The Way I Found Her (47 page)

I threw another pawn forward. Alexis paused, wondering what on earth I was doing, then snicked out my pawn sort of daintily, as if he was taking a sugar lump out of a china bowl. Next, I gave up my knight, and even though I didn't look up I knew both Alexis and Vasily were staring at me, thinking, what kind of chess is this? But Alexis grabbed it, as I knew he would. He grabbed it fast and greedily, like the computer would have done. He was snapping up lots of material and enjoying this and it was like he didn't notice, until he saw my queen land on rook six, until it was almost too late, that his king was exposed.

It was a race then. Alexis began rushing over everything in sight to defend his king, but I had enough men left and I was their steel-cool commander-in-the-field. I got to checkmate in ten moves.

There was a silence in the room. Vasya was staring at Alexis, like he couldn't believe this had happened. Alexis finished the whisky in his glass and got up. I thought he might kick over the table or something, but he didn't. It was as if he was mellowing out with the whisky and didn't really care. He said: ‘I will ask Valya if she minds sleeping near to your shit bucket,' and he went out.

I was left alone with Vasily, who seemed to be in shock. He said to me in French: ‘Who taught you to keep pushing pawns like that?'

‘Somebody called Julian,' I said. ‘Long ago.'

He was laying the chessmen carefully in their wooden box. Next door, I could hear Alexis talking to Valentina in Russian. I sat in my chair, waiting.

Vasya went out, taking the chess set, and switching off the light as he went, and after the brightness of the unshaded bulb the darkness in the room seemed absolute, like it used to feel when I was a kid. I was never afraid of it exactly, but I used to get angry with it, it felt so pointless. I once said to Grandma Gwyneth: ‘What's it
for
?' And she said it was for the birds, so that they could rest their throats before morning.

I stayed still, resting my brain after the chess game. I could hear the storm continuing in a circle, not being able to make up its mind to move away, but the rain had stopped. Part of me was thinking about how slippery the slate roof would have become after this torrent of rain and the other part was thinking, if Valentina comes and sleeps in my room, I'm not going to attempt any escape, not tonight; I'm just going to lie down beside her.

I don't know how long I sat on the chair in the darkness. What I remember next was that my door was opened again and the light was snapped on and Alexis was there, still wearing his monkey mask. He looked round for me on the mattress and seemed surprised that I was still sitting at the table. ‘Go to bed,' he said. ‘Valentina is coming in a while.'

‘When?' I asked. ‘How long?'

‘Go to bed. Go to sleep. Then she will come.'

I reckoned he was lying. He didn't have to do anything for me or give me anything, even though I'd won the game. He could make any old promise and not keep it. And he liked taunting me. He thought I was a rich, spoilt kid whose brilliant future was all mapped out. He probably had moments of wanting to drown me in a rock pool. At my age, so Valentina had told me, he had a job as a cemetery sweeper at Père Lachaise. The thing he hated most in the cemetery was the bindweed that grew everywhere and stuck to your arms.

I got up slowly and lay down on my mattress. The damp and cold from the roof seemed to begin seeping through into the room now and I felt as cold as I'd been on my first night in here, when I'd puked on the floor. I pulled my blanket round me and lay with my eyes open, listening.

The house had gone quiet, like the monkeys were downstairs, and no sound came from next door. Tentatively, I tapped on Valentina's wall, but no answering knock came. I put my ear close to the wall, but there was nothing to be heard, only the storm fretting on and on above us, moving near and moving away, then moving near again, like something that wanted to go somewhere but couldn't find its way.

I was almost asleep, as if in the cradle of the storm, when my door opened and I saw, from the light in the corridor, Vasily and Alexis both standing there. They came in and switched the light on again and I had to shield my eyes from it. Then they began to move things around in my room. They lifted the table and put it and the two chairs against the back wall, behind me. They stuck my shit pail under the table. Then they went out and came back, dragging a mattress, and laid this down by the far wall, where the table had been.

