The Troika Dolls

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The Troika Dolls Page 10

by Miranda Darling


  Henning’s voice continued on the phone.

  I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can . . . And Stevie, take Vadim if you go anywhere. Please . . . It’s safer, and it’s doing him good to be involved. Alright . . .

  There was a tiny pause, a minute awkwardness that came through even on the recorded message, as Henning tried to decide what to say next.

  Bye now.

  Stevie reached for the house phone to ring her grandmother then thought the better of it and picked up her mobile. You never knew who was listening in hotels and she would never compromise Didi’s safety in the slightest degree.

  There was no answer at the house in Zurich. Stevie frowned. It was early, but her grandmother always rose at six. She must still be out on her vita parcours—a ritual she followed unfailingly every morning and in all weather.

  The vita parcours was an obstacle course of sorts, a set of tree stumps

  and gym bars and elevated planks set up at various intervals on the forest trail, with instructions on what exercises had to be performed before one could move on. The formidable lady no longer ran between stations— she walked—but it kept her fit as an eighty-two-year-old fiddle.

  Didi had taken Stevie with her every morning when she was a child and she vividly remembered the burn of the freezing air puffing out of her little lungs as she ran along in her thick winter tracksuit, or jogged along under the cool of the heavy green leaves in summer. Their morning run would be followed by a breakfast of blueberry yoghurt with heavy, homemade muesli, then a spoonful of a revolting treacly-brown syrup made of yeast and mountain herbs that Didi insisted was the elixir of life.

  Stevie’s flat was near the woods and she still ran the same vita parcours every morning that she was home. Some mornings, if she was feeling feeble, she even took the spoonful of yeast syrup.

  She lay her head back gingerly on the enormous pillow. The headache had transformed itself into a full body ache. This was no hangover, alas. It was definitely the opening sally of some horrid Slavic flu. There was nothing for it but to swallow aspirin and eat a lemon, rind and all.

  She would make her bath extra hot this morning.

  The Metropole hotel was a stone’s throw from Red Square. The roads had been salted earlier that morning and the ice was fast turning into filthy sludge. Passing cars, their windows tinted even though the sun never seemed to shine, sprayed muck, the grime conveniently obscuring their number plates.

  Muscovites in matching fur hats and coats strode the boulevards, on some immutable course. In the pale blue mist they looked like bears out for their morning feed. A patrol of four militzia—police—crossed at the lights, so padded in their grey jackets and fur-trimmed hats, submachine guns slung casually over one shoulder, like teddy bears playing at war.

  Stevie watched them home in on a shabbily bundled couple. He had a thick black beard. That was suspicion enough. They would have to be stopped, papers scrutinised.

  Friday was the day to avoid being stopped if you were a foreigner because the militzia patrols went out looking for vodka money. Although it wasn’t Friday, Stevie avoided crossing just there. She set off to meet Vadim at a tea house, just outside the great red walls of the square.

  Stevie passed through the guarded gatehouse, up a small slope, and into Krasnaya Ploshyad. She caught her breath. Every time she came here, she felt she was standing on the top of a beautiful, malevolent mountain. Today, it was covered in snow and people were crisscrossing it on their way to work.

  St Basil’s church, with its wildly coloured onion domes and its golden exploding stars, sat like a Faberge jewel at the far side. On Stevie’s left was GUM, the famous shopping arcade, a delicate stone building the colour of vanilla, intricately carved and tipped with pointed copper roofs, now a weathered green. On her right was part of the wall that surrounded the Kremlin, the palace of government itself. The walls were fortress height and the colour of dried blood. Red Square. A massive wrought-iron gate sealed the entrance.

  Lenin’s tomb was dug in at the foot of the wall, marked with a heavy slab of dark stone and the simple letters: . Tourists from Central Asia, in from the steppes to see the famous capital from where their lives had once been ruled, milled about the gates in their furs, tiny dark eyes and pink cheeks, before joining the eternal funeral procession around Lenin’s embalmed body.

  It is impossible to pass casually through Red Square. It has a weight that crushes you, a gingerbread beauty that makes the history born from its ugly heart all the more menacing.

