If Only You Knew

by Alice Jolly

  ‘I never wanted to get old,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want that.’ I want to comfort him as he comforted me during the night. But we’re both at the end of comfort. My eyes follow the pattern of the carpet – squares of brown and gold. I hold onto his shins, pushing my head against them.

  ‘I can’t do anything,’ he says. ‘I can’t do anything.’

  ‘You’ve done something for me. You know that. You have.’ He nods his head and half-smiles. He mumbles apologies. I take hold of the socks again and put them on, fitting the heel carefully in place.

  Liusinovskaia Bol’shaia, Moscow

  August 1991

  Moscow is still happening, just as it always has. At early-morning stations, the sun spreads a generous light. Men board the train, yawning, their eyes still heavy with sleep. On the platform a stray dog rummages in a paper bag, two women swing a small child between them, laughing. Don’t these people know what has happened? Is violence usually this quiet?

  The Metro is running and people are on their way to work. I tell Jack that I’m going to walk home with him to help him with his bags. He wants to argue, but he hasn’t the energy. Sometimes he shuts his eyes and draws in a deep breath. When a seat comes free, I make him sit down. I stand among creaking leather jackets. Somewhere further down the carriage a man strums on a guitar. My lungs feel as though they’re full of tar.

  As we come up from the Metro at Dobryninskaia, Jack stumbles and nearly falls. He reaches out for my hand and I steady him. The air rumbles as though a plane is circling overhead. In the street Jack tries to insist that I should go back. But I say, ‘Just let me carry your bags as far as the flat.’ As we walk, I stare up at the sky, trying to locate the source of that uneasy sound. Jack’s face is set hard and he’s trying to walk faster than he should.

  We reach the turning to his street. I try to tell him to slow down, but he can’t hear me. I shout the words at him. ‘What is that noise?’ I stop and feel the muscles of my legs tremble, and realize that the road is vibrating. A growl fills the air. I steer Jack off the main road in the direction of his flat, but he won’t go, and turns back. Two women have moved to the edge of the pavement, and stare down the Liusinovskaia Bol’shaia as it heads out of town. I look up at the windows around us and they seem to rattle in their frames.

  A tank appears on the main road. It’s gone in a snarl and a flash of khaki, but it’s followed by another. And another and another. A stream of faceless steel boxes stretches for as far as we can see. The tanks dwarf the cars parked at the side of the street. They leave trails of blue-grey smoke which spread a distorting haze across the morning air. Their caterpillar tracks score marks in the tarmac. Up towards Dobryninskaia there’s a place where the road narrows. There the tracks of the tanks catch against the kerbstones, cracking them open and leaving them splayed in the road.

  Along the pavement, people stand watching. An old woman is close to the kerb, shouting curses, flapping her apron, crying. Looking up at an office block, I see blank faces crowded at every window. Jack puts out a hand to steady himself against a railing. I reach out to him, hoping that I might pull him away, take him to his flat. But he wants to see the full extent of this. Eventually the noise lessens and we see the end of the line. The last tank rolls up the street. Then all that’s left is a pall of diesel fumes.

  Jack turns to me. ‘Eva, do you already have a ticket booked to England?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘You must go to the airport and get it brought forward – and if you can’t, just buy a ticket out of here.’

  ‘No. I’m just going to explain to Rob that you’re ill and that I need to be with you.’

  ‘No. No. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s what I should have done months ago.’

  As Jack raises his hand to wipe sweat from his face, his arm shudders violently. For a moment he looks at me, and his eyes are like tunnels which run far back into his head. In his mind he’s running through a hundred calculations. I have the feeling that he’s coming up against some new idea, but it isn’t one he wants to contemplate. ‘Listen, Eva. I’m sorry, I can’t talk about this now. Let’s just leave it until tomorrow I need some time alone.’

  I agree to that. One night can’t make any difference. ‘Give me your phone number so I can call.’ He puts his suitcase down and starts to look for a pen. I find one in my bag and he writes on the back of a receipt from his pocket. He’s staring away from me into the street. ‘You promise to do what I’ve said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nods his head vigorously. ‘Go now. Please go.’

