Red Shadow (17 page)

‘Why didn't you try to save her? ' asked Misha, trying to keep the anger from his voice. ‘You were Stalin's old comrade. Didn't you save his life? Surely he must listen to some people . . .'

Yegor Petrov sat up very straight. Misha could see a blood vessel bulging in his bald head.

‘Misha, your mama was arrested for trying to save someone she cared about. I couldn't risk leaving you on your own. Who would have cared for you?

‘I did manage to do something for her. Just after I discovered she had been arrested I paid three thousand roubles to one of Zhiglov's comrades in the NKVD to get her sent to a work camp that wasn't going to be the death of her. I heard nothing more about it. Zhiglov's contact disappeared not long afterwards, so I never knew if she was sent to an easier camp. In fact, I never knew until the other night whether or not they had just shot her. But maybe that is the best three thousand roubles I ever spent.'

The envelope of money. Misha felt an overwhelming relief, mixed with shame for ever having suspected his father.

Yegor spoke again, his own sadness tinged with anger. ‘Your mama should have known better. I witnessed several people trying to intervene on behalf of a friend or relation. You know what happened? Nothing – if they were lucky. But plenty weren't. Morozov's wife, remember her? She tried to get the
Vozhd
to release her brother. Dressed up in her best cocktail frock, flirted with him all night . . .'

He pulled a finger across his throat.

‘And that fool Leonov, who I used to work with, addressed the
Vozhd
as Iosif Vissarionovich. Stalin hates overfamiliarity. He came out of that meeting shaking like a leaf. Disappeared a week later. I wasn't going to jeopardise my life and your future on a fool's errand. Look at me, Mikhail.' His voice was trembling. ‘Look at me.'

Misha met his father's intense gaze.

‘You would have been put in a children's home. Or you might have been arrested along with me. They would have sent you to a penal battalion, Mikhail. You would have been slaughtered by the Nazis when the war broke out . . .'

Misha realised, like never before, how fortunate he had been to have his father to protect him.

‘I have survived for five years in this snake pit. And I have provided a good life for you. Hardly anyone in the country lives better than us. And until your mother went we were all happy.'

Misha was blushing with shame and staring at his feet.

Yegor began to speak very quietly. ‘I have seen it all. The Party elders who tried to convince Stalin to slow down, the ones who tried to stop the famine in Ukraine, the ones who thought we had come too far too quickly . . . good communist men and women, who had given their whole lives to the Soviet cause. They all thought they had the stature and authority to speak openly, in the spirit of communist brotherhood. They all went. All of them shot in a squalid basement somewhere, begging for forgiveness sometimes. Yes, I heard reports of their executions. I think he let me listen deliberately, to remind me to stay in line. We have created a monster, Mikhail. I am the monster's servant and I know the rules. Which is why you and I are still alive. Did you ever stop and think who lived in this apartment before us? I heard stories . . . I'm surprised they don't come to haunt us.

‘All of us in that office know what it feels like to lie in our bed, listening to the knocking on doors and praying it would be your neighbour and not you. The scuffles on the stairs, the screaming children as their parents were manhandled away. I spend my life trying to prevent that happening to you and me. I don't even know what they charged your mother with. Something utterly ridiculous. “Spying for the Germans. A factory saboteur, a wrecker. An enemy of the people . . .” Complete fantasy. Alice in Wonderland.

‘I heard of men who had raised up factories from bare fields, tortured into admitting they deliberately sabotaged their own machinery. Men who had built great steel works . . . tortured until they confessed to throwing artillery shells into their own blast furnaces. Bizarre crimes, not even barely plausible. Insane.'

‘But, Papa, we hear about the Trotskyite wreckers and imperialist spies almost every day at school. Surely some of it must be true?'

‘Most of it is a fairy tale, Mikhail. Was your mother a wrecker? Was she a Nazi spy? She's no different to the others. They were just more important. More known to the people. We have failed the people. The Revolution has gone sour.

‘My son, I want you to understand why things are as they are. I want you to survive.'

Chapter 20

The next morning Misha left the apartment to be greeted by an oppressive grey sky and biting northerly wind. There was no snow but he could taste the chilly moisture in the air and hoped the downpour would hold off until he reached his school.

The news on the radio had been bad. There was no talk of any victories or advances, or the Hitlerites being driven back, only ‘heroic defenders’. And the towns and cities the radio announcer mentioned were getting closer to Moscow by the day.

As he walked through Cathedral Square, a strange smell crept into his nostrils. The nearer he got to the Borovitskaya Tower, the stronger it became. It was the sort of unsettling odour you noticed in a really cheap second-hand clothes shop or market stall – a dense fug of unwashed clothing and unwashed bodies.

As Misha walked through the tower gates and out on to the bridge, he was confronted by an extraordinary sight. The street was clogged with a great swathe of exhausted, filthy people. There were old men with straggly beards,
babushka
s of all shapes and sizes, and wan little children, blank faces staring into nothing. Misha realised at once they were fleeing from the approaching Nazi army.

Some of the crowd carried their possessions in handcarts, others looked as if they were wearing all the clothes they owned. Most had their heads covered in scarves or blankets. A lucky few had an emaciated donkey or horse, to drag a cart stuffed with tottering belongings.

What unnerved Misha was their utter silence. There was the clop of hooves, the trundle of wheels, and the shuffling of thousands of feet, but clearly no one here had energy to waste in conversation. They exuded a misery that was almost palpable.

He heard the honking of geese and instinctively looked to the empty sky, then realised the geese were there among the crowd, close by him, being driven in a small flock by a little boy with a stick. Their honking set off other farm animals among this ragged procession. Cattle began to low and sheep bleated pitifully.