  A crocodile of schoolgirls in dark coats and white scarves and furry bonnets—like gumnut babies—wove its way past Stevie, towards St Basil’s. GUM was still closed.

  Stevie stopped to look at the huge glass windows, the restaurant, luxury goods. Only party members had been allowed to shop there under communism. They had even managed to justify segregated shopping in the name of the revolution. Now it was open to anyone. Anya had been shopping there when she disappeared.

  When it was open, guards patrolled the marble galleries and watched the crowds stroll by eating ice-creams. Very little passed unnoticed. It would have been difficult to force Anya out of there. There were guards at every entrance.

  Could Anya have gone willingly then? Stevie shook her head. From what she knew of her, it seemed very unlikely. Anya didn’t seem like the type.

  The tea house was ugly, but Stevie had expected it would be. There was no tradition of cafés, no café society in Moscow. It was one of the things that had surprised her when she had first come to the city.

  Perhaps it was too easy for conversations to be overheard. Talk had been dangerous, often lethal, under communism. People had perhaps preferred to talk in the privacy of their own living rooms, kitchens, cupboards. Or perhaps the party had considered cafés too subversive, too fertile an intellectual climate to be tolerated, having never forgotten that Lenin planned the revolution from the Café Odeon in Zurich, a stone’s throw from the Bellevueplatz.

  The café was filled with plastic tables, a mock tile floor and smoke like fog. Vadim was waiting at a table by the window. He looked the part, she thought, for a covert operation: a grey woollen overcoat—the collar turned up to hide his jaw—a black rollneck; the sleeves of an old naval jersey, striped blue and white and worn at the edges, poked out from the black cuffs. An army cap lay on the table bearing the already faded colours of the new Russia.

  They ordered hot tea with lemon.

  ‘The hospital’s not far,’ Vadim began. ‘I will tell them I am a friend of Petra’s and that you are her music teacher.’

  Music teacher. Delightful.

  Stevie wished she’d worn her most snappy tweed ensemble, hair waved in a didactic but faintly musical style; she would have chosen her long opera pearls, the ones that hung to her navel, and attached a piano key to the clasp, fingers perfumed with rosin from the little violin bows of the children.

  The sound began as a low rumble, like distant surf. Stevie ignored it but it grew quickly louder until Vadim noticed it, too. Through the window they saw a mass of people come snaking around the corner, some waving placards, others waving fists, one with a shabby loud hailer. There would have been some three hundred at a rough guess. Militzia were gathering around them like flies, buzzing just out of touch but planning a landing.

  The protesters stopped and began to shout at the Kremlin walls, punching the air, shaking their placards. Stevie was tempted to go outside for a closer look but experience (Jakarta, burning tyres, a rather disastrous betchuk chase) had taught her that it never did to get caught in other people’s anger. And in Russia, as in Indonesia, the security forces could be unpredictable.

  ‘What are they protesting about, Vadim?’ Stevie peered closely, trying to read the placards. The protesters were all women, bundled up tight in the cold with headscarves, their pale faces pinched with pink. Her eyebrows shot up incredulously. ‘Are they—mothers?!’

  ‘They are from the Mothers’ Rights group.’ Vadim spoke q
uietly. He lit another cigarette. ‘They are the mothers of soldiers who have disappeared in Chechnya, or been tormented to death by their officers, or who have returned home physically and mentally destroyed, only to be swept under the carpet like ashes.’

  Vadim rubbed his scar absentmindedly. It grew red. ‘When you turn eighteen, you are conscripted. You become a “human resource” for the great nation of Russia, and so like that she may do with you what she wishes.’

  ‘So, it really is as bad as they say.’

  He smiled bitterly. ‘Probably worse than you know. Think on this, and every word is true: in 2002, five hundred men were killed—that’s a whole battalion’s worth—but not from fighting a war. They were beaten to death by their own officers. Whole squadrons have deserted because conditions are so bad. The officers steal tanks, weapons, even the few roubles the privates get sent by their parents.’

  Vadim looked out at the protesters. The militzia were buzzing in tighter circles now. Trucks had arrived, ominously windowless.

