Natasha's Dream (21 page)

‘I know where he was going to take you, Natasha,’ said Mr Gibson, driving steadily and with care through the black countryside of Brandenburg.

‘No, you cannot know.’

‘The destination of the coffin was Ekaterinburg. The undertaker told me so.’

‘Oh, it is no good for you to know things. The monarchists would kill you, so would the Bolsheviks.’

‘What happened in Ekaterinburg, Natasha, beside the massacre of the Imperial family?’

Natasha was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I think I am hungry, after all.’

‘We’ll stop in Frankfurt and find a suitable
restaurant there. You can think then about telling me what it is that gives you so much pain and worry, and makes certain people consider you dangerous.’

‘Dangerous? I am dangerous?’ Natasha ridiculed the possibility with a gesture and a laugh. Anything was better, anything, than sharing her secrets with Mr Gibson. To confide in him would be fatal. He was not a man who would allow other men to keep him quiet. He had come to Berlin to collect information and facts, and to draw conclusions, and if he was given information that could affect his conclusions dramatically, he would hold that information up to the light. And that might have the effect of sending him to Austria, to look for a man called Kleibenzetl. Perhaps Kleibenzetl was still alive, perhaps he was not. No one had ever heard from him. No one among the monarchists, that is, or among the supporters of that tragic lady in the clinic. If Mr Gibson went in search of him, then someone would go after Mr Gibson. ‘Mr Gibson, how could I be dangerous?’

‘I don’t know. You haven’t told me. All you’ve said is that it’s better for me not to know.’

‘Yes. I am glad you agree. We need not talk about it any more. Oh, I still cannot believe I
am free of those men. God has been very good to me.’

‘Some people might question that, after all you’ve suffered,’ said Mr Gibson.

‘But I’m alive, we are both alive, and are going to Switzerland,’ said Natasha. ‘My life is full of light. You are the best man in the world. Thank you, thank you.’

‘You could not have been left in the hands of the Bolsheviks, and I was only too relieved I caught up in time. A generous amount of thanks is due to young Hans, and also to Herr Gebert and his wife. Now we’ll find a restaurant in Frankfurt where we can both freshen up before we eat.’

‘Yes, Mr Gibson. Thank you.’

The German police at Swiebodzin would not allow the man Vorstadt to leave the country until a decision had been made about whether or not he should be prosecuted for dangerous driving. His passport, a Russian one, was confiscated. Commissar Bukov had no option but to take the hearse to Warsaw himself. He drove through the evening and all through the night, with not a single compassionate thought for the young woman he had interred in the coffin.
She was, after all, a woman who, as a girl, had so frustrated him that, in an excess of hatred for her family, he had had them shot. That had led to him being condemned by the workers’ council as a man of intemperate judgement and, accordingly, of suspect value to the Revolution. That had been a bitter pill to swallow. She was to blame, the girl who was now a woman.

He knew, of course, that the workers’ council of Ekaterinburg, the Soviet, was no longer made up of Lenin’s adherents or Trotsky’s followers. They were Stalin’s men now. Those who had wavered had been liquidated. That made no difference to Bukov. His soul belonged to the Revolution. He had promised to bring back the girl who had refused to divulge what she knew about a sequel to the execution of the Romanovs. She had denied knowing anything. But she knew, yes, she knew. It was not something Lenin or Trotsky wished to become common knowledge, not at that particular time. Well, at least he had her, and together they would keep the belated appointment with the Ekaterinburg Soviet. They would both die. She because she had refused to help the Revolution, and he because Stalin’s men had taken over. He knew he had been away from Russia too long.

There was an anonymous hole in the ground for the woman.

There was a coffin for him, a coffin that represented a macabre self-gesture.

He reached the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw at ten in the morning. He was admitted through the gates, and drove round to the rear of the building. One of the embassy officials came out to talk to him. As a consequence of the talk, two servants were called to lift the coffin out of the hearse and carry it in. In a bare room, the lid was unscrewed and taken off. A loose tangle of cord and a limp gag were exposed. Nothing else. Bukov’s eyes seemed frozen.

‘I have heard of Houdini,’ said the official, ‘who has not? I have never heard of his female counterpart. Wait here, Comrade Commissar.’ He disappeared.

