The Concubine's Secret

27

The group of prisoners stood alone in the central courtyard behind heavy studded doors. Nine men, three women. In the back of a truck, sheltering out of the bitter wind, two soldiers watched over them, unseen in its dark metallic interior with rifles across their knees, cigarette smoke warm in their lungs. Outside snow fluttered down in spinning spirals, settling on hats and shoulders, yet despite the cold and the tall gloomy buildings that loomed over them, blocking out what little winter light filtered down, each of the prisoners was smiling.

It was always the same. A day free from the rattle of locks. No jangle of keys, no interminable grey corridors that led only to more locks and more keys. Anticipation prickled their skin. It reminded Jens of when he was a young man in St Petersburg, standing in the stable courtyard waiting for the carriage to arrive to whisk them away to the summer palace for the day. Well, today wasn’t an outing to any palace. Far from it. Just to a gigantic hangar in a well-guarded field surrounded by dense forest. Not that he’d ever seen the forest here, but he’d heard the wind in the branches, the sigh of wooden limbs as they flexed and shivered. It was a sound he’d listened to a million times in the forests of Siberia, a sound as familiar as his own breath.

‘Jens.’

‘Olga,’ he smiled. ‘No need to be nervous.’

‘I’m not nervous.’ She said it breezily. ‘It’s the noise of the wheels I hate, that’s all, as they drive over rough ground. Like bones being crushed.’

Olga was a skilled chemist, no more than forty but she looked older, the lines round her mouth etched deep after eight years’ hard labour in a lead mine. Her body was fleshless, stick thin, and she complained of stomach pains whenever she ate her meals. Here in this prison they were decently fed, a world away from the labour camps. They routinely devoured more protein in one week than they’d previously had sight of in a whole year. Stalin was feeding them up the way a farmer fattens a pig before slitting its throat. To get the best out of them. Stalin wanted the best out of their brains.

The prison doctor declared that Olga’s pains were all in her mind and he might be right. Guilt, Jens believed, guilt was eating her up each time she pushed a forkful of food past her lips, because her daughter was still out there in the lead mine where bones were regularly crushed under rockfalls.

‘I hate going in the truck,’ Olga muttered.

‘Just imagine that you are in a horse carriage,’ Jens urged, ‘trotting down the Arbat to take tea at the Arbatskiy Podval café. That would put a smile on your face. Cakes and pastries and sweet strawberry tarts and-’

‘Mmm,’ murmured a younger woman nearby, ‘plum tart with cream and chocolate sauce.’

‘Annoushka, you never think of anything but food,’ Olga scolded.

‘Food is comforting,’ Annoushka confessed. ‘And God knows we all need comfort in this place.’

‘If you keep eating the way you do, you’ll soon be too fat to fit in the truck,’ Olga teased.

It was true. Annoushka did eat a lot, but so did most of them. They’d been starved for too many years to let even a crumb remain uneaten on a plate. Like squirrels, they hoarded nuts for the winter that was sure to come again one day soon, once Stalin and Kaganovich and Colonel Tursenov had finished picking their minds clean. Behind them the truck’s engine started up, the noise of it rebounding off the high courtyard walls, and a plume of black exhaust billowed into the chill air. The two soldiers in the back jumped out and held open the rear doors.

‘Let’s go,’ Elkin called out from among the huddle of engineers and strode towards the truck. He was eager to be gone.

The others followed at varying speeds.

‘Friis, everything had better damn well work today,’ an elderly unshaven prisoner grumbled as a young mechanic hoisted him up into the back of the vehicle.

‘It will, old man. Have faith.’

‘Faith!’ Annoushka said, stamping her feet on the cobbles while she waited her turn. ‘I’ve forgotten what that word even means.’ She beckoned to Jens and Olga. ‘Come on, you don’t want to get left behind. Today’s a big day.’

Olga shivered as she tightened the scarf around her neck and was helped by Jens to pick her way across the slippery courtyard.

‘Close your eyes on the journey and think only of the day your daughter was born,’ Jens murmured, and felt her hand tighten gratefully on his arm.

It wasn’t often they were all together like this, though it was happening more frequently now as the project neared completion. Most of the time they worked in isolation in their separate workshops, with messengers passing between them with blueprints and reports. So when they did come together there was always a sense of celebration – but today of all days Jens saw nothing to celebrate.

There were no windows in the back of the truck. The moment the rear doors clanged shut the prisoners were plunged into darkness as thick as tar. Jens placed his hands on his knees and closed his eyes. He knew exactly what to expect and braced himself, concentrating on breathing steadily and making no noise. The blackness started to crush him as soon as the truck began to rumble its way into the street. Slowly and relentlessly the blackness descended, squeezing him, pressing down on his skin, slithering under his eyelids however tightly he held them shut. His tongue was wrapped in its sticky coils and his lungs felt as though they would collapse under its weight. He sat still. Shallow breaths. His heart rate battering his ears.

It hadn’t always been like this. He used to enjoy the dark, relish the privacy it granted in the overcrowded barrack hut in the forest Work Zone, but too many weeks in the camp’s cramped and unlit solitary confinement cell had robbed him of that. Now the darkness was his enemy and he fought his war in silence.

The truck stopped but it was only a junction. The streets of Moscow were full of strange unexplained sounds, unfamiliar to him, noises that fifteen years ago when he had last roamed its pavements had not existed. Engines and klaxons, exhaust pipes and factory sirens. But now out of the surrounding darkness, as the truck waited in the street, one noise leapt into his head and brought a faint smile to his lips. It was music. Unmistakably an organ grinder. The tinkling notes dragged into his head a memory that elbowed its way through the bleak tunnels. Of a time when, with his four-year-old daughter, he had watched a black-skinned organ grinder.

He had learned long ago to block out all thoughts of the past, to live moment by moment, but the knowledge that his own daughter was out there searching for him broke down all the rules he’d made. He could feel it now, Lydia’s tiny hand tucked warm and safe in his, hear her laughter as she fed peanuts to the organ grinder’s tiny monkey. Its wrinkled little face had enchanted her and she had enchanted him.

The truck jolted over potholes, shaking its passengers on the metal benches which lined both sides of the black interior. The music faded and a murmur of loss pushed its way out between Jens’ lips, hollow and barely audible. A sigh? A groan? A bastard attempt at both. At neither. The precious memory was fading.

Fingers touched his. They brushed along the bones of his hands then tapped lightly on his wrists as if to waken them, and then the fingers curled round his own, holding them tight. Stayed like that. It was Olga. She was seated opposite him at the back of the truck. He lifted one of her hands to his lips, inhaled the familiar chemical scent of her skin and kissed it gently.