The Jewel of St Petersburg

Thirty-five

VALENTINA WOKE LATE. AN AX WAS CHOPPING SPLINTERS from her brain and her mouth tasted sour. Before she even opened her eyes she remembered the vodka, the full glass of it afterward. Afterward. The word lingered like oil on her tongue, and she longed to burn it off. A dull ache inside her reminded her of her body’s resistance, but it was nothing to the other pain. The one that clawed at her heart.

“Valentina?”

She opened her eyes. Already it was light and Katya was leaning over her. “Are you all right? You were moaning.”

Valentina sat up and waited for the room to stop swooping around her. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Neither do you.” Her sister’s skin was a thin transparent film that looked as if it would tear if she touched it. “We’ll be going home today. Arkin has promised to release us.”

Katya frowned. “You believe him?”

“Yes. He promised. I’ll call him in now.”

Katya shook her head. “He’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“He left before it was light; I heard him. The other one is here, the one with the beard.”

Something cold as granite tumbled into Valentina’s stomach. Instinctively she put her hand over her unborn child. She raced to the door and hammered on it, shouting for Arkin, but Mazhik’s voice swore at her and a folded piece of paper was pushed under the door. She snatched it up.

You expect too much of life, Valentina Ivanova. I was drunk. My promise was worthless. Today I see clearly that you and your sister must be examples to your class and to all oppressors. It saddens me, but it must be done. Our small personal tragedies mean nothing in the storm that is sweeping through Russia. I would ask your forgiveness, but I know you have none in your heart for me.

There was no signature. Valentina froze. Ice crawled through her veins.

“What is it?” Katya asked.

Valentina crushed the note in her hand, screwing it into a tight ball. “It’s from Arkin.”

Whatever was in her voice, Katya heard it. “What’s the matter? Valentina, come here, what’s happened?”

She didn’t want Katya to touch her, didn’t want Katya to smell him on her. “He broke his word,” she said flatly. “He’s changed his mind.”

“You mean he isn’t going to release us? Maybe Papa can find the money somewhere.”

“No. I told you. He is bankrupt.”

“Well, the police could be tracking us down right now.”

Valentina gave a murmur of scorn. “They have no idea where we are being held. Arkin is too clever for them.”

“I see.” Katya’s voice sounded far away. “So you think they will kill us.”

Valentina wanted to lie, but she couldn’t, not to Katya. “Yes, I believe that’s why Mazhik is still here.”

“To finish us off.”

“Yes.”

To her astonishment Katya’s eyes brightened. She smiled. “So what are we going to do? Start another adventure?”

Valentina sat down on the bed. “I have an idea.”

MAZHIK!”

“What? I’m eating.” His voice was surly. He hadn’t bothered to bring them bread this morning. Why feed the dying?

“Mazhik,” Valentina called through the door, keeping her tongue soft. “We know what is going to happen to us. We do not blame you for this, but we do not want to die with our souls impure, so we are offering up our prayers to our dear Lord Jesus Christ, savior of souls. We are asking the Blessed Virgin to intercede for us.”

“So?”

“So, I beg you to let us have a candle to burn to consecrate our prayers.”

“Fuck off.”

“Mazhik, do not send us to suffer in hell for all eternity, I beg you. One candle. To cleanse our souls. It’s a small thing to ask of a man of the people who will one day soon be in control of all Russia.”

Katya’s young voice joined hers in a piteous thin wail. “Please, Mazhik.”

There was a grumbling outside, followed by the sound of a chair being pushed back. Valentina’s and Katya’s eyes fixed on the door. It opened a crack and the blackened stub of a candle was tossed in, and then the door banged shut again.

“A match?” Valentina called out.

After a moment a single match slid under the door. Valentina pounced on it. She picked up the pile of threads that they had shredded from one of the blankets and her silk gown in a bundle.

“It will burn well,” Katya had pointed out. “You can wear the shirt and trousers.”

“Ready?” Valentina asked.

Katya’s blue eyes glinted with excitement as she clamped over her nose her handkerchief dipped in their drinking water. “Ready,” she answered.

Valentina struck the match on the rough floor-they were committed now-and held the flame to the candle’s wick. She waited for it to flare, then stood it in the heart of the nest of material piled against the inner wall of the room. It spat and crackled, but one lick of yellow flame was persistent and smoke began to billow from the planks. Valentina retreated to the bed beside Katya and draped the other blanket over their heads with just a spy hole to allow her to keep track of the fire’s progress. She wrapped an arm firmly around her sister, who faced her with a wide smile.

