

The man had a bright red face, unhealthily stressed. His plump black moustache quivered.

‘No. My name is Lensky. My father was injured here this afternoon. I wanted to thank whoever it was who—’

‘Ah, yes! Alcohol, of course. Your father was drunk. Disgracefully drunk. Unsafe, is it? You can’t come here and accuse me – oh no! Quite the reverse. The Party Gives high priority – very rightly – safety, of course – not that we can let up, mind you—’

The man boomed on as though anybody cared. Other men had obviously seen Tonya’s entrance and drew close, from curiosity. News of who she was instantly spread and she began to get snippets of fact.

‘—tumbled from the carriage in a stupor—’

‘—the whole thing came smashing down—’

‘—broken loading pin, you see, it’s the only winch we still have working—’

‘—the whole carriage – bam! – eight tons unloaded—’

‘—at least a bottle, I’d say, I don’t think he knew a thing about it—’

‘—old Tupolev just wanted to rip him out. He’d have left his arm right there under the carriage—’

‘—’course, the hard part was lifting the carriage again—’

‘—I wasn’t going in under there. Any fool could see the winch would never hold—’

—bloody fool Tupolev—’

‘—reeking—’

‘—so we sent in our very own bourgeois. Ha, ha, ha! The winch is obviously a true Bolshevik—’

‘—the loading pin was too small—’

‘—almost had his head off—’

‘—came crashing down—’

‘—eight tons unloaded—’

‘—reeking, absolutely reeking—’

‘—bloody fool—’

‘—bam!’

Tonya felt the men swarm around her. Judging by the smell, her father hadn’t been the only one to take a drink that day. The Railway Repairs Yard was an all-male preserve and Tonya felt something charged and predatory in the atmosphere.

‘Who is he? Is he here now?’

‘No, no, the hospital took him ages ago. You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’ – Tonya’s uniform was visible under her coat – ‘Didn’t they tell you?’

‘Not my father. The man who pulled him out. He was hurt? Injured?’

‘Ha, ha! Thank the bourgeois, is it? He’s over there.

You won’t get much sense from him, though. Not with a crack on the head like he got.’

The men were unhelpful, pressing close. With their oily, leering faces and black beards and moustaches, the men didn’t just seem like another half of the same species, but like a different species altogether: dirtier, noisier, brutish, dangerous. Unconsciously, Tonya held her coat closed at the front and broke away from the men, heading for the welding bay. Behind her, the fool Tupolev began ordering his men back to work, so she was spared the delight of a fifteen-man escort.

Down in the welding bay, a single man worked with a blowtorch. Showers of flame and sparks were struck into being. The metal glowed red-hot, even white-hot. Nothing of the man himself was visible. He wore a protective suit and had a dark visor to protect his face. Except that he was tall, Tonya could guess almost nothing of his looks. He didn’t see her approach. He didn’t stop work. He was mending a thick metal tube which must have been heavy, but the man handled it with a rare combination of strength and deftness, turning it with his left hand as he welded with his right. Finally the job was done. He cut his torch and the flame died. He pulled his visor up and off. He stepped back and saw Tonya.

She was the first to react.

‘Comrade Malevich!’

‘Gracious! Good Lord! Lensky!’

Tonya saw a bright red weal across Misha’s forehead and the start of what looked like an almighty swelling. She was disconcerted by seeing Misha, of all people. She didn’t know what she felt.

‘It’s you… I had no idea… I came because of my father.’

‘Your father?’

‘My father, Kiryl, the drunken oaf whose life you saved this afternoon.’

‘That was your father, was it? Good Lord.’

As a nurse, Tonya was well accustomed to seeing head trauma, shock, and concussion. She could see at once that Misha had a well developed case of all three. He shouldn’t be working at all, still less handling dangerous equipment. He rubbed his head again, as though trying to clear his mind.

‘You hurt your head. None of the imbeciles over there could tell me what happened.’

Misha shrugged. ‘Your father got himself caught underneath a railway carriage. We had to winch it up and I slid in to get him out. The winch isn’t up to much though, and the whole thing came crashing down again. I only got out because Tupolev got hold of my leg and whipped me out. Somewhere along the way, I banged my head. It’s fine though. Sore, but fine.’

Tonya felt a surge of emotion, a mixture of tenderness, anger, impatience, compassion. She felt angry with her father for being a drunk. She felt suddenly, briefly, angry with all of Soviet Russia for being a place where winches broke, where drunk men tumbled from railway coaches, where injured men were sent back to work, unthanked.

‘You’re not fine,’ she snapped. ‘Come on. I’ll take you home.’

‘No, really, it’s—’

‘Don’t argue. I’m a nurse.’

Brusquely, almost rudely, she pushed Misha away from his work and out towards the exit. He let himself be pushed. When Tupolev called out to him to stop and explain his early departure, Misha just said, ‘Oh don’t be such a damned idiot!’ and carried on walking. Outside, under the violet night and the first scatter of stars, Tonya felt Misha stiffening and pulling away.

‘What’s the matter? You need to get home and rest. I’ll tell Tupolev, if you like. An official instruction from the hospital.’

‘Oh, I don’t care two kopecks for Tupolev … but I’ll go home by myself, thanks. I don’t need you to walk me.’

‘You’ve got a nasty case of concussion. You shouldn’t be alone.’,

Misha, tall, pale, suddenly angry, turned on her.

‘Alone? No, I expect not. But then again, I’m not sure if I want to be walked home by you. Our last expedition didn’t turn out so well, did it?’

‘Our last expedition? The logs? I think I was rude when you left. I’m sorry. I didn’t know… I didn’t mean…’

Misha brought his face close to Tonya’s. She felt his force, his anger.

‘Comrade Lensky, you can be as rude to me as you like. But I had thought we had gone to buy logs together. I didn’t know you were on a little mission from the secret police.’

‘The police? I don’t know… I didn’t… I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Tonya felt her voice vibrating with emotion. She didn’t really understand why. Only it was desperately important to her that this unusual man did not think badly of her.

‘The police. You don’t understand, eh?’

‘No, really not. Really!’

In a few brief and savage words, Misha explained. His arrival home. His instant arrest. His interrogator’s perfect knowledge of their little shopping trip.

Tonya’s face was wet with tears. ‘No. I know nothing of that. I told no one. I wouldn’t. It was you who bought me those logs. That figurine! I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I wanted it almost more than the firewood. They must have followed you. Maybe my cousin. Maybe Rodyon. Not me. I wouldn’t.’

‘Really? Really not?’ For several seconds, Misha searched Tonya’s face for the truth of what she said. Illuminated and simplified by the moonlight, Tonya’s face was a pale oval, surrounded by a halo of dark hair. Her lips and eyes were imploring. They had a softness about them which they seldom or never seemed to have by daylight. A strand of hair had fallen across her face and had stayed there, wet from her tears. At long last, Misha nodded. He put his hand to her face and moved the strand of hair away from it. ‘All right then. I believe you. I take back what I said. Sorry.’

‘Sorry.’

