All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  ‘Are you alright, mate?’ Adrian asks. ‘You look very pale.’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Yes, you seem a bit tired. What have you been up to? Tell me.’

  Unable to think of anything else, Aleksandr says, ‘Ksenia’s leaving me.’

  Adrian looks pained. ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ he says.

  The turbot in chive-and-butter sauce arrives. Someone tops Adrian up with Lafon Perrières.

  Aleksandr just looks at the dead fish on his plate while Adrian, with silver knife and fork, starts expertly to prise his apart.

  5

  Ampleton House, on the outskirts of Ottershaw in Surrey, is not visible from the road. Only a high wall, and the tops of the tall trees in the famous arboretum, nearly leafless now, are visible. Darkness is falling when they arrive. The long, turning driveway takes them to the expanse of gravel in front of the mansion – Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1913 – where the Maybach and the Range Rover pull up. ‘Here we are, sir,’ Doug says through the intercom, as if his employer might be asleep.

  Aleksandr is not asleep. He is just sitting in the silent, padded interior of the Maybach, wishing that he never had to leave it. For a moment he even wonders whether to ask Doug to take him back to London.

  ‘Here we are, sir,’ Doug says again. His voice sounds tired. He has been on duty since early in the morning, waiting at Farnborough for the Falcon to arrive.

  Normally, someone would have emerged from the house by now, with an umbrella, and opened the door for him, and held the umbrella over him as he walked over the wet gravel to the house and into the double-height hall.

  The staff, however, are all on leave, or in the London house.

  So it is Madis who opens the door of the Maybach for him, and lets him into the house, and, having dealt with the alarm, turns on the lights in the hall.

  He asks him whether he needs anything.

  ‘No,’ Aleksandr answers.

  ‘I’ll be in the flat,’ Madis says, ‘if you need anything.’

  Madis lives in a flat with a separate entrance, at the side of the house, in what was once the stable yard.

  ‘Okay. Thank you, Madis,’ Aleksandr says.

  Alone, he unwinds his scarf and sits down in the hall.

  He shuts his eyes, tries to stop thinking.

  Wherever his thoughts wander they find something that hurts.

  Like the face of Adam Spassky – the way he smiled as the judge delivered her verdict.

  His thoughts move from the unendurable humiliation of that moment to the practical fact of his poverty. And then to the humiliation again. And then the poverty. There seems to be nothing else – only those two things.

  And he would be able to stomach the loss of his money, he thinks, if it weren’t for the humiliation. And he would be able to take the humiliation, just, if he still had his money – though of course the loss of the money is part of it. The sheer idiocy of losing so much money. His other humiliations, however, would not be so total if he still had the money – the money itself would be a sort of answer to them, as it was always an answer to everything in the past.

  He is still just sitting there in the hall, holding his scarf in his hands.

  Madis opens the door. He seems surprised to see Aleksandr standing there, in the damp darkness.

  ‘Madis.’ Aleksandr is trying to smile. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

  ‘No,’ Madis says.

  ‘I was wondering.’ The situation is definitely more awkward than Aleksandr thought it would be. ‘Would you like to have a drink with me?’

  Madis is wearing a T-shirt, tracksuit trousers, has no shoes on, only white sports socks on his feet. There is the sound of a television from somewhere in the flat. He says, ‘I … I don’t drink.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Aleksandr says. ‘I forgot. Okay.’

  Madis, perhaps out of embarrassment, says nothing.

  ‘Well,’ Aleksandr says. His shoulders are hunched against the frigid darkness – the temperature has dropped and over his silk shirt he is wearing only a thin black sweater. ‘Goodnight, then.’

  ‘Goodnight, boss,’ Madis says.

  He is just shutting the door of the flat when Aleksandr, who has turned to leave, says, ‘Oh, Madis.’

  The door is half-open. Madis is looking out at him.

