Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  She was white-faced. She watched him with lifted chin and in silence. She would not cry. She would not beg. She would not show her fear. She would not! But she could not speak.

  ‘It will give us a breathing space at least.’ He shrugged, a little helplessly. ‘It’s the best I can think of for now.’

  She was aware of his weakness, his deadly tiredness. He looked perilously frail.

  ‘Jussi Lavola!’ The door opened with a sharp click; Tilda stood in the doorway, hands on ample hips, an expression of not entirely assumed outrage on her face. ‘For goodness’ sake, what do you think you’re doing? Back to bed with you! This minute! Or I’ll tell the Russians about you myself!’ Behind her Heimo stood, grinning.

  Jussi lifted his undamaged hand, laughing. ‘Don’t be such a bully, Tilda! You know what I am when it comes to a pretty girl! Go take your own dreadful medicines and leave me to mine!’

  ‘Out!’ She bustled to him, took his arm to help him from the bed; and for all her briskness she did it with infinite care. ‘Out with you! It’s a good job August isn’t here to see this – he’d wash his hands of you, that he would!’

  They left the room. Before Heimo shut the door to lock it after them he sent Katya an amused and not unfriendly wink. Obscurely comforted by the small gesture, she settled herself, thoughtfully, by the window to ponder this strange new development.

  * * *

  They were married a week later in the lofty pine-panelled sitting room of the Heikkala house, with Heimo, Tilda and her husband August, a tall, stooped man with a gaunt but kindly face, as witnesses whilst a returned – and scowling – Kaarlo looked on. The simple ceremony was performed by a trusted cleric dressed severely in black and white. There was neither music nor feasting. The groom’s voice was firm, the bride’s less so; they did not kiss. Anything further from the kind of celebration that Katya Bourlova might have expected for her nuptials could not have been imagined. The groom was still grimly pale. The unexpected bottle of champagne that Heimo produced afterwards was drunk awkwardly and almost in silence. Then the bride was escorted back to her imprisoning room and the groom was ushered to his bed.

  For the first time since her arrival in Kuopio Katya cried herself to sleep that night.

  * * *

  At least, on Jussi’s insistence, from then on she was not kept so closely confined. With the ever-watchful eyes of Jussi’s friends upon her she was given, more or less, the freedom of the house, which made her captivity at least a little less irksome. Tilda’s home was warm and spacious and beautifully kept; not a speck of dust marred polished floors and furniture, the stoves gleamed in their tiled corners as did the pots and pans in the whitewashed kitchen and the shining brass knobs of the wooden doors and the iron bedsteads. The only part of the house that was closed to Katya was August’s office and surgery, where strangers came and went without disturbing the peace of the rest of the house. She was not allowed outside. A week passed, and then another. Jussi grew stronger; already he spent more time in a chair in the sitting room than in his bed. With a shock Katya realized that Christmas was approaching. She spoke to Tilda about the possibility of writing to her parents again – perhaps of giving them some address so that they could write back. Even her father’s fury, her mother’s disappointment would be easier to face than blank silence. Tilda promised to have a word with the others. It was significant, and they both knew it, that Katya had not approached Jussi.

  It was in the first week of December, with the initial tentative preparations for the coming festive season being made, that the bombshell burst.

  Katya was woken in the middle of the night by raised and urgent voices, quickly hushed. She sat up in bed, straining her ears. A small night-light burned on the table by her bed; grotesque shadows loomed on wall and ceiling. She slipped from the bed, walked on bare and silent feet to the door, eased it open a crack. Kaarlo and Heimo, fully dressed, stood in the hall, outside Jussi’s door. Tilda, in dressing gown and shawl, her grey-brown hair loose and untidy down her back, was with them. Jussi leaned in the open doorway, clad in a nightshirt, his right shoulder still bulky beneath it with dressings and bandages.

  ‘One at a time!’ he snapped. ‘How did you hear this? How reliable is it?’

