скачать книгу бесплатно
‘You want those?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to study. I think I’d like engineering.’
Tonya shrugged, approached the man, and struck a bargain. Misha thought she’d used her lump of sugar and a half-pack of tobacco, but he wasn’t sure. The man leaped away, as though hurrying to preserve his good fortune. Tonya dumped the stack of books on the sledge.
‘There.’
‘Goodness! Thank you! You didn’t have to… How can I…’
Tonya brushed aside his offers of repayment with a cross shake of her head. ‘Why do you owe me anything? If you don’t tie those books down, you’ll lose them.’
Misha tied the books down next to the logs.
‘You’ll need to go fast. My place is a mile or two further than yours.’
‘As quick as I can.’
He set off. The way back lay slightly uphill and even though the snow had a good icy crust, the slope and the rutted surface caused innumerable problems. Misha’s arms and back were already sore by the time he arrived back in Kuletsky Prospekt. He unloaded the logs, getting Yevgeny and his mother to carry them upstairs. Then he headed back to Tonya, who had been waiting four hours by now, but who looked as immobile and impassive as if she’d been waiting four minutes or four years.
‘Comrade Lensky.’
‘Comrade Malevich.’
Without much further talk, they loaded up and began the long journey back. The roads had thawed a little, making the pulling conditions worse. It was heavy, dogged labour, even with Tonya helping. Once a soldier challenged them to produce the right documentation for their load. Tonya didn’t even bother to pretend to justify herself. She just swore at the soldier, using deliberately coarse, proletarian expressions. Misha had never heard a girl swear before. And though the soldier swore back, he didn’t try to stop them.
‘You put him in his place,’ said Misha.
‘Did it shock you?’
‘No. Yes, maybe. The way people speak and so much else seems to have changed these days. But I’m pleased we didn’t have to stop.’
Tonya made a ‘tsk’ noise, as though Misha had said something wrong, and they relapsed into silence as they continued. Tonya’s house was further than she had said and it was almost dark by the time they reached her yard. Misha was very tired now, but said nothing about it. They unloaded the sledge. The logs had become wet on the journey and were now starting to freeze.
‘Do you want me to carry them up for you?’
‘No.’
‘A good day’s work.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you want…’ Misha began, then stopped. If she wanted, then what? Misha knew where the peasants congregated now. He wouldn’t need her help again, and without things to trade – things such as he still had and she didn’t – the girl wouldn’t have much reason to go back there.
‘If I want, what?’
‘Nothing. Only … where do you work?’
‘The hospital. The Third Reformed. I’m a nurse.’
‘I see. And your father works on the railway, I think you said.’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Nothing, only I need a job.’
‘Well you can get work anywhere, can’t you? I don’t think you’d be much use as a nurse.’
‘No, but the railway appeals.’
‘Well then. Go to the railway.’ Tonya picked up an armful of logs. She stacked them in the crook of her arm, piling them until they were tucked high under her chin.
‘You’re sure I can’t help?’
‘I’ve been carrying logs all my life, comrade Malevich. For me, today wasn’t an adventure.’
‘Yes, I see.’
Misha picked up the reins of the sledge and began the slow trudge home.
7
He got home, weary but satisfied.
His satisfaction lasted approximately one second from the moment he threw open the door to their rooms.
His gaze fixed first on his mother, silent and white-faced – then Yevgeny, the same – then on two soldiers in the corner by the window, holding their rifles in front of them like walking sticks. A third man in a tie and a dark coat waited on the opposite wall. He had a revolver at his waist. There was total silence.
Misha broke it.
‘Good evening,’ he said.
‘Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich?’ said the man in the tie.
‘Yes.’
‘Come with us.’
‘Come? Why? Is this an arrest?’
The man didn’t bother to answer. Emma was frozen in her chair by the stove, eyes terrified, too scared even to cry. Misha saw Yevgeny, his ‘little comrade’, clutching his mother as though it was his job to comfort her.
‘I’ll be fine, Mother. This gentleman only wants to ask some questions. I’ll be home soon.’
Perhaps or perhaps not. He knew he had no way of telling. With the man in the tie leading the way, the soldiers pushed Misha out of the door, then led him downstairs into a waiting car. There were two more soldiers in the vehicle, also armed. Still no one spoke.
