Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

being taken away. You didn’t breathe, you didn’t move. You edited yourself and fitted in and survived.’
    ‘Why do you want to make them talk?’ asked Adam.
    Joe smiled. ‘I’m writing a book.’
    ‘Is that a good enough reason?’
    ‘It has to be. It’s the only reason I’ve got. I’m not going to include all these personal stories, anyway. When people say to me, “You won’t put that in your book, will you?” I’m not lying when I say that I won’t, it’s between them and me. Their personal stories are all-important but they’re not usable. I need to know them.I need to understand what I can about what it was like to live then. I need to be able to go into those rooms of the past and walk around in the dark without bumping into the furniture.
    ‘I’ve got to get to where he was. The person at the heart of all that terror. Terror was the dominant emotion of the twentieth century and we don’t understand it.
    ‘I talked to a man whose mother was taken away when he was six. She was a minor Party official. When Stalin, Molotov and Yezhov made their speeches to the Central Committee at the plenary in February 1937, it became clear that it was people like her who were the targets now. The Party itself was going to be turned inside out and gutted. No Party member was safe.’
    He stood up, went to the window and stood there looking out. Olya had come in with glasses of tea which she placed on the low varnished table. I lifted my glass of tea, and drank.
    ‘She sleeps well,’ said Olya, nodding at Ruby. Both of us looked at Ruby in Adam’s arms, her closed, pearly eyelids with the faint blue veins, her pale cheeks, the curl of dark-red hair that clung to her forehead, damp with sweat. It was very hot in the apartment.
    Olya leaned over, unfastened the cardigan Ruby was wearing, and very carefully slid first one arm and then the other out of its sleeves. Her thick dark hair fell forward, touching Ruby’s cheeks, touching Adam’s clothes. Neither of them stirred. Olya slipped the cardigan off, and folded it neatly.
    ‘Olya likes babies,’ said Joe. He had turned away from the window and was watching us all. I couldn’t tell from his voice if he was praising Olya, or blaming her.
    ‘Yes, I like babies,’ said Olya. ‘They have something which other people don’t have any more.’ But she said it very quietly, as if she had to say the words but did not expect him to listen to them.
    ‘The man I spoke to,’ Joe continued, ‘he didn’t know anything about the speech to the Central Committee, or the beginning of the Yezhov terror. He was a child of six. What he knew was this. His mother lost her job. Suddenly she was at home in the apartment all the time. He knew something was wrong because of the terror that clung round her like a smell. She kept saying that things were fine, there was nothing the matter. He remembers being angry with her and asking why she didn’t go to work as usual. He remembers that she was sorting out his clothes, putting away his winter clothes and mending his summer ones, and she got out a pair of shorts he didn’t like and said it would do for another summer, and he was angry.
    ‘Then one day, quite early, she woke him up by kissing him. The smell of terror was stronger than ever. She kissed him and held him tight and he would like to remember that he kissed her back and clung to her but he knows that he didn’t. He said, “I want to go back to sleep, Mama, leave me alone,” and he turned over in the bed, away from her. He knew that she was still there bending over him, but he kept his eyes squeezed shut.
    ‘You already know what I’m going to say. That was the last time he saw her. They didn’t come for her in the night, they asked her to go in and answer a few questions, clarify a few points. She went on her own two legs, not taking anything with her.
    ‘She was too afraid to listen to the truth of that smellof terror that surrounded her and told her to put on