3
‘Where’s Kolya?’
‘Out.’ Anna lifts the pot from the stove, and places it on the wooden mat.
‘Has he eaten?’
‘Of course. When does Kolya ever miss a meal?’ She gives him the glint of a smile before her face turns solemn as she lifts the lid on her stew, releasing a puff of savoury steam.
‘I made the stock with the last of that boiling fowl,’ she murmurs, as she ladles two generous helpings into bowls. For the hundredth time Andrei marvels at the time and trouble Anna takes, and the way she can transform a handful of dried mushrooms, a few onions, barley and a chicken carcass into a potful of thick, rich golden stew. ‘It needs a bit more pepper,’ she says critically, after tasting a drop from the side of her spoon.
‘What are those dark bits?’
‘Chopped nettles. I’ve only used the tips. I brought a bagful back from the dacha.’
‘I’ve told you, Anna, for heaven’s sake, just go to the market and buy fresh greens. We’ve got the money.’
‘Nettles are full of iron.’
He gives up. Anna’s like that. She’ll spend hours hunting for puffballs in the forest until she finds one the size of a melon to bring home. She slices and fries the thick creamy flesh, and they eat it just as it is, smoking hot. Every time, one or other of them will say, ‘Don’t you think it tastes like chicken?’ Anna claims to be able to pick nettles without gloves – ‘It’s fine, you just have to grasp them tight and then they can’t sting you’ – and she’ll walk miles in search of wild raspberries. But she can be extravagant too. He’s shocked sometimes by what she’ll pay for a bunch of the earliest lilac.
Anna smiles. ‘Kolya had two platefuls.’ He always eats too fast. At least they’ve got him out of the habit of curving his arm around his plate as if someone were about to snatch it. People say that children forget, but Kolya hasn’t forgotten. Hunger is imprinted in him.
‘I suppose he’s gone off with his friends,’ says Andrei.
‘They’ve gone to the Summer Garden. He said he wouldn’t be back late. Anyway, they’ll be kicked out of there at ten.’
The apartment seems many times larger when Kolya’s not at home. Andrei takes a breath, feeling his lungs expand. It’s so good to be alone with Anna for once, although of course he’ll never say so. It’s ironic, really, that they’ve had a child with them from the day they met, and yet their own child, the child they once took for granted and expected to come along just as surely as a train will grow from a speck in the distance until it reaches the platform … That child has never come.
They have each other. They have Kolya. Anna doesn’t want tests and examinations, and he’s not going to force them on her. The one time he suggested it, as tactfully as he could, she backed away from him. Her eyes were narrow with anger. ‘Just because you’re a doctor, you think I’m nothing more than a broken-down machine.’ Besides, the thought of Anna with her legs in stirrups while one of his colleagues levers a speculum into her vagina makes him recoil. This is enough: the two of them alone together in the apartment, the rich steam, Anna’s hair escaping into curls around her forehead.
Anna thinks, disloyally, of how calm it is. Kolya and Andrei both put pressure on her, because they both want to come first with her. They don’t mean to do it, but sometimes she feels as if she is being sawn in half.
‘It’s after nine,’ Andrei says. ‘He stays out later and later.’
‘I know. But they’re all out in the streets these light evenings. They can’t stay indoors. You remember how it was when we were young ourselves.’
It stabs him, that she should speak as if she weren’t young any more. She’s not much over thirty, for God’s sake.
‘Do you know, Andrei, it was the funniest thing. Just as Kolya went out of the door, I caught a glimpse of his back view – and you know how sometimes you suddenly see someone not as the person you know they are, but objectively? I mean, when you come across one of your family in the street when you aren’t expecting it, and you see them as other people do, who don’t know them?’
‘Yes?’
‘He looked so different suddenly – quite old, like a student. And I’ve never thought Kolya looked like my father, but he’s beginning to. He pulled his cap forward and then he ducked down to see himself in the mirror and he looked exactly like my father. They must be almost the same height now, Kolya’s grown so much this year.’
He notices two things: that she has slipped into speaking of her father in the present tense, and that even though Mikhail is Kolya’s father as much as he is Anna’s, Anna never refers to ‘our father’.
