Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  ‘I’m hungry,’ ’Tasha announced, plaintively. ‘And I smell horrible.’

  ‘So are we all, and so do we all,’ Anna replied, grimly, breaking her own portion of bread into three pieces. ‘Here. Don’t eat it all at once.’

  ‘I think I’ve got fleas,’ Nikki said in an interested voice.

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Nikki –’

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ It was Stepan, suddenly, who so rarely said a word that three pairs of eyes turned to him, astonished. His cushion was tucked under his arm as always, his small face was pinched with cold, his mouth trembled. ‘Oh, please, Aunt Anna – are we nearly there?’

  The question struck them all to a sudden choking silence. ’Tasha blinked. Nikki’s face turned very red. Anna reached for Stepan and hugged him to her. As always he lay rigid against her, neither resisting nor returning her embrace. ‘Yes, darling, truly yes. It won’t be long now.’ She felt tired tears rising in her own eyes. ‘You’ve all been very brave, so very brave. Just a little while longer, my pets, just a day or two longer.’

  ’Tasha curled herself around to lay against Anna’s side. ‘Tell us about England, Aunt Anna. Tell us about Sythings. Will we really be allowed to have dogs, and ponies of our own? Is there really a garden as big as a park?’

  It was a favourite game, and one which Anna played with every bit as much fervour as did the children. Talking about England, talking about Sythings, made it feel close, and real; even made it seem possible that one day she might actually see it again.

  It was the following day that they ran into the white-coated ski patrol. Anna, seeing them as they emerged from the trees, hauled on the reins to turn the pony and flee. Kaarlo it was who saw the insignia and armbands. ‘No, Anna, no! It’s all right – they’re friends! Friends!’ He was in amongst them then, shaking hands, accepting cigarettes – they had run out two days before – exchanging news.

  ‘We can strike out for the road now. We’re safe. They’ve held Vaasa. Mannerheim’s there.’

  They struggled into the battered, busy town the following day. Evidence of its takeover by the military – Anna found out later there were two thousand men stationed in the town – was everywhere. Men drilled in the streets and squares, volunteers who were pouring in from the countryside to support the charismatic Mannerheim and to fight at last for the independence of their country. Small cavalry columns trotted by, field guns and armoured cars ploughed noisily along the neat and usually quiet thoroughfares.

  They took leave of their companions on the edge of the town. All the young men were here to volunteer and were anxious to be gone. They shook hands and mumbled good wishes, kissed the children. Anna watched as they set off talking and laughing excitedly, skis over their shoulders, before with Kaarlo leading the pony they turned towards the centre of town. Kaarlo too was impatient to don uniform and regularize at last his participation in his country’s battle, but he had offered, to Anna’s surprise, to escort them to the address where they hoped to find Jussi and Katya first.

  The last fraught moment of these anxious days came when they reached the house and Kaarlo pulled the doorbell. Neither spoke. The thought was in both their minds. Much had happened in the past weeks. There must be at least as much chance that the Lavolas had left the city than that they had stayed.

  And then the door was open and Katya was there, a brigh-tfaced child astride her hip, her eyes first, delightedly, upon Kaarlo and then in growing recognition and utter disbelief upon Anna. ‘Anna! My God! It is Anna, isn’t it? Anna! It can’t be!’

  * * *

  There was so very much to talk about. They had not met since Anna’s wedding. They talked all day and, with the exhausted children and the overexcited Jaakko bathed and safely asleep in bed, half the night.

  ‘So,’ Jussi said at last, ‘you’d like help to get to Sweden?’

  ‘Is it possible?’ Anna, despite her happiness and relief, was battling fatigue. The skin of her face was chapped and sore, and she ached all over.