Bukov waited. He had to. The door was locked. His face looked as if it had been carved from dark-grey stone, although his lips twitched loosely from time to time. That woman, the woman who had once been a maddening girl, she had slipped him at the very beginning, she had slipped him many times since, and at the very last she had slipped him again and for ever. It did not matter how she had done it. It
was final. The bitter salt that encrusted his soul began to slowly consume him.

In one of the embassy offices, the official was talking about him to his superior. ‘One questions if she was ever there,’ he said.

‘Or if she was, he released her? She was of an age and looks to interest him?’

‘One could suggest contamination had weakened him.’

‘He has actually been out of Russia for seven years?’

‘No time limit was laid down.’

‘Certain members of the Ekaterinburg Soviet must have been in default of their senses.’

‘One could readily assume so.’

‘For seven years he has been in contact with capitalist degenerates of Poland and Germany?’ That was not a question, even if it sounded like one. It was a judgement. The official knew it, and so did not answer it. ‘The present Ekaterinburg Soviet are aware of this?’ That was a definite question.

‘They are.’

‘Then see he is returned to Ekaterinburg under escort.’

The interrogation of Bukov began almost as soon as he arrived in Ekaterinburg. It was conducted by men who were one with Stalin. To Stalin, any Russian who had rubbed shoulders with people of capitalist countries was suspect.

For two days, ceaseless questions were asked about the contacts Bukov had made during the last seven years. Bukov tried to frame his answers around what had been an agreed commitment to bring the girl back. He was repeatedly told not to introduce irrelevancies. He did not become irritated or confused. He behaved like a man whose every emotion was frozen. His insistence that he had made no contacts, except for the man Vorstadt, that he had never needed either contacts or friends, might have been believable of others, but not of a man who had moved among the enemies of Soviet Russia for so long.

The two days of questioning came to an end.

On the third day, two men entered Bukov’s cell and shot him.

He was buried in a shroud made of an old sheet.

The coffin was chopped up and used as firewood.

It was cold in Ekaterinburg.

‘What’s this?’ asked Mr Gibson, having read a note he had just found lying flat on the living-room mantelpiece.

‘Excuse me?’ said Natasha from the kitchen, where she was preparing breakfast.

‘Are you leaving?’ called Mr Gibson. ‘I mean, have you just written this?’

Natasha came into the living room. She saw Mr Gibson with the note in his hand. She pushed back a falling lock of hair, looked at him enquiringly, and remembered. Everything that had not related directly to the miraculous moment when he pushed the coffin lid aside yesterday, had slipped from her mind. The note had lain unseen by him and forgotten by her. Mr Gibson smiled at her. Her colour rose. She had signed it with all her love.

‘Oh, that was to do with yesterday’s first bad
moments,’ she said, and went back into the kitchen so that she could continue in light vein, without having him looking at her. ‘It was all he would let me write, that commissar. I wanted to leave you a message, to let you know in some way that I was being forced to leave. But he would only let me write goodbye. You did not—’ She jumped, for Mr Gibson was at her elbow, and although the kitchen was spacious, she felt parlously hemmed in. She bent her head over a basin and whipped up the eggs she was going to serve scrambled, with toast. Mr Gibson liked scrambled eggs for breakfast. ‘You did not see it?’

‘I didn’t look for it. But thank you for the thought. I’ll grill some toast, shall I?’

‘No, no, I will do it,’ she said, relieved that he was not making embarrassing comments, but wanting him to understand that she loved doing all she could for him, as a wife would. ‘Go away, please, and write up your notes. You are not to interfere with my cooking—’ She broke off, dusky red. ‘Oh, I am sorry, that was so impertinent of me. It is your apartment, you are paying for everything, and I – oh, how could I say such a thing, that you are interfering?’

