Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  I tear Yevgeny’s number into pieces — quickly, without thinking, the way you swallow medicine — then walk to the window and turn the handle. Cold air knifes into the room. I reach out with my fist and open my fingers. The bits of torn paper are sucked sideways into the dark. For a moment I see them as plasma. Blood draining from my body. Life leaving. I pull the window shut and lie down on the bed. Just the pyramid of lamplight on the desk. Arkhangel’sk. My heart starts beating faster, as if I’m waiting for a lover. I have come so far.

  In my mind I track the fragments as they whirl off into the bitter Russian night. I picture a boy out walking, hood up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. When he glances up and sees the scraps of paper he knows what he must do. He must collect each and every one of them or something terrible will happen. He’s an only child. He’s always playing games like that. If he kicks a stone and it doesn’t stay on the pavement his father will lose his job. If he’s on his bike and the traffic light turns red before he reaches it his parents will separate, or die. How can he hope to pick up all the pieces though? They scarcely show up against the snow, and there must be at least a dozen of them. My thoughts are dogs, he tells himself. Keep them on a tight leash. One piece at a time. He’s methodical, obsessive. Even though it’s close to freezing. Some of the bits of paper he finds do not belong. They’re part of another puzzle, a different challenge. His hands go numb. He doesn’t care. And finally, when he has gathered them all, every last one, he takes them home and shuts himself in his bedroom and fits them back together. Only then does he realize it’s a phone number. He waits until his parents are asleep — they’re still alive, still married — then he tiptoes to the phone and dials.

  A man answers. “Who’s speaking, please?” The man sounds old.

  The boy says his name.

  “Do I know you?” the old man says.

  “No.”

  The old man lowers himself onto a chair and stares out across the room. On the wall above the phone is a calendar showing the rooftops of Oxford. “How did you get my number?”

  The boy describes how he saw the little bits of paper flutter from the window of a tall building in the city center, and how he chased them down until he had them all.

  “Which tall building?” the old man asks.

  “The Dvina.”

  “That’s a hotel — near the river.”

  “Yes.”

  The old man falls quiet, thinking. Then he says, “Ah yes. I see.”

  “I stuck the pieces together,” the boy says. “Like a jigsaw. It took me ages.”

  The old man smiles. He tells the boy that he has enjoyed talking to him and thanks him for calling and then hangs up. The smile drains from his face like water sinking into sand. He remains on his chair, staring out across the room.

  “Yevgeny,” he says, “what were you thinking?” And then, a few moments later, “Stupid old man.”

  Lying on my bed, I feel bad. My imagination has become my conscience.

  What does the boy do? He puts the piece of paper in a safe place, along with his other treasures. It’s proof of something — of what he isn’t entirely sure. His urge to make sense of things, perhaps. His tenacity. At some point in the future, when he has grown up, he will come across the piece of paper and stare at it. He will remember the old man’s voice and he will call the number again. Will the old man answer? Or will the number ring and ring?

  My imagination might be acting as my conscience but it’s also a thread that reaches all the way back to the beginning of the journey. It’s my only contact with the world I’ve left behind.

  It’s a kind of lifeline.

  /

  They have come for me. They’re milling around downstairs, in the lobby. I can’t see their faces and I don’t know their names, but I can hear them murmuring. They ask Olga for my room number, then they gather by the lifts and draw lots. They use cigarettes, some with filters, some without. The losers will have to climb the stairs. They want to cover all the bases, make sure that I don’t slip away. One of them steps forwards and presses the call button.

  I need to leave my room as soon as possible but I’m only half-dressed and I can’t find my shoes. They’re not in the cupboard or the bathroom. I kneel on the floor. They’re not under the bed. Was I even wearing shoes? I can’t recall. And all the time the lifts are rising through the building, and the footsteps in the stairwell are growing louder. Is there another way out? A fire escape? It’s the law, surely — even here. The notice on the wall next to the door is written in Cyrillic. I manage to decipher the words EVACUATION — FIFTH FLOOR but can’t make sense of the floor plan. It bears no relation to the hotel I’m staying in. For what seems like minutes on end I move my fingertip from one room to another, from one stenciled box to the next, trying to discover how it works, trying to orient myself, but I can’t even tell which room is mine, let alone find an emergency exit.

