Authors: Belinda Alexandra
‘We’re fine,’ Antonia assured her. She patted Laika’s head. ‘This little dog is lovely. She hasn’t left her mistress’s side for a moment.’
Lily had been in the waiting room of Yelchin Veterinary Hospital for only five minutes when she realised that it was the wrong place for her to be. It was six o’clock and the hospital was busy with people turning up to collect their animals after surgery. Veterinary nurses moved back and forth through a swing door, bringing out carry cages containing wide-eyed cats, or walking dogs out on leads. The sight of a poodle with bandaged legs and a cat with stitches down the side of its neck, along with the relieved expressions on their owners’ faces, made Lily’s eyes well with tears. The last time she’d been in a vet’s surgery was the day that Honey, her beloved cat, had been put to sleep. She’d lived a good life to nineteen years of age, but suddenly her kidneys began to fail and she stopped eating. She died six months after Lily’s grandmother did; Lily lost her two dearest childhood companions in one year.
The memory made her heart even heavier and she looked around for something to distract herself. There was a pile of magazines on a side table and she rifled through them. They were mostly issues of
Moscow Life
or Russian
Vogue
that she’d read at work. But then a journal caught her eye:
The Relic Hunter
. The subtitle read:
Until all the fallen are brought home
. Lily flicked through advertisements for metal detectors and pictures of German tanks being hauled from bogs and came to a feature on the lost pilots of the Battle of Britain. She was surprised to read that a number of pilots had remained buried with their aircraft until the 1980s, when they were recovered by civilian researchers, because military authorities were against excavating their crash sites. It seemed wrong to Lily that someone should make the ultimate sacrifice for their country and then be denied a proper burial because of red tape.
She looked at the photographs of the pilots that accompanied the article. They were so young, with smooth skin and eyes full of the future. Most of them weren’t more than nineteen or twenty years of age, much younger than Lily. If I’m so traumatised after witnessing a bomb attack and losing a colleague, she thought, how did they cope with battles and death every day?
‘Aphrodite and Artemis?’
Lily glanced up. A man in a blue uniform was standing near the front desk and holding a large crate. He looked expectantly at Lily, who was now the only person left in the waiting room. He had dark-blond shoulder-length hair and an athletic build. The colour of his uniform complemented his olive skin.
‘Yes,’ she said, standing up.
The man smiled. Although it was the end of the day, he was still clean-shaven and he sported fashionable sideburns. Lily had pictured Doctor Yelchin as an elderly man with a wise face and stooped back. She hadn’t anticipated someone in his mid-thirties who looked like a movie star. ‘You must be Oksana’s friend Lily?’ the vet said, placing the crate on the floor and taking a discharge form from the nurse. He had one of those deep Slavic voices that Lily found hypnotic.
‘And you must be Doctor Yelchin,’ she ventured.
The man laughed and shook his head. ‘Doctor Yelchin is my uncle. He is in the process of retiring and I’m taking over the running of the surgery for him. I’m Doctor Demidov, but please call me Luka.’
Lily blushed. Wasn’t using his first name when she’d only just met him too informal for a Russian? If Luka noticed Lily’s discomfort, he didn’t show it. ‘Aphrodite and Artemis are still sleepy,’ he said, pointing to the crate. ‘I’ve given them long-acting pain medication and antibiotics but if you notice any swelling or bleeding please call me immediately.’
He wrote his home and mobile numbers on the discharge sheet before handing it to her. Sure that she must be glowing from head to foot, Lily fumbled in her handbag for her purse.
‘There’s no charge,’ said Luka. ‘Oksana is a good woman. This practice tries to help her as much as possible. Everything was quite straightforward.’
‘Thank you,’ Lily said. ‘Oksana will appreciate that.’ She fumbled again to put her purse back in her handbag and reached down for the crate.
Luka put his hand on her arm. ‘I’ll carry it to your car. Oksana wanted the cats put in together so I used a dog crate. It’s a bit heavy.’
‘Thank you,’ stammered Lily again.
