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

‘I am fearless, Comrade Rossel, but not suicidal.’

Rossel took a step towards the door of his own room, which was the second one from the right at the end of the main corridor. Behind him, Lena decided she had no option but to risk it and slammed the toilet door after her. If you lived in the same kommunalka for long enough, few subjects were taboo.

He stopped and called out through the door.

‘Has she played tonight, Lena? Has she been playing Oy, to nye vyecher?’ he said.

‘No,’ came the reply. ‘Not last night, not for a week.’ He heard her giggle. ‘Are you in love or something?’

*

Ah, it is not yet evening. ‘Oy, to nye vyecher’ is a beautiful song.

Rossel’s girlfriend, Sofia, would sometimes half whisper, half sing the Cossack folk song to him, on one of those distant days at the conservatory when they lay in bed together. It had been many years now but when he closed his eyes, he could still see her face: the olive-green eyes, so big and wide and questioning; the black, untidy mop of hair, grown long enough to cover the nape of her neck; the lips, far too wide and thin to make her, to the world, truly beautiful and yet to him, from the moment he saw her, she was perfect. She’s like Magnus’s Frau, he had said to himself when they bumped into each other in the corridor, just before their first lesson together. He had not long seen Eduard Magnus’s painting of the enigmatic Swedish heiress, which hung in the Hermitage. A portrait of a woman who seemed to have permitted only the tiniest sliver of her true self to be observed by the artist, hiding the rest away from the world in some unreachable place.

And yet, when they were together . . .

‘You’re my Cossack,’ she would tell him before they made love. ‘Who comes running, first to rescue . . .’ Sofia would roll on her back, put her hands behind her neck and stare into his eyes, ‘. . . and afterwards to ravish me.’

But often, just as he did as she commanded and matched his intensity to hers, she would giggle at his seriousness. Then they would both collapse into laughter.

Afterwards, she would instantly retreat again. Barely acknowledge his whispered questions. Reveal almost nothing of her self to him. Become Magnus’s Frau once more.

Felix had been in love with her, too, he remembered. As much as it was possible for Felix Sorokin to love anyone other than himself. ‘I so dearly want that sultry little dark-haired songstress to whisper me a lullaby,’ his friend had told him. ‘The way she sings unsettles me; makes me wish to be something better than myself.’

But Sofia hadn’t sung for Felix. She had sung for her Cossack.

Oy, to nye vyecher . . .

Oy, it will surely come off, he said, that wild head of yours . . .

Rossel had always loved that line.

He got up from the faded green armchair, walked across his room and, even though it was still snowing, slipped the broken catch on the frame to open the window wider to see if he could hear the music of the guitarist on the floor above better.

Oy, to nye ny vyecher . . .

‘Ah, it will surely come off,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Ah, it will surely come off, that wild head of yours.’

Are you in love or something?

He had been once.

And it had meant everything.

9

Tuesday October 16

Gerashvili pulled on her thick leather gloves and regulation hat.

‘Just the ledgers. That is all you need, Comrade Lieutenant?’

Rossel nodded. He picked up a pine log from the meagre pile by the fire grate and threw it into the flames. On the outside, he was calm, playing the part of the thorough, conscientious detective. But Lipukhin had sidestepped the investigation and put Rossel at its centre. It was hard, therefore, to put the threat of the MGB out of his mind – the invisible but merciless threat that haunted every Soviet citizen, dutiful or not. Failure would be unforgiveable. Failure would not merit mere demotion but a much more inventive punishment. And even success might be unwelcome, depending on what he found out.

But there was no point spooking Gerashvili with his fears. ‘If Djilas has sold those earrings then there’s a good chance they will be listed in there somewhere,’ he said. ‘Next to a purchaser, perhaps, who may be of interest in our enquiry?’

‘He may have doctored them by now.’

‘That’s the trap I set for him by not removing them yesterday. Let’s see if he is a fool. If he doctors the ledgers, under Article 58–14 of the Penal Code that would be classed as counter-revolutionary sabotage – deliberately careless execution of defined duties, aimed at the weakening of the power of the government and of the functioning of the state apparatus. And so he would be subject to at least one year’s deprivation of freedom. Obstructing state investigators carries a further automatic sentence of eight years’ deprivation of liberty.’

Yet as a man who handled luxurious items of foreign origin without making any attempt to disguise the fact, Djilas was also indubitably a man with political cover.

‘Djilas strikes me as a man who likes the finer things in life and moves in circles where he can obtain them. I don’t think he will do anything to jeopardise that. If he keeps his ledgers intact and unedited, we may learn something.’

The fireplace in the main room of the station was a grand one, cast in iron. A mixed motif of seabirds and a merchant’s ship decorated its mantelpiece. The personal choice, presumably, of the silversmith who once owned the house before it became a police station after the revolution. Rossel watched as a pale blue flame began to lick and flutter around the wood.

Gerashvili walked towards the main door that led to the stairs. Then she turned back towards him.

‘I took my niece to the ice rink in Tauride Gardens last night. She’s only eleven