Heads You Win

“Perhaps you should remember that without Dimitri’s help, we wouldn’t have a roof over our heads, and there would be no possibility of you going to university,” she said, her voice rising with every word. “So I’ll say this once, and once only. You will stop spying on Dimitri, because if you don’t, you could end up just like your friend Vladimir, a lonely, sick individual with no morals and no friends.”

Alex was so shocked by his mother’s words that he didn’t speak for some time. He bowed his head and apologized, telling her he would never raise the subject again. After she left for work, he once again thought about her outburst. She was right. He couldn’t have done more for them, but what he hadn’t told his mother was that he feared that Dimitri was working for the KGB.

12

SASHA

London

Although Sasha worked hard when he returned to school for his final year, once the last football game had been played he hung up his goalkeeping gloves and began a strict regimen that even impressed his mother.

He rose at six every morning, and had already done two hours’ work before breakfast. He ran to and from school—almost the only exercise he took—and while the other boys were in the playground enjoying French cricket, he remained in the classroom, turning another page of another book.

Once the bell sounded at the end of the day, and everyone else had gone home, Sasha remained at his desk and, with the help of Mr. Sutton, tackled yet another past Isaac Barrow exam paper. Finally he would run home and eat a light supper, before going to his room to do his prep, often falling asleep at his desk.

As the day of the exam drew nearer, he somehow managed to work harder still, finding hours even his mother wasn’t acquainted with.

“The exam will be conducted in the Great Hall at Trinity,” the headmaster told him. “It might be wise if you were to travel up to Cambridge the night before, so you don’t feel rushed or under any unnecessary pressure.”

“But where would I stay?” asked Sasha. “I don’t know anyone in Cambridge.”

“I’ve arranged for you to spend the night at my old college.”

*   *   *

“Perhaps I should take the day off and come up to Cambridge with you,” Elena suggested.

Sasha managed to talk his mother out of the idea, but he couldn’t stop her buying him a new suit that he knew she couldn’t afford. “I want you to look as smart as your rivals,” she said.

“I’m only interested in being smarter than my rivals,” he replied.

Ben Cohen, who had just passed his driving test, drove Sasha to King’s Cross. On the way, he told him about his latest girlfriend. It was the word “latest” that made Sasha realize just how much he’d missed out on during the past year.

“And my dad’s going to buy me a TR6 if I get into Cambridge.”

“Lucky you.”

“I’d swap it for your brain any day,” said Ben, as he turned off the Euston Road and parked on a yellow line.

“Good luck,” he said, as Sasha climbed out of the car. “And don’t come home with a clean sheet.”

Sasha sat in the corner of a packed carriage, staring out of the window as the countryside rattled by, not wanting to admit that he wished he’d agreed to let his mother come with him. It was his first journey outside London, unless you counted away matches, and he was becoming more nervous by the minute.

Elena had given him a pound note to cover any expenses, but as it was a clear fine day when the train pulled into Cambridge station, he decided to walk to Trinity. He quickly learned only to ask people wearing gowns for directions to the college. He kept stopping to admire other buildings he passed on the way, but when he first saw the great gates above which Henry VIII stood, he was transported into another world, a world he suddenly realized how much he wanted to be part of. He wished he’d worked harder.

An elderly porter accompanied him across the court and up a flight of centuries-worn stone steps. When they reached the top floor he said, “This was Mr. Quilter’s room, Mr. Karpenko. Perhaps you’ll be its next occupant.” Sasha smiled to himself. The first person ever to call him Mr. Karpenko. “Dinner will be served at seven in the dining room on the far side of the court,” the porter said, before leaving Sasha in a little study that wasn’t much bigger than his room above the restaurant. But when he looked out of the mullioned window, he saw a world that appeared to have ignored the passing of almost four hundred years. Could a boy from the backstreets of Leningrad really end up in a place like this?

He sat at the desk and once again went over one of the questions Mr. Sutton had thought might come up in the exam. He was just starting another when the clock in the court chimed seven times. He left his books, ran down the stone staircase, and into the court to join a stream of young men chatting and laughing as they made their way around the outside of a manicured grass square, on which not one of them stepped.