  ‘You don’t have anything to eat, do you?’ Aleksandr asks, with a small laugh. ‘It’s just that … In the kitchen … There doesn’t seem to be …’

  Madis hesitates for a moment. Then he says, ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Aleksandr laughs. ‘It’s embarrassing.’

  ‘No, sure,’ Madis says. ‘No problem.’ And then he says, ‘I’m just eating now, in fact. Do you want to join me?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to disturb you …’

  ‘No, don’t worry about it,’ Madis says.

  ‘Okay then. It’s very kind of you.’

  Madis opens the door and steps aside to let Aleksandr in.

  It is the first time he has seen the inside of Madis’s flat. Madis leads him into a living room with a small dining table and a sofa and a TV which is switched on and showing the early-evening news, and some pictures on the walls. A framed print of Titian’s Allegory of Prudence.

  ‘Lamb rogan josh,’ Madis says. ‘That okay?’

  ‘Fine. Of course.’

  And then Madis says, as if something has just occurred to him, ‘It’s a supermarket one.’

  ‘Fine.’

  He leaves Aleksandr standing there, and in the small kitchen puts another Tesco’s Finest lamb rogan josh into the microwave.

  Madis, Aleksandr knows, lives there with his wife Liz. He is Estonian, originally. He emigrated to the United States as a teenager, and served in the army there, in some sort of special forces unit. He was in Iraq.

  He must be about forty. Not very tall. Stocky.

  He speaks English with a strange accent.

  ‘It’ll take a few minutes,’ he says, emerging from the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Liz?’ Aleksandr asks.

  ‘She’s out,’ Madis says. ‘Sit down.’

  It sounds almost like an instruction.

  ‘Thank you,’ Aleksandr says, and sits.

  Madis turns off the TV.

  Which was perhaps a mistake. There is just silence now – just the hum of the microwave from the kitchen.

  Aleksandr sits at the table, and looks at his hands.

  There is something strange about the way he is sitting there, looking at his hands, not speaking.

  He looks up, and finds Madis watching him. Madis is standing near the kitchen door, waiting for the microwave to finish. ‘It’ll be done in a minute,’ he says.

  ‘What’s the best way to die?’ Aleksandr asks him. His eyes are shining, as though with tears.

  ‘The best way to die?’ Madis says, surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The best way … The best way is to die happy.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean …’

  The microwave pings.

  Madis, in the kitchen, peels back the heat-darkened plastic foil of the packaging and spoons the food onto two plain white plates. He takes the plates to the table and puts them on the straw place mats, then returns to the kitchen for the knives and forks.

  ‘Thank you,’ Aleksandr says.

  They start to eat in silence.

  Aleksandr does not seem to want to eat after all – he just pushes the food around the plate.

  Eventually he stops, and sits there, while Madis, embarrassed, finishes his own meal.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Aleksandr says. He indicates the half-eaten meal on his plate.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. When he stands, Madis stands too, and walks with him to the door.

  ‘Goodnight, Madis,’ Aleksandr says on the threshold.

  ‘Goodnight, boss,’ Madis says. ‘If you need anything … I’m here, okay.’

  ‘Yes. Thank yo
u. Goodbye.’

  Without undressing, he falls asleep at some point, and wakes in the darkness later – is wide awake and knows he will not be able to sleep again.

  Waking itself is a terrible experience. Everything still there, just as it was, there in the darkness.

  Except for a second after he wakes there is nothing. An empty second. A sort of peace, for a second. And then it is over, and everything is there again.

  He lies there in the darkness.

  He is thinking of the last time he saw his father, in that hospital in Sverdlovsk, the nomenklatura hospital. The hospital seemed luxurious then. His father was proud to be treated there. He had told his son, when he visited him, who else was there – some well-known general – and it was almost as if he was happy to have had the heart attack just so that he could share a hospital with such a high-status individual.

  And his son had enjoyed the sense of privilege too, sitting in his father’s private room. He had tried to impress his father by translating the German text on a packet of medicine. He was at university in East Germany then, and spoke German perfectly, and his father, who spoke not a word of anything except Russian, was impressed, and he enjoyed impressing him. And that was the last time he saw his father, since the operation went wrong somehow and he was in a coma for a few weeks, and then he died.