The car, lurching dangerously on the uncleared roads, crept through the city. It was dark now and from his position, seated in between two soldiers, Misha had a hard job working out where they were going. Lamps flashed by in the darkness. The soldiers in front muttered inaudibly between themselves. Once, they hit a patch of ice and slid sideways into a drift. Two of the men had to get out to help push the car out again, while the driver turned in his seat and stared at Misha with unreadable eyes.
After twenty-five minutes they stopped outside a large building somewhere near the centre of town. The building had two large iron lanterns burning outside and a pair of armed guards just inside the doorway. Misha thought he could see a sign reading ‘Ministry of Economic … but he didn’t have time to read the whole sign and wasn’t certain of what he’d seen anyway. He was thrust through the doorway and was marched at speed up a broad turning staircase and along wide, ringing corridors. They stopped at a door. One of the soldiers knocked once, got an answer, then shoved Misha through.
The room was around a dozen feet square, with a grey striped rug over a parquet floor. One wall was covered by a dark wooden unit, cupboards on the bottom, glass-fronted shelves above. The shelves were mostly empty, except for a few rows filled by books with titles like Report of the Commission into the Iron and Steel Industry 1912. The only other adornments were a map of Russia and a portrait of Karl Marx.
Behind the desk sat a man, formal, neat, wire-rimmed spectacles over a beaky nose. The man wore a carefully trimmed beard and a look of mild busyness. A second man stood on the opposite side of the room by the door, so Misha couldn’t look at them both at the same time. Misha was given a low stool and told to sit.
‘Malevich? Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich?’
Misha confirmed his identity with a nod. Then it began. Questioning, intense and repetitive, constant and intrusive.
He was asked about everything. Things that mattered, things that didn’t. Things to which they must already have known the answers, things that it was impossible for anyone to have known. Misha’s time in the army. His purchases on the black market. His father’s business dealings. The conversion of Kuletsky Prospekt into workers’ accommodation. Their various small breaches of the housing decrees. His acquisition of logs that day. His contacts with other members of the old regime.
Mostly the questions were asked by the man at the desk: a functionary, not a policeman or a soldier, one of a new breed of Bolshevik bureaucrats. Whenever the man at the desk had had enough, he took a sip of water, a sign for the other man to take over for a spell. Nobody offered Misha violence, but they hardly needed to. The disparity in power in the room was so extreme that a kick or a punch would have been almost an anticlimax. The man with the wire-rimmed spectacles never raised his voice or varied the pace of his questions or took notes. But he never relented. He never gave time to pause. If Misha’s answer to a question ever varied by even a half-shade of implication, the man burrowed away at the variation until it seemed even to Misha as though he’d been caught in some barefaced lie.
Round and round the topics came.
Misha had been dealing ‘enthusiastically’ on the black market. Could he deny it? Was he not aware that there were official allocations of goods, that black-market speculation was tantamount to stealing from the workers? Misha had acquired logs in this way. He admitted it, did he not? What other items had he bought illegally? The man ticked off a list of items on the tips of his fingers as Misha made his confessions.
But through it all, Misha began to sense the man was play-acting. He couldn’t be interested in a few minor black-market dealings. Everyone in Petrograd used the black market. Misha’s strongest feeling was an odd one. He felt sure that Tonya must have betrayed him: that the housing commissar had brought her to do a job, that she’d done it, that he’d been its victim. He felt oddly, deeply wounded. He felt taken in and tricked.
The questioning turned off in another direction. Misha answered as best he could. There was something hypnotic in the rhythm of question and answer. To break the spell, Misha looked at the books on the shelves. Analysis of International Trade from the Baltic Ports 1898–1914. Prussia, Austria and Russia: An Enquiry into International Capital Transactions. The books were as dull as anything Misha could imagine, but they were also used. One or two books lay out on the desk. Others had small paper bookmarks sticking out of them. Misha guessed that he’d seen the sign right as he came in, that he was now in some kind of economics ministry. And in that case, this man, with his private room, his substantial desk, his black telephone, his air of importance, was no minor functionary. Misha guessed he was dealing with a Bolshevik official of some seniority. And in that case, there was only one possible topic of interest to him: namely, Misha’s father’s business dealings in the months before his arrest and murder.
