All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.
Cold was crawling through the city like an invisible fog, crawling into every cranny, crawling into every cubbyhole, across the slums, up through the tower blocks, down along the Neva, elbowing aside all other concerns, crawling up the fat legs of its familiar winter throne. In three days the tyranny would be established anew. And those in the converted palaces and executive apartments would be forever on the threshold of their homes and offices and restaurants, forever putting on or taking off their heavy cloaks and furs and gloves and brightly colored department-store scarves; those on broken chairs watching TV in their subdivided rooms had already donned their redarned sweaters, their shawls, their ancient coats for the duration; and those lying in the lean-tos beneath the shadow of the power station now rose swaying to their feet and came out like thin sickened jackals scavenging for new cardboard, rags, rubbish to burn in their oil drums.
Henry lingered, shivering in the swelter of the superheated bank. He kept patting at himself—hand to knee, hand to cheekbone, one hand on the knuckles of the other. The first snow was falling on the Nevsky outside, and a filthy quagmire of evil gray was already caking the ground. He had mistimed it. In the past few days he had been forced to use only twice. The sickness was beginning, and he wasn’t sure he could last. He wanted Arkady gone. Go, you bastard, go. He needed that passport bought and paid for. The train left at eight. He needed to be alone, back in his cell, the door barred against himself. Belly full of sleeping pills. He had absolutely no faith in his endurance, nor in his spirit, least of all in the veracity of his intention to actually stop. He had done this only once before, and had lasted less than twenty-four hours. And he was afraid, terrified.
He closed his eyes, seeking other thoughts, another Henry. But for a moment there was no other Henry to turn to. Addiction was his entirety. He was sweating—sweating, shivering, shaking. His last hit had been more than thirty-two hours ago. His nose was running. And the roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums. He bit his cheek. Maybe he should buy one last hit—Leary might even give him some. He wanted wanted wanted wanted. He could not trust himself with this money as far as the end of the Nevsky. Just get home for now. Then maybe buy some. No. No no no no. No, come on, Henry.
The worst of the nausea wave passed and he screwed himself up and stepped through the door. The road was striped from the center with gray sludge—plain gray, dark gray, darker gray, and black gray, churned and squashed and churned again by the endless traffic. The blackest gray at the edge where the exhausts of the filthy buses disgorged their worst. The snow not as a blanket, he thought, but as some kind of blotting paper instead, revealing at last the colors of the truth. He pulled his collar up and his woolen bobble hat down. Buried deep in the inside pocket of the huge greatcoat he wore was the very last of his money and his passport. He would not tell Arkady, but he had borrowed right to the limit of his meager overdraft.
Concentrating on his footsteps—his old black leather Sunday service shoes utterly inadequate, the hole ever-worsening—he walked right toward the river, moving slowly through the crowds on the treacherous surface. Though indistinguishable on the outside from most others passing by, likewise bound in coats and hats and scarves and blinking snow out of their eyes, Henry was thinner now than he had ever been. And beneath his hat he had shaved his head.
He kept his eyes down and stared at the ground. He prayed rosaries by way of trying to claw back some calmness, mumbling to himself, his hands struggling to pat even where he had jammed them into his armpits. The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled gray ice. Pedestrians were squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the earth, it was virgin white.
Arkady’s coat felt unendurably heavy, as though his skeleton might give way beneath its weight. And his bones ached as though they were being gnawed by emaciated rats from within. But the wind —a capricious Beria to Stalin’s steely cold—was coming down the river to tighten the regime (he could feel it now as he passed beneath the Admiralty), and to remove the coat was unthinkable. He had a sudden cramp in his gut and tightened his jaw’s clench against it. He began to shuffle to avoid jogging his stomach more than necessary and to minimize the risk of slipping on his gripless soles. His toes were numb.
At the far side of the little park, he thought he heard someone behind him and turned… He stopped a moment, his jaw working, looking back, standing by the railings beneath the Bronze Horseman, Peter’s mount rearing against the snake of treason. There was nobody. He peered back into the snow, seeking if not the who, then at least the why and the how. But his past was all confused, fretful, restless. He could no longer find the main vein.
But it was there—beneath, beside, between all the other damaged tributaries of the blood, twisting, twining—the thread of his life.
Old Henry, Henry Stuart Wheyland, was the only issue of a loveless marriage, brought up by a mother whose latent Catholic piety rapidly ossified following not a divorce but a parting-of-the-ways trauma into a great and rigid structure of brittle dicta, observances, rituals matched only by the adoration she gave to her one and only holy child. Henry rewarded her with endless exam successes—a flare for chess, for reading, for doggedly enjoying choral music in the face of the wholesale mockery and ridicule of his fellows. He was altar boy and sacristan, teacher’s pet, assiduous student, and seminarian—all before he dared to look himself in the eye.
Then his mother died. Called to Jesus one evening crossing the road outside the junior school, where she had been putting up decorations in preparation for the school play. Called to Jesus by a minibus driver with a belly full of cheap beer, navigating with his knees, one hand pincering a cigarette, the other clamping to the side of his head a cell phone in which could be heard the recorded voice of a woman promising all callers that her pussy was getting wetter and wetter.
And that was it for Henry. The gates opened, and ready or not, real life came swarming through. Faith was quickly revealed as a farce, belief a beguilement, the whole religious enterprise simply a mighty and mesmerizing distraction from the heart of existence. A colossal and redundant folly. The crisis was not a crisis, it was the termination. He had an audience with his bishop and told him that he could not go on.
Continuing to live in his mother’s house, he retrained as a teacher. He read and read and read. He traveled alone to London—to concerts, spending his tiny inheritance on tickets, modest meals out, solo gin and tonics. Two years later he was qualified and teaching at a comprehensive school. But he was nervous, awkward, jittery, and the children could smell his fear. They savaged him. He drank cheap wine in the evening. His classes were a joke—the only quiet pupils were those who were openly doing their homework for another subject. He considered it a success if he could get through the week without any physical violence in his class. He started to drink at lunchtime. His afternoon rages quietened the children for a while. And he resorted to forcing them to read aloud. But still they mocked him, by breaking off whenever they felt like it. Emily Bront&edie; sucks fat donkey ass, they said, what was the point? And he could not remember what he was supposed to say in response. Perhaps they were right: perhaps she did suck fat donkey ass.
He sold his mother’s little home in the real estate boom, he paid off her little mortgage. He added the sum to her little legacy and set off for Asia, relatively rich. Good for at least as many years as he could see ahead, assuming he wasn’t profligate. And for a while it worked. He was born again. He was still young enough, and nobody suspected the failed teacher, the seminarian, the skinny priggish schoolboy.
Through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, then by plane to Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, from Egypt to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Greek islands for a summer; then back east to India—India east, south, west, and north, an odyssey within an odyssey. He acquired the dusty disguise of the traveler And for a time, at least, the chugging contentment of momentum was his. A quiet beer on the go from noon where possible, his sipping spirits where not.
And yet all the while a shadow of awkwardness continued to track him, forever at his back—however far he went, however fast he went there. Shy, clumsy, tongue-tied and graceless with the women, ignored by the men, he was forever ill at ease among his fellow travelers, save for a brief half-hour between inhibited sobriety and introverted drunkenness. Gradually, gradually, the truth that his youth had failed to grasp stole upon him: that no traveler alive yet escaped himself. And this realization caused his mind to falter and slump, and he began to see the world in its old familiar ways again. But worse: because now, he realized, he had replaced his former parochial hopelessness with the hopelessness of entire continents; the futility of addressing himself to schoolchildren had become the futility of addressing populations. Everywhere humanity seemed to seethe and shriek before him, redder yet in tooth and claw than nature ever dared to be. The Hindus hate the Muslims, it whispered, and the Muslims hate the Hindus; the Jews hate the Arabs and the Arabs hate the Jews; the Protestants hate the Catholics, the Catholics hate the Protestants; the Sunis hate the Shiites and the Shiites hate the Sunis; Animist versus Orthodox versus Islamic versus Hindu versus Buddhist versus Hindu versus Sikh versus Islamic versus Jew versus Christian versus Jew versus Islamic versus Orthodox versus Animist—caste, creed, and capital, the unholy trinity and the keenest blades of the cutting world. Too many fucking people fucking. And so, one multicolored afternoon, to a certain dragon’s lair with Anthony, a fellow teacher of English as a foreign language.
The exact moment of his fall was never clear to Henry. Perhaps the first pipe. Perhaps the hundredth. Perhaps later. In any event, he stopped drinking altogether. If a balm for the eczema of his spirit was all this time what he had been seeking, then this was a better balm than his wildest imaginings. He never touched booze again. He went north with Anthony, where it was easier. They crossed into Pakistan—Lahore, Gujranwala, Islamabad. They fell in with others. They passed east into Kashmir. Anthony went to Thailand. But (cool now, relaxed) Henry made his home in a commune of sorts with Dutch, American, Scots, French, and various Scandinavians. Others passing through. Captain Charlie and his wife, Anjum, ran the place, had been there since 1965. There were other teachers, aid workers traveling, an English-language Web site designer, bad musicians, lapsed missionaries, students, wasters… Henry and his new friends sat high on escarpments and looked down the iridescent valleys while their pipes bubbled. He dreamed of paradises lost and found. He laughed and was at ease with the women and the men alike. Nine months passed. He worked a little at teaching again, happy to have rediscovered a vocation. One May day he was paid well to go to a young lawyer’s home village, near the border with Jammu, to help two younger brothers with their English. The commission was for a month. But Henry became sick after four days and had to go back to the commune and return the money. He did not even realize that he had withdrawal symptoms. It was one of the Scots, Craig, who told him that he was hooked.
In the late summer there were new rumors of helicopters. People began to leave. The military was said to be arriving. Police. Some of the local boys stopped coming for the cricket at Captain Charlie’s pitch; Charlie blamed the Americans “for ruddy well polarizing the ruddy world.” One afternoon the little Internet place in town refused to let Henry use the computer. Meanwhile, Craig and Amy, a New Yorker pretending to be Canadian, were going north in three weeks. There was a road open. They could get forty-eight-hour transit visas.
Henry caught the bus with them. Overnight, in Kabul, Amy acquired a cache of unopened syringes—from the army, she said. You needed less, much less, this way. It was better than smoking and cheaper.
And so Henry moved on.
Dushanbe, Tashkent, Qaraghandy, Astana… and eventually to Russia. Omsk. Their chief difficulty not scoring but the supply of clean needles. Henry was lucky. He had good veins.
A week or so later, Amy went one stage further and got married for money. So Henry caught the train for Moscow with Craig.
The relationship was no longer casual. He had to take it seriously. Time to settle down. Become a creature of habit. He taught a little in Moscow, rented a place with Craig in a clean and decent flat near the Ismailova Park. He used twice a day. He still had plenty of money. New Henry was… cool.
By the time he made his first visit to Petersburg six months later, Henry was shooting up only to return himself to normal. The drug was having no other effect. He went back again and again (on what he called the Anna Karenina train), and each trip to Petersburg enchanted him further—the easier size of the city, the relative safety, and its beauty. The music. (So much music so close by.) At some point in the interim Craig started stealing from him. So before the winter came, he decided to move again, taking his two ballasts with him—the satchel and the scag bag—to keep him on an even keel. He found a generous and reliable dealer. He fell in love.
Henry came now to the wide-openness of the river, where the wind was driving the snow obliquely, closer in, so that the cars were forced to slow and loomed one after another out of a closing veil of yet more gray. Already there were swirls of thickened water in the Neva below, ice forming in darkening slabs, the remaining river running strange and contrariwise in channels in between. He went on, face turned away from the angle of the snow. Momentum.
On the far side of the bridge he slipped and fell awkwardly on his side, twisting his knee and scraping his hand despite the gloves. The accident ripped him from his silent rosary to the full consciousness of the present, and he was forced to take off his glove to suck at his hand, where he had somehow drawn blood. He swore, a litany of the worst words he knew. He had come far enough on foot. But he had no money, he had no money, they had no money. Actually, yes, he had money. He had all this money in his coat. No, he had no money. Yes. No. Yes. No. Just get home. And then. He turned left toward the warship, walking with some difficulty along the embankment. Now the snow was really sticking, each flake seeming to outlast the previous. He did not have the strength, he knew it. He did not have the strength for anything. But he struggled on, arguing with himself, praying, then cursing.
He was assailed by a sudden surge of panic: that his inner pocket had given way during the fall. He turned his back to the snow, bit off his glove, painfully undid two of the buttons, and reached inside with numb fingers to feel for passport and the plastic wallet they had given him at the bank. Both were still there.
He buttoned up and went on, shuffling forward, hands jammed under his arms. He had noticed that the urge toward self-sacrifice was growing more and more powerful the weaker he became—something to do with purgation, he thought, or with providing his life with meaning. And the fact of his own blood amazed him. Astonishing that it carried on circulating so devotedly when he had long ago ceased to care for its welfare. Yes, the harder things became, the more he wanted them to become even harder. Test me then, you dead, dumb, deaf little god. Test me. See if I care. See if I value this life you claim to have given me. Perhaps this state of mind was the secret of all holy men and women. The urge to make a life mean something. Yes, what the prophets really wanted—Christ, Muhammad, Moses, and the rest—was to give their lives meaning. And what a feat of persuasion, if you could pull it off: my words are God’s words, my life redeems all humanity for all time, my life is the only guide, my life is the example for eternity. Selfish, histrionic little narcissists. He had no more money. Zero. He was going to kick his baby, his bitch, his beautiful angel, his boy. Arkady was going to get the passport he needed. And go. Don’t let him down now. Don’t you dare let him down, Henry Wheyland.
But he could walk no farther and he had come far enough and the point, if there was one, was that he should not injure himself or be late on account of sticking to a smaller vow when the larger sacrifice was what really mattered. A ride from here would make little or no difference; Arkady would have a few rubles, surely. What were a few rubles in so many thousands anyway? Yes, he had come far enough. He crossed the road and stuck out his arm. A brown Lada skidded to a halt almost immediately, bald tires gliding through slush. Henry climbed in, rubbing at his knee. Across the river, the buildings of the English Quay watched him through the snow.
By chance or design, Arkady was already waiting on the curb when the Lada drew up—boots on, mittens and some giant old and ugly striped sweater that Henry had never seen before. Christ, he’s going to be cold, Henry thought; and then he remembered that he himself was wearing his friend’s coat.
Arkady opened the far door and leaned in.
“Okay?”
“Yes. We’ll be a few rubles short.” Henry looked across. He felt the need to explain, to apologize. “Sorry—I meant to walk. I hurt my hand, I—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Arkady got into the car, his knees squashed against the front seat, and gave the address in Russian—up by the Black River.
The driver nodded, eyes briefly in the rearview, crunched the brittle engine into first gear, and began to turn around, yanking at the wheel as though it were the door to a breached compartment on a submarine.
“I will tell Leary,” Arkady said. “The bastard will enjoy it anyway… Shows him how he has everything—every ruble. That we have nothing left. Not even to pay for a fucking ride back.”
Henry’s lips worked. He felt nauseous again, unable to acknowledge anything. Maybe it was the engine fumes being pumped in by the car’s cheap little heater. He unfastened the coat, reached inside, and handed his friend the plastic wallet.
“This is everything.”
“I can go alone,” Arkady said.
“No.”
They had stopped at the end of the street, the driver waiting for a gap in the careering traffic.
“You do not have to come.”
They both knew that he was hoping for an extra hit.
“I am coming.”
Arkady met his eye. “Okay.”
Henry wound the window down—stiff and awkward on the ratchet—and turned his head to breathe the icy air. Under the cover of snow, the darkness was slipping in.
The driver was young and in a hurry to earn his money. The car slewed. The wipers squeaked and the heater scraped. Henry watched the lights of the other cars coloring the snow. Of course it had turned out that Kostya’s contact was Grisha, which meant Leary. Bitter wasn’t the word for it. (There were far better words in Russian.) And yet it was to Vsevolod Learichenko—Uncle Seva, as Grisha called him—that the two were now driving. Arkady knew of nobody else. Petersburg was not such a big city. Moscow, London, New York, Los Angeles, even Paris, there might have been alternatives. Fake-passport purchase was still easy enough with money and contacts, Henry understood, but not half as easy as the newspapers pretended. The biggest danger was of being scammed by amateurs. Paradoxically, you were safest going with the gangs. Or you risked being arrested at the airport, your money already spent, your forgers long disappeared. They could have gambled and gone to Moscow, but they were in a hurry, and there was something perversely persuasive, Arkady reasoned, in trusting Leary: since he had already reduced them to nothing, he would not therefore risk cheating them further. Leary would assume, rightly or wrongly, that Arkady (a native of the city, unlike Leary himself, and friends with fringe citizens enough) would seek some kind of violent recompense if further torture were inflicted. An unnecessary irritation that Leary would not wish for. Far better to have Arkady well served. Far better to have Henry on his staff. Far better to keep out of petty troubles. So Arkady had calculated Leary would calculate. And Henry had been in neither mood nor condition to argue.
The car slithered to a stop. Henry sucked at his injured hand, then clutched at his leg, which was twitching again, threatening cramp. The snow was thicker than ever as the two climbed out. Arkady went to the driver’s window to hand over the rubles for the ride. Henry eased his way around the back of the car, little scoops of snow wedging themselves through the hole in his shoe. Arkady was pointing at a low covered passageway wide enough for a single cart.
The center of Leary’s operation—or one center of it, at least—appeared to be a filthy, soot-blackened brick building six stories high, constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century on the outskirts but stranded now amid a squalid swath of scum and shortage that stretched like a tide mark around the edges of the city. Henry shuffled over and stopped beneath the shelter. He had taken off his hat in the car, and he looked like some bewildered creature of the gulag—shaven-headed, gaunt jaw chewing on nothing, kneading at his hat with both hands. Arkady came over at a run and ducked within.
The passageway was heaped with putrescent rubbish—cans, split plastic bags, rancid food, old clothes—a rotten mouth that swallowed them whole. They groped their way forward until ahead of them they saw a curtain of snow, pale strands of saffron lit by a weak lamp beyond. They passed through, into yet another minicourtyard.
And this time hell wasn’t down but up. They climbed the communal stairs in the darkness as far as an innocuous door on the second floor. Here they stood still with their hands where they could be seen through the spy hole and waited for the unlocking process to begin. When the door finally opened, it was Grisha—face like a cheese grater, fingers like bratwurst—who motioned them inside.
They were led to a large front room, which, save for an incongruously yellow bicycle helmet hanging from a nail by the blinded window, was entirely bare.
“Wait there.”
Grisha went back out into the corridor and began to relock the main apartment door.
There was nowhere to sit, so they stood. Henry’s nose was streaming, his body sodden with sweat inside the greatcoat, despite the cold. He was praying that the cramps would not come back. Time snagged like a forgotten rag flapping on a barbed-wire fence.
An hour later—or it might have been five minutes or three days—Grisha reappeared.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?” Arkady asked. They were speaking in Russian. “This way.”
“How long is this going to take?”
“You have to go somewhere?”
“I have to take my dog to fuck your mother again. She already paid for it.”
Grisha turned and answered him with a grin like a scar.
Through his ache, Henry wondered vaguely what was going to happen. But Grisha carried on walking. Henry thought that maybe they were going out into the communal hall again, but instead they continued down the corridor, past a series of shut doors on the right, and entered a room at the opposite end of the apartment, this one furnished haphazardly, as if uncertain whether a lounge, an office, or a doctor’s waiting room.
“Wait here.”
Grisha disappeared, and they heard a moment’s conversation in Russian as he opened another door and then nothing again.
Arkady looked around with mixed scorn and tense wariness. “Now he has let you see this place, you know that he will kill you if he thinks you fuck with him.” He addressed Henry directly in English. “I am serious. This is not a child’s thing. People die in this world all the time. Nobody cares.”
“I know people die. I am not going to fuck with him and I am not going to work for him.”
Arkady fixed the Englishman with his candid, sunken eyes, his gaze seeming to come from a long way within. “I hope. But you are far from your place in the world now.”
Henry could neither answer nor stand any longer, and so he lowered himself into the disheveled armchair against the far wall and closed his eyes. How in the name of God had he come to this? At least he had stopped caring about anything—even Arkady. All he wanted. The only thing in the world he wanted. And he wanted it with every cell of his body. Was his fix. Maybe this was the point where the virgin tapped the shoulder of her son, busy in the office of his heaven, and made her intercession on Henry’s behalf? He hoped so. Do it, woman—do it now.
Arkady took the upright chair on the far side of the desk, which sat more or less in the middle of the room.
And then they waited some more.
Eventually Leary came through the door, quiet, almost stealthy, like a media mogul who enjoyed understating his power. He had an over-bite, a receding lower jaw, and the beginnings of a double chin, so that his face appeared to slope away smoothly from the overhang of his front teeth. His hair was longish, curly, and black; he had protruding dark eyes, suntanned skin, and a slight but habitual hunch that created the impression that he was always addressing people from below, looking up with bulbous solicitation from between the curtains of his hair, though he was tall enough to meet most on the level. He was carrying a neat blue plastic wallet, and he sat down almost cheerily in his leather swivel seat behind the desk, opposite Arkady. He might have been a helpful if unsavory high-street travel agent. Grisha followed a moment later, cigarette burning, and heavily stationed himself on the ragged sofa just behind.
Arkady continued to stare at the ceiling, his head back on the lip of his uncomfortable plastic chair, legs stretched out directly into Leary’s foot space. In his deeper armchair behind, Henry was likewise ignoring the arrival, though for very different reasons: he was sitting back but gripping the frayed armrests, his knuckles all but popping from their sockets, his face as white as dough, a cold sweat shining on his forehead. His pupils seemed to be widening visibly, twin black holes gorging on nerve and cell. He was shivering spasmodically, and every few seconds he leaned forward, pressing his head toward his knees against the cramp. Then he’d straighten up, stretch his jaw, yawning, before clamping his mouth shut again, lips working.
Leary’s eyes slid over Henry for a moment, and then he began carefully to take out the contents of the wallet and check them through. When this task was completed to his satisfaction, he glanced up with studied casualness.
“Grisha, get me something for this fuckup.” His Russian was heavily accented but from where exactly was impossible to tell. “Before he shits himself on our lovely furniture.”
Henry was rubbing his hands together as if to start a fire then and there between his palms.
“Leave him alone.” Arkady leveled his gaze and faced Leary. His voice was the flatter Russian of a pure Petersburger. “He’s coming off. Leave him.”
Leary frowned and then smiled his selachian smile. “I am giving it to him. I am not asking for money.”
Grisha remained unsure, an indeterminate menace, about to get up, about to continue sitting down.
“He’s coming off,” Arkady repeated. “Just leave him.”
Leary sighed. “He won’t get through it.”
“He will.”
“How long has it been?”
“A day and a half.” Arkady eyed the passport and papers that Leary was returning to the file. “Is this everything I need?”
“Yes.”
Arkady held out his hand.
“Of course.” Leary handed the file across the desk. “Okay, yes. He might get through the withdrawal—most of them manage it once or twice. Even the scum. But he won’t make it through the months afterward.” Leary’s expression was all amused weariness. “I am sure you know this. You must have seen it a hundred times. They can get off, but they can’t stay off. It’s not even the drug. It’s the addiction itself—they can’t replace the addiction. Addiction is… is part of them. It’s the conversation they want to have with themselves. It’s who they’ve learned to be. And when it goes, they do not know what to fill the emptiness with.”
“Is this the visa?” Arkady indicated a page of the passport.
“That is your visa.” Leary nodded.
Arkady examined it closely.
“Even when they quit five or ten times, they always come back. It’s a cycle. And you know it. So don’t be stupid and don’t be cruel. Look at the poor guy. He might as well save himself the pain… because he will be back in three days, a week, a month, six months.” Leary addressed Henry directly in English. “Henry? Henry? You want something?”
Henry was facedown again—head in hands, hands back and forth across shaven scalp. He nodded repeatedly. Then straightened abruptly. His face could not have spoken of need more eloquently. His lips peeled back from his yellow teeth. “Yes.” He gave a series of shallow nods. “Yes. Fuck. Give it to me.”
Arkady passed Henry’s money across the table. “Here is the money,” he said in Russian.
Leary was distracted. He began to count—climbed as far as ten thousand rubles and then stopped.
Henry was patting.
“Grisha, please.” Leary had likewise returned to Russian. “Before he starts shitting himself. The best. And some to take away.”
“I said leave him.” Arkady eyes were as level as his voice.
Grisha stiffened. Leary looked up, his own eyes seeming to bulge and swim while Arkady’s remained still, sunken. There was a moment when a different future might have begun. But perhaps Leary did not want any bodies in his office. More than this, perhaps there was something about Arkady that made Leary want to outwit him rather than injure him, as if physical pain were what the other expected and would not therefore hurt him.
“Arkasha,” Leary said, in the manner of someone explaining the rules of the house, “I don’t want to start some bullshit with you. I have nothing against you, and it is a waste of my time. What is the point? But Henry needs what I have.”
Grisha sat down.
Leary’s voice hardened. “And please remember, I don’t make him take the shit. I don’t make anyone take it. He takes it because he wants to take it. They all have a choice. And if it weren’t me, it would be someone else giving it to him. And you know—you know—that it will never stop.” Leary lowered his head but kept his eyes on Arkady. “If the governments were not such gutless suckers of rat cock, they would hand it out to these people. They would have their taxes. All that money they have been missing would suddenly appear. Chechnya, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Indonesia… all the shit holes fixed. The world’s big problem—gone.”
Leary licked finger and thumb and paused as if waiting for Arkady to speak.
But Arkady said nothing.
So Leary’s eyes went over to Henry again (who had his head back now, mouth gaping) before swiveling once more onto Arkady. He continued his count, saying the numbers out loud. Then he softened his voice. “At least mine is pure and safe. He takes more of mine, he will be okay. He comes off now, he goes back on tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. When you have gone. His body is not used to it. It’s fucking chaos for him. He buys some cheap shit from Kostya or worse. He overdoses. That’s how it happens. We’ve both seen it a thousand times.” He shrugged, his hands poised to finish their count. “Or… Or he works for me. He sells to the million young wankers who are coming… Prague, Riga, Tallinn, they’re moving east. The Europeans are returning. They’ll do away with the visa here soon enough and the place will be crawling with fresh young whores and used old bank notes.” Leary indicated the Englishman with a small thumb. “And Henry will be fine. Safe—from the police, from me, from himself. He takes what he needs. I put him in a decent apartment. Buy him some clothes. Then, when the day comes, when he really wants to stop, he stops. Because that’s the only way it ever happens. He stops because he wants to stop for real. Not because of some bullshit. Not because his boyfriend won’t fill his dirty hole for him. You know that I am right.” He counted the remaining stacks quickly. But laid the last note down slowly. “You’re short. But I let you off.”
Arkady stood up, holding the file. “I do not give a fuck what’s right. Right means nothing to me.”
Grisha was also back on his feet, cigarette burned down almost to his inner-tube lips.
Arkady crossed to Henry and began unclasping the Englishman’s knuckles from the armrests of the seat. He bent down to face his flatmate, pausing for a moment to look into the vacancy of his pupils. Then he hooked the great magnitude of his hands under Henry’s armpits and hoisted him forward to the edge of the chair.
“I need some fucking shit, Arkasha,” Henry said, grimacing. Then again, half crying, half whispering: “I need some fucking boy.”
Arkady put down the file a moment, turned his back and squatted, and reached behind himself for Henry’s body. Then, grasping both legs, he dragged the Englishman from the chair and up onto his back. He bent awkwardly to gather the file and then stood up with the appearance of ease.
“Not this time,” he said. “Not today. Not while I am here.” He shifted his friend’s body. “And you know, Seva, that if this passport does not work, I will kill you myself.” He turned. “Grisha, open the door. We are going.”
Saturday night. Second night back in London. And already she felt different. The fury and the apprehension were still there, but the long free fall was over. She had money for three months—four, at a stretch. And she was determined. For far too long, far too much crap had clogged her mind. (Her own, she readily admitted, as well as everybody else’s.) And it was true, crap had a way taking over a person’s days, little by little, until there was nothing but crap. Now, instead, to face with sober senses the real conditions of her life and her relations with those about her. No more false starts. No more mythology. She heard her friend’s familiar voice calling up the stairs.
Five minutes later she stood in the large front room, two children at her knees, as Susan Thompson and her husband, Adam, backed parentally out of the front door onto Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town, London.
Susan spoke as she searched the pockets of her red coat for the house keys. “The terrible two will probably stay awake longer than normal, just because you’re here and they’re excited, but Joe should sleep straight. Fingers crossed. There are loads of books in their bedroom—you can refuse to read to them unless they get into bed. That’s what Adam does. They like anything with monsters and a good story.”
Adam shouted from halfway down the steps, “Monsters! Monsters do the trick. You’ll have to read until they are both asleep, though, or they won’t let you go.”
Susan, having found her keys, added softly, “Any problems, just call the mobile.”
“Same goes for you,” Isabella said wryly.
Susan smiled and rolled her bright green eyes. She had shoulder-length midbrown hair and was pretty in a plain kind of way, or plain in a pretty kind of a way; medium height, medium build, and English all the way back to pre-Roman Gloucestershire. The two had known each other since they were three or four. They went their different ways for a while, during Isabella’s turbulent college years, but they had also lived together for eighteen months before Isabella left for the States.
“Okay. So go. See you later on.” Isabella put her hand on the head of the eldest, Mark.
“Be good for Auntie Isabella, both of you. If I hear of any trouble, then…”
“Bye, Suze. Go. Go on, go.”
“See you later. Don’t wait up if we’re late.”
“Oh, I’ll be up. Jet lag.”
“Bye-bye.” Susan gave her children one more wave.
“Will you come on?” Adam shouted.
Susan widened her eyes as if to say “Poor man, he thinks he’s in charge,” and for a moment Isabella was aware of the curious effect of their shared surety of each other, something that seemed to affirm that long before Adam, the terrible two, or baby Joe, they were friends. A weird thing, Isabella thought as she shut the door, this sense of knowing someone of old. Seeing someone in the thick of her circumstances—woman, wife, mother—and yet being familiar with so much of what had led to these circumstances that the circumstances themselves seemed merely that: circumstantial.
