Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  Anna clutched the grubby envelope. ‘She’s well? And Jussi? And Uncle Mischa – he reached Helsinki safely? Oh, of course he must have or you wouldn’t know I was here. Come in, come in – let me take your coat.’

  As he stepped into the hall he was overtaken again by a choking bout of throaty coughing. He put his hand out to the wall to steady himself.

  ‘You’re not well!’ Anna said, with swift concern.

  Too breathless to deny it in words he shook his head, reassuringly. But Anna could see now the brightness of fever in his face. The hand that touched hers was dry and hot.

  ‘Anna? Anna, who is it?’

  ‘It’s a friend, Mama. A friend of Katya’s.’ Full of worry, she watched as the tall young man with the gentle smile pushed himself away from the wall and determinedly steadied himself. ‘Come in,’ she repeated briskly. ‘Come in at once and sit down. I’ll make you something warm to drink, something to soothe your throat.’

  The cough rasped harshly again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘A little cough, that’s all –’ and sank to his knees, his head in his hands.

  * * *

  By the time Volodya came home Anna’s guest was tucked into bed and sleeping restlessly, his breathing harsh. Volodya stood, frowning, in the doorway. ‘Anna, you’re sure this is a good idea?’

  Anna had spent a long time talking to Heimo before his illness had finally and utterly felled him. ‘You think it a better idea to turn him out onto the streets to take his chances? Perhaps to die?’ The words were crisp. She had foreseen careful Volodya’s objections. ‘We have no choice. He’s very sick. Come – come and read Katya’s letter. What adventures! Trust Katya to be in the thick of things!’ With brisk movements and a repressive expression that spoke louder than any words she shut the door and led the way back into the scullery.

  ‘There’s insurrection in Finland,’ he said, leaning on the door, watching her as she hauled out her bag of potatoes.

  ‘I know there is,’ she said, shortly. ‘Read Katya’s letter. You’ll find out all about it.’

  ‘Anna, that man is an enemy of the Russian Government –’

  She turned on him, fiercely. ‘That man is Katya’s good friend, Volodya,’ she snapped. ‘And that’s good enough for me.’

  ‘If they should find out –’

  ‘Who should find out? Why should they find out? And what else do you suggest? Volodya, I tell you the man is sick!’ She turned back to her potatoes. The silence was heavy. She stopped, turned to him. ‘You want to peel the potatoes?’

  He shook his head, sheepishly.

  ‘Then go and do something else,’ she said composedly and turned back to her task. ‘Try reading Katya’s letter. It might make you think twice about who is an enemy and who a friend.’

  Heimo’s fever rose. Anna sat with him throughout the long night, sponging him with cold water, trying to make him drink, praying when all else seemed to be failing.

  ‘We need a doctor,’ she said when Volodya crept in to join her as the first pale light of dawn touched the sky.

  ‘A doctor? Are you mad?’

  She said nothing.

  The man in the bed thrashed restlessly, muttering. His fair skin glowed drily and painfully bright.

  ‘What would you rather?’ Anna asked at last, tiredly. ‘That he died here? How, pray, would you explain that?’

  * * *

  The doctor was a small, plump and nervous man. Anna distrusted him on sight. Yet his examination of the patient was brisk and professional, and he did have some medicines, at a price.

  ‘How much?’ Anna gasped.

  ‘I’m sorry. It is the market price. Inflation, you know.’

  ‘Greed more like it.’ Anna thrust the money at him. It was true that each time she went to the bank the money she drew out bought less and less and lasted for a shorter and shorter time. Heimo muttered confusedly, and not in Russian.

  The doctor’s face was bland. ‘The market price,’ he said again. ‘Even doctors have to live.’

  The fever subsided a few hours later, though whether due to the drugs, to Anna’s ministrations or to the simple workings of a healthy constitution it was impossible to tell. Exhausted Heimo lay upon fresh pillows in the bed that had seen Katya’s conception, and smiled a tired but still infectious smile. ‘Look at this. A bed fit for a king.’

