The Secret Speech (8 page)

Leo turned to the door and then turned back again, unable to leave her in such a state. How could he fix the problem when he was the problem?

– I just want to love you, Zoya.

Elena was looking from Zoya to Leo. Her being awake resulted in a change in Zoya. She regained her composure, calmly telling Leo:

– I’m going to wash my sheets. I’m going to do it myself. I don’t need your help.

Leo left the room, leaving the young girl he’d hoped to win over sitting in piss and tears.

Entering the kitchen, Leo paced the room, drunk on catastrophe. While he’d tidied away the files, the sheet of paper from Moskvin’s printing press was as he’d left it:

Under torture, Eikhe

An appropriate companion: a reminder of his former career, a career that was going to shadow him forever. Picturing Zoya’s reaction in the bedroom, Leo was forced to contemplate something he’d only minutes ago dismissed as unthinkable. The family might have to be broken apart.

Had his desire to hold them together become a blind obsession? It was forcing Zoya to pick at a scab that would never heal, infecting her with hatred and bitterness. Of course, if she couldn’t live with him then neither could Elena. The sisters were inseparable. He’d have no choice but to find them a new home, one with no connection to the State, perhaps outside of Moscow in a smaller town where the apparatus of power was less visible. He and Raisa would need to search for suitable guardians, meeting prospective parents and wondering if they could do a better job, if they could bring the girls happiness, something Leo had so utterly failed to provide.

Raisa appeared at the door:

– What’s going on?

She’d come from their bedroom. She didn’t know about the bedwetting, the conversation, referring instead to Nikolai, the phone call, the midnight meeting. Leo’s voice was cracked with emotion:

– Nikolai was drunk. I told him we’d talk when he was sober.

– That took all night?

What was he waiting for? He should sit her down and explain.

– Leo? What’s wrong?

He’d promised there would be no more secrets. Yet he couldn’t admit that after three years of trying to be a father he had nothing but Zoya’s hatred to show for it. He couldn’t admit that he had woken her in the middle of the night, pathetically petitioning to be her father. He was afraid. The division of their family might make Raisa wonder which side of the divide she wanted to be on. Would she remain with the girls or with him? For the years he’d been an MGB officer she’d despised him and everything he represented. In contrast, she loved Elena and Zoya without qualification. Her love for him was complicated. Her love for them was simple. In making her decision she might choose to remember the man he was, the man he used to be. Part of him was convinced that his relationship with Raisa depended upon him proving himself as a father. For the first time in three years he lied to her:

– Nothing is wrong. It was a shock seeing Nikolai again. That’s all.

Raisa nodded. She looked down the hall.

– Are the girls awake?

– They woke up when I came back. I’m sorry. I said sorry to them.

Raisa picked up the sheet of paper taken from the printing press.

– You better move this before the girls sit down.

Leo took the sheet, carrying it to their room. He perched on the bed, watching as Raisa left the kitchen to wake the girls. Nervous, nearly sick, he waited for Raisa to discover the truth. His lie had bought him a temporary reprieve and no more than that. She would listen as Zoya explained what had happened.

He looked up, stunned to see Raisa casually emerge from the bedroom, returning to the kitchen without saying a word. Seconds later Zoya emerged, carrying her sheets to the bathroom where she deposited them in the bath, running the hot water. She hadn’t told Raisa. She didn’t want Raisa to know. The only thing she hated more than Leo was the idea that he’d been able to embarrass her in this way.

Leo stood up, entering the kitchen and asking:

– Zoya’s washing the sheets?

Raisa nodded. Leo continued:

– She doesn’t need to do that. I can arrange to have them cleaned .

Raisa lowered her voice:

– I think she had an accident. Just leave her, okay?

Leo nodded:

– Okay.

Elena entered first, her shirt buttoned up incorrectly, taking her seat. She was silent. Leo smiled at her. She studied his smile as if it were something unknown and threatening. She did not smile back. He could hear Zoya’s footsteps. They stopped. She was standing out of sight, waiting in the hall.