Isabella followed the two children (already racing ahead) to their playroom upstairs, watched them go inside, and then entered Adam’s tiny office. She turned the computer on and waited for it to come alive. She was grateful that she had not been enlisted in the evening herself. Adam had cheerfully invited her, and Susan had been required to slip her deftly from the noose. There were going to be ten or so other guests at the dinner party, “singles as well as couples,” Adam had said encouragingly, so he thought. Increasingly, though, Isabella found the very idea of a couple annoying. Not because she herself was now “single”—another word she could hardly even think, let alone say, without retching—but because to her mind the whole (previously interesting) female dialectic between being part of a “couple” and being “single” seemed to have somehow metamorphosed into this sprawling, transatlantic, society-wide giant squid of a cliché that insisted on stinking and dripping all over more or less everything—most viscidly of all at dinner parties. It wasn’t the blithely impoverished fiction or the dumb TV series that killed her the most (though these were surely written by the soulless undead) but the fact that so many women she met seemed to reach so quickly for the tentacles of this mighty cliché, the better, they believed, to swing into their conversations. Indeed, so tightly did they seem to cling to these tentacles that it was as if the very fact of their being alive at all had become secondary to their being “single” or “coupled up” or married.
She had no good mail. An invitation to buy more Viagra so that she could go harder for longer more often, and a chance to own a pair of little Suki’s freshly worn knickers. She surfed some news sites awhile, then looked idly at one-bedroom flats to rent in North London, then went to Molly’s home page, then typed Molly a simple “Hi there, it’s me—made it so far” e-mail.
Feeling at a loose end and yet with too much energy, she got up, left the computer on, and went to check on the baby. He was safely asleep. She wondered for a moment why her own mother had not had any more children. Then she wondered who would be the father of hers. She bit her lip and half smiled. After all the remonstration and dissent, perhaps she would just offer herself to the most handsome and intelligent doctor she could find. Get the good genes and the delivery care all done in one go.
She shut the door quietly and returned to the playroom, there to behold the baffling multilayered miracle of her oldest friend’s son and daughter playing two characters in their computer game version of The Lord of the Rings.
She had a moment’s misgiving, trying to remember if they were allowed to play on the console, and if so, which games. But both children seemed so adept at what they were doing—butchering orcs—that she could only assume this was normal.
“Okay. You two. You’re allowed to play for another half an hour, then your mummy says you have to help me make hot chocolate and popcorn.”
Girl hit pause. Boy sighed.
“We’re not allowed.” This from Louise.
“What?”
“Popcorn.” This from Mark.
“Why not?”
“Mark made a right mess when we did it last time and spilled everything on the floor and nearly burned the whole kitchen down and the house.”
Mark made a face of profound older-brotherly scorn. “No I didn’t.”
“You did. Mummy basically had to ring the firemen.”
Mark: “No.”
Louise: “Yes.”
“You are such a liar. Mum did not have to ring the fire brigade.”
He took a six-year-old’s pleasure in knowing the right word. And Isabella observed his emphasis take the wind out of four-year-old Louise’s tiny new sails.
“Well, your mum said it was okay to try again as long as I helped this time. So—you guys carry on for a bit. I’m going to be upstairs on the computer if you want me. And after the hot chocolate and the popcorn, we can decide what story you want.”
“Hobbit,” Mark said, turning back to the screen.
“It’s the prequel,” Louise added, nodding assuredly.
The slaughter of orcs began again with renewed vengeance.
She decided to compose a letter on the computer. She could write it out by hand tomorrow. Francis would have the address. If she could get something down, then she could post it straightaway. Two days maximum to Paris. No sense delaying. And e-mail clearly wasn’t getting through. She sat down, refreshed the screen, and felt her entire body go tense.
My dear Isabella,
Thank you for your last three e-mails. And I am very sorry not to have replied until now. The reasons for my silence are both silly and rather more sobering. Simply, I did not have my computer for much of November and so missed your first and second of earlier that month; and then, unfortunately, I suffered a stroke, and so missed your third until yesterday. Fortunately, I am home from the hospital now, and the individual who had the loan of the laptop has returned. And so, what a welcome surprise to hear from you, the first name I saw on my first day back.
Of course there is so much that I wish to write—in response to your thoughts about your mother’s death, your curiosity regarding her life, and in response to your oblique, but no less kind for that, inquiry about my circumstances. But forgive me if I plead a twofold pardon for the moment: though I am very lucky—the stroke was relatively minor, and recovery has been frustrating but steady—it is still rather difficult for me to concentrate (or type) for too long; and, second, well, there is so very much I would like to talk to you about that it seems altogether overwhelming to begin here on e-mail.
For now, then, let me say that I am well enough, the computer thief has become my carer by way of recompense, and so I am looked after. That I continue to live here in Paris. That I am awed by your being so long in New York and would love to hear more about this and the rest of your life. That, most of all, I am sorry we have been incommunicado for so long and hope this change is a permanent righting of that wrong. And, finally, that I think of you every day.
It seemed to Arkady Alexandrovitch as if the night itself had grown hoarse. He lay sideways across the wear-smoothed wooden seats and listened to the clank and thunder of the train heading west, his bag a pillow, his coat a blanket. He had not been able to sleep properly but wandered back and forth, sometimes wakeful, sometimes in deep reverie, never quite gone from himself. There was little purpose now—the border could not be far off.
He heard everything distinctly: the whir of the heater in his compartment, the chatter of the shutters where they refused to fasten down, the low rumble of the wheels as they plundered the uneven track and the creak of the carriages as they concertinaed through the slow curves, the grate and scrape of every road crossing, the clink of points, the jangled wail of station bells rushing by, the grunt and snort of the engine itself, the sudden press and whoosh of the tunnels, the heavy breath of spur lines, and, beneath it all, the bass croak of the sleepers. If there were such a thing as music’s jealous rival, then this train, on this December night, was it.
There was nobody else in his compartment. He had extinguished all the lights and pulled down all the screens so that he lay in darkness save for the passing of shadows. The heater was feeble—might even have been blowing cold—and he kept himself still so as not to disturb the pockets of warmth beneath his greatcoat.
The carriage jolted over some unknown junction and he pressed his hands deeper into his armpits. He had never left Petersburg in this direction before. He had never left Russia before. But he did not feel afraid—there was nothing further that the world could really do to him. All the same, though he did not recognize the feeling to give it a proper name, he was lonely.
The plan was to take the train through the Baltic states as far as Riga in Latvia. There he would transfer to a direct flight to London Stanstead on the new route operated by some bullshit British airline. It was the cheapest way, Henry said, and Stanstead was easiest. Henry had purchased his train ticket, Henry had paid for the flight, Henry had given him thirty pounds, but the two hundred and forty dollars that Arkady had in the money belt strapped to his chest were his own—secret money he had saved.
In reality, Arkady did not expect to make it as far as Riga. He expected the whole thing to go to shit as soon as he came to the Latvian border. His passport to be laughed at, confiscated, ridiculed as counterfeit. Or perhaps he might be able to bribe his way through. But that would be all his funds gone—then he’d be refused his place on the plane, and he’d have to walk or hitchhike all the way back, probably though Estonia, and hope to slip home into Russia crosscountry through the forests, the only fool going the other way. He was glad of his boots and his coat.
He shut his eyes. The train hammered on. His mind wandered close by sleep again. His imagined hell was a quasi-religious one (the memory of the dormitory whisperings of the secret “our savior” cabals): a black and broiling landscape as far from the white of a Petersburg winter as possible; nameless long-necked creatures flying across a red moon that rode out as quickly as it disappeared; a discarded sickle by the banks of an oozing yellow lava stream; and a narrow path that climbed the caldera, snaking through the smoke and sulfur, one switchback after another, people lying by the side, people crawling, people pressing in beside him, all of them dressed in rags and dying of thirst, nothing but disappearances and desolation spoken. And whatever they hissed, it was his curse not only to expect three times worse on this journey but also to encourage it—as if to prove, again and again, that neither luck nor God existed. Though why he had to demonstrate this to himself when he knew it for a fact of experience—as surely as he knew that there was blood on some of the sheets at the orphanage and that it never quite washed out—he did not know. With the piano gone, perhaps the only thing that was saving him from vodka (as he became aware of the engine altering pitch) was the thought that he needed to stay alive to hunt down Leary if his bullshit papers failed.
The brake squeal when at last it came was deafening. He rolled over, stood up, and put his coat on quickly before the warmth fled its folds. It was becoming colder. He grimaced. There was a Petersburg saying he had always liked: “Just when you think it can’t get any colder, it gets much fucking colder.” He reached his hand up to the heater. Broken. If he made it across the border, he would change compartments, even if it meant sharing. He found the light, lifted down his bag, and opened up the zip to pull out some music to read. He and Henry had made up someone to be. They had made up somewhere to be from. But he was a pianist still, and the same age. Might as well look the part.
He wasn’t anxious—rather, he just wanted his fate decided. So that he could resign himself to it. But there was no way of knowing whether the passport and visa would pass inspection. And neither did he know what would happen to him if they did not. He had looked through everything, of course, but he was no expert on such documentation, so it was a pointless inspection. And Henry was useless.
He read the notes on the score—heard them within—and the sound rinsed his imagination clean of the whining. He liked to read the orchestral part to these concerti—he liked to understand what the other instruments were doing. He liked to hear the companion songs to his own.
Eventually the train shuddered to a stop. He let a moment pass. Then, cautiously, he opened the door to his compartment. Nobody around. He began to make his way toward one of the doors at the end of the carriage. There were voices. A dozen or so people had gathered. Men smoking, a woman with two children bundled in hats and scarves, their noses streaming, their cheeks red. Somebody said the border guards would start at the front and work their way through. Another said that it could take two hours. Another ten minutes. A fourth pushed open the main door and descended, cigarette angled, hands already cupping for the match’s brief spark. Arkady hesitated a moment, but he had no wish to talk and nothing to say, so he followed this man down.
The cold was absolute and brutal. The snow crunched sharp and the air smarted in his throat, crackled in his nostrils. The train had stopped at some forgotten place. A long platform: a hut at the one end; farther away, cracks of light; a tower at the other end, all dark. What was to prevent a man from walking boldly to his freedom in whichever direction he thought it lay? Nothing. But then, not so long ago all of this was Russia—right, left, forward, back.
Though the snow was no longer actually falling, it lay heavy, and his boots left a deep trail. At first, as his eyes adjusted, the forest seemed to hem in on either side, but gradually Arkady thought that he could make out the deeper black of water through the narrow belt of trees across the opposite track. It was hard to be sure. A freezing fog beset the ground there, seeming to curl in and out of the trunks. Perhaps a lake mist. There was no sound. And the silence was blissful after the train.
He turned and stood another minute peering down the narrow cutting of the track due east, from whence he had come. The smoker climbed back up onto the train. Something stayed him awhile yet. For the first time in his life he was feeling the traveler’s thrill: a mixture of apprehension and excitement.
“All of Mother Russia is old—old rock, old geology,” his history teacher had said, “and there is nothing that she cannot provide. Why would any of us wish to leave her? The Soviet Union is the hope of all mankind!”
Someone was coming along the platform. He assumed it must be a border guard. But as the figure drew closer, he realized it was some madman of the night, carrying a samovar wrapped in heavy blankets.
“Get back on the train,” the man said in heavily accented Russian, “or they will leave you here. They give no warning. They don’t care. The real border is farther on.” He inclined his head backward to point the direction he meant but did not pause, continuing on his way to the end and entering the last carriage.
Arkady’s eyes followed where the man had indicated. Then he withdrew his hands from his armpits. They were going numb. He held them out in front, looking at them as he flexed the muscles. Then, slowly, carefully, he unwrapped the bandage on his index finger and let it drop to the ground. He kicked it across the snow until it fell onto the track, between the wheels of the train. Then he squeezed both hands hard into two big fists and shoved them deep into his pockets.
Fifteen minutes later, cradling his tea, the music still open on the seat beside him, Arkady Alexandrovitch Kolokov (as he now was) offered up his passport. The squat guard, whom no cap nor boot could elevate, barely looked at it, nodded, and left the compartment. Arkady sipped some more and felt the heat coursing inside him.
Five minutes later another official—this time a taller Latvian— entered the carriage. He sat down on the bench opposite and took out his flashlight, though the light was working well enough. He examined the passport. He pointed the beam into Arkady’s face. Arkady blinked. He examined the passport again. Then shone on the music.
He spoke in Russian. “Where are you going?”
“London.”
“Good.”
The Latvian stood. Passed back the passport. And then he was gone. That was it.
Arkady swore repeatedly under his breath. Stay here. Put some more clothes on. The cold wasn’t so bad. Better than having to talk to people. In any case, he had another glass of tea lined up.
He sat alone, listening to the guard moving down the carriage. He wondered if the British authorities would be quite so easy.
Twenty minutes later the train hauled itself into the night, heading due west again.
The next day, Sunday, was wintry sharp but pleasingly so, the faintest frost still whispering white on the branches that the two women stooped beneath, the cold air thicker on the breath. Mornings like this reminded Isabella of Petersburg—the colors all reduced to their essences and only the bravest red flash of a robin’s breast daring to challenge the cobalt of the sky. They were walking together up Swain’s Lane, the steep road that divided the famous Highgate Cemetery into two plots—east, west—and took them up to village beyond. The pavement narrowed every few steps to accommodate the wayside trees, so they went along sometimes side by side, sometimes in single file. Roots had cracked and cleft the path, and they had to be careful not to stumble or slip.
At Isabella’s suggestion, and then at Susan’s urging, they were on their way to call on Francis, the keeper of the old Highgate house. As girls and then teenagers, they had done this walk many times before, though it was the first time Isabella had been back in nearly five years. She realized that this was her allotted session: Sunday morning—cordoned off from Adam and the children, negotiated, set aside; and ordinarily such a choreographed falsity would have irritated her. But there was something about old friends, something that exonerated Susan from the usual strictures of Isabella’s unforgiving mind.
The two women passed the last tree in the immediate line and the pavement widened so that Isabella could step beside her friend again—Susan’s sensible walking shoes click-clacking on the pavement while her own sneakers made no noise.
Susan looked across. “So you can store your stuff in the old house? If you decide to move back properly, I mean.”
“If I’m coming back, I want my own flat.” Isabella shook her head ruefully. “Just watch me—twenty-four hours in London and all the psycho crap will be forgotten and I’ll be after all the usual: job, flat, man. Not necessarily in that order.”
“I doubt it.” Susan smiled and went ahead as they came to another tree. Over her shoulder she said, “And you know you are welcome to stay with us for Christmas.”
“That’s kind, Suze.”
Susan stopped to retie her lace. “You didn’t write back this morning?”
“No. Not yet. Which is pretty stupid, since I started it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Because…” Isabella stood watching her friend fashion a methodical double bow. “I suppose because I’m shocked to hear from him at all. Because it’s been ten years. Because of his stroke. Because I don’t know exactly what to say. And because I still really, really dislike him. Because everything.”
“Do you feel sorry for him?”
“I feel sorry for anyone who has had a stroke… but. It’s hard to explain, Suze… It doesn’t change anything. It shouldn’t change anything.”
“But it does, it does.” Susan rose and they went on. “You do want to stay in contact now, right?”
“Yeah. It’s just the idea of actually doing it that makes me feel sick. It’s almost worse, now that I know he is actually reading what I write. And I definitely can’t face the thought of talking to him on the phone or—Christ—seeing him. Then there’s the whole thing with Gabs.”
“You mean you can’t tell Gabriel if you are in touch with your dad?”
“No. No way. He would be really upset. He’d be crazy. He’d think that it was some kind of betrayal.” She paused. “Are you sure of that, Is?” Susan asked. “Yep. It’s probably the only thing I can’t talk to him about.”
“It’s still that bad?”
“It’s worse.”
“Gabriel wasn’t that keen on your dad when he was little.” Susan clicked her tongue. “Well, either we have to think of a way of telling Gabriel or you have to stop bothering with your dad.”
They were side by side now.
“Yeah. Except I feel like I owe Gabs. I want to help him despite himself, if you know what I mean. Apart from anything, he’s been so good to me with all my fuckups. I don’t want to give you the twins shtick, Suze, but there is something about being born on the same day or whatever—you know, a weird kind of extra loyalty. Maybe it would be different if we had more siblings, but… Well, seeing as it’s just us two and we’ve always been that way and—”
“But come on…” Susan waited for the noise of a passing bus to die down. “Come on, Is, surely he’s got to take care of himself?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course, in some ways… But I worry that he can’t see the problem. It’s as if… as if Gabs carries this backpack of hatred or hurt with him everywhere these days. And he never takes it off or talks about it. But it stops him sitting still, and it gets in the way when he wants to move. Basically, it’s hindering his whole life. And only I can see it. It’s ridiculous. I was exactly the same. Until, for some reason, I think Mum’s dying changed me.” They were coming to the steepest part of the walk. “I left Petersburg two days after Gabriel, Suze, and I was on my own and I had to go back to her flat again and box some more of her papers and stuff up to be shipped here. And I was in the maddest state I have ever been in. It’s hard to describe—it’s like total obliterating-everything sadness and you feel so on your own with it, because she was no one else’s mum, I suppose, and you are on your own with it. And I was walking along the canal where she used to live and I crossed the bridge outside—it’s the Raskolnikov bridge, where he stops in the book—and I wasn’t even crying. More like I had just been punched in the stomach or whatever and was completely winded, completely empty, everything gone inside, everything totally gone, like a child turning around from the fun at a playground and realizing that her mum has left not just for a minute but forever—feeling really, really desolate. But on that bridge it was as if I suddenly caught sight of my true reflection in the water—as if I suddenly saw myself with this huge lump of a backpack on my back. And even though it has taken me weeks to get the shit off, all that time in New York sitting at my stupid desk at work, I have definitely done it now—I’ve taken my backpack off and I’ve got it where I can see it. Unpack. Face. Sort.”
“It’s difficult for me to imagine. I’ve never lost anyone.” Susan slowed. They were coming to the entrance to the cemetery. “But I sort of understand. You’re stuck. You can’t tell Gabriel if you speak to Dad, and you can’t speak to your dad without telling Gabriel.”
“And now I’m worried that I’m running out of time with Dad too.”
They stopped. A crowd was gathering for the next tour of the morning.
“What on earth happened between those two, anyway?” Susan asked.
“Oh, about fifty million things. Apart from the general fact that he was the worst father of all time, Dad used to like to mock and humiliate Gabs in front of other people when he was young. Belittle him. Although it was only when Gabs was older that Dad got seriously nasty. He used to go around to Gabriel’s girlfriends’ parents’ houses and tell them not to trust Gabriel.” They set off again. “All kinds of shit went on between them. You remember when Gabs came home from college and put on his play at the Gatehouse? As You Like It—you remember?”
“Of course I remember. I went. It was fun.”
“Yeah.”
“Shame about that horrible review,” Susan said. “He was so upset.”
“Right.” Isabella nodded. “It was a massive thing for him—you know, he had borrowed money from the bank to finance it, rehearsed all the actors, persuaded them not to go up to Edinburgh, directed the play, more or less designed the set, the lighting, everything… It was a huge risk, and it meant everything to him—you know what it’s like when you’re twenty-one. He really wanted to be a director badly. And he thought this was make or break.” Isabella looked across. “Well, anyway, that review: Dad wrote it.”
Susan stopped. “Oh shit—no.” Her mouth fell open and she shook her head slowly, her even features aghast. “No… That’s… that’s sick. All that stuff about how students shouldn’t be allowed near the stage?”
“Yep. All of it. Dad was mates with the theater critic and they swapped jobs that week for a joke.”
“And Gabriel found out?”
“Wasn’t difficult. Dad told him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Dad gave him this long horseshit lecture about how he had to understand the cut and thrust of the adult world, and how it was an honest review and it was better that Gabriel heard the truth from him rather than someone else. Let this be a lesson to him. That he should have got a proper summer job and learned how to support himself and stop hanging around. Earn his keep. And… and Gabs just lost it. He went crazy. I don’t think they ever spoke again. Not alone.”
Susan let out a low whistle. “I didn’t know. I mean, I had absolutely no idea… That was your dad.”
“Well, Gabriel didn’t want anyone to know. So we kept it quiet. What else could we do? It’s not exactly the sort of thing you can explain.” Isabella shrugged. “And nobody came to the play then, of course, so he lost the money he had borrowed as well.”
“My God.”
Isabella began walking again. “That was just one thing, Suze. There was a lot of other stuff too. And physical violence between them. All the way through. Though I don’t think Gabriel ever struck back. Even though he could have put Dad on the floor.”
Susan’s voice hardened. “Did your father hit you?”
“Yes, sometimes. When he was angry. Until I was about thirteen.”
“Your mum?”
“Not sure. I don’t think so. I reckon Dad has all the classic misogyny stuff going—women are to be worshipped or denigrated. Virgins, whores, princesses, dolls, waifs, angels. I think it would go against some twisted machismo of his to hit grown women. He prefers to use money to fuck with their minds.”
“No wonder you both hate him.”
“I don’t hate him, Suze.” Two gray squirrels shot out in front of them and raced across the road. “Maybe it’s something to do with Mum dying. Or maybe I never absolutely hated him. Not like Gabriel hates him. I just think he’s… I don’t know—that he’s emotionally selfish, that he’s a bully, that he’s congenitally manipulative, abusive…” Isabella made a face that acknowledged the ironic humor. “All the things Gabriel has in his magazine.”
They were almost at the top of the hill.
Susan clicked her tongue. “You know, I completely missed all the stuff that must have been going on in your house. I mean… I suppose-pose you don’t see the whole story when you are little. You think someone’s dad is strict or whatever, or their mum is a bit mad, but there’s no reason that you’d get beyond that.” They stood aside to let a family pass, and Susan turned to face Isabella. “Of course, I remember the stuff when we were older. All that palaver about your boyfriends. What was that about?”
“Don’t ask.”
“And those fights you used to have with him. You screaming. Bloody hell, Is, it makes me cringe just to think about them.”
“Not as much as me.” They came to the edge of Pond Square.
“Now I think about it,” Susan said, “the last time I saw him—God, it must have been before you went—the last time I saw him was in your kitchen. He started telling me all this rubbish about how hard it is out there and you’ve got to learn your lesson and pull your weight and pay your way and all of that. He was so snide. I didn’t know what to say. I was furious.”
“There’s nothing to say. Dad just repeats himself to anyone who is around. Or he used to. It’s a kind of self-validating mantra or something.”
“And I thought, Hang on a minute—I work seventy hours a week and what the hell has he ever done, anyway? Six or seven jobs on local rags—part-time at best—while his wife has worked solidly for twenty-five years as a copy editor on a serious and stressful newspaper in her second bloody language.”
Isabella had to smile.
“Apart from anything else,” Susan said, “it’s very hard to understand why a man like your dad, who’s basically had a pretty good life, should have such a sense of grievance.”
“That’s just it. That’s exactly it.” Isabella nodded and turned her head to meet her friend’s eyes, appreciative of the accuracy of the observation. “He does have this overwhelming sense of grievance. And it sort of permeates everything he says and does and thinks. He can’t get away from it. Every conversation, every action, everything has some reference to this grievance of his. Which we all have to acknowledge and dance around, even though none of us—including him—have any idea what specifically he is so aggrieved about.”
“I guess it’s also a way of building himself up,” Susan suggested. They were walking along one side of the square, watching for a break in the traffic.
“If you’re doing better, he wants to pull you down,” Isabella said. “If you’re doing worse, he wants to gloat. He’s only got one mode of discourse. He can’t converse—all he can do is goad.”
“Maybe that’s just how he is with people our age, Is, or his children or something.” Susan shrugged. “Maybe he’s completely different with other people when you’re not around.”
They crossed the main road and walked toward the Grove, the tall Georgian houses seeming all the finer in the sharp winter’s sun.
Susan looked across. “Have you thought what you are going to ask Francis?”
“I’m going to ask him lots of questions about the house and I’m going to be very normal and then—”
“No. You need to actually ask him outright if he was your dad’s lover, Is.” Susan’s expression was pure, wholehearted sincerity. “You need to do that. You have to be absolutely no shit now. And you’ve got to start today. If you don’t, I will. I mean it. You cannot spend the rest of your life kowtowing to whatever messed-up version of reality your dad enjoys. We’ll just have to think of a way of telling Gabs.”
Two hours later, Susan caught the bus back down the hill and Isabella set out alone, wearing her friend’s gloves for the return walk, the sky still a burnished December blue. She knew two more things for certain now: that she could enter her old home without weirdness after all, and that gentle old Francis had indeed been her father’s lover. Most of all she felt relieved. But, curiously, she also felt (at last) that she was nearly as old as her father and mother—not in age, but in the sense that she was no less an adult than they, and not in the fake way she had pretended to be an adult in her twenties but for real: parity. Perhaps it had been Susan’s influence.
The cemetery tours were thriving. Old ladies bossily shepherding groups this way and that.
Karl fucking Marx.
Fierce histrionics or fierce history (there was, as ever, no way of telling), she had once seen her mother cry real tears at that grave. Tears for the parlous state of her marriage, tears for her fate, tears for the fate of nations. Or tears for Karl himself and all the murder done in his name. Impossible to know. Impossible even to guess. But she could remember the afternoon clearly—could see the fresh flowers, bright yellow and crimson, lying scattered on the hard cut stone, could the hear the hushed voices of the visitors (as if the dead might be further offended—beyond the final insult of mortality), could feel her mother, not much older than she was now, letting go of her arm to press the heel of a hand into the corner of one eye, then the other.
And even as an eight-year-old girl, Isabella was conscious that she was supposed to see her mother’s tears. And conscious that she was absolutely not supposed to see them. That was the whole reason she had been brought along: to see tears and not to see tears.
The sickness was on him. The sleeping pills were wearing off. He hadn’t got any. All he had to do was get up, somehow. Go. Find some. (Call Grisha.) Then this would be over. He hadn’t got any. (Club Voltage—go there.) The stink was unbearable—acrid. Each cramp a fresh agony. Make it quicker, God, make it quicker. You bastard. Make it quicker. The smell was the worst thing. And this was him: this body, in these moments. He was this man. Cramp. Shudder. Flesh like a gray plucked goose. (All he had to do was get up.) His stomach squirting. So onto his side, braced against it. His eyes squeezed shut and watering. His nose streaming. Then eyes open again—used syringes. Onto his back. The sallow ceiling. So ill. He was sweating the mattress sodden. Then eyes shut—a blackness made of headache reds and flashing yellow shapes. He wanted to die. All he had to do was get some. (Get up and go. Find. Easy. Half an hour?) He was hot. His armpits wet. He wanted it over. (No. Stay—take the rest of the pills.) He could not keep his legs still. Twitching, shifting, jittery. Worms burrowing through his stomach. So back onto the other side. The pain in his bones, an aching that seemed to dwell in his marrow’s marrow. Oh God. All he had to do was get some, end it. Then it would be over. (Don’t take the pills. Get up and go.) Lizards’ feet on his skin. A nip. A tremor. Take the rest of the pills. Use them all up now. Adrenaline. Oh God, he hadn’t got any. All he had to do was get some. Roll over. The sear of a sudden spasm. Oh. God. There was liquid shit in the bed now. He could not do this. He could not believe this. He could not believe that this was he, living and conscious through these moments. This was his life. And he had made it so. (All he had to do was get up. If he got up, he could stop the pain. Go out. Get some.) He gulped at the water. He swallowed the sleeping pills, all six. Make it quick. Take this from me, God, you bastard. I owe nothing. (All he had to do.) I have nothing. I know nothing. I am nothing.
Gabriel doubled back on the Northern Line, a trip no Northern Liner truly enjoyed: down to Camden, then across the platforms, and then up again to Chalk Farm. Felt like treachery, somehow, going up the other branch. He broke ground, the swarming city there to greet him, walked left around the sharp corner, and so set off up Haverstock Hill. He was looking forward to drinking, Sunday or not. He bent forward as the incline bit. The morning’s frostiness had been replaced by an unusually strong wind; it was one of those dark and low-skied cloud-scudding London nights when the windows rattle in their casements and the tarpaulin that hangs on the scaffolding flaps and slaps as if it might fly away at any second. Sudden gusts snatch at scarves, toss careful hair awry, or chivvy at the cracked chimneypots and threaten to tear the roof tiles loose, and the forgotten trees sway and creak, heavy branches bending hard upon their natural snap.
He was late. He reached the cheerfully ever-empty Chinese restaurant and the off-license, passed the tall, amber-lighted, stained glass windows, walked beneath the old-fashioned lamps that hung from the side of the building, under the old sign (swinging heavily) on which Sir Richard Steele himself (a little drunk in the wind) continued to watch the footsore folk of London making their way up the endless hill away from the cramp and toil of their city, and so he entered the pub, tousled and ruffled, through one half of the oddly narrow double wooden door.
The noise rose to greet him like a friendly dog as he stepped into the fug. Just inside, to the left, a two-piece band was playing—or rather had that very second finished a song, which Gabriel recognized as “It’s Alright, Ma.” He excused his way through their audience (all standing and trying to clap with their drinks in their hands) and made for the bar. He took stock a moment and then eased his way along, checking the huddles and clusters sitting cozily in the deep red seats at the tables on his right.
He had the impression that he was moving amid an old, old scene. The pub, proudly named after a fourth-rate playwright, had stood in much the same aspect as he saw it now for some three centuries, a wayside host to countless conversations, fights, kisses, partings, declarations, collapses, dances, intrigues, songs, jokes, and tears—everything but work in fact, and therefore everything important in the lives of its denizens. He loved the place—as did his sister. The Steele’s great secret being that it never allowed any one deputation of humanity to get the upper hand. Indeed, he sometimes thought that it was as if the very wood of the long crook-shaped bar held it a truth that any section of society quickly becomes unbearable if left to congregate and fester unchallenged among its own.
There was no sign of Isabella. He had the feeling that she would be in the back room, so he edged around the narrow end of the bar, past the turtle-backed stool-sitters (whose drinks arrived without their seeming to make the slightest movement by way of an order), and then ducked left again, around by the big old table that was really the heart of the place, and so came through the low doorway to the semisecret snug at the rear of the building. In here were four or five homely wooden tables, an aged iron brazier in which a fire glowed, a tall mantelpiece on which several candles burned in empty gin bottles, a high mirror above these, and rows of unread books on either side of the chimney breast. For reasons nobody could quite remember or guess, there was also a life-sized mural of a seminaked and rather camp-looking Christ on the interior wall—he was standing entwined in what appeared to be vines, an expression neither particularly ecstatic nor redolent of recent crucifixion on his face. Isabella was sitting at Christ’s feet, poring over a printout of some description.