  ‘Fit for a friend of Katya’s, certainly,’ Anna said. ‘Lie still, do! We have little, I’m afraid, to tempt an invalid appetite, but I have potatoes and a little butter. Could you manage a spoonful?’

  She sat with him as he ate, left him to sleep, then returned when he awoke.

  ‘You’ve been so very kind,’ he said. His fair skin was cool now, the ugly flush gone. His eyes were calm. He still coughed a little, but it was less harsh, less obviously painful. ‘I’m so very sorry to have inflicted this upon you. I hadn’t realized – a cold, I thought, just a cold. The journey was perhaps a little longer, a little more difficult, than I had expected.’ He grinned, faintly. ‘We go from dodging the Tsar’s patrol boats to dodging those of the Provisional Government. Perhaps I preferred the Tsar’s. At least, I never had to swim for it before!’

  ‘So that was what happened?’

  He spread expressive hands.

  ‘Katya’s letter wasn’t damaged.’

  ‘Neither were the others I carried. There are ways to protect such things.’

  Anna leaned forward, her elbows on the bed. ‘Are you tired? Can you talk?’

  ‘For as long as you wish.’

  ‘Then tell me – tell me about Finland – about Katya.’

  * * *

  Heimo’s presence was, perhaps inevitably, a cause of friction between cautious Volodya and an Anna who, despite these past months, had become dangerously used to living in a more open society.

  ‘He stays for as long as he needs to.’

  ‘Every moment he stays is a danger to us all. To you. To me. To your mother.’

  She turned from him in disgust.

  ‘Anna, please, be sensible!’

  ‘Volodya,’ she said, coldly and she well knew unjustly, over her shoulder, ‘be a little brave. Just a little.’

  That night in bed she tried to make it up to him, knowing how she had hurt him. They lay in silence after their lovemaking, his head upon her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ she said, softly, and the apology fell emptily into the silence that engulfed them.

  He turned his head to kiss her breast. But he said nothing.

  Later they talked. ‘He’s almost better,’ Anna said. ‘A day or two and he’ll be gone.’

  She sensed his smile. ‘It’s jealousy,’ he said, ‘pure jealousy. I want you to myself.’

  * * *

  The soldiers came looking for him the next day. This time they had the courtesy to ring the front doorbell; by which time Heimo, nothing if not alert, having seen them enter the building, was on his way out of the servants’ door on the back landing.

  ‘But won’t they have the back of the building guarded?’ Anna asked anxiously.

  ‘Don’t worry – I shan’t go down, but up. Where there’s a roof there’s usually a way across it.’ He caught her hand. ‘Anna, thank you. I know what you’ve done for me.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You call saving my life nothing?’ He shook his head. ‘Now, don’t forget – if you need us, you know where we are. You’ve memorized the Helsinki address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He dropped a quick kiss on her cheek.

  ‘God speed!’ she said. ‘And be careful! Give all my love to Katya!’

  There was one last flash of that smile, and he was gone.

  The soldiers searched, noisily and carelessly, and found nothing. They declined to tell her the source of their suspicions that she was harbouring ‘an enemy of the people’.

  ‘That bloody doctor,’ Volodya said, after they had gone.

  Anna was scraping about with a pair of tongs in the cold ashes o
f the stove. ‘I suppose so. Well, Heimo’s gone, and so have they. Ah –’ She pulled out a package, shaking it free of ash. ‘Here it is. Katya’s letter.’

  ‘Anna! You were supposed to have destroyed it! What if they had found it?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t, did they?’ Anna blew the fine ash from the paper.

  ‘Anna? Anna! Anna, where are you?’

  Anna raised her eyes to heaven. ‘Here, Mama. Coming, Mama.’

