The Lost Daughter

by Gill Paul

  * * *

  Two days later, when Maria visited Peter’s grave, another woman approached. It looked as though she had been waiting for her.

  “Are you Maria? My friend told me you can get information about people who have been arrested. I wondered if you could ask about my husband? He was taken by the NKVD a month ago and I’ve heard nothing since.”

  Maria was about to say no, she couldn’t help, but the woman’s eyes were swollen, her face etched with desperation. She imagined Peter listening to their exchange, and replied, “Give me the information and I’ll see what I can do.”

  As she walked home, she pondered the problem. Yuri would not take kindly to her asking another favor when she had nothing to offer in return. Perhaps she should try to locate Annushka, and if she found her, they could concoct a story together.

  On her next day off, Maria caught a tram to the Winter Palace and was glad to see that Annushka’s brother Fedor was still a guard there.

  “How are you?” she greeted him, smiling brightly. “It must be easier to stand here all day now the weather is warmer.”

  He agreed, but seemed tense.

  “Do you work long hours?” she asked. “When do you finish today, for example?”

  “I started at eight and finish at six,” he told her, glancing around. “I’m not supposed to chat while I’m on duty.”

  “How is Annushka?” Maria continued. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “I don’t know where she is. She’s left home. I haven’t heard from her.” He couldn’t meet her eye and she knew he was lying.

  “Oh dear, I hope she’s all right. Do give her my regards if you see her.” Maria smiled and walked past, as if simply going about her business.

  At six that evening, she huddled in a doorway of the Admiralty building on the other side of Nevsky Prospekt, waiting to see which way Fedor would head. He crossed to a tram stop heading into town and waited there, stamping his feet against the cold. When she saw a tram approaching, Maria pulled her scarf tight around her head and scampered across the road just in time to jump on the back. She stood behind a large man in workers’ overalls as the tram headed out toward the suburban districts.

  When Fedor alighted, Maria jumped off too, turning as if to walk in the opposite direction then checking over her shoulder. He didn’t look around as he crossed the street and headed into a park. She hurried after him and saw him emerge through a gate on the other side. He stopped by a bread shop, which was closed for the night, and hammered on the door. After a while a woman opened it and handed him a loaf wrapped in paper. He must be a regular.

  At last he stopped outside an apartment building. Maria was on the opposite side of the road so couldn’t see which bell he rang, but on the third floor a curtain twitched and she saw a face looking down. It was Annushka. She was sure of it. Fedor entered the building.

  Maria crossed the road and waited till someone else opened the street door, then rushed forward to catch it before it slammed. She walked up the concrete stairs, similar to her own, all the way to the third floor, and estimated which door it must be: second along from the main stairs. Thankfully these blocks were built to a uniform pattern.

  Fedor opened the door and gawped at her. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Can I come in?” Maria asked. “I’m here to see Annushka.”

  He hesitated, then stood back to let her pass. Annushka gasped and clutched her young son to her side as Maria walked into their sitting room.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Very easily,” Maria told her, looking at Fedor. “And Yuri could do the same anytime. If you want to avoid him, you will have to do better than this.” She sat down before explaining that he had asked her to look for them.

  Fedor was embarrassed that he had been followed with so little difficulty. “You mustn’t tell him where she is,” he pleaded.

  “Of course I won’t,” Maria agreed. “But you must tell me the truth.”

  “I couldn’t stay any longer with a man who scares me. You’ve seen him, Maria.” Annushka’s eyes were pleading for understanding. “He’s moody and unpredictable. He can switch from pleasant to enraged in the blink of an eye. And he’s so big, he terrifies me.”

  “But is it fair to stop him seeing his son?” Maria asked.

  “If I let him see the boy, he would never give him back. He would hold him hostage to force me to return.”

  Fedor looked on, lips pursed, and Maria couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Many Russian men had a temper. Yuri was not alone in being volatile.

  “Yet here you are a prisoner. You don’t dare leave the apartment in case one of Yuri’s colleagues sees you on the street. Your son cannot go to school in Leningrad or he will find out.” Maria was thinking aloud. “Is there anywhere else you could go? Perhaps to a relative in the countryside? If I tell Yuri that’s where you are, but that I don’t have the address, perhaps he will give up looking eventually.”

  “I suppose I could go to my cousin in Moscow.” She glanced at Fedor. “For a while at least.”

  Maria nodded. “Very well. That’s what I’ll say. Don’t tell me your cousin’s name, but leave as soon as you can. I will wait another week before telling him.”

  Annushka ran across and hugged her, kissing her on both cheeks. “Bless you for your kindness to us,” she said. “I hope good fortune will be with you.”

  “With you too,” Maria replied, meaning it.

  * * *

  When she met Yuri a week later, Maria waited first to hear what information he had for the woman who had approached her in the cemetery.

  “Your friend’s husband is being questioned. I think the charges are not serious and that he will be released within a week, if he cooperates.” He paused, and Maria knew what he meant: if the man agreed to become an informer.

  “Thank you.” She hesitated, feeling nervous. If Yuri was as quick-tempered as Annushka claimed, he might lose his temper over what she had to say next. “I have some information for you,” she began. “I hear Annushka has gone to stay with a cousin in Moscow. Your son is with her.”

