‘I can’t. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll make some coffee.’
She went through to the kitchen, which was cold and silent. There was a sour smell that she tracked down to an unwashed cloth in the spotted damp under the sink. She dumped it in the bin. It disturbed her, the way the house seemed to be sinking into the decay of abandonment. She’d have to try–again–to get some basic maintenance done. She’d tried once or twice, even going so far as to phone a local builder, but Grandpapa had been adamant. ‘Not necessary,’ he’d said.
She’d lived in this house until she was eighteen. Katya had brought her here when she was born, and had left her here in Grandpapa’s care when she went to live in London. What Katya had been looking for, Faith didn’t know. Her mother had been an angry woman when Faith was a child, and was still an angry woman. She had never married, and had had no more children.
She shrugged off the memories and spooned coffee into a jug. She put cups on to a tray, and took it through to the sitting room where Grandpapa was tidying up the table where the photos had been scattered, tucking them into the envelopes and putting them back into the box.
‘Don’t put them away,’ she said. ‘I want to look at those.’ She put a cup of coffee on the table beside him.
‘Is just photos, sweetheart,’ he said, frowning. ‘From work–long time ago.’
‘But I’ve never seen any photos of you from then,’ she said. He was not a man who preserved memories of his life. There was no photographic record of Katya’s childhood, and what photos there were of Faith’s grandmother, Katya had taken when she had left. ‘Come on, hand them over.’
He pushed the box across to her reluctantly, and went on putting away the remainder of the photos, carefully checking each one.
He was right. The photos were dull–pictures of mill buildings, factories, industrial landscapes that had vanished years ago. But there were one or two where a young Marek Lange appeared. They must have been taken in the post-war period. He looked tall and robust, a young man full of energy and dynamism. But his face looked older. Even then, Grandpapa’s face had worn that same cold severity with which he met the world today.
He finished putting the photographs away, and sat back in his chair, frowning.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘I think I have been dreaming…’ The cup he was holding tilted slightly, the coffee spilling over the rim.
‘Careful,’ she warned.
He didn’t seem aware of her. ‘Winter,’ he said. ‘So cold…’
She mopped at the spilled coffee with a tissue. ‘It’ll be spring soon.’
‘In spring it rain,’ he said. ‘So cold, that year. They told me…I have to do it. I have to.’
‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you have to do?’
He looked at her. ‘Faith…’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He pushed himself out of his chair. When he spoke again, his voice was firm. ‘I must see to the garden.’
After he left the Lange house, Jake drove back into Central Manchester. He called in at the university library to collect a book, then walked down to Oxford Street station for coffee. He ordered an espresso and watched the people passing by outside the window as he went over what he had just learned. The waitress smiled at him as she brought his cup across. She was pretty with dark hair, which made him think of Faith Lange who’d brightened up the gloomy, rambling house.
Why was it that a man of Lange’s means had let that beautiful old house deteriorate into such dilapidation? Some old people lived in the past, he knew that. But Lange had–apparently–rejected his own past.
Whatever that past was. After meeting the man, Jake wanted to know.
Faith Lange had told him the same story the few records told, but these were all records that would have relied on Lange for their information. It was possible that a tiny village in agricultural Poland might have vanished, but without any trace, leaving no evidence of its existence? He wasn’t convinced. As for the destroyed records…not so. It was surprising, once the Iron Curtain had fallen, to find how intact the records were. As you moved further east, further into the areas that had been devastated by the battles that had raged across the land, then the gaps started to appear, but if the story Marek Lange told was true, then there should have been something.
Further east…the further east you went, the darker the story became. He lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes against the smoke as he remembered that tantalizing moment, cut short by Faith Lange’s untimely arrival. Lange had spoken Russian. Old people in times of stress sometimes reverted to the language of their childhood. In extreme cases, they could lose the language they had later learned. Something had shocked Lange, and in that moment he had switched, unconsciously, Jake was sure, not to Polish, but to Russian.
And he had been in Minsk at the start of the war. When the old man had named the city, almost as if the word had been torn out of him, a chill had run down Jake’s back.
He opened his notebook. As Faith Lange had walked into the room, on impulse he’d slipped the two black-and-white photographs between the pages. He studied them again, the mother and children standing in the doorway of the house, the young soldier in his uniform.
Jake was reminded of a photograph Juris Ziverts had shown him the first time they met, soon after the Latvian government began extradition proceedings against the old man, charging him with war crimes. Latvia and the other Baltic countries had been brutally occupied by Stalinist Russia when Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. Two years later, when the Nazis attacked the Soviets, the stage was set for tragedy. Eastern Europe erupted in a frenzy of killing as virulent anti-Semitism was compounded by a hatred of communists and the ‘lesser races’. From the Baltics, from Estonia, from Lithuania and Latvia, the death squads went forth.
And now, after decades of inaction, their governments were trying to make amends. Memories from half a century before were taxed; photographs of men, young and in uniform, were compared with pictures of aging exiles. And the fingers of accusation began to point.
Juris Ziverts lived in a small semi in Blackburn. He had welcomed Jake, ushering him into the front room of his house, a room with a patterned carpet, blown vinyl wallpaper and bric-a-brac on the narrow mantelpiece above the electric fire. There was a fuchsia on the coffee table, its frilled petals looking oddly exotic in the resolutely suburban home. Jake, looking for a neutral topic to break the ice, said, ‘That’s a beautiful plant.’
The old man’s face, heavily bearded, was hawkish, but it lit up at Jake’s words. ‘You like flowers? I too. Since I retired, I spend my days in my greenhouse.’ He poured tea for Jake, his hands trembling slightly. ‘I am so glad you have come, Mr Denbigh. There has been a mistake. I’m sure it will all be sorted out…’ He was trying to make light of it, but his tense face and trembling hands told their own story.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’ Jake had come to the house with no strong views about Ziverts one way or the other, but he was prepared to listen.
‘It is…’ Ziverts’ voice wavered, then came back stronger. ‘I am Latvian, Mr Denbigh. I was a refugee after the war. My family died, so I came here. I am a teacher. Of maths. I married. I worked in Manchester for forty years, then I retired.’ He hesitated and cleared his throat. ‘When I arrive,’ he continued, ‘my English was not good. My name–it was very strange to the people here. They called me George. It was easier, and they meant no harm. So I became George Ziverts.’
Jake nodded. It wasn’t unusual for Eastern Europeans to change their names. He knew a Kazimierz who had changed his name to Carl and a Zbigniew who had become John. ‘And then…?’
‘I fought in the war,’ Ziverts said suddenly.
Jake kept his tone casual. ‘The German