If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  Every minute of the day I longed for him. Behind my forehead a nerve was plucked again and again, its rhythmic pain reverberated through the muscles of my face, my neck, the roots of my teeth. On the palms of my hands, I found half-moon cuts made by my fingernails. Food tasted of cardboard, the edges of it stuck in my throat and I gagged. Every day I asked the babushka if a letter had come for me. I was waiting for the solicitors to find the right address for my father. If he were here he’d understand. He’d know what it’s like to live in fear of your own mind.

  *

  One day, as I arrived home, I heard a noise from above. A shadow loomed and Mrs Balashova appeared. Her shoes were shiny black stilettos and her puffy flesh stuck out around the edges of them. Her bra, clearly visible through her Lycra dress, was too small and created the impression that she had four breasts instead of two. I don’t remember her beckoning to me, or asking me to come up, but somehow I finished up stepping through her front door.

  The flat was exactly the same as ours, except that their kitchen and sitting room had been knocked into one large room. Just in time I remembered to take off my shoes. Everything smelt of nylon, and in the corner a television fizzed and crackled. Mr Balashov was behind me, hovering in a corner. The whole place was crammed full of empty bottles, cardboard boxes, old newspapers, broken chairs. A vase of yellow plastic roses stood on a table near the television, and goldfish swam in a weedless, stoneless bowl.

  Mrs Balashova sat down in an armchair, filling it entirely. She picked up a cigarette which lay smoking on a marble ashtray, took a puff and wheezed. Boxes of pills, and bottles of medicine, were lined up on the table next to her. A second armchair was pulled up close to her own and she motioned to me to sit there. I kept my hat on and my coat wrapped around me, although the room was badly overheated. She asked me if I wanted tea and, without waiting for any response, shouted at her husband to get it. I stood up, thinking to help him, but she wouldn’t let me. As she shifted in her chair, there was a sound of nylon rubbing against nylon, a puff of asthmatic breath, the creak of chair springs. She wore several rings on her sausage fingers which were too tight and cut into her flesh. Behind her was another door, veiled by a curtain made of strips of brightly coloured plastic. The bedroom. I thought of the noises we heard in the night.

  Mr Balashov made tea in that strange Russian way – pouring out half a glass of hot water, stewing tea in it, then adding more hot water. He served it on a tray with a tiny lace mat and some jam to put in it. His wife opened her mouth and was about to shout at him but I stood up, making it clear that I would leave, and she stopped. Instead she instructed him to give me some food, and a slab of sawdust cake appeared. After he’d given me the cake, he hovered. I was determined that he should sit down and so stood up myself, motioning to him to sit with us. Mrs Balashova watched suspiciously but didn’t comment when he sat down.

  She showed me an unidentifiable garment she was knitting in baby pink wool, then handed me a folded piece of card and a half-unravelled jumper. It was clear that I was to unravel the rest of the jumper and wind the wool on to the card. Mrs Balashova’s needles clicked as she knitted and I unwound the jumper. I didn’t want to eat the cake but from past experience I knew that refusing food could cause grave offence, so I pushed it down. On one side of my forehead a nerve throbbed and thumped. The pain was so bad I had to put the wool down and shield my eye with my hand. Mr Balashov poured out some kind of alcohol and eased my coat off. The wool and the card had got in a knot and Mrs Balashova leant over to untangle them for me.

  The next day she invited me in again, and I went. I heard no shouting, either when I was there, or later at night. After that I went there often. The crinkled wool wound on to pieces of cardboard. I put jam in my tea and discovered that it tasted rather good. One day I tried to engage them in a political discussion. It wasn’t like this during the good Communist days, Mrs Balashova said. After that she seemed to say that the Army needed to restore order, and that the scum needed to be cleared off the streets. For once I was glad that my understanding of Russian was inexact.

  Sometimes I talked to them in English about Jack. I went on and on, explaining the same things again and again, as my head thumped. They nodded sympathetically without understanding a word. Mrs Balashova became almost grand-motherly. They always offered me tea, and cake or sweets – food that must have been difficult for them to obtain. I didn’t hear them shouting any more and I wondered how I’d brought about that change, just by sitting there.

