The Secret Wife(87)
‘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.’
‘He retired from carpets in 1951, on his sixtieth birthday. By that time he was relatively wealthy because the movie adaptation of his novel In the Pale Light of Dawn had come out, and he owned a share of the box office. The receipts from that and the follow-up, Toward the Sunset, kept him comfortably for the rest of his life.’
Kitty was gobsmacked. Call herself a journalist? She’d been trying to find out about Dmitri all summer and hadn’t even turned up the fact that two of his novels had been filmed. It made her all the more astonished that no one had told her about him when she was growing up. She’d often sat down to watch old movies on Saturday evenings with her mum, dad and Grandma Marta. Why had none of them mentioned the family connection to movies?