“What you reading?”
She looked up and raised her eyebrows in greeting. “Dylan interview off the Internet.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Not really—more or less says that he can’t understand why anyone would want to bother interviewing him when everything that is important is right there, clear as day, in his songs.”
“I could have told you that.” He smiled and came around to her side of the table to put his arm around her for a moment.
“You have. Many times,” she said with mock-weariness. “And you will again.”
“They were playing ‘It’s—”
“I know.”
He eyed her glass. “You want another drink?”
“Six vodka and cranberries—easy on the cranberry and as much vodka as they can spare.”
“You as well?” Gabriel smile became a grin.
“I blame the parents,” she said.
He set off back to the bar to find himself a Guinness to go with his sister’s request. It was always good to see her. He had missed her when she left. And he missed her still. She looked as sharp as ever. Though he was not sure quite what he was expecting—her jet-black hair suddenly gray, her brown eyes red with sleeplessness and grief? It had been nearly seven weeks. Was it just his imagination, though, or was she looking thinner since the funeral? Hard to tell. The minute he saw her, he felt that it was his responsibility to ask, his responsibility to look after her. More so now than ever. A strange feeling, because of course she could look after herself in all the obvious ways… But still, he had always felt as if it were his duty to keep watch on those deeper parts that she herself did not even acknowledge or recognize.
“So you’re at Susan’s?” He dropped into the chair she had been saving for him.
“Yeah. Just for a while. I was wondering if I could come to you for a few days, actually. Next week.”
“Yeah. Of course.” He sipped his Guinness. “You on holiday? What’s going on with work?”
“Actually, I have taken a bit of a sabbatical… Well, they have let me have a sabbatical.”
Gabriel observed his sister closely. Yet another contradiction that Isabella had inherited was that though she was almost clinically obsessed with knowing the whole truth about everything, she herself was one of the world’s foremost tellers of halves.
“You mean you sacked it? Or they sacked you?”
“No.” Isabella’s eyes met his, absorbing his sarcasm. “No, really, I am on a sabbatical. I told them about Mum and that I had stuff to sort out and that I was leaving and that they could either take it as a resignation or whatever but that if they didn’t mind, I’d look in on them again when I got back.”
He considered. “Sounds like you just walked out and they’ve no obligation to you—”
“Forgot you were an expert on corporate obligations,” she said.
He made a have-it-your-own-way face. But it was principally a way of avoiding taking her on. He considered the wall and Christ’s ever-increasing gayness thereupon, then asked, “Are you all right for money?”
“Yeah, for a while. A month or so. I’ve got a few thousand in the bank, but obviously I’m going to have to sort something out.”
“So… what are you planning? Coming back to London?” He looked at her. “Or staying in New York?”
“I don’t know.” She met his eyes.
“Jesus.”
“I left Sasha and moved out.”
“Jesus.”
“Had to.”
“Jesus.”
Not for the first time, Gabriel found himself stunned by his sister’s self-assurance.
“It… it’s over,” she continued, mashing the ice in her drink with her straw. “He is a nice guy, but really he’s a child. You know—all kind of secretly competitive and point-scorey, silly subterranean ego games. Can’t see the good in good people because he’s in the way of himself. And you know—it has to end, or it has to become something new.”
“Right.” Gabriel understood that these reasons, though quite possibly true, were but the tips of whatever icebergs Isabella had been towing across the Atlantic. But he also knew her well enough to guess the mighty and jagged shape of what moved beneath. And again he could only admire her certainty. “I’m glad for you, Is. If you are sure.”
“I’m sure.”
He sipped his drink. “Must have been difficult,” he said. “Especially since you didn’t even hate him.”
“It was. It is. And no, I don’t hate him.” She sipped hers.
They fell silent for a moment. He wanted to let her say more of her own volition rather than press her. But the silence continued, and he recognized that she did not wish to do so. There was no demand or strain or artifice between them. He knew she understood that there was a bottomless well on which she might draw at any time. So instead he looked around and asked, “Where are you with not smoking at the moment?”
“I’ve got this new thing.”
“Go on.”
“I’m not smoking. But I am smoking. It’s like… I don’t, but I do.”
“Oh, right. How does it work?”
“Easy,” she said. “I don’t smoke. But if I want to, I smoke.”
“Uncanny. That’s exactly where I am.”
“Shall I go and get some, then?” she asked.
“And some more drinks, seeing as you’re up.”
“Jesus, Gabs, we’ve just started these.”
“I know. But what if there’s a terrorist attack and everyone panics and we can’t get to the bar?”
She returned seven minutes later carrying glasses in both hands and the cigarettes under her chin.
“You know,” Gabriel said, “I wish someone would give me a sabbatical.”
“Self-Help! still shit?” Isabella offered him her match.
“Shittier than ever.” He inhaled and felt almost immediately sick. “I’d like a sabbatical from myself too, while they’re at it. A year off. A year out. Whatever they call it.” He noticed that the two men who had sat down at the other table had started looking at Isabella. “Want to come and work for Randy?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“Great benefits—enough homoeopathic water to drown your sorrows, tankloads of Rescue Remedy if that doesn’t work, and herbal teas to revive you at the end of your long hard day of fooling yourself. You’ll love it. Hmmm… these cigarettes taste lovely. Tar, nicotine, ash. Gives me that special inner glow everyone talks about.”
Isabella smiled. “Why do you need another bad writer on the staff?”
Gabriel took a deep drink of the fresh pint to cleanse his mouth. “I need anyone who is prepared to do any work of any description without crying, walking off, sulking, bitching, pretending to do it and then not doing it, phoning their union representative, or calling me names. I may well be an utter penis. I accept this charge. But we still need to do the bloody work.” He paused. “Christ, Is, even to see a member of staff coming back from lunch would make me uncontrollably happy.”
“Maybe you should get a motivational speaker in.” Isabella leaned her head to one side. “I hear that they are very… motivational.”
“Oh, they are. I’ve heard a few. They re highly effective. They motivate everyone to become motivational speakers as fast as possible. Lots of money for the same old shit over and over again. Easy hours. Everyone loves you. And nobody can hold you to account or remember what you said. Perfect way to earn a living.” Gabriel smiled, then suddenly remembered a work conversation from a few days previously. “Hey—actually a friend of mine, Becky, told me about an assistant producer job on this new Culture Show. I’ll get in touch with her if you’d like to meet up. Might even be good. You never know.”
“Thanks, Gabs. Why not? No sense ruling anything out.” Isabella squinted against her shortening cigarette’s acridity. “Well, that’s our careers dealt with. And I’ve done my relationship news. Over to you. What’s the Lina situation?”
Gabriel considered his drink. He had three quarters of pint to finish before he could legitimately lobby for the next.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know? Or you do know? But you don’t know how to end it?”
“Both. Neither. All three.”
“What’s the core of it?”
“I can’t live without Lina. I can’t live without Connie.”
“You can.” Isabella stubbed out her cigarette. “Which?”
“Both.”
“Easy to say. Not easy to do.”
“For your own good.”
“My own good is entirely lost to me. I know you’re clear about everything, Is. And I’m pleased for you that you are. Really. But for me—I don’t know—everything is complicated and shaded and there’s no clarity.”
“Not true.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what you hate.”
“Do I? Sometimes I think I just invent that as well.”
Isabella bent to drink from her straw, looking up at him as she did so. “Are you having a breakdown?”
“No.” Gabriel sat up straight. “I am the one still at my job and still with my girlfriend. Still living in the same place. Are you?”
“Still with two girlfriends. Still hating your job. Still pretending.”
“Don’t knock denial. Sometimes it’s the healthiest place to be.” He tapped his remaining cigarette. “Humanity has achieved all of its greatest successes in denial. I’m a big supporter of denial. If you could march under denial’s banner without denying it, then I’d be at the front of the parade.”
Isabella looked back at him and said, half seriously, “I think you should talk to someone.”
“That’s because you’ve been living in America.”
“No it’s not.”
“I don’t want to investigate myself, Is. I don’t want to hold up any more mirrors to myself. I’m sick of myself. I’m the most tiresome person I know.”
“I feel insulted.”
“Okay, the most tiresome person I know apart from you.” He passed the halfway point of his Guinness. “Christ, Is, I’d love to talk to someone, but I haven’t got five years and the thousands of pounds needed to wade through all the idiotic so-called therapists, shrinks, and other secret lovers-of-the-self to get to the someone who actually knows anything useful or pertinent. Take it from me, psychology is just the same as every other subject in the world—there are five people who know what they re talking about. And they re not talking. The rest are just rehearsing various forms of ninth-hand crap. Anyway, you’re the one who has left everything—boyfriend, work, continent. You’re the one on the run here. I’m all sorted. Look at me. Happy. Happy as an organic pig in fair-trade shit.”
“Not the same as a breakdown. I am running toward the issue. I am truly sorting things out. Taking things on. Not hiding.” She stopped to drink through the straw again. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Going around with your brain in flames all the time.”
“You do that too?” He poked his cigarette violently into the ashtray.
“More or less every second of the day. I wake up and I can’t stand the news—the radio and the TV—not just the crap that’s on but the way that it’s on, and the way that the people behind it try to make it seem. I hate the whole thing. I hate that the newsreaders stand up because their stupid producers told them that standing up is cool. And I hate it when they sit down because some idiot told them to sit down again.”
Gabriel picked up. “Oh, I am way past that. I have started actually hating individual words. I hate the word ‘mayo.’ I hate… I hate ‘latte.’ I hate people who say ‘win-win’ or ‘going forward.’ I hate sports writers who cite that fucking Kipling poem.”
“That’s nothing. I have even started to hate the font—that fucking font they use on those women-and-shopping books. I mean, how can a typeface become so insidious?”
“No. Don’t.” Gabriel shook his head. “Do not start me on typefaces. That stuff gets me really angry.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I hate every billboard I ever see. Like, I am not in conversation with your fucking stupid brand. There is no relationship. I don’t know you. I don’t like you. I don’t want to know you or to learn like you or feel part of your phony cl—”
“Okay. Okay, okay.” Gabriel interrupted, holding up both hands. The two men at the adjacent table were listening in, he could tell, watching his sister’s animation with ever more frequent glances. “Feel better?”
“Yes. Thank you.” She finished her drink. “You?”
“Remember, you are a nut case, Isabella. The rest of the world is just going to work, the supermarket, on holiday. We are the ones with the problems.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I do. That doesn’t help either.”
Chumps, the pub cat, an intelligent-looking ginger with bright eyes and a languid manner that spoke of a happy, untroubled life full of food and the loving whispers of some latter-day Aphrodite in both his ears, blocked Gabriel’s route to his chair on his return. Man and cat exchanged glances a moment; cat accused man of crimes innumerable, man pled guilty and enduring disgrace; then cat set off at a contemptuously slow pace toward the kitchen, allowing Gabriel to put down the drinks at last.
“Did you get any letters?” Isabella asked.
“No. Only one or two ages ago. Like I said, I used to get phone calls. More or less every night…”
“I don’t know if that is more or less weird.”
“It was pretty harrowing… she wouldn’t let me go. She kept me on the phone for hours.”
Last orders had been called. The men at the other table had left and they were alone in the room. One of the candles was guttering on the mantelpiece. Jesus seemed to be slouching a little above them. And the alcohol was deep and warm in their veins. Their conversation had ranged and wandered, but now there seemed to be nothing else worth talking about.
“What did she say in her letters?” Gabriel asked. “I’d love to read them. I get scared I am forgetting her.”
“You won t. You never will.”
“I wish I’d recorded her voice or something.”
“Don’t you hear her all the time in your head?”
“I used to—a lot,” he said. “But now… now it’s changing. Now I talk to her, but she doesn’t talk to me so much. You?”
“I catch myself all the time—thinking with her mind, almost. Thinking her thoughts. But no, you’re right—I suppose I don’t hear her voice specifically.”
Gabriel picked at the dried wax on the neck of their candlestick-bottle. “What did the letters say?”
“Nothing, really… Well, that’s not true.” Isabella sipped her pepper vodka. “Just all mixed up, you know—about the Russian government and Chechnya and all of that… America going backward too, the stuff I told you about—Jefferson—that the Founding Fathers were great men who believed in all the right things and how disgusted they would be if they could see what was happening. And you—she talked about you a lot… About your work and what you were going to do and how you had to be shocked into something radical.”
“I wish.”
“And other stuff. About how…” Isabella’s latest cigarette seemed to make her cough. “About how she loved Dad. And how I was supposed to go and see him.”
Gabriel looked up, his eyes liquid black and shimmering in the candlelight. “What for?”
Isabella frowned, lowering her brows as if to duck the direct question that she feared he might ask. “She said… She said that he would… She said that he was a little schemer or something and that he would be sure to distort everything.”
He kept his gaze on his sister, compelling her to continue.
“She said that he would want to be certain—”
“About what?”
“Certain that I… that I loved him, Gabs, especially now that he was getting older.”
“He made her life a wasteland of misery and suffering for over thirty years. Every good thing she offered him, he sneered at, he scorned, and he trampled upon. He can be certain that—”
“But distort what, Gabs?”
“Who gives a fuck?”
“I need to speak to him to find out.”
“No. No, you don t.” Gabriel took half his Talisker at one sip. “You need to speak to him for oth—”
“Gabs, Dad has had a stroke.” She lowered her eyes. “I went home to talk to Francis about storing some stuff there this morning. He told me. Dad has had a stroke. I thought you should know.”
He walked within himself. And there was nothing about him to suggest that he was Russian and only six hours in the country—none of the usual giveaways, at least: not the luminous tracksuits of the poor, nor the leather jackets of the racketeers, nor the overdone designer suits and jewelry of the moneyed; nothing to suggest he was a foreigner at all save a barely detectable apprehension in the movement of his head, which turned too quickly this way and that, seeking to absorb as much of the vast, strange, teeming city as he could. He feared police, spot checks, authority. He was in his boots, his jeans, and an anonymous sweater—no coat, despite the gusting wind. Beneath, he felt as tense as a submariner under the ice. But his aim was invisibility.
After the Internet café—his first job to make contact—he had decided to attempt the exploratory journey from his hostel on foot, surreptitiously following the map he had printed out—eight cheap pages that did not quite meet at any of the borders. He did not expect anything back today, but he hoped that tomorrow, by noon, this Gabriel would reply.
Presently he stopped again, turned his back on the traffic, and leaned into an alleyway, trying to read the smudgy print. He had been sick on the plane—a terrifying experience that had left him knotted and shaking—and even now the queasiness lingered and he hunched rather than stood at his full height.
He reemerged and met the suspicious eyes of a man setting up a newspaper stand. He went quickly on. A muscle worked in the hollow of his cheek. The map appeared to indicate that the Harrow Road flowed easily onto the Marylebone Road or crossed the thick-drawn Edgware Road at an obvious right angle, but there was no clear way through the giant intersections he had come upon, and the foot tunnels confused him further. So for half an hour he wandered around the Paddington basin, crossing and recrossing the pretty canal, which reminded him of home, except for the great glassy office developments and thunderous overpasses, which reminded him of Moscow. Eventually he saw a sign pointing to Paddington station. He followed its direction. At least the station would be a way of placing himself on the map again. From Paddington to Marble Arch looked easy enough.
Gone the tenebrous gray of the Russia he knew best—the suburbs, the orphanage, Vasilevsky’s dilapidation. Gone the ruin and collapse. And gone the somber monotone of Russia itself. Instead, as he came to Oxford Street, his ears were full of the strange singsong beauty of the English spoken all around, and the air seemed to resonate with the chimes of a hundred different registers, voices, music. He could scarcely believe it. I am in London, he whispered to himself. Ya v Londone.
The dusk swept in. He could not think what else to do, and the warmth and hum of the Soho bum-boy bars made him feel his foreignness and poverty too hard. So he stood in the doorway of a sex shop and read his map by the intermittent light of a flashing plastic cock. Then, resolved on his new direction, he set off to look at the South Bank.
Gone too the heavy brown assumption that had long smothered his life and that he had not known the shape or meaning of until now: gone the assumption that change was impossible. And nobody—no police, no militia—asking for his papers.
He crossed the river by Waterloo Bridge and stood for five minutes, staring in disbelief at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where so many of his heroes had played. He had imagined some great theater—something like the Mariinsky perhaps—not a concrete Soviet-style shit hole.
After a while he turned to face the blustery Thames and take in the abundance of lighted buildings on the opposite bank—old, new, grand, plain, stately, and grotesque—seemingly built without care or reason, to his Petersburg eye, as if a drunk had long been in charge of planning, only sober once every fifth day.
He walked upriver The water relieved his apprehension a little. Faintly he felt the stirrings of new desires, appetites he had not known before. In the underpass he shook his head at a homeless young guy begging, who asked him, “What’s so funny?” Then, all of a sudden, he came upon the exact picture he remembered from the history textbooks of his childhood. The bullshit Houses of bullshit Parliament. The light from the windows shimmering in the water.
Halfway across Westminster Bridge, he slowed and then stopped. The passersby were in hats and coats. He realized they must think it cold. He leaned on the rail. And he wondered if he had the nerve to stay—regardless. The water was black, but not as black as the Neva. The wind blew his hair this way and that.
Pat’s Place was grotty even by Russian standards. And his morale had fallen on the long walk back, the elation vanished, the map driving him mad and the night wind bringing with it a return of his sense of foreboding and vulnerability. His moods were like the weather. He lived within them. And he no more thought of asking why he experienced one feeling rather than another than he would have thought of interrogating the snow.
A collapse of drunks shouted something to him as he crossed to the door beside the minicab office. The two sitting on the stairs outside were users. Inside, another—Turkish by the look of him—was lying on the floor of the landing, pretending to have lost his key, but Arkady doubted that he had ever had one. Scum—everywhere, scum. Bosnian bullshit. Albanian sewage.
If he did not eat, go anywhere, or do anything, then he had enough money for ten nights. His flight back to Riga was booked for the Sunday fourteen days hence. So somehow he was going to have to find somewhere even cheaper, or join the Turkish bear-fuckers on the landing. Unless tomorrow’s reply contained the offer of an immediate meeting and plenty of money up front. Not fucking likely. Probably just a bullshit coffee and a bullshit conversation. In fact, the sooner this whole bullshit was over, the better… Why was he even here? What a joke. What an embarrassment.
He walked softly up the narrow stairs to the second floor and stood framed on the threshold for a moment. He stepped within and moved slightly to one side so that the dim light of the corridor behind could better illuminate the small dormitory room. There were four bunks—two on either side, with the narrowest of aisles between them. The one above his was empty. But he saw that those opposite were now taken. The window beyond was open. Hence the noise. Two tattered backpacks were propped up beneath the sill, a towel draped over one, a baseball cap on the other.
He checked under the bed. His greatcoat was still there. And his pack had not been touched. He was angry with himself. He would take no further risks.
He took off his sweater and his shirt and unbuckled his money belt. There were no covers, no blankets, not even a second sheet. Pat’s Place provided beds, and beds only. And he had not brought anything to sleep under. He stood for a moment, considering. People were shouting in the street below. He pulled off the sheet, and the streetlight shone dully on the surface of the rubber pad beneath. At least here in London they tried to save the mattresses from the worst of the alcoholics. He put down the money belt where his head would lie and drew the sheet back over it. Then he turned to the window and fastened it shut.
He listened for a moment before stepping carefully out of his jeans and rolling them up. He removed a plastic bag of clean laundry from his pack, took out a T-shirt and pulled it on, then flattened the rest of the bag out to fashion a pillow. He laid his jeans across the top and the shirt he had been wearing over them. The room was too close. He needed cold air to sleep. He opened the window again, fastened the latch against the wrench of the wind. Then he placed his pack against the wall, picked up his greatcoat from under the bed, and laid himself down beneath it.
Yes, the sooner this bullshit was over, the better. All he had to do was survive two weeks. He wondered what he would do back in Petersburg. The thought of playing in the bars made him so angry that saliva poured into his mouth and he wanted to spit. Work for Leary. Make a fortune. That stupid bitch. He closed his eyes and turned to face the wall.
But he neither slept nor rested. Long after the other two returned (talking at normal volume in Moldavian accents before belatedly whispering when they became aware of him), and long after they had fallen asleep, he lay uneasily alert, watching the lights and the shadows on the wall sweeping, merging, steadying—swelling circles, diagonal lines, penumbras and silhouettes—the headlamps of the cars as they turned, the streetlights, the glow from the shop opposite, the fizz and flicker of the neon sign that advertised cosmetics. Apart from anything else, he wished that he were here as himself. There would be some comfort in that.
Mice moved in the wall. The elder of the two Moldavians began to snore on the lower bunk, less than four feet away. He set himself to listen to the city instead. But all the usual sounds—car doors closing, breaking glass, motorbikes, cans being kicked, drunken shouts, the muffled thump of angry music, the hiss and squeal of bus brakes, unnatural birdsong, a dog barking crazily somewhere on the edge of his hearing—all the city sounds seemed now to threaten and loom, alien and strange, as if each were just another moment in a gathering drama, the aural narrative of developing violence that would soon involve him and that would surely culminate in a vicious raid—gangs or, worse, the police bursting through the door. The blaze and stab of flashlights. Guns, snarled orders. The Moldavians panicking.
All the while the wind was growing stronger, banging and slapping, rattling at the window. He turned and turned again back to the wall. He told himself that London was nothing compared to Moscow or Petersburg. In the long years he had waited for his place at the conservatory, though only on the fringes, he had seen more death than those of his fellow orphans who had joined the army. But the difference was that in Russia, he knew the face and weight of every danger; in Russia, he knew what they wanted, why, and how they planned to take it. Here, now, he had no idea. He was blind.
A woman screamed.
She sounded as though she were directly beneath the window. A car pulled away, engine straining. Doors slammed. He lay rigid. Voices. Men. Swearing.
He had heard the stories and believed them well enough—London, the European capital of organized crime: the Albanians, the Turks, the Croats and the Serbs, the Jamaicans, the triads, the Irish, the Islamic cells, other Russians, the Nigerians, the Colombians, the plain old-fashioned mafia; people smugglers, drug smugglers, weapon smugglers; prostitutes, heroin, explosives. The whole world liked to squat right down and do its nastiest possible shit in London. He was not afraid for his well-being or even his life (if only they would take it quickly, get the fucking thing out of the way), but he feared the police, he feared robbery, and most of all he feared violence.
Blue lights came swirling across the ceiling, sweeping from one side of the room to the other, then stopping directly above him, as if spotlighting him for some provincial nightclub’s amateur dance competition. The Moldavians were awake now. They would all be arrested as part of the raid or fight or whatever it was that was happening out there. He would be sent back. Before he had his chance. All three floors of the hostel, he knew, were heaving with people that even a blind Gypsy cocksucker would recognize as illegal—construction workers, cooks, waitresses, cleaners. He could not understand why the police did not raid it every night.
There was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, but going down, not coming up. He did not know whether to rise and dress or lie still. Where would he go? More voices outside—a man and a woman’s, raised. Another, quieter voice answering. The older Moldavian got up from the bottom bunk. The sirens had stopped, but the blue continued to swirl.
Now there were footsteps coming up. If the money went, he would have to steal. If his passport went, he would never be able to prove he was the man he was pretending to be. But even that he could survive. It was physical violence that scared him to a tight and silent shiver. Not because he was physically afraid—he had faced a gun, preferred a gun—but because of his lifelong curse: he had to protect his hands. Simply, he could not fight back. He could not lift a single finger to defend himself. He could not risk anything. As long as he held to the identity of musician, he was as vulnerable as a limbless cripple. Oftentimes in his dreams he had hoped for some knife slash to sever the tendons, some hammer to crush his fingers, some axe to separate a joint, so that it would be over, the stupid hope, so that he could ball his fist just once.
The Moldavian spoke in his heavy accent, the sound of Russian comforting all the same. “The police are taking the woman away. It’s okay, Mikhail, lie down. Just filthy British motherfuckers again. Cannot take their drink.”
Monday. Worst day of the week the wage-slavery world over. But at least the wind had dropped And at least the next magazine—“You Meets You”—was a good while away yet. He looked idly through some of the putative cover questions:
“If you met yourself, would you like yourself?”
No.
“If you met yourself, what would you say?”
Fuck off, asshole, and sort your life out while you’re about it.
“If you met yourself, where would you go for a romantic mini-break?”
Palestine. Rwanda. Or maybe East Timor.
“Why?”
Teach myself a lesson.
Aside from the worst piece he had ever read—“How to Be Single and Satisfied”—this was the entirety of the “You Meets You” issue thus far.
He did have an idea that he would like to commission: “How to Laugh about Everything in Your Life When It’s Not Funny at All.” But for this to work, it would have to be a spread, a good read, and that would require him to find a knowledgeable writer capable of an engaging style and a sophisticated grasp of tone and register. Fat chance. Anyway, bollocks to it—the deadline wasn’t for two weeks and he was ahead of himself: he’d got the issue title, which was more than he usually had at this stage. He clicked on one of the news pages he kept as a favorite… Another day here on Earth. Another day of attrition, murder, beauty, and birth. Another day of six billion soloists at full lung, all hoping for some miracle of harmony.
And for him, sitting there, drifting through all this on screen after screen… For him, another day of thinking in ever tighter circles. And no doubt about it, he was as implicated as anyone else. His world, his time, his life. Agreed, nobody expects meaningful every day or even every week, but intermittently worthwhile must surely be possible, right? How to make something of his life while he still had a chance, though? How to weigh in on the right side, whichever side that was? Before it all tapered down to feed, clothe, pay for, look after the children, hang on to the wife, get through it. Hey, Ma, you’ll be proud: I got through it! I worked. I had some kids. Made some money! Yep, I really followed my own path out there. I’m a granddad! Anyway, it’s over. Coming, ready or not. And how had he arrived in this position? (His hypocrisy he imagined like a mucous membrane around everything—everything he thought, said, did.) How had he become so very faithless and unfaithful? Hey, Ma, help me: what what what what do I really believe?
Phew, lunchtime.
He called Connie.
One good thing: eagerly, before he left, he replied to the e-mail from his mother’s Russian friend suggesting that if this suited, Arkady Alexandrovitch should come around to his home this Sunday, for lunch—Gabriel’s sister would be around then, and she would love to say hello too. He wanted a proper afternoon with the guy. Not some quick after-work thing. He wanted to hear stories of his mother.
The six o’clock call to Stockholm revealed all to be well, but on nights like these, when he wasn’t supposed to be here, there, or anywhere, the corners of his eyes swarmed with dangerous people: unexpected encounters with long-lost friends (“It is you. I thought so. How are you? I must give Lina a buzz…”); chance escalator passings-by of her colleagues (puzzled faces, recognition, belated wave); yet another of her half-brothers covertly spotting him on the platform at Swiss Cottage. It was a slim chance that he’d run into anyone while out with Connie, but then, slim chances were the entire story thus far—Homo sapiens, evolution, gravity, the universe itself, one overwhelmingly slim chance after another.
Eight, and they were locked into yet one more urgent conversation in the bar at the end of her street in West Hampstead: lovers trying to be friends trying to be sensible trying to be good trying to be anything but lovers trying to be friends.
Midnight. And oh, but how the subtle logic of desire mocks the plodding reason of the mind.
Tuesday morning. He awoke beside her. Instantly he knew he wasn’t going in to work.
They drank tea and talked and ate sweet pears with broken pieces of chocolate. And he watched her kneeling on the floor in her white sweater and nothing else as she watered her plants—all brought inside to protect them from the frost and placed on the money pages of the weekend papers, side by side, in their little pots beneath her bedroom windowsill.
“I still don’t agree,” she said. “When lies are thought to be okay—more interesting than being honest. And when what is true carries no weight—in the family, or in the country, or in the press, whatever; it’s the same principle—when what is true carries no weight, then everything becomes equal and alike and there’s no firm ground. Everything is everything. Everything is nothing. We can’t find our way.”
He sipped his tea. “And so what happens then?”
She turned to look at him and smiled. “If we are clever, we glamorize amorality as our defense. And we burnish this defense until it shines brighter than any other. We strip the truth of its privileges. And we become powerful. Because we can destroy anything we wish.” She pointed the old kitchen spray bottle that she was using as a watering can at him. “As in the family, so in politics, so in the press.”
He wanted to pick her up, carry her the three steps back to bed, kiss her pretty knees.
“You’re right. In one way. Maybe it is a defense. But not against others.”
“Against who, then?”
He reached out to touch her, but she kept her distance, weapon at the ready. “I think that when everything is everything, as you put it, then the result is not really power—no, it’s more like obsessive doubt. A distrust of all sides of the argument. Or a belief in all sides of the argument. It amounts to the same thing. Belief and doubt become identical twins.”
“You’re too clever and too stupid to deal with,” she said.
“When everything is discredited—when everything is discreditable—then we are able to believe only to the extent that we can doubt. Neither one outbraves the other.”
“But I like you.” She met his eyes and held them. “This is the last time, Gabriel.”
The first snow started that afternoon as they climbed Parliament Hill. Though they had left her bed only an hour earlier, it was past four and the light was fading. They walked side by side. There was almost nobody else abroad, and even the path ahead was vanishing as they went on. Despite the cold, his hands felt warm and his blood was easy. They reached the top and halted, standing together. London lay before them, but disappearing now, house by house, quarter by quarter, as the city wrapped itself deeper in its shroud. A fresh flurry bent in from the north, heavier still, and she let go of his hand to pull up her hood so that all he could see as he turned to her was her face framed, and the snow alighting in the escaping wisps of her fair hair, half melting, running clear down her cheek to her lips, which beckoned as though the very pair to his own. And gradually it seemed to Gabriel that once again the world itself was fading—that time and space themselves were in retreat, and that there was only he and she standing there alone in the holiness of the snowfall.
Later, when they came to a place where the path was muddy and there was no way around, even though she insisted that there was no need, he bent and lifted her onto his back because he wanted to carry her across. He held her legs in his arms and he felt her warm breathing by his ear, her body against his; and if he could have halted everything, if he could have commanded the world to cease its turning and all creation to end, he would not have hesitated. Without a moment’s pause, he would have stopped the beating of every other creature’s heart—all in the name of his selfish certainty that he would never again know a moment as pure and replete with happiness and love as that instant.
