Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  And, ‘Difficult times indeed,’ Katya agreed.

  Elisabet deftly relieved her of the baby. ‘Your mother’s still with you?’ she asked, in that same neutral tone of voice; though the blue glance that Katya caught above her child’s head was sharp.

  Katya sighed, unable – unwilling was perhaps the better word – to play silly, timewasting games. ‘Yes, Elisabet, my mother is still with me. And I’m sorry if it inconveniences you.’ She glanced about her, corrected herself wryly. ‘Us. But she came from the goodness of her heart. And she’s a great help. She doesn’t suspect anything, I promise. She believes that Jussi’s death was a hunting accident.’

  Elisabet made a tiny, bitter face.

  Katya nodded. ‘Yes. The irony of that had occurred to me, too. It’s what it was, isn’t it? But no accident.’

  Elisabet laid her face upon the baby’s head.

  Katya saw Kaarlo approaching. ‘Elisabet,’ she said, and there was in her voice the faintest thread of appeal that brought her sister-in-law’s eyes sharply to her. ‘Please, don’t make a fuss about mother. She poses no danger, I promise you. If she knew what I was doing – and she doesn’t, I know it – she’d never betray me.’ She watched the other woman steadily, over the soft, fair head of Jussi’s son. ‘I truly believe that Jussi would not have begrudged me the comfort of my mother, nor my mother the joy of her grandson.’

  Into the small silence Kaarlo said from behind her, gruffly, ‘I’ll get the sledge in and emptied. You’ll want to be getting on home.’

  He offered to walk the mile or so back to the small but comfortable house in the district of Kamppi that she shared with her mother. She refused with a smile and a shaken head. ‘I’m perfectly safe, Kaarlo. It’s best I go alone, or our friends outside might be suspicious.’

  He shrugged and returned to the others. Elisabet tucked the furs around the baby very carefully before handing him to Katya. ‘Take care. Get him home quickly. It’s very cold.’

  Katya found herself thinking as she took her leave and went to the front door that neither Elisabet’s nor Kaarlo’s concern was for her. She hugged Jaakko to her. She could not blame them. To anyone who had loved Jussi, this child was more than precious. She tried always, often through irritation, to remember that.

  She was tucking the baby back into the sledge when Elisabet joined her. The other woman stood, waiting, until she had finished and straightened and was pulling on her gloves. ‘Katya?’

  Katya glanced at her in question.

  ‘I just wanted to say –’ Elisabet stopped, oddly awkward, almost defensive.

  Katya waited.

  ‘I just wanted to say – we know what you risk, and for a country and a cause not your own. And – we do appreciate it.’ The words came out in a rush. ‘Jussi would have been proud of you. I know it. We all know it.’

  There was a small, surprised and slightly unnerving silence. Katya blinked. ‘I know it too,’ she said, quietly, at last. ‘That’s why I do it.’

  She thought about that as she trudged along the icy sidewalks towards home. It was the simplest of truths. Only one thing had Jussi loved better than he had loved her, and that was his country. He had fought and he had died to free Finland from the manacles of repression. Now he had a son, and in her heart and soul she had never felt herself to have a choice; the least she could do was to continue that fight, in Jussi’s name. To make sure that Jaakko grew up in the free and independent country for which his father had made that last and terrible sacrifice.

  She was tired when she reached the house. She lifted the small sledge – relatively light now that it contained no more than her small baby – up the steps that had been neatly swept clear of snow, set it down in the porch, carefully lifted the sleeping baby from it. The wooden front door opened into the pleasant, square hall, light and bright and smelling of polish. The house was warm and cosy. ‘Aili?’ she called. ‘Mama? Anyone home?’ She unwrapped the still soundly sleeping Jaakko from the encumbering furs, dropped them onto a polished bench that stood by the wall, kicked off her boots.

  There came the sharp tapping of footsteps upon the wooden floor of the parlour. The door opened. Zhenia stood, looking at her daughter with an expression upon her face that all but stopped Katya’s heart. ‘Mama! Mama – whatever’s wrong?’ She hurried to her. Stopped.

