2024/149: The Betrayal — Helen Dunmore

The blob of sun on the corridor wall wavers. The day shines before him, impossibly ordinary and beautiful. This must be how the dead think of life. All those things they used to take for granted, and can never have again. [p. 13]

Sequel to The Siege, The Betrayal begins ten years later, in late 1952. Anna is a nursery teacher, Andrei is a doctor, Kolya is a sullen and uncommunicative teenager who annoys the neighbours with his piano-playing. Andrei is asked by a colleague to give an opinion on a sick child, Gorya: "My ‘initial findings’," says the colleague, "are that this patient is the son of — an extremely influential person." No wonder he wants to pass the case to somebody else. Gorya forms a liking for Andrei, so Gorya's father Volkov -- a commissar in Stalin's secret police -- insists that Andrei takes the case. It does not end well, and Andrei, together with the Jewish doctor who performs surgery on the boy, become scapegoats.

Anna meanwhile is trying to conceive; trying not to draw her boss's attention to the fact that her father was a banned writer; hiding her father's diaries, which not even Andrei knows about; making a dress for the Doctors' Ball, from some silk left to her by Marina, with a sewing machine lent to her by her wealthy friend Julia; trying to keep envious neighbours at bay; trying to keep going after Andrei's arrest. She is a very ordinary person, but she does have good friends, and they are her salvation.

Andrei is the core of this novel, in particular his charged interactions with Volkov. His talent for diplomacy can only take him so far, though, and his professional ethics won't protect him from the system. In the background is the Doctors' Plot conspiracy, in which a number of doctors -- mostly Jewish -- were accused of deliberately causing harm to top Soviet figures. Andrei, though not Jewish, is subject to many of the same injustices and indignities. But Volkov still has a spark of humanity left in him.

I didn't find this as compelling a read as The Siege: in places it felt almost formulaic, and distinctly predictable. (I kept expecting more of a twist, perhaps Kolya's involvement in the denunciation of Andrei.) Perhaps the lack of tension was simply because, unlike the siege of Leningrad, the terrors of Stalin's Russia are so well-known, so common a theme in fiction. 

At the end of the novel, Anna celebrates the death of Stalin: "I hope that just before he died, he saw the ghosts of all the people he’d murdered, and knew that they were waiting for him." And perhaps that new world she was hoping for at the end of The Siege will have a chance at last.

I bought The Betrayal in November 2021, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.