The Concubine's Secret (2 page)

‘Feel free to steal from me, if it helps,’ she offered.

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Lydia smiled.

The woman laughed and reached for a pristine square of white towelling that was draped ready over one shoulder, but in doing so she tugged too hard and it tumbled to the floor. Lydia watched the pale face crumple in panic.

‘It’s all right,’ she reassured the woman quickly and stooped to pick it up. ‘The floor’s clean. It’s just been washed.’

‘I know. I washed it. I washed everything.’

Lydia spoke soothingly, with the same tone she had used to her pet rabbit when he was nervous. ‘Don’t worry, no harm done. You can use the other side of the towel, the side that didn’t touch the floor.’

‘No!’

‘There’s a hotel towel on the wall over there.’

‘No. I can’t touch that… thing.’ She said the last word as if it were covered in slime.

‘Do you have another one?’

The woman breathed out. Nodded and pointed to her bag. Lydia immediately went to it, removed a small paper package from its depths and opened it up to reveal another pristine square of white. Without actually touching the material anywhere, she held it out to the woman but kept a good arm’s length away from her. Any closer she knew would be too close. For both of them.

‘Thank you.
Spasibo
.’ She patted her dripping arms, meticulously dabbing at each spot, and Lydia noticed scarlet hairline cracks in the skin.

‘You need cream on them,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘I have gloves.’

The woman walked over to the leather bag and, using only forefinger and thumb, carefully extracted a pair of long white cotton gloves. She slid her hands into them and released a soft sigh of relief.

‘Better?’ Lydia asked.

‘Much.’

‘Good. I’ll say goodnight then.’ She moved towards the door.

‘
Do svidania
. Goodbye and… thank you.’ Lydia had opened the door when the woman asked quietly, ‘What’s your name?’

‘ Lydia. And yours?’

‘Antonina.’

‘Get some sleep, comrade.’

Slowly the woman’s head started to move from side to side. ‘
Nyet
, no, I have no time to sleep. You see…’ For an awkward moment no words came, then she murmured, ‘I am the wife of the camp Commandant, so…’ The words stopped again. With an uncertain frown, she stared for a long moment at the pure white gloves.

In the silence Lydia whispered, ‘The camp? You mean Trovitsk prison camp?’

‘
Da.’

Lydia shuddered. She couldn’t help it. Abruptly she left the washroom. But as the door closed behind her, she heard the taps start to run once more.

That evening nothing had changed. The same confusing hotel, the same people moaning about the cold when really all they wanted to complain about was the lack of a reliable railway system. All waiting for the same train that never came. Lydia ’s feet ached from standing on a frozen station platform all day, but now she pushed it from her mind. It was time to concentrate.

In the heart of the hotel the bar stank. Stank like a camel pen because there had been a delivery of dung today to burn on the fire. It was a big shambling place, packed with too many vodka-stained eyes and too much greed. Lydia drew a slow breath and watched carefully. She felt the greed throb in the air around her, crawling like a living thing from one man to another, creeping through their mouths and nostrils down into their empty bellies and their crusted lungs. She had to time it right. Just right. Or Liev Popkov’s arm would break.

Money was thrust into hands. Men shouted across the room and spirals of cigarette smoke rose, turning the air as grey and thick as rabbit fur. In one corner a forgotten dog hurled itself forward to the limit of its stubby chain, choking off its bark. Its scrawny ribcage heaved with excitement.

All eyes were focused on the struggle taking place at the centre table. Chairs had been kicked roughly aside. Bodies jostled to find a place close, close enough to see the sweat burst forth and veins rear up like serpents under the skin. Two men were seated opposite each other. Big men. Men who looked as if they chewed the heads off weasels for fun. Their heavy bearded features were contorted with effort and the greasy black eyepatch of one of them had slipped out of place, revealing a sunken, twisted socket the colour of overripe plums. Their massive forearms were locked in battle.

The arm wrestling had been Liev Popkov’s idea. Lydia hated it at first. And yet in a strange insidious kind of way she loved it at the same time. Hate. Love. She shrugged. A hair’s breadth between them.

