The Secret Wife(95)

‘Come, sit down,’ Valerina fussed, pointing to a comfortable armchair by a window. ‘You must be tired from your journey. I will have a room prepared.’

Dmitri looked at Tatiana then back at his sister before he spoke: ‘We would like to share a room – if it is acceptable to you.’

‘Well, of course …’ Valerina was momentarily flustered but soon regained her composure. ‘Of course you would. I’ll make arrangements. Are you well, Your …’ She paused, unsure how to address her guest.



‘Please call me Tatiana. These last decades I have been known by the name Irena Markova but I miss the name of my birth.’

‘So you were brought out of Russia by men from the Czech Legion?’ Valerina asked.

‘One man. Yes.’

Dmitri was consumed by jealousy. Who was this man? Was he the one she had married?

‘I can’t even begin to imagine what you have been through,’ Valerina said softly. ‘You are welcome in my house for as long as you like. Both of you.’

Dmitri hugged her. ‘Thank you. I knew you would say that. I am going to apply for a passport and visa so Tatiana can come to America with me and I don’t know how long it will take, so if we could stay here in the meantime …’

‘Of course.’

Dmitri was astonished by how quickly the women became friends. Tatiana may have told him she did not want to talk about what had happened in the years since they last saw each other, but Valerina had soon coaxed most of the story from her, after serving them glasses of sweet amber-coloured sherry.

‘The man who brought me to Czechoslovakia is called Vaclav Markov,’ Tatiana said. ‘He is a good man, a Czech soldier, as you guessed, and he smuggled me out of Russia and all the way to the village of his birth, outside Brno. I was in the depths of despair after hearing the fate of my family. Although I hoped desperately that it was not true, I had a feeling right from the start that it must be. We all knew death was close those last weeks. I think we accepted that we were unlikely to survive once we arrived at that wretched house in Ekaterinburg – even little Alexei.’

She shook herself as if to expunge the memory.

‘I wrote to your mother’ – Tatiana looked at Dmitri – ‘and received a reply saying that you had died at the battle of Tsaritsyn. And that’s when I gave up all hope …’



Dmitri was furious with himself. If only he had written to his mother so she knew he was alive … Everything would have been different. ‘Malevich died at Tsaritsyn,’ he explained. ‘I couldn’t bear to stay in the army after that. I left to continue searching for you.’

Tatiana gave him a look of compassion. ‘It’s all so long ago. We’ve both had to live with the decisions we made. I married Vaclav because it was the only way to stay in that village without attracting attention. We always worried that the Bolsheviks would find me so we lived unobtrusively on a farm. That’s where I’ve been all these years.’

‘Did you have children?’ Valerina asked. It was the question Dmitri had felt unable to press her on after she told him she didn’t, but from his sister it felt natural.

Tears welled in Tatiana’s eyes. Up to that point she had been composed, but now she could not speak. Valerina rose, knelt at her feet and took her hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said quietly.

The tears began to flow as Tatiana spoke. ‘My only son, Jaroslav, was executed by the Nazis. It happened five years ago but feels like yesterday.’

Dmitri came to put her arms around her shoulders and she leaned her face into his waist and wept. He felt useless, lumpen, that he was unable to take away her pain.

‘It was too cruel,’ she sobbed. ‘After everything else. Then that.’

Valerina and Dmitri caught eyes. There was nothing to say, so they remained there, holding Tatiana, until her crying passed. Dmitri felt the scale of her loss keenly – her homeland, her family, her son. It was unthinkable.

‘But now I have you.’ She looked up at him through wet lashes and he knew that whatever happened he must keep her close for the rest of his life.

The passport and visa came through, in the name of Irena Markova, since that was what she was called in her Czech documents. Dmitri and Tatiana bade farewell to Valerina and flew to New York together in early December 1948. It was a long, gruelling flight with six stop-overs between Istanbul and New York, but much faster than a ship’s crossing. Rosa had been expecting Dmitri weeks earlier – he had been absent for three months rather than one – and despite several expensive international calls from Valerina’s house, he knew she was anxious.



He and Tatiana caught a train from Grand Central station and she gazed out the window at this country that would be her new home. Light snow was falling and the grass sparkled with frost, while stark trees waved against a white sky, almost like their Russian homeland. As the train neared Albany, Dmitri walked along to alight from another compartment, as he knew Rosa would be waiting on the platform. He had given Tatiana an envelope full of money, instructions on where to find the taxi rank and the address of a good hotel – and thus his double life began.

When Dmitri saw Rosa on the platform, wearing a coat the colour of raspberries with three oversized black buttons down the front, and a pillbox hat with two black feathers sticking up jauntily, he felt a gush of warmth for her. She ran along the platform and threw herself into his arms, and Dmitri couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder to check if Tatiana was watching. He couldn’t see her, so he hugged Rosa and kissed her on the cheek. This was going to be hard. Already he felt torn: on the one hand he worried that Tatiana might not find her hotel safely, that she might feel lonely on her own in a strange land, and on the other he was nervous that Rosa might sense his infidelity, might smell it on his clothes or detect it in his manner. She had always been good at reading his moods and he was not practised in deception.