Letters from Yelena

by Guy Mankowski

  ‘I must look pretty terrible to you,’ I whispered.

  ‘You look anything but. You have grown so beautiful. Though that’s not a surprise. The nurses tell me you’re recovering really well!’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been on the phone to them a few times after you’ve hung up. Sometimes I even rang them back! You didn’t think that I wouldn’t ask after my sister’s welfare?’

  I paused. ‘I don’t know. What’s with the expensive clothes, Inessa? I should have known you would make quite the girl about town.’

  ‘Thanks. But I have none of the natural glamour of a prima ballerina.’ She seemed to say the words with genuine admiration. I laughed. ‘I helped negotiate the sale of Dad’s business, and with the money I made, I started my own beauty retail company. But haven’t I told you that already? So far it’s going really well! But I don’t need to sell myself to my sister. Dear Yelena. How did we fall out of touch for so long?’

  Because you didn’t help me fight Bruna, I thought. You weren’t there for me. You were in another world. I looked up at her, making the effort to bite my tongue. She registered my silence, whilst seemingly absorbing my expression. I wondered if it caused her some pain.

  ‘We’re going out for dinner tonight,’ she told me. ‘I will arrange us a taxi in a few minutes, and we can talk properly then.’

  After a few effusive conversations with the staff, Inessa ordered us a taxi to a small Italian restaurant overlooking the coast. It was good to leave The Cedars, but I was rather disappointed when Inessa led me down a small flight of steps to the restaurant’s candlelit cellar. I didn’t protest as her body language suggested she had something to disclose, something which would perhaps not suit wide-open spaces. Nonetheless, this sudden intimacy slightly unsettled me.

  Her lips remained pursed until we had ordered our meals. Finally, when the waitresses had left us alone, Inessa leant in conspiratorially.

  ‘I wanted to come here to see how you are,’ she started. I tried not to react. ‘We are not good at looking out for one another in our family, Yelena. Dad is – I’m sure you know – very worried about you. But how could he bring himself to come right out and say it, let alone visit? He always was so poor at communication. He sends his love. I know he does, but you know as well as I that he could never put it quite like that himself.’

  I smiled. I tried not to think of the loneliness I’d felt in those early days just after the accident. When even a card from my family would have meant so much. There had been nothing but silence from my father, and Inessa.

  ‘I’m not sure I know him as well as you,’ I said.

  Instantly I felt transformed back to the fourteen year old who was envious of their bond. Her eyes darted between me and the table, in what seemed a spontaneous reaction of guilt.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘But if that’s true, it’s only because I stuck to him to keep me safe from Bruna. And I learnt a little more about him as time went on. What surprised me most was that he didn’t even enjoy his work. The truth is, when Mum died his light was snuffed out. It all became too much for him. The only way he was able to get through each day was to get his head down and work. Working meant he didn’t have to ask himself questions about how well he understood his daughters. But, what you’ve got to remember is that at the root of all that was a love for us. It’s just that he turned that love into fear.’

  I knew that inevitably this was only a compacted version of my sister’s understanding of him, but it surprised me how shaken my perception of my father was simply by the language someone else used to describe him. I realised I might have been working from misconceptions and in time building them, making them more elaborate.

  ‘I should have supported what you were trying to do before you went away, Yelena. I was young, yes, but you were right to try and bring Bruna to justice before leaving. You were right to push me to admit what she had done.’

  I felt a powerful urge to speak, to remonstrate with her. Again I restrained, but I felt her sense my anger.

