The agents finished their work and forced my father to stand up. Where would they take him? Not to the Lubyanka, surely? My father wasn’t a criminal! My mother would have to contact Comrade Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan, the commissar for the food industry, and let them know what had happened. My father would be released straight away.
Then, to my horror, I saw Mama take out a bag from the bottom shelf of the cupboard. It was the bag she had packed when she first began to fear Papa might be arrested. She must have repacked it. Why? Now he would look guilty! But I was too distracted by the agents marching my father out the door to be angry at my mother.
I followed the men down the stairs. A chill seized me when I saw the black van parked in the street.
‘Papa!’ I cried, grabbing his arm. ‘Papa, they can’t take you away!’
My father turned to me and I will never forget the look in his eyes. Papa, always playful, cheerful and childlike, was like a ghost. His skin was pale and his eyes were hollows, as if his soul had left him.
The red-haired man pushed me away. ‘Go back to your mother,’ he said. The door to the black van was slammed shut. The agents jumped into the front and the vehicle sped away.
‘This will be sorted out and your father will be home later tonight,’ a voice behind me said.
I turned to see the trembling figure of Aleksey Nikolayevich standing behind me. But even as I tried to console myself with my neighbour’s words, I understood my world of family, comfort and privilege was at an end.
Mama wrote to Comrade Stalin and spoke to the secretary of Anastas Mikoyan regarding Papa’s arrest. Comrade Stalin was away from Moscow, we discovered, but Mikoyan’s secretary assured us that if my father could prove his innocence of the charges against him, he would be released.
Every day Mama and I went to the Lubyanka prison for news about my father. But the prison officials wouldn’t reveal anything, nor would they accept the parcel of food we had prepared for him.
I used to despise the people I saw waiting outside the Lubyanka and other government offices. I had viewed them as collaborators and enemies of the people. Now I was one of them. These wretched souls, with their desperate expressions and the rings of exhaustion under their eyes, were the only source of information — and empathy — we had in our plight.
‘Go to Butyrka prison,’ a woman advised us one day when we were turned away yet again. ‘Your husband might have already been questioned and sent there to await his trial.’
We thanked the woman for her advice. To our relief, Butyrka prison accepted our parcel, although the guards wouldn’t confirm whether Papa was there or not.
‘It’s a good sign,’ the woman waiting next in line assured us. ‘If they accept the parcel, he is here.’
Mama and I looked up at the stark walls of the prison.
‘He’ll know that we are thinking of him,’ Mama said, weeping. ‘He’ll know that we haven’t forgotten him.’
My mother expected to be arrested at any time herself and she had good reason to fear it. I had learned that if a husband had been taken, it was almost guaranteed his wife would be detained shortly afterwards. The logic was that if she hadn’t denounced her husband, she had failed in her duties to the State.
‘No, Mama,’ I told her when I found her packing a bag for herself. ‘We are doing things differently this time. You are not to bring bad fortune on yourself. Instead of preparing for your arrest, we are going to get ready for Papa to come home.’
Some of our furniture had been damaged in the search, but no valuables had been stolen. The agents hadn’t taken the sapphire brooch or my dance shoes as I’d feared they would. My mother and I fixed the apartment as best we could: mending ripped curtains, polishing away scratches on furniture, repairing Papa’s favourite books. By keeping ourselves occupied, we pretended that things would return to normal and Papa would come home. Zoya continued to set his place at the table and Mama laid out his clothes for him every day. We were like children playing make-believe.
The magic must have worked in Mama’s case — the NKVD agents didn’t return to arrest her — but Alexander was discharged from the air force.
‘Papa can’t have been tried yet,’ I protested when Alexander returned home to live with us.
‘It didn’t matter to my commanding officers,’ Alexander replied bitterly. ‘The mere idea that Papa might be an enemy of the people was enough reason to get rid of me.’
Nor was my brother the only one to suffer rejection after Papa’s arrest. When I turned up at the gliding school to take my advanced examination I found Sergei Konstantinovich blocking the doorway.
