The Russian Concubine

30

He didn’t speak, Liev Popkov. But neither did she. Yet they kept close, even touching at times. Side by side they hunched forward against the biting wind that whipped up off the Peiho River, and Lydia’s lungs ached with the effort.

‘Here,’ he muttered.

He meant the narrow street that twisted away from the quayside to their left. It was grey and cobbled and stank of putrid fish guts. She nodded. His broad shovel of a hand pulled her tight against him, so that not a crack of the thin wintry light sneaked between them and her body became no more than an extension of this great greasy bear. It was weird the effect he had on her mind. She felt big and bold and fearless. The hostile eyes around them no longer sent shivers down her spine, and when one of the Chinese dockhands reached out to touch her as he passed, Liev casually raised an arm and smashed his elbow into the man’s face. Broken bone and blood and high-pitched screams. She looked at the mess and felt ill. They kept on walking, no comment. Liev was a man of few words.

In the beginning on their first few forays down around the dock-land quays, she had tried to speak to him in her halting Russian, to offer some flow of simple conversation, but all she received in reply were grunts. Or no response at all. She grew used to it. It made it easier for her to concentrate on the faces that swarmed over the congested harbour and in the slippery hutongs, easier to avoid the thousands of shoulder poles carrying weighty piles of God-knows-what in their buckets and panniers. Easier to watch where her feet were stepping.

Easier. But not easy. None of this was easy.

‘Lydia Ivanova.’

Lydia’s head jerked up from her desk. Wisps of bright dreams fled her mind and she stared up into Mr Theo’s eyes. Grey eyes that had turned black, the pupils were so huge, and his tongue was sharper than ever.

‘Are you with us, Miss Ivanova? Or shall I bring a bed into class for you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You surprise me, girl. I would have thought the love affair between Philip II of Spain and Mary Tudor of England would be passionate enough to keep your eyes open in class. Isn’t that what girls your age like? Love affairs. Even with young Chinese boys.’

‘No, sir.’

He smiled a little. She did not return the smile.

‘Detention after school. You can do me an essay on…’

‘Please, sir, not after school. I’ll do detention for a whole week of lunch breaks, but not…’

‘You’ll do detention when I say, young lady.’

‘It’s just that…’ Her voice trailed away. Everyone was looking and listening. Polly was making signs but Lydia couldn’t work out what.

‘Lydia.’ Mr Theo walked over to her desk. His black headmaster’s gown billowed around him and to Lydia’s mind he looked like a long-legged crow come to peck her eyes out. ‘You will do detention today. After school. Understand?’

She wanted to hit him. As Liev Popkov would have done. But she lowered her head. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Oh, Lyd, you silly. When will you learn to grovel to him?’ Polly was clucking over her like a mother hen. ‘All you had to say was “I’m sorry, Mr Theo, I promise I won’t let it happen again,” and he would have let you off.’

‘Really?’

‘You are so naïve, Lyd. Of course he would.’

‘But why?’

‘Because that’s what men like. It makes them feel powerful.’

Understanding dawned. Yes. People want to feel powerful. She had seen its effects in the alien world of the docklands when she was linked to Liev Popkov and had learned the way it made you feel good. Powerful men. They made sure they got what they wanted, just as Polly’s father knew how to get things he wanted. Or people he desired. It made Lydia’s skin crawl. A question occurred to her, but she wasn’t sure quite how to put it to Polly.

‘Polly, you’re much better at handling people than I am. I can’t even get my mother to do things I want sometimes.’ She paused and rubbed the side of a fingernail. ‘By the way, does she ever come to visit your house?’

‘Gosh, no. What an odd question. Why on earth would she?’

‘I thought maybe she might come to talk to your mother, you know, like mothers do when their daughters are friends.’ She shrugged. ‘I just wondered, that’s all.’

‘You are a strange one sometimes, you know.’

‘You’d tell me if she did. Come to your house, I mean.’

‘Of course.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Good.’

‘How’s Mr Parker, by the way?’

‘He’s still around.’

‘Oh, you’re so lucky. When they’re married he’ll give you everything you’ve ever wanted like a house and pretty clothes and holidays and everything.’ She laughed and poked her friend lightly in the ribs. ‘Including a nice new school uniform. It’s what you need.’

‘It’s not what I need,’ Lydia snapped. ‘It’s what people with power make you think you need.’

‘Oh, Lyd, you’re hopeless.’

Liev Popkov was still standing at the end of her road, waiting for her. He must have been there a long time because snow had built up into epaulettes on his shoulders and his fur hat had turned white like a stoat in winter.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Prastitye menya. I’m late because I had to stay longer at school.’

