Betrayal Read online

  There was a time when her father never slept properly until after dawn. He’d drop off, then wake with a jerk. He’d get up, make tea, read. She was so used to him turning night into day that it seemed normal to her. It wasn’t until much later that she realized why he’d only been able to fall into a deep sleep once dawn was safely past. It was because that was the hour when they came for you, when you were weakest. Night after night he waited, listening for the tramp of boots in the stairwell, boots worn by men who couldn’t care less whose sleep they broke. Boots, and voices. ‘One more floor. It’s up here. This is the door.’

  He was afraid that they would all be destroyed, because of him. If she’d understood that then, she could have been more help to him, or at least she’d have been less impatient. She hopes he never realized quite how impatient she used to become when he sat there sunk in gloom hour after hour, not moving from his chair, bestirring himself only to drink another glass of tea if she placed it at his right hand. He seemed so cold and distant, even towards Kolya. He brooded endlessly on the course of his life. Could it have been different? Could or should he have acted differently?

  Such questions led nowhere. They served only to paralyse his will to live, write, love. She’d known that he felt isolated. She’d thought she understood what it was like for him to be rejected and a failure whose work nobody would publish. But she’d understood nothing, it seems to her now. She was too young and, although she’d thought she was a realist, she was still wrapped in the envelope of optimism that surrounds the young. Now, since his death, she is beginning to understand him better.

  Did she show him enough love? This is the question that torments her now these days. She was always so busy. She had Kolya to bring up, the endless shopping and queueing and cleaning. She had her job.

  But maybe her constant busyness seemed to him like a criticism of his own stalled life.

  At least she has the consolation that she showed him love when he was dying. Oh God, maybe even that isn’t completely true. She was angry with him, even then, because he refused to fight for life. She thought he was giving up the struggle, when there was still a chance of recovery. Looking back on those times, she can see her judgement wasn’t normal. It couldn’t have been. She was beside herself with cold and hunger, and the fear that the others wouldn’t survive. That was the worst terror of all: that you might be the last one left alive. This terror made her angry. Why should her father sink into death, leaving her to carry the burden of life?

  But there was love there too, even in those times. A window had opened into her father’s soul towards the end and he had allowed her to become close to him. He spoke to her with a tenderness that had been hidden away for years. ‘I’m not really hungry, Anna, moya dusha. Just tired.’ He had smiled, reached out, and taken her hand. Everything became simple. She was his daughter and he loved her. He didn’t have to be frightened any more about what he might bring down on her head, because he knew that he was going to die.

  Now that she fully realizes how afraid he was, it makes sense of something else he’d said, which had puzzled her at the time: ‘They’ll soon forget about me, once I’m dead.’ He’d said it without a trace of bitterness; in fact there’d been a faint smile on his face, as if something worthwhile had been accomplished. He’d meant that the name of Mikhail Ilyich Levin would soon fade, and so his family would be safer. He could no longer be summoned before committees. His work could not be picked apart and then rejected. No other writer could denounce him to save his own skin. There’d be no more risk of expulsion from the Writers’ Union, after which it would be open season on him and all who were connected to him.

  But the man who haunted her father’s nights is still alive. Thousands – millions – perish around him, but Stalin appears immortal, like the pitiless gods of the Ancient Greeks. They think, Surely he must die soon, but he does not die. And now there is Volkov.

  Anna had to accept, once Andrei had explained it all, that there was no choice. He had to take on the boy. It would be worse than useless to argue with Volkov, even on the basis that it wasn’t a professionally sound decision. All Volkov would think was that Andrei was trying – for reasons which were certainly discreditable – to avoid a professional relationship with him. He’d know why – of course he would – and probably he’d take pleasure in it. They like us being afraid, thinks Anna. It makes them strong.

  The fact that Volkov has taken to Andrei is one of those things that even years of being careful can’t protect you against. A red, tender swelling on a child’s leg, that’s all it takes to destroy years of caution.

