Eeyoreovitch!’ he shouted. ‘My dear, dear friend Louie Eeyoreovitch!’ He threw out his arms, grabbed me in a bear hug and dragged me to my feet. He unclasped me and then with renewed fervour threw his arms round me again and squeezed me. He kissed me on both cheeks. ‘Louie Eeyoreovitch!’ he exclaimed. ‘How can I ever thank you? My daughter, my lovely daughter, my dear heart’s blood, lost to me, alone in the world full of evil predatory men, and through the exquisite offices of our benevolent and ever-merciful Lord, she met you! My darling dear Natasha has come back and all because of you, the noble, thrice-blessed Louie Eeyoreovitch!’
Chapter 22
His name was Pyotr. He drove with one hand lazily caressing the wheel and the other making gestures in the air to amplify the effect of his words. We drove south through town, down the broad tree-lined avenue of Praspyekt John Hughes, into Petrovsky Pereulok and then Merthyr Tydfil Naberezhnaya. He said we were heading for Sadovaya Ulitsa.
‘You can imagine how I felt,’ he said. ‘I knew sooner or later the moment would come. For years I worried about it, how I would cope without her mother to guide her. At times like that, when a girl starts to become a woman, she needs the company of other women. I flatter myself I did all right, together we managed to get through the trials of those years. Yes, there were boyfriends, some of which I disapproved; others I tolerated. Then a few weeks ago she came home and said in the sort of voice a girl uses to say she wants to be an actress that she wanted to be a honey-trapper. Imagine it! I was thunderstruck. Of course, I didn’t want to stand in her way . . . She thought it was glamorous, being a spy, a Mata Hari, but I knew better, I knew how the world works, especially the grimy shabby shadow-world of secret agents. I told her, it’s not like in the James Bond movies: you don’t get many counts and countesses, handsome spies and debonair millionaires travelling on the Orient Express these days. It’s just a train, like the one to Dnipropetrovsk, full of bourgeois riff-raff. She wouldn’t listen, of course.’ He made an especially dramatic wave of his hand. ‘Who would be a father, eh? Louie Eeyoreovitch, who would be a father!’
We turned into a street of solid nineteenth-century civic buildings, and parked outside the Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering. The chain was hanging loose, the jaw of the padlock open. The door was ajar. We climbed the steps and entered.
‘And then, after everything I told her, what does she do? She meets a handsome James Bond on the train, the wonderful chivalrous knight Louie Eeyoreovitch who shows her the error of her ways and sends her back to her father.’
We walked into a lobby of scuffed linoleum and faded paint. Pyotr pressed the button on an old wire-cage elevator. There was a rumble from the basement and far above our heads wheels and pulleys creaked into motion. The cage arrived and Pyotr pulled back the concertina door and bid me enter. We travelled up to the second floor.
‘We closed the museum about fifteen years ago.’
‘Why did you close it?’
‘Budget cuts, as usual. It was my initiative. I was in charge of the five-year plan for dream husbandry at the time.’
We emerged on to a landing. Next to the door leading to a gallery there was a table, chairs, vodka and Vimto. A girl sat at the table leafing through a dossier, pencil perched on her ear and an earnest expression on her face. It was Calamity. She looked up briefly from the dossier. ‘Oh, hi Louie, good you could make it.’ Her attempt at nonchalance was betrayed by the wide grin which flashed across her face. I rushed forward and, as she stood up, I hugged her. ‘How was the interrogation?’ she asked, struggling to breathe under the pressure of my arms.
‘A lot nicer than the ones you get in Aberystwyth, but I was worried about you the whole time.’
‘I was worried about you, too.’
Pyotr sat down and poured out the vodka and the Vimto. He drank to our health. Calamity pointed to the dossier on the table. ‘It’s Uncle Vanya’s file.’ On the cover there was a picture of a young man in Soviet labour-camp clothes staring blankly into the camera. Pyotr took the photo of the levitated dog out of an envelope and placed it on the table top.
