Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  “So you knew all along. You knew I wasn’t going to change my mind.”

  “Sometimes, if you do one thing, you can make the other thing happen.”

  I understand the principle. Like the opposite of tempting fate.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work,” I say. “But thank you, anyway. It’s a lovely thought.”

  He looks away from me, adjusts his baseball cap.

  “What’s your first name?” I ask.

  “Olav.”

  I step back, towards the door. “Enjoy the winter, Olav. I’ll see you in April.”

  “And your name?” he says. “You won’t tell me your name?”

  “I’ll tell you — on one condition.”

  Folding his arms, Olav turns back into a figure of authority — decisive, unruffled.

  “If somebody asks about me,” I say, “or shows you a photo of me, you must say you haven’t seen me.”

  “What if it’s the police?”

  Once again he catches me off guard but I don’t hesitate. “You haven’t seen me. It doesn’t matter who it is.” I pause. “You have to promise.”

  “That’s a big condition.”

  But he promises, and so I tell him.

  “Misty?” he says in a voice that suggests he would never have guessed. “It sounds like a country-and-western singer.”

  A boat on a lake, three men in tartan shirts. My mother up on her feet, singing Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose …

  Lights glittering all along the shore.

  Then later, in a motel outside Milan, a man shouting, Maledetta putana, in the car park at four a.m., and my mother murmuring, Go back to sleep, darling, and then, half to herself, It’s just some drunk.

  “Do you like country-and-western?” I ask Olav.

  “Actually, I do — and Röyksopp.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He grins. “It’s Norwegian music.”

  Later, back in my room, I wonder why I didn’t tell him who I was. I owed him the truth — surely. But perhaps I didn’t feel I could bank on the fact that such an honest straightforward man would lie successfully on my behalf. At least now, if someone asks him about Katherine Carlyle, he can say, with his hand on his heart, that he has never heard of me.

  /

  I gaze down at the dull pewter-colored key Zhenya gave me, unmarked except for an unevenly stamped number. A few weeks ago, Klaus asked me what I was doing in Berlin and I told him, rather pretentiously, that I was “experimenting with coincidence,” and now, as I stand in the corridor outside Mrs. Kovalenka’s apartment, the walls a hospital green, the air smelling of reheated food, I realize my idea has become a reality. I would prefer her departure to have been less traumatic — a lottery win; a golden handshake at the very least — but once again I have the impression that I only have to apply the slightest pressure to the fabric of the world and it will give. It’s as though I forged the key through sheer force of will; I wanted it so much that it came into being. Is it any wonder I feel powerful? I haven’t met the cleaning lady, and probably never will, yet I’m about to wrap the remnants of her life about me like a cloak. I could take her name, adopt a new persona. Complete my disappearance. Misty Kovalenka: less like a country-and-western singer than an ice-skater or a tennis star.

  Facing the stairwell, Mrs. Kovalenka’s cheap wooden front door has been treated with a clear varnish and fitted with a Judas eye. I insert the key into the lock and feel it engage. The door clicks open. A gust of air moves through the gap like someone breathing out. A final sour exhalation. The door’s bottom edge catches on the floor as I enter, and I have to push it with both hands. Expecting similar resistance when I close it, I give it a good shove. It slams loudly, then stares at me with its Judas eye. What?

  Inside the apartment it’s colder than in the stairwell, so cold that I can’t smell anything. The hallway is L-shaped, with a glass light shade in the ceiling. Just inside the front door, on the left, is a windowless kitchen, its walls the scorched yellow-brown of nicotine-stained fingers. A half-full glass of tea in an ornate metal holder stands on a work surface. I open a cupboard. A jar of pickled mushrooms, a tin of sprats. A few packets of rice and crackers. At the end of the hallway or corridor, on top of a chest of drawers, is a kind of shrine, with china animals, church candles, and a tin jug filled with plastic flowers. Tacked to the wall above is a picture of Jesus, his soulful eyes gazing skywards, a red heart bleeding through his robes. There’s also a photo of Putin, cut from a magazine, and one of Marcello Mastroianni, as he appeared in La Dolce Vita. The bathroom, which is also on the left, has the white-tiled walls and floor of a slaughterhouse. The mirror above the sink is cracked, but the tube of toothpaste on the shelf below has been carefully rolled from the bottom and isn’t quite empty. A pink towel hangs on a rail. One moment I feel like a detective, clear-eyed, forensic, looking for evidence or clues. The next, I’m one of Mrs. Kovalenka’s relatives, feeling for her. Missing her. I asked Zhenya about the cleaning lady but she didn’t give too much away. Quiet, she said. Lived alone.

