The house of russian dol.., p.7
The House of Russian Dolls, page 7
‘You want extras?’ suggested the girl in heavily accented English as she trailed her long fingers provocatively.
‘How much?’
‘Fifty. Dollars.’
For a moment even Dodo was tempted, though this wasn’t exactly the type of thing she could place on expenses.
‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me about Luda.’
The girl’s fingers withdrew sharply.
Sitting up on the table, Dodo reflected that this was probably the first time she had interviewed a witness naked. The ‘probably’ bothered her, she really was going to have to sort out her life.
‘Look you’ll still get fifty dollars to give your pimp and get another fifty for yourself.’
Dodo could see the girl’s blue eyes dance between greed and anxiety as she backed towards the door. Pulling out two fifty dollar notes from the cigarette packet she’d left on the side, she offered one to the girl, betting that the sleeves of her uniform helped to hide the track marks of many a hooker’s habit.
Irina took the note, as well as one of the low tar cigarettes Dodo had resumed smoking since 7/7.
‘I know nothing about this girl.’
‘But Luda was your sister,’ returned Dodo in lightly accented Russian.
‘You are police?’ replied the surprised looking masseuse.
‘Do I look like a cop?’ smiled Dodo as she gazed at a girl now looking no more than eighteen or nineteen years.
‘I can tell you nothing.’
‘You don’t want to help me find the men who killed your sister?’
‘They will kill me.’
‘Just tell me the name of the man you will be giving this to,’ urged Dodo as she handed the girl the second fifty dollar bill.
‘Aslan.’
‘And a surname?’
‘I only know him as Aslan.’
Well unless he was the leonine hero of C.S. Lewis’s children’s classics, that wasn’t much help thought Dodo as she gazed on the child woman opposite her.
‘Your sister died alone and terrified, Irina. Can you really tell me nothing more?’
Dodo waited patiently as the tension returned to her body. Having had no luck following up any of her leads on Marina Davenport, she was just going to have to hope that one of the few leads on the names of one of the girls discovered on Arkady Listyev’s estate was going to pay off. Tracing Luda’s sister to this central Moscow hotel had used up all her ingenuity and childhood Russian, she would just have to hope that by quite literally laying herself open she might have won Irina’s trust.
‘He brings fresh girls here every Friday. I pay him then. At eleven, but please don’t be here then,’ pleaded Irina as the lights lit up in Dodo’s eyes.
****
She was never sure who she had lost her mother to, or even when. If she had to guess she would have said it was the Summer of ’93 – that was when Vakhid finally moved into their flat on a full-time basis just after their thirteenth birthdays. Mama must have been losing it around then, as it was the first year that she and Natasha hadn’t received any presents.
When New Year had dawned Mama and Vakhid had been out drinking and they didn’t return home that night, or even on the following day. Natasha had been keyed up all day and every time the buzzer went she had expected it to have been Mama bearing gifts, yet it was only people looking for Vakhid and wanting to know where he was. That had been another reason she had resented him moving in with them, these callers came at all hours and there were few nights when their sleep was not disrupted.
It must have been Vakhid who had introduced Mama to the drugs, but she could never be sure. At first Mama had seemed happy and content, as unlike her other boyfriends Vakhid was never rough with her, yet she became more and more listless. Oxana was forced to do more and more of the housework in order that they remained respectable. Mama never washed their uniforms anymore and if she hadn’t taken care of her sister they would have been made the laughing stock of school number 22.
When their mother forgot to feed them they at first went hungry, but then Natasha got bolder and would steal money from Vakhid’s jacket until he cottoned on to what was happening and gave her a hiding with his belt. It wasn’t the sight of her sister’s tears which had distress her the most, it was Mama looking on with a lazy grin on her face and a faraway look in her eyes that really hurt the most.
Papa’s picture which had always stood besides the television, even when Mama had been dating other men disappeared that Summer. Their mother looked bewildered when they asked about it and yet that had become her default setting. Sometimes she was still very affectionate to them, although that air of vacancy never disappeared.
Later, one of their friends found the broken photograph frame in the playground down below. They’d rescued the picture of their Papa, smiling dressed proudly in his paratrooper’s uniform and hidden it in their room, as the communal areas of the flat were places they no longer felt safe in. Vakhid and his friends treated their home as a bar or club, filling it with their smoke and ugly voices. Far worse than the voices though were the looks some of the dark and evil looking men gave them if they dared to use the toilet or went scavenging for food in the kitchen.
Their friends and neighbours never visited them anymore and Papa’s family were far away in Siberia, whilst Mama’s family seemed to shun them. The long school holidays had now become the worst time of the year, as they could no longer rely on their midday meal being provided for them and often went hungry rather than dare the crowded kitchen of their flat. They would have played outside, but the things their friends were saying about Mama were not nice and you could only fight so many times to make them take it back.
