Sapphire Skies (7 page)

Lily thought of the old woman waiting for her at the underpass exit and glanced at her watch. It was already five-thirty. She hoped the woman would wait. She didn’t want to lose her again and spend all night worrying about what might have happened to her and Laika.

Kate left and Scott turned his attention back to Lily and Colin. He didn’t say anything further about Lily’s contract but instead described the building the hotel had purchased in St Petersburg. ‘It’s a former Baroque mansion on Nevsky Prospekt and the plan is to incorporate the original interior features into the new design.’

Lily was wondering how to excuse herself from the discussion when Scott himself noticed the time.

‘Gosh! Is it already five-forty? Melanie has a function today and I have to pick up the kids from their music lesson.’

‘You’d better get going then,’ said Colin. ‘The traffic will be heavy this time of evening.’

After saying goodbye, Lily rushed out of the hotel and towards Pushkin Square. Surely the woman would wait for her? A noise like two cars colliding took her by surprise. She stopped and looked around. There wasn’t an accident in sight, and besides she hadn’t heard any screeching of brakes. What had made that noise then?

When she reached Pushkin Square, Lily stopped in her tracks. It took her a moment to comprehend the scene before her. Figures were staggering around covered in soot. Black smoke was pouring from the underpass exit and out of it clambered people with bleeding and burned faces, their clothing torn.

‘Get them water!’ a woman shouted to the occupants of a nearby building who were watching from their windows.

The smoke began to billow from the exit in greater volumes. What was happening? A fire?

Lily thought of the woman and Laika. ‘Oh my God!’ she cried and ran towards the exit, but everything had slid into slow motion. Her legs felt like lead. The woman’s face and Laika’s trusting expression flashed before her. She had told the woman to wait for her inside the underpass instead of up in the square.

A man with a bleeding cut on his forehead grabbed Lily before she reached the stairs. ‘Are you crazy?’ he screamed. ‘A bomb has just exploded! There’s a fire! You’ll find nothing but dead bodies down there!’

From several blocks away came the sound of sirens as rescue vehicles tried to get through the traffic. Lily couldn’t think clearly. Her body had gone numb. She leaned against a lamppost to support herself.

The police arrived and cordoned off the area. Groups of onlookers gathered on the opposite side of Tverskaya Street, trying to see what had happened. More bleeding and burned people stumbled out of the underpass or were carried by others. Ambulance medics lifted the worst cases onto stretchers while other victims collapsed on the ground. An office boy arrived with a mail cart filled with bottles of water. Lily joined in handing out the water to the victims to pour on their burns. The number of injured people was too large to grasp.

‘Did you see an old lady with a dog?’ Lily asked each emerging one as she handed out the water. They either shook their heads or stared at her blankly, too shocked to understand what she was asking.

The fire-fighters arrived, along with security agents, and rushed into the underpass. Lily looked at each stretcher as it was brought up the stairs. She couldn’t tell who was alive or who was dead. Some of the victims had been so badly burned it was hard to believe they were human.

‘Did you see an old woman with a dog?’ she continued to ask. Then she realised that her question was being echoed around the square. ‘Did you see my sister? She sells cosmetics in the underpass.’ ‘Did you see a man with a child in a stroller?’

She sat down on the pavement and began to cry. Who could have done this? The police diverted the traffic and ordered everyone who wasn’t involved in the rescue operation to move away. Lily didn’t want to leave. She stared into the smouldering tunnel, hoping she’d see the old woman and Laika delivered safely from the site. A policeman pushed her away and in a daze she walked along Tverskaya Street. Then, in front of McDonald’s she saw her. She was sitting down, while a man in a pharmacist’s uniform applied a plaster to a cut on her neck; the flower vendor stood nearby and Laika waited beside her, regarding her mistress with concern in her eyes.

‘Oh, thank God!’ cried Lily, rushing towards them. ‘Is she all right?’ she asked the flower vendor.

‘She’s not badly hurt,’ the vendor assured her. ‘Just a nasty cut to her neck. After the explosion the lights in the underpass went out. All I could hear was smashing glass and screams. I managed to grab hold of her and the dog and drag them up the stairs with me.’

‘Thank you!’ Lily said. ‘I thought they’d been killed!’

The pharmacist closed his first aid kit and stood up. ‘The cut’s deep but I’ve cleaned it,’ he explained to the two women. ‘If it becomes sore or red though, take her to a doctor.’ He moved on to attend to other victims.

