For a second, it almost looks as if Jennifer will accept the situation. To a mind like hers, bounded by the better areas of London, Russia is indeed a long way away, a convenient dumping ground for an old woman who has outlived both her friends and her usefulness. Then her face clouds over. She squares her shoulders and shakes her head. “I can’t allow it,” she says. “We’re still responsible for her.”
And once in Russia, there’s no telling who I might talk to or what I might say, is there, Jennifer? Once in Russia, you’d have no control over me.
“You can’t stop me if I want to,” I say, like a defiant child.
“I’m sorry, great-grandmother, but I can,” Jennifer says firmly. “You’ve forgotten already, haven’t you?”
No great-granddaughter, I haven’t forgotten, but still I watch with horrified fascination as she snaps open her handbag. So Charles has got his doctor friend – his club-friend – to sign the appropriate order. And with so much haste! Yuri must really have worried them. Jennifer pulls an official-looking piece of paper out of the handbag, and holds it up.
“Do you know what this is?” she asks Yuri.
“It’s a Gulag billet-doux,” I tell him.
He nods his head, understanding immediately, but Jennifer merely looks puzzled. Of course she does. She never lived through it. Wasn’t brought up, as Yuri was, in a country where it was a recent, painful memory.
“It’s a committal order,” she tells the journalist, and then turns back to me. “I told you before it would be better for everyone if you went voluntarily, but you never listen, do you? Well, here it is, all signed and sealed.”
All signed and sealed. Like the orders which used to come out of Stalin’s Secretariat.
“Twenty years’ hard labour. No appeal.”
And there’s no appeal now. Who would side with an old woman against an army of doctors, social workers and concerned relatives? But I won’t give up yet.
I look across at Yuri. He shrugs his shoulders as if to say he doesn’t think there’s anything he can do to help – but that he’ll try anyway. “Why don’t you let the Princess come back to Russia?” he asks. “It’s her life.”
The two husbands have been standing in the corridor like the useless appendages they are, but now Edward, our budding politician, steps just inside the room. “Look here, old chap,” he says, “I’m not sure how you handle things in your country, but what my wife’s holding in her hand is a legal document, and we British are brought up to respect the law.”
We British! Oh Edward, you pompous windbag, I almost love you!
I rise stiffly to my feet. Edward and Charles move closer together, blocking the door. Do they expect me to make a run for it? At my age! I step round Sonia and open the top drawer of my chest, the one which contains my pension book, bits of string and money-saving coupons.
“What’s she doing now?” Sonia says.
Why don’t you ask me, Sonia?
My hands are trembling with excitement, but also with fear. Is it here? It should be. Where else would I have put it? Leaflet on saving electricity, pair of scissors, magnifying glass – it has to be here somewhere. My fingers brush against stiff cardboard and I know I’ve found what I am looking for.
I pull it out of the drawer and wave it triumphantly at Jennifer. “Russian passport!” I say.
Jennifer snatches it from me. Clumsily, for she still clutches her precious piece of paper in one hand, she flicks through my passport, a part of my history. She swoops down on the page containing my personal details. The words are mumbo-jumbo to her, but the numbers are the same.
“What’s this mean?” she demands, holding out the page for me to read.
A younger Anna, a pretty Anna, stares up at me from my photograph.
“Don’t you know?” Jennifer asks. “Have you forgotten your Russian?”
No, I haven’t forgotten. “It says, ‘Expires’,” I tell her.
“Then it’s over sixty years out of date!” Jennifer scoffs. She hands the passport back to me, now that she no longer considers it a danger. “And surely, you took out British citizenship.”
No, I never did. I may have been an exile with no hope of returning home, yet somehow I could never bring myself to cut that last link. “Can I get my passport renewed?” I ask Yuri.
“There should be no trouble about that, Princess,” the Russian says, smiling broadly now.
Jennifer has clenched her fists. She’s scrunching up her neat, white legal paper. “This is ridiculous!” she explodes. “What does it matter whether she’s British or Russian. We’ve got a committal order here.”
“I’m … er … not so sure it applies any more,” Edward says cautiously. “We could still put great-grandma in a retirement home, of course, but if the Russian Government made a request for her return to her own country, we’d have to comply. And the whole incident might … er …”
Might leave a nasty taste in the mouths of the electors who Edward hopes will vote him into a nice, easy living at the Palace of Westminster?
“Oh really, this is impossible!” Jennifer says – almost screams.
But it isn’t, my girl. Just once in a while things happen differently from the way they should in the World According to Jennifer.
Sonia, with the compulsiveness common to her type, has never stopped packing during the whole argument. Now that she’s finished, she’s at a loss.
“Close the case, Sonia,” I order her.
And that’s exactly what she does.
“Great-grandmother,” Jennifer says wheedlingly, “you don’t really want to go back to Russia. It’ll be like a foreign country to you.”
I don’t even bother to answer her.
“Can you find somewhere to put me up until it’s time to leave?” I ask Yuri.
“I think my budget could stand a modest hotel,” he says cheerfully.
“Then if you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand with my suitcase …”
He stands up and takes the case from an unprotesting Sonia.
“My coat!” I say to Edward.
I speak to him as if I were Countess Olga, and he one of the servants at the Big House. And he acts like a servant, mutely reaching for my coat and holding it while I put it on.
Charles stands out of the way so that I can pass. Corridor, front door, and we are in the street. It’s cold here, but it will be colder still in Russia.
Yuri’s car is parked in front of the house. He helps me in. My relatives, the survivors of the once great house of Mayakovsky, stand on the front doorstep, rigid as statues. They are still standing there when the car reaches the corner of Matlock Road.
“Stop, please,” I tell Yuri. “Stop right now.”
“Have you forgotten something, Princess?” he asks, pulling up to the curb and glancing nervously over his shoulder at Jennifer and company.
“I’ve never forgotten anything,” I say, half-jokingly. “That’s my curse.”
My aged arm winds down the window, and the three men standing in front of the shop – Ali, Winston and Terry the barman – turn around to look at me.
“Feeling better, Princess?” Terry asks. “She was a bit Brahms and Liszt earlier,” he explains to the others.
“Much better,” I tell him. “I’m going home.”
“Home!” Winston sighs, and the air is suddenly full of sound of steel bands.
“One day!” Ali promises himself, and I can almost smell the jasmine.
“I’ll miss you all,” I say.
And I mean it. If not with understanding, then at least with kindness, all these men have stepped a little way into my silent land of age and loneliness.
“We’ll miss you, too,” Terry replies. “Bound to, aren’t we?”
“Drive on,” I say. I’m speaking to Yuri, but I’m still looking at the three friends I will never see again.
I feel the car pull away.
“Don’t go now, Princess,” Ali says, and I can tell from his expression he’s search
ing for some reason to make me stay. “We’ve got a special offer on stewing steak,” he shouts after me as we turn the corner.
I wonder how my daughter will feel – about me, about herself – now that her revolution is just as dead as mine. And will I still be able to love this ageing woman who was once a tiny helpless baby in my arms?
There will be other challenges, too. Confronting my past. Observing a Russia which is in my bones, but which I can no longer claim as mine.
“It will be very hard going home,” I tell my dead husband. “Did I do the right thing?”
“Of course you did, my dear,” he answers reassuringly. “You’ve always been a fighter – why stop now?”
We are on Kilburn High Road, but already my mind is back in my motherland, the wide steppes, the busy streets of Petersburg.
My aches and pains have disappeared. I imagine myself riding a wild Cossack pony again. I know I couldn’t really do it – but I feel as if I could.
The Silent Land Page 32