Archangel

  She remembered all these things.

  And the kulaks?

  Yes, she remembered the kulaks. She was seventeen. They arrived at the railway station, thousands of them, in their strange national dress. Ukrainians: you never saw so many people – covered in sores and carrying their bundles – they were locked in the churches and the townspeople were forbidden to approach them. Not that they wished to. The kulaks carried contamination, they all knew that.

  Their sores were contagious?

  No. The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution. Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

  And so what happened to the kulaks?

  It was like the English battleship. You went to bed at night and they were there, and you got up in the morning and they were gone. The churches were all closed after that. But now the churches were open again – she had seen it with her own eyes. The kulaks had come back. They were everywhere. It was a tragedy.

  And the Great Patriotic War, she remembered that – the Allied ships moored out beyond the mouth of the river, and the docks working all day and all night, under the heroic direction of the Party, and the fascist planes dropping fire-bombs over the old wooden town and burning it, burning so much of it down. Those were the hardest times – her husband away fighting at the front, herself working as an auxiliary nurse at the Seamen’s Policlinic, no food in the town and not much fuel, the blackout, the bombs and a daughter to bring up on her own …

  ALL of this, of course, took much longer to extract than the printed record would suggest. There was a lot of banging of her stick and doubling-back and repitition and meandering, and Kelso was acutely aware of O’Brian fidgeting beside him and of the snow piling up and muffling the sounds outside. But he let her talk. Indeed, he kicked O’Brian twice on the ankle to warn him to be patient. He wanted to let her come to things in her own time.

  Fluke Kelso was an expert at this. This was how the whole business had started, after all.

  He sipped his cold tea.

  So you had a daughter, Comrade Safanova? That’s interesting. Tell us about your daughter.

  Vavara prodded the linoleum with her stick. Her mouth turned down.

  That was of no consequence to the history of the Archangel Regional Party.

  ‘But it was of consequence to you?’

  Well, naturally it was of consequence to her. She was the child’s mother. But what was a child when set against the forces of history? It was a matter of subjectivity and objectivity. Of who and whom. And of various other slogans of the Party she could no longer fully remember, but which she knew to be true and which had been a comfort to her at the time.

  She sat back, hunched in her chair.

  Kelso reached for the satchel.

  ‘Actually, I know something of what happened to your daughter,’ he began. ‘We have found a book, a journal, that Anna kept. That was her name, wasn’t it? Anna? I wonder – can I show it you?’

  Her eyes followed the movement of his hands, warily, as he began to unfasten the straps.

  HER fingers were spotted with age, like the book itself, but they didn’t tremble as she opened the cover. When she saw the picture of Anna, she touched it hesitantly, then her knuckle went to her mouth. She sucked on it. Slowly she brought the page up level with her face and held it close.

  ‘I ought to be getting this on camera,’ whispered O’Brian.

  ‘Don’t you dare even move,’ hissed Kelso.

  He couldn’t see her expression, but he could hear her laboured breathing and again he had the odd sensation that she had been waiting for them – for years, maybe.

  Eventually, she said, ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘It was dug up. In a garden in Moscow. It was with some papers belonging to Stalin.’

  When she lowered the book, her eyes were dry. She closed it and held it out to him.

  ‘No. Read it,’ he said. ‘Please. It’s hers.’

  But she shook her head. She didn’t want to.

  ‘But that is her writing?’

  ‘Yes, it’s hers. Take it away.’

  She waved the book at him and wouldn’t rest until it was safely put back in the satchel. Then she sat back, leaning to her right, one hand covering her good eye, stabbing at the floor with her stick.

  ANNA, she said, after a time.

  Well. Anna.

  Where to begin?

  Truth to tell, she had been pregnant with Anna when she married. But people didn’t care about such things in those times – the Party had done away with priests, thank God.

  She was eighteen. Mikhail Safanov was five years older – a metallurgist in the shipyards and a member of the Party’s factory committee.

