The names of these authors seemed to strike him as hard as the word ‘enchantress’ had struck her: he looked away from her and the air between them seemed to change.
‘Our code!’ His voice had grown husky. ‘Serafima, I never forgave myself for your arrest and your time in the camps. It took me years to find out what had happened. Of course I didn’t believe that you were really ill on the train, but there was nothing more I could do. We couldn’t ask your family without putting them in danger and I felt so guilty that I had ruined your life. It’s only now with
Serafima could hardly speak. ‘There’s nothing to forgive. You were the greatest blessing in my life. You still are. You always will be.’ She looked at him, remembering the way he always greeted her with his trademark two-fingered salute, brimming with excitement at seeing her again. ‘When did you marry?’
‘Nineteen fifty-one. I waited for you for six years.’
‘I was still in the Gulags then.’ She imagined his diamond engagement ring on the finger of another woman, his wife, the mother of his children. Yet she had released him on that snowy night with Dashka. She, the ghost, had no right to it.
‘You know, I still often find myself saying aloud: “Missing you, loving you, wanting you,”’ he said.
‘So do I,’ she whispered. ‘I thought of you… I thought of you every day in the camps. When I looked at the sun at midday and the northern star at midnight.’
‘Not a day passes when I haven’t remembered you, Serafimochka.’
‘And I you, Frank,’ she said. ‘But we’re both married, and we both have families we love.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, reaching into his pocket as if he was looking for something. ‘But shouldn’t we keep in contact?’
She thought for a minute, and then shook her head. ‘We can’t go back, you and I. But you should know: I shall always love you, and nothing will ever change this.’
‘I feel the same way,’ he said. ‘But oh, how I wish it was 1945 again, and we could plan our lives together.’
They walked on through the afternoon sunshine.
‘How long were you in the camps?’ he asked.
‘Eight years.’
‘So long. How terrible. How did you survive?’
‘I was saved by a dear friend, a doctor – though thinking about you, remembering the time we spent together, helped me survive too.’
Frank closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Are your parents alive?’
‘Yes. My mother.’
He shook his head. ‘If it wasn’t for her, we’d be together. Did she get that damned part in the movie?’
‘That’s the silly thing,’ replied Serafima. ‘In the end, she didn’t get any big parts any more. Stalin decided she was too Jewish.’
‘Your mother felt guilty about you, I guess?’
‘For this and for the burn when I was little, but she desperately tried to make up for it and get me freed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I would never tell anyone this, but you. But she bargained with all she had, first with Beria and then with Abakumov, to win my freedom.’
‘You mean…? Jesus. Poor woman.’
‘Beria just forced himself on her and then it turned out that he no longer ran the Organs, while Abakumov courted her like an old-fashioned knight but she succumbed too late – just before he was himself sacked and arrested.’
‘So she gave herself for nothing? But at the same time she redeemed herself?’
‘She didn’t need to in my eyes, but yes, I suppose she did.’
‘I think we should turn back now,’ he said.
‘Yes, we must.’
He started to say something, stopped, and then tried again: ‘Before we go back, may I do one thing? I’ve thought about it all these years.’
Serafima took a quick breath as he moved towards her. She nodded. Was he going to kiss her?
He placed his hand on her blouse right over the snakeskin.
He recited it in his perfect Russian and Serafima replied:
‘You never did lose it,’ she said quietly, feeling a passionate lightness, exactly like she had as a young girl when he first traced the snakeskin and made love to her. She felt her skin answer his touch.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Because an enchantress gave it to me.’
They walked back holding hands. When they saw the house, he kissed her on the lips and she kissed him back.
‘Kissing you is exactly the way it always was,’ she said.
She saw he was weeping, so to let him recover, she walked the last few metres on her own. Up the steps, through the house and out to her car on the other side.
‘Where would like me to take you?’ asked Andrei when she got into the car. His hands were, she noticed, tapping quickly on the steering wheel.
‘Home, of course,’ she answered. ‘Where else?’
