by John Boyne
‘Because we should watch it together,’ she told me. ‘As a family. Please, Pasha,’ she added, offering me the beseeching smile that never failed to win me over. And sure enough, the following Monday, only the afternoon before the Queen was due to make her way to Westminster Abbey, I finally relented and returned home with a new wedge-shaped Ambassador console, which fitted snugly into the corner of our small living room.
‘But it’s so ugly,’ said Zoya, sitting on the sofa while I tried to attach the wires correctly. At the showroom I had been momentarily seduced by the models on display and had chosen this particular receiver for its wooden surround, which was made from a similar material to our dining table. It was divided into two halves, a small twelve-inch screen resting comfortably above a similar-sized speaker, the two settings giving the box the appearance of an unfinished traffic light. Despite myself, I was quite excited by this new purchase.
‘It’s wonderful,’ said Arina, sitting down beside her mother and staring at it in wonder as if it was a Picasso or a Van Gogh.
‘It should be,’ I muttered. ‘It’s the most expensive thing we own.’
‘How much was it, Georgy?’
‘Seventy-eight pounds,’ I said, astonished even as I said the words that I could have spent so much money on something so essentially worthless. ‘Over ten years, of course.’
Zoya uttered an old Russian oath beneath her breath but didn’t offer any criticism; perhaps she was already seduced by the machine too. It took a little time for me to understand how to operate it, but I finally finished making all the connections and pressed the ‘on’ button and we watched, the three of us, as a small white circle appeared in the centre of the screen and then, two or three minutes later, spread out to fill the screen with a symbol for the BBC.
‘Programmes don’t start until seven o’clock,’ explained Arina, who seemed content nevertheless to sit there staring at the test card.
The whole country had been given the following day off work and the streets were lined with so much bunting and decoration that the city appeared to have transformed itself into a circus overnight. Ralph arrived before lunchtime, laden down with cold meats, chutneys and cheese for sandwiches, and more bottles of beer than I thought strictly necessary.
‘Anyone would think you were getting married, the way you’re carrying on,’ I said to Arina, who had been up since six o’clock, fussing about in great excitement, and had finally ended up sitting on the floor in front of the television in an attempt to get as close to the proceedings as possible. ‘Is this what we’re going to be like from now on, a family of baboons, transfixed by a flickering light emerging from a wooden box?’
‘Oh, Pasha, shush,’ she said, watching as the reporter in the studio repeated the same information over and over again and passed it off as news.
Zoya did not seem as interested as the young people in the events taking place, maintaining as much distance from the television set as was possible in our small living room, busying herself with small unnecessary jobs. But when the young Queen began her journey in the gold-crested carriage from the palace, looking out towards her people with a confident smile upon her face and waving with that particularly regal twist of the wrist, she pulled a seat over and began to watch silently.
‘She’s a pretty thing,’ I remarked as Elizabeth ascended the throne, only to receive another shushing from my daughter, who thought nothing of commenting on every jewel, every tiara, every throne and every piece of ceremonial splendour which was displayed before us, but didn’t want me to interrupt the proceedings with a single word.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she asked, turning to us then, her face lit up with delight at what she saw. I smiled at her, feeling uncomfortable, and glanced across at my wife, who was transfixed by the images on the television too and had, I thought, not even heard a word that our daughter had said.
‘Ralph and I are going to the palace,’ announced Arina when the ceremony was finally over.
‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘Haven’t you seen enough?’
‘Everyone’s going there, Mr Jachmenev,’ said Ralph, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Don’t you want to see the Queen when she steps out on the balcony?’
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
‘You go,’ said Zoya, standing up and stepping away from us, filling the sink with hot water and throwing the used plates into it forcefully. ‘It’s for the young people, not us. We couldn’t stand the crowds.’
‘Well, we better go now, Ralph, or we won’t get a good place,’ said Arina, grabbing his hand and dragging him away before he even had a chance to thank us for our hospitality. I could hear others on the street beyond, leaving their houses too, having watched the Coronation, and making their way along Holborn towards Charing Cross Road, and from there on to the Mall in the hope of getting as close to the Queen Victoria Memorial as possible. I listened to them for a few minutes before standing up and walking over to Zoya.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No.’
‘Was it the ceremony?’
She sighed and turned around to look at me, our eyes meeting for a few seconds before she looked away.
‘Zoya,’ I said, wanting to take her in my arms, to hold her, to comfort her, but there was something that prevented me from doing so. This disruption in our marriage. She sensed it herself and offered an exhausted sigh, walking away from me without another word or touch and stepped towards the bedroom, where she closed the door behind her, leaving me alone.
I knew that something wasn’t right long before she told me about it. This man, Henry, had arrived at the Central School, where Zoya worked, from America to teach for a year and they had quickly become friends. He was younger than her, in his late thirties, I think, and no doubt found himself lonely in a city where he knew no one and had no friends. Zoya was not the type to feel a responsibility towards people in this way – she typically eschewed any form of social interaction with her colleagues outside of the school itself – but for some reason, she took him under her wing. Soon they were taking their lunch together every afternoon and arriving back late for classes because they had found themselves so engrossed in conversation.