  On the other side of the corridor are two more rooms. The bedroom isn’t much bigger than the kitchen, with a single bed and a wardrobe, and the walls are papered with a recurring pattern of blue flowers and brown autumn leaves. On the bedside table is a cheap alarm clock, a pair of glasses, a radio, and several bottles of pills. The clock is half an hour slow. The window overlooks the football pitch and the road that leads to the heliport. A renovated apartment block stands on the high ground to the right, snow piled at its base in dirty sculpted heaps. I face back into the room. Open the wardrobe. Enclosed in see-through plastic is a jacket and skirt of a synthetic green material, which Mrs. Kovalenka probably kept for special occasions. At the bottom is a pair of fur-lined ankle boots worn down at the heel. I have a flickering sense of the woman, a twinkly, half-suggested image, like a hologram. She keeps her own company and doesn’t ask for much. I wonder what brought her to this place. I wonder if she’ll survive.

  In the living room, too, the wallpaper is oppressive — a psychedelic design of orange-and-yellow swirls. On the sideboard is a TV with a framed picture of a boy and a girl on top. Though they’re dressed in matching fleeces, they don’t appear to be twins. The boy has a pudding-basin haircut. The girl is smiling, but her lips are clamped tight shut, as mine often were in photographs when my milk teeth started falling out. On the other side of the room are two brown armchairs and a sofa covered in a crocheted blanket. Above the sofa is a large creased map of the world. Given how far north I am, it’s hard to believe in all those countries, especially the warm ones, but maybe that’s exactly why the map is there, to link the cleaning lady to the mainland, her past, the children in the picture. Vertigo grips me for a second, just as it did on my first morning.

  I should air the place, as Zhenya advised. I open the cupboard between the kitchen and the bathroom and flick the switch. The boiler responds with a reassuring whoomph. I listen to the radiator pipes begin to tick. It will be a relief to move out of the hotel, away from the woman with the white masklike face, though I feel differently about her now Zhenya has told me something of her story. The woman’s name is Ivonna, and her husband is serving a long prison sentence in Ukraine. That, perhaps, Zhenya said in her deadpan way, is why she does not smile.

  /

  There are some things you can’t prepare for. When I realized I would never see my mother again I locked myself in the bathroom. Now what? Thinking I should be sick I knelt on the floor, leaned over the toilet bowl and retched. Nothing came up. I breathed the musty coolness for a while, then I got to my feet again and studied myself in the mirror. My face looked misshapen, sloppy, as if the two halves didn’t fit together properly. For fuck’s sake, I said, watching my mouth. It was something I’d heard my father say, when my mother accused him of not loving her, or not being around enough, or having an affair. For fuck’s sake, I said, you knew this was coming. It didn’t help, though. Nothing helped.r />
  The morning after my mother died I heard the doctor say that her body would have to be removed from the apartment. Seized by a kind of terror, I hurled myself from one room to another, picking items up, then putting them down again. I couldn’t allow my mother to be taken. I had to stop that happening. But how? I stood in the kitchen, a pair of scissors in my hand, the two blades overlapping, knifelike. My father was on the terrace. He had his arms round Auntie Lottie and held her carefully, as if she were not one thing but several, as though she had come apart. Her shoulders were shaking. He stared over the top of her head and out across the tiled rooftops. He had the face of a statue, his features gritty, dry.

  I crept back to where my mother was. The doctor had gone, and the door stood ajar. The silence coming from inside the room was exaggerated, artificial, as if there were people hiding. As if they might suddenly jump out. Surprise! I found it hard to believe that she was not alive and yet still there. I slipped round the edge of the door. She lay on her back with a sheet pulled up to her neck, her lips slightly parted. She might have died in midsentence or midsong. I Fall to Pieces. Crazy. Help Me Make It Through the Night.

  “It’s only me,” I whispered.

