The Silent Land Read online

  Damn you, Konstantin! Why were you always so right, and how did you always succeed in making me feel such a idiot? If there is such a thing as heaven, you’ll have talked your way into it somehow. You’ll be there now, looking down at me – and still laughing at my foolishness.

  Chapter Eight

  Today is Thursday, the day my social worker sweeps down on me like a Cossack at a street demonstration. She’s not my first, there have been a succession of them since I turned seventy. A succession – and a progression. The denim suits and earnest expressions are a thing of the past, the long scarves which hung down over the backs of padded Millets’ anoraks have gone for ever. My newest social worker dresses in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. She represents the high point of the social services evolutionary scale, and she knows it. She stands, better than anyone else I know, as a symbol of the late 1980s. She is, in other words, a self-opinionated, hard-faced bitch.

  Yet she has power over me. One word from her in the right place, and I will fall victim to the Knock on the Door. The men standing outside won’t be wearing belted raincoats and felt hats pulled down over their eyes. They won’t inform me in dull, flat voices that I’m wanted for questioning. They will make no mention of Comrade Stalin. Instead, they’ll say that they have come from ‘the Home’.

  The Home! What they’ll mean is that they have come from the death camp, the institution where the old are left to dribble and moan to themselves and slowly fade away. What they’ll mean is that after all I’ve endured, I’ve finally been taken prisoner – and this time there is no escape. They’ll tell me to pack my case, they may even offer to help. And I’ll tell them that I’m quite happy where I am, and they can stuff the ‘nice bed’ and ‘kind nurses’ they have promised me.

  My protest won’t do any good. The old are not invisible – they’re far too visible for some people’s liking – but they are inaudible. My words will go as unheeded as if I’d spoken in my native Russian.

  So … I have to be careful, I have to be polite. I must watch my social worker carefully, gauging what she considers to be normal behaviour – safe behaviour – and doing my best to conform to it.

  She is here, scowling at me, as if annoyed that I’ve managed to survive another week. I smile, and offer her a chair. “A cup of tea, Mrs Forbes?”

  See! I can remember her name! Could I do that if I’d gone ga-ga?

  “No, thank you, Mrs Mackoksky,” my angel of mercy replies.

  She can’t get my name right. Why don’t they lock her up?

  “It’s no trouble,” I tell her ingratiatingly. I want her on my side. I want to show her that I’m still capable of making tea.

  “I really don’t want a drink,” she says firmly.

  She never does. She never will. Because although my room looks clean, although I have spent hours preparing it for her, you can never tell with old people. Look at my hands, wrinkled and covered with liver spots. Isn’t there something slightly unhygienic about them, however well scrubbed they are?

  My social worker snaps open her briefcase and pulls out a buff-coloured file which she thinks contains everything worth knowing about me. “Your granddaughter Sonia phoned me up yesterday,” she says.

  “Great-granddaughter,” I correct her. She frowns. Easy, old woman. Don’t argue with your social worker.

  “She’s very keen for you to move to somewhere you can be properly looked after.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to go.”

  My social worker glares at me. “Don’t you think we’re being just a teeny bit selfish, Mrs Mackoksky?”

  “I don’t want to be any trouble to anyone,” I tell her. “Or any expense. I’d rather the girls spent their money on themselves.”

  Liar! I don’t give a damn what they spend it on. They can burn it or flush it down the toilet for all I care. As long as they leave me my freedom. Not much of a life, is it – tottering up to the shops, drinking my daily bottle of Guinness in the Vulcan? But it’s all I’ve got, and I want to hold on to it.

  “Your granddaughters worry about you,” my social worker says.

  They worry about their friends finding out where I live. They worry that I might do something to embarrass them. But worry about me? Not a chance.

  “And it’s all very well to go on about not being a trouble to anyone,” my social services saviour continues, “but you’re troubling people just by being here. My caseload is heavy enough, heaven knows, without having to deal with people who’ve been offered a place in a perfectly beautiful Home, and are just too stubborn to take it.”

