‘So you’ve got it all planned,’ says Volkov. His face is still hard and shrewd, but at this moment Andrei’s sure that he’s thinking only as a parent. The fear and anger in his voice are only what any father would feel. You have to be so careful, as a doctor, not to assume that because a procedure is routine to you, it is remotely normal to the families. To cut into a child’s leg, after all, is monstrous. To a father, the flesh and blood the scalpel touches is far more precious than his own.
‘It’s what we have to do, to give Gorya the best possible treatment.’ The best possible chance would come closer to the truth, but that can’t be said; not to any parent and certainly not to this one.
‘You say, “we”,’ observes Volkov. ‘You’ll take the case, then? The surgeon – the oncologist – whoever you need. Let them report to you. You’re the one I want to look after my son.’
There’s no way out of this. Hospital protocol and correct practice will count for nothing. Besides, in this particular case no one’s going to feel demeaned by not having ultimate responsibility for the boy.
‘We haven’t had the biopsy yet,’ says Andrei. ‘You’ll appreciate that I can’t prejudge the results. But you must understand that there’s a strong possibility that your son may be very seriously ill.’
‘Do you think I’m not aware of that?’ At that moment, suddenly and without warning, Volkov bangs his fist on the table. Andrei just manages to prevent himself from reacting. ‘Do you doctors think we’re all fools? Don’t you know who I am?’ He hasn’t been able to resist it, in the end. For all his intelligence, he’s like his wife, not quite able to believe that ‘who he is’ will make no difference to the cells that are proliferating in his child’s body.
Andrei lays his own hands on the table, palms down. There is silence. For one thing, Andrei cannot think of anything to say; for another, he suspects that whatever he says might be construed as a provocation. It’s quite natural for parents in this situation to vent their feelings. Volkov, above all, has to feel that here, in this hospital, he is a parent and nothing else.
Suddenly the tension relaxes. Volkov leans back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘You’re an Irkutsk boy,’ he says. ‘You don’t flinch.’
6
Anna guides the fabric over the foot of the sewing machine with her left hand, while she turns the handle smoothly with her right. The needle stabs up and down, the seam lengthens, and the stitched fabric pours satisfyingly over the side of the table.
Julia has lent her the sewing machine for a week. Anna had the dress cut out and tacked, all ready so that she could make maximum use of the time. Julia has lent her the pattern, too.
The dress is sleeveless, with a full skirt that comes a little below the knee. The shoulder straps and the neck are the most difficult to get right. If the neck doesn’t fit properly, she’ll end up having to improvise a scarf out of the leftover fabric. That would look awful.
Anna peers at the fabric. Yes, the seam is straight. She’s almost there.
She can start to gather the skirt with running stitch, and then pin skirt to bodice.
‘What about shoes?’ Julia had asked.
‘I’ve got these ones.’ They’d been Vera’s; Anna’s feet are exactly the same size as her mother’s. The shoes are silver brocade, with a little heel and a button fastening that Anna used to love fiddling with as a child. Vera must have bought those evening shoes long ago, before she met Anna’s father, who never danced. Anna has had them resoled. Fortunately the style is classic.
‘Mmm.’ Julia had nodded without enthusiasm.
‘They’re very comfortable. Don’t look like that, it’s a hospital ball, Julia, not some grand event at the Astoria. No one’s going to be staring at my feet.’
‘Oh my God, Anna, don’t say that. I can’t bear women who say, “After all, no one’ll be looking at me,” as if it were a point in their favour. Isn’t the world dull enough without filling it with dowdy women? You’re going to a ball. It calls for maximum effort. I always look at people’s shoes. It’s a pity our feet aren’t the same size or you could borrow my satin pumps.’
But Anna could never fit into Julia Slatkina’s pretty little shoes. She smoothes out the fabric again, and turns the sewing-machine handle faster. It’ll be such a beautiful dress. Andrei will love it. The kind of dress you put away and keep for your daughter –
No. She’ll lend it to Irina.
