The Siege (3 page)

3

The track narrows to a path. She’s going to have to get off her bike. Birch, bird-cherry and larch have given way to the deep green gloom of fir, and the trees meet overhead. Anna dismounts, and takes out the sheet of directions her father has written down for her. ‘Turn left at the Tutaev farm (watch out for the dogs), then carry on for about six kilometres until you come to the crossroads…’

He was right about the dogs. Two Alsatians ran out after her, snarling and snapping round her wheels. But they were half-starved, and couldn’t run fast enough to catch her as she raced downhill away from the farm. What if she’d had Kolya on the back, with his plump legs hanging down and his weight slowing them just enough for the dogs to outrun them? She must remember to go back another way.

There should be a wooden gate in the wall which runs along the track here. The wall is crumbling, held together by moss, ivy and creeping tendrils of bramble. She could climb it, but that would mean leaving her bike. She’d better keep going.

Anna half-lifts, half-pushes her bike. The sun is hot now, and under the canopy of firs the air is warm, resinous and sleepy. You could lie down here, with your head on a cushion of pine-needles, where the trees’ roots arch above the forest floor like arthritic fingers playing the piano. You could shut your eyes.

Anna never gets enough sleep. There’s Kolya to rouse and wash and dress. He ought to do it himself, but there isn’t enough time. She makes his porridge, tidies round and does some washing if there’s time. Her father never wakes. He sleeps like a stone in the mornings, in a thick, dead sleep that doesn’t refresh him. It’s not surprising, since he’s up most of the night. She hears him moving about. A shuffle from room to room, very quiet, so as not to wake anyone. The clink of a glass. A cough, a sigh. Sometimes she could swear she hears the pages of his book turning as she listens, frozen and on edge, unable to go back to sleep herself because it feels as if she’s abandoning him. And then for a long time, as much as an hour sometimes, he doesn’t move at all. She pictures him sitting there, head bowed towards his chest, book slipping to the floor, worn out and sleepless, with a glass of tea cooling by his side. But she must get some sleep – she’s got work in the morning.

She has to be at the nursery by seven. She sets the tables, scrubs the little toilets that Lyuba never cleans properly, checks menus and food deliveries and does as many of the dozen jobs on the list inside her head as she can, before the children start to arrive at seven-thirty. And here they come, six of them, seven, a dozen, fifteen, a flood of little bodies packed into padded trousers, jackets, caps and boots, swaying sleepily on their feet and quite unable to take off their own boots, or put their jackets on the correct pegs.

Their mothers have been up since five and even so they’ll be late if they don’t rush off now, this minute, unpeeling the hands of little Vasya or Maya who clings on tight to mammy’s legs and won’t let go without a screaming session. Above the din, Anna says over and over again: ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine as soon as you’ve gone. I promise you, he’ll be smiling again in five minutes.’
If only I keep my job here. If only I can keep Kolya with me.

All day Anna deals with runny noses, tired tears, biting and hair-pulling, lessons in hygienic hand-washing, and socialization at playtime. Demarcation lines are strict. Anna is an unqualified nursery assistant, not a teacher. Elizaveta Antonovna Zamirovskaya, with her pedagogical qualifications and anxious, pedantic sticking to theory, never forgets for one instant that she is the expert and she is in charge. ‘I have to deliver the type of education which will develop the children’s concept of Soviet citizenship to its full extent. I don’t expect you to understand the nature of that responsibility, Anna Mikhailovna, but I do expect you to cooperate with it to the best of your ability.’

‘Allow me to assure you of my fullest cooperation, Elizaveta Antonovna!’ Anna shouts back eagerly whenever this speech comes round, as it does two or three times a month. She has realized some time ago that Elizaveta Antonovna lacks confidence, for all her degrees. She needs bolstering, and the best way for Anna to do this is to assume the manner of a zealous factory forewoman receiving her morning orders. ‘And may I report that the children’s toilets are still overflowing. I don’t think that plumber we had last week was much good.’

But after all, poor Elizaveta Antonovna, it’s a struggle for her. She doesn’t like the children much, and they don’t like her at all.

Anna is becoming anxious. Still the same crumbling wall. Still no gate. Maybe Marina Petrovna never meant her to find the place. It isn’t going to happen. No need to have selected and sharpened her drawing pencils so carefully, and spent so much more of her wages than they could afford on a new block of drawing-paper. And all this, because her father had written about Anna’s work in one of his letters to Marina Petrovna. He was too conscious that she’d had to leave school to take care of Kolya, and he tried to make up for it with praise and encouragement that sounded false in her ears. He thought she was turning into a worker bee. But wasn’t that what he wanted and needed? Anna to queue for him, and mend Kolya’s clothes, and run from shop to shop until she got hold of fresh milk.

