Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  “For one week in January we refused to admit the logic of no calories. There were no rations at all. It was that week that young Kolya surrendered his last gold coin. Seva bought sausages and cheese. You may have read that supplies were transported to Leningrad with great heroism over the frozen Lake Ladoga. Fearless truck drivers hurtled across the ice with doors open to the shattering cold so they could leap out if the road gave out. As starving citizens, the only way we would ever see such a miracle of calories was on the black market, where it was sold for valuables or the embraces of skeletons who were once young girls.”

  Another have-you-had-enough-yet look. Then the irony of another pirog. I had brought them. Maria did not ask, she just placed it in front of me with a wry, reflective smile.

  “By March it was still day-to-day survival. Always one day at a time; always we fought for each other. One of us always remained positive, like a guard on watch, so that black thoughts could not come into our little camp.”

  She paused here, lost in her thoughts.

  “Yes, I remember. I was going to talk about Little Kolya and how strong he was. There are several examples. In one he stood up for Plotnikova against a drunken soldier. That may well have speeded his evacuation. Since I am talking about the five, I will tell you about one time with Valentin.

  “I have said that Valentin was our leader. His humor was the darkest. He was always talking about the State and its blundering, about Comrade Stalin, his personal relations with him. This is an outrage! I shall call our Leader immediately. Perhaps his black talk helped us to rise above the trap we were in. By early March, Valentin Dmitrich was not rallying as he used to. He would get down as we all did. He bounced back with less force than he used to, like a ball that is dropped so it bounces less and less until it lies still.

  “We all had black moods. We hid them; it was part of the understanding we had between us. Kolya and I were shocked that such an understanding could be violated so openly.

  “Poor Valentin Dmitrich was spinning faster and faster—we could not see how this could end in a way that preserved the integrity of the five. Valentin was now sitting in Zina’s only chair; the rest had been processed for the animal-based glue, then burned for heat. He hung his head low between his knees. The only two possibilities were more ranting, or heaving sobs. Either of which would have been unbearable. I wanted to run out of the room. I didn’t dare move.

  “Only…‌Little Kolya detached himself from Zina, calmly walked over to Valentin and patted him on the top of his head. It’s difficult to explain how well he did this. A few pats full of humor, affection, leadership, other qualities. We all smiled, perhaps even Valentin (we couldn’t see his downturned face).

  “Valentin’s shoulders became soft, his left hand came away from a fistful of his hair. He was figuring how to surface with some dignity. ‘Now I understand,’ he said, bringing his head up a few inches, ‘how our young hero can be so good at catching rats.’

  “Enough of all this misery! Certainly none of the younger generation has any interest in it. To conclude, Valentin died of starvation in the middle of spring. Kolya was evacuated east a month later. In June Zina perished, when a shell hit the hospital she was working at (the Fascists had been trying to hit it for months). Seva was evacuated two months later to Moscow to perform secret physics. I was evacuated in October.

  “I will never forget Little Kolya’s departure. The manager of our building arrived with two bored-looking men. ‘You are Maria Nikolaevna Leontovich?’ Half-question; half-statement.

  “I knew immediately they had come to take me away. It felt little different than the time they had come for my father. They asked where ‘the boy’ was. Okay, they had me. I must protect Kolya. My soul screamed: not both of us!

  “Somehow they knew about the roof. Two men went after him; the manager stayed with me. It was a miracle to see these men, the energy they had as they ran for those stairs. Now I understood how slow, dazed and half-asleep we had become.

  “Just like that, Kolya was gone. We had only time for one quick look. Yes, eyes talk fastest. Kolya was too busy being brave in front of these thugs to have more than a short burst of a ‘so this is how it ends’ smile for me. ‘Where?’ I screamed. They waved me away. ‘He’s my brother, I have a right—’ Bang! They slammed the front door on me. I stood there, holding a piece of paper the manager had given me. “You are to report to School No. 284 (with address) at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow. Warm salutations, O. B. Plotnikova.

  “It is a lesson we all learn: the party always wins.

