Sapphire Skies (11 page)

Then one afternoon Papa came home from the factory with a grin on his face. He looked himself again. Lydia was having elocution lessons with Mama, and I was doing my homework with Svetlana, when Papa walked into the apartment. He had two packages under his arm.

‘Come, everybody,’ he announced, nudging Mama into the kitchen and gesturing for Lydia to join us. ‘I have good news!’

‘What is it?’ I asked him.

‘Comrade Stalin telephoned me today. He said that he is personally ordering supplies for the factory so I can continue to work unhindered. He also insisted that we use the new State dacha on the river in Nikolina Gora this summer. You know the one — the villa with the pier and the long veranda.’ Papa turned to Lydia. ‘We would be honoured to have the Novikov family as our guests there,’ he said.

Lydia’s eyes flashed. She would have known that the dacha was used by high Party officials.

My father turned back to us. ‘Then Comrade Stalin sent one of his bodyguards around with these packages addressed to the Azarov family.’

He placed them on the table and unwrapped one. It contained caviar, smoked fish, cheese, some dried peaches and a bottle of champagne from Abrau-Dyurso, the best wine-making region in the Soviet Union.

‘Tonight we will have a party to celebrate.’ Papa squeezed Lydia’s arm. ‘You must call your husband and ask him to join us.’

Lydia seemed confused as she eyed the food spread out on the table. Perhaps she thought I had made up the story about my dance shoes being a present from Stalin. She would have to believe his generosity towards us now.

Zoya led Lydia to the telephone and dialled her husband’s number for her. We turned our attention to the other package.

‘This one,’ said Papa, ‘came with the instruction that it was to be opened by my wife and daughter.’

‘You open it,’ Mama said, pushing the package towards me.

I unwrapped the brown paper to discover something large and soft wrapped in tissue paper. Mama’s name was written on it. I handed it to her. She untied the string and pulled aside the tissue paper to reveal a fine wool shawl. She lifted it up and Svetlana and I gaped at its beauty: pink cabbage roses were printed on a sky blue background, and the fringe was gold. The shawl was elegant and would be perfect for summer evenings in Nikolina Gora.

The other item in the package was a black velvet box with a cardboard tag attached with my name on it.

‘Perhaps it’s a compass,’ said Svetlana. ‘Or something else to encourage you with your flying.’

‘Open it!’ urged Zoya.

The box smelled old and dusty. I lifted the lid. Resting on the cream silk lining was a sapphire brooch surrounded by tiny diamonds.

‘Oh my!’ Mama gasped. ‘Stepan, can we accept such a valuable gift?’

Papa looked surprised when he saw the brooch. It was certainly something unusual. ‘If it comes from Comrade Stalin, then we have to accept it … with gratitude,’ he said.

‘Comrade Stalin must be pleased with you, Stepan,’ Mama said. ‘He is being very generous with us.’

Her frown lines had disappeared and she looked as if ten years had fallen off her face.

I held the brooch in my hand and stared at it in wonder. The dance shoes had been the most beautiful thing I had owned — until now!

Lydia returned from the telephone, flustered. ‘Pyotr said that Svetlana and I must leave. His mother has a bad cough.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Papa, picking up the dried peaches and cheese and wrapping them in some of the tissue paper. ‘Please take these for her. I hope she feels better soon.’

Lydia looked at my father with an odd expression on her face and ushered Svetlana towards the door. Before leaving, she turned and stared at us again as if about to make an announcement, but her lips trembled and she faltered. ‘I know that dacha in Nikolina Gora,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve seen it in a photograph. It’s very beautiful.’

‘And we will all enjoy it together,’ said Papa cheerfully. ‘I hope your husband will be able to come and relax and leave his work worries behind for a while.’

Lydia nodded and put her arm around Svetlana, guiding her out the door.

Mama opened the bottle of champagne that Stalin had sent us and poured some for my father and herself. Even I was allowed half a glass. Then Mama put a record on the gramophone and she and Papa danced the tango to ‘Wine of Love’. I placed the brooch on my desk in my room so I could admire it later.

Zoya called us for dinner and we sat down to eat.

‘Lydia was not herself this evening,’ observed my father.

