The Red Coffin (14 page)

He stood outside the Tsarina’s Mauve Boudoir, fist raised to rap
his knuckles on the door.

To the Alexander Palace maids, who passed by with bundles
of laundry, or trays of breakfast china or with feather dusters
clasped like strange bouquets of flowers, he seemed to be frozen
in place.

At last, as if the strength required for knocking on that
door was more than he possessed, Pekkala sighed and lowered his
hand.

Ever since the Tsarina sent for him that morning, Pekkala had
been filled with uneasiness. She usually stayed as far away from
him as she could get.

Pekkala did not know why she disliked him so intensely. He
only knew that she did, and that she made no secret of it, his only
consolation being that he was far from alone in finding himself
out of favour with the Tsarina.

The Tsarina was a proud and stubborn woman, who made
up her mind very quickly about people and rarely changed
her opinion about them afterwards. Even among those whom
she tolerated, very few could count themselves as friends. Aside
from Rasputin, the Tsarina’s only confidante was the pouty,
moonfaced Anna Vyrubova. For both of them, remaining in good
graces with the Tsarina had become a full-time job.

Now she had summoned Pekkala, and he had no idea what
she wanted. Pekkala wished he could have turned and walked
away, but he had no choice except to obey.

As he raised his hand again to knock upon the door, he caught
sight of a sun wheel carved into the top of the door frame. This
crooked cross, its arms bent leftwards until it almost, but not
quite, formed a circle, was the symbol the Tsarina had chosen as
her own. It could be found carved into the door frames of any
place she had stayed for any length of time. Her life was filled
with superstitions, and this was only one of them.

Knowing there was nothing to be gained by postponing this
meeting any longer, Pekkala finally knocked.

‘Come in,’ said a muffled voice.

The Mauve Boudoir smelled of cigarettes and the dense
fragrance of pink hyacinth flowers, which grew in planters on
the window sills. The lace curtains, a mauve colour like every
thing else in the room, had been drawn, turning the light which
filtered into the room into the colour of diluted blood. The dreary
uniformity of its furnishings and the fact that she never seemed
to open the windows combined to make the space unbearably
stifling to Pekkala.

Adding to his discomfort was the presence of an entire miniature
circus made out of thin strands of glass, gold filigree and pearls.
There were more than a hundred pieces in all. The circus had
been specially commissioned by the Tsar from the workshops of
Karl Fabergé and was rumoured to be worth the lifetime salaries
of more than a dozen Russian factory workers.

The fragile figures – elephants, tigers, clowns, fire eaters and
tightrope walkers – were balanced precariously on the edge of
every flat surface in the room. Pekkala felt as if all he had to do
was sigh and everything would come crashing to the floor.

The Tsarina lay on an overstuffed day bed, legs covered by a
blanket, wearing the grey and white uniform of a nurse of the
Russian Red Cross. It was the second year of the war and ever
since casualties had first started pouring back from the front, the
Great Hall of the Catherine Palace had been turned into a hos
pital ward and the Tsarina and her daughters had taken on the
role of nurses to the wounded.

Soldiers who had grown up in thatch-roofed, dirt-floored
Izhba huts now woke each day in a room of golden pillars,
walked across a polished marble floor and rested in linen-sheeted
beds. In spite of the level of comfort, the soldiers Pekkala had seen
there did not look comfortable at all. Most would have preferred
the more familiar surroundings of an army hospital, instead of
being showcased like these glass circus animals, as the Tsarina’s
contribution to the war.

There were times when, in spite of her hostility towards him,
Pekkala felt sorry for the Tsarina, particularly since war had broken
out. No matter how hard she worked, her German background had
made it almost impossible to make any gesture of loyalty to Russia
without the gesture recoiling upon her. In trying to ease the suffering
of others, she had only succeeded in prolonging it for herself.

But Pekkala had come to realise that this might not have been
entirely by accident. The Tsarina was drawn towards suffering.
A particular nervous energy surrounded her whenever the topic
turned to misfortune. Attending to the wounded had given new
purpose to her life.

Now, with Pekkala standing before her, the Tsarina gestured
towards a fragile-looking wicker chair. ‘Sit,’ she told Pekkala.

Hesitantly, Pekkala settled on to the chair, afraid that its legs
would collapse under his weight.

‘Pekkala,’ said the Tsarina, ‘I believe we have got off to a bad
start, you and I, but it is simply a matter of trust. I would like to
trust you, Pekkala.’

‘Yes, Majesty.’

