The Art of Waiting (18 page)

Summer came, and Aldo was strong enough to take the long path around the lake and through the woods, and he followed Katerina through the trees at dusk. They passed through the small clearing
where Aldo had woken on that first morning of freedom, after the gate of the camp had been left wide open and the storm had set him free.

‘I need to go back to the camp,' he said suddenly. ‘Just to take a look.'

She looked at him.

‘Just to take a look, to see if it was real.'

‘It was real, Aldo, I promise you that. And you don't want to go back there, I promise you that too.'

‘So if that was real, maybe this is just a dream? How can two such different things exist together, in the same place, almost at the same time?'

‘The world turns, Aldo. Things change.'

‘Do they? Do they really?'

‘Aldo, come here,' she said. ‘Hold me.'

He embraced her in the gathering darkness.

‘No, I mean hold me like you really mean it,' she said. ‘Like you never want to let me go.'

And he squeezed her as tightly as his returning strength would allow and he held on to her until she spoke.

‘Do I feel real to you now?' she asked at last.

He nodded.

‘So I'm real, then. And even if this were all a dream, if it feels real, then what's the difference?'

‘Because I'm afraid I'll wake up and you'll be gone.'

‘Well, if that happens, then sleep again and you'll dream once more, and you'll find your way back to me that way.'

She smiled and ran her fingers through his hair. ‘A wave always finds its way to the shore, Aldo. My friend Vassili Ivanov told me that, years ago, when I was just a little girl – and he was a sailor, so he should know.'

They skirted the edge of the forest and looked out from the last of the trees and Aldo saw again the guard tower thirty yards away, the barbed wire running in long lines around the bunkers where the prisoners lay and then Aldo saw a bent figure standing in darkness by the wire and his fear returned. He pinched his arm and bit his lip,
and he held Katerina tightly in his arms again, but when he looked up again the figure was still there and now it had turned to face him, and he saw it looking back at him and it set him off running, out of her arms again, back into the forest, Katerina running after him. She caught up with him and grabbed his arm.

‘Aldo, Aldo! What's wrong?'

‘I won't go back, you know. And don't ever let them take me back, not ever. Promise me you won't let them.'

‘I promise, Aldo. I promise. They'll never take you back. Never.'

That night they lay side by side, barely touching at first, only their eyes converging, then their lips met late in the night and they lay together until dawn and listened to the sound of early morning, the wooden beams creaking in the roof, the warming breeze rustling the leaves in the trees, and Viktor tramping back down the path to the house and quietly opening the door after a night in the woods. They rose late and went to the lake and swam out to the island and spent the morning beneath the swaying boughs as the sun brushed the tops of the clouds with yellow.

‘Tell me about Venice,' she said after dinner that evening.

‘Let me see,' he said. ‘Pass me that bit of paper.'

He sketched a rough map of the lagoon, the island in the shape of a fish, an arrow towards his home on Fondamenta della Sensa, just back from the northern quays.

‘This is where my house is,' he said as he scribbled the address. ‘Promise you'll come and visit me there when I finally make it home.'

She laughed. ‘That's ridiculous, Aldo. How could that ever come true?'

‘A wave will always find its way to the shore, you said. Your life is what you make of it.'

‘Well, all right, then,' she said, filling their glasses to the brim again. ‘To us, in Venice, one day.'

‘To us . . . in Venice . . . one day.'

They downed the spirit in one wholehearted swallow, then sat back and looked at each other in their chairs.

‘Oh my, look at the moon,' said Katerina suddenly. ‘Let's go out to the beach – it'll be beautiful out there now. And bring a violin.'

They went to the beach and Aldo began to play, the notes of the violin skimming like stones across the darkened waves, out towards the woods where they might fall upon the ears of the night's hidden creatures or the ears of a Russian patrol. But love is deaf as well as blind and Aldo played on and Katerina leapt and danced to the music as it lifted her higher, and finally she took the violin from Aldo's arms and replaced it with herself and she led him back to the house, to the room where the spider had hung its sticky web again, and Koshka already slept on the bed, and Aldo and Katerina slipped beneath the covers and into each other's arms.

In the morning, when they woke, they lay in silence, listening to Viktor going about his chores in the other rooms.

‘Katerina,' Aldo said at last. ‘You know, don't you? That I love you?'