  Yuri blew out impatiently. “Without telling me. The bitch.” He pulled out a Belomorkanal, tapped it on the dashboard, then lit it. “When will she be back?”

  “I don’t know,” Maria ventured. She didn’t dare tell him that the answer might be never. “Maybe she needs some time away. All marriages go through difficult patches.” She glanced at his face. Was she being too presumptuous? He didn’t seem to mind.

  “I don’t understand what she wants,” he complained. “She has a decent home, food, money for clothes, she doesn’t have to work . . . What more can I give her?”

  Maria never for one moment forgot she was in an NKVD van, talking to an NKVD officer. A single wrong word and she could be summarily arrested. But she decided to tell him part of the truth. “Maybe she wanted to feel loved.”

  He turned his face away, inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “She never understood the pressure I am under. This is not an easy job.”

  “I’m sure it’s not.”

  “I see things that . . . well, they haunt you.”

  Maria dared not ask what. She did not want to imagine. All she wanted was to get out of his van and walk away, back home to her children. She gathered her shopping bag handles, as if to leave.

  “Who told you Annushka had gone to her cousin’s?” he demanded suddenly.

  Maria had been hoping he wouldn’t ask. Now she would have to lie. “I asked the women in the baker’s shop and they put the word around and news came back. I don’t know who found out.”

  “Who told you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know her name. A blond woman. In a brown coat.”

  He nodded. “You could point her out to me if we went to the baker’s shop together, could you?”

  Maria hesitated. “I’m not sure. Possibly not. I’ve only seen her once.”

  “But I hear you are very good
at remembering faces. That’s why you are able to reunite families. Surely you would remember this woman?”

  It had turned into an interrogation. Maria was flustered and could feel her cheeks burning.

  “Don’t ever lie,” he said, watching her through narrowed eyes. “You will get found out every time. Your face gives you away.”

  Maria looked at her lap, clutched her shopping bag closer. What could she say? How could she get out of this?

  Before she could answer, he continued, “If you have any other friends who want information, you know where I live.”

  Maria was astonished. “But you—”

  “I have to go now.” He flicked his cigarette out the window. “Goodbye, Maria.”

  She jumped out of the van, slammed the door behind her, and walked quickly down the road. When it rolled past, she did not dare turn around to look.

  Chapter 40

  Sydney, September 1975

  A MONTH AFTER HER DIVORCE WENT THROUGH, VAL got a call from her lawyer to say that finally, after much argument and following sanctions from the court, Tony had transferred the money he owed her, and dropped off a box of items he claimed were from the safe deposit box.

  “I’ll come by in my lunch hour,” Val said straightaway. She couldn’t wait to see what was there.

  The attorney’s secretary indicated a cardboard box with “Chiko Roll” printed in diagonal type around the outside. Val was immediately suspicious. She had never seen her father eat a Chiko Roll. He served plain food: soup, meat, and potatoes.

  She pulled back the top flaps and saw a dark brown leather traveling bag and a folder of documents with something written in Russian on the cover. They smelled of mold and decay. At least that seemed authentic. Perhaps the contents were her father’s and Tony had thrown them into a random box.

  She carried it back to work but didn’t have time to explore further before she got home that evening. After the evening meal, while Nicole was watching cartoons on their brand-new television set, she cleared the kitchen table and opened the leather bag.

  The first thing she pulled out was a sketchbook filled with pretty watercolor close-ups of flowers. The artist was talented, capturing tiny details of stamens and petals in a fine hand. The paper itself was yellowing with age and there were reddish-brown stains on the back pages.

  Next she pulled out a leather-bound photograph album, thick as a Bible, with black paper pages. As soon as she began flicking through it, she realized it contained images of the Romanovs. There were the girls in their white dresses and hair ribbons in a pretty garden; little Alexei in a sailor suit; several adults dancing in a circle; the younger ones paddling in the sea, hems held high to stop them getting wet. Far from the formal studio poses Val had seen in books, these were intimate family shots. They all looked younger and happier than in the photos she had found in her father’s camera. Perhaps they dated from the years before they were taken captive.

  Next she found two Russian Orthodox icons, with gold-haloed figures painted on wood, surrounded by bejeweled frames. She wondered why Tony hadn’t taken them. Perhaps he didn’t appreciate their value because they looked gaudy, but if they had belonged to the Romanovs, the jewels were almost certainly real.

  Finally she turned to the folder with the Russian writing on the front. Inside she found what looked like accountants’ ledgers, with columns of figures and dates, none of which she could make out. There were also several sets of identity papers—she counted eight altogether—each with a grainy photograph of her father. He was a young man, but his distinctive brow, pronounced as a window ledge above his dark eyes, was the same as when she knew him.

  At the back of the folder there was a leaflet with Russian writing and a blurred photograph printed on it. Val guessed it might be one of the Romanov girls and took out a book to compare it with. Olga had a melancholic look; Tatiana had a pixie face . . . It was Maria, she decided. Her face was plumper and her eyes bigger and rounder than the others’.

