The Concubine's Secret (39 page)

‘You know nothing more? Just that he was moved to Moscow?’

‘I have the prison number.’

‘What is it?’

‘Number 1908.’

He narrowed his eyes, contemplating the possibilities and the impossibilities, while she laid her cheek on his naked chest and remained quiet. He looked down at the glorious tangle of hair and the clean line of her forehead. How could he tell her? How could he make her see that maybe her father wouldn’t welcome her interference? That perhaps it could put at risk a life he was building for himself now.

Lydia slipped into her room, her valenki boots dangling in one hand so as to make no noise in her stocking feet. It was snowing outside, the night suddenly alive with huge damp flakes. As Chang had walked her through the icy streets of Moscow she’d asked him about China. He talked of his travels in Canton and of city life in Shanghai, but she knew his voice better than she knew her own. She could sense the secrets hiding like shadows behind his words. She didn’t push or pry. But what he didn’t say frightened her. Her hand tucked into his and she held him safe.

At the corner of her road he kissed her goodbye and she rested her forehead against his cold cheekbone.

‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Tomorrow.’

She didn’t turn on the light in the room, but threw off the wet blanket and knew she wouldn’t sleep.

‘So you’re back.’

Lydia froze. ‘You’re up early, Elena.’

‘And you’re up late.’

‘I was restless. I went for a walk.’

They were both talking in whispers and Lydia realised with relief that Liev must be still asleep. She could just make out Elena’s bulk in the chair. How long had she been sitting like that?

‘You went for a walk?’

‘Yes.’

Elena gave a low laugh. ‘
Malishka
, little one, it’s me you’re talking to, not the Cossack. I am a whore and I know the smell of men and the smell of sex. You stink of both.’

The night hid the flush that rose to Lydia ’s cheeks. She started to undress, to peel off the clothes that belonged to Elena, unconsciously smelling them, searching for Chang.

‘Elena, it’s kind of you to sit up for me but you don’t need to worry so much. I can take care of myself.’

‘Can you?’

‘Yes
.’

Elena gave a little snort. ‘Come here, malishka.’

Lydia tugged her nightdress down over her head, went over to the chair and knelt down beside it, so that their heads were close. In the unlit room eyes were just dark holes in pale moons. Elena’s hand found Lydia ’s shoulder.

‘Leave him, Lydia. Let the Chinese go.’

It hurt. Even the thought of it hurt.

‘Why do you say such a thing, Elena?’

‘Because he’s no good for you. No, don’t look away, listen to what I’m saying. Why would a Chinese Communist be so interested in a little Russian chit of a girl?’

Lydia wanted to shout Because he loves me, of course, but the question made her nervous. It was one she had asked herself a thousand times.

‘Why do you think, Elena?’ she enquired softly.

‘He wants to get between your sheets, that goes without saying: a Western girl notch on his bedpost.’

‘Don’t.’

‘But that isn’t the main reason, is it?’

‘No.’ Now she would hear the words she wanted: It’s because he loves you.

‘It’s because he’s using you, girl. Simple as that.’

‘Using me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘That’s for you to find out. You’re not stupid. Maybe the Chinese have ordered him to find out through your friendship with that Russian officer what is going on behind the smiles at the Kremlin. Who knows?’

‘No, you’re wrong. Wrong, I tell you.’ She couldn’t swallow.

‘Hush,
malishka
. You’ll wake Liev.’ Suddenly her hand touched Lydia ’s cheek, a brief caress in the dark room. ‘What is it? Is he keeping secrets from you, little one? Can you trust him?’

Lydia pulled away angrily, remembering the shadows behind Chang’s words. ‘More to the point, can I trust you?’

‘Hah, a good question. But think about this, girl. What future is there in it for him? Or for you?’

‘Elena,’ she said, flat and firm so that Elena would know. ‘I trust him. I trust him with my life.’

‘More fool you, girl.’ She leaned closer, her nightclothes musty. ‘I don’t want to see you hurt.’

‘I won’t be. Not by him.’

A silence trickled into the room, a small stream of it between them, and they both waited to see who would be first to cross it.

