The Jewel of St Petersburg

Forty

VALENTINA’S HAND SHOOK. NOT FOR LIEV POPKOV’S EYE, which lay in an enamel bowl on the kitchen table. Not for the blood he’d lost or the bone that showed white across his forehead in a diagonal line. Not for the effort it must have taken for him to get himself and his horse back to her with the news of what happened, nor for the death of Hero.

Her hand shook for Jens.

She’d bathed Popkov’s head and snipped out the smashed eyeball, swilling an antiseptic solution into the socket, and tipped enough vodka down him till he could speak.

“Arkin has got him,” he’d slurred.

Arkin has got him.

Her hand shook and she pictured Arkin’s knee in splinters from a bullet that came from Jens’s rifle. She poured herself a vodka.

JENS TASTED DRIED BLOOD IN HIS MOUTH. THAT WAS WHAT came first. Piece by piece more images slid back into place until his mind started to turn, slowly at first, then faster, gathering speed, racing ahead of him, crashing into things, wrenching his thoughts out of his head. He opened his eyes.

He was in a prison cell.

A dull yellow light was caged inside a metal grille on the ceiling. It never went out. A metal door with an observation hatch at eye level and a food hatch at floor level was the only thing of interest in the tiny room. Brick walls, a bucket in one corner, an enameled bowl in another, and the narrow cot he was lying on. A bare stinking mattress under him, one blanket on top of him.

His head hurt. The vision in one eye was blurred, and dried blood was encrusted down the side of his cheek like a black crab clinging to his face. He stood up and the room hurtled around him, but he made it to the door. He hammered a fist against it.

“Arkin, you fucking bastard, open this door.”

He hammered for an hour. Two hours? He had no idea but his fist grew sore and the skin of his knuckles cracked. They’d taken his shoes and his belt, so he had nothing else to use for hammering. Slowly he slid to the floor, his back against the cold metal, and at last let his mind begin to think.

ONLY ONCE DID ARKIN ENTER THE PRISON CELL. AS THE days passed, Jens could hear other metal doors clanging, feet shuffling along the corridor, shouts from the guards, and sometimes soft whimpers from prisoners that caused Jens to call out. If there were screams, they were always cut short.

Jens lived alone day after day in a twilit world. He never saw anyone. Food and water were pushed twice a day through the hatch in the door, watery kasha in the morning, broth in the evening. A scrap of gristle or cabbage in it became a source of celebration. Every morning his bucket was emptied, removed through the same hatch, and he washed using a tiny part of his water ration tipped into the enameled bowl. It became precious, the water. He dipped his fingertips in it and thought of all the times in his life he’d wasted water with such careless abandon. Now he was like the slum dwellers who huddled around a leaky pump in the courtyard, cherishing every drop.

Each day he expected guards to enter his cell, men with iron bars and heavy fists. But none came. No one. So when Viktor Arkin walked into his cell after four weeks of only his own thoughts and his own smell, he was tempted to smile at him. Instead he sat in silence on his mattress, back against the wall, and watched him carefully. Behind Arkin stood three guards in uniform, bars and restraining chains in their hands.

“Jens Friis.” Arkin spoke his name as if it tasted sour in his mouth. “There’s something I want you to know.”

Jens rose to his feet. He was taller than Arkin and forced him to look up. “The only thing I want to know from you is when I’m getting out of this rat hole.”

“Don’t be so impatient. This will be your home for a long time to come.” His eyes grew dark and he dropped his hand to his leg. “Like this knee will be my reminder of you for a long time to come.”

“If I’d had my way, it would have been your brains spattered over that courtyard, not your knee.”

Arkin’s hand jerked, and for a moment Jens thought the man’s control would slip. Underneath the mask of his face, under that hard arrogance, rage prowled. Jens could see its shadow.

“So what is it,” Jens demanded, “that you came to tell me?”

“I want you to know that I slept with your wife at the izba in the marshes.”

“You’re lying.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You are a filthy fucking liar. Valentina loathes you. She wouldn’t let you lay a finger on her without clawing your eyes out.”

“It was her idea. She loved it.”

Jens went for him. Caught him by surprise and slammed his fist into the gloating mouth. The guards used their metal bars, but Jens had the satisfaction of seeing blood on Arkin’s face and a twist of fury as he wiped it away with his wrist.

“I know her, Friis, I know every inch of her body. The freckle on her thigh, I kissed it, the tiny white scar on her ribs, I sucked it till she moaned, the thick black curls around the moist center of her, I licked them as I put my fingers inside her and…”

If three guards had not thrown their chains around Jens he would have killed Arkin.

“Get out!”

With a satisfied smile, Viktor Arkin limped out of the cell.

VALENTINA SEARCHED FOR JENS DAY AND NIGHT FOR EIGHT months. But people had vanished all over the city, friends and loved ones there one day and gone the next, so no one wanted to know, no one cared. They were all too frightened for themselves. Mobs roamed the streets, opened prisons, slaughtered police. They set fire to large houses at whim and torched a courthouse and the offices of the secret police. The Okhrana agents were hanged from lampposts in their turn. The city was ablaze with red banners and posters: DESTROY THE TYRANTS and VICTORY BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE OF RUSSIA.