‘You’ve got real talent, Anna. You must develop it.’

‘Yes, for getting hold of an extra hundred grammes of sausage… ‘But she didn’t say it aloud.

What was the use of talent, without training? She was making no progress at all. Her technique was poor. What she needed to learn could never be learned in spare moments in between her job and the house and Kolya. She needed teachers. She needed contemporaries, who would drive her on. But then, did she need to learn to be ‘national in form, socialist in content’?

Without telling her, Mikhail packed up Anna’s pen-and-ink portrait of Kolya, and her pencil sketches of Lyuba working in the nursery kitchen, and sent them to Marina Petrovna.

‘What did you do that for!’ Anna shouted at him when she found out. ‘You should have asked me first. I’m not a child.’ The flare of humiliation surprised her. Suddenly she hated that portrait of Kolya, which was the best thing she’d done. She wanted to disown it, and the sketches too. But then Marina Petrovna sent the work back, padded and packed with extreme care, as if Anna’s drawings were rubies. With it there came a letter. She’d liked Anna’s work. Would Anna accept a commission? Because if so, Marina Petrovna would very much like Anna to come and draw her.

‘Draw Marina Petrovna! My technique’s not good enough. I’m an amateur, can’t she tell that? I can’t even afford materials.’ Again her father’s hurt, conscious look. He thinks she’s blaming him, because he contributes so little to the household now.

‘No,’ she says. ‘All I meant was –’ And breaks off. What’s the point? One circle of her father’s pain only leads down to another, until it reaches the freezing floor of his lost sense of self. He has wanted this for her so much. He has written a long letter to Marina Petrovna, ‘explaining everything’, no doubt. Anna’s talent, the impossibility of her studying as she should be studying, his own guilt. Does he really know her well enough to spill all this out to her? Yes, he knows her well enough.

‘What did you write?’ she asks more gently.

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘It was just a note. I thought Marina Petrovna would like to know how you’re getting on. She would remember you. And she was very close to your mother.’

‘Was she?’

‘Of course. I thought you knew that.’

But was she really close to my mother? I don’t think so. She wrote letters to my parents with both their names on. My father always passed the letter to Vera, so that she could read it first. And she would tap the envelope on the table, and raise her eyebrows, and then hand it back to him, unopened.

It’s you she writes to, isn’t it?

Anna stops. She’s almost pushed her bike straight past the gate. Perhaps she didn’t really want to find it. Marina Petrovna Berezov-skaya is one of those legends everyone knows and no one talks about. But she’s also her father’s friend Marina, who wrote letters her mother didn’t want to read.

‘Isn’t she your friend as well. Mammy?’

‘Not really. She’s your father’s friend. He’s known her for a long time.’

‘But she wants to be your friend, or she wouldn’t write to you.’

‘I daresay. But friendship doesn’t work like that.’

4

The creak of the gate flushes out a pair of woodpigeons from the birch-scrub. The birds go up, clattering their wings, and then settle again on a branch way up above Anna’s head. Prr
-coo,
they say, prr
-coo,
as they smooth away the noise she’s made. The path is so narrow that she’d be better off leaving her bike here, just inside the wall where it can’t be seen.

Anna is prickling with excitement now. In a few minutes she’ll be at the dacha. Marina Petrovna will be in front of her.

Anna has studied a dozen photographs, trying to become objective, trying to separate the woman she is going to draw from the woman who was her parents’ friend. Her father’s friend. There she stands, in a pale dress, beside a chair where her father sits. Here, she is in trousers, crouched over a pail of berries, looking up. The sun must be bright, because she’s shielding her eyes. Anna’s father is slightly out of focus, behind her. He looks young. Another photograph shows Vera and Marina Petrovna together, side by side. But Vera seems to be pulling away, as if she’ll be gone as soon as the shutter clicks. These photographs, with many others, are pasted into her father’s scrapbooks. He ought to get rid of them.

A bramble snags on Anna’s arm. The path is overgrown, and the trees are loaded with ivy and wild clematis. Anna treads softly, as if someone is listening. In the green rankness of the trees she catches shadows making faces. The path turns, and turns again. She might go on like this for ever, making her way soundlessly towards the house on this perfect summer morning. She might never reach it at all.

After weeks or months, someone might find her bike with its tyres sagging into the dust. But not a trace of Anna anywhere. Not a note, not a bone, not a scrap of her clothing. Like all those others.

Anna glances down at the crumpled sheet of instructions.
Follow the path to a second gate…

The second gate. Even more ramshackle than the first, this one is hanging off its hinges. Briars have closed around it. She steps over the gap.