‘With that in mind,’ she said, her clasped hands pressing into
her lap as if she had a cramp in her stomach, ‘I would like for us
to work together on a matter of great importance. I require you
to conduct an investigation.’

‘Of course,’ answered Pekkala. ‘What do you need me to
investigate?’

She paused for a moment. ‘The Tsar.’

Pekkala breathed in sharply. ‘I beg your pardon, Majesty?’ The
wicker seat creaked underneath him.

‘I need you,’ she continued, ‘to look into whether my husband
is keeping a mistress.’

‘A mistress,’ repeated Pekkala.

‘Yes.’ She watched him closely, her lips formed into an awkward
smile, ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’

‘I do know, Majesty,’ replied Pekkala. He also knew that the
Tsar did, in fact, have a mistress. Or, at least, there was a woman
who had been his mistress. Her name was Mathilde Kschessin
ska and she was the lead dancer of the Russian Imperial Ballet.
The Tsar had known her for years, since before his marriage to
the Tsarina, and had even bought her a mansion in Petrograd.
Officially, he had broken off ties with her. Unofficially, Pekkala
knew, the Tsar kept in contact with this woman. Although the
full extent of their relationship was unknown to him
,
he knew
for certain that the Tsar continued to visit her, even using a secret
door located at the back of the Petrograd Mansion, so that he
could enter undetected.

Pekkala had always assumed that the Tsarina knew everything
about this other woman. The reason for this was that he did not
believe the Tsar to be capable of keeping any secret from his wife.
He lacked the necessary guile, and the Tsarina was far too suspi
cious to allow an affair to continue undetected.

‘I regret,’ said Pekkala, rising to his feet, ‘that I cannot inves
tigate the Tsar.’

The Tsarina appeared to have been waiting for this moment.
‘You can investigate the Tsar,’ she told him as her eyes lit up. ‘The
Tsar himself gave you the right to investigate anyone you choose.
That is by Imperial Decree. And, what is more, I have the right
to order this investigation.’

‘I understand, Majesty, that technically I am permitted …’

‘Not permitted, Pekkala. Obliged.’

‘I understand,’ he continued.

She cut him off again. ‘Then it is settled.’

‘Majesty,’ pleaded Pekkala, ‘what you ask, I must not do.’

‘Then you refuse?’ she asked.

Pekkala felt a trap closing around him. To refuse an order
from the Tsarina would amount to treason, the penalty for which
was death. The Tsar was at army headquarters in Mogilev, half-
way across the country. If the Tsarina wished it, Pekkala could be
executed before the Tsar even found out what was wrong.

‘You refuse?’ she asked again.

‘No, Majesty.’ The words fell likes stones from his mouth.

‘Good. I am glad we are finally able to see –’ the Tsarina held
out her hand towards the door – ‘eye to emerald eye.’

The knocking came again, but there was something unusual about it. The knuckles were striking halfway down the door.

At first, Pekkala could make no sense of it, but then he smiled. He stepped over to the door and opened it just as the little girl on the other side was about to knock again. ‘Good evening, Talia.’

‘Good evening, Comrade Pekkala.’

Before Pekkala stood a girl about seven years old, with plump cheeks and a dimple in her chin, wearing a khaki shirt and dress, and the red scarf of a Young Pioneer around her neck. In a fashion popular among girls in the Communist Youth Movement, her short hair had been cut in a straight line across her forehead. Smiling, she gave him the Pioneer salute: the knife edge of her outstretched hand held at an angle in front of her face, as if to fend off an attack.

Conscious of how much he towered over the girl, Pekkala got down on one knee so they were looking each other in the face. ‘And what has brought you here this evening?’

‘Babayaga says you are lonely.’

‘And how does she know that?’

The child shrugged. ‘She just does.’

Pekkala glanced back at his dinner laid out on the table – the lumps of bread and bowl of watery cheese. He sighed.
‘Well, Talia, it just so happens that I could use a little company right now.’

Talia stepped back into the hall and held out her hand for him to take. ‘Come along then,’ she said.

‘One moment,’ said Pekkala. He pulled on his coat which, although it had been cleaned, still looked the worse for wear after his journey across the proving ground.

Joining Talia out in the corridor, Pekkala caught the smell of evening meals – the fug of boiled potatoes, fried sausages and cabbage.

The two held hands as they walked down the pale green hallway with its ratty carpet to the apartment where Talia lived with her grandmother.

Until six months ago, Talia had lived with her parents in a large apartment in what had once been called the Sparrow Hills district of the city but had since been renamed Lenin Hills.

