The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  They kicked in the door of one of the storehouses, helping themselves to potatoes out of our barrels, to jars of pickles, to smoked hams, to anything they found. It was my first of many such encounters. The maids shrieked and wept as much then for the thefts of our winter supplies which represented a significant loss, as for the later rapes and murders they were to witness. And their cries, I saw, both terrified and incited the soldiers in their violence. Such men would have shot Xan out of hand.

  Our next visitors, from the NKVD, would have taken him away politely, with every appearance of legality, with warrants and correctly stamped papers, but the result would have been the same. Xan’s loyalty and admiration found excuses for them. This was just how things were, he explained, amid the upheavals of war. In reality, these men were representatives of the fairest society yet instituted on earth. Because of this loyalty to his principles, Xan did not wish to join the partisans. After a while he began to despair of ever finding credentials to present to the Soviets and began to think of escape. He wanted to get into Germany where he had contacts in the army and Diplomatic Service, men of old families who were less than enamoured of Hitler and the Nazis and might be willing to help him get to Sweden. Later, he would arrange for me to follow by the same route with the baby, since it was only too clear that I could not travel with him at that time.

  My pregnancy did not really become visible until about February 1941. I advanced it a little, by letting everyone know that the baby was expected in June, which allowed clear time for conception before Xan was supposed to have left. I could see them all counting the months backwards and forwards as they eyed my not very thickened waistline. They all must have suspected that what I said was false, but no one wished to know the truth, except Lai.

  He was bitter towards the Russians. He lamented his country’s lost independence, his parents’ disappearance to almost certain death in the camps. He hated the new regime at the university. I knew he would have like to run away to join the partisans, of whom we began to hear that winter, tiny bands of outlaws living in the woods, demanding food and cash from remote villages and farmsteads. I knew too why he did not go. He thought he could not leave me alone, pregnant, as Xan, so egotistical and selfish, had apparently done.

  I wanted Xan to go because I wanted him in safety. I thought, as he did, that a woman and child were less vulnerable in their helplessness and might escape unnoticed, while he would always be targeted, by the Soviets as an aristocrat, by the Nazis as a left-winger. But I feared the dangers of his journey and the thought of the months without news which would follow depressed me. There was the contrast, too, with Lai, whose loyalty to me Xan was going to make use of. He decided he must talk to Lai before he left and early in June 1941 I told Lai what he had already guessed, that Xan was in hiding nearby and wanted to see him.

  One night, in the early hours, under a sky which is never really dark at that time of year, we set off together from Kornu, Lai and I. Normally, Xan came to the house, but since we intended to talk, we decided that we must make the journey to him. I knew the forest paths well, but I cannot say I made my usual speed along them. I was eight months’ pregnant, though not large; we had too little food for me to balloon up or to be indulged in cravings. We met on one of the rides leading up to the woodcutters’ hut and sat to talk on a fallen trunk. I could sense that Lai disapproved of Xan’s hiding and his running away.

  However, he listened to the plan and only added, “When you get to Sweden you must tell them what they have done, the Russians, the fixed elections, the deportations. Two or three hundred people every month arrested, and shipped east by the NKVD, the confiscations, the impossible quotas placed on the farms. Genya knows all about that; she will have told you.”

  I hadn’t of course. I knew it would be of no use. Xan began to argue.

  “This is just the initial stage. Since the country voluntarily joined the Soviet Union, it will quickly adapt itself. It’s simply a question of the adjustments that have to be made in the change to a planned economy. Of course, the kulaks will resent it. There are always losers in a historical process like this.”

  He was as unconscious, as I was distressedly aware, of Lai’s recoil. Lai had expected that Xan’s views would have changed with experiences of the last year. He had not realized, and I had not been able to prepare him, that Xan’s beliefs had hardened during his isolation. Xan had had no contact with Soviet reality; he had only listened to the propaganda on the wireless. He lived in a world of ideas.

  “Hasn’t Genya told you what has been going on? It’s not just expropriations of banks and big manufactories, it’s real oppression of the peasants, much worse than in the old days when you lot ruled us. I can understand their taking away my father. According to them, he was a capitalist and a bourgeois intellectual and I suppose we are as much class enemies as you aristos, but why take away the sons of peasants, impose enormous quotas on the farmers, lengthen hours at the factories? It is simple national oppression. It is not socialist revolution at all.”

  “Lai, you will never understand,” Xan said impatiently. He did not want even to discuss the subject with him, not because he knew that their minds were so fixed at the start that there was no possibility of understanding, but because he did not think Lai was worth debating with. I could read his feelings as if they had been written on a banner flying over his head: You are a jumped-up Latvian peasant: you have neither the breadth of culture nor the range of historical view to see that this is inevitable. Only an intellectual can see past his personal, class and national interest to recognize the necessary, impersonal forces of history.

  In later years, I learned more of the psychological phenomenon of the victim’s identification with the bully, the admiration the loser feels for the winner, even for the unjust winner. I see now that I myself adopted the same strategy in becoming English: I was one of the defeated; I made myself into one of the winners. This was what Xan was doing with his allegiance to communism; it made him feel he was not one of the dodos; he had joined history’s winning side. Lai was not like us; he and his people had been losers for so long that they could wait. They waited until last year.

