‘Did he come often?’

‘Every Saturday afternoon. I never questioned why he came so regularly. Or why he always made such a fuss of me. Sometimes he brought me presents.’

‘What kind?’

‘Oh,’ he let his hand drift casually through the freezing air, ‘stamps for my stamp album or a new model for me to build.’

‘Model of what?’

‘A ship. A wooden schooner to sail to the Far East. But sometimes he would cover my eyes, spin me round and present me with a book.’

‘What kind of book?’

‘Poetry. He liked Pushkin’s poetry. Or Russian folk tales. Though he was Danish, he was keen for me to know my Russian heritage.’

She nodded.

‘So I’d rush over to the window seat,’ his voice was growing warm with the memories, ‘whenever Mama told me Jens Friis was coming to visit, and I’d crouch there, ready to jump up and wave to him.’ A self-conscious laugh pushed its way between the words. ‘Just a small boy at one of thirty or more windows.’

‘But did he see you when he came up the drive?’

‘Da, always. He would lift his hat to me and sweep it through the air with a great flourish to make me laugh.’

‘In a carriage?’

‘Sometimes, yes. But more often he was astride his horse.’

His horse.

A memory came rushing into Lydia’s head from nowhere, barging its way through the thin bones of her skull. A horse. A magnificent high-stepping chestnut with a black mane which she used to hang on to with stubby fingers. A horse that smelled of musty oil and sweet oats, a horse called…

‘Hero,’ she said. ‘Geroi.’

Alexei’s face was suddenly closer to hers and she could smell tobacco on him. ‘You remember Hero too?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I loved his ears.’

‘His ears?’

‘The way they twitched and pricked when he was happy. Or flattened when he was irritable. I thought they were so magically expressive. I wanted ears like that.’

She could hear, rather than see, Alexei’s smile in the darkness. ‘Jens used to take me riding. I would perch like a monkey in front of him on Hero’s saddle, and later when I was big enough to have a pony of my own, we’d go off for the afternoon together, just the two of us.’

A small sound escaped Lydia.

‘We’d ride out along the banks of the Neva River.’ Alexei was speaking to her but she could tell that he’d slipped far away. ‘We’d canter all the way to the woods.’

We. Always this we.

‘We used to laugh a lot on those days out. I especially loved it in the autumn when the trees were so full of burning colour it was as if they were on fire. Until one day – I must have been seven years old – he stood me in front of him like a stiff little soldier, holding my arms to my sides, and told me he couldn’t visit me every Saturday any more.’

Lydia listened to the silences that stretched between the words. They both could guess the reason for the abrupt change in Jens’ routine, but Alexei was the one who voiced it.

‘He must have become involved with your mother, Valentina. Obviously he had to stop seeing my mother.’

‘Was that the last you saw of him?’

‘No. For a whole year I lost him and I had no idea why. I’d heard him quarrel with my mother behind closed doors, so for a long time I blamed her. But without warning he came back.’

Lydia stared at Alexei, surprised.

‘Don’t look so shocked,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t often. He came for birthdays and for Christmas sleigh rides. And an occasional canter through the forest again. That’s all.’

‘What did you call him?’

‘I called him dyadya. Uncle. Uncle Jens.’

Lydia said nothing.

‘He taught me to jump. First the boughs on the forest floor, I’d pop over them on my pony, no trouble, but then he put me to bigger obstacles, the fences and streams.’ Alexei tipped his head back and she saw a ripple of something flow up the line of his throat. ‘He used to roar with laughter whenever I fell off and sometimes…’ he gave a chuckle deep in his chest, ‘I used to tumble out of the saddle just to hear that sound.’

Lydia could see them. A boy. His green eyes alight with excitement. His red-haired father leading the way on the chestnut horse, the sun low in the sky, painting them both golden. Leaves forming a bright brittle carpet under the hooves.

She thought her heart would crack with envy.


***

The railway carriage was cold. Nevertheless most of the ten occupants managed to sleep in their seats, heads askew, as the train hauled itself through the night. At times Lydia’s exhausted mind convinced itself of strange certainties as she sat wrapped in a rug, Alexei beside her, his body upright even in sleep. She could hear the throb of the train’s heartbeat in each turn of its wheels, but outside the black windows it seemed to her that all existence had ceased. She closed her eyes. Not because she was sleepy but because she couldn’t bear the sight of all that nothingness. It was too oppressive. Tapping at the windows. Seeping through the cracks. Curling round her ankles.

Sleep eluded her. She found herself irritated too by the moodiness of the train, by the way it stopped and started for no obvious reason, so that the hours of darkness crept past slowly. But as soon as her eyes closed, pictures painted themselves on the insides of her eyelids, images of Chang An Lo, dark eyes intent, watching her stitch his foot together after it was savaged by a dog. Or wide with astonishment when she carried in a white rabbit to his bedside to make him laugh when he was sick in Junchow. Those same eyes black with anger… or bright with love. They snagged in her mind, always there.

What were they gazing at now? At whom?

Lydia snapped her own eyes open.

‘Nightmares? Koshmary?’

It was the woman from the hotel who’d spoken. What did she want? Conversation was the last thing Lydia felt like right now. Her eyes must once have been blue but now were as colourless as tap water, and they were studying Lydia with lazy interest. No one else seemed awake. The man on the woman’s left was wearing a pale sable fur coat which had fallen open as he slept, and she had taken the opportunity to peel back a section of the coat from his lap and spread it over her own for added warmth.

Lydia liked that. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nyet. No nightmares.’