‘You can’t come here any more,’ he said. ‘You put everyone who associates with you in danger. Don’t you understand that?’
At school it was as if I had a disease. The teachers and pupils shrank away from me; they disappeared down corridors or into rooms when they saw me coming. Some of the bolder girls bullied me and wrote nasty things in my schoolbooks and stole things from my desk. They knew the teachers were afraid to stand up for me. I wished I had Svetlana by my side, but she had come down with scarlet fever the night my father was arrested and had to do her lessons at home. Only the music teacher, Bronislava Ivanovna, treated me as before and everyone knew that she was showing courage — and foolishness — to do so.
‘Be strong, Natasha. Don’t give up,’ she’d whisper to me whenever I passed her in the corridor. ‘You have too much talent to let them destroy you.’
There were no more special parcels of food and Mama’s students stayed away. Lydia had to look after Svetlana so it was understandable that she didn’t come. Without Papa’s wages, money became tight. We lived on kasha and soup. Alexander went from factory to factory trying to find work but they all turned him away. The only job he could get was cleaning toilets at the metro station. Mama sold her gramophone and her jewellery to keep us.
‘We are cursed,’ she told Zoya. ‘You must go away and find another family, otherwise you will fall with us.’
But Zoya refused. ‘You’ve never treated me like a maid, Sofia, so I won’t act like one. We are family now.’
In the end, Zoya became a lifesaver for us. As we no longer received special packages, we needed someone who could stand in line the whole day to secure food and other necessities. In other families, it was the babushkas who performed that task but both my grandmothers had died young. Zoya did her best but sometimes after waiting at the store for seven or eight hours, she might only return with sardines and potatoes. Still, that was better than nothing.
I didn’t even consider going to the Young Pioneers meetings after Alexander told me what had happened to another boy whose parents had been arrested. When the boy refused to renounce his parents and spit on their portraits, he was stripped of his uniform and made to march home in his underwear. The other children taunted him and threw sticks at him. Later that day, the boy hanged himself.
We were allowed to deliver a parcel a month to Butyrka prison. When the next parcel Mama and I took was accepted it bolstered our spirits.
‘Maybe Papa will be home soon,’ I said to my mother. We returned to our apartment to find that the NKVD had been again and turned us out of our home. Our belongings were piled on the pavement and the apartment door was sealed. When I couldn’t find Ponchik, I panicked. I thought that they’d trapped him inside and breaking an NKVD seal was a crime. But then Mama found him hiding under a blanket.
I picked him up and held him close to me. ‘I’d die if anything happened to you,’ I told him.
Mama sighed. ‘Natasha, maybe Svetlana would like to have Ponchik. I don’t know what’s going to become of us. I don’t know if we can keep him.’
The idea of being parted from Ponchik was unthinkable. He had been a gift from Papa. Besides, Lydia was allergic to animals; she would turn him out on the street. Mama must have seen the despair in my eyes, as she said nothing more on the subject.
We were allocated a room in a communal apartment,
where the floorboards were painted red to look like carpet and the wallpaper was stained. Mama, Alexander, Zoya and I shared a kitchen, bathroom and toilet with three other families and a divorced couple who still lived together because they didn’t want to give up their spacious room. The atmosphere was poisonous. The divorced couple fought constantly, and even though everyone had their own gas ring, shelf and kitchen table, the residents were forever accusing one another of stealing food.
At first we decided it would be better for us to eat in our room. But the way the other residents watched us was unnerving. Mama was sure they were scrutinising us for actions they could denounce us for in order to get extra space in the apartment. To avoid aggravating them, we decided to keep up the ‘communal spirit’ and ate in the kitchen despite the indigestion the tension caused us.
The partition walls were so thin that if we wished to talk privately we had to pull a blanket over our heads. We kept a picture of Papa hidden under the mattress Mama and I shared and we took it out every evening and set a plate of hard chocolate next to it. In the morning, we hid it again. Families of those accused of being an enemy of the people were supposed to erase all memory of the person and never mention them again. But how could we forget Papa?
