May 1927
If it was me who made the arrangements, we would have caught the Orient Express from London to the new Turkish state and driven by car: nothing mad like a Daimler, but still a model that offered some kind of comfort and decent suspension. We would have broken our journey for a few days in Venice and wandered down footpaths by the canals like real honeymooners. We would have stayed in a grand hotel–though not the Grand Hotel–and practiced behaving like lovers. I would have worn kid gloves from Brown Thomas and shoes with a thin ankle strap and a patent leather gleam. We would have eaten macaroni and thought ourselves smart when we worked out that the St Peter’s fish on the menu was good old John Dory.
It was not me who made the arrangements.
On the seventh of May, we boarded a merchant ship on the dockside in Aberdeen. Our cabin had a porthole and two mean single bunk beds, and an empty water basin nailed to a bare wooden stand. The open deck smelled of oil, rope, stale sweat, and dried fish. A solid wall of grey drizzle followed us from Scotland all the way to Norway. By the time we landed in Bergen, the British police had raided the Soviet consul’s offices in London. Accusations of spying and shenanigans and bad faith soon followed, along with rumours of war and invasion. Sabres were rattled, and strongly worded cables went flying forward and back across the continent.
Donal showed me the papers, three days old and damp from the newsstand outside the hotel. He read the Berlin news, while I thawed myself out with a cup of something that the waiter swore was tea, and that he clearly expected me to drink black, with a skinny half-moon of lemon on the saucer, because whoever heard of sugar for a cuppa, let alone a splash of milk?
‘And that,’ said Donal, ‘is why we could not travel to Moscow by luxury train, with the British Empire’s insignia shining like a target on the front of the engine.’
‘And this,’ I said, pointing to the paper in my lap, the newsprint smudging my cold fingers, ‘is why we should have commandeered a sea plane, to get us there before they close the borders.’
He smiled, and I cracked a half-smile back. Never mind the secrecy; we did not have the funds to speed up our journey to St Petersburg–no, Petrograd–no, Leningrad–then on to Moscow. ‘If it’s still called Moscow by the time that we arrive, I’ll give you half a crown,’ I said, like somebody who had money of her own and could afford to be throwing it away. We would get there by the end of the month with a fair wind behind us, and we could endure no more delay, or Donal’s mission would not go well.
‘For the love of God, don’t call it a mission, or you’ll get us all shot,’ he said to me, in jest but not even faintly joking at the same time. I promised that I would keep my rosary beads hidden away for the duration of our stay in the Red Republic.
That night, in a blissfully overheated hotel room in a Nordic sea port, in a bed the size of the boat we arrived on, he checked me for concealed holy medals and scapulars. And if I had been wearing any when the inspection began, by the time we were finished, there were none.
In the morning, the cobbles on the street below were gleaming like polished steel, the drizzle finally melted away and we strolled through a park where the air carried at least the hint of summer.
From Bergen to Stockholm by train, then Stockholm to Helsinki, and Helsinki to Leningrad. First class for privacy, for Donal had a ton of work to do. I read a book of folk tales to revive my _cúpla focail_of Russian, checking the handful of words I could not remember in a dog-eared dictionary. And I gazed out the window, at dark green forests of evergreen trees, and fields of cattle grazing on meadow grass. Wildflowers along the railway embankments filled the air with a scent almost but not quite good enough to cancel out the tang of burning coal from the Empire-free steam engine
that dragged us closer to the place where we were headed, the lives we would be faking and the chances that we would be taking with our own lives, and the lives of those so eager to do business with us, and those determined to derail us.
Europe braced itself for war between two weary giants, while we quietly plotted to give a tiny nation the resources to survive, and make it to the tenth anniversary of its shaky independence. A nation that did not–yet–have the right to set up embassies or send diplomats beyond its borders, and was obliged to send unacknowledged deal-makers like Donal instead.
I grew to tolerate lukewarm black tea with lemon. I grew to love the mad, wild landscape of the north with its nineteen, twenty hours of daylight in late May. By the time our train groaned to a halt in Finland Station in the crowded heart of Leningrad, I was no longer homesick, or apprehensive. I was impatient for our great gamble to begin.
I was ready, but our hosts were not.
We unpacked our bags in a hotel room where the chandelier made me nervous; I moved beneath it, expecting it to fall on me the minute I turned my back. Clumps of dust spied on us from beneath the bed. The sheets were starched and clean, but tinged with grey, and I quickly learned to hide my soap because the maids kept stealing it.
I bought an electric plate in the hotel lobby from a timber merchant leaving for Canada. And I had learned how to use it for heating up pastries by the time Donal received his first summons for a meeting. Later, when I got to know Nadya, the friend of a friend of a man at the Trade Ministry, she taught me how to brew tea in the Russian way, and to drink it with a tiny spoonful of jam.
It tasted nice enough in its own way, though it was not the same.
