by Alice Jolly
But why Mexico, of all places? Had he spent time there before he met my mother? I didn’t know. But he was following a family tradition, I suppose. My paternal great-grandfather was an explorer in Mexico; he disappeared there and was never found. My grandfather was a cartologist who worked in Central America. Rob’s father was a diplomat. Escape disguised as adventure, recklessness disguised as decision-making, activity disguised as purpose. A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about that and I said to Rob, ‘It’s a fine line, isn’t it, between escape and adventure?’ He looked at me narrowly and said, ‘Fine, yes, but distinct.’
I looked at the photograph and sorted through the bottom drawer of my mind. Half-formed images drifted in my head, of a time when everything was upside down, a summer of endless cartwheels. My father fizzing down the lawn like a Catherine Wheel, his shoes spreading in an arc towards the sky. A round of applause as I tucked my dress into my knickers and stood on my head with my feet wavering above me, my head pressed into the grass. Marsh End House suspended from the edge of the lawn, my mother’s head dangling down into the cloudless sky, the frown on her face changed into a smile.
I was sure that he’d put all the clocks and the pictures in the house upside down, but could that be right? And his shirts fastened up the back and he ate dinner with the plate the wrong way up. From far back in the past I heard rhyming words. Cabbage-rummage-damage-sandwich. Words-at-good-was-he. Those sounds fade but a memory of warmth and ease remains. What was that feeling – happiness?
At Maya’s party I’d suddenly said, ‘But why did my father leave?’ Such an obvious question, but I’d never asked it before. I’d somehow always known that I must never ask my mother, or anyone else, about my father. I thought of Jack Flame and how he’d said, ‘Yes, it sometimes happens that if the people around you don’t want you to see something, then they pretend it isn’t there, and so you learn not to see it. And if something isn’t seen for long enough, then after a while it simply doesn’t exist.’
I lay down on the bed, which was fake Louis XIV in style, with a tapestry headboard, and one leg resting on a crate. The wall next to me was covered by brown carpet, stuck there with glue. Above me, a five-armed lamp swung from the ceiling, filling the room with ochre light. Trapped inside its frosted glass bowls was a haze of dust and a few dead flies. I kept my eyes fixed on that lamp. And as I lay there, a thought came to me which I had been avoiding all week. Now I couldn’t escape from it any longer.
Jack Flame was right, what he’d said was true. If I could understand what had happened to my father, then I’d stop hesitating at street corners, stop asking, Should I turn left or right? Drink tea or coffee? Get married or not? And I’d stop moving from one rented room to another, from one dead-end job to the next. I was sure that that was true, but how could I find out anything about my father? I had tried once before, when I was eighteen, but it had seemed as though there was nothing to know. I needed to talk to Jack Flame. He would know what I should do, he’d be able to make it happen. I was sure of that. For once, I’d made a decision.
Tsaritsyno, Moscow
November 1990
The snow has come, just as Jack said it would. I walk with him along a wide path through trees which are a hundred different shades of white. Every branch, every leaf, is covered by its own intricately piled layer of snow. Flecks of ice cloud the air, settling like dust on our coats. The only sound is the rustle of trees as the snow collects in their branches. Under the snow, the path is covered with packed ice, and so we walk carefully, placing our feet down flat. Occasionally Jack reaches out as though to steady me, but I keep my hands by my sides.
The path turns and opens out. The skeleton palace lies ahead, its vast façade three storeys high. Its arched windows contain no glass, and it has no roof, no doors. We walk towards it across what must once have been a lawn. Now trenches have been dug and pipes are exposed. We pass a derelict bandstand and rubbish bins. A babushka sits next to a gate, swaddled in layers of black, topped by a pink beret. She sells gherkins in a bucket, two or three plastic bags, and two boxes of Chanel perfume. A few other figures move along the front of the palace, staring up at it. Sagging barbed wire surrounds the building and it’s hung with signs. Vkhoda nyet. No Entry.