  Through the open doorway, over her mother’s shoulder, she saw the comfortable and familiar parlour, clean and neat as the rest of the house, enamelled stove shining in the corner against a background of blue and white tiles and pastel-painted walls, the rag-scattered wooden floor polished to a mirror-like shine, sofas and chairs bright with cushions set about the well-proportioned room.

  And in one of them Jussi sat, haggard-faced, lean as ever, fair hair flopping untidily over his eyes.

  Jussi. Alive.

  For a long, paralysed moment she did not take a breath.

  ‘Katya,’ her mother said, and stopped, biting her lip, stepping back from the door.

  There were two others in the room, men she did not know. Katya did not even spare them a moment’s attention. Very slowly, very carefully, carrying her sleeping child, she walked towards the seated figure. ‘Jussi?’ she asked, into the silence. ‘It’s you?’

  He smiled. Lifted both his hands. He did not stand, and as she neared him she understood why. ‘Jussi,’ she said again, and sank to her knees beside him, still clutching the sleeping Jaakko.

  Jussi cupped her face in his long hands, that were in memory so strong but now oddly smooth and soft. The hands of an invalid. His strained and tired face was the loveliest thing she had seen in her entire life. ‘Jussi!’ she said again, as if it were the only word she could say, or would ever say again.

  Behind her she heard the sound of her mother’s tears.

  She lifted the baby. Sleeping still, his innocent face was like a flower, the sweep of dark lashes upon his smooth, rounded cheek perfectly symmetrical, irresistibly beautiful. Gently Katya laid him in his father’s arms. ‘I called him Jaakko,’ she said.

  He grinned, a shadow of that old, feckless smile. ‘Not Ivan? Not Boris?’ Tears lit his eyes to a brighter blue than she remembered.

  ‘No. Nor Vladimir nor Nicholai. I can’t think why.’

  He shifted the child to his other arm, reached for her, pulled her to him.

  The feel of him, so close, convinced her at last. He was real. He was here. She saw and accepted the cruel thing that had happened to him; the right leg stiff and awkward, the left not there at all, in its place a cruelly truncated stump. But this was Jussi, her Jussi, alive and come back to her, and to his son.

  The fragile strength to which she had unswervingly clung for months seeped from her. Like a child she laid her head upon his lap and cried as she had never allowed herself to cry when she had believed him dead.

  * * *

  The explanations came later, after the euphoria had waned a little and conversations could be held without tears.

  Within an hour of Kaarlo and the others leaving Jussi at the camp another small group of recruits had arrived, making for the same sanctuary. The already demoralized remnants of the Russian patrol had been taken in the rear, and entirely by surprise. Jussi had not had to fire a shot. Which was just as well since by the time his rescuers found him he had slipped into a deep coma and was half frozen to death.

  ‘And me supposed to be playing the hero,’ he added, his voice caustic. ‘What a joke.’

  ‘Don’t be so daft,’ Katya said. ‘Go on.’

  Since for obvious reasons none of them carried identification, and since the group that found him came from a different part of the country, no-one knew who the injured man might be, except that he was clearly a Finn, and as clearly a partisan. In any case he was so very close to death that shelter and care were the priority; names and explanations could wait. They sledged him on across the ice to Sweden, truly astonished that he survived the journey. There they left him in the care of a sympathetic household, to
fight his own fight, to live, or to die.

  ‘And there I lay,’ Jussi said, ‘like the Sleeping Beauty –’

  ‘Sleeping what?’ Katya asked.

  ‘– for longer than I care to remember.’

  Katya still sat on the floor beside him, her hand in his, unwilling to lose physical contact with him. She turned her head to look at him. ‘How long?’ she asked. ‘How long were you unconscious?’

  There was a small and acute silence.

  She waited, all laughter suddenly and swiftly fled.

  Jussi said nothing.

  ‘Well?’ she asked again, at last, calmly, determined upon an answer. Knowing with sudden certainty what he had done to her. To all of them. To himself.

