Gerö signaled to Elías to stand, and he stood. But on his way out, Elías stopped for a moment, looked at the colonel, and asked, “Will I see her again?”
“Who?”
“Anna Akhmatova.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Your job is to take care of Antonov.”
Consul Antonov-Ovseyenko was summoned to Moscow in early 1937. A few months later he was executed for high treason. Much of the evidence used against him was provided by Elías Gil, his personal secretary and lieutenant in the newly formed Military Intelligence Service of the Republican Army. None of the evidence was ever proved true.
18
BARCELONA, SEPTEMBER 2002
Gonzalo charged into the house, propelled by a terrible premonition. He’d forgotten that Alcázar had installed an alarm system, and its ear-piercing shriek startled everyone. Within seconds, Lola stood before him, fear and confusion reflected on her face. She looked at him as if he was a ghost, then keyed in the code to turn off the alarm; finally, the deafening sound stopped.
“What are you doing here? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Patricia! Where’s Patricia?”
“In her room. What’s going on?”
Not stopping to explain, Gonzalo raced up the stairs. Standing in the hall were Javier and Patricia, both looking afraid. Seeing him, she became immediately gleeful, broke free of Javier’s protective embrace, and sprang into her father’s arms. Gonzalo held her tight, so tight in fact that Patricia whined delightedly as he pressed her to his chest. But he let go only when Lola asked curtly what all the commotion was about. Gonzalo patted his daughter, as though needing to prove to himself that she was really there. He realized he was scaring them and smiled nervously at Javier, who gazed on in silent condemnation. Gonzalo felt compelled to make something up on the spot.
“I got a bad feeling and wanted to make sure everyone was okay.”
It sounded ridiculous. Everything at the house was perfectly normal, with the exception of his freak-out. And suddenly Gonzalo felt like a stranger in his own home, with his own family. Nothing had happened, and there was no reason anything should, but when Alcázar had shown him the photo of Patricia and made that veiled threat, he realized how precarious it all was. Their safety was at risk. Neither the children nor Lola sensed the danger in the air, but he did.
Javier was moving his head slowly up and down, not in agreement but a sort of condescending accusation.
“And you couldn’t wait until morning? You scared us to death,” he said, pulling his sister to him, reclaiming her. Gonzalo realized that his son had taken on the role of man of the house, and that his own presence was evoking hostility. I can take care of them, Javier’s defiant expression said.
“I’m sorry,” Gonzalo replied, and this seemed to satisfy his son.
Twenty minutes later, Alcázar turned up.
“Is everyone okay?”
He wore an expression of genuine concern. Overly solicitous, he avoided looking Gonzalo in the eye and focused instead on Lola and the kids. When Lola told him it was a false alarm, the ex-inspector shot Gonzalo a quick but meaningful glance: This is just the beginning, and it’s in your power to stop it, his eyes said. Then he made a point of stroking Patricia’s cheek.
“Your father worries so much about you.”
Gonzalo trembled with rage but managed to contain himself. Lola walked Alcázar to the door, thanking him for coming and apologizing for the trouble, and Alcázar said good night with a smile so frank and open that it made Gonzalo’s blood boil.
When Lola asked Javier to take Patricia back to bed, she protested vociferously and clung to her father, crying. Gonzalo had to use all of his powers of persuasion to convince her to go up with her brother.
“You have no right to turn up like this!” Lola fired reproachfully, the second the two of them were alone.
Gonzalo considered his words carefully, weighing how much he could say and what he’d have to keep quiet. He had an undeniable urge to tell Lola what was going on, but he didn’t know how the events linked together or how to separate the parts that concerned both of them. In the end, he opted for a prudent approach; it was better to protect them, keep them in the dark about what was going on. Alcázar had given him a clear warning: no cops, no leaving town. Everything had to carry on as normal.
“I suddenly had this gut feeling that Atxaga was at the house,” he lied.
