The Betrayal

by Helen Dunmore

  Anna thinks of how Kolya would listen to stories when he was seven. His face was wide open, as if it were a window through which the stories flowed. He would put one hand on her arm, urging her on. He used to ask her the most astonishing questions, and she would think: Are all children like this?

  He is often critical of her these days. ‘You’re always …’ ‘You never …’ Andrei says it’s not worth getting upset. It’s just Kolya’s age, and they have to expect it.

  It’s a long time since she and Andrei talked about having children of their own. Towards the end of the war, when Kolya was eight or so, they began to imagine it. The siege was broken. Our forces were driving westward, sweeping back over the land that had been swallowed by the Germans. They could begin to think of a future.

  ‘When we have children …’

  ‘Which do you think would be better, a girl first or a boy?’

  ‘Maybe a girl. Kolya might be jealous of a boy.’

  ‘He won’t be jealous if we handle it right.’

  ‘It’s just as well really, isn’t it, that you can’t choose?’

  ‘No, you have to take what comes.’

  Take what comes. They’d laughed then. They had a future. Not only had they not died, but their children would be born and would survive them. They would become parents. A boy with Andrei’s eyes; a girl who walked as if she was only just managing not to break into a run, like Anna. But different, too; entirely different. Children who would grow up in better times. They wouldn’t remember the war, and they’d only know about hunger from books.

  She’d allowed herself to drop her guard. She’d believed that things really might be different, after the war. Surely people would have had enough of death. And Andrei, too, had hoped for better things. Otherwise, suffering was just suffering; purposeless and mechanical. You couldn’t allow yourself to believe that.

  People said that Leningrad’s heroism would be rewarded. No other city had held out for so long. Paris had fallen in forty days. Leningrad had held out for nine hundred, and had never fallen, no matter how many shells rained down on it. They had starved in thousands, and then in hundreds of thousands, but in the end it had been the Germans who retreated.

  It seemed impossible now that they had really done the things they’d done. That they’d lived, let alone continued to work and to fight.

  But so soon after, the signs of hope began to disappear. Exhibitions that showed the life of the city under siege were dismantled, and the exhibits scattered. Plays were written, but never put on. Memoirs were put away in drawers. What has happened to you is not as important as you think. We intend to tell this story in a different way.

  The visionary reconstruction was a pipe dream. Money was needed elsewhere, and Leningrad must accept that there were other priorities. It was a provincial city and due for relegation. If Leningrad thought it had deserved better, it was naive. We don’t mind hearing about the battles and the shells, but the appalling details of starvation are not required. Besides, it raises unpleasant questions. Please keep your personal stories where they belong, inside your heads.

  Every hope had been smashed.

  But maybe some time, in the not too distant future, things would start to get easier. ‘No one can live for ever,’ they whispered to each other. Even now, when they’re alone, they go no further than that. He is an old man, even though his polished-up photographs make him look young as he presides over the great parades. Over seventy now.

  ‘Georgians live for a long time,’ said Andrei once.

  ‘Only if they stay in Georgia,’ Anna replied.

  ‘Kolya might be jealous of a boy.’

  ‘He won’t be jealous if we handle it right.’

  ‘It’s just as well really, isn’t it, that you can’t choose?’

  ‘No, you have to take what comes.’

  Take what comes.

  Yes, and embrace it. In this one area of her life at least, Anna wasn’t going to struggle and organize and plan and budget. She thought of the warm wind that blew from the south-west after winter had broken, and the way the earth seemed to spread itself out in its nakedness and wait.

  She can hardly bear to think of all that now. She’d known nothing, and she’d been punished for it. That wind certainly hadn’t blown anywhere near her. She was twenty-six, then twenty-eight, and then suddenly she was over thirty and beginning to be frightened. Now she is thirty-four. Sometimes, when Andrei’s out, she secretly takes down his medical textbooks. She scours through them, as hot and scared as a kid trying to find out about sex. The diagrams and cold descriptive paragraphs repel her. They talk about abnormalities, and propose investigations on defective lumps of flesh.