‘Well, I probably am,’ said Mr Gibson
equably. ‘It’s accepted that one cook is enough in a kitchen. You’re so accomplished in the use you make of this one that you’re entitled not to have me get in your way. That’s scrambled egg you’re doing? Good.’ He watched her pour the mixture into the hot pan, then slide bread under the grill for toasting. Her movements seemed nervous. She jumped again as he moved past her, brushing her elbow. Her awareness of the fact that she was living with him in this apartment was more sensitive each day. He treated the relationship in a comfortable way, as if it was entirely the most practical thing, which it was, but to Natasha it was an intimacy of a very disturbing kind. It disturbed not only her emotions, but her physical being. It heated her body at times, especially if he was close to her. For the first time in her life she was in love, passionately so, and it induced in her the kind of physical need that made her blood rush. The sweetness of being with him, of living with him, was so painful, for she knew they would not be together like this for much longer.

Over breakfast, she asked, ‘It is satisfactory?’

‘The scrambled egg? It’s delicious, Natasha, it always is. By the way, I think we might drive to Switzerland. It would be an adventure.’

‘We are to go in the car? But it isn’t ours.’ The idea appealed to her, all the same. They would be more together than on a train. ‘Count Orlov will—’ She bit her lip.

‘I don’t think it’s Count Orlov’s car. I think it belongs to his friend, the gentleman who bundled you into it. However, when we’ve finished with it, we’ll let the count know where it may be recovered. We don’t know the name or address of his friend.’ Mr Gibson sounded cheerfully casual. ‘Yes, it’s the count we’ll contact.’

‘Yes,’ said Natasha, willing to go along with anything he suggested. Anything.

‘You agree?’ Mr Gibson smiled. ‘But I thought you didn’t know either of the two men who tried to carry you off that day at the clinic. Now you think it would be correct to refer to Count Orlov in respect of the car?’

‘Oh, that is not nice,’ said Natasha heatedly.

‘What isn’t?’

‘It is an act of deceit.’

‘What is?’

‘What is? What is? To lead me into a trap, that is what is.’

‘And you’re angry with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very right and proper,’ said Mr Gibson.

‘Oh, I am only angry on top,’ said Natasha. ‘Underneath I am still devoted to your goodness. Also, not many men can perform miracles. One should not let one’s anger affect one’s gratitude.’

Mr Gibson laughed. That made Natasha look a little put out.

‘I am comical?’ she said.

‘No, very sweet,’ said Mr Gibson.

‘Oh,’ said Natasha, and bent her head in the familiar way to hide her swimming eyes.

Mr Gibson thought it would not be long before she was a quite beautiful young lady.

‘We’ll leave for Switzerland tomorrow, immediately after breakfast,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

She brought a letter to him a little later, one that had been slipped under the apartment door. It bore an English stamp.

Mr Gibson read the letter. It was from a lady called Mildred Thornton, a close and charming friend. She had, she said, received his own letter concerning a well-mannered and intelligent Russian girl with a linguistic gift. It caused her much interest and astonishment. What was he doing in Berlin, and what was
he doing in finding Russian girls down on their luck? He could find all kinds of people down on their luck in London, without going to Berlin to look for hard-up Russian girls. It was all very intriguing. However, she had, she said, noted his call for help, and was able to say that providing his Russian protégée was not too long in arriving, Mrs Hall at Stoneleigh Manor could take her on as a maid. If that was not quite the kind of position he had in mind for the girl – and Mildred said she had a feeling it wasn’t – had he thought about a governess for his sister’s twins? His sister Jean had lately considered sending them to a boarding school to curb their tendency to anarchy, and allow her to devote herself undistractedly to her increasingly successful career as a portrait painter. Mildred wrote that she had suggested a governess-tutor as an alternative to a boarding school, and Jean was giving it favourable thought. If the young Russian lady in question had some teaching gifts and could take care of the twins’ education for a few years, there were prospects for her. Meanwhile, said Mildred, she awaited his return with interest and curiosity.

Mr Gibson passed the letter to Natasha, and she read it.

‘There, you see,’ he said, ‘the possibilities are not impossible.’

‘Mr Gibson, such possibilities are so much more than I ever dreamed of that I cannot think of them as anything but quite impossible,’ said Natasha. ‘So I must compose myself for disappointment in such a way that it will hardly be a disappointment at all.’

‘I want a much more self-confident outlook from you than that,’ said Mr Gibson.

‘But, you see,’ she said, ‘I should be only too happy to work in a kitchen or to look after chickens.’