‘ “Until they reached the shepherd’s hut where the shepherd was sleeping while his daughter guarded the flock on the mountain pasture …” ’ recites Anna.
‘Who’s reading this? “And then the mightiest of all the boulders smashed into the walls of the hut and sent them spinning down the mountainside until there was no piece of wood left that was bigger than a matchstick. But the shepherd, who was sleeping, was thrown high into the air on his mattress of straw.” ’
Anna shifts restlessly under her rug. ‘Don’t go on, Andrei. I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘But Kolya used to love this bit. Anyway, the shepherd isn’t killed.’
‘I know, and he finds his little daughter alive because she’s been playing in a cave instead of looking after the sheep. He clears away the stones from the entrance with his bare hands.’
‘So it’s a happy ending, what’s wrong with that?’
‘How about the sheep?’
‘What?’
‘Do they get crushed to death?’
Andrei skims the pages. ‘It doesn’t say anything about the sheep.’
‘How about the people who lived at the bottom of the mountain, when the boulders came hurtling down on top of them?’
‘No, nothing about them either.’
Anna opens her eyes. ‘Funny, isn’t it, all I used to care about was the shepherd and his daughter. I suppose it was because they were the main characters. Maybe that’s the moral: you can’t care about everybody.’
‘It’s just a children’s story, Anna.’
‘I know. Sorry. Doesn’t it seem odd without Kolya playing the piano?’
‘Not to the Maleviches.’
‘I hope he’s getting on all right.’
‘I’m sure he is.’
‘At least he’s old enough to understand why it’s all happening.’
‘He’ll be fine, Anna. I expect he’s glad to miss some school.’
‘D’you think it would be all right to write to him?’
‘Maybe not just yet. Let things settle down a bit first.’
Suddenly, without warning, a terror which she hasn’t felt in years seizes on Anna. Her hair is parted by icy fingers. Her skin crawls. Her heart pounds in her throat, suffocating. ‘Andrei!’
‘What is it? Are you ill?’
‘Andrei, I don’t feel too good.’
‘Lie still. Don’t move. Have you got a pain?’
‘No, it’s not that. Hold me a minute.’
He kneels beside her, awkwardly, and gathers her to him. ‘You’re not bleeding? No cramps or anything like that?’
‘No. It was just a horrible feeling. It’s going already.’
She won’t tell him any more, not a word. Things are bad enough as it is. It won’t help for her to blurt out that she felt as if someone were standing over her with a hammer in his hand, ready to smash it into her temples. And that his face was unemotional as he looked at her carefully, judging the best and most vulnerable spot.
‘I’m all right now,’ she says. ‘Hold me tight. Tighter than that.’
‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘You won’t hurt me.’
He shifts position, easing her into his arms. ‘There, is that better?’ He feels her nod. Freeing a hand, he begins to stroke her hair. ‘You and the baby, that’s all that matters.’ He feels And Kolya start in her, but she says nothing aloud. ‘There, there,’ he says, jogging her slightly, rocking her in his arms. ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry, my darling, I’ll make sure you’re all right.’
17
Andrei lies awake, listening for cars. There are few at this time, because it’s almost two in the morning. He hasn’t been able to sleep. No wonder, given that he’s had no exercise. He thinks of getting up, but it would wake Anna. She is deeply asleep, turned away from him, breathing softly and evenly.
He lies on his back, stretched, rigid. He thinks of the letter. He has written draft after draft, and destroyed each of them. Anna thinks it would be madness to send a letter. He thinks she’s probably right, and yet he can’t stop planning the paragraphs in his head. In part of his mind he can’t get rid of the picture of Volkov reading his letter.
And then what, you fool? He reaches for the telephone and calls you to say that he understands you were only trying to do what was best for his boy?
Anna murmurs in her sleep. She doesn’t sound upset, or anxious. Just as if she’s talking to someone about something perfectly ordinary.
Anna had insisted that he burn the drafts, just as they’d burned Lena’s letter. She said he could commit to memory everything that he wanted to say. It would be safer. He thought she was mistaken, but he went along with it. He didn’t want to distress her now.