  She can’t talk to Andrei about it. She can’t bear to bring her failure out into the open between them. Besides, Andrei works such long hours, and Kolya never seems to go to bed now. It was easier when he was little and after eight o’clock the evening was their own.

  She shouldn’t be thinking like this.

  The ball is a month away, at midsummer. Andrei has been lucky in the draw this year, and is neither on duty nor on call. Kolya suddenly decided that he’d like to stay in the city that night, but Anna wasn’t giving way.

  ‘No, you’re going with Grisha to his uncle’s. It’s all arranged, and you agreed.’

  ‘Only because you wanted me to. “Acquiesced” is the word, not “agreed”. Grisha’s uncle lives way out in the sticks.’

  ‘There’ll be a bonfire, and loads of food. There are five or six boys from your class going.’

  ‘I’d rather stay here in the city. I’m not really friends with Grisha.’

  ‘It’s not going to happen, Kolya. I don’t want you hanging around the parks all night with Sasha and Lev.’

  ‘Their parents think they’re old enough.’

  ‘You know what the white nights are like. There’ll be too much drinking going on.’

  ‘We won’t be drinking much,’ said Kolya, with a weary, scornful air.

  ‘No, you won’t, because you won’t be here, you’ll be at Grisha’s uncle’s.’

  Kolya shrugged in a way that always made Anna feel as if she were the childish, unreasonable one.

  Well, maybe she is being selfish, but for one night she doesn’t want to have to worry about Kolya. She and Andrei will be free. They’ll be able to wander through the white night as long as they like, and when they get back the apartment will be empty, all theirs. Kolya stays up so late, and often Sasha and Lev are there too. Adolescent voices boom and crack. Sometimes it sounds as if they’re making speeches, not talking to one another. The bed creaks, chairs scrape, laughter bellies out, or someone starts to play the piano …

  She can’t remember things ever being like that for her. She and her mother always had to be careful, because of her father. He was so sensitive.

  You can’t blame the boys for wanting to be round here. Sasha shares a room with his grandfather and younger brother. Lev, his mother and his grandparents are squeezed into one room in a communal apartment. It’s a big room, Lev said, but his grandfather snores whenever he rolls on to his back. They wedge him with pillows, but it doesn’t work. And he farts, too, Kolya told Anna later. All night long.

  Kolya has that miracle, a room of his own. God knows how they’ve managed to hold on to the apartment, with its two good-sized rooms. Anna and Andrei sleep in the living room. They’ve put up a rail and made curtains which they can draw around their bed at night. Kolya might wander through at any time, to the toilet or for a drink of water. He takes after their father; he’s a nightbird. But sometimes, with three boys tiptoeing through the room in procession and then collapsing with laughter as soon as they’re back behind a shut door, it can be a bit much.

  At least Kolya never tries to play the piano at night. The neighbours won’t stand for that. Even in daytime Anna has to be careful. If the Maleviches were to put in a complaint it might start an investigation into their living space. She’s warned Kolya, but she d
oesn’t want to keep on nagging him all the time.

  You want them to be spontaneous, even though of course they can’t be. Her friend Evgenia, in the war, used to have a saying: ‘He’s swallowed the rule book, and now he shits out rules.’

  3

  ‘Where’s Kolya?’

  ‘Out.’ Anna lifts the pot from the stove, and places it on the wooden mat.

  ‘Has he eaten?’

  ‘Of course. When does Kolya ever miss a meal?’ She gives him the glint of a smile before her face turns solemn as she lifts the lid on her stew, releasing a puff of savoury steam.

  ‘I made the stock with the last of that boiling fowl,’ she murmurs, as she ladles two generous helpings into bowls. For the hundredth time Andrei marvels at the time and trouble Anna takes, and the way she can transform a handful of dried mushrooms, a few onions, barley and a chicken carcass into a potful of thick, rich golden stew. ‘It needs a bit more pepper,’ she says critically, after tasting a drop from the side of her spoon.

