The Road from Midnight

by Wendyl Nissen

  Of course Trubetskoy was not Nikolai’s real surname because he never had one. When he arrived at the prison camp he just gave us one name, and that was it. So he was on our files as Nikolai 1956, the year we estimated he was born. We thought he was about eight, which made his sentence of five years seem cruel, but at that time in Russia the idea was to keep the criminal element off the streets, reducing the evidence that the system wasn’t working. So it was convenient to have him in that camp.

  He had been convicted on charges of thieving — mainly food to survive — and murder. He and a friend had brutally clubbed another boy to death after drinking grain alcohol. They hid the boy’s body in a barn, but Nikolai’s older accomplice saw the death as a badge of honour and talked too much. Nikolai has always claimed it was this boy who dealt the fatal blow.

  I never saw Nikolai cry, like so many of the others who came into the camp at such a young age. I think he was just glad to be away from the man who had him and to be able to have three meals a day and somewhere warm and safe to sleep. He made few friends and kept to himself, always a danger sign for those of us who cared for them.

  And then at the age of about 10 he appeared with three tattoos on his knuckles he had done himself. He had made the ink for the tattoos by burning the heel of his boot and mixing the soot with urine, and applied it with a sharpened guitar string threaded through a pen cap. He had a St Petersburg cross on his left ring finger and had begun a star on the finger next to it. A new point would be added every year he spent in the camp.

  He told the other boys that the cross was a symbol of a greater power who watched over him, although I knew, and I think so did he, that it simply represented St Petersburg and the fact he was in prison there. And he said that the star was a symbol that they would one day shine above all others. He had the other boys believe that if they too had these tattoos, they would receive their power. Already Nikolai was showing a talent for providing a rare service that others needed. He became very popular after that, administering the tattoos and charging the boys whatever they could offer, such as extra food, cigarettes, even letters from their families if they had them, which he found consoling to read with no family of his own to send him letters. It was the first sign in Nikolai that he had an entrepreneurial spirit. I turned a blind eye to his tattoo sessions, relieved to see that finally he was finding his way.

  When Nikolai was released from prison at the age of 13, he was given two choices. Join the Soviet Army or work in the gold and platinum mines in Kolyma in the north-east of Russia.

  Nikolai chose mining and was immediately befriended and accepted as a surrogate son by Pyotr Lopakhin, a former accountant from Moscow who had been imprisoned for refusing to incriminate a fellow official for financial irregularities. By the time he was free to leave prison his wife had been arrested and tortured. She died in prison and he had no family or friends left to return to.

  So he stayed on at the mines.

  “I can live here well enough,” he would tell Nikolai. “I will teach you to hunt and fish, and I can also teach you about money.”

  Pyotyr lived with Vasya Nikonov who had taken care of Pyotr for many years in an unlikely alliance of political and criminal prisoner. The two shared a two-roomed hut they had built in the forest, where they had also constructed an elaborate bath house, and got by on the tobacco, vodka and food Vasya managed to steal from supply trucks and the fish and game Pyotr caught in the forest and rivers.

  It was a peaceful and happy existence for the two former prisoners. Nikolai felt as though he had found his first home there, and stayed with them for nine formative years. He had found two people who would become the only parents he would ever know.

  “I call it my University of Kolyma,” Nikolai would joke. “It was there that I learned how to make the most of the corruption which exists among our police, government officials and inspectors.

  “Another thing I learned in Kolyma,” he would add, his grey eyes softening. “Was how to be loved.”

  That was the closest I would ever get to understanding how Nikolai operated. He kept his plans and his activities very close to his chest always replying “You do not need to know,” if my questions became too pointed.

  Nikolai did well for a young man whose life started on the streets of Moscow, born to parents he did not know. His criminal past did him no harm as the tattoos on his hands gave him a certain authority with the shady figures he was dealing with. He began looking into some small investments and would read up on economics late into the night, keen to take Pyotr’s knowledge further by learning how to make larger amounts of money and understand the international markets.

  When Katya arrived at Polnoch he was already one of the wealthiest men in Communist Russia, a not unusual situation as many people high up in the Party accumulated much wealth, even if a lot of it was hidden off shore.

  And while she was enjoying her childhood hidden away Nikolai could not have been better placed to benefit from the chaos and opportunity of post-Communist Russia.

  By the mid-90s Nikolai’s name appeared in a list of the top 10 Russian oligarchs.

  To me he was always little Nikolai. But I never let my guard down, I never forgot what he was capable of.

  • • •

  Ola is one of those women who looks older than she is. When she first started looking after me she was only in her forties but to me she has always had the look of an old peasant woman, dressing in sensible cardigans, brogue shoes and tweed skirts. She has always been a little plump, possibly due to her penchant for the sweet Russian doughnuts she ordered our chef to make daily. Ola loves food and if I have trouble finding her in the halls I head straight for the kitchen where she will be energetically making khachapuri, her favourite cheese-filled breads, or golubtsy, her minced meat and rice rolled in cabbage leaves.