Another car, going fast down the empty street. He listens, as if the walls of the building are a skin through which he’s trying to catch a pulse. It’s coming closer. It must have turned into their street. Suddenly, there is a sound of brakes. Not a screech, but brakes being applied firmly. It sounds too big to be just a car.
Andrei slides out of bed and puts on his dressing-gown in the dark. He feels under the bed for the slippers Anna made for him last winter. They haven’t drawn the curtains round the bed, with Kolya away.
He hears doors slam. They don’t care who they wake. The caretaker will have to open up for them.
He takes a deep breath. His heart is pounding and his thoughts race. The caretaker will open up and then they’ll all climb the stairs to the apartment. That’s how it happens, everybody knows. The caretaker is witness to the arrest.
Is there anything he should hide? No. They’ve got rid of everything hat could possibly be compromising. Anna is still asleep. Should he wake her? No. He should get dressed. No, there isn’t time. He doesn’t want them to find him half naked, struggling into his clothes. Fortunately he went to the toilet only an hour ago.
He listens for sound from the depths of the building. Yes. The caretaker has opened up for them. It’s happening, now. Andrei reaches for the switch of the bedside lamp. In its dim light he sees Anna motionless, curled in on herself. He must wake her before they do.
‘Anna,’ he says, and shakes her gently by the shoulder. ‘Anna, my darling.’
She stirs, and mutters a protest.
‘Anna!’
He feels her go rigid under his hand. She is awake instantly. Just as instantly, she knows what’s happening. She twists round and the pupils of her eyes contract as her face fills with horror.
‘I think it’s them,’ he says.
‘Oh my God.’
Yes, the caretaker has let them in. They’re coming up the stairs. Several pairs of boots, heavy, tramping. They don’t care who they wake. They’re on the first floor now, he thinks.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ says Anna.
‘Here’s your dressing-gown. Cover yourself up.’
Seconds pass. He finds he’s staring at the alarm clock. It’s just after ten past two.
‘What can we do? Andrei, they’re coming!’
He leans forward, cups her face in his hand. The footsteps are growing louder and he knows from her face that she can hear them too. They aren’t hurrying. They know they don’t have to.
‘Remember what we agreed,’ he says. ‘Go straight to the dacha. You must keep out of sight. Tell the nursery you have a threatened miscarriage and you’ve been told to stay in bed.’
The boots stop. They are still on the stairs, not at the apartment door. For a second Anna’s mind floods with hope. They are not coming here. They are after someone else.
‘It will only be an investigation,’ he tells her. ‘Don’t be frightened.’
‘You must put on your warmest clothes,’ she answers.
They hear a shouted order, and the boots come to their door. Anna is already out of bed, and as if by instinct she pulls the covers over and straightens them, so that the men won’t see into their bed. She hasn’t time to pull the curtains round.
It’s not so much knocking as thumping on the door. Probably with the side of a clenched fist, thinks Andrei, as he goes to the entrance.
‘Just a moment,’ he calls, as if it’s any ordinary neighbour in the middle of the night.
‘Open up!’ shouts a voice, as if they can’t hear him unlocking the door. Andrei braces himself, and opens up.
There are four men in uniform. Blue caps. An officer and three soldiers. At the side of the door stand the caretaker and his wife in their nightclothes.
‘Alekseyev, Andrei Mikhailovich?’
‘Yes.’
‘We have here a warrant for your arrest.’
There’s a pause, and then the officer says impatiently, ‘Stand aside,’ and in a moment they are all pushing into the apartment, thrusting Andrei in front of them. One of the soldiers takes Andrei by the arm, in a grip that Andrei hasn’t felt since he was a boy in trouble at school. Another snaps on all the lights.
Anna stands at the side of the bed. One hand is at her mouth, the other at her breast. He sees her with terrifying clarity, as if he will never see her again. Under the old flannel dressing-gown her body is rounding out with pregnancy. Her eyes are stretched wide with terror.