  ‘What are those dark bits?’

  ‘Chopped nettles. I’ve only used the tips. I brought a bagful back from the dacha.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Anna, for heaven’s sake, just go to the market and buy fresh greens. We’ve got the money.’

  ‘Nettles are full of iron.’

  He gives up. Anna’s like that. She’ll spend hours hunting for puffballs in the forest until she finds one the size of a melon to bring home. She slices and fries the thick creamy flesh, and they eat it just as it is, smoking hot. Every time, one or other of them will say, ‘Don’t you think it tastes like chicken?’ Anna claims to be able to pick nettles without gloves – ‘It’s fine, you just have to grasp them tight and then they can’t sting you’ – and she’ll walk miles in search of wild raspberries. But she can be extravagant too. He’s shocked sometimes by what she’ll pay for a bunch of the earliest lilac.

  Anna smiles. ‘Kolya had two platefuls.’ He always eats too fast. At least they’ve got him out of the habit of curving his arm around his plate as if someone were about to snatch it. People say that children forget, but Kolya hasn’t forgotten. Hunger is imprinted in him.

  ‘I suppose he’s gone off with his friends,’ says Andrei.

  ‘They’ve gone to the Summer Garden. He said he wouldn’t be back late. Anyway, they’ll be kicked out of there at ten.’

  The apartment seems many times larger when Kolya’s not at home. Andrei takes a breath, feeling his lungs expand. It’s so good to be alone with Anna for once, although of course he’ll never say so. It’s ironic, really, that they’ve had a child with them from the day they met, and yet their own child, the child they once took for granted and expected to come along just as surely as a train will grow from a speck in the distance until it reaches the platform … That child has never come.

  They have each other. They have Kolya. Anna doesn’t want tests and examinations, and he’s not going to force them on her. The one time he suggested it, as tactfully as he could, she backed away from him. Her eyes were narrow with anger. ‘Just because you’re a doctor, you think I’m nothing more than a broken-down machine.’ Besides, the thought of Anna with her legs in stirrups while one of his colleagues levers a speculum into her vagina makes him recoil. This is enough: the two of them alone together in the apartment, the rich steam, Anna’s hair escaping into curls around her forehead.

  Anna thinks, disloyally, of how calm it is. Kolya and Andrei both put pressure on her, because they both want to come first with her. They don’t mean to do it, but sometimes she feels as if she is being sawn in half.

  ‘It’s after nine,’ Andrei says. ‘He stays out later and later.’

  ‘I know. But they’re all out in the streets these light evenings. They can’t stay indoors. You remember how it was when we were young ourselves.’

  It stabs him, that she should speak as if she weren’t young any more. She’s not much over thirty, for God’s sake.

  ‘Do you know, Andrei, it was the funniest thing. Just as Kolya went out of the door, I caught a glimpse of his back view – and you know how sometimes you suddenly see someone not as the person you know they are, but objectively? I mean, when you come across one of your family in the street when you aren’t expecting it, and you see them as other people do, who don’t know them?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He looked so different suddenly – quite old, like a student. And I’ve never thought Kolya looked like my father, but he’s beginning to. He pulled his cap forward and then he ducked down to see himself in the mirror and he looked exactly like my father. They must be almost the same height now, Kolya’s grown so much this year.’

  He notices two things: that she has slipped into speaking of her father in the present tense, and that even though Mikhail is Kolya’s father as much as he is Anna’s, Anna never refers to ‘our father’.

  ‘He reminded me so much of my father,’ Anna goes on, in a low voice. ‘You know how he was, always so absorbed in whatever he was doing.’

  ‘Yes.’ And so far from being absorbed in you, thinks Andrei.

