217 Babel Street | The Penthouse, 1945
“You are entitled to know the facts, Lulu liebling. I travelled with Erich – Mr Mendelsohn – to Leningrad to visit the site of what would be the Red Flag Textile Factory. His baby. It was going to define Expressionism to the world. Though hardly anyone knew it then or knows it today, the ship-like design was mine. I have always dreamt of the sea. That’s why we’re in Blackthorn Sands now. But I am trying to explain: that was the time, the time I met your... father. He had luminous black eyes. Beautiful eyes, like yours. Mikhail. A thinker. A literary critic. A dissident. We fell in love instantly. I saw him only one other time, three years later. 1929. I’d managed to get back to Leningrad. It was the only time we were... together. Later that year, he would be exiled to Kazakhstan, and you would be born. I sent countless letters to be forwarded by his friends. But who knows if he received them? And even if he ever made it back to Leningrad, it is unlikely he survived the siege. Do you see? You were too young before. How could I tell you all this? Wasn’t it better for us all to pretend?”
And suddenly Lulu felt a hatred she’d never known in her sixteen years – hatred for her pretend father who was “fond” of her, hatred for her real father for whom she’d never existed, and hatred for all the men yet to come who would discard her too.