‘You’re looking for Anya.’ Those limpid eyes were on Stevie now.
For Masha, like Galina, small talk was talk wasted. But Masha had none of the abruptness that people mistake for honesty. Both women in fact, it struck Stevie, were civilised and gentle; working away in their buried cells, they were women in full possession of their human credentials.
‘I never actually saw Anya,’ Masha continued. ‘Of course, I heard her. She came for her violin lessons next door. I knew certainly that it was Anya because there is a lesson schedule in Galina’s room. But I would have been able to tell anyway. The notes from her violin were different from all the others. They had a longing in them, the kind that is full of hope and unfocused desire. Like the heart of a young girl.’ She sat back down, gesturing to the seat opposite her.
‘I told Masha about Anya,’ murmured Vadim, as he pulled out the second chair for Stevie. ‘She was recording my story and it had just happened. I could think of nothing else. I know I wasn’t supposed to speak to anyone but Masha doesn’t know my sister. It was a comfort to tell someone what had happened, how worried I am.’
Stevie turned her head to look into the young man’s tortured face. ‘It doesn’t matter, Vadim. Sorrow is as hard to keep to yourself as happiness. Better you tell someone with no stake in the matter. What were you recording for?’
Stevie saw Masha look to Vadim. Was it for permission?
‘Stevie, I think, would be interested in your book, Masha Ivanovna.’
Masha addressed Stevie. ‘You have been to Russia before I’m guessing, you speak Russian well. Perhaps you have noticed we are sliding slowly towards hell.’
But even as she pronounced her sentence, Masha smiled, showing small, white pointed teeth. Her eyes suggested energy, not defeat.
‘Despite everything I am optimistic. Aggressively so. I try hard to build optimism because pessimism is too easy, too self-fulfilling. It is not a prophecy I want to be responsible for realising. I want instead to create hope, because that is what people live for.’ Masha smiled again, her hand fluttering in an arc. ‘Hope and the trivial, tangible things—things like hot, sweet tea, a piece of gossip, an admiring glance from your husband, maybe a new magazine, birthday parties.’
There was a tiny silver samovar in the corner. Masha stood and went over to fill three glasses of tea. She spooned in enthusiastic amounts of sugar as she continued.
‘Living on a human scale cannot be done on ideas. That was the real flaw of communism. The texture of life was neglected and it became threadbare and joyless. There was never enough of anything and everyone was afraid of everyone else. It ground away at us. Every day was all about the great
Rodina
—the Motherland. All sacrifices—and there were many—were in her name. For the party members, certainly, there were material benefits—trips overseas, imported shoes, food, anything— equality was in name only. But for everyone else, the return on everyday sacrifices was supposed to be ideological satisfaction and that is not something you can hold in your hand.’
She passed a glass to Stevie, one to Vadim, and continued. ‘Yes, ideas underpin everything, but they express themselves in the details of our lives and this is how we understand them and consume them. The worst things in the world have been done in the name of ideas divorced from their human consequences.’
Masha sat back down and stirred her tea into a whirlpool, her tiny brass spoon tinkling like a tooth-fairy’s wand.
For such a diminutive woman, thought Stevie, she certainly packed a punch. Her face was familiar, the elfin smile, the eyes behind the big glasses . . . but Stevie couldn’t place it.
‘My project is a drop in the sea, the smallest thing. It is a book.’
Masha paused to blow gently on her tea. ‘In it I record the personal stories of ordinary individuals, the events big and small that have shaped them; I record the feel of their lives. Every time I do that, I feel I am returning just a little of the power and dignity that a monolithic, despotic government takes away from every private life: the right to go quietly about your business, pursue your dreams, build a future free from interference.’
Masha turned her gaze to Stevie. ‘Our country is not a machine and its citizens are not interchangeable, expendable moving parts. Someone needs to remind the powers of that. When you know the details of someone’s story, it is much harder to treat them with contempt.’
‘It’s a bit like humanising yourself to your captors so they won’t kill you,’ Stevie added quickly, having burned the tip of her tongue with the tea. She was inspired by Masha’s energy, felt that she wanted to join her somehow.