My dear Isabella,
I write with a proposal. Why don’t you come here for Christmas? You don’t have to answer straightaway. But do have a think about it. I need hardly sell you Paris as a “destination.” (Aren’t they awful, these words the journalists come up with? I assume it’s they. It usually is.) Do you remember the Île St. Louis—the place where we used to have those ice creams? It’s just upstream from Notre Dame. I can’t remember the last time we were all here together. I think it must have been when you and G were much younger. Twelve, ten? I daresay you’ve been here many times since then, though—probably know the city inside out. In any case, everywhere is nearby, and you must feel free to bring whomsoever you choose so that you can do as you please. There’s plenty of room. And I’m very lucky: it’s a beautiful apartment—the original buildings date from the 1400s, though there have been one or two rebuilds since then. You should see the place for yourself: the front windows face the Seine, and the guest bedroom (yours whenever) looks out over the courtyard. It’s really no great leap of the imagination to see the horses drawing in and the servants bustling about and all of that. Perhaps I am spending too much time indoors—I cannot get out without help at the moment—but you know what I mean, I think.
No word from you for a while… Perhaps you are away or busy at your job. I confess, ever since your last, I have been looking forward to hearing from you. How is New York? I find it hard even to imagine your life there. I’ve started to think I might never see the place… I’d love to have your impressions—though I suppose they are more than that now. How long have you been there—four years, five? America needs a fundamental rethinking, I would say. They all seemed so much happier over there in the sixties and seventies. Maybe it’s just the folk that make the news bulletins these days, but suddenly the country seems so terribly adolescent again. It’s as if they’re going backward. (This was a favorite idea of YKW, of course…) The new Americans all seem so embattled and apprehensive and overwrought all the time. Whatever it is that they feel they have to assert, defend, uphold, it doesn’t appear to be doing them any good. I’m going on, I know.
Frustratingly, my recovery is much slower than I had first hoped. It seems to go in stages. Quick spurts and then nothing tangible for a week or two. I still can’t really walk properly, though my speech is almost fully recovered, thank god. I can’t describe the sheer irritation that comes with not being able to do at all that which only a few weeks back one could do without thinking.
Anyway, I don’t know what your plans are, and you may well have something lined up for Christmas by this stage. If so, New Year’s? It would be lovely to see you. I know you will be cross, but my circumstances are different now, and I feel that I can claim the invalid’s privilege of directness. I am happy to pay for your flights (and those of your friend), and if you really do not wish to stay here (and I would quite understand), there is a fine hotel just around the corner; I’m sure I could arrange for you to stay there.
As you see, I have managed to write a fair amount without addressing a single one of your questions about Masha, our lives together, or anything else! I’m sorry, but I don’t think I yet have the energy to write all that down in an e-mail. It seems so cold, apart from anything else. But I would dearly like to talk to you again—about that, about everything. So do please have a think about my offer, and maybe I will see you for Christmas!
The following Saturday, the sky was like the underbelly of a sick gray seal. They were out searching for he did not know what—a desk, new covers for the futon that matched the old, stripy tea towels, a fashionable garlic press? He could not remember. Camden Market was as thoroughly wet and cold as he had ever known it. Damp saturated the bones and the winter rain fell—unremitting, unenthusiastic, unwholesome. The old brickwork of the arches above the bigger stores seemed to be cold-sweating out two hundred years’ worth of fever and toxins; the awnings of the smaller stores sagged and threatened calamity; the hot-food booths were lost in steam, and it was impossible to see any of their offerings through the glass counters for all the pinguid condensation.
Somehow time had managed to crawl as far as three-twenty, and Gabriel was now crammed up at one end of a damp bench, thigh to thigh with a family of tourists from Salford. Doggedly, he was forking his way through a medley of multicolored Chinese food, all the favorites thrown in together—sweet and sour, black bean, oyster mushrooms, nonprawn prawn, reconstituted chicken, debeefed beef. Imagining that he was an astronaut helped: then it tasted kind of interesting, and he felt oddly grateful, appreciative of human science.
It seemed as if it had been three-twenty for ages; as if the whole day had subsided at three-twenty and now lay in a slag heap of wet dust, rubble, and contorted masonry. It felt as if old Father Time himself—exhausted, depressed, sick to the back teeth of the endless tick-follows-tock of it all—had simply downed tools (at long last) and strode offsite, bound for the recruitment agent’s office—I want to switch dimensions, chief, I’m through with the fourth; it’s not a job, it’s bloody slavery, that’s what it is. It’s about time I traded up. Something out of the range of these ignorant bastards, please. I hear the ninth is cushdie.
The last other time Gabriel could remember was seven-seventeen, when he had been woken by Lina’s alarm clock. She liked to set it three minutes before she wanted to get up. And about three hours before he did.
The outer edge of the nearest plastic awning did not quite cover his table, and an uneven veil of runoff water was dripping onto the heads of the poor tourist children opposite as they waited for their oblivious parents to finish ramming spring rolls into themselves. Lina had disappeared.
He returned his attention to his own carton. He wondered how far from an actual chicken a piece of chicken in a Chinese chicken dish could go and still get away with being called a piece of chicken. Of course, these nameless cubes (tasting of chalk and chamois leather) had nothing to do with young hens roaming around the farmyard; nothing to do with the main bits of even a battery bird, not leg nor breast; and nothing to do with the secondaries either—the wings or the feet; nothing to do with livers, gizzards, or neck; nothing to do with bones or beaks or feathers. No—at best, it was just about possible that these bits he was now eating had once been on the same factory floor as other meats that had known a few chicken pieces in their youth. And that was probably all the acquaintance with chicken they had ever garnered. So you had to credit them for their audacity—they were quite prepared to go out into the world armed with nothing by way of a briefing save these old-timers’ stories of what chicken used to be and just… just fake it, just belligerently pretend. Come on, then, you fuckers, if we’re not chicken, then what are we? Huh? If we’re not chicken, then don’t eat us. Ha… see… you are doing it! You’re eating us! Fucking A.
They had been attempting to have their lunch together amid the busy food booths in Camden Market because it was here that Lina had arrived at the end of her endurance. Having wandered from place to place all the way up Camden High Street, turning down each with some (admittedly accurate) remark on the decor or menu or staff or seating plan, she had become so hungry that she could barely speak. And for some reason her hunger increased at the same rate as her annoyance, so that by the time they arrived at the Old Stables booths at the Chalk Farm end, she was furious. She could go no farther; she had to eat. Like Joan of Arc sacrificing herself (for God, for France), she had thrown herself into the midst of the antiprawn prawns in sauces unnamed and unnamable. Do unto me what you will; I care no longer.
Mercifully (or even more destructively), Lina’s rages were always speechless and internal. And though Gabriel genuinely felt for her—was he not a fellow soldier in the silent wars of the subconscious?—he had learned to say nothing when she got this way, as she did three of four times a year. No species of humor, no mode of cordiality, no method of clowning or conversation could draw her out of the tight angry spiral into which her spirit plunged. His every gambit only made it worse. A few days later, when she was herself again, she would calmly explain that a whole host of troubles contributed—her parents’ divorce, things not exactly perfect, local rudenesses suffered (perceived or actual), the cold, the wet, the passages of the moon—but no, he was not to worry, it certainly wasn’t anything to do with him. More and more, though, he had started to doubt her. No, that too was disingenuous. Actually, he had long been utterly convinced that he was the root cause—the dark energy that caused her universe to continue falling apart when it should by now have stabilized. And if she was not lying to avoid some deeper conflict or issue (and he could think of one or two), then her endlessly generous subconscious was protecting them both from the same by citing the moon. She was displacing. Yes, it was all him.
And so there they were, an hour later, with plastic chopsticks, cartons, and sodden napkins. Desperate. The rain and the cold did not help. Nor that she had not found whatever it was that they were supposed to be looking for. Nor that the whole expedition had been her idea because she wanted to “do something” with her Saturdays. Nor that he was, if anything, in far greater disarray than she. Nor, indeed, that he still loved her with a confusing conviction.
He had watched supportively as she had bought herself her carton’s worth. He had watched tenderly as she carefully spread three purpose-recruited plastic bags across her side of the bench to ensure no possibility of dampness. He had watched gingerly as she had put a chopstick’s worth into her pretty mouth. He had watched forlornly as she promptly spat it out into her napkin in disgust.
“I can’t eat that,” she had said, a look of horror on her face—as if they two were alone in some forgotten Vietcong camp facing roach fried rice forever. “I can taste the dye.”
“Get something else, then.” He was deep into his own carton already.
“How can you eat it?”
“It’s not too bad.”
She had looked at him as if he were a man capable of surprising her only in his ability to conjure up new lows from human existence. And of course he felt there was nothing else to do but go for another mouthful.
He had meant to antagonize her, perhaps. But he had also actually meant it: there were a million worse meals being served up on the planet every second, and a whole lot of meals not being served up at all. It wasn’t too bad. He had watched her fold the napkin neatly (almost madly, he thought), lean over, and place it in the nearby bin, following it quickly with the rest of her food. Then she rose silently—incandescent—and set off to get something else to disgust her.
Now she had disappeared
He wondered how much time he had.
Preoccupied wasn’t really the word for it.
He was disintegrating.
And even this he wasn’t doing properly, because every time one part of his mind began to address the questions, every time he felt the emotional panic rising as he tried once again to confront himself, another part of his mind would remind him of something horrific happening elsewhere on the planet and in so doing render his own problems and predicament infinitely unimportant, unworthy of thought or time or even feeling. And in this way he continually hijacked himself. But this too he only managed to do unsatisfactorily. (Mania, definitely a mania of some sort.) Because of course he continued to live and think within himself, and within himself the questions remained, returning every few hours, cycling back up to the forefront of his mind regardless of the rest of the world and all its undeniably greater misery. Despite these hijacks, despite everything, he was still himself; still young enough, not subjugated, not tortured, not diseased, not dying, but still living where he lived, a healthy representative of the first adult generation of the new century. The very latest wave of humanity. And he was still required to make an intelligent fair-hearted go of it, just as all the parallel Gabriels he imagined among the Victorians or the Renaissance courtiers or the flappers or the Athenian senators or the Minoans or the Aborigines or the Jutes or the twelve tribes of Israel or the Mongols had been required to make a go of it before him. (Curiously, the beef tasted of… of real chicken.) And yet it seemed to him that he was uniquely required to live and act against a social background of near-total doubt. Any other Gabriel from any other time and place would at least have been able to believe in something. Sure, these other Gabriels might have had a lot of shit on their plates—war, disease, violent death, and so on. (And better chicken.) But not this… not this complete and utter evaporation of all possible belief, or consistency, or any good way for the intelligent man to live. (Might this pale and watery sphere once have been a proud water chestnut?) These other Gabriels had not had to face the fact that God was now well and truly dead, over, a calamitous joke. They had not had to face the fact that the medieval religions had grown senile, demented, and crazed, unable to contend with or relate to the present world in all its instant and tentacled reality (the flavor was inconclusive—might just as well have been a lychee); that, devoid of any great countervailing idea or ideal, capitalism was sweeping all before it (definite oyster mushroom); that conventional politics had been reduced to little more than a fretful soap (“crab” “stick”); that art was now measured not by any external litmus of quality or skill or even endeavor, and that so many seeming acts of creation turned out to be mere gesture and these were celebrated out of all proportion (prawns again, or maybe… goat); that all ideas had become small or embarrassing or superficial, languishing in the lowercase (bean sprout—GM, definitely GM); that the strength of an argument was now gauged only by the emotional temperature at which it was delivered; that science had become too fast for the executive or legislative to understand; that the media had grown mad with chasing what they thought the public wanted and the public mad with what the media fed it; that personal experience had become the tyrant of truth (rind? squid? pig’s ear?); and that right and wrong were now as lost to the world as a pair of penguins in an underground car park long ago sealed off by an earthquake and flooded over by a tsunami.
All that was left was hedonism and acquisitiveness; all that was left was the self. For the first time in history, it seemed to him (watching the rain drop as the family departed) that for the thinking man, absolutely nothing credible existed; or rather, as he had said to Connie, nothing that could not be readily discredited. And he just wasn’t sure the self was up to it. The self much preferred to be selfish.
Worst of all, though, with a third part of himself, he suspected that he was thinking about all this as a deliberate distraction—a means whereby he might cloak his inability to sort anything out in the secular-holy robes of some spurious and self-deceiving faux humanitarianism. Unbelievable: yet more horseshit. Which in turn made him feel guilty. To add to the plain and simple guilt that he already felt—and here the cycle began again—about how he was treating the women in his life whom he sincerely loved…Both of them. Yes, both, Ma: two at the same time. Which was the immediate point. And stop dodging it, Gabriel…
The veil of rain thickened.
He put down his chopsticks.
Oh Ma, I am the torturer in chief. I am the double traitor with two lives hollow. I am the counterfeiter. I am the simulacrum. I am the one with a shard of ice in his heart. They throw open the secret chapels of their hearts, I walk in, plant my monitoring devices, and leave; they come to me with open eyes, I tweak out their tears. Or else I am hidden, Ma, I am closed off and locked away. Where am I, Ma, where am I, your son? In what lead-lined bunker did you leave me? For what reason? And who… who am I? This director of propaganda. This creature never present. This looking-glass man.
But for something like seven seconds a month, the power failed, the burning spotlights were all extinguished at the same time, the noise was roundly silenced, his heart slowed its battering, his breathing deepened, and he glimpsed the naked truth stealing across the darkened stage of his mind between costume changes.
And now at last the decision came, not like a butterfly or a ray of celestial light but in the shape of a fat pigeon beaking its way through the daily jamboree of the fallen Chinese.
Leave her. Leave everyone. Do it now. Start it now. Give yourself no choice.
And he set off at a run through the rain like a man chasing a thief that only he could see.
When the call came, she did not recognize his voice. She stood in Susan’s hall with the children running this way and that and tried to make sense of what Gabriel was telling her. But she could not process the words—she felt instead as though listening to a stranger describing the actions of a supposedly mutual friend that she wasn’t actually sure she knew. “I’ve left Lina.”
“What?”
“I’ve taken a room. In Chalk Farm.”
“What?”
“I’m there now.”
“Gabs?”
“In a shared house. There’s a guy from work—they were looking for someone. I’ve given them a deposit. I had to do it straightaway, Is. I’ve been…”
She clutched the receiver closer, hoping that might help her understand. “Gabs—what—what are you talking about? What have you done?”
“I keep on feeling it all from—” He interrupted himself. “It makes me so angry for every… About me, I mean. And sad.”
“What—what have you done?”
“Sorry. I have made a decision, Is. No idea if it is the right one. But I couldn’t carry on. The whole thing was killing me. Trying to think my way through it all. Seeing it from all the different angles. I just got sick of thinking. It’s like the way Mum used to say that Kasparov would beat his opponents: he would complicate it and complicate it until they just got sick of thinking about the problem. Then, eventually, their stamina went. Well, I’m beaten. That’s it. I’m moving out.”
“Jesus, Gabriel, you’re moving out of your flat? You’re splitting up with Lina? Are you… Where are you?”
“And—and I need you to help me. I have to go back and talk to her now—she’ll be worried about me, she keeps calling my mobile—but I… I need you to help me move my stuff out. I’ve hired a van. I’m picking it up in King’s Cross at eight. I’ll do the first run tonight—as soon as—or it will be too late. Sort the rest tomorrow.”
“Gabriel, where the hell are you?”
“Grafton Terrace.”
“Where’s that?”
“Chalk Farm.”
“That’s just around the corner.”
“I know.”
“I’m coming… I’m coming now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell me where exactly.”
When she arrived, his behavior was the most unnerving she had ever known, odder even than when she had discovered him earnestly playing charades with total strangers on the heath during one of his boyhood disappearances. He was being grotesquely normal. And yet only she seemed to be able to see through the threadbare ordinariness of his manner. His dark eyes danced with his intelligence and yet they were ringed with tiredness as if with tar; his hair was straggled dry from the rain and smelled of smoke; his jeans were still soaking at the bottom where he’d obviously drenched himself in puddles. And he would not shut up.
Just like that, he introduced her to all his new flatmates, all five of them in their late twenties and early thirties, as if this were just another routine and reasonably considered move in a life of steady progress. There was talk of handy shops. Talk of the local. Talk of a dinner party so that he could get to know their various “other halves.” Talk of bills and a few house rules. Talk of a cleaning rota. Talk of the garden’s being lovely in the summer. Excited talk of a New Year’s party they were planning. He was all agreement, regularity, and straight, easy charm. She couldn’t believe he was fooling them. A good actor—she had forgotten that—a very good actor. Because he meant it. While he was saying it, he meant it. And he made her feel discomfited and deceitful for not going along with it. As though she would be letting down not only him but these great new flatmates too: Claire, Chris, Sean, Louis, and Taz. So she just had to stand there and nod and smile and listen.
Stunned, anxious, panicked, she climbed into the moving van at eight the next morning, the Sunday sky raw as pale flesh before the flogging starts. He had not answered his phone all night. She had left three or four messages. And a part of her was plain relieved that he was here, alive, staring dead ahead from behind the blue plastic wheel, dressed in paint-stained green overalls that she could not imagine her brother wearing, let alone owning, in a million years of trying. She took one look at his face and knew that he had not slept for a moment, nor bothered to try. She said nothing. He would speak or not, as he wished. The radio told of yet another leadership crisis. They set off, brother and sister.
After a while he began to talk—brusque and broken sentences, which she did not question. She understood that Lina had last night cried such terrible silent tears that in the end Gabriel had carried her across the threshold in his arms and driven her, wrapped in a blanket, to her mother’s in the van. The bitter opposite of marriage, he muttered. Then he himself had gone to his friend Larry’s, at one or two. Beyond that, more or less all he would say was that it was not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, over and over again.
He was no longer pretending to be normal, at least. Instead, for the rest of the morning he was mostly silent or blank. She had not known a more suffocating day—the very air seemed to be shrinking and shriveling from the evolving pain.
And the day did not relent. At one, still feeling helpless, anxious, and now hungry, Isabella stood alone in the cream-colored bedroom that her brother had shared with Lina for the past four years, packing a torn English translation of War and Peace into the final box of this trip and wondering if she would make it down to the car with all the remaining plastic bags and the holdall in one go. She did not want to come back up. Gabriel had set off again in the van. Adam was in the car waiting for her. He had been roped in (by Susan) to help. Poor, poor Lina was at her mother’s.
Staring at the book, she allowed herself to access the secret cargo of guilt she had been carrying since Gabriel’s call for help: perhaps… perhaps indirectly she had been the cause. Had she not in some way prompted him to this decision in the pub? Had she been too forthright about leaving Sasha? By showing off about her decisiveness (and that, she knew, was what she had been doing), had she not thrown his indecision into relief, made him feel his inaction as a fault? And now he had gone and done this. Taken a cheap room in a shared house in Chalk Farm on what looked like the rashest impulse of his life.
She opened the book, knowing well that the inscription would be in her mother’s hand.
Dear Gabriel, I hope one day you will read this book and find in it all the life that I do! Life is all there is—it seems obvious enough, but you will be amazed at how many people forget. And for Tolstoy, as for his Pierre Bezukhov, the only duty is to life itself: “Life is everything. Life is God.” Even in the fever of our wars and the squandering of our peace. Happy Birthday! Again!
Isabella had the same edition herself, also a birthday present from her mother. Though, as she recalled, her inscription was to do with Tolstoy saying that “the one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.”
Oh Mum, Mum, Mum.
The doorbell rang, startling her. Or rather, the doorbell chimed. She put the book in the holdall with the rest, swung it over her shoulder, and then bent to pick up the box and various plastic bags. She remembered (with a bite of her lip) that it had once been one of those nerve-shredding London buzzers, before Lina took action. Now it was a Serenity Chime.
And Isabella had to let it chime serenely all the way to the final chord as she struggled into the hall, the holdall creeping forward and refusing to stay properly over her shoulder, the plastic bags straining at her fingers, the box weighing her down.
Jesus. I’m coming. Persistent bastard. Surely not Gabriel? No, he would come straight up. For a horrible moment she thought that maybe it was Lina, returning impromptu from her mother’s, and that there would now be more tears and that terrible slow-motion anguish. And what in Christ’s name was she, Isabella, going to say? But then she realized with relief that Lina, of course, had keys to her own flat. And Lina would not come back now the decision had been made, however unconvincingly, however madly. Because in her own way, Lina was far stronger than Gabriel knew. And though he was the emotional vandal now, in the long run it would be her brother whose suffering was greater. Dear God. Ten percent more or less of a bastard and Gabs would have been fine.
The chime built toward its final chord again. She managed to put down the box on Lina’s little telephone table without everything underneath sliding to the floor. It must be Adam. He had been waiting with his car and partially blocking the narrow road—maybe there was a warden. Desperate to prevent the whole cycle from beginning again, Isabella grabbed the entryphone, one hand still balancing the box, fingers now white and taut from the heavy handles of the bags.
“Hello. I’m just coming down.”
But it wasn’t Adam. The accent was East European. “Hello—this is Gabriel Glover?”
“Nope.”
“This is Gabriel Glover’s house?”
“Yes… No. Yes. For about another two minutes, anyway.”
“I am sorry. May I speak with Gabriel Glover, please?”
“I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment.” Some strange friend of her brother’s, she guessed. “But I’m coming out. Hang on a second.”
For heaven’s sake. She hung the thing back on the wall, placed the key in her teeth, hoisted box, bags, and holdall, pulled the door shut behind her with her trailing foot. Probably some Sunday thing her brother had forgotten about. Not surprisingly. She put everything down on the stairs, locked the door, jiggling the key against the stiffness, picked everything up again, cursed her brother, and set off for the front door.
She did not regret offering to help Gabriel move, of course—she would gladly have offered to fetch his things from hell itself—but she was conscious that innocent Adam had been volunteered as a supplementary driver without being present at the discussion. And having carried out the best part of a trunk’s worth himself, he was no doubt anxious to return to his own (much better) life. She reached the front door in a hurry, therefore, as well as a fluster.
A tall, gaunt-looking man in a dreadful dark brown suit was waiting just outside as she stepped into the colorless light with the box underneath her chin, threatening to spill. She was aware of Adam double-parked and leaning across so he could see out of the passenger window. And the books were heavy.
Before she could say anything, though, and just as the main door swung shut behind her, the man spoke.
“Hello. I am here to see Gabriel Glover, please. He said to me to meet him here at one. Is he inside this house?”
She tried to nod over the box as she paused in her stride. She recognized the accent now—Russian. Of course. But it was hard to tell if the formality of his manner was a function of his speaking English or the purpose of his visit. Obviously her brother had some strange friends—either that or gambling debts.
“I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment. Now is not a good time. What is it about? I’ll tell him that you ca—oh, shitting hell.” The holdall had swung around again, off her shoulder, and she was in danger of losing some books from beneath her chin.
The man stepped forward, and before she had time to wonder what he was going to do, or for that matter to be afraid, he had taken the box.
“Thanks. Thanks…” He remained motionless while she sorted out all the bags. She looked up and met his eyes—sunken, turquoise, arresting. “Thank you.”
“Are you Isabella?”
The question took her completely aback. They stood on the doorstep facing each other for a second.
“Yeah—yes. I’m Gabriel’s sister.” The books clearly weren’t half so heavy for him, though he held the box oddly, she noticed, resting it on his arms, which he stretched out in front of him as if he were a forklift, hands free at the end. The guy must know her brother quite well after all. She relaxed a few fractions.
“Sorry.” She indicated the car. “We’re in a rush. You’re lucky you came today. Gabriel is moving out. This is all his stuff. Or unlucky, I suppose. There’s been a bit of an upheaval. You’re—”
“My name is Arkady Artamenkov. I am here from St. Petersburg. Your brother told me to come to this house to talk to him… to talk to both of you. This is how I know your name.”
And only now it occurred to her that it was something to do with her mother. Her curiosity sparked. The bags were murdering her fingers again.
“Hang on.” She started toward the car. Adam reached over his shoulder and opened the back door, and she placed the bags and holdall on the floor.
“Sorry,” she said to Adam, “just one sec ”
The man was now standing behind her, holding the box. She turned, took it from him, and dumped it flat on the back seat.
“Thank God for that.” She stood up straight as he took a step back. “Is it something to do with the flat?”
“No, no.” The other’s face changed, as if he realized that she was mistaking him completely. “No, I am sorry. I am a friend of your mother from Petersburg. I know your mother very well. Today I was going to speak with your brother about this, about her. He said you would both be here.”
“Oh. Oh God, sorry.” She wanted to send Adam home alone. She considered a second. No, it simply wasn’t fair. Her curiosity was burning her up now, though, and she felt her neck going red. She must get his number and organize another time. Gabriel should be there too. The guy’s English was better than she had first thought. She softened her tone. “Oh, I see… Sorry. What a balls-up.” She put her hand through her hair. “It’s just a very bad day today. My brother is—Gabriel is—moving out because he and his girlfriend, Lina, are splitting up. For a while.”
“I used to practice on your mother’s piano at her apartment on the Griboedova in St. Petersburg.”
“You are a musician?” Why hadn’t Gabriel told her anything about this?
“Yes. I play the piano. She… she said to me many things about you. We were supposed to talk together today.”
“Right, right, right. Oh, well, we have to arrange another time.” She glanced at the car. A scaffolding truck was turning into the road. It would not be able to get past. “I—we—would love to meet up. We really would. Is there a number I can call you on? I’m so sorry about this.”
“No. I—I—I do not have a phone.”
“Okay. Is there a way of getting in touch with you?”
His head fell and he seemed to be looking at his feet.
“How about… how about this Friday?” Give Gabriel some time, she thought; yes, he would want to be there. “Erm… whereabouts are you based?”
“I do not understand.” He looked up again.
“Where are you staying?”
“Oh, near Harrow Road.”
“Well, to be honest, the simplest thing to do is say… seven-thirty on Friday evening… at Kentish Town tube. I will definitely be there. Hang on a sec.” She opened the passenger door, reached pen and paper out of her bag, apologized to Adam again, and scribbled down her cell phone number on a piece of paper. The scaffolding truck pulled up behind the car. “This is my number. Call me anytime to confirm. I promise I will be there. Friday, Kentish Town at seven-thirty. What’s your e-mail?”
He told her an address.
“Write it down.” She handed him the pen.
The driver leaned out of the window of the truck. “Oy, love, how long you gonna be? We’ve got houses to rob.”
“Okay. See you… on Friday.” She met the Russian’s eyes a second time, hoping to convey her sincerity. A car was coming in behind the truck.
“Yes, okay.” He seemed to be about to say something but then stopped.
“Friday at Kentish Town. I promise. I am so sorry about this.”
“I will call you.”
“Yes, call me whenever. I’d love to talk. I’ll send you an e-mail to confirm.” She turned to open the door and climb into the car. When, three seconds later, she looked back through the window to wave, he was already walking away.
The sickness passed toward the end of day four. He washed himself over and over in cold water on day five. Shaved. Face and head. Bin-bagged his bedclothes and as much of his filthy room as he could. Carried the bags out into the narrow hall. Left them by the hole. He ate a tin of beans, a biscuit, and some dried figs. As much as he could stomach. Then he took the last of the sleeping pills and moved into Arkady’s room. He slept for ten hours in the cleanliness of his friend’s bed.
On the sixth day, he thought he could appear almost normal again, though his knees ached and his stomach was still uneasy. He dressed in Arkady’s oldest clothes—sweater sleeves and trouser legs rolled, the same gulag prisoner but liberated this very morning, emaciated and all but drowning in borrowed civvies. He lugged out the black sacks. Hauled out his mattress, kicked it down the stairs one flight at a time. Burned everything on the fires outside.
There was never any real daylight in the winter. A light snow began to fall.
He climbed the stairs one flight at a time, amazed at the simple functioning of his lungs. He found another sweater, put some socks on his hands, squeezed into his old raincoat, and walked slowly all the way to Sennayska market. He went straight to Tsoikin, the CD seller from whom he had bought so much of his beloved library. The darkness returned. He walked back. He sat waiting. (Had he known all along that he would sell the music? It now seemed so.) Tsoikin arrived at seven and offered him a derisory sum for everything. He accepted immediately and took the cash. He apologized for the hole in the wall and the dust on all the cases. He explained that he was leaving. He asked to keep a single disk—Vivaldi’s holy music. He left Tsoikin boxing up and went straight out to call Grisha from a pay phone.
He hung around Primorskaya station, scared that he would miss him, nursing tea that was forever cooling. Three hours later, at eleven, Grisha arrived in his car. They went for a ride. Henry agreed to meet with Leary the following day. He gave Grisha his money. And Grisha, all grins and goodwill, gave him a little extra in return.
He climbed out by the bank of the Neva. He waited while Grisha pulled cautiously away—mirror signal maneuver, fog lights on, a scrupulous and law-abiding driver. The wind had dropped, but snow was falling thickly again, flakes like crumbled Eucharist, sticking to everything. The river was frozen. He stuck his hand out and took the first car that came skidding in to the curb. At the lights the man offered him half a bottle of vodka—very special, he said. He gave the man the rest of his money. Just what he needed to make sure.
Tsoikin was gone. The room was empty now save for the dust, the stereo, and the tattered sofa. He found an unused syringe in his desk. (Had he been saving it there for this? It now seemed so.) He put on the only CD he had kept, seeking Beatus vir, in memoria aeterna. He knew his tolerance level would have dropped. But he prepared a bigger hit than his usual. He drank some of the vodka as he did so, wincing against the sting. Vivaldi’s voices sang. He thanked God for his good veins, thanked God that he had taken care to rotate. He swigged another slug of vodka. He thought, I do not want to be here. He thought, This is my friend. He thought, This is coming home. He thought, Don’t push it all in at once. Push and stop. Push and stop. Push and stop.
And when it came, it was like the pure-purer-purest relief and the tranquil-happy surge of every good thing in the world, every sweet taste, every scent, every sound, and then an ever-flooding and perfect absence; and the music played and he didn’t care, and his breathing slowed, and he really didn’t care, and he lay back, and he felt himself going going going and he didn’t care. And his breathing slowed a little more. And he knew he was going over. He knew he was going over. But he didn’t care. His soul at last was circling that most blissful zero, angels falling, ragged wings ripped and broken, circling that very center of nothingness.
And on the seventh day he was dead.
London was in a damp and rheumy mood when he awoke at six; his windowsill wet with the night-long tears of some passing ghost or other. A hundred generations of Londoners seemed to have been weeping in the streets when he set off half an hour later. The parked taxi opposite, the red pillar box on the corner, the trees and the lampposts—all seemed to loom at him out of the murk as if to signify a cold aggression on the part of his new surroundings. So suddenly did the first figure he encountered appear that he almost fell into the dead pools of the other’s eyes before he had time to stand aside. They stopped a moment before passing each other, and the stranger muttered something unintelligible, which Gabriel’s imagination took to be more of the same: “What are you doing here? Get out of the way. Yes, you, asshole.”