They went for a drink together every Thursday evening after work. I was invited along only once, and found him pleasant company, if a little trivial in his conversation and prone to self-importance, and then I was never invited again and no reference was made to this fact. It was as if my audition to join their little club had gone badly and they didn’t want to hurt my feelings by mentioning it. I didn’t mind particularly; if anything I liked the fact that Zoya had made a friend of her own, for she had never had very many of those, but still, the rejection smarted.
She’d come home and tell me all about Henry, the things he had done that day, the things he had said, how knowledgeable he was, how funny. He did a near-perfect impersonation of President Truman, she told me, and I wondered how Zoya even knew what President Truman sounded like in order to make the comparison. Perhaps I was being naive, but none of it bothered me in the least. In fact, I found her little obsession amusing and started to tease her about him from time to time, and she’d laugh and say that he was just a boy she got along with, that was all, it was hardly worth making a fuss over.
‘He’s hardly a boy,’ I pointed out.
‘Well, you know what I mean,’ she said. ‘He’s so young. I’m not interested in him in that way at all.’
I remember that conversation well. We were standing in the kitchen and she was scouring a pot over and over, despite the fact that it had become entirely clean a few minutes earlier. Her cheeks had grown flushed as the exchange continued and she’d turned away from me, as if she couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye. I had only been teasing her, nothing more, in the way that she had always teased me about Miss Simpson, but it surprised me that she had gr
own so coy, almost coquettish in response.
‘I wasn’t talking about you being interested in him,’ I said, trying to laugh it off and ignore the sudden tension that had fallen between us. ‘I was talking about him being interested in you.’
‘Oh, Georgy, don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘The very idea.’
And then one day, she simply stopped talking about him entirely. She was still returning home from work at the usual time, still going for a drink with him once a week, but when I asked whether they had enjoyed a pleasant evening, she shrugged her shoulders as if she could barely remember any details of it and said that it had been fine, nothing special. She didn’t even know why she bothered any more.
‘And is he enjoying London?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Henry, of course.’
‘Oh, I expect so. He doesn’t really talk about it.’
‘So what do you talk about?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Georgy,’ she said defensively, as if she wasn’t even present for their conversations. ‘Work, mostly. Students. Nothing very interesting.’
‘If he’s not very interesting, then why do you spend so much time with him?’
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, growing unexpectedly angry. ‘I hardly spend any time with him at all.’
The entire thing began to strike me as quite bizarre, but even though there was a tiny voice at the back of my mind telling me that there was more to this than she was telling me, I chose to ignore it. The idea seemed utterly impossible, after all. Zoya was in her fifties. We had been together for more than half our lives. We loved each other very much. We had been through an extraordinary amount of hardship and difficulty together. We had suffered and lost together and survived. And through it all there had always been the two of us; we had always been GeorgyandZoya.
And then the year ended and Henry went back to America.
At first, Zoya seemed a little hysterical. She came home from work and talked all night long, as if she was afraid that to pause for even a moment would allow her to consider everything that she had lost and break down entirely. She cooked elaborate meals and insisted on our taking expeditions at the weekends to the most ridiculous places – London Zoo, the National Portrait Gallery, Windsor Castle – behaving as if we were a pair of young lovers getting to know each other for the first time and not a married couple who had been together for their entire adult lives. It felt as if she was trying to get to know me again, as if she’d lost sight of me somewhere along the way but knew that I was worthy of her love, if she could only remember the reason why she had once felt that emotion for me.
The hysteria gave way to depression. She started to engage less and less in conversation with me, spurning all attempts on my part to talk or share details of our days. She went to bed early and never wanted to make love. She, who had always taken such pride in her appearance, particularly since she had unexpectedly won the position at the Central School and felt that she had to equal the high fashion standards set by the other teachers and students, started to ‘dress down’, not caring if she went to classes in yesterday’s clothes or with her hair more unkempt than it would previously have been.
Finally, unable to contain her deceit any longer, she sat beside me one evening and said that she had something she wanted to tell me.
‘Is it about Henry?’ I asked, surprising her, for he had left England more than five months before and his name had never been mentioned even once in our home during all that time.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How did you know?’
‘How could I not have known?’ I said.
She nodded and told me everything. And I listened, and didn’t grow angry, and tried to understand.
Not easy.
And then, a few weeks later, her nightmares began. She would wake in the middle of the night, covered in perspiration, breathing heavily and trembling with fear. Waking beside her – for we never slept apart, not even on our worst nights – I’d reach out for her and she’d jump with fright, failing to recognize me at first and then, the lights on, her fear subsiding, I would take her in my arms as she tried not to weep but to describe the images she had been confronted with in the darkness and solitude of her dreams.