Tonya breathed the word as if it held no meaning. Misha’s apology didn’t seem to change things. Her face was still turned up to his. She was still crying, not even she knew why. Then quietly, gently, she raised herself on tiptoe and put her face to his. She kissed him, the first real kiss of either her life or his. The kiss was mouth to mouth, but still quite chaste. It was as though she wanted to break a barrier, but still allow herself room to retreat if she had got the situation wrong. But she hadn’t. When she pulled away, slightly frightened at what she had just done, he pulled her back and kissed her again. After a few minutes, they stopped kissing, but stayed arm in arm, suddenly and astonishingly close.

‘If this is concussion,’ said Misha, ‘then I like it.’

She butted his shoulder with her head in mock-rebuke.

‘Do you always thank people like this?’ he continued. ‘I should think it makes a good impression mostly, but some people must be a bit surprised.’

She shoved against him as if to scold him, but he had his arm so tightly wrapped around her body that the two of them moved together, one creature under the moonlight.

‘I wanted to kiss you when we sledged down that hill together and rammed the big snowdrift at the bottom. I wanted to kiss you and kiss you and never stop,’ he said.

‘Me too.’

‘Well, why didn’t you?’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Because I thought you didn’t want me to. You weren’t very friendly, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Well then… What about you? Why didn’t you let yourself kiss me?’

She tossed her head coquettishly, secure now that she was in his arms. ‘A girl doesn’t have to explain,’ she said.

‘But a good citizen always should, comrade Lensky.’

‘You make a good point, comrade Malevich. But I still won’t say.’

‘In that case, comrade Lensky, I might be obliged to tickle you.’

‘But first, comrade Malevich, you would be obliged to catch me.’

She broke away and ran from him, laughing. He chased her down the muddy street, and caught her. They were both laughing hard and panting hard. He pulled her close and they kissed again, longer and even more passionately than they had the first time.

Tonya did walk Misha home that night, but it took her more than four and a quarter hours to do so. Misha did go to bed that night with his cut head wrapped in bandages and bathed in vinegar, but it took him until dawn to get to sleep. Both Misha in his bed and Tonya in hers knew that their lives would never be the same again.

3

Four weeks passed the same way.

Misha and Tonya were in love: each was the other’s ‘little paw’, as the Russian phrase had it. Each day after work, Tonya would meet Misha by the road leading down to the rail yard. Mostly, they spent their time together walking. The spring was a warm one and it was a pleasure to be outside after a long and dreary winter. They strolled through the city parks, or along the banks of the Neva. But they were outside for another reason too. There was nowhere else for them to go. Twice Tonya had come to Misha’s rooms on Kuletsky Prospekt. Both times his mother had treated her as she would have treated any member of the servant class. Tonya felt invisible, irrelevant and unwanted. Neither she nor Misha could behave normally in that atmosphere and they burst downstairs and outside as soon as they could.

Things were no better at Tonya’s home. Her father had been sent home from hospital, but his arm was healing slowly and it would be months before he was able to return to work. Deprived of his work, the nasty old man was also deprived of his access to tobacco and vodka. When Tonya and Misha were there together, he missed no opportunity to make a cackling joke, a dirty innuendo. He never thanked Misha for saving his life, nor did he ever once refer to the incident. When Tonya had to go next door to look after her grandmother, Misha had to sit and endure the old man’s silent, malicious scrutiny until Tonya was done and they could leave.

So, in the time that they weren’t at work, or taking care of their respective families, Misha and Tonya walked – outside, covering miles and miles, talking, laughing, kissing and walking. They made love too, not once but many times. There was a spot in the park they returned to again and again. It lay inside a thicket of birch trees, screened off by a dense curtain of juniper and broom. They were hardly alone in wanting privacy, of course, and there were times when they found their spot had already been taken (‘Give us a sodding minute, will you, mates?’ came from inside the thicket), and other times when they sensed a queue forming outside (‘Sorry, comrades, take your time’).

But, despite the limitations on their relationship, their love expanded. They lived in a daze. When they were with each other, nothing else seemed real. When they were apart, they dragged themselves around as though drugged.

There was one subject, and only one, that had never been broached by them, but, aside from Tonya herself, it was the topic uppermost in Misha’s mind. The subject had to come up, and one day it did. It was the middle of May. They were walking through the streets in the deepening shade, listening to the dying burr of traffic and the clop-clop of horses’ hooves. Then Tonya squeezed Misha’s hand and said, ‘Your mother. You said she was ill.’

‘Yes.’

‘Headaches again?’

‘Headaches, yes, and back pain. And if it isn’t headaches or back pain, then it’s a cough or a fever or something else.’

‘She’s not strong.’

‘Oh, she’s strong enough, or would be if things were easier for her… You know they want her to start work as a factory hand?’

‘Your mother, a factory hand!’

‘At the saw mill down by the Finlyandsky goods depot. Can you imagine? Wearing blue overalls and shouting above the rotary saws all day.’ Misha laughed, but his face reverted almost instantly to its former serious expression. ‘I have to get her out of Russia. You know that, of course?’

‘To get her out? But…’

‘Her and Yevgeny. They’ll have to join Natasha and Raisa in Switzerland.’

Tonya heard his words and something inside her began to freeze. She walked along, silent and tense. Misha was preoccupied and took a moment or two to notice.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said in surprise.

‘Switzerland!’

‘Yes. Where else? Most of Europe is still at war, you know.’

‘But if she goes, won’t you need to … will you … who would go with her?’

‘Who would go with her?’

Misha stopped and looked full into Tonya’s face. He saw the worry gathered between her eyebrows, her green eyes flitting from one place to another on his face. He was still for a moment, then his mouth quivered and broke out in a merry, widening laugh.

‘Oh, comrade Lensky, comrade Lensky!’

He took her by the waist and her left hand, and, whistling out a tune to give them rhythm, he led her in a rapid waltz down the empty street. Infected by his mood, she started to laugh, but her anxiety hadn’t gone.

‘But really … wouldn’t you need to go?’

‘Comrade Lensky, you’re missing your steps!’

‘No, tell me!’

‘One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one. That’s better. Keep going.’

Tonya’s feet began to move as he instructed her. She was naturally a better dancer than he was, even though he’d been the one with the boyhood dancing tutor. He’d begun to teach her one evening and already she was technically more competent than him, though she still didn’t give herself to the dance the way he did.

‘Excellent, Lensky! Lensky of the Bolshoi!’

Misha turned from a simple waltz into a complex Viennese one, full of turns inside turns, spinning and circling down the street. Then he fumbled his steps. She pushed him in mock disgust. The dance ended with them leaning against a high stone wall, panting.

‘Charmante, Madame,’ said Misha bowing.

‘Tell me.’

‘My job is to get them out of the country with a little money. Natasha and Raisa are fifteen and sixteen. Mother will be safe enough with them.’

‘Really?’

‘No. I lied. Raisa must be seventeen now.’

‘Misha!’

He took her in his arms. He wasn’t broadly built, but there was something in his tallness and confidence that made him seem bigger. ‘I won’t leave Russia without you. And you have your family to think of – your brother, father, and grandmother.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘You wouldn’t leave them?’ It was half statement, half request.

‘No… No, I don’t think I could. Father – well, he needs me, but I don’t know if I owe him much. But Pavel’s young, you know. Younger than his age. And Babba, my grandmother, depends on me completely.’

