The Siege

  ‘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 someth
ing, 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.’

  5

  The green and gold evening passes like a hundred others. It seems nothing special at the time. Anna’s tired after the bike ride back, with a long detour to avoid the dogs at the Tutaev farm. She’s washed away dust and sweat, put on her favourite green cotton dress, and made a casserole of potatoes and anchovies. Kolya and her father are late back from fishing, but it doesn’t matter. The casserole will be a little crisper on top, that’s all.

  ‘Anna!’ she hears Kolya shouting through the garden. ‘Anna, we got two! Two real beauties.’

  The fish are brown trout. She could wrap them in wet muslin and they’d last until tomorrow, but she decides that for once they’re going to have a real feast. Casserole first, then the trout fried in butter. Her father has already cleaned the fish and they lie on the kitchen table with the patient, helpful look a trout takes on after its death.

  If only she’d known at the time how important every detail of that evening was going to become. Kolya boasting that the trout he’d caught had been this one, the fatter of the two. Her father, sunburnt and relaxed after his day at the lake. The taste of the trout.

  Anna peels back the salty, delicate crust of scales. Each of them dips forkfuls of trout flesh into the foaming butter Anna has swirled around the pan. And her father says as he does every summer: ‘There’s nothing like fresh-caught fish. By the time it gets to market half the flavour’s gone.’ Sharp, smoky taste of anchovies, potatoes rich and savoury with anchovy oil. A handful of early lettuce. Kolya’s red lips greasy with butter as he reaches for another chunk of bread to wipe round his plate.

  No, she doesn’t really notice any of it. After Kolya’s gone to bed, she and her father drink tea on the verandah. He smokes while they talk, and a warm breeze shivers the birch leaves. Plumes of flower toss on the lilac, and now its
scent is strong. They sit up until long after midnight, because neither of them wants to break the spell of the summer night. The only unusual thing is that when at last her father rises to go to bed, he doesn’t shuffle off with a mumbled goodnight, his shoulders bowed by the thought of the night to come. He stands beside his daughter for a moment, with his hand on her hair.

  ‘What a night, eh?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your mother’s roses will be flowering soon.’

  ‘Kolya helped me to weed them.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s how it should be.’

  He strokes her hair again. ‘That’s how it should be,’ he repeats.

  ‘Well… Goodnight, Anna.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Anna sleeps. In her dream, her father is reading her a bedtime story. He has the book open on his knee but he isn’t really reading, because he knows the story by heart. It’s a very frightening story but Anna doesn’t want him to stop. Her father says that it is about a war that happened a long time ago, when the French invaded Russia.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Oh, more than a hundred years, Anna. You’ll learn about it in history one day:

  Once, long ago, General Hunger met General Winter. General Winter, as you would expect, was sheathed in snow. His fingers were daggers of ice, and where his boots struck the earth they left blackened footprints in the grass. When he bent to smell a rose, his breath scorched it. But he loved roses, and rippling fields of wheat, and naked, suntanned children. He loved them all, because he had power over them all.

  General Winter stood in his greatcoat of snow, and greeted General Hunger, as all great generals greet one another, once enough of their people have died and they can open their talks.