Misha realised this and felt relief glowing through him. He knew nothing of his father’s business. He could answer truthfully and not be caught out. His answers became fuller and franker. Once, in an answer to one question he began talking about the coal mines his father had owned down in Zhavalya. The man listened to him with a thin smile for a few minutes before interrupting.
‘Your father didn’t own those mines. He sold them in October 1916.’
‘No, no, I’d have known if he’d done that,’ said Misha, sincerely.
‘He mortgaged them in June with the Petrograd Savings Bank, then sold his remaining interest in October to a consortium of fellow bourgeois. Please confirm the amounts of the relevant transactions.’
‘No, no, you have that all wrong,’ said Misha. ‘Those mines, they were on the estate in Zhavalya, they were his most important…’
The man took some papers from a drawer and threw them across the desk. Misha caught them and read them, stunned. The documents were obviously genuine. A brief note written in his father’s writing confirmed it absolutely. And the papers confirmed precisely what the man had been saying. Misha was dumbstruck. If his father had done as these documents suggested, then he must have sold virtually everything he’d owned. And the money had gone somewhere. But where? In the middle of a world war, it had hardly been safe to transport valuables out of the country. And as for anything inside the country, the Bolsheviks had confiscated all physical assets and they’d devalued or rendered worthless everything else.
Again and again, Misha’s thoughts returned to the safe in his father’s old study.
It was obvious that his father kept his most valuable possessions in there. And Misha knew that the Bolsheviks hadn’t yet gained access to it. Why hadn’t they just put dynamite to the hinges and blown it apart? Presumably because they suspected that what lay inside might be vulnerable to the blast. Not gold then, but papers.
Misha kept his knowledge secret, but he felt the interrogation was becoming increasingly formal, increasingly pointless. Misha didn’t have the answers the man needed. The man was becoming increasingly sure of it himself. The man asked again and again if Misha cared to remember any communication from his father he had hitherto chosen not to mention.
‘No. For heaven’s sake, I’ve been away in the army for a whole year. He sent letters of course. I’ve kept them. They’re back in the apartment. I can show them…’ Misha stopped, realising that the apartment was probably being searched as they spoke. ‘Well,’ he ended lamely, ‘you’ll see, there’s nothing there.’
Then suddenly, the phone on the desk rang loudly. The sound was immense: a landslide of noise. The man poked his wire-rimmed glasses higher up his nose and answered it. He spoke a word or two and listened. Then he nodded, said, ‘Good, very well,’ and hung up. He looked at Misha.
‘You’re right. There was nothing there.’ There was a short pause. No one moved. Then the man waved a hand at the door, tired but almost amused. ‘Comrade Malevich, you are free to go.’
8
Misha was taken home by the same car, the same driver that had brought him. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the eastern sky, but the city was still dark enough that all Misha could really see was the brightly lit channel carved by the car’s headlamps. The streets were severely iced and the car had to move slowly to avoid skidding.
They stopped at Kuletsky Prospekt.
‘Thanks,’ said Misha.
The driver shrugged.
Misha entered the house and closed the big door behind him. Something seemed wrong. He felt a draught on his face that he didn’t recognise. The hall, never warm, seemed unnaturally cold. From no motive that he could put a name to, Misha, instead of going directly upstairs to his frightened mother, moved across to the room that had been his father’s study. He opened the door as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake the families that would be snoring within.
Only he was wrong. There was no one there. The entire back wall had been ripped away. One whole side of the room was open to the night air and the snow. A light snowfall had drifted into the room itself and lay in a fine dust across the carpet and the mantelpiece. In the half-light of early dawn, the room glowed silver.
Misha stepped further on inside, hardly breathing. In the yard behind the house there stood a pair of tractors. A pair of thick iron chains ran from the yard into the room, and lay across the floor like a pair of giant metal snakes. A sentry stood in the shelter of one of the tractors, smoking a cigarette and looking the other way.
So that was it. The Bolsheviks had traced his father’s asset sales and hadn’t been able to locate the proceeds. And they, like Misha, suspected that this safe held the answers. Having failed to extract any answers from Misha that night, they’d rip the safe out in the morning, then blast their way into it.