Misha nodded.

‘That’s what I thought. You’re right.’

They walked on.

Tonya wanted to ask Misha if he meant what he had just said about not leaving without her, but she kept her mouth shut, knowing that if she asked him again, he would be certain to bound off again on some teasing diversion. All the same, the thought boomed in her head. Her lover, an aristocrat, a wealthy bourgeois of the old regime, was willing to stay in a country which had, for him, turned into something not unlike a prison camp. And for her! She felt light-headed at the thought.

‘You say you have to get them out … do you know how?’

‘Yes. The Rail Repairs Yard. I didn’t just end up there by chance, you know.’

‘The rail yard? You mean…?’

Misha told her. He told her about the single-track railway which crept out of Petrograd up to the Gulf of Finland. How it crossed the border between Vyborg and Lahti before turning and heading for Helsinki itself. How six wagons from the Vyborg line had come into the yard. How he had manipulated Tupolev into assigning the repair job to him.

‘They do need repair,’ said Misha. ‘They’re in a terrible state. A couple of them are probably beyond salvage. But that’s not all I’m doing.’

He told her the rest of it. How he was building a compartment flat against the rear of one of the wagons, built to look like the sloping wagon wall itself. How he would put in a bench, airholes, a sliding entrance panel. How another few weeks’ work would see his project completed. How he planned to conceal his mother and Yevgeny in the compartment one summer’s evening before the hoppers were loaded for export.

Tonya could well imagine the labour, ingenuity and sheer courage that had gone into Misha’s plan.

‘Your mother is very lucky,’ she said.

‘Well, we have yet to see if the idea works.’

‘And money. You said they needed money.’

‘Yes.’ Misha hesitated. He trusted Tonya, of course. He could hardly have told her about his escape plans otherwise, but telling her about the money seemed like a still more serious confidence. After all, senior Bolsheviks had been on the trail of the money when Misha had wafted it from in front of their noses. He had even at one stage suspected that Tonya had been involved in the whole affair.

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘No, no. It’s all right.’

Misha preferred to trust Tonya than to hold anything back. So he told her. About the safe. The codes. The items inside. ‘There was jewellery there. Not a huge amount, but – well, plenty.’ Misha felt embarrassed. It might not have been a huge amount to him, but to Tonya it would have represented vastly more money than her father had earned in his entire life. ‘And papers,’ he added. ‘Father had been buying stocks, bonds, anything he could. But buying it through agents abroad. He was clever about it. He didn’t know whether England and France or Germany and Austria would win the war. So he shared the funds about. Some in Berlin. Some in London. Some in Paris. Some in Geneva. Part of that money will be lost of course, but not all. If my mother gets to Switzerland, she will have plenty. She will be a rich woman. Rich enough. If, one day, we go to join them, then we’ll have enough to set up in business, to make a good life out there.’

Tonya heard his words as though he were talking about taking her to dinner on the moon, or asking her how she would like to furnish her palace. His words seemed ludicrous, but also somehow believable, coming from him. For the first time, Tonya began to believe that things might yet all turn out for the best.

4

Tonya was home early from the hospital. It was early July, the season of Petrograd’s famous white nights, when the nights were so brief that darkness never really set in, a late twilight fading into an early milky dawn.

Normally, she would have gone straight to the rail yard to wait for Misha to emerge. But not tonight. Misha wanted to use the long night to complete the secret compartment in one of his grain hoppers. He planned to stay up all night to do it. He wouldn’t see Tonya again until the following evening.

But, though Tonya missed him, she didn’t mind too much. She was behind with her housework and the apartment needed cleaning. She spent half an hour with her grandmother, Babba Varvara, then went back into the main room and began working. She hummed to herself as she worked, and sometimes found herself unconsciously repeating the dance steps that Misha had taught her. She was doing just that, twirling as she carried the cooking pot over to the stove, when she sensed the door open behind her. She stopped dancing and put the pot down. It was Rodyon.

He looked tired and thin, worn down. She saw him still from time to time, but not often. She was surprised to see him, and guarded.

‘Zdrasvoutye,’ she said.

Rodyon nodded, but said nothing. He sat down.

‘Tea?’

‘Yes, please, if you have it.’

‘You can have bread too, if you want.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not fine. You look tired and hungry.’

Tonya put the kettle on the stove, then jiggled the logs inside to stir up the heat. The apartment was hot even with the windows open wide, and the heat was an unwanted extra. There was also something unsettling about the length of these summer days. When she was with Misha, the long days made sense. But when he was absent, the endless days and shimmering nights seemed mildly insane, as though the world had lost its ability to rest. She cut a slice of bread and spread it with pork dripping and salt.

‘Here.’

‘Thank you.’

Rodyon ate it wolfishly, then sighed.

‘You know, Marx took a material view of humanity. It was his greatest insight, his greatest accomplishment. But you don’t realise how right he was until you’ve been hungry. All the time I’ve been sitting here, I’ve wondered whether you had sugar or jam to go with the tea. I desperately hope that you do, but have been too proud to ask. A spoonful of sugar against a man’s soul. Pitiful, isn’t it?’

‘I have sugar, yes. And lemon.’

‘Ah, the careful management of the official allocation or the miraculous bounty of the black market. I wonder which.’

‘You know very well which.’

‘Yes, and I’m going to enjoy it anyway. You were cooking as I came in. At least, you were dancing with a cooking pot, which I assume is the same thing. Don’t let me stop you.’

Tonya did as he said. To the pot, she added cabbage, beans, carrot, onion and a thick shin of beef. She put the whole thing on to boil. She worked carefully, guarding her expression. She wasn’t exactly nervous of Rodyon, but the two of them hadn’t seen each other for a while and Rodyon seldom did things without a purpose. She waited for him to reveal it.

The kettle boiled. She made tea, let it brew, then poured it, adding three spoonfuls of sugar. Rodyon took the cup with thanks. He had barely changed his posture since first sitting down, but she could see his tiredness slipping away, and he wore it now as a mask more than anything.

‘We’re seeing Pavel more and more at the Bureau of Housing,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

It was true. Because of Misha, Tonya had been at home very little. Pavel, never properly rooted since their mother had died, had taken to leaving home more and more. He often ended up at the Bureau of Housing, where his admiration for Rodyon had blossomed into something close to hero-worship.

‘He is useful. He runs a lot of errands for us.’

‘He’s a good boy.’

‘Yes… And when did he last wash, do you know?’

‘Wash? He washes every day.’

‘Face and hands, yes. I meant more than that. All over.’

Tonya shrugged. ‘He’s fourteen, nearly fifteen. You know what it’s like.’

‘This week? Last week?’

‘What do you care? He won’t wash in cold water and boiling enough water for a bath in this heat … well, he’s old enough to boil water for himself if he wants it.’

‘You didn’t always say that.’

‘He wasn’t always fifteen, or as good as.’

‘But the change came four months ago, didn’t it, Antonina Kirylovna?’

Tonya swallowed. Rodyon was creeping around to the real subject and she felt her mouth go strangely dry. Though she wanted to blame it on other things – the endless day outside, the light glittering from the city’s roofs and cupolas, the heat of the stove – she knew it was none of those things.

