Sapphire Skies (2 page)

Something sharp pricked Orlov’s skin. Glancing down he saw that he was holding a round object and that his palm was bleeding. He took whatever it was to the rinse bucket. When he had washed away the dirt and recognised what he had found, a wave of grief overwhelmed him. He sat down in the dirt and tugged at his collar. Leonid, frightened that his father was having another heart attack, rushed towards him. But he stopped short when he saw the delicate object Orlov was holding in his trembling fingers: a sapphire and diamond brooch.

‘It was her call sign, wasn’t it?’ asked Leonid. ‘Sapphire Skies.’

‘It was her lucky charm,’ Orlov replied softly. ‘But it didn’t help her that day.’

By late in the afternoon, the mechanical digger had removed all the wreckage of the plane and the volunteers had searched the topsoil of an area wider than had originally been marked out. They had located most of the interior of the plane — the seat, controls, Natasha’s personal belongings — but nothing of Natasha herself nor her parachute. Ilya walked around the site deep in thought then gave the volunteers the instruction to secure it and gather the search equipment. Klavdiya placed the cosmetic cases and brooch into a protective metal box and pressed it to her chest.

Leonid indicated to his father that the military car had returned to take them to their hotel.

Ilya approached Orlov and the two men held each other’s gaze. There was no need for them to state the obvious. The day’s dig had finally solved the mystery of where Natasha’s plane had crashed, but without Natasha’s remains, Orlov was in turmoil. He did not want to look at Lagunov, the air-force man. Instead, he glanced at the setting sun, as if the answers he sought might somehow appear there. For years now, he had been convinced that his beloved had been killed in an air fight. There could be no other explanation for why she had not returned to him. But today’s discoveries had made it very clear: Natasha had not gone down with her plane.

L
ily was having that dream again. She was hanging from the side of a ship with only a piece of rotting rope to cling on to. The sea churned beneath her dangling feet. If the thirty-metre fall didn’t kill her, then the propellers would, or the sharks that lurked beneath the surface. Her heart pumped like a piston. The rope creaked and began to fray …

‘No!’

Lily gave a start and opened her eyes. Pushkin, who had been asleep on her legs, blinked at her. She glanced at her alarm clock: 6.30 am; then looked up at the ceiling and the brass pendant light fitting that hung above her head like a guillotine blade.

‘Come on,’ she said, reaching down and rubbing Pushkin’s chin.

The geriatric cat stretched his rickety legs and jumped onto the floor to join the two kittens, Max and Georgy, who were staring at Lily with their guileless eyes. One of the good things about street cats, thought Lily, swinging her feet to the floor and feeling around for her slippers, is that they’re patient. She remembered her family’s cat, Honey, who wouldn’t have tolerated waiting for her breakfast.

The cats followed Lily to the kitchen, their untrimmed claws clicking on the parquet floor. Lily filled the kettle with bottled water and plugged it into the wall socket before opening a can of cat food and spooning the contents onto a plate. She placed the plate on the floor and leaned against the refrigerator, watching her feline guests lap the food.

‘Before you go to sleep,’ the counsellor back in Sydney had advised her, ‘think of something you like and examine it from every angle. A cat, for instance: imagine the rumble of a cat purring; the caramel smell of its fur; the warmth that transfers to your hand when you scratch its belly. Cats are therapeutic.’

Lily shut off the memory of those sessions with the counsellor. If she started thinking about them again she’d have trouble getting through the day and she had an important meeting with the advertising agency. ‘Moscow in winter isn’t a place you go to cure depression,’ Lily’s mother had told her before she departed from Sydney airport seven months earlier. But Lily had found Moscow cocooned in snow strangely comforting. It was summer now and the trees on Tatarskaya Street, where she lived, were in full leaf. Yet Lily felt the same sense of despair she’d had when she’d arrived. She was thirty-two years of age and she had lost all direction.

She made herself a cup of smoky-tasting Russian tea with lemon and carried it to the living room. She sank down onto the floral sofa, and stared at the imposing mahogany wall unit where she’d placed her television and CD collection. How had they got that thing up to the fourth floor, she wondered each time she sat in this spot. She’d decided that it must have been carted up piece by piece. All the furniture in the apartment was too big for the space and added to the cramped feeling inside. It was the antithesis of the breezy beachside cottage she’d shared with Adam in Sydney’s north.

She sipped her tea and, despite her intentions, began thinking about the day she and her fiancé had thrown a barbecue for their friends to mark the completion of the renovations to their cottage and the bombshell that had fallen on them.

‘Hey mate, you better get that spot checked out,’ Adam’s best friend, a nurse at Royal North Shore Hospital, had told him that afternoon. Bradley had pointed to a pink bubble on Adam’s shoulder, so tiny that Lily, who thought she knew every inch of Adam’s skin, hadn’t noticed it before.

