‘Not yet. Later perhaps. I’ll clear up these bits first, maybe make a bonfire. The ash will be good for the garden.’
‘It’ll spit!’ Yuri said, laughing. ‘I’ll see you later, then.’
Back at Kirilhor, he put the logs down by the hearth in the kitchen and took off his outdoor clothes before joining his mother in the living room. She was cowed on the floor in a corner of the large room, her shoulders hunched into a ragged shawl, her eyes flashing hate at a man who stood watching her as if unsure what to do, a man in a business suit and a clean shirt. ‘Yurochka, thank goodness you are here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what this man wants, but he won’t go away. Tell him to go away, tell him we don’t want whatever it is he’s selling.’
Alex held his hand out to the boy. ‘I am Alexei Petrovich Simenov. I am sorry if I have disturbed your mother. I assume the lady is your mother?’
‘Of course she is,’ Yuri said, shaking the hand. His grip was firm. ‘What do you want with her?’
‘Nothing,’ Alex assured him. ‘And I’m not selling anything.’ He noticed Olga’s eyes flashing dangerously and thought quickly. ‘I am sightseeing.’
‘In Petrovsk?’ Yuri laughed. ‘What is there to see in a dump like this?’
‘Kirilhor,’ Alex answered. ‘It has an interesting history. Did you know that?’
‘I know it once belonged to a count, but he’s long dead, and all his kind. And good riddance too. If he were alive now, I would spit on him. You aren’t anything to do with him, are you? You haven’t come to claim your inheritance?’ And he laughed again.
‘No, I have no claim on Kirilhor.’ Alex wondered if they paid rent for living there, and if so, to whom. Perhaps they were simply squatting. ‘But I know someone who lived here as a child before the Revolution. Her father was Count Kirilov. He died during the Civil War, along with his wife and son. Lydia was the only one who survived and went to England. She returned in 1938 with her husband, Nikolay Nikolayevich Andropov. She remembers it with fondness. I wanted to see the place and perhaps take a photograph to show her.’
Olga was undoubtedly disturbed and the mention of Kolya’s name roused her to a furious response. ‘Get out!’ she yelled, scrambling to her feet. Grabbing a knife from the table she came at Alex brandishing it. ‘Get out and leave us alone. We don’t care that…’ she clicked bony fingers at him ‘… for a stiff-necked aristocrat, do we, Yurochka?’
Yuri shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Alex, taking Olga’s hand and gently removing the knife from her fingers. ‘My mother is not well. She was wounded in the head at the beginning of the war and has never fully recovered. It is best you leave us. I shall have to calm her down. You understand?’
‘Yes, I understand,’ Alex said, and took his leave.
He made his way along the forest track until he came to where Ivan was tending a bonfire; he was almost obscured by thick smoke. The whole forest smelt of pine resin. Seeing Alex he threw the branch he had in his hand on the fire and came towards him. ‘You went to Kirilhor, my friend?’
‘Yes,’ he said turning away because the smoke was making his eyes water. ‘The woman’s mad.’
‘I told you that, didn’t I? What did you say? What did she say?’
Alex recounted their conversation word for word. ‘Now I’m in a quandary,’ he finished. ‘What shall I do?’
‘I should go away and forget you ever came here. The boy will be all right. He’s clever; he’ll grow into a fine man and make his mother proud of him.’
Alex gave a humourless grunt of laughter. ‘Which mother?’
Ivan chuckled. ‘Both of them.’
‘Should I tell her? Lydia, I mean.’
‘You must make up your own mind about that, young man, but if I were you I’d say nothing. It will break her heart.’
Alex left him and made his way back to the hotel, booked out and took the train back to Moscow. He knew he ought not to go back there but he needed to tell Leo what had happened and ask his advice.
Leo’s advice was the same as Ivan’s, even though he had never known Lydia. ‘In any case,’ he added, ‘how were you going to tell her? You are here, in Moscow, where you have no business to be, and the lady is in England. A letter? Not advisable, everything is censored. You are banned from the cities, but that doesn’t mean you can go where you like. I stayed around to make sure no one followed you onto the train to Kirilhor, but you can be sure someone will pick up your trail before long.’
‘I know.’ Alex was drowning in despondency. He had not felt so down since he had been taken prisoner outside Minsk. All his longing centred on Upstone Hall and Lydia, even though he realised, deep inside him, that returning there was an unrealistic dream. Too many years had passed since that tearful parting in Moscow, even though it was the memory of that which had kept him alive when he could so easily have succumbed to cold and hunger and cruelty, as many another had done. And with no good news to take back to her…
‘Cheer up, my friend,’ Leo said. ‘You were taken at Potsdam, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s in the Russian zone; the authorities won’t stop you going back to where you came from and you never know, you might be welcomed with open arms. Even if you’re not, you’ll be nearer the West. More chance of hopping over the border.’
This was subversive advice from someone who lived in the Soviet Union, but it sounded like sense and Alex was too tired to argue. ‘I don’t like abandoning the boy,’ he said.
‘I’ll keep an eye on his progress. If he shows promise, I’ll see he gets to university or technical college.’
‘Why should you do that?’ Alex asked in surprise. ‘You don’t even know him.’
‘For our friendship’s sake and because Russia needs educated men. Too many were lost in Stalin’s purges.’
Alex couldn’t stay in Moscow a moment longer. He took his friend’s advice, bidding him and his wife goodbye, choking back tears.
Potsdam was not where he wanted to be. Leo had been right; even as a free man, he could not return to England. Freedom was relative and he would still be inside the Russian zone, stuck until he could think of a way to cross to the West. And it soon became obvious to him that the nearer he came to the border, the more roadblocks and checks there were. Every time the train rushed over a crossing, he could see them from the window. And there were wide swathes of a kind of ploughed-up no-man’s-land between one side and the other, designed to allow no cover for anyone trying to cross.
Arriving in Potsdam he discovered Else had married in his absence and had two children. She was not pleased to see him and anxious enough to be rid of him to persuade her husband to show him where there was a weakness in the rows and rows of barbed wire that separated East from West. He was guided to the spot at the dead of night and quietly abandoned.
He took a deep breath and dashed across, ready to start dodging if the bullets came, but strangely no one saw him. Once on the other side, he trudged westwards, his senses keyed to every rustle in the undergrowth at the side of the road, every drip-drip of water from hedges, every barking dog, ready to dive into a ditch if anyone came along the road. In a mile or so he came to a crossroads and another of the ubiquitous border posts, but this time it was manned by American soldiers. They stopped him, guns at the ready.
‘Take me to the British,’ he said.
‘You’re a Limey?’ one asked in surprise.
‘Yes.’
The sergeant detailed one of his men to take him to their CO, where he explained who he was and how he came to be in the East. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ the man said. ‘That’s some story.’