The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [95]
Kirril turned his back on Stevie and began to walk away. He called out without turning around, already half-invisible in the fog, ‘Go home, Stevie Duveen.’
‘I am home, Mr Marijinsky,’ she called back.
‘Then go to hell.’
Decidedly unsuccessful, possibly downright stupid was Stevie’s assessment of her meeting with Kirril. There had been little to gain from the conversation. She could see now why he and Valery had fought.
There had been traces of what the old Kirril must have been like, but the men who had taken his fingers had taken much more than sinews and bone. They had shattered him. He had become an indifferent colluder with the forces of evil.
Was that too harsh?
Stevie thought of Anya and decided it was not. She still had a niggling worry that she had said too much—but it was Kirril who had brought up the list.
The train for Chur pulled into the Hauptbahnhof. Stevie dismissed her worries, swung her soft duffle bag over her shoulder and leapt aboard.
By eleven, she was settled in a window seat on the Glacier Express, en route to St Moritz. The little red train chugged its ways through the valleys and peaks. When the sun shone, it was one of the most scenic journeys in the world, but today everything was half obscured by low cloud and dulled by a grey light.
The pretty alpine villages lay hidden, only their church steeples poking through the fog. The bare rock of the mountains loomed black and forbidding where it was too steep for snow to cling. Great icicles menaced the track like Damoclean swords.
Before the Alps had become a holidaymaker’s paradise, they had been the terror of travellers. Spurred by stories of wild mountain men and plague-ridden villages, travellers hurried through as fast as they could, hands on their purses and hearts in their mouths. On a day like today, it was easy to imagine what it had been like then. There were still many villages cut so deeply into steep valleys that the sun only ever reached them for a few days in mid-summer. These villages wouldn’t have noticed that it had been months since the sun had shone anywhere in Europe.
Stevie flicked through the pages of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There was an article about some scientists in Poland who were heralding the coming of a new mini ice age. Many were publicly scoffing at their findings, saying they had it the wrong way around—that the planet was heating up—but looking out onto the glaciers, Stevie thought that the Europe she knew seemed only to be getting colder.
Another article, this time a scandal involving fake formula that had been imported from China and fed to babies in North Western Russia. Many had died as a result of malnutrition. The horror.
Stevie turned the page. It was too much to bear thinking about.
Another article, this time it was about the wildlife that was flourishing in the Dead Zone, after Chernobyl. The fact that no humans could live there due to the residual radiation meant the area had turned into a haven for all kinds of animals.
Stevie’s mind turned to The Man from Chernobyl. The accident had obviously changed Dragoman’s world. He had lost everything. In a way, she supposed, it must have shaped him or he wouldn’t have that nickname. She guessed April 1986 had probably shaped the lives of everyone who had lived through it.
The rocking motion of the train set her thoughts adrift as she stared at the blank white window. In a way, everyone became what they chose to be defined by: their manhood, an act of shame, of heroism, kindness, a humiliation, their mother’s country, the unfairness in their lives, an illness, their faith, an accident. In every person’s past and present and future, so many patchwork pieces were represented. As people chose to keep some things and to discard others, they set