Misha walks home from the Conservatory with his new friends when he’s done his classes, and in fair weather he and Antonina take Tinka and Dani to the nearby park. Dani is Misha’s dog. He is small, brown and white-spotted with long, soft ears, and he sleeps at the foot of Misha’s bed at night. Tinka is too old to walk far now, so Antonina carries her.
After the park, they have dinner and talk about the music they have heard and made that day. Misha does his homework, or practises. The apartment on Iliychiv Prospekt, two blocks from the Fontanka River, is small but warm and inviting.
“Mother,” Mikhail says—at twelve, he no longer calls her Mama—“when can we go out to the square for the fireworks?”
Antonina pictures Misha watching the display Konstantin put on every New Year at Angelkov; she still can recall the wonder on Misha’s face.
“Soon, my son. Lyosha? What time are the fireworks scheduled?”
Lyosha glances at the clock on the piano. “We should leave in fifteen minutes.”
“We will leave after the toast. If you will, fetch Anya from the kitchen. Ask her to bring the good glasses.”
Lyosha married ten months ago. Anya Fomovna is small and winsome, with chestnut hair that gleams like wood. They came with Antonina and Misha to St. Petersburg, and they live nearby. Lyosha secured a well-paying job in the military stables. Anya comes to Antonina’s apartment every morning to help out with the housework and laundry while Antonina works. On the weekends she teaches Antonina how to cook.
Little Nusha returned to her parents in one of the local mirs with the gift of a bag of rubles. Antonina secured Pavel a job at the Bakanevs’; she gave him permission to take anything he wished that had belonged to Konstantin.
Fyodor and Raisa look after Angelkov. They live in the house with blue shutters. Olga went with them; she was too old to start a new life. She died only last month, and Antonina went back to Angelkov to attend the funeral and see the old woman buried behind the Church of the Redeemer. While there, she supervised the erection of stone markers for both Konstantin’s and Valentin’s graves, and she alone stood by the violinist’s grave for his prayers.
She knows everything that happened in those last, terrible months at Angelkov. She glances at the desk where Grisha’s letter sits in the top drawer: the letter, written in his firm hand, on the back of her notes to Glinka. The two pages were delivered to Angelkov a week after Misha came back to her. The letter tells her everything. She knows it by heart, she has read it that often.
She is working on forgiveness, and finds it is easier to forgive when looking ahead instead of back.
Now the four of them—Antonina, Mikhail, Lyosha and Anya—raise their glasses and toast the New Year. The wine is cheap but glows, ruby, in the crystal glasses Antonina brought with her to St. Petersburg.
“Za vashe zdorov’e!” Lyosha says. Antonina echoes, “To your health,” and the four of them clink their glasses. Misha grimaces at the taste, but looks proud to be given wine on this special occasion. God knows, Antonina thinks, he has been through enough to be thought of as a young man now.
On this special night, she thinks of her parents and brothers, of Konstantin and Valentin—poor Valentin—of all those who tried to care for her in their own ways. She thinks of Lilya.
Lyosha tried three times to visit his sister in Seltocheeva, but was turned away. Lilya Petrovna, he was told, has devoted her life to God, and has permanently left the outside world. Lyosha has accepted that he will never see her again.
After the toast, Antonina sets down her glass, the wine untouched. She has kept the promise she made to God and to herself in the dacha.
As they dress warmly to go to the square for the fireworks, Antonina notices with a start that Lyosha is putting on a quilted coat that Grisha wore in the stables. She runs her hand over the sleeve and smiles at Lyosha.
On the way out, she kisses the icon and crosses herself. To faith, she thinks, and then follows Lyosha and Anya and Misha out into the cold January air, closing the door firmly to keep in the warmth.
ZERENTUY KATORGA, SIBERIA
The men in Hut 83 are finished their labour for the day, and have been given a ration of potato vodka to celebrate the New Year. Thirty-two men are crammed into the wooden shack. There is a narrow corridor between the sixteen stacked cots, with the door at one end and an open bucket for a toilet at the other. Tonight the hut is even more raucous and malodorous than usual.
“And what are your plans for 1863?” the new man—his name is Bogdan—asks. Then he smiles, a grimace, really, at his own attempt at a joke. “Plans,” he repeats with a rude snort.
Grisha rolls the tin cup with the two inches of potato vodka between his palms. “The only thing possible,” he says, looking into the other man’s red-rimmed eyes.
Bogdan was among the most recent shipment of prisoners brought to Zerentuy. He is a Sybiraks—a Pole. He was assigned the bunk over Grisha’s. The man who had formerly slept above Grisha died three days before Bogdan arrived, coughing up blood and wasting to a thin layer of flesh over bone. A few others, noticing the unnatural quiet from the top bunk, had stealthily made away with the dead man’s blanket and clothes and boots before morning, when the guards were alerted and hauled the body away.
Grisha had been the first to know that the man, an elderly cellist who had once played for the Tsar, was dead. He’d liked and respected him, and so instead of taking what the dead cellist no longer had use for, he’d made the sign of the cross on the man’s forehead, covering the cold, waxen face with the blanket before the others crept up to take it away. He didn’t hold it against them; he’d done the same.
Bogdan, his head half shaved in the way of all new prisoners, still has some weight on him. As yet there are no rough, frostbitten patches on his cheeks. Grisha eyes his boots, surprised the guards haven’t taken them yet. But they will. He again wants to feel supple leather wrapped round his feet, instead of the newspaper-lined felt boots of the prisoners. He wonders, absently, what this man, Bogdan, did to end up here, in the Siberian work camp. He also knows it’s unlikely he’ll find out.
