The Concubine's Secret

51

Snow had fallen overnight and transformed the prison into a creature of beauty. Its roofs and windowsills, its courtyard and even its stone seat, all glittered under the early morning floodlights like pearls on a wedding dress. Jens hated it. Such hypocrisy. How could something so ugly inside look so exquisite? He trudged the circle, single file, head down, no talking. Snowflakes settled on his eyelashes and melted down his cheeks like tears. In front of him Olga’s small figure stumbled and for half a second he held her elbow to support her. It felt as fragile as a sparrow’s wing.

‘No touching!’ Babitsky yelled.

Jens muttered under his breath, ‘One day soon, Babitsky, I swear I’ll come and touch you.’

‘Jens,’ Olga whispered behind her glove without turning round, ‘don’t. The brute isn’t worth it.’

‘He is to me.’

He hadn’t told her that the big man shot dead in the courtyard the day before was his friend. That in the golden days of the Tsar they had sat up all night playing cards together in the stables of the Winter Palace, that they’d fought each other over a girl, arm wrestled for a horse. That they’d bound each other’s wounds and saved each other’s lives. No, he hadn’t told her any of that. He picked up his feet on the white carpet that was smothering the tramp of boots, as if the prisoners were no longer real. Transparent and soundless. Ghosts of a past that was gone. How could he have imagined that they would ever fit into this real Soviet world again? He must have been mad.

He lifted his face to the falling snow and squinted up past the yellow prison lights to the black clouds beyond, where the moon and the stars lay buried. Out of reach. He thought about his daughter for ever out of reach and again felt that dull ache in his chest that, until the letters started arriving, he’d learned to strangle at birth with a simple click of the mind. But now it wouldn’t go away. It was stuck there, as though someone had hammered a nail into his heart and left it there to rust.

So engrossed was he in his thoughts that when the iron gate to the courtyard swung open, growling on its massive hinges and letting in the rumble of early traffic noise, he didn’t look up. There would be no more letters, he was certain of that. Dimly he was aware of the horse jingling its bridle, of the baker grumbling about the cold, of the rattle of metal trays and the enticing aroma of freshly baked bread. But still he couldn’t bear to see beyond their compound.

‘Jens.’ It was Olga. A quick whisper. ‘Look.’

He glanced at her and then through the fence, and saw a girl. She was holding a tray of pirozhki on her head, walking into the building. All he caught was a glimpse of her long straight back, of the way she picked her feet up in the snow as daintily as a cat. A dismal brown hat. A flash of flaming hair at her collar.

‘ Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!’

‘Keep walking, Prisoner Friis,’ a guard growled.

Only then did Jens realise how twelve years in labour camps had trained his tongue. His screams had been silent, exploding only in his head.

‘Move, Friis!’

He moved, one foot in front of the other, making it look easy. Ahead of him Olga glanced over her shoulder at him, eyes worried. ‘Look,’ she whispered again and nodded quickly.

He needed no telling this time. Across the whole width of the courtyard, a distance of more than forty metres, the small door into the side of the prison stood open. His attention fixed on it. Suddenly she was there again, swinging the tray in one hand as if she hadn’t a care in the world, slender and supple in the way she moved. He recognised her even after all these years. A delicate heart-shaped face that made him want to cry. It was pale except for a livid bruise near her mouth, and she had her mother’s full, sensual lips. She was good. No hint of a glance in his direction.

Instead she gave a guard a half smile, patted the horse, cast a look at the stone seat, walked over to the back of the cart and only then let her gaze drift towards the prisoners and to Jens. Their eyes met. For a heartbeat she froze. As he looked at her something cracked inside him and he almost hurled himself at the mesh fence and howled her name. He wanted to feel the touch of his daughter’s fingers on his own, to kiss her young cheek, to discover the mind behind the large, luminous eyes.

Her lips moved, almost a smile.

‘Friis,’ Babitsky yelled, ‘how many times do I have to say it? Keep moving!’

Jens had stopped again. With an effort of will he shuffled forward and watched his daughter turn back to the baker’s cart, swap the empty tray for a full one and traipse once more in through the door. He tried to think straight, but couldn’t even see straight. Tears had filled his eyes and his chest was about to explode. Or implode. It made no difference. He ached with happiness.

‘Jens.’

His ears struggled to work out where the voice had come from.

‘Jens, it’s me, Olga.’

He wrenched his gaze from the doorway. Olga was half looking at him over her shoulder.

‘Is it her?’ she mouthed in a whisper. ‘Is it Lydia?’

His mind jammed. Had he told her about his daughter? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t dare nod. If he did anything wrong this moment might vanish and Lydia might never appear again. He let the snowflakes settle on his eyelids and clamped his tongue between his teeth. His feet moved obediently in the circle, though every second that passed they threatened to race over to the wire.