  Since she was gone it seemed tasteless or insensitive to look at her, but it was impossible to look anywhere else. All forms of looking were problematic; it would have been easier to have no eyes. I kept thinking she would come back to life. Sit up, smother a yawn. Run a hand through her hair, which was stiff and coppery. She would glance round the room, puzzled, but also mildly entertained. I must have dozed off. What time is it?

  At first I thought I might cut her fingernails and keep the clippings but I couldn’t bring myself to disturb the sheet. Instead, I climbed onto the covers and was kneeling over her, snipping off a piece of hair, when my father walked in.

  “No,” he cried out, and pulled me roughly off the bed.

  I landed on the floor and hit my head on the edge of a chest of drawers. There was no blood but I felt a bruise form, the kind of swelling my mother would have called “an egg.” The scissors lay in an X shape on the tiles, the blades blue with reflected sky.

  “Oh God,” my father said. “I’m sorry.” He walked to the window. “I’m just so tired.”

  I picked myself up, a lock of my mother’s hair clutched tightly in my fist. That was why I hadn’t been able to break my fall. I hadn’t wanted to let go of her hair, or let him know I had it.

  He faced back into the room and took a step towards me. “Forgive me, Kit.”

  “Yes,” I said. “All right.”

  But I didn’t forgive him. He hadn’t earned it. Why didn’t he understand that I couldn’t bear to lose my mother, and that I wanted to keep a part of her forever? Why couldn’t he see that a black wind was blowing through me, wreaking havoc? All I was guilty of was loving her too much. Like him.

  /

  The weather is becoming unpredictable. One afternoon at the beginning of November the sky has a green glow to it, a subterranean color that turns the fjord below a sulky charcoal gray. The next day there’s a whiteout. It’s as if someone stuck blank paper over my windows. I can’t see the short flight of steps leading to my building, let alone the football pitch. Sometimes the light is so delicate — primrose, oyster, eyelid mauve — that the landscape looks hand-tinted, like a photo from the early 1900s. Then, in the second week, polar night descends, a cloth thrown abruptly over the town. The footpaths that remain unlit are hazardous, and time is difficult to gauge. Under the spotlights the snow on the ground is brownish yellow, the color of burnt butter.

  Though still an object of curiosity to the miners and their families, I feel I’m beginning to earn their respect. I’m not like all the other foreign visitors, who spend an hour gawping at the town, then scuttle back to the comfort of the tourist ship. I’m not a voyeur, as Zhenya would say. I live in a residential block. I eat in the canteen. I work long hours. I’m even learning the language. People are surprised by my commitment. Flattered. I chose this place. I’m making it my own.

  On the morning of November 15, my twentieth birthday, I arrive at the library, as usual. Zhenya hands me a blue envelope and a small package wrapped in drab green paper.

  “You’re supposed to be saving your money,” I tell her, “not spending it.”

  She shrugs. “It didn’t cost so much.”

  On the card are two white kittens in a wicker basket. Inside are the words “Happy Birthday — from Zhenya.” It’s so undemonstrative, so matter-of-fact. So very like her. I unwrap the present. Inside is a guide to Svalbard, written in English, and something that looks like a tube of toothpaste. She found the book in the library, she says.

  “And this?” I hold up the tube.

  “It’s cream.”

  She takes my hands and looks at them. The sides of my fingers are hard and shiny, like plastic, and the skin has cracked open in several places. It’s partly my cleaning job, partly the cold.

  She asks if I would like to come home with her that evening. She has invited some friends round to her apartment, she says. There will be plenty to eat and drink.

  “Will you sing?” I ask.

  She smiles, but doesn’t answer.

  After work, I follow her down a path and across the football pitch. We climb the slope to the newly renovated block, our heads bent against a wind that tears out of the northeast.

  Zhenya’s apartment is far more spacious than mine, her living room filled with pine furniture that could have come from IKEA. There is a thirty-inch flat-screen TV and an old-fashioned stereo with a record deck and wooden speakers. Pinned to the wall is a huge orange-and-black flag featuring a pickax crossed with a hammer. Shakhtar Donetsk, Zhenya tells me. The football team her husband supports.

  “He’s crazy about that team,” she says. “I think maybe he loves it more than me.”

  She introduces me to Svetlana, who is in her twenties. Svet teaches the children. She has limp blond hair and sits with her hands wedged between her thighs. Her purple sweater has a white reindeer on the front. I try out a few of my Russian phrases but all she does is nod or shake her head. Zhenya tells me she is very shy. Most of the other guests are in their thirties or forties and none of them speak English. Zhenya’s husband, Gleb, sits on the sofa drinking beer with two other men.