  I look again, more closely. There must be something I have missed. Then I realize. It’s the floor plan from a different building altogether. An office block maybe. A shopping mall. Why hasn’t someone brought it to the management’s attention? How can people be so careless? I’m wearing a T-shirt and nothing much else. My feet are numb. I wish I could go back to sleep but the lift doors are opening and there are voices in the corridor. A red light wobbles through the window and settles in the room.

  I jerk awake. The room is cold but I am soaked in sweat. My T-shirt clings to me. The red light is coming from the supermarket’s neon sign. Shivering, I wriggle out of the T-shirt. I drop it on the carpet, then I dry myself on a towel and drink some water from the bathroom tap. It’s five a.m. I’m worried that Yevgeny might appear at the Dvina — or that someone might. What are the chances of that happening? Practically zero. But I can’t afford to take any chances at all.

  /

  After a breakfast of tepid semolina and hard-boiled eggs I pack my case and take the lift down to reception. A woman I don’t recognize is on duty. I ask for Olga.

  The woman seems offended. “Olga not here.”

  When I tell her I want to check out she consults her computer. “There is problem?”

  “No problem,” I say. “I just need to leave.”

  “What is problem? Room?”

  “Room good. Room OK.” I smile and give her the thumbs-up. “Skólka stóit?” How much do I owe?

  She doesn’t answer. Instead she picks up the phone and dials a two-digit number. While she talks she keeps looking at me, her eyes magnified by her glasses, like goldfish when they swim too close to the side of their bowl. Not long after she hangs up a door opens behind her and a man appears. He is short and bulky and his gray suit jacket, which is shiny, almost lacquered, is tailored in such a way that it makes his upper body look square. Between his lips is a wooden toothpick which he maneuvers using just his tongue and teeth. This man has the patient lethargic air of somebody whose job is to resolve disputes. He’s probably the manager. Outside it has begun to snow.

  “You book two nights,” he says.

  I nod. “Da.”

  He seems to inflate like a prosecutor who has exposed a flaw in a defendant’s case. “You book two nights, you pay two nights.”

  “No problem,” I say. “I pay two nights.”

  After more discussion, during which the two hotel employees break off once or twice to stare at me — did they expect me to argue, lose my temper? — they allow me to pay. I say goodbye, then leave through the revolving doors.

  I make for a travel agency I noticed the day before, when I was returning from my walk along the river. The light is muffled, gray. Soon there won’t be any light at all. I feel drunk, even though I haven’t had a thing to drink. Heads turn as I pass. A snowflake settles on my tongue and melts.

  The woman in the travel agency speaks broken English and has an unlikely tan. She was recently in Sharm al-Sheikh. Behind her are two shelves of souvenirs from her travels.

  “What’s your name?
” I ask.

  “Elena.”

  “I’d like to go north, Elena. I’m looking for a place that is very far away. Obscure.”

  “Obscure?” She doesn’t know the word.

  “A place with not too many people.”

  She glances sideways, through the window. “Not so many people here.”

  “Smaller than here.”

  “Smaller?”

  “Like the end of the world,” I say. “Like nowhere.”

  She tilts her face upwards and backwards until she seems to be looking at me through the bottom of her eyes. Though her gaze is eerie I take it to mean that she is confused by my request. Also that she’s beginning to understand what I’m after.

  “Where can I go,” I say, prompting her, “that is farther north?”

  It’s so quiet in her office that I hear her spine click as she turns in her chair. She begins to tap away at her keyboard. A map of Northern Europe and the Arctic appears on her screen.

  “Maybe here,” she says at last.

