Sapphire Skies (12 page)

‘We are cursed,’ she told Zoya. ‘You must go away and find another family, otherwise you will fall with us.’

But Zoya refused. ‘You’ve never treated me like a maid, Sofia, so I won’t act like one. We are family now.’

In the end, Zoya became a lifesaver for us. As we no longer received special packages, we needed someone who could stand in line the whole day to secure food and other necessities. In other families, it was the babushkas who performed that task but both my grandmothers had died young. Zoya did her best but sometimes after waiting at the store for seven or eight hours, she might only return with sardines and potatoes. Still, that was better than nothing.

I didn’t even consider going to the Young Pioneers meetings after Alexander told me what had happened to another boy whose parents had been arrested. When the boy refused to renounce his parents and spit on their portraits, he was stripped of his uniform and made to march home in his underwear. The other children taunted him and threw sticks at him. Later that day, the boy hanged himself.

We were allowed to deliver a parcel a month to Butyrka prison. When the next parcel Mama and I took was accepted it bolstered our spirits.

‘Maybe Papa will be home soon,’ I said to my mother. We returned to our apartment to find that the NKVD had been again and turned us out of our home. Our belongings were piled on the pavement and the apartment door was sealed. When I couldn’t find Ponchik, I panicked. I thought that they’d trapped him inside and breaking an NKVD seal was a crime. But then Mama found him hiding under a blanket.

I picked him up and held him close to me. ‘I’d die if anything happened to you,’ I told him.

Mama sighed. ‘Natasha, maybe Svetlana would like to have Ponchik. I don’t know what’s going to become of us. I don’t know if we can keep him.’

The idea of being parted from Ponchik was unthinkable. He had been a gift from Papa. Besides, Lydia was allergic to animals; she would turn him out on the street. Mama must have seen the despair in my eyes, as she said nothing more on the subject.

We were allocated a room in a communal apartment, where the floorboards were painted red to look like carpet and the wallpaper was stained. Mama, Alexander, Zoya and I shared a kitchen, bathroom and toilet with three other families and a divorced couple who still lived together because they didn’t want to give up their spacious room. The atmosphere was poisonous. The divorced couple fought constantly, and even though everyone had their own gas ring, shelf and kitchen table, the residents were forever accusing one another of stealing food.

At first we decided it would be better for us to eat in our room. But the way the other residents watched us was unnerving. Mama was sure they were scrutinising us for actions they could denounce us for in order to get extra space in the apartment. To avoid aggravating them, we decided to keep up the ‘communal spirit’ and ate in the kitchen despite the indigestion the tension caused us.

The partition walls were so thin that if we wished to talk privately we had to pull a blanket over our heads. We kept a picture of Papa hidden under the mattress Mama and I shared and we took it out every evening and set a plate of hard chocolate next to it. In the morning, we hid it again. Families of those accused of being an enemy of the people were supposed to erase all memory of the person and never mention them again. But how could we forget Papa?

When Mama was sorting through our clothes one day, she found a scarf she had borrowed from a neighbour in our old apartment building before Papa’s arrest.

‘Can you take it back on your way home from school?’ Mama asked me. ‘Slip it under the door and make sure nobody sees you.’

On my way home that day I did as Mama had asked. The seal on our old apartment was gone and there was a new doormat out the front. The air in the corridor smelled of fresh paint and floor polish. Some other family lived there now. Out on the street I was surprised to see Svetlana stepping out of a café. I had heard nothing from her since she had fallen sick. Our eyes met. ‘Sveta!’ I said, rushing towards her. ‘You are well?’

She froze for a moment and then reached out her arms to me.

‘When are you coming back to school?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve missed you!’

Lydia came out of the café and saw us. Her eyes narrowed as if I were a dangerous lion about to attack her daughter. She tugged Svetlana away. ‘You don’t talk to that girl any more!’ she hissed at her. ‘Do you understand? Do you want what has happened to her family to happen to us? Her father is a wrecker!’

Lydia sent me a ferocious look.

Svetlana struggled against her mother. ‘It’s Natasha!’ she said. ‘Natasha!’

