Moskva

47 Bearding the Lion

It was cold but she’d been colder. Inside and outside, she’d been colder and she could stand Moscow’s icy winds and wait, if that’s what it took. The facade of the building she’d been watching was absurd. It had been absurd when it was built and it was absurd now, pharaonic architecture at its worst. Stalin always did have appalling taste. Yellow stone pillars rose like Egyptian obelisks, with windows between that belonged to a Parisian department store. The House of Lions was a mansion block by a set designer for a third-rate provincial opera, and a bad one at that.

Wax Angel knew she was being bad-tempered.

At her age she was allowed to be bad-tempered. The wind and the cold and the idiot militsiya man who had tried to move her on earlier were enough to make anyone lose their temper. He’d told her to move and she’d refused. They’d gone through this several times, as if it were a refrain, or responses to prayers, or the chorus to a musical spectacular or question-and-answer from some absurdist play.

Louder and louder, until everyone was looking.

That had embarrassed the young man. If he couldn’t move on an old tramp – and a female one at that – how could he ever hope to impose order on the city? In from Azerbaijan, from the sound of him. He’d have done better if he was from Georgia. The crowd gathering might have given him more encouragement, or they might still have just watched in amused contempt, which was what they did.

‘Why don’t you just leave her alone?’ a smartly dressed woman in a brown coat had finally shouted.

The young man had disappeared, promising to be back shortly.

‘Shortly’ had come and gone, and they were well into ‘later’ and there was still no sign of him. The crowd thinned too, as crowds always did, after the curtain had come down and the encores were done and the lights went up.

Pulling her rags more tightly around her, Wax Angel dug into her pocket for a stub of candle, found her pearl-handled knife and began to carve.

Over the years she’d simplified the outlines, stripped away their detail and individuality, the way the sculptors had done in the thirties, during that brief period when the Soviet Cubist Movement met Monumental Propaganda. The way the KGB did when they wanted to remind you that you were no one really, even if your picture had been on posters for the Bolshoi ballet company.

Recently she’d started to put the detail back.

A cheekbone where once she’d have put a flat plane, a wing where she’d have left a curve, eyes where blind indentations might have been.

She was, she suspected, becoming kinder to herself.

That or she was running out of time. That was possible. She’d had more of that than she’d ever expected. They all had. The war had withered life expectancies to months and days and sometimes hours. In the cellars of the Lubyanka, even hours had felt like years. That was where she’d learned to fracture herself – to do complicated multiplications of prime numbers, and something called the Fibonacci sequence which an old woman who had briefly shared her cell had taught her – while they did the things they had to do to your body.

She’d been young then, relatively.

That old woman in the cell, who had seemed so old, had probably been far younger than she was now. Everything after the war, after those dark days, Wax Angel should have seen as a bonus. Sometimes, though, she wondered if life wouldn’t be easier if it simply matched her fears.

She’d been watching the House of Lions for a week now. Such a stupid building. Such a stupid name. Most of them hadn’t been lions when they were young and the ones left were rank and mangy with their fur coming out.

He was in there, though.

She’d seen him arrive in that car of his.

The old cars had been properly beautiful. The ZiS 110B, now that was a real car. Great curves that flowed like riverbanks and the weight and strength of a tank. Black as a Steinway piano too, and when polished properly its bodywork glowed like Japanese lacquer. People used to look and point and smile. No one looking at his new car would smile.

They’d just think, Big, powerful, ugly…

So many things in the country now fitted that label. It wasn’t meant to be like this. She knew that, and he knew that, and everyone who’d fought through those days knew it too, for all no one was allowed to say it.

He’d come with the girl.

She was a solid little thing now, tough as a weightlifter without the bulk and strong as a ballerina without the need to show off. Sometimes when you mixed grape varieties the vintage improved. Other times the wine soured. Occasionally, the results were startling. It was a long time since Wax Angel had drunk wine but she could remember that much.

It was time.

If anything, it was long past time.

At the door of the block, a guard moved towards her.

She waited until he was close and then locked her gaze on his.

He was young and pretty and blond in that slightly Baltic sort of way. There’d been a lot of blond and blue-eyed boys in Moscow once, prisoners of war all of them. She wasn’t sure if this monstrosity had been built by prisoners but the university and the block for foreigners out by the flyover had.

‘Tell the commissar I want to talk to him.’

The boy blinked at her. He gripped his rifle like it was his girlfriend’s hand.

‘Go on then. Make the call.’

‘We have no commissars here.’

‘You have one. I watched him arrive with Sveta and that crippled brat of Dennisov’s. Go on, tell Marshal Milov his wife is here.’