Lola sighed and tilted her head back, as though searching with her gaze for someplace to escape to.
“My father is taking care of it,” she snapped cruelly, and was instantly sorry for her words, for giving in to the childish urge to hurt him. But it was already done, and her condemnation echoed in the living room.
“Your father. What do you know about your father and his ambitions?”
Gonzalo, too, should have kept quiet and not let himself start down the slippery slope of tit for tat, knowing even as he did that his thoughts would go unspoken, leaving a question in the air for Lola to pounce on.
“What about my father? What’s that supposed to mean?”
She waited for Gonzalo to say more, but he didn’t, and she’d had enough of her husband’s perpetual silence. Silence that, she now knew, could go on for years and then suddenly be broken, just like that. It was strange, but Gonzalo’s revelation—that he knew she’d had an affair and that Javier was not his son—had shamed her for only a second. What she felt now was resentment: He’d forced her to feel guilty, to pretend for eighteen years, and he’d known all along…
“What kind of a man are you?”
Gonzalo made no reply. From his expression it was clear that he was no longer even there. Lola stared challengingly a few seconds more before giving up. It was all over, she thought. Their relationship, their marriage—it was done. And the certainty of that brought with it a sense of freedom that overpowered her sorrow.
“You can sleep on the couch if you like…But don’t even think about smoking in my house.”
Harsh comments, stupid petty outbursts concealing untold grievances from the past, a tangled web of contradictory feelings and recriminations they vented by acting out. This was what it had come to.
Gonzalo slept on the sofa, fully clothed. In the different shades of darkness he could make out the contours of the furniture. For a long time, he lay there listening to silence echo with all of the things—arguments, good times, laughter, and tears—that were contained in that house and no longer belonged to him. Lola’s question pounded in his head. What kind of a man was he? A man who loved his family, despite it all. One who’d do anything to protect them.
He got up and went to the garage. His mother’s things were stored up in the loft, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. He put up a ladder, got a flashlight, and pushed aside piles of stuff at the front, feeling around for the metal box hidden among some plastic tarps. When he opened it, he grew pale.
It was gone. The rusty old pistol was gone.
A sound made him turn to the garage door. He shined the flashlight and saw a shadow skulking off.
“Javier? Is that you?”
“Señora Márquez called to cancel her appointment. That makes”—Luisa consulted the date book, running a fingernail down the page—“four cancellations. Isn’t it great? Now you get the whole day off and I’m out of a job.”
Gonzalo hunched lower in his desk chair. “There will be others, don’t worry. You’re not going to lose your job.”
Luisa tried to come up with a snappy retort, but for once her acerbic wit failed her and it was her stomach that felt acidic. In her desk drawer was the note that Agustín’s secretary had personally delivered that morning. They wanted her to work for them and would pay a much better salary than Gonzalo did, certainly far higher than what she’d get in the unemployment line if things kept going down this path. She’d
walked into Gonzalo’s office determined to quit, but on seeing his devastated look couldn’t make herself do it.
“The old man is really turning the screws. He takes my clients, kicks me out of the office, and now he wants to steal the best assistant in all of Barcelona.”
Luisa blushed.
“I saw the note on your desk before you had time to hide it. You should accept; it’s a good offer.”
“I should accept? Maybe, and you should have a shave and change your shirt. If by chance a client were to walk in, we wouldn’t need your father-in-law to scare them off; you’d do it all by yourself.” Luisa opened the door to leave and then stood with her hand on the doorknob.
“Is it really worth it? Putting everything you have on the line for an old house? I’m not doubting you, I’m just asking.”
It wasn’t the house, or the fact that his father-in-law was trying to impose his will through threats and intimidation. It was far more than that, but Gonzalo couldn’t explain.
“Yes, it’s worth it.” He would have liked to be more forceful in his avowal, but not even he felt sure. And yet, for Luisa, it was enough.