‘I’d better go and ring my husband,’ the vendor told Lily. ‘He’ll be out of his mind.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Lily asked her. ‘You must be upset.’

The vendor shook her head. ‘I’m rattled but it’s worse for elderly people like her who lived through the war,’ she said indicating the old woman. ‘This sort of thing brings it back to them. The sound of a car backfiring used to send my grandmother scrambling under the bed.’

The vendor left and Lily sat down next to the old woman and put her arm around her. With the mayhem all around, she was grateful that the woman and her dog were still alive. What now, she wondered. She’d promised to take Laika but she couldn’t possibly leave the old woman alone.

‘C
ome, let’s run!’ I shouted to my friend, Svetlana, when we alighted from the trolley bus on Arbat Street. ‘Mama is sure to have baked us something delicious!’

Svetlana and I hitched our school books under our arms and darted between the pedestrians and through the maze of crooked streets. The Arbat district used to be where Moscow’s artists and intellectuals lived side by side with its gentry. Now it seemed everyone was living here as ancient churches were torn down to build residences for Party officials and the mansions of the aristocrats were divided into communal apartments. The elegant Filatov building used to house two hundred people. Now three thousand lived there. This was necessary, of course, I knew.

When Svetlana and I reached Number 11 Skatertny Pereulok, where I lived with my family, we stopped to catch our breath then raced up the five flights of stairs to Apartment 23. Our Armenian neighbour, Amalya, came out of her apartment on the first floor holding her new baby boy. She and her husband had been given permission to move to Moscow after excelling in their roles as Party officials in Yerevan. Now her husband was an engineer with the Ministry of Defence.

‘Ah! Here are the twins!’ Amalya said when she saw us.

Svetlana and I weren’t sisters, of course, but we had similar physiques and round doll-like faces. We were the smallest girls in our class at school but we were the champions at ice-skating and gymnastics. Our compact frames were explosive with strength and speed. But while I was fair with long straight hair, Svetlana struggled to keep her golden brown curls restrained in her braids. At fourteen, my breasts were beginning to swell under the black serge of my school uniform with great promise, and boys were noticing, while Svetlana remained as flat as an ironing board.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Amalya, her eyes sparkling. ‘I have a gift for your mother, Natasha.’

She disappeared into her apartment and returned with something wrapped in a cloth. ‘The dried peaches she likes so much,’ she explained. ‘In return for the jam she gave me the other day.’

I thanked Amalya, and Svetlana and I continued on our way. When we reached the door to our apartment, I was surprised to hear my mother playing the piano. She usually put the gramophone on when she was giving dancing lessons. I opened the door and motioned for Svetlana to follow me. The aroma of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg wafted around us. Svetlana and I grinned at each other. Mama had baked her delicious cookies.

We took off our shoes and put on the slippers that Mama kept on a shelf by the door. I placed the peaches next to the cookies in the kitchen, then Svetlana and I padded down the corridor towards the living room where my mother gave lessons during the day. At night it became the main bedroom. Our apartment was small but at least we had it to ourselves, a privilege given to my father because of his position at the chocolate factory.

Mama was playing Chopin when we entered the living room. My brother, Alexander, who was on leave from the air force, was leading Svetlana’s mother, Lydia Dmitrievna, around the living room in a waltz. Svetlana’s father was the manager of a factory and a Party official. Lydia was taking dance and deportment lessons from my mother. Everyone came to a stop when they saw us.

‘The gramophone is broken and we couldn’t fix it,’ my mother explained.

Like me, Mama was blonde with a round face and grey eyes. She was wearing a royal blue dress with a gored skirt and tailored bodice. My mother was always well dressed and made up even when she was doing housework.

Svetlana’s gaze drifted in the direction of the gramophone.

‘Let Sveta try to fix it,’ I told my mother. ‘She can fix anything.’

Svetlana planned to go to the Moscow Aviation Institute when she finished school. She was fascinated by the way things worked.

‘I’ve unscrewed the top,’ said Alexander, whom my father described as a taller, slimmer and more elegant version of himself. ‘But I can’t see what the problem is.’

Svetlana picked up the screwdriver next to the gramophone and examined the parts. She asked Alexander to bring her a rag. He returned from the kitchen with one and handed it to her.

Mama started playing the piano again and Alexander and Lydia resumed dancing.

‘I’ve fixed it!’ cried Svetlana, winding up the gramophone and watching the record spin. ‘There was too much grease around the spring.’

‘Marvellous!’ said Alexander. ‘Can you fix fighter planes as well? Maybe I should take you back to the base with me.’

