Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore Page B

him. Even to me it seemed like bad luck. The bones of some men don’t lie as still as they should.
    ‘Too many questions,’ said Olya. ‘People read histories in order to hear answers.’
    ‘You’re wrong, Olya,’ said Joe passionately. ‘You are completely wrong and you don’t understand why I am writing this book. People will read it in order to know what the right questions are. They’ll read it in order to go into those rooms and know where the light switch is, even though it’s dark.’
    ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ said Olya. ‘But it’s my history you’re writing about.’
    ‘A man like Stalin belongs to all of us,’ said Joe. ‘He couldn’t have been what he was without the permission of the whole world. Think of the Yalta Conference.’
    ‘Oh my God,’ said Olya, getting up again. ‘Why should I think about the Yalta Conference, or about any of it? Idon’t have to think about any of it any more, don’t you understand? Nobody can make me learn those parts of the history books if I don’t want to. Why should I give such a man space inside my head?’
    ‘He’s there already,’ said Joe. ‘He’s in all our heads. He’s colonized our minds. We haven’t begun to understand Stalin yet, or Hitler. We’re still reacting to the blows, that’s all. We are still staggering from them.’
    Adam was drinking more vodka. Away from the hospital, relaxed, holding Ruby, he was letting himself drink far more than usual. His face was smudged and softened. Maybe he was listening to Joe, maybe he wasn’t. He and Ruby together, her skin like his for all its baby pearliness. Mine was darker. His red curls, her red curls with their blue shine. There was a touch of sun in the afternoon light and it shone through the dirty double windows and onto their hair. They were beautiful together.
    ‘No phone,’ I said aloud.
    ‘Of course, there is a phone,’ said Olya quickly and a bit indignantly.
    ‘No. I meant no phone that will ring for Adam. No calls from the hospital.’
    He’ll be at peace, I meant. No one can touch us here.
    Adam smiled, and held out his hand to me, from far away. I leaned across the sofa and touched his fingers, but they were soft and unresponsive. He was a little drunk, and happy. Now Olya was watching him, too.
    ‘A man who was afraid of poison,’ said Joe. ‘He’d lost a lot of weight and looked skinny and shaky and old. A man who would go on the radio for the first time early in July, nearly two weeks after the invasion, speaking with marked hesitation, loudly drinking water in thepauses. He would sound shaky. A man whose hands sweated, so that when he handled documents he left oily marks on them. Maybe one day I’ll be holding a document and I’ll see those oily traces and I’ll know who read it before me, who put his mark on it.
    ‘But a clever man. Never, never to be underestimated. What I’m interested in is why he lost himself during those few days, and where he went. What he ate, who he talked to, where he walked, what he knew and what he didn’t know. What he thought about. What he believed would happen, now that the German army was on the move, with its superior equipment and the element of surprise on its side.
    ‘But Stalin hadn’t been surprised. He’d been shocked, that’s something else. He’d seen the surprise coming miles off, but the shock was that Hitler had dared to rouse him, as no one for years had dared to rouse him.
    ‘You have to think of a cunning man, a fanatically suspicious man, as suspicious of being fed false information as he was of being fed poisoned food. A man whose wife had killed herself and left a letter which scorched his spirit for the rest of his life.
    ‘Was Stalin really cornered when he went out to the dacha and disappeared from public life? No, I’m not sure. Maybe it was more like a body in crisis. The way the body can shut down most of its functions so that the vital ones are preserved. So that it keeps on living. Maybe, with