Despite the Falling Snow (17 page)

While he is filleting the fish and slicing bread, she has excused herself and disappeared into her bedroom. She quickly applies a little lipstick, for that is what she has ostensibly come here to do. In the mirror she eyes the briefcase. There is no time to consider, she must simply do it. She walks over to the bed in her bare feet, as silently as she can, and flips open the catch. It makes a sound and she glances at the door to see if he may have heard, but he is busy outside, and the background throb of the cooling oven is probably all he can hear. Inside is a notebook, full of clean paper, and one folder containing five sheets of paper. She scans them. They seems to be minutes of a meeting, something to do with defence research. They are in his handwriting; probably he was appointed to take the minutes. She reads two of the pages within a minute, memorising what she thinks are the key names and points. She will write them down later, when he is gone.

“Katya,” he calls.

She slips the folder back into his bag – she can hear him coming to find her. Quickly she twists the catch closed again, and she is up and at the door of the bedroom, kissing him as he crosses the threshold. She stays in the kiss for a long time, to his surprise and pleasure, for she needs a few moments to recover herself, to slow the adrenalin that is coursing through her and making her hands tingle. Unexpectedly, she is also wracked by guilt, immediately. She is completely consumed by it, without any warning, without her even having to think through what she has just done. She leans her head against Alexander’s shoulder, positioning herself so that her face is hidden from his gaze. You’ve done what you were told to do, she reminds herself, as he holds her. You’ve done what you’ve always wanted to do, and it will be all right when you get used to it.

Later, she lies back on her bed with one arm crossed protectively over her stomach and chest. Often these days she misses him when he leaves, but tonight she is grateful to be alone. With her other hand she rubs her temples, as though soothing a headache. There is no pain there, but there is confusion, and she does not like it. She has been unhappy since the moment she opened his briefcase. It is the kind of thing she has had to do many times before, but today’s assignment, with Alexander, was the most difficult to execute. Partly because he knows her so well and is sensitive enough to read her every look and expression; and partly because for the first time in her experience, she simply did not want to do what had been asked of her. She knows this move was made too early, and that Misha only wanted to put her to the test, but she knows also that there is something more at play here. She is worried that stealing secrets from Alexander and abusing his trust and love will not become any easier as time goes by.

All her life has been a struggle against confusion, a wish to keep things clear. Ambivalence and uncertainty are of no help to someone who has chosen the path she has taken. You must believe in what you do and why you do it, even more so than any communist leader who sentences millions of
kulaks
to death with the stroke of a pen must be certain that he is acting for the greater good, or at least for his own good.

“I do believe in it,” she says, in a whisper. That is not the problem. She will fight the system that made her an orphan, that killed her parents and everyone else’s with such brutality, until she dies. But now she is falling in love – she can barely allow herself to even think the phrase in her head, much less admit it aloud – with a man who represents that system and is deeply involved in it. What does that make her? A traitor to everything she has lived for, probably. A traitor to the cause of making amends for what happened to her parents. A traitor to the anti-communists, to the Americans whom she indirectly works for.

She thinks about Alexander, running through her conversations with him in her mind. She is sure that he is a good man, and this makes her think of the others that she works against, steals secrets from, lies to. Are they good and just working in a system that she considers bad? She rarely knows these adversaries well enough to judge, but it is possible, probable even, that the majority are good, but unthinking. Unquestioning. And in a state where questioning and thinking can cost you your life, or your freedom, can they be blamed?

But Alexander has told her that she has made him think. Or start to think. His boss is not Stalin, it is Khrushchev. Would his questioning cost him his life now? Perhaps not, but his career certainly. He would be left with nothing if anyone found out the thoughts that are winding their way into his head. Or that he was falling in love with Katya. No, that would not cost him anything, not yet, because nobody knows what she really is. What she really does. But they might find out – she lives with that awareness at all times. And then what would happen to him?

She laughs slightly, a laugh of sarcasm at her own thoughts running in that direction, imagining this life with Alexander, and the potential consequences for him. As if his future should be of any concern to her. She should only want to know him to access his information. Khrushchev may not be the same breed of monster as Stalin, but the system is the same, and it still stinks. His crazy agricultural ‘reforms’ are still leaving people starving. And Misha has just told the latest disaster for his father and grandmother out in the country. Their cooperative farm, their small
kolkhoz
, is being forced to buy all their old tractors and equipment from the government outright and at inflated prices, leaving them with huge debts that they can never hope to pay off. And here in the city, who you are and whom you know are still the only certain way to progress. Alexander himself is where he is today because of his father. These, Katya, are the kinds of things you must keep in your mind.

But for the first time, she is discovering that the head and the heart can have two different wishes, different motives, different objectives. Her heart is a frightening organ, to Katya. She neither trusts nor understands it. When she was twelve, and she watched her mother and father being hustled out of their apartment with guns pressed to their heads, leaving half-finished plates of food behind them, her heart broke. Where it had been, there remained only a hollow, into which she swallowed her tears of terror at what they might do to her parents, and the desperate fear that she could not speak, the crude fear of a child being left all alone. Those roughly hurt emotions left raw, open wounds that no-one but she could slowly try and soothe. And since then, her heart has been sitting quietly within her, untroubled by much more than the effort of pumping her blood through her veins. There is nothing more that she wants of it, for she knows that it is a fearsome, ruthless animal that can rise up and rip out the rest of her organs in a second.

“Katya? You awake?”

She jumps. She has been so absorbed in her thoughts that she has not even heard Maya return.

“Yes. How was your dinner?”

