The Girl from Junchow

by Kate Furnivall

  “No, Alexei. Thank you, but no.”

  “Please, Lydia, don’t do this. It’s all wrong. What are you and I without Russia? It’s in our blood.”

  She shook her head. “I love Russia. But not enough.”

  Their eyes held. How could she ever have thought this man cold? The fire was there, deep in him, hidden behind the wall of pride. “I love you, my brother,” she said softly. She couldn’t rob him of his father by telling him the truth.

  He rose from his chair and knelt on the polished floor in front of her, taking both her hands in his. “Stay in Moscow,” he begged. “I would like to have you at my side. With Maksim’s support I am going to remain one of the vory and intend to work my way up, so that . . .”

  “When Maksim dies, you’ll be there, ready to take over. My dear brother, you are nothing if not ambitious.”

  He didn’t nod, but she saw his eyes shine and she recognized the thrill that rippled through him at some deep level. He wasn’t a man to conform to Stalin’s straitjacket, but she could already see changes in him and she was frightened for him. How much of what she loved most in him would disappear if he spent his life with these thieves? It was ironic. She used to be the one who stole and risked prison, not him.

  “Or,” she suggested, “you could return to China with me.”

  He frowned at her. “No. I’ll not leave Russia.”

  Did he think her a traitor then? Is that what he meant?

  “So what is it you said you have for me?” she asked.

  He scrutinized her face, as though searching for something, before standing and removing some papers from a cabinet.

  “Here, new identity documents.”

  Her heart thumped. “That was fast.”

  “A gift from Maksim.”

  “Thank him from me.”

  “I will.” He stood looking down at her. “One last time, little sister. Give him up. You will make each other unhappy in the end.”

  “I can’t. Any more than I can give up breathing.”

  “Very well.” He held out a packet. “Here’s a form with Dmitri’s personal stamp on it to enable you to travel freely and buy tickets. And enough roubles—from Antonina—to get you to China.”

  She took them. Her hand trembled as she blinked back tears. “What can I say, Alexei? You are the brother I always wished for.”

  He smiled awkwardly, her words creeping under his guard.

  “And I have something for you,” she added. “I hope it will please you.” From her pocket she extracted a small folded piece of paper and handed it to him.

  He unfolded it. “It’s one of Jens’s notes.”

  It was the one in which he mentioned Alexei. “For you, if you’d like it.”

  Alexei nodded and turned away quickly, but not before she saw an emotion she couldn’t read flood his face, making him look young and vulnerable. Carefully he refolded it and kept it in his hand.

  At that moment Antonina entered bearing a tray. While Lydia drank the strong coffee and ate one of the warm croissants, Antonina snipped at her damaged hair with a pair of scissors, creating something orderly out of the havoc. It occurred to Lydia that Antonina would always be good at that. She watched Alexei observing every nuance of Antonina’s face as she worked, and she hoped they would be good for each other. Afterward she was taken to the main bedroom, where gowns and shoes and sable stoles were scattered across the bed.

  “Help yourself to anything you want,” Antonina said with an indifferent wave of her hand toward the bed and a black velvet box that sat open on the dressing table.

  Even from where Lydia was standing by the door, she could see that the box contained jewelry. Unable to stop herself, she was drawn to it, revelling in the glitter of diamonds and the buttery sheen of gold, but she didn’t touch anything. She might not be able to prize her fingers apart if she did.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For the roubles and now this offer. You are very generous. But no, I don’t need more.”

  “We’re going to sell it all. Getting rid of it through Maksim. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “No desire for blood money, is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Antonina came over and kissed Lydia’s cheek. “At least let me drive you to the station.”

  LYDIA STEPPED OUT OF THE SLEEK SALOON AT THE STATION. The place was thick with travelers, suitcases, and porters’ trolleys fighting for space, but she barely noticed them. What she saw were the uniforms. Gray with blue flashes at the collar, diligently checking papers and scrutinizing faces. Searching for someone.