He felt her head move against his chest in acknowledgement. He waited, to see if she would reciprocate.

‘Might you also love me, Katerina? One day, if not now?'

‘Aldo, it's when you tell people you love them that they get taken away from you. So I'd rather not say . . .'

‘Perhaps you'll be able tell me one day,' he said.

‘Perhaps,' she said. ‘When you're safe. After the war.'

When they got up, they found Viktor standing by the sink in the far corner of the house, skinning rabbits, ready for cooking that day.

‘I heard your violin last night, Aldo,' he said. ‘A beautiful sound, but dangerous too. It was a clear night, very clear, too clear to be playing music outside. Even if you are in love . . .'

‘Oh, Viktor, don't be a bore. It was such a beautiful night,' said Katerina.

‘Beautiful nights are the most dangerous. The air is too thin and sound travels too far and you never know who might be around. If there's a patrol they'll hear the violin and they'll find this place and then we'll all be in for it. I could lose my home and all of us could lose our lives.'

‘Lose our lives?' she said. ‘For what?'

‘For sheltering him. He is the enemy, after all.'

Viktor's words struck Aldo like a bullet, taking out a piece of him, just like the bullets he had seen taking away chunks of so many men around him, before he had found this place, before he had come here where he thought that he was safe, where it seemed he could be someone again, the man he used to be. But the war had suddenly caught up with him again – Viktor's words had brought it back. He
was
the enemy. He hated the thought of it, but facts are facts and there was no changing it. Katerina was trying to change it anyway, raging at Viktor, reproaching him for what he had said.

‘Well,' said Viktor, ‘enemy or not, he won't be playing the violin at night round here any more. I won't lose my home on account of him.'

Two nights later a patrol was waiting for Katerina and Aldo as they walked among the trees. Within an hour, Aldo was back in the prison camp and Katerina was back at Viktor's house, spilling out her heart. Aldo trudged into his old bunker and found a space on the floor. He curled himself up into a black-and-blue ball, beaten half to death by the guards, his punishment for being human, for wanting to be free. He listened to the sounds of the snoring prisoners, moaning and babbling in their sleep, and he thought of Viktor and how he must have betrayed him, the enemy after all, Viktor's patriotic duty done, seeing to one more bastard enemy of Mother Russia. Then a desperate thought brought tears to Aldo's eyes – the certainty that you couldn't trust anyone, not out here, not after everything that had gone on in this godforsaken war. Then he pulled up his sleeve and looked again into the eyes of his inky pig.

‘Oh, pig, still there, are you?' he whispered bitterly. ‘A wave will always find its way to the shore, eh? There's just no escaping you, is there?'

And as the pig's triumphant rage crashed over him again, he heard a familiar voice from the bunk above his head, Pietro's broken mind still churning out memories of his golden days in the sun.

‘I was a postman in Umbria,' he was saying. ‘I was a postman in Umbria . . .'

Aldo closed his eyes and untied the rope that moored him to reality, and as he drifted away, it came to him, with absolute certainty, despite it all, a sudden miracle – there
was
someone he could trust, just one, and he knew she would be out there, thinking of him still, and he knew that she would come. Yes, she would come, he was sure of it.

Back at Viktor's cottage, Katerina collapsed into bed, dived into the depths of sleep and dwelt like a stone at the bottom of a cold dark lifeless river. She was back at the camp as dawn peeked over the horizon. A short distance away, just behind the wire, she saw a stooping figure, his back towards her, his face towards the east. She ran towards him, around the angles of the perimeter fence, not hearing the shouts of the guards in the watchtowers, oblivious to the eyes of the other prisoners as she ran, and then she was in front of him and she saw that look, that longing in the eyes, as if he had never left the camp, as if they had never spent the last few weeks together in an unexpected heaven. Then she saw the bruises.

‘Oh my God, Aldo! What have the bastards done to you?'

He averted his gaze as tears welled up in his eyes.

‘Aldo, Aldo, look at me! Look at me, please!'

He looked at her.

‘Aldo, don't cry, my darling.'