  I put his suitcase down on the pavement and turn to leave. He steps back, but then he stops and puts his hand out to me. ‘Eva?’ His voice sounds strange, saying my name. He comes towards me and kisses me, his tongue feeling my lips, his hand cradling the back of my neck. ‘I just wanted to say – you know what you said, at that cafe, with the sun shining on the church?’

  ‘No, what did I say?’

  ‘That all my talk of love without need was rubbish. Well, you were right. How do you think I understand you so well?’ He kisses me again and holds me against him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry.’ His voice is muffled. ‘Remember what I said last night, won’t you?’

  ‘Do you really believe all that stuff?’

  He shrugs and rubs at his head. ‘No. No, I’m not sure that I do. But I think we have to live as though it’s true.’ Then suddenly he kisses me once more, picks, up his bags, and walks away. I watch him go, waiting for him to turn back and wave. But he’s determined not to do that. Instead, he just walks on with his crooked, old-man step and his shoulder pulled down by his bags. And although he’s sick and frightened by what’s happening to his city, he’s still the only thing I see in that bland and jumbled street. A black post standing up straight in the sea, and the rest just so much flotsam washing up against him.

  I go back to the flat because there’s nowhere else to go. My throat is choked by a ball of pain and every breath stabs in my chest. In the kitchen I pour myself a glass of water. I try to call Rob at his office. He should be back from Kiev by now but he doesn’t answer the phone. I try Sasha’s flat. No answer. It occurs to me that Rob and Sasha are among the first people who the plotters will arrest. The phone rings and I pick it up, hoping to speak to Rob but instead I hear Maya’s voice, an octave higher than usual. ‘Eva, I’ve been calling and calling. Are you all right?’

  She starts to insist that I should go to her flat. It isn’t safe where I am. Where is Rob? Why isn’t he looking after me? Her voice rises higher and higher. I should go to the British Embassy. What is the Democracy Foundation doing to protect its staff? I must come round to her flat right now and she’ll see what she can do. Harvey will know what’s best. I remember what Jack said and I know that I’ll be strong enough to speak to her. I need to do that now or it will never happen.

  ‘OK, I’ll come. I’ll come now.’

  In the Metro, photocopies are pasted on the wall and a man hands out fliers denouncing the coup. A woman in a khaki uniform hustles a drunk who is blocking one of the doors. In the train, three Germans carry cameras, lights and a thing like a furry caterpillar on the end of a stick. They get off at Barrikadnaia, which is the stop for the White House. I travel on to Kutuzovskaia and come up from the Metro to find two tanks parked in the street. Teenage soldiers lean against them, yawning and smoking in the sharp sun. Small boys swing from their sides, making tak-tak noises with pretend guns. In Maya’s building I speak to the floor lady then climb the cracked marble stairs, coughing and sweating.

  The building is filled with a fresh silence. I wonder if some people have already left. I imagine clothes left unfolded on bedroom chairs, a window hanging open, a kitchen chair overturned in haste. When I knock at Maya’s door, I hear nothing for a while, then a rustle and the door eases open six inches. A slice of red silk dressing-gown decorated with a golden Chinese dragon appears. The door opens wider and Maya pulls
me into the flat. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she tells me. ‘Harvey says that the Embassy people have been moved into secure accommodation, so maybe I can go there.’ With fidgeting hands she lights a cigarette from a pack on the hall table and takes a long drag.

  ‘Maya, there are tanks, but that’s all. Nothing is happening.’

  She rolls her eyes and disappears into the bedroom where cases are flung open on the bed and silk dresses hang from the backs of chairs. Gold jewellery lies in a pile on the bedside table. Maya sits down at her dressing-table and picks up an eyebrow pencil. Foreigners are being detained and thrown into prison, she tells me. As from tonight there’ll be no more flights out of the country. More than half a million troops have been mobilized from across Russia and the Republics, and they’re surrounding the city.

  I’m not listening to her. Instead I’m staring at the canvases propped against the wall. I know which one is my father’s. From the corner of her rolling eye Maya sees me looking at the picture and her eyebrow pencil hangs in the air.

  ‘Maya, I want to know what happened to my father.’