Lydia slapped Svetlana across the face. Before her daughter had a chance to recover, she grabbed her around the shoulders and marched her like a prisoner down the street. Svetlana turned to look at me. The sorrowful expression in her eyes broke my heart. So I had lost Svetlana too. I tried to understand what was happening to me. It seemed that everyone else was alive but I wasn’t any longer; I was looking at them all through a veil. ‘Be strong, Natasha. Don’t give up,’ Bronislava Ivanovna had said. But how could I fight? I was still alive physically but I was dead in every other sense. I no longer existed as a member of society.

‘You have to forgive Lydia’s reaction,’ Mama told me that evening. ‘She was trying to protect Svetlana. Life has become horrible and insane. We’ve all turned into whisperers. We can no longer even trust our friends.’

I scrutinised my mother’s face. ‘Why hasn’t Comrade Stalin answered us and had Papa released? He used to confide in Papa. Surely he knows he is innocent.’

Mama pursed her lips and turned away. ‘Comrade Stalin is kept in the dark by his advisors, Natasha. You know he told your papa that he didn’t trust the men around him. All this is going on without his knowledge. I will write to him again.’

At Mama’s urging, and with Bronislava Ivanovna secretly paying my fees, I continued to go to school. Svetlana never returned, and I got used to passing girls in the corridor who had once been my friends and not saying anything to them. We didn’t have a piano for me to practise on at home any more but Bronislava Ivanovna was convinced I could still apply for the conservatorium when I finished school. ‘You have a beautiful singing voice, Natasha. Let’s work on that.’

With my dreams of flying in tatters and no friends, I threw myself into singing to distract myself. As well as Russian classical songs, I learned songs by the jazz artists Leonid Utesov and Alexander Tsfasman, who were said to be Stalin’s favourites. I wanted to prove that I was a good Soviet citizen. As all her students had abandoned her, teaching me gave my mother something to occupy herself with as well. The tension in the apartment subsided when Mama and I practised together. Even the divorced couple calmed down, and one day announced that they were expecting a baby together.

The following month, Butyrka prison refused to take our parcel. Mama swooned at the news. I reached out to support her, but I was on the verge of fainting myself. This was what we had been dreading.

‘Don’t fear the worst,’ said a young mother with a child at her breast. ‘They might be depriving him to get him to confess, or they might have tried him already. Go to the station. There is a train leaving for Kolyma today.’

With our legs trembling beneath us, Mama and I ran to the station. A train destined for the Far East was waiting there but the prisoners sentenced to the Kolyma labour camps had already been loaded. The windows were boarded up with only a gap at the top for air. It must have been stifling inside. People holding packages were going from carriage to carriage shouting their loved one’s name. If there was an answer from inside, the guard would take the package to give to the prisoner. One woman received a note back from her husband and held it to her heart. Mama and I called out Papa’s name several times but there was no answer.

When we returned home that evening we found the red-haired NKVD agent waiting for us on the street corner. He was holding a box. Mama and I froze, like deer caught in the sights of the hunter’s gun.

The NKVD agent walked past us and handed the box to Mama without a word. We watched dumbfounded as he hurried away down the street. He hadn’t come to arrest us.

We waited until we returned to our room to see what the box contained. Inside we found items from our apartment that hadn’t been left in the pile for us: Mama’s handmade quilt, a valuable clock, the sapphire brooch and dance shoes I had received from Stalin, and something wrapped in cloth. We opened the cloth to find the icon of St Sofia. On the back was scribbled in pencil:
Forgive me!

Mama and I looked at each other. ‘I wonder who he is,’ Mama whispered. ‘And why he ever became an NKVD agent.’

A few days later, I was combing Ponchik in the courtyard when I saw one of the apartment’s residents, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, meet the postman. She sorted through the letters and found one that seemed to interest her. ‘Sofia, there is something for you!’ I heard her call out to my mother. I wondered who would be sending us a letter. Certainly not a friend; they had all deserted us. Perhaps Comrade Stalin had replied at last!

I picked Ponchik up and ran into the apartment. Ekaterina Mikhailovna was hovering outside our room but the door was closed. She scurried away when she saw me. I opened the door and found Mama on her knees. At first I thought she was praying but then I realised she was sobbing. I put Ponchik down and dropped to my knees beside her. Mama was holding the letter in her hand. It was typewritten and looked official.