Valentina took care. Such care that people stopped recognizing her. She wore plain peasant’s clothes, handwoven dresses and shawls, a scarf around her head, and heavy cobbled boots on her feet. She grew thin, so that her cheeks became hollow, as pale and gaunt as the workers on the street. She let her shoulders droop and her spine sag and kept her eyes lowered, her gaze fixed to the ground so that no one would see the rage that burned within it. She would kiss Lydia and leave her with her toy train and her books shut in her room at home, but never did she find anyone who had heard a whisper about a Danish engineer called Jens Friis.

Tsar Nicholas had been forced to abdicate. He and his family were put under house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo and later taken by train to Siberia. Petrograd changed then. Valentina saw it happen. It turned red. Red armbands, red ribbons, red cockades in caps. Alexander Kerensky headed the new Provisional Government, but he panicked as the city continued to spiral out of control. General Kornilov, the commander in chief of the army, was sacked, and the war against Germany stumbled through defeat after defeat until the people of Russia were begging on their knees for it to end.

It was a summer of chaos.

THE GREATEST CHAOS WAS IN VALENTINA’S HEART. IT FORGOT how to beat. It forgot how to be something living, and instead lay silent and empty, the blood drained from it, a black brittle shell that felt as heavy as lead behind her ribs. Sometimes she tapped her chest with the tips of her fingers or even thumped a fist between her breasts, but nothing she did could set it going again. Was that what was meant by a broken heart? Like a broken watch.

The odd thing was that her eyes had remembered what her heart had forgotten. At night in bed without Jens they wept, as if her tears could release her pain in a way her heart could not. Her body ached for her husband, for the strength of him inside her. Her nostrils inhaled again and again his scent on the pillow. She wore his shirt in bed, his socks in her boots, his tiepin in the collar of her blouse. If she could have used the instruments on his desk she would have, but instead she carried his watch in her pocket.

She didn’t see Liev Popkov again after the day she had bandaged his head. But she wasn’t sorry. Although she told him she didn’t blame him for her husband’s capture and he told her he didn’t blame her for the loss of his eye, they were both lying. So she searched for Jens where she could. She went to Varenka’s old house again, but she wasn’t there and the friendly man with the gypsy wife claimed he had never heard of Viktor Arkin. However much she paid him. She went to the basement room that stank of sewer water where Jens had taken her, but no one there had heard of Viktor Arkin, either.

She went to the church. The priest wasn’t there, not the one who had lied to her. She was told he’d been whipped to death by tsarist troops in his village in front of his daughter. Not even that image made her heart murmur inside her. In her plain peasant clothes she went to meetings, pinned a red ribbon to her chest, and attended every political meeting in every church and every hall she could find. She smiled at eyes she hated, talked with men who wanted to shoot all government ministers, walked with factory women to bars, and even played the piano in one. Always she wore gloves to hide her smooth hands.

Nobody knew of Viktor Arkin. What had he done? Gone back to Moscow? With Jens?

Where are you, Jens?

Talking to him in her mind was the closest she came to feeling a flicker in her heart. That, and when she sat on his white reindeer rug with her daughter on her lap and read to her about Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

SOMETIMES ARKIN WATCHED THEM, ELIZAVETA AND VALENTINA.

When he was sick of meetings. Tired of the shouting and the arguments as each man tried to impose his will on the swirling rush of ideas, throwing up new plans, new schemes, new rules. Kerensky had turned on the Bolsheviks, smashed the printing presses of their newspaper Pravda and the offices of their Central Committee. He had ordered the arrest of Zinoviev and Kamenev for campaigning against the war and even of Lenin himself, who had been forced to flee into hiding again.

But the time was close now. This chaos could not continue. With a Red Guard numbering twenty-five thousand fighters in Petrograd and with the support of the Baltic sailors, they had already defeated the assault by General Lavr Kornilov. Arkin burned in his soul for the Bolsheviks to take over the country in one almighty bloody coup, to put an end to this pretense of government under Kerensky. And in a secret back room away from other ears, he had voiced to Lenin the need to stamp out the other revolutionary parties. No Mensheviks. No Socialist Revolutionaries. No Kadets. Only one could rule, and that one was the Bolsheviks. Russia needed an iron fist.

That was why Arkin had returned to Petrograd. To be at Vladimir Lenin’s side and to make certain the opposition revolutionary leaders would end up rotting in the Peter and Paul Fortress. But sometimes when he was tired and his knee ached worse than usual, he let himself watch them in the street, Elizaveta and Valentina. Valentina was clever. She was a chameleon, hiding in her drab browns, merging with her background, thinking no one would see her. Did she really imagine that any man who looked at her face wouldn’t remember it? She had grown more beautiful in the years he’d been away in Moscow, more sensual, even more desirable in the way she moved, just a turn of her head or a flick of her hair.

Elizaveta, still parading in her silks and furs, was an easy target for any red armband seeking revenge, yet still she walked out into the streets, head held high. He had warned her. He had even begged her. But she had smiled her quiet smile and kissed his mouth to stop his words.