Perversely, he was relieved that he wasn’t sleeping. Now that he had been off work for a week, he would have resented waking up in the cold darkness and setting out for this breakfast meeting if it meant missing out on lying warm in his bed. But for the first time in his entire adult life, his bed was womanless and had become little more than a cradle for nightmares, waking or otherwise.
He emerged onto the main road at the bottom of Haverstock Hill, walked past the Salvation Army, and crossed for the tube station. There was no real reason for him to be going. Though that did not bother him: there was no real reason for doing anything. Actually, there was a reason: perhaps he half wanted to find out a little something about the job himself. Or was this too an effort on behalf of his subconscious to pretend? In fact, he didn’t give a fuck about TV. Why lie to himself? He would rather edit the new bottled-water magazine in the Roland Sheekey basement than waste his life’s dwindling energy making yet more crap for Channel Eight and its ten million catatonic viewers. Hard these days to convey how little he cared for what people did, said they did, wanted to do. His life henceforward, he feared, would be all about disguising himself, concealing his natural reaction, burying it deep. Oh Christ… Not yet six days and he missed Lina like his own limbs. And Connie, whom he must not call again. Never again—unless and until he was clear. His head ached, physically ached, so that he thought maybe he really did have the flu. He went underground.
Thirty-seven minutes later he surfaced at Westminster and was surprised to see the day no better established in the presence of the mother of all parliaments. Opposite, even Big Ben seemed a little less sure of itself, its assertion of height—bigness generally—less convincing than ever, its Gothic angles all shapeless and shrouded in the still clammy air. The time was only seven-thirty. He was hopelessly early. He decided to walk out onto Westminster Bridge. He could easily make his way back to the café in good time—have something hot and warm and wait for Becky and Isabella to arrive.
The sleepless Thames rolled on beneath. The top of the Eye was blurry in the mist, the great wedge of the South Bank barely distinguishable from the gray of the sky, air, and river. Embankment Place seemed less a building than the carapace disguise of some mighty insect—sleeping, awaiting the allotted hour. And the air was so dense with the hoary damp that it felt as though his jump would have been no great fall but slowed, bit by bit, by thicker and thicker vapors until the water swallowed him with barely a splash.
He stood awhile in his coat, hands warming in the pockets, gazing downriver. London was awakening. He had the impression that the entire city was working to keep the city going so that the entire city could work there. He would have liked a job on the river. That would be good: to see the living Thames every day. To work the water. Some sort of pollution-monitoring patrol. Or something to do with boat registration, perhaps. Rescue the odd whale. Something that started early. Something real. What river jobs were there?
He turned and began to walk slowly back, looking up again at two of the four faces of that ever-ticking clock. And suddenly he felt the stabbing hurt of memory again—his mother’s only half-joking belief that he would one day be prime minister. (Madly, he encouraged her voice every time it came now, preferring this pain of bereavement to the possibility of her vanishing.) That she had believed this of him, her confidence in him, her certainty, her ready support for any step he might take on this chosen path, her thermonuclear opposition to anything that might dare to stand in his way—these things pierced him to the heart. And here he was, all alone with the utterly insane fact that he could not pass the Palace of Westminster without feeling it to be some kind of challenge (there was plenty of time yet), the utterly insane fact that she had somehow made even the great British parliament her mouthpiece—had somehow enlisted it as surely as if all within and even the chambers themselves were merely vassals of her greater spirit. The sheer power of this: to make all things pertain to her will.
He was still early. Becky and Isabella were due at eight-fifteen. He decided to wait inside—a choice he immediately realized was a mistake, given his unhealthy state of mind. La Cantina was one of those phony places he found spiritually weakening, the whole “concept” more than likely conceived by some pathologically mediocre little masturbator of a city boy with individual interior decor supplied by the inevitably “artistic” girlfriend. Oh Christ. He looked around, wondering whether he was ill or not: polished light wood and chrome everywhere, the newspapers in racks, eggs Benedict for an outrageous sum of money, and a bad wine list presented on a blackboard as if (just this minute) written out in the hand of a motivated and cheeky member of staff. Dotted about, a clientele that deserved nothing less. He went for the sofa in the window and ordered himself a tomato juice and some coffee. He simply couldn’t read the newspapers anymore, and he had forgotten his book, so he just sat there, wishing they would turn the awful pretend jazz off, glancing around, trying not to hear the conversation coming from a nearby table.
One mind tried to remind another mind that the choice of venue was not Becky’s fault. Just near Channel Eight and convenient. So stop. Stop this. What was happening to him? (He was ill. Definitely. Fever.) And what the hell was happening out there? Beyond the window, the whole of London seemed to be engaged in an embarrassingly transparent struggle for some kind of authenticity. And yet the more they asserted their passion for this or their great love for that, the more he saw the neediness, the emptiness, the desperation. Their only authentic endeavor was their endeavor to appear authentic. Help me, Ma.
Becky was exactly on time. And for a while she rescued him. He was amazed by how good it was to see her. She was an old friend from when they were both working on the local papers, and he had forgotten how genuine her good nature was. She had tales of ex-colleagues. She had industry news. She had personal news. TV journalism was a piece of piss compared to print. There was none of the bother. The story only had to stand up for the three minutes you were telling it. And everything was forgotten immediately afterward. Oh, yes, my God: she was engaged. She was getting married to Barney. Remember Barney? (No.) How was Gabriel?
He glossed his mother’s death as “really sad, but it was a beautiful funeral,” his job as “not a bad holding station for now,” and his relationship as “a trial separation.” This last a phrase he particularly loathed. And it occurred to him while saying these things that it was he who was the fake. Of course.
Unbelievably, Isabella was nearly half an hour late, arriving barely ten minutes before Becky indicated that she needed to go. But there was no point, Becky said, in their getting together unless she gave Isabella the whole picture. So she, Becky, would hang on for another twenty. No problem. (Gabriel was touched by her kindness and her loyalty to him; he knew that she was seriously inconveniencing herself.) It was a low-paid job as a production assistant on a new magazine-style culture show. Isabella should emphasize this, leave out that. It was a long shot, admittedly, but the program was also going to cover the media, and Isabella probably knew as much about this as anyone—the U.S. connection might be useful too. The best bet was just to be honest.
“That was a waste of time,” Isabella said.
“No, you made it a waste of time.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay, Gabs?” Isabella put down the menu and looked up at him.
“Becky isn’t stupid.”
Isabella frowned. “I didn’t say she was.”
“No, but you treated her as if she was—and as if everything she was saying went further and further toward confirming it.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is,” Gabriel pressed. “It’s just that you can’t see it.”
Isabella looked at her brother with rare crossness. “What’s the issue here, Gabs? I’ve said I’m sorry that I was late. I’m sorry.”
“The issue—the issue—is that Becky got up at dawn to come here and meet you. And the only reason she did so is because she is a friend of mine, someone who might be able to help you. And so what do you do? You turn up half an hour late and immediately start in at her about her work and her life. That’s the issue.” He scowled. “Oh yeah, and the fact that you’ve left yet another job without the slightest idea what you are going to do. Which I wouldn’t ordinarily mind, because I’m used to it—you’ve never managed to do anything for more than a few hours since you were five—except… except that this time you’re bullshitting me about it. Sabbatical, my arse. Three issues.”
“Jesus Christ, Gabs.” Isabella put her coffee down to one side as if clearing the space between them. “Where did all that come from?”
“You don’t know what you’re doing here. You don’t know what you were doing there. You walked out. You gave them the usual Isabella treatment. You fucked everything and you—”
“So what if I did?” Now she sat forward to return the attack with interest. “I didn’t ask you to find me a job here. Yeah, you’re right—you organized this for me. I didn’t really get much say in it, did I? It was more or less an order. Come down to Westminster at eight-fifteen, Is, I’m sorting you out.” She paused a moment and narrowed her eyes. “Oh, I get it. Now that Mum is dead, you’ve decided that you are in charge of my life. Is that it? You’re obviously an expert at running lives.”
“Leave Mum out of this.”
She looked around for a waiter. “I don’t have to listen to you.”
They had not fought in twenty years. And even now they could have stopped, left the café, and perhaps survived without serious wounds. But some furious force was impelling them both.
“No. You don’t. You don’t have to listen to anything, Is. You never have before. Why start now?”
She turned back to him, her eyes suddenly ferocious. “Oh… oh, you have a lesson for me. That’s what this morning is all about.”
He met and held the violence in her gaze. “One day you are finally going to see that other people can be clever too. One day you are going to get it into your tiny stubborn mind that, yes, other people can be intelligent as well—in different ways. And sometimes a whole lot more intelligent than you. One day you will understand that not everyone thinks and feels the same as you—not everyone has the same prejudices. Not everyone has reached the same conclusions. There are lots of different kinds of intelligence. Besides yours.”
Her voice was heavy with scorn. “Say whatever it is you’re trying to say.”
“I’m not trying to say anything. I am saying it. You think you are this… this genius at seeing inside everything, at understanding what’s really going on. You think you have some kind of social x-ray facility. But you’re going to have to wake up and realize that you’ve no such thing. Because the truth is… the truth, Isabella, is that you never—you never see anything from the other person’s point of view. You never even come close.” He leaned toward her, and his words were measured to deliver their payload. “Just now, your body language, your manner, everything about you contrived to make the whole thing a waste of time. You weren’t listening at all. Not really. Every gesture and every remark, you made only to demonstrate your worldview to Becky. That’s all you cared about. Getting across what sort of a person you are. Whatever the conversation was ostensibly about, all you wanted to do was make her understand your way of seeing things, and not only that, but… but that your way of seeing things is… is in some way the coolest. Except she wasn’t really going along with your jocular little tone—about how it’s all shit and a bit of a game and anyone could do it with their eyes closed. Because she works in television, for Christ’s sake, Is. That’s her job. She doesn’t share your opinions. Of course she doesn’t—she can’t. She’s got a job and she is doing it. Sticking to it. Doing it. Going the distance. Actually committing to—”
“I didn’t realize you thought Channel Eight was so great.”
“That’s not the point and you know it. I don’t give a fuck about Channel Eight.” He had cowed her for the moment. “What I’m trying to get through to you is that whether or not you are ultimately existentially right about Channel fucking Eight, other people have different opinions, and they might, just might, turn out to be as clever and as insightful as yours. And you have to start understanding that. Because otherwise you can’t learn anything. Because otherwise all your insight and x-ray vision will amount to nothing more than the worst kind of pathetically disguised egotistical evangelism. Because otherwise these other people will get up and leave, like Becky did just now, thinking you are an arrogant, naive, conceited little bitch.”
“Whereas you—you are all heart, right, Gabs?” Her throat was reddening but she was leaning forward to meet him now, the space between them narrowing. “You think and feel on their behalf, on everyone’s behalf… and then—and then—you go right ahead and do it anyway. Straight to the torture: fuck with everybody around you, but it’s all okay, because you’re doing all the feeling and thinking on their behalf.” She jeered at him. “Very kind. Thank you on behalf of all the women you are so graciously caring for.”
His voice was flat and cold. “All your life you have just come in and taken my friends and used them, transparently, when you thought they could help you, and then ignored them the minute you thought they could not. You even bullshit one lot of my friends about how close you are to another lot if you think the second lot can get you something. But you never understood that the reason they’re my friends in the first place is because I give back, I put in, I keep the fucking friendships going. I don’t just turn up and ask, ‘What can you do for me? I’m waiting.’ I write the letters. I make the visits. I listen to their stories. I try to help them in return.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“But you’ve always taken it anyway.”
“Because… because you know what? Your help—which is a joke anyway—your help comes with way too much baggage. Your help comes with too much moralizing and too many conditions. And you know the sickest part? The sickest part is that you’re not even sure what your fucking morals are. Or you’re too much of a coward to act on them. So in the end your help just comes with one big fat stamp on the side that says control. Isn’t that right, Gabs? And you know who that reminds me of? Speaking of cowards and controlling bastards. No, no, of course you don’t want to hear it.”
He recoiled. “Fuck you.”
“Why don’t you come out and face it?” She was sneering. “Deal with it. Deal with the fact that you lie to yourself. Get past—”
“Oh, fuck off with your therapy bullshit.”
“Sorry—that’s your area, isn’t it? What are you afraid of, Gabriel? You’re—”
“I am not afraid of anything.”
“What are you afraid of?”
They faced each other.
His scornful features mirrored hers exactly. “We’d all love to quit our jobs, Isabella, and sit around crying or screaming or smashing our heads against the wall. Or however the fuck it is you like to spend your time. But you’re going to have to grow up now, Is. Life is about ignoring the fact that life isn’t about anything. That’s it. Get used to it. And stop looking for excuses.”
“You are afraid of being yourself. You are afraid of facing up to what and who you are. Now you sit here trying to control me. You do, you do, you remind me of—”
“You never faced one single thing.”
“I face the fact that my father is my father.”
“I have lived every day—every day since I left college—in the real world. Facing it. Doing it. Doing it despite. Despite the fact that I know it’s senseless.”
“Well, then you are an idiot.”
There was raw rage in their voices now, bloodiness in their eyes.
He pointed his finger. “You’re the one who can’t face anything. Can’t do it. Keeps on avoiding, hiding. Cowering away from real life. You know why? You know why you don’t have the nerve to try anything for long enough? Because you’re afraid that after all, you might not be very good at anything. You might just be a talentless piece of shit. The same as the people you think you are so much better than.”
“Whereas you seem delighted with your mediocrity.”
“You… you sit here bullshitting me. Lying to me. When I know… And I’ve known it ever since you came back. I know that you are in touch with Dad. Why lie to me? Why lie, Little Miss Facing Up? When it’s so fucking obvious that you’ve been calling, writing, probably planning a cute little family Christmas get-together. So obvious. And yet you haven’t got the guts to tell me to my face. Who’s the coward? Who’s controlling you now, Is? Today? Right now? Doesn’t feel like you’re in control to me. You contact Dad behind my back and expect me not to realize. Then you bullshit me, hide it. Feels like Dad is in control to me. Feels like Dad is stopping you from having some kind of a conversation with your brother. Feels likes he’s totally in control.”
“I can’t believe how fucked up you really are. It’s actually a surprise.”
“Is he giving you money as well? Is that how come you’re so relaxed about not finding work that you can tell Becky her life is a bag of shit? Fine, take his money. Enjoy it.” He got up. “This is crap. Use some of his money to pay the bill. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I’m going to work.”
“That’s a lie too,” she said to his back. “You haven’t been in all week.”
But he was gone.
All through the city, her brother’s words stalked her. Sinister clowns or blithe assassins—she could not tell. A few steps behind, peeping after her around the corners she had just turned, pretending other business if ever she swung around to confront their whispering.
By eleven a vicious staccato wind that came in from the east had begun to whip at the last of the morning’s mist. By noon it was utterly impossible to imagine such a silent foggy stillness as had delivered the day, and by two she was being lashed by the belts of freezing sleet that the easterly carried in its chattering train. From Hackney to Acton and from Finchley to Balham and at all the bitter points between, the weather nagged and thrashed at the city, and nowhere was there enough shelter or relief. The doorways were all too shallow, the roofs of the buildings never quite overhung the pavements, the shops had insufficient frontages, the streets were all too wide. There was nowhere to get out of it, no Renaissance-built arcades, no Mall of America, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape. On days such as these, she realized, the people of London felt it hard in their bones that their city was fashioned for neither one thing nor the other: not for sun or shade, rain or snow.
All day long she struggled through this weather, looking at one flat after another: a crepuscular Vauxhall basement (“excellent access”), a converted half-floor on the Maida Vale border (“vibrant community”), a “reclaimed” council flat in Bethnal Green (“superb views—up to your ears in real London here, love”), an attic in Bal-ham (“good new bars”). Had she actually been seriously looking for somewhere to live, she might have said something. But she wasn’t. Or not anymore. Indeed, she did not know what she was doing. All she was sure of was that she was grateful for two things: that the day was full of appointments to mark out the hours so she was continually moving, and that the moving itself was done on the blessed tube—dry, sheltered, out of it. If anything, she wished that she had been even more haphazard in selecting possible flats—the more time traveling, the better.
It was four now and she was back on the Northern Line, on her way to see a cluster of places near Susan’s in Kentish Town, the last of the day. The rest of the passengers looked nervous, overvigilant, tensed and ready, their heads jerking involuntarily to the maddened old tune of the centenarian track, but the racket and clatter were to her a lifelong balm. When she and her brother were young, they used to joke that happiness was a sign that read HIGH BARNET I MIN. The Northern Line was theirs. And the High Barnet branch was as good as home.
She wasn’t upset, or unduly depressed, or indeed angry about what had happened that morning—or not near the surface. Rather she felt as if she were on some kind of clumsy emotional painkiller, the sort of thing they handed out to people who could not take too much reality; she felt vaguely irritated, but she also felt cosseted from the rampage of what she knew must be the truth of her feelings. Yes, they stalked her. And she knew they would catch up with her. But not here and not yet. Not yet.
This weird fuzzy numbness had begun almost immediately after her brother had left the café. She had not been that worried. Instead she simply assumed—her spirit simply assumed, regardless of her mind—that somehow—and she had absolutely no idea how—they would find a way back. She really could not imagine what this way would be. For they had said far too much, they had said the unsayable, and she knew that she and her brother were fearsomely (and disastrously) equal in the ferocity with which neither would now yield an emotional millimeter without evidence first of a capitulation on the part of the other. Of all the people she had ever met, with the sole exception of her mother, only her brother had a focused will that equaled her own.
Everything was fucked, of course. That much was obvious. She couldn’t go on staying with Susan, though Susan had made it very clear that she was to remain as long as she liked. On the other hand, she was now no longer sure she wanted to remain in London at all. Hence the half-assed way in which she had been seeing the flats. She realized that she’d been banking on staying with Gabriel and Lina until… until she’d sorted herself out. But that too was out of the question.
At Warren Street, she experienced her first real pang for Sasha, for New York, for the East Village, for her life before. At least the old mess was properly understood: Mum—Russia; Dad—who cares?; Gabs—London; Sasha—annoying but good-hearted and actually a nice guy to hang out with. Oh God. She forced herself back into the present.
At the opposite pole from her fuzziness regarding her brother was her lucidity regarding her father. The dilemma was over. Gabriel knew. Fine. Now the way was open for her to have a clear run at Nicholas. All roads led back to him. She had enough money to see her through Christmas and a little beyond, after which she would absolutely have to work. So she must use the time between then and now to deal with the things that had brought her back to London in the first place. She had to talk to her father about her mother. And yet the thought of actually going to see him still repulsed her.
She fished her printed copy of his last e-mail out of her bag as the tube came to a standstill outside Camden.
Insidious. That was the only word for it.
My dear Isabella, I write with a proposal. Why don’t you come here for Christmas? You don’t have to answer straightaway. But do have a think about it.
His charm, as ever, was so false and so real at the same time… It crawled under her skin, squirmed, hatched there. And all that stuff about ice creams and when they were all a little family. Yuck. Drawing on her sense of him as a father, of course, niftily leading her back into the role of little one, daughter, dependant. Then all that assumed mutuality—“you know what I mean, I think,” “yours whenever”—as if they had been the closest of families through every hour of her childhood and the very best of friends every day since. As if they had spent the past ten years popping around to borrow jam from each other. Next the rant about America, disguised in that faux-humble outside-observer tone (“I’d love to have your impressions”) but really yet another covert attack: an attack on her for going there and, by implication, on her judgment, on her taste, on her very personality, her life. The disguise reinstated at the end: “I am going on.” And so back to him again. (Nothing new there— always back to him.) Followed by the offer of payment, the closing terms, the arrangements—ostensibly offering her choices but actually choices that were all alike under his control. Thus, finally, to the blackmail: I’m not going to play your e-mail game; come and see me or you learn nothing.
Part of her felt cruel. Her father had suffered a stroke, and a stranger unaware of his menace would, she knew, have been appalled at her interpretation of the poor man’s kindly invitation and evident generosity. And yet that was precisely the point with her father. Both things were simultaneously true: he was a selfish cowardly bullying bastard and a charming intelligent thoughtful man at the same time. The one did not cancel out the other. Besides, there was much new in this e-mail. There was loquacity, there was sentimentality, there was even, lurking back there, fear, panic, and loneliness…
She had forgotten about the weather. When she surfaced at Kentish Town it came at her again, as if she had returned to the deck of some desperate storm-pitched boat in the North Atlantic instead of stepping up onto the high street. The rain was almost evil, bending down in the wind to come up and under umbrellas, hoods. The cell phone she had borrowed from Susan beeped. There was a message. She stepped back inside the station’s shelter and huddled with all the other refugees. It was the guy from Petersburg, confirming their arrangement for that evening.
She had forgotten. And of course she hadn’t reminded Gabriel. Shit. Now her brother would not hear whatever the Russian had to say. She bit her lip hard. Well, fuck him.
She had already spoken to Arkady Artamenkov earlier in the week—this was how she knew Gabriel had not been at work, because the Russian had told her so. Anxious, Arkady had explained that he had been calling Gabriel, leaving messages, increasingly apprehensive as they were ignored, until eventually one of her brother’s colleagues had picked up the phone and explained that Gabriel was ill and not expected in before the weekend. Given the fiascos thus far, the Russian was clearly very worried about the reliability of Glovers in general. And so during that call she had reassured him and promised to confirm again on Friday. Yet again, therefore, she had failed to keep her word.
She listened to the Russian’s voice a second time. The message was short. She guessed that he was on a pay phone. “Hello, this is Arkady again. We are meeting tonight at Kentish Town tube station. Please call me on…” He read out the number slowly, and then again. And suddenly she was looking forward to talking with this man more than any other thing in her life that she could remember. What did he know of her mother? Please God he was still going to come.
“Hello, Pat’s Place.” A hard voice, of Northern Irish extraction.
“Hi. Can I leave a message for someone?”
“You can try.”
She was caught out a moment. “Oh. Can I—”
“There’s seventy people in and out of here every day, and half of them don’t speak a word of English, and none of them give their right and proper names. But go on—your fellow just might be the one exception. Who’s it for?”
“Arkady Artamenkov.”
“You’ll have to spell that.”
Isabella did so.
A weary breath and then: “Go on then, now. Your message.”
“Just that—just that I will be at Kentish Town tube at seven-thirty tonight as planned.”
“Your name?”
“Isabella Glover.” She hesitated. “Will you be able to give it to him? I’m pretty sure that’s his name.”
“No—no, we won’t, I’m afraid. We’ll put it on the notice board. That’s where we put all the messages. You’ll have to hope he can read.”
“Thanks.”
There was nothing else she could do. She pulled up the hood of her borrowed anorak and stepped into the sleet.
After he left La Cantina, there was nowhere else to go, so he started for home—or rather the new place. He got off a stop early to go to the supermarket in Camden; he needed to eat, something wholesome.
The weather was worsening when he came out—the wind was rising, and the pavements were no longer misty but ravaged and gnashed. He decided to walk back—up Camden High Street. Rain was coming.
It was not yet eleven. But the legion of drunks swerved and swayed and sloshed around the Camden Town station entrance, cans still cocked despite the wind, rictus grins, top of the morning to you, but even they knew that the veil was too far torn and hell was leering boldly through. The dealers and the pushers talked among themselves. The junkies lined the high street to beg his approach and plead at his heels as he passed by. He crossed the old canal, shaking his head and muttering “No, thanks” over and over. Somehow, somewhere, all that would-be counterglamour of punk, hippie, goth, and skin had drained away, vanished with last night’s disappearing tides of money and youth, and those people who remained—running the PVC and piercing stores, rolling tobacco on the street corners—now seemed far too old for their bolted brows, their blue-green hair, their black facepaint, and their careful beads. Gabriel saw through the respect-expected manner of their bearing, saw instead the undefended lines of past decades scored deep in the battlefields of their faces, the thin glaze of self-confidence like joke-shop contact lenses disguising the color of their frightened eyes.
He hurried on as the first rain came, past the petrol pumps, past the brothel, past the school. He turned onto Prince of Wales Road. Another drunk pawed at him as he came to the Maitland Park monument. This time he paused, capitulated, gave what he had, and waved away the abject thanks. There is nothing sadder than a drunk in the rain wishing you well. He reached the new and unfamiliar house, climbed the street stairs, and let himself in after struggling with the sticky lock. The others, his new flatmates, were out. Regular people. Regular jobs. Regular lives. He stowed the milk in the choking fridge and put the rest of his provisions in their places, then made straight for his bedroom at the very top.
It was a mess.
It took him a moment to understand.
He had been burgled. His laptop was gone. His portable stereo. His printer. His scanner. The floor was covered with his clothes, his compact disks, books, papers, everything.
He turned on his heel and went across the tiny attic landing to check Sean’s room. It was the same. Some part of him felt an odd comfort. They weren’t just after him.
Probably he should go down. Probably he should find out where the burglars came in. Probably he should call the police.
He looked out of his attic window for a while: defunct chimneypots and hooligan seagulls. Then, slowly, grimly, he turned. He bent under the bed. He dislodged the baseboard. He wriggled his fingers into the gap. Thank Christ. He pulled out the little box. He opened it up. The ring that his grandfather had given him was still there. Like everyone else, the burglar wasn’t very good at his chosen occupation. The mess, as ever, was just a way of diverting people from this fact.
He locked his door. He took off his coat. He prized off his shoes. He selected “Señor” on his MP3 player and threw himself down on his bed with the ring. There was no place a man could go, no matter how high or how low, that Dylan had not been before. You lay down your head in the strangest of rooms and the guestbook by the bed always said that he had passed through this way at least once before—sometimes last week, sometimes a lifetime ago.
He half woke. The weather was raging. Sleet scratching at the windowpane. A million invisible claws.
He half slept. He wanted a woman so badly that he felt he could barely breathe. Yes, this room, this mess, all of this would not matter if only there were some woman with whom he could now lie down and open up the constricted passageways of his heart. He turned away from what light was left in the day. From the age of fifteen, he had never gone more than a fortnight without someone to share his thoughts, to touch, to listen to, to laugh with—some he had admired, some he had simply desired, and those very few whom he had loved. And, oh Christ, they were haunting him now, slipping away just beyond the edges of his vision, their laughter vanishing just as his ear seemed to catch the happy chime. He drew the blanket over him. A woman’s kiss. The whole sorry, shitty, solitary slog of a man’s life could still be redeemed by a woman’s single kiss.
He was going to have to go back. He thought he was strong, but he was not. He was going to have to call her. Get up, man, get up. Rest awhile first.
He slept and dreamed that he awoke. Spiritual asthma—the whole world is suffering from spiritual asthma. In his dream he could not fall asleep.
Seemingly there was no end. He felt as though he were falling, falling, falling into ever colder and darker space, the wind rushing faster and faster, snatching at his face. He felt expelled, as though he had been thrown summarily out of heaven and the shock of it was continually ripping through him as he plunged away. He felt abandoned and lonely beyond all loneliness he had ever known or thought or imagined: abandoned even by his own better self, as if he were a lost cause to his own intelligence; and lonely to his core, terrifyingly certain that no other person would or could ever know where he was or what he was feeling—not only that no companionship was available, but that no companionship with him was possible. And there were no voices as he fell, none of the old voices of hope, argument, or reflection remained—all silent, gone, deserted—only the flat whisper sounding somewhere behind the deafening scream of the panic as it tore merciless through his flailing body. I told you so, I told you so.
He opened his eyes for just a moment. The light was strange—not quite dark, not yet; the sleet running like shivers in the jaundiced glow of the streetlamps.
And it’s like you always said: in the heart of power sits fear enthroned; and it’s as obvious as banknotes.
Mama, mi vse soshli s uma. We are all sick, Mama. We are all sick. In friends, I find evasion; in children, tautology; and love itself, an election more of blindness than of hope. I am sick. I cannot stop my mind. I cannot rest. Cut my chest, look inside, you’ll see it’s all burning.
The night came on. There were sounds in the house, a rude banging at his door. Others were home. He turned deeper into the bed.
The price of courage is loneliness. Is this the price you paid, Ma? An awful feeling—something hollow but tight that lurks in no definite place deep inside, something impossible to banish, like days and days of accumulated cold that has crawled into the secret fissures of the bones and won’t be chased out. A wretched feeling, a feeling to really drive and determine a person’s life—actions, decisions, plans — more so than love or hate or any of the other supposedly powerful emotions, hey, Ma? Loneliness, and the fear of loneliness—it could make a person do, say, think almost anything. Yes, Ma, I am beginning to understand why people settle for the most appalling circumstances, the most appalling people. The inexplicability of wives, husbands, partners, lives—I see it now, Ma. It’s all becoming a little more comprehensible. And I realize what that indefinable thickening is that I notice in the faces of the bride and the groom: it’s relief — relief from the loneliness. Yes, that halo of happiness comprises three parts relief to one part love. Look Mother, look Father, look friends, I have someone; someone I can settle for has settled for me! I’m settled. We’re settled. It’s settled.
But what if it’s not settled after all? Or what if (as we suspect) settled is merely death’s best-decorated antechamber? What if we refuse to settle, Ma? What if we refuse to settle for this life as we find it, these rites and rituals, this government, these gods, this ever-growing herd of golden calves? What if we will not settle for the derisory covenants of this disreputable age?
I’m with you, Ma. I refuse.
I have no great plan, I cannot even summon a coherent point of view, but I will not back down. I will stand here and I will say, I see through you, I see through you, and what you believe in is a lie, and what you have become is a falsehood.
Yes, it’s true, Ma: your great indignity is now mine. That last time we spoke, you were passing it on to me, weren’t you, Ma? One more time, just for good measure. As if it weren’t already thrice inscribed in the double helix of my every single cell.
I refuse.
Give us the counterpoint and you can keep the tune. Isn’t that right, Ma? Give us the contrapposto and you can keep the straight and narrow. Give us the counterintelligence and you can keep your presentations and your pulpiteers. Give us the counterlife. Every time.
But where does my refusal lead me, Ma? And where did it leave you?
I see it now: your courage and your loneliness and your despair. And I feel it: they do not ebb and flow, but they remain constant, like radiation, gravity, and death.
