The Kirilov Star (33 page)

‘That was good of you.’

‘Not at all. I promised Alexei when we parted that I would do what I could for him, in the name of friendship, you understand, but also because Russia needs brilliant engineers. He has done very well. His mother can be proud of him.’

‘Oh, I am. When shall I see him?’

‘I have arranged for him to be given some leave. You are to meet him at Kirilhor the day after tomorrow.’

‘Kirilhor!’

He grinned. ‘I thought you might like to see it again.’

‘Oh, I shall, but how …?’

‘We fly to Kiev tomorrow and must attend the first session of the conference for appearance’s sake,’ he explained. ‘Then I will keep your minder busy so you can slip away and catch the train to Petrovsk. I have some Russian clothes for you. You will be less conspicuous in those.’ It was said with an appreciative look at her evening dress.

‘You seem to have thought of everything and I am truly grateful,’ Lydia said. She rose to her feet. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I think I shall go to bed.’

Both men rose and kissed her cheek. She hugged Katya and was gone, to lay in bed too excited to sleep. She was going to see Yuri and it was Alex who had brought it about. Dearest, devoted Alex …

Petrovsk had changed little since Lydia had last been there. The paint on the wooden houses was still flaking, the windows were still cracked, the hotel even more sleazy. The church and the school had not changed, not even their paint by the look of it. The tarmac on the roads was cracked and broken and full of potholes.

It did not fill Lydia with confidence and she expected Kirilhor to be even more of a ruin than it had been when she last saw it; instead she found a substantial house, its roof the dark green of the forest, its wooden walls painted white, its many windows reflecting the low sun of a winter morning. Its garden was well kept, its gravel drive free of weeds. ‘It’s been restored,’ she murmured in surprise. ‘Are you sure Yuri is here?’

He smiled. ‘We might find out if we knock on the door.’ He took her arm because she seemed to be holding back. ‘Come on, sweetheart, what is there to be afraid of?’

The door was opened by Yuri himself, who had been warned by Leo to expect them. Lydia stood and drank in the sight of him. If she felt like throwing herself into his arms, she was constrained, not only by shyness but by his expression. It was wooden. ‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

‘My mother.’ It was said without inflexion, a mere statement of fact engendering no emotion.

This was not what Lydia had expected. But what had she expected? Hugs and kisses? Wasn’t that asking too much? She looked despairingly at Alex, who reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently.

‘You had better come in.’ Yuri led the way into the drawing room. The dilapidated room she remembered had been nothing like this. It was well furnished with two huge well-padded sofas – not like the one she remembered whose
stuffing had been coming out – bookcases and ornaments. Here they were introduced to Sophie, whom Yuri had recently married. Sophie shyly bade them welcome and then left them to prepare a meal.

There was an uncomfortable silence after she had left. ‘Why didn’t you answer my letters?’ Lydia asked, because that question was in the forefront of her mind. ‘I only wanted to know you were safe and happy.’

‘I had no letters. And I did not know you existed until last year. My mother – I mean Olga Nahmova naturally – told me when she was dying.’

‘That must have been a shock.’

‘It was. I wished she had not told me. It was her conscience troubling her and she wanted to confess before she died. I don’t know who I hated most at that time: Olga for not being my mother and keeping it from me, or you, Lydia Andropova, for abandoning me and condemning me to the orphanage.’

‘I didn’t abandon you. You were taken from me. I searched for you, Alex will bear me out, but we could not find you and then the war came to Russia and everything was chaotic.’

‘I made her leave,’ Alex said. ‘It was too dangerous for her to stay. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. She was heartbroken about it. Surely you want to know this or why did you change your mind about seeing her?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Comrade Orlov persuaded me it could do no harm.’

Lydia fumbled in her handbag and produced the brown envelope which she emptied onto the table. ‘These are my letters, all returned to me.’

He sat and looked at them as if mesmerised, making no move to pick them up. ‘Shall we leave you to read them?’ she asked. ‘You will want to do that in private.’

‘Yes, yes; have a walk round the grounds. Sophie will call you when the meal is ready.’

They left the house by the front door and walked round to the back, past a fir tree which had recently been cut down. The garden was not extensive, being close to the forest, and there was little to see – everything was covered in snow, except the paths, which had been cleared.

