The Way I Found Her (44 page)

I took off the blindfold. The room just had a tiled floor with a drain in it and a rusty shower head coming out of the wall. There was a tiny window, big enough to contain one pane of frosted glass. Vasily hadn't given me any soap, but I found some on the floor by the drain. Everything in there, including the soap, felt cold.

I took off my clothes. They looked and smelled like a health hazard and I wanted a hospital nurse to be there to take them away and put them in the incinerator with all the blood-stained gauze and burn them to ash. But there was no nurse and no incinerator, so I decided to wash my underpants and socks and T-shirt. I just took them with me into the shower and soaped them and trod on them and rinsed them and soaped them and trod on them again. I knew that, in the dark, they'd take hours and hours to dry, but I didn't care.

Bits of you get sore if you don't wash. Your arse feels like it's been cut open with a medieval sword. And then when you can soap it and let the warm water just run and run on to the wound, it's the most soothing thing you could ever have imagined.

I stayed in the shower till the water ran cold. There was no towel, so I just stood there, calling for Vasily and shivering. And then, when he came in, he wasn't wearing his monkey mask. I don't know if he'd forgotten to put it on or he expected me to take a shower with my blindfold on, or what. He came in, carrying an old threadbare towel, as if nothing was wrong and then he realised that I was staring at him. He threw the towel at me and ran out, but it was too late: I'd seen his face.

I dried myself on the towel and squeezed out my wet clothes. All I had to put on now were my trousers and jacket and in the light of the shower room I could see how dirty they were. With these on, with no shoes, I looked liked a metro beggar, the kind of pitiful kid who doesn't sing or anything, but just sits there by the wall, holding out his hand. I thought, well, never mind, they're probably going to kill me now anyway. I know who Alexis is and now I've seen Vasily's face, so I'm in exactly the same amount of danger as Valentina. And then I thought how odd it was that the face I'd seen had been so soft, so sort of babyish and kind, yet it was the sight of this baby face that had diminished my chances of staying alive. I could hear Shukov and Todorsky yelling at Vasily. I thought, they'll probably yell for hours, or even get in a fight; maybe they'll even kill poor little Vasya and I'll be in this shower room till night time, till they've drowned his body in the river.

But Todorsky, wearing his mask, took me back to my cell. I carried my wet clothes and laid them out to dry on my chair. I decided that when the house was quiet again, I might risk putting them on the roof in the sun.

Later that day, after we'd eaten some tough meat with oily white beans, a knife came through the pipe hole. It was an ordinary dinner knife, but, unlike the one I'd been given, it had a serrated edge. Valentina whispered: ‘If they ask for it back, I think we'll have to give it back, so try it now. See if you can make any impact on the batons with it.'

Moving my table and chair and locating the loose slate took me approximately sixty seconds now. As usual, when I turned the slate, a slab of sunlight fell in. And I could make it bigger. Two more slates had been loosened enough to pivot on their pins.

I calculated the distance between the cuts I was going to make in the baton, not by how wide my body was, but by how wide Valentina's hips might possibly be. I had to guess at it. I held out my arms and tried to imagine them going right round her.

The knife wouldn't operate like a saw; moving backwards and forwards, it only snagged the wood on the downward movement, so this was how I had to work, as if I were pulling the knife through a blade-sharpener. After half an hour's constant friction, I'd made a cut in the wood about two millimetres deep. It wasn't difficult to work out that to saw through the baton in just this one place would take me approximately seven hours, and already my arms felt as if they'd been doing crucifixion practice. But I made myself go on. I laid my underpants out on the slates in the sun and kept sawing. I thought, my life and Valentina's could be saved, not by jewellery from Cartier, but by a piece of cutlery.

By the time night came, I was exhausted. A river of pain began to run from my right hand to my shoulder and up into my neck. I said to Valentina: ‘Do hostages ever get given paracetamol?'

She was in the middle of telling me about Nikita Khrushchev, who became the President of the Soviet Union after Stalin died. She said Nikita Khrushchev had a fat, smiling face, and because of this face of his, people trusted him. She said: ‘If you ask for a pain killer, they will wonder why you're in pain. It might be better just to endure it.'

