Viktor punched the palm of one hand with his fist and said: ‘This proof. Tell me about it.’
‘Nikolai’s best friend is an army officer, a captain. The captain’s father was a general.’
‘Was?’
‘He was executed by a firing squad along with thirty other officers. His crime – he questioned the disposition of Soviet troops on the eastern borders. He was proved right when the troops clashed with the Japanese at Manchukuo ten days ago. But the fact that he was right merely made his crime worse.’
‘Perhaps he was executed for treason. Or treasonable talk,’ Viktor said.
Anna ignored him. ‘Nikolai knows where the executions take place. And he will know through his friend when the next one will be. For all I know they take place every day,’ she added.
‘In the imagination of Nikolai Vasilyev and his friend.’
‘There’s only one answer: you must see for yourself. If you have the stomach for it.’
Then he couldn’t refuse.
*
In the red and white coach packed with Muscovites radiating heat from their sun-burn Viktor considered Anna’s jibes about his privileged upbringing. In fact it had bothered him long before she had mentioned it.
He had been born in 1920 when the Red Army was still fighting its enemies in the civil war that followed the Revolution. There were many orphans in those days but not many who had the good fortune to be farmed out almost immediately to a respectable but childless young couple.
Viktor stood up to give his seat to a pregnant woman who had pushed her way through the strap-hanging passengers. The bus bounced as the hard tyres passed over pot-holes in the roads, but at least the crush of bodies stopped you from falling.
From what he had subsequently gathered the Golovins had become remarkably self-sufficient in the dangerous, disordered streets of Moscow. They had found a small house in a relatively tranquil suburb; his father had been given a job at the library where he helped Bolshevik authors re-write history; his mother had devoted herself to the upbringing of little Viktor.
In photographs he looked an uncommonly smug child, scrubbed, combed, smiling complacently at the cameraman. It was a paradox that such self-assurance should have led to the self-doubts he was experiencing now.
It wasn’t until he was sixteen that his father had told him that he was adopted. And it was only then that he began to question the uneventful security of his life.
To the inevitable question: ‘Who were my parents?’ his father, bearded and patient, replied, ‘We don’t know. There were thousands of children without parents in those days. You see it wasn’t just the men who were killed in the Revolution and the fighting after it: women fought side by side with them.’
‘But how did you find me?’ Viktor asked.
‘We didn’t find you. You were allocated to us. We knew by this time that my wife, your mother … foster mother? … no, let’s always call her your mother … we knew that she couldn’t have a child so we went to an orphanage. You had been taken there by an old woman who left without giving any details about your background. Perhaps she didn’t know them; perhaps she was your babushka; we shall never know.’ His father put his hand on Viktor’s shoulder. ‘But we do know that we were very lucky.’ A pause. ‘And I think you were very lucky too.’
But it wasn’t the mystery of his birth that bothered Viktor because it was true, a baby could easily have lost its identity in those chaotic days when a new creed was being spawned. What bothered him was the cloistered life that he and his parents lived; questioned on this subject his father had no real answers.
‘We’re decent, upright citizens,’ he said in his calm voice. ‘Your mother keeps a good home.’ Which was true; in her early forties when Viktor was sixteen, she was a fair-haired, handsome woman who cooked well and was obsessively house-proud. ‘And I work hard,’ which Viktor later discovered wasn’t quite so true because his father had taken to nipping vodka behind the bookshelves in the library off Pushkin Square. ‘So why shouldn’t we have our security? We’ve earned it.’
When he was seventeen Viktor pointed out that the apartment on the Lenin Hills, to which they had just moved, and the dacha were hardly commensurate with a librarian’s income. And it was then that he first heard about his father’s biography of Tolstoy. ‘I was given a considerable advance by my publishers,’ he confided.
‘Enough to support two homes?’
‘They have high hopes of my project.’
Viktor’s doubts were assuaged until he discovered that the great work consisted of an exercise book half filled with jumbled notes and a letter from the State-controlled publishers saying that they would consider the manuscript on its merits when it was delivered. Which, judging by the scope of Tolstoy’s life and the paucity of his father’s notes, wouldn’t be this century.
The bus swung round a corner and the standing passengers swayed together, laughing, still drunk with the sun. Viktor loved them all; but he wasn’t one of them – his parents had seen to that.
At school he had subtly been kept apart from other children. Even now at university where he was studying languages – English, German and Polish (he could have taken a couple more because foreign tongues gave up their secrets to him without a struggle) – his privileged circumstances created suspicion.
Through the grimy windows of the coach he could see blue and pink wooden cottages tucked away among birch and pines; then the first scattered outposts of Moscow, new apartment blocks climbing on the shoulders of old houses.
Pride expanded inside him. So much achieved during his lifetime! What scared him was the gathering threat to the achievement. War. Fermented in the east by Japan and in the west by Germany. Viktor, orphan of war, was a preacher of peace. Russia had most certainly had her fill of war, but would the belligerents of the world let her rest?
By the time he and Anna alighted from the bus and made their way towards her lodgings in the Arbat her mood had changed. She seemed to regret what she had proposed.
‘Of course you don’t have to go,’ she said and, when he protested, she insisted: ‘No, I mean it. You’re entitled to your opinions. I was being possessive.’
‘No, I must go,’ confident that in any case there would be nothing to see.
It was early evening and heat trapped in the narrow streets of leaning houses engulfed them. In the distance they could hear the rumbling of a summer storm.
She slipped on the cobblestones and he held her and she leaned against him.
She said: ‘There’s no one in the house. Would you like to come in and I’ll make some tea?’ and he said he would, but he wasn’t thinking about tea and his double standards surprised him; an hour ago they had been snapping at each other like wayward husband and nagging wife.
She slid the key into the door of the tenement owned by a baker and his wife. The stairs creaked beneath their feet, splintering the silence.
Her room was a revelation. He had expected garish touches, photographs