‘Maybe,’ she admitted.

‘Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich. Son of Ivan Ilyich Malevich. Ivan Ilyich was one of the country’s richest men. Not in the top fifty perhaps, but not so far outside either. Coal mines. Iron works. Land.’

‘They have none of that now.’

‘No.’

Rodyon stopped as though he’d finished. He finished his tea and pushed his cup away from him.

‘More?’ said Tonya.

‘Please.’

‘The sugar doesn’t come from father’s coal-stealing. It comes from Misha. The soup things too. He trades his family’s last few possessions. He is generous.’

‘Bourgeois sugar, eh?’

‘That’s one way to put it.’

‘Then I’ll have another spoonful.’

Tonya poured the tea and pushed it back at Rodyon. Her movement contained an ounce or two of anger and tea slopped over the rim of the cup. He ignored both the anger and the spillage.

‘His family’s last few possessions. What a piteous-sounding phrase!’

‘There’s no pity. It’s a simple fact.’

‘Is it? Really? That’s another insight of Marx’s. Facts aren’t necessarily simple, even the simplest ones. His father accumulated possessions by exploiting his workers. Each year, every year, men died underground in his coal mines. Others were cut to pieces in industrial accidents at his iron works. And he reaped the profit.’

‘He employed them. I don’t suppose conditions in his mines were worse than elsewhere.’

‘He gave them the lowest wage he could possibly pay them, you mean. Yes. And that wage wasn’t always enough to give his workers enough food, fuel, medicine or housing. Look at this rat-hole you live in. You have always counted yourself lucky to have it. How does it compare with Kuletsky Prospekt, eh? How does it compare with that? So: you say his family’s last few possessions, but if he stole the labour that allowed him to acquire them, then to whom, really, do those things belong?’

Tonya shrugged. ‘Who cares? In a few months, they’ll have nothing.’

Rodyon nodded, as though he agreed. He stood up. All at once, the lean tigerishness of his energy seemed to come rushing back. When before he had looked tired, now again, as usual, his face radiated an intense, challenging handsomeness, spoiled and completed by his broken nose. He paced the tiny apartment as though he felt cooped up in it. He leaned out of the open window, traced a line on a cupboard with the tip of his finger as though to check for dust, then came over to the stove and felt it for heat.

‘Good soup.’

‘Yes.’

‘The smell is almost the best part.’

‘Maybe.’

‘A meat bone?’

‘Beef.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘If it’s luck that we’ve been talking about, then yes.’

‘Hmm.’

Rodyon paced again. Back to the window, behind Kiryl’s armchair, which he rocked to and fro on its back legs, then to the table and the carrot ends and onion skins left over from Tonya’s cooking. He took some carrot ends and began to munch.

‘Babba Varvara’s all right, is she?’

‘She’s fine. No different from ever.’

‘No. You do well with her. If she weren’t your responsibility she would be mine. Thank you.’

Tonya shrugged. Then he turned abruptly around, and faced Tonya. She found herself fixed in the sudden glare of his intensity.

‘Listen, Antonina, this boy of yours, Mikhail Ivanovich. He is a danger to you. You must stop seeing him.’

Tonya opened her mouth to protest. The anxiety that she’d felt since Rodyon’s entry had been pointing all along to this one inevitable moment. She felt fiercely, passionately protective of Misha. But Rodyon didn’t let her speak. He waved down anything she might have had to say.

‘You’ll protest of course. But hear me out. At the heart of the Communist Party lies the understanding that the interests of Malevich’s class are irreconcilable with the interests of the workers. It isn’t any longer a question of living space or property or anything like that. But Malevich knows that the Party is his enemy. The Party knows that Malevich is its enemy. If you align yourself with Malevich, you align yourself against the Party. That’s dangerous. It’s inconceivably foolish, if I may say so.’

Tonya moved her tongue inside her mouth. She found only glue and ash. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to, but Rodyon hadn’t finished.

‘The second thing is this. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee is about to issue a new set of decrees. Malevich and his kind will be sent into internal exile all over Russia. It’s no use having these people crawling over the seats of power in Petrograd and Moscow. They’ll be given work to do. They will work of their own accord, or they will be made to work in a labour camp. We find it helps to keep the alternatives fairly simple. The decrees will be published any day now. They will have immediate effect.’

Tonya felt the blood rushing in her head. She wanted to find some way to block the sound of Rodyon’s words, but couldn’t. The words had already smashed aside any possible barrier and were roaring forwards in their destructive progress. Only time could tell what wreckage would be left behind.

‘And one last thing. I think I’ve handled things badly. I should have acted sooner or perhaps later. I kept putting things off. But in the end I realise that the only important thing is that I should act. Antonina – Tonya – I am – I have always been your greatest friend and admirer. I know that this isn’t the time – there’s Malevich in your thoughts I know. But you will put him aside. You’ll have to. And when you do, please know that I’m here. I have loved you for a long time. For ever, so it seems. I would like to be – if you’ll let me – I know it’ll take time – more than just your friend and your cousin. Don’t give me an answer now. The timing is all wrong, I know. Forgive me. But some day. I shan’t go away.’

Rodyon took a step or two forwards as though intending to grasp Tonya’s hands or kiss her. Then, realising any such movement would be profoundly unwelcome, he simply nodded his head, briefly looked around the room, then strode briskly away.

5

Tonya told Misha of Rodyon’s visit. She didn’t tell him about the first part of what he’d had to say, nor the last part either. But she told him about the decrees, the awful fact of impending banishment.

Misha had listened in silence, then nodded thoughtfully.

‘I’d expected something like that,’ he said, ‘only I’d hoped it wouldn’t come so soon. All the same, there’s no reason to change plans. We’ll just have to work a little faster.’

And work they did. Misha barely slept for working. He finished building a false wall into the back of one of the grain hoppers and got three of the six wagons workable. He couldn’t do more.

Nor was Tonya idle.

It was one thing to build a false wall onto the back of a freight car, it was quite another thing to get that freight car onto the right train on the right line at the right time. After consulting intensively together, Misha and Tonya agreed that it was essential to take Kiryl at least partly into their confidence. The old man was utterly untrustworthy in most respects, but there was little he wouldn’t do for vodka, and Tonya promised him enough to swim in. Somehow, Kiryl used his railway contacts to attach the wagon to a train bound for Finland. A date was set – then postponed – then set again.

And finally, things were ready. The train would leave at first light, which meant that it would be loaded overnight. Emma, Yevgeny, Tonya and Misha stood in the corner of the freight yard, watching the process.

A locomotive stood at the head of a long line of grain hoppers, moving the wagons forward in short eight-yard bursts, letting each one fill with grain from the loading chute. It was past midnight and the process was accompanied by flares of lamplight, whistles, and the occasional thundering curse. The short season of white nights had passed. The night was dark.

Misha’s wagon was near the back of the line, but the line kept moving forwards. It was time.

‘Well then,’ said Emma.

‘You’ve got the blankets?’

‘Yes. And the cushions are already inside.’

‘Good.’