  ‘These parents are despised by the officers—the Mothers’ Rights group especially. It annoys them that sometimes, just sometimes, their behaviour is so outrageous—’ the poison in Vadim’s voice could have killed a cobra, ‘—and that it transgresses the line between man and beast so flagrantly, that the mothers protest and shout and demand that something be done to discipline the officers who killed their Sascha on a drunken whim.’ He stared out at them. ‘It is worse than a death at the hands of an enemy. There is not even hate or politics behind these murders. They are wholly without purpose, a distraction, an afterthought. They deny the basic humanity of the soldiers.’

  His words were a bullet to Stevie’s heart. Vadim was just a boy but he knew the whole world. He had understood the nature of evil, how it began in frigid indifference to other people, and then slid slowly down the scale of good, towards evil. That end . . . that just blurred into a black fog of distance, a horrible, cold, endless stretch.

  ‘You’re right, Vadim. I think we comfort ourselves with the idea that evil is confined to master plans conceived in great detail by bald men stroking Persian cats with a long manicured fingernail. This puts evil beyond the reach of ordinary men.’

  Stevie herself believed that evil began in small acts of selfishness, banal cruelties in a normal day; their horror was that they were casual. To be casual with the lives of others was evil. This was an uncomfortable idea because it meant that everyone had the potential to influence the balance of good and evil on the earth. It demanded that we take individual responsibility. We would all prefer to leave that to someone else.

  Stevie’s eyes drifted back to the protest. ‘I don’t think there is ever a clear demarcation between good and evil. There’s no line drawn on the scale that declares, “From here be evil” like those old explorer’s maps of the world that say “Here be monsters”. I think what matters is your place on the scale.’

  She blew on her lemon tea. ‘Evil is the downward creep, in small, millipede steps, while goodness is the struggle to move up; trying to lift others with you is heroic.’

  Real evil required a total absence of the moral imagination. Without the capacity to empathise with the position and pain of others, their suffering, even their existence, somehow didn’t seem real.

  ‘And your officers, Vadim, are a terrible example,’ Stevie continued. ‘Once the humanity of others has been denied, there is nothing too cruel that cannot be done to them.’

  And so now, the core of society, its glue, its respectable members— the mothers and the grandmothers, the pensioners—had to take to the frozen streets with placards. It was proof enough that there was no other way to be heard.

  Grey militzia poured like ants from the back of the trucks and surrounded the mothers.

  No one was listening.

  _________

  Even the most robust and glamorous fantasy is difficult to sustain in a hospital. The setting is designed to strip people of all illusions. There is nothing more real than the sick, the injured and those who care for them. Stevie was just managing to hang on to her Mary Poppins music-teacher whimsy, but it was taking effort. At the tangy odour of the lunch trolley (boiled cabbage loaf? chicken gelatine?), she almost came unstuck. But her imagination, often problematically powerful, found a certain satisfaction in the challenge and she soon regained her equilibrium.

  Petra Koshka. Her surname meant cat. As they wound their way through long linoleum corridors and swinging double doors, Stevie thought about her cat at home in Zurich. Actually, she shouldn’t say her cat at all. They had simply met one day, walking in opposite directions along the river, she towards the lake, he towards the Bahnhof. Stevie’s romantic disappointment in the Alps was only a week old.

  The cat had recently been shaved. Only his head and the tip of his tail retained their former majesty. He was obviously furious and embarrassed and ashamed. Stevie could relate. He had snapped up the end of Stevie’s Bratwurst mit Senf, her grilled veal sausage and mustard lunch. The fact that he had not minded the mustard told Stevie the cat was starving, and she invited him home. She had offered him shelter, at least until his majesty grew back.

  Stevie had asked if she could call him Peter. He had turned out to be a gentleman. He was staying with her grandmother at the moment. Peter was clever and polite. He never took food without asking first. When Stevie had wondered if Joss’ reasons for not showing had been genuine—artists were after all unpredictable—Peter had expressed scepticism but she had not listened. A month later her heart was in shreds.

  This is only the third time I’ve thought about Joss since I came to Moscow.

  But more important matters than Stevie’s unfortunately eager heart were at hand.