‘Picture this,’ Elena whispered in a rush. ‘That your Soviet admirer, this Malofeyev, knows about you and your Chinese friend. And that is why he brought you only food today, instead of the information you want on Jens Friis. He is jealous. He doesn’t like you being with another man and so will not be as obliging as he might. It seems you can’t have both, little one. Your Chinese or your father. You must choose.’

Lydia rose from her knees. She uttered no sound, but curled up on her bed and pulled the damp blanket over her head. The ache inside her throat was strangling her. She thrust Elena’s words away into somewhere dark and unreachable, and instead she flooded her mind with the hours spent in the room with the crucifix on the wall, holding those moments up to the light. Polishing them. Making them shine.

Jens found his mind distracted. The nightmares visited more often. They broke his routine, chipped his night’s sleep into pieces. He was restless, pacing the workroom for hours on end, aware that the challenge he had so relished over the past months had turned sour in his mouth as it came closer to completion.

Not like when he first came to this unit. Then it had been a dream come true. This was work, real work, the kind of engineering he had been bred to. It was what he’d craved, the way a drowning man craves air. He used to wake up each morning convinced that he had finally died, slumped over his shovel on the icy wastes of the labour camp and been transported up to heaven. Ahead of him stretched a day of handling pens and papers and brass callipers, instead of skin freezing to axes and shovels and guts weeping with hunger. Even now, every day, he opened his eyes and couldn’t believe his good fortune.

The prison camp had been bad. That’s as far as he ever allowed his mind to go, no further. Twelve years of bad but now it had ended. He didn’t let it into his head any more, not into his conscious mind anyway. But he didn’t pretend to himself. He knew it was in there somewhere, hiding deep in the darkest coils where it only slithered out at night. So he had dreams. Nightmares. So what? He shrugged them off as a minor inconvenience. If people regarded a few unpleasant dreams as
bad
, they hadn’t been in a camp.

Since he’d learned of his daughter’s search, thoughts of Valentina and Lydia were distracting him, stirring up emotions he had long ago forgotten how to handle. Especially as now there was Olga. He ceased his pacing. Here in this safe and cosy haven he had rediscovered things. Things he valued. Work. Warmth. Food. And love? Yes, even that. A kind of love, very different from what he’d known before, but still love. He’d thought it had vanished from his heart for ever but it had sneaked in through hairline cracks in the shell he’d constructed around himself. He smiled because he knew now from Olga, a scientist, that a smile sent certain chemicals racing to the brain, chemicals that magically made you feel better. And God knows, he needed to feel better. She’d taught him that the more you smile, the more you want to smile. So he practised it each day, and the muscles around his mouth that had grown stiff and gritty with disuse started to soften and come to life.

Olga had taught him much. Not just as a chemist but as a person – taught him to become a member of the human race again. It pained him that there was nothing he could do in return to fill the black agony caused by her daughter being left behind in the lead mine.

‘I pray each night, Jens,’ she’d told him one day when they were working together on realigning a gas cylinder, ‘that my Valerya will be killed in a cave-in. They happen often, tons of rock collapsing with a roar like a train in a tunnel.
Whoosh
and it’s over. It would be quick. But then I hate myself. What kind of mother would wish such a thing on her daughter?’

He’d brushed her hand for a brief moment. ‘One who loves her.’

Her tear had dropped on the blueprint in front of them and before one of the sharp-eyed watchers noticed it he had swept it aside, smudging the ink. The tiny drop of salty fluid had felt warm and intimate on his skin and he hadn’t wiped it away, instead letting it dry on his skin. At first his and Olga’s paths crossed only rarely, though they inevitably saw each other in the exercise courtyard for half an hour each morning and evening, during the enforced parade in rain, wind or snow. But as the project progressed they worked together more often, sometimes three or four times a month, and now that the visits to the hangars were occurring every few days, he found himself doing something he hadn’t done for many years: anticipating.