Emma had a basket in her hands: food and water enough for three days, plenty of soft wax for earplugs, a candle stub and matches, enough jewellery to bribe any number of border guards. The crucial bank documents, which represented the family’s future worth in the new world, were sewn into the lining of Emma’s travelling jacket. Yevgeny, absurdly dressed in a neat blue sailor suit, stood wide-eyed with tiredness, looking at each of the three adults in turn.

Up ahead the locomotive jolted forwards. Misha reached out instinctively to pull Yevgeny away from the moving train, then kept his arm around him as they walked the eight yards on to their wagon. The sound of the grain chute was louder now. The farewells could no longer be put off.

Misha climbed into the wagon first, hoisted Yevgeny after him, then watched Emma and Tonya climb in as well. Though from the outside the wagon looked the same as all the rest, and would do even in full daylight, the inside was different. Alone in the repairs yard, working mostly by night, Misha had welded a compartment that lay up against the sloping rear of the wagon. Access into the little space was via a sliding panel which would be completely concealed when the grain was loaded. At the top of the compartment Misha had fixed a grating to provide air, but a plate had been fixed so that nobody could look down through the grating to what lay beneath. The whole thing had been made to took like a permanent feature, inconspicuous. The compartment would be cramped, noisy, sweaty, dirty and uncomfortable. But it would be roomy enough for two people to get from Petrograd to Finland in safety.

Misha slid back the steel panel. It clanked loudly, but the night air was full of clanks and bangs. No one was around, either to notice or care. The compartment yawned darkly open in the lantern’s light. The only minuscule concessions to comfort were two low metal benches, little more than sixteen inches wide, and a metal bucket with drainage holes drilled through to the bottom of the wagon. The bucket would be their toilet for the duration of the journey.

‘Very well then,’ said Emma, rubbing her hands together as though needing to keep warm. ‘Right then.’

To Misha’s surprise, the prospect of escape had revitalised his mother’s long dormant practical streak. It had been she who, without prompting, had opened the lining of her jacket to take the documents that Misha had given her. She had been surprisingly astute and accurate in understanding and assessing the value of the various bonds and stock certificates. She had been brisk and matter of fact about provisioning herself for the coming journey. She had even, to Misha’s delight, allowed herself to acknowledge Tonya for what she was – her son’s beloved – and had made her feel welcome in their apartment, with a kind of courtly, dilapidated grace.

Misha nodded. ‘Right then,’ he smiled.

He embraced his mother. He felt a surge of love for her. He felt himself, every inch, his mother’s child. He bent his head down and let her cradle it against her shoulder as she had done years ago. Then they embraced again in the normal way. Her eyes and his were blurry with tears.

‘Take care, Mother.’

‘I will.’

‘I know.’

‘Come with us, Misha. You still can.’

Misha smiled and shook his head. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Behind him he felt pressure from Tonya’s hand on his back. ‘Go,’ she whispered. He could hardly hear her over the noise of the grain chute, closer now than ever. He didn’t even bother to shake his head. Picking up Yevgeny, he hugged him once, then eased him through the open panel into the claustrophobic metal compartment.

‘Farewell, little man.’

The boy nodded, but was too overcome to say or do anything more.

‘Mother.’

Emma was about to make a movement, when the train jerked forward again, and they all steadied themselves until it stopped. Then Emma simply smiled and kissed Misha on the lips. ‘You are a good boy.’ She climbed into the compartment, her basket on her lap, and began to arrange their blankets and cushions for Yevgeny’s comfort.

Tonya came close to Misha.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow when I can.’

It wasn’t a new suggestion. Since Rodyon’s visit to her apartment, she’d felt more strongly with each passing day that Misha needed to leave. The country wasn’t safe for Misha, and was getting less safe with every month. He ought to go. She felt it in her bones. But though she’d argued with him, pleaded with him, stormed at him, cajoled him, he’d been as stubborn as a rock. ‘Things’ll get better,’ he said. ‘Look at the French Revolution. That was bad for a few years, then it blew itself out. It’ll be the same here. It’s only a question of waiting and being careful.’

Tonya knew he was wrong. What did he know of such things? All his life, he’d been rich, privileged, cocooned, lucky. She hadn’t. She knew about hardship. She had seen her mother die, and her brother Pavel almost die, from typhus. She knew things didn’t always turn out for the best; that for the unlucky ones at the bottom of the pile, they hardly ever did.

‘Go,’ she said again. ‘Please. I’ll follow when I can. Babba won’t be around for ever. Pavel is growing up. I can’t leave them now, but…’

He shook his head. This was a dispute they’d had a dozen times over the last week. Their positions had become locked and irreconcilable. It was the closest they’d yet come to a proper argument. The two of them waited together in unhappy silence while his mother arranged herself in the little metal compartment. Then Emma smiled, took Yevgeny onto her lap, and signalled that she was ready.

‘Good luck, Mother.’

‘Good luck yourself.’

Misha reached in, clasped her hand, then stood back and slid the panel closed. The compartment already looked like nothing now: part of the wagon, nothing more. Tonya said something to Emma from outside, but no answer was audible.

The train moved forwards once more. It was about twenty-five or thirty wagons long, and the first dozen or so were already filled. The grain chute itself was lit up and there was a man in the wooden observation kiosk under the chute itself. Misha and Tonya kept back to avoid being seen, but waited long enough to see that their wagon was filled like all the rest. They saw the grain, grey and colourless in the poor light, flood the wagon, then stop. Nobody noticed anything. The train moved on.

Right or wrong, there was no going back.

6

For two days, nothing happened. No good news. No bad news.

Misha didn’t dare to hope, didn’t have cause to fear. He went to work as usual. He saw Tonya in the evenings as usual. Now, of course, they had a private apartment to themselves, a bed to make use of. Strangely, though, neither of them were able to think about making love while Emma and Yevgeny’s fate was so uncertain. Not just that, but the idea of undressing completely and being wholly naked with the other seemed sudden and rather shocking – although they had made love frequently, it had always been outdoors and always at least half-clothed. So for those first two days and nights, they spent time together, cooked and ate together, then sat by the empty stove, holding hands and thinking about the rattle of train wheels in the dark. When they slept they kept their underclothes on, covered only by a thin sheet in the sweltering night.

Then, by the third day, things seemed brighter. The arrangement was that, if the escape was successful, Emma would contact a Helsinki lawyer named Dr Pakkinen, who in turn would write to a Petrograd lawyer named Kamenev, an old friend of the family. The code for ‘all went well’ would be a request to pass on greetings to Misha. It might take weeks for the letter to get through. On the other hand, if the escape had been detected, then Misha’s own arrest would follow with swift and bloody certainty. No news was good news of the best possible sort.

So Misha started to hope. But it was Tonya, as ever more careful than him, who urged him to proceed with care. They were upstairs in the apartment, sitting in front of the wide open windows, basking in the warm air and golden light.

‘You have to make a declaration to someone,’ she said. ‘If you don’t do it now, and they find out that you’ve said nothing, you’ll be held responsible.’

Misha frowned. ‘You’re right, only not yet. I don’t want to risk being too soon.’

‘And I don’t want to risk you being too late,’ said Tonya, sharply. ‘It’s not only you to think of now.’