Then, one night, NKVD men arrived at their door, searched the house and arrested the parents. Until the time of their arrest, both had been model Communists, but now they were classed as Type 58. This fell under the general heading of ‘Threat to National Security’ and earned them each a sentence of fifteen years at the Solovetsky Labour Camp.

The only reason Talia and her grandmother even knew this much was because Pekkala, having been their neighbour for several years, had made inquiries on their behalf. As for the precise nature of the parents’ crime, even the NKVD records office could not tell him. Stalin had confided in Pekkala that even if only 2 per cent of the arrests turned out to be warranted, he would still say it had been worth arresting
all the others. So many people had been brought in this past year, over a million according to the records office, that it was not possible to keep track of them all. What Pekkala knew, and what he could not bring himself to tell the grandmother, was that more than half of those people arrested were shot before they ever boarded the trains bound for Siberia.

Their family had once been farmers in the fertile Black Earth region of the Altay mountains. In 1930, the Communist party had ordered the farm to be merged with others in their village. They called it ‘collectivisation’. The running of this collectivised farm, or Kolkhoz, had then been given over to a party official who, with no farming experience of his own, ran the collective into the ground in under two years. The collective broke up and Talia’s family had drifted, like so many others, to the city.

They began working for the Mos-Prov plant, which supplied most of the electricity to Moscow. The husband-and-wife team immediately joined the Communist Party and rose quickly through its ranks. Before their arrest, they had been rewarded with special rations like extra sugar, tea and cigarettes, tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre and trips to the Astafievo resort outside the city.

According to Babayaga, the father had often spoken about the merits of ‘perekovka’; the remoulding of the human soul through forced labour in the Gulag system. Pekkala wondered what the father thought now that he was in one. Like many good Communists, the man probably believed that he and his wife were simply victims of some bureaucratic error, which would soon be corrected, at which time they could return to their old lives; any suffering he endured now would
be rewarded on some distant day of reckoning, when errors were set straight.

Although the parents might have been innocent of any charges brought against them, it did not mean that they had been arrested by mistake. They might have been denounced by someone who wanted their apartment, or who envied their marriage or whose seat they had taken on the bus which brought them to work. The accusations were seldom investigated and even the most preposterous stories served as justification for arrest. One man had been arrested for blowing smoke rings which, in the eyes of his accuser, seemed to bear a resemblance to the outline of Stalin’s face.

Pekkala suspected that the reason for their imprisonment had nothing to do with them at all and was only the result of quotas imposed upon NKVD, ordering them to arrest so many people in each district per month.

It was after the parents went away that Talia came to live with her grandmother. The old woman’s real name was Elizaveta, although she never used it and had chosen for herself instead the name of a witch from an old Russian fairy tale. The witch lived in the forest, in a house which turned round in circles at the top of two giant chicken legs. In the fairy tale, the witch was cruel to children, but Pekkala knew the little girl was lucky to have a woman as kind as Babayaga looking after her. Talia seemed to know it, too, and the name became a joke they shared between them.

The thing Pekkala noticed when he first walked into their apartment was what Babayaga called a Patriotic Corner. Here, small portraits of Stalin, as well as pictures of Lenin and Marx, were on display. Other pictures, of men like
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and Piatakov had been removed after the men in question were accused of Counter Revolutionary Activity and liquidated.

The Stalin corner was always on display, but in a closet by the bathroom, the grandmother kept small wooden paintings of saints. Each icon had little wooden doors which could be opened so that the icons could stand on their own. The wooden doors were inlaid with pieces of mother-of-pearl and curls of silver wire which looked like musical notes in the black wood.

Following their arrests, Talia’s parents had been dismissed from the Communist Party and her membership in the Young Pioneers revoked. In spite of this, she continued to wear her uniform, although only inside the building where she lived.

‘Here he is, Babayaga,’ said the little girl, swinging wide the door to their apartment.

Babayaga sat at a bare wood table. In one hand, she held an outdated copy of Rabotnitsa, the Women’s Journal of the Communist Party. In her other hand, she clasped a tiny pair of nail scissors. Her eyes squinting with concentration, the old woman cut out pieces of the paper. In front of her, strewn across the table, were dozens of tiny clippings. ‘Now then, Pekkala,’ she said.

‘What are you cutting?’

Babayaga nodded at the clippings. ‘See for yourself.’

Pekkala glanced at the neat rectangles. On each one he saw the name of Stalin, some in large print, others in letters almost too small to read. Nothing else had been cut out – only that one word. ‘Are you making a collage?’ he asked.

