and the landscape was made up almost entirely of enormous fields divided from each other by thin lines of bare- branched trees.
Korolev had heard rumours of what had happened in the Ukraine in ’thirty-two and ’thirty-three – dangerous words heard late at night from soldiers who’d had too much to drink in the Arbat Cellar. How the Red Army and the NKVD had forced the peasants to give up every scrap of food and how, faced with starvation, they had resisted, futilely, and the soldiers and the Chekists had shot them down. The car passed more than one smoke-blackened church, their domes charred black skeletons, and each village was dotted with roofless ruined buildings. Korolev couldn’t help but notice that the few hunched peasants he saw seemed older than their probable years, with barely the energy to lift their feet from the ground. They turned their heads to look at the passing car with no interest whatsoever and Korolev had seen that look before, during the war, on the faces of men who’d been fighting too long and had seen too much. On his own face caught in a mirror, not far from here, the day after cavalry had caught his company in the open and he’d hidden underneath his friend Pavel’s dead body as the horsemen had searched for the living amongst the dead, the pop of revolver shots marking each discovery. It had taken three days for his hands to stop shaking enough for him to shave. But by the time that had happened he’d been tired, so tired – seven years of fighting and so many dead friends and dead enemies filling his dreams. It wasn’t surprising he’d nearly broken. He didn’t know where he’d found the strength, perhaps the Lord had answered his prayers, but somehow he’d pulled himself together, shaved, washed his friend’s blood from his tunic and marched on with a different group of comrades, thanking the Virgin he still breathed.
Korolev looked across at Mushkin and realized that the Chekist’s expression wasn’t that dissimilar from the one on the faces of the peasants they’d just passed – a man who’d reached his limit and gone past it. The soldiers in that bar had said that in some places that winter the peasants had organized themselves and taken reprisals against Party officials – even ambushed detachments of Militia and the Red Army – and that the NKVD’s retaliation had been savage. Each rebellion had been crushed, no matter how small, and each act of resistance, real or imagined, met with brutal retribution. Mushkin must have been up to his neck in all of that, Korolev thought to himself. He noticed the way the major kept his eyes fixed on the road in front of them as they drove through the battered villages. Was it Korolev’s imagination or was the major trying to avoid looking out at the signs of the struggle that had taken place here?
‘You said this agricultural college was secure – does it need to be?’ Korolev found himself saying, and regretted it almost immediately. Mushkin glanced at him before turning his eyes back to the road ahead.
‘The struggle against wreckers and counter-revolutionaries is not yet over in these parts, Korolev.’
They passed through another village, not dissimilar to the others – thin, hungry faces and rotting empty houses, the wooden walls grey with age and the damp thatch sagging. The usual signs of Soviet Power were here too – the kolkhoz office, a small Militia post, a collective store. These buildings at least looked as though they were being maintained.
But Mushkin looked neither left nor right, driving through the village as though it didn’t exist until, on reaching a large concrete block which announced the Odessa Regional Agricultural College in foot-high letters, he turned off the main road onto a gravel drive. The drive continued into woodland, the first Korolev had seen since he’d landed, and after a minute or so it reached the remains of a small church, burnt out long before.
‘The family that owned the estate were buried here,’ Mushkin said, stopping the car and indicating a small graveyard that had suffered as much as the church. ‘When the Revolution arrived the peasants dug up their graves and scattered their bones over the steppe. Then they burnt the church down with the priest inside it.’
Korolev kept his face expressionless – he’d heard of worse things happening during the Civil War, and seen things as bad. But he was surprised by the priest. In fact he’d risk a fair amount of money that it wasn’t the villagers who’d burnt their priest alive. Korolev glanced at Mushkin and something in his expression, the way he looked at the church, made him wonder if Mushkin himself hadn’t had something to do with the atrocity. After a few moments of contemplation, Mushkin put the car back into gear and they drove for another hundred metres or so to where the woods opened up and a series of newly built concrete buildings appeared – dormitories, what looked like a gymnasium, classrooms, lecture halls and several large barns. Finally the drive led to a large house built from ochre-coloured stone, three storeys high and standing in the middle of winter-stripped gardens.
