by Rose Tremain
‘I don’t know. It’s got more strange as time has gone by. I think it’s not a laugh any more, but a cry.’
‘A cry?’
‘Yes. Like an animal cry – a rabbit or a rat or something.’
‘What’s he crying about?’
‘His life. What else?’
After the breakfast of coffee and bread, I had to have my first shit into the bucket. I didn’t dare sit on the bucket, in case it fell over. I thought, if you know you’re going to have to live with your shit, right next to it, in the very room where you are, you try your best to keep it inside you.
The bits of paper I scrunched up were from a newspaper called France Dimanche. It was like a tabloid newspaper at home, full of photographs of celebrities. I wiped my bum with about ten famous people.
I was glad there was a lid to the bucket. I couldn’t remember whether the shit buckets in British prisons had lids or not. But even with the lid I didn’t like it being there, so when the monkeys next came in I asked them to empty it.
It was the cigarette monkey who laughed this time. He said in French that nobody would empty my bucket for me; I had to do it myself.
‘Where?’ I said.
‘Vasily will show you later on.’
Valentina had told me that the cigarette monkey was called Shukov. As well as burning his brain out with heroin, he smoked about sixty fags a day. He’d once owned a small press, called Editions d’hiver, that he ran from a room above a glove factory in Charenton-le-Pont. When the press had folded, he’d joined Leo Todorsky to make money from drug dealing. She said: ‘It’s a natural occupation for Russians, Lewis. It’s the first thing they turn to when other things fail. More than fifty per cent of the hard drugs that come into France from the Far East come through Russia now. And Russians have always been very, very adept in any black market, as I expect you know.’
I asked if the fourth monkey’s name was Vasily. I knew by now there were four and I’d worked out that if they got their money and split it four ways, they’d get about £300,000 each.
She told me that the fourth monkey was younger than the others, like he could almost have been one of their sons. They bullied him and babied him, first one, then the other. They called him Vasya, but this was short for Vasily. He was quiet and small. When the others argued and shouted, he seldom joined in. Valentina said: ‘He has a sweet face.’
It was this Vasya who took me to empty my shit pail. I could tell it was him from the way he handled me, more gently than the others. He tied my blindfold on and then put the bucket into one of my hands and took the other arm and guided me out of the room.
I could see light seeping through the blindfold as we went along a corridor, past Valentina’s cell, then we went down one step on to a different level and into a smelly toilet. Vasya moved me forward. ‘Go on,’ he said in French: ‘empty your pail.’
He was holding me all the time, so I had to do this with one hand, and I thought, I could drop the fucking bucket and everything will spill over our feet. So I did it as carefully as I could. I tried not to breathe as I took the lid off. I wondered if all the scrunched-up celebrities would block the drains.
After Vasya had pulled the chain, he took the bucket from me and rinsed it out in the toilet bowl. I didn’t know whether Alexis or the others would have bothered to do this. While he was rinsing, I lifted my head and felt a breeze on my face, coming from my left, so I knew there had to be a window in this toilet. I wanted to put out a hand, to feel how large the window was, but I didn’t dare. I said in French to Vasya: ‘Does Valentina have a bucket in her room, or do you let her use the toilet?’
‘She uses the toilet,’ he said, ‘except in the night, when she must use her bucket.’
I wanted to go on with more questions. I wanted to say to Vasya, ‘Do you let her wash and take care of herself? What’s happened to her hair, to her smart dress, to her white shoes . . . ?’ But I could hear Alexis and Todorsky very near us, so I just took my bucket in silence and let Vasya march me back to my room.
It was a long time before I could move my slate. When I did, the sun came in, high and dazzling. Valentina said we ought to walk through Switzerland again, but I explained to her that we had to do some manual work. I told her to move her mattress near to her bit of the iron pipe and then we would take it in turns to try to loosen it, from both sides of the wall. And she was really pleased with this idea. She saw that if we could remove the piece of pipe, we would have a secret spyhole through which we could talk. Whenever the monkeys came back, we could replace the pipe and they’d never know what we’d done.