He grunted. Moved off with his loose shambling gait, so that Lydia had to scamper to keep up, and headed again for the harbour. It was a dismal but frantic world down there where everything from rhinoceros horns to ten-year-old slaves were bought and sold, but nevertheless Lydia liked the chance to gaze at the sleek liners and the rusting tramp steamers that brought the outside world into the heart of Junchow. It made England seem so close she could almost reach out and grab it in her hand. She watched hard-eyed men and fur-coated women stride down the gangplanks as if they owned the world, while at their feet coolies begged to carry their bags. The snow had stopped falling.

‘This one,’ Liev growled.

He led her down yet another dank and filthy alleyway where native hawkers tried to sell even the rags off their backs. One stall was offering bathroom taps, a whole tea chest of them smuggled out of one of the import warehouses that surrounded the harbour, while farther down was a row of porcelain-faced dolls sitting up like little dead children. Lydia had never possessed a doll in her life and was constantly baffled by whatever it was that drove girls to want one. Even to love the wretched things. Like Polly did. It was so…

A moon-faced man broke up her thoughts. He was speaking in rapid Chinese and pointing back down the alleyway. She started to shake her head to indicate she didn’t understand but realised he was talking to Liev, not to her. The man kept jabbering louder and louder, throwing his arms around. Liev just swung his great head back and forth. Nyet. Nyet. Nyet.

The man drew a knife.

Lydia tried to back away, but two men had placed themselves directly behind her. She felt her breath stop, and start up again too fast. With one hand Liev Popkov seized her wrist; with the other he drew from under his coat a knife that was almost a sword, long and curved and double-edged. Its hilt was heavy black metal and sat firmly in the Russian’s fist. He leaped forward with a low growl, dragging Lydia with him. Her feet skidded from under her on a patch of iced-up vegetable pulp, but without even glancing in her direction he yanked her into the air and slashed at the Chinese moon-face at the same time.

It was over before it began. The men vanished. A splash of blood started to freeze on the cobbles. Liev slipped the knife back into his belt and, without releasing her wrist, plodded on down through the crowded hutong as if nothing had happened.

‘What,’ Lydia demanded in English, ‘was that about? Did you really have to use that knife?’

He halted, stared at her with his one good eye, shrugged, and moved on.

She tried again. In Russian this time.

‘O chyon vi rugalyis?’

‘He wanted to buy you.’

‘Buy me?’

‘Da.’

She said no more. Knew she was shaking. Damn the bloody bear. She hated him to know she was frightened. She tried to snatch her wrist away, but it was like trying to pull a rivet out of one of the metal ships with your bare fingers. It just didn’t happen.

‘I didn’t know you speak Mandarin,’ she said.

‘He offered good money,’ he said and uttered a deep growling sound that it took her a moment to recognise as a laugh.

‘Damn you,’ she said in English.

The growl went on and on.

‘In here,’ she said to shut him up.

It was a kabak. A bar.

She knew it was a mistake the moment she was inside. Twenty pairs of eyes turned. Stared at them as if a snake had crawled through the door. The air hung solid and lifeless under the low ceiling and was full of odours Lydia did not recognise. A stove in one corner coughed out heat and fumes.

She stared back at the men. Her eyes roamed their faces and their clothes, all grey as ash, and the crazed enamel tables where they sat hunched over some colourless rotgut liquid. The grimy bamboo counter had a chained monkey at one end and the man behind it had no ears. He wore a soiled rag around the top of his head and held another in his hand. He was wiping a glass with it. Without taking his eyes off Liev Popkov for one second, he reached under the counter and brought up a rifle. He thumbed back the hammer with the ease of long practice and pointed the business end straight at Lydia’s chest. She felt her ribs contract. The rifle looked ancient, probably a relic from the Boxer Rebellion. But that didn’t mean it didn’t shoot straight.

Nobody spoke.

Liev nodded. Moving slowly he pulled her behind him and backed out of the bar.

‘He wasn’t there,’ she said outside. She was relieved to see her breath coiling in icy vapour from her mouth, in and out, her ribs still working.

Liev nodded again. ‘There are many bars.’

They went into ten bars that evening. Scattered over different areas of the harbour. No more rifles were pushed in their faces, but no smiles either. Eyes regarded them with the same loathing and mouths muttered curses and spat hatred on the floor.

