Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  ‘Olga Milova doesn’t live here,’ she said. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I …’

  ‘This is my house. Polina Yurievna’s house. Not hers.’ She paused, and then added: ‘Or yours.’

  ‘I know, that’s not … Polina Yurievna, may I come inside?’ She looked at me, at my fouled jacket, squinted at the red snow by my feet. The temperature was dropping further. My mouth still tasted of iron – tongue, teeth still bleeding from the impact in the taxi. ‘Please.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Are you in trouble, Maksimilian Ivanovich?’

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  A wry, unexpected smile spread across her face.

  ‘Rubbish,’ she cackled. ‘I’ve never known anyone from your family that wasn’t.’

  She pulled the door open further and stepped aside, and for the first time ever I walked into my mother’s house, cupping my left hand with my right so as not to spoil the floor with blood. Once I was inside, the old woman gazed at me intently, looking, perhaps, for proof – some trace of my mother in my face, eyes.

  ‘These are strange times,’ she said. ‘One day to the next you don’t know whom you’ll meet. And always,’ she said, leading me deeper into her home, ‘without warning. Everyone always wants something.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘How did you get here?’ she interrupted – though whether from impatience or deafness I couldn’t tell. ‘The roads are blocked. It’s been snowing all week.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They are blocked. But only once you leave the highway. A farmer out clearing snow gave me a lift on his tractor from Koptevo.’

  I spared her the details of the rest of the journey from Moscow – the majority of which I’d made hidden in the grit box of a truck heading north-east to Ivanovo, the oblast capital. I’d climbed out when the driver stopped to refuel, shivering in a culvert until the coast was clear. From there I’d hitchhiked – a series of short lifts repaid with a few hundred-ruble notes – then taken the tractor. I’d walked the last mile – with difficulty. The car crash and fall from the bridge hadn’t only knocked out one of my teeth – they had badly bruised my ribs, and sprained my left knee, as well as reopening my bullet wounds. I’d made good time, all things considered.

  We stood in silence for a moment, her eyes continuing to explore my face until she made up her mind.

  ‘I have an old sheet,’ she said, pausing again to clear her throat, ‘for bandages. Hot water, too.’ She waved her hand towards the stove. ‘And pokhlyobka for your belly.’

  I looked around. On a shelf in the far corner, an ancient, gilded icon of St Michael presided over her proud, searing poverty. We were standing by the dining table – a solid wooden platform more like a butcher’s block. Years of elbow grease and pork fat had rubbed into it a deep, burnished patina. By the door where I’d come in, a woodfired range warmed a large pan of soup. On the far side of the table sat a metal-framed bed covered with an acrylic blanket. A bucket with soaking soiled clothes lurked in the corner. There was no TV, no radio – no luxuries at all, nothing that wasn’t entirely necessary to sustain another day of life – St Michael included.

  There was a flight of stairs – open wood planks with no banister – leading to an upper level, which, Polina said, her legs could no longer manage.

  ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize how late it was.’

  ‘There’s no harm done,’ she replied, waving her hand at me. ‘I don’t sleep much, anyway.’ She patted her thigh. ‘Restless legs.’ Then she laid her hand on the table, skin tight across her knuckles. ‘Are you really Anastasia’s son?’ I nodded. ‘Well, this is where it happened, you know.’

  I took off my jacket, and began to ease myself out of my sweater. Talia had dressed me in black – guessing, perhaps, I’d need to be camouflaged against gore as I had been in Tel Aviv. She hadn’t figured I’d spend five hours up to my neck in rock salt. The wound in my left shoulder felt as fresh as the day I’d been shot in the cottage. The furrow in my right thigh had split open again, too.

  ‘Where what happened, Polina Yurievna?’

  ‘Your grandmother, Maksimilian Ivanovich. Where she crossed into the next life. And where your mother came into this one.’ She stroked the table.

  ‘And how,’ I asked, ‘would you know that?’