My bit of the pipe had a right-angle in it, so I tried lifting the long end and turning it, like you turn a wheelbrace when you’re getting a wheel off a car, but it wouldn’t move. On her side, Valentina got a long rusty nail she’d found on her first day, and with it she tried to gouge away the plaster round the pipe-end, to loosen it in the wall.
The wall had a surprising grip on it. It was like the whole structure of that wall had settled down around this useless, forgotten piece of iron. I said to Valentina: ‘This is like trying to extract the sword Excalibur from the stone!’
We gave up for a while when the monkeys – Vasya and Todorsky on their own – returned with our food. What we had today was just potatoes and onions in a kind of thin brown gravy and I thought of Grisha looking at the restaurant menu in the Place de l’Alma and seeing twenty-five different delicacies, including quail, and Valentina saying the restaurant was no good. Now, like me, she ate every bit of this disgusting onion and lumpy mash and then waited silently in the dark, as if a second helping was going to appear. Of course, nothing else came; no one in this kidnapping group had got the idea of pudding.
It was late in the day, getting bluish and dark through my sky hole, when we were able to go back to our work on the pipe. I searched my cell for a nail or something to gouge with, but I couldn’t find anything. I wondered what the monkeys had done with my Sabatier knife. And I felt, when I remembered this, a kind of disappointment at the loss of my Concorde notebook – not about the thing itself, but about all my unfinished theories that would never be brought to any conclusion, but just stay floating out there, like forgotten bits of arithmetic, lost in space and time.
I told Valentina about this. I said I’d been writing everything down for weeks and now it was all wasted. I heard her sigh and she said: ‘I feel for you, darling. Since I’ve been in here, I’ve come to believe my book will never be finished.’
I held on tightly to the pipe. I thought, now she’s going to tell me that she’s been stealing all that stuff from Grisha’s book.
‘Why?’ I said innocently. ‘Why wouldn’t it be finished?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s no longer the book I want to write.’
‘Haven’t Bianquis paid you a lot of money for it?’
‘Sure. But I could give the money back. I could just tell them I want to write something else.’
‘What would it be?’
‘What?’
‘The other book you’d write now. What would it be about?’
‘I don’t know. It hasn’t come to me yet.’
There was silence then. I thought, she will tell me, she will confide in me, but the right time hasn’t come yet.
‘Perhaps,’ I said tentatively, ‘your other book would be about Anton?’
‘Anton? My father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe. Yes. Perhaps it would.’
After about another half-hour’s work on the pipe, we felt it move. Valentina said that, on her side of it, there was quite a heap of plaster dust, where she’d been patiently gouging out the wall with her rusty nail, but she knew if she just scattered this dust around it wouldn’t be noticed. She said that her cell hadn’t been cleaned once since she’d been put in it, and because there was no air it was starting to smell.
Then she sighed. ‘Why did this happen, Lewis?’ she said. ‘I keep saying to Alexis, “What
got into your head?” To kidnap me is just a crazy joke, a revenge that is so typically Russian, it makes me laugh. But to take you: this is not a laughing matter.’
I told her not to think about this now. Once we’d got the pipe out of the wall, it would be miles easier to hear each other and have proper conversations; therefore we had to concentrate all our energy on this. Valentina said: ‘I’m trying, darling, but I’m not a plumber, you know.’
But slowly, slowly, now, the long end of the pipe was beginning to turn. When the long end was at the vertical position, I could have kicked it down if I’d had any shoes, but the kidnappers hadn’t returned these. I wondered whether one of them had a son, or a nephew or something, with size six feet.
I was working in total darkness now. I knew the grating noise of the pipe as it turned in the wall could be heard in the quiet of the house, and I just had to hope that Alexis and his friends were sleeping or stoned or not there at all. I’d begun to believe, from the noises of boats that I sometimes heard when my skylight was open, that we were near a river or a canal. I could imagine the monkeys renting a houseboat there, or a converted barge like you saw on the Seine, and coming and going secretly from that.