  “The next time I saw Kolya was 1983, when he appeared at my door. It was comical. I had spent half a year living in that soul’s eyes. He was like a third lobe of my brain. When I was forming an opinion, when I saw yet another disaster that just couldn’t be happening, when we had a stroke of good luck, always I ran to those eyes for a second opinion. Now here he was again. He had just left California; he had come home at last.

  “I knew all about him, of course. He was the famous dissident poet, Nikolai Petrovich Shalabonov. He was a child of the Siege. He played to this with great drama. His past bombed into nothing, his new life rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Leningrad, no mother or father, a son of this city that would not submit. His first name, he said, came from a refugee girl who fled with him to Leningrad (he never divulged this girl was me); his patronymic from the city’s namesake, his surname from his gentle mentor, Vsevalod Ignatovich Shalabonov.

  “I was so excited to see him I couldn’t keep still. I ran around him as if he were a conquering hero returned from the front. Oh, there was much goodwill from both of us, but in the end we were strangers. The gulf between what we felt for each other in our souls and what we found in normal, everyday life was just too wide. Normal everyday life! We had no days like that before.

  “Why did he come home? Do you want his story or mine? Well, we’ll start with his. The USA was too optimistic and happy; it got on his nerves after a while. Then there was his pact with Seva: they had agreed to meet at the statue of Peter the Great forty years to the day from the capture of Kolya’s first rat, November 7, 1941. Yes, I know; he didn’t arrive until two years later. To leave his family must have been terribly difficult for him.

  “My story? Well, you will remember I am a doctor. I know in detail most diseases. This includes cancer. If you look at a face out of the corner of your eye, quick-quick, you can sometimes see a white aura. This is no mystery; it is a quality of the skin. It is like an empty camp; soldiers are off at a war that has not been declared yet. That first time I saw him I knew your father had cancer. I don’t think he did yet, not from a doctor. Part of him knew, I think. He was a poet, and all poets are prisoners of clocks. Many clocks that measure their lines, their days, and, at last, their time in this world.”

  Part V

  LONDON AGAIN

  CHAPTER 1

  In St. Petersburg, I suffered the bone-aching reality of what my father had gone through (and what I had ignored), partly countervailed by Maria Kolokova’s warmth, our instant friendship. The two combined into a spiritual torpor, like those times in the morning when you lie in bed awake but can’t quite get up. On the tenth day I got back to my hotel to be handed an urgent message. Shura called. It is emergency. You must come to Athens. Repeat emergency. Without the “Athens” I would have thought the note was in error, Shura being a common male and female diminutive for Alexander or Alexandra.

  Sula called several hours later. She had just landed in Athens. Her father was in intensive care, a heart attack. It didn’t sound good. Sula hadn’t seen him since The Betrayal. I couldn’t help thinking it was a ruse. Sula, however, was smart enough to see through that.

  The plane to Frankfurt the next morning (where I would connect to Athens) nosed up over the city and headed to Germany, retracing that Nazi advance of sixty years before. I looked down on the terrain and thought again about my father. Where down there had he been born? Where were the
horrors that had frozen his mouth for years?

  Fathers. Sula’s was some Greek demi-god, a small-scale Ares, distrusted by all, yet powerful. Ares! Whose symbol, among others, is the vulture. I tried to find some feeling about Mr. Lamzaki—sympathy, anger, both. Tried. All I could muster was resentment for intruding on the story of my father, so new and alive in me.

  I took a cab to a penthouse apartment on the slopes of Lykavittos Hill. Athens looked anonymously foreign. Except for the Greek letters everywhere, you would be hard-pressed to say what country you were in. A bookish-looking young woman showed me to my room, then went off to arrange a welcome beverage for our rendezvous in the living room. She was friendly yet serious, with thick, black glasses, a heavy crucifix and a quiet voice, as if her stricken boss was in the next room. I sat in that large, open plan space, impersonal, male, like a law office reception area. It was hazy out. The Acropolis was right before me, over-proportioned down on that chiseled pedestal. I walked the elegant parquet floors. Looked at the artwork, all modern, all striking dabs, lines and splotches of color.