  I lean over the desk, my head next to hers. She has zoomed in on a cluster of islands with shattered or serrated coastlines.

  “Svalbard,” she says.

  I have heard of Svalbard, but the name sounds fantastical, like El Dorado or Atlantis.

  “This.” She points to a settlement located halfway down an inlet and surrounded by miles of nothingness.

  “What’s there?” I ask.

  “Very small place. Very —” and she makes a humming sound that reminds me of the man in the Peking Hotel “— very obscure.” She gives me a thin smile. She seems daunted by her own suggestion.

  “How many people?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe three hundred.” She frowns. “They look for coal.”

  “It’s a mining town?”

  “Mining. Yes.”

  “And the name?”

  “Ugolgrad.” She explains that although the archipelago belongs to Norway the settlement is Russian.

  My heart leaps as I look at the screen again. I didn’t realize such a place existed. “How do I get there?”

  “Not so easy.”

  A complicated journey, then. Good.

  While Elena makes phone calls and trawls through the Internet I stare out over the rooftops. The next step of the journey is taking shape. All I have to do is leave as soon as possible, before the people in my dream catch up with me. I hope it’s not too late in the year to be going so far north. I hope I have sufficient funds.

  The travel arrangements take hours — Elena also books me into a new hotel — and when I finally step out onto the street it’s dark again. The lack of daylight makes me feel giddy, breathless, as if time itself is speeding up. I cross Chumbarovka, with its historic houses and its young mothers pushing prams. Fog thickens the air, reducing visibility. Elena told me to catch a bus on Troitsky Prospekt. The number 61 goes directly to my new hotel, which is over a bridge, in a different part of the city. The two connecting flights have cost me close to twenty thousand rubles but I know it will be worth it. The only drawback is I have to wait four days.

  I come out onto Troitsky Prospekt. On the far side of the road is a church, its walls caged in scaffolding, two golden domes abandoned on the ground. A bus with purple curtains in the windows comes to a standstill near me. Behind the misty glass is Yevgeny. When he sees me his features widen. He points towards the door, then signals that he will get off at the next stop. As soon as the bus surges away from me I double back and cut down a side street, my suitcase bouncing behind me on its tiny wheels. I take the first left turning, past a sauna, then turn left again onto a path that divides two rows of old wooden buildings.

  As I flatten myself against the side wall of a house, a door opens behind me, or seems to give, and I’m drawn backwards into a kind of porch or anteroom, coats heaped shapelessly on hooks, a spade propped against the wall. Beyond is a dimly lit interior that smells of solvents. The room is about the size of a railway carriage, with bare boards on the floor and a tin ceiling. At the far end a low-voltage bulb dangles above a glass-topped counter. The shelves that line the walls on either side of me are crammed with small round objects that reflect the meager light.

  I take a few quick steps into the room. The objects are snow globes, some made of plastic, others of thick discolored glass. I pick one up at random and wipe off the dust. Inside is a replica of Lenin’s mausoleum. I shake it gently and watch the white flakes shower down onto the famous revolutionary’s face. I look at the base. No price tag. I put the snow globe back and pick up another. This one contains a murky sea encrusted with ice floes. Resting at an angle on the ocean bed is the slim shape of a submarine. The figures of survivors float on the surface — or are they casualties, the bodies of the drowned, the dead? I have a dim memory of a news story about the sinking of a Russian submarine. It happened around the time of the millennium. Thoughtfully, I return it to the shelf. The third snow globe I look at holds a stand of birch trees, a frozen pond, and a couple skating hand in hand. I sense a heightened innocence, a pleasure that seems intense but fragile, as though the small glass dome has captured the moments preceding a catastrophe. I have never seen such an extraordinary collection. Is this a toyshop or a museum?