Now that the pipe was loose in the wall, it was up to me to pull it through. Valentina couldn’t do much more from her side, so I told her to lie down and rest. As I pulled and strained, I thought how ironic it was that this important feat of strength had to be achieved by the puniest bits of my whole being – my arms.
And then I felt the pipe come free. It was like a tooth that’s finally given up its struggle to stay attached to the gum and the bone. I simply drew it out and it didn’t resist any more, but just came out, and I held it in my hands.
I knocked on the wall. ‘It’s out!’ I said. ‘It’s out!’
‘OK,’ said Valentina. ‘Lie down, darling, and put your mouth close to the hole and I’ll do the same and just whisper something to me and I’ll see if I can hear you.’
So I laid the pipe aside and settled myself by the hole with my head resting on my left arm. I could feel something warm coming through to me from the other side of the wall and I knew it was Valentina’s breath. The thing that I wanted to whisper to her was a confession of my mad, unstoppable love. We could hear each other perfectly now, just as if we were lying face to face on a bed and whispering in the dark, like lovers do in movies. Except that in the movies there always had to be some kind of light coming from somewhere, moon-light or street neon or a motel sign blinking on and off, or else the screen would be completely blank.
I said: ‘Alexis only took me because I was getting close to what had happened. I think his first idea may have been just to threaten me.’
‘Threaten you how?’
I described how the face had come to my attic window. I said I still couldn’t tell which one of the kidnappers it was, because it had been hidden by this horrible cloth, but I knew that if I hadn’t run out to Moinel’s apartment this person would have come into the flat and threatened me or even killed me.
‘But why, why?’ said Valentina.
‘Because Moinel and I worked out how you’d been taken – from the hospital, right?’
‘Yes. It was clever what they did – so easy. But how did you work it out, darling?’
‘Just by following every lead, and that was one of them. Moinel knows some of the doctors there and so he could get authorisation to look at the register. And then I went back on my own, because I realised the receptionist we’d talked to was Russian . . .’
‘She was the one. No one will tell me her name. But I’ve come to think the whole idea may have started with her, that she’s connected to Alexis in some way. And, suddenly, he thought it would be easy to get rich by taking me . . .’
‘So she was at Reception when you checked in?’
‘Yes. I checked in with her and then I sat down in the waiting area. Then she went away. I was early for my appointment. One of the other receptionists came by, but she was just on her way to somewhere. She didn’t stay, but she said hello to me.’
‘And she admired your dress?’
‘Yes, I think she did. How did you know?’
‘That’s what she told your mother on the telephone. Did she look at the register?’
‘Oh no. She’d just come to collect something from the desk. Then she left and the Russian girl came back. She told me Dr Bouchain was doing his consultations in a different room today. She asked me to follow her and so I followed her. We walked a long way down some corridors and then she opened a door and said this was the room. But it wasn’t the room. It was some kind of a store, and there was a man in there, wearing a white hospital coat. I remember thinking, this guy looks very like poor Alexis . . .’
‘And then . . . ?’
‘The Russian girl gave me an injection, in my arm. I was still awake after it, but very sleepy. I remember they put me in a wheelchair and then wheeled me out back into the corridor. I wanted to ask where Bouchain was, but I couldn’t speak. That’s all I can recall, darling. I suppose they put me in a car or a van or whatever it is they’ve got. When I woke up, I was here, in the dark.’
We were silent for a bit. Neither of us moved and I supposed Valentina could feel my breath coming through the hole, just as I could feel hers. It was odd to think of our two invisible breaths meeting in the space where the pipe had been, but just passing each other and travelling on.
After a while, I got up from the floor. I’d suddenly decided that now was the moment when I was going to give Valentina her present – the thing she’d never before held in her hands. I told her I was fetching something for her and then I’d try to pass it through the hole into her room. She said: ‘What is it going to be, Lewis?’ And I said: ‘Wait.’
