Hitler’s invasion of neighbouring countries and the outbreak of a new war only twenty-one years after the last tipped Dmitri suddenly and emphatically into depression. He couldn’t believe that no lessons had been learned from the mass slaughter of the trenches. He couldn’t understand why no assassin slipped through the cordons that surrounded the Führer to end the world’s misery. He was anxious that he would no longer be able to support his family if naval blockades prevented the import of rugs. Suddenly, he could see no happiness in the life that had previously seemed so sunny; it was as if a shutter had come down that made everything dark and hopeless. Men were intrinsically evil the world over, from the Red Guards who had slaughtered the Romanovs to the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung who were shipping Jews and Communists off to live in segregated ghettos.
Rosa did her best to buoy him, remaining her cheerful self and asking nothing of him except his presence. He felt guilty that he had been such a poor choice of partner for her: he had spent their first ten years hankering after another woman, and now he was nothing but a dead weight, who found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. His adolescent children irritated and exhausted him: Marta was too interested in boys for a girl of her young age and when he confined her to her room, she would climb out the window; Nicholas never missed an opportunity to argue with him. Everything he said or did was wrong, as far as his kids were concerned.
Once America entered the war in both Europe and the Pacific, Dmitri sank to new depths of depression and stopped going to work. There seemed little point, since they had only occasional shipments to process. Alex continued to wire money, and that made Dmitri feel useless – a grown man who could not support his own family – but he could not afford to refuse it. He spent his days poring over the newspaper or listening to reports of the war on the radio and often did not bother to change out of his pyjamas. He was too old to fight, and of no further use to the world.
Sometimes he took Tatiana’s diary from the old brown suitcase where he still kept it, the one he had brought with him from Istanbul in 1922. When he read her descriptions of those last days in the Ipatiev House, it reminded him once again of his failure to save her and made him feel more useless than ever. In the evenings he drank until he passed out or made himself sick, then suffered the following morning. After a night out drinking in Berlin in the old days, he’d felt no more than a little stuffy-headed but now hangovers wiped him out. A symptom of age.
Up till then, Dmitri had caught the train to New York once or twice a year to have luncheon with Alfred Knopf. They were always convivial occasions at the city’s great restaurants – the Waldorf, Barbetta, the exclusive 21 Club – and the meal would last from twelve-thirty through to four or five in the afternoon, by which time copious quantities of alcohol would have been consumed and Dmitri would have to stagger back to Grand Central to catch the train home. Alfred’s secretary would telephone three weeks in advance to arrange these luncheons, but when she rang in March 1942 to set a date Dmitri told her he would not be able to make it.
‘Mr Knopf will be disappointed. What reason shall I give?’
‘Just say that I can’t condone the expenditure at a time when the world has gone mad. I’m sure he will understand.’
An hour later, when Alfred rang personally, Dmitri refused to take the call. Rosa closed the kitchen door but he could hear her explaining that he was depressed about the war because it brought back too many memories from the past. She promised she would persuade him to telephone and set a new date for luncheon once he felt up to it.
The following week a van pulled up outside their house and a deliveryman knocked on their door.
‘I have a gift from Mr Alfred Knopf,’ Dmitri heard him say to Rosa. He got up to look out the window and saw a Borzoi, a Russian wolfhound, just like the one on the Knopf logo. It was black with a white undercoat, and had the bounciness of a puppy. He felt like crying that the American publisher should care enough to send such a thoughtful gift.
Rosa called for him and he walked out to the porch and crouched to look at the pup. It was a beautiful animal, with intelligent eyes set in a small head, the exquisite curve of the haunches giving that famous silhouette, a coat that felt like silk. It was a boy, he noted. The pup licked his face and he felt just a fraction of the ice within him begin to thaw.
‘Malevich,’ he said. ‘I’ll call him Malevich.’
Dmitri was not the kind of man who had many friends: Malevich had been his closest friend during the last war, and Alfred was his closest during this. He wrote to express his undying gratitude and promised he would be well enough for that luncheon soon.
It was a turning point in more ways than one: Dmitri now had to go out twice a day to take Malevich for walks, and during those walks he began to analyse his depression and attempt to understand it. Was it some kind of affliction, like measles, that clogged up brain function? Why did everything bad come to the forefront, so that activities he had previously enjoyed no longer held any pleasure? What was the weight that caused his feet to drag, that made it too much effort to brush his teeth or comb his hair? It was lack of hope, he realised. Somehow any hope for the future had been extinguished, but Malevich’s uncomplicated enjoyment of life had brought back a flicker of light.
He began to write a novel about a man going through a period of melancholy that tips over into full-blown depression and leads him to attempt suicide. Instead of a puppy, Dmitri’s character was rescued by his secretary, a young woman of eccentric appearance and cheerful disposition whose random thoughts on the universe were pivotal in adjusting the faulty wiring in his brain so that he could hope once more. He called the secretary in his novel Gloria but in essence she was a tribute to Rosa.
Chapter Fifty
Lake Akanabee, New York State, 7th October 2016
Three days after the discovery of the body, a detective came to visit Kitty at the vacation park. He was a tall man with friendly eyes. She invited him to sit on the floral sofa while she took a chair by the pine dining table.
‘I need to ask some questions about your great-grandfather,’ he began, taking out a notebook and rooting around in his briefcase for a pen.
‘Have you identified the body yet?’ Kitty interrupted.
He tapped his pen on the arm of the sofa before answering. ‘She was a woman, in her seventies when she died, and forensics can’t find any signs of broken bones or bullet wounds. They think she could have been buried forty-odd years ago, although it’s not an exact science.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Now, your great-grandfather purchased the cabin in 1956 so it seems likely that he owned it at the time the body was buried.’
‘Oh God!’ So Dmitri could have been responsible. It was her worst fear.
‘We checked to see if it might be his partner, Rosa – your great-grandmother – but it seems she died in 1955 and is buried in a cemetery in Albany.’
‘So he bought the cabin a year later. Perhaps he wanted to be alone.’ She imagined him there, grief-stricken, introspective, living a quiet life, but the detective’s next words shattered that vision.
‘Have you ever heard of a woman called Irena Markova?’
Kitty nodded. ‘She was the translator of Dmitri’s later novels. He thanks her in the acknowledgements.’
‘We’ve checked Dmitri’s bank records and it seems he made monthly payments to Irena Markova from 1948 through to 1975. Quite substantial amounts. You never heard anything about her, perhaps from your mother or grandmother?’
Kitty shook her head, baffled. ‘Maybe she did other translation work for him. Or perhaps she acted as his secretary.’
‘We thought of that. We checked the records of the carpet import business where Dmitri Yakovlevich worked on his arrival in the United States, but there was no employee of that name.’
Kitty was amazed. ‘He worked in a carpet import business? I never knew that.’