Moskva

30 Back at the Dacha

You can’t have her…

The things Tom was to remember about that night were not those he felt he should remember. He should have been worrying at the boy’s last words, running through all their possible meanings.

He, Tom, couldn’t have her?

Nobody could have her?

What if the boy hadn’t been talking about Alex? His accent had been strange. Definitely not Muscovite, perhaps Baltic. He might have been speaking colloquially and talking about his weapon.

Give me the gun.

You can’t have her.

It was the second time in days Tom had stared death in the face.

He should be more frightened. At the very least he should feel grateful that he’d been granted more time to find out what had happened to Alex.

Actually, he did feel that. He simply didn’t feel anything for himself.

What he was to remember were the little things, the fragile and illusive threads that held the fabric of those hours together. The sound of an unexpectedly loud clock striking after midnight, the little dacha falling back into what he’d thought was silence until he noticed the creak of its walls and the tap of a branch against the window of a different room. The scuttle of a mouse, so different to the skittering of the rat in the cellar before he was shot. The pad of an elderly tomcat checking all was right with the world. All these. And a slowly growing sense that those words had to refer to Alex.

She was still alive. What else could You can’t have her mean?

Against that, he was no closer to finding her.

Sveta’s grandfather had settled back into his little dacha as if it was a second skin, drinking brandy from a heavy goblet, fussing over his mog, telling Sveta to take Tom outside and see to his shoulder, while he made a telephone call.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Sveta said, when Tom asked who he was calling.

‘Can you find out?’

‘It’s not my business,’ she said. ‘It’s not your business either.’

‘Then why am I here?’

In answer, Sveta tipped neat vodka on to a rag and began wiping dried blood from Tom’s shoulder. When he yelped, she raised her eyebrows and Tom kept his jaw clamped after that while she tacked his wound shut with a stitch of ordinary thread.

‘Where did you learn that?’

She glanced towards the dacha. ‘Where do you think?’

That evening, after her grandfather had retired to bed, she showed Tom the stars. They seemed colder and clearer in a sky that was darker and wider than any he remembered. There was no moon and no cloud cover. The nearest town was too small to cast any light and the capital far enough away to be a haze on the horizon.

On nights like this, she told him, she expected Mongols to ride out of the darkness on their shaggy ponies, with their bows over their shoulders. At least with enemies like that you knew where you stood. She smiled when she said that. Then told him it was time he went to bed, because tomorrow her grandfather would want to talk again about what happened when the house was stormed.

‘He thinks Alex is alive?’

‘Probably. Until she’s more useful dead.’

Tom didn’t find that reassuring.

Shutting the front door behind them, he shot the bolts at the top and the bottom while Sveta looked on amused. She checked the windows herself and pointed up the narrow stairs, telling him to turn right. No sofa this time. He had a box room at the end. Her bedroom was at the other end. Even from downstairs they could hear her grandfather in the room between, his snore as slow and regular as a blunt saw across dry wood.

You can’t have her.

Should he tell Sveta what the boy had said?

To turn it round, why hadn’t he told Sveta already? Why hadn’t he told her grandfather? Because he didn’t trust a man who’d send Sveta and him outside while he made a telephone call? But if he couldn’t trust the commissar, who among the Soviets could he trust? That thought brought its own questions. And then he remembered Dennisov.

He trusted Dennisov.

‘That boy who tried to shoot me…’

Sveta hushed Tom into silence. They’d left the boy on the hill in the snow and kept going, with Sveta in the driving seat. The spa would take care of it, Tom had been told. It hadn’t happened. It was not to be discussed.

He would be wise to remember that.

She indicated that he should climb the stairs ahead of her and they went up together, pausing for Tom to get his breath at the top.

‘Your shoulder hurts?’

He nodded.

‘If Vedenin sent him, my grandfather will find out.’

Sveta shut her door without looking back and Tom went to the box room he’d been assigned and halted, looking for the bed. It was in a cupboard. Rather, it was the cupboard. A set of drawers beneath supported a coffin-like frame on which sat a rolled-up mattress. Unrolled, it fitted exactly.

Painted roses curled inside the doors, which were pierced by heart-shaped air holes.

The wooden wall at his feet showed a naïf painting of the forest behind the hut. The cupboard roof above had the stars he’d seen outside. The only wall unpainted was behind Tom’s head. This was lined with copies of Pravda so old they showed pictures of Khrushchev. Curiosity made him peel back a corner. Behind Khrushchev he found Stalin and behind Stalin the edge of a saint’s halo. In pain or not, Tom was grinning as he turned out the light.

The dreams came in hard and fast and he found himself in a valley, a house on fire behind him and a bastard with a sniper rifle coming after. They hunted him through dark drizzle across a sodden hill under a moonless sky and only the lack of a moon saved him. He dreamed of a white Mini crashing into an oak tree on a dry road under a bright moon, and wept because he could do nothing to stop it.