  ‘It’s me Volkov wants. He thinks I’m the one to look after his boy,’ Andrei said.

  The favour of such a man is as random and potentially lethal as the cancer that brought the child to hospital in the first place. Andrei has told her that the boy’s name is Gorya, but Anna doesn’t want to use it, even to herself. It makes him too real.

  She’s always been so careful. Hedged about with second thoughts at every step, silent when she’s longed to speak, speaking when she’d prefer to be silent. If she could have thrown a cloak of invisibility around them all, she would have done so. But you can’t. It’s the stupidest of illusions. She is so sick of all those phrases: Keep your nose clean; keep your head down; a fly will not get into a closed mouth …

  They are all lies. There’s no protection in making yourself small and hoping to become invisible. All you do is make yourself small.

  Anna folds her sewing, stands up, and goes to the door to Kolya’s room. She glances at her watch, then very quickly goes across to the piano, kneels down by the piano stool, lifts the lid, takes out a pile of music and places it carefully on the floor. She leans forward and stays still for a moment, looking into the empty box, and then she gets up, goes back into the living room and searches through a toolbox in one of the cupboards. She returns to the piano stool, carrying a small screwdriver. She kneels down again and one by one she unscrews the screws that fasten the base of the piano stool. When they are all loosened, she slips the point of the screwdriver into a groove between the side of the stool and the base, wriggles it around, and then slowly lifts.

  Underneath the lifted sheet of plywood lies a small compartment in which there are several notebooks and some larger sketchbooks. Layered sheets of paper line the bottom of the compartment.

  Anna picks up one of the notebooks. The handwriting is her father’s. Even now, after she’s opened these notebooks so many times, the familiarity of it still gives her a pang. A person’s handwriting is part of him. She seems to hear her father’s voice.

  This I should not be writing down. How can a man with children be so criminally irresponsible? But there’s something deep within me that says: Write, whatever happens.

  So I keep on writing. I have a little place under the floorboards, big enough to hold a couple of these notebooks. There’s a rug over the floorboards, and a table covered with work planted on top of it. Anna would never dream of disturbing my work.

  He’d been so sure of her. She is not sure that she recognizes the ‘Anna’ who emerges from her father’s diaries. But he’s right: she’d never have discovered them if Marina hadn’t told Anna where they were, before her own death. Her father and Marina must have shared many secrets. It’s terrible how bitter that can still make her feel. Death is supposed to bring reconciliation, but sometimes she feels angrier with her father than she ever did while he was alive. And with Marina, too. They’ve got away, they’re dead, and she can never ask them what they thought they were doing.

  After they died she had to turn to the future. Kolya had to survive. Those who lived through the siege were like a different race by the time they emerged. She had Andrei and they had to make a life. She didn’t even try to lift that floorboard, not for a long time.

  Sometimes, it has to be said, I lose that thread of hope to which I cling. I begin to believe that they are right, and I ought to change my style. No, not just my style but my
content and my whole approach. The inner furnishings of my mind are wrong. I’m a relic. The future has no place for me. I’m no Tikhonov.

  Anna knows that her father was a friend of the poet Tikhonov long ago, when they were both young. He thought very highly of Tikhonov’s Twelve Ballads. ‘He was the real thing then.’ But since Tikhonov became a much-decorated flag-bearer for socialist realism, he’d chosen different friends.

  ‘My God, the stuff he’s been churning out!’ her father said once. ‘He buys his trips to congresses in Paris at a high price. And you know, Anna, a few years ago he was even kind enough to favour me with some advice, for old times’ sake. I’ve got to “adopt a more positive perspective, let go of my individualistic neuroses and produce something that reflects the deep, pure reality of the people”. But he’s given up on me now. Tikhonov doesn’t even look at me these days, let alone speak.’