  It’s easy to say that now. Maya’s snake-clad hand is unsteady and a black line veers up above her plucked eyebrow. ‘Damn, damn.’ She scuffles among her make-up and pulls out a cotton bud. Her hand knocks a powder compact and an empty glass to the floor.

  ‘There was a party,’ I say. ‘After Christmas in 1967. You were there – and my father ran out onto the frozen lake.’ My words fade into a cough and blood thumps in my forehead. My mind tips and a chasm opens. For a moment I’m back on that moon-striped path. The ivy-covered door, the sudden screaming. Maya gets up and scrambles clothes into a suitcase. Her dressing-gown, half-undone, falls open to reveal a shrivelled breast. ‘Eva, da-a-rling, you don’t seem to understand. The government of this country has been deposed.’ She sits down at the dressing-table again, picks up a tube of lipstick, then looks at me, shaking her head. ‘Just look at you. You need to see a doctor. You’re ill. Come on now, co-o-me on. I’m sure I’ve still got some of those pills somewhere.’

  She’s moving towards me, stretching out her hand. I long to let her give me pills, make me tea, look after me. I want us to be back where we were before. Of course, she didn’t He to me. We should laugh and drink vodka and she should tell me how pretty I am and lend me clothes. She goes to get me a glass of water. Now the pills, the pills, where would those be? I think of all the times in my life when someone has said, ‘Pills, tea, sit down and rest, you’re ill.’ But I’m not ill and I never have been.

  ‘Maya, what happened? Did he fall through the ice? I just want to know.’

  An image forms of my father’s hand burning on that hot-plate. Except now it’s not his hand, it’s mine, and I’m pushing it down on to the burning metal again and again. Maya-liar-fire. She slams a drawer shut and turns to look at me. ‘Eva, you think you want to know but you don’t. You re-e-ally don’t. I’ve done my best to help, I re-e-ally have. But you’ve always been the same. You could never be told anything. Push, push, push. You’ve never known when to stop. You’d been told so many times.’

  Yes, of course, I might have known. It all turns out to be my fault. The little red devil with her forked stick and too-big shoes. It was all your fault, if it hadn’t been for you, everything would have been fine. My mother had said that as well. Eva, I had to think of you. They’ve both been so kind to me, and made such sacrifices. And I’ve always been such a problem. Except I don’t believe that any more. I may have been the tiresome child who wouldn’t go to bed that night, but I was also the only person who was there when he went out onto the ice. Maya and my mother – they both cared for him so much – but they weren’t there when he needed them.

  ‘Harvey will be here in five minutes and I must be ready.’ Maya grabs at a bottle of vodka which is standing on the floor near her chair and pours some into a glass. Maya-liar-fire. Her doll’s eyes roll as she smears lipstick across her mouth. I start to see the child standing on the ice. I press my hands over my ears and stare down at the pattern on the carpet. An ape face leers in the corner of my mind. The front door opens and Harvey marches across the hall. ‘All right, dear? It’s only me. Are you ready?’ He enters the room with a purpose I’ve never seen in him before. The time for strong men has arrived. ‘My dear, we must go now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maya says. ‘We re-e-ally must leave.’

  I go to the door and I try to shut him out. His pale eyes don’t see me, but he moves his foot forward and blocks it against the door. I wrestle with the door but he doesn’t move. Maya shuts up her suitcases and shovels her make-up into a travelling case. I stand in front of her. ‘Tell me,’ I say. For a moment she looks straight at me. I know her then as I’ve never known her before. Our minds are touching and I think she might speak. I need to hear her tell me exactly what happened. Tell me. Harvey picks up the cases and ushers Maya out of the room.

  I’m shouting now. Words tumble out. ‘You lied to me. You and my mother – you didn’t watch him, you didn’t take care.’ I follow them out onto the landing and the words keep on coming. ‘You lied to me, you lied, you said you weren’t even there that night. You said you’d gone to Rome. But you were there, you were.’

  Maya is tucked in close against Harvey as he steers her down the stairs. She looks back at me once, then they’ve gone and I’m left alone on the landing. I see myself from far above, standing in the stairwell, next to the cage of the lift. Like a woman in a Greek tragedy, I’m wringing my hands, tearing my hair, shouting out all the rage of twenty long years.