  * * *

  In the dangerous and disturbed weeks that followed Anna took to visiting Natalia and her children very frequently. She had come to be very fond of the two children, especially the little girl ’Tasha; and ’Tasha and her brother, bereft of any real warmth or tenderness from a mother who was all but obsessed with their small, ailing brother, returned her affection in full. Since Natalia still adamantly refused to leave the apartment Anna made sure that what supplies her money and Volodya’s contacts could provide were shared between the two households. Life was getting harder with each day that passed. After the violent riots and the mass demonstrations in April against the Provisional Government’s determination to honour their obligations to their allies and continue the war, the city seethed, faction and counter-faction fighting bitterly for advantage, the streets of the city their battleground. At the beginning of May a Coalition Government was formed, that included both the Duma deputies and some Socialists, though no Bolsheviks. But the apparent co-operation was never anything but a farce, and unrest and anarchy continued to stalk the city. Food became scarcer, and more expensive, by the day. There were massive and violent demonstrations against the Government. At the Front the Russian army was nearly disintegrating; up to a million men deserted in that year of 1917, and discipline had broken down entirely. No-one doubted that worse was to come. As the month of June approached preparations were laid for more demonstrations, more challenges to the power of the Government. Quarrelsome committees and Bolshevik Soviets took charge of factories, workplaces and regiments. There were stories of disaffection in the Baltic Fleet. Once again, Petrograd was a powder keg, and this time it was the Bolsheviks, led by the man known as Lenin, that held the match, poised to light the fuse.

  On a warm and placid day in late May Anna and Volodya sat in the sunshine upon a bench in the Tauride Gardens, behind the palace that was the seat of the Duma, relishing a moment’s peace and privacy. For once the city was quiet. Anna, driven to distraction by her mother’s demands, had been desperate to get out, if only for an hour or so. In the cause of her own sanity she had produced almost the last of Zhenia’s store of chocolates, dumped them into Varya’s lap, and, with Volodya, had fled into the open air. She sat, face tilted to the sun, eyes closed, for a long, still moment. Volodya watched her, smiling faintly. A swan glided lazily across still, shining water.

  At last Anna sighed, opened her eyes, settled back against the seat. ‘That’s better!’ She breathed deeply again. ‘Funny how nothing seems so bad in the sunshine!’

  They sat for several minutes in an easy silence, watching the water birds and the glitter of the sunshine through the trees. A mother and three small children strolled by. The eldest boy was inexpertly bowling a large hoop that all at once escaped him, wobbled wildly and fell, clattering, beside Volodya. He bent to right it, sent it bowling back towards the child. The mother smiled her thanks. Volodya watched the child’s renewed and dogged efforts to control his toy with amused and affectionate eyes.

  Anna turned to look at him, her eyes thoughtful. ‘You like children, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  ‘And yet – you never married?’

  ‘No.’ The word was quiet.

  She held his eyes for a moment, then, uncomfortable, looked away.

  ‘The only girl I ever wanted ran away and married someone else,’ he said, lightly.

  She shook her head vehemently. ‘Volodya –’ She stopped, at a loss for words.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, calmly, and reached a hand to cover hers. ‘It has to be said, doesn’t it? Anna, I know. I know you don’t love me. You didn’t then, and you don’t now. It isn’t your fault.’

  ‘I do!’ she said. ‘I do love you! But –’

  ‘But not in the way that I love you. Not in the way I would wish you to love me.’

  For one brief moment she remembered; remembered the blaze, the wonder, the agony of her feelings for Andrei. The warm depth of her love for Guy. ‘No,’ she said. And then, ‘I’m sorry,’ she added.

  ‘No need to be. I told you. It isn’t your fault.’

  ‘It feels as if it is.’

  He shook his head.

  The silence this time was long, and not quite as easy.

  ‘Volodya, I don’t know what to do,’ Anna said at last. ‘I don’t know what to do for the best; for you, for the others – for myself.’

  ‘You must go of course,’ he said, very promptly. ‘As soon as possible. There’s nothing else you can do in the end. You have another life. A safe and happy life. You should go back to it.’

  ‘Save myself? Forget everyone else?’ She rubbed her forehead a little tiredly with her fingertips. ‘I sometimes find myself wondering – why did I come? It’s so hard to remember what it was like. What on earth did I think I was going to be able to do? Waltz in – tidy everyone up – spend a few roubles – waltz back out again!’

  ‘You do yourself an injustice.’

