Bearable.
Her gaze explored the room, sliding with slow consideration over the curtains, the chair, the carpet, the shirts hanging on hooks, all full of colour. Colour. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed it. In the camp everything had been grey. A small sigh of pleasure escaped her, a faint sound, but it was enough. Instantly a whining started up outside the bedroom door and brought her back to reality.
Whose house was she in? Mikhail’s? Or… No. She shook her head. No, it wasn’t Mikhail’s. Only dimly did she recall being carried in a pair of strong arms, but she knew exactly whose bed she was lying in and whose dog was whining at the door.
The latch lifted quietly. Anna’s heart stopped as her eyes sought out the figure standing in the shadows. He was tall, holding himself stiffly, and in a flash of anxiety she wondered whether the stiffness was in his mind or his body. His shirt fitted close across his wide chest, and his hair was cropped hard to his head.
Vasily. It was Vasily, with the Dyuzheyev forehead, the long aristocratic nose – and the eyes, she remembered those grey swirling eyes. But the once generous mouth was now held tight in a firm line. At his heel stood a large rough-coated wolfhound; Anna recalled Sofia telling her its name.
‘Hope,’ she breathed. It was easier than saying Vasily.
The dog loped towards her, its claws clipping the wooden floor, and nuzzled her hand. The simple display of affection seemed to persuade Vasily at last to walk into the room, but there was something deliberately formal in his step and he came no nearer than the end of the bed.
He spoke first. ‘How are you feeling?’
His voice was controlled, and deeper than it used to be, but she could still hear the young Vasily in it. A shiver of pleasure shot through her.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you cold? Do you need another quilt?’
‘No. I’m warm, thank you.’
Another awkward silence.
‘Are you hungry?’
She smiled. ‘Ravenous.’
He nodded and, though he didn’t move away, his eyes did. They looked at the dog’s shaggy head now resting on the quilt, at the round wooden knobs at each corner of the bed, at the white-painted wall, at the window and a gust of snowflakes sweeping across the yard outside. Anywhere but at her.
‘You look well, Vasily,’ she said softly.
He studied his own strong hands, but didn’t comment.
This time she let the silence hang. She didn’t know what was happening and her mind felt too weak to struggle with it. Was he angry at her for coming here? For risking his position as Chairman of the kolkhoz? Who could blame him? She didn’t want him to be angry, of course she didn’t, but at the same time, in some strange way, it didn’t matter if he was. This was what mattered. Being here. Seeing the way his grey eyes had sparked as he stepped into the room.
She studied the long lean lines of his body, the familiar set of his head on the broad shoulders. The only thing she missed was his hair, the way it used to fall in a soft brown tumble across his high forehead and make him look… what? She smiled. Look lovable. These shorn hard spikes of hair belonged to a different Vasily.
He saw the smile. Even though he wasn’t looking at her, still he was aware of the smile and she saw him move closer. She felt choked by the wave of love that engulfed her. So much was unsaid. And she felt no need to say it. Just looking at him was enough.
Abruptly, when she least expected it, he turned and disappeared from the room. She had no idea whether he was gone five minutes or five hours, but when she again opened her eyes he was sitting in a chair beside her bed, so close she could see the shadows that lined his eyes and a tiny web of lines etched at the tight corners of his mouth.
‘Here, time to eat.’
In his hands lay a bowl of soup. Steam rose from it and brushed his chin, and she couldn’t take her eyes from that strong square line underpinning his face.
‘Eat,’ he said again.
She tried to sit up and failed, so struggled instead to lift her head higher on the pillow. She was shocked to find herself so weak. Everything ached. Even that little movement of her head set off more coughing, and when she’d finished gasping for breath he wiped a damp cloth across her lips, studied the red smear on it with a frown and put the cloth aside. He looked at her intently.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine,’ she whispered.
For a brief moment a faint ironic smile tilted one side of his mouth.
‘Fine,’ he repeated, ‘just fine.’
He lifted a spoon from the bowl and raised it to her lips. Willingly she parted them and felt the thick aromatic liquid flow down into her starved stomach.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she murmured.
‘Only a few mouthfuls now. More later.’
‘But I’m-’
‘No. Your body can’t take much yet, Anna.’
Anna.
It was the first time he’d spoken her name. She badly wanted him to say it again.
‘Thank you… Vasily.’
‘My name is no longer Vasily. I am called Aleksei Fomenko now. It’s important that you call me that. I’m putting it about in the village that you are…’
But he stopped, unable to finish. His eyes were fixed on her face and she could see a thousand thoughts and questions racing through their grey depths, but none that she could decipher. She was all of a sudden acutely conscious of what she must look like to him, a skeletal jumble of bones in a nightdress, her skin as lifeless as ash and weeping sores on…
Nightdress?
Who took her out of her filthy rags? Who clothed her in this pure white nightgown? Instantly she was sure it was Vasily himself. He’d undressed her and bathed her and seen the sickening state of her, and the thought surfaced with a hot surge of shame. He seemed to read her thoughts and put down the bowl, reached out a hand and rested the tips of his fingers on her bare throat.
‘Anna,’ he said in a low voice, ‘I can feel your heart racing. You…’ His breath caught. For a long moment there was only the wind rattling the window pane and Vasily’s finger brushing her throat, ‘You are even more beautiful than I remembered.’
‘Vasily!’
As his name burst out of her mouth she saw something break inside him. And suddenly his arms were around her and he was sitting on the bed holding her to his chest, rocking her, crushing her tight against his own body, as though he could press her deep in his bones.
‘Anna,’ he whispered over and over, ‘Anna, my Anna.’ He kissed her hot forehead and caressed her filthy lank hair. ‘Forgive me.’
‘For what?’
‘For not coming.’
She brushed the line of his jaw with her lips. ‘You’re here now.’
‘I made a promise,’ Vasily explained.
‘To whom?’
‘To Lenin.’ He shook his head. ‘To the bronze statue of him in Leningrad. After I came back from the Civil War,’ a tremor shook his voice, ‘and couldn’t find you – though I scoured the city endlessly for news of you – I swore I would become the perfect Soviet citizen, dedicating my life to Lenin’s ideals, if-’
She lifted a finger to his lips. ‘Hush, Vasily, there’s no need to explain.’
‘Yes there is. I want you to understand. I dedicated my life to Communism. I even spilled some of my blood and wrote the promise in red to seal the bargain, in return for-’
‘For what?’
‘In return for Lenin’s spirit keeping you safe.’
Anna gasped.
‘I kept my word,’ he murmured into her hair, ‘all these years. When I did help people escape from the authorities, it was because they were the intellectual building blocks who would be needed to strengthen Russia.’ He drew a deep breath and repeated fiercely, ‘I kept my word.’