  He did not, directly, answer her question. ‘When I woke up,’ he said, ‘I was not – quite as I had been.’ His free hand, resting upon the stump of his leg, curled slowly to a fist.

  Katya waited to see if he would say more. ‘And – how long ago was that?’ she asked at last, very quietly. ‘When did you realize?’

  ‘That I was a cripple?’ The word was obviously chosen with bitter deliberation. He turned clear eyes upon her. ‘Five months ago.’

  ‘Five –’ she bit the word off, disentangled her fingers from his, sat back on her heels, watching him. Lamp light gilded her hair, which was still wild and uncombed since she had thrown her hat aside, to a halo bright as sunshine. ‘You didn’t try to contact us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shook his head, helplessly.

  She considered, carefully, trying to reason when her heart was raw with shock and hurt. Fighting sudden fury. ‘You didn’t know about the baby.’ The words were very quiet, very careful.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you had – would it have made a difference?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was so swift, so sure, that it could not be doubted.

  ‘So.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Why didn’t you let us know where you were?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ he said, simply. ‘I had to think.’

  ‘Think about what?’ The violence in her own voice shocked her to silence. She turned her head sharply from him, angrily fighting tears. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She sensed his movement, resisted the strength of his hand for a moment before she allowed him to draw her around to face him again. The onlookers, caught unwillingly in this sudden, emotional storm stood helpless witness to something that should have been – that was – intensely private.

  ‘No. It’s I who am sorry,’ he said quietly. His hand rested upon the stump of his leg. ‘I have no excuse, can ask no forgiveness. I can only say that – at the time – I thought it best.’

  ‘Best to have me – to have others who love you – think you dead?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was utterly uncompromising.

  ‘You were wrong,’ she said, fiercely.

  ‘Yes. I know. Now, I know.’

  There was a small, searching silence. Katya took a quiet breath. ‘What changed your mind?’

  ‘You did,’ he said.

  ‘I?’ The bright and lively face he had remembered so well during these past tortured months, so used to laughter, so impatient of sobriety and sorrow, had changed, he saw suddenly, matured to something far more precious than simple beauty. There were dark shadows beneath the eyes that could not be attributed simply to her recent tears. The bones stood stark through the fine, fair skin. ‘I did? How?’

  ‘I dreamed of you. And I knew I had to come home.’

  The hand that rested upon the stump was moving, restless, rubbing back and forth.

  Katya reached a hand and stopped the nervous movement.

  There was a long moment of silence. From another part of the house came the sound of an aggrieved wail. Collectedly Katya stood, palmed the tears away, bent to kiss her husband’s cheek. ‘I must go to see to the baby – Aili can’t cope with him when he gets into a temper.’

  With difficulty Jussi smiled. ‘I’d have guessed it.’

  ‘And I,’ Zhenia said briskly, sniffing, ’must find Cook who appears to have hidden herself with Finnish discretion in the kitchen and arrange for dinner, before we all starve to death.’

  In the hall Katya stopped for a moment, her hand on her mother’s arm. ‘Mama – I’m sorry about all this – it must be such a shock, and terribly confusing. I’ll explain, I promise.’

  ‘Explain?’ her mother asked, mildly, tears banished, fair eyebrows cocked, in her eyes that faint look of exasperation that only a muddle-headed offspring can engender. ‘Whatever can you mean?’

  There was a long moment in which the only sounds were the murmur of conversation from the room behind them and the faint crying of the baby from upstairs. ‘You know,’ Katya said, astonishment leaching all other emotion from her voice. ‘Mama? You know?’

  ‘Certainly I know. At least some of it. For goodness’ sake, Katya –’ the same affectionate exasperation showed in the tartness of her tone ‘– do you think I’m blind? And deaf too? Or simply stupid?’

  ‘Why no, of course not –’

  ‘Because I would have had to be all three not to know that something was going on in this house.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  Her mother smiled, wryly. Katya flushed to the roots of her hair.

  ‘Katya, darling, why didn’t you?’ Zhenia asked, with gentle asperity, and to Katya’s relief was robbed of her reply by a sharp knocking upon the door.