Svetlana grinned. ‘Maybe one day I will design airplanes. And Natasha will fly them.’

‘Even as a child my daughter preferred building sets to dolls,’ Lydia said proudly. Lydia’s eyes were green like Svetlana’s but lacked their gentle expression. My mother had taught her how to powder her face and create a beauty mark on her temple to draw attention to her eyes, but Lydia’s impoverished upbringing was evident in the smallpox scars on her cheeks and the stains on her teeth. Even though she always smiled at me, I sensed that she disliked me. I didn’t know why. Perhaps she resented sharing Svetlana. Like my mother and me, Svetlana and Lydia were close.

‘I’ve made cookies for you girls,’ Mama told us. ‘Go and eat them and then do your homework while we finish here.’

On our way to the kitchen, I let our dog, Ponchik, out of the bathroom. He was a stray, with fluffy black-and-white fur, that my father had found wandering about on the metro line. Mama put Ponchik away when she gave lessons so he wouldn’t get underfoot. I took him to the kitchen with us and shut the door. We ate the cookies and drank a cup of tea with a spoonful of jam in it. Then we settled down to do our algebra homework at the kitchen table. I noticed the fine line that appeared between Svetlana’s brows as she concentrated and I watched her write down her calculations in her notebook. Her handwriting was so small, so neat, so scientific-looking that I grabbed the book from her to admire it.

‘Ah, Sveta, what a perfectionist you are!’

‘What about you?’ she replied, picking Ponchik up and cuddling him on her lap. ‘You practise the piano for hours! When you are playing, the building could catch fire and you wouldn’t notice!’

What Svetlana had said was true. Since I was a young child, music had been my passion and I had planned to study at the Conservatory. But these days I was more interested in flying. Svetlana and I had finished our homework when our maid, Zoya, came in carrying the special food parcel that we received twice a month. She smiled at us, patted Ponchik and hummed softly as she filled the shelves with cheese, caviar, sugar, flour, tea, canned vegetables and eggs. She pulled out a bottle of red sauce.

‘What’s that?’ asked Svetlana.

‘Something called ke-tch-up,’ replied Zoya, squinting at the label.

‘Oh, I’ve seen that advertised in the newspaper,’ I said. ‘It’s a condiment that every American family keeps on their table.’

Zoya was still unpacking when Mama and Lydia appeared at the door.

‘Come on, Svetochka,’ Lydia said, using the familiar form of Svetlana’s name. ‘We must go home now so you can study for the history examination tomorrow.’

Lydia’s gaze fell on the cakes of finely milled soap Zoya was stacking on the kitchen bench. As far as I knew, while Svetlana’s family could shop in closed distribution stores, they never received special parcels like us. Although they also had an apartment of their own, it was smaller than ours. It was darker too because all the windows faced the wall of an adjacent building. They had to share the bathroom with a man from Georgia whom Lydia complained was vile and dirty and who spat on the floor.

When Mama noticed what Lydia was looking at, she picked up a cake of the soap and handed it to her.

‘No! No!’ Lydia protested.

‘I insist,’ said my mother, pressing the soap into Lydia’s hand. ‘It smells beautiful and is soft on your skin.’

I picked up another cake of the soap from the bench and inhaled a breath before handing it to Svetlana to smell. Indeed, the fragrance was heavenly: honey and almonds.

‘I have something for Svetlana too,’ Mama said, disappearing into the corridor and returning with a length of woollen cloth. ‘I bought this the other day from my neighbour. I’ve made a skirt for Natasha. There’s enough left over for you to make one for Svetlana too.’

Mama had obtained the material from a woman in our street, Galina, whose husband had been killed in the Civil War. Galina would hear a rumour that material was available and buy it, then sell it for a small profit. Speculation, as it was known, was a crime but there was often no other way for us to obtain certain goods. Sometimes the State produced rolls of material but no buttons, zippers or needles and thread. At other times, the opposite was true. Of course, none of this was Comrade Stalin’s fault. It was the result of spies and saboteurs who didn’t want the Soviet Union to succeed. ‘Really, Sofia, you know I can’t accept this,’ Lydia said. ‘I could get Pyotr into trouble.’

‘Yes, you can,’ said my mother. ‘Think of keeping Svetlana warm.’

Lydia acquiesced and she and my mother kissed each other’s cheeks. Svetlana and I did the same.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I told Svetlana.

