Archangel (35 page)

KELSO went in first, and then O'Brian, who had to duck to get through the low entrance. It was dark. The solitary window was thickly glazed with snow.

If they wanted tea, she said, setting herself down heavily in a hard-backed wooden chair, then they would have to make it themselves.

'Tea?' said Kelso softly to O'Brian. 'She's offering to let us make her tea. I think yes, don't you?'

'Sure. I'll do it.'

She issued a stream of irritated instructions. Her voice, emanating from her buckled frame, was unexpectedly deep and masculine.

'Well, get the water from the pail, then - no, not that jug:

that one, the black one - use the ladle, that's it - no, no no -she banged her stick on the floor ' - not that much, that much. Now put it on the stove. And you can put some wood on the fire, too, while you're about it.' Another two bangs of the stick. 'Wood? Fire?'

O'Brian appealed helplessly to Kelso for a translation.

'She wants you to put some wood on the fire.'

'Tea in that jar. No, no. Yes. That jar. Yes. There.'

Kelso couldn't get a handle on any of this - on the town, on her, on this place, on the speed with which everything seemed to be happening. It was like a dream. He thought he ought to start taking some notes, so he pulled out his yellow pad and began making a discreet inventory of the room. On the floor: a large square of grey linoleum. On the linoleum:

one table, one chair and a bed covered with a woollen blanket. On the table: a pair of spectacles, a collection of pill-bottles and a copy of the northern edition of Pravda, open at the third page. On the walls: nothing, except in one c&rner, where a flickering red candle on a small sideboard punctuated the gloom, lighting a wood-framed photograph of V. I. Lenin. Hanging next to it were two medals for Socialist Labour and a certificate commemorating her fiftieth anniversary in the Party in 1984; by the time of her sixtieth, presumably, they couldn't run to such extravagance. The bones of communism and of Vavara Safanova had crumbled together.

The two men sat awkwardly on the bed. They drank their tea. It had a peculiar, herbal flavour, not unpleasant -cloudberries in it somewhere: a taste of the forest. She seemed to find nothing surprising in the fact of two foreigners arriving in her yard with a Japanese video camera, claiming to be making a film about the history of the Archangel Communist Party. It was as if she had been expecting them. Kelso guessed she would find no surprise in anything any more. She had the resigned indifference of extreme old age. Buildings and empires rose and fell. It snowed. It stopped snowing. People came and went. One day
death would come for her, and she would not find that

surpri
sing
either, and she would not care - not so long as He trod in the proper places: 'No, not there. There...'

WELL, yes, she remembered the past, she said, settling back. Nobody in Archangel remembered the past better than she did. She remembered everything
She could remember the Reds in 1917 coming out on to the street, and her uncle wheeling her up in the air, and kissing her and telling her the Tsar had gone and Paradise was on the way. She could remember her uncle and her father running away into the forest to hide when the British came to stop the Revolution in 1918 - a great grey battleship moored in the Dvina and runty little English soldiers swarming ashore. She played to the sound of gunfire. And then she remembered early one morning walking down to the harbour and the ship had gone. And that afternoon her uncle came back - but not her father: her father had been taken by the Whites and he never came back.

She remembered all these things.

And the kulaks?

Yes, she remembered the kulaks. She was seventeen. They arrived at the railway station, thousands of them, in their strange national dress. Ukrainians: you never saw so many people - covered in sores and carrying their bundles - they were locked in the churches and the townspeople were forbidden to approach them. Not that they wished to. The kulaks carried contamination, they all knew that.

Their sores were contagious?
No. The kulaks were contagious. Their souls
were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution. Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.
And so what happened to the kulaks?

It was like the English battleship. You went to bed at night and they were there, and you got up in the morning and they were gone. The churches were all closed after that. But now the churches were open again - she had seen it with her own eyes. The kulaks had come back. They were everywhere. It was a tragedy.

And the Great Patriotic War, she remembered that - the Allied ships moored out beyond the mouth of the river, and the docks working all day and all night, under the heroic direction of the Parry, and the fascist planes dropping fire-bombs over the old wooden town and burning it, burning so much of it down. Those were the hardest times - her husband away fighting at the front, herself working as an auxiliary nurse at the Seamen's Policlinic, no food in the town and not much fuel, the blackout, the bombs and a daughter to bring up on her own...

ALL of this, of course, took much longer to extract than the printed record would suggest. There was a lot of banging of her stick and doubling-back and repitition and meandering, and Kelso was acutely aware of O'Brian fidgeting beside him and of the snow piling up and muffling the sounds outside. But he let her talk. Indeed, he kicked O'Brian twice on the ankle to warn him to be patient. He wanted to let her come to things in her own time.
Fluke Kelso was an expert at this. This was how the whole business had started, after all.

He sipped his cold tea.

So you had a daughter, Comrade Safanova? That's interesting. Tell us about your daughter.

Vavara prodded the linoleum with her stick. Her mouth turned down.

That was of no consequence to the history of the Archangel Regional Party.

'But it was of consequence to you?'

Well, naturally it was of consequence to her. She was the child's mother. But what was a child when set against the forces of history? It was a matter of subjectivity and objectivity. Of who and whom. And of various other slogans of the Party she could no longer fully remember, but which she knew to be true and which had been a comfort to her at the time.

She sat back, hunched in her chair.

Kelso reached for the satchel.

