Hesitantly, Pekkala settled onto the chair, afraid that its legs would collapse under his weight.
“Pekkala,” said the Tsarina, “I believe we have gotten off to a bad start, you and I, but it is simply a matter of trust. I would like to trust you, Pekkala.”
“Yes, Majesty.”
“With that in mind,” she said, her clasped hands pressing into her lap as if she had a cramp in her stomach, “I would like for us to work together on a matter of great importance. I require you to conduct an investigation.”
“Of course,” answered Pekkala. “What do you need me to investigate?”
She paused for a moment. “The Tsar.”
Pekkala breathed in sharply. “I beg your pardon, Majesty?” The wicker seat creaked beneath him.
“I need you,” she continued, “to look into whether my husband is keeping a mistress.”
“A mistress,” repeated Pekkala.
“Yes.” She watched him closely, her lips tight in an awkward smile. “You know what that is, don’t you?”
“I do know, Majesty.” He also knew that the Tsar did, in fact, have a mistress. Or, at least, there was a woman who had been his mistress. Her name was Mathilde Kschessinska and she was the lead dancer of the Imperial Russian Ballet. The Tsar had known her for years, since before his marriage to the Tsarina, and had even bought her a mansion in Petrograd. Officially, he had broken off ties with her. Unofficially, Pekkala knew, the Tsar kept in contact with this woman. Although the full extent of their relationship was unknown to him, he knew for certain that the Tsar continued to visit her, even using a secret door located at the back of the Petrograd mansion so that he could enter undetected.
Pekkala had always assumed that the Tsarina knew everything about this other woman. The reason for this was that he did not believe the Tsar to be capable of keeping any secret from his wife. He lacked the necessary guile, and the Tsarina was far too suspicious to allow an affair to continue undetected.
“I regret,” said Pekkala, rising to his feet, “that I cannot investigate the Tsar.”
The Tsarina appeared to have been waiting for this moment. “You can investigate the Tsar,” she told him, as her eyes lit up. “The Tsar himself gave you the right to investigate anyone you choose. That is by Imperial Decree. And what is more, I have the right to order this investigation.”
“I understand, Majesty, that technically I am permitted—”
“Not permitted, Pekkala. Obliged.”
“I understand—” he continued.
She cut him off again. “Then it is settled.”
“Majesty,” pleaded Pekkala, “what you ask, I must not do.”
“Then you refuse?” she asked.
Pekkala felt a trap closing around him. To refuse an order from the Tsarina would amount to treason, the penalty for which was death. The Tsar was at army headquarters in Mogilev, halfway across the country. If the Tsarina wished it, Pekkala could be executed before the Tsar even found out what was wrong.
“You refuse?” she asked again.
“No, Majesty.” The words fell like stones from his mouth.
“Good. I am glad we are finally able to see”—the Tsarina held out her hand towards the door—“eye to emerald eye.”
THE KNOCKING CAME AGAIN, BUT THERE WAS SOMETHING UNUSUAL about it. The knuckles were striking far too low against the door.
At first Pekkala could make no sense of it, but then he smiled. He stepped over to the door and opened it just as the child on the other side was about to knock again. “Good evening, Talia.”
“Good evening, Comrade Pekkala.”
Before Pekkala stood a girl about seven years old, with plump cheeks and a dimple in her chin, wearing a khaki shirt and dress and the red scarf of a Young Pioneer around her neck. In a fashion popular among girls in the Communist Youth Movement, her short hair had been cut in a straight line across her forehead. Smiling, she gave him the Pioneer salute: the knife edge of her outstretched hand held at an angle in front of her face, as if to fend off an attack.
Conscious of how much he towered over the girl, Pekkala got down on one knee so they were looking each other in the face. “And what has brought you here this evening?”
“Babayaga says you are lonely.”
“And how does she know that?”
The child shrugged. “She just does.”
Pekkala glanced back at his dinner—the lumps of bread and the bowl of watery cheese. He sighed. “Well, Talia, it just so happens that I could use a little company right now.”
Talia stepped back into the hall and held out her hand for him to take. “Come along, then,” she said.
“One moment,” Pekkala said. He pulled on his coat which, although it had been cleaned, still looked the worse for wear after his journey across the proving ground.
Joining the girl out in the corridor, Pekkala caught the smell of evening meals—the fug of boiled potatoes, fried sausages, and cabbage.
They held hands as they walked down the pale green hallway with its ratty carpet to the apartment where Talia lived with her grandmother.
Until six months ago, Talia had lived with her parents in a large apartment in what had once been called the Sparrow Hills district of the city but had since been renamed Lenin Hills.
Then, one night, NKVD men arrived at their door, searched the house and arrested her parents. Until the time of their arrest, both had been model Communists, but now they were classed as Type 58. This fell under the general heading of “Threat to National Security” and earned them each a sentence of fifteen years at the Solovetsky Labor Camp.
The only reason Talia and her grandmother even knew this much was because Pekkala, having been their neighbor for several years, agreed to make inquiries on their behalf. As for the precise nature of the parents’ crime, even the NKVD records office could not tell him. Stalin had confided in Pekkala that even if only two percent of the arrests turned out to be warranted, he would still say it had been worth arresting all the others. So many people had been brought in this past year—over a million, according to the records office—that it was not possible to keep track of them all. What Pekkala knew, and what he could not bring himself to tell the grandmother, was that more than half of those people arrested were shot before they ever boarded the trains bound for Siberia.
Their family had once been farmers in the fertile Black Earth region of the Altai Mountains. In 1930, the Communist Party had ordered the farm to be merged with others in their village. It was called “collectivization.” The running of this collectivized farm, or kolkhoz, had then been given over to a party official who, with no farming experience of his own, ran the collective into the ground in less than two years. The collective broke up and Talia’s family had drifted, as had many others, to the city.
They began working for the Mos-Prov plant, which supplied most of the electricity to Moscow. The husband-and-wife team immediately joined the Communist Party and rose quickly through its ranks. Before their arrest, they had been rewarded with special rations like extra sugar, tea, and cigarettes, tickets to the Bolshoi Theater and trips to the Astafievo resort outside the city.
According to Babayaga, the father had often spoken about the merits of perekovka: the remolding of the human soul through forced labor in the Gulag system. Pekkala wondered what he thought now that he was in one. Like many good Communists, the man probably believed that he and his wife were simply victims of some bureaucratic error which would soon be corrected, at which time they could return to their old lives; any suffering he endured now would be rewarded on some distant day of reckoning, when errors were set straight.