Sapphire Skies

by Belinda Alexandra

  Lily froze. The bomb was set off outside the theatre kiosk at a few minutes to six. Kate would have been standing right there when it exploded. White spots began to dance before her eyes. Scott helped her into a chair.

  ‘Kate?’ she asked, unable to believe that this was real. Surely what she was thinking couldn’t have happened.

  Scott grimaced. ‘The consul-general said that she was severely burned. She died at the scene. As you can imagine, Rodney and her family are devastated.’

  The hotel’s director arrived and Scott went to speak to him. Lily sat at her desk in a daze. Her picture of the world had turned upside down. Not Kate. Surely not! Awful events didn’t happen to perfect people. Perfect people lived perfect lives. They married perfect partners, had perfect children and grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren. They died in their beds at home surrounded by their loved ones. They didn’t die at twenty-five years of age, a few weeks before their wedding, killed by a terrorist bomb in a Moscow Metro underpass.

  Lily switched on her computer but couldn’t read a thing on the screen. If Scott hadn’t called her into his office the evening before to tell her about the hotel in St Petersburg, she too would have been in the underpass at the time the bomb went off.

  ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’

  Lily looked up to see Mary staring at her. Her make-up was smudged and her eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Lily replied. ‘It hasn’t sunk in yet.’

  ‘Her poor mother,’ continued Mary, taking a tissue from a box on her desk and dabbing at her nose. ‘She has cancer, you know. Terminal. That’s why Kate and Rodney brought the wedding forward.’

  Lily felt herself blanch. ‘Kate’s mother has cancer?’

  Mary nodded. ‘She took so much joy in planning her daughter’s wedding and now she’ll be arranging her funeral.’

  Lily felt like she’d been kicked in the ribs. She switched off her computer. People were coming in from other departments and putting flowers on Kate’s desk. Lily rushed around to find vases for the bouquets but she couldn’t think clearly. She’d reach a cupboard and then forget what it was that she was looking for. Kate’s mother had cancer?

  Finally, she had to stop. She went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She had assumed Kate’s exuberance over her wedding was a bride-to-be’s insensitivity to the mundane lives of others. Now she understood that Kate’s excitement was a veneer for her own breaking heart: she had been about to lose her mother. She and Kate had more in common than she had realised. Lily knew Kate’s sort of deception firsthand. When Adam was ill people used to tell her how well she was handling things, but she was shattered inside. Once he had gone, she’d crumbled.

  Lily packed up her desk and said goodbye to Scott. She and Mary hugged. ‘We’ll get through this,’ Mary said, rubbing Lily’s back. In Pushkin Square Lily bought a bunch of roses and laid them at the makeshift shrine along with the other bouquets. Despite her anguish, she managed to find the right platform and get onto the right train. Then she remembered the eyewitness account on the news that morning: ‘I saw a young woman die before my eyes. She was horrifically burned and crying. The medics didn’t reach her in time.’ Was that Kate? Everyone else in the carriage was wearing their blank commuter faces but Lily couldn’t keep her composure. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she began to sob. What was Kate thinking about as she lay dying? The loss of her dreams? Never seeing her family again?

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t know,’ Lily wept. ‘I’m truly sorry.’

  Lily sat in the park opposite her apartment for a while to calm her thoughts after the morning’s shock. Oksana had formulated a plan the night before: Babushka and Laika would stay with Lily while she found out where the old woman had been living and if there were any relatives to help her.

  When Lily entered her apartment, Oksana’s friend Antonia was watching a historical drama on the television. Babushka and Laika dozed next to her on the sofa. Antonia was surprised to see Lily but didn’t ask why she was home early.

  ‘She ate some kasha,’ she whispered to Lily. ‘But she hasn’t said a word. We changed the dressing on that nasty cut. Oksana thinks she might be anaemic. She’s organised for a doctor friend to come and examine her this evening.’

  Lily sat with Antonia and watched the television. She tried to lose herself in the story of duels and romances played out against the backdrop of the Tsars’ palaces, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Kate and Rodney. How awful all those wedding plans would seem to their families now. Lily was relieved when it was time for her to pick up the cats from the veterinary hospital. At least that would occupy her for a while.