Actually, I know something of what happened to your daughter,' he began. 'We have found a book, a journal, that Anna kept. That was her name, wasn't it? Anna? I wonder -can I show it you?'

Her eyes followed the movement of his hands, warily, as he began to unfasten the straps.

HER fingers were spotted with age, like the book itself, but they didn't tremble as she opened the cover. When she saw the picture of Anna, she touched it hesitantly, then her knuckle went to her mouth. She sucked on it. Slowly she brought the page up level with her face and held it close.

'I ought to be getting this on camera,' whispered O'Brian. 'Don't you dare even move,' hissed Kelso.

He couldn't see her expression, but he could hear her laboured breathing and again he had the odd sensation that she had been waiting for them - for years, maybe.

Eventually, she said, 'Where did you get this?'

'It was dug up. In a garden in Moscow. It was with some papers belonging to Stalin.'

When she lowered the book, her eyes were dry. She closed it and held it out to him.

'No. Read it,' he said. 'Please. It's hers.'

But she shook her head. She didn't want to.

'But that is her writing?'

'Yes, it's hers. Take it away.

She waved the book at him and wouldn't rest until it was safely put back in the satchel. Then she sat back, leaning to her right, one hand covering her good eye, stabbing at the floor with her stick.

ANNA, she said, after a time.

Well. Anna.

Where to begin?

Truth to tell, she had been pregnant with Anna when she married. But people didn't care about such things in those times - the Party had done away with priests, thank God.

She was eighteen. Mikhail Safanov was five years older - a metallurgist in the shipyards and a member of the Party's factory committee.

A good-looking man. Their daughter took after him. Oh yes, Anna was a pretty thing. That was her tragedy.

'Tragedy?'

Clever, too. And growing up a good young communist. She was following her parents into the Party. She had served her time as a Pioneer. She was in the Komsomol: she looked like something out of a poster in her uniform. So much so that she had been picked for the Archangel Komsomol delegation to pass through Red Square - oh, a great honour, this - picked to pass beneath the eyes of the Vozhd himself, on May Day 1951.

Anna's picture had been in Ogonyok afterwards andquestions had been asked. That had been the start of it. Nothing had been the same after that.

Some comrades had come up from the Central Committee in Moscow the following week and had started asking around about her. And about the Safanovs.

And once word of this got out, some of their neighbours had started to avoid them. After all, though the arch-fiend Trotsky was dead at last, his spies and saboteurs might not be. Perhaps the Safanovs were wreckers or deviationists?

But of course nothing could have been further from the truth.

Mikhail had come home early from the shipyard one afternoon in the company of a comrade from Moscow -Comrade Mekhlis: she would never forget his name - and it was this comrade who had given them the good news. The Safanovs had been thoroughly checked and found to be loyal communists. Their daughter was a particular credit to them. So much so that she had been selected for special Party work in Moscow, attending to the needs of the senior leadership. Domestic service, but still: the work required intelligence and discretion, and afterwards the girl could resume her studies with good words on her file.

Anna - well, once Anna got to hear of it - there was no stopping her. And Vavara was in favour of it, too. Only Mikhail had been opposed. Something had happened to Mikhail. It pained her to say it. Something during the war. He had never spoken of it, except once, when Anna was talking, full of wonder, about the genius of Comrade Stalin. Mikhail said he had seen a lot of comrades die at the front:

could she tell him, then, if Comrade Stalin was such a genius, why so many millions had had to die?

Vavara had made him rise from this very table - she struck
it with her hand - and go outside into the yard for his foolishness. No. He was not the man he had been before the war. He wouldn't even go to the railway station to see his daughter off
.

She fell silent.

Kelso said quietly, And you never saw her again?'

Oh yes, said Vavara, surprised at the question. They saw her again.

She made a curving motion with her hands, outwards from her belly.

They saw her again when she came home to have the baby.

SILENCE.

O'Brian coughed and bent forwards, head down, his hands clasped tight in front of him, his elbows on his knees. 'Did she just say what I thought she said?'

Kelso ignored him. With great effort, he managed to keep his voice neutral.

'And when was this?'

Vavara thought for a while, tapping her stick against her boot.

The spring of 1952, she said eventually. That was it. She got through on the train in March 1952, when it was starting to thaw a bit. They had had no warning, she had just turned up, with no explanation. Not that she needed to explain anything. You only had to look at her. She was seven months gone by then.

'And the father.. . ? Did she say...

No.

A vigorous shake of the head.

But you guessed, didn~you? thought Kelso.

No, she didn't say anything about the father, or about
what had happened in Moscow, and after a while they gave up asking. She just sat in the corner and waited for her term to come. She was very silent, this new girl, not like their old Anna. She wouldn't see her friends, or step outside. The truth was, she was scared.

'Scared? What was she scared of?'

Of giving birth, of course. And why not? Men! she said -and some of her old fire returned - what did men know of life? Naturally she was scared. Anyone with eyes in their head and a mind to think would be scared And that baby didn't give her an easy time, either, the little devil. It sucked the goodness out of her. Oh, a proper little devil - what a kick it had! They would sit here in the evening and watch her belly heave.

Mekhlis came by sometimes to keep an eye on her. Most weeks there was a car at the bottom of the street with a couple of his men it.

No, they didn't ask who the father was.

She started to bleed at the beginning of April. They took her to the clinic. And that was the last time they saw her. She had a haemorrhage in the delivery room. The doctor told them everything about it afterwards. There was nothing to be done. She died on the operating table two days later. She was twenty.