With his free hand, Luka pushed open the surgery door and let Lily go through first to the car park. She opened the rear door to Oksana’s Niva jeep and spread out a blanket on the seat. Luka placed the crate on top of it.
‘So you’re interested in relic hunting?’ he asked Lily, moving out of the way so she could place a towel over the crate. She realised that she was still holding the copy of the journal.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, handing the magazine back to him and securing the crate with the seatbelt. ‘I picked it up to read.’
She was blushing so much she was beginning to feel light-headed. Why was she making a fool of herself? Was it because Luka was so good looking. She had loved Adam for so long that she’d never thought of another man as attractive. It was an unsettling feeling and she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
‘Well, I hope to see you again, Lily,’ said Luka, flashing his charming smile again before turning to go back inside the hospital. ‘Call me if you have any problems.’
Lily couldn’t bring herself to answer. She got into the jeep and started the engine. ‘I must be losing my mind,’ she muttered, before turning out of the driveway and heading back to her apartment.
Lily found a parking space outside her apartment building. Yulian, a neighbour, spotted her and offered to carry the crate with Aphrodite and Artemis inside. Russian men, Lily had discovered, were chivalrous that way. They caught the elevator to Lily’s floor and Yulian placed the crate on her doormat while she searched in her handbag for her key, but Oksana heard them and opened the door. Thanking Yulian, she and Oksana lifted the crate through the doorway.
In the living room, Oksana’s doctor friend was examining Babushka, holding a stethoscope to her chest. The doctor was a handsome man in his forties with silver-grey hair and chiselled cheekbones. Lily thought of Luka at the veterinary hospital and marvelled at Oksana’s ability to get attractive men to do favours for her.
The women put the crate in the bathroom. ‘They’ll be fine here for a while,’ Oksana told Lily. ‘I’ve got a hospital cage set up for them in my apartment.’
When they returned to the living room, she introduced Lily to her friend.
‘Lily, this is Doctor Pesenko.’
‘She’s still suffering shock,’ he told them. ‘I’ve given her an injection of B12, but I want to take some scans of her spine and chest. Can you bring her to my office the day after tomorrow?’
The three of them helped Babushka back into Lily’s bed.
‘There’s something else,’ Doctor Pesenko said when they returned to the living room. ‘I couldn’t get her name out of her, but when I rolled up her sleeve to give her the injection I found a serial number tattooed on her forearm.’
‘You mean like one from a Nazi concentration camp?’ asked Oksana.
Doctor Pesenko shrugged. ‘There isn’t a triangle or other symbol to single her out as Jewish. But it’s possible she was sent to a camp if she lived in a village that was invaded by the Germans during the war.’
Lily glanced at Babushka, who was asleep now with Laika tucked under her arm. Everyone who had lived to that age had a story to tell, but Lily sensed that this old lady’s tale was an exceptional one.
Even after two days, Lily and Oksana couldn’t coax Babushka to tell them her name. When Lily had first met her in Pushkin Square and again at the building site, she had been articulate and alert. The shock of the bomb in the underpass seemed to have caused her to retreat into herself. She mumbled words that sounded as if they could be names of places or people but Lily couldn’t catch them.
Each time the telephone rang, Babushka jumped as if she’d been given an electric shock. So it surprised Lily that Babushka showed no resistance when she and Oksana took her to Doctor Pesenko’s surgery. She submitted meekly as the doctor weighed her, took her blood pressure and a blood sample, felt her neck and legs, and then listened to her chest before sending her with a nurse down the hall for an X-ray.
When she had gone, Doctor Pesenko invited Oksana and Lily to sit down opposite his desk. ‘She’ll need more tests, but everything so far indicates that she has a chronic heart condition that’s been left untreated,’ he said, taking his own chair. ‘The most I will be able to do for her is give her medication to help alleviate the symptoms.’
‘Do you mean her condition is terminal?’ Oksana asked.
Doctor Pesenko nodded. ‘I’m surprised she’s kept going this long. She’s malnourished, which doesn’t help, of course.’