  ‘Will you be all right here until Oksana gets back?’ she asked Antonia.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Antonia assured her. She patted Laika’s head. ‘This little dog is lovely. She hasn’t left her mistress’s side for a moment.’

  Lily had been in the waiting room of Yelchin Veterinary Hospital for only five minutes when she realised that it was the wrong place for her to be. It was six o’clock and the hospital was busy with people turning up to collect their animals after surgery. Veterinary nurses moved back and forth through a swing door, bringing out carry cages containing wide-eyed cats, or walking dogs out on leads. The sight of a poodle with bandaged legs and a cat with stitches down the side of its neck, along with the relieved expressions on their owners’ faces, made Lily’s eyes well with tears. The last time she’d been in a vet’s surgery was the day that Honey, her beloved cat, had been put to sleep. She’d lived a good life to nineteen years of age, but suddenly her kidneys began to fail and she stopped eating. She died six months after Lily’s grandmother did; Lily lost her two dearest childhood companions in one year.

  The memory made her heart even heavier and she looked around for something to distract herself. There was a pile of magazines on a side table and she rifled through them. They were mostly issues of Moscow Life or Russian Vogue that she’d read at work. But then a journal caught her eye: The Relic Hunter. The subtitle read: Until all the fallen are brought home. Lily flicked through advertisements for metal detectors and pictures of German tanks being hauled from bogs and came to a feature on the lost pilots of the Battle of Britain. She was surprised to read that a number of pilots had remained buried with their aircraft until the 1980s, when they were recovered by civilian researchers, because military authorities were against excavating their crash sites. It seemed wrong to Lily that someone should make the ultimate sacrifice for their country and then be denied a proper burial because of red tape.

  She looked at the photographs of the pilots that accompanied the article. They were so young, with smooth skin and eyes full of the future. Most of them weren’t more than nineteen or twenty years of age, much younger than Lily. If I’m so traumatised after witnessing a bomb attack and losing a colleague, she thought, how did they cope with battles and death every day?

  ‘Aphrodite and Artemis?’

  Lily glanced up. A man in a blue uniform was standing near the front desk and holding a large crate. He looked expectantly at Lily, who was now the only person left in the waiting room. He had dark-blond shoulder-length hair and an athletic build. The colour of his uniform complemented his olive skin.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, standing up.

  The man smiled. Although it was the end of the day, he was still clean-shaven and he sported fashionable sideburns. Lily had pictured Doctor Yelchin as an elderly man with a wise face and stooped back. She hadn’t anticipated someone in his mid-thirties who looked like a movie star. ‘You must be Oksana’s friend Lily?’ the vet said, placing the crate on the floor and taking a discharge form from the nurse. He had one of those deep Slavic voices that Lily found hypnotic.

  ‘And you must be Doctor Yelchin,’ she ventured.

  The man laughed and shook his head. ‘Doctor Yelchin is my uncle. He is in the process of retiring and I’m taking over the running of the surgery for him. I’m Doctor Demidov,
but please call me Luka.’

  Lily blushed. Wasn’t using his first name when she’d only just met him too informal for a Russian? If Luka noticed Lily’s discomfort, he didn’t show it. ‘Aphrodite and Artemis are still sleepy,’ he said, pointing to the crate. ‘I’ve given them long-acting pain medication and antibiotics but if you notice any swelling or bleeding please call me immediately.’

  He wrote his home and mobile numbers on the discharge sheet before handing it to her. Sure that she must be glowing from head to foot, Lily fumbled in her handbag for her purse.

  ‘There’s no charge,’ said Luka. ‘Oksana is a good woman. This practice tries to help her as much as possible. Everything was quite straightforward.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lily said. ‘Oksana will appreciate that.’ She fumbled again to put her purse back in her handbag and reached down for the crate.

  Luka put his hand on her arm. ‘I’ll carry it to your car. Oksana wanted the cats put in together so I used a dog crate. It’s a bit heavy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ stammered Lily again.