“Well, maybe serving coffee in some mall wouldn’t be so bad. People need to expand their horizons.”
Once he was alone again, Gonzalo pulled open his desk drawer to study the locket, gazing at the faded image of Irina. He thought about the conversation he’d had with his mother. His father had loved this mysterious woman, had perhaps done what Gonzalo was doing right now—caressing the locket’s worn surface, running a fingertip over her blurry name—thousands of times. Maybe Alcázar was right. Maybe his father simply hadn’t wanted to live out the rest of his days a slave to his own reputation.
His head felt like it was going to explode and his body like two horses were pulling him in opposite directions, shredding his muscles and breaking his bones. What Alcázar was asking him to do was to betray not only Siaka and Laura but also himself, to admit that despite his ideals and illusions he was no hero, nor was he called upon to be one. He was nothing but a two-bit lawyer with no clients and no ambition, the father of a boy who couldn’t stand him, a man whose marriage had collapsed due to his own stubborn silence. A father incapable of protecting his children, who’d already unnecessarily put them in harm’s way. Why, Gonzalo? Is it pride? What are you trying to prove? And to whom? He didn’t know what to do, whom to turn to. Putting the locket back in the drawer, he walked out to the reception area.
“Is the old man in today?”
“I don’t spend my days spying on the competition, you know.”
Gonzalo wasn’t in the mood for Luisa’s sarcasm, and she could tell.
“I think he’s out of town. Asia.”
How convenient, Gonzalo thought: The ACASA project blows up, Alcázar threatens to harm Patricia, and the old man disappears. The bastard goes on about his grandkids nonstop but doesn’t think twice about using them as blackmail. And in the meantime, he skips town.
Gonzalo needed some fresh air. At least that was what he told himself. But he wasn’t fooling anyone. In recent weeks he’d started frequenting Flight. He’d stop by late, in the hopes of seeing Tania again. Lately, the thought of that girl and her red hair was the only bright spot in his days. He wasn’t harboring any illusions, but he couldn’t help fantasizing about her.
That afternoon, Vasili greeted him with his customary faint smile and treated him to coffee. The two of them had tentatively begun having conversations that Gonzalo awkwardly tried to steer in the direction of Tania, though what the old man liked talking about were the photos of the Great Patriotic War adorning the walls. Vasili turned out to be an easy conversationalist with a quick tongue. Until 1941, he had been an instructor at Osoaviakhim, the Soviet military flight school. After that he was sent to the border with Belarus, where the German offensive took him by surprise after Hitler broke the 1939 pact by invading the Soviet Union. Assigned to a fighter squad, he battled the Nazis until he was shot down near the Polish border, only a few days after the start of the war. He was taken prisoner and sent to a military camp in Poland. While other comrades proudly displayed the Order of Lenin medals they’d received at the time, Velichko, when the war ended, was accused of treason. They claimed that he wasn’t actually taken down by enemy fire, that he’d been trying to desert the army and had run out of fuel, which was why he didn’t make it. He was sentenced to twelve long years in a gulag on the border with Kazakhstan and served each and every day of it. When he got out, in 1957, he had no family awaiting him, couldn’t find work, and people kept their distance. Everyone was afraid to be associated with him. Everyone but Anna Akhmatova, Tania’s mother.
Gonzalo caught sight of a faint number tattooed on Velichko’s forearm, peeking out from beneath his rolled-up sleeve. Though the ink had faded over the years, the number was still there, branded into his flesh. Gonzalo wondered if it had been put there by the Germans, while he was in the camp in Poland, or by his own countrymen in Siberia.
“Why do you still revere them? They betrayed you.”
Velichko gazed at him sadly. It was so hard to talk about the camaraderie of the front, the way fear not only tore men apart but also brought them together, the bonds it created, the way acts of abject cowardice were forgiven in a fleeting burst of heroism.