Zoya stepped into view. She faced Leo directly, looking at him from across the room. She glanced at Raisa, who was busy stirring the oats, then at her sister, who was eating. She understood that he hadn’t told them either. The knife was their secret. The bedwetting was their secret. They were accomplices, complicit in this false family. Zoya wasn’t ready to tear the family apart. Her love for Elena was stronger than her hatred of him.

Gingerly, like an alley cat, Zoya moved toward her seat. She didn’t touch her breakfast. In turn, Leo ate nothing, churning the oats in the bowl, unable to look up. Raisa was unimpressed:

– Neither of you are going to eat?

Leo waited for Zoya to reply. She said nothing. Leo began to eat. As soon as he did, Zoya stood up, depositing her untouched bowl in the sink.

– I feel sick.

Raisa stood up, checking her temperature:

– Are you well enough for school?

– Yes.

The girls left the table. Raisa moved close to Leo:

– What is wrong with you today?

Leo was sure, if he opened his mouth, he’d start to cry. He said nothing, his hands clenched under the table.

Shaking her head, Raisa moved off to help the girls. There was bustle around the front door: final preparations to leave, coats being put on. The door was opened. Raisa returned to the kitchen, carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper, tied with string. She placed it on the table and walked out. The front door slammed shut.

Leo didn’t move for several minutes. Then, slowly, he reached forward, pulling the parcel toward him. They lived inside a ministerial compound. Letters were normally left at the gate: this had been left on his doorstep. The parcel was about thirty centimeters long, twenty centimeters wide, and ten centimeters deep. There was no name, no address, just an ink drawing of a crucifix. Ripping the brown paper, he saw a box, the top of which was stamped:

The metro carriage wasn’t crowded yet Elena took hold of Raisa’s hand, gripping it tightly, as if fearful they were about to be separated. Both girls were unusually quiet. Leo’s behavior this morning had unsettled them. Raisa couldn’t understand what had come over him. Normally so careful around the girls, he’d seemed to accept that they were about to sit down for breakfast and witness him preoccupied by that word: torture. When she’d asked him to take the sheet of paper away, his cue to pull himself together, he’d obeyed only to return to the kitchen in exactly the same disheveled state, staring at the girls and not saying a word. Bloodshot eyes, a haunted, ragged look: she hadn’t seen that expression for years, not since his returns from all-night assignments as a secret police officer, exhausted and yet unable to go to bed. He’d slump in the corner, in the dark, brooding, silent, as though the events of the previous night were playing over and over in his mind like a looped reel of film. During that period he’d never spoken about his work yet she’d known what he’d been doing, arresting indiscriminately, and she’d secretly hated him for it.

Those times were past. He’d changed-she was sure of it. He’d risked his life to break from a profession of midnight arrests and forced confessions. The State Security apparatus still existed, renamed the KGB, remaining a presence in everyone’s life, but Leo played no part in its operations, having declined the offer of a high-ranking position. Instead, taking a much greater risk, he’d opened his own investigative department. Every night he shared stories of his working day, partly because he sought her advice, partly to show how different his department was from the KGB, but mostly to prove there were no more secrets between them. Yet her approval wasn’t enough. Observing him around the girls, it struck Raisa that he behaved as if he were cursed, a character in a children’s fairy tale, and only the words- I love you- spoken by both girls, could break the dark magic of his past.

Despite his frustrations, he’d never shown any jealousy of Raisa’s easy relationship with Elena and Zoya even when Zoya deliberately tormented him by being openly affectionate to her and cold to him. Over the past three years he’d withstood rejection and rudeness, never losing his temper, soaking up hostility as if he considered it nothing less than he deserved. In the face of this, he’d made the girls his only hope of redemption. Zoya knew it and reacted against it. The more he sought her affection, the more she hated him. Raisa couldn’t point out the contradiction, or tell him to relax. Once fanatical about Communism, he was now fanatical about his family. His vision of utopia had been made smaller, less abstract, and though it now encompassed only four people, rather than the entire world, it remained just as elusive.

