Free The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne Page B

right. It’s important that we begin as soon as possible. You do understand that, don’t you?’
    ‘How long would it take?’ she asked.
    ‘The treatment would continue indefinitely,’ she replied. ‘Until we could control the disease. That might be a short time, it might be for ever.’
    ‘No,’ said Zoya, shaking her head. ‘I mean, how long would I have left if I don’t seek treatment?’
    ‘For pity’s sake, Zoya,’ I cried, staring at her as if she had lost her reason entirely. ‘What type of question is that? Didn’t you understand what—’
    She held a hand in the air to silence me, but did not look in my direction. ‘How long, doctor?’
    Dr Crawford exhaled loudly and shrugged her shoulders, which did not fill me with confidence. ‘It’s difficult to say,’ she replied. ‘We would of course need to run these tests anyway to determine exactly what stage the cancer is at. But I would say no more than a year. Perhaps a little longer if you were lucky. Although there is no saying how the quality of your life would be affected during that time. You could be healthy until near the end, and then the cancer could attack quite quickly, or you could begin to deteriorate very soon. It really is for the best that you take action immediately.’ She opened a heavy diary that lay in the centre of her desk and ran a finger along one of the pages. ‘I can schedule you for the initial pelvic exam for—’
    She never got to finish that sentence, interrupted by the fact that Zoya had already stood up, taken her coat from the stand beside the door, and left.
    Originally, we planned to go no further east than Helsinki, but then, on a whim, we travelled on towards the harbour town of Hamina, on the Finnish coast. The Matkahuolto bus drove us slowly through Porvoo and just north of Kotka, names which sixty years before had been as familiar to me as my own, but which had slowly dissolved from my memory over the intervening decades, replaced by the experiences and recollections of a shared adulthood. Reading those words again on the bus timetable, however, pronouncing their lost syllables under my breath, jolted me back to my youth, the sounds echoing with the regret and familiarity of a childhood nursery rhyme.
    Zoya and I were offered seats at the front of the bus owing to our advanced years – I had celebrated my eightieth birthday four days before leaving London and my wife was only a couple of years younger than I – and we sat together quietly, watching the towns and villages pass us by, in a country which was not home, whichhad never been home, but which made us feel closer to the place of our birth than we had been in decades. The landscape along the Gulf of Finland reminded me of long-forgotten sailing trips along the Baltics, my days and nights filled with games and laughter and the sound of girls’ voices, each demanding more attention than the last. If I closed my eyes and listened to the cries of the seagulls overhead, I could imagine that we were dropping anchor once again at Tallinn on the Northern Estonian coast, or sailing northwards from Kaliningrad towards St Petersburg with a light wind behind us and the sun burning down on the deck of the Standart .
    Even the voices of the people who surrounded us offered a sensation of familiarity; their language was different, of course, but we could recognize some of the words, and the harsh guttural sounds of the lowlands blending with the soft sibilant language of the fjords made me question whether we should have come here many years before.
    ‘How do you feel?’ I asked Zoya, turning towards her as the sign for Hamina indicated that we would arrive there in no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Her face was a little pale and I could see that she was moved by the heartbreaking experience of travelling east, but she gave nothing away in her expression. Had we been alone, perhaps she might have wept out of a mixture of sorrow and joy, but there were