Misha had never been close to his father, but he felt his presence in the empty room. His father had been powerful, distant, authoritative, dominant. It was almost impossible to believe that his life could be ended so simply, that his life’s work of turning one sum of money into a very much larger one could be ended by a pair of tractors and a few sticks of dynamite. Misha felt his father’s ghost, hovering in silence, watching the scene with the grim acceptance of a man who knows he’s been bested.
To the right of the safe, and still, ridiculously, in its old position, was an oil painting depicting the 1812 Battle of Borodino, in which Russian troops under General Kutuzov had halted Napoleon before Moscow. The painting was neither especially good nor especially valuable, but, for the dead businessman, it had symbolised everything important about the Russian spirit. The painting had always been referred to just as ‘the 1812’, as though the date said everything that needed saying. Misha remembered the picture postcard that had come with his father’s papers, amused at the coincidence.
Outside in the yard, the sentry threw away his cigarette, turned his face to the room, then yawned.
Misha froze. The light was growing now and he could see the sentry as clear as anything. Inside the room it was darker, but still barely inky. Misha pressed himself against a wall, hardly daring to breathe. It was crazy for him to be here, crazy and dangerous. He should go upstairs at once, home to his mother. He should leave this safe and all its contents well alone.
The moment lasted a few long seconds, before the sentry turned away again, back to his post by the tractor. Misha realised that it was the machinery that was being guarded, not the room. The safe was a safe, after all. And he didn’t go upstairs. Not yet.
He turned back to the painting. The familiar old picture, lined with the faintest powdering of snow along the horizontals of the frame, seemed to jog a memory. In his father’s last letters, he’d kept referring one way or another to the defeat of Napoleon. Perhaps it was his way of reading the disasters that lay ahead and reminding Misha that the Russian spirit would triumph in the end. Treading as quietly as he could, Misha walked up to the picture. A cavalryman on his horse held his sabre high above a cowering Frenchman.
The 1812.
Then Misha got it. In a sudden tumble of insight, he understood it all. Of course his father had been afraid for the future: the asset sales had been proof enough of that. And who could his father trust with his secrets except Misha, his eldest son? But Misha had been away. Letters directed from a Petrograd seething with revolution to a front line crumbling under enemy attack was hardly the most secure form of communication. If Misha’s father had wanted to communicate something of the highest importance, he might well have felt the need to use coded language.
And this was the clue: so simple, so utterly simple. The postcard had been another clue. His father’s references to the defeat of Napoleon had been yet another.
Misha guessed that this safe would unlock like other safes. He would have to turn its hundred-numbered dial clockwise to a particular number, then anti-clockwise to a second number, then again, and then perhaps again. But there was nothing to say that the numbers couldn’t be the same, or repeated.
Misha went to the safe and put his hand to the cold metal of the dial. It moved as soon as he touched it, surprising him. He steadied himself. Outside the sentry was still there, still smoking. In the old picture, the cavalryman still reared, sabre raised over the beaten Frenchman.
Misha turned the dial. Clockwise to eighteen, then back again to twelve. Then again. Then once more. 18, 12, 18, 12, 18, 12. The dial was marked with small black lines on the outside, with numbers marked 0, 5, 10 and so on. In the poor light of the room, Misha had to examine the dial carefully to make sure it was clicking to a halt on the right number. When he reached the last digit, he felt a jab of disappointment. Perhaps he had been foolish to hope, but there was no sound, no sharp click of release. The door didn’t gape suddenly wide. Misha half-stepped away. He remembered his mother upstairs and felt guilty at not having gone directly up. But just before leaving, almost as a gesture of farewell, he put his hand to the door and pulled.
It swung open in total silence.
There was a small packet of jewellery and some papers. Misha put his hand inside and took them all.
THREE (#ulink_e2d8010a-5f68-5ab7-8afd-d168270dc899)
1
The train nosed in, then stopped. Men began to uncouple the long chain of carriages. A short but massive man in a waist-length coat and a flat cap began to bellow instructions in a continual torrent. Half the time, the orders made no sense. The man shouted things like, ‘Lift it up – up – no up, you wet dishcloth – well, down then if it doesn’t go. Down!’ He didn’t make it clear who he was addressing or what he was talking about. His face was bright with anger, and he had a tic in his upper lip. The man giving the orders was comrade Tupolev and he was Misha’s new boss. It was spring.