‘Perhaps you are right.’ Masha nodded. ‘The president has our whole nation hostage, and others besides. Perhaps he will come to hear of the stories of these simple people and see that they have souls and hopes and people who love them deeply. I believe contempt is what allows leaders to repress and dehumanise and destroy their own people. The concentration camps and the gulags of last century’s history did just that, reduced people to a cipher, stripped them of what it means to be a man or a woman or a child. A number can be erased without a second’s thought.’
Masha could see the Russia around her changing once again. The trauma of the years under the Soviets had been repressed, initially by the euphoria of freedom, now because no one had time to think through what had happened. Disillusionment was setting in.
Many people had become poorer since the Iron Curtain was swept aside and the window of freedom revealed. They resented this, as anyone would. They no longer even had the glorious Soviet Motherland—an empire that stretched from Europe to China, a space programme, one half of the world under its belt—the über myth that had compensated for certain deficiencies in the Soviet system. The myths had turned to ash. The past had been taken from the people; their future was uncertain, the present uncomfortable. Little wonder that racism, distrust, paranoia and rage seemed to be taking hold of Russia.
Masha drained her tea and smiled mischievously. ‘Our history is unpredictable. This is a book of witnesses. I want to remind people of the past, and of who they were, and of the things that happened, to stop them.’
The three of them became aware of a flute being played in Galina’s room; she was accompanying on the piano. Her student must have been a young child, just beginning to learn: the notes were uncertain and imperfect.
‘It’s a Sisyphean task Masha has taken on.’ Vadim was leaning against the wall, half smiling. ‘To restore humanity soul by soul, tale by tale.’
‘But the struggle is part of the victory,’ Masha replied. ‘It will probably take me the rest of my life.’ She grinned, as if this idea pleased rather than daunted her.
Then she grew serious. ‘I told Vadim the other day about another of my subjects, a man named Gregori Petrovitch Maraschenko. He came to me on four occasions and I recorded his story. He was caught in the Moscow theatre siege, when the Chechens took the audience hostage.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘On the second time, he was early and waiting for me in Galina’s music room. He was reading the lesson timetable. I thought he was just bored, passing time. But then he asked me about Anya Kozkov. I didn’t know her, I told him so. But after that, he always came when she had a lesson.’ Masha shot an apologetic glance at Vadim.
‘Perhaps it was coincidence, but perhaps not, in light of the questions he used to ask: where did she go to school, who were her friends. I told him I knew nothing about her and he stopped asking. But he always seemed to be listening if she was playing in the next room, trying to hear her conversations with Galina. You can half-hear most things.’ Masha gestured towards the thin wall. ‘I thought maybe he had some fascination. On the last day Anya and Galina were arguing . . . She wanted to be a fashion model.’
Their voices would have been raised, Stevie thought, and Petra’s name would have come up. She could see how easily the argument might have been overheard in this tiny room, with its paper walls.
‘I should have warned Anya.’ Masha’s eyes were still on Vadim. ‘In fact, after this last time, I decided I would speak to Galina so that she could warn Anya. It would be better coming from her.’
‘But there was never a next time?’ Stevie asked, guessing the answer.
‘No. Gregori never came back. I tried to ring him but the number was no longer in use. I thought it strange. He seemed to enjoy our sessions. But I didn’t think too much of it until Vadim came and he told me about his sister being missing. I wondered if the two disappearances were connected.’
Stevie frowned. ‘It sounds possible. How did you find Gregori?’
‘I put a small ad in the paper, for people with interesting stories they wanted to tell, in exchange for sweet tea and biscuits, for a book about Russia. I was quite overwhelmed with replies. I didn’t expect that.’ Masha shrugged. ‘But perhaps the longing to tell one’s story remains one of the most basic in humans.’
Stevie nodded. ‘And then you whittled it down, I presume, to the most interesting among them.’
‘Yes, it was a difficult process and I wanted to choose very different stories. But I chose Gregori because of the Nord-–Ost theatre siege.’
The flute in the next room stopped. Galina’s voice, only faintly muffled, came through the walls—a correction of the flautist’s finger position, a gentle word of encouragement.
Stevie considered the new information. ‘It doesn’t sound like Gregori contacting you was premeditated. He couldn’t have known that Anya Kozkov was having music lessons in the next room to where you would be working.’
‘Impossible.’