Once they were gone, Alexander — Sasha we called him — came into the kitchen and helped himself to some of Mama’s ginger cookies.

‘Listen, you two,’ said Mama, ‘I have a message from your father. He received a package today at the factory. He wants you to go and collect it. Why don’t you go now while Zoya and I make dinner.’

‘Really?’ I replied, perking up. ‘Who is the package from?’

Mama smiled at me. ‘From Comrade Stalin. Natasha, I think you made a good impression on our leader when you met him last week.’

The Red October chocolate factory was situated on Bolotny Island, opposite the Kremlin. Mama gave Alexander and I string shopping bags to take with us. Everyone carried string bags now and called them ‘just-in-case bags’. Although there were certain staples in the packages we received, some items — kerosene and matches; spoons and forks; paint; nails — were always difficult to obtain. If a person saw a queue outside a store, they joined it. Only after they had secured their place did they ask what was being sold.

On Vozdvizhenka Street, a group of people were huddled around a store window admiring the goods displayed in red and gold boxes. They were the kinds of things we received in our special packages — cups and saucers, eggs, cheese, pens and hair rollers. A sign on the door of the shop read:
Sold Out
.

‘Don’t you think it’s unfair that we receive things that the rest of our comrades go without?’ I asked Alexander.

He frowned and stopped on the street corner. ‘Sacrifice is necessary to the building of the Socialist State, Natasha,’ he said. ‘It’s not someone privileged by birth who is receiving those special packages. It is our father, an ordinary citizen who has achieved outstanding success for the Motherland through dedicated work. What he and other innovators, leaders and pioneers receive today, every citizen can expect tomorrow.’

My brother spoke articulately but the way his gaze shifted downwards made me wonder if he believed what he said. I believed it. It was a lovely dream and I put my faith in it. After a Socialist State had been constructed in Russia, life would be exactly as Comrade Stalin had described it: more fun and more joyous for everyone.

I could tell when we were nearing the chocolate factory because of the smell of cocoa and roasting nuts that wafted in the air. As well as chocolates, the factory produced caramels, nougat and pralines. But it was the chocolate department that worked three shifts instead of two. My father and the factory’s managers toiled from the late afternoon to early in the morning. Those were the hours that Stalin kept and nobody wanted to risk being absent in case he telephoned to inquire about a new delicacy that was being developed or to ask how the imported machines were performing. Although my father was the chief chocolatier and not responsible for production, Stalin often asked for him. He would speak with Papa about everyday things: family life and the challenges of growing older. Papa told us that he thought Stalin sounded lonely and that he had the impression our leader could not trust the Politburo members around him. My father would tell him jokes to cheer him up and Stalin would laugh and say it was good to speak to him. Although Papa never asked for privileges, it was because Stalin liked him that we had a comfortable apartment and use in the summer of a dacha in the pine forest of Nikolina Gora.

The workings of the chocolate factory were secret, but as children of the chief chocolatier we had special access. The guard who stood at the kiosk at the front of the factory waved us through, and Maria, who sat in a booth near the office, opened the door to the factory for us. She led us past the clocking-in machines and the cloakroom and out onto the factory floor.

No matter how many times I visited, I never got tired of the magic of the place. The delicious smell of burnt sugar tickled my nostrils. My eyes opened with wonder at the conveyor belts that whisked chocolate cigars and fruit-filled pillows from one end of the site to the other. The workroom was like a kitchen for giants, with cauldrons that needed ladders and gangways to reach them and enormous vats that bubbled with cherry- and vanilla-scented syrups. Maria led us past the packing department, where women wearing red kerchiefs arranged chocolates into boxes, then the art department, where artists sketched designs for the packaging; sleigh scenes and kittens in baskets being the most popular themes for the New Year. Pavel Maximovich, the factory’s chief manager, rushed past us. Normally he would stop to greet us, but Papa had warned us that he was preoccupied these days. After overfulfilling their target for the past five years, the factory was now faced with a shortage of raw materials, especially cocoa beans and coconut oil. Maria left us at the door of Papa’s kitchen-laboratory. If the factory was a fairytale land, my father in his white coat and thick-rimmed glasses was its wizard. Papa was developing a new truffle with a caramel cream centre. When in the process of inventing something, he became obsessed by it; even at home his mind was on his creation. He never smoked or ate spicy foods lest they interfere with his sense of taste. Each innovation was a result of weeks, sometimes months, of measuring, titrating and boiling to not only find the right combinations of flavours but to perfect the variables of temperature, pressure and cooling.