Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  When all that began to crumble it was ugly stuff. Terrifying. She could not get back those parts of herself he had possessed. She could not destroy Stalin-within-her, without destroying herself.

  The next morning Nadya is found dead, shot through the heart with a pistol that her brother has given her. Her daughter is six, her son eleven. After her death, everything changes. Family life ends. Stalin reads the terrible letter his wife has left for him. He sees her lying in her blood. And there’s something deep in him that feels more than shock and anger and grief for the end of a woman whom he has loved. There’s a humiliation in the core of him. She has had the choice between life with him in the heart of the Kremlin, and death. She has chosen death. When she was a girl of seventeen she loved him with all her heart. She took on the child of his first, dead wife and she gave him two more children. But now she prefers death to him, and in her coffin she is smiling and at peace. Her face shines with unearthly radiance. She has got away, she has insulted him and then escaped. But such an insult must be avenged.

  He wants revenge. When his first wife died, he thought he had lost the one person capable of melting his heart. Now he knows it wasn’t true. Let them wait. They’ll find out. They don’t know anything yet.

  Joe spent a long time looking at photographs of Nadya, searching their grains. In her opened coffin, surrounded by flowers, her face is calm. Her eyelids lie peacefully over her smooth, closed eyes, her mouth is slightly parted, the pure lines of her face are clear-cut. There’s no sign of a death struggle, or of the inner torment which must have thrashed through her before she wrote that final letter and picked up the pistol. She really does look like someone sleeping. She’s got away, she’s escaped. The story given out was that she’d died of appendicitis.

  He’d showed Rebecca that photograph once. He told her the story of Nadya and Stalin. Joe’s work often bored Rebecca, but that photograph didn’t bore her. She stared at Nadya’s dead face and then she said, ‘But it’s all wrong, isn’t it? She looks so peaceful. But she’s left her children behind to suffer.’

  Joe thought of the children when they saw their mother lying deep in a bed of flowers and radiant with light. Somehow the children hadn’t really occurred to him before.

  ‘She couldn’t help herself,’ he defended Nadya. ‘She wasn’t in a normal frame of mind. She was suffering too much.’

  ‘Never,’ Rebecca said. ‘Never, never, never. Not if I had children. I would never do that to them.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that.’

  ‘Yes, I can. Some things you can be sure of, even about yourself. I would never kill myself if I had children. I would never leave them.’

  ‘She was tormented.’

  ‘Tormented! How do you think they felt for the rest of their lives? They must have hated her,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Her children?’

  ‘Of course. She’d failed in the most important thing parents have to do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘To make their children believe that life is good. Or if they can’t manage that, at least make them believe that life is bearable. That there are ways to bear it and that they will help the children to find them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe slowly. ‘Probably you’re right.’ He’d been seduced by the dead woman, and Rebecca understood it. Because Nadya was beautiful and he responded to her story and the final glamour of the flowers and shadows which surrounded her, and the drama in the men and women stepping past her coffin while Stalin watched and watched to see who came and who did not. But Rebecca had seen into the heart of it. Anger, abandonment. The hardness of Nadya’s dead flesh. The sordid day-to-day of a household where there’s no family love any more. When the book was published he sent a copy to Rebecca and Adam, and they wrote back to thank him, but he is sure that Rebecca will not have read it.

  After that conversation with Rebecca, Joe had wondered if her adoptive parents believed that life was good. But he hadn’t asked her. Her adoptive father had died of bowel cancer, and her adoptive mother had osteoarthritis and lived in a home in Whitstable. Rebecca went to see her four or five times a year. She was particularly fond of small, ripe Caribbean bananas, and Rebecca always took a large bag of them. In the days when they shared a flat Joe had offered to go with her, but Rebecca had said no.

  ‘She’d start thinking I was going to marry you. She’s like that. She’s always trying to find a purpose for me. You know, Joe, to her I am like some kitchen implement that’s strange to her and she knows it must have a use but she hasn’t discovered it yet.’

  ‘Probably it’s essential in the cuisine of another country,’ Joe had answered, and they’d laughed.

  ‘… and to get to him – to his very heart –’

  By now Joe knew it wasn’t possible. Years of research and writing wouldn’t do it. He was not a poet. He was not going to pay for knowledge with his life.

  He was in the Kremlin now, inside its brilliance of gold and white. He had no permit or papers, any more than Mandelstam had had. But things had changed and he did not need them. Only money, for the entrance ticket. Ordinary people swirled about, a bit in awe and a bit cautious, keeping close to the walls. The architecture was intended to dwarf them, and they knew it.

  He was no closer to solving the mystery of Stalin. His readers believed he’d illuminated it for them. They loved the way he wrote Nadya’s story. They wrote letters to say so. They said that he had made Stalin come alive for them. They were waiting eagerly for his next book.

  He had made Stalin come alive for them? My God. What a monstrous thing to do, if it were possible. Joe looked around at the gold, the white domes, the dazzle of it all and the squat brutality under all that beauty. He turned slowly through 360 degrees, staring. Crowds of Russian tourists walked purposefully past him, with an air of holiday devotion. They made Joe feel like a Methodist at Lourdes.