  A good-looking man. Their daughter took after him. Oh yes, Anna was a pretty thing. That was her tragedy.

  ‘Tragedy?’

  Clever, too. And growing up a good young communist. She was following her parents into the Party. She had served her time as a Pioneer. She was in the Komsomol: she looked like something out of a poster in her uniform. So much so that she had been picked for the Archangel Komsomol delegation to pass through Red Square – oh, a great honour, this – picked to pass beneath the eyes of the Vozhd himself, on May Day 1951.

  Anna’s picture had been in Ogonyok afterwards and questions had been asked. That had been the start of it. Nothing had been the same after that.

  Some comrades had come up from the Central Committee in Moscow the following week and had started asking around about her. And about the Safanovs.

  And once word of this got out, some of their neighbours had started to avoid them. After all, though the arch-fiend Trotsky was dead at last, his spies and saboteurs might not be. Perhaps the Safanovs were wreckers or deviationists?

  But of course nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Mikhail had come home early from the shipyard one afternoon in the company of a comrade from Moscow – Comrade Mekhlis: she would never forget his name – and it was this comrade who had given them the good news. The Safanovs had been thoroughly checked and found to be loyal communists. Their daughter was a particular credit to them. So much so that she had been selected for special Party work in Moscow, attending to the needs of the senior leadership. Domestic service, but still: the work required intelligence and discretion, and afterwards the girl could resume her studies with good words on her file.

  Anna – well, once Anna got to hear of it – there was no stopping her. And Vavara was in favour of it, too. Only Mikhail had been opposed. Something had happened to Mikhail. It pained her to say it. Something during the war. He had never spoken of it, except once, when Anna was talking, full of wonder, about the genius of Comrade Stalin. Mikhail said he had seen a lot of comrades die at the front: could she tell him, then, if Comrade Stalin was such a genius, why so many millions had had to die?

  Vavara had made him rise from this very table – she struck it with her hand – and go outside into the yard for his foolishness. No. He was not the man he had been before the war. He wouldn’t even go to the railway station to see his daughter off.

  She fell silent.

  Kelso said quietly, ‘And you never saw her again?’

  Oh yes, said Vavara, surprised at the question. They saw her again.

  She made a curving motion with her hands, outwards from her belly.

  They saw her again when she came home to have the baby.

  SILENCE.

  O’Brian coughed and bent forwards, head down, his hands clasped tight in front of him, his elbows on his knees. ‘Did she just say what I thought she said?’

  Kelso ignored him. With great effort, he managed to keep his voice neutral.

  ‘And when was this?’

  Vavara thought for a while, tapping her stick against her boot.

  The spring of 1952, she said eventually. That was it. She got through on the train in March 1952, when it was starting to thaw a bit.
They had had no warning, she had just turned up, with no explanation. Not that she needed to explain anything. You only had to look at her. She was seven months gone by then.

  ‘And the father …? Did she say …?’

  No.

  A vigorous shake of the head.

  But you guessed, didn’t you? thought Kelso.

  No, she didn’t say anything about the father, or about what had happened in Moscow, and after a while they gave up asking. She just sat in the corner and waited for her term to come. She was very silent, this new girl, not like their old Anna. She wouldn’t see her friends, or step outside. The truth was, she was scared.

  ‘Scared? What was she scared of?’

  Of giving birth, of course. And why not? Men! she said – and some of her old fire returned – what did men know of life? Naturally she was scared. Anyone with eyes in their head and a mind to think would be scared. And that baby didn’t give her an easy time, either, the little devil. It sucked the goodness out of her. Oh, a proper little devil – what a kick it had! They would sit here in the evening and watch her belly heave.

  Mekhlis came by sometimes to keep an eye on her. Most weeks there was a car at the bottom of the street with a couple of his men it.

  No, they didn’t ask who the father was.

