The Concubine's Secret

40

Lydia left the house early while Liev and Elena still slept. She wanted time to herself, needed room to breathe, space to think about Chang. But she could no more think straight than she could walk straight on the city’s pavements, which at this hour were still thick with mounds of ice. She was not thinking of him, but being him. There was no other word for it. Being a part of him, as he was a part of her. Already she missed the physical weight of him and the feel of his skin next to hers. Her feet moved faster, stretching her stride.

‘No, Elena, you’re wrong,’ she whispered as she walked. ‘I trust Chang with my life ten times over.’

‘Talking to yourself?’

It was Edik. He’d sneaked up on her as she crossed the street and fallen into step beside her. He carried his usual pack on his chest and the little dog’s domed head rose out of it, golden eyes as round and watchful as an owl’s.

‘Do you need me to take another message?’ he asked.

‘No, not today. Thanks anyway.’

He looked disappointed. ‘So where are you going?’

‘To queue for bread.’

‘Can I come?’

‘Of course.’

She wasn’t sure whether it was her company he wanted or the bread. Either was fine with her. They walked together past a row of shops, enjoying the bright morning sunshine despite the snow thick on the ground. She noticed he was up on his toes again, bouncing with energy, eyes darting everywhere. It was, she decided, his eyes that betrayed him. He had thief’s eyes. She must warn him of that, but not now.

‘Are you warmer in your new coat?’ she asked.

He grinned. ‘It’s all right.’

‘You must thank Elena.’

‘If I thank her nicely, do you think she’ll boil me some more pelmeni? And cook a sausage for Misty?’ He winked one of his blue eyes slyly at her. ‘I needn’t bother with thanks if she won’t.’

Lydia laughed, putting an arm across his thin shoulders as they walked down the street and, to her surprise, he didn’t shrug it off.

Alexei felt the sunlight settle on his skin. He was standing on the steps of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer and relished this moment of stillness. The last twenty-four hours had been anything but still. Hell, his head felt heavy from the night before. Too much wine and too many cigarettes. He closed his eyes. Minutes passed. He thought about Jens Friis and offered up a small prayer to the God he didn’t believe in. Let him be alive. On the steps of God’s glorious house, surely He would listen if He was in there.

‘Hello, Alexei. So you got here at last.’

He didn’t bother opening his eyes. He was sure the voice was coming from inside his own head but it was so real he smiled, conjuring up the teasing stare that would go with the words.

‘Alexei?’

A hand touched his arm. Dimly something jarred. He realised he was falling asleep standing up, like a lazy old horse, and he opened his eyes with an effort. She was here, right in front of him, her hand on his arm holding him upright, and it occurred to him that she was swaying. Or was it him?

‘Alexei,’ she said softly and kissed his cheek.

He felt the warmth of her small arm tuck through his as she led him on to a tram. It was crowded, full of bodies wrapped in fufaikas and headscarves and battered old cloth caps, but Lydia pushed her way to find a seat for him. She stood over him, hanging on to a strap, and he had the odd sensation that she was guarding him.

The windows had steamed up, boxing him in, so he had little idea of where they were heading. Each time the doors clanked open he caught a glimpse of streets he didn’t know as people piled on and off, but he was more disconcerted by the care with which Lydia was keeping anyone from jostling against him, and the frequent glances she directed his way. They were so attentive, full of a gentleness he’d not seen in his sister before. Where had that come from? Where were the sparks and the fire and the impatience? Her concern worried him. Did he really look that bad? Did he need to be treated like a sick kitten?

‘Time to get off, Alexei.’

‘Right,’ he said, but continued to sit there.

She didn’t yell or shout or tell him he was a lazy bastard, which is what he half expected. Instead she bent down, smiled into his eyes as she positioned her arms under his armpits and straightened, scooping him up with her. He was embarrassed. He had a feeling he probably smelled.

‘I didn’t sleep at all last night,’ he explained.

‘And how many days ago did you last eat?’

‘I don’t know.’

It made him sound stupid. She held his hand and led him off the tram. The air outside was crisp and bright and it startled him.

‘Alexei,’ Lydia said, ‘how did you get in such a mess?’

‘I’m not sure. I got lost.’

‘Well, let’s see if we can find our way home, brother. Without getting separated this time.’

She laughed as she threaded his arm through hers. It gave him hope.

He rolled into bed with one thought flickering through his head: he hadn’t told her about the vory v zakone. But before he could open his mouth to do so, the flickering died out and he had no idea what the thought had been. His eyelids sank as if dragged down by lead weights. It was black inside his head and he liked it that way.

He slept. His dreams were so busy it seemed that he was dead to the world for a whole month, but each time his eyelids lifted a crack, Lydia was sitting by his bed wearing the same brown cardigan. It had to be all the same day. At one point he heard raised voices but he had no interest in them and drifted back into the blackness, unsure whether the sounds were in his head. Then a door slammed. That was real.