‘I can’t believe I’ve actually seen him and spoken to him,’ Lydia said as they walked hand in hand. ‘If he didn’t know about his connection with the Kirilov family, how does he come to be living in the family home? Does he know he was born here? There are so many questions I want to ask.’

‘I’ve no doubt he’ll have questions for you too.’ He paused. ‘Now he’s found, what do you expect to happen? What do you want to happen?’

‘I don’t know. I’m still too confused. It would be wonderful if he could come to England, but I don’t suppose that’s feasible, although we could still write to each other, keep in touch. Perhaps, one day, things will improve between East and West and travelling will be easier.’

They stopped when they were confronted by what Lydia afterwards described as Father Time, a bent old man with a long white beard and a weather-beaten face. He lifted a gnarled hand. ‘Lydia Kirillova,’ he said in a quaking voice. ‘Is it you?’

‘Yes. It’s me.’ She took his hand and kissed his cheek. ‘I am so glad to see you, Ivan Ivanovich. I never thought to find you still here.’

‘Where else would I be? I’ve served this estate all my
life. I shall be here the day I die. The Reds, the Whites, Bolsheviks, war and famine have come and gone and still I survive. Yuri Nahmov is good to me.’

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Of course I know who he is. He is your son, grandson of Count Kirilov, though that counts for nothing these days.’

‘He says he didn’t know himself. Why didn’t you tell him?’

‘Some things are dangerous to know. Better to be ignorant. But I watched over him. When Olga Nahmova brought him back here after the war ended, I watched him growing up. Now he watches over me. He’s a good boy.’

‘No longer a boy,’ Alex said. ‘He’s matured since I last spoke to him, mellowed, you might say.’

‘He’s had a lot to contend with. Olga Denisovna wasn’t easy to deal with. Her brain had been affected.’

‘The
dacha
looks lovely,’ Lydia said. ‘Who owns it now?’

‘Leonid Orlov. He lets Yuri stay here when he wants.’

Lydia turned to Alex in surprise. ‘Did you know this?’

‘No, I didn’t, but it’s typical of Leo.’

Lydia was blinking back tears as they bade the old man
dosvidaniya
and returned to the house.

Yuri had carefully arranged the opened letters in chronological order and had just finished reading the last one. He looked up as they entered. ‘I never knew,’ he said, his voice rough with emotion. ‘I never knew.’

It was not until after they had eaten the meal Sophie had prepared that he felt ready to talk to Lydia about his life.

‘My earliest memory is of being in an orphanage in Solikamsk when I was about three or four. There were thousands of children there, all with shaved heads. We had
a hard time of it. I remember always feeling hungry, but if we stole food we were severely punished. I still have the scars on my back.’

‘I am so sorry,’ Lydia murmured, which to her was inadequate.

He went on as if she had not spoken. ‘Hunger, or rather fear of hunger, is something that never really leaves you. Even toddlers learnt to hoard food. When the war ended and the Germans left Ukraine, I was sent to another orphanage in Verkhnedneprovsk. It was a little better than before, but not much, and I was given a rudimentary education, aimed at making me a good Soviet citizen. I had been there two years when Olga Nahmova came to claim me.

‘I had to take her word for it that she was my mother. She told me we had been separated when a bomb went off at a railway station on the way to Minsk. My father was killed and she was badly injured and not expected to live. But she survived and was in Minsk when the Germans invaded Russia. She was evacuated to the east along with the other patients and recovered, if you can call it a recovery. She was deeply scarred by it.

‘She brought me to Petrovsk, expecting to find friends here, but the war had scattered them. I don’t know how we lived. We had nothing – no money, no clothes. The land wasn’t being farmed and the tractor factory was ruined by bombs. We squatted here and my mother did whatever work she could find to keep us from starving and to send me to school. All we had to eat was bread, soup and potatoes, and little enough of that. She would clean lavatories, carry bricks, hoe the fields when the kolkhoz started up again, anything to keep us from starving. She cultivated the bit of land around the house and grew vegetables and flowers
which she sold in Petrovsk. She would buy things off the peasants who needed money to buy food, and sell them for a profit.

