The Troika Dolls (13 page)

Lenin’s tomb was dug in at the foot of the wall, marked with a heavy slab of dark stone and the simple letters:
. Tourists from Central Asia, in from the steppes to see the famous capital from where their lives had once been ruled, milled about the gates in their furs, tiny dark eyes and pink cheeks, before joining the eternal funeral procession around Lenin’s embalmed body.

It is impossible to pass casually through Red Square. It has a weight that crushes you, a gingerbread beauty that makes the history born from its ugly heart all the more menacing.

A crocodile of schoolgirls in dark coats and white scarves and furry bonnets—like gumnut babies—wove its way past Stevie, towards St Basil’s. GUM was still closed.

Stevie stopped to look at the huge glass windows, the restaurant, luxury goods. Only party members had been allowed to shop there under communism. They had even managed to justify segregated shopping in the name of the revolution. Now it was open to anyone. Anya had been shopping there when she disappeared.

When it was open, guards patrolled the marble galleries and watched the crowds stroll by eating ice-creams. Very little passed unnoticed. It would have been difficult to force Anya out of there. There were guards at every entrance.

Could Anya have gone willingly then? Stevie shook her head. From what she knew of her, it seemed very unlikely. Anya didn’t seem like the type.

The tea house was ugly, but Stevie had expected it would be. There was no tradition of cafés, no café society in Moscow. It was one of the things that had surprised her when she had first come to the city.

Perhaps it was too easy for conversations to be overheard. Talk had been dangerous, often lethal, under communism. People had perhaps preferred to talk in the privacy of their own living rooms, kitchens, cupboards. Or perhaps the party had considered cafés too subversive, too fertile an intellectual climate to be tolerated, having never forgotten that Lenin planned the revolution from the Café Odeon in Zurich, a stone’s throw from the Bellevueplatz.

The café was filled with plastic tables, a mock tile floor and smoke like fog. Vadim was waiting at a table by the window. He looked the part, she thought, for a covert operation: a grey woollen overcoat—the collar turned up to hide his jaw—a black rollneck; the sleeves of an old naval jersey, striped blue and white and worn at the edges, poked out from the black cuffs. An army cap lay on the table bearing the already faded colours of the new Russia.

They ordered hot tea with lemon.

‘The hospital’s not far,’ Vadim began. ‘I will tell them I am a friend of Petra’s and that you are her music teacher.’

Music teacher. Delightful.

Stevie wished she’d worn her most snappy tweed ensemble, hair waved in a didactic but faintly musical style; she would have chosen her long opera pearls, the ones that hung to her navel, and attached a piano key to the clasp, fingers perfumed with rosin from the little violin bows of the children.

The sound began as a low rumble, like distant surf. Stevie ignored it but it grew quickly louder until Vadim noticed it, too. Through the window they saw a mass of people come snaking around the corner, some waving placards, others waving fists, one with a shabby loud hailer. There would have been some three hundred at a rough guess.
Militzia
were gathering around them like flies, buzzing just out of touch but planning a landing.

The protesters stopped and began to shout at the Kremlin walls, punching the air, shaking their placards. Stevie was tempted to go outside for a closer look but experience (Jakarta, burning tyres, a rather disastrous betchuk chase) had taught her that it never did to get caught in other people’s anger. And in Russia, as in Indonesia, the security forces could be unpredictable.

‘What are they protesting about, Vadim?’ Stevie peered closely, trying to read the placards. The protesters were all women, bundled up tight in the cold with headscarves, their pale faces pinched with pink. Her eyebrows shot up incredulously. ‘Are they—
mothers
?!’

‘They are from the Mothers’ Rights group.’ Vadim spoke quietly. He lit another cigarette. ‘They are the mothers of soldiers who have disappeared in Chechnya, or been tormented to death by their officers, or who have returned home physically and mentally destroyed, only to be swept under the carpet like ashes.’