‘You’re out of your crazy Cossack mind!’ she responded when he came out with the idea. He’d just downed half a tankard of gut-rot vodka.

‘
Nyet. No.’

‘What if you lose? We need every rouble of the money we have left.’

‘Hah!’ Popkov shook his big shaggy bear’s head. ‘Look, little Lydia.’ He jerked up the sleeve of his filthy shirt, seized her hand in his paw and placed her fingers on his massive biceps. It didn’t feel like a piece of human anatomy. It felt more like a winter log that had been warming in front of the fire. She had seen him break a man’s face with it.

‘Popkov,’ she whispered, ‘you are a devil.’

‘I know.’ His white teeth flashed at her above the black beard and together they had laughed.

Now she glanced quickly up at the gallery landing above them. It coiled round two sides of the room and led to the corridor of shoeboxes which the hotel chose to call bedrooms. A tall figure was up there, leaning forward, alert and staring down on the scrum beneath him, his arms resting on the banister rail, his thumbs linked as if he couldn’t bear his flesh to touch its grimy surface.

Alexei Serov. Her half-brother.

They shared a father, if it could be called sharing. Which Lydia doubted.

His brown hair was swept back from his face, emphasising the arrogant forehead inherited from his aristocratic Russian mother, the Countess Serova. But his fierce green eyes came straight from the Viking father Lydia could only dimly remember. Jens Friis was their father’s name, a Danish surname neither of them bore. Jens had worked as an engineer until 1917 for the last Tsar of Russia, Nikolas II, and now, more than twelve years later, he was the reason that she and Alexei had spent months travelling with the unruly Popkov in tow, all the way through the mountains of China to this godforsaken dead-and-alive hole in Russia.

A shout dragged her attention back to where it should have been, and her young stomach swooped with a sudden flutter of panic. Popkov was losing. Not just pretend losing. Really losing.

She felt sick. Coins were pouring into the grubby green kerchief on the bar where the bets were held, and all of them were now against Popkov. That was exactly what she and he had planned, but she’d left too late her signal to him to start fighting back. The black hairs on his burly forearm were only a hand’s breadth from the surface of the table as his opponent forced him down, and the bulging muscle started to twitch and shake.

No, Popkov, no.

Damn it, how could she have left it so late? She knew he would see his arm break before he’d allow it to collapse in defeat.

‘God damn you, Popkov,’ she yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘are you some kind of
babushka
or what? Put a bit of effort into it, will you?’

She saw his teeth flash, his shoulder swell. His fist lifted a fraction, though he never took his one good eye off his opponent’s face.

‘He’s done for!’ someone shouted.

‘
Da
, I’ll drink well tonight.’ Raucous laughter.

‘Finish the job. You’ve got him-’

Sweat dripped on to the stained table and the dog in the corner barked in time to their rapid heartbeats until someone slapped it down. Lydia elbowed a path through the crush of bodies to stand right behind Popkov, desperately rubbing her own right forearm as if by doing so she could rub fresh life into Popkov’s tearing muscle.

She couldn’t let him lose. Couldn’t.

To hell with the money.

Up on the landing Alexei Serov lit a black cheroot and flipped the dead match down on the drinkers below.

The girl was impossible. Didn’t she realise what she was doing?

He narrowed his eyes against the pall of smoke that clung to his hair and his skin like dead men’s breath. There were probably thirty men down there in the bar, plus a handful of women in dark dreary clothing, heavy grey skirts and brown shawls. That was one of the things he loathed most about this new Stalinist Russia: the dreariness of it. All the towns the same. Depressing grey concrete, grey garb and grey faces, dull eyes that slid away from you to the grey shadows and mouths that stayed firmly shut. He missed the exuberant colours of China, the same way he missed its swooping roof lines and vibrant songbirds.

Lydia was proving harder to deal with than he’d expected. When he sat her down and explained the dangers here, she just laughed that effortless laugh of hers, tossed her flaming hair at him and assured him with eyes wide that she might be only seventeen but she’d lived with danger before and knew how to handle it.