  ‘Because I was here when it happened, Maksimilian Ivanovich. Right here.’ She turned to look at me, pale blue eyes lingering on mine in the lamplight. ‘I delivered your mother, on this very table.’

  I scraped the last of the soup from the bowl.

  Polina had helped to dress my wounds before we ate. While she’d wrapped my shoulder, I’d told her that my mother was dead, too – a fact that she had received with the sign of the cross.

  ‘Her first breath was your grandmother’s last,’ she’d said.

  We’d broken bread after that. When Polina finished eating, she got up from the table and fetched two small glasses, which she filled to the brim with colourless liquid from an unlabelled glass bottle balanced on the stairs.

  ‘Let’s drink to Anastasia, may God rest her soul.’

  We drank in silence, without touching glasses. Then she stood up again and shuffled off towards the bed. From under it she produced a scuffed tin box tied shut with a length of twine. She unpicked the knot and, back turned to me, riffled through what sounded like a stack of papers. Finally she returned the box to its place and turned around, a piece of card in one hand, and a knife in the other.

  ‘These are for you,’ she said.

  The piece of card revealed itself to be a black and white photograph. The image showed a young girl, laughing, blonde hair wound up in the glowing crown of a tight basket-braid.

  ‘It’s Anastasia. Your mother.’

  I looked on the reverse. There was nothing except the date: 1959. She would have been seven or eight years old. Decades of certainty crumbled on the lips of that bleached-white almost-smile. I’d thought, when I ran away aged sixteen, that her past had evaporated – and mine with it; I’d imagined that Doc beamed the last rays of light shed by a star that had died long ago. It wasn’t so. My mother had made me an orphan. But I had chosen exile.

  I sat with my hands on the table, feet on the floor, trapped in the space between the competing stories of who I was.

  ‘And the knife?’

  ‘It was your grandfather’s,’ Polina said, sitting down again. ‘He said it killed many fascists in the Great Patriotic War.’ She winked at me. ‘But Olga said he just whittled wood with it.’

  I drew it from its home-stitched leather sheath. It was an old Red Army scout’s knife – with a pitted six-inch blade and battered, black wooden handle. It had an inverted S-guard, designed for holding it with the cutting edge upwards, and a needle-sharp clip point. It was rudimentary, but oiled and well balanced.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, slipping it into the makeshift scabbard and then tucking it away in the back of my jeans. It sat comfortably in the spot where I usually carried my pistol.

  I turned back to the image of the enigmatic little girl playing behind the rusted pelmet of the Iron Curtain. It was the only photograph of her I had.

  ‘She kept that smile her whole life, you know. I never could tell what she was thinking.’

  ‘They said she was a spy. Is that true?’

  I zipped the photograph into my inside jacket pocket. ‘Who,’ I asked, ‘said that?’

  ‘Everyone. After she went to England.’

  ‘Ireland,’ I corrected her.

  ‘Yes, there. Everyone said she must have been a British spy. How else could she have …’ She looked around the room, at the worn wood panelling and sparse old-fashioned furniture, searching for the right word, ‘escaped?’

  ‘My mother wasn’t a British spy,’ I reassured her. ‘Of that, I am one hundred per cent certain.’

  ‘The woman who came here at Christmas said the same thing.�
� She poured two more glasses of vodka.

  ‘This Christmas?’ I asked. ‘In December?’

  She looked at me as if I was a simpleton.

  ‘Anastasia brought you up speaking Russian, but she didn’t bring you up in the Church, did she?’ I shook my head. ‘January the seventh. Our Christmas.’

  ‘But that was less than two weeks ago.’

  ‘No, it was the sixth. I remember, because Aleksandr Denisovich brought me some fresh logs in his new car … or … No, that was the day before. It’s very nice, his car. His brother bought it …’

  ‘Polina Yurievna,’ I interrupted her, ‘what woman?’