Then she told me about what she called Khrushchev's ‘maize craze'. This ‘maize craze' was the thing that finally drove Anton out of Russia. Valentina said it broke the remaining bit of his Soviet heart.

Apparently, Nikita Khrushchev went on a visit to Idaho in the United States some time in the 1950s. He was taken on a tour of the maize fields there, and when he saw all this plump maize growing under the Idaho sun he decided it was the ideal crop to grow back home to solve the food shortages. So he ordered maize to be planted in vast swathes right across the country, including on Anton's farm. Anton used to refer to him as
kukuruznik
, which meant ‘maize freak', but the farmers soon saw that the maize wasn't growing. It wasn't like that fat Idaho maize; it was dry and thin. The air was too cold for it.

Valentina said: ‘My father used to go out in the middle of the night and look at his maize crop in the moonlight. It should have been as high as his shoulder, but it barely came up to his waist. He'd grown potatoes before and his potatoes had been all right, snug under the soil, and he knew what he could see in the moonlit maize: he could see hunger and ruin.'

In the dark of my cell, it didn't seem difficult to picture Anton standing in the maize field with the moon glimmering down, except that what I imagined it glimmering down on was his white hair, and then I realised that all this had happened so long ago, his hair wouldn't have been white, but still dark, like it was when he met Olga in the queue to see Stalin's coffin.

I said to Valentina: ‘You once told me you stood in the maize.'

‘Yes. I did. I looked out of my window one night and I saw Anton there in the maize. So I went down and joined him. The maize was taller than I was. I didn't know it was no good. But I was only three.'

And I tried to picture her then: this plump little girl, wearing some kind of bright dress, feeling small among the scratchy green stalks.

She told me it was that same autumn, when the maize cobs had failed to ripen, that Anton and Olga joined the official visit by the Collective Farmers of the Lovat River Valley to the wine co-operative in Provence. They took Valentina with them because they knew they were never going to come back.

I said: ‘How could they be sure? How could they know they weren't going to be found and arrested?'

‘They couldn't,' said Valentina. ‘What they did involved a great amount of risk. But sometimes, in a life, risk is inevitable. Lewis. I expect you will discover this.'

I almost said that I knew it perfectly well already and that my escape plan had quite a high risk element to it, but I didn't. When the time came, I wanted Valentina to believe that my plan was flawless.

We were quiet for a while and I began to think that Valentina had gone to sleep, but then she suddenly said: ‘I took a risk, in my recent life. I counted on something that didn't happen. And now, I've realised – since I've been here – that I will have to pay some price for it.'

I knew what she was talking about. She was talking about Grisha's book and how she'd believed that his life of Catherine the Great would never be published outside Russia, but I didn't let on.

‘What price?' I asked.

I heard her turn over on her mattress. ‘It's too complicated to explain, darling,' she said.

‘Try,' I said.

‘No, I can't explain it all. It had to do with the pressure I was under, from my publishers here and in the States and in London, to produce a book every two years or so. I knew that one day I would run out of stories . . . and this is what has happened.'

I said: ‘But your book's almost finished.'

‘It's almost finished, but now it will never be
completely
finished. If I get out of here, I'm going to renegotiate everything. I think Valentina Gavril has written her last Medieval Romance.'

She said she wanted to go to sleep then. It was like she was on the very brink of telling me the truth and then something held her back.

The following day, just after I'd been with Vasya to empty my shit pail, Alexis came into my cell. He was wearing his monkey mask.

He got Vasya to stick a light bulb in the overhead lamp, then he pulled my table out from the wall until it was under the light and told me to sit down. Vasya brought in a second chair and placed it opposite me. Then Alexis went away.

I looked up at the roof baton, where I'd been sawing away at it with the knife. If you examined it closely, you could see there was a cut in it, but I didn't think Alexis was going to be staring at the roof; I knew that he'd decided on a game of chess.