But she was crying too. She reached inside her pocket but she had nothing to give him this time. She twisted a hand through the wire all the same, then the other, then the full length of her arms, and she hauled him in towards her and she held him in her arms and tried to kiss his face through the wire, but the wire between them pushed its sharp points through their clothes, puncturing their skin, jabbing at them until they bled. Then the guards rushed up and pulled them from each other's arms, disentangling Aldo from the wire that bound them together, dragging him away, and the last glimpse that Aldo caught of her was her face pressed hard against the wire, and that was the moment she told him that she loved him.

Katerina returned to the camp the following day but there was no figure behind the wire, nor was there the next day, or the one after that.

‘He's gone,' said one of the guards. ‘They've sent him away.'

‘Away? What do you mean away? Where to? The east?'

‘I can't tell you.'

‘Tell me, please. I beg you. I've never begged anyone for anything in my whole life but I'm begging you now.'

‘Yes, to the east, I guess. The gulags.'

‘Siberia?'

‘I suppose. He could be anywhere. He should never have tried to escape, you know. Listen, do yourself a favour, love – forget about him. He's a dead man now, you can be sure of that. And you'll get yourself into all sorts of trouble if you come here again.'

She didn't budge.

‘Really, love, you'll never find him, not now. Just accept it, move on.'

She turned and walked away.

Oleg

Leningrad, July 1944

It was never the same between Katerina and Viktor after that. He swore on his life he hadn't tipped off the guards, but Katerina never really believed him. When she finally said goodbye to him the following summer, and turned her back for the last time on his house by the lake in the woods, she did so without much regret.

She travelled first to Moscow, then boarded a train for Leningrad, where the siege had finally ended. She was unable to find a seat, the train crowded with soldiers and refugees and commissars and old women who sighed as they clasped and unclasped their hands in their laps. The train pulled into Leningrad through the bombed-out suburbs, then the passengers tumbled out onto the platform. The streets were dusty and warm in the early summer heat. An evening squall passed overhead, the raindrops gone as soon as they touched the street, the isolated cloud continuing on its way, leaving behind the scent of summer rain. Katerina walked briskly up the alleyway and into the courtyard where she had spent so many long childhood hours on her doorstep in the rain. Despite all the bombs that had fallen on the city during the siege, the house was intact. She stood on the step and banged on the door and waited. She knocked again but no one came so she sat on the step and looked across the courtyard at the window in which she had first seen Oleg's pallid little face all those years before. She thought of the last time she had seen him, in the early summer of 1941, both of them little more than twenty years old. It had been a beautiful May evening, but four weeks later the German army would seep out of the birch
forests of Poland and Prussia and cross the border into the Soviet Union, the start of a long weary road that led not to Moscow but Berlin. In May 1941 the war had been far from their minds as Katerina and Oleg made their way along the busy avenues towards the Mariinsky. They spent the evening watching from the cheapest seats as the stars of the ballet company – their company – lit up the night with joy. Later they had returned home together via the long route, stopping at a coffee-house, staying there for hours, then ambling back to their neighbouring homes, walking so close to each other that their hips rubbed together. Oleg had turned to wave as he opened his door, beaming at Katerina as he stepped inside. He had been called up a week later, and before the summer was out Katerina had left Leningrad for her aunt's village in the countryside hundreds of miles to the south-east, and all the while the Germans burned their way across the Russian countryside and Katerina heard no news of Oleg. She had heard no news of him since.

But now the siege had finally lifted and Katerina was home, and she stood up from where she had been sitting and she knocked on the door of Oleg's house. Mrs Ivanova opened it, her canary song long gone. The war had piled the years upon her. She looked at Katerina for several long seconds.

‘Well?' she said at last.

‘Well what?' said Katerina.

‘Well, look who it is.'

Katerina knew their relationship could never be repaired, not since that day in 1928 when she had called the woman a fucking whore and she had thrown the little girl out into the rain.

‘Is he in?' Katerina asked, resisting the urge to use similar expletives again now.

‘Is who in?'

‘Who do you think? Oleg, of course.'

‘Of course he's in. He's always in.'

Katerina's heart leapt. ‘Well, aren't you going to let me in to see him?'

‘I might.'

Katerina pushed her way past Mrs Ivanova and hurried up the stairs two at a time. ‘Oleg! Oleg! Where are you?'

She heard his voice, quiet and changed, reaching out to her from the end of the hall, from the room where he had slept as a child. She rushed past the room in which the body of Vassili Ivanov had reposed in its coffin and she burst into Oleg's room, ready to embrace him in arms made heavy with waiting, but the curtains were drawn, the room was in darkness, and no one rushed over to greet her. Instead she heard his plaintive voice again. ‘I'm here,' he whispered. ‘Over here.'