  With his free hand, Luka pushed open the surgery door and let Lily go through first to the car park. She opened the rear door to Oksana’s Niva jeep and spread out a blanket on the seat. Luka placed the crate on top of it.

  ‘So you’re interested in relic hunting?’ he asked Lily, moving out of the way so she could place a towel over the crate. She realised that she was still holding the copy of the journal.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, handing the magazine back to him and securing the crate with the seatbelt. ‘I picked it up to read.’

  She was blushing so much she was beginning to feel light-headed. Why was she making a fool of herself? Was it because Luka was so good looking. She had loved Adam for so long that she’d never thought of another man as attractive. It was an unsettling feeling and she wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  ‘Well, I hope to see you again, Lily,’ said Luka, flashing his charming smile again before turning to go back inside the hospital. ‘Call me if you have any problems.’

  Lily couldn’t bring herself to answer. She got into the jeep and started the engine. ‘I must be losing my mind,’ she muttered, before turning out of the driveway and heading back to her apartment.

  Lily found a parking space outside her apartment building. Yulian, a neighbour, spotted her and offered to carry the crate with Aphrodite and Artemis inside. Russian men, Lily had discovered, were chivalrous that way. They caught the elevator to Lily’s floor and Yulian placed the crate on her doormat while she searched in her handbag for her key, but Oksana heard them and opened the door. Thanking Yulian, she and Oksana lifted the crate through the doorway.

  In the living room, Oksana’s doctor friend was examining Babushka, holding a stethoscope to her chest. The doctor was a handsome man in his forties with silver-grey hair and chiselled cheekbones. Lily thought of Luka at the veterinary hospital and marvelled at Oksana’s ability to get attractive men to do favours for her.

  The women put the crate in the bathroom. ‘They’ll be fine here for a while,’ Oksana told Lily. ‘I’ve got a hospital cage set up for them in my apartment.’

  When they returned to the living room, she introduced Lily to her friend.

  ‘Lily, this is Doctor Pesenko.’

  ‘She’s still suffering shock,’ he told them. ‘I’ve given her an injection of B12, but I want to take some scans of her spine and chest. Can you bring her to my office the day after tomorrow?’

  The three of them helped Babushka back into Lily’s bed.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Doctor Pesenko said when they returned to the living room. ‘I couldn’t get her name out of her, but when I rolled up her sleeve to give her the injection I found a serial number tattooed on her forearm.’

  ‘You mean like one from a Nazi concentration camp?’ asked Oksana.

  Doctor Pesenko shrugged. ‘There isn’t a triangle or other symbol to single her out as Jewish. But it’s possible she was sent to a camp if she lived in a village that was invaded by the Germans during the war.’

  Lily glanced at Babushka, who was asleep now with Laika tucked under her arm. Everyone who had lived to that age had a story to tell, but Lily sensed that this old lady’s tale was an exceptional one.

  Even after two days, Lily and Oksana couldn’t coax Babushka to tell them her name. When Lily had first met her in Pushkin Square and again at the building site, she had been articulate and alert. The shock of the bomb in the underpass seemed to have caused her to retreat into herself. She mumbled words that sounded as if they could be names of places or people but Lily couldn’t catch them.

  Each time the telephone rang, Babushka jumped as if she’d been given an electric shock. So it surprised Lily that Babushka showed no resistance when she and Oksana took her to Doctor Pesenko’s surgery. She submitted meekly as the doctor weighed her, took her blood pressure and a blood sample, felt her neck and legs, and then listened to her chest before sending her with a nurse down the hall for an X-ray.

  When she had gone, Doctor Pesenko invited Oksana and Lily to sit down opposite his desk. ‘She’ll need more tests, but everything so far indicates that she has a chronic heart condition that’s been left untreated,’ he said, taking his own chair. ‘The most I will be able to do for her is give her medication to help alleviate the symptoms.’

  ‘Do you mean her condition is terminal?’ Oksana asked.

  Doctor Pesenko nodded. ‘I’m surprised she’s kept going this long. She’s malnourished, which doesn’t help, of course.’

