‘Give me a little time to get used to the idea,’ Dmitri said, but he gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze.
‘We’ll need a bigger apartment,’ she continued. ‘Not straight away but our son will need a bedroom of his own …’
Dmitri laughed. ‘You are convinced he is a boy, even though you knew nothing of his existence until a couple of hours ago!’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It’s strange, but I am.’
Back in the apartment he helped her into bed then climbed in beside her and switched off the light.
In the darkness, Rosa asked timidly: ‘Dmitri, could we please get married before the baby comes? It would mean so much … And my family will ask …’
‘I can’t,’ he told her gently. ‘I’m already married.’
‘Yes, to a ghost,’ she said sadly. ‘How can I ever compete with that?’
Chapter Forty-Five
Berlin, 1925
The baby was a healthy boy, with sandy blonde hair, blue eyes and Russian bone structure. He looked remarkably similar to Dmitri’s father.
‘What would you like to call him?’ Rosa asked, unable to take her eyes off him as he sucked greedily at her breast. She was blooming, her cheeks pink and her short hair lustrous. Dmitri had been worried that neither of them would know what to do with a baby, but straight away Rosa seemed to have an instinct for motherhood. She was so calm that the child stopped crying the instant he was snuggled in her arms.
‘I like the name Nicholas,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘Nicholas is lovely!’ she cried. ‘Do you mean after your tsar?’
‘No, our tsar was a fool. I just like the way the syllables fall from the tongue. Nich-o-las.’
Rosa had found a crib for the boy and arranged his things in the corner of their bedroom. She sang as she rocked him to sleep, or changed his nappy, or played with him on the rug; it was obvious she was happy. She had given up asking Dmitri to marry her but only insisted that he buy her a ring so that people thought them married, and to that he consented.
After the birth, he had planned to take his typewriter to a café on the corner to work without interruption, but found that he liked being at home, with the babble of their voices in the next room and the smell of his lunch bubbling on the stove. Rosa was careful not to disturb him while he was working: as well as continuing to write articles for Rul he had started a new novel.
Like his first novel, Exile had elements of autobiography: the main character was haunted by a terrible act he had committed in his past, before being banished from his homeland, and living a shadowy half-life, unable to forget. Dmitri analysed the experience of being a stranger in a foreign land, with a culture quite different from his own, and concluded that in many ways it was liberating. In Berlin he could reinvent himself outside the strict rules of Russian society. Had his father been alive, he would never have been able to become a writer; he would have been expected to pursue a military career all the way to the top, amassing medals as he went. And yet, he still felt a sense of dislocation, as though he was leading someone else’s life. Not being fluent in German annoyed him; somehow he couldn’t get to grips with the staccato rhythms of the language. And his relationship with Rosa still felt temporary; she was someone to keep him company until Tatiana returned. Even with the baby he couldn’t shake that feeling, although he knew it was unfair to Rosa.
He had no complaints about her. In many ways she was the perfect wife: cheerful, affectionate and forgiving. She asked little of him: a roof over their heads, money for food, and not much else. When her mother and sister visited, he was polite and welcoming, although their disapproval of him was visceral.
‘Why do you love me?’ he asked Rosa once. He genuinely couldn’t understand it.
‘Because you need me,’ she replied. ‘Because I want to try and make you happy.’
‘It won’t work,’ he told her. ‘Melancholy is the condition of the Russian soul.’
And yet, Rosa could make him laugh, almost against his will. When she returned from the daily shopping trip, she usually had a vignette of some tiny incident with which to entertain him: a housewife scrubbing her front steps with vigour then a bird defecating on them with a huge splat just as she turned to go indoors; a bad-tempered tram conductor who was unaware someone had stuck a notice on his back saying ‘I’ve not had a bath since 1917’.
They no longer went out in the evenings, because they could not afford a Kinderhüter never mind the cost of alcohol in the cafés and nightclubs, but Dmitri would pour himself a vodka at home. Sometimes they invited friends for supper, but mostly they read books or listened to the radio. He was not unhappy. At night, they often made love. Rosa had a remarkable enthusiasm for sex and a talent for arousing him even when he felt exhausted. Cool fingers, the touch of her lips, her luscious breasts pressed against him, all had a miraculous effect on his libido. She had assured him that it would be impossible for her to get pregnant again while she was breastfeeding little Nicholas, so they were both astonished to find, when the baby was just seven months old, that she was wrong about that. Their doctor confirmed another was due the following year.
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had a bigger apartment, where the children could have their own room,’ Rosa sighed. She didn’t nag – never nagged – but he knew it was a reasonable request. He asked his publisher for an advance against the next novel and managed to pay the deposit on a two-bedroom apartment not far away, where they moved just before a little girl was born in the summer of 1926.
‘Can I call her Marta?’ Rosa pleaded. ‘I always wanted a daughter called Marta.’
‘Of course,’ Dmitri replied, his voice a little husky. ‘Marta is a pretty name.’
The strength of his feelings when he looked at his baby daughter amazed him: a combination of protectiveness and sheer awe at her innate femininity. Even as a newborn she held her hands daintily, like a ballerina, and gazed up at him with innocent adoration. How could they have created someone quite so beautiful? Sometimes he almost fancied she looked like Tatiana – although that was, of course, impossible.
‘Hello, little girl,’ he whispered, and she clutched his finger in a surprisingly strong fist. Nicholas had begun to crawl and annoyed him by grabbing at his papers, knocking over cups, falling down and wailing even though he could not possibly be hurt. Secretly Dmitri admitted to himself that he loved his daughter more. Nicholas was clumsy and needful of attention, reminding Dmitri of himself as a child, while Marta seemed graceful and sure of herself, completely unlike him. When he said anything of the sort to Rosa, she laughed and chided him: ‘They’re babies! You can’t possibly judge their characters yet.’
In summer 1927, Exile was published, and it proved rather more controversial than Interminable Love, with much debate over Dmitri’s views of life in exile. The discussion was taken up by the German press when it was published in translation, resulting in many more sales. The book was reprinted and for once they had a little money to spare. Dmitri gave Rosa cash to buy new clothes for herself and the children, and one summer’s day they took a day trip to the countryside with a picnic that Rosa had carefully packed in a wicker basket.
Watching the children playing on the grass, completely caught up in the moment, and watching Rosa hum as she cut big hunks of bread and cheese to serve with beer and sausage, Dmitri felt the closest he ever came to happiness. He examined the sensation, suspicious of it, feeling he did not deserve it. What about Tatiana? What about the way he had let her down?
Rosa handed him his food, then leapt to her feet, tucked one child under each arm and began to spin them round and round. Nicholas and Marta shrieked and chortled from deep in their bellies and suddenly Dmitri found himself laughing too. It was still an unfamiliar sensation for him but it got easier every time.