‘No. Perhaps you’re right. What do you think? Maybe the house committee?’

‘Of course the house committee. I’m not saying you need to go to the Cheka.’ The Cheka were the new, much-feared, secret police.

They stood up. He was perhaps eight or nine inches taller than she was and the difference in that little room seemed suddenly huge. Tonya, as always, wore her hair tied and pinned at the back. He had never seen it otherwise. Putting his hands gently to the back of her head, he began pulling at the pins. She did nothing to help him except turn her head as he wanted, and she stood silently breathing, feeling the warmth of his hands on her neck. Then he was done. Her hair fell free in a dark curtain, framing her face and softening it. Misha ran his hands through her hair, then dropped them. The two of them stood in silence. It felt like the most intimate thing they’d ever done.

‘Well?’ said Tonya.

‘Well?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you look beautiful.’

‘Really?’

Misha was about to answer light-heartedly, before seeing that Tonya had been genuinely anxious.

‘Really. You should wear it like that all the time.’

‘I always wanted curly hair. I used to see all these pictures of the ladies at court—’

‘I like your hair just as it is. Besides, most of those court ladies wore wigs.’

‘Really?’

‘Most of them were bald underneath. Or hairy like a bear.’

‘Idiot!’

She pushed him and he pushed her back. But they both knew that they needed to go downstairs to see the old woman of the house committee before she retired for the night. Tonya was about to start putting her hair up again, when Misha stopped her.

‘Don’t do that. Go as you are.’

‘I can’t go like this. I look like—’

She stopped and blushed. They fought for a moment, then compromised. Tonya tied her hair at the back, but only loosely, so it still fell like a soft halo around her face. They went downstairs and knocked on the basement door, where the comrade chairwoman of the house committee had her room. The old lady was ready for bed, dressed in some voluminous white nightgown which could have served for somebody five times larger. She cackled when she saw the two of them together and Tonya felt sure that she was staring at her hair and drawing conclusions. Misha explained why they had come. He said that his mother and Yevgeny had gone out to visit friends the previous evening and not come back. He said he was very worried.

‘Worried? You should be, comrade. In this city, disappearance is a bad thing. It’s not the right thing from a political perspective. If a comrade worker vanished that would be one thing, but for a member of the propertied classes – well! That’s a serious business.’

The old woman seemed caught between two emotions. The first and strongest one was fear and anger that Misha had brought her this problem. But the other emotion was delight at the scope for gossip and interference. When her chatter turned to the latter subject, her voice became suddenly italicised, full of leering innuendo.

‘Oh yes, and you will need to inform the Bureau of Labour. If the disappeared ones don’t turn up soon, then you’d do well to send their papers along to the foodstuff distribution committee. You wouldn’t want to be found profiting from excess distributions – not someone in your position. Not even if you can think of other young people who might enjoy the food. Oh yes, I’m sure you have ideas on how to use the living space. Perhaps you already have done. Eh? That would be something, wouldn’t it, comrade? Your mother missing, maybe killed for all you know, and only one thought on your mind.’

They burst away from the old woman as soon as they could. Going upstairs, they hugged each other tightly. The future seemed suddenly very close, unknown and dangerous. Almost without speaking, by common assent, they stripped silently off and made love, naked and in bed together for the very first time.

7

The decrees were published. Internal exile for the ‘propertied classes’, an old Tsarist tool turned to new uses by the Bolsheviks.

Misha was relocated, but not far. The Petrograd railway authorities didn’t want to lose Misha’s services, so he was shifted just a hundred miles to Petrozavodsk, on the line north towards Murmansk. Misha was employed as a railway engineer there as part of a small team of four, one of whom was also an ex-bourgeois like himself. The job was pleasant, his fellow workers positively cordial. Meantime, the old lawyer Kamenev had passed on greetings from Doctor Pakkinen in Helsinki.

Misha felt a fierce kind of joy at the news. His mother was safe. His brother was safe. He had done his duty to his father and his family.

Best of all, it wasn’t hard for Tonya to come out to see him, often once a week. She’d come sometimes on her own, sometimes with Pavel, and the three of them would go out, looking for mushrooms in the woods, or swimming or boating on Lake Onezhskoye. They got on well. Misha took a liking to Pavel and taught the boy metalwork and how to bait a fishing line. Pavel still hero-worshipped Rodyon, but seemed to have a place in his affections for Misha too.

Then, one late November afternoon, Tonya was in the yard below her apartment. The family’s fuel allocation had just arrived and she wanted to get the logs upstairs before they were stolen. She had just taken one load up and had her arms full with another, when she observed, in the growing gloom, somebody bending over the pile and helping themselves to as much as they could carry.

Tonya threw a log at the stooping figure.

‘Hey! Get out of there!’

The figure straightened.

‘Well, comrade, that’s not very friendly.’

It was Misha.

Tonya dropped her logs, and ran over to him, apologising and, in the same breath, telling him that he shouldn’t have come here to Petrograd, it was too dangerous for him to break the terms of his exile.

‘Lensky, Lensky!’ he said, kissing her. ‘I’m here legally, or sort of. I’m here to pick up a new slide valve for one of our engines. The one they send us keeps getting stolen. I’m due back at midnight.’

Tonya’s emotions turned at once from worry to hospitality.

‘Good! Then come up! I didn’t know you were coming, or I’d have found some meat for you somehow. I’ve got a beef stock, though. I could make soup, and—’

Misha brushed away her words as if he were clearing snow from a woodpile.

‘I can’t stay. I told you. I’ve got to go and get this valve. But listen. There’s a hospital at Petrozavodsk. It’s small and not very good, but it needs staff. I’ve made friends with a doctor there – a real doctor, a proper old bourgeois like myself – and he can get you a position there as a nurse. Just three days a week, mind you. For the winter only. Pavel is old enough to take care of himself for that time.’

‘There’s Babba, too. I couldn’t…’

‘So get Pavel to pull his weight. He’s easily old enough and he only does so little because you let him. Or Rodyon. He’s always offered to do more.’

Other objections rose to Tonya’s lips, but they got no further. Tonya knew that she was seeing problems only because she was scared, because she didn’t believe in luck when it came, because she distrusted the world most of all when it seemed to promise something. But being with Misha changed things somewhat. His outlook was so different from her own, so boundlessly optimistic, that she couldn’t help but doubt her own first instincts.

He saw the struggle in her face and held her gently to him.

‘It’ll be all right. Just say yes. I’ll sort everything else out.’

She looked up at him – his earnest face, long and pale in the twilight. She nodded dumbly.

‘Yes? Is that a yes? Good for you, comrade Lensky. Good for you.’ He kissed her. ‘Listen. I mean it. I do need to go. The hospital will be in touch. It’s a Dr Zurabov. He’s nice.’

And with that he was gone. The yard was empty again and only the pile of logs at Tonya’s feet gave any sign that the conversation had happened. She picked up the fallen logs and began to carry them upstairs.

8

Just ten days passed, then Tonya was ordered in to see her hospital supervisor.