I fetched Elroy from his position on the mattress. I untied his string, so that I could still mark out my floor measurement to the skylight, then I lay down again and said to Valentina: ‘Reach into the pipe hole as far as you can. Something’s going to come through to you.’
I put him into the hole head first and helped him along the little tunnel by pushing his feet. As I felt him arrive on the other side and get pulled out by Valentina, I thought, I was right when I used to long to be as tiny as him.
At first, she didn’t say anything. I guess she was trying to figure out what on earth Elroy was. Then, gradually she would feel that he was a kind of doll with a face and limbs and everything and even start wondering whether he’d come from the Palais Royal toy-shop. I waited, with my face very near to the hole. Only after a long time went by did Valentina say: ‘What’s his name?’
‘Elroy,’ I said. ‘He’s a Royal Marine.’
What I remember most about the days that followed were all the hours I spent listening to Valentina’s voice telling me about the past. It was like her whole life was being gathered in and brought back from all the far corners of the cold earth where it had once been and distilled in the darkness of her cell and poured into my ear through the funnel in the wall. It was like I was learning in a short space of time more than I’d been taught in nearly fourteen years of existence.
‘You know, Lewis,’ she kept saying, ‘I think this is boring for you, hearing about all these things which are past and gone. Why don’t we talk about the future?’
I said I didn’t want to talk about that. I knew there might be no future. Valentina must have known this, too, deep inside her somewhere, but she’d just decided not to admit it.
She told me the person in her family she most resembled was her grandmother, Zoya, Anton’s mother. She said: ‘Zoya was fat and greedy, like me. Her idea of paradise would have been to own a patisserie shop. But paradise never came.’
Zoya lived in Leningrad, where Anton was born. She lived there all her life, including right through the siege of the city which began in 1941 and lasted nine hundred days. During all this time, there were no trains and no trams and no light.
Food was so scarce, people ate up all the dogs
and cats and rats and all the sparrows and starlings of the city. They made soup from book bindings and glue. When someone died, as 900,000 people did die, bits of their bodies were often eaten in secret, in the lightless rooms. Buttocks were considered a delicacy. Zoya and her neighbours kept themselves alive for two weeks in the winter of 1942 by making a stew out of four crows. Into this stew they put morsels of a road-mender, who had died on the stairs.
I asked Valentina whether, if we were starving and I died, she’d slice off slivers of my bum and make a casserole with them, and she said: ‘Darling, I can say no, never, I would never, never, do that, I would rather die. But the truth is you do not know what you are capable of doing, until that moment – of starvation or self-protection or whatever it is – arrives. People say they know, but they do not. If you had told Zoya, when she was young, that one day she would eat pieces of a road-mender’s body, she would have said that was impossible. But when the moment came, this is what she did.’
I said that if I was starving and Valentina was dead, I would definitely eat her. I asked her if breasts were a delicacy.
She said: ‘Well, I don’t know. Perhaps not. Perhaps there is too much fat in them, what do you think?’
I said I thought they might taste of cream. Then I added: ‘The only thing I’d like to have to go with you, Valentina, would be a bit of sugar.’
She told me about the ship frozen in the Neva river at the time of Zoya’s cannibalism. All through the siege, this ship kept going with a radio broadcast, run from the ship’s generator. It called itself Radio Leningrad. It tried to bring people news about the war and news about where food was to be found and when the siege would end. Valentina said: ‘Zoya told my father that these broadcasts were the things that people most looked forward to every single day. A voice that talks to you, even if you can’t see it, like we can’t see each other now, can give you hope, even if there really and truly is no hope at all. And do you know what those broadcasters used to transmit between the programmes, Lewis? They found a metronome and put it by the mike and just let it tick, on and on. And Zoya said that when you switched on your radio and heard that metronome, you knew that the ship was still there in the river and that the city was still alive.’