  “You must try this,” she would say enthusiastically, stuffing something warm, sweet and delicious in my mouth. “Is that not heaven!” she would exclaim. Some of my favourite memories are sitting in that kitchen eating Ola’s food, and through her I developed a love of experimentation with taste, always keen to try something different.

  Ola’s hair was grey, swept back into a bun to reveal a strongly Slavic face with strong cheekbones, which once would have been very beautiful. But Ola is in denial about that. Despite having large brown eyes, good straight teeth and a plump heart-shaped mouth, she always dressed down, and I doubt she’s ever used a moisturiser on her face. She’s also a secret smoker. If Nikolai knew, they’d have one of their famous rows, but it’s our special secret and I know how much smoking helps her get through her days.

  I can never remember a moment in my life where I wanted for anything. Except perhaps some playmates. We rarely left the estate except to accompany Nikolai to his apartment in St Petersburg when I was a lot older and he felt I needed to learn about the ways of the big city. And I never minded life on the estate because it was so beautiful.

  Nikolai had found it as a ruin several years before I arrived, and using pictures and paintings he found in libraries, he restored it to its former glory, when it was part of the lost world of Czarist Russia. It was built by Prince Boris Vasilyevich Trubetskoy whose great grandfather was a trusted adviser to Peter the Great. In recognition of his services, Boris was presented with land on the island of Kronstadt thirty kilometres west of St Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland. The land was never used by the family, who spent their time in St Petersburg. None of them was fond of making the sea journey out to the island.

  That was until Boris had no choice but to hop on the boat. A fixture at the court of Catherine the Great he got offside with the scandalous and sexually free queen, apparently for spreading gossip about her favourite lover, Grigory Potemkin, after the queen had rejected Boris after only one night in the bedroom. He went into exile for some years before returning to Russia, hopeful that the empress would have calmed down. He was wrong.

  He had no choice but to devote the next few years to
creating his own version of a grand palace in the Greek Revival style on his island. He named it Polnoch, the Russian word for midnight. The name symbolised his hope that his time here would be the midnight of his life, with a brighter dawn eventually emerging when Catherine forgave him.

  Boris employed the services of an Italian architect and hired craftsmen from all over Russia to construct the enormous three-storey mansion.

  When Catherine the Great died in 1796 Boris was welcomed back to the court and Polnoch was left deserted for decades.

  During the 1917 revolution angry peasants looted and vandalised the manor house, stealing everything that wasn’t screwed down and taking out their fury of oppression on the estate by slashing paintings, decapitating statues and setting the place alight. By the time Nikolai visited, it was being used as an asylum for the insane.

  “When I first heard of the estate I hoped I would find it still had good bones and would require little to restore it,” said Nikolai. “But I was sadly disappointed.

  “I walked up the avenue, which is lined by the oaks we still have today, and the moment I saw the old building my heart leapt,” he told me. “I knew that this was the home I had always dreamed of. I could sense its grandeur in the design and the layout even though so much of it had been destroyed.

  “And then marching up to me came a large woman of about 45, naked to the waist, her head shaved and eyes torched with madness. ‘You must go from here,’ she yelled at us. ‘Leave us alone, we don’t need your interfering. Go now or we will kill you!’

  “I looked at the local official who had brought me here and he simply smiled.

  “ ‘Mad, all of them,’ he explained. ‘There are only 25 of them living here now, but in its day this place housed 200 mental patients. We had to go to some effort to keep them in.’

  “Only then did I notice that the entire estate was more like a concentration camp, with high barbed wire fences, and as we approached the main house the stench was unbearable. These people were living among pigs and cows, covered in excrement and barely human. I had never seen anything so disgusting in my life, not even when I lived on the streets as a boy.”

  When Nikolai took possession of the estate, after months of bribes to any number of government officials, he decided to allow the mental asylum to remain in the out buildings on the grounds.

  “I could only imagine the human suffering and pain which had gone on in that place, Katya,” he said. “I wanted to change that, to make it humane again.”

  He brought in staff with medical backgrounds who cleaned up the patients and supervised them. He had the outer buildings modified into modern units for each patient and tracked down Ola, his old carer at the prison camp. He had never forgotten her kindness and thought she would prefer to live there with him than continue with the work at the camp. He installed her in the main house with him and put her in charge of the patients.

  He also changed his name to Nikolai Vasilyevich Trubetskoy. He wasn’t fooling anyone in Russia that he was descended from the original owner of Polnoch, but it would definitely impress his international associates, he told me with a laugh.

  When I arrived at Polnoch only a few of the mental patients were still alive and worked on the estate managing the park and the gardens and working in the house as cooks, maids and housekeepers.

  Gaev, Yasha and Firs worked in the gardens and stables and were all born with foetal alcohol syndrome, the result of having a mother who was permanently smashed out on vodka. They all looked odd, with thin lips and small eyes, something Ola said she had seen a lot of in her work with children in the camp. And they were permanent children with short attention spans and a tendency to enjoy fantasy lives involving stories and characters they invented. Which was fine by me growing up. These three became my playmates as I rode my pony Charlie and ran around the lawns with my dog Bobo.

