Red Shadow (16 page)

‘Good God, Misha. That’s the Tsar. That’s Nicholas, with all his medals,’ said Valya. ‘Who are these people?’

Misha’s hands began to shake. What had his mama been hiding here?

He looked at the documents. There were five of them in total, all from Moscow Imperial Conservatory, dated between 1911 and 1916. All declared that Anna Potemkin, of the Prince Alexander Baryatinsky Academy, had passed a succession of piano exams, each one with distinction.

‘That can’t be Mama,’ said Misha. He sounded relieved. ‘She could just about bash out “The Red Flag” and a few other communist songs.’

The kettle on the stove began to whistle. They sat on the veranda in the watery sun enjoying a coffee and their little picnic.

‘What are you going to do with this haul?’ she asked.

‘The piano certificates can go on the fire,’ he said. ‘I’m keeping the photographs.’

‘Misha, I’m not going to nag you about this, but if your papa specifically asked you to destroy them, then shouldn’t you do that?’

‘Valya, it must be Mama in the photos. That’s why Papa wanted me to burn everything.’ All of a sudden he felt as though he had a cold stone in his stomach.

They sat in silence, then Misha took the piano certificates and tore them into pieces before throwing them into the stove. He put the three photographs in his top pocket and hammered the panel back into place in the gilt frame. Then, in a pleasant early afternoon haze, they wandered through the ragged silver birches of the forest, almost shoulder to shoulder, their feet kicking up the autumn leaves. Misha ached to touch her, even just hold her hand. Out of nowhere a cold wind blew down from the east and she shivered.

‘Here, have my jacket,’ he said, and had to hide his delight when she took it.

‘It’s my favourite time of year, the autumn,’ she said wistfully. ‘You savour every moment of a day like this, knowing it won’t come again until May.’

‘Time we headed back,’ Misha said. ‘There’s a train just after four.’

Misha busied himself with the shutters and made sure the fire was out. ‘I wonder if we’ll ever come back,’ he said.

He picked up the poppy painting, and she picked one of his pictures from the wall – something he had drawn with coloured pencils when he was ten or eleven, of the cat who used to visit their garden.

Weighed down with the frames, they hurried to the station. The train had still not appeared by twenty past four and both of them began to fret. Maybe the Germans had taken the line further down? But a few minutes later they heard a distant whistle and soon spotted the engine approaching with its plume of smoke.

Misha felt that familiar sinking feeling as the city began to close in around them. Factories, gas-storage cylinders and grain silos all stood black against the fading evening sky. Now an icy fear gripped him too.

‘No air raids now, please God,’ said Valya, which surprised Misha as he had never heard her mention God before in her life. She looked a little embarrassed. ‘Wouldn’t it be awful to be caught on a train in an air raid?’ she said. ‘The Hitlerites are strafing trains, even little local trains, not just the goods trains and the troop trains.’

Misha could picture it all too vividly. The
Stukas
with their screaming sirens, the roar of the engines, the stutter of machine guns, the splintering glass and wood, and an agonising death dancing to the steel whip of machine-gun fire.

But the sirens didn’t sound and the train didn’t even stop for an unexplained twenty minutes outside Leninsky Prospekt, like it usually did.

That evening as they walked over the bridge back to the Kremlin, weighed down with the paintings and a new secret, the cold wind continued to blow and the first few flakes of snow fell from the black sky.

Chapter 19

 

 

Misha sat up all evening waiting for his papa to come home. He had an awful squirming anxiety in the pit of his stomach and kept prevaricating about what he was going to do. Should he just go to bed and say nothing? Should he accuse his father of betraying his mother? After all, they had come for her but not him. What had that envelope full of money that he had found in the cupboard been for? Misha wasn't really sure how much he wanted to know about what had happened.

The Spasskaya Tower clock chimed through the quarter-hours. He tried to read but could not settle to anything. Eventually he began to doze. The door clicked and he woke with a start.

‘Papa,' he called.

‘Misha, you are still up. You have school tomorrow. Your mama would never have allowed this.'

Yegor Petrov came into the room. He was looking drawn. ‘Did you to go Meshkovo?'

Misha nodded. ‘Papa, I couldn't destroy those photos. I have brought them back. They're of Mama, aren't they?'

Yegor just nodded. In his mind Misha had been through the scene many times and he had imagined his papa shouting or even hitting him. He never expected this. His papa took the photos from him. ‘I will burn them,' he said softly. ‘You know what would happen if anyone found them.'

Yegor sat down on the sofa and rubbed his tired eyes. Then he went to the drinks cupboard and pulled out a bottle of vodka and poured himself a shot.

He drank it in a single gulp and then poured another. Misha waited uneasily.

‘You should know the truth, I suppose,' said Yegor.

He took a further slug of vodka and beckoned for Misha to sit beside him.

He turned on the radio and as one of Tchaikovsky's concertos played quietly in the background he began. He spoke in the kind of cautious voice people used when they talked about forbidden things in cafes and parks.

‘Mama has an interesting history. One that the Party would not approve of. When Zhiglov said she is still alive, I didn't want anyone to find out any more about her than they already know. They might want to punish her even more. That is why I sent you to destroy those things.'

‘Your mother was born into a noble household, Misha. Imagine. She was one of them! Don't look so shocked. It's not that bad. She wasn't a countess or a princess or anything. Her mother – your
babushka
, who you never knew – was one of the servants. She had an affair with the Count in his Moscow mansion. He was a navy officer. Look, that's him in the photograph with her.

