‘There’s no point in you denying it, we know all about you.’ The taller one was talking. Alyosha had also been seen in a cabaret in the Saxe nightclub, plotting with two members of the Comintern on such and such a day on such and such a time. He was an agent of the Kremlin, and his cover name was Gelendzhik.

  ‘What were you discussing in the nightclub?’ asked the shorter detective.

  ‘My name is Alexei Fyodorovich Alexandrov.’

  ‘So you keep claiming, but you don’t have any proof,’ said the taller of the two, crushing his cigarette into a saucer. ‘Not a shred.’ He stood up. ‘You peddle some pathetic story about jumping on a ship from France because of some girl you’ve been fucking…’

  ‘Because that’s the truth.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ muttered the taller detective under his breath, more in frustration than anything else, then gestured at one of the uniformed policemen who placed a sheet of paper on the table in front of Alyosha and gave him a pen. He refused to sign his name. For a while nobody said another word and there was complete silence in the room. Then one of the Defensira gave an almost imperceptible nod to the young woman who immediately picked up the typewriter, clasping it to her breast like a baby, and left the room, closing the door behind her. After a few more minutes of silence, there was a knock on the door and an elderly uniformed policeman came in, carrying a kettle with steam wafting out of its spout, and a funnel. Alyosha was informed briskly that they had another of the Comintern’s agents in custody. She had slipped over the border from Russia some weeks previously, in order to plot against Józef Piłsudski’s government, and was still stubbornly refusing to confess her part in the mission to infiltrate Polish factories in order to organise strikes and agitate, with the ultimate aim of putting the whole country under Moscow’s red thumb. She was in the next room, they told him, tied to a chair. The elderly policeman took the kettle and funnel, opened a connecting door and went into the adjoining room, keeping the door slightly ajar.

  Alyosha stared at the black type on the form. He knew signing the confession they had written for him was a mug’s game. He was under no illusion that, once he did that, it would be the end of him. He knew, too, that they weren’t lying about the girl in the next room, because the second the connecting door opened he could smell her: some rough scent mixed with sweat and shit. He heard her say something. Was she speaking German? Polish? Ukrainian? Her speech was too muffled to tell. He lifted his eyes to look at the two detectives, who were still watching him.

  ‘Are you going to make her drink boiling water?’

  ‘Boiling piss,’ one of them corrected.

  ‘Her own piss,’ added the other, picking his nose. ‘We’re not animals.’

  He could hear splashing and gurgling as the boiling liquid was poured into the funnel, followed by such screams as he’d never heard in his life.

  That night, in his cell, Alyosha lay awake in a tormented dilemma, but, by the early hours, he had come to a decision: he would confess that his real name was Gelendzhik, and that he was an agent for the Comintern.

  Through the high bars, dawn broke in bruises; his days were numbered. They would bring him before some court, and his name would be in the newspapers for a day or so, reporting a guilty verdict and a sentence of execution by shooting. Then he’d be buried and that would be that.

  He felt a strange sense of relief.

  12.

  Alyosha expected to see his confession waiting for him on the table. Instead, the room was empty apart from a man in a grey jacket and tie, smoking a pipe, who greeted him and offered him a cigarette.

  ‘Let’s sit.’

  What was this? A butcher tickling his pig before the slaughter?

  They sat smoking in what might have passed to an observer as a companionable silence. After a while, the man told him a mistake had been made in his case, that they now believed him and so he was free to leave the country.

  This was the last thing Alyosha had expected, and he took a moment to digest it. ‘Why this sudden change of mind?’ he asked, horribly afraid it was yet another trap. This was ignored, but there was something close to sympathy in the man’s eyes as he began to explain the arrangements which had already been made to transport him safely across the border.

  Within a few hours, Alyosha was back in Gdynia once again, and that same evening, he was put on board a fishing boat, which crossed the bay to the free city of Danzig, under the authority of the United Nations since the Treaty of Versailles. He’d been instructed to liaise with the French consul, who would help him with his onward travel to France.

  Sure enough, he was given a temporary visa which allowed him to return to France, and was told that a passage had been arranged and paid for, although he would have to wait two days. In the meantime, he was given the address of a modest but spotless pension, and the wherewithal to pay for it, and told that a room had been reserved for him.

  Freedom had never tasted so sweet. After sleeping soundly, and with a good breakfast in his stomach, Alyosha set out from the pension the next morning to explore. The morning clouds soon dispersed, and the day opened out. He wandered along the streets and found his way to the library. Leafing through the Gazeta Polska, he came across a picture of Ludwika which left him shaking and shocked. When he’d recovered his wits, he took the newspaper to the librarian and asked politely whether somebody might be able to translate the column for him. The librarian spoke German and was happy to oblige. He told him that Ludwika, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Zawadzki, had married Count Mateusz Kolodziejski, military attaché, in the Polish embassy in Bucharest, Romania. The ceremony had taken place the previous Saturday.

  13.

