The Concubine's Secret (24 page)

‘Why did they leave their villages?’ she asked Elena as they waited in line with their ration cards.

‘Why do you think? They’re starving out there in the communal farms and they’ve heard there are jobs to be had here.’

‘It must be true because there are factories going up all around us. It’s part of Stalin’s Five Year Plan.’

‘Exactly.’ The woman lowered her voice. ‘But they’re peasants, for God’s sake, they don’t know the first thing about operating machinery. If they can press the
on
and off buttons, they’re doing well.’

‘Aren’t they trained?’

‘If you call losing a finger training, yes. When they’ve lost one, they don’t make the same mistake again.’

‘How do you know all this?’

Sometimes it astonished Lydia how much this woman knew. Lydia had heard little about her life except that she’d had a child and fallen into whoring.

‘It’s the one bloody thing I’m any good at,’ Elena had chuckled one night when they passed a prostitute parading the street. She’d slapped Lydia on the back with relish. ‘Don’t get any ideas. No one would want a skinny runt like you.’

‘That’s not true,’ Lydia had retorted.

Elena had slid her gaze over her companion’s bony hips and small breasts and snorted disparagingly. Lydia’s cheeks had burned.

As they shuffled forward on the pavement outside the bakery, ice seeping up through the thin soles of their boots, Lydia pointed across the street.

‘Look,’ she said.

In the doorway of a boarded-up shop, a small makeshift cardboard shelter had been thrown together, drooping sideways like a bird with a damaged wing. A pair of feet wrapped in rags stuck out one end. But they remained immobile for too long. Was the man asleep? Dead? Injured? Or just sliding down the crack in his dreams?

‘Leave it,’ Elena said and placed a restraining hand on Lydia’s arm. ‘It’s dangerous.’

‘Elena, I remember what it’s like to be so hungry you’d eat your own toes.’ She shook off the hand. ‘Communism is supposed to make society fairer. For everyone.’

Elena brushed the straw wisps of hair off her face with irritation, tucking them into her hat as if tidying her thoughts. ‘This world isn’t fair, don’t you know that yet? Look around you.’

Lydia looked. At the women waiting hours in the queue for a few grams of heavy black bread and at the feet in the cardboard shell. But Elena hadn’t finished.

‘The trouble with you, girl, is that you think you can construct a new world for yourself with a father and a brother of your own, all wrapped up cosily together in a fair society. And you’re frightened that it will come crashing down around your ears and then you’ll be left with nothing and no one.’

‘No.’ Lydia gazed directly at her. ‘No, you’re wrong.’

The lines of the older woman’s face grew gentle. ‘Don’t look so desperate. I know what it’s like to have nothing and no one. It’s not so bad.’ She smiled, a sad little upward twist of her lips. ‘When you get used to it. Because then you’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘But I still have…’ Lydia felt something delicate tremble inside her chest. ‘Everything to lose.’

She pulled away from Elena and launched herself across the road towards the cardboard shelter.

The doorway smelled and Lydia almost turned away. Old newspapers were piled in a sodden yellow heap behind the cardboard and a mess of something slimy lay in the corner. As if someone had been sick and left it there to freeze. She knew Elena was right when she said this was dangerous. She wasn’t a Muscovite and didn’t know this city’s ways. Nervously she prodded the foot with her own.

‘Are you all right?’

Instantly the foot withdrew. It wasn’t a corpse. That was something.

‘Do you need help?’

The cardboard shifted. In the street people hurried past, heads averted. Wary, Lydia bent over to peer inside the shelter.

‘Hello?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Are you all right?’

She rested a hand on the cardboard and it was wet and soft, and as cold as a dead man’s cheek. She wiped her hand fiercely on her coat. She was tempted to turn and cross the road, back to her place in the queue where Elena was waiting, still glaring at her.

‘Hello?’ she said again and tapped the front flap of the cardboard, which was acting as a door. It immediately caved in.

A pair of blue eyes stared back at her. For a fleeting second neither reacted, each of them in shock at the unexpected confrontation. The eyes moved before she did, as the figure threw itself out of the back of the shelter and hunched like a cornered rat against the brickwork at the rear of the doorway’s arch.