  ‘Rakhil,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely name, isn’t it? And so unusual.’

  My pulse quickened. I swallowed hard.

  ‘What did she look like, this “Rakhil”?’ Inside my chest my heart banged against bruised, burning ribs.

  ‘Black hair and green eyes.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘And so beautiful. Are you sure you’re not in trouble, Maksimilian Ivanovich?’ She chuckled to herself and added: ‘Or that she’s not?’

  Rakhil. It was as if she’d shot me between the eyes. Rachel. In Arkhangel. It was inconceivable.

  ‘And she’s here, still here, in this village?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In your village.’ She smiled and held her arthritic fingers up for inspection. ‘I’m old, but I could still deliver one more of Arkhangel’s sons.’

  I reached over and took her hands in mine, rubbing my thumb gently across her knuckles.

  ‘Trust me, Polina Yurievna,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice steady. ‘You already have.’

  I steered clear of the path.

  It was barely a hundred and fifty metres to the church of St Michael the Archangel, but the snow was thigh deep between the trees. Fresh flurries piled it even thicker. It must have been minus fifteen. There was no moon visible, no street lamps. Away from the glow of Polina’s windows the night absorbed me, sucking me into the void of the winter landscape.

  Polina told me that Rachel had declined her offer of hospitality and said that she would be staying at the priest’s house next to the church instead. And what was the harm in that? It was nice to see young people moving back to the village again. Polina had also confirmed – to the point of irritation at how many times I asked – that no one else had visited Arkhangel immediately before, or since, Rachel had arrived.

  I put one foot after the other, and tried to fathom why, of all the places she could have bolted to – whether she was running from something or towards it – she had come here. Was it me? Or my mother? Or perhaps it was closer to home than that. In my mind’s eye I saw Doc dead in his drawing room, slumped in front of the fire. For better or worse, he linked us all. Our pasts and our presents all spun around him. The thought of what might happen if – when – they collided made me shudder.

  On the way to my mother’s old family house I’d avoided the road and persevered along an old cart track that had taken me to the west of the church, but not past it. The birch trees on the approach were thick enough to give good cover against infrared, though if anyone nearby had thermal imaging I’d be lit up like a Christmas tree. Despite Polina’s protestations about no one else having come to the village, an entire detachment of Special Forces could have deployed without her suspecting a thing. I was about to find out for certain if the GRU had connected Arkhangel the place to Arkhangel the project. My cheeks burned. There was just enough time for a simple recce. Ideally, I’d have watched the churchyard all night – but without the proper kit, minus fifteen will kill you. I didn’t have the proper kit. I didn’t have any kit – and I was injured.

  I tried to empty my mind of Rachel, of the uncertainty of what meeting her might beget, and filled it instead with the specifics of safely crossing the short distance to the churchyard.

  I looped around the other painted wooden cabins neighbouring Polina Yurievna’s. There couldn’t have been more than ten houses in total – smallholdings, mainly, and all separated from each other by fields and trees. At the front of the third plot along stood a snow-covered Lada Niva, tyres unworn, snow around it undisturbed: Aleksandr Denisovich’s new car, in which he’d brought Polina the logs for her Christmas fire. I watched the house. The silhouette of a man passed in front of the downstairs window and then vanished behind the woodpile. Five-eleven, maybe, and wrapped up against the cold. I heard a door shut, and then the lights went out. I listened carefully, but the night was silent again, all sound muffled by the snow: no wolves, no planes, no car engines. I crept around the offside of the four-by-four and pulled gently at the door handle. It was unlocked, keys in the ignition.

  I crossed the road at a crouch. The church itself was a dilapidated nineteenth-century two-storey white box – topped by a short spire and onion dome supporting a silver Orthodox cross. At the west end there was a lower extension – where the congregation would have entered and bought candles. It had been a long time since I’d been inside an Orthodox church. In Ireland my mother had taken communion with my father in the Roman Catholic church of Sts Mary and Peter in Arklow – although there were parts of the service she always refused to say out loud.