  ‘What you have to understand is that Dad was my whole life, Yelena. You had your dancing, but I had nothing else.’ There was a pleading edge to her voice now. ‘Keeping him content and happy was all I had, and at that age, I wasn’t ready to distress him by admitting the things that Bruna had done to us.’ Her expression softened. ‘But once the business was sold, I gained a little confidence. By then Bruna and Dad were, of course, separated. She’d moved back to… whatever rock she had crawled out from. Yelena, I have been desperate to tell you this,’ she leant forward. ‘After you left for the Vaganova I got in touch with a local police officer, and started to sound out how one would go about reporting a case of child abuse. Gradually, over the course of a many months I told her our story but I wasn’t quite ready to submit an official testimony. I suppose I didn’t think Dad was ready to confront the truth just yet and I didn’t want to pull you back to Donetsk when you had only just got away. I suppose I let the trail run cold, to be honest. But then I had a call, a month ago, from the police officer I had first spoken to about Bruna. I had, for a long while, known that when the time was right I needed to bring her to justice, to make sure that another child was never at risk of abuse from her again.’ I forced myself to stay silent. I told myself I had waited so long to hear her speak about this, that I must not interrupt her now.

  ‘This officer,’ she continued, ‘was only a new recruit when I first brought our case to light. Now she is in a more senior position, and it just so happened that when she was promoted she became a senior officer in the district that Bruna now lived. One day she was asked to look into a woman who had recently been offered a position at a school, as a dinner lady. Unfortunately this woman’s criminal checks had gone through, and without the charges having been pressed, the case had been dropped and Bruna was about to start working. However, her file had been brought to this senior officer as the policeman permitting Bruna’s new appointment had been unsettled by some of the allegations he’d read about her, and had wanted someone above him look into it. Having found out about Bruna’s current situation, the senior officer tracked me down and contacted me to ask if I was ready to pursue the charges. They needed me to testify, she said, if Bruna was going to be prevented from working in a school.’

  I was sat bolt upright at this point.

  ‘I engaged with her straight away,’ Inessa continued.

  At that moment a waiter bustled into our conversation. Hurriedly, I ordered red wine from him. Inessa, just as I had expected her to, took her time deciding.

  ‘For God’s sake tell me what happened Inessa,’ I said, the moment he’d finally left.

  ‘It seemed that my engagement with her was not quite fast enough. Bruna had already been working in the laundry department at this school for many weeks. This new post as a dinner lady had represented something of an advancement for her. An advancement, the senior officer told me, which had come about because of her new relationship with a teacher in the English department. A rather elderly and eccentric professor. Apparently a man of some controversy, who’d recently fathered a child with a former student of his. They’d had a daughter, who he now had custody of.

  I felt as if my blood was about to freeze. ‘Inessa,’ I suddenly hissed, with an audible bitterness that shocked me. I felt years of frustration rise up inside me. ‘How could you have been so cowardly? You had the perfect opportunity to put this woman behind bars, and yet you allowed her enough time to start working in a school?’

  ‘Please, Yelena. You must allow me to finish.’ Her hands trembled slightly as she poured out the wine. Her face had gone pale, and for the first time I wondered if this story would have a happy ending or not.

  ‘The senior officer told me her sources indicated that until recently Bruna had been working as a maid for an elderly gentleman out in the countryside. She therefore thought it very unlikely that Bruna had had the opportunity to reach any children since she had fled from Donetsk
. She assured me that this was most likely the first time Bruna had been at risk of offending again, and the moment she had become aware of the case, she had started trying to track me down.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ I snapped.

  ‘Well, the clearance for the dinner lady post had taken a very long time to come through, given the allegations that had been noted on her record. Apparently Bruna started to suspect, according to the senior officer, that I was behind its delay. Though Bruna had been informed she’d eventually gained clearance, as soon as her file had landed on the senior officer’s desk the clearance had quickly been suspended. But it still seemed she might have access to her boyfriend’s new child. The senior officer knew she had to put Bruna behind bars. I didn’t tell you about this at the time, Yelena, because it was in the week of your accident. The officer told me I had to move fast. I finally had the confidence to convince Dad to appear in court too. Reluctantly, Dad agreed. The charges were re-opened against Bruna, and it looked as though she was going to be sent to prison for a good stretch of time.’

  ‘Going to be?’

