‘I just don’t know what to do, Anna Mikhailovna, every morning he wakes up crying with the sheets wet and I’ve got to get them rinsed through and him washed, and then this old bitch starts banging on the door and screaming at me to get out –’
What’s a scrub of birch or the electric green of new leaves on the larch, compared to that?
The truth is, I’m not an idealist, thinks Anna as she pedals on. I just want the children to be washed without someone screeching at them through the door. I don’t suppose that woman’s neighbour is really so bad. Probably just desperate to get to work on time. But we end up hating each other for lack of a bit of space.
Out here, you can breathe. They are cycling into the woods now. The road is a potholed, dusty track, running uphill. Every turn is familiar. In a few minutes they’ll burst out into the sunlight again, and they’ll hear dogs barking from the old Sokolov farm. They still call it that, although the Sokolovs don’t live there any more. Her childhood playmate Vasya Sokolov died in the war, driving convoys over Ladoga ice. His aunt, Darya Alexandrovna, lives in a little cottage with her son, Mitya, Kolya’s friend. The farm was swallowed up in the German advance, and burned to the ground when they retreated. Now it’s been rebuilt as part of a huge collective.
The Levin dacha, amazingly, survived the war. At least, the walls still stood, and there was a roof. The first time Anna came back here after the siege was lifted, she could barely recognize the place. So many trees had been cut down for fuel that the landscape looked quite different. Their plot was buried under a thick coat of weeds. Ivy, woodbine and wild clematis twined all over the dacha itself, softening the destruction. Both exterior and interior doors were gone. All the windows were smashed. Someone had chopped out the wooden floor of the verandah with an axe. Inside, there was German graffiti on the walls, and they’d lit open fires. Lucky that the place hadn’t burned down, like so many other dachas – or been torched deliberately, as the Germans retreated.
Fortunately the dacha had never been much more than a glorified hut. They repaired it bit by bit, as they managed to scavenge wood and nails, corrugated iron and glass. Anna scrubbed every inch of the walls, inside and out, as if she were exorcizing evil spirits. They got hold of some exterior paint – a sombre green, and not the colour they’d have chosen, but it kept the weather out. The verandah floor was the biggest challenge. It was Andrei who fixed it. He had a contact through work: Sofya Vasilievna, one of the radiographers, put him in touch with her father-in-law, a retired carpenter who still took on small jobs. He did the work in exchange for Kolya giving his youngest granddaughter a year’s course of piano lessons. Kolya gave those lessons so well, almost like a professional. By the end of the year the little girl was able to play a concert of baby pieces for her grandpa. The floor was down and the railings fixed, waiting for varnish.
Kolya loves the dacha. Sometimes it seems to Anna as if the dacha is the one remaining beacon of family happiness. Kolya chops wood, digs up potatoes, waters the little lilacs Anna planted to replace those that the Germans chopped down and burned. Kolya’s dream is that when the silver birches grow big enough again, he’ll sling a hammock between them and laze in it, reading all day long. He talks about the dacha before the war as if he were talking about paradise. He was only five when the Germans came, but he says, ‘I remember everything.’
The Germans must have hated trees. They snapped and uprooted even the smallest saplings, which would have been no good for fuel. They wanted not just to conquer but to erase, just as they’d wanted to wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth. But they couldn’t get rid of all the Russian trees, Anna thinks, any more than they could get rid of all the Russians. We were too many for them. Everything is growing back. Wherever she can, she plants trees.
‘If they’d had enough salt, they’d have sown all our fields with it,’ the old men in the village said, and then they would spit on the ground. Anna would look at them and think: All the time we were inside Leningrad, you saw them face to face. They walked down these tracks. They took over your homes, ate your food, slaughtered the pigs and sheep, threw the chickens in a pot. Whenever they wanted, they killed you. Marina’s dacha was totally destroyed, and no one knew what had happened to her old nanny. Three entire families from the nearby village were wiped out in reprisal for a partisan attack. Seven children, aged three to fourteen. They didn’t shoot them. They hanged them one by one, starting with the youngest.