  Kaarlo gestured at Heimo. ‘Totally reliable,’ Heimo said, quietly. ‘There’s no question. They don’t know who we are, but they suspect – more than suspect – what we are. They’re coming at dawn. My informant works in the Okhrana office. It isn’t we who have been betrayed – it’s Tilda and August. Someone has laid information that they are harbouring terrorists.’

  ‘Then we leave. Now. At once.’

  ‘You can’t –’ began Tilda.

  ‘We can’t do anything else.’ Even now, Jussi was gentle with this brave and staunch supporter. Gentler, some remote part of Katya noted, than he had ever been with her. ‘Come. Tilda, we need clothes, food, and the loan of a sledge. Thank God Kaarlo had the sense to go to Pikku Kulda. Kaarlo, the house is stocked?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s it. We go to the forest. Now.’

  Kaarlo jerked his head. Katya drew back, alarmed. ‘And her?’ he asked, the old animosity edging his voice.

  Jussi eyed him very levelly. ‘She’s my wife, Kaarlo. Don’t forget it,’ he said. ‘She comes with us.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Margarita was surprised but not particularly disturbed the first time her brother-in-law Donovalov called upon her. He was not the only man to use what she perfectly well perceived to be the feeble excuse of having been in the area – of ‘all but passing the front door’ – and of being overcome by a pressing urge to check that Sasha’s pretty but presumably unavoidably neglected young wife was not in dire need of assistance or company. Her husband’s unattached fellow-officers – indeed even one or two of the indisputably attached ones – remarkably often had the same charitable thought; far be it from Margarita to discourage such gentlemanly instincts. Never in the habit of looking beneath the surface of her own or others’ actions and long accustomed to taking for granted the attentions of the opposite sex, it did not occur to her to think it strange that a man who though related to her by marriage had barely bothered to pass the time of day before should suddenly take it into his head to call upon her.

  Donovalov perched upon her pretty chintz chair, his tea glass balanced upon his knee. They discussed the weather – there had been a sudden unseasonal thaw in the city and the streets ran unpleasantly with mud and slush, making any but the shortest of journeys all but impossible – and the dying but still delightfully spicy scandal of Katya’s elopement. He mentioned neither Lenka nor the children; Margarita, never more than marginally interested in the affairs of her older sisters, barely noticed the omission. Generalities over, and a second glass of tea offered and accepted, he enquired politely and interestedly, if a little unexpectedly, about the possibility that Margarita and her husband might be visiting the estate at Drovenskoye this summer. It was a question that Margarita found a little disconcerting since she always found some difficulty in treading the fine line between her delight at being able to speak in casual vein of her husband’s landed background – after all who but she was to know of the impoverished land and the strange, dilapidated house? – and avoiding any direct commitment to going back to a place to which she had no intention of returning except as undisputed mistress. She answered his apparently aimless questions about the family and the estate vaguely and with charming if assumed diffidence. Donovalov, a skilled interrogator, did not bother to pursue the subject too far. He had learned enough; certainly just such a background had bred more than one earnest, pseudo-intellectual would-be revolutionary. As for this silly child – she’d be easy enough to break if the necessity ever arose. He allowed himself one intriguing moment to savour the thought of that before getting up and walking to the sideboard where the little toy theatre stood. ‘Charming! How charming! It’s yours?’

  ‘Yes.’ The odd, veiled and
speculative look, indefinably unpleasant, that Margarita had surprised in his eyes had discomposed her; she found herself, for no discernible reason, drawing her lace-trimmed collar a little closer about the low-cut neckline of her dress. The movement drew his eyes and she flushed. ‘Sasha bought it for me. I – I make up plays –’ The words sounded ridiculously childish in her own ears. Her colour heightened further. Her brother-in-law apparently noticed nothing. ‘Charming,’ he said again, absently, reaching in through the curtained proscenium arch to touch the tiny figure of the princess, dressed on this occasion in ruby red and sequined gold. ‘You mean you write these little plays yourself?’ He managed to inject just exactly the right shade of admiration into the words.

  ‘Yes.’ Her defensiveness was gone. Eagerly she joined him. ‘Mostly, anyway. Fairy stories, you see – often I take fairy stories – embroider them a little, if you see what I mean? – Cinderella – The Sleeping Beauty – but not always. I write my own too.’