‘I had to help her. She was as hard a taskmaster as the orphanage had been and she was excessively possessive. I could not go out and play with my friends, I had to stay by her side, and if I was even a few minutes late home from school, she would be out searching for me. I supposed it was because she had lost me once and was afraid it might happen again. After she told me who I really was, I wondered if it was because she worried that someone might tell me the truth.’

‘Who could have done?’ Sophie asked.

‘Ivan Ivanovich, for one. He befriended me.’

‘He knew me and my parents and brother.’

‘I didn’t know that. He never said.’ He paused to drain the vodka in his glass and open another bottle. He filled Alex’s glass and offered some to Lydia but she shook her head, more interested in his story than in drinking. The more he talked, the more she could see a family resemblance, a fleeting gesture, a slight movement of the head; the way he used his hands.

‘But you must have done well at school,’ she said. ‘You went to university.’

‘Yes. Stalin wanted engineers and technicians and we were encouraged to study and apply for a place. I got on by working hard and keeping out of trouble. If the authorities had known who my true mother was, I would never have got in, so I owe my adoptive mother that debt. After I graduated as an engineer and mathematician, I was given a job in Leonid Orlov’s factory. I married Sophie a year ago. Most of the time we live in our apartment in Kiev, but
Leonid Orlov allows us to use the
dacha
for vacations. He is a very influential man and I owe him a lot.’

‘So do I,’ Lydia said, with feeling. ‘And Alex.’ She turned to smile at him as she spoke. He was not saying anything, simply letting them talk.

‘He came here,’ Yuri went on. ‘Years ago. My mother was terrified of him. She was worse for weeks after he came, jumping at every sudden sound and running to hide. She wasn’t quite right in the head, you understand. It was the result of her injuries in the explosion.’

‘Did you know Kirilhor once belonged to our family?’ Lydia asked him.

‘No. My mother told me I had been born here and she often spoke of her time here before my father died as very happy. I had no idea of the truth. Even last year, when she was dying and told me she was not my real mother, she said my real mother had given me away so that she could go back to England. The authorities would not have allowed her to take a Russian child out of the country. These letters …’ he tapped the pile which he had put on the arm of his chair ‘… tell a very different story. It is very confusing. I ask myself which is the truth.’

‘What I wrote is the truth,’ Lydia said. ‘I grieved for you all the years I have been parted from you and could not find you. It is because of Alex’s promise to me we are reunited now. You have a half-brother and sister. Perhaps, one day, when travel between our countries becomes easier, you will meet them.’

‘Tell me about your life, how it is in England.’

It was so late when Lydia finished talking they were invited to stay the night. Yuri seemed to have accepted the truth at last, and as the evening wore on and the vodka
relaxed him, they were able to talk more easily. Lydia showed him her photographs, all the ones that had been tucked away in the brown envelope and others of Bobby and Tatty and Upstone Hall. Sophie was excited to think that her husband’s grandfather had been a count, known to the tsar. The years of Communism had not extinguished a curiosity about that ill-fated man.

‘Satisfied?’ Alex asked her, as they boarded the plane back to Moscow the next day.

‘Yes, oh, yes, my darling. Thank you. Thank you.’

‘And now that’s all out of the way and you have your son back where he belongs as part of your family, what about me?’

‘You?’

‘Yes, you know what I mean. I want to be part of the family too. Bobby and Tatty have met me, they’re not blind, they can see how we feel for each other and we’ve wasted too much of our lives already …’

‘We couldn’t help that.’

‘No, but we can make up for it now. So how about naming the day?’

‘When we get home. I promise.’

‘I’ll hold you to that.’

Bobby and Tatty were at home when they returned, anxious to hear their adventures, and it took ages to tell everything and look at the pictures they had taken, which she had put into an album. Here she was with Leo and Katya sitting round their dining table. Here was Alex, walking beside her in the forest at Kirilhor, which was taken by Yuri just before they left. Here she was talking to Ivan Ivanovich,
Yuri and Sophie. Yuri cutting logs with Ivan. Here was the son she had lost who was lost no longer, and the best of it was he now knew and acknowledged she was his mother. Now she could forgive Olga and be grateful to her for bringing him up and keeping him out of the orphanage. Tatty and Bobby crowded round to look over her shoulder while she explained each one.