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

Rossel stared at the wooden walls of the police station, not daring even a sideways look. Better to die in the line of duty than of boredom. But better still not to die at all.

When the speech ended, Lieutenant Shumilov cried out, ‘Three cheers for our beloved Stalin!’ and everyone in the station clapped furiously, bellowing their hurrahs, smiling in rapture. Their applause rang on and on for three, four, five minutes – with a stranger in their ranks no one dared to be the first to cease. Only when Shumilov at last cried out, ‘Comrades, a toast to the great and mighty Stalin!’ and pulled out a bottle of vodka from somewhere under his desk did they rest their stinging hands.

You had to admire the lieutenant’s thinking – the only way to safely stop applauding Stalin was to start toasting him.

*

Rossel opened the file and stared at her photograph once again. Sofia Fedotova. Age thirty-four. Born down the road in Kingissyepp, educated at school number twenty-two and then at the special music college, before winning a place at the opera faculty of the Leningrad Conservatory. Spent most of 1942 working as an ambulance nurse in the city before being evacuated to Kazakhstan.

But he knew all that. What he didn’t know was what had happened to her after the war.

She had returned to Leningrad but by August 1946 she had moved here, to Ivangorod, mopping floors and emptying bedpans, apparently having made no attempt to continue as a singer.

‘She went missing in late July of this year, according to her co-workers at the polyclinic,’ said Shumilov. He had a faint Baltic edge to his speech and, despite the Russian name, Rossel thought he was probably an ethnic Estonian. ‘She said she was going to Leningrad to meet a friend and never returned.’

‘Where is the polyclinic?’ asked Rossel.

‘Over the river. Here and in Narva, many of us work in one town and live in the other. This Sofia woman of yours lived in a kommunalka on the Ivangorod side – the address is in the file. Go if you want but they have already found someone else to live in her old apartment.’

Rossel looked up.

‘So soon?’

His opposite number shrugged. ‘Small town, too many people. Living space is not easy to come by. Word gets around fast. Besides, she hadn’t been there for months – people were getting impatient, there’s always a queue.’

There were three unfinished letters to friends – a few small moans about her work, mocking remarks about doctors trying to get her into bed, an account of a week’s holiday in Tallinn. All three were less than a page long and who knew why she had kept but not finished them. Her work record was almost completely blank – no commendations, no complaints.

Rossel turned to the books, lifting them in twos and threes out of the bag. Pushkin, Lermontov and Baratynsky. Nothing controversial – nobody had yet outlawed Pushkin. ‘Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.’ She had always loved the poet’s line from The Hero, declaiming it one night as they walked back from a concert just as an air-raid siren started up. There was not a trace of fear in her voice, he remembered.

Last of all was a green, leather-bound sketchbook. Rossel leafed through, past trees, cats, street scenes, drawings of the meandering River Narva. A grand, domed building he did not recognise, like a nineteenth-century country estate belonging to an aristocrat. She had sketched this three times from different angles.

Now came an interior drawing. Behind a bed was a table and a vase. Scattered around were a few playing cards, not a complete deck, not even a complete suit. At the foot of the bed was something else: a musical score with a couple of notes drawn on it. There was writing on the score where the title should be – Thanatos and H . . . something. The second word was unfinished.

And then a drawing unlike all the others. A shadowy presence lying on the side of the bed, sheets tangled about it. Rossel stared down at the hatching on the page but could make out no discernible features. He could only just be certain the prone figure was human.

Sofia had been an accomplished rather than a brilliant artist but somehow this drawing had an intensity, a meaning that the others lacked, as if it was rooted in personal experience, not mere observation or imagination.

There was something else too.

A second erratic scribbling. A crude attempt to deface the first image. The pen pressing so deep it had torn a small hole into the paper.

Whoever this shadow was, she was petrified of them. The certainty of this drove a cold blade through him from his throat to his guts.

*

Rossel crossed the bridge into Narva to looks of indifference from the guards and one lazy, semi-insolent salute. Shumilov had written him a pass to get over the bridge and the nominal border separating Russia from the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The town might have been in a different country but there was no need to learn the language: everybody here was either Russian or spoke Russian.

When he got to the polyclinic, he stopped any nurse he could find of about Sofia’s age. The third one he asked, a careworn thirty-year-old with short dark hair and boyish features, knew her. Yes, she said, we were friends but Sofia was elusive. She didn’t like to talk about herself too much.

‘What did she do out of work hours?’ asked Rossel.

‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ said the nurse. ‘She lived on the other side. But she sang at workers’ canteens sometimes, she got some extra money that way. She had a beautiful voice – she was classically trained, you know. But she gave that all up.’

‘Did she ever say why?’

‘Yes, once, she did,’ said the nurse. ‘She was in Leningrad, during the blockade. All of that horror’ – and here the woman paused to flick the fingers of one hand