He dreamed that a tattooist’s vibrating needle plunged right through his chest wall, penetrating his lungs, and he began to drown in his own blood. He choked violently. A hand stroked his forehead and he slept again. But there was something he needed to say. It was sticking spikes in his brain.

Lydia sat and watched her brother. He’d slept for hours, though she could scarcely call it sleep. More like running a race with eyes tightly shut. His body was never still, eyelids twitching, legs scrabbling, arms flailing. His teeth clenching and unclenching, releasing sounds that belonged to a dog. She learned to place a hand on his cheeks and whisper words to drive out whatever demon had dug a hole for itself inside his head. When the door opened and Liev Popkov stumbled into the room, she knew he would not be best pleased.

‘Hello, Liev,’ she smiled up at him. ‘Look who’s here.’

‘Dermo! Shit!’

‘He was on the steps of the Cathedral. I told you he’d be there one day soon.’

‘Shit!’ he said again and walked over to her bed, scowling down at Alexei with his one black eye.

‘Let him sleep,’ she said.

‘Skin and fucking bone, that’s all there is to him. And he stinks like a horse’s arse.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I was sure the bastard was dead in Felanka somewhere.’

Lydia looked up at him, shocked. ‘You never said.’

He grunted.

‘I’ve said he can stay here.’

Popkov snorted. ‘No, he can’t.’

‘Damn you, I say he can.’

‘Nyet.’

‘What do you expect me to do? Throw my brother out on the street?’

‘Yes. He can’t stay.’

‘Why not?’

‘He doesn’t have a resident’s permit, so he’ll bring the police down on our necks.’

She forced down the hard lump in her throat. ‘We can get him one on the black market.’

Slowly Popkov turned his shaggy head, beard first, and glowered at Lydia in the chair. ‘You would use the few good roubles we have left? The ones we need to spend on finding Jens Friis. You’d use them on this worthless piece of shit?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ha! Then you are not your father’s daughter.’

Lydia leapt to her feet. ‘Take that back, you dumb Cossack.’

He stood immobile in front of her and she knew he would take back nothing. She slapped his stubborn chest hard with the flat of her hand and he caught her wrist, held her until she was quiet. His big scarred face leaned down to hers and she could see the creases in it deepen.

‘ Lydia, my little friend, you must decide what it is you want. Use that clever mind of yours. Who is it you have come here to find?’

He released her wrist, lumbered out of the room without a glance at Alexei, and slammed the door behind him.

Lydia sat quietly again in the chair. But this time she didn’t sip her tea, even though her throat was burning. Instead she forced herself to handle the words Liev had thrown in her lap, to turn them endlessly round and round the way a potter turns his wheel. Who is it you’ve come to find?

Who is it? Who?

My father. It’s my father I’ve come to find, Jens Friis. The words sounded faint inside her head so she repeated them out loud.

‘I’ve come to find my father, Jens Friis.’

But voices dragged at her mind. Sharp as fingernails on a windowpane. She sank her head into her hands, burying her fingers in her hair as if she could tease out the lies from the truth among the tangle of its strands. She heard a low whimper. She looked around, surprised, expecting Misty to crawl out from under one of the beds, and she was horrified when it dawned on her that she had made the sound herself.

A hand touched her knee. For a moment it startled her. With an effort she came back into the room, into the present, and realised it was her brother’s hand she was staring at. Strong fingers, blue veins snaking deep under the skin, a scar on one knuckle, a long crimson scab down the thumb. But dirty nails, grimy skin. Not the hand she remembered.

‘Alexei,’ she smiled at him. ‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’

‘Are you all right?’

She widened her smile. ‘More importantly, are you all right?’

He nodded. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look fine.’

‘I just need something to eat.’

‘You’ve certainly slept a long time.’ She patted his hand and rose to her feet. ‘I’ll go and heat some soup.’

She was aware of his eyes on her as she left the room, but when she returned with a tray of soup, a chunk of black bread and a slice of Malofeyev’s smoked ham, he said little, just a polite ‘Spasibo.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and she let him eat in peace, but when he’d finished she rose from her chair and joined him.

‘Take care,’ he said with a crooked sort of smile, ‘I probably have fleas.’

‘Looking at the state of you, I think they’re more in danger of you than you are of them.’

He smiled and she caught a glimpse of the old Alexei in it.

‘Tell me what happened to you, Alexei. I waited for you in Felanka for weeks but you didn’t come and I thought you’d left me behind. Gone off on your own.’

He frowned. ‘You are my sister, Lydia. How could you think I would do such a thing?’

Guilt, thick and sticky, rose in her chest. She picked up his hand and held it between her own, resting them on her knee. ‘Because I’m stupid,’ she shrugged and was relieved when he smiled. ‘So where did you go?’ she asked.

He took a breath. She waited, watching the tension in the tendons of his neck, and after a long silence he told her. About the attack on him by prison guards in Felanka, the drowning in the black choking waters of the river and then finding himself on a barge.

‘I lost our money, Lydia. Every bloody rouble of it.’