It was also hard to hold his tongue, to keep from talking about Elías Gil. But Anna had made him swear. In fact, if she’d known Gonzalo had so much as set foot in the bar, she would be furious. And yet Vasili risked her anger because Gonzalo reminded him so much of Elías, though of course he had no idea. Words are nothing without experience, nothing but smoke and mirrors, easily forgotten.
“People need something to believe in, and the war was our common cause. What happened before and after was tragic, and absurd. And I will never forgive the men who betrayed our ideals. But during the war years, we were free. I can’t explain it.” Those days—the days of Vasili and Anna and Elías—were gone, and now all he cared about was an idealized past, the dust-covered photos that no one asked about or wondered who they were and what they meant.
The old man glanced at the entrance and grunted.
“Well, it looks like the person you’re actually here to see has arrived. No need to keep humoring me. The real reason for your visit just walked in.” He pointed to the door.
Heaven had smiled on Tania Akhmatova. She was a radiant beauty in her loose-fitting blouse—the same dark blue as her eyes and long necklace—wide belt and tight jeans. Her open-toed espadrilles had a slight heel that made her far taller than Gonzalo, who felt awkward and ridiculous as he stood to greet her. Tania took a seat beside him. Though there was plenty of room, she made a point of sitting so close that her elbow almost brushed against him.
“You look good. Those bruises will be gone soon.”
Instinctively, Elías touched his side. Maybe the bruises would disappear, but his ribs were still killing him.
“That’s a pretty tattoo on your neck,” he declared idiotically, in an attempt to be glib. Tania looked amused and then leaned over and stuck her neck out so he could see it better.
“Tattoos aren’t just there to look pretty, you know. They have a meaning, they’re a declaration of intent. I like butterflies. There are more, you know, on other parts of my body,” she remarked flirtatiously.
“So what intent are you declaring? That you want to fly? Have wings? Be free?”
She said it wasn’t that obvious, that it was more to do with transformation.
“When I was little, I lived in really remote place out in the country in a 1970s building that had once been an isolation hospital for soldiers with mental problems. It was a horrible building, all cement with hardly any windows. But the surrounding area was beautiful, especially in the springtime. There were meadows all around and a pine forest nearby. When the cold finally ended and the rains stopped, all of the caterpillars that ha
d gone into their little cocoons seemed to emerge at once, and thousands of butterflies would appear on the same day, fluttering in the pines. It only lasted a few hours but it was a breathtaking sight. If you lay in the grass and stayed very still, within seconds hundreds of them would land all over you—on your lips, your eyelashes, your fingertips, your nose. They’d all flutter their wings in unison, and it felt like they might lift you up off the ground, envelop you in a swirl of color and joy and carry you off, away from that awful building. But if you resisted the temptation to go with them, if you lay completely motionless and stopped breathing, then something even better happened: It felt like you were slowly turning into one of them, transforming, metamorphosing, like your body was their cocoon and not really a human body.”
Velichko had sauntered over and was listening, eyes half closed in pleasure. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard Tania tell this story, but she was so passionate that it seemed like the first time he’d truly listened. That, however, did not keep him from crabbily disagreeing.
“What I remember about that place are the insufferable swarms of mosquitoes and insects. There was no way to get away from them, no matter what you did. I saw mules go insane from the bites and hurl themselves into ravines, men so enraged they opened fire at the black clouds. I don’t remember the butterfly stuff.”
Tania stroked his arm. “I remember that, too, and my mother told me that people had to wear handkerchiefs over their faces just to go outside and thick rubber gloves to swing an ax, steam rising as they chopped. But I couldn’t get a tattoo of a horsefly, could I?”
Velichko gazed affectionately at her. Memory, he thought, is a country, and each of us chooses to reminisce wistfully or look back on it with hatred.
“You’ll never be a true Siberian.”
Tania’s expression changed. She downed her beer and stood.
“It’s late, we should go.” And with that she kissed the old man on the cheek, after whispering a few words to him in Russian.
A Million Drops Page 36