Jack finds a place where the wire is low and he puts his foot on it. Then he stretches out his hand to help me over. The ground is uneven and for a moment I wobble. As he catches at my shoulder, I look up at him and see him smile. There’s something fresh about that smile. With other people I always see emotions pass through several filters before they’re expressed to the world. With him there are no filters.
We set off along the front of the building. The ground-floor doorways are boarded up but he finds a place where the boards are rotten and pulls them away. I’m frightened that someone is going to come and tell us that we shouldn’t be doing this, but Jack doesn’t hesitate. We step through the boards into a vast deserted room. The remains of a fireplace stand out from a wall and there are marks where stone pillars must once have been. Broken timbers litter the ground. In one corner a pair of boots with no soles lies in the remains of a campfire.
Jack walks away from me. His head is stretched back, looking up through the missing storeys at the sky above. Standing there, he has the stillness of a figure painted on a museum vase. Ever since I met him earlier in that nameless café, I’ve been trying to work out what quality it is that he has. Now the word comes to me. Savour. Yes, that’s it. He sees and feels much more than I do. He’s like a wine merchant, holding the day on his tongue and letting its tastes spread on his palate. Or like a tailor rubbing the air around us between his fingers, feeling its warp and weft.
I follow him towards the remains of a stone staircase. He turns back, stretching out a hand. I don’t take that hand but I follow him and we start to climb. On a narrow ledge, we stand looking out through a gap where a window must once have been. From there we can see the chimneys and pylons of Moscow made pale by the snow. An occasional onion dome shines gold through air which is white with a mixture of mist and chimney smoke. I feel Russia stretching away from us on either side. More than four thousand miles, all the way from the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok. Forests, lakes, railway stations, villages. A country in which geography makes individuals irrelevant.
The silence folds in on us, broken only by the sound of a lump of snow sliding from a ledge above. Jack moves me in front of him so that I can see more clearly. His breath is warm against my hair. I turn to him and our faces are close. For a moment I feel dizzy and put out a gloved hand to steady myself. My voice echoes against the walls. ‘What is it? This …’
I don’t expect him to know what I’m talking about but he answers immediately. ‘It’s recognition, that’s all.’
‘Recognition?’
‘Yes. Sometimes you meet someone and they’re like a mirror. When you look at them you see yourself more clearly.’
I keep my eyes fixed on the distant shapes of Moscow.
‘You know Plato’s idea?’ he says. ‘He thought that before the soul enters the body it exists in a place of great beauty, a place which is infinite, perfect – but when it enters the body, it can no longer remember that place. Until the moment when we fall in love, and then what we experience is a memory of that other place and a yearning to return.’
He’s standing too close to me. I move my foot and a stone beneath it wobbles. ‘But there can also be other ways to see back into that world, can’t there?’ I say. ‘Like the memory of certain moments. You measure everything against them, and find all of it wanting. And you long to be allowed to go back but you never can.’
‘Which moments?’
‘Just … I don’t know.’ Despite the cold my neck prickles with sweat. ‘I always think of a beach, and the sun is setting in a certain way …’ I feel tears suddenly gather behind my eyes. ‘I always want to go back there. You understand?’ Above us, a brick moves and we both look up. Further along the wall we see the brick slide,
then fall, bringing with it a shower of snow.
‘Come down,’ Jack says. ‘It’s not safe.’
He moves towards the steps, and we climb down from the ledge. As we step out through the broken boards the sun is failing and snow starts to fall again. We take a path which leads downhill, and see below us a wide lake. In my mind I’m flicking through the future. Rob’s contract expires in March. Jack says he may leave Moscow soon. So how many more times will we walk together like this? I wonder if he’s thinking of that as well.
Jack walks away from me, along the bank of the lake. The evening light brings with it a strange stillness. His head is held high and he’s staring out across the frozen water towards a smudge of black trees on the distant shore. And to me it’s as though someone has taken a black pen and drawn a thick line around him. Nothing can be added to him, nothing can be taken away. He creates his own limelight. For me he’s there – really there – in a way that nothing else ever has been.
