The White Russian

11

H is father stood before him in a red silk dressing gown.

“I want to see my son.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I want to see him.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Then I want to see him asleep.”

The senior Ruzsky’s stare revealed the depth of his contempt. “How low can you sink?”

Irina emerged from the shadows, a tiny figure in a white gown, her black hair disheveled and her eyes full of sleep.

“I want to see our son,” Ruzsky said.

“He’s asleep.”

“Then I want to see him asleep.”

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, Sandro. Any more than you already have.” She looked up at her father-in-law, who placed his arm around her shoulder and drew her to him.

Irina murmured, “Give me a minute, Papa.”

Reluctantly, the elder man withdrew, turning his back on his son as he climbed the stairs.

Irina took Ruzsky’s hand and led him through to the drawing room on the left. It was an oddly intimate gesture. She closed the door behind them. A fire was dying on the hearth.

Irina took a step closer to him. Her mouth was tight, her eyes narrow and without discernible warmth in the fading light. Her hair, which had once been sleek and dark, was shot through with gray.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

“No.”

“By doing this, you make it worse.”

“How could it be any worse?”

“You lower yourself still further in the eyes of your father.”

“That’s hardly possible.”

Irina gave him a thin smile.

Ruzsky was facing two giant silver candlesticks and a carriage clock in front of a bookcase that stretched to the ceiling. This was his home and yet his wife had succeeded in making it more alien to him now than it had ever been. Her smile was one of victory.

He glanced wearily at the portraits of Dmitri and Ilya. “You said I could see Michael, but when I telephone, you don’t come to the receiver. You never return my calls or reply to my letters.”

For the first time, she looked shamefaced. Ruzsky realized that it was not merely anger that had been driving her evasiveness. “We thought it-”

“We?”

“Your father thinks Michael would be better away from your influence. I don’t-”

“You have talked about it.”

“I don’t agree with him, but it has been hard for Michael. The arguments, the upheaval. I thought… think it would be better if he were allowed to settle for a time, without the upset of seeing you.”

Ruzsky thought of his boy upstairs, sleeping peacefully, still unaware of his presence. “I want to see him.” He moved toward the door, but she gripped his arm.

“Please don’t,” she said.

Ruzsky stared into the fire. He thought how much better it would have been to have never been married than to have come to this. “You believe you understand this family,” he said. “Our history, and yet…” He shook his head. “You know nothing.”

“If that’s what you want to believe.”

“No outsider can truly understand, Irina.”

“That’s your conceit.”

Ruzsky opened the door. His father stood in the hallway, but Ruzsky looked up to see his brother coming down the stairs. “Give me a minute, Papa,” Dmitri said as he took Ruzsky’s arm and led him onto the stone steps outside, pulling the door shut behind them.

Dmitri’s face was solemn but his eyes sparkled. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips and then they clasped each other. They held on so tight and for so long that when they parted, they were both short of breath.

They stared at each other until Ruzsky grasped his brother again, still harder. “I thought I’d lose you,” he said.

They stepped back once more. “You don’t look a day older,” Ruzsky said. His delight at seeing his brother alive and well began to sober him up.

“I wish I could say the same for you.” Dmitri patted his hair affectionately, lowering his voice to a whisper. “If you’re not careful, you’ll end up looking like the old man.”

“How is your arm?”

Dmitri smiled again and raised it. “Strong enough to resist a bear hug from you.”

“I’m sorry.”

They stood close together, the snow falling silently between them.

“A real soldier now,” Ruzsky said. “A veteran. The ancestors would be proud.”

“Spare me the judgment of our ancestors…”

“You survived,” Ruzsky said. “That’s all I care about.”

Dmitri dropped his gaze and Ruzsky leaned forward quickly to touch his brother’s shoulder, his protective instinct not dulled by the years. Relief and warmth flooded through him, but he’d sobered up enough to realize what a fool he was making of himself. “I’ll go.”

“We’ll work something out, Sandro.”

“Have you seen him?”

Dmitri hesitated. “He’s fine. He’s a strong boy. Ingrid helps to look after him.”

