Moskva

48 Into the Den

The hall had been repainted. Of course it had. So many years had passed.

There was new carpet on the main stairs and Stalin was gone, Khrushchev too. He’d been replaced by a huge painting of the steppe, empty as rhetoric. You knew things were bad when they had to replace heroes with oversized picture postcards. There was not even a sturdy boy or pretty peasant girl to stare at the horizon.

So much had been hollowed out. So many pillars of the state turned out to be trompe l’oeil or cardboard. Only Lenin survived. God knows how. He’d be the last to go, she imagined.

This building had three of him.

A marble bust in the hallway on a porphyry plinth.

A bronze monstrosity on the half-landing, which had stood in the hallway until it was judged too ugly or vulgar to remain. Iliych’s beard jutted fiercely at the future. His brows were heavy, his eyes all-seeing.

The final bust was right outside her husband’s apartment.

Made of spelter, cheap and nasty, mass-produced for school foyers, Party offices and factory canteens. In this case a factory in Stalingrad that had produced tractors until it was converted to making armaments and later bombed flat.

A crack split Ilyich from shoulder to ear.

Wax Angel grinned.

She could remember the grenade that did that.

‘Smug bastard,’ she said, patting Lenin’s head.

The guard from the front door who’d accompanied her this far looked terrified. She could tell the boy a few things about terror. They weren’t born these days. Half of them would die without even realizing they’d been alive.

‘Remember me?’ she said to the bust.

‘How could he forget?’

The commissar stood in his doorway, wearing a tatty yellow smoking jacket given to him by the Chinese premier back when Moscow and Peking were still friends. There was a strange look in his eyes.

If Wax Angel hadn’t known better, she’d have said it was relief.

‘Hello, Maya,’ he said.

‘Hello Comrade Commissar.’

Stepping forward, he swept her up in an embrace that seemed fierce for his age. He smelled as he’d always smelled, of sweat and soap and cigarettes. The dressing gown smelled as she remembered too, of mothballs that had done too little to keep the moths at bay if the state of his collar was anything to go by.

‘You look like you,’ he said.

‘About time,’ she said.

Behind him stood her granddaughter, wide-eyed and fully grown, Dennisov’s drunken brat at her side. When Sveta put her hand to her mouth, the young man wrapped his arm tightly round her shoulders.

‘Remember me?’ Wax Angel asked.

Sveta burst into tears.

Wax Angel sighed. She should have realized the girl might be shocked.

‘The commissar picked Lenin up and dumped him on a grenade. Your grandfather’s first and last romantic gesture. The blast cracked most of his ribs, put a hole through a rotten floor too. Just as well. If the floor had been concrete, he’d be dead. Daft bastard.’ Turning to the guard, Wax Angel said, ‘You can go.’

The young man went without checking with the marshal first.

To Sveta, Wax Angel said, ‘Come on then. Let’s have a proper look at you.’

Sveta glanced at Dennisov, who nodded her forward.

‘A major, eh? Better than I managed.’ The ragged woman walked slowly round Sveta and nodded approvingly. ‘Good profile. Good posture. Good boots.’

‘As for him…’ She took a long hard look at Dennisov, in particular his rusting leg. ‘Stands straight for a cripple, meets your eye. He’ll do, if you must. Your grandfather was a slouch too. Except on parade. On parade no one’s a slouch.’

‘Maya, what are you doing here?’

‘I could ask the same.’

‘I live here.’

The ragged woman glanced at his waterfall of greying hair and snorted. ‘Call this living? Some day you’ll have to tell me if the House of Lions is a mausoleum or a zoo. Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

‘I’m on my way to the Hotel National.’

‘Planning to set up a provisional government?’

For a moment she thought he was going to say that her remark was in bad taste. She was glad he didn’t; that would have made her cross. She imagined that setting up governments, provisional or otherwise, had been on his mind a lot lately.

Instead he said, ‘An Englishwoman wants to see me.’

‘So do I. And I’ve brought you a present.’

She tossed what looked like a lump of rancid jerky at his feet. From the shock on the commissar’s face, you’d think he’d never seen anyone castrated.

‘Vedenin?’ he said.

‘Should have done it years ago.’

It was surprising how much better one could feel after killing the bastard who bedded your underage daughter. Sveta’s mother had been beautiful and fragile and too innocent not to trust the man who ruined her. Too fragile not to take her own life.

‘Maya…’

‘You know I should have done it years ago.’

He wasn’t bad for his age, the commissar. Slightly too impressed with himself, but men always were. At least he wasn’t fat like Vedenin. Fat people bleed so badly. Vedenin had bled like a pig as she peeled the fat from his body.

Squealed like one, too.

‘We talked a little about the old days,’ Wax Angel said. ‘About his habits. About who might have been leaving bodies around Moscow. And then I asked him what was really going on. We got to the English girl eventually. You know who has her now?’

She looked her husband in the eye, smiled grudgingly.

‘Yes, I thought you might.’