  ‘Of course it is. Jussi will fix it. Jussi can fix almost anything,’ Katya laughed. She sat on the floor beside Jussi in his wheeled chair, her arm leaning on his good leg. She was thinner than Anna remembered her, and the smile she recalled so vividly was neither quite so ready nor so carefree. There was no surprise in that; much had happened since those days in the schoolroom in the Bourlov apartment. Those days a lifetime ago when they had been friends, and the world about them had been safe and secure. She watched as Katya lifted her head to smile again at her husband, saw the warmth in his face as he looked down at her; and felt the faintest twinge of envy. Despite Jussi’s terrible disability and the short temper she had already seen it could occasionally produce, despite the bloodshed and danger about them, they had each other and they had Jaakko, flesh of their flesh, child of their love.

  ‘Rest here for a couple of days,’ Jussi was saying. ‘You’ve had a hard time, and the children need to recuperate before you go on. The supply lines are open to Sweden. They’re perfectly safe. We’ll get you out.’

  * * *

  They crossed the frozen Gulf of Bothnia two days later. Jussi himself drove the sledge, part of a column that plied freely between the liberated west coast of Finland and friendly Sweden. At Umea they boarded the train for Stockholm. In Stockholm there was a British Embassy; friends, help and safety.

  On the third day of March 1918, the day that the Bolshevik Government of Russia finally signed a punitive peace treaty with Germany in the city of Brest-Litovsk, Anna and the children sailed for Newcastle, and for home.

  Interlude: 1918-1925

  The men of the erstwhile 27th Royal Prussian Jaeger Battalion finally reached their homeland a few days before Anna and the children sailed from Stockholm. For a week they had known that the German High Command had at last officially agreed to their return to Finland. For a week they waited; until, on 13 February 1918, the battalion was disbanded as a German fighting unit and the men, who had waited three long, tough years for this, were told they could go home. They were also told as a final and potentially disastrous twist of the two-faced diplomacy that had dogged them for all of those years that their uniforms and their arms must stay in Germany.

  The years of planning and of hope might have been crushed at that one stroke. The only Independent Finland that Lenin and his Bolsheviks were ready to recognize was a Red Independent Finland; and to that end units of Russian soldiers were pouring into the country to support the Finnish Reds, to ‘liberate’ the people and to ensure they stayed in the Russian fold. Whilst Mannerheim and his fighters with skill and with courage held onto the advantage he had so brilliantly engineered the month before, he was desperately short both of trained men and of arms. The well-trained, properly-armed Jaegers, dispersed between the hastily assembled battalions of the White Finnish army, were essential to his plans; he knew that victory, if it might be gained, must come quickly. The longer the fighting continued, the stronger established became the Government in Petrograd and the more likely was the successful negotiation of a separate peace with Germany. That achieved, Lenin would be free to turn his full energy upon crushing the rebellion.

  It was the integrity of the Jaegers’ German field officers, in contrast to the political duplicity of their masters, that saved the day in the end. Orders were orders, and the orders were that the Finns were to board the two ships that awaited them in the port of Libau as civilians. No orders were given, however, to patrol the streets of the town, nor to supervise the embarkation of these newly-made civilians. It was with little surprise that a certain Captain Ausfeld woke in the chill of the morning of 14 February to discover that the men he had trained, and whose cause he had come so firmly to support, had during the night spirited aboard the transport ships Arcturus and Castor not just themselves but their weapons and their uniforms. Jubilantly, and armed for combat, the young men of Finland were going home; and from the bow of each ship flew, for the first time, the gold and blue Lion Banner of Finland.


  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which brought peace to the Eastern Front, was signed two weeks later. But the joyfully-greeted homecoming of the Jaegers had by then put new and determined life into the fight for Finland. The struggle throughout the March of 1918 was bitter. Many died. There were betrayals and atrocities, as in war there always are. The wood-built towns and villages of Finland were in flames. But as so often the spirit of independence, no matter how long held to a glimmer by repression, once exposed to the fresh air of freedom burned stronger and brighter than the inimical flame that consumed building and forest. The Russian troops that bolstered the strength of the Finnish Red Guards, confused and debilitated already by war and revolution, were undisciplined and demoralized. Mannerheim’s Finns were not. Outnumbered and outgunned, yet they possessed the weapons of will and determination. The decisive battle – the battle for Tampere – came at the beginning of April. It was bitterly fought, and one of the longest and bloodiest of the war. By 10 April the Red armies were in retreat – a shambles of a retreat, its path marked by fire and indiscriminate death.