‘I’m not here to frighten you,’ Lydia said quickly.

No response. Just feral eyes and skin stretched so tight over bones it looked ready to split. Lydia realised with relief it was only a boy, around twelve years old. Despite the icy temperatures, sweat trickled down his neck. She smiled to show she meant him no harm.

‘I thought you might need help.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘You don’t look… well.’

‘So what?’

‘So I came across to-’

‘Fuck off.’

His rudeness was starting to annoy her. ‘Shut up, will you? I’m offering help.’

‘Why?’

Suspicion was mutual. The dismal doorway was thick with it.

‘Because… well, just that I remember.’

His hair was a strange colour. Milk-white. As if he’d been shocked almost to death by his life. His face and hands were black with grime and he reminded her of an old-fashioned chimney sweep’s boy, though on his chin a small round patch of skin shone pink. She took a step backwards, unwilling to unsettle him further, and almost slipped on the ice. His expression didn’t change.

‘Remember what?’ His breathing was laboured.

‘It doesn’t matter. Are you ill?’

‘What’s it to you?’

Lydia almost gave up, but not quite. ‘Here,’ she said.

She reached into her coat pocket and tossed him a coin. His quick eyes, heavy-lidded and sunken in his skull, darted along the coin’s arc through the murky gloom and he snatched it from the air with a speed that turned Lydia’s heart over. She remembered. Having that level of need.

‘Eat something,’ she said.

He bit the coin. She grinned.

‘Some
khleb
, I mean.’

Abruptly he crouched down to the ground and she saw a rip all the way down the back of his ragged jacket, as if someone had tried to grab him and he’d torn away. His attention was no longer on her but on the sodden heap of cardboard that had collapsed when he rolled out of it.

‘Misty,’ he whispered.

A tremor shook the pile. Then a blur of movement as something leapt out, something disturbingly like a rat. Lydia shot back on to the pavement, crashing into a pedestrian who was passing. He dropped his umbrella and swore at her clumsiness.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said and swung round to look again at the boy.

In his arms curled a puppy, its fur a smoky grey. The creature seemed to be made of nothing but brown eyes, long silky ears and bony ribs so fragile they looked as if they would snap at a touch. It was licking the boy’s chin with frantic joy but before Lydia could even smile, the boy and dog were gone, a faint ripple in the crowd.

The metal sang to him. In the prison’s engineering workshop Jens Friis could hear its voice as he worked it. He listened to its hiss of laughter as he welded one bar to another, felt its tremor as he inserted rivets, making it stronger, more structured. He’d forgotten how he loved handling different metals, searching out their qualities and watching out for their weaknesses. Like people. Each one unique.

For ten years in the labour camp he’d handled nothing but wood. Felled unending forests of it. The scent of pine became so much a part of himself that he was no longer capable of differentiating between the smell of wood and the smell of his own skin. At times – desperate times – he had gnawed the rough bitter bark. It stained his teeth a strange russet colour and lay hard and indigestible in his gut, but it had granted him the illusion of food when he most needed it. For that he was grateful.

Some mornings when he woke in the stale, odour-heavy air of the crowded prison barrack hut, he’d inspected his fingertips intently, convinced they would start to sprout tiny green buds one day soon. The buds would grow into whippy little twigs and eventually into massive branches that he would have to drag out through the forest with him each day to the Work Zone.

Starvation does strange things to the mind.

‘Faster. The work
must progress faster.’

The words were spoken by Colonel Tursenov, but the two men standing either side of him nodded vehement agreement. The Colonel was a reasonable man in his position as Controller of the Development Centre but he was under heavy pressure. Lazar Kaganovich himself, a leading member of the Soviet Politburo, telephoned each Friday evening to question progress. That meant each Saturday at seven o’clock in the morning the team of six senior engineers was summoned to stand in a rigid line in Tursenov’s office and ordered to speed up their work rate.

Jens Friis took one step forward. The sign that he wished to speak.