  Inessa’s face darkened. ‘This is where the story gets a little more… difficult. Along the years, Bruna had found a solicitor who not only cost very little, but who was also very good at his job. He was able to delay the proceedings in order to buy Bruna the time to mount a more rigorous defence.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And because Bruna wasn’t put immediately into custody, she had some freedom. The future was looking pretty bad for her, no doubt about it. Yelena she… she came to visit me.’

  ‘She came to visit you? When?’

  ‘Two weeks ago.’

  Inessa’s face had now gone completely white. ‘She tracked me down. It couldn’t have been very difficult, I should have been more careful to cover my tracks. It was the day Uncle Leo and I were clearing out Dad’s offices, after the sale of his business had just gone through. I was taking boxes into the hallway, when I looked up to see Bruna waiting for me on the doorstep.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, barely breathing.

  ‘Dad wasn’t in,’ she continued. I saw a painful memory flash across her face, and I wished I had been there. She suddenly looked very small, like my baby sister, little Inessa. Ambushed by the woman who had caused her so much pain. At that moment I loathed the world for the situations it sometimes handed us. I sat back, willing myself to let her speak.

  ‘I was with Uncle Leo. He was in Dad’s study, just behind me. We had been loading everything into the car so for once the front door was open, and Bruna was coming through the entrance, seemingly going towards the foot of the stairs. Her face was a little more wizened, more twisted than I remember it being. I think I quietly said her name, barely believing that it was really her. ‘So you’ve not forgotten me yet then?’ she roared. I screamed so loud that I felt sure it would shatter the hallway mirror. I heard an imperceptible shout from Leo, and Bruna grabbed me by the neck. I tried to wrestle her onto the floor. But she was stronger than I had ever imagined she would be. There was just so much anger in her.’

  ‘Did she hurt you?’

  At that point Inessa set down her glass of wine. I saw for the first time how much her long, pale hands were shaking. She reached down, and after looking carefully around her to ensure that we were alone, she unzipped the side of her dress to reveal a long, freshly stitched scar running down the side of her torso.

  ‘Inessa!’ I cried.

  She looked me steadily in the eye. ‘I thought I had her,’ she said. ‘I was just turning her over, when I saw the flash of a blade. I was terrified, but I somehow managed to wriggle free of her. But she panicked, and I felt the knife bury itself in my side. There was this awful feeling, Yelena, as it punctured the side of my body. I looked at her in disbelief, and she looked surprised too, surprised that she had actually done it. I kicked out at her, and she fell back onto the hallway table. Desperate to get away, I ran up the long staircase, but seconds later I heard her coming after me. It was then that I realised Uncle Leo had finally come out of the study, seen Bruna, and worked out what was happening. I heard him struggle with her at the foot of the stairs, but she somehow got free of him and charged up the steps towards me. I couldn’t believe how much blood there was; I was almost shaking too much too defend myself, and Leo seemed so useless at preventing anything.

  Bruna got to the top of the stairs, and backed me further down the balcony. Leo was right behind her, treading cautiously in her wake. I remember him repeatedly saying, ‘Put the knife down, Bruna. This has gone too far.’

  ‘It’s her who’s taken it too far,’ Bruna hissed, and then she lunged for me. I fell onto my back, trying to use my feet to keep her at a distance. But with a shout, Uncle Leo pulled her off me. Bruna staggered back against the balcony rail. For a second I wasn’t sure if she was going to fall over the rail or stagger back towards me. But then her eyes widened with shock as she realised she had suddenly lost her balance. The knife fell to the floor with a clatter, and then I heard this desperate scream come from her as she toppled over the side. A second later we were looking down on her. She was lying awkwardly on her back on the stone floor of the hallway, a small trickle of blood emerging from her mouth. Leo ran down the stairs, and a few seconds later he shouted that she was dead.’

