Free The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch Page A

pushed from one place to another. Then later on I married my wife in the camp. Tanya was her name. Tatiana, that is. She was Russian. And she had T.B. And no one would take us with the T.B. It was a matter of finding some country that would take us, you see.” He had never intended to marry Tanya. It was Leo who had decided that matter.
     
    “And what did you do all those years in the camp?”
     
    “Nothing. Well, a little black market. Mainly nothing.” He recalled the long wooden hut among the pine trees. His bunk was in the corner. The thing was to get a corner. Later he and Tanya shared a small hut with another couple. They had arranged a few things round them, pinned pictures to the wall. He had not been too unhappy, especially when there was Leo. It was odd, after seven years of killing work, nine years of idleness.
     
    “Did you ever think of going back to Russia?”
     
    “Yes. I did think of it then. Tanya didn’t want to. I think I would have been afraid to anyway. And then there was religion.” He lifted his eyes to the icon. With gentle inclined faces the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost conferred around their table with the white cloth. Their golden wings overlapped, entwined. They were melancholy. They knew that all was not well with their creation. Perhaps they felt that they themselves were drifting quietly away from it.
     
    “Oh, you’re a Christian, Russian Orthodox Church.”
     
    “No, not now. I’m nothing now.” During the war his religion had consoled him, more perhaps as a memory of innocent and good people than as any personal faith in a saving deity. In the years of idleness it had slowly faded as indeed almost everything had faded in those years. He had given up his country for a God in whom he no longer believed. But no, he would never have had the guts to go back. Yet he had thought about Russia so much in that camp, lying on his bed through interminable summer afternoons, feeling hungry and smelling the pines and the creosote, and had imagined himself surrounded again by his own language and his own people.
     
    “The picture, the icon. Did you have that with you all the time?”
     
    “Not all the time, no. It was my mother’s. After she died some friends of ours in Prague took it, that lawyer’s family. Then after the war they traced me through the Red Cross and brought it to me in the camp. It’s the only thing that was there and is here.”
     
    It was odd to think that it had hung in his mother’s bedroom in that house in St Petersburg. His mother’s bedroom was dark, full of wavery hanging curtains, laces and nets. It was stuffy and smelt of eau de Cologne. It was even stranger to think the icon had made that journey than to think that he himself had. Perhaps because he had grown old and the icon had not.
     
    “It’s lovely. It must be worth an awful lot.”
     
    “It is. I was always thinking someone would steal it in the camp. I think they might have done only they were a bit afraid of it, superstitious about it. I keep my room locked here—there are always sneak thieves about in this part of London. I meant to say to you to always lock up carefully. It might frighten a thief even here though. It’s supposed to be a miraculous icon. It belonged to a church before it came into our family, and they say it used to be carried on a procession once a year round the town, and while it was out it made all kinds of things happen, people suddenly confessed their crimes or became reconciled with their enemies.”
     
    “Has it done any miracles for you?”
     
    “No. But then I deserve no miracles. I have lost my faith.” He had lost his country and he had lost his faith. The great dark glittering enclosed interior of the Russian church had been a home, a house for him, for so many years of his childhood and his youth. A bearded Russian God had listened in that darkness to his supplications and his prayers, chided his failings, forgiven his trespasses, loved him.