as though it was stuffed with cotton wool. When she got up to make tea in the morning, Tom said, ‘This is a little awkward, but I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’ And they both collapsed in giggles; it still made her giggle now. And then she remembered Karren with the double ‘r’ and stopped abruptly.
She got up and laid the book to one side while she waded into the cool waters of the lake. It was shallow close to shore but she always swam out until the cabin was barely distinguishable amongst the dense woods that surrounded it. From that distance she could see how isolated it was, with no other man-made structure for at least a mile on either side.
It was three weeks since she arrived at Lake Akanabee and she hadn’t been in touch with anyone back in England. She knew this might be construed as eccentric behaviour but the solitude was feeding something within her. She could feel herself getting stronger with each day of self-sufficiency and she supposed before long she would be tough enough to go home and deal with her marital problems. Perhaps she could also deal with her discontent about the whole fabric of her life. She was thirty-five years old and it was time to decide how she wanted to spend the next few decades. If she wasn’t going to be with Tom, she should look for someone else before the wrinkles and grey hairs set in. She shook her head to dispel this image. The thought of being with another man filled her with dismay: all that adjustment as you learned someone else’s tastes, their sleeping habits, their moods …
She dived down through the clear, cool water. She could see the bottom but it was further than it looked and she had to turn and come up for air before she reached it.
The heat was too intense for hard physical work so Kitty decided to take a day off and immerse herself in her great-grandfather’s novel. It was strange to get a glimpse of his personality through the story while living in his cabin and walking in his footsteps. She felt a kinship with him as she lay in the shade of the trees he must have looked up at, and read Interminable Love, his first novel.
Civil war separated Mikhail and Valerina when their families were sent to opposite sides of the country and he was forced to fight, but their love remained strong as ever. Neither would marry; neither could contemplate being with anyone else, so they lived half-lives shadowed by the memory of their first and only love.
As the sun set, Kitty lit a fire, cooked herself a burger on a rack set over the flames, opened some wine, and continued to read in the orange flickering glow. In the final chapter, Mikhail tracked down the remote Siberian village where Valerina now worked on a collective farm. He asked around to be told she was out in the fields operating one of the new-fangled tractors that had just been delivered. Modernity was often portrayed as evil in the novel, with machines taking the place of people in a metaphor that suggested the unquestioning obedience to the regime of its cowed citizens. Mikhail spotted Valerina from afar and began to run towards her. She saw him approaching, realised who it was, and tried to turn off the tractor’s engine – but something went wrong and it started to accelerate. It was heading straight for Mikhail so she pulled down hard on the steering wheel and as the vehicle turned it toppled onto its side, crushing her underneath. Mikhail struggled to lift the tractor but it was far too heavy. He called for help but there was no one in earshot. Valerina’s injuries were too severe for her to survive so he lay on the earth beside her, kissing her face as she slipped off into the blackness of death.
It was something of a clichéd ending but tears were streaming down Kitty’s cheeks. She wiped them on the hem of her t-shirt but couldn’t stop crying and soon she was sobbing out loud, with huge painful spasms that hurt her chest. She hugged herself and buried her face in the crook of her elbow, crying with the abandon of a child. She hadn’t even cried like this when her parents died. Was it because she was tipsy? What was this about? And as soon as she asked the question, she knew: it was because she missed Tom. There was so much she wanted to tell him. She wished he could see the work she had done on the cabin. She wanted to tell him about this Russian great-grandfather who had been an author. Perhaps he could help her to decide how to make her life more fulfilling … But he was not ‘her Tom’ any more. She couldn’t talk to him because the huge matter of his infidelity lay between them and until she could decide how to deal with that it was easier not to be in touch at all.
As she lay in bed that night, wrung out from crying, Kitty’s thoughts turned again to Dmitri Yakovlevich: he must have been a romantic soul to write so movingly about love. Why had he been living in such a remote spot? Was he alone there? Did he ever come to London to meet his great-granddaughter or was he too elderly and frail to travel by the time she was born? His bed had been in the spot where she now lay, in a corner beneath the window, so he must have looked out at the silver birch tree branches swaying in the moonlight just as she was doing now. She didn’t believe in ghosts but at that moment she felt as if she could almost sense his presence, standing a few feet away, calmly watching over her.
Next morning, she drove to the coffee shop with her laptop and tried to find out more about Dmitri. She went to an ancestry website she had used for journalistic research at college. It had a US immigration section, but she couldn’t find anyone with Dmitri’s name. She tried her grandmother Marta’s maiden name and the search engine whirred and finally came up with a child of eight years old, who had entered the United States in 1934. That sounded about right. Travelling with her, in a second-class cabin, were her mother, Rosa Liebermann – a name Kitty had never come across – and her brother Nicholas, aged nine. She’d heard there had once been a great-uncle Nicholas, so this must be them. She looked further up the page and there it was: Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama, aged forty-three years and four months. Was his real surname Malama? Why had he used Yakovlevich on his novels? The party’s place of departure was given as Berlin. It took Kitty only a few seconds to speculate that the reason for their departure from Germany in 1934 might lie in Rosa’s Jewish-sounding surname. But how had Russian-born Dmitri come to be in Berlin in the first place?
She tried several other searches but with no more success. She couldn’t find where Dmitri and Rosa had lived on arrival in the US, what schools the children had attended, or where he had worked.
She closed the computer and drove to Indian Lake for some pots of varnish. She wanted to cover the entire cabin with a weatherproof coating while the weather was dry. The man in Lakeside Country Stores recommended the type he said was most effective against the cold, snowy winters in these parts. He was respectful now, as if he’d accepted she knew what she was talking about.
While she worked on the front wall that afternoon, she heard an outboard motor on the lake and turned to see a mahogany-skinned, silver-haired fisherman close to the shore. She waved and walked down to the broken jetty to greet him.
‘Y’all bought the cabin, have you?’ he called, squinting up at it.
‘I inherited it,’ she explained. ‘My great-grandfather used to live here.’
‘Well, I’ll be!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re Dmitri’s kin? I thought that cabin was a write-off but he would be happy to see you doing it up all nice.’
Kitty blinked. This man had known Dmitri. Rather than spend an hour on the internet, why had she not thought to ask around locally? ‘Can I offer you a beer? Or a coffee?’ she asked.
‘A beer’d be nice.’ He tied his boat to one of the broken struts of jetty and leapt to shore. ‘Name’s Bob. I live over the far side.’ He gestured.
Kitty fetched two Buds and a bottle opener and they sat on the grass facing the water. He offered her a Marlboro and lit up himself when she refused.
‘It’s funny you should come along because I’ve been trying to find out about Dmitri,’ she began. ‘Were you two friends?’
Bob shook his head. ‘We said hi when we bumped into each other at the store, but he never invited me here and I never invited him to mine. We lived our own lives.’
‘Did his wife stay here with him?’
Bob frowned. ‘I never saw a woman. Just him padding around on his own, with his dog at his heel. He was a writer so I guess the solitude suited him.’
‘I read one of his books yesterday. Until recently I had no idea