‘He didn't cast her out when he discovered her condition. Indeed he made sure your grandmother and her baby were well looked after with a nice apartment in Arbatskaya and a monthly income. He used to visit your grandmother frequently when your mother was tiny. Not long after, Aunt Mila was born. There they are in the photo with their father and mother. He took an interest in them both. Anna had letters from him telling her she and Mila were the most beautiful girls in Russia, and that he would always be there to look after them. She used to keep the letters with the photographs and piano certificates. But Mama always worried about these things. The letters were the most obviously incriminating evidence so they had to go in the stove. How she cried when she had to do that.

‘The Count paid the fees for them to be sent to a good school. They made up a story about their father being killed during the Russo-Japanese War. He paid for piano lessons too. Look at her there at the piano. She was a beautiful young woman, wasn't she? I can't tell you how much Anna missed being able to play. I only heard her once – when we were staying at a hotel on our honeymoon. She played exquisitely – Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, all from memory. But that was a reckless thing to do. This was in 1920. There were people giving her funny looks and whispering. It taught her to keep quiet about her ability. For a woman her age, it was too much of a clue that she had had a bourgeois upbringing. Now, with music schools for talented proletarians, it's OK, but those sorts of accomplishments in a woman of your mother's generation made you very suspect. You were probably a non-toiling element, a class enemy.

‘She told me about her background before we married. Of course I was shocked but I wasn't going to betray her. Her father, the Count, was an interesting man, to be sure. You know, he was an officer aboard the battleship
Potemkin
– one of the officers who sided with the mutineers during the 1905 revolution. Your mother borrowed that name for herself. He was sent to Siberia by the Tsar for his pains, where he lived in a grand house with his servants. Not the sort of exile you'd expect these days, where you count yourself lucky to be sent to a work camp rather than a mine.

‘Well, he came back eight years later, just before the war began in 1914, and even though he had tuberculosis, which he'd caught in exile, he went to fight the Germans. He survived the war and he joined the Whites in the Civil War. Mama had lost touch with him during the war but her mother told her just before she died that she thought he was killed fighting the Revolutionary Guards at Tsaritsyn. I might have even fought against him myself.'

Misha was beginning to feel really upset. ‘But it's not Mama's fault her father was an aristocrat,' he said. ‘Didn't Comrade Stalin himself say you can't punish the children for the sins of their parents?'

‘Misha, you are old enough to know that what people say and what they do is sometimes quite different. Look what happens to the families of the soldiers who surrender to the Nazis. When Yakov, the
Vozhd
's own son for Christ's sake, was captured this summer, even his wife Yulia and their two children were arrested and sent to prison. So close relatives of aristocrats who fought for the Whites – like your mama and you – they would be the lowest of the low. Come on, you have seen enough of your fellow students being unmasked to know this.'

Misha sat there boiling with anger. His mother was everything a good communist should be. She was totally dedicated to her students. She had been his inspiration when he volunteered to teach the factory workers. There was nothing snobby about her, like those sad old matrons you saw with their china cups and black lace dresses, having furtive conversations in cafes. Mama was everything that a new Russian should be. Her life, her political consciousness, had been ‘remoulded' by the Soviet Union. But evidently that was not enough to save her from the NKVD.

‘This country has gone rotten from the inside,' said Misha softly. ‘Papa, how can you continue to serve a man who is responsible for the very worst of it?'

Yegor snapped. ‘We do what we do to keep alive, and keep our family alive.'

Misha waited for him to calm down.

‘Why did you never tell me what you knew about Mama?' asked Misha.

His father took Misha by the hand – something he had not done since he was ten or eleven. ‘Misha, children who have noble blood are pariahs. They are not allowed to go to university. You were always the brightest of our children. Wouldn't it have been terrible if you had had to leave school because Mama had noble blood? The less anyone knew, the safer you would be.'

Misha could barely contain his disgust. ‘What a stupid waste,' he said. ‘What a ridiculous waste of people's talents. The children of these people don't deserve punishment, any more than the wives and children of soldiers who have been captured.'

All at once, that familiar look of stark terror returned to Yegor's face. ‘Misha, never, never talk like that, not even to your own papa,' he whispered. ‘You may be young but they will take you away and you'll be shot if anyone hears you saying such things.'

It was then that Misha realised his papa was as terrified of Stalin and Beria as everyone else. A man who could imprison his own son's wife and children would think nothing of ordering the liquidation of an old comrade.

‘So what do you know about Mama's arrest?' asked Misha. ‘Why did they take her and not you? I still don't understand why she was arrested. Was it her background?'

‘No, it wasn't that. Mama said things . . .'

‘What things? Who to?'

‘To the
Vozhd
. She picked her friends unwisely. I will tell you. Swear you will never repeat it . . . When we first came to live here, Mama made friends with a couple, the Usatovs.'

Misha remembered them. They were the couple who introduced the Petrovs to fine wine. The husband, Grigory, was a naval attaché at the Kremlin. Misha could picture him clearly in his uniform. There weren't many navy people at the Kremlin and Grigory really stood out. Vera always arrived with presents – usually a book for Viktor and Elena and some chocolate from the foreign provisions shop for Misha. Vera and his mama would sit and chat for hours over coffee.

‘They were not a good choice for friends. In early 1940 Grigory was arrested as a Trotskyite spy and two weeks later the NKVD came for Vera too. Your mama was convinced she was entirely innocent. She told me Vera was a dedicated communist to her soul. So Anna went to plead with the
Vozhd
to let her go. Mama knew Comrade Stalin liked her. But she pushed her luck too far. I think he thought she had come to seduce him when she asked to speak to him in private. She told me he was very frosty with her when he realised why she wanted to be alone with him. As soon as she told me what she had done, I knew it was only a matter of time before they came for her. I thought they would come for me too. I was surprised when they only took her.'