I sat up and watched them. They did everything in silence, with their masks still on, and when they'd put the mattress in place Alexis turned to me and said: ‘In chess, if I lose, I always pay my debts.' Then they switched off the light, took the bulb out of its socket and went out, but they didn't close my door and I could hear them standing outside and talking.

I'd been cold, but now a weird burning feeling welled up in me and I could hear my heart pumping. I sat still, holding on to my knees.

After a few minutes, Alexis came back and behind him was Valentina. He led her forward into my room and she stood there, peering at me in the dark, and Alexis looked at me and said, ‘Here's “Maman”,' and then he closed the door and bolted it shut.

She came and knelt down by my bed. I couldn't really see her, only feel that she was there, and I reached up with my arms outstretched, like kids reach up with their eyes all wide, like they know the world is going to be given to them there and then. I held on to her and pressed my face into her neck and kissed her and breathed her in and I could feel her arms going round me and clasping me to her, my chest to her breasts and my face into the soft hollow of her shoulder.

She rocked me and she let me cry. I felt her hand on my head, stroking my hair. I thought, I'm going to stay like this for ever and I'm going to cry for ever, and I knew that no moment of my life had ever been like this one. I couldn't say anything. The power of speech had drowned inside me. All I could do was just hold on to Valentina and weep.

The storm finally went away and when I opened the gap in the slates, a pallid sliver of moonlight came in, like a ghost that had been waiting there for a place to haunt.

By this ghostly light, Valentina and I looked at each other, and when our eyes had readjusted themselves in the grey shadows we saw that all our rue Rembrandt smartness had completely gone and what we resembled now were street people with no home. ‘Darling,' said Valentina, ‘did you ever see an old movie called
The Mudlarks
? About the river children by the Thames? Well, you look like one of those mudlarks, you know!' And she laughed.

She was still wearing the black-and-white dress. In the moonshine, all I could really see were the white bits and the white plaster on her broken arm, but the sight of that dress, which had been there at the centre of all my anxiety and all my longing for so many days and weeks, somehow choked me. I stared at it. It was creased and filthy and the hem of the skirt was torn and hanging down. I said: ‘Your dress is a bit dirty, Valentina.'

‘My dress, darling?' she said. ‘Oh yes, so it is.'

She began to laugh unstoppably then. And it wasn't a hysterical, frightened laugh; it was her old infectious laugh that was sort of filled with lightness. I joined in and we fell on to the dusty floor, holding on to each other and flailing about with laughter, like morons. I wondered if Alexis could hear us and, if so, whether this laughter would piss him off and he'd rush in and take Valentina back to her cell. But no one came to the door, and when we'd recovered from our giggling we sat side by side on my mattress, with our arms round each other and our heads leaning in together. Round Valentina's head was tied the ‘Ypres' scarf and it was sort of lolling down over one ear, like a slipped bandage. I knew she'd put it on because her hair would be dirty and there might be too many grey bits coming through for her liking, but at the back of her neck some little blonde wisps were straggling out and I reached up and touched these and stroked them between my finger and thumb, and the touch of her hair was as soft as I'd always imagined it to be.

After all our conversations through the pipe hole, we seemed to have run out of things to say. We just sat there and the moonlight got brighter as the storm clouds began a kind of race across the horizon, reminding me that the night was passing and that all my planning was coming to its moment of crisis. Before the morning came, while Alexis and Vasily slept, I knew that we had to climb out on to the roof, make our daring leap across to the barn, tumble on to the hay and walk to our freedom up the road. Except I didn't want to move. It was like I no longer believed in my plan. The hours I'd spent sawing through the batons, patiently moving the slates on their pins – they all seemed really futile, like the imaginings of a film-maker who hasn't got the plot properly worked out.