Vadim rubbed his scar absentmindedly. It grew red. ‘When you turn eighteen, you are conscripted. You become a “human resource” for the great nation of Russia, and so like that she may do with you what she wishes.’

‘So, it really is as bad as they say.’

He smiled bitterly. ‘Probably worse than you know. Think on this, and every word is true: in 2002, five hundred men were killed—that’s a whole battalion’s worth—but not from fighting a war. They were beaten to death by their own officers. Whole squadrons have deserted because conditions are so bad. The officers steal tanks, weapons, even the few roubles the privates get sent by their parents.’

Vadim looked out at the protesters. The
militzia
were buzzing in tighter circles now. Trucks had arrived, ominously windowless.

‘These parents are despised by the officers—the Mothers’ Rights group especially. It annoys them that sometimes, just sometimes, their behaviour is so outrageous—’ the poison in Vadim’s voice could have killed a cobra, ‘—and that it transgresses the line between man and beast so flagrantly, that the mothers protest and shout and demand that something be done to discipline the officers who killed their Sascha on a drunken whim.’ He stared out at them. ‘It is worse than a death at the hands of an enemy. There is not even hate or politics behind these murders. They are wholly without purpose, a distraction, an afterthought. They deny the basic humanity of the soldiers.’

His words were a bullet to Stevie’s heart. Vadim was just a boy but he knew the whole world. He had understood the nature of evil, how it began in frigid indifference to other people, and then slid slowly down the scale of good, towards evil. That end . . . that just blurred into a black fog of distance, a horrible, cold, endless stretch.

‘You’re right, Vadim. I think we comfort ourselves with the idea that evil is confined to master plans conceived in great detail by bald men stroking Persian cats with a long manicured fingernail. This puts evil beyond the reach of ordinary men.’

Stevie herself believed that evil began in small acts of selfishness, banal cruelties in a normal day; their horror was that they were casual. To be casual with the lives of others was evil. This was an uncomfortable idea because it meant that everyone had the potential to influence the balance of good and evil on the earth. It demanded that we take individual responsibility. We would all prefer to leave that to someone else.

Stevie’s eyes drifted back to the protest. ‘I don’t think there is ever a clear demarcation between good and evil. There’s no line drawn on the scale that declares, “From here be evil” like those old explorer’s maps of the world that say “Here be monsters”. I think what matters is your place on the scale.’

She blew on her lemon tea. ‘Evil is the downward creep, in small, millipede steps, while goodness is the struggle to move up; trying to lift others with you is heroic.’

Real evil required a total absence of the moral imagination. Without the capacity to empathise with the position and pain of others, their suffering, even their existence, somehow didn’t seem real.

‘And your officers, Vadim, are a terrible example,’ Stevie continued. ‘Once the humanity of others has been denied, there is nothing too cruel that cannot be done to them.’

And so now, the core of society, its glue, its respectable members— the mothers and the grandmothers, the pensioners—had to take to the frozen streets with placards. It was proof enough that there was no other way to be heard.

Grey
militzia
poured like ants from the back of the trucks and surrounded the mothers.

No one was listening.

_________

Even the most robust and
glamorous fantasy is difficult to sustain in a hospital. The setting is designed to strip people of all illusions. There is nothing more real than the sick, the injured and those who care for them. Stevie was just managing to hang on to her Mary Poppins music-teacher whimsy, but it was taking effort. At the tangy odour of the lunch trolley (boiled cabbage loaf? chicken gelatine?), she almost came unstuck. But her imagination, often problematically powerful, found a certain satisfaction in the challenge and she soon regained her equilibrium.

Petra Koshka. Her surname meant cat. As they wound their way through long linoleum corridors and swinging double doors, Stevie thought about her cat at home in Zurich. Actually, she shouldn’t say
her
cat at all. They had simply met one day, walking in opposite directions along the river, she towards the lake, he towards the Bahnhof. Stevie’s romantic disappointment in the Alps was only a week old.