As he walks back towards me I see distant figures far out on the ice. What are they doing? Jack says that they are fishermen who have bored holes through the ice and let down lines. I ask, ‘Don’t they fall through?’ Jack says that perhaps they sometimes do and I shudder, suddenly aware of my numb feet and raw lips.
We talk then, as we trudge back up the hill, about that night at Maya’s. It’s hard for me to speak about those images – so much sharper than memory – of that child. I usually don’t even admit to myself what I see. Of course, I could ask Maya about my father, I say, but I don’t think she knows what really happened. She’d already gone away to Rome by the time he left for Mexico, but all the same, I could ask. I expect Jack to think that a good idea, but he only says, ‘Well, you could do but I doubt you need to. Your mind is its own detective story. All the information you need is almost certainly there, it’s just a question of whether you can find it.’
The snow is falling heavily now, blurring the air. When we come upon the ruins of a Palladian pavilion beside the path, Jack suggests that we should shelter for a while. Half of the roof is missing, and graffiti is scrawled on the walls, but a narrow bench remains under the ruined roof, so we sit down there.
I take off my gloves and unbutton the collar of my coat. Then I remove my scarf to shake the snow from it. I see him watching my throat and the open collar of my shirt. He puts out his hand and picks up the crucifix I wear around my neck. His fingers brush against my chin. I move back but still he holds the crucifix in his hand. ‘Does this mean anything?’ he asks.
‘Yes, something.’
I have a vision of him bending down and pressing his lips, cold with snow, against my neck. I imagine placing my hand on the side of his head, feeling his hair, touching the skin just below his ear. I jerk my head back and he lets go of the crucifix. I twist my scarf through my hands as I search for words. ‘You know, if you’re like me, and you know you can easily become the victim of your own mind, then you need someone larger to hand that over to. Someone to help keep the lid on.’
‘Why keep the lid on?’
I look away from him, unable to answer. My hands are blue because of the cold and I can’t feel my fingers. Taking off his own skiing gloves, Jack pushes my stiff fingers into them.
‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘About that beach?’
I struggle to find the right words. ‘It’s not just the beach – it’s also this figure. He’s tall, and he’s wearing these eighteenth-century clothes – a frockcoat and a three-cornered hat – and he’s standing out at the water’s edge. And the beach is like the one near our house in England – mud and stones. And I don’t know … I just feel that’s a place I want to go.’
‘I think those places exist for all of us. But in your life now, don’t you ever feel you’re in that place?’
‘No, not really. I suppose I once did, for a few months, when I was eighteen, just before I left school. But then I got asthma and – I don’t know …’
Jack is looking down at me, his eyes intense. ‘But you know, Eva, you don’t have asthma.’
I’m about to start arguing with him but there’s no point because I know he’s right. A doctor I saw when I was eighteen told me that, but since everyone else always insists that I have asthma, I say that as well. Now it seems like that moment at Maya’s – a sudden hole opening up in front of me, the kaleidoscope twisting, the patterns changing.
‘You know, you can always go back to those perfect places,’ Jack says.
‘How? How can you do that?’
‘They’re here, now – those exact places. It’s just that you can’t see them.’ For a moment I almost believe him. It’s as though his words have summoned up that world. I hear the wash of the sea, and smell salt, and dank seaweed. And it seems as though I feel the sun above, spreading its rays. He puts out his hand and lays it over my gloved fingers.
‘And it was that place you saw when we last met?’
‘No. No. Well, not really.’
I look down at his hand resting on mine. He should have long white pianist’s fingers, but instead his knuckles look sore and chapped. A scar runs across the end of his index finger, and the nail is yellow and misshapen. Suddenly I start to think, This man is thirty-five years older than me, and I’ve got a boyfriend, and I’m going to marry him. I don’t want to become Valia, or Svetlana, or whatever her name is. And this isn’t even what he wants, I know it isn’t.