  He was in the heart of it now, all right, but the heart was empty. Or at least it was empty for him. No broad-cheeked Georgian, no Minotaur with glistening black hair and moustache and high, supple boots, waited in the inmost heart of the inmost heart, to tell Joe the truth about himself. Stalin’s fingers were exceptionally sweaty. They made greasy marks on the papers he handled. He could not bear people to notice things like that about him, human things. Mandelstam made that mistake in his poems. He put what he had noticed into the poems.

  There was music in the Kremlin now. A choir of priests in training sang their hearts out to raise money for restoration funds. Young, strong men who once again believed that the church was a route to stability and advancement. He thought of Stalin training for the priesthood in his youth, and believed that he could hear the wheel spinning, spinning, coming full circle.

  He thought: I can’t write about these people any more.

  He thought of Rebecca. For three years he’d left her alone, knowing that she’d left Adam. They’d written and telephoned and once he’d seen her in London, where she’d come to his hotel late and wearing an unfamiliar, sharp little black suit and a pink linen shirt. Her hair was brushed off her face. She had looked awful in some indefinable way that seemed to lodge in her eyes and mouth. She’d talked endlessly about her employer, in a flood of trivia that stopped all conversation. And he’d just let her carry on.

  ‘Come and visit me in Moscow,’ he’d said, and her mouth had trembled for the first time.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she’d said. ‘I’m afraid of aeroplanes.’

  ‘But you travel all the time for your work. You’ve just been telling me about it.’

  ‘That’s for work. That’s different. I know that I have to do it.’

  ‘Either you’re afraid of flying, or you’re not afraid.’

  And she’d looked at him as if he’d revealed such innocence that it was a gulf she couldn’t even call across.

  ‘It’s to do with ways of being afraid,’ she’d said at last.

  I’ll leave, he thought, as the trainee priests raised their v
oices again and the sound rose in a pure jet towards the roof. For an instant the oppression of the past lifted. It wasn’t possible to believe that it had never existed, but it was possible to believe that the present was equal to it, and could bear its weight without being crushed.

  ‘Forgive us, Lord, forgive us,’ sang the choir over and over.

  I’ll leave, thought Joe. I don’t have to stay here. I can go anywhere I want to go. I’ve been locked into this story for long enough.

  He thought of the way Rebecca’s mouth trembled when she said she was afraid. He thought of how he would go to her, but not yet.

  22

  Golden Fleece

  Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?

  This is one of the poems Joe was always telling me, in the days when we’d sit after our supper and pour one glass after another down our throats. Not drunk, no. Just hazy, with the city and all its lights slung out below our windows.

  ‘Well, where is it, then?’ I asked when Joe had declaimed this poem once too often, first in English and then in Russian. I never liked the sound of that language in his mouth until I heard him use it in Russia, to speak of everyday things. ‘Where is this golden fleece that’s so wonderful?’

  ‘Don’t you know the story?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said a bit too quickly. If I didn’t know then Joe would immediately tell me. I preferred to look it up by myself, later.

  ‘It’s a symbol. The golden fleece is a symbol.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of happiness. No, that’s not right. Of desire.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake. Why can’t they just search for the thing for itself? A golden fleece is nice enough to have, without mixing it up with happiness and desire.’

  He didn’t argue. He laughed and stretched and yawned and agreed with me. It was one of the nights I woke and had a nightmare and yelled out and he woke up straightaway in spite of the wine we’d drunk. He did what he always did. He got into my big bed beside me and wrapped his arms around me tight and lulled me with things we never said or remembered in daylight. I fell asleep easily.

  Looking back, how many times did that happen? I’ve forgotten. So much of it went out of my head when Adam came. I’ve been remembering a lot of things since I’ve been on my own.

  Can it be true that Adam’s changed the colour of the front door?

  I left Mr Damiano sleeping. He’d worried me, the way he looked so old all at once. I gave him a while to settle, then I went upstairs after him, to the inner office where he would sleep on his couch sometimes.

  He was fast asleep. He was lying on his side and he was snoring, quite heavily. He was still wearing his suit, he hadn’t even taken off his tie. I wondered if I could loosen the tie without him feeling it. I bent over him and very gently I managed to loosen the knot, just a little. I didn’t like the thought of him sleeping with something tight around his throat. That would lead to bad dreams.

  He lay on his side with his knees drawn up. He hadn’t put anything over himself even though there were blankets in the cupboard which he kept for such occasions. Beautiful soft fleecy blankets. Everything he kept about him was good. I opened the cupboard and found a blanket and laid it over him, then I tucked it in around his feet.

  He looked better so. He looked more cherished. I stood and watched over him and thought of everything he’d told me in the garden. He’d given his life to me, maybe because there was no one else to receive it. All those stories, all that history. I would never have been able to imagine such a past for him, but I believed it, every word of it. A man like him could only come out of a past no one in his present could guess at. Maybe he’d been only an average flyer but then barely anybody is a flyer at all. I could see Bella’s accident just as he had made me see it.