He waited for ever. Another lifetime. Heart kicking his ribs in, and fear for Lydia sharp as acid in his mouth. Yet when she did emerge it all vanished and he felt only a rush of happiness, hot and liquid under his skin. As she neared the seat the metal tray tumbled to the ground and with an apologetic smile she crouched in the snow to retrieve it.

Her hand was faster than any snake.

Dearest Papa,

Today I will see you. You cannot imagine how happy that makes me. Happy and overwhelmed. I’ve missed you. Since I was five years old I’ve missed you and the thought of seeing you today, my dear father, made the night hours slow and cumbersome.

How will I not run to you? I learned from the boy that you will be behind a fence, but what if my feet will not listen to my head? I will want to fling my arms around you, Papa, but that will not be possible, so you must imagine it in your mind, your daughter returning to you.

There is something else I must say. Alexei and I travelled to the forest around the secret clearing where you work and I have seen the wall. Seen the hangars. I believe I saw you but my brother says I imagined it because I wanted the person to be you. Today there will be no imagining. Soon everything will change. We are coming for you. Be ready. Alexei has friends here in Moscow who are willing to help us, he has given much to gather these allies to our side. I can’t tell you more. I am nervous of putting words to paper.

I cannot come into the prison again as I have nothing more with which to bribe the baker. Fortunately he has a greedy heart but my pockets are empty now. So this is goodbye for the moment. Au revoir. Till I see you again. I am nervous. What if I am not the daughter you hoped for? I love you, Papa.

Your Lydia

Jens’ hand shook. He knew already that he would not be the father she was hoping for. But for one day with her, just one day, he would bargain his miserable soul. Oh Lydia, my own sweet daughter, how much are you risking?

‘Alexei, this makes me proud.’

‘That pleases me, Maksim.’

‘He’s done a fine job. He is a true artist.’

Alexei lifted his arm and studied the new tattoo. It was of a large spider climbing up his biceps, an indication that its bearer is active in the criminal life. A second mark of Cain.

‘Is everything arranged?’ he asked.

‘My men are ready. The final meeting is today.’

‘ Lydia has asked to be included.’

‘No.’

‘Pakhan, she and I have travelled a long way for this.’ He raised his eyes from the spider to Maksim’s face. ‘Let her come.’

‘My son, you are bewitched by this girl. She is no longer your sister, remember that. A vor has no sister.’ He sipped his brandy, eyes stern.

Alexei pulled on his clean white shirt and buttoned it thoughtfully. ‘Maksim, I am grateful for all you have done.’ He lifted his own brandy to his lips, though the morning had only just started and his stomach was still empty. ‘When this is over, you can ask of me any favour you choose.’

‘When this is over you may be dead.’

Alexei laughed, a loose easy sound that took Voshchinsky by surprise. ‘In which case I shall hold the door open for you, my friend.’

Maksim did not smile.

My Lydia,

To hear of your Chang An Lo, your white rabbit and your taste for an artist I have never heard of, puts flesh on your bones. You have become real. I also am greedy. I want to know all of your life till now, each day, each success and each stumble, each thought that grows in your young head.

You ask me to tell you about myself and what I think but, Lydia, there is nothing to tell. I barely exist. I don’t smile and I don’t laugh and I try not to think. Somewhere in the prison camp my laughter died and I no longer mourn for it. What kind of person am I? A non-person. So instead I shall do as you ask and tell you about my work. It is the one thing left in me which is good and fine and worthwhile. But even that facet of me is one I am corrupting. Nevertheless here it is.

You have probably never heard of the Italian General Nobile. Why should you? He is a brilliantly skilled designer of semi-rigid airships. I was told about him by a young Ukrainian who used to be his assistant but who ended up in the bunk below mine in Trovitsk prison camp. The poor bastard had made a minor error, so that his calculations proved to be inaccurate. ‘Sabotage!’ they screamed and threw the Ukrainian in prison.

He died in the harsh winter of the timber forest but first he told me things. About Nobile’s plans. He intends a massive expansion of the use of airships for military purposes. Lydia, you wouldn’t believe how exciting this is. It is the future. Nobile has even enthused Stalin himself. So what will happen now? Stalin is going to order a Red Airship Programme to be set up and demand a public subscription of millions of roubles for it. Josef Stalin may be brutal, he may be an egocentric tyrant, but he isn’t stupid. He knows another war is coming and he is determined that Russia will be prepared.