‘What is it, prisoner Friis?’

‘Colonel, we are working all hours already and the construction is making steady progress – which is what we are all aiming for,’ he added solemnly. ‘But the reason the test last week was aborted was because the metal supplied for the rear support struts proved to be of poor quality. It was too brittle and so it snapped under the weight of-’

‘Silence!’

Jens forced himself to contain his words. But he didn’t step back into line. The other engineers, prisoners like himself, were wiser. They said nothing, just fixed their eyes on Tursenov’s highly polished shoes and nodded each time he spoke. The Colonel was a big man with a big voice which most of the time he kept reined in, speaking softly and deliberately, but on the rare occasions he relaxed he forgot and let it boom out like gunfire. Today it was soft. The Colonel’s mouth settled into a familiar line of disappointment and Jens feared he was suspecting sabotage, but nothing was said. When the silence in the room had lasted so long it became painful, Tursenov turned to the stocky woman with iron-grey hair behind him, who was clutching a notebook and a red pencil.

‘Comrade Demidova,’ he said, ‘check the supplier. Report them.’

‘
Da
, Comrade Colonel.’ She scribbled something on the paper.

‘No more stoppages,’ he said curtly.

‘No, Comrade Colonel.’

‘How long before I can see a demonstration?’

‘It will take at least a month,’ Jens began, ‘before-’

‘Two weeks.’ It was Elkin who had spoken at the end of the row. ‘It will be ready in two weeks.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘
Otlichno!
Excellent! I shall inform Comrade Kaganovich. He will be pleased.’

Elkin smiled and concentrated on the polished shoes. Tursenov took his time scanning the men in their khaki overalls, noted that Jens was still forward of the line and frowned. ‘Anything more, prisoner Friis?’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘What is it you wish to say?’

‘If a demonstration is conducted before the problems are fully overcome, the canister could open prematurely and that would be highly dangerous to-’

‘Two weeks,’ Tursenov interrupted in his softest voice. ‘Overcome them in two weeks, prisoner Friis.’

Their eyes met for no more than a second but it was enough. Jens knew now he couldn’t delay the project any longer. Tursenov’s suspicions were roused. Without another word he stepped back into line.

‘Wait here,’ Lydia said.

‘Don’t worry, girl, you wouldn’t get me in there if you paid me.’

Elena folded her arms comfortably over the bulk of her bosom and positioned herself to one side of the large double doors like an incongruous sentry in a headscarf. She faced out on to the busy road and her eyes became stubborn slits in her broad face. Lydia wasn’t yet good at reading this woman’s expressions but she had the feeling Elena preferred to keep it that way. Today she noticed Elena looked tired, the lines sinking into ragged crevices around her eyes, but she was careful not to mention it – or the new navy coat Elena was wearing.

The brass plaque on the wall stated in discreet lettering: COMMUNIST PARTY LIAISON OFFICE.

‘I’ll be quick,’ Lydia promised.

‘The words
quick
and
Communist Party
aren’t even on speaking terms,’ Elena muttered, stamping her feet to keep warm.

Lydia darted up the steps.

‘Papers?’

A uniformed middle-aged man with receding fair hair and kindly eyes stood just inside the door. He stepped in front of Lydia, shoes squeaking on the marble floor, and held out an expectant hand.

‘
Dobroye utro
, comrade,’ she said and tipped him a smile.

‘Back again?’

‘
Da.’

‘You must like it here.’

‘Not as much as you,’ she joked and was pleased when he laughed. It made her feel safer.

She handed over her precious residence permit and identity document and immediately started chatting. ‘It’s not so cold today,’ she said, waving a hand at the window where the mist outside hung like a grey, secretive curtain. He started to examine her papers. This was the moment when her heart skipped. Forgot to beat. It was always the same. ‘Do you think it’s going to snow later?’ she asked.

He glanced up and smiled at her. ‘Why? No umbrella today?’

She yanked off her hat and saw him watch her hair tumble to her shoulders. ‘I was in too much of a hurry to get here,’ she laughed.

‘How many times is it you’ve come here now?’