When Mama was sorting through our clothes one day, she found a scarf she had borrowed from a neighbour in our old apartment building before Papa’s arrest.
‘Can you take it back on your way home from school?’ Mama asked me. ‘Slip it under the door and make sure nobody sees you.’
On my way home that day I did as Mama had asked. The seal on our old apartment was gone and there was a new doormat out the front. The air in the corridor smelled of fresh paint and floor polish. Some other family lived there now. Out on the street I was surprised to see Svetlana stepping out of a café. I had heard nothing from her since she had fallen sick. Our eyes met. ‘Sveta!’ I said, rushing towards her. ‘You are well?’
She froze for a moment and then reached out her arms to me.
‘When are you coming back to school?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve missed you!’
Lydia came out of the café and saw us. Her eyes narrowed as if I were a dangerous lion about to attack her daughter. She tugged Svetlana away. ‘You don’t talk to that girl any more!’ she hissed at her. ‘Do you understand? Do you want what has happened to her family to happen to us? Her father is a wrecker!’
Lydia sent me a ferocious look.
Svetlana struggled against her mother. ‘It’s Natasha!’ she said. ‘Natasha!’
Lydia slapped Svetlana across the face. Before her daughter had a chance to recover, she grabbed her around the shoulders and marched her like a prisoner down the street. Svetlana turned to look at me. The sorrowful expression in her eyes broke my heart. So I had lost Svetlana too. I tried to understand what was happening to me. It seemed that everyone else was alive but I wasn’t any longer; I was looking at them all through a veil. ‘Be strong, Natasha. Don’t give up,’ Bronislava Ivanovna had said. But how could I fight? I was still alive physically but I was dead in every other sense. I no longer existed as a member of society.
‘You have to forgive Lydia’s reaction,’ Mama told me that evening. ‘She was trying to protect Svetlana. Life has become horrible and insane. We’ve all turned into whisperers. We can no longer even trust our friends.’
I scrutinised my mother’s face. ‘Why hasn’t Comrade Stalin answered us and had Papa released? He used to confide in Papa. Surely he knows he is innocent.’
Mama pursed her lips and turned away. ‘Comrade Stalin is kept in the dark by his advisors, Natasha. You know he told your papa that he didn’t trust the men around him. All this is going on without his knowledge. I will write to him again.’
At Mama’s urging, and with Bronislava Ivanovna secretly paying my fees, I continued to go to school. Svetlana never returned, and I got used to passing girls in the corridor who had once been my friends and not saying anything to them. We didn’t have a piano for me to practise on at home any more but Bronislava Ivanovna was convinced I could still apply for the conservatorium when I finished school. ‘You have a beautiful singing voice, Natasha. Let’s work on that.’
With my dreams of flying in tatters and no friends, I threw myself into singing to distract myself. As well as Russian classical songs, I learned songs by the jazz artists Leonid Utesov and Alexander Tsfasman, who were said to be Stalin’s favourites. I wanted to prove that I was a good Soviet citizen. As all her students had abandoned her, teaching me gave my mother something to occupy herself with as well. The tension in the apartment subsided when Mama and I practised together. Even the divorced couple calmed down, and one day announced that they were expecting a baby together.
The following month, Butyrka prison refused to take our parcel. Mama swooned at the news. I reached out to support her, but I was on the verge of fainting myself. This was what we had been dreading.
‘Don’t fear the worst,’ said a young mother with a child at her breast. ‘They might be depriving him to get him to confess, or they might have tried him already. Go to the station. There is a train leaving for Kolyma today.’
With our legs trembling beneath us, Mama and I ran to the station. A train destined for the Far East was waiting there but the prisoners sentenced to the Kolyma labour camps had already been loaded. The windows were boarded up with only a gap at the top for air. It must have been stifling inside. People holding packages were going from carriage to carriage shouting their loved one’s name. If there was an answer from inside, the guard would take the package to give to the prisoner. One woman received a note back from her husband and held it to her heart. Mama and I called out Papa’s name several times but there was no answer.