“Valentina, I want you to know that there’s no one on earth I’d rather burn to death with than you.”

Valentina laughed grimly. “We won’t die. I give you my word.”

It didn’t take long. In a matter of minutes they were both coughing and the flames were climbing like monkeys up the timbers. It was time. She held a strip of Arkin’s shirt over her nose and took up position behind the door.

“Fire! Pozhar! Fire! Mazhik, come quickly. Help! Na pomosch! Help! Bistro!” Her fists hammered on the door the way her heart was hammering on her ribs. “Mazhik! Fire!”

Smoke filled the air, pouring under the door into the room outside, and she heard the key in the lock, Mazhik cursing her. Relief flooded her brain, making her light-headed. Or was that the lack of oxygen?

“You fool! Dura! What have you done?”

“Water!” she shrieked.

He turned and ran. In the few minutes it took him to seize a bucket and race to the water trough in the yard outside, Valentina had Katya wrapped in the blanket and hoisted her up on her back. Eyes stinging from the smoke, she stumbled through the door, through the living room and out into the crisp fresh air.

“Get a bloody bucket, you fool,” Mazhik screamed at her. “If this house burns down, I shall kill you.”

She almost laughed. He was going to kill her anyway. She sat Katya on the ground next to the woodshed and picked up a bucket beside the trough. Hurriedly she filled it, ran indoors, and hurled the water at the burning wall. Even she was amazed at how the flames were leaping to the roof rafters already, greedy in the speed with which they were devouring the izba. For several minutes she and Mazhik worked together with the buckets, back and forth to the trough, passing each other at a run.

It was on his fifth dash out the front door with his empty bucket that she stepped up behind him and brought a heavy log crushing down on his skull. He crumpled to the ground as though the strings working him had snapped, and she dragged him away from the house toward the store of logs.

“Is he dead?” Katya whispered.

Valentina crouched at his side and felt his neck for a pulse. “No.”

“Thank God.”

“The bastard would have killed us, don’t forget.”

“Valentina! We aren’t like them.”

“Aren’t we?” Valentina looked across at her sister and asked again more thoughtfully, “Aren’t we?”

But Katya was staring openmouthed at the house. The whole shabby building was on fire, flames crackling and spitting, punching holes in the misty air, painting it bright orange. The glow gleamed like sunlight on Katya’s cheeks, and it struck Valentina that despite the pain she was in, her young sister looked more real, more engaged with life than she had been since that day in Tesovo. As though the fire in this dismal piece of deserted marshland had set something alight inside her. Time to move. Rope, she needed rope. At the back of the woodshed she found a length of it and quickly tied it around the man’s wrists and ankles.

“Feel that,” she muttered under her breath. “Feel what it’s like to be helpless.”

At the side of the shed was something else, something she had spotted from the window of their prison room: a small cart for shifting logs from the forest. It consisted of a large rectangular box on wheels with a long rope for towing it. She dragged it out and pulled it up to Katya.

“Your carriage awaits!”

Not once did Katya let a moan slip past her lips as her limbs were tucked into the cart.

“Let’s go,” Valentina said.

She fixed the rope around her shoulders like a sled dog in harness and set off at a fast pace. She didn’t look back, but she knew the peasant cottage was still blazing fiercely and she was glad. She wanted it to burn. To become such a furnace that only ash would remain as she walked away, pulling her sister behind her over the rough road. All her shame, all her disgrace, all her betrayal, all of it, burned to nothing. Just dead white ash blown across the wetlands in the wind. No secrets. Nothing.

THE GOING WAS TOUGH. THE ROAD WAS STREWN WITH stones and potholes that jolted the cart but she didn’t slow. The air tasted clean after the izba, though large areas of standing water on the wetlands had formed into mosquito-ridden ponds and stagnant channels on either side of the raised track. Feathery threads of mist clung close to its surface. The cart was difficult to maneuver and the rope cut into her shoulders, yet for no reason Valentina could understand, a fierce sense of joy possessed her.