They are almost at the dacha now. Andrei and Kolya are cycling abreast, talking. Anna’s too far behind to hear what they’re saying but she feels a surge of pleasure. Once Kolya’s through this difficult stage, those two will be real friends. Not that she has anything to criticize Andrei for. He’s patient and consistent in just the way you need to be with a boy of Kolya’s age. Sometimes, though, he withdraws. Anna hates that. They seem not to be a family any more but just three random people, forced together and ideally equipped by their intimacy to make one another unhappy.
‘Anna! Anna!’
They are there. Anna dismounts, pushes her bike through the gate and up the little path. They prop their bikes around the back of the dacha, where the gooseberry patch is full of bright, immature fruit.
‘Let’s make a gooseberry pie,’ says Kolya.
‘They need at least three weeks more,’ replies Anna. ‘It’ll be a good crop, look how many there are. And the white currants, too – that’s the best we’ve had for years. But we’ll have to tie string over the bushes, Kolya, or the birds will get them all.’
If only she had some muslin curtains. She saw a little cherry tree wrapped in muslin once, with all the fruit untouched –
‘Can’t we pick just some of them?’
‘Not the currants. It’s just a waste when they’re not ripe. But if you and Andrei catch a trout, I’ll make green gooseberry sauce.’
Even with its windows shuttered, the dacha welcomes them. There are fresh weeds pushing up everywhere in the vegetable garden. She’ll have to weed by hand this time. A hoe does too much damage when the growth is young and tender. The carrots and beet are doing well, and her onion patch is coming on nicely –
‘Anna, let’s have some tea.’
They go inside the dacha. As always, when they first come, it smells damp and woody.
‘It’s all the rain we had last week,’ says Andrei. ‘I’m going to light the stove.’
Wood is piled beside the stove, left there to dry from last time. Arriving at the dacha is always the same. A ballet of tasks, so familiar that they could all carry them out with their eyes shut. Kolya, who doesn’t lift a finger without complaint at home, is already fetching the bag of charcoal for the samovar.
‘We’ll have tea on the verandah,’ Anna decides. She doesn’t want the dacha full of smoke. Andrei is on his knees, feeding wood into the stove. This one doesn’t draw as well as their old, fat-bellied cast-iron stove. That was ripped out, either by the Germans or by someone local.
‘Is Galya here this weekend?’ asks Andrei. Galya is an old friend and colleague of Anna’s mother, and she has one of the few neighbouring dachas that survived. It was never a big dacha colony here, because the land was too poor. It’s taken decades of farm manure, days and days of back-breaking trundling and muck-spreading, to make the soil at the Levin dacha as fertile as it is now. Their compost heap is a legend. After the war a new dacha area was opened up six kilometres to the south. There was enough land there for everyone to get a decent-sized plot. They are trade union plots, of course. Anna or Andrei could have applied for one, but they prefer it here. They like the uneven land, and the little gorge where the stream flows. Besides, they wouldn’t want to add another six kilometres each way to their bike ride. There’s a railway halt near the new plots, but Anna and Andrei prefer to cycle. The weekend trains are always so packed.
‘Anna, will Galya be here?’
‘She should be. Now she’s retired she’s here most of the time.’
The samovar hisse
s. They drag the wooden chairs on to the verandah, and Kolya fetches cushions. They are spotted with damp, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll scrub them, and put them out in the sun.
‘And the sugar, Kolya!’
This is the moment she’s been waiting for: the first glass of tea, with the sun coming down on the pine planks, and the smell of earth all around. Anna relaxes and shuts her eyes. She can smell wild garlic. Wood pigeons are purring in the distant trees. All around her, food is growing. The day stretches ahead of them, full of work. Later on she’ll take the chocolate down to Darya Alexandrovna, who has a sweet tooth and keeps chickens. Darya Alexandrovna always wants to chat these days. She used to be so brisk, but now, sometimes, you can hardly get away from her. She can’t be bothered with ‘all these new people’. It’s people like Anna that she wants to talk to, because they remember the old days, and because Anna was her nephew Vasya’s playmate when they were little. Even Andrei is of no great interest to her, although she did once remark that he had very good teeth, and Anna had done well for herself.