What I wanted to do was stay there, just exactly as we were for a while, and then slowly, slowly, let myself fall on to the mattress and, as I fell, take Valentina down with me, and without speaking, without saying a single thing, and almost without her noticing what was happening, lift up the skirt of her torn dress and fit myself inside her and rock her gently, like a parent rocks a child, to calm her and soothe her and love her into darkness and into sleep.

And so this, in my ghostly cell, where the light was seeping out as the moon moved away down the sky, was what I did. And when Valentina understood what I was doing and what I felt, instead of turning away from me or pretending to be shocked or insulted or that any of this was strange she just let me come into her, and she held me and let me kiss her ear and her neck, where the blonde wisps of hair lay curled.

And when it was over, she lay on her back and put my head on her breasts and still held me to her and I knew she was smiling, I mean laughing almost, amused, like she was remembering something funny or crazy from long ago. The thing she could have been remembering was the boy-lover of Catherine the Great. She stroked my hair and after a little while she whispered to me: ‘Darling, now I know all your secrets and you know mine, and all that matters is that we keep them safe.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘That's all that matters.'

I went to sleep and when I woke up it was almost morning.

When I saw that I was lying with Valentina, with my head on her shoulder, I longed to just stay there and not move, but I also knew that if we didn't try to make our escape now, we'd never make it at all. Part of me didn't want to make it at all. If I could have lived in this room with Valentina for the rest of time, that would have been OK with me. But I knew this wouldn't happen. I knew that when the ransom money arrived, Shukov or Todorsky would be sent into our cells to kill us and our bodies would be buried under the trees.

I woke Valentina and said to her: ‘The time's come. We've got to go now.'

She opened her eyes and stared at me. I was leaning on my elbow looking down at her and she stared up at me gravely and then reached up and stroked my eyebrow with her finger. ‘Lewis,' she said, ‘do you know what today is?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘it's the day when we put my plan into operation.'

She smiled. ‘I've been keeping track,' she said; ‘ever since I was brought here, I've been counting days. It's the sixteenth of September.'

‘That's my birthday,' I said.

‘Yes. I know. That's what day it is.'

I lay still for a moment. Then I gently touched one of Valentina's breasts and felt it there, large and soft and warm under my hand, and she didn't move or push my hand away. What she said was: ‘Happy birthday, darling.'

I thought, if I leave my hand on her breast one second more, I won't be able to move away from her. So I got up and began carrying the table and chair to the centre of the room. When they were in place, I climbed up and removed the baton and took off the slates. When I stuck my head out, the sky above me was grey and flat, but I could see, far off, way beyond the horizon of the meadow, a line of yellow light brimming up above the earth.

I listened. A long way away, a dog was barking, but apart from this, everything was silent. It was odd, in that silence, to think that I'd been alive for fourteen years and that now, today, I was no longer a virgin.

I looked all around. And suddenly I could see, beyond the trees, something faintly glimmering, and I knew it was the river or canal where the boats sometimes passed. And I thought, instead of burying us, they might just tie stones to our feet and drown us there, and we'd lie in the mud and waterweed through all the autumn and winter and the fish and the snakes would come and nibble us away and by spring we'd be gone.

I climbed down again and back into the room. Valentina was retying her ‘Ypres' scarf round her hair, and today she tied it like Russian peasant women do, winding the ends right round her head and knotting them at the back. This task was difficult because she couldn't lift the arm in the cast very high.

I stood by the table and said: ‘Valentina, the time's come now. We've got to make our escape.'

She finished knotting her scarf and held out her hand to me. ‘Darling,' she said, ‘come here. Listen to me. I know you've made this wonderful, daring plan and that you've worked so hard on those batons. But it's no use asking me to climb around on the roof. I just can't do it, Lewis.'

‘You've got to do it,' I said. ‘Look, it's almost light. We can't stay here discussing it. All we have to do is lower ourselves down towards the guttering and then jump on to the barn roof. It isn't difficult . . .'

‘I'm too afraid of roofs, Lewis. I always was. And you know, I believe this whole thing will be resolved, probably quite soon, and then Alexis will release me.'