  At this point I saw that I was gripping Inessa’s hand. It dawned on me that I hadn’t held her hand for many years, and yet at this moment it felt so natural to do so. ‘I think I passed out with the pain,’ she continued. ‘Uncle Leo called for an ambulance, and for a few hours it was just flashing lights, worried expressions and this terrible pain.’ She pointed at the scar, and furrowed her brow. ‘The major organs were unaffected, they said, but there were some minor internal abrasions that will take time to heal. But fortunately, after a few days I found my feet again. I wanted to phone you, but Dad insisted that you weren’t told about it all until you were back on your feet. Leo wanted to phone you too, but I stopped him. I told him, once the wound had started to heal, that I would come to England and tell you myself.’

  For a few minutes, neither of us were able to look at one another. Through the disbelief, we were merely two people trying to understand the chaotic plane that we were both living on. And beneath it all, I knew we were wondering if we had somehow caused all this, or at least allowed it to happen.

  I held Inessa’s hand. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. And that you’re okay.’

  I said it suddenly, for once speaking to my sister without trying hard to moderate my emotions. She clearly didn’t know how to respond. She looked down on my hand, now gripping hers, and her eyes remained fixed on it.

  ‘I am now. I am now that I’ve told you,’ she said.

  ‘Have you ever told anyone else, about Bruna?’ I asked.

  She looked up, and slowly shook her head.

  ‘Dr Ibarra said I mustn’t carry it alone any longer. He said it can destroy a person.’

  Her eyes glazed over. ‘I’ve no doubt it can. But I bet he hasn’t ever had to wonder what to do with all the horrible things a person can put in your head. There’s just nowhere for those thoughts to go. I think they take on a new life inside you, and eventually, if you kill them you kill a part of yourself too.’

  I squeezed her hand tighter, desperately hoping something sincere would transmit through me and into her. I hoped that I could speak without being hindered with formality or self-consciousness, that I would speak just to heal my sister, who had never felt more like my own flesh and blood. And yet she also seemed so alien to me just then. Her mind so different in the ways it had coped with events, even events that had happened when we had been in the same room.

  ‘Then maybe we can’t do that,’ I said. ‘Maybe we just have to learn to live with them. And not lock them away.’

  She looked up. ‘How can I lock it away, Yelena? She obviously hated me so much more than you, because I was that bit closer to Dad. She used your love for me against you. How can I b
ring all that out in the open, find a way round it? She just… intrudes. Even dead, Bruna just intrudes on everything.’

  ‘Do you… ever feel her intruding even now?’

  Her eyes fell. ‘All the time,’ she said. ‘I dream about her all the time, Yelena. And I hear her voice too.’

  ‘I do too,’ I said, as I clasped her hand. ‘I didn’t like him saying it at first, but Dr Ibarra says we can be fixed.’

  ‘I hope he’s right,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I’m so glad you’re back on your feet. I prayed for you, you know. For weeks after the accident, and I don’t even believe in God. I didn’t know what else to do. I worried about how you were feeling when you were alone in the hospital.’

  I felt something inside me move. Her voice began to break. ‘I worried about how you were ever going to handle it, so far away from home. I prayed like I did for us when we were little girls, do you remember? I prayed someone would come in the night and keep you safe.’

  Then her voice broke, my body moving into hers to protect her sob from the other guests. ‘It sounds so stupid, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ I laughed, gently. ‘It means a lot to me.’

  She smiled and wiped her eyes. I looked apologetically at the waiter, but in truth I was glad he had seen her tears. Strangely, I felt proud.

  The rest of the dinner was spent in silence. The loud, somehow undignified clattering of cutlery behind us only accentuated the relieved silence that now bloomed between us. Two sisters, sat together in the dark, in the corner of a near-deserted restaurant. For once, I felt aware that anyone looking at us would know we were family. The way we moved into one another’s space, the way we were so content to sit wordlessly.

  Despite the horrors she had described, I didn’t want Inessa to leave my side. I felt there was someone I needed to protect. That I had a responsibility. For the duration of that dinner, I also felt safe for the first time. Despite all that there was to still contend with, I felt happy.