‘How long do you think —’ Lily broke off as she felt herself choking up. Babushka must have sensed that her health was worsening; that’s why she had been so desperate for Lily to take Laika.
‘She might have six months. She might have three days,’ replied Doctor Pesenko. ‘It’s difficult to predict. I’m going to try to pull some strings and see if I can get her into a hospital — a State or charity one — for further tests and palliative care.’
The nurse came in with the X-ray results in a folder. ‘I’ve left the patient lying down in the examination room,’ she told Doctor Pesenko before leaving again.
Doctor Pesenko opened the folder, took out the X-rays and studied them. He put them on the light box so that Oksana and Lily could see.
‘There is evidence of pulmonary congestion,’ he said, pointing to the lungs. ‘But there is something more unusual. You see, her heart is further to the right than it should be.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked Oksana. ‘Is it something she was born with?’
The doctor shook his head. ‘I’ve only seen this twice before. In one instance the displacement was the result of a chest injury sustained in a car accident. The other was in a man who had been so badly beaten by thugs that his heart was punched out of place.’
‘I wonder if something happened when she was in the concentration camp,’ said Lily.
Doctor Pesenko wrote out several prescriptions and handed them to Lily. ‘What are you going to do with her until I can find a hospital bed?’ he asked. ‘This woman is going to die and most likely in the near future.’
Lily sensed that Oksana was looking at her. She was under no illusions about how difficult it was to care for someone who was dying but she felt compelled to help Babushka. ‘She can stay with me,’ she told Doctor Pesenko. ‘If Oksana doesn’t mind?’
Oksana nodded. ‘Of course not. Yulian is moving out of his apartment tomorrow. It’s bigger than yours, Lily — you can use it until we can get a place for Babushka in hospital.’
‘So we are conspirators,’ said Doctor Pesenko with a gentle smile. ‘Three people willing to help an old woman we know nothing about.’
‘You know,’ said Oksana thoughtfully, ‘dying animals often come to me. I believe they are angels in disguise, because in caring for them I find that they always leave me a gift.’
O
rlov woke with a start. He glanced at his clock: it was four in the morning. A weight pressed on his chest as if he’d relived the darkness of his childhood while asleep. Now that he was reaching the end of his life, images from the beginning of it came back to him in dreams. He turned on his side to alleviate the discomfort in his chest. What was it? Indigestion? He barely ate anything these days. His gaze settled on the empty vodka bottle by the bed and he squeezed his eyes closed. Even the vodka wouldn’t shut out the memory of the clackety-clack of the wheels of the train that took him, his older brother and his mother to disaster.
His father had fought in the White Army during the Civil War. When the forces loyal to the Tsar had been pushed back to Vladivostok and were on the brink of defeat, he’d sent word to Orlov’s mother to bring the children and his parents to the east. There were plans for an evacuation to China. As an aristocratic family in 1922, they would be imprisoned or executed if they stayed in Moscow. But Orlov’s grandparents refused to go, despite his mother’s pleas. In the end, fearing for the life of Orlov and his nine-year-old brother, Fyodor, she had boarded a train with them for Siberia.
The face of Orlov’s red-headed brother arose in his memory. Four years older than Orlov, Fyodor had been his protector. Because of the war, the journey to Vladivostok took much longer than normal, with frequent stops at villages in between stations. In some of the places along the way, famine had hit so severely that the train was besieged by hundreds of orphans. The sight of their outstretched hands and the wail of their voices had frightened Orlov. He had never seen such misery. Even if the passengers on the train had given these children all the provisions they had, it would not have been enough to feed them all. In one village near Novosibirsk, Orlov saw groups of small children digging up roots in the forest and running away from any adults who came near. As a grown man, whenever he saw stray cats in the street he would remember those children. He had found it impossible to imagine that they didn’t have parents to care for them. He didn’t know then that Russia’s homeless orphans numbered in the millions. And he’d had no inkling that he would soon be one of them.
The train Orlov was on with his mother and brother caught fire outside Chita. Those who survived the inferno fled to a village that had been hit by typhus. Orlov’s mother caught the disease and died a week later. Fyodor had to give the priest every last rouble in their possession so that she could be buried with the proper rites.