Julia dresses beautifully, and she’s so completely at ease in her skin. She doesn’t even notice other women’s glances. She offered Anna one of her own dresses to wear for the ball, but Anna refused. She wanted to feel like herself.
She wonders if she would become friends with Julia if they were to meet for the first time now. She was Julia Slatkina before she married; one of the little Slatkins who were so much part of Anna’s childhood. They all lived together, in the same communal apartment. Julia was like a sister, but when the Slatkin parents separated it all came to an end. Julia’s mother went off without the children. She worked for Lenfilm, Anna remembers that. Anna assumed that Julia must have moved away from Leningrad with her father, or died in the war, until the day a well-dressed woman approached her in the crowded foyer of the Philharmonic Hall. And there was Julia’s voice, full of doubt and hope. ‘Anna? Is it really you? Anna Levina?’
Julia and Anna knew each other almost before they knew their own names. They played together under the kitchen table while the grown-ups talked endlessly. Slatkins, Levins and God knows how many other assorted writers and musicians and idealists of the new dawn. There was a man who used to smoke a pipe and sit Anna on his knee while he declaimed poetry in a growly voice. In her memory, the people who actually lived in the apartment, the procession of temporary residents who just needed a mattress to sleep on, and the visitors who dropped in and out at all hours are mixed up together. The adults’ faces are indistinct. She can remember their shoes and their voices, the smell of cigarettes, the endless glasses of tea that gave way to beer and vodka when there was enough money. She can remember her mother’s impatient voice: ‘Aren’t you lot ever going to bed? I have to go to work early tomorrow.’ Even Vera’s face is shadowy, but Julia was under the table with her. Julia’s vivid features, her hazel eyes and sharp pinching fingers are as clear to Anna as the grain of the table’s wood, when they traced it with their fingers.
She had never expected to see Julia again.
‘Anna? Is it really you? It’s me, Julia. Julia Slatkina!’
Memory surged back. Yes, the eyes were the same, thickly fringed with the dark eyelashes that used to lie on her cheeks ‘like butterflies’ when she was asleep. Anna recalled one of the grown-ups saying that, and her own chagrin because she wasn’t like a butterfly. A knot of tears thickened in her throat.
‘Julia!’
It was Julia who reached out for her, Julia who held Anna tight, as if she might vanish again. A rich scent enfolded Anna. She blinked away her tears, while Julia let hers run down to the corners of her mouth. People were looking at them.
‘It’s really you. I can’t believe it, after all these years.’
‘I thought you must have died.’
‘No, I’m still here. Only I’m not Julia Slatkina now. I’m married to a wonderful man called Georgii Vesnin.’ She held Anna away from her and looked expectantly into her face. Of course Anna recognized the name. A leading filmmaker who had received a Stalin Prize quite recently. Anna and Andrei had seen Journey across the Snow. She hadn’t found the story particularly interesting – it concerned the construction of a railway in Siberia – but Andrei had loved it. And they had both admired the style: spare, even austere, but bold too.
‘A real artist,’ Anna said, and Julia squeezed her hand.
‘He is. He really is. I’ve got to rush, but listen, you mustn’t disappear again. Here.’ She scrabbled in her bag. ‘Here’s my card. We must get together. How about coffee one morning next week?’
‘I’ll be working, Julia.’
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‘Oh – of course. All right, let’s have supper one evening, somewhere nice. My treat. Look, write down your telephone number here … But look at you – you’re lovely. I always thought you would be.’
‘Not half as lovely as you,’ Anna had said, taking in Julia’s polished hair and high heels.
‘Oh well, all this!’ Julia made a face as she smoothed her skirt over her hips. ‘It doesn’t mean a thing. You should see my mother, she thinks of nothing but face massages and these wretched strip things that she sticks on her forehead at night – and she looks more of a hag than ever.’
‘What – you mean Lydia Maximovna?’