  ‘How very clever.’

  She shook her head, pleased. Surely she must have mistaken that strange, fearful moment of threat? ‘Oh no, not really. But I do love it. I make up plays for Sasha and his friends –’

  ‘Which I’m sure they enjoy immensely,’ he interrupted smoothly. ‘Sasha must be very proud of you.’

  She laughed, the special, pretty laugh that she no longer had to practise. ‘Oh I’m sure that half the time he must be bored to death – they all must! But of course they’re far too gallant to admit it!’

  ‘Surely not?’ He was looking at her directly now, and again she was suddenly aware of that odd frisson of fear. ‘Surely nothing you could say or do would bore your handsome husband?’ The words were exaggerated, heavily playful; yet strangely she sensed a question; a disturbing question to which she was not certain she knew the answer. ‘A man who has someone as lovely – as talented – as you to come home to couldn’t possibly be bored.’ He left a small, deliberate silence. ‘Could he?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed a little, annoyed with herself that the sound was uneasy. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And he comes home often, of course?’ He had turned back to the theatre, was apparently absorbed in the brilliantly-coloured cardboard figures.

  ‘Yes. Whenever he can.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Whenever he can.’ He nodded. Turned. ‘Might I trespass upon your good nature and ask for another cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh – but of course.’

  He stayed by the theatre whilst she poured it, watched her as she carried it to him, thanked her pleasantly as he took it. ‘Sasha’s friends,’ he said, turning back to the theatre, ‘for whom you perform your little plays – they’re his military friends, I take it?’

  ‘Why, certainly.’ Margarita looked at him in surprise. ‘Sasha doesn’t have any other friends. Heavens – he doesn’t have time!’

  ‘Of course not.’ She was utterly and transparently guileless – in this at least. He allowed himself to acknowledge for a moment what a pity that was. Certainly he would have to look elsewhere for his informant; and for his information. He’d leave this soft-skinned little chicken alone. For the moment, at least. Patently Margarita was not the author of the obliquely-worded note that had brought him here. He could not, however, resist a last sly shaft. He had long ago discovered that a little mischief could sometimes go a very long way. He turned back to the theatre, picked up the tiny figure of the prince, aware of and amused by Margarita’s small start of annoyance as he did so. ‘A handsome lad,’ he said, thoughtfully, and lifted dark, sardonic eyes to hers. ‘But something of a scallawag from the look of him. Tell me – does he mistreat his poor little princess? Does he love her truly?’ He smiled, gently. ‘Dare I ask it – is he faithful to her?’

  She was affronted. And, again, indefinably uneasy. She stepped forward and took the tiny figure from him. ‘Faithful? Yes. He’s utterly faithful.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I made him up. I invented him.’

  ‘Why, so you did.’ The words were mild. ‘So you did.’

  He left a few minutes later, bowing over her hand.

  When he had gone she went to the window, looking down, waiting for him to appear in the street below. Something about the man – something about his quiet, probing questions – had been infinitely unsettling. She heard her own voice, clear and sharp: ‘Of course I’m sure. I made him up. I invented him’, and then his: ‘Why, so you did. So you did.’

  Her brother-in-law had stepped out into the filthy slush of the street below. He looked up. She drew back sharply, but not before he had seen her. He lifted his hat in an exaggeratedly, almost mockingly chivalrous gesture. She turned from the window, stood leaning upon the sill, looking at the tiny figure in her hand, the figure with a small, dashing scar upon the left side of his jawbone. Of course I’m sure. I made him up. I invented him.

  They had had the most dreadful row again last night. About the same wretched thing; the lack of a child. It seemed to her that Sasha had become positively and unhealthily obsessed with the idea, and she had said so. He had stormed out, gone back to the barracks. At least – that was where she had assumed he had gone.

  ‘Does he love her truly? Is he faithful to her?’

  Ridiculous. Absurd. But yet?