  Without warning, the heating in our building was switched off. For a week it was cold in the flat but not unbearable. Then the temperature dropped, as winter gave a brief encore, and Rob and I slept in our coats and cracked ice from the loo in the morning. In the evenings, after my visit to the Balashovs, I went home and lay in bed under duvets and coats, trying to keep warm.

  One night Rob tried to make love to me but he couldn’t do it. Physically, he couldn’t do it. I was so frozen up that he couldn’t get inside me. We both tried to make a joke out of it. Out of luck, better luck next time.

  Maya telephoned several times. Each time I said, ‘Oh sorry, I’m just going out, I’ll call back.’ I thought of that evening at the Smolenskaia Hotel when she’d been so sure that Jack and I had no future together. I couldn’t bear the fact that she’d been right.

  One day I was sitting with Mr and Mrs Balashov when we heard the scuffle of boots coming up the stairs, and then shouting. I thought someone might be trying to get into our flat so I went out onto the landing. Down below, a policeman in a grey uniform was knocking on the door of the Lady with a Hundred Relatives. No one answered and the man knocked again. Below him, two soldiers appeared on the stairs.

  Mr Balashov came to stand beside me. ‘Ne idi tuda. Otoidi, ne meshai.’ Don’t go down there, he said. Keep out of the way. Downstairs, the policeman thumped on the door again and it was pulled open. I caught a glimpse of the Lady with a Hundred Relatives as the soldiers forced their way in. Questions were being shouted again and again. A soldier with a gun stood at the door of the flat, guarding it. From inside, a woman’s voice rose in a long wail and a man cursed. The merciless glow of the strip-lights above made every detail distinct. Outside, rain battered down, pouring in through the broken landing window.

  I started to walk down the stairs, and when Mr Balashov caught hold of my arm, I broke away. Downstairs, I went up to the soldier with a gun and asked in Russian what was going on. He ignored me. Through the door I caught a glimpse of closed curtains, cooking pots and mattresses spread on the floor. I wanted to know where the hopscotch girl was. I pushed my way in front of the soldier, ‘What are you doing? Tell me – what are you doing?’

  The soldier shouted into my face, his spit splattering on my forehead. From above Mr Balashov pleaded with me – ‘Ne idi tuda. Otoidi, ne meshai.’ Soldiers were yelling instructions. Inside the flat, a feverish scrabbling started – clothes were pulled from cupboards, plastic and string bags stuffed, arms pushed into coats. I stepped forward, but the soldier forced me back against the wall. People started to tumble out of the flat, carrying bags and suitcases. The soldiers barked and grunted, pushing them down the stairs. One man wore his pyjama top under his jacket, another had shoes but no socks. As they stepped across the cracked floor, I imagined it giving way beneath them – the soldiers, the suitcases, sections of concrete, all dropping down into the void below.

  ‘You can’t take them away. You can’t do that.’ The soldiers wouldn’t look at me. People continued to file out of the flat. The hopscotch girl came with her mother. She was wearing the coat I’d given her and she skipped a few steps, carrying a pink frilly pillow under one arm. Her mother was cursing and wailing, shaking her fist. The man with no socks hissed at one of the soldiers and pushed him. The butt of a gun slammed into the side of the man’s face so that he reeled against the wall.

  I jostled my way down the stairs, trying to lay my hands on the girl. ‘You can’t take them. You can’t t
ake them.’ One of the soldiers shoved me to the floor, his boot crushed my leg against the edge of the steps. Pain fired up my shin and into my knee. The strip-lights wavered far above my head. My hands scrabbled on the concrete floor as I tried to get up. I shouted again but it was already too late. I wasn’t brave enough to go and question the soldiers again, or pull the girl back.

  I don’t know what happened then. Shouting, a gleam of green light, that star-shaped crack in the landing window suddenly grown large. I sat on the stairs with my head in my hands and in my mind I was hearing the hopscotch girl, her feet slapping across the landing. She was holding that pink frilly pillow in her arms and laughing. And I was remembering the pride on her face when I’d given her that coat which was twenty years old and six inches too long.