  I wished I’d paid more attention.

  Snow worked its way into my pockets, boots. The wind picked up a little and cut through my jeans, stinging my ears. I was chilled and getting colder. Whatever the risks it was time to get back inside. The church itself, Polina Yurievna had told me, had been closed for years – another victim of the Soviet era which had never recovered. The St Michael that hung on her wall had been rescued three days before the doors had been shut for good. More recently, by the looks of it, a large metal grille had been bolted over the north entrance – though who, or what, it was meant to deter out here was anyone’s guess.

  The priest’s house was set in the south-west corner of the churchyard – a ramshackle wood cabin that looked as if it might have been used more recently for livestock than clergy. I slipped through the remains of an old picket fence, the tops of which crested the drifting snow like the masts of a sunken clipper, and threaded my way between the frosted branches of ancient apple trees to the back of the house.

  Smoke leaked from the chimney. A light flickered in the window, but the panes were smeared with grime and impossible to see through. I circled around to the front door and stamped the snow off my boots. I breathed deeply, sending a column of silent white mist into the air. Since I’d fled the burning cottage in Donegal, all roads had led me here. Led me home.

  Whatever happened next, I knew Rachel would at least want to know how her father had really died. In Tel Aviv I’d braced myself to be confronted, hoping all the while to be forgiven. I’d thought I’d been prepared. But as soon as I’d stepped into her office, I’d been swamped with uncertainty. I still was, but with this difference: I no longer knew which of us was guilty, or of what. I thought that I had come to assuage her. But I hadn’t. I’d come to accuse her. What followed might lead to revenge. Or atonement. Either way, I told myself, I’d be ready.

  Midnight in Arkhangel and all was quiet.

  I raised my fist to strike the door, but as I did so I saw that it was already open. I pushed it gently, and stepped through the looking glass.

  32

  Rachel was facing away from me, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, knees drawn up to her chin, arms locked around her shins. Her hair hung long, falling down the back of her tunic in a jumble of black tresses.

  Three candles – arranged neatly in a line – burned on an old dresser pushed up against the far wall. Wax spilled on to the bare floorboards. The remains of a fire glowed in the stove. I closed the cabin door quietly and stood still, letting my eyes adjust. The ceiling was fouled with lamp soot, the walls covered with crazy patterns scored into them by years of decay.

  Before I could speak, she said: ‘Ner tamid.’

  She turned and looked hopefully at me over her shoulder. She was both Rachel and a strang
er – familiar and yet disarmingly different. Her face was set with worry; a hard journey etched in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Eternal light,’ she replied, pointing to the taller candle in the middle. ‘God’s gift to us who live in darkness.’

  I took a step closer. I looked at her, at the room. Light pooled above the candles. The marks that at first had looked like random patterns in the cracked wooden panels took shape. The whole back wall was covered in an organized explosion of mathematical calculations. Dead centre, repeated in dozens of permutations, the serial number of the hundred-dollar bill: 73939133.

  I trod the ten feet between us. I tried to squat down beside her, but my knee gave way. I grunted with pain as I sprawled on the floor, leaning on my right hand with one leg folded beneath me. I could feel fresh blood leaking into Polina’s bandages.

  ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said, ‘after I saw your photograph in the paper. You want to convince me that you didn’t kill him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  We were a foot apart. Her accent was harsh and unfamiliar, pulled between Ireland and Israel, edged with fear.

  ‘But you did, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know where to start,’ I said.

  I looked at the candles, at the few personal effects scattered around the room: a sleeping bag by the stove, a half-eaten loaf of bread, a plate and a bowl. But I could find no anchor to steady me; see no compass to navigate by. It felt both unremarkable to see her again and deeply disorientating.

  ‘Yes, you do, Max. Where all stories start,’ she said. ‘At the beginning. Remember?’