“I am me. And you are you,” she had murmured. “Let us leave it like that.”

So he had left it like that. He could not bring himself to ask Elizaveta about the child, but he never saw the little girl with them. Valentina kept her hidden away.

VALENTINA SAT WITH LYDIA AT HER SIDE ON THE CHAISE longue in her parents’ drawing room and pleaded with them to leave Petrograd while they still could.

“Valentina,” her father said sternly, “this is our home. This is our country. I will not leave.”

“Papa, please, it is not safe.”

He scowled, but not at her, at the carpet, his skin settling into the downward lines that were now permanent on his face. He had lost weight in recent months like everyone else. Valentina could see that things were missing from the room. The pair of gold candelabra was gone, and an antique mother-of-pearl fire screen. Was he secreting them somewhere, hoarding them for better times? Or had they been sold or used as bribes? Maybe even stolen by roving bands of Red Army soldiers pushing their luck.

“They do not frighten me, these Bolsheviks,” he said.

“They should.” It was her mother who had spoken. She didn’t look frightened. She didn’t even look annoyed at the mention of their name. She was quietly dressed in somber silk, no pearls or jewelry of any kind, Valentina noticed. So she was also being careful in her own way. “We should all be frightened, not at what they have done but of what they have yet to do.”

Ivanov looked at her, surprised. “How do you know what they intend to do?”

“I read the newspapers, I hear talk. They are hunting us down one by one. Taking over our houses. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Mama, don’t you hate them?”

“No. They are fighting for what they believe in, just like we live in the way we believe in.”

Her husband snorted with annoyance, and Valentina went over to his chair.

“Stay at home, Papa. Keep safe.” She touched his hand and he wrapped his fingers around hers. She bent and kissed his cheek. It felt softer, as if an outer layer had been removed. “Look after yourself and Mama.”

“Is that what you’re doing? In those ridiculous clothes? I never thought a daughter of mine would wear such rags.”

“Grandpapa,” Lydia said with her father’s smile, “you should wear a work shirt and cloth cap. You’d look funny.”

They laughed, all of them together. Later, Valentina remembered that last laugh.

THINGS BECAME WORSE AS THE WEATHER GREW COLD again and Valentina started work on preparing her house. She summoned a furniture dealer and had most of their possessions removed in exchange for a fat pile of paper roubles. Immediately she exchanged it for gold coins and diamonds because the paper rouble would soon be worth next to nothing. Both the dealer and the jeweler robbed her blind, but she was in no position to argue.

She sacked all the servants, filled the house with worthless beds and chairs and cupboards, and locked all her and Lydia’s belongings in two rooms upstairs. She kept Jens’s engineering drawings, a few of his clothes, none of his books, a stout pair of shoes. Everything else she let go. Lydia clung tight to her toy train and her wooden bricks as she sat on her mother’s lap and listened solemnly.

“We have to become one of them,” Valentina explained. “We mustn’t let them throw us out of our house, or how will your Papa know where to find us when he comes back?”

“Will he come back soon?”

“Yes, my angel. Soon.”

The tawny eyes blinked hard. “I am five now, Mama.”

“I know.”

“That is almost grown up.”

Valentina smiled. “Indeed it is.”

“So you must tell me the truth, Mama.”

“Of course.”

“When will Papa come back?”

“Soon.”

WORST WAS THE ERARD GRAND PIANO. LETTING IT GO was like chopping off a limb. She polished it till it gleamed and sat on the stool one last time with Lydia on the floor, her back propped against Valentina’s leg. She played the Chopin and Lydia cried.

“It’s Papa’s favorite.”

“Maybe he heard it.”

Lydia shook her head, biting her lip. Then the piano was taken away in a cart.

People moved into the house. People who walked mud onto the polished floors and who did not know what a light switch was for or how to use a flush lavatory. Valentina shut herself away in her two rooms, curled on her bed wrapped up in Jens’s cotton shirt that now smelled of herself instead of him. She’d lost his house, she’d lost his beloved books, and now she’d lost his scent. She turned her face into his pillow, dry-eyed, and a sound came from her lips, a low formless moan from deep within her.

On the top step of the stairs Lydia sat hugging her knees and watching two barefoot boys play football in the hall with her father’s globe of the world.

DON’T HURT HER, VIKTOR.”

“Elizaveta, I will never hurt your daughter, I have promised you that. Her husband is still alive only because of you.”

“Don’t let them hurt her, the ones in gray that call themselves an army. Or the ones that roam in packs like wolves, administering their version of justice. Don’t let them hurt her.”

“I can only do so much. When you remove a dam from the river, you cannot tell it not to flow. But”-he lifted his head from the pillow and kissed her slender throat above him on the bed-“I will do what I can. To protect you.”

She moved her hips in rhythm to his as she lay astride him, her breasts soft as satin as they brushed over his chest, and a low sigh punctuated her words. “I don’t need protection.” She pressed her lips hard on his mouth, and her tongue sought his as if she would starve without it.