  Vadim pushed open the door to Petra’s room. A girl lay back on the starched hospital pillows, like a dried flower in an envelope. She had long dark hair and a big bandage across the middle of her face. It could be the girl in the photo. Really, it was hard to tell.

  ‘Petra?’ Vadim asked, walking quickly towards her.

  The mummy face turned. She had two swollen eyes, a deep shiny red like plums, and greenish-yellow bruising on the visible skin of her face. Poor girl, thought Stevie, and immediately wondered if she had been bashed. And by whom . . . The possibility that Petra would have something to add to Anya’s mystery was growing.

  ‘Vadim. Privyet!’ She tried a smile but that seemed to hurt her.

  ‘What happened, Petra? Did someone hurt you?’

  ‘No, Vadim,’ she said dismissively. ‘Don’t be stupid. Haven’t you ever seen a post-op nose job?’ She touched her bandages lightly. ‘My mum’s had three. And liposuction. If you want to see bad, that’s bad. But she looks hot at forty. I’m going to do the same, but I probably won’t wait till I’m forty.’

  Petra obviously wasn’t feeling that bad.

  ‘I’m so happy you came to see me. Can you change the TV channel? The food in here sucks.’

  ‘Your dad paid for you to get a nose job?’

  Stevie shared Vadim’s incredulousness but only sneezed twice, and said nothing.

  ‘Of course he did,’ the mummy answered scornfully. ‘Anyway, it only makes him look better in the end, doesn’t it? Hot wife, hot, hot daughter.’ Petra tried to smile again and winced with pain.

  Vadim gestured with his hand. ‘This is my friend, Stevie.’ Petra glanced at Stevie, saw she was pretty and paid more attention. ‘She’s trying to help me find Anya.’

  ‘Oh my God. She’s still missing? What do you think’s happened to her? I thought she would have turned up by now.’ Petra swallowed with some difficulty and looked at the boy. ‘That’s really scary, Vadim.’

  ‘We need your help, Petra.’ Stevie sat down by her bedside. ‘We think Anya’s been kidnapped and we need to find out by whom. It will help us negotiate when the kidnappers make contact—are they professional, opportunists, politically motivated—so we know how to deal, and how far to push them.’

  ‘Tot
ally.’ Petra looked away to the TV. ‘Umm . . . I don’t know anything I haven’t already told Vadim on the phone. Anya and I were shopping. We got coffee and I got up to pay and when I came back, she was gone. I tried her mobile but she didn’t pick up.’

  ‘We tried Anya’s phone all that night, too. But there was no answer.

  Then it went dead.’ Vadim stood at Stevie’s shoulder. She could sense he didn’t much like Petra.

  Petra kept batting her eyes at the pale boy. She, on the other hand, clearly had a giant crush.

  ‘Were you with anyone else, Petra?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Did you notice anyone watching Anya? Did anyone try to talk to you?’

  Petra snorted. ‘Guys are always staring, trying to talk to us.’ She caught the look in Stevie’s eye and grew subdued. ‘But no one did that day. I didn’t notice anyone looking at us.’

  Stevie turned to Vadim. ‘The people who snatched her would have got rid of the phone as soon as they took her. Too much risk that police could pinpoint a location if the phone was turned on or if Anya managed to make a call.’

  ‘Maybe she just ran away? You know she always wanted to model . . .’ Petra could see she was getting Vadim’s attention and continued eagerly along this track. ‘Maybe she was trying to sign up with an agency in New York. She always wanted to go there. She would have done anything to be a model.’

  Stevie picked up the jealousy in Petra’s reasoning and pounced.

  ‘Petra, did anyone ever approach Anya about modelling?’

  Petra began to pick at the blanket on her bed, ripping out the cotton threads one by one. Finally she spoke.

  ‘Yeah. At Zima’s model comp. They picked both of us, you know.’

  ‘Yes. You are very beautiful, Petra. You would make a very good model.’ Stevie laid her words carefully on the girl. She brightened under her bandage.

  ‘Yeah. After this nose job I’m going to go for it. I’m getting a contract, you know.’

  ‘Did Anya get a contract?’

  ‘Umm. Well, she was going to and . . . yeah. I mean, I don’t know.’

 

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