Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore Page A

her warmest underwear, take her spare glasses, stitch a photo of little Volodya into her knickers.
    ‘She went and she didn’t come back.
    ‘There he was, six years old. His father survived for the time being – he died later, in the war. But Volodya wasn’t sent to an orphanage, he kept his identity, he knew who he was. His grandmother took him, because his father thought he would be safer there.
    ‘Volodya blames himself. He has never stopped blaming himself for being bad-tempered with his mother that morning, for saying that he wanted to sleep. For not embracing her. For not looking up when she remained there, bending over his bed. For hearing the door close behind her, and turning over in his bed, back into the warmth of it, and going to sleep again. A child of six cannot forgive himself.
    ‘So, this is the furniture that’s got to be in the room when I write about Stalin’s fugue.’
    ‘He told you all those things,’ said Olya, ‘and yet you’re not going to put them in your book.’
    ‘I’ve told you why.’
    ‘What happened to his mother will disappear, also,’ said Olya. ‘No one will remember it.’
    We were all silent for a while. I thought of Ruby in her bed, and the way I liked to sit beside her, when Adam was working and she was asleep. I thought of old gravestones and how they sometimes mark the deaths of children, one after another in the same family with the same first name, dying in their infancy. I thought about how we try to believe that parents then suffered less than we do, because they were accustomed to loss.
    But it isn’t so. We think it to comfort ourselves, but in thinking it we belittle them.
    Ruby stirred and gave a cat-like triangular yawn. Adam smiled and stroked her hair. I saw how he caught Olya’s eye. He had liked the way she noticed that Ruby was sweating, and the sure and gentle way she’d taken off Ruby’s cardigan. I looked at Olya and Adam and thought that they were similar people. They might belong together, in another world.
    But they did not belong together. It was Adam who could make me ache and feel the rich darkness unfold to let us down into it. It was my child he had on his lap.
    ‘So,’ said Joe. ‘Here we have him. It’s a beautiful summer day and he’s out at the dacha. The German army is advancing into Soviet territory at fantastic, unexpected speed.
    ‘Unexpected, that is, unless you are Stalin and you’ve had accurate, detailed intelligence about German troop movements, weaponry concentrations, overflights of Soviet territory, and plans for invasion after the spring planting. For months and months you’ve been getting warnings from the highest levels. Some of them have come direct from the German military itself.
    ‘You’ve ignored it all, and that looks like the act of a fool. But you’re not a fool. You are Stalin. You are a cunning, manipulative, highly skilled strategist. You grasp situations and you act: that’s why you are where you are, and why you’ve stayed there, at the top.
    ‘So let’s say that you were trying to gain time. You thought that you could stave off the German attack for a few vital months, by pretending to believe it was not imminent, by not allowing yourself to be provoked into action.
    ‘But you didn’t prepare. You didn’t do what was necessary. Or maybe you’d won so many battles that you simply could not believe that this time you would lose, and that Hitler would be even more cunning, more ruthless, more manipulative than you. That he would succeed, and you would fail.
    ‘Khrushchev says that when the invasion came you cried out: “ All that Lenin created we have lost for ever .”
    ‘Did you really say that? Or was Khrushchev remembering those nights when he had to dance a Cossack dance with his buttocks almost touching the floor? All that Lenin created we have lost for ever .’
    I could see that Olya didn’t like it when Joe talked like that, as if Stalin was still here with us and might answer