When we returned home that evening we found the red-haired NKVD agent waiting for us on the street corner. He was holding a box. Mama and I froze, like deer caught in the sights of the hunter’s gun.
The NKVD agent walked past us and handed the box to Mama without a word. We watched dumbfounded as he hurried away down the street. He hadn’t come to arrest us.
We waited until we returned to our room to see what the box contained. Inside we found items from our apartment that hadn’t been left in the pile for us: Mama’s handmade quilt, a valuable clock, the sapphire brooch and dance shoes I had received from Stalin, and something wrapped in cloth. We opened the cloth to find the icon of St Sofia. On the back was scribbled in pencil: Forgive me!
Mama and I looked at each other. ‘I wonder who he is,’ Mama whispered. ‘And why he ever became an NKVD agent.’
A few days later, I was combing Ponchik in the courtyard when I saw one of the apartment’s residents, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, meet the postman. She sorted through the letters and found one that seemed to interest her. ‘Sofia, there is something for you!’ I heard her call out to my mother. I wondered who would be sending us a letter. Certainly not a friend; they had all deserted us. Perhaps Comrade Stalin had replied at last!
I picked Ponchik up and ran into the apartment. Ekaterina Mikhailovna was hovering outside our room but the door was closed. She scurried away when she saw me. I opened the door and found Mama on her knees. At first I thought she was praying but then I realised she was sobbing. I put Ponchik down and dropped to my knees beside her. Mama was holding the letter in her hand. It was typewritten and looked official.
My heart sank. Papa must have been found guilty. The people outside Butyrka prison had told us it was common for former friends and colleagues to testify against the accused if they thought it would advantage themselves in some way. What would happen now? Would Papa be sent to a labour camp like the prisoners on the train?
‘Mama,’ I said, putting my hand on her trembling shoulder, ‘if Papa has been found guilty then we must see Comrade Stalin in person. We know that Papa is not a saboteur. He loved his work.’
Mama turned to me. Her eyes had a tormented look in them. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.
‘It’s not too late,’ I in
sisted. ‘An appeal can be made. If Comrade Stalin isn’t in Moscow, we must find out where he is and go there!’
The letter slipped from Mama’s fingers to the floor. Something about the action made my stomach twist with fear. ‘Mama?’
She put her hand on my wrist. It was ice-cold. I knew then that the inconceivable had happened even before my mother told me. ‘Natasha,’ she said, ‘Papa was tried and found guilty. He was executed the same day. My darling, your father is dead.’
TWELVE
Orël, 2000
Orlov arrived at Kursky station with dozens of scenarios running through his head. Ilya hadn’t wanted to reveal any more over the telephone; all Orlov knew from his call was that someone had buried Natasha. Who? Where? Did she survive the parachute jump, or did she injure herself and die? Or maybe she had survived the war, lived the rest of her years in a village and passed away an old woman? But in all the circumstances Orlov came up with, Ilya’s use of ‘buried’ meant that the woman he had loved was dead. He had resigned himself to that possibility many years ago, but now that he was closer to finding out how she had died, he was terrified. He had lived in limbo for so long that the feeling of melancholic inertia it produced was familiar. What if the truth was worse than anything he had imagined? A shudder ran through him. He wouldn’t allow himself to think of that.
He hurried past the stalls selling souvenirs — matryoshka dolls, fur hats, khokhloma spoons — and stopped when he saw a stall peddling Soviet memorabilia. His eyes narrowed as he took in the figurines of Lenin, the pieces of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union flag. These things were sacred once; ideals by which Russians had lived and died. Now they were relegated to the realm of kitsch and curios. He was about to turn away when he noticed the bust of Stalin. Could the younger generation make a joke of the devil too?
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