  Then I heard Rob’s voice and Mr Balashov explaining to him what had happened. I unlocked my hands from my eyes and rolled up my jeans to examine the damage to my leg. My shin was raw, and an ink-smudge bruise was already spreading, but it was nothing really. I waited for Rob to come and comfort me but he didn’t. Instead he came down the stairs and ordered me into the flat.

  I got up from the stairs, hopping, and followed him. The door slammed behind me with such force that a cup moved on the kitchen table. ‘Eva, what the bloody hell were you doing? For God’s sake – you don’t have a visa.’ Rob spat each word. I sat down in the kitchen and started to explain – the hopscotch girl, the coat – but he wasn’t listening.

  ‘I’ve told you again and again. Don’t go anywhere near anyone in authority. Why don’t you get it? What’s the matter with you?’ He was standing by the window. Outside, rain streamed down the glass and bounced off the sill. Rob’s arms were waving and his mouth was wet. A blue vein stood out on his forehead. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with us. Finally you need to understand that it isn’t our problem.’

  Rob was waiting for some response, but I didn’t have one. A phrase from our childhood appeared in my mind. She became involved in politics in a way which was inappropriate. My mother’s comment on Amelia. Up until now, I’d never thought it strange that Rob had never said anything at all about his mother. Rob was a practical man, a man of the future; he didn’t waste time with things that couldn’t be changed. But now I began to wonder. Perhaps because neither of us had any knowledge of the past, then we didn’t have any grip on the present? I couldn’t work it out and the only person who might have been able to help was Jack.

  Outside, water gathered and sloshed in the gutters. I thought of the hopscotch girl and longed for the tap-tap of her shoes on the concrete landing. I rolled up my trouser leg again, and said that perhaps I’d go and find some antiseptic cream. ‘You should have just kept out of the way,’ Rob said.

  I looked up at him, his colourless face outlined against the raining window. ‘OK. OK.’ But he was right. My gesture was pointless. What could I ever have done against a policeman and three soldiers? Rob stamped towards the kettle and clattered around finding mugs. I stood up and said I’d make the tea but he wouldn’t let me. When he’d found mugs and tea bags he went to get the antiseptic cream. In silence he pushed it at me. He made the tea and then sat opposite me, stirring so vigorously that tea slopped and he had to get a cloth. As he wiped the table, I stretched out my hand, took the cloth, and put it in the sink. ‘Rob, please. What’s the matter?’

  He sat down again and his shoulders sagged. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Under the table, I pushed my knees against his. From outside, water crashed down from an overflowing gutter. ‘You know, I’ve just started to think – maybe the Russians are a race of corrupt, stupid people, who are more interested in dish-washers than democracy, and have got the political system they deserve.’ Rob was staring past me, watching the rain coming down the window. He said again that he was sorry, then he told me that he’d found out that Sasha’s arrest didn’t have anything to do with the newspaper. For some time Sasha had been involved in stealing cars. He’d certainly been doing it all the time Rob had known him. Rob told me this quite calmly but I knew he was bitterly disappointed. Sasha was meant to be a close friend, Rob had had faith in him. And yet for some reason I wasn’t surprised.

  ‘Yeah, so there’s that – and then today my contract finally got renewed.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?’ I should have been racing to Room 815 to tell Jack the news.

  ‘Well, yes. Except they wait until the week before it runs out, then they give me virtually no pay rise … And I had vaguely suggested that I could do with a car – I mean a proper car, because everyone else has one, but apparently that’s not possible. And … well, I’m just pissed off about it.’

  ‘Did you tell Bill that?’

  ‘Yeah, I did, and he’s embarrassed. But I can’t go on at him too much because Sarah screams at him every night that she’s going to leave. And anyway, it’s not his decision, it’s people in New York, and they don’t have a budget, or that’s their excuse anyway. And once I wouldn’t have minded but now … I don’t know.’ He sighs and shakes his head. He asks me if I want some toast. That’s the only food we’ve got.

  ‘But you don’t really care about the money?’