“Good.” Maya stumbles to her bed, a few feet across from Katya’s and Katya can smell the slightly acrid, smoky smell of a bar on her friend. “I drank too much, of course. I’ll have a hell of a headache in the morning. How was your date?”

Katya gives a half-smile in the dark. My date. “Fine. He’s nice.”

“About time you showed some interest in someone. Men are not all pigs you know.” Maya is unbuttoning her clothes, pulling on a nightdress. She wanders slowly to the dressing table they both share, where brushes, towels and soap are all kept so that they will not be taken from the bathroom out in the hallway that they share with the two daughters from the apartment upstairs.

“I didn’t think they were,” replies Katya. “I’m just…”

“Picky,” finishes Maya.

Katya laughs. “Perhaps.”

Maya disappears to the bathroom, and Katya lies looking at the pattern that the moonlight makes on the corner of the ceiling as it plays through the small, high window of their room. When she returns, Katya whispers to her.

“I like him, Maya.”

But the drink, or exhaustion, or both have made Maya deaf to her roommate’s half-whisper. Katya listens as the girl clambers into her bed, giving a slight moan of relief or pleasure at lying down between cool sheets after a warm, tiring evening.

“Goodnight,” Katya calls.

But Maya is already asleep.

A
LEXANDER CANNOT WALK HOME FAST ENOUGH
, and Lauren is having to work hard to keep up with him, to enclose him fully beneath the capacious umbrella that she carries.

Courteously, he tries to slow down, and smiles at her briefly, but his face reflects a series of indefinite, discomforting emotions – irritation, nervousness, depression. His thoughts are black-edged with melancholy. Around them the settling evening darkness is being made weightier by the relentless drizzle, and they are both grateful for the lights of home that come into sight when they turn into their own street at last. The two hours at Estelle’s apartment have unsettled him fully, have left him unmoored and feeling exposed. He tries to pin down which aspects of the afternoon have led to his present mood, but he senses that there is something insidious at work here, something that has crept into his mind and now lies curled up and threatening inside his head. He glances sideways at his niece. He had seen pained surprise and yet such clarity of vision in her face earlier, when Estelle’s comment about her portraits had stung her. The idea of such unexpected awareness, such sudden and complete illumination is strangely attractive to him. If he could have felt that clear about certain things in his life – in his younger life especially – would he have taken a different path?

“So what do you think?” Lauren asks as he unlocks the front door.

He is embarrassed to realize that he hasn’t heard anything she has been saying. With a look of apology he shrugs off his coat, and then takes hers.

“I’ve been miles away. Sorry.”

She follows him into the living room, where he paces about, switching on lamps, lighting the fire and putting on some music. He keeps moving, diligently, but it does not seem to help – wherever he goes he feels that he is being followed by the eyes of Katya’s portrait. Finally he looks at it, a hungry, desolate look, until he becomes aware that Lauren is watching him, and he smiles at the picture, as though taking pleasure in it, as he would with any present.

“I just thought that it might be a good project,” Lauren continues. “Sketching, and then painting the two of you.”

He looks at her, not understanding.

“You and Estelle.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.” She remains standing, even after he sinks into his armchair. “I’ve been thinking about a series. Sort of based around the Seven Ages of Man.”

Her choice of title makes him smile. “I don’t suppose I would be number six, would I?”

“What?”

“Of the seven ages of man.”

“I haven’t decided yet. Maybe not.”

“You know how to hit an old man where it hurts.”

“But Uncle Alex, you have such character in your face, such romance in your eyes…”

“Please. You should be ashamed of yourself, trying to charm a man my age.”

Despite his banter, he is distracted, she can see that, so she decides to leave aside her idea for a while, even though she is keen to discuss it with her uncle. She has deliberately chosen a theme, an underlying idea that she can think about and work on, in order to try and bring some emotional and intellectual depth to the next portraits that she does. She wants to discuss with him what Estelle had said earlier about her work sounding formulaic. She had felt a cool prickling of fear at the realisation, so sudden and yet so clear, that Estelle was right – what she has been doing for the past few years has lost any edge, any philosophy. Her work is now steady and comfortable and plentiful and if she is to be brutally honest with herself, meaningless. She is living the kind of easy, uninspired existence that is precisely what she has always despised in others and dreaded for herself. She has always assumed that being an artist of any kind somehow implied a sense of integrity in your work – the kind of integrity not so easily found in other fields. Like business, for instance. But then she sees the fervour with which her uncle has built his company, from the seeds of his passion. And now it occurs to her to wonder whether Melissa Johnson’s devotion to her work might represent a passion also. Perhaps it is harder for Lauren to recognize because it is rooted in the day to day work of deal-making and consulting, rather than in a desire to make a life’s work out of an art or a single love like Alexander’s love of food and cooking. She glances at her uncle once more, hoping to talk through some of this; she is astute and sensitive enough, however, to tell that he is in one of those rare moods when he has no wish for company. Leaving him with a kiss on the cheek, she tells him she wants to have a bath, and he nods. A sigh escapes him – it has risen from deep within, on the tide of memories and feelings that have been stirred up by Estelle and her questions. He smothers the sigh under a smile, and just before his niece leaves the room, he calls her back.

“And Estelle? Where does she fit into the Ages of Man?”

“I guess she’d be number six. Of the seven. She has a great face – such life and movement in her eyes. What do you think?”

Whether she means to ask his opinion for her being the sixth, or of her eyes, he is unsure, but he nods mildly, and gives away nothing of his pleasure that Lauren’s new idea might throw Estelle and himself together more frequently.