Here and there uniformed men and women directed the flow, and as Misha looked over Lebyazhi Lane up to Ulitsa Mokhovaya he could see no end to this stream of people. The Militia and the army personnel were hardly needed to keep order, they were just there to direct them wherever they were going. Everyone seemed too worn out to be angry or violent. Misha guessed they would be heading for the Highway of the Enthusiasts, the road east out of Moscow to the distant Ural Mountains and Siberia. He wondered when these people had last eaten and guessed they must be starving.

He ran immediately to his apartment and raided the refrigerator and pantry, coming back laden with a canvas bag filled with bread, dried meat and apples. Standing at the edge of the crowd he handed out his provisions to whoever he thought looked most in need. At first his offerings were snatched away with barely a word but then, as the crowd began to realise what was happening, there was a mad scramble that knocked him flat on to the cobblestones and saw his bag and its contents spilled on to the floor, and the remains of the food snatched away. It reminded him of the time his family were set on by a flock of gulls when they had laid out a picnic on the banks of the Dnieper.

Misha had cut his hand in falling and he hurried again to his apartment to wash the dirt away. As he ran his hands under the bathroom tap, the Spasskaya Tower on the north-east wall of the Kremlin struck one o’clock and he realised with mounting anxiety that he was going to be late for school.

He took a route through the back streets to avoid the great stream of people and passed several small factories and workshops that were bustling with activity. As he glanced through windows and open warehouse doors, he could see men and women dismantling machinery and packing whatever they could into crates and boxes. It seemed like the whole of Moscow was getting ready to flee.

For a single selfish moment, Misha regretted being so generous with his food supply. He had taken it for granted that he and Papa would always have enough food in the Kremlin.

The meals they were getting in school had become even more frugal – and so bad he was grateful for the small portions. He sometimes brought a picnic with him these days but Misha had not brought food to share since the incident with Barikada. He ate his own provisions quickly and surreptitiously, when he was alone in a classroom, preparing to teach the younger ones. He did not want anyone to see him and make him feel like a greedy noble stuffing his face while peasants starved around him.

Today he arrived to find his class of twelve-year-olds half empty. ‘Where are the others?’ he asked the fifteen or so children that clustered around the desks at the front.

‘Please, Comrade Petrov,’ said a tall girl with plaits and a grubby beige smock, ‘we had a terrible time getting here through the crowds. Maybe the rest have given up trying and gone home?’

‘I had trouble too,’ said Misha. ‘Well done for making an effort to get here. You should be proud of yourselves.’

‘Please, comrade,’ said one small boy. ‘I only live in the next street.’

They all giggled at that and Misha let himself smile too. ‘Well, you can’t be proud but the rest of you can.’

‘Comrade, who are the people out in the street?’ asked another child.

Misha didn’t want to tell them they were fleeing from the Nazis. It would alarm them terribly. ‘They are being moved by our brave soldiers, so they don’t get hurt in the fighting,’ he said, then quickly changed the subject. ‘So, who has read the passage which I set you for homework?’

All of the children raised their hands and Misha felt really pleased. Despite it all, he enjoyed teaching the younger classes. Once he had adjusted to what these children were actually interested in, he had discovered they responded well to him, and he had little trouble keeping order, even with the rowdier children. It was all down to confidence, he decided. Make it look like you know what you’re doing and they will respond, and behave.

But as Misha was reading another passage from
War and Peace
, he noticed something at the back of the class that filled him with horror. All Soviet classrooms had a poster or painting of Comrade Stalin on their walls and this one had too – surrounded with drawings the children had done of the May Day military parades.

Someone had drawn a great dagger through Stalin’s head, from one ear to the other, the point dripping blood. Two vampiric fangs jutted from his lips, and blood trickled down his chin. A childish hand had scrawled
УБИЙЦА
– Murderer – on the
Vozhd
’s forehead. Above, curving around the white space that surrounded his head, was written
УБЛЮДOК
– Bastard.

Misha stopped reading. He had never seen anything like this before. He wondered immediately whether he should carry on and pretend he had not seen it, but the children noticed his shock and while some turned round to follow the direction of his gaze, others began to snigger. They had noticed already.

All at once the class was in uproar. ‘Please be quiet,’ Misha pleaded. He had decided on a plan.

‘Class, settle down.’ His voice was harsher. And this time they responded. Misha did not want any of the remaining teachers, or the Komsorg, coming to see what the trouble was.

‘Does anyone know who did this?’ he asked in a gentle matter-of-fact voice.

He looked at the children’s faces. No one was giving anything away.

Misha walked over to the poster and reached up to take it down. He rolled it carefully into a tube and placed it beneath his desk. ‘Now where were we?’ He smiled, and continued teaching as if nothing had happened.

Afterwards, when the children had filed out to another lesson, Misha locked the classroom door. With trembling hands he tore the poster into small pieces and hid it in his knapsack. He was not going to report the incident. He did not want an inquisition, with the Komsorg trying to find heretics like Torquemada or the Witch-finder General. These children had enough on their plate waiting for the Nazis to arrive.

That evening Misha sat alone in his apartment, scouring the latest edition of
Pravda
for clues on the progress of the war. He saw, with a sickening feeling in his chest, a news piece on Nazi atrocities in the Smolensk area. A camera had been found on the body of a German soldier and the film inside it told a grisly story. Two partisans had been captured and hanged. A series of shots reproduced in the paper told the story in graphic detail. There was a teenage girl, maybe his own age, proud but bruised, surrounded by jeering German soldiers, her hands tied behind her back. She was wearing the same sort of stripy pullover Yelena often wore at school, and had a placard around her neck, saying
I AM A TERRORIST
, written in Russian. Misha could barely bring himself to look further. He glimpsed another shot of two dangling figures, then folded the paper over so he could not see the photographs, and read the article.