Vasya has no grave, of course. Darya Alexandrovna has set a stone for him in the corner of her cottage garden, beyond the hen-run. She had his name carved into it. That must have cost a chicken or two.
Anna sighs, sipping her tea, and Andrei glances at her but says nothing. She doesn’t notice. Kolya’s eating the sugar again. Do boys of that age ever stop eating? And the more he eats, the skinnier he seems to get.
‘Leave the rest of it, Kolya, you can’t just eat sugar.’
‘I’m starving.’
‘I’ll make you a sugar sandwich. Bring me the bread, it’s in my bag, and the big knife.’ Thick slices of bread, spread with a smear of butter and sprinkled with sugar. Kolya will eat sugar sandwiches for as long as she’s prepared to go on slicing the loaf. ‘There you are, and that’s got to keep you going until lunch, so don’t wolf it down. I’m sure if you ate more slowly you wouldn’t be so hungry.’
‘Only old people eat slowly,’ says Kolya.
Andrei and Kolya will go fishing. She’ll sweep out the dacha and prepare the potatoes for dinner, then she’ll get into the vegetable garden. There’ll be radishes and lettuce thinnings to have with their bread and sausage for lunch. She’ll just have five minutes in the sun before she gets to work. How good the wood smells as the sun warms it. My God, Kolya’s already demolished that sandwich …
And later, they’ll bury the manuscripts. She’s decided to tell Kolya about it. If anything should happen, it’s best he knows. Kolya is old enough now, and families are stronger, she thinks, when there aren’t too many secrets.
She opens her eyes. ‘Do you remember how Father used to smoke and keep all the mosquitoes away?’ she asks Kolya. He nods, so casually that she probes further. ‘When you think of Father, can you see his face?’ she asks, then immediately wishes that she hadn’t. Kolya drops the knife with which he’s been whittling a leftover piece of pine, and chucks the wood over the railings.
‘I keep telling you. I remember him perfectly,’ he says in such a cold, angry voice that for Anna the light of the whole day is dimmed. Why couldn’t she have kept her mouth shut? But suddenly Kolya relents. ‘I’m going over to see if Mitya wants to go fishing with us, and then I’ll dig the manure into the new fruit patch. We are going fishing later, aren’t we, Andrei?’
‘Yes, later,’ says Andrei. ‘I’ve got to fix those panels to the side of the shed first.’
Everything’s all right. It will be a perfect day. But when should she tell Kolya about the manuscripts? Now, or later? After dinner, she decides, when he’s full of fish; if they catch anything, that is. If not, it’ll be soup with the sausage again. And then putting out the fire, closing everything up, and cycling slowly back to Leningrad in the evening light.
‘Tell his mother I’ll be over later,’ she calls to Kolya, who is already through the gate.
The sky has clouded over by evening. Dinner’s over – one rather small trout each, and a steaming pile of potatoes – and it’s too cold to sit out on the verandah any longer. It might even rain.
‘Let’s get it done,’ says Andrei.
‘You mean the manuscripts?’
‘Yes.’
Andrei has told Kolya, on the way back from Mitya’s place after fishing. Kolya didn’t seem surprised, or even all that interested.
Anna has forked away some of the compost from the edge of the heap. It felt like sacrilege, because she grew up being told that she must never mess about with the compost heap in case it stopped heating itself up properly. She has dug down deep through the warm, crumbling soil. It’s so fertile that even a manuscript might start growing there.
‘Come on then. Kolya!’
They troop alongside the vegetable patch, past the raspberries and down to the compost heap. Anna glances round, but of course no one’s there but themselves. Andrei produces the biscuit tin, and another, larger package wrapped in oilcloth.
‘Is that hole deep enough? It doesn’t look it.’
‘Put the package at the bottom and then the tin can go on top of it. I dug really deep.’
Kolya stands back, not committing himself to the scene, but watching everything. Once the oilcloth-wrapped package is in, Anna steps forward with the biscuit tin, and crouches down. She doesn’t want to throw it in; it seems disrespectful. She has sealed all around the lid with adhesive tape. It should keep the water out once autumn comes.