‘She was moved by your generosity,’ Mama responded. ‘She grew up in poverty. Her father and mother died when she was young and she had to fend for herself and her siblings. Considering where she’s come from, Lydia’s done well. Svetlana is a charming young lady.’

‘I couldn’t agree more!’ I said, scooping some beetroot onto my plate.

‘Alas,’ said Papa, glancing at the clock, ‘time for me to return to work. If Comrade Stalin is sending me supplies, I’d better start on new chocolate ideas for May Day.’

Papa was putting on his jacket when a knock sounded at the door.

‘NKVD! Open up!’

We all looked at each other.

‘Who are you after?’ Mama called, moving towards the door. ‘This is the Azarov apartment. You must have the wrong place.’

Before my mother could open the door there was a bang and the sound of splintering wood. The door fell inwards and three NKVD agents rushed into the apartment. The tallest of them, a man with red hair and a moustache, grabbed my father and flung him against the wall. Mama and I screamed. Zoya ran out of the kitchen with a saucepan to defend Papa but one of the NKVD men pushed her away.

‘There must be a mistake,’ said my father, wincing with pain. ‘I am Stepan Vladimirovich Azarov, chief chocolatier at the Red October factory. I’m on my way there now to receive supplies ordered by Comrade Stalin.’

The red-haired man reached into his pocket and ripped out a document. He shoved it into my father’s face. ‘There is no mistake. This is your arrest warrant. You are accused of being an enemy of the people. But first we will search the apartment.’

He dragged Papa to the living room and threw him on the sofa. The other agents pushed Mama, me and Zoya into the room after him. Mama clung to Papa and cried. It was then I noticed our neighbour, Aleksey Nikolayevich, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway. The NKVD must have forced him to act as a witness to the search and arrest.

For six hours we huddled together while the NKVD agents tore through our apartment like a hurricane, flinging books off the shelves and upending drawers. They seized the strangest of things as evidence: Mama’s sheet music; recipe books; a camera; even the record Mama had put on the gramophone. I watched the red-haired agent write the items down in a notebook. He had long, elegant hands but they were calloused. I might never learn his name but I knew that I would never forget his hard, angular face and those cold eyes.

I heard the agents searching the room I shared with Alexander. Would they take the sapphire brooch and my dance shoes as well? Ponchik must have been hiding under my bed. He yelped when one of the men kicked him. I stood up but Mama tugged me back down. To my relief Ponchik came running to us and nestled by my side. What was to become of us? A moment ago we had been enjoying luxurious gifts sent to us by Comrade Stalin … and now this? There must be a mistake. It gave me smug satisfaction to think that when Comrade Stalin learned about it, these men would pay dearly for treating us like criminals.

The red-haired agent returned to the living room and began searching it. He ordered us to stand up and then ripped through the sofa’s cushions. Mama stifled a cry when he lifted the lid of her piano and slammed it down again. He opened the cabinet and saw the icon of St Sofia. My blood froze. Papa hadn’t committed a crime, but worshipping icons was against the law. Forgive us, Comrade Stalin, I silently prayed. Despite everything I was taught at the Young Pioneers, the paradox of my faith had never registered itself so clearly until then. The agent stared at the icon before seizing it in both hands. I thought he intended to smash it on the floor but instead he winced as if he had been struck in the heart. The sound of the other agents returning to the room alarmed him. He flung the icon under the cupboard and said nothing about it. He didn’t record it in his notebook.

The agents finished their work and forced my father to stand up. Where would they take him? Not to the Lubyanka, surely? My father wasn’t a criminal! My mother would have to contact Comrade Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan, the commissar for the food industry, and let them know what had happened. My father would be released straight away.

Then, to my horror, I saw Mama take out a bag from the bottom shelf of the cupboard. It was the bag she had packed when she first began to fear Papa might be arrested. She must have repacked it. Why? Now he would look guilty! But I was too distracted by the agents marching my father out the door to be angry at my mother.

I followed the men down the stairs. A chill seized me when I saw the black van parked in the street.

‘Papa!’ I cried, grabbing his arm. ‘Papa, they can’t take you away!’

My father turned to me and I will never forget the look in his eyes. Papa, always playful, cheerful and childlike, was like a ghost. His skin was pale and his eyes were hollows, as if his soul had left him.