In the camps he’d lived from moment to moment because it was the only way to survive. Never think about tomorrow and all the other tomorrows. Never. It was a cardinal rule. But now he found himself taking that risk, looking at the future from behind laced fingers. It was so new to him. He thought he’d forgotten how. To anticipate something, anything, took a ridiculous amount of courage. Just to look forward to something as small as meeting with a friend in a black truck felt good.

But now his distracted mind had run away from him. It was anticipating all on its own and it made him nervous. So when the door to his workroom swung open with a bang, it came as a relief.

‘Ah, Comrade Babitsky, do join me.’

The guard walked over to the table, his boots squeaking on the linoleum floor. He placed a roll of engineering drawings on it, treating them with respect. He was a large lumbering man, good-looking with thick fair hair, but he had the faintly bemused look of someone who is not quite sure where he’s going. He’d joined the team of guards only recently, and Jens was interested to see he had not yet managed to overcome his awe at such a gathering of impressive minds.

‘Who is it from this time, Comrade Babitsky?’

‘Unit four.’

‘Ah, the squabblers.’

‘Prisoner Elkin and prisoner Titov. They’re not speaking to each other.’

Jens rested his elbows on his desk and chewed the end of his pen. It gave him such intense pleasure to hold a pen after all those years without that he was reluctant to put it down even for a moment. He’d even been known to sleep with one wrapped up in his tight fist, a talisman against the nightmares.

‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that scientists and engineers like to argue. It’s how they sharpen their minds.’

‘Then prisoner Elkin and prisoner Titov should have bloody sharp minds.’

Jens laughed. ‘They do.’

He remembered in the camp, the starvation of the mind. Starvation of the body he’d learned to live with, but a blank nothing in the mind was a form of death. Twelve long years of dying.

‘Tell me, Babitsky, are you married?’

‘I was,’ the guard said gruffly.

‘What happened?’

‘The usual. She got her tail tied up with my neighbour, a metal worker from Omsk, and left.’

‘Any children?’

His big face grew soft and he chuckled. ‘My son, Georgi. He’s five.’

‘Do you still see him?’

‘
Da.
Once a month I take the train to Leningrad. That’s where my boy is living. It’s better now I’m here in Moscow. When I was stationed in Siberia I only saw him at Easter time.’

Siberia. Jens studied his guard and was astonished at the way he could look at this man without anger. Maybe that was a necessary part of the process, the way of returning to the human race. It was ironic. Babitsky didn’t recognise him. Now that Jens was well fed, clean shaven, and wore a pair of rimless spectacles for close work, the guard didn’t remember him. But Jens remembered Babitsky, oh yes, he remembered him well. In Trovitsk camp Babitsky wasn’t nearly so polite. He possessed a liking for jabbing his rifle butt between fragile shoulder blades.

‘Friis,’ Babitsky leaned closer, ‘I like the way you don’t look at me like I’m some piece of shit on the bottom of your boot, the way some of the scientists here do.’

Jens looked at him, startled.

Babitsky lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I heard something the other day, something I thought you might want to know.’

‘What’s that?’ Jens slid the end of the pen into his mouth.

‘They’re thinking of bringing in a new team to finish this project. I don’t know what the fuck it is that you do, but someone up the ladder obviously thinks you lot aren’t doing the job you were brought here for. So you’re out.’

‘No.’

‘Oh yes, so just watch your step.’

Jens froze. His face hurt where his teeth were clamped in a vice around the pen. ‘Who said?’

‘Colonel Tursenov.’

‘No,’ Jens said again. ‘He can’t do that.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Friis. Of course he can.’

‘But it’s our design, it’s the result of all this team’s hard work, our careful calculations and efforts, our successes and, yes, our errors too. He can’t take it away, it’s…,’ his voice was growing agitated but he was unable to stop it. ‘It’s
my
project.’

The words were out. He couldn’t take them back.

Babitsky gave him a look that placed them firmly back in the roles of guard and prisoner. ‘Friis, whatever the hell it is you and the team do here, sure as fuck it isn’t yours. It’s the Soviet State ’s project. It’s Stalin’s project. So don’t think that just because you’re using your brain you’ve suddenly got any rights here. You don’t. You’re still a nobody, a non-person. A prisoner. Don’t ever forget that.’