‘He reminded me so much of my father,’ Anna goes on, in a low voice. ‘You know how he was, always so absorbed in whatever he was doing.’
‘Yes.’ And so far from being absorbed in you, thinks Andrei.
‘He couldn’t get outside himself, that was the trouble,’ Anna says, her voice even lower. ‘He was trapped. I used to hear him in the night, walking about.’
‘That doesn’t mean Kolya won’t be happy.’
‘I know. Did you have a good day?’ She says it casually, as she spoons the last of the stew on to his plate.
‘Quite good.’
‘Morozova wants me to go on a maths course, and statistics as well. She’s got her eye on me.’
‘Sounds ominous,’ says Andrei lightly. He can see that Anna really is worried.
‘I’m not “fulfilling my potential” apparently.’
‘My God, that woman wouldn’t recognize your potential if it jumped up and bit her.’ It drives him mad, this obsession with status, position, qualifications. The questions that check and place you in less than a minute: your current research interest? Your publications? Party membership?
He’s even been infected by it himself. The fear of being left behind, and becoming one of those doctors whose opinion no one ever seeks. You have to go to meetings. You have to be seen, and be heard saying the right things. Someone whose clinical work you really respect puts an arm around your shoulders one day as you’re both walking down a corridor and says: ‘You know, young man, I’ve been thinking that you’d have a lot to offer to the hospital liaison committee. It’s so important for the decision-makers to be kept in touch with our rising clinicians …’
And, of course, it is. He understands exactly what good will be done, and to whom. Doctors who want to develop their careers must learn to sit on committees and talk about the public good rather than getting bogged down in the detail of individual cases. Besides, it’s in the interests of the patients as well. A doctor with ‘pull’ can secure the latest equipment and drugs for his clinics. Keep yourself pure as the driven snow if you want, but there’s a cost attached, and it’s not just you who’ll pay it. The brotherly arm will fall from your shoulders. The minutes of the meetings will never reach you. Much better roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.
The arm around his shoulders gives an encouraging squeeze. We’re all in this together.
Andrei crumbles bread into his stew. Already the moment when he should have said something about Russov and the child has passed. He looks at Anna, willing her to break through the fog that wraps itself around him.
‘I shall have to do something,’ says Anna, ‘Morozova’s not going to leave me alone. It’s not as if I didn’t respect her –’
He gets up and comes round the table, behind her chair. She leans back, pressing her head against him. He bends over her, and kisses her cheek because he cannot reach her mouth. Her eyes are closed as she takes his hand and kisses it, then continues to hold it against her face. Another light kiss touches him, and then another. There’ll just be time, before Kolya gets back, if they’re quick –
But he can’t. He’s got to tell her.
‘Anna.’
‘Yes?’
‘Something happened today.’
She twists around to face him and looks up, her eyes wide and searching. Her body has stiffened. ‘What?’
‘It might turn out to be nothing. But Russov asked me to look at one of his patients today.’
She says nothing, waiting.
‘It’s a child, a boy of ten. The father – well, I’ve only had it from Lena. He’s MGB. Volkov.’
‘Volkov!’ She starts as if an electric shock has gone through her.
‘I know.’
There’s a long silence between them, and then Anna rises from her chair, walks to the window and looks out. After another little while she turns back to him. He can’t see her expression clearly, because she’s standing against the light.
‘The Volkov, you mean?’
‘Yes. There’s only one, I should hope.’
‘My God.’ Instinctively, she has lowered her voice. ‘What’s the matter with the child?’
‘Russov wouldn’t tell me; he made out he had the usual symptoms of some form of juvenile arthritis. Swelling, pain, redness. I haven’t got anything like the whole picture. It’s all been completely unprofessional. But Lena says it’s serious.’
‘How would she know?’
‘Apparently Russov’s had X-rays done on the quiet.’
‘But you can’t do that, can you?’
‘It seems Russov has. There are no records, so I don’t know what the results were.’
‘But that’s –’
‘You don’t need to tell me.’
‘It’s something bad. That’s why he doesn’t want you to know.’
‘It’s hard not to come to that conclusion,’ says Andrei drily.
‘My God.’ Anna’s quiet for a moment, then she says, ‘I should be thinking of the child but I’m only thinking of you.’