  ‘Do I?’ she asked, bleakly unreassured. ‘Oh, Volodya, it all seemed so simple then. And it isn’t. It isn’t simple at all. It’s all such a muddle, isn’t it? A horrible, messy – dangerous! – muddle.’

  He caught her shoulders firmly, turned her to face him. ‘Anna, there’s one thing you must face. We are lost. Russia is lost. What is to come will be as bad as if not worse than what has gone before. You have to go back to England. You have to save yourself.’

  ‘You want me to go?’

  ‘I want you to be safe. I want you to be happy.’

  She turned away from him, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’

  ‘Come. You’re overwrought. Let’s walk a little way.’ He held out his hand.

  They walked in silence.

  ‘Nothing’s as I had expected, as I had hoped,’ Anna said, quietly, as they came out onto the embankment of the Neva. ‘Mama – Natalia and her poor weakling of a baby – God alone knows what’s got into Margarita. And then – Lenka.’ She stopped walking, her eyes distant on the busy scene before her. ‘Volodya, why should Lenka still hate me so, after all this time?’ It was a question that haunted her.

  He watched with her for a moment the wide, busy waterway that divided the city. Grey naval ships were anchored on the bank opposite the Winter Palace, near the Fortress, tugs and civil traffic ploughed through the wide, slow-moving waters. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know any of you well enough to know exactly what went on.’

  Impulsively she turned to him, touched his arm. ‘I want to go and see her. I want to try to explain.’

  ‘Now?’

  She shrugged a little. ‘Why not? If trouble starts again I may not get another chance.’

  * * *

  The apartment building where Lenka had a room was typical of many in the overcrowded industrial suburbs of the city. It was dark, depressing and none too clean. The alleyway outside was squalid. Despite the warmth of the day the air within the heavy walls was chill and damp, and the smell was stomach-turning.

  Volodya hesitated by the door, looking at Anna enquiringly. Anna took a breath; nodded. He rapped, sharply.

  The door opened almost immediately. A girl perhaps seven or eight years of age peered in the half-light. ‘Yes?’

  Anna stood struck to silence. The youngster was tall, and very thin. The wiry halo of her hair was lit to fire by the light of a flickering lamp upon the wall behind her. Her skin was pale and freckled, her nose straight, her mouth wide.

  ‘Yes?’ the girl asked again, sharply. ‘What do you –’ She sto
pped abruptly, looking at Anna, her face registering the same shock, and then almost immediately a flame of fierce anger. She reached to slam the door.

  Volodya moved his foot and the door jammed against it. ‘Is your mother here?’

  ‘Who is it, Tonia?’ Lenka’s voice was hoarse. The words were followed by a fit of coughing.

  ‘Lenka, it’s me,’ Anna said, very clearly, her eyes riveted, appalled, upon the hate-filled look that the child who from appearances might have been mistaken for her own had fixed upon her.

  There was a moment of silence, followed by movement. Lenka appeared behind her daughter; a Lenka thinner and gaunter than Anna remembered her, wrapped in an ancient dressing gown, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk. Please, Lenka.’

  ‘Anna, there is nothing to talk about. I’m not well. Please go.’ There was nothing of the old sullen strength of will; she looked simply exhausted, her eyes dark-ringed.

  ‘Let me help you,’ Anna said.

  ‘No.’ There was no weakness in that. ‘We’re all right. Just go away.’

  ‘Who is it, Mama?’ A little boy had come up behind her, wrapped his hand in the worn skirt of her gown, his thumb in his mouth, bright eyes upon Anna.

  ‘It’s a wicked witch,’ Tonia said, loudly, ‘who’s come to gobble you up.’

  The dark eyes widened.

  ‘That will do, Tonia,’ Lenka said, none too severely. She was breathing heavily, the sound of it loud in the quiet.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Anna said. ‘That’s all I ask. Five minutes to talk. To let me try to explain.’

  Tonia, thin and agile as a monkey, had ducked beneath her mother’s arm and stood, blazing with protective fury in front of her and the bemused little boy. ‘Go away!’ she shouted. ‘Go away, witch! Leave us alone!’

  ‘Tonia –’ Anna put out a hand to her. The child struck it aside.