  As she looked through these objects, Val’s mind was jumping around trying to make sense of things. Her father must have stolen them from the Ipatiev House along with the camera. She looked at the bag again: it was a carpet-bag shape with pleats where it was stitched beneath a gold buckle. The base was badly stained with dark blotches. She picked it up by the handles, and as she turned it around, she heard something rattle inside. A few pencils were rolling around the bottom and an object was trapped between the cloth lining and the outer leather.

  She found a rip in the inside pocket through which she was able to pull out a rectangular gold-colored box, about half the size of a matchbox. On top there was a yellow stone, one large white one, and a scattering of smaller white ones. She could tell by shaking that there was something inside the box, but she couldn’t get it to open no matter how hard she tugged. There was a joint in the metal but it felt as if it had been fused shut. Perhaps the edges were rusted with age.

  It felt odd looking through a stranger’s belongings, as if she was poking around in someone else’s handbag. It didn’t tell her anything about her father, except that he must have stolen these items. Why did he not sell them, as he had with all the other White Russian property he stole? He could surely have charged a premium.

  Next day, she went back to see Bill Koskov in the Russian department at the university, taking the accounts ledgers, the identity papers, and the leaflet.

  “What do you make of this lot?” she asked. “They all came from my father’s safe deposit box, and there was a Romanov photo album and a sketchbook with them.”

  Bill opened one of the accounts books and frowned. Then he read the leaflet and his eyes widened.

  “Can you leave them with me?” he asked. “Meet me for lunch in the canteen tomorrow and I’ll have the translations for you.”

  “You speak Russian yourself?” Val asked.

  “White Russian parents.” He grinned. “I had no choice!”

  * * *

  “This is particularly odd,” Bill said the next day, pointing at the leaflet with the grainy picture of Maria, the third Romanov daughter. He’d brought his own lunch with him in a Tupperware box: a mountain of cheese sandwiches, which he was devouring in huge bites, as if ravenous.

  Val had bought herself a tuna sandwich and a black coffee into which she stirred a sugar cube. “What is?”

  Bill swallowed a mouthful. “Whoever wrote it clearly believed that Maria had escaped from Ekaterinburg. It gives her description alongside the photo and offers a reward for information leading to her discovery. It doesn’t say she is a Romanov; just that she’s a person of great interest.”

  “Maybe it’s not her.” Val took the leaflet and had another look.

  “I’m pretty sure it is,” Bill said. “Especially given the fact that it was found with a Romanov photo album. I’ve been thinking about it overnight and I’ve come to the conclusion that the leaflet must have been produced by someone working for the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police force between 1917 and 1922, and one of their successor organizations thereafter. Just imagine: if one of the Romanovs had escaped, they wouldn’t want to publicize it because it would make them look inefficient, but they would have been at great pains to prevent her traveling overseas and telling her story to the outside world.”

  Val frowned. “Do you think my father was working for the secret police?”

  “Either that or he was helping them. One of the accounts books gives the names of people working in different soviets around the country, and there are sums of money as well as dates listed. To me, it looks as though they were on the payroll, being bribed to look out for Maria.” He caught her eye. “Stop me if I’m being presumptuous. I don’t mean to criticize your father.”

  “No, not at all. Growing up, I assumed he was a White Russian who fled after the Revolution, but the more I learn, the more I realize I didn’t know him at all.” Val sipped her coffee. Had he been on the Bolshevik side? It was beginning to sound that way.

&n
bsp; Bill pulled out another accounts ledger. “This lists letters received at the house of a family called Vasnetsov in Ekaterinburg.”

  Val recognized the name. “I have a photograph of Peter Vasnetsov. Remember? He was in one of the shots developed from my dad’s camera.”

  “Curious!” Bill smiled at her. “I think we’re onto something, don’t you? He was clearly under suspicion. Look.” He ran his finger down a column. “Here are the dates each letter was received and the places they were posted from. They seem to have come from a village in the Urals, from Perm, from Moscow—never the same place twice.”

  “So you think Maria was moving around? I suppose she would have done, to evade capture.” Val pointed at another ledger. “What’s in this book?”

  Bill opened the pages. Val noticed that he had long fingers with neat, well-kept nails. It surprised her, since his clothes were scruffy: a beige jacket with saggy pockets, as if he walked around with his hands permanently shoved in them, and faded khaki trousers that bagged at the knees. “It gives the dates of trips from Manchuria into Russia between the years 1920 and 1925. And get this: it ties in with the dates that letters were received at the Vasnetsov house. It looks as though your father traveled to the places each letter was sent from. Perhaps Maria was writing to Peter Vasnetsov and your father hoped to find her by tracking the letters.”

  “But look at all those trips!” Val realized the ledger covered the years when her father was dealing in stolen White Russian goods. That was why he kept traveling into the country. She didn’t want to admit it to Bill, though.

  “He was using the different identity papers so as not to arouse suspicion,” Bill continued. “But what fascinates me is that he would never have gone to so much trouble if he hadn’t had good reason to think Maria was alive. He must have had some evidence.”

  “Weren’t there theories that Anastasia escaped? I’m sure I read that somewhere.”