  Inside the house were Anya, Varya and Dunyasha, who all suffered from various mental disorders but none that was ever explained to me. They always seemed quite normal but I think Ola kept them well medicated.

  Looking back, I think it suited Nikolai to have Polnoch staffed exclusively by mental patients because they would never leave the estate, not even to go to the local village, and therefore my presence remained a secret for many years. I didn’t leave it until I was five and even then it was in the middle of the night, and we were whisked off by helicopter for my first holiday in the Mediterranean.

  Polnoch was the perfect setting for a Russian princess and until I was an adult, that is who I thought I was. I genuinely believed that Nikolai was a descendant of Prince Boris and that I was too. I slept in a four-poster art nouveau bed which was brought from Paris, the walls of my bedroom were lavender polished faux marble, and they were covered in silk hangings.

  My education was taken care of by Nikolai, who taught me Russian and French, and a series of tutors who were brought in for a few months at a time to hothouse my Japanese, practise English with me and instruct me on maths, history and literature. My favourite was Stanislav Zadchuk, but he didn’t last very long.

  They never did. Nikolai would have them removed the moment they started asking too many questions about who my real parents were, as my English was very good even if I spoke it with an accent they’d never heard. I had become adept at evading these sorts of questions myself because I knew it made Nikolai happy. It meant a lot to him that I called him Pappa and regarded him as my real father, which was easy because he was the only father, I felt I had ever known.

  At first I was very afraid of him. He is a big bear of a man, 6ft 4 in tall with broad shoulders and a huge barrel of a chest. He’s the sort of man who could lift you up and throw you in the air without any effort whatsoever and he used to do that a lot with me once I trusted him.

  Nikolai is very fit, quite good looking with his silver hair and eyes the colour of slate. His face is lived in and a little lined but it has strong features and he has aged well. He has always looked at me with so much love, his eyes at those moments are nothing but fine sunny days and clear blue skies.

  But I’ve seen them change. I’ve seen him angry and cold when talking to Ola or in those rare moments when I’ve interrupted him on a business phone call. At those times his eyes are pure evil, grey-blue slivers of metal which could stab you in the heart. He’s always careful not to let me see him like that, but I have grown up with the knowledge that he has a dark side.

  When I first met him he knelt down beside me and spoke to me in English, calling me by my new name “Katya.”

  From then on he came to see me often throughout the day as I slowly adjusted to my new surroundings and started to feel more at home.

  The next day he brought me the best present I have ever had in my life. He came in with a pink box tied up with a white silk ribbon. As I opened it I could hear something inside and there he was. My white toy bichon frise, who cowered in the corner of the box before letting me gently lift him up to my face. He tentatively licked my nose and we were bonded from that moment.

  I called him Bobo and he was the most extraordinary dog you could ever hope to have. I swear he was human in another life because he could read my mind and my moods and hated it if we were parted even for a moment. Now that I look back I realise we were the same, Bobo and I. Both parted from our families but finding comfort in each other.

  They say children are resilient beings and I was certainly that. Within a few months I was happily ensconced in my daily routine of being spoiled rotten by Nikolai, fed, bathed and clothed to perfection by Ola and enjoying my lessons.

  Little did I know that the life I was leading as the daughter of a Russian oligarch was that of one of the world’s richest little princesses who had the best of everything.

  I would ask Nikolai how I ended up living with him and Ola and he would talk in his faraway voice.

  “My friends found you on the streets of Moscow,” he would say. “You were a half-starved waif, covered in sores and riddled with lice.” He wo
uld then look away and continue: “Like me, you were the product of this country’s communist idealism where we were all supposed to be looked after by the State. But instead we are a nation of alcoholics and our children are left to starve on the streets,” he would spit.

  “From the moment I saw you Katya, I could never leave you. I brought you here to Polnoch and adopted you.”

  He could never be drawn on any more details, no matter how hard I tried to find out, especially as I got older and became convinced that I would one day track my own parents down. He always changed the subject and picked me up in one of his bear hugs, and I guess because I was always so happy it never really bothered me.

  Nikolai was sometimes away on business but he would often work from Polnoch, barking instructions down the phone. He had a rule that we would never be apart for more than a week and so most nights of my childhood we would spend an hour before dinner together in the library, surrounded by his books and favourite art and in winter a roaring fire. I still associate the warmth and red flames of a roaring fire with immense pleasure and love. No one was allowed to disturb us during that time and during those precious moments he would talk to me about his work, about art and food, about anything really. I came to love those precious hours with Nikolai and nothing would stop me from being there, even when I was sick.

  I know Ola was jealous of this time we had together because she was always a little disapproving, and one night I heard her shouting at him. I was supposed to be in bed but I had forgotten a book I had left in the library and could hear raised voices coming up the marble staircase from below. My Russian was good by then and I caught every word

  “I detest what you are doing to that girl,” spat Ola

  “You have no idea what you are talking about, you mad woman. Leave me be,” replied Nikolai in his angry voice, and I could imagine that his eyes were cold.

  “If I thought reporting you to authorities would mean anything in this country I would. You will have your way, because you have your money. But do not forget that I know, and I will always know what you did to her.”