‘Of course. I’ve only got one mother, haven’t I? Unfortunately. We kids didn’t see her for years after she left Father, but as soon as I married Georgii she was straight back on the scene. He was worth knowing, you see. She’s still writing screenplays. Not very good ones, Georgii says,’ and Julia had grinned with such sparkling malice that Anna half expected a pinch from a perfectly manicured finger and thumb. ‘My God, Anna, she’s indestructible. Like a rubber ball. No matter how hard she gets thrown, she only bounces higher. Listen, darling, I’ve got to rush, but I’ll ring you. Don’t you dare vanish again. I can’t wait to talk about old times.’
If it weren’t for her, Anna would be sewing this dress by hand. Julia brought the sewing machine round to Anna’s apartment herself. When Anna opened the door, there was Julia, leaning against the wall, out of breath but triumphant. She must have lugged the machine all the way up, staggering in her high heels.
‘Julia, you shouldn’t have, I’d have come to yours and fetched it –’
‘I came by taxi, idiot. A few stairs are good for the health. Now, let me show you how it works … My God, Anna, what a wonderful apartment. It’s so – so Levinish!’
‘Well, it was my parents’ apartment. We’ve been here ever since we left the kommunalka.’
‘All those paintings … And isn’t that a piano through there?’
‘It’s Kolya who plays. That’s how we got it. His piano teacher knew a woman who was thinking of selling her upright because she had the chance of a baby grand. The teacher made sure this woman heard Kolya play, and so we got it at a bargain price. We robbed her, really, but she didn’t seem to mind.’
‘Kolya’s got talent, then?’
‘Not enough to make a career. But he’s good. He practises until the neighbours start banging on the walls.’
‘Neighbours. Some of them can be such bastards,’ said Julia, with a strength of feeling which surprised Anna. Surely the Vesnin family didn’t have troubles like that.
Julia had looked around the apartment with hunger in her face. ‘Are those your father’s books?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Of course we had to sell some of them.’ She won’t tell Julia about the books that had to be burned, to feed the burzhuika. People who weren’t ‘here’ don’t understand such things.
‘It’s so like the old days.’
‘Julia, that’s ridiculous,’ said Anna, more sharply than she intended. ‘The kommunalka wasn’t like this at all.’
‘But it’s got the same feeling. You’ve kept it somehow, Anna. I don’t know how you do it. It feels as if any moment one of those old poets will wander in and start declaiming.’
‘What about your brothers, Julia?’ asked Anna.
‘They’re all right. I don’t see much of them,’ said Julia shortly, but the next moment her face lit up again as she explored the rows of books. ‘I’m sure I remember some of these … Isn’t that your father’s Dante? Yes, I thought so. And it’s not even a very big book. Do you know, I used to think it was huge? And so heavy, when he let me hold it and turn the pages to look at the drawings.’
‘Your hands were smaller then.’
‘Here’s his name on the flyleaf … You are so lucky, Anna.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, you are! No, don’t smile like that. You really are.’
Julia’s not happy. When the sparkle dies away from her face she looks drawn, exhausted. She loves her husband, though. She speaks proudly about his epic dramas of Arctic exploration and railway construction, and her whole face glows when Anna says how wonderful she and Andrei had thought some of the shots.
‘But what do you do, Julia?’
They were having supper together, tucked into a comfortable corner of a restaurant that Anna had heard about but never visited. The head waiter clearly knew Julia well. Would she be happy with this table? Or perhaps she’d prefer to sit in the window?
‘The lamb’s very good here,’ Julia had said. ‘They do a wonderful shish kebab.’ The lamb was meltingly tender and succulent, pink inside and charred at the edges. Anna ate slowly, savouringly. Julia pushed most of hers to the side of her plate.
‘You’ve told me about Georgii. But what do you do, Julia?’
Julia lit a cigarette, then glanced quickly at Anna’s plate, and stubbed it out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so uncultured. Well, I was a dancer.’
‘A dancer! Were you really?’