  “Security police,” she murmured to Alexei.

  “It’s not too late to turn back.”

  The car door still stood open. All it would take was one step to be safe inside the car, but that one step would be a journey into her past instead of her future. Chang An Lo had offered her Hong Kong. It was an island teetering just off the mainland of China, but it bridged the gap that yawned between East and West, between his world and hers. A British colony, yet at the same time a thriving Chinese center of activity and growth. There he could still be part of his own country and could take his time to make his decisions. Whether to free his throat from the choking hand of Mao Tse-tung. And it might even be possible there for her to fulfill the dream she and her mother used to weave of her going to university one day. With a British passport in her possession, Hong Kong could be hers. Like an open door. All she had to do was push it wide and find Chang An Lo waiting for her.

  She touched the quartz dragon at her throat. None of it would be easy, she knew that, because their love was fierce. It burned as well as bound them. Chang called her his fox; her mother had called her an alley cat; she was good at surviving. But their love? Would that survive what lay ahead?

  Yes, she was determined they would make it survive. Each day they would breathe life into it, despite the dangers that circled them like wolves. She looked again at the officer in gray, at the gun holster on his hip, and she fingered the papers in her pocket. She knew that in China she would miss Russia the way she’d miss a limb, but to remain without Chang was impossible. She’d tried that. And almost died of the pain.

  It’s not too late to turn back.

  The car purred behind her, smelling of leather and cigars.

  “Lydia?” Alexei asked from inside.

  Choose.

  She closed the door and stamped her feet on the icy ground, smiling as she drew in a deep breath of Russian air and felt her heart race. There was a future ahead, one that she and Chang An Lo would carve together. It was a risk, but life itself was a risk. That much she’d learned from Russia, that much she’d learned from Jens. With a farewell wave to Alexei and a final touch of the Chinese amulet around her neck to tempt the protection of Chang An Lo’s gods one last time, she looped her bag onto her shoulder and headed for the gateway.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  Kate Furnivall’s novel

  The Russian Concubine

  The story of Lydia Ivanova’s early years in China

  Available in paperback now

  from Berkley Books

  One

  Russia

  December 1917

  THE TRAIN GROWLED TO A HALT. GRAY STEAM belched from its heaving engine into the white sky, and the twenty-four freight carriages behind bucked and rattled as they lurched shrieking to a standstill. The sound of horses and of shouted commands echoed across the stillness of the empty frozen landscape.

  “Why have we stopped?” Valentina Friis whispered to her husband.

  Her breath curled between them like an icy curtain. It seemed to her despairing mind to be the only part of her that still had any strength to move. She clutched his hand. Not for warmth this time, but because she needed to know he was still there at her side. He shook his head, his face blue with cold because his coat was wrapped tightly around the sleeping child in his arms.

 
“This is not the end,” he said.

  “Promise me,” she breathed.

  He gave his wife a smile and together they clung to the rough timbered wall of the cattle wagon that enclosed them, pressing their eyes to the slender gaps between the planks. All around them others did the same. Desperate eyes. Eyes that had already seen too much.

  “They mean to kill us,” the bearded man on Valentina’s right stated in a flat voice. He spoke with a heavy Georgian accent and wore his astrakhan hat well down over his ears. “Why else would we stop in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Oh sweet Mary, mother of God, protect us.”

  It was the wail of an old woman still huddled on the filthy floor and wrapped in so many shawls she looked like a fat little Buddha. But underneath the stinking rags was little more than skin and bone.

  “No, babushka,” another male voice insisted. It came from the rear end of the carriage where the ice-ridden wind tore relentlessly through the slats, bringing the breath of Siberia into their lungs. “No, it’ll be General Kornilov. He knows we’re on this godforsaken cattle train starving to death. He won’t let us die. He’s a great commander.”

  A murmur of approval ran around the clutch of gaunt faces, bringing a spark of belief to the dull eyes, and a young boy with dirty blond hair who had been lying listlessly in one corner leapt to his feet and started to cry with relief. It had been a long time since anyone had wasted energy on tears.