  On 29 April the Red Western army was all but destroyed at Viipuri; and a few days later the war was at an end. On 16 May the victorious White army, led by the Jaegers, marched through the streets of a liberated Helsinki, and Suomi was free.

  Just over a month later, civil war broke out in Russia; a civil war that was to prove perhaps the bloodiest and most hate-filled in the blood-drenched history of the country. In July the Tsar, his wife and their five children were brutally murdered in Ekaterinburg; they were not the only, simply the best-known, victims of the indiscriminate brutality inflicted by both sides on the other in the savage struggle. No-one knew then, nor ever discovered, how many people died in the slaughter that followed, the so-called Terror. For the peasants and the poorest of the people it hardly mattered that Lenin was as systematically murdering Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists in his bid for total power as he was the detested Whites who supported the Tsar. For simple folk, no matter who fought, who won, or who lost, the problems were the same as they always had been. Quite apart from the bloodletting, hardship, famine and epidemic killed an estimated seven million people between 1918 and 1920. By 1922 the Bolsheviks, now called the Communists, had a stranglehold upon Russia.

  And, ironically, it was in the spring of that same year that Lenin had his first stroke. The second felled him in December, and the third the following March, leaving him half-paralysed and speechless. Ten months later he died.

  There were many who truly mourned the passing of a visionary – and inevitably in the case of such a man, such a catalyst in so many people’s lives, there were perhaps as many who did not. But any rejoicing was premature. For looming in the shadows, awaiting his moment, was a man who had watched, planned and ruthlessly manoeuvred in anticipation of this hour. A man who, despite Lenin’s own opposition and distaste, had manipulated himself into an all but unassailable position of power, and who stood now, the prize within his grasp. Over the next few years the monstrous Josef Stalin mercilessly eliminated, one by one, any who opposed him: the true Terror had begun.

  Meanwhile, in the West, in November 1918, the War To End All Wars at last ended, leaving Europe battered and exhausted, a generation of young men wiped out, the lives of many of the survivors wrecked. But life, as ever, was not to be denied by tragedy. As the decade ended and the new era of the Twenties was ushered in, frenetic gaiety became the order of the day, at least for some. By then Alcock and Brown had flown the Atlantic non-stop, and civilian airships were catching the popular imagination, their wartime past forgiven if not forgotten. The first regular broadcasting station was started in Pittsburgh and jazz and the pursuit of noisy pleasure swept the western world like an epidemic.

  In a Germany bitter, sore and resentful at the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the National Socialist Party was founded.

  Anna and the children arrived at Sythings in the late spring of 1918. Resilient as only children can be, ’Tasha and Nikki settled into their new life as if born to it. Even withdrawn Stepan, who for some time, still silent, still undemonstrative, clung to Anna as if she were the only stable thing in a world gone mad about him, did at last begin to respond to the peace, security and comfort with which Anna surrounded and anxiously protected him. Mistrustful at first, flinching fearfully from anything he did not understand, yet gradually as the months and then the years went by the unseen wounds apparently healed. Only the worn and threadbare cushion that lay always upon his bed and which he stubbornly refused to allow anyone to touch – the mere suggestion was enough to send him into a rage that left him white-faced and shaking, and even the tormenting ’Tasha learned when to let well alone – testified to the continued existence of old terrors, old hurts.

  Anna watched, and waited, and hoped. She loved all three of them as if they had truly been her own; but in her secret heart, this was her most precious child.

  News from Russia itself was scant. If Volodya wrote, Anna never received his letters, and those she wrote to him simply, it seemed to her, disappeared into an empty void; she never knew if he received them. It did not take long to occur to her that even to have such letters addressed to them could constitute a danger to those she had left behind; after a year, reluctantly, she stopped writing.