  Katya got there first. Elisabet stood on the doorstep, usually serene face animated. ‘Katya, there’s news from Petrograd – what news! Oh, good morning, Zhenia Petrovna.’ She flew across the threshold, divesting herself of fur coat, hat, gloves as she came, and fairly bursting with excitement. ‘It’s happened! Revolution! Revolution in Russia! There’ve been huge demonstrations – strikes – riots. Battles on the streets of Petrograd! God knows how it will end, but they say –’ She stopped, suddenly realizing that her momentous news was not quite creating the excitement nor the impression she had expected. ‘It’s revolution!’ she said again, eagerly. ‘The people have risen against the Tsar.’ Puzzled, she looked from one to the other. ‘Well, don’t you care? Aren’t you going to say anything? What’s the matter?’

  Katya, back on the edge of tears, was smiling, widely and with unselfish affection. She stepped forward, threw her arms about Jussi’s sister and hugged her tightly, something that in the years they had known each other she had never done before.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter, Elisabet. Nothing. On the contrary. And yes – your news is exciting. Astounding. But we have news of our own, Lissi. Wonderful news of our own. Come – come and see.’

  Chapter Twenty

  The city in which Anna and her travelling companion arrived on that afternoon of 25 February 1917 was in turmoil.

  On the previous day, in a culmination of the most serious social unrest the city had seen in years, there had been a general strike which had inevitably degenerated into violence and to bloody clashes on the streets. Shops, houses and government offices had been looted and wrecked, and in some cases fired, with indiscriminate and impartial fury. Death, too, had been even-handed in this upheaval: students and workers had been shot and cudgelled to death as they marched; but this time vengeance was being taken in full, and all over Petrograd the roughest and most brutal justice was being meted out to those against whom the mobs and their leaders harboured a grudge. In the streets and boulevards the barricades were up. The armed forces were in uproar; men who just the day before had obeyed without question their officers’ commands to shoot unarmed demonstrators were today listening to other arguments and defying authority to take to the streets themselves. Whole regiments had defected – with their arms – to the people, at times murdering their officers as they went. Yet many of the rank and file wavered still; enough, certainly, to threaten to reduce the city to a bloody battleground if they could not be persuaded to join the rebels. Confusion reigned; no-one knew
truly what was happening. Not the Generals who had consistently refused to listen to warnings of the possibility of revolt, not the Tsar himself, far away in Mogilev and still naïvely believing the reports of officers too frightened to tell him the truth, nor his furious and outraged Empress, trapped in the palace at Tsarskoe, utterly refusing to believe the evidence of her eyes and ears. Not even the Duma that was now in open rebellion, nor any citizen from the richest and most powerful down to the lowest street-sweeping urchin. The city was chaos. A few days before, in an attempt to head off possible trouble, the Government had ordered the arrest of the Menshevik leaders, whom they saw as the greatest threat to political and social stability; a mistake they were to rue. With these relatively moderating influences under lock and key the way was open to their rivals for the leadership of the workers; those who advocated the extremes of revolution. Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries now manned the barricades, delivered impassioned speeches to the regiments and whipped up the fury of a people pushed at last to violence by disillusion, by constant betrayal and by hunger.

  In the ensuing confusion Petrograd was swept by rumour, as a forest by fire, and the city was as chancy and unstable as a powder keg in a burning waggon.

  As they alighted from the train at the Finland Station Anna and Grigor were already aware that dramatic and dangerous events had overtaken them; they had seen the conflagrations in the city from the windows of the train, heard the gossip and speculation that had swept from carriage to carriage ever since they had passed the frontier. Containing her unease Anna stood, hands clasped in the warm shelter of her fur muff, watching as Grigor supervised the unloading of their trunks. The huge station buzzed with subdued and anxious talk. People milled around uncertainly, or stood grouped about huge piles of luggage, master or mistress and servant together, all equally unsure, all equally afraid. ‘What do you suppose we should do?’ Anna asked, calmly. Very faintly she heard a distant crackle that could only be gunfire. Heads turned, listening. ‘The man over there said there are no sledges – indeed no transport of any kind.’