  Sula came back about an hour later. We hugged meaningfully before the hired help. (The crucifix-bearing lady was Livina, one of Mr. L’s PAs, the one who handled his domestic affairs.) The operation had been postponed; Lamzaki was not stable enough yet. They were hoping for tomorrow. I wasn’t following the details, waiting only for that celestial thumb to rotate one way or the other.

  Sula walked around this elegant apartment in charge and at home. She had an easy authority as her heels clicked and she rattled off instructions to our PA, or so I guessed from the rhythms of her Greek. Our unwanted third hovered at the doorway for one last matter. That tension of playing the adult, once defined as the ability to postpone immediate gratification, for this minor domestic scene. I had thought Sula’s immediacy would fade in St. Petersburg, that I would start to wonder what all the fuss was about. Not at all. At this spectacular church, that museum, a street scene over there, at the heroic Soviet monuments, at the horrors of the Siege museum and at the mass graves at Piskariovskoye, all I wanted to do was have her with me to share it, to comment on it.

  Once Livina had departed, we caught up with physical news. Extra! Extra! Couple in throes of raging passion. Such hunger. Her breath in my ear jolted my fuse box. Her usual reluctance to let me work my lips up her bad arm. Her foreign accent as she calls to me: her foreign “oy” to my Cro-Magnon “unh.” It was all there, stronger for its absence. Still all new.

  I hadn’t slept much the previous night, caught up in the abrupt good-bye to the land of my father and imminent reunion with Sula. Now, I lay there heavy, sated, completed, comfortable in Sula’s arms.

  Sula takes my hand. She leads me down the immaculately gleaming parquet hallway, a quick knowing, naughty, dark smile. I’m fine with this, but shouldn’t she be going to her father, not coming with me? Aren’t I the wrong man; her father the wronged one? Aren’t we talking betrayal here? Sometimes women can be so certain.

  Now she’s guiding me down a tree-lined path. Laden, black clouds occlude most light. In the shadows at path’s bottom a small way through a gap, a vague trail there. We are, I think, in Dante’s dark wood. Sula pulls me through the foliage, darker here. I nearly fall, slipping on wet clay. After a time our way, now narrower, leveled out. Sula pulls at me with urgency. Hurry. Now a first row of stones. Oh, tombstones. Covered in a blanket woven of creeping vines that rise into a thorny knoll. Now cypress trees, flared shadows up into the darkened sky. We hurry on. Sula’s beseeching pull. More slabs just visible under a heaving swell of thicker foliage. A distant owl hoots. Now it’s darker. The wind bends the cypress trees, moves the clouds, opening up the moon. I feel tall into the night like those cypresses. Then ahead the lane opens up to hard graveled ground. Just ahead a mausoleum, vines up the facing like snakes basking in the moon-reflected light. A gust of wind moves the trees and I can see the large letters chiseled into the lintel under the pediment. Greek, led by a cat’s eye, some a’s, other letters. I don’t know them. The trees unbend. The facade is dark again. Sula is pulling me more urgently now. What? You want to go in there? What? Her hand so warm, all else cold, getting colder.

  A deadened acoustic in this marble room: the wind’s complaint is outside now. From a vertical gap in the back wall a dim glow. I’m pulled through it into a small chamber. Now wide stone stairs lead down to the source of light. Come on! Sula pulls me to go faster. We dream-glide down the steps to a long corridor, more thought than movement. Sula rips a torch off the wall. It looks like a femur with the hip ball on fire, a tremulous light. Hurry! she beseeches, her pull does. Please! More corridors, stairs, a large room with the squeal of bats, a whomp-whomping of wings. Corridors, more stairs: down, along; down, along; down. We’re nearly there. Sula, what’s our mission? Is it to betray? Is our story now paramount and is that right? Can we abandon blood, forsake the past, hog all headlines? Tell me!

