‘Inspector?’ Kirov called again. He stood well back from the desk, edged in behind the wheezy iron stove they used to heat their office on Pitnikov Street. ‘Inspector, you must wake up. We are wanted at the Kremlin.’ The call had come in only a few minutes before, ordering them to appear. Whenever Kirov had to listen to Poskrebychev, and especially over the phone, he always had the impression that he was being barked at by a small and irritating dog. Flinching involuntarily as he listened to Stalin’s secretary relay the Kremlin’s order, Kirov had glanced at the Inspector, unable to comprehend how the man could sleep through the clattering of the telephone bell, followed by the muffled ranting of Poskrebychev through the receiver.
After a few more attempts at trying to wake the Inspector with only the murmuring of his voice, Kirov removed an onion from a basket where he kept whatever food they had on hand. Removing a knife from his desk drawer, he sliced up the onion and placed it in an iron frying pan, along with a splat of butter, which he stored, wrapped in a handkerchief, on the sill outside the window, where the Russian winter kept it frozen solid.
Resting the pan on the flat surface of the stove, which had almost consumed its daily ration of wood, it was not long before the onions began to sizzle and the room soon filled with their aroma.
Almost imperceptibly, one of Pekkala’s hands twitched. Then his fingers began to move, as if, in his unconscious state, the Inspector was playing out a tune upon some ghostly piano.
Sharply, Pekkala breathed in a breath. He blinked rapidly, as the focus returned to his eyes.
‘Where were you?’ Kirov asked.
Pekkala shook his head, as if he could no longer recall, but the truth was he remembered perfectly. It was simply too complicated to explain.
He had been in St Petersburg, strolling with Lilya along the Morskaya and Nevsky Prospekts. They had stopped to buy chocolate at Conradi’s, before going to see a play at the Theatre Michel. And afterwards, they went for a drink at the Hotel d’Europe, where the bartender was a man from Kentucky.
These things had never happened. They belonged to a parallel world in which he had never been separated from her, and there had never been a Revolution, and a bank robber named Joseph Dzhugashvili had not murdered his way to the Kremlin, from which he ruled under the name he gave himself – Stalin – Man of Steel.
Only in moments of great stillness, such as that quiet afternoon on Pitnikov Street, could Pekkala glimpse that other life he might have lived.
Sometimes, in that trance of overwhelming memory, he would reach out, as if to pull himself into that second world, only to watch that fragile loophole disappear when sounds or smells or the touch of his well-meaning assistant intruded, and he would find himself once more a prisoner of flesh and bone.
But this time it was different. Although Pekkala had long since resigned himself to the fact that those two paths – the one he had taken and the one he might have done – were never going to converge, still they both had a role to play, in this world if not in the other.
At the outset of her days in exile, Lilya Simonova had clung to every detail of the time she had spent with Pekkala.
But the more time that went by, the more difficult it became. The memories began, very slowly, to fracture. It was as if she had found herself in a room full of broken mirrors and even if she could have glued every shard back into its place, the image could never be properly restored.
Eventually, instead of trying to remember, she did all she could to forget. It was either that, or lose her sanity completely.
But some of them refused to fade away, especially in those moments just before she fell asleep at night, when no amount of concentration could force the memories back into the darkness. The most vivid and tenacious of these were the legends he had told her of the place where he came from.
Pekkala had grown up in the lake region of eastern Finland, not far from the town of Lappeenranta. His father had been born there, and knew the waterways and forest trails as well as if they’d been the creases on his palm. But Pekkala’s mother was a Sami, from the northernmost reaches of Lapland. It was from her that Pekkala had learned the stories which he then passed on to Lilya, as they walked the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo in those first weeks of their acquaintance.
He would meet her at the stone wall after she had locked up the schoolhouse for the day. Then they would walk to the yellow stone house known as the Bath Pavilion, or else they would make their way to the Lyceum garden, where the statue of Pushkin cast his brooding shadow on the ground.
But under the spell of Pekkala’s stories, Lilya barely noticed her surroundings.
He told her of the time when, as a child, he had gone to visit his mother’s family in the north and, after a three-day journey, arrived to find the men of the village on the point of setting out to hunt a bear. The beast had only recently emerged from hibernation and had already killed three calves from the reindeer herd on which the village relied, not only for food but for clothing.
So sacred was the bear that no one dared to speak its name. Instead, they just called him by a word which meant ‘the Walker in the Woods’.
The animal was tracked to its lair and brought down with spears tipped with bone from the reindeer it had killed. Then its corpse was tied to a V-shaped trellis made from birch trees and dragged back to the village. That night, meat from the bear was cooked over a fire made from the same trellis used to haul him in.
The taste of it, Pekkala told her, was rank and sour and, when no one was looking, he spat it back into the fire, where the fat burned with a flame like polished brass.
The next morning, the bear was buried in a hole as deep as the bear had been tall and even though the animal had been cut to pieces for the feast, his bones were now arranged in exactly the way he had carried them in life.
The place where they buried the bear was at the edge of a grove of trees where the People of the Twilight lived. But there were no houses to mark their property or any sign at all that they were there. The name of this tribe was the Sajvva, and they lived in a parallel world, making themselves known only when they had to. They were said to be tall and beautiful, and their skin appeared to radiate a glow like that of polished wood. The Sajvva lived much as Pekkala’s people did, catching their own fish from the lakes and tending their own herds of reindeer. These animals they did not share. Only the bear lived in both of their worlds; serving as an emissary between the Twilight World and that of men. They buried his bones with respect, not only for the animal itself but for the Sajvva who considered him a friend.
In time, when he was ready, the Walker would rise up from his grave and piece his body back together, bone by bone, until he was himself again, so he could carry on his ceaseless wandering between the worlds of gods and men.
He had told her that story one evening as they stood at the edge of the Facade Pond, with the Alexander Palace at their backs. The palace had been lit up and the moon had just risen above the trees, casting its mercury light across the still water.
‘What strange names they have for things up there,’ Lilya had remarked.
‘They would have a name for you as well,’ Pekkala told her.
She turned to him, smiling. ‘Oh, really?’ she asked. ‘And what name would that be?’
‘They would call you,’ he began, and then he paused.
‘Yes?’
‘Your name’, said Pekkala, ‘would be “She Whose Hair Glows Softly in the Moonlight”.’
Even though the words had just rolled off his tongue, there was something both ancient and haunting about them, as if the name had been waiting for her much longer than she’d waited for the name.
The last thing she heard of Pekkala, after the Revolution drove them apart, was that he had been sent to the labour camp of Borodok, in the valley of Krasnagolyana. As years passed, and only silence reached her from the forests of Siberia, she began to wonder if Pekkala was still alive.