  I wished I’d known Bella. I liked the sound of her. The two of them had stuck together. They’d done well, I thought, thinking of the first Dreamworld they’d created when Bella was only a child. She’d have liked his hotels. She’d have seen the point of everything he did.

  He snored, and his breath rattled in his throat. It was an old-man sound. Something troubled his dream as a fly troubles a horse and he twitched and then was still. Before tonight I would have thought he wouldn’t like me watching him when he was like this. He wanted to be seen in his prime, with all his power alive in him. That was how all his employees saw him. The woman called Elena who was his personal assistant before me spent a month inducting me into his service, as if it was the performance of a mystery.

  I sat down at the little desk in the inner office, took a sheet of paper, and began to write.

  Dear Mr Damiano,

  It is three in the morning and you are having a sleep. I wish I had not told you so suddenly that I was leaving. But I had to. Otherwise I would still be with you in twenty years’ time. Maybe it wasn’t Ruby on the runway. Maybe it was all my imagination. You didn’t say that, although I expect you thought it. Anyone would. But I think she was there for a purpose.

  I’m going to see if Adam has changed the colour of his front door. I have to do some other things first. But I’ll be back.

  I’ve dealt with the outstanding emails.

  With love from

  Rebecca

  He would know what that signified. We’d talked one day about people who cram the word love on the end of emails to acquaintances whom they don’t love in the least. Mr Damiano said it was just normal, acceptable hypocrisy. I said I wouldn’t write it.

  ‘So if you write love, then it always means love?’

  ‘Always.’

  He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘At the time, it means love,’ I corrected myself.

  It wasn’t true that I’d dealt with the emails, but I made it true over the next few hours, while Mr Damiano continued to sleep. It was light by the time I left. The streets were pale and quiet and cleaners were unlocking the outer doors of offices. I went to the studio apartment I rented, not far from the office. Going there was only the first step.

  I showered for a long time. I packed clothes. I thought of setting out without sleep and I was sure I could do it, but while I was waiting for the kettle to boil, the long day and the night and everything that had happened came up and hit me and I was on the bed, flat, falling, with no time to pull the covers over me or take off my shoes.

  The sound of the phone pulled me out of a sweet sleep. It was Mr Damiano. He sounded twenty years younger than he’d been the night before.

  ‘Rebecca. I want you to come to my house. Can you come now?’

  I sat up and blinked. Sun was flooding onto the bed. I hadn’t closed the blinds, or undressed.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s OK. I needed to wake up. What time is it?’

  ‘Nine-twenty.’

  I’d only been asleep for a couple of hours, but I felt as if I’d been deep in dreams for a hundred years.

  ‘What day is it?’ I said suddenly.

  ‘It’s Friday.’

  It had been Wednesday when I got back from New York, I was sure of that. Wednesday night. The time was different, but not that different.

  ‘Mr Damiano, last night when we were talking in the garden –’

  ‘Not last night, Rebecca. The night before last.’ I heard the smile in his voice. ‘You’re not awake yet.’

  ‘No –’

  ‘I shouldn’t have let you go like that.’

  ‘But I told you. I can’t keep on working for you. I thought you understood that.’

  Mr Damiano made an impatient sound, as if asking himself when I would ever get the point.

  ‘I don’t mean that. That is all under way. Elena shortlisted for me yesterday, from a pool of contacts she maintains. I saw two candidates for your job yesterday evening. Marina will start work for me on Monday. I am flying to New York tomorrow morning, to the Sidn
ey. Things are not going well there.’

  He had his power back. I had seen him as an old man, bowed over and heavy. I was wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but seeing only one way in which the kaleidoscope of Mr Damiano could settle.

  ‘Come to my house now,’ came his full, strong voice. ‘I am not happy with the way we left each other.’

  He gave me the address, and we said goodbye. I already knew where he lived, though I’d never been there. No one in the office had been there. There was a myth in the company that he had no home. He was later and earlier in the office than anyone, and then there were the blankets in the cupboard and the couch where he often slept.

  I knew so many separate things about Mr Damiano, but I still wasn’t sure how they joined together. He loved horses, and once told me that he used to bet heavily and that he’d bought a share in a small Italian restaurant with his winnings. He still ate at that small, dull restaurant almost every day. There was no better food in London, he said.

  He no longer placed bets. He liked to go over to Ireland, to the races at Leopardstown and Punchestown. He loved the business of it, the thousands of lives, human and animal, knit up on the chance of a horse’s hooves beating on the turf. It was play and he loved play.

  ‘Play is the best thing human beings do,’ he said to me, smiling.

  I had been asleep for twenty-six hours, it seemed. How was that possible? But it felt good as I showered again and put on my jeans and a white T-shirt, to show myself and him that my job was over and the little black suits were tucked away in a cupboard. The sun fell everywhere. I’d never seen a day like it for glisten and dazzle, and this was the dirty heart of London. What would it be like elsewhere? There was dust all over the apartment. I would clean it before I left, I thought. I had enough money to keep paying the rent for a few months, so I could leave my possessions there, but there were not many of them. My working clothes already had the look of garments which could gladly go to a charity shop and be picked up more or less as a bargain by people who more or less wanted them. I would be rid of all of it. Everything I needed for now would go into one bag.