Lauren Chater - Lace Weaver

I jerked my head sharply, turning away from it towards the bare wall. Olga’s fingers were still tangled in my hair, and I felt a few strands tear away, twisted from the roots. My scalp burned. Good .

Olga gasped. Her hand fluttered over my back, hovering like a bird afraid to land.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ My voice was muffled by her dress. ‘Why did you lie?’

There was silence. She’s thinking , I thought. Imagining how to phrase her lies so they are tastier, so I will swallow them like medicine. ‘Oh, my little Vasilisa…’ she said at last, her hand cupping the back of my head.

‘No.’ I sat up, shaking myself free from her grasp. ‘Don’t call me that.’

Olga’s face fell. She looked suddenly old in the lamplight, her skin like crinkled linen, her eyes dull buttons aged by time. A surge of pity and love rose up inside me. Along with my mother, this woman had raised me. Her stories were woven into every memory, her funny sayings and proverbs always in the back of my mind. My mother had hired her before I was born. Before she came to work as Mama’s trusted companion and confidante, Olga was married to a chef employed at the world-famous Hotel Metropol on Theatre Square. In the years before the Revolution, the Metropol had been the glamorous epicentre of life in Moscow, with film stars attended by uniformed bellhops, a restaurant with full silver service and a bar that played American jazz every night of the week. During the battle with the Tsar’s loyalists, Bolsheviks had shot out every window in the hotel’s expensive façade. The White Army had responded with force, peppering the streets with bullets. Some of the fleeing staff had been killed, including Olga’s husband. Bereft, Olga had taken up work as a cleaner at the House on the Embankment, and it was here that my mother met her. Each day, Olga would clean Mamochka’s rooms and tell her stories. Eventually, Mama gave her a job as her companion and her own room in our apartments. She could not bear to be without Olga and her stories, and when I was born, she had entrusted me to Olga’s care while she attended Party meetings and tried to improve her education with courses at the Industrial Academy. Olga was the closest thing I had to a mother. Hurting her was like sticking a needle beneath my own fingernail.

Sitting up, I took her hand and held it in my lap.

She sniffed. ‘I should have told you,’ she said with a sigh. ‘But it was not my decision to make, and your uncle, he made us all promise, swear, that we would keep it a secret from you. He said it was for your own good, that your mother’s memory should not be tainted by scandal. It was to protect you.’ Her mouth hardened. ‘Now I see he was saving it, to use it against you himself. How could he hurt you this way?’

Her voice made me look up sharply. Much worse had happened during the past few years. So many people had been arrested. Many of the ground floor apartments in our building were still empty, the residences sitting bare, their occupants held in Lubyanka accused of spying and feeding intelligence to the West. A sudden coldness crept over my skin.

I found myself thinking of Alyona Petrova; a quiet girl I had met four years ago at the Model School. Alyona and her parents had moved to Moscow so her father could pursue his work as a State Publisher. One morning she had simply failed to return to class. Rumours circulated that her father had been exposed for printing anti-Soviet pamphlets. And then there was the Vasiliev family from apartment 120. Every one of them – three daughters, two sons, wife and husband – had disappeared one cold winter night last year. Zoya told us that they’d been reported for criticising the Soviet regime and spreading rumours about Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful head of the NKVD. They had fled before they could be captured.

A new thought struck me. What if people like Alyona’s father and the Vasiliev family had been innocent, as Joachim was? Joachim was no spy and yet he had been accused. I knew now that he would be convicted, no matter the truth. Had Olga and I so blindly believed everything I was told that we had cut those neighbours from our lives and thoughts, ignoring the evidence before us? What if their crimes had not been crimes at all, but slights against my uncle and his friends? What if their imprisonment was nothing more than the will of a madman, bent on revenge? I felt sick with regret.

‘He must hate me,’ I said. ‘That’s why he keeps me here in this place. To control me.’

Olga said nothing. She tried to tug her hand away, but I held it fast.

‘Is that why Papa left?’ I said.

Olga’s eyebrows drew down. ‘Your father…’ She paused, her fingers plucking at her skirt. I knew she did not want to discuss it; it was something we did not speak of often, the way Papa had virtually disappeared after Mamochka’s death, leaving Olga and me to deal with the aftermath, travelling instead to the furthest reaches of Russia’s empire to carry out his duty. Now I wondered if there wasn’t another reason for his sudden absence. What if he had been sent away against his will?

I knew Papa still cared for me; he wrote a few times a year to tell me where he was stationed, what his life was like. My situation was not unusual for the daughters of bureaucrats. I knew one girl, Natalya Kruglova from apartment 280 in the ninth entrance, whose mother had died in childbirth. She had been raised entirely by her nanny and an army of servants while her father, a General, moved on to remarry and spend time with his new family in the Ukraine. At least my father had not left me completely behind. At least he had kept me informed of his whereabouts and sometimes responded to my questions about life outside of Moscow.

The last letter he’d sent had been postmarked Tartu. I’d been excited to receive it, aware of my mother’s connection to Estonia, wondering if my father recalled the warm memories Mamochka had shared about her birthplace or if he’d had time to visit the coastal town of Haapsalu where she had lived until my grandparents brought her here. I had filed the letter in my desk, wedged between two books, the paper creased over many times. It had, sadly, not contained any stories about Mamochka or about Haapsalu, but perhaps those memories were too painful for him to speak about. Instead, he had described his work as Partorg of the area and the surrounding parishes, detailing the poor conditions in which the Estonians had lived before the Soviets arrived; their farms bare, empty of workers to maintain them and harvest produce; the local government full of corrupt officials skimming money from funds that should be used to educate the less fortunate. In return, I had sent him a clipping from Pravda about the way the Baltic populations had welcomed the Soviets with open arms, praising Stalin and sending him good wishes in the form of poems and stories. Although Papa had been too busy to respond, I liked to imagine him smiling as he received my package, perhaps reading my letter over breakfast before he put on his uniform and climbed into the car waiting to take him to his office. We might not be physically close, but I was convinced there was a tenderness in his letters that remained unchanged all through the years. He still signed his letters, Your loving Papochka .

‘I don’t know,’ Olga said at last. ‘Your papa thought you would be safer here. It’s not easy, the life of a police captain. Moving about wherever you are sent. Your papa does love you, that I do know. Sometimes love is complicated, though. When you were younger, you would host parties in his honour and all your toys would be police captains and lieutenants. Do you recall?’

I did. I remembered making my toys drink cups of milk while I watched my parents dance from beneath a table during a garden party my uncle was hosting in the Kremlin’s gardens. My uncle had asked my mother to dance. I could still see her fine pale hair caught up in an elegant chignon on the top of her head and hear the bell-like notes of her laughter as Uncle swirled her around, the flash of her teeth as they caught the dazzling light from the nearby fountain.