Everything had changed. At the heart of her life now-at the heart of herself-Jens and their child were waiting. She knew he’d be angry with her for running off after Katya without him, and she fretted about the blow to his head, but none of that mattered when she pictured the life together that lay ahead of them. Years and years of it. Her head on his lap, his fingers combing her hair. Their thoughts interwoven. She wanted to be at his side long enough to watch his hair grow white and the lines deepen around his eyes as he smiled at her. To discover the secrets at the core of him and to know the intricate pathways of his strong mind.

What had happened in that izba behind her was over and done with, scorched away by the flames. In her mind she made herself lock the betrayal deep down in a dark and secret place where no one would ever seek it out. Only she would know where it lay, always able to find it by the smell of filth. But Katya was safe. They were both alive.

“Sing, Katya!” she shouted.

She heard a laugh and then her sister’s voice reaching out into the morning air with a good army marching song. Where had she learned that? But almost immediately a shout stopped her in midstride, and the singing ceased abruptly. She whirled around to see that behind them on the road a man was approaching at a rapid pace, leading a long-eared white horse with a woman on its back, a heavily pregnant woman.

“Hey!” the woman called out. “Are you young ones in trouble? Out here on your own.”

Valentina wanted to fling her arms around the horse and kiss its muscular neck. “We could do with a little help,” she admitted.

The man was bearded, with a harsh guttural way of speaking and his front teeth missing, but his eyes were kind and his hands were gentle as he hitched the makeshift cart to the back of the horse using the rope.

“Look at you,” the woman scolded. “Climb in with your sister. You look exhausted.”

“No, thank you, I’ll walk.”

“It’s three hours to Petersburg.”

Three hours. No time at all. To walk into a new life.

ONE HOUR LATER THE FIRST RIFLE SHOT SLAPPED INTO the back of the cart and made Katya jump with shock. Valentina spun around and spotted Mazhik on the road behind. Chyort! He had found something to cut the ropes. By the time the second bullet snicked at the stones at her feet, she was pushing Katya’s head down below the level of the cart’s sides and the man had released his grip on the leading rein. He was dragging a gigantic ancient shotgun from the pack on the horse’s back.

The roar it made as he pulled the trigger nearly ripped her ears apart. It startled the horse, which skittered sideways, ears flattened, but the shot stopped Mazhik in his tracks. He fired off one more wild shot, then shied away and retreated along the road, but that final crack of a bullet was too much for the horse. Its nerves leapt out of control, and with a loud whinny of panic the animal bolted down the track. The woman was a strong horsewoman and held on firmly, but the flimsy cart at the back was not built for such speed. Valentina screamed. She raced after the horse and her legs felt slow, too heavy, as though moving through mud, fighting for speed that wasn’t there. She fixed her eyes on her sister’s pale face. Katya’s mouth opened but Valentina heard nothing, just the high-pitched eerie cry spilling out of her own mouth.

A wheel snapped off and the cart slammed one corner on the ground. Nails split, splinters of wood spiraling up into the air as the horse veered off to one side. The rope snapped. In Valentina’s head everything slowed. She saw the moment piece by piece, as if it had shattered. The wheel whirling back toward her, the cart leaping like an unwieldy dolphin in a wide arc into the murky channel beside the road. The splash of water rising in a rainbow of colors, the awful sucking sound as mud and water seized their prize, and Katya’s body sank under the surface.

“Katya!”

Valentina leapt into the channel. The water came only to her waist and she plunged her hands under the upturned edge of the cart, twisting it over. Immediately Katya’s head bobbed above the water and though her face was covered in black slime like witch’s weeds, she spat the filth from her mouth and cursed Mazhik when Valentina grasped her tightly in her arms.

“Enough adventure for you?” Valentina hissed.

Katya gave her a crooked smile. “I always liked swimming.”

“Next time get out of the cart first.”

“Next time I’ll…” But she started to shake.

“Bistro!” Valentina shouted to the man to help her. His wife had the horse under control and was holding out a blanket for Katya. “Spasibo,” Valentina said gratefully.

The people of Russia were kind; Valentina felt it keenly. Something soiled and selfish corrupted their souls when they lived too long in Petersburg, but out here in the wide open spaces of this country the heart of Russia still beat strongly. It gave her hope.

In the distance ahead of them a lone horseman was galloping hard toward them, his cape flying out behind him. The bearded man murmured a word of warning and reached once more for his gun, but Valentina seized his arm.

“No!”

Even at this distance she knew who it was. Jens.