Word was spreading. About the giant bear who broke men’s faces and the flame-haired girl. When they entered a bar and stood inside the door for no more than two minutes, heads raised because they’d heard of this strange pair who haunted the dockland. Lydia could see it on their faces, as clearly as she could see the desire to slit their fanqui throats. Each time she peered through the gloom of some narrow stinking room and heard the silence slide over the tables as drinkers turned to stare, she did not expect to find the one face she sought, the one with the intense and thoughtful eyes that had always observed her so closely and the nose that flared when he was amused though his mouth was slow to smile. She didn’t expect to see it. But still she hoped.

In one of the bars a short barrel of a man with oiled hair came and placed himself nervously in front of them. He said something in Chinese.

Liev Popkov fixed his eye on the questioner but grunted to Lydia in Russian. ‘He says, who are you looking for?’

‘Tell him the name is not for his ears. Tell him to say to all his…,’ she hunted for the Russian word, ‘… pyanitsam… customers that the girl with red hair was in his bar. She searches for someone.’

Liev frowned at her.

‘Tell him,’ she said.

He told him.

Outside in the street once more, the big man took root, indifferent to the snow flurries that were burrowing into his black beard, and put a hand on her shoulder. It felt like a truck had landed on it.

‘Why don’t you tell his name?’

‘Because it is too dangerous for him, slishkom opasno.’

‘A Communist?’

‘A person.’

‘How will you find him if you will not say his name?’

‘I am here. People talk. He will hear.’

‘And he will know it is you?’

‘Yes. He’ll know.’

Lydia lay in bed fully clothed. Shivering. She couldn’t get the dockland ice out of her bones. They felt as if they were cracking open, and even though she tucked her fingers under her armpits the chill air still managed to spike needles through them. Her old eiderdown was wrapped around her, tight as a cocoon, with every scrap of clothing she possessed draped on top, but still she was cold. The old black stove spluttered. Not that it was short of kerosene. Not now they had Alfred. But the meagre heat coaxed from it was no threat to the breath of the Chinese winter that climbed in through the window each night.

The door to the attic banged open.

‘Blin! Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

Lydia heard the church clock strike two.

‘I wasn’t asleep.’

‘I’ll just light a candle. Go to sleep now.’

Valentina had gone out with Alfred to a party. She’d been drinking. Lydia could tell by her footsteps. There was the flick of a lighter, a faint glow in the darkness, the noise of a chair dragged across the floor, then silence. Lydia knew what her mother was doing. Sitting in front of the stove. Smoking. She could smell it. And drinking. She knew it. Though Valentina could open a bottle and pour a glass of vodka without a single sound. Still, she knew it.

‘Mama, I saw something bad today.’

‘How bad?’

‘I saw a dead baby. Naked. It was lying in a gutter and a rat was biting off its lips.’

‘Ach! Don’t, sweetheart. Don’t let such things into your head. This God-cursed country is too full of them.’

‘I can’t forget it.’

‘Come here, little one.’

Lydia slid out of bed, still wrapped in her eiderdown, and pushed aside the curtain wall. Her mother was hunched in front of the stove, cigarette in one hand, glass in the other. She was wearing a new fur coat, the dense colour of honey, and her cheeks were flushed.

‘Here, this will make you forget.’ She held out the glass to Lydia.

Lydia took it. Never before had she done so. But now… now she needed… needed something. To help her hold on to the belief that somewhere out there Chang was safe. Her head was drowning. Great suffocating pools of blackness had opened inside it. Faces. They floated to the slimy surface, faces and faces and more faces, Chang’s eyes so wide and watchful and so eager to make her understand, and then came a dead baby with no lips, a Chinese jaw smashed to a pulp, Mr Theo’s huge echoing pupils, and all the street faces full of hatred and spite and venom.

She drank the vodka.

A kick in the gut. Then warmth. It seeped up into her chest and made her cough. She drank again. Slower this time. The black pools were turning grey. She sipped again. It tasted foul. How could anyone like this stuff?

Her mother watched her but said nothing.

Lydia sat down on the floor in front of the stove and Valentina stroked her head.

‘Better?’

‘Mmm.’

Valentina took back the empty glass and refilled it for herself. ‘Do you like my coat?’

‘No.’

Valentina laughed and ruffled the beautiful soft fur. ‘I do.’ Lydia leaned her head back, rested it on her mother’s knee, and closed her eyes.

‘Mama, don’t marry him.’

Slowly and gently Valentina continued to stroke her daughter’s hair. ‘We need him, dochenka,’ she murmured. ‘In this world when you need something, you have to ask a man. That’s the way it is.’

‘No. Look at us. We’ve survived all these years without a man. Between us we managed. A woman can…’

‘That’s balderdash, to use one of Alfred’s words.’ Valentina laughed again, but this time there was no humour in it. ‘It was always through men that I got my concert bookings, never women. Women don’t like me. They see me as a threat. C’est la vie.’