‘Bad news for you, Antonina Kirylovna,’ he said, tossing a paper at her. ‘Some awful hospital out in the sticks needs a nurse. They’ve requested you. Don’t know why. I’d say no if I could, but the request has come through Party channels. I can’t say no. It’s only three days a week, if that’s any—’

Tonya didn’t hear any more, but felt a surge of joy at the news. It was almost as though Misha’s magic had somehow found a way to penetrate the remorselessly grinding machinery of the state. Tonya made her arrangements and two days later she was in Petrozavodsk. The snow had already come up there, and lay like a clean white mantle over town and countryside alike. When she finished work at the hospital that evening, Misha was there to meet her. But he didn’t take her back to his room, a space so tiny there was barely enough space for one. Instead he took her out of town, three miles down a track to a little wooden hut on the edge of the forest.

‘It’s an old hunting lodge. Run down, but fine. No one uses it.’

‘Don’t we need to …? Shouldn’t we get authorisation?’

Misha stood up to his knees in the snow, bright-eyed and exultant. ‘Yes, comrade. You are right. You raise an important point.’ He opened his arms wide and said in a loud voice, ‘I claim this house on behalf of the ultra-bourgeois family Malevich.’ There was a low cliff not too far distant, and his voice bounced off the grey rocks in a series of echoes. He turned back to her with a widening grin. ‘To hell with comrade Lenin,’ he shouted. ‘To hell with the revolution. Long live the bourgeoisie!’

Tonya was shocked to begin with. Shocked, because she’d never heard anyone say anything so daring for months now – let alone shout it at the top of their voice. And shocked too, because she was torn. She knew that the revolution was riven with too many little men: driven by fear, anxiety, power, greed. But there were also the Rodyon Kornikovs: good, hard-working idealistic men, who had pledged their lives to the service of their fellow men. She wasn’t as quick as Misha to condemn the changes.

‘You say it,’ he said. ‘Down with Lenin.’

She smiled and shook her head.

‘Ah, pardon me, comrade worker, you should be saying “Up with Lenin! Power to the people!” Go on. Say it.’

She laughed, and again shook her head. But this time her denial went only skin-deep. It was a game.

‘Comrade Lensky, the revolution will fail if you don’t shout.’

They looked at each other, grinning, then they both began to shout.

‘Up with the revolution!’

‘Down with the Bolsheviks!’

‘Power to the people!’

‘Bring back the Tsar!’

‘Up with Lenin!’

‘Down with Lenin!’

They shouted as loud as they were able, till the rocks boomed back with the sound of their voices: ‘Lenin… Lenin… Lenin…’ Then, because Misha had the louder voice, Tonya jumped at him and pushed him backwards into the snow. He grabbed her leg and pulled her after him, and they rolled over and over together, as though the snow were the softest of white feather beds. They could hardly breathe for laughter.

They grew a little more serious. They stood up and brushed themselves down. The hunting lodge stood ready for them.

Misha bowed. ‘Mademoiselle Lensky, je te presente le chateau Malevich.’

Until he’d been seven, Misha, like many Russians of his class, had spoken French with his mother, and he spoke it now with a kind of careless elegance, which Tonya secretly found daunting. But she curtsied low and gave Misha her hand so that he could escort her, like a grande dame, across the heaped up snow to the lodge itself.

The interior was bleak, dark and cold. It had an intimidating, depressing feel and Tonya’s heart sank. But there was a stove and the wooden walls were mostly draught-proof and there were no vermin of any kind. Misha dug a lamp out from somewhere, lit it and got to work straight away on lighting a fire. The red spit and crackle of the kindling immediately lifted Tonya’s spirits again. She took the lamp and bustled around the hut, exploring her new domain. There was a bed with an old feather mattress, some store cupboards full of bits of old harness or hunting gear whose use she didn’t know. There was a sackful of potatoes that Misha had brought out; also a stack of logs, oil for the lamp, some cooking pots, and, in one cupboard, a small store of tea and sugar which made Tonya gasp for joy. She came back to Misha, whose fire was now beginning to blaze.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘I love it.’

Misha stood up, smiling. ‘Bugger Lenin. And bugger the whole blasted lot of them.’

‘Apart from Rodya.’

‘Yes, good old Rodyon, apart from him.’

Tonya stepped into Misha’s arms and by a shared understanding they began a slow dance around their new room; a waltz again, but not a fast one; slow and deliberately graceful. For almost the first time, Tonya didn’t just dance the steps correctly, she gave herself to them and her upturned face seemed shot through with something grave, almost spiritual. Misha didn’t try to break into her mood. He just danced in silence, making sure not to disturb her rhythm.

And then, after a while, she changed posture and grinned. Misha suddenly speeded up, and they shot around the room, whirling and stamping, until they spun apart laughing. That night, though they heard wolves howling outside, they slept in bed with each other, feeling absolutely safe, absolutely secure for the first time for years.

9

That winter, Tonya was able to spend half her time or more with Misha. When the weather was bad and the storms came in, they didn’t even go to work, knowing that the power would be down and there would be nothing for them to do. Misha had borrowed a shotgun from somewhere, and shot and snared rabbits, pigeon, and other game. They ate well. In the long hours of darkness, they talked, or made love, or danced, or made plans. Misha began to teach Tonya French, then – deciding French was of no practical value – he switched and began teaching her German, which Tonya was quick to pick up. When it was cold, they loaded their stove with fuel until its sides glowed red. They talked about everything on earth, and sometimes just spent long hours in happy silence with each other.

It was, by far, the best period of their entire lives.

But as the thaw came, and snow began dripping and slopping from every roof, branch, rock and slope, their long winter idyll came to an end. Tonya was summoned back to her city hospital full time. Misha received instructions requiring him to relocate to a railway repair depot in Perm, six hundred miles and more east of Petrograd.

Tonya cried at the impeding separation, full of foreboding.

As ever, Misha saw only the positive side of things.

‘Perm is ideal. Out there in the provinces, the revolution won’t have changed anything too much. I’ll be able to get on with things. As soon as you can, you can join me. In a few years’ time, you’ll see, everything will be different.’

He was more right than he knew.

On the fifteenth of April, 1919, he left Petrozavodsk. His route took him first to Petrograd, then east to Perm. He sent a message to Tonya, asking her to meet him at Ladozhsky Station so they could say their goodbyes. There wasn’t time for him to wait for a reply so he just went through the tedious business of getting his ticket sorted out, hoping against hope that she’d find a way to see him off. The line moved forward and Misha got to the ticket counter.

‘Authorisation?’ said the clerk. ‘Ah, yes, priority. All right for some, isn’t it? And I suppose you’ve got a travel warrant too? Of course, you’ll need to get that stamped. Unstamped means nothing at all. That queue over there, by the glass windows. No, they’ve abolished the special trains. Over there, that window.’

The clerk shoved Misha’s papers back at him. His wodge of documents had mounted up over the past eight months, until it was now a compact little brick of grey papers, soft and fibrous, like blotting paper. Misha moved over to the window that the clerk had indicated. A crowd of starlings had flown under the arched roof into the station and now couldn’t find their way out.

He started again in another queue. The country was well into a civil war by now and there were soldiers everywhere. When he reached the head of the line, his papers were inspected again. There was a minor problem: one of Misha’s papers had been stamped but not initialled. Regulations stated that it had to be initialled as well as stamped.