  “Lai, you will never understand.”

  What Xan did not say was written on his face. I could see it there, and so could Lai. It was like that moment a decade earlier beside the lake, when Lai had dived into the water to escape from Xan’s mockery. I didn’t know whether Xan was conscious of the pain he was causing, of his injustice and cruelty. Then, I didn’t want to believe that he knew what he was doing; now, I think he probably did. Just like that earlier moment, it was a deliberate act. He did it because he believed he was right, the most powerful motive for inflicting suffering. But the greater blame lies with me. For I saw he was wrong and I saw what he was doing to Lai, but I said nothing. I averted my eyes in order not to see, and not to have to see Lai see me seeing his humiliation. I chose the side I was on; I chose to be Xan’s accomplice, rather than Lai’s defender. But I was punished for it, later.

  They abandoned the discussion of politics and began to make arrangements for Xan to go. A date was set, a week away, a route was chosen. Lai promised to make certain enquiries and to return the answer to me in two days’ time. Eventually Lai rose to leave. He and Xan shook hands. Xan kissed me, on the mouth, which he would not normally have done in front of others – we were very discreet in those days – so I knew that his antagonism to Lai reached as far as marking me clearly as part of his possessions. He could not bring himself to ask Lai to look after me or the baby. There was to be no sharing of that responsibility. I would look after myself. Lai and I walked away and Xan watched us go from under the trees.

  Two or three days after this last meeting of the three of us there was a great round up by the NKVD, the last, as it happened. A troop of soldiers, marching through the woods with a gang of prisoners, searched the woodcutters’ shelter and found Xan. They took him away with them. He was being loaded onto a train for the East with
other prisoners, when he was involved in a fracas with a guard and shot. A week later, on 22nd June, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, sweeping through Latvia by the end of the month.

  I’ve described Xan’s capture and death so quickly because to tell how I went to the shelter to see him and found it ransacked, how I searched for news, how I heard of his death on the platform of the station would still pain me after all these years. I shall never forget walking up the ride towards the hut in the moonlight, expecting every moment to see Xan, whose watch I told myself must have stopped. But even as I made explanations for myself, fear already anticipated what I would find. I could still weep to think of the story I heard from the wife of another deportee who had been present, of how she had seen Xan’s body flung into the cattle truck just before the train moved off, as the guards could not be bothered to deal with it. I imagined the doors being opened to put in more prisoners, or to water them, like beasts, somewhere on the line into Russia and his corpse being tossed out to lie and rot beside the track in the summer’s heat.

  But worse than the pain of loss, the certainty of his death, was the suspicion I lived with, no, more than a suspicion, a conviction, that he had been betrayed by Lai. How else could the Russians have found him? Why was he discovered just a few days after Lai was shown where he was? These were grounds for suspicion; my conviction came from my feeling that somehow Xan merited Lai’s revenge.

  I could not read Lai as I could read Xan. I could see no guilt in him, in his reaction to the story that I told him the next weekend when he came to Kornu. His horror at what had happened, his grief at Xan’s death, his sympathy for me appeared all they should have been. But what is guilt? It doesn’t show like leprosy, eating away the flesh. Can one tell the state of another’s soul, as Xenia claimed? She has nothing to hide, perhaps, so she can believe that. I know it is possible to live a lifetime with the past hidden, smoothed over, like the soil over the child’s bones, and nobody any the wiser. Once I had reached England, I hid my past as completely as I could. Only the outline remained, the details were obliterated. And what details; husband, child, lover, all erased. So why should I have expected to see guilt in Lai?

  I said nothing, but my certainty of his betrayal lay beneath everything. I made no accusations, for I needed Lai and indeed was to need his particular skills scarcely a month later when my son was born.

  I had been relying with the complete carelessness of youth on the experience of the maids to assist me at the birth. Maris had had three illegitimate children; the gardener’s wife had a family of seven of her own and five grandchildren. Everyone else managed, I reasoned, so why shouldn’t I, especially with such experienced help at hand. In fact, to my indignation, the process was much less easy and natural (or perhaps it was too natural) than I had believed and only Lai’s presence saved Alek’s life. For that act of preserving the son I forgave him for ever for destroying the father. If I had ever loved Xan, and I had, passionately and wholeheartedly, for a long time without hope, it was nothing to what I felt for Alek from the moment he was placed in my arms.

  He was born on his father’s birthday, 7th July 1941, less than a month after Xan’s death. Setting aside his troublesome arrival, he was the easiest and happiest baby in the world. He had a long oval head with enormous eyes that had turned grey like Xan’s by the time he was one. His hair was dark when he was born but lightened to brown as he grew older. His fingers were disproportionately long and I shall never forget the first time I uncoiled his minute mottled fist like the tendril of a new frond of fern to put my finger in his reflexive grasp. I think it was the happiest moment I have ever known.

