Free Potsdam Station by David Downing Page B

Shchepkin.’
    ‘He’s not here,’ she said abruptly, and started to close the door.
    ‘Who is it?’ another woman’s voice asked anxiously from further inside the apartment. The young woman’s answering burst of rapid-fire Russian contained the word ‘father’.
    ‘I am a friend of your father,’ Russell told her.
    The second woman appeared in the doorway. She was probably in her forties, with grey hair tied back in a bun, and clothes that had been worn too long. She had been a beauty once, but now looked worn-out. There was a large spoon in her hand, and Russell realised he could smell borscht.
    ‘My name is John Russell,’ he said again.
    ‘You are German?’ she asked, worrying him somewhat. Was he speaking Russian with a German accent?
    ‘I’m English. Are you Comrade Shchepkina?
    ‘Yes,’ she admitted.
    ‘I met your husband in Poland in 1939, and again in Sweden in 1942. And as I was here in Moscow, I thought I would visit him.’
    ‘He’s not here,’ she said dully. ‘He is away.’
    ‘Will he be back soon?’
    ‘No, I do not think so. I’m sorry. We cannot help you. Please.’
    The young woman said something to her mother about Russell being a friend of father’s, but she was still opening her mouth to reply when they all heard the creak of a door opening further down the landing.
    No one appeared.
    ‘I will show Grigori Sergeyevich back to the Metro,’ the daughter said in a loud voice. Her mother looked like she wanted to argue, but forbore from doing so. ‘Come,’ the daughter said, almost pushing Russell towards the head of the stairs. The door down the landing clicked shut.
    Outside on the street, she turned towards the river. ‘The spiteful old cow won’t be able to see you if we go this way,’ she told him coolly.
    Like father, like daughter, Russell thought to himself. ‘I know my way back,’ he told her.
    She ignored him. ‘Tell me about my father,’ she said with more than a hint of hostility.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’ve hardly seen him since I was a child.’
    ‘Surely your mother…’
    ‘She knows him the way a wife knows her husband. The world outside – she doesn’t like to even think about it. When he leaves, it’s as if he was never there. Until he suddenly appears again, and then it’s as if he had never left. It drives me crazy.’ She put an arm through Russell’s. ‘So tell me.’
    ‘I don’t really know him. We met more than twenty years ago, here in Moscow. We were both in the First War…’ He paused to order his thoughts. ‘I think we both became communists because of what that war showed us about the way the world was run. But we didn’t get to know each other, not really. We were both involved in the same discussions and arguments about the Revolution, and where it should be headed. Your father was always full of passion,’ he added, remembering as he did so that Shchepkin had said the same of him in that Danzig hotel room six years earlier.
    ‘Passion?’ she murmured, as if trying the word on for size. They had reached the river, and the half-repaired roof of the Kiev Station was visible to the north. A line of empty barges was chugging downstream.
    ‘That’s how all this started,’ Russell said, as much to himself as to her. ‘Hard to believe now, perhaps. But twenty years is a long time. Once it becomes clear that your passion will also cause innocents to suffer, it begins to wear you down. First there’s good and evil, and then the good gets tarnished, and soon it’s only a lesser evil. Some quit at that point; they walk away, either physically or mentally. Those that don’t, it just gets harder. Your father kept going – that’s the one and only thing I really know about him.’
    ‘You make him sound like a hero,’ she said, with more than a trace of anger.
    ‘Do I? I don’t mean to. People like your father, they lock themselves in. Like a sailor who ties himself to a mast in a storm. It makes sense, but once you’re tied up