She stood back up on her stiff, aching legs and took in her surroundings properly for the first time. In the midsummer twilight the tundra seemed to stretch away from her forever in all directions. So too did thousands of small pools. She hobbled over to the nearest one and used both hands to cup the first water to touch her lips in hours. It tasted of the Earth, and chemicals. She realised her hands were still caked in whatever substances the power plant had flung into the atmosphere and all over her. She plunged both hands into the pool and tried to scrub them clean. Then she took her own pack off her back and pulled out a large, rough wool jumper. She slipped it over her head, wiping her hands across the front of it.

The falling temperature had driven the cloud of gnats away and Valera started to feel the silence of the night around her. She realised just how alone she was. There were no distant cries or howls, no beasts calling out to their mates or taunting their prey. The only sound was Valera’s own breath. It occurred to her that she hadn’t encountered anything larger than the gnats on her long walk across the tundra. There had been no snarling wolves or skittish elk, no tracks to follow or avoid. Even the animals had abandoned Karelia.

She spotted the low remains of a building a hundred metres away—just two walls a few metres high on a slab of concrete. She couldn’t tell if it was the final remnant of another lost village or some lone hut that had succumbed to the wilderness. But it didn’t matter. It was shelter.

Valera picked up both her packs, carried them over to the walls and wedged them into the corner where they met. Then she curled up against them and finally let out all the pain and anger she’d carried across Karelia. She cried. She wept for everything she’d lost. She wept for her parents. She wept for her beautiful, innocent son. She wept because the cost of her freedom had been too high.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

In the years following Stalin’s death it became increasingly fashionable for high-ranking members of the Communist Party to move out of the centre of Moscow to the city’s burgeoning suburbs. Apartments were swapped for houses, commutes by car replaced short metro rides. It was all part of the Soviet paradox.

General Grigor Medev had never made the move out to the pretty, manicured neighbourhoods of Zhukovka or Barvikha, like so many of his comrades. He still lived in the Narkomfin Building, El Lissitzky’s grand communal housing project for Soviet workers in the centre of the city. He’d moved in in 1945 at the end of the Great Patriotic War, as the survivors of the Eastern Front returned home, and had lived there ever since.