‘Even the ones hidden in your boots?’

‘Even those.’

She forced herself not to react. Willed her hands not to tremble. ‘You should have let me look after half of it, Alexei, you should have trusted me.’

‘I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.’ He shook his head and his hair sent out a smell of something bad. ‘But what good is sorry to us now?’

‘None.’

‘ Lydia, I can’t get that money back but I’m doing everything in my power to make up for…’ He exhaled sharply. It was an angry, disappointed sound that mirrored Lydia ’s own anger and disappointment. ‘For my hubris,’ he finished.

‘Your hubris?’

‘My pride, my arrogance, my blind belief in my invincibility. Look at me. Nothing to be proud of now, is there?’

‘You’re wrong. I am still proud to have you as my brother.’

He threw back his head and barked a noise that unnerved her until she realised it was meant as a laugh. ‘God knows why!’

She studied the gaunt face. The eyes sunken in their sockets, mulberry patches like bruises on his skin. It had changed. Some crucial part of who he was had been stolen, something far more important than the money.

‘Was it so hideous, Alexei? Your journey to Moscow.’

‘ Lydia, you wouldn’t believe what I saw. The suffering and the greed, the anger and the enmity. Brother against brother, father against son, all so convinced they have the right answer. In one village I saw the Komsomols burning a man’s possessions in the street because he couldn’t pay his taxes. His wife threw herself and her baby on the bonfire and had to be dragged off it.’

‘Oh, Alexei.’

‘I understand at last what Communism is about. I know they spout about justice and equality but it’s much more than that. It’s about changing the whole way man is made. Turning us away from being people and making us into a new and improved mass creation that allows for none of the weaknesses inherent in our nature. To do that, the State must become a god and at the same time a monster.’

‘That is a bleak future you see for Russia.’

‘How else can we make this unwieldy and godforsaken country work?’

‘You sound like Chang An Lo.’

For the first time he looked at her hard, a fierce stare that felt as though he was using a shovel to dig around inside her.

‘He’s here?’

‘Yes. He is part of a Chinese Communist delegation to Moscow.’

‘I see.’

He said no more, just those two flat words. But he looked round the room, taking in its stained wallpaper and shabby curtains, and she could see him thinking what a disgusting little room it was.

‘It’s all we can afford,’ she explained. ‘Popkov and Elena are living here with me. We were lucky to get it at all. Rooms are like gold dust in Moscow. It’s not easy, Alexei. Nothing here is easy. It’s the way life is.’

He lowered his chin to his chest. ‘And Jens? What news of him?’

‘Not good. We’ve been searching to find the prison he’s in but people are too frightened. They won’t talk.’

‘I see,’ he said again.

She wondered if he did. She pressed his hand to make him look directly at her, and when he did she wanted to tell him that she was just as frightened as everyone else and she didn’t blame any of them for keeping their mouths firmly shut. She wanted to say that having Chang An Lo here in Moscow made her come alive for the first time in months, but at the same time she was seething with rage at the Soviet watchers for making it so hard for them to be together. She wanted to tell Alexei that having her brother here in her room made her feel safe, even though he was in a worse state than she was. But what about their father? What kind of world was he in? Was he surviving? How in this twisted and secretive city would they ever be able to find him? Tell me how. How? Yet when she looked into Alexei’s eyes, which used to be green but now were the colour of mud, she said none of it.

Instead she smiled at him. ‘I’m so pleased you’re here, as safe and as handsome as ever under all that filth.’

‘ Thank you, Lydia. You know I wouldn’t abandon you to do this alone.’

She felt two hot tears trickle down her cheeks. Alexei brushed a thumb lightly along her cheekbones, wiping the tears away with an affection that she knew she didn’t deserve after all the times she’d sworn at him behind his back.

‘I’m happy,’ he said, ‘to see you happy.’

She was just working out whether he meant it or was just trying to please her, when a heavy fist banged on the door. Twice. They froze, his thumb still on her skin, her fingers still clasping the hand on her knee.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No.’

Quickly she bundled her brother back into bed, pulled the blanket up to his ears and tucked it tightly round him.

‘Don’t move,’ she hissed.

Then she opened the door.

Outside on the landing stood three men. Lydia took one look at them and slammed the door in their faces.

‘Who is it?’ Alexei was struggling up in the bed.

‘It’s bad news.’

‘Police?’

‘No.’

‘Who, Lydia? Tell me.’

She had her back pressed to the door, breathing hard. ‘They look like killers.’

Alexei tumbled out of bed and moved close to the door, listening. The fist slammed on the door again, three bangs this time.

‘Alexei Serov,’ a rough voice called out. ‘Open this fucking door or I’ll kick it down.’

Lydia stared in horror at Alexei. ‘They know you. Who are they?’

Alexei leaned round her, took hold of the doorknob and clicked the door open. ‘My dear sister,’ he said with a smile so crooked it made him look like a stranger, ‘I’d like you to meet my new friends.’