I start to slide my fingers out of his gloves. Immediately his hand jumps back from mine. For a moment it drifts through the air, as though to suggest that it was only ever an accident that he touched me. Although he doesn’t move, I feel him drawing away from me. ‘Please don’t mind too much,’ I say. ‘You know, you’re deceived by me. People always are. Somehow I cast spells, quite accidentally, and people think they see something in me, but really there isn’t anything there.’
‘No. You’re wrong. That’s not how it is. There is something there. It’s just that other people see it and you don’t.’ He stands up and I try to give him his gloves back but he won’t take them. Instead he digs his hands into the pockets of his coat and strides away. I follow, but he’s moving too fast. We head back along the icy path, and I’m slipping and sliding, and I want him to come back and offer me his hand but he’s brisk and distant now. We reach the Metro and take the train back into the city. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. What did I think this was all about?
As we reach the centre I ask him where he lives. He doesn’t answer but says he’ll travel back to my stop with me. He says it kindly but still he’s all closed up inside. When we reach Byelorusskaia he gets off the Metro with me. A woman in a khaki uniform wields an object like a table-tennis bat as she marshals passengers on and off the train. We’re caught up in a mass of people, crossing the vast platforms, walking under high marble arches and past statues of Soviet peasants enthusiastically tilling the fields. We travel miles up long wooden escalators, the brown gloom illuminated by circular white lights.
As we arrive at ground level and walk through the underpass, men in black leather caps gather around kiosks. They drink from bottles, standing in puddles of melted ice. On the wall, posters displaying Communist slogans have been defaced. People stare at Jack and me as we pass because they know we’re from the West. My red hair gives me away but also my clothes. Wearing baggy leggings and Army Surplus boots is a luxury that Russian women can’t afford.
In the square the snow has been swept off the streets and lies in piles in the gutters. Cars hoot and crowds of people push towards the station. Women upholstered in layers of black pack up the remains of makeshift market-stalls. We pass through wooden walkways which have been built to protect the pavement from falling masonry. At the entrance to my street, we stop and shelter in the doorway of an office building, standing close. I give his gloves back to him. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet up again?’ I try to say it casually.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘My time is very limited.’
‘Yes, I’m sure.
But at least write down your number for me.’
‘There isn’t any need. If you want me, you’ll find me at that café.’
After that I expect him to say a brief goodbye and leave, but he doesn’t go.
‘Jack, it’s just … you understand things. You know, I thought about what you said – about the past – and I know you’re right. But I need your help.’
For a moment he closes his eyes and shakes his head. ‘Eva, you know I’m not really interested in playing at substitute fathers.’
I feel my lungs suddenly close, and I turn away. My legs are dissolving but I hurry towards home, my head down. He comes after me and catches hold of me. I yank my arm away. We stand together under a streetlight. ‘I’m sorry. For some reason I had the impression that you were interested … that you could …’ I can’t find the words and flap my hands in frustration.
For a moment both of us stare, wide-eyed, then suddenly we’re laughing. I know myself to be ridiculous. Our laughter sounds exotic in that concrete street. He shakes his head, watching me. ‘Eva, of course I’d like to see you again, but it’s difficult. You have to understand – I didn’t expect this now. It comes too late for me.’ He looks away from me, assailed by a thought from outside.
‘Why? You’re not old.’
‘No, I’m not. But I’m dying.’
I want to have misheard the word but it isn’t possible. Its echo fades into the air. I want to start laughing again and I look into his face, hoping that I’ll find mirth there. But what he’s saying is real. ‘You can’t be.’
‘Of course I can.’ He taps the flat of his hand against his chest. ‘My heart is worn out.’
I move towards him, standing close, and, without thinking, I put up my hand and touch his cheek. Deep inside him I feel a shudder, as though a breeze has moved through the leaves of a tree, but his eyes are untroubled. He reaches up and, taking hold of my hand, he presses it against his face. ‘Of course, my dear. Friends. Of course.’