You were lonely and powerless in that old house, stranded in a foreign country with so faithless and selfish a man while your pride and your dreams were year by year mocked and belittled.
I refuse.
Count me for the living, not the dead.
For Arkady Alexandrovitch, the moment had arrived. He did not care to question or to understand. The truths within lies, the lies within truths, thoughts within feelings, feelings within thoughts—they were all so many beguiling matryoshka dolls to him. And now that it came right down to it, he was revealed at the last to be his mother’s son. This discovery he did not recognize or consciously acknowledge. Rather he felt it, he experienced its expression, and its expression was stamina. His entire being was certain that whatever fate had in store, he could endure. His mother’s most eloquent and effective gift was passed on silently, secretly, inarticulately, and without her agency. Yes, now that it came right down to it, life turned out to be mostly about not flinching. Keeping going. And he knew that it had come right down to it. He could feel it, tingling in his fingers and hanging out there in the cowardly weather that would neither rain nor snow but hovered between the two.
He had not been idle. He had printed a map that showed everything, however generally, on one page. He had talked to everyone he could—fellow Russians, fellow East Europeans, fellow men and women. It started at the hostel. One contact led to another and to another. He had borrowed a cheap anorak (against the endless rain) from one of the Moldavians, and with them he had visited building sites in Harlesden. From there to Hammersmith to meet an electrician. From there back up to King’s Cross to a go-cart track, looking for a mechanic. From there, three cafés in Fitzrovia; they’d need a short-order chef before too long, they always did. And thus he had spent the week walking, his boots forever devouring the pavement. He moved by general direction, learning his way as he went. He stayed clear of drugs, but everything else he investigated. Nightclubs, escort agencies, hotels, minicabs, restaurants, pubs, shoe booths, florists, hairdressers, Finsbury Park, Neasden, Golders Green, Stock-well, Vauxhall, Ealing, and Bow. District by district, he must have covered more than fifteen miles a day. He listened and he learned. He was on a dozen job waiting lists. Turn up here at six-thirty, whatever day you want, they said, and there will be labor. He stopped worrying about the police altogether, his identity, or his papers. He drank water from the tap. He stole fruit from the outside racks whenever he passed a fruit shop. He had one hot meal—a baked potato with tuna and sweet corn—every night in the café that the junkies used farther up on the Harrow Road. Besides that, he spent no money at all.
Even so, thanks to the cost of his bed alone, he was now down to his last one hundred and twenty dollars. And he owed four more nights—the maximum debt they would allow, even with his passport. So already there was a shortfall. Time to be moving on.
He placed the borrowed anorak on one of the Moldavians’ backpacks with a half-full carton of cigarettes he had stolen. He picked up his own pack and went quietly into the narrow corridor. Carrying his boots, he walked down the stairs as far as the second floor. Luck was with him: the woman on the desk downstairs was having a cigarette and her back was turned as he crossed the landing behind her. He squeezed into the tiny, filthy shower room, which stank of mildew. The sleet was thrashing and the wind was blowing as he loosened the catch. He dropped his pack out the window into the alley below. He threw his coat out after it, stuffed inside two plastic bags.
He put on his boots. But came out of the shower room quietly, only beginning to make a noise as he stepped down the flight of stairs to the desk. He took the cigarette from behind his ear, stuck it in his mouth, and asked the witch for a light in his friendliest English.
“I owe you for four nights,” he said. “And I want to stay two more, please. I am going off to the bank now—I need my passport for identity. Is it okay?”
She looked at him suspiciously. “You’ll get soaked to the skin in your shirt. It’s raining like the end of the world out there.”
He blew smoke toward the nicotine-stained ceiling. “I will run.”
She tutted. “Where’s your coat?”
“I left it upstairs. Locked in the room. It’s not good for the rain.”
“What’s your name?” She bent down, disappearing from view, and he heard her opening up the safe.
He leaned over the counter. “Arkady Kolokov.”
She reappeared. “Okay. I need your room key until you come back.”
He handed her the key.
She handed him his passport.
Once outside, he walked right, out of sight of the desk, and then slipped down the alley. He ground the unwanted cigarette beneath his boot and unpacked his coat, leaning against the side of the building. The sleet hacked down relentlessly.
He carried his pack in his hands in case he was challenged as he came out. But the weather had emptied the street. So he walked swiftly away from the hostel without looking back. Right, then left. He walked fifty yards farther with his pack still in front until he reached the twenty-four-hour shop, where he ducked beneath the awning. Ignoring the supplications of yet more bullshit homeless people, he fished out a black garbage bag that he had stolen from the cupboard by the toilet. Then he retrieved his cap from one of the side pockets and slung the pack onto his shoulders, loosening the straps to accommodate the bulk of his coat. He made a hole in the bag, took off his cap a moment, and pulled the thing over his head. Then he put his cap back on and set off, his feet warm in his boots.
It was only just four. Partly because of the necessity of pretending that he was going to the bank, he had given himself three and a half hours, plenty of time. His idea was to walk along the canal, which he had come to know quite well since that first night, when he had lost himself in the Paddington basin. The route would be quieter and it was direct to Camden. He could stop along the way without needing to spend any money. From Camden, it looked straightforward to Kentish Town.
At first it was easy, but soon the water disappeared into a tunnel where there was no path, and for a while he wandered around trying to find where the canal reemerged. He asked a passerby, but she knew nothing. (Nobody in London seemed to know where they were, or where anything was, or where anything might be.) When finally he saw the water again, brown and turbid in the rain, he could not get down to the bank, so he was forced to walk on the road above until the fence was low enough to vault.
The towpath was deserted and he slowed a little, more confident. He listened to the sounds of his boots and his breathing. His previous anxiety—that he had not actually stolen anything that night when Oleg had left the hole in her window—had ceased to bother him entirely; it seemed irrelevant now that he was actually here in London and so close. His plan was to be sure to find out where the brother was. Find out if Gabriel Glover was ignoring his e-mails and calls or if his silence was something to do with all the bullshit that had been going on last Sunday. Either way, he wanted to see Gabriel too. Make sure that there was no chance at all of anything from brother as well as from sister. Make sure there was nothing offered, nothing to hope for. Nothing.
Once he knew how to get hold of the brother, then… then he would simply tell the sister the truth. There was no longer any reason to piss around with the strategies that he and Henry had talked about—ways of getting to know them while making up further bullshit about Maria Glover and her fucking piano. There was no time and no point. If the sister did not want to know, if she was hostile, then fuck it. He would go and find the brother. And if he did not want to know either, then fine. His choice would be made. His new life would start. Good. Fuck the piano. Fuck the conservatory. Fuck Mother Russia. He was staying here and he was going to make money like everybody else. It would be bullshit at first, but he would get through that phase quick enough. Hundreds of Russians were doing the same. Brothers, sisters. Yes, he was down to it.
He passed a mooring. There were no lights on any of the boats. His cap was sodden but his feet were still dry. He passed some fine buildings, pale-colored and elegant, and he was reminded of Petersburg. He saw pretty gardens on the opposite bank. He passed beneath a bridge that dripped and echoed away into the narrowing darkness wherein he could not see. He passed what seemed to him to be giant nets that loomed crazily against the wet heavens. All the while the sleet continued to come down, bending this way and that in the wind, slapping against the plastic of his makeshift cloak. The path ahead was slick and shiny. He kept on, breathing steadily, the water streaming down his face.
Six forty-five and the Internet café on Kentish Town High Street was half empty. She seemed to be spending her life at these places, but she did not want to go back and disturb Susan and her family. She had said that she would be out until late. And she wanted to let them have their dinner uninterrupted. The last two flats she had seen had been a total waste of time. She’d canceled the third, and now she had three quarters of an hour.
There were a few tourists tapping vigorously at the cheap keyboards, Australians mostly, and a circle of Lebanese huddled around a screen in the corner, but most of the seats were unoccupied. She was facing the wall near the entrance, one empty booth in from the front window. A cheap neon sign advertised unspecific “exchange” to the world beyond, and the back of the flashing light caused the frame of her screen to glow red-gray thirty times a minute.
Outside, the lashing continued, but more sporadically now. If she looked up and turned her head to the left, she could see directly onto the high street. Minicabs, vans, and rented limousines arguing one inch at a time up and down, up and down, up and down. The sleet like thin liquid wires in the headlights.
She must have been sitting in something like a trance, staring at the screen, when she first became aware of someone behind her. A steady, unmoving presence Not someone hovering, as if hoping to interrupt with a quick question, but someone in the business of waiting, steadily—waiting for her to look up, look around, turn her attention toward him. Which she purposely did not do for a minute or two, having learned a long time ago that the best way to handle unwanted men in public is to ignore them completely. She deleted part of the question she had typed: “Did you ever meet her mother, Russian granny?” And then deleted the whole paragraph.
Her second thought was one of irritation. She wanted to reread what she had written alone. But the presence was still there, refusing to go away, a force field behind her chair. Her irritation began to escalate… She didn’t want some bloody random bloke… For Christ’s sake. With anger jackknifing her brow, she swung away from her screen to meet the face, a curse on her lips.
The man standing a just-polite distant behind her was tall, thin, and trying to smile. He had messy, longish blond-brown hair swept to one side off his forehead, and he was wearing an ill-fitting older man’s suit jacket with faded blue jeans and what looked like hiking boots. But it was neither frame nor clothes nor boots that stopped her mouth: it was his face. Hollow cheeks, head raised a fraction in defiance despite the effort at a smile; close-shaved; nose, lips, and brow as even as an icon’s, and a sunken pair of deepest turquoise eyes. It struck her for a second as the face of some ancient human tribe from an unknown pinnacle of civilization long ago. Not handsome—indeed, the sort of face that made “handsome” sound silly—but striking, enduring, prototypical in the way of those faces on ancient vases or the ones cut in stone. And the eyes… the eyes stopped her dead. All of this before she recognized him—then a flood of confusion as she realized who he was, bafflement that she had not seen these features for what they were on the street when loading Adam’s car. Followed, just as suddenly (as he held out his massive hand), by the thought that he looked nervous and tense.
“Hello. I saw you in the window. I was going to the station where we arrange to meet. I am sorry for the surprise.”
She recovered herself. Evidently it was just writing to her father that was heightening everything. She noticed now that the jacket he was wearing was the upper half of the suit he had been sporting on Gabriel’s doorstep.
“Hi. No, not at all. I just didn’t recognize… How are you? What time is it?”
“I am early. It will not be half past seven for forty minutes.”
“Sorry. No, I didn’t mean that.” She didn’t. She realized that it was quite normal for a Russian to stop in if he saw an acquaintance; only Londoners crossed the street and pretended not to have seen each other so as to arrive at an appointment separately. “Hang on, I’ve just got to save this and shut down and then we are gone.”
“Of course. But please, there is no problem if you need to finish. I can wait.”
“I’m finished.” She turned back to her screen, saved her mail as a draft, and began to log out.
“How much is this café?” he asked. “How much to use the Internet?”
“Yes.”
“It’s four pounds for the first hour and then one pound for every half-hour after that.”
“It’s expensive.”
“Yes.”
“People must be millionaires in London.”
“I know.” The computer dropped offline. She swiveled in her chair and stood up. Now she noticed his coat and his backpack on the floor behind him.
He said, “How much is the subway to here?”
“The tube? It depends where you are traveling from.”
“Harrow Road.”
“There’s no station there—you have to use Warwick Avenue, or Westbourne Grove is better. Three quid, something like that. Too much.” They stood in line to pay. “How did you get here?”
“I walked.”
She had forgotten how seriously poor the vast majority of Russians were. Even those on student visas were way below Western student poor. But the real Russians, the sixty-dollars-a-month Russians, simply couldn’t survive a single day in London without immediate work. And thereafter they continued to be staggered by how much Londoners casually spent and the stuff they chose to spend it on. Isabella retuned her sensitivity. She realized too that she had suddenly developed butterflies. Too many reasons to be anxious, perhaps.
It was becoming colder—the sleet thickening, the ragged wind snatching at the door. She had not been to the Petrel for five, maybe six years, since before she moved to New York. As she remembered, the pub used to have a full-sized old-fashioned pool table and regulars talking football and what-happened-to-Frank. It had been an unpretentious, unpremeditated pub: dog, London Pride, and piano. So she was surprised, and then not surprised, as she went in, to see that it had used the intervening years to convert itself into a faux-authentic, faux-gourmet place. She realized she was torturing herself again. Or maybe it was simply because she was seeing the place through his eyes. She turned. He was standing just inside the door, tall in his coat, carrying his backpack in front of him a little awkwardly, taking the measure of the place. She felt a prickle of shame, shame that she had bought him here; and embarrassment too, that he might think she liked this sort of phoniness. As ever, she overcompensated and went back toward him too quickly, eager to cut down the distance between them.
“Christ, it’s busy,” she said. “They’ve changed everything since I was here last. Do you want to stick that over there? We can grab that little table by the window.” It occurred to her that he must be about her own age. “I’ll get them. What do you want to drink?”
He didn’t smile or soften. “Just water.”
She absorbed her first real impression of his personality—cold, distant, unyielding. She nearly asked him still or sparkling, but checked herself in time.
“Water—are you sure? Not a glass of wine or something?”
“Or tea. Tea. If there is tea here.”
“There will be… I’ll ask.”
She set off to the bar determined to procure tea, telling herself to relax. She could feel curiosity writhing in her blood alongside the overexcitement. (How did this man know her mother? What when how why who?) What was the matter with her? She told herself to calm down. Half of her childhood friends had been Russian. Even now there were twenty people she would love to see the next time she was there… An awful thought occurred to her as she eased her way past a group of men arguing about ski resorts: maybe now that her mother was dead, she wouldn’t be going back to St. Petersburg anymore; maybe there was no reason to; maybe now that her mother was dead, her connection with Russia itself was dead, severed. She had not considered this until now. She pushed forward and reached the counter. Tea. She wondered whether he was a teetotaler or merely too proud to ask for a drink when he knew he could not buy her one in return. Tea—tea would do it. How did this man know her mother? What when how why who? Something that mattered. Something that counted. In all of this.
“So how long are you in London?”
“I do not know. It depends.”
“Are you working here?”
“No.”
“Is this your first visit?” She knew already that it was.
“Yes,” he said. “Do you have your brother’s new address? I must write it down.”
“Yes, of course.”
He pulled a small exercise book from his jacket pocket. She told him the number on Grafton Terrace and watched him write it down in English. She was used to this curtness. Not with the boys in the trendy Petersburg bars, but with the men she had met with Yana in the crumbling table-football-one-beer-and-one-vodka bars away from the center, away from the tourists. Their definitiveness wasn’t rudeness; rather, they simply didn’t do small talk. There was talent, there was beauty, and there was power; either you had one of the three or you talked about one of the three or, by and large, you shut up.
She tried another line. “Where are you staying?”
He replaced his book. “I was staying at this place near Harrow Road.”
“And where now?”
“It was full of scum.”
She registered this but did not know where to take it, so she said, “Your English is way better than my Russian.” She intended genuinely to compliment him, but it sounded patronizing.
He didn’t notice, or he didn’t care. “I have a very good teacher. An Englishman. I have his letter.”
The waitress arrived with the tea and they broke off. She had ordered some bread and olives because she felt awkward ordering nothing but tea. Now she felt awkward that she had ordered something besides the tea. The carefully careless patterns of the balsamic vinegar in the olive oil were somehow ingratiating, insulting, inappropriate. Then she noticed that the waitress caught Arkady’s eye as she set the pot down. And that he met it steadily, without looking away. It was a shock to see the waitress blush.
Too hastily, she asked, “Whereabouts do you live—in Petersburg?”
“Yes.” He misunderstood.
The waitress left.
“I meant where in the city—which part?”
“I live on Vasilevsky.”
She waited for the usual “Do you know St. Petersburg, have you been there a lot?” But it didn’t come. “And do you work there?”
“I have worked. But now I am a student.”
“At the university?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
He looked at her directly. “At the conservatory.”
Finally he was volunteering something.
“Oh, yes, you said. Of course. You are a musician. You’re studying music?”
“Yes.” And then he added, “All my life.”
Simply, fatuously, disarmed by his avowal, she said, “I love music.”
“Do you play an instrument?” he asked.
“I used to play the violin. But only as an amateur.”
“Can you play… can you play a Mozart violin sonata?”
Straight to it again. “No. Yes—I used to. But I am really bad.”
“If you play a Mozart violin sonata, you are not so bad.”
“I haven’t played for years.”
His face almost softened. “There is no bad. We are all students. We find the pulse. We make the first note. We start the journey.”
She could feel the thawing that the subject had brought them. And maybe it was the tea, but her tiredness finally left her and with it the troubles of this most awful day. The rest of the pub faded away and her naturalness returned and she was concentrating again, meeting his eyes with her own.
This time it was Isabella who came straight to it. “How did you know my mother?”
“I met her.”
“You met her.”
He sat forward. His voice dropped. “Yes. We met. A woman introduced us.”
“Who—I mean, what was her name? Was she one of my mother’s friends?”
“I don’t remember her name. Zoya, I think. She was a detective.”
“A detective?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean—why did a detective introduce you?” She searched his impassive face. “Was my mother in some kind of trouble? Was my mother involved in something?”
“I don’t know. Your mother—she hired a detective to find me.”
“To find you?”
“Yes.”
This time she was prepared to outwait him. She noticed his hands on his cup—big hands, nails pared right back. Even the cuffs of his sleeves were frayed.
He set his mug down by their untouched milk. “Your mother—did she ever say anything to you about her family?”
“What do you mean?”
Now he waited for her.
So she continued. “You mean, did my mother talk about her mother or her sisters? Her extended family? No, she didn’t say much about them. Why? I never met them.”
“I do not mean this. No.”
“Do you know something about my mother’s family?”
“Did she ever say to you anything about her life before she left Russia?”
“Yes. Sometimes she did.”
“About… about having a son?”
“No.” And now it gripped her, shook her, plunged her—that strange and sudden emotional vertigo of physically knowing what someone was going to say without her mind’s acknowledging that she knew.
“Did my mother have a son?” She was leaning forward, her voice as quiet as snow.
“Yes.”
“How do you know? I mean, do you know him? When did she tell you this? When was—”
“I am her son.”
She could not speak. She could only stare. She believed him utterly. Her mother’s eyes.
A moment of absence. From all that had gone before and all that was to come.
He spoke again. “I am her son. I am your mother’s only son.”
And then the world, her contexts, everything rushing back into the edges of the vacuum. “No… God, no. I mean, I… What you are saying cannot be true, Arkady. My God. It’s just that my mother… it’s just that I have…” She could not say “another brother.” “It’s just that my mother has another son—my brother, Gabriel. Of course you know that, you were there at his—”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Gabriel is not her blood son. And you, you are not her daughter.” His face was as full of meaning as any she had ever seen. “She is your mother, of course. That is true. I do not change this. Nothing changes this. But she is not your mother from your birth. This is also true. I am her son by blood.”
She was shaking her head, but no words were coming out.
“Here. I have a letter. You must read.” He began to unstrap his pack.
Everything around her seemed to warp and swarm—the last of the vacuum vanishing too quickly, the wide world’s daily normality layering itself upon her senses at the speed of light. People eating and drinking on a regular Friday night. Kentish Town, London. Date. Time. Place. Life itself unfolding, happening, every second, all around. And yes, just like when she had learned of her mother’s death: the strange inconsequentiality of the general moment when for the individual the moment’s consequence is everything, her whole life. And this is how news comes. A before, when you don’t know. An after, when you do. A moment’s glimpse of real life naked between its disguises. And stupid stupid stupid to look for it on the tops of yogic mountains or on your knees in the church or mosque or temple or staring at the setting sun, feet in the sand. When here it is all around you—in every view, in every instant.
He handed her the letter and said, “Maybe your father knows some of this.”
Dear Mr. Gabriel Glover, Ms. Isabella Glover,
If you are reading this letter, then my friend Arkady Alexandrovitch has given it to you. So I’m glad that he found you and I’m glad that he’s made it this far. It’s been quite a struggle! My name is Henry Wheyland. I live here in St. Petersburg. I am Arkady’s flatmate.
Before I go any further, I wish to convey my condolences. I lost my own mother some years ago, and I know that there is nothing anybody can say that makes the sorrow any less. You have my deepest sympathies.
I hope I can persuade you to believe that what follows is the truth as far as we know! What you choose to do or not do is, of course, up to you. I know Arkady well enough to be sure that he is too proud to ask for or expect anything that you aren’t willing to give. I’m pretty sure he won’t even read this. He wanted to make contact—just to meet you. The rest is mine. Anything you find presumptuous or thoughtless, therefore, please blame me, not him.
You’ll also have to forgive the fact that we don’t know how much of this you know! If you are already aware of everything that follows, then you might have decided that this is a part of your mother’s life you want to have nothing to do with. In which case, I am genuinely sorry for having brought up what may well be painful. If, on the other hand, you are unaware, then all of this is going to be an awful lot to take in, and I’m sorry that it’s through me this information arrives! My defense is that at least Arkady himself is there and will vouch for my best intentions.
This, then, is what I know about Arkady. He was born here in Petersburg. He grew up in the Veteranov orphanage, where he excelled at the piano. In 1985 he was chosen to play for Gorbachev. He was supposed to go to the Petersburg Conservatory sometime around 1988 or ’89, but when the country collapsed his scholarship went the same way. I think he waited for a few more years in the hope that he would still get his place. He then spent five more unsuccessfully trying to raise the money himself by playing in bars and so on.
Sadly, Arkady met his mother, your mother, only once. And I’m afraid he reacted angrily to their meeting. She would have liked them to become friends but had no desire to force herself into his life. Instead she offered him any kind of help he wanted. He refused this. I don’t think the meeting between them went well, to be honest. He has never talked to me about it beyond the barest outlines.
I met your mother twice. (I knew her as Mrs. Maria Glover.) The first time, some days after she had found Arkady. And then again, a few weeks after he started his course at the conservatory, when she approached me to ask if it was possible to listen to her son play. On this second occasion I spent two or three hours with her at her flat on the Griboedova Canal. This was when she told me the story of her defection, her new family, as she called it—her marriage to your father and her adoption of both of you. I understood that she had lived in London for more or less all her life since leaving Russia and that she and your father had no other, natural children. This life, she said, became her whole life.
So in fact it was my idea to ask your mother to pay for the course to get Arkady back on the right track with his music. It’s a strange thing to understand at first, especially of an outsider like Arkady, but an integral part of Arkady’s ambition is graduating from the conservatory. I didn’t appreciate this for a while, but it’s to do with his institutionalism. As a Soviet orphan, he has total devotion to the institution, which, I suppose, has always been his home, his surrogate parents, if you like. In some way, he doesn’t feel real unless he has passed through the system fully, passed the exams and been sent out officially stamped into the world!
Your mother kindly agreed and paid a sum before each term to the conservatory. (In my opinion, she rescued him.) I think the total was something like £8000 a term. He is now midway through his second year of three.
As well as for his own reasons already mentioned, there is a real practical career need for Arkady to finish the course: the whole system here still favors those who come up through the conservatories. It’s virtually a requirement. This is how a pianist is first booked on the concert circuit. This is the system. This is how they get entered for the big competitions. And so on.
Personally, I’m not sure that he needs any more lessons, and I’d prefer to see him at the Moscow Conservatory anyway. But, well, after this term, which she also paid for in advance, there are three more terms to go. (Two a year here.) You would have thought there would be some provision for the likes of him, but I’m afraid the conservatory is a pretty ruthless (and corrupt!) place and he’s too old now, I think, to qualify for the few established scholarships.
In short, Arkady is completely stymied without your mother’s help. It’s a sad and desperate situation.
Money being what it is, the remaining fees represent a huge sum if you do not have any, and nothing at all if you have lots! I would have liked to pay toward his lessons myself, but, well, that is no longer possible…
The fact is this: if you or the wider family can contribute, then you’ll be giving the world a really great artist. And I always think we need them! And I’m afraid it does feel a bit now or never. Arkady has an all-or-nothing approach to his music (the Russian mentality!), and I have a real worry that if he does not finish the course, he will see it in some way as proof that he was never meant to do so, and consequently take another path out of something like spite. You will appreciate that because of his age, this is absolutely his last chance. There are already ten years’ worth of talented young Russians elbowing him out of the way. But I honestly believe he’s better than any of them. I am a great follower of music, and I say here without any shadow of a doubt that he is the best pianist I have ever heard. In any case, you can also be absolutely sure that your mother wanted him to finish the course.
In one way, I am afraid corroboration for all this is a bit thin on the ground. Below is the number of Zoya Sviridova, the woman your mother hired to trace Arkady. She is an independent private detective and will, I am sure, confirm your mother’s instructions and corroborate much of what your mother told me. On the piano side of things, Arkady is registered at the conservatory and of course there is no better proof than listening to him yourselves… As for myself, if it makes any difference, I trained to be a Catholic priest at St. Steven’s Seminary in Birkenhead, was then a teacher at St. David’s College in Reading—by all means check the records! My e-mail is below, as well as my postal address. And of course I am happy to arrange to speak on the phone (we don’t have one at the flat, I’m afraid, and I’m between mobiles!) or best of all in person if you are planning to come to Russia.
Once again, I am sorry so boldly to intrude on your grief like this and bitterly regret now that I did not establish better communication with your mother, whom I found to be a highly intelligent, warm, and charismatic human being. But I hope you will understand that I write with honest intentions. I wish Arkady only the very best of luck and the opportunity that he has so far not seen too much of. One feels a duty to do one’s best by one’s friends. And I am very fond of him.
There was a tremendous banging. Some stupid bastard trying to break into or out of hell, he wasn’t sure which and he didn’t care. He wanted to shout and tell them that either way there was no point. But there was no point, so he didn’t. And so the hammering continued. Which was annoying and distracting. Because he was alone in his cell—deliciously warm, sitting at his desk, trying to study for an exam, which he had in fact already passed the year previously but which for some reason he was now required to take a second time, tomorrow. He was going through past papers. Question number one: “By which great philosopher’s light are we now living?” Now there’s a question. Not Aristotle or Augustine, not Kant or Hulme or Bentham or Nietzsche, not Hobbes, not Marx (that cunning old mule), not Sartre nor Descartes nor good old Machiavelli, not even Christ (not if we’re now going to be honest), nor Moses, nor Muhammad, nor Brahma, nor the Buddha for that matter, not even…
Shit! The door was opening. He sprang upright, yelling, awoken, hoarse.
“Jesus, Is. Fucking hell. What are you doing?”
“Ssshh. Ssshh. It’s okay.” She was standing just inside the room, the light from the hall behind her shadowing her face.
“It’s not fucking okay. Jesus Christ.” He stared at his sister.
“Ssssh. There are police downstairs. They don’t know you are here. You were dreaming, Gabs. You were asleep. That’s all. Ssssh.” She closed the door behind her, but then it was completely dark again.
“Dear God, woman.”
“Gabs, where is the light?”
“No! Don’t you dare turn it on.” He held up his hand in anticipation of the glare. “Use the side lamp.”
“Okay.” Leaving a crack of light from the door, she crossed the room and got to the desk.
“You scared the living shit out of me, Isabella.” He was shivering from a cold sweat, and his heart would not go back to normal.
She found the switch and twisted the Anglepoise so the bulb lit the sloping attic wall behind, stretching the shadows.
“Get dressed.” She was looking at him with the widest smile he had ever seen her manage. “You have to come. You have to come now. With me. Get dressed.”
“Where?”
“Now, come on. Get dressed.”
“Isabella, what?” He was recovering.
“You have to come with me.” She beckoned. “I’ll tell you everything in the cab.”
“What in the name of fuck is this about? What are you doing?”
“Will you please just get dressed? Please, Gabs. Please. I can’t explain everything here now. You are wasting time.” Her face implored him. “There’s a cab waiting. The driver has already tried to rip me off.”
“Is, you can’t just—”
“Gabs, please, I am. Come on.” She was picking his clothes up off the floor.
“If this is about—”
“It’s nothing to do with Dad.” She paused. “Or this morning. Just please, please, please come on. Hurry.”
He looked at her directly for a moment, holding out his jeans in the strange light thrown by the lamp, her eyes dark like his own; hurt contending with forgiveness, injury with loyalty, hostility with the closest lifelong kinship—kinship all the way back, and further. Further. Maybe that was the point. Something altered in the chemistry of his body. Almost against his will, aggression and anxiety deserted him; it was one of only two or three times in his life that he had felt the reality of his and Isabella’s being twins—the actuality of it—in his twinned blood running, in his twinned heart beating.
“How did you get in here?”
She gave him a rueful smile. “If you come with me and it’s anything, anything at all, that you think is me being a stupid cow or wasting time, then I promise, I absolutely promise, you don’t have to speak to me ever again.”
“Is, for Christ’s sake. I’m never not going to speak to you.”
“You would. You’d never say another word to me again if you thought it was a matter of principle.”
“Same goes for you,” he returned.
She threw his pullover at him. “But then, this isn’t a matter of principle or whatever,” she said. “It’s get-your-fucking-clothes-on time.”
He shook his head. “I thought I was way ahead in the race for insanity, but you’ve come right back into the frame tonight, I don’t mind telling you. It’s neck-and-neck again.” He cast back the duvet. “I’m sorry for being such a total arsehole this morning. Where are we going?”
“Don’t worry—that was another lifetime ago.”
“Feels like it.”
“We are both complete arseholes—no getting away from it.” She picked up his coat, which was draped over the desk chair. “But I suppose one of us has always been hanging on to the safety rope to haul the other back before. I think we both leaped over the edge together this morning, that’s all. We’re just going over to Kentish Town. Now get dressed.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” He put on the pullover over the T-shirt he was wearing. “But seriously, Is. I am going mad. I’m really worried… I mean it. I’m not just saying… I’ve been in bed all day. It’s been terrible. And now, just now—I had this dream.”
“You’re not going mad. You’re seriously bereaved. You’ve left two girlfriends, whom you probably love, for no reason other than that there are two of them. You hate your job. You hate you father. Both with very good reason. You think that ninety percent of everything is total shit. And you’re right. You’ve fallen out with me, the only family you have left. You haven’t got any real money. You don’t own anything. And you have no idea what to do with the rest of your life. You’re pissed off. Seriously pissed off. Who wouldn’t be? Even I would be pretty pissed off if I were you.”
“Thanks.” He stood and slithered into his jeans. “You missed one thing.”
“What?”
“I’ve also just been burgled.”
“I know.” She started to laugh out loud.
