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

the other nurse who shared with me, said we couldn’t trust Lidia, you know, with her being a . . .’

She stopped herself.

‘In the militia,’ said Rossel.

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me, again, exactly what happened on the night she was arrested.’

‘I liked Lidia. She was kind, is kind, she let me borrow her best dress to go on a date a couple of weeks ago – not every girl would do that. It’s green with a beautiful pattern around the collar. She said I looked like Lyubov Orlova in it. I know I don’t look like any film star but she does, sometimes. Dominika says she’s a little fat, but I think she’s really pretty. Dominika’s too thin. Thin enough to slip through a crack in the floorboards. Men don’t like that. I think she’s just jealous.’

‘Please, the night she was arrested. It would help me.’

‘We sometimes eat together, the three of us. We did that night. Lidia was late in, about seven thirty. When she arrived, she was carrying a package with her – it was books, books covered in brown paper.’

‘How many books?’

‘I told them already,’ Nurse Durova said.

‘Tell me again.’

‘Three, there were three of them.’

‘And what did she do with the books?’

‘Put them in a small cupboard next to her bed. Then we all sat around the table in the middle of the room talking, smoking and eating piroshki that I made.’

‘Did any of you leave the room before the security officers came?’ he asked.

‘Only Dominika for about ten minutes. She went to use the telephone.’

‘Did Lidia say anything to either of you about the books?’

Nurse Durova shook her head.

‘No, Dominika asked her what was in the package, but she said it was nothing important, just work stuff.’

‘And what happened when the MGB came?’

‘We all were laughing about this old man, Volodya, on the second floor who has his eye on Lidia and sometimes leaves posies outside our door. There was a knock and we all cried out, “It’s him, Volodya has come courting.” And then . . .’

The nurse took a hanky out of her bag and dabbed at her eyes.

‘Yes?’

‘Dominika opened it, and the officers came in. MGB, we all could tell. It was terrifying. But one of them read out Lidia’s name from his notebook. They said they needed to talk to her about a matter of state security. Lidia got up from the table and went with them. She didn’t say anything at all, either to us, or them. Not a word. It was like she knew they were coming. She didn’t act surprised in any way.’

‘And the books?’

‘That was the really odd thing. They never mentioned the books. Never asked Lidia about them. But one of the officers went straight to where they were, straight to the little cupboard next to her bed, and took them.’

‘Nothing else? They didn’t search your room?’

Nurse Durova shrugged.

‘No. And I, well.’ She looked away. ‘I was glad they hadn’t come for me.’

Rossel thought for a moment.

‘Was there anything else out of the ordinary that happened while the three of you were together before the officers came? Anything she did? Anything else she said?’

The girl started to shake her head. Then stopped.

‘You know there was one thing. I didn’t think much of it at the time but . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘Pskov, she asked about the town of Pskov. Dominika’s grandma is from somewhere near there. When I first put out the plates of blinis, she asked Dominika if she had visited any of the famous churches there. I mean, Lidia wasn’t religious in any way, not at all.’

‘And what did Dominika say?’

‘Nothing. Just that she thought most of them had been turned into storehouses, libraries and museums, same as everywhere else. “No priests left in Pskov, then?” Lidia asked her. Dominika just laughed and said: “Not many. Once God left, so did most of the priests.”’

He stood up.

‘That’s it, no more questions?’ She sounded confused.

Rossel smiled and pointed in the direction of the maternity ward.

‘You watch the babies in there, am I right?’

Nurse Durova’s expression softened.

‘Sometimes on the incubation ward with the ones who are premature, on a night shift, it’s just me and them. It’s so quiet in the darkness, all you can hear is their soft breathing, coughing and crying,’ she said. ‘After a while, you can tell just from the way they breathe if something’s not quite right.’

Rossel began to walk away but then stopped himself.

‘Your friend, Dominika. Is she a good friend?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

He nodded.

‘Yes, I’m sure she is. Just as you watch over those little ones. So attentively. I’m certain that, in exactly the same way, your friend, Dominika, watches over you.’

*

Rossel sat in the filing room in Gerashvili’s chair. There were seventeen files in front of him. They constituted every file he had found on Gerashvili’s desk – the exact paperwork she had been examining just before her arrest. He had sorted through them and piled fifteen on one side of the desk, two on the other. All were of priests and clergy who had gone missing over the past five years in the administrative regions around Leningrad.

As he settled down to examining the files, he reached for the radio switch, an on-off button that activated a speaker on the wall. It was All-Union Radio or nothing. It took him a moment to recognise the music – the second movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, about halfway through. With the celebrations of the Road of Life coming up, they were playing it a lot, he’d noticed. The composer had dedicated his mammoth work to his home city of Leningrad, which at the time had been in the grip of the German and Finnish blockade. Nine hundred days of hell. Rossel stopped for a moment to listen. By the time of the premiere in Leningrad itself, in August 1942, the symphony had been played around the world, hailed as the sound of Soviet defiance. But for those who had endured and survived the siege, it also evoked a great many