  “Dear God, I pray you are right,” said a hollow-eyed man with a stained bandage on the stump of his arm. At night he groaned endlessly in his sleep, but by day he was silent and tense. “We’re at war,” he said curtly. “General Lavr Kornilov cannot be everywhere.”

  “But I tell you he’s here. You’ll see.”

  “Is he right, Jens?” Valentina tilted her face up to her husband.

  She was only twenty-four, small and fragile, but possessed sensuous dark eyes that could, with a glance, for a brief moment, make a man forget the cold and the hunger that gnawed at his insides or the weight of a child in his arms. Jens Friis was ten years older than his wife and fearful for her safety if the roving Bolshevik soldiers took one look at her beautiful face. He bent his head and brushed a kiss on her forehead.

  “We shall soon know,” he said.

  The red beard on his unshaven cheek was rough against Valentina’s cracked lips, but she welcomed the feel of it and the smell of his unwashed body. They reminded her that she had not died and gone to hell. Because hell was exactly what this felt like. The thought that this nightmare journey across thousands of miles of snow and ice might go on forever, through the whole of eternity, that this was her cruel damnation for defying her parents, was one that haunted her, awake and asleep.

  Suddenly the great sliding door of the wagon was thrust open and fierce voices shouted, “Vse is vagona, bistro.” Out of the wagons.

  THE LIGHT BLINDED VALENTINA. THERE WAS SO MUCH OF IT. After the perpetually twilit world inside the wagon, it rushed at her from the huge arc of sky, skidded off the snow, and robbed her of vision. She blinked hard and forced the scene around her into focus.

  What she saw chilled her heart.

  A row of rifles. All aimed directly at the ragged passengers as they scrambled off the train and huddled in anxious groups, their coats pulled tight to keep out the cold and the fear. Jens reached up to help the old woman down from their wagon, but before he could take her hand she was pushed from behind and landed facedown in the snow. She made no sound, no cry. But she was quickly yanked onto her feet by the soldier who had thrown open the wagon door and shaken as carelessly as a dog shakes a bone.

  Valentina exchanged a look with her husband. Without a word they slid their child from Jens’s shoulder and stood her between them, hiding her in the folds of their long coats as they moved forward together.

  “Mama?” It was a whisper. Though only five years old, the girl had already learned the need for silence. For stillness.

  “Hush, Lydia,” Valentina murmured but could not resist a glance down at her daughter. All she saw was a pair of wide tawny eyes in a heart-shaped bone-white face and little booted feet swallowed up by the snow. She pressed closer against her husband and the face no longer existed. Only the small hand clutching her own told her otherwise.

  THE MAN FROM GEORGIA IN THE WAGON WAS RIGHT. THIS WAS truly the middle of nowhere. A godforsaken landscape of nothing but snow and ice and the occasional windswept rock face glistening black. In the far distance a bank of skeletal trees stood like a reminder that life could exist here. But this was no place to live.

  No place to die.

  The men on horseback didn’t look much like an army. Nothing remotely like the smart officers Valentina was used to seeing in the ballrooms and troikas of St. Petersburg or ice skating on the Neva, showing off their crisp uniforms and impeccable manners. These men were different. Alien to that elegant world she had left behind. These men were hostile. Dangerous. About fifty of them had spread out along the length of the train, alert and hungry as wolves. They wore an assortment of greatcoats against the cold, some gray, others black, and one a deep muddy green. But all cradled the same long-nosed rifle in their arms and had the same fanatical look of hatred in their eyes.

  “Bolsheviks,” Jens murmured to Valentina, as they were herded into a group where the fragile sound of prayers trickled like tears. “Pull your hood over your head and hide your hands.”

  “My hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why my hands?”

  “Comrade Lenin likes to see them scarred and roughened by years of what he calls honest labor.” He touched her arm protectively. “I don’t think piano playing counts, my love.”