He sat back down to drag on his socks. “Welcome to my life. Please, go ahead, laugh.” He nodded sarcastically, but there was humor in his voice now. “This is one of the best bits. In a minute I am going to get into a very expensive cab with a total head case, also for no reason, and we are both going to speed as fast as we can to fuck knows where.”
“I’m sorry, Gabs.” She looked around her for the first time. The room was a mess: everything on the floor. “Laptop?”
“Gone.”
“Scanner? Printer?”
“Gone. Everything gone.”
“Fucking hell.”
“But at least my sister is soothing to be around.” He bent to tie the laces of his boots. “Anyway, what do you mean you know? How do you know?”
“The police are downstairs interviewing your flatmates. They’re all in a state. One of them is shitting it because he’s got drugs stashed in his room. One of the others is crying about his computer. That girl, what’s-her-name, is saying that she feels like she’s been violated.”
“So much fun in one day.”
“They thought you were out.”
“Why?”
“Because your door was locked and you didn’t answer when they banged.”
“The door was locked. And no, I didn’t answer. Why did they let you up?”
“I said I had a spare key.”
“You are such a liar.” He looked around for his wallet. “How did you get in?”
“You left the key in the door,” she said.
“I left the key in the door in case anyone did have a spare key.” He put on his coat.
“So I poked the key out onto a piece of paper on the floor and then dragged it under the door.”
He shook his head in genuine consternation. “What are we going to tell the police?”
“They’re all in the kitchen in the basement. If we leg it, we’ll be fine.”
“Seems a bit suspicious, given the general state of things.”
Isabella said, “Okay. You go, and I’ll tell them you aren’t here.”
“Jesus. Why am I never allowed to be where I actually am in my life?”
Outside, the sleet had finally made up its mind and a thin, ethereal snow was falling, though with no chance of sticking to the streets, which were running wet. The driver had turned and was idling on the other side of the road. Gabriel crossed and stood waiting behind the cab in case someone other than his sister came out. He was struck by the thought that Grafton Terrace looked oddly beautiful now—the street, unusually wide for London, stately even, broad enough for the cars to park diagonally to the curb, and the tall white terraces, London brick, London stucco, with the people warm and snug in so many rooms, and the streetlamps with their halos of light and flurry. Isabella appeared in the doorway, ran down the steps, and motioned to him to get in. He was no great lover of the word, but, well, it looked… on the way to Christmasy. Numinous. Maybe the snow would stick overnight.
The meter had already climbed past thirty pounds. The cabbie did not turn to look at them but spoke into his driver-to-passenger microphone. “Back to the pub then, is it?”
Isabella answered, “Yes. Back to the pub.”
“No problem, love.”
They braced themselves for the speed bumps.
Gabriel’s curiosity was a starving crocodile. “Okay. Tell me.”
“No. I… I can’t tell you in the cab.”
“Isabella, you said you’d tell me.”
“Another lie.”
“Tell me.”
“Gabs, I honestly can t. I need you to understand all this for yourself. The same way I have.”
“Understand what? This better be—”
“You won’t guess.” She looked at him, her eyes glassy and bright. “I don’t want to guess.”
“Well, don t, then.”
“I can’t think of anything that you would come and get me for like this.”
“Please, honestly, we’ll be there in five minutes and then you’ll understand. Everything will be clear. Everything in your whole life.”
He looked across.
There was so much excitement in the air, raw and crackling, that he could almost taste it, like the near singe of lightning. He realized that the two of them were probably very close to hysteria, but he didn’t care.
She paid the cabdriver his filthy millions, but she was first in through the door just the same. And for an awful, stalling second she thought she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. She had not even brought the letter. Gabriel would think that she was…
No. There he was.
Thank God.
He had just moved seats for some reason. She hurried over. She’d been gone, what? Half an hour, maybe more. She was aware—madly, peripherally—of two men talking about her as she passed their table. He was now sitting at a place for four, by the wall, underneath some fake-old advertisement for laundry detergent.
“Hi, Arkady, hi… Sorry, sorry it took longer than I thought. My brother was asleep and everything. Are you okay?” She bit her tongue. She was treating him like a child.
“Yes. I am okay.”
“You moved tables.”
“Yes, I moved the table—because now there is three of us and it seems a good idea.”
She looked over her shoulder. Gabriel was inside the door, looking around. She felt a sudden surge of loyalty as she motioned toward him.
He came over.
“Lovely place,” Gabriel said.
“Gabriel, this is Arkady. We met last week when I was helping you move.”
“Hi.” Gabriel offered his hand.
“Hello.” The Russian stood. And she watched the two very different men greet each other the way men do—serious, eye to eye, shaking as if to affirm some ancient rite that women could know nothing about.
“Oh Christ,” Gabriel said, sudden understanding declaring itself in his face. “Sorry. Your e-mail, last weekend—oh, sorry. I am so sorry. I wasn’t there. I completely forgot. I was… I was moving.”
“It is nothing.” The Russian seemed oddly cheered.
“But you ran into Is?” Gabriel asked.
She smiled.
Arkady appeared puzzled.
“You met Isabella—last weekend,” Gabriel said.
“Yes.”
“Thank God for that. I am so sorry.” Gabriel shook his head. “Various problems.”
“I understand.”
Gabriel asked, “Who wants a drink?”
“Arkady, do you want some more tea?” This from Isabella.
“You’re drinking tea?” This from Gabriel.
“Yes, we are. Arkady doesn’t drink.”
Arkady himself spoke. “Maybe once a year. Maybe tonight I drink.”
“You ever had a Guinness?” Gabriel asked.
“No.”
Gabriel grinned. “Well, this is a good time to start. Made for weather like this. When it’s not cold enough for vodka and too cold for normal beer. I’ll get you one. Is?”
“Vodka lime.”
He nodded.
“For Christ’s sake, hurry up, Gabs. Arkady has some important information.”
“And you are such a freak. Okay. I’m hurrying.”
She sat down with the Russian. She felt that she might chew through her own cheeks. She felt nervous and insane and serene all at the same time. Part of her was staggered afresh by how quickly Gabriel could interpret a situation. (Even though he had no idea what was to come, already he had gleaned that this was Arkady’s first time in London. He was putting the man at his ease as she never could.) And another part of her was attempting to be as normal as possible with Arkady and stop treating him like an endangered species from the most precious part of Russia.
Gabriel stood at the bar, conscious that Isabella was looking up at him and then back at Arkady, as if either one were about to die or give birth. He turned away to place his order.
The thought occurred that she was about to announce she was getting married—some hungry-looking Russian she had met two hours ago, and bang, they’d hurried straight to the nearest gastro-pub to seal the bond. He’s the one. Hates all forms of convention. Loves music and doing what he damn well pleases in any kind of company. After all these years, it had taken her only two hours to know… True love—despite everything that happened in the desperate burning world, you still had to factor it in.
He himself was recovering now. Glad to be out of that accursed room. Most of all, he was eager—desperate—to discover how well the man had known his mother. He must have spent a fair amount of time with her, for Isabella to come in person to his own pit of despair. He hoped that they would become friends. Arkady was roughly his own age.
He turned, carrying the drinks. And he felt that sudden warm feeling suffuse him—the feeling of being sheltered inside on a winter’s night, of cheer and good company. Yes, he was looking forward to a long evening, listening to Arkady’s stories from Petersburg, eating together, talking, real things. The snow too made him ache for Russia. He could see it falling now through the plain glass of the upper windows, still thin and wispy, but falling nonetheless.
He placed the drinks carefully on their table and sat down.
“Here you go.”
“Thank you,” Arkady said.
“Is.”
“Thanks.” His sister looked as though she were about to collapse from some kind of overwhelming excitement or pain or something.
“Is, are you all right? Do you need to take your medicine or go to the loo or something?”
Isabella could stand it no longer.
“Arkady. Do you have the letter? I would like my brother to read it.”
“Yes,” Arkady said.
He took out the letter from the inside pocket of his old jacket and gave it to Gabriel.
“This is true,” he said.
Saturday, five days before Christmas, minus three outside, the coldest December on record, and they were running out of places to be. So they were now sitting in the kitchen of Susan’s house, back on Torriano Avenue. Arkady was at Gabriel’s new place on Grafton Terrace. Gabriel had moved into Larry’s spare room. Isabella was still the guest of Susan and Adam. And Susan and Adam had taken the children out to visit Santa Claus, who had set up unlikely shop on the Finchley Road.
The heating, presumably on some kind of a timer, had switched itself off, and Isabella didn’t know where the control was and didn’t dare fiddle with it in any case. It was absolutely freezing. They were hunched over on either side of the kitchen table, which was covered with coloring books, crayons, and children’s activity centers. Indeed, the whole room—with snow sitting on every cross-pane of the window frame, with the bright red plastic fire engine in the corner, the huge yellow rag doll, the piles of Lego on the high chair—the whole place had a faintly surreal, grottolike atmosphere.
Isabella was speaking animatedly: “Christ, yes, of course I’m angry. I’m probably in shock. I’m probably in worse than that.”
“Yeah, me too.” In contrast, Gabriel’s face wore a lugubrious expression. “Me too.”
“We have been lied to,” Isabella added.
“What’s worse than shock—what’s the next grade up, medically I mean? Trauma? Is it trauma?” Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “It is, isn’t it?” He nodded to himself. “I’m in trauma. That’s what I’m in. Make a note. I am definitely in trauma. Or is it disbelief? Or terror? What’s next? What comes after shock? What’s top of the scale?”
“All our lives.” Isabella shook her head with mild impatience. “All our lives, we have been lied to.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Okay, maybe not. No. But that’s why we have no choice but to go.”
Gabriel held up his palms. “I’ve said I’m not arguing with you.”
“So… right, then. Let’s go upstairs to the computer and I’ll book you a ticket for later this afternoon.”
“Was there anything back from this Henry?”
Isabella frowned at the diversion. “No. But I only e-mailed him this morning, and Arkady said he has to go to the café to check email. He may not get it for days.”
“Okay.” Gabriel eyed the olive-green Martians in the comic that was open by his elbow.
“And yes,” Isabella continued, “we can ask him to play the piano, but don’t you think that’s going to be just a bit awkward? ‘Excuse me, Arkady, thanks for coming all the way from Russia with no money and living in a shit hole for two weeks while we ignored you but could you just please play us the Goldberg Variations while we, experts that we are, check out your talent to our satisfaction?’”
“I’m not saying—”
“And what if he is brilliant? Does it change anything as far as we are concerned—as far as our lives go? No.” She shrugged excitedly. “It may or may not mean we feel duty-bound to raise the money for him to finish his course. But it makes no difference to who our real mother is—or isn’t. And if he’s dog shit, the same. We still have to go. We have to know everything. We need the answers to some pretty fundamental questions here. And the only—”
“Arkady said he’s not going to play anyway,” Gabriel cut in. “Not until he knows about the conservatory one way or the other.”
“He what?” Isabella’s flow stopped abruptly.
“That’s what the guy said when I tucked him in last night.”
“Jesus.”
Gabriel blew into his cupped hands awhile and then said, “Even if it’s all true, it doesn’t change much—Mum is still Mum.”
“Of course, Gabs, of course.” Isabella knitted her brow. “Come on, I’m not—”
“We’ve been adopted, that’s all. Happens all the time. But she was our mother all our lives. From the first moments of consciousness until… until she died.”
“Of course. I’m not arguing with you about that. I feel the same.” Isabella softened, hooked her hair behind her ear. “I feel exactly the same. In one way, it changes nothing.” She paused a moment. “But in another… Anyway, Christ, come on—we don’t even know if Dad is actually our dad. I mean, it’s that basic, Gabs. We don’t know the first thing about who we are. We might not—”
“Okay. Okay, I agree. You’re right, we do have to know. But regardless of whether we have been lied to or not, the truth, as far as I’m concerned, is that Dad is Dad and Mum is Mum.” There was another pause. Gabriel put his hands in his armpits. “Why don’t you go?” he said. “Go now. You’ll be at Waterloo in forty minutes.”
“I’m not going. I can’t. I…” Isabella tailed off and dipped her head to bury the lower half of her face in the scarf she was wearing. “Dad… Dad makes me feel so… so nauseous.” The scarf dropped from her chin as her head came up again. “And anyway, look at the state of me. I can’t be calm. I can’t even pretend to be calm. I will row with him. I will. I’ll start a terrible argument. I’ll be absolutely furious from the minute I see him. I will be storming out before I’ve even stormed in. I can’t hide it like you can. I haven’t got your ability to… I can’t… I can’t make myself unreadable like you can. I’m polished glass to Dad.”
Gabriel said nothing.
Isabella pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “And you know, the thing is that Arkady is… He is kind of like a solution. Not a problem.”
“I’m not saying the guy is a problem.” Gabriel grimaced. “Jesus, can’t you do something about this intense cold?”
“Sorry, no.” Isabella bit her lip. “I know you’re not saying he is a problem, Gabs. But he’s more than not a problem. Think about it. He’s the answer. He’s kind of brought us back from the brink—well, he’s brought me back to my senses, anyway. You may well be past help.” She smiled. “I mean, the guy has got nothing at all. He’s totally fucked. He has absolutely nowhere to stay. He’s got no money. He was actually saying that he needed to start walking to the airport for his flight tomorrow because the trains are too expensive.”
“They are too expensive.” Gabriel’s eyes ran around the room and back to meet his sister’s. “How long is his visa?”
“Six months. But that’s not the point. He can’t afford another ticket if he misses the flight. That’s it. He’s stuck.”
“We’ll buy him one if he wants to stay.”
“More than that, he’s given us the excuse we need, Gabs. He’s the reason. Now you have to go.”
“Now I have to go? Why me?”
“And…” Isabella dipped her head into the scarf again. “And he does look like her.”
“Does he?”
“More than we do. Come on. He’s got Mum’s eyes.”
“What do you mean, I have to go? If I am going, you are going.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know if I can stand it—even being in the same room. Seriously. We need to make him talk. Not fight.”
“Is, if I am going, then you are going. At least to Paris.”
“What about Arkady?”
“We give him some money, obviously. He can stay at Grafton Terrace if he wants. Or he can fly back tomorrow as he planned.”
“But what do we tell him about the course? The conservatory.”
“That depends.” Gabriel stood up. “Can we make some tea, at least? We need something that’s warm in here to focus on. I’ve got a bitch of a hangover, and I’ve been at the police station since eight trying to convince them that I haven’t been robbing myself.”
“Yes. Make tea. Why do they think that?”
“Divert attention from my robbing everyone else, apparently.”
“Makes sense.” Isabella smiled again. “Depends on what? What does what we say to Arkady depend on?”
“On whether it’s all true. If Arkady is Mum’s son for real, then Dad is going to pay for him to finish his course and a whole lot more. Whether the bastard fucking well wants to or not. Even if I have to walk out with an armful of his precious paintings to raise the money.”
This, then, is what it came down to: a dribbling and diminished old man sitting in silence beneath a blanket beside an easel on which there was a portrait he could not paint while a dirty winter’s rain fell into the raddled old Seine outside.
Waiting.
Waiting for the light to thicken. Waiting for the day to end. Waiting for the week to pass. Waiting for a son who was not his son, a daughter who was not his daughter. Waiting, in essence, for the second stroke of death that surely must be coming—any night soon.
And suddenly now so fearful. Fearful of everything, even as it existed in his own imagination. Fearful of stagnation, fearful of travel; fearful of speed, fearful of stairs, fearful of the sea; fearful of other races, of the street-corner young, of every neighbor’s real intentions. And every stranger suddenly an attacker, terrorist, swindler, or thief; every pavement a desperate, seething deathtrap of violence and crime; every ache or sneeze the herald of plague. Fearful of his own bones grown too brittle, his body too slow to heal, his mind too narrow, obsessive, or stale. Fearful of too much company, fearful of none. Fearful of conversation.
Fitting, though. Well shaped. He would give the Fates that. Those three squint-eyed goddesses, spinning their threads, black shawls about their heads, reckoning and rectitude in their every callused fingertip. Clotho: that he who had so traduced the family now had none. Lachesis: that he who scorned convention should feel convention’s scorn. Atropos: that he who would so rudely take life’s secret temperature in the bodies of a thousand lovers should now be left so cold and unconnected.
And yet. He felt no remorse. There were things he owed to Gabriel and Isabella. There were the duties of the truth. And he would pay these now—for in his own way he loved them both. He was the only father they had known. If they came, he would tell them everything. He would give them all the explanations they required. But no… no excuses.
For still he felt it—the old defiance, the lifelong no. Sluggish, furred, but undiluted and stirring in his blood still. That great and resolute no, swimming the wrong way around his heart. Perhaps this was what had caused the clot in his brain. One day this no of his had simply grown too gnarled and swollen to pass along the channels of his lifeblood. The same no that had kept him alive all these years was now trying to kill him. His eyes swept the sodden ashes of the winter’s sky.
The train rolled through those somber fields of northern France, the rain hanging in the air, the sky all bruised, low, lowering, washed-out purple giving way to gunmetal gray, the farms here and there, the narrow roads riding the slight rise and fall of the ground, and he sat by the drizzle-straggled window, bad coffee cooling, and thought the same thoughts he thought every time he passed this way: about the two generations of soldiers, unimaginably heroic, those who dug themselves into this mud and those who, twenty-odd years later, hurried back and forth across it, pursued or pursuing. Men dying for a cause, right or wrong. And this imagining kept his thoughts from anything else. Kept him silent and still, imagining most of all the sadness of all the million unwitnessed moments, the horror and the terror and the pain that a certain man might see or find himself amid, for just a second, utterly alone, with no other to corroborate the experience, testify. The loneliness of that second. Then, immediately, more fighting, or death. What generations they must have been.
And this led him to thinking of his own grandfather, Max, and how little he had talked to him—twenty-six-year-old Max, already working for the British with the Russians against Hitler. Or so the story went. But perhaps none of it was true. All that could be certain was that his grandfather lived in Russia, in Moscow and then in Petersburg, doing who knows what for most of his life. Weighing in on one side or the other, or both, and thereby canceling himself out. He wondered what his grandmother had made of it all. Dead thirty years now. Perhaps the real difficulty was that life was far too short. Just as one generation learned their lessons, they died; and the next had to step forward and start again from scratch, with nothing to work from but those anonymous deep-coded atavistic imperatives, the secret commands of the genes, and whatever few cogent guidelines they had managed to rescue from the minute-by-minute demonstration of human contradiction, confusion, and hypocrisy that was their parents. Or guardians. Childhood: it was like trying to chart an entire continent by the brief flare of a firework. Except that you had no idea that this was your only chance to explore for free, and instead you spent the five seconds of precious light gawping at the sky, stuffing treacle into your mouth. And then it went dark again.
He could not love Paris. Because his father lived there and the whole place seemed to exude his father’s manner. This was ridiculous, of course, and he knew it; but then, underneath he had started thinking that everything was ridiculous, so why discard one notion and hang on to others? Nonetheless, he decided to walk to his father’s flat and see if the Christmas streets would make him happy, sad, angry, or full of goodwill to all men. He had the notion that he should start treating himself as a human experiment, an ongoing private investigation into the effect of environment on the emotions. Maybe even take some notes. A purpose, at least.
After arriving late yesterday afternoon, he had gone straight to the place he was staying, at the top of the Rue de la Chine, up in the twentieth. His friend Syrie, Anglo-French aspiring actress turned massage therapist, had given him her spare room; they had done a play together years and years ago.
Syrie had gone out early that morning with her boyfriend, Jean-the-physiotherapist. She had left him a map, but he knew the way, more or less—down to Gambetta, past Père Lachaise, and then in along the Chemin Vert. He had set off at twelve, in plenty of time.
Now he stopped at a café and ate a light lunch—mussels in white wine—preferring not to risk the tiredness that heavy food might bring on. He needed to be alert. He tried to read Le Figaro and regretted his bad French. He drank a delicious coffee, smoked a perfect cigarette, and watched the passersby. He was beginning to feel more and more disengaged—freewheeling, almost—as he set off again. Perhaps it was Paris after all, his London self hushed, the personality appeasement of a foreign city.
At length, after the Place de la Bastille and the canal, he came to the river and began walking north along the embankment in the direction of the Hotel de Ville and the Pont Marie. The weather was cold, but at least it wasn’t snowing or raining. He was glad of his gloves. Maybe, he thought, if it were not for Isabella, then he wouldn’t have bothered. Sure, he would have believed Arkady. He would have uncovered Nicholas’s whereabouts. He would have written Arkady a second letter addressed to his father, bought the Russian a Eurostar ticket, and sent him on his way. Sorry, but I can’t help. These people, whoever they are—these relations—they’re an accident. Please, take what you need, do what you can, and good luck. Shout if you are ever in London again.
He came to the bridge and turned left, over the river, a slight wind cold on his right cheek. Or maybe Isabella was right: maybe you simply needed to know. Maybe you could not go anywhere, in any direction, unless you knew where you had started. As a human being, perhaps you had a deep and inescapable requirement to understand your history, your genesis, as clearly and as fully as possible, however painful, however unpleasant. And those who did not, or could not, come to this knowledge walked the earth as if inwardly crippled, forever compensating, forever uneasy, forever secretive. (Jesus, just look at it: Notre Dame like some mighty queen termite, belly-stranded in the middle of the river by the sheer volume of her pregnancy.) But strange that being human was never enough on its own. That the need went further. The need to belong. To belong to one tribe or the other. This is my land, these are my people, this is what we believe—which is where the trouble began. Why could we not be content with species-pride, the staggering good fortune of belonging to humanity itself? Mankind, the mother of all miracles. Wasn’t that enough?
And here he was: the Café Charlotte. So this… this must be the quay. He seemed to remember this street vaguely from a childhood trip. Ice cream. He turned left, looking up at the numbers as he went along. He had the odd sense of the day as intensely normal and abnormal at the same time—something like watching the closed-circuit footage on the news a week later: this is the station five minutes before the bomb. The sky was as many shades of gray as black and white could fashion. A little windier now, and a bite in that. Curiously, he had remembered the Seine as wider. But of course this was only half of it. This was an island.
Here.
He went under the arch and into the courtyard.
And now, now that he was actually at his father’s address, his heart, his spirit, his mind, everything suddenly felt like a million maggots writhing. And he was astonished to find that there was no anger either—or no anger anywhere near the surface, no hostility, no upset, no sadness or seething. Instead there was only this overwhelming, excruciating sense of embarrassment.
He stopped at the bottom of the century-worn stairs. He felt painfully, agonizingly nervous, shy. He felt ashamed of himself. And it was beyond anything he had ever experienced before—terrible nerve-squirming embarrassment. Worse, he was not just embarrassed for himself but also, unbelievably, embarrassed for his father. Dear God. Despite everything, here he was, stuck still, empathizing with the old goat for having to enact his part in this ghastly meeting with so ridiculous a son.
He leaned against the wall in the semidarkness. He felt physically sick with it. Of all the reactions, he had least expected this one.
Time stalled. He could neither go up nor turn around. He became apprehensive that at any minute someone might come out of one of the other doors on the staircase and wonder what the hell he was doing. So, madly, he took his telephone from his pocket and began thumbing through the names in his address book for no reason. He had the idea that he might call someone. Might, in fact, call Isabella.
Christ, today was the wrong day. Maybe it was the train ride. But there was nothing there. No fury and no flame. No injury, no hurt. He was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to remember what it was all about ever again, that he might go in there, go through with it all, and at no point do justice to whatever it was he had previously thought had been so traduced all his life. This was a new malaise altogether: standing in the shadows of his father’s stairway, scared to move in case anyone heard him.
The door opened.
“Okay… I have to go,” he said to nobody, into the receiver of his telephone, before making a show of pressing a button to end the call.
“Gabriel. I thought it must be you.”
The figure in the doorway looked nothing like his father. He was an old man, completely white-haired, with rheumy eyes, and thin, very thin; and now, as the door was pulled back, Gabriel could see that this old man moved with great difficulty and with a cane.
“Gabriel.”
The shock. “Hello, Dad.”
Nicholas smiled, a little lopsidedly, but abruptly Gabriel saw that it was there—the light, the old familiar animus. It was as if the stroke had left his father with a death mask as his default face; as if eerie blankness was where he must begin and must quickly subside; and it was only when he physically, consciously willed himself to move his muscles that expression returned, flooding into his features.
“Sorry.” Gabriel was conscious that he was already apologizing. “I just had to finish a call.”
“Come in. Come in.” Nicholas beckoned, his arm extended. “It’s freezing out there.”
Conscious too that he was apologizing for something that he hadn’t actually been doing at all, something that was not in fact true. So it began.
“It’s not too bad. I walked here.”
“From London?”
“From the twentieth.”
“Ah, shame—thought you might be able to teach me how to walk on water so that I can annoy my doctor. He’s a very difficult man to impress. Danish. But walking-on-water-and-bugger-the-cane would do it, I imagine.” Nicholas closed the door and turned. “It’s very good to see you, Gabriel.”
The charm was there yet. But for these two men, for whom physical contact and human touch meant so very much, there was no embrace. Instead Gabriel merely stood looking around at all the wood, the paintings on the walls, the elegance.
“How are you, Dad?”
“I’m fine. It’s taking me longer to recover than I had hoped, of course—it sort of goes in fits and starts. I was quick at first, but not so now. Still”—he dragged his lips into a smile—“I’m able to get out of the apartment as of this week, and my walking is improving. I’m aiming to go all the way to Notre Dame and back by the end of the month. A pilgrimage. I count myself lucky. Very lucky. My speech wasn’t really affected. The Dane says I’ll be passing myself off as normal soon enough.”
His face fell to nothing again and he shifted his weight onto his cane.
Gabriel remembered what his mother had once said about his father, about him being a man of so much energy, about that being what had attracted her to him. And now, a man of so much energy so reduced. He spoke to stop himself from sympathizing any further.
“These are beautiful rooms.” They were in a paneled antechamber with three double doors leading off, ahead and to either side. Everything smelled of rosewood and furniture wax. The walls were hung with paintings by artists Gabriel assumed to be famous but whom he had no hope of recognizing. He looked about self-consciously. He focused on the fabric of the building instead: the slight bulge between the wooden beams of the ceiling, the slight slope of the parquet floor.
“When was this place built?”
“Bourbons.” His father’s eyes actually twinkled. “As haute bourgeois as I could manage. Here, give me your coat and gloves. And you go on through.” He gestured to the door on the right. “We will sit in there—you can see the river. Though it’s miserable on a day like this, I like to keep an eye on it just the same.”
Gabriel took off his coat and handed it to his father and watched him turn slowly and half shuffle, half walk toward the stand. He didn’t know whether to wait or go, so he waited. Nicholas hung his coat on a wooden hanger, but it was awkward for him using only one hand, the other on his cane.
As if reading Gabriel’s mind, Nicholas spoke over his shoulder. “I have someone here to help every day.” He raised his voice. “Alessandro?”
Then, his cane like the center point of a mathematical compass, he turned, one quarter at a time. “He comes by twice every day, which is useful. I told him to wait for you, so he could make us some tea or something. Do you want tea? Or would you rather—”
“Tea is fine.” Though he said it lightly, Gabriel suddenly felt severe, like a puritan or an overearnest college sportsman. And he had forgotten his father’s extraordinary ability to make every gesture count, every word weigh, as if there were always some underlying contest to each encounter, an underlying score to be kept, advantages gained, points lost, positions suspected, held, or revealed as false—the results of which somehow showed exactly what sort of person you really were. He felt compelled to add, “Tea is fine. I had a heavy night last night.”
“Good French wine, I hope.”
“Couscous, mainly.”
“This is the age of the tureen.”
“I am staying with people obsessed with couscous.”
“These are the creatures of the twentieth?”
“Friends, Dad.”
A man about his own age but pretending to be younger appeared from the opposite door.
“Alessandro, we’re going to have tea. Could you bring it through and… and a jug of milk?”
The reminder of his father’s many pathological subversions allowed Gabriel to recover himself, fortify himself. Though he disliked the trait, he was, he knew, fearsomely equipped with a similar arsenal. Updated, though. The next generation.
“Of course, Nick. Hi.” The man waved as if to suggest that he was too busy or too discreet to come over. “I’m Alessandro. You must be Gabriel. I have heard so much about you.”
Lies, Gabriel thought as he said a polite hello.
Five minutes later Gabriel stood by the high river window of the drawing room, waiting for his father to make the unbearably incremental journey from the door. In his mind’s most secret eye (wherein he had foreseen that this time would eventually come), he had long imagined that they would sit down face to face, that he would mentally shuffle his papers, and that he would then begin—solemnly—to ask a series of questions, which Nicholas would—candidly—answer: the penitent former foreign secretary finally facing the nation’s great journalist; why did you really invade, you oleaginous bastard, and what in the name of the living fuck did you think was going to happen once you were in there? But he had no chance to marshal his teeming thoughts—half hostile, half appalled; half compassionate, half desperate; halving and halving again every time he managed to fix on any single one in particular—no time to recover from the simple shock of the past three months, of everything, no time before Nicholas preempted him.
“What was the funeral like?”
“Surreal.”
“On Vasilevsky?” Nicholas stopped two steps in, steadied himself, and looked up.
“Yes. The Smolensky.”
“Surreal. Hmmm.”
“I mean… it happened so fast… everything. Five days, I think. Isabella stayed longer, but I couldn’t—I… I had to get back.”
“It is a shame Isabella could not be with us today.”
“The consulate was helpful. More than that.”
“Of course.” Nicholas moved forward. Cane. Pivot. Plant one leg. Shuffle the other. “You know that Masha always wanted to be buried there? In Petersburg.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No reason why you would.” He stopped again. A crooked effort at a smile. “Yes, she was most enthusiastic about it. Very macabre woman when she wanted to be.” Forward. “Well, I’m glad that there was a proper burial and that she was where she wanted to be, even if we did have to pay the bloody church for the privilege of using her own soil. I’m glad it went to plan.” Nicholas bowed his head and concentrated on his walking.