  It was an idyllic spot, only twenty miles outside Moscow, in a clearing among the pine trees. The air was resinous, and the birdsong competed charmingly with the thin tinkle of a piano being played somewhere inside the building. Margarita was shown around the kitchen, where a wholesome lunch was being prepared – meat with potatoes and fresh vegetables from the gardens. She was introduced to one of the young cooks, a girl with the traces of a hard life still in her eyes, but who held up her left hand and told Margarita that she had given her wedding ring to the fundraising campaign for the ’23 revolution in Germany.

  ‘Why didn’t it happen? Who betrayed the working class?’ she asked.

  Margarita did her best to answer, but the girl made her feel ashamed. She vowed silently to work even harder back in Berlin, to bring about the revolution their Russian comrades were expecting.

  The delegation ate their lunch with the young people in the dining room. There were almost three hundred of them sitting on wooden benches at tables, which had been manufactured there, and their easy conversation and laughter filled the room.

  It was the young people, and not the authorities, who explained the philosophy behind the prison to their guests. In the Soviet Union, there were no such things as crimes, just personal failings which could be remedied. There was no such thing as punishment, either, just measures to protect society. There was no wall, no lock and no chains. There weren’t even any cells. Nobody had to live on bread and water in Bolshevo. There didn’t seem to be anybody much to keep an eye on them either. Margarita asked the girl at her side what was to stop them all running away, and the girl explained that the prison had been such a boon to her, that she had applied to her local soviet for permission to come back for a further term. She had even found a husband there, and once his term came to an end, the two of them were going to work in a factory in Perm, as he came from there originally. It was the director and his staff who had found them the work.

  Nobody had a bad word to say about Bolshevo. The delegates were all charmed by the place, especially Paul, the only one who had spent any time under lock and key – in Moabit prison in Berlin, for disturbing the peace at a meeting of the Socialist Democratic Party, when he heckled some of the stewards and started a fight.

  As they were leaving, Margarita and Hella were each presented with a bouquet of flowers and a skilfully carved wooden model of the prison.

  Back in Moscow, that evening’s reception was held at the Tretyakov art gallery. Irina, who translated for the German delegation, confessed to Margarita that she was exhausted, as she had been working very long hours for days now, so Margarita offered to help by translating what the artists and judges were saying. In truth, the Germans were flagging almost as much as Irina from the long days and the longer evenings, a hectic itinerary of visiting museums, schools, crèches and factories of all kinds by day, followed by elaborate receptions, dinners, and opera, theatre and ballet performances in the evenings. On the omnibus on the way back to their hotel that evening, Margarita asked Irina about Masha Ivanovna, but she didn’t know anything about her.

  14.

  Alyosha was reading the newspapers in the Russian library one afternoon, when he was tapped on the shoulder. ‘Alexei Fyodorovich.’

  Looking around, he saw Vladimir Glebovich grinning down at him.

  ‘How are things?’

  Olga Sherbatovna, Vladimir’s mother, came hobbling over to greet him too, with a book in her hand. She explained she had turned her ankle badly on the kerb of the pavement the previous afternoon.

  ‘Lovely to see you again.’

  ‘And you too.’

  Smiling, she asked him, ‘We haven’t seen you since that evening in Sète. How is Ludwika?’

  ‘Fine I expect. She got married.’

  ‘Married?’ repeated Vladimir sounding surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A while back. To some Polish diplomat.’

  He felt a flash of anger as he remembered how he had been so cruelly treated by her, but, since his return to Paris, he felt his feelings towards her were slowly rotting away.

  Aware of the disapproving glances from the other readers, Olga Sherbatovna suggested going to Café de la Rotonde. There, she drank Darjeeling tea and the men, coffee, as the endless flow of life passed by. She told Alyosha that she was reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, but wasn’t enjoying the first volume very much. She never gave up on a book, but she was beginning to lose patience with the author, as so few of his characters escaped his rancour and malice. She felt that there was a humanity lacking in Proust’s writing when compared with Tolstoy; the Russian writer’s spirit was so much more expansive and liberal, and he showed so much more sympathy for the human condition.

  As they talked, it became clear that the widow’s circumstances were very much straitened. Her son’s education at the lycée on Rue Montparnasse had come to an end, and he was trying to pay his way. For the last few months, she had been working in a cheaply rented cellar of an old house on Rue du Bac. The workshop employed half a dozen women, all émigrées, who spent their days painting traditional Russian nesting dolls, where a slightly bigger doll swallowed a smaller one, until every doll in turn was swallowed by the biggest doll of all; that one was always the Tsar or the Tsarina. Painting the dolls was one thing, but then they had to be sold, which was Vladimir’s task. Six days a week, he’d take samples around the tourist shops along the Champs-Élysées, but business was slack and orders were scarce. This meant his wages were tiny, as he was paid on commission, and the working conditions in the cellar were poor, as there were only two weak lightbulbs to paint by.

  ‘We’re sure to be ruining our eyesight,’ sighed Olga Sherbatovna over her empty cup. ‘We’ll be blind as moles by the end.’

  Alyosha inquired hopefully. ‘Is there an opening for another seller?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Duchess Lydia? She owns the business.’

  This turned out to be none other than the Duchess Lydia Herkulanova Vors.

  15.