‘Move away from the bed,’ the officer tells her sharply, and Anna moves to one side, stumbling slightly but recovering herself quickly, even before Andrei has started forward and then been pulled back by the soldier closest to him.
The men fan out and begin to pull out drawers, rummaging through the contents and then emptying them on to the floor. They go along the bookshelves, picking out some books for examination and dropping others to the floor. They open Marina’s trunk and upend it. Marina’s red satin slippers skid across the floor. A soldier picks one up, looks inside it, and then drops it with an expression of disgust. They pull clothes out of the cupboards, and throw shoes on top of them. There goes the green dress. One soldier pulls back the bedclothes and then the bottom sheet and the old blanket that covers the mattress.
Of course the mattress is stained, thinks Anna. Everybody’s mattress is stained. But she feels a deep blush rise into her face.
‘Turn the mattress over,’ says the officer, and two of the soldiers heave the mattress, sweating.
‘Get your shoulders under it.’
The mattress flops over. The men beat it perfunctorily, as if they know they will find nothing inside it, but are bound to go through the motions. Once the mattress has been searched they throw it back on to the base. The youngest soldier, forgetting himself, punches the surface flat as he must once have seen his mother do. The caretaker and his wife watch from the door. How sharp their noses look in their pale faces. Neither of them will meet her eyes. What have they said? Have they denounced us? No, they are just frightened. Perhaps they have to sign the warrant as witnesses.
‘Sit in that chair,’ the officer orders Andrei, ‘and you’ – gesturing at Anna – ‘sit on the bed, there.’
‘I need to go the bathroom,’ says Anna.
‘It is not permitted for anyone to leave the apartment during the search.’
‘My wife is pregnant,’ says Andrei.
The officer doesn’t reply. He looks down at the papers in his hand, frowns, shrugs, then in a loud, dramatic voice he orders, ‘Search the other room!’
They leave the door between the rooms wide open. They throw Kolya’s mattress on the floor. Books are tossed from the shelves with hardly a glance. Two of them tip out the chest of Kolya’s old toys, which Anna put away years ago ‘in case’, and the sheets and towels she stores in the cupboard above his bed. Meanwhile the third soldier is in the food cupboard, sweeping packets off the shelves, emptying out flour and rice. He’s reaching right into the back of the cupboard. He has got hold of her jars. As he pulls it out, Anna sees it’s one of the jars of honey. He rips off the top, breaks the wax seal and stabs the honey with a short knife. She gives a cry of protest but Andrei says, ‘Anna.’ The soldier glances at them before digging his knife deep into the honey and emptying it into the sink. He returns to the cupboard and takes out all the jars. One by one, he tips them into the sink. The jams, the other jar of honey, and now the pickled cucumbers and mushrooms. He works fast, frowning. Another soldier has picked up a few books from Kolya’s floor and is slitting their spines and then shaking out the pages. A piece of paper falls out of one and the youngest soldier picks it up.
‘What’s that?’ asks the officer sharply, striding towards him.
‘It’s a shopping list,’ says the boy naively.
‘Bring it here.’ The soldier tramps into the living room, holding the paper. The officer studies it at length, frowning and shooting a glance at Anna and Andrei as if to say, You can’t fool me. Shopping list, indeed! ‘Put it aside for full examination with the other articles,’ he raps out at last, and the soldier obeys and puts the paper into a box that they must have brought with them, because Anna doesn’t recognize it.
There’s a crash from Kolya’s room. They are pulling the front off the piano. Keys jangle as the men delve into the body of the instrument. The officer goes to look, leaving the young soldier to guard Anna and Andrei. Anna glances up at his face, taking care not to meet his eyes. He’s just a boy, she thinks, not much older than Kolya. His face is round and smooth, but he wants to be a man. He won’t have been out on many night-fishing expeditions like this yet. He’ll want to prove that he’s tough, in front of the others. No use asking him for anything. Her bladder hurts, but she can hold on. If she could go to the bathroom she would have a moment to think.
