Yuri gazed first at the fading photographs, trying for an emotion he had not been able to find in the cramped loft in the Lenin Hills dacha. The soft-featured woman, hair caught high and full on top of her head, did look too demure and innocent to have done what she did, cheat and cuckold. Had she loved them both? Or just turned to Kazin in the terror of war, frightened and confused as people were frightened and confused in war, doing things which at any other time would be unthinkable? His father had been a handsome man, reflected Yuri. And before the deforming injury he would have been impressive, too, with his broadness and his height: it would have been easy to be proud of someone like his father. Had his mother felt pride, as well as love? She had loved, Yuri knew: his father had told him during that stumbled, inadequate account. And it was inadequate: still so many unanswered questions.
The last photograph was of the three of them together, at the wedding. Yuri concentrated upon Kazin. My supporter, his father had said. He’d also said he did not know how long the affair had been going on. Not then, surely? Surely she hadn’t married one while she was sleeping with the other? Yuri tried to remember his impression when he’d first seen the picture. Proprietorial, he recalled. Kazin appeared to be looking at his mother as if there was already something between them, an understanding. Yuri shook his head in the empty, metalled room, refusing the impression. It was a trick of the camera, a half-caught expression. How could it be anything else?
Now that the personal danger was over – now that Kazin was dead – Yuri felt differently about the imagery of the man. Later, during their confrontation, he had been over-indulged and bloated but that man actually wasn’t there in the photo, and it had been wrong to think him so. Heavy, certainly – a hint of how he became – but no more than well built. Still impossible to understand…
Yuri stopped the pointless drift, laying the photographs aside to turn to the frail, brittle correspondence, lifting the bundles completely from the box to set them out on the greater space of the table.
Initially he did not attempt to read the contents. Determined upon a chronology, Yuri went through the letters establishing by date that they were consecutive, his mother’s to his father, his response to hers. And then he began to read.
It appeared to have been a stilted courtship in the beginning – the strange formality he had recognized in the loft – with some indication that her family had disapproved: there was an early letter, a copy Yuri guessed, of a plea not to his mother but to her family in which his father had stressed his prospects. A secure and rewarding career, the man had promised. And he had written something else: ‘I will always honour your daughter.’ A pity, thought Yuri, that she had not been able to return that honour.
The change, to Stalingrad, was abrupt and obvious, his father’s letters on scraps of paper, the writing scrawled and almost illegible, in pencil. Yuri strained to make sense, suddenly aware of Kazin’s name. Our courier, the man had been called. And by his mother, not his father. And then another reference. This time ‘Our beloved courier’. Yuri swallowed against the hypocrisy, reading on. There was no description of the horror of the siege, of course, because that would not have been permitted, but his father had hinted at the awfulness. There was a reference to noise above which it was impossible to speak, and that there were no longer in the city any animals, a clue to how they’d stayed alive eating the cats and the dogs and finally the rats. Where, wondered Yuri, had the beloved courier been then?
And then another abrupt change, which Yuri could not immediately understand until he realized it was the period of his father’s hospitalization. Still in Stalingrad, at first – the Stalingrad from which he knew Kazin had by now been evacuated – and from the dates a long gap between their writing. In that first letter his father had written ‘I am not dead, as you thought’, and Yuri wondered if there were an explanation for everything in those seven words. And maybe in the next line: ‘I will be ugly.’ Yuri blinked against the blur making it difficult for him to focus, which came again when he coordinated his mother’s reply, reminiscent of the stiffness of the courtship letters. There was an official communication, telling me you had been killed.’ And then: ‘How are you hurt? What does ugly mean?’
From his father’s reply – ‘my arm has gone’ – Yuri accepted it would have been impossible for his mother to imagine the true extent of the untreated injury: that it would have been a shock when she first saw him.
Which from another letter he saw had been in February 1943, when he’d been airlifted from the relieved city to Moscow: ‘I existed in the thought of seeing you again,’ his father had written. The jar came to Yuri from a sentence in his mother’s reply. ‘I will care for you, until you are better…’ What had ‘until’ meant? Had she been setting a time limit upon a relationship she had resigned herself to be over, having already established another? He went back to the Stalingrad letters, calculating the gap. A full three months, he saw. Three months when she believed her husband to be dead, with their best friend always there, to comfort her. Could she be criticized for falling in love again? Shouldn’t the feeling instead be pity, for the dilemma she faced when the man reappeared from the dead?
Yuri stretched back in the upright chair, trying to relieve his ache of concentration. Yes, he decided, answering his own questions. He’d looked for an answer in the letters and he’d found it. What had happened to his parents was the other sort of destruction that war caused. Except that they had not been destroyed. His mother had made an understandable mistake and when she’d realized it she had returned to his father and lived out her life with him.
There was not much correspondence left. Yuri leaned forward again, reading the letters in sequence, tracing his father’s recovery and recuperation against his mother’s frequent assurances that she would care for him – ‘my duty’ was an often-used phrase – not immediately aware until there was a reference to his father’s promotion within the intelligence service that the letters now were no longer wartime-dated but afterwards. And then he became aware they marked another separation, this time his father’s promotion through what had by then become the KGB. There was a posting to Tbilisi in Georgia, and again in Karaganda in Kazakhskaya.
There was only one letter left, from his mother to his father, and Yuri frowned at it, recognizing from the date another gap between those from his father’s travels. And made further curious from its origin, the maternity clinic at Bakovka.
‘The pain has gone now,’ she had written. ‘I don’t know for how long but I am to summon them if it gets too bad again, as bad as it was when you were here. I know I said it then but I want to say it once more, because I am frightened.
‘I am sorry. I tried and I failed. I am ashamed and I beg your forgiveness, as I have so often begged your forgiveness in the past, always to fail again. We know the reasons: that they will always exist. That I am weak…’
Momentarily Yuri looked away, uneasily, forcing himself to go back to the neat, precise script. ‘I have always loved you, in my way. I only wish, my darling, that it could have been a different way, a complete way. Like it could have been. But wasn’t allowed to be. This has to be the last time I hurt you: could there be any way worse, than how I have hurt you this time?
‘He doesn’t know the truth. His knowing before you is unimportant. I owe you that, at least. I want this to be final: we’ve talked and cried too often for there to be any words or tears left although I am crying now. You were always more tolerant of my tears than Victor: always more tolerant about everything.
‘The doctor who gave me the injection said he thought it was going to be all right. I want it to be all right – to be easy like I’ve always wanted everything to be easy – but I am very afraid that it won’t be. So very afraid. Weak, in every way.
‘I know you promised, when I asked, but I did not believe you. If anything should happen – the anything we could not talk about – please try. You were so close once and could be again: if I were not between you, as I’ve always been between you, would there really be any reason to go on as enemies? If that anything of which I am so frightened happens there will have to be a meeting between you, after all. You will have to tell him, if I can’t. Ask him to be kind: he can be kind and good, you know. He saved your life when he could have let you die, didn’t he? Ask him to protect whoever is inside me, against the truth about me.
‘There is more I want to write, and will, but the pain is coming back and so I will stop, until they make it go away…’
The letter ended there, unsigned.
There was no blur of emotion, no feeling at all. Yuri felt empty, hollowed out, trying to comprehend it all. It had not ended with the war, as he had imagined. His mother had remained with his father – ‘my duty’ – but continued the relationship with Kazin. Which would have been easy, with his father’s necessary Second Chief Directorate postings, throughout the other republics. The reason, most probably, that she had not accompanied him. Always more tolerant. Could it really have been that his father loved his indecisive, weak mother so much that