‘But this danger is different,’ he’d explained patiently. ‘It’s everywhere. In the air you breathe, in the khleb you eat and in the pillow that lies under your head at night. This is Josef Stalin’s Russia. It’s 1930. No one is safe.’

‘
Davai, davai, davai!
Come on, come on, come on!’

The gamblers in the bar were chanting the words, and to Alexei it sounded dismally like the bleating of sheep. The locals had bet their petty kopecks on their own man and now crowded round the pair, who were locked together as intimately as a couple in the throes of sexual frenzy, mouths open and spittle in silver threads between their lips. There was nothing more than a shiver between Popkov’s arm and the table. You couldn’t slide a goddamn knife between them. Alexei felt his heart kick up a pace and that was when Lydia leaned down to the Cossack and whispered something in his ear. She was a small slender figure among the bulk of broad swarthy faces and thick padded waists, but her hair stood out like a fire down there in the dim light as it drew close to the greasy black curls and stayed there.

It took a moment. No more. Then slowly the massive arm began to rise, to force the other arm back, a whisper at a time, until the crowd began to howl its anguish. The local man flared his broad flat nostrils and roared a battle cry, but it did him no good. Popkov’s arm was unstoppable.

What the hell was she saying to him?

A final roar from Popkov and the battle was over, as he drove his opponent’s meaty fist flat on to the surface. The force of the impact made the table screech as if in pain. Alexei pushed himself back from the banister, turned on his heel and set off for his room, but not before he’d seen Lydia dart a glance in his direction. Her wide tawny eyes were ablaze with the light of victory.

Alexei leaned his back casually against the closed door of Lydia’s room and looked around the tiny space. It was no better than a cell. A narrow bed, a wooden chair and a metal hook on the back of the door. That was it. He’d say this for her, she never moaned about the conditions however bad they were.

It was dark outside, a wind rattling a bunch of loose shingles on the roof, and the naked overhead lightbulb flickered every now and again. In Russia, Alexei had learned, you never take anything for granted. You appreciate
everything
. Because you never know when it will disappear. You may have electricity today, but it could vanish tomorrow. Heating pipes shook and shuddered like trams on Nevsky, one day dispensing a warm fug of heat but lying silent and cold the next. The same with trains. When would the next one arrive? Tomorrow? Next week? Even next month? To travel any distance across this vast and relentless country you had to have the patience of Lenin in his damn mausoleum.

‘Don’t grumble.’

Alexei’s gaze flicked to Lydia. ‘I’m not grumbling. I’m not even speaking.’

‘But I can hear you. Inside your head. Grumbling.’

‘Why would I be grumbling, Lydia? Tell me why.’

She pushed back her hair, lifted her head and gave him a sharp glance. She had a way of doing that which was always catching him off guard, making him feel she could see inside his head. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the thin quilt pulled round her shoulders and a square of green material between her knees. Her busy fingers were counting out her winnings into small piles.

‘Because you’re angry with me about the arm wrestling for some reason.’ Lydia studied the money thoughtfully. ‘It does no harm, Alexei. It’s not as if I’m stealing.’

He refused to accept the bait. Her thieving activities of the past, snatching wallets and watches the way a fox snatches chickens, were not something he cared to discuss right now.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but you took something from them downstairs and they won’t thank you for it.’

Lydia shrugged her thin shoulders and returned to her miniature coin towers. ‘I took their money because they lost.’

‘Not the money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Their pride. You took away their pride, then you rubbed their noses in it by emptying their pockets.’

Her eyes remained firmly on the money. ‘It was fairly won.’

‘Fairly won,’ he echoed. ‘Fairly won.’ He shook his head angrily but kept his voice low, his words deliberately measured. ‘That is not the point, Lydia.’

She twirled one of the coins between her fingers and flashed him another quick glance. ‘So what is your point?’

‘They won’t forget you.’

A shimmer of a smile touched her full lips. ‘So?’

‘So when anyone comes asking questions, the people here will take pleasure in recalling every detail about you. Not just the colour of your hair or how many vodkas you fed into Popkov or your name or your age or the names of your companions. No, Lydia. They’ll remember carefully the numbers on your passport and on your travel permit and even what train ticket is hidden away in your bodybelt.’