  ‘How long do you think —’ Lily broke off as she felt herself choking up. Babushka must have sensed that her health was worsening; that’s why she had been so desperate for Lily to take Laika.

  ‘She might have six months. She might have three days,’ replied Doctor Pesenko. ‘It’s difficult to predict. I’m going to try to pull some strings and see if I can get her into a hospital — a State or charity one — for further tests and palliative care.’

  The nurse came in with the X-ray results in a folder. ‘I’ve left the patient lying down in the examination room,’ she told Doctor Pesenko before leaving again.

  Doctor Pesenko opened the folder, took out the X-rays and studied them. He put them on the light box so that Oksana and Lily could see.

  ‘There is evidence of pulmonary congestion,’ he said, pointing to the lungs. ‘But there is something more unusual. You see, her heart is further to the right than it should be.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Oksana. ‘Is it something she was born with?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I’ve only seen this twice before. In one instance the displacement was the result of a chest injury sustained in a car accident. The other was in a man who had been so badly beaten by thugs that his heart was punched out of place.’

  ‘I wonder if something happened when she was in the concentration camp,’ said Lily.

  Doctor Pesenko wrote out several prescriptions and handed them to Lily. ‘What are you going to do with her until I can find a hospital bed?’ he asked. ‘This woman is going to die and most likely in the near future.’

  Lily sensed that Oksana was looking at her. She was under no illusions about how difficult it was to care for someone who was dying but she felt compelled to help Babushka. ‘She can stay with me,’ she told Doctor Pesenko. ‘If Oksana doesn’t mind?’

  Oksana nodded. ‘Of course not. Yulian is moving out of his apartment tomorrow. It’s bigger than yours, Lily — you can use it until we can get a place for Babushka in hospital.’

  ‘So we are conspirators,’ said Doctor Pesenko with a gentle smile. ‘Three people willing to help an old woman we know nothing about.’

  ‘You know,’ said Oksana thoughtfully, ‘dying animals often come to me. I believe they are angels in disguise, because in caring for them I find that they always leave me a gift.’

  NINE

  Moscow, 2000

  Orlov woke with a start. He glanced a
t his clock: it was four in the morning. A weight pressed on his chest as if he’d relived the darkness of his childhood while asleep. Now that he was reaching the end of his life, images from the beginning of it came back to him in dreams. He turned on his side to alleviate the discomfort in his chest. What was it? Indigestion? He barely ate anything these days. His gaze settled on the empty vodka bottle by the bed and he squeezed his eyes closed. Even the vodka wouldn’t shut out the memory of the clackety-clack of the wheels of the train that took him, his older brother and his mother to disaster.

  His father had fought in the White Army during the Civil War. When the forces loyal to the Tsar had been pushed back to Vladivostok and were on the brink of defeat, he’d sent word to Orlov’s mother to bring the children and his parents to the east. There were plans for an evacuation to China. As an aristocratic family in 1922, they would be imprisoned or executed if they stayed in Moscow. But Orlov’s grandparents refused to go, despite his mother’s pleas. In the end, fearing for the life of Orlov and his nine-year-old brother, Fyodor, she had boarded a train with them for Siberia.

  The face of Orlov’s red-headed brother arose in his memory. Four years older than Orlov, Fyodor had been his protector. Because of the war, the journey to Vladivostok took much longer than normal, with frequent stops at villages in between stations. In some of the places along the way, famine had hit so severely that the train was besieged by hundreds of orphans. The sight of their outstretched hands and the wail of their voices had frightened Orlov. He had never seen such misery. Even if the passengers on the train had given these children all the provisions they had, it would not have been enough to feed them all. In one village near Novosibirsk, Orlov saw groups of small children digging up roots in the forest and running away from any adults who came near. As a grown man, whenever he saw stray cats in the street he would remember those children. He had found it impossible to imagine that they didn’t have parents to care for them. He didn’t know then that Russia’s homeless orphans numbered in the millions. And he’d had no inkling that he would soon be one of them.