His words sent a chill across my skin. I hoped he was right, but the lack of reception at the train station made me wonder if Olga’s letter had reached him yet. My letters had always gone through my maid, who I presumed sent them on to the correct bureau for processing. Had I misjudged the time it would take for my letter to arrive? What if Papa was taken off guard? Then I gathered my courage. This man was my father. Your loving Papochka. He would not have written that if he did not miss me. I think of you often. Those were not the words of a man who had forgotten his only child. They were perhaps the words of a man who had to comply with directives, a man who must put his position before his family. But they were not a rejection. I had to believe Papa would protect me. I tried hard to suppress the churning nerves in my stomach.
Everything would be all right. I was here. Mama had called me.
I was hardly aware of the steps Lieutenant Lubov led us up to a thick oak door. A brass plaque announcing my father’s name sat at my eyeline.
Lieutenant Lubov knocked smartly and waited for a response.
‘Come in!’ a voice called. It was a stern voice. Imperious. A voice used to being obeyed. I waited for a feeling of recognition, a connection to the voice’s owner. But I felt nothing.
Lieutenant Lubov opened the door. The room was a haze of warm colours; green leather chairs, a timber desk. Hundreds of books lined up in neat rows in glass-fronted timber cabinets. A man sat behind the desk. When he looked up, his spectacles flashed, little silver half-moons reflecting the light from the window.
‘Yes?’
I hesitated. I wanted to step forward but my feet would not obey.
I looked around to Olga. She was smiling.
‘Yes?’ the man said again. ‘What is it, Lieutenant?’
Lieutenant Lubov cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me for interrupting, Captain. But your daughter is here.’
The man behind the desk blinked. He laid down the pen in his hand, placing it carefully in the centre of the documents stacked before him and then he stood up, scraping his chair back. ‘My daughter?’
Footsteps. He was coming towards us. The brass buttons shone on his uniform. His beard was speckled with white hairs. Up close, I realised he was old; much older than I had imagined. I could not place him with the image I remembered of Mamochka. The young woman she had been, full of spirit. I forced my legs to move, so we came face to face in front of the bookshelf. He peered at me over the top of his glasses. A long nose. A heavy brow that jutted out over his eyes, forming a cliff to which his grey eyebrows clung. I tried to remember the picture I had drawn of him, the one still hanging on my wall in the House on the Embankment. But the picture would not reconcile with this stranger. It was a child’s fond remembrance, each pencil stroke a wish of longing. It was not reality.
I found my voice. ‘Papochka?’
I was eight years old again. The meeting hall of the Octoberists’ group had high ceilings. It smelled of pine sap and varnish. The timber had been recently cut, built specifically for our private group, and the scent of the forest lingered in the wood. My papa’s face was shadowed, but I knew he was smiling. Papa was proud of me. He had taken time away from his important work to come to my ceremony. His fingers brushed against my shirt as he pinned the badge on my scarf. Always ready!
‘It’s me, Papa,’ I said now. I tried to smile. ‘It’s Lydia.’
He said nothing, just continued to stare at me.
‘Captain?’ Lieutenant Lubov looked from me to my father. ‘Are you quite all right?’
My papa ran his tongue between his lips. ‘Leave us,’ he said sharply. His gaze darted to Olga. ‘Take the woman with you.’
I heard Olga begin to speak before Lieutenant Lubov hurried her out, pulling the door closed firmly behind him.
I waited for Papa to reach for me, to embrace me. But he simply stood, staring, his arms hanging limp by his sides.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said at last. His face was twisted up, as though he had drunk week-old tea and the shrivelled skin was clinging to the roof of his mouth.
‘Olga sent a letter,’ I said. I could hear the quiver in my voice. ‘Letting you know we were coming.’
‘I did not receive it,’ he said. He sounded incredulous. ‘The communications lines have been busy. Your uncle knew?’
I hesitated. But this was not the moment for secrets. This was the time for revelation, for all things to be made clear. ‘No,’ I said, sounding bolder than I felt. ‘I planned to let him know once we arrived. It did not seem necessary to tell him. After all, I am grown up, aren’t I?’
He didn’t answer.
‘You aren’t pleased to see me,’ I said. The words were painful but I said them anyway. Adults did not shrink from telling the truth. They swallowed their bitterness and their disappointment. That was what Mama had done; but in her case, it had been a draught, medicine crushed into liquid form, pounded down until the flakes were small enough to dissolve on her tongue. I was not Mama, though. I was myself and I wanted to live. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We should have waited. But we’re here now.’
He drew in a deep breath. ‘There’s been a mistake.’
I tried to answer, but my tongue felt too big for my mouth. Suddenly, understanding made the words come. ‘I know about Mama,’ I said. ‘I know how she died. It wasn’t your fault.’
He made a strange sound. ‘It’s not that.’ He lifted his chin. ‘You will have to go back.’
At first I thought I had misheard him. It was a simple mix-up. My uncle would be upset, but my father could talk him around, surely. My absence was nothing that could not be fixed by a telephone call and then we would perhaps take our dinner together at Papa’s residence, Olga fussing about, overseeing each course as Papa and I shared a look of secret exasperation. And then he would excuse himself, dabbing his lips with his napkin and take himself off to his study to finish some work while I slipped into my new bedroom and stared at the lights twinkling over Tartu, a place so foreign and yet, with Mama’s heritage and her stories and the language she had so carefully taught me, so strangely and achingly familiar.
‘You poor child,’ he said. ‘You have no idea who you are. Do you?’
And then the meaning of what he had said hit me.
I took a step backwards.
My father opened his mouth as if he had more to say, more commands to impart. But then he sighed, and the telephone wire twisted around his arm as he picked up the mouthpiece. A moment passed. ‘Comrade Stalin?’
I heard the muffled reply. His eyes darted towards mine.
‘Comrade Stalin… your daughter is here. Lydochka. She’s safe.’ A pause. ‘She brought the woman with her. No, I don’t know how they slipped away.’ His tone sharpened. ‘Isn’t that the role of her bodyguard, to know where she is at all times?’ He bent to listen to the response, wincing. ‘I’m sorry, Comrade. Of course. I apologise. Yes… I suppose. That seems best. I’ll tell her. Don’t worry.’ He turned slowly in a half-circle to pin me with his gaze. ‘I’ll tell her,’ he said again, his voice softer now. Complacent. ‘I understand.’
The telephone clicked as he replaced it on the cradle. Then he came slowly back to the middle of the room and took me by the shoulders. I wanted to turn my head, to shake off everything I had heard. The meaning of his words could not reach me if I let them sit on my skin, like oil on feathers. Your daughter Lydochka. If I could simply ignore them…
‘Lydia.’ I had never before realised that Papa’s eyes were green. They were as green as the rippling grasses in the fields outside Uncle’s dacha in Zubolovo. They were different to mine. They were not the shifting hues of the sea, changeable, moody, at once peacock blue then grey and stormy.