Finally, our marriage at its lowest ever ebb, my wife unable to sleep, barely eating, and me filled with love and anger and hurt, she woke one day and said that this could go on no longer, that something had to change. I froze, thinking the worst. Imagining her leaving me alone, facing a life without her.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, swallowing nervously, preparing a speech in my mind that would forgive everything, everything, if she would only love me as she had before.
‘I need to get some help, Georgy,’ she said.
The Starets and the Skaters
FOR SEVERAL DAYS I felt an uncanny sensation that I was being followed. Leaving the palace for a walk along the Moika in the early evening, I would hesitate, stop and turn around, scanning the faces of the people walking quickly past me, convinced that one of them was watching me. It was a curious and disturbing feeling that, at first, I put down to paranoia brought on by my changed circumstances.
By now I was so happy in my new position with the Imperial Family that I could barely recall my past without fearing a return to it. When I did think of home there was a pricking of my conscience, but I ignored it and cast it quickly from my mind.
And yet I wasn’t thinking of Kashin at all when it manifested itself once more in front of me. I was thinking of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, of the moments when we would meet on darkened corridors when I could spirit her inside one of the many hundreds of empty rooms in the palace to kiss her, to pull her close to me, to hope that she would suggest an even greater intimacy to quell my teenage lust. The previous evening I had quite forgotten myself, taking her hand as we embraced and pushing it slowly along my tunic, down towards my belt, my heart racing with desire and the anticipation of the moment when she would pull away and say No, Georgy … we can’t … we can’t …
My mind was so filled with these thoughts and an urgent desire to return quickly to the solitude of my room that I barely glanced at the young woman standing wrapped in heavy shawls by the side of the Admiralty. She said something, a phrase I didn’t hear as the wind blew around me, and in my selfishness I snapped irritably at her that I had no money to give her, that she should go to one of the soup kitchens that had sprung up around St Petersburg for food and warmth.
To my surprise she ran after me and I spun around just as she grabbed my arm, wondering whether she really thought that she could rob me of what little money I had, and even then I failed to recognize her immediately until she said my name.
‘Georgy.’
‘Asya!’ I cried, astonished, delighted at first, staring at my sister as if she was an apparition and not a person at all. ‘But I can’t believe it. Is it really you?’
‘It is,’ she said, nodding, tears of joy forming as pools in her eyes. ‘I have found you at last.’
‘Here,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Here, in St Petersburg!’
‘Where I always wanted to be.’
I embraced her, pulled her close to me, and then a moment of great shame: the thought went through my mind, What is she doing here anyway? What does she want of me?
‘Come over here,’ I said, beckoning her towards the shelter of one of the colonnades. ‘Step out of the cold, you look frozen. How long have you been here, anyway?’
‘Not long,’ she said, sitting beside me on a low stone bench hidden away from the noisy winds, where we might hear each other better. ‘A few days, that’s all.’
‘A few days?’ I replied, surprised. ‘And you’re only coming to me now?’
‘I wasn’t sure how to approach you, Georgy,’ she explained. ‘Every time I saw you, you were with groups of other soldiers and I was afraid to interrupt. I knew I would find you on your own sooner or later.’
I nodded, recalling the fe
eling that I had been watched and had felt annoyed by it.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, you have found me now.’
‘At last,’ she said, breaking into a smile. ‘And how well you look! You are eating, I can tell.’
‘But exercising too,’ I said quickly, offended. ‘My work here never ends.’
‘You look healthy, that’s all I meant. Life in the palace agrees with you.’
I shrugged my shoulders and looked out towards the square and the Alexander Column that had been one of my first sights of this new world, conscious that my sister looked extremely thin and pale.
‘I nearly fainted when I first saw it,’ she said, following my gaze.
‘The palace?’
‘It’s so beautiful, Georgy. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’
I nodded, but tried to look unimpressed. I wanted her to feel that this was a place where I belonged, that my life had always led me here.
‘It is a home, like any other,’ I said.
‘But it’s not!’ she cried.
‘I mean that on the inside, when you are with the family, they think of it as their home. One quickly grows accustomed to such wealth,’ I lied.
‘And have you met them yet?’ she asked me.
‘Who?’
‘Their Majesties.’
I burst out laughing. ‘But Asya,’ I explained, ‘I see them every day. I am companion to the Tsarevich Alexei. You knew that was why I was being brought here.’
She nodded and seemed lost for words. ‘It was just … I didn’t believe it could be true.’
‘Well, it is,’ I said irritably. ‘Anyway, why are you here?’
‘Georgy?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, regretting my tone immediately. It astonished me how much I wanted her to go away. It was as if I believed that she had come to take me home. But she represented a part of my life that was over for me now, a time that I wanted not only to move past but to forget entirely. ‘I only meant, what good fortune has brought you to the city too?’