The red-haired man pushed me away. ‘Go back to your mother,’ he said. The door to the black van was slammed shut. The agents jumped into the front and the vehicle sped away.

‘This will be sorted out and your father will be home later tonight,’ a voice behind me said.

I turned to see the trembling figure of Aleksey Nikolayevich standing behind me. But even as I tried to console myself with my neighbour’s words, I understood my world of family, comfort and privilege was at an end.

Mama wrote to Comrade Stalin and spoke to the secretary of Anastas Mikoyan regarding Papa’s arrest. Comrade Stalin was away from Moscow, we discovered, but Mikoyan’s secretary assured us that if my father could prove his innocence of the charges against him, he would be released.

Every day Mama and I went to the Lubyanka prison for news about my father. But the prison officials wouldn’t reveal anything, nor would they accept the parcel of food we had prepared for him.

I used to despise the people I saw waiting outside the Lubyanka and other government offices. I had viewed them as collaborators and enemies of the people. Now I was one of them. These wretched souls, with their desperate expressions and the rings of exhaustion under their eyes, were the only source of information — and empathy — we had in our plight.

‘Go to Butyrka prison,’ a woman advised us one day when we were turned away yet again. ‘Your husband might have already been questioned and sent there to await his trial.’

We thanked the woman for her advice. To our relief, Butyrka prison accepted our parcel, although the guards wouldn’t confirm whether Papa was there or not.

‘It’s a good sign,’ the woman waiting next in line assured us. ‘If they accept the parcel, he is here.’

Mama and I looked up at the stark walls of the prison.

‘He’ll know that we are thinking of him,’ Mama said, weeping. ‘He’ll know that we haven’t forgotten him.’

My mother expected to be arrested at any time herself and she had good reason to fear it. I had learned that if a husband had been taken, it was almost guaranteed his wife would be detained shortly afterwards. The logic was that if she hadn’t denounced her husband, she had failed in her duties to the State.

‘No, Mama,’ I told her when I found her packing a bag for herself. ‘We are doing things differently this time. You are not to bring bad fortune on yourself. Instead of preparing for your arrest, we are going to get ready for Papa to come home.’

Some of our furniture had been damaged in the search, but no valuables had been stolen. The agents hadn’t taken the sapphire brooch or my dance shoes as I’d feared they would. My mother and I fixed the apartment as best we could: mending ripped curtains, polishing away scratches on furniture, repairing Papa’s favourite books. By keeping ourselves occupied, we pretended that things would return to normal and Papa would come home. Zoya continued to set his place at the table and Mama laid out his clothes for him every day. We were like children playing make-believe.

The magic must have worked in Mama’s case — the NKVD agents didn’t return to arrest her — but Alexander was discharged from the air force.

‘Papa can’t have been tried yet,’ I protested when Alexander returned home to live with us.

‘It didn’t matter to my commanding officers,’ Alexander replied bitterly. ‘The mere idea that Papa might be an enemy of the people was enough reason to get rid of me.’

Nor was my brother the only one to suffer rejection after Papa’s arrest. When I turned up at the gliding school to take my advanced examination I found Sergei Konstantinovich blocking the doorway.

‘You can’t come here any more,’ he said. ‘You put everyone who associates with you in danger. Don’t you understand that?’

At school it was as if I had a disease. The teachers and pupils shrank away from me; they disappeared down corridors or into rooms when they saw me coming. Some of the bolder girls bullied me and wrote nasty things in my schoolbooks and stole things from my desk. They knew the teachers were afraid to stand up for me. I wished I had Svetlana by my side, but she had come down with scarlet fever the night my father was arrested and had to do her lessons at home. Only the music teacher, Bronislava Ivanovna, treated me as before and everyone knew that she was showing courage — and foolishness — to do so.

‘Be strong, Natasha. Don’t give up,’ she’d whisper to me whenever I passed her in the corridor. ‘You have too much talent to let them destroy you.’

There were no more special parcels of food and Mama’s students stayed away. Lydia had to look after Svetlana so it was understandable that she didn’t come. Without Papa’s wages, money became tight. We lived on
kasha
and soup. Alexander went from factory to factory trying to find work but they all turned him away. The only job he could get was cleaning toilets at the metro station. Mama sold her gramophone and her jewellery to keep us.