A glance at Caitlin’s expression brought McColl back to earth. Here he was planning their future, and only twenty minutes before she’d been begging Sergei to come home. Had she been lying to coax him away from the others, or had she really meant it? Even if she hadn’t, why was he assuming that she wouldn’t return on her own? Because she loved him? She’d loved him in 1918, and that hadn’t stopped her from saying good-bye.
They were, he suddenly realized, drawing up outside the serai. It was gone midnight, and their feet on the stairs sounded loud in the sleeping building. Once they were safe in their room, he tried to take her in his arms, and after an initial flinch, she allowed him to do so. “Thank you,” she said when he let her go, but he had no idea what for.
She lay herself out on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Things would look better after they slept, he told himself, lying down beside her. He felt exhausted but was determined not to drop off before she did.
She seemed to sense as much. “Go to sleep,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ll be able to.”
“Do you want to talk?” he asked.
“No.”
In the hour before dawn, McColl awoke with a jerk, a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. His mind reached for the fading dream, but it was already gone, leaving only the feeling that somehow he had gotten everything wrong.
He levered himself into a sitting position and stared down at her sleeping face, shadow drawn in the dim light: the dark pools of the shuttered eyes; the strong, graceful line of the jaw. The new Russia, he thought. Humanity’s best hope, where the best of people ended up as executioners.
One day maybe, far in the future.
When he woke up again, the sun was streaming through the window, and she was gone. So was her suitcase and, as he quickly discovered, half of their money. She was going back to Russia.
There was a note on the table. “I love you, Jack, and that makes this the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Forgive me, Caitlin.”
He read it through again, and again, examining each pencil stroke as if there was some way he could release the feelings they had imprisoned, then sat staring into space for several minutes, before running a hand through his hair and walking out onto the balcony.
“I can give myself to you,” she had once said to him, “because I know I can take myself away.”
Outside, the familiar sensory palette presented itself: the smells, the noise, the ache of color. Across the street a man in a turban was sitting on a stool, a cobbler’s last between his knees, hammering away at a long black boot. A rickshaw went past, carrying a pasty-faced European toward the Red Fort. Above the roofs the sky seemed blue as the dome over Tamerlane’s tomb.
Had he always known she would go back?
He had to admit the answer was no. The fear had always been there, but he hadn’t really believed that she would.
What could he do now? Go home, he supposed, if only for his mother’s sake. To a country awash with anger and bitterness, to the half-dead life he’d left behind, to grieving her loss all over again.
He walked back into the room and wearily gathered his possessions together.
The map of Tashkent he’d taken from Rafiq’s room at the Hotel Lux was still in his bag, and seeing it there he remembered the courtyard of women, the flickering film on the wall, all those eyes in search of a better world.
Her place of hope. He seemed no nearer to finding his own.
The plumes of smoke in the distance presumably marked the station. After she’d found a place there to change back into her Russian clothes, she would buy a ticket to somewhere. She had no idea how she would get back to Moscow and suspected it might take months, but there had to be a way. For someone like her—young, clever, and white—there would always be a way.
So why did the smoke in the distance seem too close? She had done the hardest part, done it because she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to do it again. So why was she crying inside?
What in God’s name was she doing?
They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens. “Pull over,” she told the driver, pointing him toward the curb when he turned to see what she wanted. He looked around again once they were stationary, and she held up five fingers.
He muttered something and climbed down from his seat. “More annas,” he warned her, before lighting a cigarette and ambling into the garden.
She sat there, absurdly exposed, watching the palm fronds sway in the morning breeze.
Was she returning to something that was no longer there?
In 1918 she’d been closer to joy than she’d ever expected. She remembered trying—and failing—to convey the strength of that feeling in a letter to her aunt Orla. What had happened in Russia was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, maybe rarer than that. A sense of togetherness, of social happiness, that had left her and all the people she knew drunk on hope and fellow feeling. The world had opened up, and things that had once seemed carved in stone—the poverty and exploitation, the never-ending wars, the subjection of women—were suddenly seen to be written only in sand, so swiftly erased, so easily rewritten. And she had been part of the change, one of so many making a difference.
Wordsworth had put it welclass="underline" “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”
The years that followed had not been so joyful—the civil war and the hardship it brought in its wake had seen to that. Some had thought victory would rejuvenate the revolution, but the opposite seemed to have happened. The magic was gone, the world closing down, the sand reverting to stone.
They found it hard to admit, to themselves as much as to one another, but all of them knew. Sergei and Komarov had railed against it in their very different ways; Kollontai was doubtless still tenaciously fighting her corner. But deep in their hearts, they all knew that the odds were against them, that the brand-new world they thought they had glimpsed was fading like a dream.
Caitlin sighed and watched as a pair of young Indian men in suits strode past, presumably bound for some office. She could go back to hers in Moscow and do that work that could still be done. Part of her wanted to; part of her thought she should.
But other voices demanded a hearing. The one that said, “Cut your losses, and find a new country where doors are waiting for someone to break them down.” The one that just said, “Jack.”
In 1918 she’d had to choose between love and ideals because he was a wanted man where she most wanted to be. But even then, setting him loose, she’d hoped that they might meet again, that she wasn’t burning her bridges completely. And miracle of miracles, she’d been right.
If she left him again, she knew there’d be no way back.
Passionate love wasn’t everything, but it sure as hell was something. And though for women it often seemed to crowd out everything else, that didn’t have to be the case. Maybe winning that particular battle was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do.
He took one last look around the empty room, and felt the sting of tears. Feeling foolish, he wiped them away and made for the stairs. He was halfway across the courtyard below when the street door swung open and there she was, suitcase in hand.
Seeing him there, an uncertain smile appeared on her face.
“Forget something?” he asked.
“Just you.”
Historical Note
With historical fiction the question often arises as to where the history ends and the fiction begins, and I feel it is incumbent on authors to at least take a stab at explaining their own approach. The most important thing, to my mind, is that the historical context—by which I mean everything from political events to food and clothing—should be as accurate as possible. Some will disagree with my judgments—history, after all, is often a matter of opinion. Others will gleefully point out the odd mistake, and as someone prone to schadenfreude myself, I can hardly complain when they do.