My heart sank. Papa must have been found guilty. The people outside Butyrka prison had told us it was common for former friends and colleagues to testify against the accused if they thought it would advantage themselves in some way. What would happen now? Would Papa be sent to a labour camp like the prisoners on the train?

‘Mama,’ I said, putting my hand on her trembling shoulder, ‘if Papa has been found guilty then we must see Comrade Stalin in person. We know that Papa is not a saboteur. He loved his work.’

Mama turned to me. Her eyes had a tormented look in them. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

‘It’s not too late,’ I insisted. ‘An appeal can be made. If Comrade Stalin isn’t in Moscow, we must find out where he is and go there!’

The letter slipped from Mama’s fingers to the floor. Something about the action made my stomach twist with fear. ‘Mama?’

She put her hand on my wrist. It was ice-cold. I knew then that the inconceivable had happened even before my mother told me. ‘Natasha,’ she said, ‘Papa was tried and found guilty. He was executed the same day. My darling, your father is dead.’

O
rlov arrived at Kursky station with dozens of scenarios running through his head. Ilya hadn’t wanted to reveal any more over the telephone; all Orlov knew from his call was that someone had buried Natasha. Who? Where? Did she survive the parachute jump, or did she injure herself and die? Or maybe she had survived the war, lived the rest of her years in a village and passed away an old woman? But in all the circumstances Orlov came up with, Ilya’s use of ‘buried’ meant that the woman he had loved was dead. He had resigned himself to that possibility many years ago, but now that he was closer to finding out how she had died, he was terrified. He had lived in limbo for so long that the feeling of melancholic inertia it produced was familiar. What if the truth was worse than anything he had imagined? A shudder ran through him. He wouldn’t allow himself to think of that.

He hurried past the stalls selling souvenirs —
matryoshka
dolls, fur hats,
khokhloma
spoons — and stopped when he saw a stall peddling Soviet memorabilia. His eyes narrowed as he took in the figurines of Lenin, the pieces of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union flag. These things were sacred once; ideals by which Russians had lived and died. Now they were relegated to the realm of kitsch and curios. He was about to turn away when he noticed the bust of Stalin. Could the younger generation make a joke of the devil too?

Orlov struggled past the tourists and other travellers to the first-class carriage. The train stewardess directed him to a seat by the window, opposite two young German businessmen. ‘Hello,’ they said in Russian and pointed to Orlov’s overnight bag, using gestures to let him know that they would lift it onto the rack for him. It irked Orlov although he understood that they meant well.

When the men were all seated, one of the Germans took out a package containing slices of dark bread that smelled like molasses and a block of aged cheese. He cut the cheese and shared the meal with his companion, then offered some to Orlov, who accepted a piece of bread and cheese only because it seemed polite. Germans and their bread, he thought. The meals offered on Russian trains had improved in the last few years, but Orlov believed that it wouldn’t have mattered if his travelling companions had been offered five-star cuisine; they still would have preferred their pumpernickel bread and salty cheese.

After their supper, the Germans returned to studying their laptops while Orlov tried to lose himself in the Solzhenitsyn novel he had started that morning. He looked over the top of his book at the Germans again. How strange a thing war is, he thought. And how easily animosity is erased when it’s all over. I could have killed these men’s grandfathers — shot them out of the sky or protected the bombers that blew them to smithereens — and yet here we sit, completely civilised. He looked out the window and his mind wandered back to the bronze bust of Stalin. Would somebody buy that and put it in their living room? Stalin was a madman who murdered millions of his own people.

Orlov had been in the air force when the crazed purges of the late 1930s began. He had watched in horror as his commanding officers fell one after the other. They had all been fine men, but had signed confessions, no doubt extracted under torture, stating that they had committed acts of anti-Soviet sabotage and spying. They had been executed or sent to labour camps. Stalin wasn’t only vicious, he was a fool! Even during the German invasion, he continued to remove talented officers from the armed forces. At first, there might have been self-serving logic to the arrests: revolutions had often followed on the shirt tails of war and Stalin wanted to remove anyone who could threaten his power. But then things became frenzied. Every day, people were arrested and shot for nothing more than accidentally bumping a portrait of Stalin or wiping their backside with a piece of newspaper with his image on it.