He needed engineers, so that’s why I was brought back from the dead. There is an airship project at Dolgoprudnaya near Moscow which is public knowledge, but the one I’m working on in the forest is secret. We are constructing a… what shall I call it? A monster. A vast silver thin-skinned monster with lethal breath. A killing machine.

Oh Lydia, is that what God felt when He created man? That He had created a beautiful killing machine?

For that is what my project is. Airships can fly long distances, well beyond any aeroplane’s range. So – this is the part I can barely let loose in my brain, let alone set down on paper – we have slung two biplanes under the envelope of the airship, both of which will be equipped with not bombs but gas canisters. Equipped with a poisonous gas. Yes, you read it right. Poison gas. Phosgene. When the airship has flown unsuspected deep into enemy territory, the planes will drop from a height and skim low over a city or an army barracks. They will spray their lethal gas and pass on like the Angel of Death.

Stalin intends to build a fleet of these. With my help. My help. What kind of man am I, Lydia, who can construct such a creature? This week we carry out the first full test – that means with real phosgene instead of soda crystals, and real people instead of rubber dummies. My beautiful killing machine will go to work.

Pray for my soul, Lydia, if you have any faith and if I have any soul. And for that of my dead friend Liev Popkov.

Your father who loves you with what is left of his heart, Papa

Chang An Lo watched Alexei fold the letter neatly along the creases of the thin tissue paper with its tiny penmanship and hand it back to Lydia. Saw him struggle to keep the anger out of his voice.

‘You went into the prison? You risked your life for a letter?’ Alexei demanded of his sister.

‘No, there was little risk involved.’

They all knew she was lying.

‘Let me remind you,’ Alexei said stiffly, ‘that Popkov was shot for doing the same.’

‘No, that’s not right. A guard recognised him and Liev was shot for resisting arrest. No one was going to recognise me.’

To Chang’s eyes it was obvious that Alexei couldn’t decide which enraged him more, his sister’s disobedience or his own disappointment in his father. And the letter hadn’t even mentioned him. As if bastards don’t count for anything. But Alexei was clearly shocked by the horror of what Jens Friis had described, far more than it seemed to shock Lydia. To Chang the confession in the letter made little difference because he was not doing any of this for Jens Friis, but it angered his heart that Lydia ’s father had let her down. He could see it in her eyes, the confusion.

‘So,’ Chang said quietly, ‘do we drop the plan?’

Four pairs of eyes focused on him, all but one was hostile.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

The first and loudest No was Lydia ’s, the last was Alexei’s. In between came Maksim and Igor. The meeting was taking place in the Russian thief’s apartment and Chang liked neither the place nor its owner, but let none of it show on his face. He was here because he had requested it and he took no offence when the fat man with the mottled skin said, ‘Not a bloody Chink as well as the girl.’ Chang had seen the fanqui’s expression harden in the silence, the way molten iron hardens in water, and he took it as a good sign. A scheme as risky as theirs needed a heart of iron at its centre.

‘They won’t like you coming,’ Lydia had warned him.

‘I’m not here to be liked.’

She’d laughed but there was no life in it and that had saddened him. Now as he regarded their faces and noted the tension in their necks and in their hands, he knew Alexei would prevail. His voice would be the last. The fat man with the cheeks like dough would not say no to Lydia ’s brother.

Voshchinsky banged his fist down on his broad knee. ‘Very well, my comrades,’ he grinned at them, his jaw jutting in a display of aggression. ‘Let’s talk about tomorrow.’

Chang led her away. He wanted to rid Lydia ’s skin of the stink of them, to draw her from their cigars and their words of violence. He walked her across the city to Arbat, to a small Chinese tea room, and it pleased him when her eyes brightened at the sight of it.

‘I had no idea it was here,’ she smiled.

‘There’s one in every capital city in the world. We Chinese are like rats, we get everywhere.’

She tugged off her hat, shook down her hair and inhaled the familiar scents of spices, jasmine and incense that rose from the jade fretwork on its facade.

‘I had forgotten,’ he murmured, ‘how much my spirit misses the colours that bring life and energy. Here in Soviet Russia the streets are grey as death. Even the sky above us is flat and colourless.’

He drew Lydia into its fragrant interior. They sat at a low bamboo table and were served steaming red tea by a young Chinese girl in a cheongsam the colours of ripe watermelon – dark greens, crimson and black. She bowed low with respect and Lydia watched Chang with a soft smile on her lips.

‘My love,’ she said when the girl had gone, ‘do you miss your native country so badly?’

‘It is part of me, Lydia, its yellow earth is in my blood.’

Her tawny eyes held his. ‘What are we to do?’

He leaned forward and took one of her hands, curled it in a ball and wrapped his own around it.

‘Let’s talk about your father.’