  There was someone else in the room, he thinks, when he was translating the German on the medicine packet. Someone else was there. Who was it?

  Strangely, he imagines Stalin, unshaven, silver stubble on his chin, doddering among plants with a pair of secateurs …

  It is light in Surrey.

  Light outside. Yellow leaves.

  One more day.

  He is still just lying there.

  He feels numb.

  And also tired. Just so tired. So tired of everything.

  It was his uncle, he thinks, who was in the room while he was translating the German on the medicine packet.

  His uncle, Aleksandr. Aleksandr, like him.

  And ten years later he took his own life.

  He had nothing left to live for. He had devoted his whole life to something, and it had failed.

  What else did he have left to live for?

  Nothing.

  It was over.

  That was it.

  9

  Time will say nothing but I told you so,

  Time only knows the price we have to pay;

  If I could tell you I would let you know.

  1

  The next morning he needs to do the shopping. There is nothing in the house. He drives, as soon as it is fully light, at about eight, to the Lidl in Argenta. From the house, near Molinella, the main road points straight towards it. Dead straight, and lined in places with windy poplars. This is flat land. The horizon dominates here.

  Argenta: a suburban fragment in the middle of the plain. He waits at a traffic light and passes through the centre, and then along the canal, its surface giving back the winter sunlight. The car park is empty this early on a weekday morning. He parks near the entrance and wheels a trolley into the bright warmth of the interior.

  He knows where to find what he needs. When he was last in Italy, earlier in the year, he started shopping here. He pushes the trolley past the piled-up stuff, sometimes taking things, or stopping to look at what there is. He needs to put his glasses on to study the label on a packet of tea. Then he takes them off and nudges the trolley on to the next thing. He is evidently in no hurry. He takes a moment to remove his overcoat and fold it over the edge of the still nearly empty trolley.

  He selects his fruit with care. He tears off one of the small plastic bags and then, after failing for a few moments to separate it open, starts to fill it with tangerines.

  He turns his attention to the apples.

  He selects, with inquisitively squeezing fingers, an avocado.

  One lemon.

  He takes his list out of the pocket of his trousers to make sure he has not forgotten anything in this part of the shop. Apparently satisfied, he pushes on, towards the drinks, where he spends some time comparing the prices of the various lagers they have, still packed on pallets. The prices of things hang on signs – loud yellow signs, with the price printed in a font that looks almost as though it has been handwritten with a marker pen. (He wonders, for a moment, whether the signs are, in fact, handwritten. No – too uniform.) He puts a six-pack of Bergkönig lager into his trolley and moves on. He ignores the wine. He would never buy wine here.

  Non-foods is next, and he spends some time fussing with sponges and washing-up liquid.

  The stuff in his trolley, the small quantities of everything – he has just taken a shrink-wrapped pack of two sausages from a fridge – suggest a man who is living alone.

  And indeed he is here on his own.

  He arrived last night at Bologna airport – the late Ryanair flight from Stansted. The taxi through the wintry darkness to the house. The house was cold. Entropic forces were gnawing at it. There were mouse droppings on the floor. Signs of damp, again, in the wall at the foot of the stairs. Still in his coat he sat down on the small sofa in the hall. He felt weak and frozen. His breath hung in the air in front of his mouth as he sat there, with the key still in his hand. He had to start the heating – to struggle with the oil-fired furnace. He had a small glass of grappa. He managed to start the heating.

  It is nearly ten when he transfers his shopping from the trolley to his old VW Passat estate, and then wheels the noisily empty trolley back to the mass of others near the entrance. He asks himself whether there is anything else he needs to pick up in Argenta. Nothing much springs to mind, and he wonders, starting the car, whether to stop somewhere for a coffee. The Piazza Garibaldi. There are a few places there where it might be a pleasure to sit in the cold sunlight with a cappuccino and a newspaper for half an hour. He is undecided as he drives back along the canal. What decides it is the lack of parking space in the small piazza. He feels a faint pang of disappointment. It is not worth trying to find somewhere else to park, though, and soon he is out of Argenta again, among fields that stretch to the luminous winter horizon.

