‘I think Sascha would have approved of what you did with the money.’
‘Your donation meant a great deal to me. Not because of the money but because I knew that you had given the idea behind the foundation your blessing. Did you know that I went looking for you before you came to that signing?’
‘No.’
‘I saw you.’
‘Where? When?’ Her hand began to shake.
‘In New York.’ He took the wine glass gently from her and set it on the table in front of them. ‘It was at an art exhibition; you were with a young boy. He looked so like your husband, I wondered if he had been frozen in time.’
‘You saw my grandson Claus. He looks exactly like my husband, but he is nothing like him in character. He is a carpenter.’
‘A carpenter is a better occupation than a soldier,’ Leon observed.
‘You should have spoken to me.’
‘You looked so busy, so happy with your friends, I didn’t like to interrupt.’
‘You haven’t said anything about your wife. Did you go back to her after you left the camp?’
‘Ludmilla?’ Leon laughed. ‘She would sooner move in with the devil than me. Did Sascha tell you that he and I had been friends since we were three years old?’
‘Yes.’ Memories came flooding back of sitting in the tack room, listening as Sascha talked about his life before the war.
‘Sascha and I did everything together – school, music college, even marrying our girlfriends on the day we received our call-up papers; one or the other of us thought we should have someone to come back to when we returned as heroes. Not a bright idea, but war is the cause of many mistakes big and small. Sascha and I both enjoyed a week’s honeymoon and marched away. I didn’t see Ludmilla again for forty years. Sascha never saw Zoya again.’
‘If you never went back to your wife, was there someone else?’
‘Dozens,’ Leon laughed again. ‘But there was never one special person. Not like you and Sascha. And Ludmilla wasn’t the sort to sit around and wait. She wasted no time in making a life for herself even before the war ended, and believe me, that one knows how to live. But after One Last Summer was published legally in the Soviet Union, she looked after the royalties, and well. She also looked after our son and, after Zoya died of starvation during the war, Sascha’s daughter. Zoya called her Alexandra after Sascha, and she and my son Alexei grew up together. In Russia children who had been born during the war, and grew up during the Cold War, learned to live for the moment. The memory of what the Germans had done to Russia and the Russians in the war hung over the whole country. We all expected to be turned into clumps of radioactive dust any moment by an atomic bomb lobbed at us from America. Perhaps it was different for Westerners.’
‘Not different at all,’ Charlotte said seriously. ‘We were just as afraid of you as you were of us.’
‘Sascha’s daughter started drinking. Ludmilla tried to stop her but it proved impossible. My worthless son Alexei didn’t help. Even before Alexandra drank he saw no reason why he shouldn’t go from one woman to another. He has had so many wives and lovers I have lost count. But one good thing did come out of the short time they spent together. Mischa is Sascha’s grandson as well as mine. But you knew that from his eyes. It’s quite extraordinary how some things can skip a generation. Alexandra didn’t look at all like Sascha and her eyes were grey.’
‘Ludmilla brought up Mischa?’
‘We may not get on and she may not want me around, but she is a good woman. She saw the way Alexandra lived – endless men, drinking parties, sometimes disappearing for days at a time – and took Mischa to live with her when he was two years old. Sometimes Alexandra came and took him away, but Mischa always found his way back to Ludmilla. It was no wonder; she was the only one who fed and clothed him and kept him clean. Alexandra died when Mischa was six, Ludmilla sent him to school and, when his teachers discovered he was musical, she badgered them until they sent him to a conservatory. We both went to his graduation. At twenty-five he became the youngest professor ever appointed to the conservatory. They will be sorry to lose him, but, as I said, the idea to turn Grunwaldsee into an international academy was his, and I would have been tempted to ask him to work here even if he wasn’t my grandson. He really is gifted, not just as a musician but a teacher.’
‘Does he know about Sascha and me?’
‘Yes. I told him the story behind One Last Summer.’
Charlotte’s eyes darkened in pain. ‘Was Sascha buried in a common grave in Siberia?’
‘The winters are long and hard in Siberia, and, as I said, he died in February. We had to wait for the spring thaw to bury him. I managed to get assigned to the burial detail and dug a separate grave for him away from the common pit. I marked the spot so I would be able to find it again.’
Picking up her glass, she left her chair and walked to the window that overlooked the woods around the lake. ‘Thank you, Leon.’
‘For buying your old home?’
‘For saving it from dereliction,’ she contradicted.
‘And for telling you how Sascha died when you had already guessed?’
‘For telling me what I wanted to hear. That the only man I ever loved truly loved me. And that our love was as unselfish as I always believed it was.’
‘I find it difficult to believe that you could ever doubt it, Charlotte. You and Sascha had something few people ever find in life. I envied you every time I saw you together. One look across the yard at Grunwaldsee between you two was like ten hours of conversation between most people. And it was memories of you that kept him alive through all the horror and misery of the gulag.’
‘Until he gave up.’
‘No, until he was able to go into that other world he dreamed of every night.’ He left his chair and joined her at the window. ‘I’ll drive you down to the summerhouse.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see when you reach there. I’ll bring the other bottle of wine. Then we can sit there and toast his memory – and you. I fell a little in love with you, too, you know.’
‘Leon –’
‘But don’t flatter yourself. You were the only presentable woman of my own age I came close to in almost forty years.’