‘Listen, Natasha, there is something you should know …’

Orlov was distracted from his memory of that fateful July afternoon by the drinks waitress pushing her trolley down the aisle. He purchased a bottle of Georgian wine for himself and the Germans.

‘To friendship between nations,’ he toasted them in Russian.

They had no idea what he’d said and toasted him back with ‘
Prost!
’ Then they went back to their laptops and Orlov returned to his memories.

Nikita Khrushchev, whom Orlov got to know well when he was working on the space program, told him that Stalin once said it was better to kill the innocent along with the guilty than to risk letting the guilty go free. The NKVD were given quotas during the purges, as if they were a factory, and when they couldn’t fulfil those quotas they fabricated charges. Even the Bolshevik general and his wife who had run the orphanage where Orlov grew up disappeared in the purges. That general had been a Party loyalist and from the time Stalin came to power made the orphanage’s children, including Orlov, stand and salute the portrait of ‘their Great Leader’ in the dining room every morning. ‘It is because of Comrade Stalin that you have a roof over your heads. He has provided you with an education, warm clothes and a future. It is because of him that you are not dead,’ the general had repeatedly told them.

Orlov often wondered why he himself had been spared. Despite the cult of Stalin he had been exposed to in the orphanage, he’d hated the man and the Communists. He had mouthed platitudes and kept his views to himself in order to survive. He had fought for Russia during the war, not Stalin. Stalin died in 1953, either of a stroke or poisoned by those around him, according to the differing views. The public mourning was overwhelming. People were crushed to death in the crowds that went to view his body. It was only when Khrushchev began his program of de-Stalinisation that Orlov felt he could visit Natasha’s mother without drawing attention to her. It was remarkable that she had survived after the arrest of her husband and with her missing daughter suspected of being a German spy. Orlov had found Sofia Grigorievna living in an apartment in the Arbat: one room, with a bathroom so small one could barely turn around in it and a kitchenette with enough space only for a sink and a café table. But the apartment was meticulously kept, with white antimacassars on the chairs, pink chrysanthemums in a vase on the windowsill and not a speck of dust anywhere. Orlov’s eyes fell on the icon of St Sofia in the corner. His mother had once owned the same image. There was a portrait of a man — Natasha’s father, he assumed — in a frame on a side table. Next to it was a photograph of Natasha with her brother, who was in an air-force uniform.

‘Won’t you please sit down, General Orlov,’ Sofia Grigorievna said.

She had Natasha’s fair colouring and doll-like features. But while her daughter’s beauty had been vibrant, Sofia Grigorievna emitted the fragile dignity of a woman who had survived tragedy. All her family was gone, and the only living being she had to lavish her affection upon was the red-furred dog she lifted onto her lap.

‘Natasha told me a lot about you,’ she said.

Her grey eyes met Orlov’s and he wondered how much Natasha had revealed to her mother. Then he realised that even if she knew everything, it wouldn’t have made this meeting any easier.

‘You were kind to write to me the details you knew of her disappearance,’ Sofia Grigorievna continued. ‘I have your letter still. I shall take it, along with Natasha’s correspondence, to my grave.’

Orlov took this as confirmation that she hadn’t had contact with her daughter since the war. Or was it? He decided to be more direct.

‘Do you think that your daughter might still be alive?’ he asked her. ‘We have not found her plane … or her body.’

Sofia Grigorievna’s gaze moved to the pictures of her husband and children. ‘I don’t know. With my son, Alexander, I knew he had died the night it happened. But with Natasha …’ She shook her head. ‘I simply don’t know.’ Looking back to Orlov she added, ‘I am sure that if Natasha could have, she would have contacted you or me by now. Both of us know she wasn’t a spy.’

They lapsed into silence. Out on the street there was the sound of singing. A group of old men and women were marching along with Stalin’s portrait. There were those who believed that the Soviet Union couldn’t survive without him. They listened to the singing and chanting for a while.

Sofia Grigorievna said suddenly, ‘I’m glad that monster is dead. Aren’t you?’

Orlov was taken aback. It wasn’t the sort of statement people came out with, no matter what they truly thought. The Soviet Union was a nation of people who knew that a single utterance could cost them their lives. But he understood that her boldness meant she trusted him and he wanted to assure her that her faith wasn’t misplaced. Something he hadn’t considered telling her before came into his mind.