The cat had recently been shaved. Only his head and the tip of his tail retained their former majesty. He was obviously furious and embarrassed and ashamed. Stevie could relate. He had snapped up the end of Stevie’s
Bratwurst mit Senf
, her grilled veal sausage and mustard lunch. The fact that he had not minded the mustard told Stevie the cat was starving, and she invited him home. She had offered him shelter, at least until his majesty grew back.

Stevie had asked if she could call him Peter. He had turned out to be a gentleman. He was staying with her grandmother at the moment. Peter was clever and polite. He never took food without asking first. When Stevie had wondered if Joss’ reasons for not showing had been genuine—artists were after all unpredictable—Peter had expressed scepticism but she had not listened. A month later her heart was in shreds.

This is only the third time I’ve thought about Joss since I came to
Moscow.

But more important matters than Stevie’s unfortunately eager heart were at hand.

Vadim pushed open the door to Petra’s room. A girl lay back on the starched hospital pillows, like a dried flower in an envelope. She had long dark hair and a big bandage across the middle of her face. It could be the girl in the photo. Really, it was hard to tell.

‘Petra?’ Vadim asked, walking quickly towards her.

The mummy face turned. She had two swollen eyes, a deep shiny red like plums, and greenish-yellow bruising on the visible skin of her face. Poor girl, thought Stevie, and immediately wondered if she had been bashed. And by whom . . . The possibility that Petra would have something to add to Anya’s mystery was growing.

‘Vadim.
Privyet!
’ She tried a smile but that seemed to hurt her.

‘What happened, Petra? Did someone hurt you?’

‘No, Vadim,’ she said dismissively. ‘Don’t be stupid. Haven’t you ever seen a post-op nose job?’ She touched her bandages lightly. ‘My mum’s had three. And liposuction. If you want to see bad,
that’s
bad. But she looks hot at forty. I’m going to do the same, but I probably won’t wait till I’m forty.’

Petra obviously wasn’t feeling that bad.

‘I’m so happy you came to see me. Can you change the TV channel? The food in here sucks.’

‘Your dad paid for you to get a nose job?’

Stevie shared Vadim’s incredulousness but only sneezed twice, and said nothing.

‘Of course he did,’ the mummy answered scornfully. ‘Anyway, it only makes him look better in the end, doesn’t it? Hot wife, hot, hot daughter.’ Petra tried to smile again and winced with pain.

Vadim gestured with his hand. ‘This is my friend, Stevie.’ Petra glanced at Stevie, saw she was pretty and paid more attention. ‘She’s trying to help me find Anya.’

‘Oh my God. She’s still missing? What do you think’s happened to her? I thought she would have turned up by now.’ Petra swallowed with some difficulty and looked at the boy. ‘That’s really scary, Vadim.’

‘We need your help, Petra.’ Stevie sat down by her bedside. ‘We think Anya’s been kidnapped and we need to find out by whom. It will help us negotiate when the kidnappers make contact—are they professional, opportunists, politically motivated—so we know how to deal, and how far to push them.’

‘Totally.’ Petra looked away to the TV. ‘Umm . . . I don’t know anything I haven’t already told Vadim on the phone. Anya and I were shopping. We got coffee and I got up to pay and when I came back, she was gone. I tried her mobile but she didn’t pick up.’

‘We tried Anya’s phone all that night, too. But there was no answer.

Then it went dead.’ Vadim stood at Stevie’s shoulder. She could sense he didn’t much like Petra.

Petra kept batting her eyes at the pale boy. She, on the other hand, clearly had a giant crush.

‘Were you with anyone else, Petra?’

She shook her head.

‘Did you notice anyone watching Anya? Did anyone try to talk to you?’

Petra snorted. ‘Guys are always staring, trying to talk to us.’ She caught the look in Stevie’s eye and grew subdued. ‘But no one did that day. I didn’t notice anyone looking at us.’

Stevie turned to Vadim. ‘The people who snatched her would have got rid of the phone as soon as they took her. Too much risk that police could pinpoint a location if the phone was turned on or if Anya managed to make a call.’