‘The priest said that Vladivostok has fallen to the Reds,’ Fyodor told Orlov. ‘Father is either dead or has already fled to China. Our only choice is to go back to Moscow.’
With no money for the fares, Orlov and Fyodor returned to Moscow by hanging onto the undercarriages of trains, along with other orphans who hoped to escape the famine by going to the big city. When they returned to their home, they found that their grandparents were gone and the house had been occupied by proletarian families.
A former servant took pity on them and admitted them to an orphanage. But when Fyodor laid eyes on the overflowing latrines and the emaciated faces of the children, he pushed Orlov out of a ground-floor window and they took to living on the streets. Their upbringing hadn’t prepared them for such a life, and without Fyodor’s ability to adapt quickly Orlov would have perished.
‘Watch what those street urchins do,’ Fyodor told Orlov, pointing to a couple of children who were hiding behind a planter in an outdoor cafeteria. As soon as a patron departed, they would descend upon his scraps and shove whatever they could into their mouths before the waiters came and chased them away.
Orlov and his brother survived the increasingly cold weather by burrowing into woodpiles or sleeping among the litter in garbage cans. For a while they found shelter in a crypt in Vvedenskoye Cemetery, until some older street children discovered their ‘luxurious’ accommodation and forced them out.
The Bolshevik government had made plans to get the orphans off the streets and into State institutions, but the problem was overwhelming for an administration recovering from a civil war. Appeals were made to citizens to adopt the children. When Fyodor learned of this, he took himself and Orlov to stand in the designated disused churches along with hundreds of other hopefuls, all trying to look appealing enough to attract genuine families and not those looking for cheap labour.
On several occasions couples had approached Orlov. ‘What lovely dark curly hair,’ said one woman to her husband. Orlov had heard another make a remark about his cute button nose.
‘Go with them,’ Fyodor would tell Orlov. ‘Go and have a good life.’
But Orlov would cling to his brother’s sleeve and refuse to be separated, and no one wanted this older boy with his wizened face and nervous twitch brought on by living on his wits.
Winter set in and food became scarcer. Fyodor found them some space in a tunnel at the train station. When morning came, hundreds of children crept from the tunnel or the crevices in the station’s walls. Orlov developed a cough, and no matter how tightly Fyodor held him to his chest he couldn’t keep his brother warm. Then Fyodor learned of a new orphanage that had opened a few houses down from where they had once lived. Some of the other children staying in the tunnel had gone there in an attempt to steal food and clothing so they could sell them on the streets.
‘Did you have any luck?’ Fyodor asked one of the boys when he returned.
‘No! It’s run by a retired Red Army general. That old Bolshevik was too smart for us.’
‘Do you think he’ll take Valentin?’ Fyodor asked, indicating Orlov. ‘And maybe me?’
The boy laughed. ‘Getting too soft for the streets, are you?’ He shook his head. ‘I think they’re already full, so there isn’t much chance of the old general taking the two of you. I heard he runs the place like a military camp. But it did look clean.’
Orlov remembered the day that Fyodor had carried him on his back to the orphanage. He smuggled Orlov into the hallway and hid him in a closet.
‘What are you doing?’ Orlov asked his brother.
Fyodor put his finger to his lips. ‘You stay here where it’s warm, all right? I’m going to get some medicine for your cough. I’ll be back soon.’
Fyodor embraced Orlov and kissed his cheeks before sneaking out the front door again. Orlov wouldn’t see his brother again for twenty years.
The pain in Orlov’s chest subsided and he went to the living room and stood by the window. Although his building contained two hundred apartments, everything was quiet. The sun was beginning to rise and he could feel the warmth of the day through the glass.
What a strange life I have lived, he thought. People have always called me lucky. Lucky that the old Bolshevik and his wife took me into their well-run orphanage; that the State gave me a good education; that I was selected for an elite air-force academy; that I survived the war; that I was chosen to be part of the most ambitious adventure mankind has ever attempted; that despite my age I survived a heart attack. But I’m not lucky. I’m cursed. He would have traded all his success in return for coming home with Natasha from the war; for having a family with her and growing old by her side.