  She started to bleed at the beginning of April. They took her to the clinic. And that was the last time they saw her. She had a haemorrhage in the delivery room. The doctor told them everything about it afterwards. There was nothing to be done. She died on the operating table two days later. She was twenty.

  ‘And the baby?’

  The baby lived. A boy.

  THE arrangements were all made by Comrade Mekhlis.

  It was the least he could do, he told them. He felt responsible.

  It was Mekhlis who provided the doctor – an academician, no less, the country’s leading expert, flown up specially from Moscow – and Mekhlis who arranged the adoption. The Safanovs would have reared the child themselves, willingly – they asked to do so: they begged – but Mekhlis had a paper, signed by Anna, in which she said that if anything happened to her, she wanted the baby to be adopted. She named some relatives of the father, a couple named Chizhikov.

  ‘Chizhikov?’ said Kelso. ‘You’re sure of that name?’

  Certain.

  They never even saw the baby. They weren’t allowed inside the hospital.

  Now she was willing to accept all this, because Vavara Safanova believed in the discipline of the Party. She still did. She would believe in it until the day she died. The Party was her god, and sometimes, like a god, the Party moved in a mysterious way.

  But Mikhail Safanov no longer accepted the doctrine of infallibility. He was set on finding these Chizhikovs, whatever Mekhlis said, and he still had enough friends in the regional Party to help him do it. And that was how he discovered that the Chizhikovs were not fancy Moscow folk at all – which was what he had expected – but were northerners, like them, and had gone to live in a village in the forest outside Archangel. The whisper in the town was that Chizhikov was not their real name. That they were NKVD.

  By this time it was winter and there was nothing Mikhail could do. And then one morning in early spring, while he was still looking out each day for the first signs of a thaw, they woke to solemn music on the radio and the news that Comrade Stalin was dead.

  She had wept, and he had, too. Did that surprise him? Oh, they had howled and clutched at one another! They had cried in a way they never had before, not even for Anna. The whole of Archangel was in grief. She could still remember the day of the funeral. The long silence, broken by a thirty-gun salute. The echo of the gunfire had rolled across the Dvina like a distant storm in the forest.

  Two months later, in May, when the ice had gone, Mikhail had filled a backpack and had set off to find his grandson.

  She had known nothing good could come of it.

  One day passed, then two, then three. He was a fit man, strong and healthy – he was only forty-five.

  On the fifth day some fishermen had found his body, about thirty versts upstream, rushing along in the yellow meltwater that was pouring out of the forest, not far from Novodvinsk.

  KELSO unfolded O’Brian’s map and laid it out on the table. She put on her spectacles and hunted up and down the blue line of the Dvina, her good eye held very close.

  There, she said, after a while, and pointed. That was the place where her husband’s body had been found. A wild spot! There were wolves here in the forest, and lynx and bear. In some places the trees were too dense for a man to move. In others, there were swamps that could eat you in a minute. And here and there the grey weathered bones of the old kulak settlements. Almost all of the kulaks had perished, of course. There was not much of a living to be scratched in such a place.

  Mikhail knew the forest as well as any man. He had been roaming the taiga since he was a child.

  It had been a heart attack, according to the militia. That was what they said. Maybe he had been trying to fill his water bottle? He had fallen into the cold yellow water and the shock had stopped his heart.

  She had buried him in the Kuznecheskoye Cemetery, next to Anna.

  ‘And what,’ said Kelso, conscious again of O’Brian just behind them, filming them now with his wretched miniature camera, ‘what was the name of the village where your husband said the Chizhikovs lived?’

  Ah! This was crazy! How could she be expected to remember that? It was so long ago – nearly fifty years …

  She brought her face down close to the map again.

  Here somewhere – she placed a wavering finger on a spot just north of the river – somewhere around here: a place too small to be worth recording. Too small to have a name, even.

  She had never tried to find it herself?

  Oh no.

  She looked at Kelso in horror.

