The Concubine's Secret

39

Jens found his mind distracted. The nightmares visited more often. They broke his routine, chipped his night’s sleep into pieces. He was restless, pacing the workroom for hours on end, aware that the challenge he had so relished over the past months had turned sour in his mouth as it came closer to completion.

Not like when he first came to this unit. Then it had been a dream come true. This was work, real work, the kind of engineering he had been bred to. It was what he’d craved, the way a drowning man craves air. He used to wake up each morning convinced that he had finally died, slumped over his shovel on the icy wastes of the labour camp and been transported up to heaven. Ahead of him stretched a day of handling pens and papers and brass callipers, instead of skin freezing to axes and shovels and guts weeping with hunger. Even now, every day, he opened his eyes and couldn’t believe his good fortune.

The prison camp had been bad. That’s as far as he ever allowed his mind to go, no further. Twelve years of bad but now it had ended. He didn’t let it into his head any more, not into his conscious mind anyway. But he didn’t pretend to himself. He knew it was in there somewhere, hiding deep in the darkest coils where it only slithered out at night. So he had dreams. Nightmares. So what? He shrugged them off as a minor inconvenience. If people regarded a few unpleasant dreams as bad, they hadn’t been in a camp.

Since he’d learned of his daughter’s search, thoughts of Valentina and Lydia were distracting him, stirring up emotions he had long ago forgotten how to handle. Especially as now there was Olga. He ceased his pacing. Here in this safe and cosy haven he had rediscovered things. Things he valued. Work. Warmth. Food. And love? Yes, even that. A kind of love, very different from what he’d known before, but still love. He’d thought it had vanished from his heart for ever but it had sneaked in through hairline cracks in the shell he’d constructed around himself. He smiled because he knew now from Olga, a scientist, that a smile sent certain chemicals racing to the brain, chemicals that magically made you feel better. And God knows, he needed to feel better. She’d taught him that the more you smile, the more you want to smile. So he practised it each day, and the muscles around his mouth that had grown stiff and gritty with disuse started to soften and come to life.

Olga had taught him much. Not just as a chemist but as a person – taught him to become a member of the human race again. It pained him that there was nothing he could do in return to fill the black agony caused by her daughter being left behind in the lead mine.

‘I pray each night, Jens,’ she’d told him one day when they were working together on realigning a gas cylinder, ‘that my Valerya will be killed in a cave-in. They happen often, tons of rock collapsing with a roar like a train in a tunnel. Whoosh and it’s over. It would be quick. But then I hate myself. What kind of mother would wish such a thing on her daughter?’

He’d brushed her hand for a brief moment. ‘One who loves her.’

Her tear had dropped on the blueprint in front of them and before one of the sharp-eyed watchers noticed it he had swept it aside, smudging the ink. The tiny drop of salty fluid had felt warm and intimate on his skin and he hadn’t wiped it away, instead letting it dry on his skin. At first his and Olga’s paths crossed only rarely, though they inevitably saw each other in the exercise courtyard for half an hour each morning and evening, during the enforced parade in rain, wind or snow. But as the project progressed they worked together more often, sometimes three or four times a month, and now that the visits to the hangars were occurring every few days, he found himself doing something he hadn’t done for many years: anticipating.

In the camps he’d lived from moment to moment because it was the only way to survive. Never think about tomorrow and all the other tomorrows. Never. It was a cardinal rule. But now he found himself taking that risk, looking at the future from behind laced fingers. It was so new to him. He thought he’d forgotten how. To anticipate something, anything, took a ridiculous amount of courage. Just to look forward to something as small as meeting with a friend in a black truck felt good.

But now his distracted mind had run away from him. It was anticipating all on its own and it made him nervous. So when the door to his workroom swung open with a bang, it came as a relief.

‘Ah, Comrade Babitsky, do join me.’

The guard walked over to the table, his boots squeaking on the linoleum floor. He placed a roll of engineering drawings on it, treating them with respect. He was a large lumbering man, good-looking with thick fair hair, but he had the faintly bemused look of someone who is not quite sure where he’s going. He’d joined the team of guards only recently, and Jens was interested to see he had not yet managed to overcome his awe at such a gathering of impressive minds.

‘Who is it from this time, Comrade Babitsky?’

‘Unit four.’

‘Ah, the squabblers.’

‘Prisoner Elkin and prisoner Titov. They’re not speaking to each other.’

Jens rested his elbows on his desk and chewed the end of his pen. It gave him such intense pleasure to hold a pen after all those years without that he was reluctant to put it down even for a moment. He’d even been known to sleep with one wrapped up in his tight fist, a talisman against the nightmares.

‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that scientists and engineers like to argue. It’s how they sharpen their minds.’

‘Then prisoner Elkin and prisoner Titov should have bloody sharp minds.’

Jens laughed. ‘They do.’

He remembered in the camp, the starvation of the mind. Starvation of the body he’d learned to live with, but a blank nothing in the mind was a form of death. Twelve long years of dying.

‘Tell me, Babitsky, are you married?’

‘I was,’ the guard said gruffly.

‘What happened?’

‘The usual. She got her tail tied up with my neighbour, a metal worker from Omsk, and left.’

‘Any children?’

His big face grew soft and he chuckled. ‘My son, Georgi. He’s five.’

‘Do you still see him?’

‘Da. Once a month I take the train to Leningrad. That’s where my boy is living. It’s better now I’m here in Moscow. When I was stationed in Siberia I only saw him at Easter time.’

Siberia. Jens studied his guard and was astonished at the way he could look at this man without anger. Maybe that was a necessary part of the process, the way of returning to the human race. It was ironic. Babitsky didn’t recognise him. Now that Jens was well fed, clean shaven, and wore a pair of rimless spectacles for close work, the guard didn’t remember him. But Jens remembered Babitsky, oh yes, he remembered him well. In Trovitsk camp Babitsky wasn’t nearly so polite. He possessed a liking for jabbing his rifle butt between fragile shoulder blades.

‘Friis,’ Babitsky leaned closer, ‘I like the way you don’t look at me like I’m some piece of shit on the bottom of your boot, the way some of the scientists here do.’

Jens looked at him, startled.

Babitsky lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I heard something the other day, something I thought you might want to know.’

‘What’s that?’ Jens slid the end of the pen into his mouth.

‘They’re thinking of bringing in a new team to finish this project. I don’t know what the fuck it is that you do, but someone up the ladder obviously thinks you lot aren’t doing the job you were brought here for. So you’re out.’

‘No.’

‘Oh yes, so just watch your step.’

Jens froze. His face hurt where his teeth were clamped in a vice around the pen. ‘Who said?’

‘Colonel Tursenov.’

‘No,’ Jens said again. ‘He can’t do that.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Friis. Of course he can.’

‘But it’s our design, it’s the result of all this team’s hard work, our careful calculations and efforts, our successes and, yes, our errors too. He can’t take it away, it’s…,’ his voice was growing agitated but he was unable to stop it. ‘It’s my project.’

The words were out. He couldn’t take them back.

Babitsky gave him a look that placed them firmly back in the roles of guard and prisoner. ‘Friis, whatever the hell it is you and the team do here, sure as fuck it isn’t yours. It’s the Soviet State ’s project. It’s Stalin’s project. So don’t think that just because you’re using your brain you’ve suddenly got any rights here. You don’t. You’re still a nobody, a non-person. A prisoner. Don’t ever forget that.’

The big guard walked out of the workroom and slammed the door behind him with relish. The key grated as it turned in the lock.