He arrived in Kiev late at night. Even so the air was several degrees warmer than in Moscow. After living in the Arctic Circle for so long, it hit him like a warm bath. Picking up his case, provided by Leo to contain his new clothes, he made his way to a cheap hotel. Leo had given him money, more than he deserved, but he wasn’t sure how long he would have to make it last and so was careful with it. Next morning he continued his journey and by evening found himself once more looking down the Petrovsk main street. The view had not changed, except for being more run-down than ever. He booked into the dilapidated hotel, ate a lonely meal and went to bed early. He tired easily these days and the journey had taken it out of him, which was surprising since it was nothing like as long as the journey from the gulag to Moscow, but put the two together, one after the other, and he seemed to have been travelling half his life. In a way, he supposed he had, and he wasn’t at the end yet.

The next morning he set off on foot for the woodman’s hut, telling himself the man had been getting on in 1939 and people died young if they never had enough to eat and not to be surprised if he had gone. But Ivan was there, chopping wood as if he had been doing it non-stop ever since Alex had last seen him. His white hair had thinned to almost nothing and his beard, left untrimmed, came well down on his chest. His cheeks had fallen in and his bony hands were covered in dark-red veins. He wore an old leather jerkin, a fur hat with ear flaps and long felt boots. He put down his axe and stared at the newcomer. ‘Major Alexei Simenov,’ he said, sinking onto a tree stump, shaking his white head in disbelief. ‘Surely not?’

Alex laughed. ‘So you remember me?’

‘I remember you. Did you find my little Lidushka?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she well? What are you doing back here?’

‘I found her and I’m here because we never found the baby.’

‘Ahhh.’ It was a long drawn-out sigh. ‘You had better come in.’ He indicated the door of the hovel. ‘I’ll make tea.’

Alex preceded him into the only room. The thatch on the roof was wearing thin and he could see the sky through one spot. ‘You sound as if you know something. Do you know where he is?’

‘He’s at Kirilhor. They came back here in 1947.’

‘My God! I never thought to find him here.’ And then another thought struck him, making his heart race. ‘They? Surely not Lydia?’

‘No, I never saw her again.’ He busied himself over the stove. ‘I mean Olga Denisovna. She brought the boy up.’

‘She’s here too?’

‘Yes, though not quite right in the head, if you understand me – violent sometimes, though not with Yuri, never with Yuri. But, excuse me – if you did not expect to find the boy here, why have you come?’

For the second time in three days Alex found himself telling the story, while they sipped tea from cracked glasses and he ate a little bread dipped in salt. At the end of the tale, the old man grunted. ‘You should have stayed away. You won’t be welcome and Olga Denisovna has wits enough to denounce you.’

‘I’ve served my time and been given a pardon, she has no grounds for denouncing me.’

‘No?’ The old man gave another of his grunts. ‘What about attempting to lure a Soviet citizen out of the country to be indoctrinated by the West?’

‘I never said I intended to do that.’

‘She will make it sound as though you did.’

Alex sipped tea. There was a lot of sugar in it. ‘What about the boy?’

‘He’s a good little Pioneer, a real Soviet citizen. He believes everything they tell him. He was even seen to weep when Stalin died. And he loves Olga, looks after her all the time, even when she’s at her worst.’

‘That’s hardly surprising if she brought him up.’

‘He doesn’t know she’s not his real mother.’

‘Why didn’t you tell him as soon as he was old enough to understand?’

‘What would that have achieved?’ Ivan answered one question with another. Olga Denisovna had told him, when they first arrived, that if he said one word to the boy or anyone else about who Yuri really was, she would denounce him. ‘You’ll be sent to a labour camp, and how long do you think you’ll survive there?’ she had said belligerently. ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ And so he had. There was no point in stirring up trouble either for himself or Yuri, and there was no one left in the village who remembered Olga before the war or Yuri being born. Besides, if he kept quiet he could keep his eye on the boy and see he came to no harm. It was strange when he thought about it: Yuri was the grandson of Count Kirilov and by rights the heir to Kirilhor. Not that there was anything worth inheriting. It was a ruin. He had once asked Olga, when she was in one of her more sensible moods, why she had come back. ‘It’s where the boy was born,’ she said. ‘I thought Svetlana might still be here and help us, but she wasn’t. I have no one but Yuri. He’s a good boy. And clever too. I am going to be proud of him.’

‘I should like to see him,’ Alex said. ‘At least then I can tell Lydia I have seen him and he is well. Perhaps if I spoke to Olga Nahmova first…’

Ivan shrugged. ‘You must do what you think is right, but don’t blame me if you get less than a welcome.’

Alex thanked him and went back to the hotel.


Yuri Nahmov was chopping down a fir tree in the forest. They needed more logs for the stove. Ever since he had been considered old enough to wield an axe, he had been responsible for seeing the stove was never without fuel. His mother couldn’t do it. Half the time she didn’t know what she was doing. She often burnt the soup and she went for any visitors to Kirilhor like a wildcat, as if they had evil intent. ‘Hide!’ she would cry whenever a stranger arrived in the village. ‘Hide in the cupboard.’ Yuri hated being shut in a cupboard; that was how you were punished at the orphanage and it always brought back unpleasant memories. It made him want to scream and beat his fists against the door, but nothing would satisfy Mama until they had hidden and waited for whoever it was to go away again. She was afraid, always afraid. Did she suppose the authorities would come and take him back to the orphanage?

How he had hated that place! They were half starved and brutally treated, especially those whose parents had been arrested and sent to Siberia. He had had no idea who his parents were and it had been assumed he was either one of those or one of the thousands of besprizomiki, street children without family and means of support, who had been rounded up to be made into useful Soviet citizens. He was full of jealousy when someone came to claim a child and take him away amid tears of joy, which didn’t happen very often. He would hide his misery in a show of indifference, until in the end his pretence became real and he was indifferent.