  Her father had said this as if it were a relief, but Anna wondered. It couldn’t have been pleasant to be ignored by a writer as influential as Tikhonov. If he slighted her father, others would rush to slight him too. Thank God her father hadn’t lived to see Tikhonov become Chairman of the Writers’ Union …

  Sometimes, especially at night, I begin to wonder. What if all the Tikhonovs are right, and their careers aren’t consummate demonstrations of expediency, but the only true and possible response to our times … And then I’m forced to consider the possibility that I’m simply wasting my own life and whatever talent I have left. And perhaps I should admit my weakness, ask for forgiveness, start again.

  If it weren’t for the taste of Tikhonov’s boot polish … No, I don’t think I could quite swallow that.

  Anna closes the notebook. She still feels as if she is spying on her father by looking at his diary, and yet she feels compelled to read it. It seems as if by doing so she is keeping his memory alive. The same, familiar pages yield different meanings each time.

  If she had a grave to visit, perhaps the diary wouldn’t matter so much. Her father and Marina are buried in the swampy, overgrown mass graves at Piskarevskoye Cemetery. At least the anniversary of his death falls in midwinter, when the graves are covered with a thick blanket of snow. The place looks less neglected then. In summer she can hardly bear to visit, because the weeds are so rank.

  Andrei doesn’t know that she has kept these notebooks, although of course he always knew that her father wrote a diary. Andrei was carrying one of these notebooks the first time he came to their apartment – and Anna was terrified, because she thought he’d come to bring her the news that her father was dead. But Mikhail was only wounded, with a good chance of recovery; or so it seemed then. Andrei had known immediately that the notebook must be taken into safe keeping. It would be dangerous if it were found in her father’s pocket when he was taken to hospital.

  She has that notebook in front of her now. The war notebook. She opens a page at random.

  Andrei and I have just eaten our eggs. Little fires are burning, Everything is calm and settled and almost like home. That’s the main thing I remember from the last war. You had to make a home out of wherever you were, no matter what the place was like.

  He goes on to write about Andrei, and how they’d talked about the taiga, and Andrei’s home. Strange to think that her father knew and liked Andrei before Anna had even met him. In fact, if it hadn’t been for her father, she would never have met Andrei at all.

  It’s better that Andrei and Kolya don’t know about the piano stool. It’s a good hiding place, she thinks. She’s heard that one of the first things they do when they make an arrest is to pull up the rugs, feel for any loose floorboards and then wrench them up. At first she thought of wrapping the notebooks in oilskin and burying them at the dacha, so that they could be dug up one day ‘when things are better’, but then she realized that she needed to have them near her. Besides, things might never be ‘better’. This is her life, her only life. Reading the diaries was like a conversation with her father, one which she had never had. As she grows older, she is coming closer to him. One day their paths will touch, and join. They will be the same age. No, she doesn’t want his diaries to be mouldering under the earth.

  And she, too, had things she needed to hide. It wasn’t difficult to organize the piano stool’s secret compartment: Anna’s good with her hands. The important thing was to keep it shallow enough not to arouse suspicion if anyone ever tipped the music out of the stool. She lined the bottom edges of the compartment with narrow wooden battens, five centimetres deep, and then fitted the plywood cover so that it could be levered in and out, but would not loosen on its own.

  The original label from the bottom of the stool was stuck so hard that she had to turn the stool upside down, prop it up and hold a steaming pan of water inside until the label loosened enough for her to peel it away. When it had dried, she stuck it back down on top of the plywood cover, and rubbed wax into it until the new wood looked more or less the same as the old.

  The only problem with such a good hiding place is that it reveals the trouble you’ve taken to conceal whatever is in it.

  There’s one notebook that she has never read. She opened it, saw that he was writing about Marina, and closed it again. In her mind it’s the ‘Marina notebook’, and dangerous. She’s afraid of finding out her father’s side of the story. She knows Marina’s, and will never know her mother’s.

  Anna reaches for the top sketchbook, and opens it.

  There is a drawing of a tram, stuck in a snowdrift. Its windows would be full of frost, except that a shell blast has shattered them. Through the gaps you can see a woman sitting, muffled in coat, hat, scarf. Her head has fallen to her chest. She is dead.