‘I was the same. As soon as Russov told me all I could think about was you and Kolya.’
Slowly, Anna stands up, pressing her palms down on the table as if she needs to support herself. ‘Let’s go out. There’s no air here. Let’s go down by the water.’
‘But we won’t be back in time for Kolya,’ says Andrei, surprised to find that he’s the one who remembers this.
‘He can let himself in for once, he’s got his key. I’ll write a note for him.’
They walk in silence, arm in arm, through streets that are washed with evening light. The sun is hidden by a thin fleece of cloud. It will scarcely grow dark tonight. The main streets are busy, but Anna and Andrei keep to the back ways, along potholed roads, past damaged buildings.
‘Let’s go down to the Neva.’
The whole city seems to be out of doors, moving slowly, as if heading to a destination that everybody has agreed on. But there’s no destination, only the summer night itself. That’s enough for everyone. You stroll like this, relaxed, expectant, swinging hands, when you’ve got a whole summer night ahead of you. Girls’ cotton dresses billow against their bodies as they lick their ice-creams. Young men in naval uniform link arms. An old woman in rusty black with a kerchief on her head hobbles very slowly along the centre of the pavement in front of Anna and Andrei, leaning on her stick. Anna hops off the kerb to pass her, followed by Andrei, and followed by the old granny’s voice, grumbling, ‘It’s all very well when you’re young, just wait until you’re old like me.’
But she and Andrei are not so young any more, thinks Anna. That girl who’s crossing the road, in her white dress splashed with red flowers: she’s really young. She looks back, laughing, at the rest of the gaggle of high-school girls who are running to catch up with her. Her hair flies up and her silver necklace jumps against her collarbone. She’s very pretty. Anna slides a look at Andrei to see if he’s watching, too.
No. Andrei’s staring ahead, frowning. Anna’s stomach lurches as the fear she’d almost left behind catches up with her. My God, what’s she doing, worrying about such a thing when –? But all the same she can’t help being glad Andrei wasn’t watching the girl.
‘Let’s get away from all these people,’ says Andrei. At the next corner he turns left, into an even narrower, dustier and more potholed street.
‘This isn’t the way to the river.’
‘It’ll be quiet along here.’
They wander on, more slowly now. Maybe it’s better to avoid the water, Anna thinks. She and Andrei would be like a couple of black crows among the summer faces.
A memory rises up in Anna’s mind. Her mother kneels at her feet, tying the sash of Anna’s best dress. She glances up at her little girl. Maybe Anna is frowning, or tear-stained, because her mother says, ‘You don’t go to parties with a long face.’
A thin, scabby cat hurtles out of an entrance, ears back, yowling. Anna stops, and peers into the courtyard. In the shadows a circle of children bunches. They stare at the couple defiantly. This is our world. You can’t come in. Anna and Andrei walk on. Suddenly she stops and leans against a pock-marked stone wall. Shell splinters, probably.
‘Are you all right?’
‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do, Andrei?’
Even the stone might be listening. She’d been desperate to get out of the apartment. Some nights she can almost hear the Maleviches breathing through the walls. She’d thought they would be freer out here in the summer night, but they are more exposed. His face is close to hers, anxious, drawn. He mustn’t be worried about her, on top of everything.
‘I’m sorry, I was being stupid,’ she says. ‘Of course we will be all right.’
‘Of course we will,’ he says, and pulls her close. She feels his heart beating like hers, too fast. She says nothing.
In bed that night, they talk quietly, because they know that Kolya will be awake.
‘He never seems to sleep.’
‘No wonder he’s so pale.’
‘And he’s like death warmed up in the mornings.’
‘When you think how he used to get us up at five in summer.’
‘ “It’s not time to sleep! The sun’s shining!” ’
‘And you had to have the curtains relined.’
They grumble quietly, holding each other, avoiding the subject that burns in both their minds.
‘Andrei?’
‘Yes?’
‘Move your arm a bit … Listen, you can’t get involved. Why should you do this for Russov? He wouldn’t do it for you. Lena’s right, you’ll have to call in sick.’
She’s silent, calculating.