“How is Ingrid?”

“Still German. She hides away here.”

Ruzsky took a step back. “Good night, Dmitri.”

“Telephone me. We’ll get together.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it. Tomorrow. We’ll have Sunday lunch. At the club. Agreed?”

Ruzsky hesitated.

“Tomorrow. Promise me.”

“I’d like that. We have a lot of work. I-”

“Sandro, there is a war on and I’m an officer in His Imperial Majesty’s army. If I can find the time, so can you.” Dmitri was still smiling.

“Of course,” Ruzsky said. “I’ll be there.”

“One o’clock. Don’t be late.”

Ruzsky turned his back and began to walk. Suddenly, he wanted to get away. But after a dozen paces, he stopped and turned. The front door was shut, Dmitri back in the warmth of their family home, but he looked up to see Michael in the attic window, the bedroom that had once been his own. The boy’s small, dark head was illuminated by a flickering candle. Ruzsky moved closer, urgently, his heart thumping, tears creeping into the corners of his eyes.

The boy was watching him.

Ruzsky raised his hand. He mouthed his name, and the boy raised his own hand in response, his eyes never leaving his father’s. And then Irina was behind him, her hostile face replacing his in the window.

She tugged the curtains shut.

Ruzsky turned away, trying to convince himself he had been right not to insist upon seeing Michael. He was drunk. He was a disgrace. Michael would have been embarrassed.

In the night, Michael’s face appeared beneath the ice, his cheek pressed against it, eyes distorted by fear, fingers scrabbling silently for freedom.

Ruzsky knelt above him, hammering with his fist against ice as solid as brick until the blood seeped from beneath his nails. Panic gripped him. His body shook. He was shouting for help, but no sound came. And all the time he could see the desperation in Michael’s face as he lay trapped beneath him, fighting the current, struggling to breathe…

Ruzsky awoke to the sound of rifle shots and leapt from his bed. He was sweating and shaking and not even the intense cold of the darkened room could shake the images from his mind.

Then the room and the city beyond were silent once more.

A dog barked nearby and Ruzsky scratched a patch of ice from the window so he could look out into the night. It was clear now, the moon bright; a new layer of snow lay thick on the street. His breath froze against the glass.

His head hurt. He turned and walked to the door, his boots-he had fallen into bed fully clothed-noisy on the floorboards.

The room that Pavel had rented for him was in a large tenement building on Line Fourteen of Vasilevsky Island, not far from, but much less respectable than, the apartment he and Irina had occupied before his departure.

The rents had gone up and, of course, he no longer had the allowance given to Irina by his own father, so all Pavel had been able to get for the budget Ruzsky had wired him was a small, bare room in a building that stank of cabbage and cat urine. There was a photograph of Michael above the fireplace and a dark wooden dresser along the opposite wall, between two scruffy armchairs.

Ruzsky took out his cigarette case and reached for the box of matches. He lit up and exhaled heavily. He steeled himself for a long night.

He thought of his son’s face in the attic window.

At what point, he asked himself, should a man accept that his life had been a failure?

Ruzsky sat down. He cast his mind back to the summer of 1908 when he and Irina had fallen in love. Anton had still been a part-time lecturer in law at the university and Irina one of his students. She had been admitted to one of the special “courses for women” in law, since ladies were not officially enrolled in the university. Ruzsky recalled the long, heady nights in the back garden of Anton ’s small country home north of the city, the midnight sun bringing a soft glow to faces flushed with vodka and good food.

Ruzsky remembered Anton lecturing Irina on how much her clever paramour was admired in the department, how bright his future, even if it was not the one his father had wished for him.

Ruzsky got to his knees and put a light to the fire that Pavel had laid the previous evening. He sat cross-legged and watched the flames begin to climb from the kindling toward the blackened walls of the chimney. After a few minutes they died down again, the remainder of the wood too damp to sustain them.

Ruzsky tried to keep the fire alive, but was rewarded only by smoke and a low hiss.

He gave up. He took a full bottle of vodka from his bruised leather suitcase, and placed it on the table beside his bed.