  Valentina nodded, slipped her hood over her head and her one free hand into her pocket. Her gloves, her once beautiful sable gloves, had been torn to shreds during the months in the forest, that time of traveling on foot by night, eating worms and lichen by day. It had taken its toll on more than just her gloves.

  “Jens,” she said softly, “I don’t want to die.”

  He shook his head vehemently and his free hand jabbed toward the tall soldier on horseback who was clearly in command. The one in the green greatcoat.

  “He’s the one who should die—for leading the peasants into this mass insanity that is tearing Russia apart. Men like him open up the floodgates of brutality and call it justice.”

  At that moment the officer called out an order and more of his troops dismounted. Rifle barrels were thrust into faces, thudded against backs. As the train breathed heavily in the silent wilderness, the soldiers pushed and jostled its cargo of hundreds of displaced people into a tight circle fifty yards away from the rail track and then proceeded to strip the wagons of possessions.

  “No, please, don’t,” shouted a man at Valentina’s elbow as an armful of tattered blankets and a tiny cooking stove were hurled out of one of the front wagons. Tears were running down his cheeks.

  She put out a hand. Held his shoulder. No words could help. All around her, desperate faces were gray and taut.

  In front of each wagon the meager pile of possessions grew as the carefully hoarded objects were tossed into the snow and set on fire. Flames, fired by coal from the steam engine and a splash of vodka, devoured the last scraps of their self-respect. Their clothes, the blankets, photographs, a dozen treasured icons of the Virgin Mary, and even a miniature painting of Tsar Nicholas II. All blackened, burned, and turned to ash.

  “You are traitors. All of you. Traitors to your country.”

  The accusation came from the tall officer in the green greatcoat. Though he wore no insignia except a badge of crossed sabers on his peaked cap, there was no mistaking his position of authority. He sat upright on a large heavy-muscled horse, which he controlled effortlessly with an occasional flick of his heel. His eyes were dark and impatient, as if this cargo of White Russians presented him with a task he found distasteful.

  “None of you deserve to live,” he said co
ldly.

  A deep moan rose from the crowd. It seemed to sway with shock.

  He raised his voice. “You exploited us. You maltreated us. You believed the time would never come when you would have to answer to us, the people of Russia. But you were wrong. You were blind. Where is all your wealth now? Where are your great houses and your fine horses now? The tsar is finished and I swear to you that—”

  A single voice rose up from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. “God bless the tsar. God protect the Romanovs.”

  A shot rang out. The officer’s rifle had bucked in his hands. A figure in the front row fell to the ground, a dark stain on the snow.

  “That man paid for your treachery.” His hostile gaze swept over the stunned crowd with contempt. “You and your kind were parasites on the backs of the starving workers. You created a world of cruelty and tyranny where rich men turned their backs on the cries of the poor. And now you desert your country, like rats fleeing from a burning ship. And you dare to take the youth of Russia with you.” He swung his horse to one side and moved away from the throng of gaunt faces. “Now you will hand over your valuables.”

  At a nod of his head, the soldiers started to move among the prisoners. Systematically they seized all jewelry, all watches, all silver cigar cases, anything that had any worth, including all forms of money. Insolent hands searched clothing, under arms, inside mouths, and even between breasts, seeking out the carefully hidden items that meant survival to their owners. Valentina lost the emerald ring secreted in the hem of her dress, while Jens was stripped of his last gold coin in his boot. When it was over, the crowd stood silent except for a dull sobbing. Robbed of hope, they had no voice.

  But the officer was pleased. The look of distaste left his face. He turned and issued a sharp command to the man on horseback behind him. Instantly a handful of mounted soldiers began to weave through the crowd, dividing it, churning it into confusion. Valentina clung to the small hand hidden in hers and knew that Jens would die before he released the other one. A faint cry escaped from the child when a big bay horse swung into them and its iron-shod hooves trod dangerously close, but otherwise she hung on fiercely and made no sound.