  ‘No, no. Of course I don’t care about the money, but … Listen, is your leg OK?’

  ‘Yes, it’s fine.’ He came to look and made me put some cream on it. He wondered if he should go out and look for a shop which might sell a bandage, but we both knew it wouldn’t be possible to find one. We sat together eating toast while the rain continued to come down. My mind moved outside itself and I saw Rob and me from above, with the rest of our building around us. The Balashovs, the old couple from downstairs, Rob and I, all trailing in and out of the building, day after day. And from there I could see that Rob and I had become indistinguishable from everyone else. We had the same blank eyes, the same shrug, the same way of swallowing sadness whole and then turning away.

  ‘You know, with the job, it’s just – I met this guy from the UN last week and he asked me for my CV. And I don’t know why but yesterday I left a meeting early and went back to the office and typed it up. Because, you know, if I worked for one of those organizations …’

  ‘But you wouldn’t really work for the UN, would you?’

  ‘No, not really. No, but …’ Rob started to tell me then about an old schoolfriend who he’d met up with for a drink. The friend was on business for a couple of nights in Moscow. He worked as an accountant in Clapham and was married with two children. ‘And you know what?’ Rob said. ‘I wanted to feel so superior to him. I wanted to say, “Look at the amazing places where I’ve lived and the things I’ve seen.” But then it just wasn’t like that. Because, you know, that guy … well, he was somehow thoughtful and grown up and … he was happy. And I suddenly thought, maybe that’s what happiness is – just being dull?’

  After they took the hopscotch girl, hours of my life went missing, sometimes whole days. Mrs Balashova was ill and so she and her husband were often at the doctor’s or the hospital. A man who looked like Jack stalked the maze of my mind but he had the face of an ogre. I spent whole afternoons lying in the hall with my face pressed against the skirting board. Every day I decided to go to Leningrad to look for him but I couldn’t find the energy. My mother’s voice rang in my head. You must listen to the doctor, dear. You really shouldn’t go to Moscow. You know how you are. I longed for drugs so strong that if you put your hand on a hot-plate you wouldn’t feel it. I didn’t want to live in the same head as myself any more.

  Rob pleaded with me to go to the doctor but I wouldn’t. He was working less because, although he still helped with the newspaper, he was barely on speaking terms with Sasha. He didn’t know that Sasha still came round to see me sometimes when he was out. The first time he came, I wondered if I should ask him about the stolen cars but decided against it. Rob had judged Sasha too harshly, I thought. A few months ago I’d probably have been the same. But Moscow had made me wary of certainty. It no longer seemed possible to know the
difference between good and bad. Committed radicals do steal cars, good Catholic girls do have affairs with men twice their age, friends can turn into ogres overnight.

  And I’d missed Sasha – his shambling walk, his stained-tooth smile, the way he stooped to listen to me. He laid a hand on my shoulder and peered down at me intently. ‘You are been very sad,’ he said. How did he know that? I thought of those late evenings when he talked about his childhood. So cold, always so cold. Always I’m waiting for them to light a fire. We sat in silence at the kitchen table. I gripped my thumping head, while he drank our vodka, chainsmoked, and played music on our tape recorder.

  Rob started to walk to college with me, carrying my bag. During the day he came home from work to make me lunch. My bones stuck out and my skirt started to fall down. He found a safety pin for me and helped me put it in place. In the evenings he prepared meals, made tea, did the washing up. Neither of us could be bothered with shopping so for days at a time we ate nothing but tinned pilchards. Bill came round to see us quite often and talked politics with Rob in a voice that was determinedly cheerful. One night, after he’d gone, Rob told me that Sarah was being treated for depression. Maya telephoned but I put the phone down as soon as I heard her voice.

  The crack in the concrete outside our door opened further, revealing a wire mesh. I could look down through it to the landing below. A man with a shaved head, tattoos on his hands, and thighs like tree trunks, moved into the flat next door. He had a Dobermann-type dog, with a spiked collar, which smelt and lay outside on the landing, slobbering. He left his rubbish on the stairs and shouted at me when I asked him to move it.