Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

Fine, thought Talin who had no wish to travel on the scheduled flight. He sighed – and switched to guile. ‘I might just as well be trying to fly to Mongolia.’

She smiled, joining in the spirit of the thing. ‘Ah, there you would have no trouble. There are plenty of seats on the flight to Ulan Bator.’

Talin pounced. ‘Then book me on it.’

‘But—’

‘If I’m not mistaken Flight SU-563 to Ulan Bator stops at Omsk and Irkutsk. Book me to Irkutsk.’ From there it would be easy to pick up a connection to Khabarovsk.

She snatched his ID and disappeared. She returned with the manager who asked Talin why he was flying at such short notice. When Talin told him it was the wish of the First Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force the manager retreated swiftly leaving the blonde woman to cope.

With dimpled fingers she fed his requirements into the desk computer. When the answers came back she took his money and gave him a ticket.

So he was through their first line of defences. But he could still be stopped at the airport. Finding him gone, Sonya would be worried – he had been told to rest after the accident – and might contact Sedov. Sedov, knowing that he was due at Leninsk the following day, would contact Aeroflot. Hopefully, they would check departures for Khabarovsk from the domestic airport whereas he would be taking an international flight from Sheremetyevo. There could be trouble at Omsk and Irkutsk but he possessed deep reserves of guile and swagger.

It was 6 p.m. Three hours and twenty minutes until takeoff. He walked down Leningrad Highway and went into a clinical, neon-lit café. He sat down with a cup of steaming hot coffee to rest his aching body. ‘I don’t believe what Massey told me,’ he thought. ‘They can’t have deceived me for twenty years.’

Half an hour later he stopped a passing taxi and told the driver to take him to Sheremetyevo.

He didn’t report directly to the check-in desk; instead, shark-like, he circled the departure lounge with its marble columns and silver ceilings. It was said that you could always identify a KGB agent by his smart new shoes (Sedov being the exception) but there was no outstanding footwear among the fur-clad Mongols and Muscovite officials lining up for Flight SU-563.

Just before the deadline for check-in Talin presented his ticket. The dark-haired girl behind the counter raised an eyebrow. ‘Ulan Bator, Comrade Talin? It must be much the same as the moon,’ telling him that she had recognised him.

He was given a window seat on the Tupolev 154. The aircraft was only half full and the seat next to him was empty. The engines fired. The aircraft rolled forward, taxied to the end of the runway. The engines screamed, Talin stared through the window at the black and white film of the night flashing past; the body of the aircraft tilted, and he was on his way back to his childhood.

The village near Khabarovsk was a poor place. With its wooden cottages, fretworked eaves painted pink and blue, it was pretty enough when it was washed by rain, but more often than not it was grimed with coal-dust and in the winter it snowed grey snow.

But its grubbiness emphasised the beauty of its boundless surroundings, the taiga, where among the forests of birch, larch and pine shaggy tigers hunted spotted deer, beavers and wild sheep; where, from the melting perma frost, the pale people from the cities dug edible roots to keep them young; where from the River Amur on the border with China fishermen netted gasping sturgeon fat with roe.

Nicolay’s father worked at the mine as an overseer; so did his mother, sorting nuggets on the conveyor belts in between cooking meals in the izba they shared with another family next to the village well. In the summer food was plentiful, bloody meat from the taiga, berries, black bread and fish; in the winter the soup course lasted from November till April.

Being the only child of middle-aged parents, Nicolay was spoiled. At weekends he went hunting, trapping, horse-riding and fishing with his father who had black hair and black eyes and black crystals under the skin of his hands. In the evenings his mother, a plump, jolly woman who sang the sad songs of Siberia with great zeal, taught him to read and write so that when, at the age of seven, he attended Work Polytechnical School 14 in Khabarovsk he immediately impressed his teachers.

When he got home at night after a work-crammed day – he was an Octobrist at seven, a Young Pioneer at nine – he was exhausted. After a summer steak or a winter soup he tied himself in his sleeping bag in the room he shared with three other children and listened to his father and his friends uncorking the vodka bottle and their emotions around the coal-burning stove in the living room. As he retreated into sleep he sometimes heard anger rasping their rowdy good humour, heard oaths spilling from their lips.

Where, they demanded, was the equality they had been promised in the October Revolution? Where were the fruits of the Great Patriotic War that they had won? Was eight in one izba a decent way to live? And while they caroused and berated, while the coal spat and flared, it seemed to Nicolay that injustice also had something to do with a mother who sorted the good coal from the bad and had to make do with the bad.

Nicolay liked all these white-skinned, carbolic-smelling men save one named Konstantin. He was inward looking, always listening; Nicolay knew this because he rarely heard his voice, although none of the other men seemed to realise this, not when they were intent upon washing the coal-dust from their throats with vodka.

One late afternoon after the day shift had been hauled to the surface, his father didn’t return home. Nor did his friends call that night. Next morning, although his mother stayed at home, the cottage had an emptiness about it which at first Nicolay, on holiday from school, couldn’t identify; then he realised that it was her songs that were missing.

That evening Konstantin called. Nicolay and the other children were banished to the bedroom. He heard his mother crying. Then the sound of breaking glass. When he opened the door an inch he saw Konstantin, blood streaming from his cheek, facing his mother. On the floor was a broken vodka bottle. Then Konstantin was gone.

His mother told him that his father had gone to Khabarovsk to be trained in the use of new coal-cutting machines. When he returned three weeks later he was different, all the fun squeezed out of him. He told Nicolay that he had been promoted but he would have to go away for a while to another mine.

They went fishing that day in a hole cut in the ice on the Amur and they caught big fish with tails that snapped like whip-lashes and for a while, as the wind from the taiga polished his cheeks, the fun returned to his father. All the time two men stood in the background; miners going north with him, his father explained.

Outside the izba his father knelt and hugged him and said gruffly: ‘Look after your mother, Nicolay. Remember those fish we caught and the other times in the taiga.’ He didn’t follow Nicolay into the cottage and Nicolay never saw him again.

How can I have been so stupid all these years? Talin asked himself, waving away the stewardess with the plate of food.

Easy. At twelve you ask a lot of questions, you accept the answers and they lodge as facts. ‘Why have we moved to Novosibirsk?’ ‘Because it’s nearer to the mine where Papa’s working.’

A cobalt mine! Bastards.

‘When are we going to see Papa?’ ‘When he’s finished this new course…’

‘Passed on… What do you mean, passed on?’ ‘He became sick, a certain sort of sickness, it happens to a lot of miners…’