  Part Nine

  ZITA

  18

  Zita was at a concert with two of her quintet friends. Normally, she found that music had the power to eradicate the quotidian and to transport her to a world of pattern and harmony. This evening the effect was absent. Her mind moved restlessly, distracted by one sense or another, by memory, by the ever-intrusive Oliver, while the music could only thread through her fretful thoughts. She observed the curious acoustics of the little gothic church in which she was sitting between Gerald and Georgina Orr. It was narrow, truncated, inordinately high for its ground plan, so that the voices of the singers were funnelled upwards to hang in the upper air of the clerestory. (Oliver, Oliver, Oliver.) She lowered her eyes to take in the red linen of her skirt, the satisfyingly tight texture of its web, slightly scratchy to the finger tips, palpable to the eyes. She must ring her dressmaker to see if her new black dress was ready. (Oliver, Oliver, Oliver.) His name was like the rhythm of the wheels of a train, drumming along a track without a destination. (Oliver, Oliver, Oliver.) Tom had been a real pig this evening. She had hoped that the concert would soothe and compose her after a day of frustration in which she had tried to undertake two new resolutions.

  The first was to pay more attention to Tom. She did not like to admit to herself that her mother’s visit had shown her how little time she actually spent with her son. Nevertheless, it had been the unexpected sight of Valentina wheeling her grandson about, maintaining a constant flow of conversation with him, that had jolted Zita into recognition of her neglect. Her life might be organized on the basis of his needs, but she did not really do very much with him. She lacked Lynne’s patience and empathy, her quick understanding of what his groping, dribbling, headbanging and rages were about.

  Her second resolution was action against Stevens. It occurred to her that there might have been a well-known story which would explain the discovery of the skeleton, a story, that is, that was well documented in its time but which had simply been forgotten. This was the reasoning that had led her, with Tom, to the library that Saturday morning.

  As it was a fine day, she had decided to walk. She strapped Tom into his wheel chair. It was very upright, holding him in position, with a head rest that came around the sides of his skull, like earphones. As she knelt down to buckle the belt around his waist she looked into his hazel eyes, very pale, greeny brown this morning, just like Oliver’s. They were like spirit levels, she thought; she must concentrate on his eyes; they remained faithful to his understanding when everything else about him was out of true. Today they were full of life and interest.

  “There. Are you comfortable, now?” He cast up his eyes to say yes. “We’re going to the library and we’re not going in the van, so I can’t take your computer. You’ll have to look at a book when we get there. OK?” As they walked towards the centre of town, jolting over the kerbs and uneven pavements, she kept up a monologue about what they could see as they passed: a cat perched on a wall turning its head to watch them with insolent eyes; a car parked across the edge of the pavement so that they had to make a detour round it. Tom seemed to enjoy this. He listened and she could sense his concentration even from her view of the top of his head. Then her own attention slipped. It was impossible for her to comment endlessly on the cars and gardens that ran past her moving gaze and her mind turned back to the child’s skeleton. There were several oddities about Stevens and his enquiry. The first was that he was very senior for such an unimportant investigation. She thought it very likely that normally a much younger and more junior officer would have been placed in charge of a few old bones. Stevens had taken over the case from the start and had given it its momentum. She also suspected that he was running two enquiries, official and unofficial, one from the incident room at Broad Woodham police station, another in his head.

  At the library she had rung for assistance to get Tom up the imposing nineteenth-century steps into the building and had taken him straight to the children’s section where she selected a book at speed. With this to act as a distraction for her son, she took him to the lift to the reference section on the first floor. Tom was pleased by the novelty. He was watching everything with his attentive look rather than his sullen one. She parked him, opened his book and began to scan the local history section. Some thirty minutes later, she had, with the help of the librarian, ass
embled a number of volumes on her desk and was ready to read them, when Tom signalled that he was bored. His book fell to the floor. Zita picked it up and opened it again. He closed his eyes, to indicate he did not want to look at it. Although he could not talk, Tom could make a range of extraordinary sounds, which Lynne alone could interpret with finesse. Now, he was gurgling gently in the back of his throat, raising the volume slightly until Zita abandoned her book and turned to him. She mopped the saliva from his chin and turned his head so he would look at her.

  “Be quiet, Tom,” she hissed. Already hostile glances were being cast at them by the smelly old men reading the racing pages who always seem to occupy the chairs in public libraries. He closed his eyes again.

  “Look, take one of mine if you don’t like yours.” She put a picture book of local beauty spots in front of him and turned the pages for him every few minutes, as she attempted to examine the indexes of the other works on her pile. Tom read well for a seven-year-old, but his lack of control of his limbs meant that turning pages was a source of enormous frustration, as he needed an attendant to help him when he eye-pointed his readiness for the next page. His computer was much more successful as he could scroll down using the head switches on his wheel chair. Zita, dividing her attention between her books and her son, was almost as frustrated as he. There was plenty of local history of the Queen Elizabeth slept here variety; very little that was recent and relevant. She allowed herself to be distracted into reading some amusing and interesting facts or fictions about the town’s history without gaining any information to explain why poor Yorick lay in Yevgenia’s garden.