by John Boyne
‘I hoped you’d come,’ I said.
‘Mother brought us,’ she cried, falling into my arms. ‘Alexei is …’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I should have … I should have taken more care. If I had known—’
‘You weren’t to know the dangers,’ she insisted. ‘I’m frightened, Georgy. Hold me, won’t you? Hold me and tell me that everything will be all right.’
I didn’t hesitate. I wrapped myself around her and pressed her face to my chest, kissing the top of her golden hair and resting my lips there, inhaling the sweet aroma of her perfume.
‘Anastasia,’ I said, closing my eyes, wondering how I had ever found myself in this position. ‘Anastasia, my beloved.’
1953
I WAITED FOR ZOYA in the window seat of a café opposite the Central School of Art and Design, glancing at my watch from time to time and trying to ignore the chatter of the people around me. She was already more than half an hour late and I was beginning to grow irritated. A copy of The Caine Mutiny lay open before me, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words and eventually set it aside, picking up a teaspoon instead to stir my coffee as I tapped the table nervously with the fingers of my left hand.
Across the road, the staff and students from the college were wandering past, stopping and chatting with each other, laughing, gossiping, offering kisses, some attracting the disapproving frowns of passers-by due to the unorthodox nature of their clothing. A young man of about nineteen turned the corner and marched along the street as if he was trooping the colour, wearing a pair of drainpipe trousers, a dark shirt and waistcoat, all topped off with a knee-length, Edwardian jacket. His hair was slick with Brilliantine and turned up at the front in an elegant quiff, and he strutted along as if the entire city was his alone. It was impossible not to stare at him, which was presumably the intention.
‘Georgy.’
I looked around and was surprised to see my wife standing beside me; I had been so entranced by the goings on outside the college that I’d failed to notice her arriving. That, I considered in a moment of sadness, was something that would never have happened a year before.
‘Hello,’ I said, looking at my watch and instantly regretting the move, for it was an aggressive gesture, designed to indicate her lateness without having to articulate it. I was annoyed, that was true, but I didn’t want to seem annoyed. I had spent most of the last six months trying not to seem annoyed. It was one of the things that was holding us together.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, sitting down with an exhausted sigh and divesting herself of hat and coat. She had cut her hair quite short a few weeks earlier in a style reminiscent of the Queen – no, the Queen Mother; I still hadn’t grown accustomed to calling her that – and I didn’t care for it, if I was honest. But then there was a lot that I didn’t care for at the time. ‘I got held up as I was leaving,’ she explained. ‘Dr Highsmith’s secretary was away from her desk and I couldn’t leave without making the next appointment. It took her for ever to get back, and when she did, she couldn’t find her diary.’ She shook her head and sighed, as if the world was simply too exhausting a place to countenance, before smiling a little and turning to me. ‘The whole thing took for ever. And then the buses … well, anyway, what can I say? Except sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, shaking my head as if none of it really mattered. ‘I hadn’t even noticed the time. Everything all right?’
‘Yes, fine.’
‘What can I get you?’
‘Just a cup of tea, please.’
‘Just tea?’
‘Please,’ she said brightly.
‘You’re not hungry?’
She hesitated for a moment, considering it, and shook her head. ‘Not right now,’ she said. ‘I don’t have much of an appetite today, for some reason. I’ll just have tea, thanks.’
I nodded and went to the counter to order a fresh pot. Standing there, waiting for the water to boil and the leaves to be drenched, I watched her as she stared through the window, looking out towards the college where she had been teaching for about five years now, and tried not to hate her for what she had done to us. For what she had done to me. For the fact that she could show up late, without an appetite, which suggested to me that she had been somewhere else, with someone else, eating lunch with him and not with me. Even though I knew that this was not the case, I hated her for the fact that she had made me suspicious of her every move.
‘Thanks,’ she said, as I placed the cup down in front of her. ‘I needed that. It’s cold outside now. I should have brought a scarf. So how was your morning?’
I shrugged my shoulders, irritated by her cheerful demeanour and meaningless chit-chat, as if there was nothing wrong in the world at all, as if our lives were as they had always been and would ever be. ‘No different to usual,’ I said. ‘Boring.’
‘Oh Georgy,’ she said, reaching her hand across the table and placing it on top of mine. ‘Don’t say that. Your life isn’t boring.’
‘Well, it’s not as exciting as yours, that’s for sure,’ I said, regretting the words immediately as she froze, trying to decide whether I had meant them to be quite as cutting as they had sounded; her hand remained flat on top of mine for a few seconds longer and then she removed it, looked out of the window and sipped her tea cautiously. I knew that she wouldn’t speak again until I did. After over thirty years of marriage, there was very little she could do that I wasn’t able to anticipate. She could surprise me, of course, she had proved that. But still, I knew her moves like no one else ever could.
‘The new girl started,’ I said finally, clearing my throat, introducing a safe topic for conversation. ‘That’s news, I suppose.’
‘Oh yes?’ she asked in a neutral tone. ‘And what’s she like?’
