The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [41]
Perhaps it was too easy for conversations to be overheard. Talk had been dangerous, often lethal, under communism. People had perhaps preferred to talk in the privacy of their own living rooms, kitchens, cupboards. Or perhaps the party had considered cafés too subversive, too fertile an intellectual climate to be tolerated, having never forgotten that Lenin planned the revolution from the Café Odeon in Zurich, a stone’s throw from the Bellevueplatz.
The café was filled with plastic tables, a mock tile floor and smoke like fog. Vadim was waiting at a table by the window. He looked the part, she thought, for a covert operation: a grey woollen overcoat—the collar turned up to hide his jaw—a black rollneck; the sleeves of an old naval jersey, striped blue and white and worn at the edges, poked out from the black cuffs. An army cap lay on the table bearing the already faded colours of the new Russia.
They ordered hot tea with lemon.
‘The hospital’s not far,’ Vadim began. ‘I will tell them I am a friend of Petra’s and that you are her music teacher.’
Music teacher. Delightful.
Stevie wished she’d worn her most snappy tweed ensemble, hair waved in a didactic but faintly musical style; she would have chosen her long opera pearls, the ones that hung to her navel, and attached a piano key to the clasp, fingers perfumed with rosin from the little violin bows of the children.
The sound began as a low rumble, like distant surf. Stevie ignored it but it grew quickly louder until Vadim noticed it, too. Through the window they saw a mass of people come snaking around the corner, some waving placards, others waving fists, one with a shabby loud hailer. There would have been some three hundred at a rough guess. Militzia were gathering around them like flies, buzzing just out of touch but planning a landing.
The protesters stopped and began to shout at the Kremlin walls, punching the air, shaking their placards. Stevie was tempted to go outside for a closer look but experience (Jakarta, burning tyres, a rather disastrous betchuk chase) had taught her that it never did to get caught in other people’s anger. And in Russia, as in Indonesia, the security forces could be unpredictable.
‘What are they protesting about, Vadim?’ Stevie peered closely, trying to read the placards. The protesters were all women, bundled up tight in the cold with headscarves, their pale faces pinched with pink. Her eyebrows shot up incredulously. ‘Are they—mothers?!’
‘They are from the Mothers’ Rights group.’ Vadim spoke quietly. He lit another cigarette. ‘They are the mothers of soldiers who have disappeared in Chechnya, or been tormented to death by their officers, or who have returned home physically and mentally destroyed, only to be swept under the carpet like ashes.’
Vadim rubbed his scar absentmindedly. It grew red. ‘When you turn eighteen, you are conscripted. You become a “human resource” for the great nation of Russia, and so like that she may do with you what she wishes.’
‘So, it really is as bad as they say.’
He smiled bitterly. ‘Probably worse than you know. Think on this, and every word is true: in 2002, five hundred men were killed—that’s a whole battalion’s worth—but not from fighting a war. They were beaten to death by their own officers. Whole squadrons have deserted because conditions are so bad. The officers steal tanks, weapons, even the few roubles the privates get sent by their parents.’
Vadim looked out at the protesters. The militzia were buzzing in tighter circles now. Trucks had arrived, ominously windowless.
‘These parents are despised by the officers—the Mothers’ Rights group especially. It annoys them that sometimes, just sometimes, their behaviour is so outrageous—’ the poison in Vadim’s voice could have killed a cobra, ‘—and that it transgresses the line between man and beast so flagrantly, that the mothers protest and shout and demand that something be done to discipline the officers who killed their Sascha on a drunken whim.