Misha took back the document, and tucked some paper money inside it – kerenkas – currency issued by the Provisional government in the months before the revolution. The money was mostly worthless, but not entirely. The clerk took it with a shrug and initialled the offending document himself. Another four minutes and the all-important travel warrant was stamped.

Misha’s train had pulled in by now, and there was a surge of passengers towards it. Misha knew he ought to join them if he wanted any chance of a seat, but he still hoped to see Tonya. He went to the main entrance and waited there, hoping to catch sight of her. He saw two nurses, but both of them short and fat. He felt a jab of disappointment. A column of conscripts were being herded into the station at rifle-point. Inside the station, a whistle shrilled.

Misha could delay no longer. He turned back into the station, feeling suddenly lonely and afraid. He made his way towards the train, but his path was blocked by the column of conscripts. A man had just keeled over and there was a knot of other men around him shouting and arguing.

Misha began to negotiate his way through the mêlée, when there was a shout behind him. It was Tonya. She came bursting through the crowds, her face straining with the effort.

‘Misha! Dearest!’

They kissed with passion.

‘Take care.’

‘I will. I’ll be fine. As soon as I’ve got myself sorted out, I’ll let you know. The sooner you can come, the better. You and Pavel and Babba Varvara and Kiryl, of course.’

‘Yes, yes. Is that your train? You mustn’t miss it. If you want a seat…’

‘Oh, the seats are long gone. Don’t worry. I don’t mind standing.’

They were interrupted by one of the soldiers who had been herding the conscripts.

‘Hey! Comrade nurse, we have a man here who’s just conked out. One minute standing, next minute, whack! Over he goes. Anything to get out of fighting, eh?’

Tonya took an impatient look at the fallen man. The man was obviously unfit to fight. He had the pale face and ravaged expression that often preceded typhus, and there was an ooze of blood from where his head had struck the station concourse.

‘He can’t go,’ she snapped. ‘Look at him. He needs to get to a hospital. Take him to the Third Reformed and ask for Dr Griese.’

She stood up, seeking Misha’s hand with hers. But they were prevented from moving. The officer in charge of the soldiers, an easterner with Khirgiz eyes and a reindeer skin cap instead of his regulation headgear, detained them with a sharp movement of his pistol.

‘Well, comrade lovers, it seems you’re right. This man isn’t fit to serve. But the trouble for you is that we have a quota to deliver. We can’t be short.’

‘That’s your business,’ said Tonya, beginning to pull away.

‘Your papers.’

The officer ignored Tonya, but a ring of his men stopped Misha from going anywhere. Tonya, already half out of the circle, came back into it, scared and white. Misha handed over his documents, knowing they were in order. The officer began to flip through them, commenting on them in his thick Siberian accent.

‘Travel authorisation – yes. Warrant – yes, stamped. Immunisation certificate – you have been thorough, comrade. Authorisation from local party commissariat – no, I don’t seem to find that.’

‘Yes, I have that. Here.’

Misha reached out, but the officer anticipated his movement. With a short, sharp jerk of his arm, he hurled the whole meticulously collected stack of documents high up into the station roof. The movement alarmed the starlings who were roosting there, and all of a sudden the air seemed to be alive: the tumbling grey papers and the swooping birds. The papers fell down into the crowd, only a few yards away, but as inaccessible as the coast of Japan.

The officer with the Khirgiz eyes smiled at his new recruit.

‘Welcome to the war, comrade fighter.’

The soldiers closed around Misha and began to sweep him away.

Tonya watched numbly, but with ever-rising shock. This, she realised was the moment she’d always dreaded. The moment in which the world proved itself to be as hostile as she had always believed it. She had been right to fear, right to be untrusting, right to have told Misha to leave when he could. These thoughts took shape in a sudden awful burst of realisation. For a second or two, she stood woodenly, seeing Misha’s form dwindle as it passed down the platform in the knot of khaki-clad soldiers. Then, all of a sudden, she found herself running, sprinting, as fast as she could, her shoes clattering down the platform in a burst of noise that made even the soldiers stop and turn.

She caught up with them, but was prevented from getting close to Misha.

Over the arms and shoulders of the men who held her, she shouted: ‘Leave! When you can, leave. I’ll join you. I’ll find a way. Just get out. As soon as you can, get out.’

Misha stared back at her. He too was in shock. At any rate, his face was void of all expression, all emotion. He said nothing, just nodded. Then the soldiers pushed him forwards, and Tonya away down the platform.

Tonya didn’t know when or if she would ever see him again.

10

It was eight weeks later.

Tonya had heard nothing. She didn’t know where Misha was, which unit he belonged to, or where he was fighting. She had received no letter or message of any sort. All the same, he was always on her mind. It was because of him that she had come here – to the Bureau of Housing in Petrograd.

The Bureau was located in one of the old palaces that used to line the banks of the Neva. The large old rooms had been crudely divided with rough block walls to make a row of offices that faced onto the courtyard. Tonya made her way along the corridors until she tracked down the room where Rodyon worked. The door was open and Tonya peeped through it before announcing her presence.

He sat at a desk with his back to the window. Three junior functionaries sat in front of him, taking notes, amending documents, presenting letters. Rodyon dealt with his business with a brisk but even rhythm, as though he were competing in some long-distance race of paperwork, where pace had to be balanced against the importance of conserving energy. Rodyon dealt with one functionary and dismissed him.

Tonya let the official go by, than sidled past him into the room. Rodyon had his head down and didn’t look up.

It was summer now, mid June. The courtyard outside was lined with maple trees, their leaves dense, healthy and green. A few moments went by. Then Rodyon glanced up and saw Tonya.

‘Ah. Antonina Kirylovna. How long have you been there?’

‘The door was open.’

Rodyon nodded. He dismissed the two remaining officials with a nod, and invited Tonya to sit with a wave of his hand. Or perhaps invited was the wrong word. Authority was stamped in everything Rodyon did. It was half invitation, half command.

‘You’ll have tea.’

‘You don’t need to be formal with me, Rodya.’

‘No, no … but still, tea would be good. I usually have some around this time.’ He stuck his head around the open door and called down the corridor for refreshments. ‘The greatest empires have always been tea-drinking. The Chinese. The Mughals. The British, of course. Now it’s our turn. The rise of the Russian tea-drinking empire.’

Tonya knew that Rodyon’s flippancy was carefully managed. It was very unrevolutionary to speak of the Russian empire. A good Bolshevik knew that the revolution in Russia was only a prelude to revolution elsewhere. The only empire that counted was the workers of the world acting in unity. Rodyon spoke as he did to take the ideological sting out of his position of power. He did it as an act of delicacy towards Tonya. She smiled her appreciation.

‘You’ve heard nothing, I suppose?’ he said.

‘No. I don’t suppose I will.’

‘Well, there’s always a chance. Let’s hope we hear something soon.’ In the weeks since Misha had been taken away, Rodyon had done all he could to find out his whereabouts. He had made full use of his official position, bending the rules as far as he was able. He hadn’t once mentioned the offer he’d made in her apartment that hot July evening last summer. He had been tactful and generous.

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