‘Very pleasant. Eager to learn. Quite knowledgeable about books. She read Literature at Cambridge. Frightfully smart.’
Zoya smiled and stifled a laugh. ‘Frightfully smart,’ she repeated. ‘Georgy, how English you’ve become.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. You never would have used phrases like that when we first came to London. It’s all those years of being surrounded by dons and academics in the library.’
‘I expect it is,’ I said. ‘They do say that language changes as one becomes more assimilated into a different society.’
‘Is she mousy?’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Your new assistant. What’s her name, anyway?’
‘Miss Llewellyn.’
‘Is she Welsh?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is she mousy?’
‘No. Just because she chooses to work in a library doesn’t mean that she’s some sort of shrinking violet who can’t bear to be spoken to in case she turns bright red, you know.’
Zoya sighed and stared at me. ‘All right,’ she said, shaking her head a little. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just making conversation.’
Irritability. Petulance. Anxiety. A subconscious desire to find something wrong in every phrase she employed. A need to criticize her, to make her feel bad about herself. I could hear it every time we spoke. And I hated the fact of it. This was not who we were supposed to be. We were supposed to love each other, to treat each other with respect and kindness. We had never been Georgy and Zoya, after all. We were GeorgyandZoya.
‘She’ll do fine,’ I said, my tone a little lighter now, not wishing to increase the tension of the conversation. ‘Things won’t be the same without Miss Simpson, of course. Or Mrs Harris, I should say. But there we are. Life goes on. Times change.’
‘Yes,’ she said, reaching down for her handbag and taking out a copy of that morning’s Times newspaper. ‘Have you seen this?’ she asked, placing it on the table in front of me.
‘I’ve seen it,’ I replied after only a slight hesitation. I made sure to read The Times every morning at the library, she was well aware of it. What surprised me was
that she had seen it, for Zoya was not a person who particularly enjoyed reading about current affairs, particularly when so many of them in these days were bellicose in nature.
‘And what do you think?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ I said, picking the newspaper up and staring for a moment at the face of Josef Stalin in the photograph, the heavy moustache, the lidded eyes smiling back at me with fake cordiality. ‘What do you expect me to think?’
‘We should hold a party,’ she said, her voice cold but triumphant. ‘We should celebrate, don’t you think so?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘What is there to rejoice over, after all? So he is dead. And after him, you think … what? You think things will be as they once were again?’
‘Of course not,’ she said, taking the paper from me and looking at the photograph again for only a moment before folding it over and pressing it forcefully back into her bag. ‘I’m just happy, that’s all.’
‘That he’s gone?’
‘That he’s dead.’
I remained silent. I hated hearing such venom in her tone. Of course I was no admirer of Stalin; I had read enough about his actions to despise him. In the thirty-five years since leaving Russia I had remained well enough informed on the events that were taking place in my native land to feel relieved that I was no longer a part of them. But I could not celebrate a death, even his.
‘Anyway,’ I continued after a moment, ‘I don’t have long before I have to go back to work and I want to hear about your morning. How did it go?’
Zoya looked down at the table for a moment. She seemed disappointed that we were changing the subject so quickly; perhaps she wanted to engage in a long conversation about Stalin and his actions and his purges and all his multiplicity of crimes. She could have that conversation if she wanted, I had already decided in my head. Only not with me. ‘It was fine,’ she said quietly.
‘Just fine?’
‘It was a little more … complicated this time, I suppose.’
I considered this and hesitated before questioning her further. ‘Complicated?’ I asked. ‘How so?’
‘It’s hard to explain,’ she said, her forehead wrinkling a little as she thought about it. ‘When we had our first appointment last week, Dr Highsmith seemed interested in very little other than my daily life and routines. He wanted to know whether I enjoyed my work, how long I had lived in London, how long we had been married. Very basic questions. The kind of things you might chat about at a party if you were talking to a stranger.’
‘Did that make you uncomfortable?’ I asked.
‘Not particularly,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I mean, there was a limit to how much I was willing to talk about, of course. I don’t even know the man. But he seemed to recognize that in me. He challenged me on it quite early.’
I nodded. ‘And how far back did you go?’
‘Quite far, in different ways,’ she admitted. ‘I talked about how things had been during the war, the years leading up to it after we first got here. About how long we had waited to become parents. I talked …’ She hesitated now and bit her lip, but then looked up and spoke in a more determined voice; I wondered whether this was something Dr Highsmith had encouraged her to do. ‘I talked a little about Paris.’
‘Really?’ I asked, surprised. ‘We never talk about Paris.’
‘No,’ she said, her tone betraying a slight accusation. ‘No, we don’t.’
‘Should we?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘What else?’
‘Russia.’
‘You spoke about Russia?’
‘Again, only in the most general terms,’ she said. ‘It seemed strange to discuss such personal matters with a person I’ve only just met.’