  *

  He thinks about death quite a lot now. It is hard not to think about it. Obviously, he doesn’t have that much time left. Ten years? In ten years he will be eighty-three. More than that? Well, probably not. So about ten years. Seen in one way, that is frighteningly little. It is terrible, how little it seems, sometimes. Waking at five a.m. on a December morning, for instance, in the large damp bedroom of the house near Argenta, the turquoise walls still hidden in darkness. The quiet ticking of the clock on the table next to the bed. It is terrible how little it seems. And since the operation two months ago he has understood that even ten years might be optimistic. He has had, since the operation, this strange permanent awareness of his heart and what it is doing, and this fear that it will suddenly stop doing it. He lies there, unpleasantly aware of its working, and of the fact that one day it will stop. He feels no more prepared to face death, though, than he ever has.

  It is starting to get light in the large turquoise bedroom.

  He has been lying there, awake, for two hours, thinking.

  It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him. It still seems like something that happens to other people – and of course friends and acquaintances are already falling. People he has known for decades. A fair few are dead already. He has attended their funerals. The numbers are starting to thin out. And still he finds it hard to understand – to properly understand – that he will die as well. That this experience is finite. That one day it will end. That ten years from now, quite probably, he just won’t be here.

  There is something very strange about trying to imagine the world without him. The strangeness, he thinks, still lying there, is to do with the fact that the only world he knows is the one he perceives himself – and that world will die with him. That world – that subjective exper
ience of the world – which for him is the world – will not in fact outlast him. It is the ending of that stream of perception that seems so strange. So unimaginable. He is staring at the enormous walnut wardrobe that stands on the far wall of the room, and he is aware, in an unusual way, of that stream of perception, of perceiving things. Of the pleasure of perceiving things. Of seeing the light from the window pass through slits in the heavy drapes and in dust-filled shafts find the surface of the wardrobe, the deep, time-darkened varnish.

  Of hearing footsteps on the gravel outside.

  The footsteps are Claudia’s. Claudia, the Romanian daily. His wife, Joanna, must have phoned from England and told her he was there.

  ‘Buongiorno, Claudia,’ he says, appearing downstairs in his dressing gown and slippers.

  He has lost weight, a lot of weight, since she last saw him in the early part of the summer. Then he looked over-inflated, with a high, unhealthy colour. He doesn’t look healthier now, particularly. He seems shrunken, diminished. ‘Buongiorno, Signor Parson,’ she says. She is preparing herself for work. They speak Italian to each other – Claudia knows no English. Her Italian isn’t perfect either. It is worse than his. She arrived a few years ago, to join her son, who installs kitchens for IKEA in Bologna. ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t know you are here.’

  ‘Did Joanna call you?’ he asks.

  ‘Signora Parson, yes. I am sorry,’ she says again.

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he tells her. ‘Thank you for coming in. I’m sorry I didn’t call you to let you know I was here.’

  ‘Is okay,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not sure how long I’m going to be here,’ he says. They are in the kitchen and he starts to make his coffee, spooning it into the machine. ‘Just a week or two, I think.’

  It is unusual for someone to be here at this time, first week of December. Christmas, sometimes, they are here. Not so much any more. In the old days, quite often. When Simon was little, and Joanna’s mother was still alive. In the old days. No Claudia then. An Italian lady, they used to have. And she had had to stop working. Some medical issue. What was her name? They stayed in touch for a while. Did they visit her in hospital in Ferrara or somewhere? He might have a memory of that, or he might be mixing it up with something else. Anyway, he has no idea what’s happened to her now. All these people you know in a lifetime. What happens to them all?