Gabriel did not know whether he was supposed to apologize for not inviting his father to the funeral or thank him for taking care of the expenses, chivvying the consul, paying the hotel, all of it. So he stood and watched his father’s labored progress and said nothing. Christ, why did he feel as though everything was always, always, a chess game with his father? And why did all available moves somehow always look disadvantageous? Zugswanged—that was the word. (Cane forward. Plant. Pivot. And shuffle.) Even in the most innocuous of conversations, it was impossible to escape the impression that his father had some great elliptical plan—had somehow foreseen this moment and made his moves in Petersburg the better to pin son and daughter when this precise and well-foreseen configuration arrived. Check… I think you will find that the only place you can go is there. But I’d like to think about it, Dad. Fine, but only one move is available, I promise you. Fine, but I’d still like to think about it. Perhaps that was one way to beat him: to refuse to move. Play for a time victory. His clock had a three-decade advantage. At least, he thought (as his father stopped again), at least it made him angry that it was always chess. At least this experience was customary. Even if all the rest—stroke, Paris, this apartment—was not. This anger he recognized. And he welcomed its return like that of a long-lost brother. Again, though, before he could harness his thoughts to speech, Nicholas surprised him.
“I was there. The week before she died. She was very ill. Cancer.”
“I know she was ill. I guessed it was cancer. I didn’t know you visited.”
“We spent three days together.” Nicholas raised his face once more, and this time Gabriel saw an unfamiliar expression—but whether it was the effect of the stroke or some twisted contour of grief, he could not tell. “We even managed to go to the Hermitage for a few hours. I knew she was in agony, but I didn’t really appreciate the sheer… the sheer incapacity of serious illness—not until this.” Nicholas gestured with his cane. “The damage it does to your sense of self, your mind. The courage you need.”
At last he collapsed heavily into his leather chair. “I couldn’t go back. Not after that. And—selfish, perhaps—but I have better memories this way. Masha lecturing me on painting techniques—those eyes of hers, shining.”
Gabriel took the chair opposite. There was a side table between them. And the radiator beneath the window caused the hot air to quaver as it reached the draft. He let his eyes go to the river, hoping to bathe his mind clean. Then he reached across to stop his father’s cane from falling and prop it against the chair.
“Thank you. She forgot the pain, I think, for a few minutes each day. I sourced some excellent pills for her—they don’t sell them here. Cox-2 inhibitors, they’re called. I tried to persuade her to come back. I was prepared to return to London and see her properly cared for. We could live together in the old house. But she said, of course, that she was already back. Typical. Headstrong. I don’t think she really had a chance. In any case, I can’t take bloody funerals. Make sure they burn me, won’t you, Gabriel?”
Gabriel flinched inwardly.
The door opened and Alessandro appeared, carrying a pot of tea on a tray with two mugs. He had the manner of a bit-part actor who wished the audience to know that they were witnessing not so much a play (by whoever, about whatever) as one of the great injustices of modern casting. Nonetheless, Gabriel found himself grateful for the simple speed with which the guy moved.
“Thank you, Alessandro. Thank you for waiting in,” Nicholas said.
Alessandro seemed to make a point of ignoring his father and instead addressed Gabriel. “I wasn’t sure whether to go for Russian Caravan or Lady Grey or Higgins Afternoon. In the end I thought Russian Caravan.”
Nicholas said nothing.
Gabriel said thank you.
Alessandro said, “De rien.” And began to faff with the table and then with the tea.
Gabriel’s eyes returned to the river. The problem, as ever, was that both things were simultaneously true. His father was struggling more than necessary, Gabriel was sure, but the stroke, the indignity, the difficulty, were genuine. His father was playing out his charm, but Gabriel sensed there had also been real relief and pleasure in his greeting. His father knew that he would not have been welcome at the funeral, but he also genuinely had not wished to be there. And now, most duplicitous of all, Gabriel could not escape the feeling that his father’s revelation of a reconciliation with his mother was calculated to hurt as much as to heal. Sly, always sly; but steadfast too—never gave in. You think you’re dealing with slime, you shut your eyes, you hold your nose, and just where you plunge in your hands, you hit granite. Perhaps after all his father had loved his mother, but he had also treated her like… like shit. For decades.
Alessandro was about to leave. This was it. Speak now; use the fact that the Italian was still in the room and his father’s manners would require him to wait until they were alone. Speak. First. Speak now. No more of your theater, Father. No more. Now.
“Who is Arkady Alexandrovitch?”
His father’s pupils contracted. “Arkady is probably your mother’s son. Has he turned up? I thought he might.”
“Don’t speak in riddles, Dad.” Nastier for the casualness, Gabriel thought. “Just tell me the truth. Who is he?”
“I am doing so. Masha had a son. Before I met her.”
“And so you think Arkady… Why probably?”
“She was unmarried, of course. She was attacked. Or close enough to make no difference. She never discussed it with me.”
That expression again on his father’s face: the pain of memory, of movement?
“Why probably?”
“She never spoke of the matter at all. It was her secret. The father was somebody high up in the Party, I think. I really don’t know. Assuming that this person, Arkady, is not lying, then it’s probably him. That’s why probably. I can’t be sure.”
There could be nobody else in the world who understood how to make a general nonchalance hurt so precisely.
“How do you know any of this?” Gabriel deliberately withheld what he knew of Arkady’s story. He wanted to know if his mother had told his father that she had met her son again in Petersburg.
“Grandpa Max.”
No, she hadn’t.
“Grandpa Max,” Nicholas continued, “took great care to tell me all about it when he knew I had fallen in love with her. He was that kind of a man. I’m afraid you didn’t… But he mis calculated. If anything, it caused me to love Masha more. She was working for the Party then. She probably had to go and see the bloody brute who got her pregnant every day. Some fat fake Communist in a uniform. They were all such fakes. Except good old Joe. Oh, he meant it. Every minute. You want to know what I think?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“I think she tried to have the child aborted and there was some horrific botch job and—”
Gabriel’s eyes reached for the river. “That’s why she couldn’t have children.”
He forced them back, dark as ink but incandescent, as if they might set fire to whatever they beheld, and he fixed them directly on his father. “Who am I, then? Who is my sister?”
“Don’t worry. You are twins.”
“Don’t speak to me facetiously.”
“Don’t ask me these questions as if I am some kind of Old Testament mystic, then.”
“I’m asking you as your son. You are my father. Answer me as a father.”
“No. That’s just it.” Nicholas was unflinching. “I am not your father.”
“We were adopted.” Neither did Gabriel’s face change. “I accept that. But you are still my father.”
“And yet I can’t speak to you as if you are my son. I have never been able to. That is our problem. That is what lies at the root… the root of all these twisted branches between us.”
“Who am I?” Still Gabriel held his father’s hollowing gray eyes.
“As a brother, though, maybe as a brother…”
“For Christ’s sake, please, just tell me the truth. For once. As a fellow human being.”
“Your real father is my father. Your real father is Max.”
Only now did Gabriel let himself look away a moment. Then back. “And my mother?”
“Your real mother’s name is Anastasiya. She was one of… one of our father’s lovers. There were many.”
Gabriel felt his blood prickle, as if her very name were causing it to seek the surface.
Nicholas said, “I have a single letter she wrote. It was in his papers. It’s in Russian, of course. She refers to you as Maxim and Anna. Masha changed your names. She wanted to invent you all over again. As hers.”
“How old were—”
“Not yet a year old.”
“What—”
“I never met your real mother. I was at Cambridge when they began their affair, and she was not at any of the parties when I went back—or not that I knew. I don’t have any photographs—I am sorry. You might want to look at some of the pictures of the Kirov from that time. She was in the chorus for a while, I think. A bad dancer.”
“Is she alive?”
“No. She died. Our father ruined her life. He gave her money. And of course she was reported. Not very intelligent.”
“How do you know?”
“I know that she is dead. I do not know how she died. In Max’s will there is a provision for a certain sum of money to be paid annually for flowers. I went through everything when I went out there after he died. It was not an insubstantial amount. The solicitors gave me the name of the recipient of the money. It was a family of florists at Troitsky. It turned out that Max had arranged for them to put flowers on a woman’s grave once a week. I called them pretending to know all about it. They were happy to tell me where it was—I went to see for myself. The grave is there. The flowers too. The name on the headstone is the same as that on the letter. She never married. I am sure she is your mother.”
“Thank you.” Gabriel dropped his eyes a moment. His face was expressionless. But inside he felt as though his lifeblood were reversing direction. He was empty. He was full. He wanted to suck air into his lungs. He wanted to be sick.
Nicholas put down his cup. “The funny thing is that I never thought I would have this conversation with you. I never thought I would be saying any of this, Gabriel, I really didn’t. It was the one principle, the one silence I set myself to honor. For your sake. For Izzy’s sake. For Masha… And yet now, all of a sudden—now I find that it’s the only conversation I have ever wanted to have. Indeed, I realize I have been thinking about it all my life. Ever since the day I first saw you—here in this city, not two miles away. You and Is, side by side, crammed together in a single pram on the corner of the Rue des Islettes.”
Gabriel, his eyes back on the river, gave no sign that he was still listening, but above the din of the revolution burning through his body, he was hearing something in Nicholas—his father, his brother —that he had never heard before, and he was stuck fast to his seat, pulled equally between his ferocious desire to leave forever and his need to stay close to the sound of something true, to hear every last word.
“You were less than a year old, and… and you were helpless, Gabriel, totally helpless.” Nicholas let out a tightened breath. “I had been with your mother some time then—let’s call Masha your mother, because that is what she is. There were difficulties. She could not have the children she wanted. I had my own troubles. We were also very poor. Excruciatingly so. We were enjoying our lives in Paris, but we needed to find work. I had not heard from my father since I left Russia with your mother. Then, out of the blue, he sent a message—we did not even have a phone—he sent a message, with a messenger—can you imagine that?—sent a message that he was in Paris. He had come for a visit, he said. And just like that he arrived at our tiny apartment on Goutte d’Or.”
Gabriel’s face was still turned slightly toward the window. He was rigid against the waves of sickness within. He realized what it was: it was fear stalking his father. His father was afraid. As simple as that.
“But actually Maximilian had come to strike a deal with me. Do you want a real drink?”
“No thanks.”
“Look, Gabriel.” Nicholas grasped his cane. “I know you cannot forgive me, and really I don’t ask you to—I am not interested in forgiveness—but I would like now to tell you at least some part of what my life has been. No excuses and no self-exoneration—I am not a fool. I know… I know that we are all of us able to choose, and my choices have been, with no exception I can think of, selfish. I do realize all of that—and such as they are, I stand by my choices. I and no other am responsible for my actions.”
He sought Gabriel’s eyes again, as if to fix them with an intensity that he could not evade.
But Gabriel, aware perhaps of their keenness, continued to look steadily away, his gaze on one particular turbulent spot in the moving water.
Nicholas, exasperated, sat back, his knuckles white around his cane. “In essence, the old bastard offered me the house in Highgate and an annual sum for maintenance—I’m giving you all the details —to adopt you two as my own. Your mother was desperate to have children anyway. I saw no grave harm in the idea. You were my brother and sister, after a fashion. I bore you no ill will. I never have. Our father would pay for your education and upkeep. For the rest of my life, I would be free to pursue what I was interested in rather than forced to work for work’s sake. I said yes. And I—we, all of us—have been living with the consequences of this deal, for good, for bad, ever since.” Now Nicholas also looked out. “That was the choice I made. I could have said no, of course. But I did not. I was offered a life of relative ease. I took it.”
Gabriel felt his breathing becoming shallow. There was acid in his throat. He had faced all he had come to face. He was exhausted.
“I also rescued you. And I never once went back on… I never went back on my bond to you. However bad a would-be father I have been, I never once—though sometimes circumstances screamed at me to do so—I never once broke the spell. Not even when I was drunk and furious with you, with Isabella, your mother, myself.” The cane fell with a clatter. “I kept to it. I kept you believing that she—that fine, fine woman—was your mother, and that I—I was your father. I have always wanted you to believe Masha was your mother.” He held his shaking hands out in front of him over the table, staring, as if appalled that they belonged to him. “I did it… I kept the necessary secrets… I did it as much for your mother’s sake as for any other. I knew she was capable of loving you as her own. And I wanted… I wanted her always to have you two—you two pretty, clever, troublesome children—to love and to care for. In her exile. And you both to love her in return, as if she were your own flesh and blood. To love her without distance, bridle, or complaint. Unequivocally. Since… since I have always known that I would be a failure in this. I did it for my wife.”
Gabriel looked down at his father’s trembling hands for a second, then abruptly stood. His vision was suddenly blurred. And his heart was traveling too fast, ricocheting from fury to confusion to numbness to exhilaration and back again. He could not trust himself anymore. He had to leave. And no, he was not ready to agree to this last devious bargain: to accept his father as a brother was to absolve him as a father, and this he could not do. When in fact nothing was changed. Not a single cruelty was excused. Not to him, his sister, or his mother. No, there could be no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness.
“I am sorry, Dad. I do not know you as my brother. Only as a father. Only as my father. This is all I know.” The taste of bile was in his mouth. “It may not be true, it may be founded on this lifelong lie, but that lie became my life. And for now, what is true is of no consequence. I have to go.”
“The letter?”
“Isabella will take it. Don’t—I can see myself out.”
“Are you going to come back tomorrow?”
“Goodbye, Dad.”
He leaned over the water and heaved his stomach inside out. The convulsions ripped through him, sudden paroxysms that gripped his body and emptied his mind. The river carried the sickness slowly away.
The next day, Sunday, the fifty filthy shades of gray were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniformly blue. A sharp winter’s cold was on the lips, a soft winter’s light on the cheek; the river walks were busy again beneath the embankments with people in striped scarves and coats and gloves; the drunks were out beneath the bridges, their stocks of brittle bonhomie briefly replenished; children were running ahead of chatty mothers, fathers in responsible colloquy two steps back, joggers; a blue-fingered juggler, a dozen walkers of a dozen different dogs, an elderly couple renewing their lifelong domestic hostilities, a slouch of teenagers (stereo thumping), tourists taking and retaking the same shot with a digital camera, and a man with white hair having considerable difficulty walking beside a young woman in an elegant pale coat.
And there ahead Notre Dame, a great leviathan, she thought, turned to stone by some gorgon of even greater dominion.
“Who is Alessandro?” she asked as her father drew up alongside. The Italian had just left them on the riverside walk and was climbing back up the stone stairs to the quay.
“He is a friend, Isabella, whom I pay handsomely.”
“Strange friend.”
“The most reliable sort.”
They walked on. And she fell into something of a pattern: she would wait patiently for Nicholas until she sensed that his effort to make progress was crossing from authentic to performance. Then she would take two or three steps of her own, ignoring him awhile, before turning back to address him once more.
“Besides everything else, why didn’t you tell us you were gay?”
Nicholas did not pause or look up but continued to concentrate on walking.
“I strongly dislike that ridiculous little word. Do you really want to talk about my private life? Is that why you came?”
“No… no. I suppose I just want to… to understand.” She felt herself weakening and so repeated her pattern of going ahead for a while. “I want to understand why you treated Mum so badly.”
He stopped, looked up, and raised his voice, as if the distance were at least double the three strides. “You think, at this late stage, that if I declare that I am conveniently homosexual, this will be a satisfactory excuse.”
“No,” she said. He genuinely did not care what other people thought of him; she would give him that.
“Well, then.” Her father shook his head.
She did not know what else to say on this matter—suddenly there seemed to be nothing to say. Perhaps that was his skill. In any case, she had vowed to Gabriel, to herself, not to argue. So she fell silent, watched her father, waited, walked on, waited.
She had spent yesterday morning with Arkady. She had given him money for the train to the airport. And then she had caught a late-afternoon Eurostar. Gabriel had met her at the Gare du Nord, fresh from his ordeal. Blankets stolen off the beds and thus wrapped against the cold, they had stayed up most of the night, sitting on the tiny balcony of their small hotel room, looking down through iron railings on the Rue des Grands-Degrés, drinking red wine, water, hot tea. Talking.
“As far as the third bench up there.” Nicholas brandished his cane.
“Okay.”
They were side by side for a moment.
Softly he said, “I am very fond of you, Isabella. I admire your intelligence. And your pride.”
She resisted the urge to take his arm.
“The pills, Zeloxitav, that you gave Mum—I looked them up. They have been withdrawn in this country—I mean in England—because they are thought to have side effects.”
“Where? Where did you look them up?”
“On the Internet.”
“I see.” Nicholas dragged up his eyebrows in an expression of disdain.
She went ahead and turned her back on her father to look at the cathedral again. Gabriel had been right: every second was agony.
“It’s astonishing how sharp the flying buttresses look in this light, isn’t it?” he said from behind her. “So exactly defined against the sky.”
“Yes.” How did he know what she was thinking?
Another family was coming toward them. The parents, not much older than she, smiled as they passed, telling their children to take care, take care. Nicholas stood still until they had all gone by. Then on again he went, head down. There was something heroic in his effort, something almost ferocious. It occurred to her that he had taken on a similar air to the one she remembered Max having—that air of irreducibility. Although it was different, of course, with Nicholas, tinged with bitterness and anger—an irreducibility despite everything he was rather than because of everything. But the spirit had traveled—in the blood, in the manner. The genes passed on their codes, like it or not.
They walked on together for another ten minutes, stopping and starting in their odd fashion. They had covered less than fifty yards.
“Here, I have a handkerchief. You can wipe it dry.”
Isabella attended to the bench. She wished she had brought a hat. Her ears were cold.
Nicholas sat down.
She sat beside him, facing the river, her hands curling and uncurling in the slim pockets of her coat. Then, without turning her head, she said, “You probably killed her, you know. The pills were withdrawn because they caused strokes.”
“I loved your mother all my life.”
“You may even have done it deliberately.”
He looked across.
And now she turned in time to see his face attempt to express irritation and then fall blank again, though whether because the effort was too much or because he thought better of signaling enmity, she could not tell.
“But you can also be very foolish sometimes, Isabella. For all your intelligence, you continue to act on your emotions. Whenever the wind is full in your sails and you are careering forward, it’s your feelings powering you. You are wholly at their mercy. Until they subside, you have no choice but to race on. And if the wind changes direction, then you do too. You should learn to tack.”
“I didn’t come all this way to hear you talk rubbish, Dad.”
“Yes you did, I’m afraid.” He managed a smile and turned back to face the river, holding his cane in front of him, his sheepskin gloves perched together on top.
A pleasure boat was passing by.
“She was dying, Izzy, she was dying. And do you want to know something?”
“What?” Isabella raised her chin a fraction, watching the tourists sitting with their faces pressed up against the windows of the boat.
“By the end she was begging me to kill her. Day and night, she implored me to help her die.”
Isabella stiffened.
“That’s what we really talked about for those long three days—death,” Nicholas continued. “Death. That’s all we talked about. It was bloody terrible. The one thing she wanted most in the world was to die while I was still there. ‘To oversee it,’ she said. Everything, Izzy, everything—a game of chess, our trip to the Hermitage, each cup of coffee—everything was to be ‘for the last time.’ She would not do anything—she would not even lie down—unless we pronounced that it was ‘for the last time.’ And I had to go along with it. I thought… I thought if I played along, then I could take her to the Hermitage ‘for the last time,’ and that way I could get her out so that she would see life again, life outside, her favorite paintings, at least, and then maybe she would stop, come to her senses. No more death. But I was wrong. She did not stop; she carried on. ‘If you love me,’ she kept saying, ‘help me.’ She was scared. So scared. ‘If you ever really loved me, help me.’ She begged me when she was angry. She begged me when she was crying. She did not believe… She did not believe there was any point. It was beneath her dignity.” Nicholas raised his cane a millimeter or two and tapped it down after each phrase to lend his words emphasis. “But still I refused. I refused to allow her not to fight on. I arranged for her to see a specialist. I booked myself a flight back to Russia. I was determined that she should live.”
“I do not understand you,” Isabella said quietly.
“And those pills—those pills eased her pain tremendously. Those pills blocked out the suffering of her body. They allowed her to think and to talk again. When you are in serious pain, Isabella, you cannot do either. Those pills gave her back the privilege of her mind. The human privilege. No, Isabella—you do not consciously kill the ones you love. And I was then, I have always been, and I am still very much in love with Masha. She is the other half of what I am.”
“I do not understand you at all.”
“I do not ask you to.”
She turned to him and searched his face. This was it—at last, this was it: the real questions behind all the other questions.
“Why—in God’s name, why did you cheat on her so… so openly, for so long, and with such contempt? Why torture her? How do you think that made her feel?”
“I tried not—”
“And why cheat on us? We could never trust you. Do you have any idea how it feels for a child to know that her father is fucking every man and woman who comes through the front door?”
“Yes, I have a very good idea of how that feels.”
“Then all the more so—why? I knew. Gabriel knew. Dad, you had people—you had lovers to the house. You rubbed our noses in your… your… your—”
“I could not leave. I had made a deal. I had made a commitment to your father, to Ma—”
“Rubbish. You could’ve left. You could have worked it out with Grandpa—with Max. Left for good. Properly. Split up. Gone. We could have visited you at weekends or whatever. You could’ve spared Mum—you could’ve spared us all—the torture of having to know you and… and witness. You wanted an audience.”
His eyes held hers.
She did not look away.
“Isabella, I cannot explain any of this, least of all to you.” “Why not? I would say that it is specifically to me that you owe an explanation.”
“Because the answer is not rational.”
“But only a moment ago you said that I was the queen of the emotional high seas, that—”
“Because—” His voice raised, he cut her short. “Because you are who you are—my daughter, in every important way.” He looked away, then softened, speaking again to the river. “And if I even begin to attempt to explain myself to you, it will only make you… only make you dislike me all the more. No child likes to hear of her parents’ true lives.”
But she was mesmerized by the moment. And involuntarily, her hand reached sharply for his sleeve, as if to grasp hold of something within her father that she had not seen or touched before.
“For Christ’s sake, Dad, please stop. Stop shielding me. Stop acting for me. Stop trying to control everything. Let me decide. Let me know. Let me deal with whatever I have to deal with. It is not for you to worry about me—if that is what this is.”
“You sound like Gabriel’s bloody magazine.”
“Forget that I am who I am. Forget that we are who we are. Forget everything. Just try to tell me the truth, as one person to another. A stranger, if it helps.”
“Clever of you to understand that strangers help. Your mother saw that too.” Nicholas sucked his crooked teeth, then turned to face her again. “Very well.” He drew his cane toward him so that his chin was almost resting on his hands and half turned, speaking into the space between them. “All my life, for reasons that I do not know, Isabella, I have wanted—no, I have needed—the intimate company of other human beings. Dear God, believe me, I have thought that it was psychosis, I have thought that it was insecurity, I have thought it was loneliness, madness, vanity, selfishness, lust, anger, depression… And it’s all of these things, I admit it. I admit it to you—as surely as those idiots on that boat would admit that they wished they had paid the extra for the headphones instead of pretending to themselves that they can speak French. But more than any of these, much more, it’s actually to do with feeling alive. And I can say that now and really mean what I am saying.” He inhaled heavily through his nose, as if to emphasize how much he had come to value every breath. “This fact your mother understood. Intuitively. Yes, it is to do with feeling life’s only meaning close up. You know—the chaff and chatter all stripped away, the naked beauty of creation right there and present and real. Action and reaction, the body and the mind, offer and response. Where words end and even freedom itself flags, that’s where the act of love begins. And I know, of course I know, that for some people—for most people—a single other is enough, is all they want, is satisfaction. But for me—for me, not so. Again, your mother understood this. And there was shelter in her understanding. And I loved her for it. I never wanted ease or comfort or familiarity or affirmation or the certainty that bills would be paid and children fed. I did not want any of life’s kindly smothering disguises. I could not be contented like that.” His voice strengthened, and he raised his head as if to address the river itself. “No, I wanted life naked and truthful, and I wanted to gaze upon its revealed face over and over again by the changing light of a hundred different souls. I wanted to feel its brutality, its gentleness, its recklessness, its caution, its power and its weakness, its give and its take. I wanted to fix it in my arms and see it shining in every pair of eyes I lay with. I can’t play the violin or—Christ knows—paint, I really cannot paint, Isabella; I can’t write; and I have neither the hands to work the land with nor the obsequiousness required for any kind of office. I can’t teach or heal or make.” He seemed to wince against some new pain. “Forgive me, Isabella, but the act of love was—is—as close as I could get to life’s disappearing quiddity. I was born that way. Or I became that way. Born or made—who knows? You can answer that question better than I. But every nerve of mine asks me to it again and again. Even now, it is what forces me to take each one of these tortured steps. For me, it is life.”
Isabella was silent awhile. The river ran on.
“And yet, Dad, there are some lies still, even in what you’ve just said. Because you did have the bills paid, you did have security. Okay, we never had much money, I know that, but—”
“Some lies too.” Nicholas interrupted her quietly. “Always some lies. The salt.”
“But in fact,” Isabella continued, ignoring him, “you never had to worry about feeding or clothing your children. Our true father saw to that. If we’d only known the real reason he was giving you money. We both thought he was just being a nice grandpa! Christ, did you ever have any of your own, Dad? Was it all his? I bet Mum paid for our summer holidays with the money she earned. But how did you fund all those trips abroad that none of us went on?”
Nicholas said nothing. And suddenly she was empty and tired and she wanted desperately to leave him. To go, swiftly, directly. To Russia. She turned away. “Do you have anyone? Apart from Alessandro.”
“I have lots of friends here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“There is a woman—Chloe—whom I would like you to meet…” He hesitated. “If we are to become friends again.”
“Is that what you want?” she asked. She felt his eyes on the side of her face.
“I would like it if we could see each other from time to time. Continue this conversation.”
“I don’t know if I can ever have this conversation with you again. I’m sorry, Dad.” She looked at him again but could not meet his eyes anymore. “You’re right. I am your daughter. Maybe not born but made so. And I can’t suddenly be your friend and… and everything. Not just like that.”
“I do not expect anything to be quick. But let’s at least admit that we find each other interesting company, if nothing more.” He tapped his cane. “Where are you staying?”
“No. I am not staying. I’m going home this evening. Back to London with Gabriel.”
“What about Christmas?”
“We are ignoring Christmas. We are going to Petersburg. We’ll have Russian Christmas in January.”
She stood.
Nicholas nodded slowly. “Your mother’s flat is paid for and empty until the summer, if you wish to stay there.”
“I’m not sure.”
“And what about you, Isabella, what do you want?”
“I want what Mum wanted. I want you to pay for the course for Arkady. I want you to write me a check for the full amount now. You can give it to me with the letter when we go back. Then I want you to set up a fund so that he gets enough to live on for the next ten years. If you don’t have enough, then you must sell the Highgate house and do it with that money.”
“Is he any good, this Arkady?”
“I don’t know.”
Nicholas held up his arms, asking to be pulled up. “You don’t know?”
She had no choice but to help him to his feet. “I haven’t heard him play.”
I am going.” Arkady spoke suddenly from behind them.
They had left him only five minutes. They themselves were still looking, scraping off the snow and trying to read the names. Gabriel turned.
The Russian stayed back on the shoveled path. “Thank you,” he said. “For showing me the place. It is a coincidence—I came through here many times.”
Isabella straightened and tried to smile, but it felt like her skin was frozen and cracking, even deep inside her rabbit-fur hat.
“So. It’s cold, no?” There was a trace of humor in Arkady’s voice.
“Yes,” Isabella said. “Properly cold.”
“How long will you be?” He indicated their work.
They had uncovered a dozen names between them. There was only four hours of light per day. Barely that. An hour or so left. And though Isabella had brought a flashlight, neither wanted to spend any time out here in the darkness.
“Not too long.” Gabriel stopped and stamped his feet. The snow fell in wedges from his soles. “We know it is one of these. We will do a few more. Come back tomorrow if we don’t find it.”
Arkady nodded in the manner of someone trying to be polite while urgently required elsewhere.
Gabriel squeezed his nose, which was starting to freeze. “Then Yana is going to take us straight to Cosmonaut, if you want to come.”
They had all driven out to the Smolensky together in Yana’s wreck.
“Some people we know will be there,” Isabella added. “It will be fun. Bring your friends. Bring Henry.”
“No. I…”
“Or come down later.” Gabriel grinned. “I promise I won’t buy you a drink.”
“No. Thank you.” Arkady looked up. A flock of black birds was flying across the white page of the sky like an ever-changing bar of music. “I need to practice. I need very much to practice.”
Isabella spoke from deep within her hat. “You are going back to play Mum’s piano?”
“Yes. I am going to play this piano.”
“That’s great.” Isabella spoke excitedly.
“The spare keys are stiff, but they do work,” Gabriel said. “You remember the combination to the main gate?”
“Yes.” Arkady nodded. Then, his voice matter-of-fact, he added, “You should know—Henry is dead.”
“What? Henry is dead?” This from Gabriel.
“Yes.”
Isabella took a step forward. “That’s terrible,” she said. “That’s really terrible. We were going to… God. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Arkady’s face was blank.
“Was he ill? Was it an accident or something?” Gabriel asked.
“No. But I think he did not want to live.” Arkady shrugged. “Some people do not think life is so great.”
“Jesus. Well, I’m very sorry to hear about that.” Gabriel shook his head in a gesture that expressed sympathy as best he could from beneath two wool hats.
“He sounded like a nice guy,” Isabella said, raising a mitten to her head. “In his letter, I mean.”
“He was. But that makes no difference.”
The three stood in silence a moment. There did not seem to be anything more to say. But it was too cold not to be moving.
“Okay. So. I will see you later, maybe. My friends will help me move the piano tomorrow. We will wait until after lunchtime in case you sleep.”
“Oh… Okay.” Isabella looked at her brother. Then said quietly, “Well, neither of us can play it.”
Gabriel was silent.
Arkady nodded slowly for a moment, seeming to assess them both anew. “Good luck,” he said.
Then he turned, murmuring to himself in Russian. He looked like a soldier in his greatcoat and his bearskin. They watched him go, walking oddly, his hands deep in his coat pockets, hurrying through the snow.
They were nearing the end of their endurance. Isabella was using her flashlight recklessly as a scraping device.
“Give it another five and then we’re off,” Gabriel said. “Yana will be waiting.”
“Hang on. I think I’ve found it.”
Gabriel came over as fast as he could through the drifts.
“Yes, this is it.” Isabella rubbed the rest away with her elbow. Frozen flowers.
He was beside her. “Let me see.”
Isabella turned on the light. Nothing. She shook it. The sudden illumination made the surrounding snow glimmer, almost blue. They stood back. In Cyrillic letters, the name spelled out was Anastasiya Andreev.
“That’s her,” Gabriel said.
“Yes.” Isabella played the beam back and forth across the name.
After a while the bulb cut out completely. But even then it seemed a shame to stop looking while there was still a little light lingering in the sky.
She spoke softly. “What now?”
“Start again,” he said. “Every day, start again.”