Then she saw him, the strange chair in which he sat, and it all hit her in a rush. She dashed over and hugged him, reaching her arms out to him as he sat in the wheelchair and stretched his arms awkwardly around her, and her hair fell across his face and she smelt the familiar smell of his skin and a momentary happiness fluttered up in her.

‘Oleg, Oleg. Oh, I'm so happy to see you. I can't believe it.' She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. ‘I really thought you'd gone forever.'

‘Perhaps it would have been better if I had,' he said softly.

‘Don't say that, Oleg. Please don't say that.'

She felt his tears on her cheek and she wiped them away with her sleeve, first from her face, then from his. ‘When did you get back?'

‘A few months ago. After the siege was lifted, they sent me home. Before that I was in a hospital in Moscow, and before that I was in a hospital in Voronezh, a hospital in Saratov, a hospital in . . . well, I forget all the names. Seen one hospital, seen them all. It's two years since I walked, you know. There's a lot I don't remember, but I'll never forget that last step.'

He slumped further down in the chair as he talked, then stiffened slightly. ‘I'm sorry. That's not much of a hello, is it? I saw you sitting on the step. I was watching you out of the window.'

‘Why didn't you call me up to see you, then?

‘What, like this? Surely not like this?'

‘Oleg, don't be stupid. I don't care what you look like.'

‘But, Katerina, I wanted you to remember me the way I was.
Remember how I was? I was magnificent, wasn't I?' He laughed. ‘Well, maybe not, but you know what I mean. And now look at me. What a fucking mess.'

He slapped his leg hard and Katerina took his hand in hers and held it still.

‘Don't do that to yourself.'

‘Look at it,' he said. ‘I can't move it, can I?'

She squeezed his hand and didn't know what to say. ‘Been up to much since you got back?' she asked, awkwardly trying to lighten the tone. ‘I bet you've been having a great time . . .'

‘Oh yes, I've been out dancing almost every night.' He leant back in his chair and closed his eyes, screwing them tight, wrinkling his face with pain. ‘What have I been up to?' he said. ‘Now, let me see. Um, nothing. Less than nothing. Nothing but listening to fucking Mrs Ivanova wittering on all day. I sit here all day and I wait and I look at these curtains and sometimes I look out the window and then I close the curtains again. And that's about all. You know how often I've been out since I got back, Katerina? You know how often, in six months? Twice! Once when the building next door caught fire and they thought we'd better all get out before we burned, and the other was the day one of Mrs Ivanova's fancy men hauled me out and wheeled me around the streets like some sort of trophy. A hero returned from the front, he told everyone, shot to bits doing his duty for Mother Russia, and they all crowded round and had a bit of a gawp and a mutter about how brave I must have been, but I know half of them were thinking, “So what, another poor bastard who got his legs shot to bits, but at least he's not dead like all the poor dead bastards.” And then they all went on their way to drink and fight and fuck themselves into oblivion and Mrs Ivanova's fancy man heaved me around for half the night, one fleapit to another, and he tipped me out of my chair more than once, he was so out of his mind on vodka or diesel or whatever the hell it was he was drinking, and then eventually he got me home but he was too weak from drink to get me up the stairs so he left me in the kitchen all night and I froze half to death and pissed myself and had
to listen to him and Mrs Ivanova testing out the springs in the bed above my head until dawn. And those are the two occasions – both highly memorable, you'll agree – on which I've been outside this house in the last six months.'

‘Well, I'm taking you out now, then.'

‘No, you're not.'

‘Who's going to stop me? You?'

‘Katerina, don't you dare! I don't want those bastards staring at me like I'm a freak.'

‘You're not a freak, Oleg, you're the gentlest, most beautiful person I've ever known and I'm not going to let you sit here and rot just because you can't move your legs any more.'

She pulled the curtain open but Oleg pushed it back. They struggled back and forth with it until Katerina relented and the curtain once more covered the window.

‘Oleg! You're coming out with me, do you hear?'

‘Katerina, you don't understand. I'm not the person you knew. I'm not the same old Oleg. You probably won't even like me any more.'