But Lydia heard the loneliness in the words.

‘It is not balderdash, Mama. It’s true. We can manage.’

‘Dochenka, don’t make me mad at your stupidity. Look at yourself. When it’s a rabbit you want, you get it out of Antoine. For a hutch or money, it’s Alfred. Oh yes, don’t look so surprised. He told me you came to him for a few dollars.’

‘It was for… things.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not prying. In fact Alfred was quite touched by it because you asked him instead of going out and stealing it.’

‘That man is easily pleased.’

‘He said he believed it was a sign of your growing maturity. And of a better sense of morality.’

‘Did he really say that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But, Mama, I ask women for help too. Like Mrs Zarya and Mrs Yeoman, and even Anthea Mason showed me how to bake a cake. You taught me how to dance. And Countess Serova taught me to walk taller.’

Valentina snatched her hand away from Lydia’s head. ‘What?’

‘She told me to hold my…’

‘What in the name of all that’s holy has it got to do with that witch of a woman?’ Valentina threw the vodka down her throat. ‘How dare she? How dare…?’

‘Mama.’ Lydia twisted around to look at her mother, but her face was swathed in deep shadow from the single candle on the table behind her. Only her eyes glittered. ‘Don’t get upset, Mama. She’s not important.’

Valentina drew hard on her cigarette, a bright pinprick of fire, and exhaled fiercely as if she were spitting poison.

Lydia rubbed her cheek against the fur-covered knee. ‘She can’t hurt you.’

Valentina was silent, then stabbed out her cigarette, lit another, and refilled her glass. Lydia felt her own head swirling gently with a pleasant drowsy slowness that made her eyelids too heavy to raise. Behind them Chang’s smile floated in mist.

‘Where do you go these days, Lydochka? After school, I mean.’

‘I go to Polly’s house. We’re working together on a project for school. I told you.’

‘I know you did.’ She drank more of the vodka. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s the truth.’

Lydia almost told her then. Everything. About Chang and his crazy leaps and his foot and his fierce beliefs and the way his mouth curved into a perfect… The drink had loosened her tongue and words were longing to pour out, to tell someone. Someone.

‘Mama, what did your parents say when you married a foreigner? ’

To her horror she felt her mother’s knee start to tremble beneath her cheek and when she looked up, tears were rolling down her mother’s face. Lydia gently stroked the knee, over and over, the fur almost as soft as Sun Yat-sen’s under her fingers.

‘They disowned me.’

‘Oh, Mama.’

‘They had the eldest son of a fine Russian family from Moscow all lined up for me. But instead Jens Friis and I eloped and they cursed us. Disowned me.’ She brushed the tears from her face with the back of the hand that held the cigarette, only just avoiding setting fire to her hair.

‘You loved each other, that’s all that matters.’

‘No, durochka, you little fool. It’s not enough. You need more.’

‘But you were happy together, you were, you’ve always said so.’

‘Yes, we were. But look at me now. The curse of my family has done this to me.’

‘That’s crazy. There are no such things as curses.’

‘Don’t you kid yourself, darling. The one thing that monster Confucius got right among all his claptrap about women is that you should obey your parents.’ She tapped her glass on the top of Lydia’s head. ‘That’s something you need to learn, you little alley cat. Parents really do know what’s best for their children.’

Lydia began to laugh. She couldn’t help it. It just bubbled up from nowhere and burst out regardless. Once she’d started she couldn’t stop and laid her face in her mother’s lap, howling with laughter.

‘It’s the drink,’ Valentina murmured, ‘you silly thing.’ But she was starting to laugh herself.

‘Do you know,’ Lydia giggled, ‘that Confucius said a nursing mother should feed her grandparents from her breast when they can no longer eat solid food.’

‘Good God!’

‘And,’ Lydia gasped out, ‘a man should feed his own fingers to his parents in time of famine.’

‘Well, dochenka, it’s about time you fed me yours.’ She picked up one of Lydia’s hands and took a bite of her smallest finger.

Lydia went weak with laughter, tears streaking her cheeks and her breath coming in great noisy hiccups.

‘Wicked child,’ Valentina suddenly exclaimed, ‘look, the vermin is here!’

Lydia rolled her head around and saw the long white ears flicking with concern by her side. Sun Yat-sen had hopped off her bed and come to inspect the noise. She scooped him up into her arms, placed a kiss on the tip of his pink nose, laid her head down on her mother’s lap, and was instantly asleep.