‘You don’t trust him?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I do trust him, I think. It’s just … it’s curious, he doesn’t really ask any questions as such. He just talks to me. We have a conversation. And then I find myself opening up to him. Telling him things. It’s almost like a form of hypnosis. I was thinking about that earlier as I was waiting for his secretary to return and he put me in mind … he reminded me of—’
‘I know,’ I said, very quietly, almost in a whisper, as if the very mention of his name might summon the beast back from the afterlife. A snapshot of reminiscence exploded in my memory. I was seventeen years old again, freezing cold, dragging a body towards the banks of the Neva, ready to throw it into the depths. There was blood on the ground from the bullet wounds. A feeling in the air that the monster might yet spring back to life and kill us all. The room began to spin a little as the sensations of that evening returned to me and I trembled. This was not something I liked to think about. It was not something I ever allowed myself to remember.
‘He has a very calming tone,’ she replied, not acknowledging what I had said, not needing to. ‘He puts me at my ease. I was afraid he’d be like Dr Hooper, but he isn’t. He seems to genuinely care.’
‘And did you talk about the nightmares?’ I asked.
‘Today we did,’ she said, nodding. ‘He began by asking me why I had come to see him in the first place. Do you know, I never even realized that last time he hadn’t asked me that? You don’t mind me telling you all of this, do you, Georgy?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, attempting a smile. ‘I do want to know, but … only if you want to tell me. If he helps you, that’s all that’s important to me. You don’t have to feel you have to tell me everything.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I suppose there are some things that would sound odd if I repeated them to you out of context. Things that made sense in the moment, if you know what I mean. But anyway, I told him how I had been waking in the night so much recently, about the terrible dreams, about how they had just come upon me out of nowhere. It’s ridiculous really, after all these years, that such memories should resurface.’
‘And what did he say?’ I asked.
‘Not a lot. He asked me to describe them to him and I did. Some of them, anyway. There are others that I don’t think I can trust him with yet. And then we started to talk about a lot of different things. We talked about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes.’
I swallowed. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to ask this question, but there was no way around it. ‘What did he want to know about me?’ I asked.
‘He just asked me to describe you, that was all. The type of man you are.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘The truth, of course. How kind you are. How thoughtful. How loving.’ She hesitated for a moment and leaned forward a little. ‘How you have taken care of me all these years. And how forgiving you are.’
I looked at her and could feel the tears begin to build behind my eyes. I wasn’t angry now; I was feeling hurt again. Betrayed. I sought the correct words. I didn’t want to attack. ‘And you told him about … did you tell him?’
She nodded. ‘About Henry? Yes. I did.’
I sighed and looked away. Even now, almost a year later, the name was enough to shatter my mood and my confidence. I could still hardly believe that it had happened, that after so many years together she could betray me with another man.
*
Arina introduced Zoya and me to Ralph at the end of summer. I hadn’t known what to expect – it was the first time she had ever brought a boy home, after all – and the truth was that I rather dreaded the prospect of meeting him. It wasn’t just that it forced me to acknowledge the fact that my daughter was approaching adulthood; there was also the matter of facing up to my own increasing age. In my foolishness, I still thought of my life as being spread out before me like a flowerbed in springtime, a row of tulips about to burst into brilliant life, when really it was more like rose plants in autumn, when the leaves begin to blacken and wither and the decay of winter is all that remains of their lives. Lost among the filing systems of the British Library, I was quiet throughout the d
ay as this sobering thought settled upon my brain, and when Miss Llewellyn asked me whether I was feeling all right, I could only pass off my gloom with an embarrassed smile and an honest explanation.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have a rather unusual evening ahead of me, that’s all.’
‘Oh?’ she said, her curiosity piqued. ‘That sounds interesting. Going somewhere special?’
‘Sadly, no. My wife has invited my daughter’s young man to dinner. It’s the first time I’ve had to sit through such an ordeal and I’m not looking forward to it.’
‘I brought my bloke Billy to meet my parents a couple of months ago,’ she said, shivering a little at the memory of it and wrapping her cardiganed arms around herself. ‘It ended in the most terrible fight. My father threw him out of the house. Said he’d never speak to me again if I kept going with him.’
‘Really?’ I asked, hoping that my evening would not end in quite so dramatic a fashion. ‘He didn’t care for him then?’
She rolled her eyes as if the scene itself was too awful to describe. ‘It was a lot of nonsense really,’ she said. ‘Billy said something he shouldn’t have said, then my dad said something even worse. He likes to think of himself as a revolutionary, does my Billy, and Dad won’t have any truck with that type of thing. A real old British Empire type, you know the sort. You should have heard the way they shouted at each other when the poor old King was brought into the conversation, God bless his soul. I thought the police would be called out over it! How old is your daughter anyway, Mr Jachmenev, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘She’s just turned nineteen.’
‘Well then, this is just the start of it, I imagine. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more dinners to look forward to in the future. You’ll see. This bloke will be the first of dozens.’
This suggestion didn’t offer me quite the relief that she had intended and I returned home a little later than usual that evening, having stopped at a local church to light a candle – for as long as I live – for it was August the twelfth and I had a promise to fulfil.
‘Georgy,’ said Zoya, turning around to stare at me as I walked through the door, her face flushed with anxiety. ‘What kept you? I expected you half an hour ago.’