At first they had fought heroically, proud daughters of a Hero of the Soviet Union and yet they began to lose the will to fight when they heard the noises coming from Mama’s room. And not always from her room – they had learnt to shut themselves away from the sitting room ever since discovering Mama kneeling in front of one of Vakhid’s friends and shaming herself so openly. She hadn’t even stopped then, seemingly being unaware of them, whereas the man had leered evilly at them.
This must have been the time they had lost her.
****
Why were housing-estates used as a short-hand for social decay and soulless living by careless scriptwriters who had presumably never lived on one? reflected Dodo as she gazed at the massive blocks of modern flats bulking out Moscow’s periphery. The newly rich might have been able to afford the opulent apartments closer to the Kremlin, or in the gated estates of the new aristocracy on the city’s outskirts, but most Muscovites lived in the mid-rise flats which they’d been given on the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. And yet sitting in the communal gardens formed by the patch of scratchy grass in the centre of four of these blocks, Dodo could only envy a lifestyle which the UK seemed to have granted assisted dying status to in the 1980s.
At least children were still playing outside, both here and in the countless other playgrounds which accompanied these functional blocks of flats. The traffic on the main roads might be far worse than that in London, but at least in the residential areas children were noticeable by their abundance and seemed happy to be playing on the gaily painted climbing frames, pushing each other on the irregularly coloured swings or digging in the sandpits.
Girls as blonde as her younger self and boys with the type of haircuts once favoured in the 80s, were boisterously enjoying the long Summer holidays, perhaps glad to escape the heat of the hot Russian summers in the shade afforded by the flats that they lived in. Whereas British children might be spending the Summer of 2006 plugged in to their computers or kept off the street by over anxious parents, these boys and girls were in full view of the family homes ringing this oasis and getting the exercise too many of their Western cousins never got…
And yet was she over doing the praise, thought Dodo as she dragged on her fifth cigarette of the day and stared at the hand written address on her lap. Looking up from the flaky green bench she was sitting on, she tried to estimate which of the many boxed-in balconies in the block opposite her might be the home of her relatives. Relatives she had never met, but relatives nonetheless. Perhaps she should just call it quits and return to the relative safety of the Western hotel she was staying in, although how could she ever hope to understand the lives of the girls she was investigating if she made no attempt to see beyond the glitz and glamour of Moscow’s golden heart and take a look into the existences so many Russians were trying to leave behind in the mistaken belief that the West had all the answers…
****
Oxana had never discovered the name of the city she had been sent to after the men had collected her from the airport. On the final leg of their long journey, they had passed a wooden and stone building in the centre of the city which had surprised her by its antiquity, as she had not expected Japan to possess such old-fashioned buildings. The glass and steel towers she had glimpsed as they continued their drive had been her expectations of what the West would look like. The wooden buildings in Russia were dilapidated and inhabited by old babushkas that belonged to another age and she would have been ashamed to have lived in such shacks.
Thankfully, they had been housed in a more modern apartment block far more luxurious than anything she had known before, even if the rooms were less spacious than the ones back home. Moreover, they had been promised that modelling would make them into stars and at first it had felt like the life that the girls back home would have envied: foreign travel, fast cars and all the finery of Western living.
It was only when she discovered a uniform not so different from her own school uniform back home laid out on the bed of the room she was to share with Natasha, that she began to have her doubts about their mother’s decision to trust the honeyed words of the men who had all but become their extended family in Russia. And yet the honeyed words were no longer on the lips of the man who had driven them here. When Natasha had complained that she was hungry after their journey his words had become even coarser than those spat out by the boys from their school and then she had begun to feel afraid.
The words had turned to blows when they had refused to change into the clothes laid out on the bed – though she had noticed the man hadn’t aimed at her face when she had tried to shield her sister, but the glancing blow which had caught her in the eye as she tore at him like a wildcat unfortunately sealed her sister’s fate. Cursing violently, he had grabbed her by her skinny arm and dragged her into the adjacent bedroom where he had locked her in.
Hours later, a Japanese woman appeared with a make-up box and had begun to cover the livid bruise below her eye. And yet this was not the prelude to going on the cat walk she had imagined. There was no mirror in the room surrounded by light bulbs and the woman who concealed her injury spoke no Russian and had no gentleness in her touch. By this point she had worked out from Natasha’s cries next door why they had been brought to this city and what their fate was to be.
When the woman departed and it became her turn, she made no further attempt to defy the man. He had already made it clear that if she refused her sister would be made to do her share of the work. The hardest thing had been keeping the make-up in place – she was terrified that her tears would smudge her mascara and get her into trouble, which would mean getting Tasha into trouble.
Unlike Natasha, she was determined not to give them the pleasure of crying and by the time the first man had finished with her the worst was over. In the months to come, she was to realise that lying there woodenly whilst oriental men used her like a piece of meat was what helped them to be convinced she was a virgin – that plus her tender age and the school girl clothes they always liked her to dress in.
