Kate Furnivall - The Concubine's Secret

Voshchinsky frowned, a wary pucker of his heavy eyebrows. Alexei returned to the chair and sat down.

‘Maksim,’ he said, ‘you have many friends.’

He lifted the man’s hand in his own, touched the veins that ran like serpents under the skin, and slid the nightshirt sleeve up the forearm. Underneath it writhed more serpents, black ones. Two of them slithered round the base of the slender skeleton of a birch tree, their eyes red, their fangs sharp as knife blades. Beneath them, written in elaborate italic script, were three names: Alisa , Leonid, Stepan.

‘A fine tattoo,’ Alexei commented.

Maksim Voshchinsky touched the trunk of the tree lovingly with the finger of his other hand. ‘That was my Alisa, the mother of my sons, God rest her soul.’

‘Maksim, we must talk. About the vory.’

The sick man’s eyes narrowed and his voice grew rough. ‘What do you know about the vory?’

‘They are the criminals of Moscow.’

‘So?’

‘And they wear tattoos.’

Lydia stood on the steps of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer in the thin sunshine. The Moskva River slid past, boats bobbing on the molten silver of its surface, and she’d counted twenty-two of them in the hour she’d been waiting.

‘Alexei,’ she murmured, ‘I can’t wait any longer.’

She’d really believed it today. That he would come. When she said to Liev, ‘My brother will be there,’ for once she hadn’t been annoyed by his big laugh, because now she knew for certain that Alexei had received the letter she’d left in Felanka and that he wanted to see her again. It had lifted a dead weight that lay in her stomach as solid and cold as the tombstones in the Cathedral’s crypt. She was alone on its wide steps. No one loitering in the street or slowing their pace as they walked along the pavement. Everyone seemed to be going about their own business as normal, an elderly man with a fat dog in tow, a young woman with a net bag and a child hanging off each hand. Lydia studied the street intently. It was hard to shake the chill of being observed.

After twenty minutes she had convinced herself that no one was watching her, but even so she intended to take a circuitous route across Moscow. First in one of the horse-drawn carriages, an izvozchik with the horse still wearing its summertime hat, its ears sticking up through the plaited straw like curious weasels; then a tram, an intricate weaving through shops, in and out of side doors, another tram, another shop, a final quick desperate dash on foot. Then the park. She had it all planned.

Lydia had run the last stretch and her heart was somewhere in her throat. She made her way along the path, everything around her so piercingly bright that she had to narrow her eyes against the sunlight. On each side stretched pristine lawns dressed up in lacy layers of snow. Ragged edges marked the boundaries between paths and lawns, as if the black earth were peeking out from under its white blanket like a sleepy mole to test the temperature outside. Lydia hurried her pace. She couldn’t see him.

She had entered the park from the Krymsky Bridge end but Chang An Lo might easily approach from a different direction. She kept turning her head, searching. Years earlier the site had been just one big scrap heap for old metal, where scavengers used to prowl at night and stray packs of dogs scraped out dens, but the land had been cleared and flattened – first for the Agricultural Exhibition and then, in 1928, turned into the Central Park of Culture and Leisure.

There was no sign of culture but people were certainly taking advantage of the leisure. The sun had tempted them out into the crisp cold air, well-swaddled figures strolling arm in arm and children scampering like kittens, released from the confines of their cramped living quarters. One athletic-looking man was kicking a ball to five young boys, all dressed in Young Pioneer uniforms with Communist-red scarves, flashing bright as robins on the snow. Such an ordinary sight, a father playing with his children, yet Lydia felt a sharp tug of envy and hated herself for it, for that weakness she couldn’t seem to escape.

Moving on through the park, past the lily-of-the-valley electric lights, she started to lose confidence with each step. This was all wrong. The park wasn’t at all what she’d anticipated when she put it forward as a meeting place. She cursed her own ignorance. She’d imagined there would be trees and tangled undergrowth, offering privacy and shadowy nooks where two people could speak without being observed, but the Central Park of Culture was still new, with wide empty stretches of grassland and flowerbeds barren under the snow, the trees freshly planted and no taller than herself. It didn’t take her long to see that Chang An Lo was not here.

The realisation slid sharp as ice into her skull. She closed her eyes, the fingers of sunlight almost warm on her lashes.

Where are you, my love?

She breathed quietly, letting loose her thoughts. When something in her mind unknotted, she knew she’d been looking for the wrong thing. Slowly she retraced her steps, scanning the ground this time instead of the Muscovites at leisure, and she saw the sign when she was back where she’d started. She smiled and felt a whisper of wind ruffle her hair. The sign was a tiny pile of stones, so small it was barely noticeable. But Lydia knew. Knew without doubt. When she and Chang had been separated in China, they had left messages for each other in a place called Lizard Creek and those messages had been buried in a jar beneath a cairn of stones. This, she realised, was her new Lizard Creek.

She crouched down and scrabbled at the stones. The miniature cairn had been placed in a corner of one of the flowerbeds where the soil was not so compacted under its skin of ice. It broke up quickly under her fingers and she found a small fold of leather. Inside it lay a slip of paper. In delicate black script were written six words: At the end of Semenov Ulitsa. Six words that altered her world.

She glanced round quickly but nothing had changed. A young woman wheeling her bicycle, an elderly couple throwing crumbs like confetti for a flock of starlings whose wings fluttered an oily black in the sunlight. Lydia piled the small cairn back together, rose to her feet, brushed her fingers on her coat and slipped the paper deep in her pocket. Her hand wouldn’t release its grasp but lay there, curled round it. She started to walk at a steady pace along the path once more, but her feet wouldn’t wait. They picked up speed, lengthening her stride and, before she could stop them, they were running.

Semenov Street was near the river. Set in the southern part of the city, it might have been transplanted straight out of one of the villages Lydia had viewed from the train on her journey across Russia. The houses were simple, a jumble of wooden one-storey buildings tilting at different angles under patched and mossy roofs.

The road was nothing more than a mix of potholes and dirt, but today it was bustling with people. A street market filled up most of the walkway, goods displayed on mats thrown on the ground. One stall boasted neat rows of second-hand boots, each one moulded to the shape of the previous owner’s life, jostling between displays of paper flowers and buckets of rusty metal clamps and washers. None of the traders had licences. If the police turned up to check they would melt away faster than ice on the tongue. Lydia was thankful for all the activity. She slid unnoticed along the street.

‘Apples? Good clean apples?’

‘ Nyet.’

A woman had thrust a shrivelled yellow apple under her nose. Lydia was tempted as she’d not eaten since a mouthful of the kasha she’d cooked for the boy this morning. The woman looked thin and tired under her headscarf, but then so did everyone else. It was the way things were. Two woven baskets stood at her side, apples in one, nuts in the other, both protected from the cold by a woollen shawl. A handful of the better samples lay on top to tempt passing trade.