‘I’ll make an appointment for you,’ she told Adam. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing, but best to get it looked at.’

Lily had been felled when the specialist’s face turned grave as he examined the spot under a magnifying lens. ‘We’ll have to do a biopsy and then a test to see where the cells might have spread to,’ he told them.

They had walked back to their car in a daze. Weren’t melanomas meant to be big black ugly things that let you know they were dangerous, like funnel-web spiders?

They postponed their wedding to focus on Adam’s treatment. While the surgeons cut a chunk out of his shoulder, Lily researched alternative therapies. She read books on juicing, and about how cancer survivors had defied stage-four diagnoses by drinking bicarbonate of soda mixed with molasses. She took Adam to his reiki and reflexology appointments. Together they posted positive affirmations on their fridge and on their bathroom mirror:
I am healthy, healed and whole
;
I now claim perfect health
.

At first, the surgeon was confident everything had been taken out. But a few months later lumps appeared on Adam’s neck, which were lymph nodes that needed to be removed.

Adam fought his worsening prognosis with everything he had, and Lily fought alongside him. To the amazement of the medical profession, Adam’s scans and blood tests started to come back normal. At his follow-up appointments over the next year, he passed every one with flying colours.

After all they’d been through, Lily would have been happy with a simple service on the beach. But Adam insisted that she have her dream wedding, with a string quartet, lavender and vintage pink rose bouquets, a pale lavender cake, flower girls, and a dress that swished around her ankles when she walked.

They’d booked the reception venue in Bowral for the second time when Lily woke up one night to hear Adam retching in the bathroom.

‘Was it the green curry?’ she’d asked him. ‘Do you have food poisoning?’

One look from Adam and Lily had understood that this wasn’t the first time the vomiting had occurred.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam’s doctor told them. ‘It appears you have tumours in your stomach and bowel.’

That night, Lily’s dream of falling into an abyss began. Eight months later, Adam was gone.

Max jumped onto the wall unit, sending CDs clattering to the floor and jolting Lily from her painful memories. She picked the kitten up and placed him on the windowsill, then glanced at the clock. She’d have to get a move on if she didn’t want to be late for work.

The bathroom was squeezed between her bedroom and the narrow entrance hall. She picked up a towel from the cupboard, heard a snarl and jumped back just in time to avoid the paw that swiped at her from under the telephone table. She’d forgotten about Mamochka, Max and Georgy’s mother. The tortoiseshell was the latest addition to Lily’s cat sanctuary, courtesy of Oksana, her landlady, who charged her a reduced rent for taking in the overflow of stray felines that she herself rescued. Lily had four in her apartment. Oksana, whose apartment was only bigger by two rooms, had thirty.

‘Sorry,’ said Lily, making as much space as she could between the cat and herself. Unlike the other strays, Mamochka was wild. She only came out to eat after Lily had gone to bed, and anyone who approached was repelled with a growl and a stomp of her paw.

‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ Oksana had assured Lily. ‘With love and affection Mamochka will come around. They all do.’

Lily turned on the shower and stood under the spray. For two weeks of the year during summer, Moscow’s city council turned the hot water off so the pipes could be maintained. Lily had grown accustomed to the ice-cold water on her skin; it was bracing and numbed her thoughts like an icepack numbed a bruise. After her shower, she dressed instinctively in what her friends called ‘Lily’s Park Avenue Princess look’: a Ralph Lauren shirt dress, tan court shoes, pink-brown lipstick and a touch of mascara around her amber eyes.

‘Lily, you dress up for everything,’ Adam used to say with a fond smile. ‘Even the beach!’

Adam, who’d been a freelance web-page designer and a volunteer surf lifesaver, thought ‘dressing up’ meant discarding thongs for a closed shoe. Lily’s mother had been a fashion and beauty writer for a newspaper and Lily had picked up the habit of dressing well from her. Now her smart clothes and fashionably blow-dried long brown hair had become a way of coping: making the outer shell presentable while inside she was in pieces.

Before leaving the apartment, she put out fresh water for the cats. Pushkin rubbed against her legs and she bent down to pat him. ‘Okay, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I’m off to work.’

It was only when she’d closed the door and turned the three deadlocks that she realised she’d spoken to Pushkin the way she used to speak to Adam. Her heart sank and she sensed another difficult day ahead.

With many Muscovites away at their dachas for the summer, the city had taken on a more relaxed atmosphere. The traffic had eased and Lily felt for the first time that she was breathing oxygen instead of the acrid fumes of diesel.