At least she had been able to smile at her sister afterwards as she was led out of the room, a smile that was meant to say they’d get through it. Later she found out that the men had paid a thousand dollars apiece to take their virginities. Once she would have thought that amount of money to be a small fortune and yet as she held her sister close to her in the bed that they had been both been raped in, she could only consider how cheap they had been made to feel.
****
Punching the flat number into the intercom on one side of the large steel door leading into the block of flats, Dodo felt very conspicuous indeed. She’d observed the comings and goings to the other blocks for the space of at least three cigarettes and they all seemed to allow the very easy possibility of slipping in alongside one of the other residents, but it was Sod’s Law that her remaining relatives in Russia seemed to live on the only side of the square where no-one was visiting.
A woman’s voice said ‘Hallo’.
Well, so far so good, but was it her Aunt?
‘It’s cousin Dorothea, Dorothea Zaitseva.’
There was a pause. Was her Russian so bad? Or had it been simply too long? Her mother had tried to keep in touch with their remaining family on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but then her mother had been dead for many years…
‘Who?’
‘Little Zeika.’
Dodo felt herself flush as she gave her mother’s pet name for her. It was a name which belonged to another life. Another cosmos. The life of a confused little girl brought up to imagine a vanished world of White Russian aristocrats who farmed the endless steppe and who drank vodka from samovars. A confused and fictitious picture of a world that had never existed in anything other than the mind of an impressionable young school girl whose Russian dreams had been formed as an escape from the cold and ruthless world of the English girls’ boarding school she’d been sent to.
But then the door opened.
Perhaps the name her mother had used for her when writing to the cousins she had never met still carried a currency after all?
Ignoring the opportunity afforded by the lift, Dodo felt the flight of concrete steps leading up was the better option. If this was a mistake she wasn’t going to exacerbate it by getting stuck in a lift; that really would open up too many questions…
By the time she had passed the fourth landing on the staircase, Dodo was regretting the resumption of her smoking habit – even if cigarettes were dirt cheap in Moscow, as evidenced by the lingering smell of smoke by the rubbish chute openings she passed on each landing as she made her way up. Thankfully, the flat she needed had to be no higher than the sixth floor and by the time she arrived at a landing where one of the residents had gone to the trouble of arranging potted plants on to four neatly appointed shelves, she was grateful to see that Number 24 was the padded steel door immediately ahead of her.
Taking a deep breath she was about to knock on the red sound-proofing material covering the flat’s entrance when it opened and a young woman in jeans and a Hugo Boss top appeared in the doorway. Formal greetings were exchanged with the woman whose name appeared to be Olga and who seemed to be part of the younger generation of relatives Dodo still had in Moscow. Having been handed a too large pair of pink carpet slippers to wear, she followed the twenty something woman into a small kitchen where a much older woman sat looking at her.
‘This is my mother – Vera Ivanovna.’
‘Dorothea Zaitseva,’ replied Dodo, annoyed not for the first time that her parents had denied her the use of a patronymic. In her dream world she had always introduced herself to Russian princes as Dorothea Alexandrovna, but the little kitchen, which hardly had space for its fridge, stove and small square table, was not the Winter Palace she had dreamt of as a girl growing up in Cambridgeshire.
Finding space on the table to place her gifts, Dodo had been too busy and too embarrassed to take in her more elderly relative, but when the woman turned her milky eyes on her she nearly knocked them flying. If her mother had lived beyond her fiftieth birthday, there was no doubt she would have looked the double of this octogenarian woman now staring at her with intelligence and recognition.
‘Little Zeica?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your Russian is good. Though accented. Natasha Ivanovna taught you well.’
‘Tea?’
Dodo nodded at Olga, grateful for this distraction. Hearing her mother’s name said like this had unlocked a world of memories she thought she had forgotten.
‘You look like your mother.’
The grey haired, but immaculately dressed woman sitting on the stool opposite her made a gesture to the younger woman who disappeared into the interior of the flat.
‘Olga is my granddaughter. She and her son live with me.’
Before Dodo could think to question what seemed to her an unusual living arrangement, the younger woman had returned with a large photograph album and placed it before her babushka.
Although it seemed to contain far fewer images than the volumes she had squirreled away in England, not to mention all the latest ones of Sasha she still had to ask Hal to download for her, the upside down pages her elderly cousin was flicking through seemed to contain much more significant pictures.
‘Tashkent. That is your mother and I before the War.’
Dodo joined her cousin on the other side of the cramped kitchen and looked down on a large family grouping which appeared to have been taken in one of the city’s parks.
‘And there is Sergei before he went to Afghanistan.’
The conscript who looked back at Dodo from the album had the same piercing blue eyes as Vera, but unlike her was wearing the distinctive light blue beret of the airborne division. There was also the look of Olga in his finely chiselled face and yet she could recall her mother making no mention of this new generation of Russian relatives. Mind you, her mother had not been well in the 80s and keeping Dodo informed about the minutiae of family life had probably been the last thing on her mind. All she could recall was that Sergei had been killed in the early 80s by the Mujahideen. She was about to offer her condolences, yet Vera had already decided to move the conversation on -