  For dinner we move to the table. Once we have finished the main course — pork escalopes and potatoes in a sour cream sauce — Zhenya leaves the room. The lights go out and she returns with a cake, her face made golden by the candles. She stops in front of me. The white icing has been sculpted to resemble the landscape that surrounds the town, while the buildings are huddled blocks of yellow, brown, and green. People sing “Happy Birthday” in Russian and when they come to the end I blow the candles out. Loud applause, and a piercing whistle from one of Gleb’s friends.

  The lights flicker on. I get to my feet.

  “Thank you, Zhenya,” I say in Russian. “Thank you for this beautiful” — I can’t remember the word for cake — “this beautiful pastry.” Everybody laughs. “I’m very happy. This town is like a home to me.” I say thank you again and sit back down.

  Later, vodka is served, and the guests sing traditional folk songs from Russia and Ukraine, one of which — “Kalinka” — they insist I learn.

  “Your Russian is very good,” Gleb says, the first words he has addressed to me all evening.

  Everyone dances, even Svet.

  It’s the strangest birthday I have ever had.

  /

  The next day I wake at seven, and though my head aches from all the vodka I pack a bag and walk over to the pool. Ever since Anatoly gave me my certificate of health I have been meaning to start swimming, and this seems as good a time as any.

  A still morning, the air like aluminium. Snow crunching and wincing beneath my feet. I pass a lighted ground-floor window. A woman in a green sweater stands at a kitchen sink. Her hair hangs past her shoulders, straight and brown. She appears to be
looking at me but her face doesn’t alter and I realize I’m invisible to her. All she can see is her own reflection — though if I had to guess I would say her mind is somewhere else, a past she misses, a future she’s hoping for. Feeling I’m intruding, I move on. On reaching the square, I tilt my head back. Breathe in deeply. Whole galaxies scattered across the sky, like cocaine on a smoked-glass table. The life I used to live in Rome seems overblown, preposterous. Made up.

  I cross a red entrance hall that is empty apart from a wooden bench and a well-stocked trophy cabinet. The TV is showing a wildlife program, but no one’s watching. As I hand my certificate to the woman in the office I think of Anatoly, who left without saying goodbye. Was he angry with me? Did he feel rejected? Or am I overestimating my own importance? Probably he knew most of the people who lived in town, and he would have had a lot on his mind, as you do when you’re moving. The last time I saw him, at breakfast, he told me he collected coins. I ran up to my room and came down with some loose change left over from Berlin. As he took the money his fingers touched mine and he looked me full in the face, then he lowered his eyes and turned the coins over on his palm. Beautiful, he said.

  The woman mutters what sounds like a caution, but I don’t understand the words. Only when I leave the changing room do I notice there is no one in the pool. There’s no lifeguard either. I walk to the deep end. The water is murky, almost brown, like the bathwater in the hotel, and I remember Anatoly telling me it’s piped in directly from the fjord, and that I should be careful not to swallow it. Perhaps the woman was saying that if I get into trouble it will be my own responsibility.

  I haven’t swum since the end of August and I reel off half a dozen lengths of languid freestyle, feeling the chill on my skin. Then, when my muscles have loosened, I switch to breaststroke. The musty muddy flavor of the water isn’t entirely pleasant but I gradually get used to it.

  After thirty laps my body finds a familiar rhythm. I started swimming laps the year my mother died. It was a way of not talking. Not thinking. Some of my wealthier friends had pools in their gardens — one even had a rooftop pool that overlooked the Colosseum — but I preferred the high hollow echo of a sports complex like Belle Arti, where I could swim unobserved, among strangers, or the Piscina delle Rose, open to the Roman sky, and surrounded by surreal neoclassical buildings and bursts of purple bougainvillea. I was soothed by the going back and forth, from one end to the other. All that repetition. It was like crossing something out. It was like forgetting. By the time summer drew to a close I could swim for an hour without stopping. When I finally hauled myself out of the water after one of those sessions I would feel exhausted and relaxed and curiously unformed, half muscle, half liquid. I spent so much time in the pool that my body began to change, my shoulders widening, my limbs longer and more toned.