The Lost Souls of Angelkov (72 page)

Bogdan, his head half shaved in the way of all new prisoners, still has some weight on him. As yet there are no rough, frostbitten patches on his cheeks. Grisha eyes his boots, surprised the guards haven’t taken them yet. But they will. He again wants to feel supple leather wrapped round his feet, instead of the newspaper-lined felt boots of the prisoners. He wonders, absently, what this man, Bogdan, did to end up here, in the Siberian work camp. He also knows it’s unlikely he’ll find out.

The men do not discuss their crimes, or what they’ve been deemed guilty of. Too much talking in a
katorga
is not a good thing. Some of the men Grisha works with each day are murderers and thieves. Some simply had too much to say about the new regime taking over Russia: those with the belief that the Tsar’s will should not arbitrarily be understood as Russia’s law.

“To get out of this place,” Grisha finally tells Bogdan. “That’s what I plan.”

A short, wizened man with a deep limp, on his way to the bucket, passes the lower cot where Grisha and Bogdan sit.

“You are a dreamer, Grigori Sergeyevich. You know you won’t survive.”

“I will.” Grisha’s voice is quiet and sure.

The older man shakes his head, his lungs wheezing like
bellows as he laughs. Bogdan drains his cup. He grips it with his huge, scarred hands.

“Because it is the New Year, Naryshkin, I will humour you. Suppose you escape from the camp. The old bastard,” Bogdan says, looking at the wheezing man’s back, “has given up. He knows there’s no chance for him. But let’s say you escape. Then what? How will you cross Siberia? Where will you go?”

Grisha puts his cup at his feet and digs under the frayed coat tied with rope and inside his layers of patched tunics. He pulls out a hard chunk of dark bread, and with some effort tears it in half. He hands a piece to his new friend. The man grabs it, nodding his thanks, and carefully puts it to the right side of his mouth, where six teeth—three on the top and three on the bottom—remain. Grisha knows, by the cautious manner in which Bogdan gnaws the bread and the awkward way he forms his words, that he has only recently lost most of his teeth.

“Go on, Naryshkin,” Bogdan urges him. “It’s the New Year, and the night for seeing the future. So tell me what you predict for yourself, my friend.”

“I will walk out,” Grisha says, picking up his cup again. “I have walked across Siberia before, and I was hardly more than a boy. I did it once, and I will do it again.”

“All right,” Bogdan says, still gingerly chewing. “Where will you go? Do you have a family who waits for you? A home?”

Grisha thinks of the house with blue shutters. “I don’t know. But I know whom I will walk towards. Whom I will look for, and hope she still waits.”

The other man’s face softens. “It is always good to think of someone waiting,” he says quietly. “What is important
in a place like this is the hope.” His cup is empty, but he raises it.

“To hope,” Grisha murmurs. He crosses himself, raises his cup towards Bogdan and then upwards. “To hope,” he repeats, picturing Antonina’s face, and he drinks.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I grew up hearing pieced-together stories of life in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century; I listened to my father and grandmother speak Russian at the dinner table, and my grandmother whispered her language to me in bed at night. I parroted back her words, not understanding them, but loving our furtive, hidden connection. Because of the suspicions and distrust surrounding the Soviet Union during the Cold War, having a Russian heritage was something I was taught to suppress. But the intrigue surrounding my grandparents’ lives in villages near Odessa and St. Petersburg before they fled in the hopes of a brighter future filled me with a longing to understand what was—inexplicably to me as a child—dark and secretive. It was this part of my past that drew me to write about Russia decades later. I started with an incident from my grandmother’s life, which I’ve fictionalized for the novel: she watched her five-year-old brother being stolen by Cossacks on a muddy road outside her village home. He was never seen again.

Studying Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, with its contrasts of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, its all-encompassing religious overtones, its emerging literary and musical giants and its long history of serfdom, was both wildly exciting and tremendously challenging. To help me in my search to capture the aura of that time I relied on fiction and poetry, from the classic offerings of Gogol and Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov to the slightly more contemporary works of Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Nabokov and Soltzhenitsyn. Memoirs such as
Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia, 1804-1824
by Aleksandr Nikitenko and
Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1758-1821
offered intriguing details of a past life. Of great assistance were
Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskiaia;
The Pearl
by Douglas Smith;
Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village
by Serge Schmemann;
Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia
by Richard Stites; and
Life on the Russian Country Estate
by Priscilla Roosevelt.

Big thanks, as always, to my agent, Sarah Heller, for suggestions and encouragement. Thanks to Anne Collins, publisher and editor extraordinaire, for her insight and gentle direction. Thanks to John Sweet for astute copy-editing and asking the right questions; to Terri Nimmo, for the jacket and interior design; to Caleb Snider, Deirdre Molina, Marion Garner and Ashley Dunn of the Random House Canada team.

To Zalie, Brenna and Kitt, thank you, as always, for so graciously putting up with your mother’s wild mind and sudden flights of fancy. Special thanks to Brenna, who shared long train journeys across Mongolia and Siberia and
into Western Russia as I sought to make this story right. Thank you to Vialetta in Ulan Ude, Valeriy in Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal, Tamara in Irkutsk, and Irena in Yekaterinburg who opened their homes to us, giving us a taste of true Siberian life. Thank you to Randall, Tim and Shannon and your families for the endless encouragement and love. In this year of change for all of us, with arrivals and departures, your caring presence has been more meaningful than ever before. Thank you to my friends—you know who you are—for your endless patience and your interest and support in the way I have chosen to live my life. Each of you brings such a rich weave to the tapestry.

Finally, loving thanks to Marty, who has taught me so much about story—both real and imagined—and the joy of sharing creative lives and hearts.