He knew the man being hunted was himself and didn’t care enough to want him to escape. He knew the girl in tears inside the Mini was his daughter and no matter how much he cared her car still carved a brutal scar into the trunk of the oak tree.

He could describe the scar it had carved precisely.

When the Mongols on their ponies appeared, burning villages, nailing priests to doors and filling the mouths of princes with molten silver, he was grateful for their kindness. They were riding away as they rode in, to the sound of waves on shingle, or a blunt saw across dry wood, when Tom woke with a jolt.

The lights were off, the dacha quiet and the doors to his cupboard shut. But someone else was definitely there. Silent and still. Not touching but crouched above him. They were good. They had to be. It must hurt like hell to hold yourself up by digging your knees into the sharp edges of the bed’s box frame.

Clenching his fist, Tom readied to strike.

‘Don’t,’ Sveta said.

A hand found his face, wiping away tears he hadn’t known were there.

‘Always so sad,’ she said.

With her knees still on the frame, she pulled the blanket from his chest and dipped forward to kiss him almost quizzically. Her breasts were heavy against his ribs and Tom realized she was naked; then she reached under the blanket and found him.

‘Sveta…’

‘Good Marxists…’

Tom felt her fingers tighten.

‘Always seize the means of production. That was a joke,’ she added, in case he hadn’t realized. ‘From my school.’

Very slowly, very precisely, she stroked him.

And then, with her knees still on the cot’s sharp edges, she lowered herself on to him, lifted herself off and lowered herself again. Her movements carried a precision he’d never imagined anyone could bring to sex.

Only the fact she suddenly gripped his shoulders while her insides quivered told him she’d come. Then she lifted herself away and moved her knees from the cot’s edge to crouch by his feet. ‘Did that hurt?’ she asked.

‘Everything hurts.’

‘Welcome to Russia.’

When Tom went downstairs the next morning, Sveta’s grandfather was sitting at a tiny table in the hall, which had been laid for breakfast with a patched white tablecloth and mismatched china. An Oxford Book of English Verse lay open on the table, a dictionary beside it.

‘Know this one?’ the old man asked. ‘“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…”’

‘“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair”?’

‘Indeed. My colleagues would say the Soviet Union is the rock on which history has broken, perhaps even ended.’

‘Rocks can be worn away.’

‘They can split, they can crack, they can sink beneath the waves. Seas can dry, however. Seabeds rise to become mountains in their turn.’

‘That could be poetry.’

The old man looked at him, the sharpness of his gaze softening as he glanced towards the kitchen. ‘I’ve come to believe history scans,’ he said. ‘It very definitely flows.’ Nodding towards the kitchen, he added, ‘I should have you killed. My granddaughter would never know. Vedenin would hardly object. I doubt even your ambassador would make much of a fuss. Sudden fever. Blood poisoning. A fatal reaction to poor-quality Soviet antibiotics.’

‘Why would you do that?’

His gaze returned to where Sveta banged pans, clattered crockery and occasionally paused, looking exasperated as she opened cupboards and drawers she’d never bothered with before. ‘Why do you think?’

‘Frying pan?’ Sveta shouted.

‘Isn’t one,’ the old man shouted back. ‘Use the coffee pan.’

The splash of water in a bowl and grumbling told them she was washing up the saucepan she’d only just finished using.

‘Then why don’t you?’ Tom said.

‘Two reasons,’ the commissar replied. ‘One, she’s not serious. She’d never have let you bed her that quickly if she was.’

‘The second?’ Tom asked, feeling deflated.

‘She’s playing.’

‘At what?’

‘Being happy.’ They watched from the little hall as Sveta broke eggs into the saucepan, accidentally smashing the yolk of one and deciding to turn fried eggs into scrambled while there was still time. ‘You did bed her, didn’t you?’

‘It was the other way round.’

‘You’re the first since her husband died.’

‘I didn’t know she’d been married.’

‘She’ll tell you if she wants to.’

‘It was unhappy?’

‘She adored him. He was a cosmonaut, a good man. The first stage didn’t separate from the second. His rocket exploded shortly after take-off.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘If he’d succeeded, we’d have had our moon landing.’

‘He went alone?’

‘Three others. You know how ground control signed off? “May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather…” Nothing was, just back to the atoms where everything began.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said, not knowing what else to say.

‘Me too. Now, what was it you wanted to ask?’

‘Were you behind the gunman at the spa?’

The commissar smiled. ‘It’s taken you this long to ask?’ He picked up his coffee, looked at it and put it down again. ‘Would I tell you if I was?’

‘Quite probably.’

The old man grinned. ‘You don’t think it’s Vedenin?’

‘What if that’s too obvious?’

‘Hurt Sveta and I’ll have you killed. Probably do it myself. Other than that, what reason do I have to want you dead? Well, what reason would I have had then?’