  I look towards the end of the room again, aware of some sort of shift or change yet unable to describe it. The naked bulb above the counter sways. There’s a draft perhaps — or else a truck went by outside and shook the building. I don’t see the man until he moves in his chair, and I have the feeling he only moved in order to relieve the tension. It reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in years. When we were living in London I would often sit so still that people would walk into the room and out again without noticing that I was there. It was as if I was able to find a wrinkle in time or space and hide in it. I used to believe I could become invisible. Inanimate. The man huddled in the shadows to one side of the counter is dressed in a brown suit that looks too small for him. His elongated head is covered with a sparse gray fuzz. Behind him is a heavy pleated curtain.

  I say good afternoon in Russian. He responds with a sweeping gesture which I assume is an invitation to browse. One of the snow globes is much larger than the rest and contains the whole of Arkhangel’sk. I can see streets fanning out from the center, and the industrial zone beyond. There is the Pur Navolok, and there, farther east, is the Dvina. There is the bridge I will have to cross to reach my new hotel. I can see buses with purple curtains in their windows. I can see people too. One is wearing a black cap. Deep lines bracket his mouth. I step back suddenly as if from a cliff edge.

  The floorboards groan and I glance over my shoulder. A second man is standing beside me. He says something in a voice that makes me think of a homeless person begging for loose change. With his narrow face and pale eyes he resembles the man in the armchair, though he has wispy hair that falls to his shoulders, and his style of dress is more traditional or archaic — a cardboard-colored leather waistcoat, a maroon shirt embroidered with meadow flowers. The man in the armchair nods, then speaks. That’s my brother. We’re twins. At least that’s what I understand him to be saying. The man in the waistcoat repeats part of what his brother said, dim light glinting on teeth that are minute and stained, then he motions towards a wooden cabinet and pokes a key into a lock. As he tugs on the brass handle and the door shudders open there’s a wincing sound and then the smell of dust and walnuts. Inside the cabinet are more snow globes, each of which houses a solitary, detailed figure. The figures are much larger than those in the replica of Arkhangel’sk, three or four centimeters high at least, and uncannily lifelike, as waxworks often are, and I realize that every one of them is a recreation of a real person. I don’t have any evidence or proof. It’s just an intuition.

  The man in the waistcoat plucks at my sleeve and breathes a question into my ear. Once again I have no idea what the words mean, only that he seems to be making an offer or a proposition, and when I look into his face, which is much closer than I
would like it to be, his eyes have a surface gleam, like balls on a pool table. In the meantime the other man has risen from his chair and is positioned at his brother’s elbow. They appear to be united in trying to exert some kind of power over me. I understand that they want me to accompany them beyond the curtain. I also understand that what happens behind that curtain isn’t something I should contemplate, or even know about.

  I free myself, then reach for my suitcase and move across the room towards the entrance. Thank you, I say in Russian, more than once — Spasiba, spasiba — as much to paralyze the two men as anything else. To keep them from coming after me. To keep them from speaking. Where’s the door? I search among the coats. Cut my hand on a protruding nail. The spade clatters to the ground. At last I find a doorknob and wrench it open. Darkness pours in. A different darkness. Keener, colder.

  As I hurry back towards the road I hear shutters being closed, bolts being driven home. The sign above the sauna flickers like a tic in someone’s eyelid. On Troitsky Prospekt the fog is thicker than before, turning headlights into halos. I suck the gash at the base of my thumb and spit the blood into a bank of dirty snow. If I happen to run into Yevgeny I will tell him that my failure to appear had nothing to do with him. I left my purse in a museum, I’ll say. I had to go back and get it. The museum is owned by two men who might or might not be brothers. They specialize in snow globes. Does he know the place?

  I approach the bus stop where we were supposed to meet. Now I have a story I’m almost disappointed to discover that he isn’t there. He’s a kind man and I have behaved badly; I would like to make it up to him. A gravelly reverberation fills the sky. It sounds like an avalanche, but there aren’t any mountains. Is it thunder? Possibly. Or maybe just a plane coming in to land, a plane hidden by the fog that is smothering the city. The 61 appears. I flag it down.