compelling, just as challenging to him, as these times were for those who lived through them. 'It might be a lifetime to us,' Shchepkin said, 'but no one experiences more than a brief span of history.'
'So only history can judge itself,' Russell had suggested, half ironically.
'No, we have to make our own judgements. But we do so on insufficient evidence, and we should always bear that in mind.' And having said that, Shchepkin had tried to persuade Russell that the Soviet Union should be his temporary home. Russell had told him he could never get used to the weather.
No one could complain about it today – the sun was still shining in a mostly blue sky, and out of the slight breeze it actually felt warm. When he finally reached the unguarded gates of the Novodevichy Cemetery, the lure of a bench under shady trees proved irresistible. He sat for a while enjoying the sense of peace and beauty, the grey stones amidst the greenery, the golden onion domes of the adjacent monastery gleaming in the bright blue heavens. He thought about looking for Kropotkin, but the stones were myriad, and there was no one to ask.
Outside again, he began the search for Shchepkin's home. He remembered the Russian mentioning an apartment, but it soon became apparent that all the houses in the cemetery's vicinity had been converted into flats. Most of the buildings looked at least a century old, and were quite beautiful – Russell found it easy to picture Tolstoy's Natasha gazing rapturously out of one of the large bay windows, or dancing down a flight of steps to a waiting droshky.
He began knocking on doors, expecting a long and probably fruitless afternoon. Several nervous rejections confirmed his pessimism, but then, at only the sixth or seventh attempt, he struck unexpected gold. A young man leaving by the front door simply held it open for him. 'Number four,' he said.
It was on the first floor, at the back of the building. Russell's knock was answered by a smartly dressed young woman. She was slim, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and looked about nineteen. She had her father's mouth.
'Yes?' she asked, almost angrily. There was fear there, too.
'My name is John Russell,' he said. 'I am looking for Yevgeny Shchepkin.'
'He's not here,' she said abruptly, and started to close the door.
'Who is it?' another woman's voice asked anxiously from further inside the apartment. The young woman's answering burst of rapid-fire Russian contained the word 'father'.
'I am a friend of your father,' Russell told her.
The second woman appeared in the doorway. She was probably in her forties, with grey hair tied back in a bun, and clothes that had been worn too long. She had been a beauty once, but now looked worn-out. There was a large spoon in her hand, and Russell realised he could smell borscht.
'My name is John Russell,' he said again.
'You are German?' she asked, worrying him somewhat. Was he speaking Russian with a German accent?
'I'm English. Are you Comrade Shchepkina?
'Yes,' she admitted.
'I met your husband in Poland in 1939, and again in Sweden in 1942. And as I was here in Moscow, I thought I would visit him.'
'He's not here,' she said dully. 'He is away.'
'Will he be back soon?'
'No, I do not think so. I'm sorry. We cannot help you. Please.'
The young woman said something to her mother about Russell being a friend of father's, but she was still opening her mouth to reply when they all heard the creak of a door opening further down the landing.
No one appeared.
'I will show Grigori Sergeyevich back to the Metro,' the daughter said in a loud voice. Her mother looked like she wanted to argue, but forbore from doing so. 'Come,' the daughter said, almost pushing Russell towards the head of the stairs. The door down the landing clicked shut.
Outside on the street, she turned towards the river. 'The spiteful old cow won't be able to see you if we go this way,' she told him coolly.
Like father, like daughter, Russell thought to himself. 'I know my way back,' he told her.
She ignored him. 'Tell me about my father,' she said with more than a hint of hostility.
'What?'
'I've hardly seen him since I was a child.'
'Surely your mother…'
'She knows him the way a wife knows her husband. The world outside – she doesn't like to even think about it. When he leaves, it's as if he was never there. Until he suddenly appears again, and then it's as if he had never left. It drives me crazy.' She put an arm through Russell's. 'So tell me.'
'I don't really know him. We met more than twenty years ago, here in Moscow. We were both in the First War…' He paused to order his thoughts. 'I think we both became communists because of what that war showed us about the way the world was run. But we didn't get to know each other, not really. We were both involved in the same discussions and arguments about the Revolution, and where it should be headed. Your father was always full of passion,' he added, remembering as he did so that Shchepkin had said the same of him in that Danzig hotel room six years earlier.
'Passion?' she murmured, as if trying the word on for size. They had reached the river, and the half- repaired roof of the Kiev Station was visible to the north. A line of empty barges was chugging downstream.
'That's how all this started,' Russell said, as much to himself as to her. 'Hard to believe now, perhaps. But twenty years is a long time. Once it becomes clear that your passion will also cause innocents to suffer, it begins to wear you down. First there's good and evil, and then the good gets tarnished, and soon it's only a lesser evil. Some quit at that point; they walk away, either physically or mentally. Those that don't, it just gets harder. Your father kept going – that's the one and only thing I really know about him.'
'You make him sound like a hero,' she said, with more than a trace of anger.
'Do I? I don't mean to. People like your father, they lock themselves in. Like a sailor who ties himself to a mast in a storm. It makes sense, but once you're tied up there's not much you can do for anyone else.'
'Why did you really come looking for him?'
'I need help, and he's the only person I could think of.'
'I don't think he can help himself anymore,' she said.
'You think he's been arrested?'
'We don't know, but we haven't seen him for over year. I went down to Dzerzhinsky Street just before Christmas, and they said his whereabouts were unknown. I asked why they had stopped sending my mother his pay, and the man promised he would look into it. But we've heard nothing.'
'If he was dead, they would have informed you,' Russell said, with more conviction than he felt.
'I hope so,' she said. 'You can take a tram from that stop over there,' she said, pointing across the street. 'It goes up Arbat and along Mokhavaya.'
'Thank you,' he said.
As she turned to walk away, he asked what her name was.
'Natasha,' she said.
Emerging from the soldiers' mess on Koppen Strasse, Paul Gehrts could see flames still leaping from the buildings further up the street. They had been hit a couple of hours earlier, courtesy of an idle or incompetent Allied bombardier. The rest of the bombs had fallen, to rather more relevant effect, in the marshalling yards beyond Silesian Station.
There was only one fire engine visible, and no sign of hoses in use. A couple of uniformed men were leaning against the engine, puffing on cigarettes, watching the dancing flames.
Paul walked the other way, towards Stralauer Platz, in hope of finding a tram to take him across the city. Four days had passed since Gerhart's death. The loss had numbed him, but not for long – the shock had worn off all too quickly, and left him seething with an anger he could hardly contain. His sergeant, sensing that he might do something stupid, had persuaded battalion to let Paul take some of the leave he was owed.
Reaching the capital had taken all night, and his first sight of the city in over six months had been a sobering experience. The streets were like obstacle courses, and in places it seemed as if almost half the buildings had