Orlov strode to the bathroom. He filled the sink with warm water and swirled his shaving brush and razor in it. The citrus scent of the shaving soap he used to lather his face roused in him memories of summers past. He dragged the razor down his cheek in a long stroke and rinsed the blade in the water. An image came back to him from the war: he was shaving in his bunker and when he looked out the window he saw Natasha by her plane. She was sitting on a chair, her legs stretched out and her head bent back. Svetlana, her mechanic, was washing her hair for her, mixing hot water from the airplane’s engine with the water she had in the bowl. Natasha broke all the rules. She was naturally blonde but she persuaded the medical staff to give her some precious peroxide each month so she could bleach her hair even lighter. She was vain about her appearance even in the midst of death and destruction. The women pilots and ground crew were required to cut their hair short, which made them look like boys. Natasha slept in curlers and wore her hair like a film star. Orlov, a stickler for order, should have despised her for her narcissism. Yet, despite all his attempts to discipline her, he’d secretly found it alluring.
He rinsed his face with cold water and patted his skin dry. He reached for his toothbrush and began to clean his teeth. The image of the two women stayed with him. He and Svetlana had shared an obsession for Natasha. Whenever the squadron left on a sortie, the mechanics used to return to their quarters to catch up on sleep, to play cards or to eat. Not Svetlana. She would pace the tarmac, her eyes never leaving the sky, until the planes returned. When Natasha landed, Svetlana first checked that her pilot was uninjured and then she checked the plane. The relief on her face when Natasha came back safely was palpable. She was like a loyal groomsman waiting for her master to return from the hunt. If Orlov came back from a sortie with bullet holes or damage to his plane, his mechanic, Sharavin, scolded him. When Natasha returned with battle damage, Svetlana would embrace her and say, ‘You go rest. I’ll see to the plane. It will be as good as new by morning.’
At first when he saw the women together, Orlov wondered if they were lovers. The intimate way they put their heads together and whispered sometimes made jealousy ripple through him and sometimes desire. Then he found out that Natasha and Svetlana had shared a friendship that went back to their youth, that was all. There had been a rift for a while, something had happened between them, but they’d been brought together again when they both volunteered for Raskova’s women’s air regiments.
Orlov had been transferred from his regiment soon after Natasha’s disappearance. After the war, when he’d searched the records, he’d found Svetlana listed as missing in action presumed dead, along with half the pilots and ground crew. He’d grieved to hear that. The last days of the war in Orël Oblast had been brutal and he’d wished he’d been allowed to remain with his regiment.
Orlov rinsed his mouth and returned to the bedroom to dress. He had no idea why, even after retiring, he’d kept this strict regime of rising early and preparing himself for the day before breakfast. He put on a pair of pressed pants and a shirt with a collar. What day was it? He glanced at the calendar that hung on his wardrobe. Monday. Leonid and his family wouldn’t be expecting him for their weekly dinner until Thursday. He would need to find something to occupy himself with until then. He went to the living room and stared at his bookshelf. Finally he decided to read Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
again and settled into an armchair.
He’d only just started when the sound of the telephone jolted him. He looked at it suspiciously then glanced at his watch. It was six o’clock. Who would be calling him so early? Worried that something had happened to Leonid, he picked up the receiver.
‘Hello,’ a male voice said. ‘Valentin?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘It’s me, Ilya,’ replied his friend. ‘How soon can you come to Orël? Can you get the train tonight?’
Orlov was taken by surprise. One minute he had no plans and the next Ilya was asking him to travel four hours out of the city. He hesitated before asking, ‘Is it something official?’
‘No. Don’t request a car. Don’t tell anyone you’re coming.’
Orlov had a sense that whatever he had been waiting for all these years was about to happen. But not the way he had hoped.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What have you discovered?’
Ilya’s voice was sharp with excitement. ‘I’ve got a lead on Natalya Azarova. I think I know where she’s buried.’