  It was with Katya in Finland that she established swift and regular contact. It was from Katya that they heard, almost a year after the event, of the death of baby Dmitri in the ’flu epidemic of the summer of 1918. Anna cried a little; neither ’Tasha nor Nikki did. It was as if the slate of their early lives had been wiped clean; their mother, Dmitri, their grandmother, Volodya, were shadowy figures from a past in young minds long gone and best forgotten. The human race survives so. Anna had employed a tutor to teach them English, and as soon as they were able, which had been remarkably quickly, had found a good local school for them. They were altogether too involved with tadpoles and newts, with puppies and kittens, with school friends and the Boys’ or Girls’ Own Paper to be concerned with an uneasy yesterday that became more distant and hazy as time slipped by. Nikki developed a passion for the internal combustion engine. ’Tasha wanted to be an actress. Then an opera singer. And then a nurse in a pretty uniform. Then she was given a pony and the world revolved around that. Steppi gave as little away of his ambitions as of anything else. Like any other family they squabbled and fought on occasion like demons, supported each other with fierce single-mindedness in the face of outside attack. Judging the first, precarious bridge to have been crossed, Anna began to pick up the threads of her own life, surprised and joyful to discover that friends made in those years with Guy were still there, and still friends. She started again to invite to the house the writers, artists and musicians who had made up their circle before the war and who to her delight needed little or no persuasion to make Sythings their meeting place again. As they grew the children became a part of these gatherings.

  She worried, as any mother would, at the thought of their going away to school. Given their less than ordinary background she feared to part them from her and from Sythings, though the conventions of the time and place demanded it. She need not have concerned herself. ’Tasha it was, in 1923, who led the campaign to be allowed to go away to school as, she insisted dramatically, every other person in the world had been allowed to do but her. Nikki weighed in eagerly behind her. His main passion – apart from the filthy bits of engine that were permanently spread across the floor of his room – was sport. A chap really couldn’t get anywhere without going to a school with a decent cricket pitch. And where the others led Steppi – and, Anna discovered within a day of his leaving, with an absurd mixture of tears and laughter, his battered cushion – would doggedly and unflinchingly follow. The first term without them was a strange one for Anna; the fledglings were, if not flown, at least spreading tentative wings. She said so in her next letter to Katya.

  In that case, Katya answered promptly and with crisp relief,
she could do them all a favour and give houseroom to a young musician who had fled the repression and terror of Stalin’s Russia and taken refuge with the Lavolas, whose Helsinki home had become, over the past years, a haven for such refugees. The route across the ice was still open to those who dared to take it. For some strange reason this boy’s heart was set upon England (Katya had already passed on what she described as ‘several stray parcels’ to her parents in the United States). He was also a promising violinist. What more appropriate resting place for such a package than Sythings?

  It was with a stirring of excitement that Anna agreed. Two weeks later – having set off, Anna noted with affectionate exasperation, long before her letter to her cousin agreeing to the proposition could possibly have arrived – the young Sergei Ivanovich Stavlov appeared on her doorstep. Six months later, Sergei having found a place in Anna’s heart and then in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, an intense and difficult piano virtuoso arrived; a young man whose anti-social habit of sleeping all day and playing impassioned piano music all night made it a positive relief when he was invited to join an orchestra in Manchester. Anna, with visits in mind, was mildly sorry that the orchestra was not in New York. And then, in the winter of 1925, Katya herself came at last, escorting a prize – a young composer snatched, so Katya would have it, from the very jaws of Stalin’s secret police.

  Anna never forgot that day. With typical panache and no warning – although it later transpired that she had spent two days in London to break the journey – Katya arrived, complete with ‘guest’ and brought with her into the quiet house the bright aura of laughter and warmth that Anna so well remembered. It was termtime. The children were away. Astonished and delighted greetings and the sketchiest of news exchanged, and the somewhat fraught young man Katya had brought with her installed a little suspiciously in the guest suite, the cousins faced each other, suddenly silent, suddenly still, across the warmth of a glowing fire. Katya, restless, turned, held her glass to the firelight, watched as its depths glowed ruby red.