‘Of course I will. And we're going out whether you like it or not.'

She drew the curtain back again and it stayed there.

‘See. There's still a bit of daylight out there. It'll be light for a while. I'll take you down to the river.'

‘You and that river, Katerina. Always you and that bloody river . . .'

Katerina took the arms of the wheelchair and pushed Oleg along the landing, bringing him and his contraption to a clumsy halt at the top of the stairs.

‘Katerina, are you trying to bloody kill me?'

‘Oleg, you'll have to get out.'

‘I can't.'

‘Hey, witch!' Katerina yelled down the stairs. ‘Come here!'

Mrs Ivanova appeared at the foot of the stairs.

‘Help me with Oleg.'

‘No, he has to stay in. The doctors have said so.'

‘Have they? Well, the doctors can go fuck themselves, because
we're going out, and you're going to help me. You're going to help me lift Oleg out of this chair or I'll bloody well tip him out.'

‘Tip him out, then. Suit your stupid self.'

Mrs Ivanova disappeared back into the kitchen.

‘Sorry, Oleg, but I'm going to have to do this on my own.'

She tried to tip the chair to one side but she wasn't strong enough to shift his dead weight, so she wedged herself between one of the wheels and the banister and rocked backwards and forwards until she tipped the chair over sideways and Oleg lay in a heap at the top of the stairs. He looked at her glumly.

‘Oleg, you're going to have to go down the stairs on your arse.'

He was soon outside in the chair in the street. Katerina went back into the house and into the kitchen where Mrs Ivanova sat at the table drinking tea. Katerina marched over and kicked the chair out from under her.

‘Next time you'll bloody help us,' she said, and strode out of the room.

She pushed Oleg out into the street. The wheels bumped and jarred across the cobbles and Oleg stared at the lumps of his knees and held the blanket over himself as if hiding a dirty secret from public gaze.

‘Where to, Oleg?'

‘Oh, anywhere, Katerina. You decide.'

‘No, you decide. This is your third day out in six months. You get to choose.'

‘And this is your first day back after . . . after how long away?'

‘Nearly three years.'

‘After three years away. Don't you want to see the sights?'

‘The sights? Is that what you'd call them? This place is a mess.'

‘Of course it is, after what the Germans did to us.'

They stopped in the square outside the Mariinsky Theatre and talked.

‘So, what happened, Oleg? Do you want to tell me?'

‘No,' he said firmly.

‘I'm your friend. Remember that. Whenever you need me, I'm here for you.'

‘I know.'

‘I remember when I broke my ankle,' she said suddenly. ‘When I was just little, just four or five. I'd been messing about down at the market and slipped on the ice. It was wintertime and I always wanted to be out – you know what I'm like – so my dad used to put me on the sledge every day and we'd go out in the snow and he'd pull me along and sometimes he'd take me fishing and I'd sit there in the freezing cold and my feet would go numb, but I always wanted to go with him all the same. Until that last time. I told you about that, didn't I? When he was fishing on the ice, and I looked up . . .'

‘Yes, you told me.'

‘. . . and I looked up and . . .'

‘You told me.'

‘. . . and he wasn't there any more. And there was a hole in the ice where he'd been, and I couldn't stand up, with my broken ankle and everything, I couldn't go over to see if I could save him. And I sat there until somebody came and helped me, and by then the hole in the ice had frozen over, and of course they never found him.' There were tears in her eyes now. ‘So don't go all fucking morose on me, Oleg. You're still here, and I'm still here, and I'll look after you. I'll take you out and I'll wheel you around. I'll even put you on a sledge and pull you around when it snows if you want me to. But just don't get down on yourself, all right?'

‘All right, Katerina. I'll try.'

They returned to the courtyard and Oleg's mother was there and she helped Katerina get him back up the stairs. Katerina sat on the side of the bed until his eyes closed and his breathing slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep and then she left and sat on the doorstep outside her house again and waited but no one came, so she stood up and walked back into the streets and she passed the Mushroom Woman's shop, now just a bombed-out shell. She came back an hour later and banged on the door of her home again. This time she heard footsteps and the door was flung open and Katerina
saw an old woman who had rapidly aged and the woman held her in an iron embrace and whispered in her ear.

‘Katerina, my daughter, Katerina. I'm so sorry. I'll never make you wait again.'