  The entrance to the Kutuzovskaia Metro is sealed by barriers and guarded by soldiers. The sky is solid grey now, and soft rain is starting to fall. I walk on towards the bridge, but the road is blocked by bulldozers, lorries and buses. Some lie on their sides across the road, others have had their wheels removed. I turn right along the embankment. As I approach the next bridge, cars are being stopped but no one seems to care about pedestrians. Patrol boats chug through the gleaming black water. As I cross the bridge a helicopter drones overhead. The White House and the Ukraina Hotel are faint as sketches in the thickening rain.

  I know now what happened. Maya didn’t say any words, but her silence spoke. My father nearly drowned in the lake that night and, after that, he left my mother, and Maya, and went to Mexico and didn’t come back. There is such power in knowing. I am equal to anything now.

  As I walk towards my college, the city is being uprooted. Chairs and sheets of corrugated iron sad down the streets. Doors are passed from hand to hand. The branches of a tree are dragged along the ground. The panels of a rusted car, a park bench, a lamp-post, an iron gate, a telephone box – everything is travelling in the same direction. I’m swept up in a crowd of people all heading towards the White House. Young men, straight out of their offices, still carry their briefcases. Elderly ladies grip their string shopping bags.

  On the bank of the river the White House – a four-storey building with two wings – sails like an ocean liner, tranquil above the crowds. It’s surrounded by barricades ten feet high. Two tanks are at the front of the building, one of them draped in flowers. Television crews push up against the white marble steps and flashbulbs pop. Lines of women, all wearing the same factory uniforms, stand to attention, linking hands. Young men with long hair huddle around fires, or sit on coats in the mud, strumming on their guitars. A woman with bouffant hair and a sleek fur coat hands out boxes from McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. Close to the building, armed men wear black masks with holes cut for their eyes. A man in a wheelchair is chained to the railings. An orthodox priest in full robes is surrounded by a group of worshippers.

  An overexcited English journalist, who knows Rob, tells me that although three tanks have decided to defend the White House, not many more will do the same. Most of the soldiers are from the Urals, the Volga, Siberia, so they care nothing about what happens in Moscow. A solid Scandinavian woman, mistaking me for a journalist, introduces herself and explains t
hat she is a delegate to an international conference of librarians which happens to be taking place in Moscow this week. Rumours run through the crowd – the KGB are using secret tunnels to enter the building. A special Alpha Force will come in from the air. Thousands of riot troops are massed in Red Square and will soon move this way. Planes will come over spraying poisonous gas. The English journalist points to snipers on the roof of the Ukraina Hotel.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder. Vladimir, the newspaper boss, is staring down at me. He speaks in Spanish. What am I doing here? Where is Rob? I say that he was due back on a train arriving at midday. Vladimir tells me that I look ill. I nod and cough but I don’t feel ill. I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. Vladimir is insistent – I must go home, at least for a while. There’s no point in staying, nothing will happen for several hours. I will be needed tonight. I should come back then.

  I wake with a jerk. My head drags up from the pillow. Thump, thump, thump. For a moment I think that the sound is in my head. But no, someone is banging on the door. I stand up and stare down into the darkness of the courtyard. I look at my watch and it’s past two o’clock. Thump, thump, thump. I struggle into my clothes, open the door, and find Sasha standing there. He’s unshaven and looks as though he hasn’t slept for weeks. The birthmark on his face is crimson and his hair hangs loose. Where is Rob? He’s definitely in Moscow because Sasha spoke to him at the Democracy offices at two o’clock. But now no one is answering there. Sasha needs to find him now. Where can he be?

  We agree that he’s probably at the White House but what hope is there of finding him? Sasha sinks down on the steps, cursing. He’s close to tears. He talks but I can’t make his words into any shape. Above us, the strip-lights buzz, filling the landing with their green glare. Sasha’s feet are close to that ever-widening crack. I think of the hopscotch girl and hear the tap of her feet. I stare down at Sasha and remember how he used to talk to me. Those memories of his childhood. A man who’s seen so little kindness that he has difficulty even recognizing it. And yet even with his drinking and car stealing, he keeps on trying to speak the truth.