‘So if he is involved, it was an opportunistic involvement. Either he set something in motion on impulse, or he sold his information. Is there anything on those tapes that might help us?’
Masha stood, shaking her head. ‘I’ve been thinking, but I can’t remember anything specific . . .’
‘They might be worth listening to anyway.’
Masha bent and pulled open a drawer. It was full of cassette boxes, all neatly labelled and stacked. She picked one out and opened it. Her little hand fluttered to her mouth.
She reached for another, opened it, then another. They were all empty.
‘Oh Vadim.’ Masha looked up, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I’m so sorry. Gregori’s tapes are gone. He must have taken them the last time he was here, when I left the room. I never bothered to hide where I kept them. There seemed no reason to.’
‘It seems like a pretty good sign of guilt!’ Vadim had his fists clenched at his sides.
Masha fumbled about in another drawer then pulled out another cassette box.
‘It’s the best I can do. It was a test—to see if my machine was working.’ She popped the tape in the cassette player and there was a hissing, followed by Masha’s voice:
Odin, dva, tri. Pozhaluista, skajite
svaye imya
. Please say your name.
Then a male voice, deep, tinny from the magnetic ribbon:
Gregori
Petrovitch Maraschenko; biznessman.
Masha rewound and played it again:
Gregori Petrovitch Maraschenko;
biznessman.
Stevie made her play it again, and again, until she felt she would know that voice anywhere.
‘Masha, how do we find Gregori Petrovitch?’
‘I think you should try The Boar. It’s a bar. He once told me he goes there on Thursday evenings, to drink away the memories. He’s hard to miss: he has a tattoo of a grinning cat on his left wrist.’
A thief’s tattoo, thought Stevie.
Suddenly, she remembered where she had seen Masha’s face: a television news broadcast from outside the House of Culture of the State Ball-Bearing Plant Number 1 in the Dubrovka area, a Moscow theatre. On 24 October 2002, the day after the Chechen gunmen took the audience hostage, the gunmen had asked for Masha to be their intermediary with the Russian government. They would only talk to her. She was a famous journalist and was known to have some sympathy for the Chechen people. Masha had walked into the captured theatre alone to negotiate with the gunmen
.
Stevie remembered an interview, the resignation in Masha’s voice when she had summed up her efforts: ‘All I could get for the hostages was apple juice.’
It had been an incredibly brave thing to do.
As they got up to leave, they heard Galina begin to play—it had to be Galina, no young pupil could have mustered the same depth of feeling. She was incredible.
Galina stopped playing as they passed through her music room. She turned her large eyes to Stevie.
‘I’ve lost one child already. Please, I couldn’t bear to lose Anya as well.’
Stevie and Vadim crept their
way back past the wild dogs in the snow outside.
‘I wouldn’t have thought to find two women like that in such a place, Vadim. I am quite in awe of them both.’
Vadim smiled and took Stevie’s arm to steady her. ‘Galina’s family is from St Petersburg. Her grandfather was a lawyer at the Leningrad State and Law Institute. Almost everyone there was killed and the institute was closed. They needed to destroy the law to create lawlessness. Every night black vans would stop in front of people’s apartments. People called them
chyornye voroni
, black ravens. One night a black raven came for Galina’s grandfather. He disappeared into the NKVD cellars at 4 Liteiny Prospekt.’
Vadim stopped to pick up a thick stick of wood. One of the dogs seemed intent on following them.
‘
Yezhovshchina,
’ Stevie whispered, ‘the Great Terror.’
Stevie remembered the terrible numbers: between 5 August, 1937 and 16 November 1938, 39,488 enemies of the people were executed in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) alone. Their bodies were thrown into mass graves. The NKVD was the predecessor of the KGB. The Chief, Nikolia Yezhov, was one of the men who began the campaign of terror. Typical execution style was a bullet from a .45 calibre Colt, fired into the nape of the neck.
‘After the raven took Galina’s grandfather,’ Vadim continued, ‘the family went down to the river Neva. There was a pipe that ran to it from the NKVD cellars. Some days the water in that spot ran red with the blood washed down from the executed. Galina’s family didn’t know whose blood was staining the river that day, but they threw flowers into the Neva anyway and said goodbye.’