The men do not discuss their crimes, or what they’ve been deemed guilty of. Too much talking in a katorga is not a good thing. Some of the men Grisha works with each day are murderers and thieves. Some simply had too much to say about the new regime taking over Russia: those with the belief that the Tsar’s will should not arbitrarily be understood as Russia’s law.
“To get out of this place,” Grisha finally tells Bogdan. “That’s what I plan.”
A short, wizened man with a deep limp, on his way to the bucket, passes the lower cot where Grisha and Bogdan sit.
“You are a dreamer, Grigori Sergeyevich. You know you won’t survive.”
“I will.” Grisha’s voice is quiet and sure.
The older man shakes his head, his lungs wheezing like bellows as he laughs. Bogdan drains his cup. He grips it with his huge, scarred hands.
“Because it is the New Year, Naryshkin, I will humour you. Suppose you escape from the camp. The old bastard,” Bogdan says, looking at the wheezing man’s back, “has given up. He knows there’s no chance for him. But let’s say you escape. Then what? How will you cross Siberia? Where will you go?”
Grisha puts his cup at his feet and digs under the frayed coat tied with rope and inside his layers of patched tunics. He pulls out a hard chunk of dark bread, and with some effort tears it in half. He hands a piece to his new friend. The man grabs it, nodding his thanks, and carefully puts it to the right side of his mouth, where six teeth—three on the top and three on the bottom—remain. Grisha knows, by the cautious manner in which Bogdan gnaws the bread and the awkward way he forms his words, that he has only recently lost most of his teeth.
“Go on, Naryshkin,” Bogdan urges him. “It’s the New Year, and the night for seeing the future. So tell me what you predict for yourself, my friend.”
“I will walk out,” Grisha says, picking up his cup again.
“I have walked across Siberia before, and I was hardly more than a boy. I did it once, and I will do it again.”
“All right,” Bogdan says, still gingerly chewing. “Where will you go? Do you have a family who waits for you? A home?”
Grisha thinks of the house with blue shutters. “I don’t know. But I know whom I will walk towards. Whom I will look for, and hope she still waits.”
The other man’s face softens. “It is always good to think of someone waiting,” he says quietly. “What is important in a place like this is the hope.” His cup is empty, but he raises it.
“To hope,” Grisha murmurs. He crosses himself, raises his cup towards Bogdan and then upwards. “To hope,” he repeats, picturing Antonina’s face, and he drinks.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I grew up hearing pieced-together stories of life in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century; I listened to my father and grandmother speak Russian at the dinner table, and my grandmother whispered her language to me in bed at night. I parroted back her words, not understanding them, but loving our furtive, hidden connection. Because of the suspicions and distrust surrounding the Soviet Union during the Cold War, having a Russian heritage was something I was taught to suppress. But the intrigue surrounding my grandparents’ lives in villages near Odessa and St. Petersburg before they fled in the hopes of a brighter future filled me with a longing to understand what was—inexplicably to me as a child—dark and secretive. It was this part of my past that drew me to write about Russia decades later. I started with an incident from my grandmother’s life, which I’ve fictionalized for the novel: she watched her five-year-old brother being stolen by Cossacks on a muddy road outside her village home. He was never seen again.
Studying Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, with its contrasts of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, its all-encompassing religious overtones, its emerging literary and musical giants and its long history of serfdom, was both wildly exciting and tremendously challenging. To help me in my search to capture the aura of that time I relied on fiction and poetry, from the classic offerings of Gogol and Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov to the slightly more contemporary works of Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Nabokov and Soltzhenitsyn. Memoirs such as Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824 by Aleksandr Nikitenko and Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1758-1821 offered intriguing details of a past life. Of great assistance were Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskiaia; The Pearl by Douglas Smith; Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village by Serge Schmemann; Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia by Richard Stites; and Life on the Russian Country Estate by Priscilla Roosevelt.
Big thanks, as always, to my agent, Sarah Heller, for suggestions and encouragement. Thanks to Anne Collins, publisher and editor extraordinaire, for her insight and gentle direction. Thanks to John Sweet for astute copy-editing and asking the right questions; to Terri Nimmo, for the jacket and interior design; to Caleb Snider, Deirdre Molina, Marion Garner and Ashley Dunn of the Random House Canada team.
To Zalie, Brenna and Kitt, thank you, as always, for so graciously putting up with your mother’s wild mind and sudden flights of fancy. Special thanks to Brenna, who shared long train journeys across Mongolia and Siberia and into Western Russia as I sought to make this story right. Thank you to Vialetta in Ulan Ude, Valeriy in Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal, Tamara in Irkutsk, and Irena in Yekaterinburg who opened their homes to us, giving us a taste of true Siberian life. Thank you to Randall, Tim and Shannon and your families for the endless encouragement and love. In this year of change for all of us, with arrivals and departures, your caring presence has been more meaningful than ever before. Thank you to my friends—you know who you are—for your endless patience and your interest and support in the way I have chosen to live my life. Each of you brings such a rich weave to the tapestry.
Finally, loving thanks to Marty, who has taught me so much about story—both real and imagined—and the joy of sharing creative lives and hearts.
LINDA HOLEMAN is the author of the international bestselling historical novels The Linnet Bird, The Moonlit Cage, In a Far Country and The Saffron Gate, as well as eight other works of fiction and short fiction. Her books have been translated into twelve languages. A world traveller, she grew up in Winnipeg, and now lives in Toronto and Santa Monica, California.
The Lost Souls of Angelkov Page 45