‘I expect you feel tired, getting up in the middle of the night like this,’ she says to the caretaker’s wife.
The young soldier frowns and says gruffly, ‘No talking there.’
The officer comes back, but the cacophony inside the piano continues.
‘Please ask your men to be careful,’ says Anna. ‘I can’t afford to have the piano repaired.’
He stares at her. She sits upright and looks him in the eye. She’s been afraid for so long and now here they are: only people, after all, like the man who stole her sackful of wood during the siege. He thought of killing her; she saw it in his eyes. But she outfaced him and she survived.
They’ve destroyed all that food for no reason. How could they do it? They even stabbed through a loaf of bread with a knife. But there are four of them and so they look sideways at one another and they carry on. Behind them they know there are hundreds and thousands more, all in their blue caps, all ready.
‘If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear,’ says the officer, and then he shouts to the caretaker and his wife, as if they are a hundred metres away instead of standing against the opposite wall, ‘You two can clear off now! Be off with you!’
They scuttle off without a backward look. Their part is played. I suppose they were needed as witnesses to Andrei’s arrest, thinks Anna. Does that mean I’m not going to be arrested? No, because if they needed they could easily order the caretaker back upstairs again. In a corner of her mind she sees the caretaker and his wife going up and down, up and down, as person after person is arrested. Each time they would open up the doors, each time they would watch, each time they would scuttle away.
Through the open door Anna sees that the piano stool has been upended. All the music has spilled out on to the floor, but there was nothing else to find. Now a soldier is pulling pictures and photographs off the walls, one by one. He lifts each one high as he scans the back of the frame, and then dumps it down by the skirting board. She hears glass crack.
It seems as if she can’t think of anything but what is actually happening in front of her. As if it’s the jar of jam she ought to think about, and the mattress.
Andrei looks straight ahead, refusing to watch what they are doing. He is pale and his lips are pressed together. How long will the search go on? They must let him get dressed. She’s heard of people being taken away in their nightclothes, or in a thin dance dress like the one she made. Somet
imes they search for hours, she knows that. She will have to go to the bathroom. Andrei must take a bundle of things.
I burned the letter, thinks Andrei. Was that good, or bad? They are only taking me. They have no reason to touch Anna. If she does as I tell her and goes to the dacha then she has a chance. She’s young enough, she’s strong, the baby can be born there as safely as anywhere. Galya’s a doctor, after all.
‘Officer,’ he asks, ‘have I your permission to get dressed?’
Anna thinks the man is going to refuse, but after a few moments he says, ‘Very well.’
‘Your warmest clothes, Andrei,’ says Anna quietly. ‘Let me help you.’
‘Sit there!’ barks the officer, as if she might hide a knife in the sleeve of Andrei’s jacket. Anna’s eyes fill with tears as she watches Andrei bend down under the gaze of the officer and the soldiers, and pick out underwear, shirt and tie, jacket and trousers from the heaps of their clothes on the floor. He wants to look right for the interview, she can tell. She wants to tell him not to worry about that. The first and only important thing is to be warm. Who knows how long he might have to wear those clothes?
‘Wear a jumper over your shirt,’ she murmurs, and he looks at her, sees the anguish in her face and picks up a dark blue lambswool jumper she knitted for him down at the dacha the summer before last. She smiles at him. Her fingers know every stitch of that jumper. It fits him so well, and the yarn is triple-ply. Her fingers remember the touch of the wool that will keep him warm. And two pairs of socks, she wants to say, who knows what you will need? But she must be careful. If she says too much they will put her in the other room and then she won’t be able to be with Andrei.
One of the soldiers stands close to Andrei as he dresses. Anna looks away. What do they think he’s going to do? Make a run for it? Swallow poison?
Perhaps people do those things. But it won’t happen here. She and Andrei are prepared. Everything seems not only unreal but also absolutely familiar, as if she’s been waiting for this all her life. All the stories she’s heard, all the whispered, shattered phrases, are suddenly alive in the front of her mind, like a set of instructions. People go off, taking nothing with them because they think they won’t be away for long.