  On the next page there is a snowdrift. A hand sticks out of it, but people walk by, not even noticing, intent on their next step. The drawings are made in strong, thick lines, like cartoons.

  She flips over the pages. There is Kolya, in his nest of blankets, cocooned in layers of clothes. His toy horse rests on his pillow but he isn’t playing with it. He stares at the window, which is crisscrossed with strips of paper as protection against blasts.

  That figure which looks like an old woman – that’s Tanya, her school friend. If she’d lived, she would be thirty-four now, the same age as Anna, but Anna heard that she’d died. Anna did the sketch from memory, after she’d come across Tanya crouched with her hand drill, boring through the canal ice for water. There was no water supply in Tanya’s apartment building any more, and she hadn’t the strength to go as far as the Neva, where the water would be cleaner.

  There are dozens and dozens of drawings. Here’s a loose piece of paper, torn from her father’s Shakespeare. Marina asked her to do that drawing, after her father died. He lies there frozen, wasted to the bone and with ice in his hair.

  Marina had said, ‘You must draw everything, Anna. One day people will want to know what happened.’

  But Marina was mistaken. People have to bury their stories. What’s wanted is an acceptable version, not the truth. Certainly not Leningrad’s truth. Anna drew the Sennaya market, with its terrifying vendors of meat whose origin mustn’t be questioned too closely. She drew the face of the man who stole her sledge with the sack of wood she’d scavenged, and the face of Zina when she came to their apartment door with her dead baby in her arms. At the bottom of the secret compartment there are her larger drawings: their apartment, with the shapeless, sexless figures huddled around the burzhuika; her father’s room, which is now Kolya’s, where her father and Marina lie together, dead. The frost is all over them like fur. Anna drew as if only drawing would keep her alive. Here’s Marina, alive again, carefully peeling off the top, painted layer of papier mâché from Kolya’s toy fort. There is nourishment in the paste that held the layers of newspaper together. They will cook and eat the papier mâché.

  She can still feel little Kolya in her arms, in the freezing darkness of the midnight apartment. He is so thin that she can touch each separate bone of his ribcage. His lips mov
e against her neck, sucking in his sleep. She holds him all night, for fear that without her warmth Kolya will die.

  Why do we think that the present is stronger than the past? They are not even separate. The past is alive, waiting. She and Andrei turned away from it because they had to, but it only grew more powerful. Part of her will never leave that frozen room.

  She turns the pages. Now there are drawings of dandelion leaves. Here is a row of cabbages, fat and solid. Here is Kolya, eating a bowl of porridge with a spoon, looking up at her with a self-conscious smile. His arm is curved around the bowl, but he is trying to eat ‘nicely’. They are not starving any more. Here is a brigade of women sweeping the streets clean. She hears the sound of the brooms, and feels the blisters on her palms. She had to make all these sketches so quickly, and often from memory. But it’s true that the more you draw, the more you can draw.

  These days she finds it so hard to begin. The sense of urgency has gone and, once again, she’s all too aware of her technical weaknesses. Sometimes she envies Kolya as he sits for hours at the piano, improvising, messing around, really playing.

  No one would want to see her drawings now. At one point she thought of handing them in for the blockade exhibition, but now she’s glad that she didn’t. The exhibition was closed down by the authorities, as if it were the scene of a crime. The exhibits were scattered. Her drawings would have been lost, or even destroyed. They recorded things that were not supposed to be part of public memory.

  And besides, why should Leningrad set itself up for special treatment?

  Leningrad has been punished for it.

  If my drawings were destroyed, would they still exist somewhere, because they have been drawn? Anna has no idea what the answer to that question might be.

  The sketchbook at the bottom of the compartment contains her most recent work. Among the drawings is one of Piskarevskoye. The overgrown mass graves form a vast, derelict space. Summer clouds sail high up in the sky, indifferent. Tiny figures haunt the edges of the drawing. It’s said that one day the cemetery will be made beautiful, so that it will be a proper memorial to everyone who died.