‘She’s making toilet paper!’ announced Talia.

The woman put down her scissors. Neatly, she folded the paper. Then, with crooked fingers, she gathered up the clippings. Rising from the table, she went over to a wooden trunk in the corner. It was the kind of trunk which might have stored blankets in the summer months, but when Babayaga opened the lid, Pekkala realised that it was entirely filled with paper clippings of Stalin’s name.

‘I heard a story,’ said Babayaga, as she tossed in the clippings, letting them fall like confetti from her fingertips. ‘A man was arrested when the police came to search his house and found a newspaper in the toilet. Stalin’s name was in the paper, of course. It is on every page of every paper every day. But because Stalin’s name was on the paper, and because …’ she twisted her hand in the air, ‘of the purpose of the paper, they arrested him. Sent him to Kolyma for ten years.’ She smiled at Pekkala, folds of skin crimping her cheeks. ‘They won’t get a hold of me that way! But just in case –’ Babayaga pointed at a laminated cardboard suitcase by the door – ‘I always keep a bag packed. If they do find a reason, at least I’ll be ready to go.’

What saddened Pekkala about this was not that Babayaga kept the suitcase ready, but that she believed she would live long enough in custody to make use of whatever it contained.

‘I understand,’ said Pekkala, ‘why you might want to cut Stalin’s name from the paper, but why are you saving all the clippings?’

‘If I throw them away, I could get arrested for that, too,’ she replied.

Talia sat between them, doing her best to follow the conversation. She looked from Babayaga, to Pekkala and then back to Babayaga again.

Once or twice a week, the old woman sent for Pekkala, knowing that he lived alone.

Babayaga was lonely, too, but less for human contact than for those days before the revolution, when the world had made more sense to her. Now she lived like an overlapping image seen through a pair of broken binoculars, half in the present, half in the past, unable to bring either into focus.

‘Off you go now.’ Babayaga rested her hand on Talia’s forehead. ‘Time for bed.’

When the little girl had gone, Pekkala sat back in his chair. ‘I have a present for you, Babayaga,’ he said. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two small, votive candles and set them down in front of her. He had picked up the candles at the Yeliseyev store on his way home that day, knowing that she liked to burn them when she prayed beside her icons.

Babayaga picked one up, smelled it and closed her eyes. ‘Beeswax,’ she said. ‘You have brought me the good ones. And now I have a present for you.’ She went into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room only by a curtain of wooden beads, and reappeared a moment later with a battered brass samovar. Steam puffed from the top as if from the smokestack of a miniature train. She returned to fetch one glass in an ornate brass holder and a small, chipped mug, which Pekkala recognised from its pattern of interwoven birds and flowers to have been made by the old firm of Gardner’s. The firm had been founded in Russia by an Englishman,
and Pekkala had not seen or heard anything of the firm since the Bolsheviks took over. It was quite likely, he imagined, Babayaga’s most treasured possession. She laid before him a dish of rock sugar and another dish in which lay the twisted black grains of smoked tea. Laying out the tea was done as a gesture of politeness, allowing the guest to strengthen the tea if he thought it was not brewed correctly. But, out of politeness, Pekkala did not touch it. He merely bent down and breathed in the slightly tar-like scent of pine-smoked tea, which he doubted Babayaga could afford.

She poured him a cup, taking the strong-brewed tea from the pot at the top of the samovar and diluting it with the water stored in the lower section. Then she handed it over to him. ‘That glass belonged to my husband,’ she said.

She told him that every time, and every time Pekkala took the glass from her with the reverence it deserved.

Babayaga produced a lemon from the pocket of her apron, and a small silver knife, with which she carved a slice and held it out to him, thumb pressing the sliver to the blade. And when he had taken it, she held the blade in the steam coming out of the samovar, so that the silver would not tarnish from the lemon juice.

‘The Tsar was very fond of pine-smoked tea,’ said Pekkala, squeezing the lemon into his drink.

‘Do you know what people say, Inspector? Those of us who can still remember the way things used to be? They say the spirit of the Tsar sees through that emerald eye of yours.’

Pekkala reached up to his collar. Slowly, he folded it back. The eye came into view like that of a sleeper awakening. ‘Then he must be looking at you now.’

‘I should have worn a nicer dress.’ She smiled and her face turned red. ‘I miss him. I miss what he meant to our people.’ Then her smile suddenly vanished. ‘But not her! Not the Nemka! She has much to answer for.’