Omega

I asked about their travels. Tanya told me that over Christmas her grandmother had let slip that she had been living in Kharkov, in the eastern Ukraine, “when the Germans came”. She wouldn’t elaborate but was miffed that it hadn’t been on their autumn agenda. So she and Geoff had spent a few days there that spring.

Naturally I wanted to know more, but we’d reached the house and floral tributes from the service were waiting for us, some m neigh-bours who’d plainly been fond of the old woman. We decorated the living room, piling bouquets on sideboards and armchairs, hanging wreaths from the mantelpiece and around mirrors so that it looked almost festive.

We sat out in the back garden, just the three of us, sipping fizzy wine and munching corn chips. Tanya asked after my brother, and I also talked about my experiences with the abortive documentary. We didn’t so much skirt around any other details of my home life as tacitly declare them off limits.

At some point Geoff announced that he had a few errands to run. Tanya’s lack of surprise told me that this was a tactical move planned beforehand in the event of my appearance. Geoff even fetched my bag from the car and set it down at my feet.

As soon as he had gone, Tanya indicated my bag and asked if I was planning on staying the night.

I immediately plunged into a hectic confessional, beginning by saying that I’d told Lyneth I might be staying overnight at Geoff’s. I was conscious that I’d never mentioned her name to Tanya before, but I hurried on, telling her that it was true that we’d been going out since our schooldays but it was nothing passionate, that I’d stayed with her out of loyalty. I should have told her from the start but I was afraid it might spoil what we had. And what I still wanted.

Tanya regarded me gravely before saying that she’d had enough emotional upheaval for one day and did I want to see some holiday snaps?

I should have known that with Tanya these would not prove conventional tourist photographs. In fact the pictures, which showed a drab post-war Soviet city indistinguishable from many others, were far less interesting than the narrative that accompanied them.

Tatiana’s claim that she had been living in Kharkov “when the Germans came” proved ripe with all sorts of possibilities. The city, the fourth largest in the USSR, had been a centre of tank and tractor production and hence an important target for the invading Wehrmacht. The Germans first captured it in October 1941 and instituted a brutal regime in which opportunistic Ukrainian nationals were employed to police the local population. Always close to the front line and of strategic importance to both sides, Kharkov remained under military rather than Nazi administration. Briefly recaptured by the Russians fifteen months later, it was lost again within a month before the German army finally quit the city in August 1943. By this time the population had plummeted, with many of its women and young men deported west to serve the German war effort. Many others had died of starvation during the winter months when all available food was appropriated by its occupiers.

What there was no longer any means of knowing was how long Tatiana had actually spent in the city during this period—a question that was crucial to her ultimate fate. As a Russian national she would probably have been hated by the native Ukrainians, while as a university worker she would have been categorised as an intellectual by the Germans and shot. Had she remained in the city, she could only have survived by somehow making herself useful to the occupiers—but would have suffered the consequences with the return of the Red Army. Even enforced collaboration would not have saved her, given that liberated Soviet prisoners-of-war were routinely executed or shipped to the gulags.

Tanya showed me an old postcard of a building that she’d bought from a street trader who’d told her it was once the Gestapo headquarters in the city. Why such a building would be commemorated on a postcard was beyond both of us, but the old man had claimed that he was once imprisoned there. When the city was reoccupied by Soviet forces, the same building and its basement torture chambers had been used by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who added letterboxes so that liberated citizens could post denunciations of traitors.

Tanya had found no wartime trace of her grandmother. There was no way of knowing if she had used the same name in those days. Even if she had, it was a long time ago, and Petrova was as common a surname in Russia as Smith was in England.