  I know why she’s pushing. She doesn’t fool me. She’s found that Edward – Jennifer’s husband – has some very important contacts in her department, and she’d do anything to ingratiate herself with him.

  “Why can’t I live out my last few days the way I want to?” I ask.

  “Now, Mrs Mackovsky, we can’t always do just we want. You should know that.”

  “I’m a person, you know,” I tell her. “I have rights.”

  At last I’ve found some way to amuse her. A smile flickers briefly across her lips. “You have obligations, too,” she informs me. “To your family, to your—”

  Something snaps inside me. I don’t mean it to, but it does. “Obligations!” I say. “I’ve given up my life to obligations.”

  “As we all have, Mrs—”

  “Have you ever marched towards a line of soldiers, knowing they might open fire any second?” I demand. “Have you ever been willing to lay down your life for the rights of the workers?”

  She looks horrified. She’s not used to people using dirty words like ‘workers’ rights’. “I … er … understood that you were a political refugee,” she says, glancing at her folder, her secret-welfare-police dossier. “From the Communists.”

  “No! It wasn’t the Party I was running away from – only what Stalin had done to it.”

  “You’re a Communist yourself!” she says accusingly.

  Than which, there is no worse.

  I’m suddenly filled with disgust – at myself, at her, at the whole situation. I lean forward until our faces are almost touching. “Of course I’m a Communist,” I tell her. “Who wouldn’t be? You get to rob the rich, eat dead babies and …” I deliberately lower my voice to throaty whisper, “… best of all, you can fuck as many men as you want to.”

  She shrinks back, as if she wishes the chair would swallow her up. She’s frightened! Of me – for God’s sake! I step clear.

  “Get out of here, you complacent bourgeois bitch,” I order her.

  She rises shakily to her feet. Her briefcase is not properly closed and only by quick action on her part does she avoid spilling her precious files all over the floor.

  It’s not until she is safely in the doorway that she seems to find the power to speak. “I think you’re going senile,” she shouts. “I … I’m going to recommend that you be locked away and—”

  I slam the door in her face and listen to her angry footsteps retreating down the hallway. I’ve done it now. If only I hadn’t lost my temper with her.

  If … if … if …

  If the bullets hadn’t missed me in Petrograd, I would already be long dead. If, that terrible winter in Murmansk, I’d given in to the cold and lain down on the snow with my child, there would have been no Sonia and Jennifer now. If Mariamna and her mother hadn’t been on holiday in the Crimea in the summer of 1912, when Misha came home from the Corps of Pages …

  If Mariamna and her mother hadn’t been on holiday in the Crimea, things would never have developed as they did. Had Mariamna been there, the summer would have followed its normal pattern. She’d have ordered us to follow her petty dictates, and we’d have obeyed. Our clumsy attempt at love making in the barn was now five years past, but Countess Olga, if she’d found out, would’ve treated it as if it had happened just yesterday. And she would have found out, if Mariamna had been there, if we’d not done exactly what our tormentor told us to. With Mariamn
a there, our relationship would have had no room to grow. But Mariamna was not there – and it did.

  The Count made his announcement over dinner. Just the two of us were dining – Miss Eunice had rushed back to Scotland to visit her sick father – and we sat opposite each other at a table half the size of the average izbá.

  “Misha’s coming home for a while,” he said.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked, alarmed more by the heaviness in his voice than the words themselves.

  “No, no, nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all. He’s just got some unexpected leave.” He hesitated before speaking again. “Anna, I hope you are not too fond of him.”

  Too fond? My mother was dead, Sasha was in exile. Misha had been kind to me when I first came to the Big House, he’d taken a beating to protect me. Apart from Miss Eunice, he was the only person left I really cared for.

  “Why should you hope that I am not too fond of him?” I asked.