A trail of commuters were making their way to the Paveletskaya metro station and Lily joined them. She descended the long wooden escalator to the platform and managed to squeeze herself onto the next train. The first stop was Novokuznetskaya. A group of tourists stared in confusion at the Cyrillic signs; there wasn’t a single notice in English. ‘Why do the Russians give things such bloody long names!’ she heard one of the tourists lament.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had seen an influx of foreign investment and international companies, as well as tourists pouring into Russia. It was the reason why Lily, with her marketing experience and bilingual skills, had found a job in the city so quickly. She glanced at the metro station guide: Bagrationovskaya; Shchyolkovskaya; Krasnogvardeyskaya. Even if you could read Cyrillic, you needed to be able to read it quickly or you’d miss your stop.

She alighted at Tverskaya Station and took the underpass to reach Pushkin Square. The underpass was like a mini shopping mall, with kiosks built into the walls selling everything from potato
piroshki
and icons painted on wooden eggs to pirated CDs and counterfeit watches. The air smelt of
kvass
, the fermented beverage made of rye bread that was popular among the Russians in summer. Lily dreaded this part of her trip to work. Her parents had told her that when they’d come to the Soviet Union in 1969, the government had made sure the drunks and the homeless were hidden from foreign tourists. Now they were out in full view. It turned Lily’s stomach to see men lying comatose with people stepping over them, or kneeling before paper cups and begging for coins. The sight that affected her most was the old women standing near the exit. Some of them sold potatoes and beets to supplement their meagre pensions, but the very elderly or crippled simply held out their withered hands. Lily knew these were the ones who had survived the bitter winter; there were many more who hadn’t.

The face of the grandmother Lily had loved and had lost when she was nineteen years old flashed before her. That trip Lily’s parents had made in 1969 was to smuggle her grandmother out of the country. If her parents hadn’t taken that risky venture, Alina might have ended up like these old women in the underpass.

When Lily had first walked through here, she’d been tempted to find some other way to cross six-lane Tverskaya Street so she didn’t have to witness the old women’s suffering. But then she’d found something inside her that hadn’t been depleted during the ordeal of the past four years and had reasoned that even doing something small was better than doing nothing at all. She’d stopped buying takeaway cappuccinos, CDs and lipsticks she didn’t really need and now kept the saved roubles to give to the impoverished women. It was a ritual for each Friday, yet on the other days she still couldn’t bring herself to look the women in the eyes.

‘You know that Moscow’s beggars are the highest paid in the world,’ the concierge from the Mayfair Hotel, where Lily worked, had told her one day when he saw her dispensing the money. She was shocked that he could be so heartless. It might have been true of some of the young people kneeling before cups in the underpass, but how could it be true of these frail old women?

‘Please! Take it!’ Lily said today, handing her roubles to the oldest of the women. When she had nothing left to give, she ran up the stairs and emerged into Pushkin Square. She closed her eyes and took in gulps of air. When she opened them again she found herself face to face with an old woman clutching a dog.

The woman pushed a sign in English towards her. It read
: Please buy my dog and take good care of her. We have nothing to eat
. The woman was aged, but beneath her mottled skin she had high cheekbones and a well-defined chin. The yellow blouse she wore was faded but clean and her white hair was neatly coiled into a French roll. The dog resembled a fox terrier and had a smooth coat and bright eyes. Compared to those in the underpass, this woman didn’t appear destitute, yet her demeanour exuded such hopelessness that Lily felt crushed by it.

Although she’d distributed her charity budget for the week, she reached into her handbag and took out her purse. She handed over a fifty-rouble note and the woman’s eyes filled with tears. She kissed the dog and whispered something in its ear.

‘No! No!’ Lily protested in Russian when she realised the woman intended to give her the dog. ‘I don’t want the dog. Just take the money.’

The woman looked surprised that Lily spoke Russian. ‘But you must take my dog,’ she said, holding out the little creature.

Lily stepped back, overwhelmed by the situation. She turned away from the woman and rushed across the square. She was close to tears. The world was a mess and she felt powerless to fix it.

‘You stupid foreigner!’ a drunk man sitting at the base of Pushkin’s statue shouted out after her as Lily passed him. ‘It was a trick! She was never going to give you the dog!’

The Mayfair Hotel was a boutique establishment that occupied a restored eighteenth-century palace and catered to executive business people and affluent travellers. Lily rushed past the floral centrepiece in the marble reception area and waved to the desk manager before making her way to the sales office. She stopped at the staff bathroom along the way to check she hadn’t smeared her mascara.

‘Come on, pull yourself together,’ she said to her reflection.

There was a brass plaque above the sink, placed there by Lily’s boss, the director of sales and marketing:
You never get a second chance to make a first impression
. Scott, an American, never seemed to have a black day, or even a blue one. His Monday morning motivational meetings were renowned. Not only did his staff have to share their work goals for the week, but he assigned them each a personal affirmation which they were to repeat to him the first time they saw him each day of that week. The affirmation Scott had selected for Lily for the current week was
My life is a super success story!