‘Boredom?’

‘Something like that.’

The woman blinked and for a while said nothing more, so that Lydia believed the conversation was at an end. But she was wrong.

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Why do you ask?’

The woman let her mouth drop open and licked her lips with a slow, deliberate, lascivious movement of her tongue. ‘I’m always looking for a man.’

‘He’s not interested,’ Lydia said flatly.

‘Interested in you? Or me?’

‘He’s my brother.’

‘Hah! Not the handsome long-legged one, durochka, you idiot. Dermo! He’s too young for me. The other one.’

Popkov? This woman was interested in Popkov?

Lydia leaned forward and politely tapped the woman’s fur-draped knee with a firm finger. ‘Stay away from both of them.’

‘You don’t need two of them,’ the woman laughed. ‘That’s greedy.’ Her pale eyes studied Lydia in a way that made her uneasy. ‘And you, malishka,’ the woman added, ‘are no more from Smolensk than I am from…’ She paused, showing a glimpse of a fat pink tongue. ‘China.’

Lydia sat back, heart thudding. How could she possibly know?

Lydia remembered what Alexei had said about people in this Soviet State knowing your secrets almost before you did yourself. With an indifferent shrug as though bored with the conversation, she removed the wool rug from her own knees, took her time folding it neatly and rose to place it up on the luggage rack above her head. Then, without a glance at the woman, she slid open the internal door of the carriage and stepped out into the gloomy corridor.

I’m breathing, my love. I’m still breathing.

6

The corridor of the train was even colder than the carriage. Lydia looked in both directions and was relieved to see no one else plagued by insomnia or feeling the urge to stretch their legs, though it stank of pipe tobacco, as if someone had been out here recently. The corridor was brown. Like climbing inside a long brown tube with only one dim light set high up on the wall. Lydia liked the gloom. It soothed her. Helped her think more clearly.

The train shuddered to the monotonous rhythm of its wheels and Lydia pressed her face to the cold glass, but she could see nothing outside except the night itself under its thick black blanket. No lights out there, no towns, no villages. Just a frozen, never-ending wilderness of trees and snow.

How on earth did they build the railway out here? The scale of Russia, like the scale of China, took her breath away and she struggled to cram the size of them into her head. Instead she’d learned to focus on the small things. She was good at that, seeing the things others missed. Like the sun flaring on a man’s pocket watch or the corner of a wallet jutting out of a jacket, or a lady’s gold lipstick case left for no more than a second on a shop counter. Lydia couldn’t help a faint smile. Yes, she’d been good at that.

Abruptly she shifted her gaze from the blackness outside to her own reflection in the glass. She grimaced. The hat was truly hideous, a brown wool thing with a wide peak that made her look like a baboon. She was glad Chang An Lo wasn’t here to see her in it. She sighed and could hear her fears crackle like biscuit crumbs in her breath. She was seventeen; he was nineteen, nearly twenty. Would a man wait indefinitely? She didn’t know. He loved her passionately, she was certain of that but… A dull flush of colour rose to her cheeks at her own naivety. How long could a man be without a woman? A month? A year? Ten years?

She knew she’d wait a lifetime for him if she had to. Is that what her father had done? Waited year after year in a labour camp for her mother to come?

Suddenly Lydia yanked off the hat and tossed her head so that the tumble of copper waves leapt into life and framed her face, rippling over her shoulders. It gave her a look of wildness that satisfied something in her. A lioness, someone had once called her. She dragged her fingernails down the glass, ripping tracks through the film of mist that her breath had painted on it, sharpening her claws.


It was just before dawn. Lydia was watching the light shift from the intense darkness that cloaked northern Russia, black as the coal that was hauled up from its depths, to a pale translucent grey. Trees began to emerge like icy skeletons. The world was becoming real again.

She headed up the gloomy corridor towards the tiny washroom at the end. A queue of three passengers had already formed outside it. Russians, she’d noticed, were good at queuing, unlike the Chinese. As she leaned against the wooden panelling and felt the constant turn of the wheels echo through her bones, her thoughts centred on the woman back there in the carriage, the one who’d asked where she came from. She made Lydia nervous.

Suddenly there came the sound of quick light footsteps hurrying towards the washroom. Lydia had shuffled her way up to second place in the line. Not that she was in a rush to use the squashed little facility, but she wanted to delay her return to the carriage. The footsteps stopped. Lydia looked behind her and was astonished to see a queue of four women and a child – when had they arrived? – all waiting patiently, clearly rural workers with headscarves and shawls and big-knuckled hands that laboured hard in the potato fields. Their faces were uncommunicative, their thoughts private. The child, a small boy in a cap, was nibbling at his thumb and making little mouse noises to himself. Behind him stood the new arrival. Lydia felt a jolt of surprise, though she shouldn’t have. It was Antonina, the wife of the camp Commandant, and she was wrapped up warm in the silver fur coat.

‘Dobroye utro, comrades,’ the newcomer said brightly. ‘Good morning to you.’ She nodded at Lydia.

The women stared at her the way they would at a gaudy magpie. One muttered, ‘Dobroye utro,’ then looked at the floor. The others remained silent. The child touched a grubby hand to her coat and she stepped away from it. She was wearing the white cotton gloves and started to rub them together awkwardly, fingers curling round each other.

‘Comrades,’ she said, but her brightness was cracking at the edges, ‘I’m desperate.’ She gave them a smile that reached nowhere near her eyes. ‘Do you think I could-?’

The line turned on her.

‘Nyet.’