  She replaced the cardboard prince upon the stage, for once did not stand and rearrange the figures, nor carefully redrape the pretty curtains as usually she would. Very thoughtfully she moved to the chair by the stove, dropped into it, fingers drumming a faint abstracted rhythm on the arm. If she for a moment could be brought to believe that Sasha was anything but totally and utterly devoted to her she would, quite simply and quite coldly, wish him dead, she knew it. She would if necessary kill him herself with no hesitation and no compunction. Except that of course there could not for a moment be any truth in such silly speculation, so there was no need to think such nonsense. She was uncomfortably aware that it made much more sense to think about this abominable business of the baby, which was causing so much trouble between them. She had to face it; Sasha was absolutely set upon it. Not for the first time the thought occurred – if Sasha so much wanted a beastly child, then why not have one? She supposed that sooner or later she would have to give in, why not now? Of all things, this was the one that would be guaranteed to tie him irrevocably to her. How remorseful he would be as she suffered bravely to produce the child he wanted so much. She saw herself, beautiful, great with child, valiantly hiding her pain and discomfort; saw Sasha beside himself with guilt and worry, dancing attendance on her, telling everyone of her gallant, self-sacrificing courage. She felt a stir of excitement at the idea. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? Everybody did it, after all – even Mama had managed it, and four times at that! And Sasha, then, would truly be hers. She would have his child and he would adore her for it, slavishly and for ever. Cinderella would indeed live happily ever after.

  Suddenly bright, she stood, and in a swirl of skirts went back to the sideboard, where carefully and with utter concentration she took out all of the bright characters from the stage of the toy theatre and set about rearranging them in a significant and complicated pattern that meant nothing to anyone but herself.

  * * *

  It was a hard winter at Pikku Kulda. The small house, not much more than a log cabin with a large verandah, scarcely suited to and certainly not intended for winter living, stood on the shores of a lake deep in the forests south of Kuopio. Above all things the memory of those strange months for Katya carried with it the memory of silence; the waters of the lake, which in the summer would ripple and lap against the shores, were petrified to solid, snow-covered ice, the forests were shrouded and carpeted in white. Except when the storms came, whipping the wind and snow through the darkness, battering door and window and wooden wall, the trees themselves stood in glacial silence; no bird sang. They saw tracks – of fox, hare and occasionally of wolf or moose – but those creatures that made them did so soundlessly. Only wh
en Kaarlo took his axe into the woods for firewood did the quiet bowl of the sky ring with noise; even their voices sounded small, lost in the winter stillness.

  The cabin had three rooms, the smallest of which, upon arrival, was immediately allocated to Katya by Jussi. It was tiny and all but bare, its furnishings consisting of a simple, low wooden bed, a chest of drawers, a table and a rickety chair. There was a small oil-lamp and a paraffin stove that smelled abominably but without which the room would have been untenable. The furs that served as bed clothes were far from clean but welcome for all that. Not for the first time Katya found herself reflecting upon the bizarre change in her circumstances and the perhaps not so surprising change in values that had accompanied it. A couple of months before she would have thrown a fit rather than sleep in such a room; now it seemed a haven, and above all things she was thankful to Jussi for preserving her privacy.

  The rest of the house consisted of a large room which Jussi, Heimo and Kaarlo shared as a bedroom and an equally large kitchen which served as living room and dining room as well. Obviously in the summer most if not all of the living was done on the huge verandah, almost as big again as the house itself, that faced the lake. At this time of the year such a prospect seemed improbable to the point of absurdity; all that the verandah was used for was to stack the wood for the stove and to shelter a battered sledge and several pairs of elderly-looking skis and skates. There were outhouses, including servant’s rooms, two water closets, unused in the winter, and, at the lakeside, the inevitable sauna. The main source of warmth was the wood-burning range in the kitchen, and since wood was the most readily available fuel that was where they spent most of their time.

  Katya’s first problem might, under other circumstances, have struck even her as being funny; it became apparent within a very short time of the party’s arrival that here, unlike in the Heikkala house in Kuopio, she was expected to work her passage. And since, after all, she was a woman it seemed natural to the three men to expect her to cook.