The Sandman

130

The old man pulls a grey file out of the equally grey cardboard box, opens it and puts a photograph on the table in front of Joona. It’s a group picture of twenty-two men standing in front of some polished stone steps.

‘This was taken in Leninsk in 1955,’ Karpin says in a different tone of voice.

In the middle of the front row sits the legendary Sergei Korolev, smiling calmly on one of the benches, the chief engineer behind the first man in space and the world’s first satellite.

‘Look at the men at the back.’

Joona leans forward and looks along the row of faces. Half-hidden behind a man with tousled hair stands a skinny man with a thin face and pale eyes.

Joona jerks his head back as if he’d just smelled ammonia.

He’s found Jurek Walter’s father.

‘I see him,’ Joona says.

‘Stalin’s administration picked out the youngest and most talented engineers,’ Nikita says calmly, tossing an old Soviet passport in front of Joona. ‘And Vadim Levanov was without doubt one of the best.’

As he opens the passport, Joona feels his pulse quicken.

The black-and-white photograph features a man resembling Jurek Walter, but with warmer eyes and without all the wrinkles in his face. So, Jurek Walter’s father’s name was Vadim Levanov, Joona thinks.

His journey here hasn’t been in vain. Now they can start to investigate Jurek Walter’s past properly.

Nikita lays out a set of ten fingerprints, some small private photographs of Jurek’s father’s christening and schooldays, junior schoolbooks and a child’s drawing of a car with a chimney on its roof.

‘What do you want to know about him?’ Karpin smiles. ‘We’ve got most things... every address he ever lived at, names of girlfriends before his marriage to Elena Mishailova, letter home to his parents in Novosibirsk, the time when he was active in the party...’

‘His son,’ Joona whispers.

‘His wife was also an engineer, but she died in childbirth when they’d been married two years,’ Karpin goes on.

‘The son,’ Joona repeats.

Karpin stands up, opens the wooden cupboard, gets out a heavy case and puts it on the table. When he lifts the lid, Joona sees that it’s a film-projector for 16-millimetre film.

Nikita Karpin asks Joona to close the curtains, then takes a reel of film from his grey box.

‘This is a private film from Leninsk that I think you should see...’

The projector starts to click, and the image is projected directly onto the medallion wallpaper. Karpin adjusts the focus, then sits down again.

The saturation of the image varies, but otherwise it’s fine. The camera must have been on a stand.

Joona realises that he’s looking at a film taken by Jurek Walter’s father during his time in Leninsk.

The image on the wall in front of him shows the back of a house and a verdant garden. Sunlight filters through the leaves and above the trees in the background he can make out an electricity pylon.

The image shakes a little, then Jurek’s father comes into view. He puts a heavy case down in the long grass, opens it and gets out four camping chairs. A boy with neatly combed hair enters the frame from the left. He looks about seven years old and has chiselled features and big, pale eyes.

There’s no doubt that it’s Jurek, Joona thinks, hardly daring to breathe.

The boy says something, but all that can be heard is the clicking of the projector.

Father and son help each other unfold the metal legs of the case, which transforms into a wooden-topped table when they turn it over.

Young Jurek disappears from view, but returns with a jug of water from the opposite direction. It happens so quickly that Joona thinks there must have been some trick.

Jurek bites his lips and clasps his hands tight as his father speaks to him.

He disappears from view again, and his father strides after him.

The water in the jug sparkles in the sunlight.

A short while later Jurek returns with a white paper bag, and then his father comes back with another child on his shoulders.

The father is shaking his head and trotting like a horse.

Joona can’t see the other child’s face.

The child’s head is out of frame, but Jurek waves up at it.

Feet with small shoes on kick at the father’s chest.

Jurek calls out something.

And when his father puts the second child down on the grass in front of the table Joona sees that it too is Jurek.

The identical boy stares into the camera with a serious face. A shadow sweeps across the garden. The father takes the paper bag and disappears out of the picture.

‘Identical twins,’ the agent smiles, stopping the projector.

‘Twins,’ Joona repeats.

‘That was why their mother died.’