Her hands are strangely reluctant to let go. She looks down at the beautiful skating ladies with their impossible arabesques. Her fingers remember them. The figures are slightly raised and she used to trace them, fascinated –
A voice calls from the dacha, ‘Anna? Anna, are you there?’
‘It’s Galya.’
‘Quick, Anna, put it in. I’ll fill the hole. Hurry, before Galya comes out here looking for you.’
‘Put all the compost back where it was.’
‘It’s like a murder,’ Kolya says suddenly, ‘and here we are secretly burying the corpse.’
His words come back to her later, as they’re cycling the long, dusty road home. The light is grey and pallid. A grey evening will switch imperceptibly into a grey dawn. It’s late – past ten already. Kolya was right. It was a rushed, guilty burial. It was her father’s life-work, thrust away under the soil. His words hidden, never to be read any more. It was a kind of murder.
But it’s not our fault, she argues with herself. We didn’t choose any of this.
10
In two days’ time it will be Midsummer’s Day, but the weather remains cool and blowy. The surface of the Neva is chopped up into little peaks, while fresh lime leaves shiver and dust blows about the streets. Andrei is late. He hurries along, head down so that the dust won’t get into his eyes, and he goes over the arguments he’ll put forward at today’s meeting, for the employment of another physiotherapist with experience in paediatric arthritic care. He’s coming up against a blank wall. Doesn’t he realize that there’s a shortage of funding? The decision has been taken to prioritize an increase of 14.7 per cent in surgical beds. The plan must be adhered to.
Where do they get these figures? It’s so exact, 14.7 per cent, that you could be fooled into thinking that it corresponded to reality. You get battered down by arguments on the basis of beds that don’t exist yet, and probably never will. Well, he’ll make his point again, even though last time he spoke out about the need for a physiotherapist, he noticed Boris Kamerevsky from Medical Personnel frowning and writing something down in a way that was meant to be noticed.
I’m becoming a problem, thinks Andrei. Sticking my neck out. Not a good idea. All the same, he’ll push one more time, at today’s meeting.
Anna has been seconded to a one-day course on Practical Statistics. She sits cramped behind a desk, watching the lecturer draw a graph on the board and fill it in with confident squiggles of her chalk.
She’s rather elegant, for a statistician. Grey skirt, freshly laundered white bl
ouse, high heels and beautifully smooth, glossy black hair. She makes Anna feel dowdy. Although it’s a cool day the room is stuffy. Too many people. The chairs are uncomfortable, but the main problem is that Anna’s not used to sitting still for so long. At the nursery she’s on her feet hour after hour, and at home it’s often almost ten o’clock by the time she finishes all the chores and is able to sit down. There are so many things she wants to do in that precious hour that she doesn’t know which to choose first. Listen to the radio, knit, sew, chat to Kolya before he goes to bed, take up the novel she’s been reading on and off for months, and above all sit opposite Andrei so that every time she glances up, there he is.
Who would have thought it could take the minute hand so long to cross the small gap between the 5 and the 10? It crawls as if it were pushing its way through sand. At the nursery, time speeds by. When she’s drawing, it’s different again. She’ll emerge to find the sun in a different place in the sky.
Her bones ache with boredom. The lecturer has a good voice, light and clear, but although Anna hears every word quite distinctly, the sentences melt away without making any sense. It’s not that she couldn’t understand it if she wanted to. It’s more that she doesn’t want this information in her head. She doesn’t want to know how to collect accurate statistics about the role played by the parental level of education in the nutritional status of the child. In her experience there is very little correlation anyway. Besides, she is sick to death of handing out questionnaires to parents. They don’t like it, and why should they? ‘Larissa Nikolayevna will be wanting me to bring my soup pot in for inspection next,’ one mother had whispered to Anna, after a particularly intrusive handout about the importance of bringing yesterday’s stock to the boil for at least five minutes before adding fresh vegetables, ‘in order to minimize the risk of bacterial growth and subsequent ill health’.