  Nothing good could come of it. Not then. And not now.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  THE BIG CAR braked hard and swerved off the south Moscow highway into the Zhukovsky military airbase shortly before noon, Feliks Suvorin hanging grimly to the strap in the rear. Beyond the checkpoint, a jeep waited. It pulled away as the barrier rose, its tail lights flashing, and they followed it around the side of the terminal building, through a wire fence and on to the concrete apron.

  A small grey aircraft, as requested – six-seater, prop-driven – was being fuelled by a tanker. Beyond the plane was a line of dark green army helicopters with drooping rotors; parked next to it, a big ZiL limousine.

  Well, well, thought Suvorin. Some things still work round here.

  He stuffed his notes into his briefcase and darted through the wind and rain towards the limousine where Arsenyev’s driver was already opening the rear door.

  ‘And?’ said Arsenyev from the warmth of the interior.

  ‘And,’ said Suvorin, sliding along the seat to join him, ‘it’s not what we thought it was. And thank you for fixing the plane.’

  ‘Wait in the other car,’ said Arsenyev to his chauffeur.

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  ‘What’s not as who thought it was?’ said Arsenyev, when the door was shut. ‘Good morning, by the way.’

  ‘Good morning, Yuri Semonovich. The notebook. Everybody’s always believed it was Stalin’s. Actually it turns out to have been a journal kept by a girl servant of Stalin’s, Anna Mikhailovna Safanova. He had her brought down from Archangel to work for him in the summer of’51, about eighteen months before he died.’

  Arsenyev blinked at him.

  ‘And that’s it? That’s what Beria stole?’

  ‘That’s it. That and some papers about her, apparently.’

  Arsenyev stared at Suvorin for a second or two, then started laughing. He shook his head with relief. ‘Go fuck your mother! The old bastard was screwing his maid? Is that what he was up to?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘That is priceless. That is brilliant!’ Arsenyev punched the seat in
front of him. ‘Oh, let me be there! Let me be there to see Mamantov’s face when he finds out his great Stalin testament is nothing more than a maid’s account of getting screwed by the mighty Vozhd!’ He glanced at Suvorin, his fat cheeks flushed with mirth, diamonds glistening in his eyes. ‘What’s the matter, Feliks? Don’t tell me you can’t see the funny side?’ He stopped laughing. ‘What’s the matter? You are sure this is true, aren’t you?’

  ‘Pretty well sure, colonel, yes. This is all according to the woman we picked up last night, Zinaida Rapava. She read the notebook yesterday afternoon – her father left it hidden for her. I can’t think that she would invent such a story. It defies imagination.’

  ‘Right, right. So cheer up, eh? And where’s this notebook now?’

  ‘Well, that’s the first complication.’ Suvorin spoke hesitantly. It seemed such a shame to spoil the old fellow’s mood. ‘That’s why I needed to talk to you. It seems she showed it to the historian, Kelso. According to her, he’s taken it with him.’

  ‘With him?’

  ‘To Archangel. He’s trying to find the woman who wrote it, this Anna Safanova.’

  Arsenyev tugged nervously at his thick neck. ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. Four or five. She can’t remember exactly.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Driving.’

  ‘Driving? That’s all right. You’ll catch him easily. By the time you land, you’ll only be a few hours behind him. He’s a rat in a trap up there.’

  ‘Unfortunately, it’s not just him. He’s got a journalist with him. O’Brian. You know him? That correspondent with the satellite television station.’

  ‘Ah.’ Arsenyev stuck out his lower lip and pulled at his neck some more. After a while he said, ‘But even so, the chances of this woman still being alive are small. And if she is – well, so, so, it’s no disaster. Let them write their books and make their fucking news reports. I can’t see Stalin entrusting his maid with a message for future generations. Can you?’

  ‘Well, this is my worry –’

  ‘His maid? Come on, Feliks! He was a Georgian, after all, and an old one at that. Women were good for only three things, as far as Comrade Stalin was concerned. Cooking, cleaning and having kids. He – ’Arsenyev stopped. ‘No –’