There is more light coming through the trees. Fir gives way to birch. There is rowan, and cherry. Sun streams between the tree-trunks, on to last year’s fallen, skeletal leaves. There is an acrid smell of fox.

Anna stops. So far she’s been heading uphill, but from here tracks spill in all directions. Some of them are animal tracks.

Surely there must be an easier way to the dacha. Perhaps she’s testing you. Marina Petrovna’s face rises in Anna’s mind. The sweep of her eyelids, the lift of her cheekbones, the downward glance. Her beauty is cool, not warm. Black hair, dark eyes, pale skin. She is said to have had a Tartar grandfather.

They could slam that head against a cell wall. They might still. Think of what happened to Professor Kozlovsky. They let him out but he’d gone crazy. He couldn’t give lectures any more.

Now the trees are thinning. The path must be coming out on top of the hill. Yes. Yes. A clearing, a thicket of lilacs, and through them the grey, quiet bulk of Berezovskaya’s dacha.

Anna slips through the lilacs. A verandah runs the length of the house. There’s a door, and it’s half-open. She’s expected.

Marina Petrovna is dressed in a cream-coloured wrapper, as if she’s just finished taking off her stage make-up at the end of a play. She is smoking nervously.

‘Anna,’ she says, taking Anna’s hands, searching her face as if for something she recognizes. She’s too close, and the smell of her perfume makes Anna uneasy. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘I’m not late, am I?’

‘No, you’re not late. But I don’t see many people. It’s always a shock, so I prepare myself.’

The hand which holds the cigarette is trembling slightly. Her skin has a parchment look, and her curly black hair is greying.

‘I know, I’m looking older. Country air is supposed to be good for you, but I’m not so sure.’ She smiles, and takes another drag at her cigarette, half-closing her eyes. ‘And you’ve grown up, Anna. I can still call you Anna, can’t I?’

‘Of course you can.’

‘You must have been fifteen or sixteen when I last saw you.’

‘Sixteen. I’m twenty-three now.’

‘And your father tells me you work as a nursery teacher.’

‘I’m not qualified to teach. I’m an assistant, that’s all.’

‘But you draw. I’ve seen your work. It’s good.’

‘I’m an amateur. I’ve no training.’

‘You’ve come, that’s what matters.’ Her voice is exactly as Anna remembers it. ‘Come and see the house, and then you can decide where you want to draw me.’

They walk together from room to room. Upstairs there are two bedrooms, and Marina Petrovna opens the shutters wide in each, so that they spring from gloom into light. The wooden floors are polished, but the rooms have a dry, unopened smell.

‘It’s bright in here at this time of day, isn’t it? I’d forgotten…’

The light flows over the face, neither cruel nor kind, but accurate. The skin that looked so velvety in the photographs is drier now, stretched over bones. She lights another cigarette, draws the smoke deep, lets it trickle out.

‘The light’s good in here,’ says Anna. Marina Petrovna pauses, and looks around the room with her eyes narrowed to see what Anna sees. There’s very little furniture: a faded blue sofa, a rug, a stove, a window-seat. The walls are cream, the wood dark. Now that the shutters are open, Anna can see how high the dacha stands. From here you look out over forest to a line of shallow blue hills. Marina Petrovna goes to the window and stares out. Her hand slides up and down the satiny wood of the window-frame.

Anna knows that this is the room. This is where she comes, to sit on that sofa or in the window-seat, to look out at the distance. This is her place.

Anna’s gaze flickers round the room, fast, excited, scenting possibilities. That big mirror above the fireplace, which is on the wall opposite the window – if you pulled the sofa forward and she sat just here, with her back to the mirror –

‘I want to try something, Marina Petrovna. Is it all right to move the sofa?’

She nods. Anna drags it forward, pulls it to the angle she wants. ‘Could you sit on here for a moment?’

She sits with a stiffness which shows how little she likes being told what to do. She’s on the edge of the sofa, knees together, dissociating herself from her own body as if to say,
This is your idea, not mine.

Anna’s taken things too quickly. But here is the composition, exactly as she’d known it would be: the reflection, the back of her head, her arm lying across the back of the sofa, and beyond it the line of forest, bluer and more enigmatic in the mirror than face to face. And yet clearer, too.

‘I don’t want to be drawn sitting down,’ she says.

Anna looks again at the curve of Marina Petrovna’s arm against the sofa’s rough blue cloth. It is perfect. Marina Petrovna stands.

‘It feels wrong.’