‘Stalin signed your husband’s death warrant,’ he said. ‘Did you know that all along?’

Sofia Grigorievna stroked the dog for a while before answering. ‘When Stalin replaced Yezhov with Beria as head of the NKVD, hundreds of thousands of convictions were quashed and scores of people were let out of labour camps. For many it was proof that Stalin hadn’t known about the NKVD’s excesses and now he was making good.’

‘Including Natasha? Even though it was too late for her father?’

Sofia Grigorievna placed the dog down on the rug and got up to close the window. ‘I’ve always known who was responsible for my husband’s death,’ she said. ‘The chocolate factory couldn’t meet its quotas because the Soviet Union couldn’t compete for ingredients with the Capitalist countries on the world market. When people don’t have chocolate for New Year’s Eve they blame the State. Well, you can’t have that. Scapegoats must be found. The first was the chief factory manager, and when that didn’t change anything, the axe fell on my husband.’

Natasha’s mother had described things clearly but now Orlov was confused. He hesitated a moment before saying, ‘Forgive me, Sofia Grigorievna, if I ask you too many painful questions but I’m trying to understand something. Did you never voice your opinions about Stalin to your daughter? You see, she worshipped him.’

Sofia Grigorievna didn’t flinch. ‘I think you understand very well, General Orlov. I let Natasha think that Stalin wasn’t responsible for her father’s death. I encouraged her in that belief. Why? Because my daughter had to survive in the Soviet Union. She already had her family background against her. How could I handicap her any further by making her hate Stalin? You know how headstrong she could be. Inflaming her would only have achieved her arrest and execution.’

Orlov recalled Sofia Grigorievna’s explanation as he sat on the train to Orël. Even now, he was impressed by her wisdom. It must have been galling to hear her daughter praise the man who had been responsible for her husband’s death, but she had borne it to protect the daughter she loved.

It was late when Orlov arrived at the hotel in Orël. There was a note from Ilya at reception saying that he would collect him at five o’clock the next morning. Where are we going, wondered Orlov.

He ate some smoked cod and bread for supper. Try as he might, he couldn’t sleep. During the war, when sleep deprivation was a daily way of life, he had thought he would sleep forever when it was all over. But his post-war life had been plagued by the insomnia that came from a troubled mind.

The hotel was modern and the walls were thin. He could hear the restaurant’s singer. Was she really singing that song or was it his imagination?

The lyrics were from a poem by Konstantin Simonov. It had been Natasha’s favourite song during the war and the regiment used to ask her to sing it often. She had a beautiful voice and her interpretation of the song brought tears to everyone’s eyes.

‘If something should happen,’ she’d once told Orlov after they’d made love, ‘I’ll wait for you no matter what because my waiting will keep you alive. I’ll wait for you just as Svetlana always waits for me to return from a mission. It’s because she waits for me that I survive.’

‘I did wait for you, my darling,’ Orlov whispered into the darkness. ‘But now it seems you were dead all along.’

His mind drifted back to Sofia Grigorievna. He hadn’t gone to visit her again after that first time but he’d used his influence to make sure she was well provided for until her death in 1960. She had been cremated, as was the new trend in the Soviet Union then. It occurred to Orlov now that he’d missed an opportunity by not asking her if he could read Natasha’s letters. Perhaps there would have been some clue in them. But back then he’d still harboured the hope that he would find her in person. Now the truth was waiting for him, somewhere out there in the dawn.

‘Where is she buried?’ Orlov asked Ilya the next morning when his friend came to pick him up. He hadn’t even said hello.

Ilya opened the door to his Skoda for Orlov. ‘There is a village on the edge of the Trofimovsky Forest where a ninety-year-old woman says her father and uncle found the body of a female pilot in July 1943 and buried her in a family crypt.’

‘A crypt?’ asked Orlov in surprise. Family crypts were unusual in Russia, especially in the countryside.

‘That’s all I know,’ said Ilya. ‘I didn’t want to investigate without you being there.’

‘Why didn’t you inform the Ministry of Defence? If there are remains there they’ll want to run tests.’

Ilya stared at the road ahead. ‘I didn’t want to call them out until we’re sure there is actually a body and we aren’t simply listening to an old lady with a failing memory. But also because … well, I thought that you should see her first.’