Donal went to meeting after meeting, bringing me with him so I could listen in on the Russian small talk while he tried to make himself understood in a mix of schoolboy German, execrable French, UCD English and what he called the international language of the balance sheet. This was, after all, our cover story for being here in the first place: looking for new business ideas we could take to investors back home: vodka distilleries that could also make single malt whiskey; new high-yielding strains of barley or rye, equally suited to the bog or the steppe; or new ways to make cement, or silver-plated cutlery. So we drank tea with machine engineers as they met after a long
day shift, and argued about economic theory, and with architects on building sites describing the new cities in the sky that they were building. Palaces that would be home to nearly ten thousand people, with cinemas and sports clubs, and canteens on the ground floor… fairer and more sociable than keeping staff, did we not agree? Well yes, as a maid of all work from the age of thirteen till my seventeenth birthday, I can assure you I agreed; I could barely resist the temptation to wave a red flag and sing a few bars of the Internationale while they showed us samples of tile work and parquet flooring and the communal dining rooms in the new apartment complexes. ‘And everyone lives like this now?’ I asked, unhelpfully. ‘Everyone will indeed live like this, in good time,’ they replied. And Donal believed them.
I liked our meeting with the women at the textile plant the best. They rattled off statistics about productivity and targets, and the average thread count in their rolls of cotton. But the kerchiefs that kept their hair tied back were colourful–pine green, red gold, or the watery blue of a clear sky in November–and the patterns were alive with hope, and the geometric shapes of dancers, and giant turbines and bluebirds soaring over soldiers marching in formation, the talking animals and heroes from folk tales blending into a jazz tapestry of revolutionary energy and light. All in a piece of cloth. I felt drunk just looking at their bold creations. The women in the textile plants knew that the work they were producing was utterly new. They complained about the factory bosses who wanted bolts of grey and blue unpatterned serge, and they took pride in the bold patterns they created instead. Soviets with style. The People’s Vogue.
Donal worked his way through the contacts on the list he had made me memorise before we left Ireland: corn merchants from the American Midwest, geologists from the coal belt of England, and newspapermen whose nose for a story could not get past their host’s determination to talk only about year-on- year improvements in steel production in the cities.
‘Even in bed,’ grumbled Nadya, shocking me by speaking so bluntly in front of the man she referred to as her fiancé, though Donal was sure that ‘keeper’ was a more accurate description. I rather liked Nadya, even when she flirted shamelessly with the commissars from the Party, ignoring their unbending, unspoken response that screamed, ‘I am too serious to lie down with a woman who has a Marcel perm and red lipstick.’ She did better with the waiters, who were less scandalised by her style and kept her glass topped up with sparkling wine from Georgia. If Nadya joined us at our table with
her fiancé / keeper Petrov, I found myself unwinding, and her tipsy, gossipy chat improved my Russian far more than any of my attempts to make sense of Isvestia or Pravda had done.
Mostly, however, we dined with men who knew other men in positions of influence, men who promised to engineer introductions in a few days, a few weeks, when the time was right, but not now, before the ground had been prepared and conditions were optimal. Donal nodded and smiled and concealed his impatience and the men drank vodka, and I nursed a glass of Vichy water, and practised listening in on conversations at nearby tables to improve my vocabulary.
It took us a while to work out that Petrov, the fixer-in-chief, was the man most likely to do what everyone promised to do: he would get Donal into the offices of the people who mattered. We were supposed to disapprove of Petrov; our official hosts, who always seemed to have a more important meeting to go to, or a better party to attend, made that very clear. But Petrov never talked about steel quotas or dams or turbines. ‘You don’t have so many steelworks in rural Ireland, I imagine. It’s all small farms and food exporters, yes?’
‘Well yes,’ we replied. And he complimented me outrageously on our lack of knowledge, which he called open-mindedness. ‘Wipe the slate clean!’ he would shout happily, as we clinked glasses in the hotel dining room under electric lights that flickered or faded, depending on how strong the current was on that particular day. He saluted Donal’s ability to speak in both English and French and seemed completely unaware that I could just about follow a conversation in Russian as well. (Why did he think my university educated husband had bothered to bring me here, I wondered? It wasn’t for my innate love of American jazz.) Oh, but when he claimed that my green eyes were a complete novelty in this city, that he had never seen anything like them, I felt like a goddess in a world without gods. The chambermaid who stole my bars of lily-of-the-valley soap had the same eye colour as me, and I doubted that her people came from a smallholding west of the Shannon. Petrov smoked Turkish cigarettes that smelled of first-class dining cars, but his mistress Nadya smelled of strong tea with lemon, sugar, and bergamot. She smelled like my old friend Hannah.
So I looked forward to the nights when we had no plans to meet with anyone important, and we might as well have dinner with Petrov and Nadya instead.
Donal was growing more and more frustrated in Leningrad. I was falling into a midsummer trance. Because it was daylight all the time now. The sun, the ever-present sun, shone on the Neva River and the watermelon sellers in the street markets. By now, Donal and I were playing the role of newlyweds with some enthusiasm. And though our marriage was as fake as the string of jet beads I wore around my neck, we strolled through squares and residential streets where the sky was still bright at midnight, shadowed only by our minder from the Party, and we kissed in shaded doorways.
Or we coupled lazily in our oversized hotel bed, in our immense and grubby hotel room, our bodies glued to one another by desire, and the summer heat, and our cover stories–shrewd businessman and his respectable bride who speaks in tongues–becoming tangled up with the grubbier details of who we really were and what had really brought us here. This convenient desire for one another became the honeymoon we needed and deserved. It was, I knew, more fitting than moonlit walks in Venice would have been.
And then, three days after midsummer, as Petrov and Nadya invited us to join them in the country for a break from the oppressive heat, the summons came. Our hosts were ready to meet us. And to talk about blood money, untraceable deals. And the Romanov crown jewels.