He was a son of the Soviet system. Stalin was his father and every morning when the children were required to chant ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood’ he sang out, unaware that there was, or could be, anything different, until one day, when he was about six or seven, a strange woman had turned up and claimed she was his mother. She said his name was Yuri Nahmov and not Ilya Minsky which was the name they called him in the orphanage. Worried and frightened, he had been handed over to a complete stranger and begun a very different life.

‘It’s not the best tree for making firewood,’ Ivan told him, watching him from his seat on a tree trunk. He was fidgety, unable to make up his mind whether to say anything about yesterday’s visitor. Perhaps he should, perhaps he shouldn’t. ‘It’s too green. It will spit.’

‘It’s easier than cutting down one of those big deciduous trees.’ Yuri had long ago decided that Ivan was the nearest thing to a father he would ever have and treated him with gentle tolerance. ‘And it won’t matter about the spitting if we close the doors of the stove. It’s too hot to have them open anyway.’

The tree toppled with a creak and a groan and a satisfying thump. Yuri set about stripping it of its smaller branches, ready to saw the trunk into logs. Ivan got up to help him with the two-handed saw.

When they had filled the basket, Yuri picked it up and hefted it onto his shoulder. He had grown into a big strong lad, uncannily like his grandfather, the count, and the weight of it meant nothing to him. ‘Are you coming back to the house?’

‘Not yet. Later perhaps. I’ll clear up these bits first, maybe make a bonfire. The ash will be good for the garden.’

‘It’ll spit!’ Yuri said, laughing. ‘I’ll see you later, then.’

Back at Kirilhor, he put the logs down by the hearth in the kitchen and took off his outdoor clothes before joining his mother in the living room. She was cowed on the floor in a corner of the large room, her shoulders hunched into a ragged shawl, her eyes flashing hate at a man who stood watching her as if unsure what to do, a man in a business suit and a clean shirt. ‘Yurochka, thank goodness you are here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what this man wants, but he won’t go away. Tell him to go away, tell him we don’t want whatever it is he’s selling.’

Alex held his hand out to the boy. ‘I am Alexei Petrovich Simenov. I am sorry if I have disturbed your mother. I assume the lady is your mother?’

‘Of course she is,’ Yuri said, shaking the hand. His grip was firm. ‘What do you want with her?’

‘Nothing,’ Alex assured him. ‘And I’m not selling anything.’ He noticed Olga’s eyes flashing dangerously and thought quickly. ‘I am sightseeing.’

‘In Petrovsk?’ Yuri laughed. ‘What is there to see in a dump like this?’

‘Kirilhor,’ Alex answered. ‘It has an interesting history. Did you know that?’

‘I know it once belonged to a count, but he’s long dead, and all his kind. And good riddance too. If he were alive now, I would spit on him. You aren’t anything to do with him, are you? You haven’t come to claim your inheritance?’ And he laughed again.

‘No, I have no claim on Kirilhor.’ Alex wondered if they paid rent for living there, and if so, to whom. Perhaps they were simply squatting. ‘But I know someone who lived here as a child before the Revolution. Her father was Count Kirilov. He died during the Civil War, along with his wife and son. Lydia was the only one who survived and went to England. She returned in 1938 with her husband, Nikolay Nikolayevich Andropov. She remembers it with fondness. I wanted to see the place and perhaps take a photograph to show her.’

Olga was undoubtedly disturbed and the mention of Kolya’s name roused her to a furious response. ‘Get out!’ she yelled, scrambling to her feet. Grabbing a knife from the table she came at Alex brandishing it. ‘Get out and leave us alone. We don’t care that…’ she clicked bony fingers at him ‘… for a stiff-necked aristocrat, do we, Yurochka?’

Yuri shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Alex, taking Olga’s hand and gently removing the knife from her fingers. ‘My mother is not well. She was wounded in the head at the beginning of the war and has never fully recovered. It is best you leave us. I shall have to calm her down. You understand?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ Alex said, and took his leave.

He made his way along the forest track until he came to where Ivan was tending a bonfire; he was almost obscured by thick smoke. The whole forest smelt of pine resin. Seeing Alex he threw the branch he had in his hand on the fire and came towards him. ‘You went to Kirilhor, my friend?’

‘Yes,’ he said turning away because the smoke was making his eyes water. ‘The woman’s mad.’

‘I told you that, didn’t I? What did you say? What did she say?’

Alex recounted their conversation word for word. ‘Now I’m in a quandary,’ he finished. ‘What shall I do?’

‘I should go away and forget you ever came here. The boy will be all right. He’s clever; he’ll grow into a fine man and make his mother proud of him.’

Alex gave a humourless grunt of laughter. ‘Which mother?’

Ivan chuckled. ‘Both of them.’

‘Should I tell her? Lydia, I mean.’

‘You must make up your own mind about that, young man, but if I were you I’d say nothing. It will break her heart.’

Alex left him and made his way back to the hotel, booked out and took the train back to Moscow. He knew he ought not to go back there but he needed to tell Leo what had happened and ask his advice.

Leo’s advice was the same as Ivan’s, even though he had never known Lydia. ‘In any case,’ he added, ‘how were you going to tell her? You are here, in Moscow, where you have no business to be, and the lady is in England. A letter? Not advisable, everything is censored. You are banned from the cities, but that doesn’t mean you can go where you like. I stayed around to make sure no one followed you onto the train to Kirilhor, but you can be sure someone will pick up your trail before long.’