  The Count was bent over his plate, cutting his meat with the precision and concentration of a surgeon. Though he could not have failed to hear them, he seemed deaf to my words.

  “Why?” I asked again.

  The Count laid down his knife, but he didn’t look up at me. “I’ve visited Misha in Petersburg,” he said reluctantly, “but you haven’t seen him in nearly two years. He’s changed – and so have you. I … I wouldn’t like to see you hurt. For your own protection, you should keep yourself distant from my son.”

  Misha changed? So changed by life in the capital that he had the power – perhaps even the will – to hurt me? I imagined him mixing with the cream of Petersburg society, speaking with scorn of the girl who used to be his playmate, and bringing that scorn back home to me. I imagined a sensitive boy suffering under the harsh regime of a military school, gradually adapting to its ways until all his sensitivity had gone, until he become a ruffian, a brutalized solider. It didn’t matter how he had changed, I realized, just the fact that he wouldn’t be my Misha was enough to break my heart. For my own protection, I must steel myself for the changes.

  “I won’t do anything foolish,” I promised.

  “No,” the Count said. “You’ve never been a fool. So why, in all these years, have you never guessed …”

  He gagged, as though a morsel of food had become lodged in his windpipe. But his fork lay on the table, and his plate was untouched.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  He slammed his hands down on the table, and pushed himself violently to his feet. His chair rocked, then fell backwards, clattering onto the floor. He walked quickly – almost ran – around the table to the door.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” I pleaded.

  He turned to look at me. His face was pale and his eyes were watery. “A chill,” he said. “I’m going to lie down. But later, we must talk, Anna. We have to.” Then he flung the door open, and was gone.

  Misha had become a stranger, I told myself, and I should be prepared to treat him as a stranger. I should expect nothing from him beyond the normal pleasantries I received from any other house guest. I shouldn’t read into a kind word – if kind word there was – anything beyond politeness. I spent those days before his arrival in hardening my heart, and when I heard the clip-clop of his horse’s hooves coming up the driveway, I didn’t even rush out to greet him.

  I was trying to fool myself, and I knew it. I was hoping all the time that despite the Count’s warning, my new armour would not be necessary, that the Misha who had made my childhood bearable would come home to me.

  I sat in the armchair, trying to read and yet all the time calculating. It would take him this long to give his horse to the groom, this long to walk into the house, this long to greet his father. I had told the servants to leave the drawing room door open – foolish little Anna, why pretend not to care? – and I heard the sound of his footsteps as he mounted the stairs, walked down the corridor and finally entered the room. I laid down my book and looked up.

  He was dressed in the field uniform of the Corps of Pages – plain blue – and wore his peaked cap at a rakish angle. He’d started to grow a pale, insubstantial moustache. He was taller than he’d been the last time I saw him, but though the military life had put some muscle on him, he was still slender.

  “Misha!” I said warmly, despite all the promises I’d made to myself.

  “It’s good to see you, Anna,” he replied, but his tone, flat and neutral, showed no sign of pleasure.

  I rose to my feet and walked slowly across the room, slowly so that I could really look at him. I gazed into his eyes, searching for traces of my old love. The eyes were cold. No, not cold! They were blank, the eyes of a boy – of a man – who no longer feels anything.

  He embraced me as if I were an old aunt he despised, but to whom he was forced to be pleasant. His arms felt as stiff and wooden as puppets, his lips touched my cheeks for the briefest of moments and then made their escape. He broke away from me as soon as he possibly could.

  We stood two feet apart, looking at each other awkwardly.

  “Hasn’t he turned into a fine young man?” asked a new voice which seemed both proud and relieved, and I realized that the Count had entered the room.

  A fine young man! The boy I had swum with, played games with, lain down naked in the barn with, was now standing as rigidly as if he were on parade, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere above my head. “Yes, he has,” I said to the Count. “He looks every inch a soldier.”