  ‘He couldn’t get outside himself, that was the trouble,’ Anna says, her voice even lower. ‘He was trapped. I used to hear him in the night, walking about.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean Kolya won’t be happy.’

  ‘I know. Did you have a good day?’ She says it casually, as she spoons the last of the stew on to his plate.

  ‘Quite good.’

  ‘Morozova wants me to go on a maths course, and statistics as well. She’s got her eye on me.’

  ‘Sounds ominous,’ says Andrei lightly. He can see that Anna really is worried.

  ‘I’m not “fulfilling my potential” apparently.’

  ‘My God, that woman wouldn’t recognize your potential if it jumped up and bit her.’ It drives him mad, this obsession with status, position, qualifications. The questions that check and place you in less than a minute: your current research interest? Your publications? Party membership?

  He’s even been infected by it himself. The fear of being left behind, and becoming one of those doctors whose opinion no one ever seeks. You have to go to meetings. You have to be seen, and be heard saying the right things. Someone whose clinical work you really respect puts an arm around your shoulders one day as you’re both walking down a corridor and says: ‘You know, young man, I’ve been thinking that you’d have a lot to offer to the hospital liaison committee. It’s so important for the decision-makers to be kept in touch with our rising clinicians …’

  And, of course, it is. He understands exactly what good will be done, and to whom. Doctors who want to develop their careers must learn to sit on committees and talk about the public good rather than getting bogged down in the detail of individual cases. Besides, it’s in the interests of the patients as well. A doctor with ‘pull’ can secure the latest equipment and drugs for his clinics. Keep yourself pure as the driven snow if you want, but there’s a cost attached, and it’s not just you who’ll pay it. The brotherly arm will fall from your shoulders. The minutes of the meetings will never reach you. Much better roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

  The arm around his shoulders gives an encouraging squeeze. We’re all in this together.

  Andrei crumbles bread into his stew. Already the moment when he should have said something about Russov and the child has passed. He looks at Anna, willing her to break through the fog that wraps itself around him.

  ‘I shall have to do something,’ says Anna, ‘Morozova’s not going to leave me alone. It’s not as if I didn’t respect her –’

  He gets up and comes round the table, behind her chair. She leans back, pressing her head against him. He bends over her, and kisses her cheek because he cannot reach her mouth. Her eyes are closed as she takes his hand and kisses it, then continues to hold it against her face. Another light kiss touches him, and then another. There’ll just be time, before Kolya gets back, if they’re quick –

  But he can’t. H
e’s got to tell her.

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Something happened today.’

  She twists around to face him and looks up, her eyes wide and searching. Her body has stiffened. ‘What?’

  ‘It might turn out to be nothing. But Russov asked me to look at one of his patients today.’

  She says nothing, waiting.

  ‘It’s a child, a boy of ten. The father – well, I’ve only had it from Lena. He’s MGB. Volkov.’

  ‘Volkov!’ She starts as if an electric shock has gone through her.

  ‘I know.’

  There’s a long silence between them, and then Anna rises from her chair, walks to the window and looks out. After another little while she turns back to him. He can’t see her expression clearly, because she’s standing against the light.

  ‘The Volkov, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. There’s only one, I should hope.’

  ‘My God.’ Instinctively, she has lowered her voice. ‘What’s the matter with the child?’

  ‘Russov wouldn’t tell me; he made out he had the usual symptoms of some form of juvenile arthritis. Swelling, pain, redness. I haven’t got anything like the whole picture. It’s all been completely unprofessional. But Lena says it’s serious.’

  ‘How would she know?’

  ‘Apparently Russov’s had X-rays done on the quiet.’

  ‘But you can’t do that, can you?’

  ‘It seems Russov has. There are no records, so I don’t know what the results were.’

  ‘But that’s –’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me.’

  ‘It’s something bad. That’s why he doesn’t want you to know.’

  ‘It’s hard not to come to that conclusion,’ says Andrei drily.