The next morning he set off on foot for the woodman’s hut, telling himself the man had been getting on in 1939 and people died young if they never had enough to eat and not to be surprised if he had gone. But Ivan was there, chopping wood as if he had been doing it non-stop ever since Alex had last seen him. His white hair had thinned to almost nothing and his beard, left untrimmed, came well down on his chest. His cheeks had fallen in and his bony hands were covered in dark-red veins. He wore an old leather jerkin, a fur hat with ear flaps and long felt boots. He put down his axe and stared at the newcomer. ‘Major Alexei Simenov,’ he said, sinking onto a tree stump, shaking his white head in disbelief. ‘Surely not?’
Alex laughed. ‘So you remember me?’
‘I remember you. Did you find my little Lidushka?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she well? What are you doing back here?’
‘I found her and I’m here because we never found the baby.’
‘Ahhh.’ It was a long drawn-out sigh. ‘You had better come in.’ He indicated the door of the hovel. ‘I’ll make tea.’
Alex preceded him into the only room. The thatch on the roof was wearing thin and he could see the sky through one spot. ‘You sound as if you know something. Do you know where he is?’
‘He’s at Kirilhor. They came back here in 1947.’
‘My God! I never thought to find him here.’ And then another thought struck him, making his heart race. ‘They? Surely not Lydia?’
‘No, I never saw her again.’ He busied himself over the stove. ‘I mean Olga Denisovna. She brought the boy up.’
‘She’s here too?’
‘Yes, though not quite right in the head, if you understand me – violent sometimes, though not with Yuri, never with Yuri. But, excuse me – if you did not expect to find the boy here, why have you come?’
For the second time in three days Alex found himself telling the story, while they sipped tea from cracked glasses and he ate a little bread dipped in salt. At the end of the tale, the old man grunted. ‘You should have stayed away. You won’t be welcome and Olga Denisovna has wits enough to denounce you.’
‘I’ve served my time and been given a pardon, she has no grounds for denouncing me.’
‘No?’ The old man gave another of his grunts. ‘What about attempting to lure a Soviet citizen out of the country to be indoctrinated by the West?’
‘I never said I intended to do that.’
‘She will make it sound as though you did.’
Alex sipped tea. There was a lot of sugar in it. ‘What about the boy?’
‘He’s a good little Pioneer, a real Soviet citizen. He believes everything they tell him. He was even seen to weep when Stalin died. And he loves Olga, looks after her all the time, even when she’s at her worst.’
‘That’s hardly surprising if she brought him up.’
‘He doesn’t know she’s not his real mother.’
‘Why didn’t you tell him as soon as he was old enough to understand?’
‘What would that have achieved?’ Ivan answered one question with another. Olga Denisovna had told him, when they first arrived, that if he said one word to the boy or anyone else about who Yuri really was, she would denounce him. ‘You’ll be sent to a labour camp, and how long do you think you’ll survive there?’ she had said belligerently. ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ And so he had. There was no point in stirring up trouble either for himself or Yuri, and there was no one left in the village who remembered Olga before the war or Yuri being born. Besides, if he kept quiet he could keep his eye on the boy and see he came to no harm. It was strange when he thought about it: Yuri was the grandson of Count Kirilov and by rights the heir to Kirilhor. Not that there was anything worth inheriting. It was a ruin. He had once asked Olga, when she was in one of her more sensible moods, why she had come back. ‘It’s where the boy was born,’ she said. ‘I thought Svetlana might still be here and help us, but she wasn’t. I have no one but Yuri. He’s a good boy. And clever too. I am going to be proud of him.’
‘I should like to see him,’ Alex said. ‘At least then I can tell Lydia I have seen him and he is well. Perhaps if I spoke to Olga Nahmova first…’
Ivan shrugged. ‘You must do what you think is right, but don’t blame me if you get less than a welcome.’
Alex thanked him and went back to the hotel.
Yuri Nahmov was chopping down a fir tree in the forest. They needed more logs for the stove. Ever since he had been considered old enough to wield an axe, he had been responsible for seeing the stove was never without fuel. His mother couldn’t do it. Half the time she didn’t know what she was doing. She often burnt the soup and she went for any visitors to Kirilhor like a wildcat, as if they had evil intent. ‘Hide!’ she would cry whenever a stranger arrived in the village. ‘Hide in the cupboard.’ Yuri hated being shut in a cupboard; that was how you were punished at the orphanage and it always brought back unpleasant memories. It made him want to scream and beat his fists against the door, but nothing would satisfy Mama until they had hidden and waited for whoever it was to go away again. She was afraid, always afraid. Did she suppose the authorities would come and take him back to the orphanage?
How he had hated that place! They were half starved and brutally treated, especially those whose parents had been arrested and sent to Siberia. He had had no idea who his parents were and it had been assumed he was either one of those or one of the thousands of besprizomiki, street children without family and means of support, who had been rounded up to be made into useful Soviet citizens. He was full of jealousy when someone came to claim a child and take him away amid tears of joy, which didn’t happen very often. He would hide his misery in a show of indifference, until in the end his pretence became real and he was indifferent.
He was a son of the Soviet system. Stalin was his father and every morning when the children were required to chant ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood’ he sang out, unaware that there was, or could be, anything different, until one day, when he was about six or seven, a strange woman had turned up and claimed she was his mother. She said his name was Yuri Nahmov and not Ilya Minsky which was the name they called him in the orphanage. Worried and frightened, he had been handed over to a complete stranger and begun a very different life.
‘It’s not the best tree for making firewood,’ Ivan told him, watching him from his seat on a tree trunk. He was fidgety, unable to make up his mind whether to say anything about yesterday’s visitor. Perhaps he should, perhaps he shouldn’t. ‘It’s too green. It will spit.’
‘It’s easier than cutting down one of those big deciduous trees.’ Yuri had long ago decided that Ivan was the nearest thing to a father he would ever have and treated him with gentle tolerance. ‘And it won’t matter about the spitting if we close the doors of the stove. It’s too hot to have them open anyway.’
The tree toppled with a creak and a groan and a satisfying thump. Yuri set about stripping it of its smaller branches, ready to saw the trunk into logs. Ivan got up to help him with the two-handed saw.
When they had filled the basket, Yuri picked it up and hefted it onto his shoulder. He had grown into a big strong lad, uncannily like his grandfather, the count, and the weight of it meant nothing to him. ‘Are you coming back to the house?’