‘And that’s where I found you nine years later,’ said Kirov, ‘living like an animal in the forest of Krasnagolyana.’
By then, Pekkala no longer even had a name. He was known only as prisoner 4745-P of the Borodok labour camp. Immediately upon his arrival, the director of the camp, fearing that other inmates might learn Pekkala’s true identity, had sent him into the wilderness, with the task of marking trees for logging crews who came to cut the timber in that forest.
The average life of a tree-marker in the forest of Krasnagolyana was six months. Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, these men died from exposure, starvation and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree-marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.
The commandant assumed he would be dead within the year, but by the time Kirov was sent to bring him back, Pekkala had already begun his ninth year of a thirty-year sentence for crimes against the State. Prisoner 4745-P had lasted longer than any other marker in the entire gulag system.
Provisions were left for him at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. Only rarely was he seen by the logging crews. What they observed was a creature barely recognisable as a man. With the crust of red paint that covered his prison clothes and the long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its flesh and left to die which had somehow managed to survive. Wild rumours surrounded him — that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a breastplate made from the bones of those who had disappeared in the forest, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.
He strode through the forest with the help of a large stick, whose gnarled root head bristled with square-topped horseshoe nails. The only other thing he carried was a bucket of red paint to mark the trees. Instead of using a brush, because he had no turpentine to wash the bristles, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. These marks were, for most of the other convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.
They called him the man with bloody hands. No one except the commandant of Borodok knew where this prisoner had come from or who he had been before he arrived. Those same men who feared to cross his path had no idea this was Pekkala, whose name they’d once invoked just as their ancestors had called upon the gods.
At the time of their first meeting, Kirov had been a newly minted lieutenant in the Bureau of Special Operations. He had been transferred to the field of Internal State Security from the Leningrad Culinary Institute, where he had hoped to begin his career as a chef. The entire institute was closed down one day without prior warning. The students, Kirov included, showed up after a long weekend break to find the building where they worked completely empty. The stoves and cutting tables where they once practised their art had been removed, along with the sinks and desks and chairs. The faculty had vanished and, in spite of several attempts to contact the Master Chefs who served as his professors, Kirov never heard from any of them again. By the time he had arrived back at the flat which he rented with another student from the Institute, transfer orders for both of them had already arrived in the mail.
Numbly, Kirov had surveyed the document. Until that moment, he had never even heard of the Bureau of Special Operations.
Kirov’s roommate, a stout and pink-faced boy named Beldugov, sat on his bed and wept quietly, dabbing the sleeve of his white chef’s tunic against his cheeks.
‘What did they do with you?’ asked Kirov.
‘I appear to have joined the Navy,’ replied Beldugov, ‘but I cannot swim. I cannot even float!’
The next morning, the two men, each carrying a small suitcase, shook hands outside the apartment building. In a futile gesture of defiance, Beldugov still wore his white chef’s tunic as they went their separate ways.
By the end of that day, Kirov had begun his studies as a commissar of the Red Army. Although, as Pekkala’s assistant, Kirov had prospered in the Bureau of Special Operations, rising to the rank of major, he had never forgotten his dream to be a chef.
Proof of Kirov’s refusal to abandon his dreams was that their tiny office, on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building near the Dorogomilovsky market, had been transformed into a menagerie of herbs, vegetables and exotic fruits, which grew in earthenware pots on every surface in the room except Pekkala’s desk. That was where Pekkala had drawn the line, but the truth was his desk was so heaped with files, pencils, pencil sharpeners, ink pots and loose rounds for the Webley revolver, that there was no room for foliage.
It had become a tradition that, on Friday afternoons, Kirov would prepare a meal for them, using a small stove he had set up in the office. He cooked chicken braised in butter and served with chestnut stuffing, or salmon poached in Madeira wine with shrimp and lemon sauce, or Siberian pelmeny beef turnovers, with wild mushroom and scallion filling. The herbs he used in his recipes had been carefully trimmed from the plants upon the window sill. This food was not only the best meal of the week for Pekkala. It was, collectively, the best food he’d ever eaten. This was why Pekkala tolerated the irregularity of these sweet and musky plants, knowing that Kirov was one of the only people he had ever encountered who could put up with his own eccentricities.
Without Kirov, and without the Cafe Tilsit, Pekkala might have starved to death.
Valentina came with bowls of gribnoi soup, made with potatoes, onions and morel mushrooms, which she grew under beds of alder leaves in window boxes at the back of the cafe. She set the bowls down on the table, then from her flower-patterned apron, she fished two pewter spoons made in the Russian style, with the handle as long and thin as a pencil and the bowl round and shallow. Gathering a handful of her apron, she wiped the spoons. Oblivious to the look of disdain on Kirov’s face, she handed one to each of the men. As Valentina turned to leave, in a gesture so slight that it almost seemed accidental, she rested her hand on Pekkala’s shoulder. Valentina did not look at him or speak. And then she was gone, shuffling back towards the kitchen.
Where Valentina’s hand had touched him, Pekkala felt a slow and heavy warmth settling into his blood, as if, for that fraction of a second, their bodies had become entwined.
Kirov saw none of this, having been momentarily distracted by the mushrooms in the soup, whose spiced and earthy fragrance wafted straight into his brain. ‘One woman or another. There are plenty of fish in the sea,’ he commented as he ladled a spoonful of soup into his mouth. ‘That’s my philosophy.’
‘And yet you have remained single all these years,’ remarked Pekkala. ‘So what is the difference between us?’
‘I have remained single on purpose,’ Kirov wagged his spoon at Pekkala. ‘That is, until now.’
Pekkala glanced up from his soup. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have found someone.’
Pekkala stared at him blankly.
‘And you are. .’ Kirov turned his spoon in a slow circle, encouraging Pekkala to complete the sentence.
Pekkala blinked.
‘Happy,’ prompted Kirov.
‘Happy!’ Pekkala echoed, coming to his senses. ‘I am happy for you, Kirov.’ He dropped his spoon into his bowl, splashing his chest with soup although he did not seem to notice. Then he sat back heavily. ‘This is good news.’