The train pulled into TsPkiO station, abbreviated from its full name, Tsentralnyl Park Kulturyi Otdykha Imeni Gorkovo. The first time the girls had heard it formally read out over the PA system they’d started to laugh. Caught unaware by this chance absurdity, Zoya had revealed a beautiful smile that, up until then, she’d kept locked out of sight. In that moment Raisa caught a glimpse of the child that had been lost-playful and irreverent. Within seconds Zoya’s smile had been wiped away. Raisa had felt an intense pain. She was no less emotionally involved. She and Leo had been unable to have children of their own: adoption was her only hope of motherhood. However, she was by far the better at concealing her thoughts, even if Leo had been trained by the secret police. She’d made a tactical decision, careful that the girls not be constantly aware of how important they were to her. She treated them without fuss or ceremony, establishing functional foundations-school, clothes, food, going out, homework. Though they both went about it in different ways, she shared Leo’s dream-the dream of creating a loving, happy family.

Raisa and the girls exited the station on the corner of Ostozhenka and Novokrymskiy, following a path dug through the snow on their way to their respective schools. Raisa had wanted to enroll both girls at the same school where, ideally, she also would have taught so that the three of them could have been together. However, the decision had been made, either by the school authorities or at a higher level, that Zoya would attend Lycee 1535. Since it only accepted secondary students Elena was forced into a separate primary school. Raisa had resisted since the majority of schools accepted both primary and secondary students and there was no need to split them up. Her request had been declined. Siblings were at school to create a relationship with the State, not to shelter within family ties. According to that rationale, Raisa was lucky to get a job at Lycee 1535 and so she’d relinquished the demand in order to preserve the advantage. At least this way she was able to keep an eye on Zoya. Although Elena was younger and had been more obviously nervous about the prospect of a new school in a large city, Zoya concerned Raisa far more. She’d fallen further behind academically, her village school not being up to Moscow’s standards. There was no question that she was intelligent. But it was unpolished, directionless, ill-disciplined, and, unlike Elena, Zoya steadfastly refused to make any efforts to fit in, as if it were a matter of principle that she remain isolated.

Outside the primary school, a converted prerevolutionary aristocratic town house, Raisa took an unnecessary amount of time tending to Elena’s uniform. Finally, holding her close, she whispered:

– Everything’s going to be okay, I promise.

For the first few months Elena had cried when she’d been separated from Zoya. Though she’d gradually adjusted to spending eight hours apart, at the end of every school day, without exception, she’d stand by the gates eagerly awaiting their reunion. Her excitement at seeing her older sister return hadn’t diminished, a reunion as full of joy as if a year had passed.

After Zoya had given her sister a hug, Elena hurried into school, pausing at the doors to wave good-bye. Once she was inside, Zoya and Raisa walked in silence toward the Lycee. Raisa resisted the urge to question Zoya. She didn’t want to agitate her before class. Even the simplest of inquiries risked putting her on the defensive, setting off a chain of disruptive behavior that rippled throughout the day. If she asked about schoolwork it was an implicit criticism of her academic achievements. If she asked about her classmates it was a reference to her refusal to make any friends. The only subject open to discussion was Zoya’s athletic abilities. She was tall and strong. Needless to say, she hated team sports, unable to take orders. Individual sports were a different matter-she was an excellent swimmer and runner, the fastest in the school for her age. But Zoya refused to compete. If entered into a competition she would deliberately forfeit the race, although she had enough pride not to come last. She’d aim for fourth, and since she occasionally mistimed it, or forgot herself in the heat of the moment, she might come in third or even second.

Built in 1929, Lycee 1535 was angular and stark in design, intending to embody an egalitarian approach to learning, a new kind of architecture for a new kind of student. Twenty meters from the gates Zoya stopped walking, remaining fixed to the spot and staring straight ahead. Raisa crouched down:

– What is it?

Zoya dropped her head, speaking under her breath:

– I feel sad. I feel sad all the time.