The Concubine's Secret

18

The silence. The stillness. The sameness. They rob you. Steal your sense of self.

In a set of bright basement rooms deep under the streets of Moscow, a tall man leaned over a clutch of technical drawings spread out over the surface of his desk and for a moment wondered whether he was dead or alive. Sometimes he couldn’t tell.

Week by week, the days scarcely varied. The electric light was never switched off and the concept of darkness became a luxury he craved. He worked whenever he chose, whenever he could concentrate his mind, unaware of time or routine. Right now, was it day or night? He had no idea. He released the pair of callipers from his hand and let them clatter on to the wooden surface of the desk, just to hear a noise of some kind other than the hum of the hot water pipes that trailed along the walls.

He rested his chin on his hand. What were other people doing? Eating? Singing? Best of all, talking? He allowed his mind to create a world up there above his head, a city where snow fell on to golden church domes in a thick lacy curtain. Where sounds were muffled and there was the swish of greased runners, and hopeful young street urchins touted firewood for sale, hauling it along the gutters on sledges.

Moscow was alive above him. Living and laughing. He could smell the dough in the ovens and taste the sour cream on his tongue… but only in his dreams. In his waking hours there was nothing but silence, stillness and sameness.

‘So you have a daughter.’

Jens Friis made no response. He was sharpening a pencil when the guard rattled his keys, unlocked the heavy metal door and entered the workroom with a grimace on his face. It was the fat one, Poliakov. He wasn’t so bad. Better than some of the other bastards. And this one liked to talk, even if it was just to poke and prod the prisoners out of their carefully constructed shells. Jens didn’t mind that. He’d developed a knack of letting the taunts slide past, and responding with comments that sometimes succeeded in enticing the warder into conversation.

But this. So you have a daughter. This was different.

He sat back in his seat, a padded comfortable armchair in which he did most of his thinking, and showed no hint of surprise.

‘What do you mean, Poliakov?’

‘Your daughter.’

‘You’ve got it wrong. I have no family. They were lost in the terrors of 1917.’

The warder leaned against the doorframe, his belly straining at the buttons of his shirt, his round brown eyes full of amusement. That was a bad sign.

‘No daughter?’

‘Nyet,’ Jens repeated.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ But his heart stopped.

Poliakov pulled out a cigarette, lit it with a match which he dropped on the floor, and took a long drag before letting loose a conspiratorial smile. ‘Now what’s the point of lying to me, Friis? I thought I was your friend.’

At least here they were called by their names. In the camp it had been just impersonal numbers. Jens dismissed the guard’s words as another attempt to provoke him, so he refused to rise to the bait.

‘Any chance of a smoke?’ he asked instead.

‘I tell you, Friis, you’re going to love listening to this. Your daughter has turned up at your last camp, it seems. Don’t look so shocked. She’s searching for you in the wrong place, thousands of miles away from here. Isn’t that funny?’ He chuckled at first, but when he saw the expression on his prisoner’s face he burst out laughing. ‘What chance does a stupid kid have of tracing you here?’

What chance?

Jens wanted to strangle him, to squeeze that thick lardy neck. He stood up abruptly and as he did so a flash of fiery curls roared into his brain. A dainty heart-shaped face. A mischievous smile that could pulverise his heart. Lydia? Is it you? My Lydia?

Could it really be her?

Sweat broke out on his skin. Was his daughter alive? After all these years that he’d believed her dead. And his wife?

Oh dear God, let my beautiful Valentina be alive. Let my little Lydia be… He choked.

For twelve long barren years he’d lived without them, without even the memory of the two people he had loved most in the world. Because to think of them, of their smiles and their clear voices, would destroy him. So for twelve lonely years he’d lived without love and without hope. Only now when Poliakov said so slyly, She’s searching for you, did images of the moment he lost them come crashing back.

He pictured once more the icy wasteland of Siberia, white and monotonous. The grey frozen slats of the cattle wagons packed with fear and fury, as the train with its cargo of fleeing White Russians growled its way across Russia in search of freedom. Valentina’s breath on his cheek, the weight of their child asleep in his arms. Then came the rifles, the men on horseback with hate in their eyes, the cries as the women and children were snatched from the train by the Bolsheviks. In flashes he recalled again the pitiless gaze of the Red Army commander as the men were herded away to be shot. Valentina’s eyes huge with an agony of despair. Lydia’s thin piercing scream. The terror spread around them as solid as the frozen snow under their feet.

He jerked his mind away from that moment, the way he would jerk his hand away from red-hot metal.

‘Valentina?’ he whispered.

‘Who the fuck is Valentina?’ Poliakov snapped.

Jens suddenly hated this guard, loathed and detested him for enticing hope back into his life. Hope was dead. Long ago he had slain it, a many-headed monster that made life in the prisons unbearable. But now it had risen from the dead to torment him again. The pencil in his hand snapped.