  It was almost eight o’clock at night, and the cellar was empty. Duchess Lydia was the last to leave every night, and the first there in the morning to unlock the door and set up for the women. Nobody was any the wiser where she lived.

  ‘Alexei Fyodorovich, are you in a hurry to leave? Won’t you sit? I’d like the two of us to have a little chat.’

  Alyosha had been working there for almost a month by now, but he had never seen her looking so exhausted. She wiped her hands with a dirty old rag, trying to lift some of the paint which stained her fingers. She was still handsome woman, and held herself well, but there was some grey in her hair now, and she had lost weight, so that the widow’s weeds to which she remained as attached as a snail to its shell, now hung about her.

  Even those ideas that had always been so sacrosanct to her were beginning to lose their grip, as poverty had begun to bite and her self-respect had begun to unravel around the edges. She had invested every centime she had in renting the damp old cellar and turning it into a workshop, in order to give herself some hope of a livelihood.

  She told Alyosha how she had been dreaming for years of being able to return to Russia. There had been a time when they had all thought of Bolshevism as some lunatic, whose strength would diminish over time, at which point wiser people could throw him out of the house. Then, she surprised Alyosha when she said that, as for restoring the monarchy, she really didn’t see the need for that any more. By now, she would be happy to settle for a Russia under a democratic government.

  She told him that she still dreamt of hearing the tinkle of the sleigh-bells as the sleighs sped down Nevskii Prospekt in the heart of winter, when the snow sparkled like a web of crystal and the sun lay low on the horizon, bathing the golden towers of Saint Petersburg in its evening light. She longed to smell the Crimean air, too, and to lie in fragrant gardens listening to the cawing of the birds from the high rocks in the distance.

  ‘Empty dreams… I realise that’s all they are now.’

  There was no return to be had, and they must accept life as it was, make the best of it, and try to become used to living among strangers. In order to succeed at this, they had to seek other comforts to bolster their souls to the end of their days.

  ‘May I share a secret with you, Alexei Fyodorovich?’ she asked, her fingers still stained with paint. ‘May I?’ She went on to tell him that Andrei Petrovich had asked for her hand in marriage. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina had introduced them at a reading, where her husband, Ivan Bunin, had been one of the poets taking part. Poetry was the language of the heart and emotion, but prose was the language of the mind and reason. That’s what Andrei Petrovich had said to her that night. But she had yet to tell her mother, and was dreading hearing her opinion, which was bound to be that she was marrying beneath herself. A former bank manager, indeed!’

  ‘Do you love him?’ was Alyosha’s question.

  She was still scratching away at a speck of blue paint on her nail.

  ‘Marrying somebody is a huge leap of faith, and there is a moral seriousness to the decision.’

  She rinsed her hand in a bucket of water and then scoured it vigorously with a scrubbing brush.

  ‘My first husband will be the only true love of my life. But, nevertheless, sometimes I feel so… I don’t know how to say this without sounding self-pitying. But, sometimes, I feel so lonely. Especially in the evenings, when it’s just Mama and me. Just the two of us, reading or embroidering, and only the sound of the needle pulling the thread through the fabric or a page turning to break the silence. And I occasionally wonder what will happen to me once Mama has passed on to the next life. Or, what won’t happen to me. I don’t know which is worse…’

  She wiped her fingers on a filthy rag.

  ‘Andrei Petrovich has lost his spouse, like me. We both understand loneliness, and he has respectfully asked for my hand.’ She smiled coyly. ‘Mind you, I really didn’t know what to say when he asked me. It was the last thing I was expecting.’ She examined her hands. ‘Because it hasn’t been so very long since his poor wife was laid to rest on her bed of earth. It was so unexpected, so strange, so… How can I refuse him? And if I do decide to refuse him, will I ever receive another offer?’

  ‘If you’re not sure how you feel, nobody can force you to marry.’

  ‘No, nobody. Nobody is forcing me to marry, Alexei Fyodorovich. Nobody but myself.’

  16.

  Paul and his little mouse, Rosa, were sitting next to Margarita. His eyes were two red slits and his breath stank like the gutter of an abattoir. He was always the last to bed and was drinking far more than was good for him. As leader of their group, she had felt it necessary to have a quiet word with him about it, but Paul saw it as an opportunity to challenge Margarita’s authority, and drank even more.

  ‘There’s been a change of plan,’ he told her as he chewed unenthusiastically on his breakfast.

  She wondered if he was still slightly drunk. ‘Didn’t anybody tell you?’ He was obviously enjoying himself. ‘They’ve decided to split the group up. I’m meant to lead half of us to Leningrad, and you’ll be taking the other half to the south.’

  ‘Where in the south?’

  Paul swallowed a mouthful of coffee before answering her. ‘Baku. In Azerbaijan. Hot and dry, even at this time of year. From what I’ve heard, the air stinks of petrol. You can’t get away from it, night or day.’

  Was he to be believed, she wondered, knowing how he delighted in provoking her. She would be bitterly disappointed if he was telling the truth; she’d been particularly looking forward to this part of the trip, as she would be revisiting the city where she grew up. She was also hoping she might have an opportunity in Leningrad to make further enquiries about her father.