She isn’t going to be shifted on this one. These early moments are dangerous, when a sitter recognizes that you haven’t just come to mirror her. You’ve come to penetrate. You’re a threat to her private world. And with Marina Petrovna it will be more difficult than usual. She’s used to controlling the way she’s seen.

‘A standing pose is tiring,’ says Anna.

‘I don’t mind that. We can have breaks, I suppose.’

‘Of course.’

Anna shoves the sofa back against the wall. Marina Petrovna remains standing, in a pose that isn’t a pose at all. Arms loose at her sides, head plumb straight to the line of neck and spine.

She’s right. This is how she should stand. She came into the world with so much that everyone wanted. All she ever had to do was enter a room and offer herself. It doesn’t matter that years have passed, or that her skin is fading and her hair going grey. The curve of her lips suggests that happiness will begin any moment.

‘I’ll do some preliminary sketches,’ says Anna. ‘Just to get the pose and the room, the basic composition. Can you stay like that for twenty minutes?’

‘Of course.’

Anna draws quickly, making thumbnail composition sketches as Marina Petrovna relaxes into the pose. She’ll be disappointed when she sees these sketches. Sitters always are. They want the likeness, and they won’t get it yet. They hate being a shape among other shapes.

It needs something more, but Anna don’t know what yet. She draws on.

Lilac. A bowl of lilac. On that table, where the mirror will double it. ‘There,’ says Anna. ‘That’s it for the moment. Rest.’

Marina Petrovna looks closely at the sketches where her face is a blank disc. Then she says, ‘It’s going to be good.’

‘Yes’ says Anna, but at this moment she doesn’t care. She’s swamped by the tiredness she always feels on starting a new piece of work. The thrust of beginning will land her somewhere she doesn’t want to be. She can get free only by drawing her way out of it.

‘After all, you’re the one who has to live with it,’ Anna says at last. Marina Petrovna looks startled. ‘The drawing, I mean.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

She walks to the window. Anna watches her outlined against the light. She knows Anna’s watching, but it doesn’t make her self-conscious. She’s grown up with being watched.

Everyone Anna has ever drawn has been nervous at first. Perhaps they are afraid that she’ll prise out hidden things, and put them down on paper for everyone to see. But Anna would say that the best portraits don’t work like that. They’re not about exposure, they’re about recognition. Anna wouldn’t voice her theories aloud, because she’s an amateur, and untrained, and hasn’t the right to speak. She is trying to work her way towards what she thinks. But it’s hard work, and drawing itself is hard enough. The line cuts its way down the paper like the arm of a swimmer doing butterfly stroke. It looks easy, but how the arm aches afterwards.

There’s something each sitter doesn’t like about herself, or himself. Lyuba screeched when she saw the sketches Anna had done. ‘My God, Anna Mikhailovna, is my bum really that big?’

‘You were bending over to mop the floor,’ Anna pointed out. She had loved the line of Lyuba’s spread, straining haunches. She would have liked to draw her naked. But Lyuba continued to gape at the paper, offended and fascinated.

Her father said, his voice light but pained, ‘Are my lips really as thin as that, Anna?’

‘I never knew I did that with my hands.’

‘Are my eyes as glassy as you’ve drawn them?’

‘I thought I was smiling.’

But what is a portrait but the scrutiny of light on form? When Anna first read this, she didn’t understand it at all, but now she likes to repeat it to herself.
Light – on form. Light… on… form.
Elizaveta Antonovna filling in her reports: light on form. The children racing in the playground, their screams rising into the air like winter smoke: light on form. Her father’s hand hanging at his side while he reads: light on form.

‘We’ll have tea,’ says Marina Petrovna. ‘I’ve got some cherry jam my Nana made last season. You must be hungry.’

She doesn’t grow any food, realizes Anna, leaning out of the window and scanning the overgrown garden. Not so much as a bunch of herbs. How can she manage?

‘And then I’ll sit for you.’

‘You mean stand, Marina Petrovna?’

‘Yes, I mean stand. But now I want you to tell me all about your father. What does he think of the situation?’

‘The situation?’

Marina Petrovna draws herself up. She counts on her fingers, snapping out the names. ‘Poland. France. The Scandinavian countries. Greece, Austria, Belgium – need I go on?’

‘Oh, I see.’

Yes, I see, thinks Anna. But I’ve got Kolya to think of, and the nursery children, and I’ve got to find a way of keeping rabbits out of the lettuces, and pickling enough cabbage for the winter, and keeping Dad from getting too depressed, and Kolya’s grown out of his shoes again, and he needs vitamins, and the girls in white dresses have graduated while I –

I can’t, I simply can’t think about everything else on top of that. We’re at peace,’ she says. ‘We have a pact with them.’