‘Natasha has asked me to apologise to you for stealing the photo.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘She is very upset. She has enrolled on a course to become a speech therapist for children with learning difficulties, and all because of you, Louie Eeyoreovitch. You restored my daughter to me and now you are my brother to whom I will be eternally in debt. However, duty dictates that, for reasons of State security, I must confiscate the photo. As recompense I make the exhibits of this the former museum available to you. It is my belief that you will find the answer to your quest here in the dust.’
I placed my fingers on the dossier and twisted it round to face me.
‘Vanya’s case is very sad,’ said Pyotr. ‘Twice he was denounced and sent to the camps. And the years in between were worse: he was captured by the Germans in Stalingrad and spent two years as a prisoner-of-war eating bread made of floor sweepings and leaves. When finally he returned to Hughesovka he did what he had to in order to survive and this meant taking employment in the criminal fraternity. His life was heading for the abyss, but then a remarkable transformation occurred. He was engaged to assassinate a woman for reasons that are now lost and, by all accounts, he fell in love with her face presented to him down the sniper scope of his rifle. He sought out the girl, paid off the people who wanted her dead, and proposed. How could she refuse the gallant man who had forborne to shoot her because he was so struck by her beauty?’
‘This much I know. He married Lara and Ninotchka was born, and then he was sent to a labour camp.’
‘Yes, of course, you are anxious to learn the truth behind this great mystery. You have come a long way and desire to know how it was that the spirit of Gethsemane Walters could inhabit the body of a little girl here in Hughesovka in the mid-fifties. Please, sit.’
I took my place at the table and chinked glasses with Pyotr and Calamity and tried to keep the impatience from my face.
‘It is indeed a very strange story,’ said Pyotr. ‘You see, not long after Vanya was sent to the camps there was an outbreak of diphtheria in Hughesovka and Ninotchka fell ill and died. And for reasons known only to her, Lara kept this terrible news secret from her husband. It is not hard to imagine her motives. She intended no doubt to spare Vanya the extra suffering. The camps along the River Kolyma were infamous, everyone knew that a spell in the gulag was the worst fate that could befall a man or woman and of this the worst of the worst was to be found in Kolyma. Lara must have thought that the extra burden of this evil news would have been too much for her husband’s poor heart to bear. She didn’t tell him, and thereby though acting from the most honourable of motives she constructed a trap that ensnared her. Because what was to happen when Vanya came home? It must have preyed on her mind a lot during those years. She found work as a cleaner in this museum. Then one day a strange event happened. They had just taken delivery from Mooncalf & Sons of some traditional Welsh furniture which would form part of a reconstruction of a typical nineteenth-century peasant’s cottage. And in a Welsh dresser they found some curious items: a bottle of dandelion and burdock, a tin of corned beef, and a child’s colouring book. One evening, a few days later, as Lara was mopping the floor she found a little girl hiding in the basement. This girl was Gethsemane, who it seemed had been hiding in the Welsh dresser and inadvertently shipped from Wales to Hughesovka. The streets of Hughesovka in those dark lean days shortly after the war were full of waifs and strays – so many mothers and fathers who went to war and never returned. It was a common thing to find a poor shivering half-starved child hiding in the warm museum at night. The girl was about the same age as Ninotchka would have been had she lived, and looked similar. Vanya had not seen his daughter since shortly after her birth; suddenly Lara saw a way out of the trap she had built for herself in the lie she told Vanya. She decided to adopt Gethsemane, to pass her off as Ninotchka and deceive her husband.’ Pyotr paused and refilled our glasses for the fourth time. He raised the glass and held it to his lips without drinking, lost for a moment in contemplation. ‘But of course there was a problem. The child stubbornly refused to accept the name of Ninotchka and not unreasonably insisted that she was called Gethsemane and was from Wales. And so, Lara invented this astonishing story about the imaginary friend in order to dupe her husband when he returned from the camps. “My darling, something very strange has taken place. Last week I gave our little daughter a Welsh doll from the museum and now she has acquired an imaginary friend from Wales called Gethsemane. I thought it was charming at first but recently the imaginary friend seems to have taken her over. Our daughter no longer answers to the name Ninotchka and insists that I call her Gethsemane. Yesterday she told me I was not her real mummy and asked for a strange dish of lamb and cheese
