City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

left for the evening, and since Gerashvili was conscientious to a fault, sometimes that could be hours. There were a few hundred files in the station and, every now and then, more arrived.

But Rossel’s goal was not to help her keep pace with these lost souls. He was looking for his missing sister, hoping he would open up a file one day and see Galya staring back at him.

It was more out of desperate hope than hard logic, for he had been looking for her file ever since he had joined the militia five years ago, not long after the war had ended, and not found her. On occasions he fed his hope with the thought that she might be using, or have been given, another name, or that her photographs might have got mixed up with someone else’s records. Perhaps there would be no photograph, just the written record of the disappearance into the snow of a woman born in 1917, the year of the revolution, on the very same day that Revol Rossel entered the world. And who vanished on 25 November 1935, when she was just eighteen years old.

This ongoing nocturnal quest was also a way of spending time away from the world, of feeling a little closer to the old one he and Galya had left behind. Of recalling life with their mother, a music teacher, and their father, a naval officer and Party stalwart, in a small but comfortable apartment in Kirovsky. Before their parents had been arrested and sent to the camps.

Of pretending to be, even for the briefest of moments, a little more like his old self. A youth once more. Naive and ridiculously hopeful. The abundantly talented violinist who had joked and drunk and sung and once declaimed the poems of Mayakovsky – ‘Eat your pineapples, chew your grouse. Your last day is coming, you bourgeois louse’ – through a megaphone from the Anichkov Bridge. His sister had laughingly shushed him – ‘Let’s go home, genius, time to sleep it off.’

After the arrest of their parents, he always felt protected by her. And always returned the favour; coming to blows with any slighted suitor who whispered against her, going into battle against any man who might take her name in vain. Once beating a swaggering brute of a naval officer into a bloody pulp.

As the drink warmed him, Rossel dragged on his cigarette again and kept flipping through the files, stopping at each image to reflect on the life into which he was intruding. Paying his respects and toasting every tenth individual with another slug of vodka. Offering them the momentary respect a godlier soul might pay to a religious icon. The portly midwife from Pskov with the dark hair and steely eyes, the spotty garage mechanic from Kalininsky, the plain-faced Narva teenager, gone missing on her way to a local dance, described by her grandmother as ‘Unexceptional, save for her virtue.’

It was foolish, he knew, this ritual, this time he spent with the missing.

Save for the simple fact that his twin sister now lived amongst them too. How could she not do? She had to be somewhere. How could someone just disappear like that, drifting away one night into the snow? At the time, it had felt that a sinister stage magician had broken in while he was sleeping and sawed his soul in two, stealing away the better half of him.

He held the picture of the Narva teenager between the twisted but intact middle and index fingers of his left hand. Then placed it next to his ear – as if the girl was about to impart a secret. He thought of these mute, monochrome faces as Galya’s only real friends now, the ones who kept his twin sister company. Until, one day, her brother would find her and rescue her, like a Slavic knight completing his quest. Earning redemption, perhaps forgiveness. The forgiveness he had sought ever since joining the Leningrad militia in an effort to track her down.

7

Monday October 15

All his fingers were present and correct, the missing ones restored, looking supple and elegant. Rossel waggled them, delighted, clicking the new ring finger on his left hand against the thumb.

He looked down again at the victim in the red gown, the Snow Queen. She was lying on the tracks but she had turned face down. That wasn’t right – Rossel knelt and reached out to turn the body over but stopped when he saw his miraculous hands.

‘Aren’t those Stalin’s fingers?’ sneered Grachev. ‘Have you stolen the hands of our great leader? That’s ten years in the gulag . . .’

Rossel rolled the body. Her head lolled against her right shoulder. But instead of a mess of muscle and glimpses of skull, he was gazing into the face of his missing sister.

Woken by his own cry, Rossel cursed and clambered out of bed. The nightmare had drenched him in an icy sweat. He pressed a hand to his chest in a futile attempt to steady his heart.

It was too late to go back to sleep, even if sleep had been possible, but too early to do anything useful. He chain-smoked three papirosy, laid out his uniform and washed in cold water in the basin that stood in the corner of his room, wiping away the cold sweat of his disturbed sleep. At last, he got dressed, pulled on his boots, took a deep breath and knelt beside his bed.

First, he pulled out a dog-eared poetry book, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. He leafed through its pages for a while before pressing the cover to his lips and putting it back where he had found it. The violin case was hidden under two or three bags of old clothes and bedding but he located it without trouble and dragged it out from under the bed. Rossel ran his palms across the cheap, battered leather and sprang the catches.

He picked up the bow and tightened the bow hair. Grasped the dry,