  The summer was unreal. The flowers had no smell, the birds no song, the sun’s pleasant warmth failed to thaw out the coldness in my flesh. Young people from the neighbouring estates came over to visit us, and we, in turn, visited them. We boated and played croquet. There were dances and moonlight picnics. Yet looking back on them, they might have been things I merely read about, rather than attended. I felt as if my life – my very soul – had been frozen.

  When we were alone – and Misha avoided that, if at all possible – we went for rides or played vigorous games of tennis in which he showed an aggression I’d never seen in him before. We talked little. He answered my questions about Petersburg in the same dry, dull tone he had used when he first arrived, painting a picture of his life there which was as flat and one-dimensional as a badly taken photograph. Sometimes, in the middle of one of these conversations, he’d break off and abruptly leave the room – just as his father had done the night he told me Misha was coming – and, despite myself, I would feel the hot prickling of tears in my eyes. I began to long for the day he returned to the Corps of Pages, the day when I could slowly, painfully, start to rebuild my life.

  The closer the departure date came, the longer and heavier the days seemed to be. Looking at Misha, I’d get the urge to scream, to shake him – to do something, anything, which might make him treat me, if not as the girl he had been so fond of, then at least as another human being. But I always held myself back. I couldn’t force him to want me, couldn’t compel him to feel about me as I felt about him.

  Not much longer, I told myself, not much longer, and it would all be over.

  There were only two days of his visit left when my horse cast a shoe on the way back from a neighbour’s. We were in the middle of nowhere – the nearest estate was seven versts away, the nearest mir at least five. Misha inspected my horse’s hoof, satisfied himself that there was nothing to be done and said, bad-temperedly, “I suppose you’d better ride with me.”

  I should have sat side-saddle – but I’m a natural rider, not a natural pillion, and as I climbed up behind Misha I instinctively straddled the horse.

  It’s impossible to share a horse and not to touch. And indeed, the idea never occurred to me. Yet as we trotted along, as an occasional jog flung us together, I started to feel vaguely uncomfortable. I became aware of my legs touching Misha’s, of my breasts pressing against his back. I began to experience a strange, new feeling which was exciting – but also frightening. I could sense that Misha was feeling something, too. His body
went as rigid as it had done when he embraced me on his return home, then slowly, almost reluctantly, it began to relax.

  He turned his head to speak to me. His eyes were more alive than they had been all summer. “Do you remember the spot by the river where we used to go swimming?” he asked.

  Back to the good, old days, when we were still friends, and everything was wonderful! “Yes. Of course I remember it.”

  “Would you like to go there now?”

  “If you want to,” I said cautiously. When what I really meant was, “Yes, oh yes, let’s go back to a place where we were happy. Let’s try and snatch at least one good memory from this miserable summer. Give me warmth, Misha, just a little warmth, to keep me going through the long, bleak months ahead.”

  The copse of trees – our copse of trees – lay before us, the green leaves gleaming in the afternoon sun. The trees had grown taller in the years since we’d last visited them, yet they looked smaller than they had when viewed through the eyes of childhood.

  Misha dismounted first, and though I didn’t need any help, I liked the feel of his hands on me as he lifted me from the horse.

  “Shall we swim now?” I asked, heading for the side of the copse where I would undress, and already starting to unbutton my riding coat.

  “Yes, we … No! No! In the name of God, no!”

  I turned sharply round to see what was wrong. Misha’s face was flushed and his hands tugged nervously at the lapels of his jacket. “No,” he said, a little more calmly. “I don’t think it would be a good idea. Why don’t we just sit here for a while.”

  We didn’t sit. We lay on our stomachs as we had done when we were younger, chins resting on hands, eyes towards the river. We watched as fish jumped, gnats dived and butterflies fluttered delicately by. We looked into the water and saw the sun, the clouds and the green leaves which hung over our heads.

  “It was all so much easier then, wasn’t it?” Misha asked.

  “Then?”

  “When we were children. Before we knew what a wicked world we were living in.”