His chess set was very beautiful, made of ebony and ivory, the pieces heavy and sort of stained and worn away by the hands of the players. I was sure the set had come from Russia. Probably, Russia was the place where the most fantastic chess sets in the world were made.

Alexis sat down and we began setting out the pieces, like we were old friends who played a game every evening.

‘White or Black, Meaulnes?' he asked.

‘I don't mind,' I said. ‘But if I win, I want something.'

He said nothing to this at first. He said he preferred to play Black. Then he just stared at his side of the board intently as he prepared it, like you see biological researchers staring at a row of tiny little tubes. Sometimes, before a game of chess has begun, you can start to see invisible moves in the minds of the chessmen, and I knew this was what was happening to Alexis now.

Then, suddenly, he looked up. ‘What is it you want?' he asked.

I said: ‘I want my notebook back.'

‘Notebook?'

‘It's got a picture of Concorde on it.'

‘You fly on Concorde, rich boy?'

‘No. Can I have my notebook?'

Alexis looked up. It was impossible to tell what his face was doing behind the monkey mask, but I could see his eyes fixed on me. ‘First, you have to win,' he said.

Suddenly, I felt nervous. I hadn't felt it a moment before, but now I did. I looked at Alexis's hands, with their long pale fingers ready to swoop on his opening move, and I thought, I won't win against hands like that: there's too much knowledge and practice in them.

I was playing White. I made one of my favourite openings, pawn to king four. Without the least hesitation, Alexis did the same, pawn to king four.

My concentration didn't feel good. I thought, I must go for a fast knockout, or else I'll lose it, so I brought my queen out straight away: queen to bishop three. Alexis allowed himself a laugh. I wanted to say, ‘That's against the rules; you've got to keep quiet.' But I didn't. I just watched Alexis rush out his knight and my crude attempts to checkmate early were parried so easily, it was embarrassing. In less than ten minutes, my queen was hustled to the edge of the board. Without my queen, I knew, and Alexis knew, that I couldn't go on. I felt kind of stunned and stupid. I hadn't lost a chess game so fast and so idiotically for years.

I knew Alexis was grinning behind his mask as he put the beautiful chess pieces away. ‘Next time you will win,' he said, ‘but we don't have any notebook. We found a knife, that was all. You will have to ask for something else.'

I thought, when the game was over, Alexis might forget about the light in my cell and leave it on. But he didn't. He sent Vasya in with a cloth and the bulb was taken away.

I wanted to describe the game to Valentina, to tell her that the
presence
of Alexis had unnerved me and see if she could give me any tips about how to beat him next time, but I didn't dare take the pipe out of the wall, because I could hear the monkeys chattering near us. They were talking in Russian, so I couldn't understand a word, but I knew they were discussing the game, saying what a transparent chess player I was. From time to time, Alexis laughed his laugh like an animal cry.

Valentina knew I hadn't won. She knocked on the wall and said: ‘Lewis, don't be downhearted, darling. Everybody who plays Alexis says he is hard to beat.'

‘Thanks,' I said.

I felt tired, but I didn't want to lie down and snivel over my loss of the chess match, so I decided to go for an imaginary walk round London. It was raining on the Thames, pocking the surface of the water. The faces of the Embankment joggers were wet and their hair was slicked down by the rain and their legs were muddy. I crossed one of the bridges and felt the wind come blustering round me, trying to blow me off the bridge and down into the grey-green river.

I was making my way towards the Festival Hall, where I had once been taken to a concert by Grandma Gwyneth when I was nine or ten. I could remember having tea in some airy interior space, which was occupied only by light and waitresses and plastic chairs.

Then we climbed up miles of wooden stairs and came out at the very top of the auditorium and looked down at the grand piano on the concert platform, far away. Grandma Gwyneth had said: ‘What we're going to hear, sweetheart, is a piece called
Rhapsody in Blue
, by an American composer called George Gershwin. Here it is, you see, in your programme,
Rhapsody in Blue
, and it's one of my favourite pieces of music of all time.'