‘Russov will have given Volkov my name already,’ goes on Andrei. ‘I know him.’
‘Then let’s go away.’
‘ “Go away”? What do you mean?’
‘Just … not be here.’
‘I can’t leave the hospital. You can’t leave the nursery. Besides, Kolya’s got exams coming up.’
‘I know all that, Andrei. But why not? We could go to the dacha. It’s safe there. No one would know we were there –’
‘Someone always knows.’
‘Not if we’re careful.’
‘People would see us coming and going. There’d be smoke from the chimney.’
They are talking as if they really might do it, he thinks in amazement. Go away, lie low, let the storm pass. Lose their careers and their livelihoods, but keep their lives. No. It’s absurd. Anna is overreacting. Things are not so bad as they used to be. The Terror is over; Yezhov is dead, after causing so many deaths. People aren’t vanishing in their hundreds of thousands, as they were in Yezhov’s time.
‘It’s impossible,’ says Andrei flatly.
‘No, don’t you see, it’s the only thing to do? The only thing, Andryusha! Once they get hold of you they never let go. They go on and on, and then they go on some more. Once they’ve got your name on a list they never forget it. They can make up whatever they like. But you can be ill, my darling. You work so hard, you need rest. It’s perfectly legitimate. We do nothing but work and work. I want to cultivate more ground at the dacha, anyway. Kolya won’t like it, but he’ll have to understand. It’s for his sake too, Andrei! We can’t let his life be wrecked before it’s even started.’
Thank God that Kolya is older now. She thinks of them often, those ranks of bewildered children parted from parents and then from grandparents, sent off to children’s homes where they got TB and faded away from sheer lack of the will to live. But on the other hand Kolya is almost old enough to be sent to the camps himself. Once the contamination gets into a family, it spreads to every member of it.
‘His life won’t be wrecked,’ says Andrei. His voice sounds cold but she knows he isn’t cold, not really. It’s just that he’s been forced into a corner. ‘Nothing’s even happened yet. For God’s sake, I’m a doctor. Russov’s asked me to make an examination, that’s all. They can’t make much out of that. If the boy’s got arthritis, they can hardly blame the doctor.’
‘But that’s exactly what they will do. It wouldn’t be any trouble to them to make a criminal out of you, simply because you’ve been involved with the treatment. If anything goes wrong, there you are: they’ve got a scapegoat. You’ll have ordered the wrong tests, or they won’t have been carried out properly, or something. Russov knows that. Lena knows it. She’s trying to help you, only you won’t listen. You won’t see what’s going to happen, because you’re too pure and you want to think that everyone’s like you.’
‘I do see it,’ says Andrei quietly. ‘Only there isn’t an alternative. So we go to the dacha … but everyone knows where that is, so it’s no solution.’
‘We could go to Irkutsk.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Anna! What on earth would we do there?’
‘We could stay with your uncle. You told me he’s got two rooms, and the boys have left home, haven’t they? They’re family. They’d help us until we could find work.’
‘That’s just crazy, Anna. You’re panicking. We haven’t got the right papers, we’d never get a residence permit just like that. We live here in Leningrad and our work is here. These are our lives. Are you suggesting that we run away from everything – destroy everything we’ve built up – just because there might – might – be trouble?’
Anna sighs deeply. She knows he understands her, and yet he’s pretending not to.
‘We should panic,’ she says. ‘People are destroyed because they don’t panic in time. They think it won’t happen to them.’
He feels her sigh become a shudder, shaking her body.
‘Anna. Anna!’
He clasps her tighter, wrapping her in his arms. Her warmth and her softness surround him. He could vanish into her, be hidden as she longs to be hidden. He could stop the world from dragging them away from where they want to be.
‘Anna!’
She sighs again, differently. Her body moves against his, yielding to his touch so that the melt and flow of sex can begin. He smells her hair and the skin of her neck. She twists round and licks his face, then dives to kiss his belly, following down the dark line of hair that leads to his penis. She rubs her face against it until he groans aloud.
‘Shh, Kolya’ll hear,’ she mutters automatically from the depths of the bed, but it’s too late for him to care. They are moving out together, far from their creaking bed and the listening walls, to the place where they are always together and always safe.