She gave a nod, a barely perceptible dip of the chin. ‘He was a man of power. A man with a family, a guest in the palaces of counts and princes. Under the Tsar he had a good life but under the Bolsheviks he lost everything, stripped to nothing.’

‘That’s what he was trying to explain in the letters, how he had to cling to the hard core of self to survive. You and I, Lydia, we understand that.’

‘Yes.’ The sadness in her one word was as heavy as the golden Buddha in the window.

‘There’s something I haven’t told you, something I learned the day I was in your father’s prison.’

She said nothing, waiting.

‘I was told by General Tursenov, who runs the prison, that the whole idea for this project came from Jens Friis himself. It was all out of his brain. He wasn’t just an engineer recruited to work on it. While in the labour camp it was he who thought up the birth of this monster, as he calls it.’

Her lips tightened. ‘Are you saying you believe he is a monster too? One not worth saving?’

‘No, that is not my point. He asked for his freedom in exchange, and that’s what the whole team has been promised when the project is completed. Their freedom.’

The tension left her face and she smiled. ‘That’s wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me this before? He’s going to be released.’

‘That’s what they said.’

The tone of his voice warned her. The smile faded.

‘No, Chang, don’t.’

‘I’m sorry, my love.’

‘You don’t believe them.’

‘No, I don’t. Can you imagine that the military authorities will allow prisoners with top secret information to wander loose?’

Lydia shook her head. ‘Would they send them back into the labour camps?’

He made no comment.

Her mouth crumpled and she hid it behind the little porcelain cup. ‘You mean they’d be shot.’

‘I believe so.’

Her hand quivered inside his.

‘He’s going to die,’ she whispered.

‘Unless we get him out.’

‘Don’t judge my father harshly, Chang. We can’t know what horrors he endured, day after day for twelve years. This was a way to make them stop.’

Chang opened his hands and released her. ‘I know. Either of us would have done the same.’

They both knew he was lying.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured and smiled at him.

The boy was perched on the end of Popkov’s bed, playing cards and arguing with the big man. The two of them were gambling ferociously for dried beans and by the look of the pile at his elbow, Edik was winning. Misty was curled up on Elena’s lap, who was chuckling as the pup licked her fingers as greedily as if they were sausages. But the moment Lydia walked in, the playing and the laughing ceased. She was tempted to walk out again.

‘So you’re all better now, Liev,’ she teased. ‘I knew you were just faking it.’

Popkov gave her a crooked smile. ‘So I wanted a day in bed.’

‘You lazy Cossack,’ Lydia frowned. ‘Why do I bother scurrying around in the snow buying you medicine?’

She tossed him a half bottle of vodka and the dog galloped over to her, all paws and tongue. She pulled a brown paper bag from her pocket and gave Misty a fried pirozhok, one to Edik and one to Elena.

‘What are these?’ Elena asked with ill grace. ‘Goodbye presents?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Is it all arranged then?’ Popkov demanded at once, between great swigs from the bottle.

‘Yes.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘No you won’t!’ Lydia and Elena both said it in unison.

‘Anyway,’ Lydia added quickly, ‘you won’t be needed. Alexei is arranging everything and you know he’d rather have a rabid dog at his side than you.’

Popkov scowled, screwed the top back on the vodka bottle and hurled it across the room at Lydia. It banged against her hip and rolled unbroken to the floor. ‘I’m coming, damn you, girl. Jens Friis was my friend.’

Elena’s pale eyes glared at Lydia, who promptly picked up the bottle, marched over to the bed and smacked it against the bruise on Popkov’s cheek. ‘You just wait here, you brainless bear, and I’ll bring him to you.’

‘Alexei, I have a present for you.’

‘The only present I need is right here.’

He lifted Antonina’s hand and kissed the pale back of it. It was gloveless. She was still in shock at what she’d done, still prey to shivers and sobs, and the anguish in her dark eyes had not yet abated. Alexei knew only too well what it felt like to kill for the first time: a moment for ever seared into your brain. It never left you, but lingered, fretting at you until you learned to put it safe in a box and close the lid on it, as quietly as a coffin.

‘Don’t stare at me,’ she said self-consciously, ‘I look hideous.’

‘No, you look lovely.’

He meant it, despite the swollen nose and the bruises. Since her husband’s death, there was something about her, something real and solid that hadn’t been there before. As if she was tentatively removing the fragile layers one by one.

‘Show me what it is,’ he said, ‘this present of yours.’

Antonina led him through the apartment to a closet at the far end of the hallway and threw open its doors with a flourish. He frowned at what was inside, surprised at first, then slowly he started to smile. On a brass rail hung a Red Army officer’s uniform.