Leon stopped the car in the lane outside the summerhouse. He opened the door for Charlotte and offered her his arm, but didn’t lead her inside. Instead they walked down to the bank of the lake, to a spot screened by trees and bushes, where you couldn’t be seen except by someone swimming or boating or standing on the opposite bank.
A concrete bench had been set there and Charlotte sank down on it. It was only then that she saw the stone at her feet:
Alexander (Sascha) Beletsky
1921 – 1947
who will for ever be Pyotr Borodin to all who read
One Last Summer
and now these three remain, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.
‘After the amnesty I applied for permission to return to Siberia,’ Leon said. ‘I didn’t ask for permission to bring him here. I was afraid that I wouldn’t get it. I’d made his coffin myself so I knew it would stand the test of a few years. I had it unearthed it late at night, put it in a packing case, and bribed the guard to take it as freight on a train back to Moscow and from Moscow to here. Mischa, Marius and I buried him here at night. We didn’t ask permission from the authorities to bury him here either, in case it was refused. The stone came from the mason who worked on the von Datski tomb. I know the text is Biblical, from Corinthians …’
‘Communists now read the Bible?’ Charlotte smiled.
‘It was the only book available in the camp. The Christians who had been sent for re-education always managed to smuggle in copies. Sascha and I were both ardent Communists before the war, but we both stopped believing in man-made creeds long before we reached the camp. It’s hard to believe in an ideology that’s destroyed your life. And we were both too cynical to believe in an omnipotent, al
l-caring Christian God after living through the war. But no other words seemed as appropriate as these for Sascha. I know that for him the greatest thing was love. And there is his symbol of regeneration and life after death.’ He pointed to a sapling planted next to the grave.
‘A weeping willow.’ Charlotte gazed at the branches that brushed the surface of the lake.
‘I thought it appropriate.’ Charlotte turned back to the stone.
‘As I said, I like to think that, like the hero of his book, he went to sleep and stayed in that other world. And it was real to him, Charlotte. Much more real than the camp. He watched your daughter grow and change day by day, celebrated her birthdays with you, sat up with you the night your son was born …’
She still had one question to ask.
‘You don’t think he was he haunted by the memory of a young pregnant woman standing in the snow-covered yard of Grunwaldsee screaming “Murderer”?’
‘No, Charlotte, I don’t. I know every memory that he carried of you, and that wasn’t one of them.’
Silence fell, and they were both content to simply sit – and remember.
‘We have been here for over an hour, Charlotte.’ Leon rose to his feet. ‘You’d like to stay here a little longer, alone?’
‘Please, Leon.’
He reached out and touched her hand. ‘You’re cold.’
She looked up at him. ‘Leon …’
‘I know.’ He looked down at the grave. ‘There is space to put another name there someday, but I hope it won’t be chiselled there for many years.’
‘Thank you, Leon. There was never a need for many words between us either.’
‘I’ll be back later with Mischa and Laura. You would like Laura to see this?’
‘Yes.’
‘She knows …’
‘Everything, Leon.’
Charlotte heard music drifting down from the small drawing room in the house. Ghostly music played on the piano by her other younger self. The Shostakovich Sascha had loved and written out for her on a piece of feed wrapper.
A shadow blocked the sun from view. Blue eyes looked down into hers, she saw the slow familiar smile she loved, and took the hand that was offered to her.
She is everything to me, this woman I love. The air I breathe, the earth beneath my feet, food, drink – all pale into insignificance when set beside my need for her. She clings to me for a moment, we kiss silently. Everything that needs to be said between us has long been said. Arm in arm, we wander back through the garden into the house. She walks up the stairs. I blow out the lamps in the downstairs rooms, close the doors, then follow her.
The End
More titles by Catrin Collier from Accent Press
Long Road to Baghdad
Mesopotamia, 1914 . In the Middle East, tension is escalating between the British and the Arabs. Misfit Lieutenant Harry Downe is sent to negotiate a treaty with a renegade Bedouin Sheikh, Ibn Shalan, whose tribe is attacking enemy patrols in Iraq and cutting their oil pipelines. Greedy for arms, Shalan accepts British weapons but, in return, Harry must take his daughter Furja to be his bride. The secret marriage leads to a deep love, to the anger of Shalan and the disgust of Harry’s fellow officers But war is looming, and the horrors of the battlefield threaten to destroy Harry’s newfound happiness, and change his life and that of his closest friends for ever.
An epic novel of an incendiary love that threatened to set the desert alight as war raged between the British and Ottoman Empires, Long Road to Baghdad is a vivid, moving, historically accurate account of a conflict between East and West, based on the wartime exploits of war hero Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Leachman.
Hearts of Gold
Book One in the Hearts of Gold series
Trainee midwife Bethan Powell lives in the shadow of the workhouse during the Depression. It's difficult to say which is harder for her and fellow nurse Laura Ronconi - their gruelling work in the hospital, or the frictions and financial hardships at home.
Bethan's Communist miner father, rigidly Chapel mother, unruly brothers and delightful but dubiously honest aunt, and Laura's vast Italian cafe-running family, cause the girls as much worry as any difficult case or strict ward sister. But working-class Pontypridd agrees on one thing - the 'crache', or gentry, who live in the big houses on the Common, may be just the other side of town, but they inhabit a different world.
So when Bethan and Laura are smitten by two young doctors, can love really bridge the divide? Or is the pull of family too strong, the gulf too wide?
One Last Summer (2007) Page 38