It wasn’t a palace as such, but a substantial residence all the same. It didn’t look Russian, with its small turrets at each corner and its arched windows, more like a building from North Africa. To the left of the house stood what must have been the stable block, the courtyard of which contained a number of trailers, a bus and a truck, as well as an odd assortment of equipment, some of which was covered with tarpaulins bearing the stencilled logo ‘Ukrainfilm’.
Mushkin stopped the car in front of the ornate entrance to the house. ‘The local Militia will be arriving soon,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘You’re not here in an official capacity, but as Babel’s friend. We’ll be asking your opinion, seeing as you’re here – by complete coincidence.’
‘So I was informed.’
‘I’m informing you again,’ Mushkin said as he pulled himself out of the car. He glanced round at Korolev once, then walked towards the stable yard, his hands deep in his pockets.
Korolev stayed where he was for a moment, looking around him. Apart from Mushkin’s departing figure there was no one to be seen. Perhaps Korolev was a little tired, and Mushkin’s story about the family graves and the burning priest too fresh in his mind, but he had a sudden image of the porch’s black-and-white tiled floor slicked with blood. For a moment the image was so vivid that he couldn’t breathe.
Shocked, Korolev sat there, not sure what else to do but open up the packet of cigarettes he had in his pocket, extract one with some difficulty, his fingers rattling a nervous tattoo on the cardboard box, and put it in his mouth. He lit it, wondering if he was cracking up, and feeling so worn that he almost didn’t care. Tiredness was all this was, he reassured himself for the second time in twenty-four hours – the previous day’s arrest, the Chekist knocking on the door, the Lubianka waiting room, the plane journey, Mushkin. Things like that took it out of a man. He sighed and coughed as he inhaled, savouring the spread of nicotine through his body.
When the bang on the driver’s door came, the surprise lifted Korolev out of his seat so high his head touched the roof.
‘What the hell?’ he shouted, adrenalin shuddering though his body like electricity and his hand instinctively going for his shoulder holster.
‘Sorry, Comrade.’ The smiling face of a small blond boy with a red Pioneer’s scarf round his neck was looking in at him through the window, nose flat against the glass. And the strangest thing was that he was the spitting image of Korolev’s son Yuri, so much so that Korolev wondered whether he were having another hallucination until he saw the small differences, the slightly darker blue of the eyes, the perfect teeth where Yuri’s were a little crooked. But the likeness was uncanny and it was with some difficulty that he pulled himself together.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, and the question came out a little more gruffly than he’d intended.
‘Pavel.’
‘And do you usually go around scaring the living daylights out of honest citizens, Pavel? And you a Pioneer as well.’ Which, again, wasn’t how he’d intended to speak to the boy and when the boy’s smile was replaced with a grave expression he felt a parent’s guilt.
‘I’m sorry, Comrade,’ the boy began, but Korolev shook his head.
‘Don’t be, Pavel. It’s me should be apologizing – you caught me by surprise, that’s all. Off with you now – we’ll meet again, I’m sure, and start from the beginning again.’
The boy’s smile reappeared and he saluted before disappearing round the corner at a gallop. Korolev hauled himself out of the car, suddenly determined to deal with this affair quickly so he could take what was left of the two weeks to go and see the real Yuri in Zagorsk. He could be there in two days with a bit of luck and Rodinov’s help with the journey. Yes, that’s what he’d do, he thought to himself, and prayed the girl had indeed killed herself.
He walked into the domed porch, glancing up for a moment at the curved sky-blue roof on which silver stars twinkled, then tried the front doors, which were locked. No one answered when he pulled at a metal chain that rang a distant bell, and there was no one to be seen in the entrance hall when he looked through one of the small windows.
A cobbled path circled the house and Korolev followed it, listening for any sign of human activity and hearing none, only the sound of the wind pushing its way through the garden’s trees, and on the opposite side of the building he found a long balustraded terrace that overlooked a frozen lake, ice embracing the withered reeds around its shore. The house was even more impressive from this angle and in front of the terrace there was a large