  Sula is puffing along now, no time or breath for talk. The stale air down here tickles my nose with its bone meal, bat-furred dust. Still Sula pulls, an importuning. She is winded now, panting: I betray/I beseech; I betray/I beseech. I have to stop, my nose, that dust …I’m gonna, gonna sn— No, it dampens to a light tickle. I betray/I beseech. We go some paces further. Ahead is more light, bright, flickering to large unseen flames. We’re close now. Finally I can find out what this is all about. I have to stop again; it’s back. Gonna, gonna, gonna. Sula pulls with all she’s got. I try to move. Gonna, gonna…‌I betray/I beseech one last time. Gonna, gonna: Sneeze! A shout of a sneeze, a half-sneeze, choked off by a realization. I slump down, the cold marble seeping into buttocks and blades. So close: just over there is where we needed to get to.

  Thanatos, that’s the name on the lintel. That’s who she’s tugging me to. Sula wants me to intervene on her father’s behalf. Talk Mr. T. into sparing her father. Sing him a song. Hat ‘n’ cane if that works. Anything. All you need, Jim Shalabon, all you’ve ever needed, is the exact right song.

  There will be no songs. I am an unstrung Strat, plugged in, amped up, alert to currents, crackling with charged inner circuitry. Sensitive loud nothing.

  I wake up alone, disoriented; then Sula is sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed. I tell her about my dream. I feel like a patient whose fever has finally broken.

  CHAPTER 2

  The next day, Lamzaki’s surgery was successful. I came back to London three days after that. There were details to sort with our new house, enough to fill a few hours each day. For those other hours I fell back on my case. In Russia I had obtained an unexpected clue from Maria Kolokova. Her son, Nikolai, an accomplished physicist/mathematician, had defected to the UK in 1972, assisted by Francine McLain. Maria was unsure about romance between her son and the “anglichanka” as she called Francine. The English lady. Two years before, in late 1999, Francine had brought my father’s book of poems to Maria like a letter of introduction, for it was her son’s inscription on the fly leaf, Nikolai Kolokov, and not Nikolai Shalabanov, Dad. Ironically, both Nikolai’s had been named by Maria—in honor of her father. Kirk could only have gotten that book from Francine, proving they’d met. The kicker was that Nikolai had died only seven months after arriving at Cambridge. Another cocaine overdose; another non-user. The papers from the time talked about a Soviet assassination.

  Most probably, Francine introduced her defector scientist to her scientist friend Catherine Drysdale, or least mentioned one to the other. In 1972 Francine was still in Moscow. Drysdale was at Oxford, eighty miles away from Nikolai.

  Then another break. I had plenty of time, with Sula still in Athens, so I contemplated a trip out to Lord Buchan in Herefordshire. He was the one who’d “shared a taxi” with Claudia, possibly in the July—his estate was near Newport, her rail destination that month—before she disappeared. A small loose end. Neeta had been working on a meeting, but Buchan bucked at that. I was thinking about doing a Drysdale, showing up on his
doorstep. First some digging. Through a combination of Internet searches and going through the archives of the Hereford Times at the British Library, I pieced together a story of drug parties and, in 1987, a drug death over the Christmas holidays at one of them. Several of the articles referred to Fey Shipley, the twenty-year-old victim, as Buchan’s fiancée. Two facts jumped out. Fey Shipley was attending Somerville College, Oxford. Also, she had died of a cocaine overdose; methamphetamines were not mentioned. Friends and family strenuously denied Fey took drugs. It could be a coincidence, or it could go back to Dr. Catherine Drysdale: it was her college and her drug. I skipped Buchan and went straight for Drysdale.

  As before, she swept the door open to whomever. She squinted into the brightness of this May evening. Her face held out well; not her shoulders, which slumped noticeably.

  “I didn’t think you’d be back.”

  “You didn’t think I’d get this far?”

  “Far?”

  She ushered me in. No mail on the bike seat this time. The same horsehair couch, coffee table, French provincial chair. The roses on the side table were pink this time. Strangely, next to them lay my vowel-challenged photographer’s album, just where I’d left it.

  We sat in our same places. Me on that horsehair couch, elbow on its high, thin arm. Her in the elegantly curved chair with the fluted wooden arms. No pretense of small talk this time. No offer of tea, either.

  “I’d like to go back further. To Nikolai Kolokov.”

  “I see what you mean…‌by far.”