‘Not a very well-known one, obviously.’ Julia smiled ironically. ‘I slogged my way through ballet school. I really liked it, though; they were hard on us but you felt looked after. I got into the corps de ballet of the Kazan Ballet Company when I was eighteen – but it was pretty obvious after a couple of years that I was never going to make it as a soloist. I was going to be dancing in the line until my hair turned grey and they booted me out. It’s a tough life, being a dancer. You’re smiling again, Anna, but it is, it is really!’
‘I believe you.’
‘I kept getting injuries and generally things weren’t going too well. Anyway – and then of course a bit later the war came. And everything was messed up.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna.
‘Dancers’ feet are horrible,’ said Julia quickly. ‘You should see mine. Excuse me a moment, I must just –’
There were too many gaps in Julia’s story, Anna thought as she finished her side dish of rice. Such fine grains, each one separate, perfect, and scented with cardamom. But if it wasn’t the truth, or was only part of it, it was what she wanted Anna to believe. And who could blame her? Everyone has their closed doors. Whatever it was that Julia didn’t want to talk about, no doubt she had good reason. But she was all right now. She’d met Georgii, she was safe. Anna watched as Julia walked back from the Ladies. Her walk was elegant, but yes, she did limp, very slightly. So that part, at least, was true.
‘And then you met Georgii,’ said Anna, to help her, as Julia sat down.
‘Yes, more or less then. But you, poor thing, you were here in Leningrad the whole time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your mother? Your father?’
‘My mother died a few years before the war, when my little brother was born. You know, Kolya. The one who plays the piano.’
‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize. I thought he was yours.’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t even know your mother had another child.’
‘No reason why you should. He’s sixteen now, and he lives with Andrei and me. I met Andrei during the siege. That was when my father died.’
‘Poor man. Do you remember how he used to write little stories for us and sew them into books?’
Anna had completely forgotten.
‘Surely you must remember! Mine had a blue cover, and yours was red.’
‘No, I –’ But even as she said this, something swam into Anna’s mind, out of the past. ‘Was the story something about a wolf princess?’
‘I knew you hadn’t forgotten! She’d been turned into a wolf and everyone was afraid of her, until she found a little girl who was lost, wandering in the forest, and the little girl curled up against the wolf’s fur and so even though it was freezing cold, she survived. The little girl loved the wolf but when her father came searching for her, with his gun, he didn’t realize that the wolf princess was protecting the child. He thought the little gi
rl was being attacked, and so he shot the wolf. But then, at the moment that she died, the wolf turned back into a beautiful young princess.’
‘Good heavens. How well you remember it, Julia.’
‘I’ve never forgotten your father’s stories. How I wish I still had my little book. But it must have got lost, with everything else. And now he’s dead. I’m sorry, Anna.’
‘He was in the People’s Volunteers. He was wounded. We nursed him, but he had no chance of recovering from a wound like that – not in those conditions,’ said Anna, suddenly wanting Julia to know that her father had been a soldier.
‘Poor man,’ said Julia again, rather vaguely, staring at the stub of the cigarette that she’d lit as soon as she returned to the table.
‘And your father?’ asked Anna hesitantly.
‘He died too,’ said Julia, in such a tone that Anna asked no more.
The needle needs rethreading. Anna stretches, yawning. Andrei and Kolya will be back soon.
The dress will be ready in good time. She and Andrei will go to the ball together. That is absolutely all she’s going to think about today. Shoes, flowers, dress, bag, her best pair of stockings. She is sick to death of being so serious and careful and fearful. She’s thirty-four, and life is flowing past so quickly that before she can turn round she’ll be middle-aged.
Middle-aged and childless. A jolt of anguish goes through her, so sharp that she has to bite her lip. Middle-aged, fussing over poor Kolya as he tries to pull away from her and get a life of his own –
No. They’ll go to the ball. It’ll be just like one of her father’s fairy tales. Music, light, the warmth of Andrei’s hand on her shoulder blade as he steers her into the waltz.
The wolf. Volkov. No matter how determinedly she pushes him out of her mind, he comes back. Her stomach tightens. I’m not going to think of you. You can’t come in, because this is my home.