I decided to take a tram to the centre and stroll around for a bit, instead of going home. Much as I have spent my whole life doing, leisurely, aimlessly, popping into this café or that, looking for anyone I knew in the queue.
No sooner did I get to Kreshchatik Street, than I saw what, subconsciously, had inspired my present stroll: the need to gather the target information Kostya had asked for. But to list the cafés I frequented and continue to frequent them, all the time expecting a bullet in the back or the base of my skull, was not the most agreeable of tasks. Not being a masochist, I would have to think of something better, more humane.
So to Great Zhitomir Street and the cellar café adjoining the baker’s. It was gloomy and practically empty. I ordered coffee.
By the third cup, my thoughts, deployed for battle, had taken the problem by storm, exciting, as if quite independent of me, even my admiration. Here once more was proof of the essential simplicity of genius. I knew what I had to do, and the relief so offset the effect of caffeine as to let me relax.
It only remained for me to pick the café to be killed in, and when. A public killing was not, of course, an easy matter. Nor was the getaway. But he was the pro, so over to him. Though if he got caught, and it came out that his victim had been an adulterer, bang would go my posthumous reputation, and my death would be more food for gossip than a tragedy. No, escape he must, and his motive be for ever a mystery. Another coffee was called for.
“Another double strength?” asked the coffee machine operator.
“Just ordinary.”
I took two lumps instead of my usual one, and set about thinking of, or more precisely, considering every café I knew, before deciding on this one as the least busy towards evening closing time. There would be rarely more than two or three caffeine addicts here then, but on the other hand, he might break his neck on the steep cellar steps dashing for the door. With so much else on my mind, it was curious that I should be so concerned for Kostya whom I had never seen and might never get to see.
6
THE OLD PHOTOGRAPHER was as good as his word. The photograph was not bad: portrait of the popular actor! The faint, enigmatic smile and the pensive narrowing of eyes were distinctly Leninesque.
It was evening and raining. I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking rosehip tea, and relishing the fact of being alone. My thoughts were of the surprise I was preparing for my wife, not of the new turn in our dysfunctional relationship, which involved her staying out all night and simply popping in next morning to change or to pick up something – so early that I heard, rather than saw, her return.
There was now a touch of both heaven and considerateness in her quitting of the scene. With her about, I could not have been moved to such sentimentality by the evening rain. Some there are whose absence is cause for joy, even happiness. And when your wife happens to be one of them, it’s bad.
The ringing of the phone failed to banish the cosy atmosphere.
It was Kostya, telling me that I should next day deposit the needful in Box No. 331 at the sub-post office, top of Vladimir Street, opposite St Andrew’s Church.
Weary, I decided it was time for bed, with the rain for a lullaby. But before turning in, I went so far as to take paper and my diary, and select for my demise the following Thursday – a special day, being the one on which I had invited a certain young lady to a café in Podol, which for one whole happy year and a bit had become our “Thursday café”. Then as now it had no proper name. On the River Port tram route three minutes’ walk from Contract Square, it had an outer and an inner room, both gloomy and ill-lit. I could have chosen a better, more congenial venue for my death, but this was the one I opted for.
On my sheet of paper I wrote “Thursday, October 12, 1800 hrs, Fraternal Street, café by tram stop 31 (for Post Office Square)”, slipped it and my photograph into an envelope, and duty done, went to bed.
7
Tuesday
NEXT MORNING I deposited my envelope in Box No. 331.
With two and a half days of life left, it was now a question of how to spend the readily calculable balance of seconds, to say nothing of minutes and hours.
Finished with the post office, I did not feel like going home. We were clearly in for a brief spell of golden autumn weather – red leaves, yellow leaves, crisp, bracing air, cloudless blue sky and not a breath of wind. Heaven, if given to autumns, could hardly better this.
I made for Podol by way of St Andrew’s Descent. The galleries and boutiques were just opening. The only sound that of my cheap plastic soles on the cobbles.
Walking aimlessly, I ended up at my Thursday café in Fraternal Street, which happily was open, judging by the student-like creature tucked away in a corner over his first coffee of the day. I, too, bought a small coffee, and sitting at the table in the opposite corner, thought of my remaining minutes and hours of life. I ought, I felt, to take pen and paper and draw up a plan: what to do, who to see, and for once try to manage at least half of it. I had the pen, but not the paper.
The young man had a briefcase.
“You couldn’t oblige me with a sheet of paper?”
Without a word he tore a double sheet from a notepad, and as I sat collecting my thoughts over it, rummaged in his briefcase.
“Tuesday, October 10,” I wrote, noting it to be 10.30 by my watch.
What to do? Today? Now? The morning seemed wasted already. But thinking of those I would like to see, I saw also the sentimentality of so doing. How to say goodbye, supposedly not knowing that it was goodbye? And to meet up only to talk boringly as per usual was something I had had more than enough of.
But Nina, semi-given-up on marriage, how about her? Always more friends than lovers, we had now and again not been averse to playing lovers also. Ours was a burnt-out passion neither of us wanted to forget. Probably because of the way it had of blazing into life and throwing us into each other’s arms, leaving us to drink tea, say it was madness, promising to be in future just good friends. It didn’t work, though, and we ended not seeing each other, just telephoning, and that increasingly less often. Chancing to see her coming out of Bonbon, the Magyar café, in the amorous embrace of a handsome, self-assured creature, I saw that part of my life to be over, and a sense of peace ensued that extended to her. I stopped phoning, thinking that was what she would now prefer. She, too, gave up phoning.
“Ring Nina,” I wrote on my sheet of paper, and had another coffee.
I found the glaring whiteness of the paper irritating. My urgent concern to make the most of what time I had left seemed suddenly totally devoid of meaning. See who? Ring who? I was needed by no-one, and needed nobody. A fact so obvious as to prompt an icy shiver followed by more positive thoughts, amongst which was the absolute rightness of my decision in favour of suicide. Collecting yet another coffee and taking a colder, more realistic view, I deleted “Ring Nina”, and was at last free to devote to myself such time as remained.
The young man at the far table got up and left, and I was alone in the café, the coffee machine operator, Valya, having disappeared into some rear area. The dark interior contributed to the general gloom. Outside, the sun was shining, though to no useful purpose at this time of the year. Still, millions of citizens would be glad of it. Taking pleasure in what served no useful purpose had become a habit, and something I was fond of doing.
On Thursday evening, I would sit nearer the door. To make things easier.
8
Wednesday
GETTING UP AND going to the window I saw that the morning was a swirl of mist, then that my wife had not come home. Hence the feeling of vitality. Ahead lay the task of somehow filling this my last whole day on earth. A walk in the mist, a purely morning phenomenon, did not appeal.
I put the kettle on and sat at the kitchen table. So this was how life ended, I thought suddenly, conscious of counterfeiting old age – as if each day nearer my chosen Thursday marked an advance in my terminal illness.
Tea by a window, a view
of mist – as in some luxury Scandinavian clinic for incurables … Bergmanesque …
This year there would be snow and no me to see it.
But what if there were no snow this year, and I missed the fact?
No great loss. Kiev would economise on snow clearing, and that would be that.
My mind was a whirl of trivialities. Nothing of the elevated, the truly philosophical remained. As if I myself had always been trivial and shallow. And as if indeed now the one and only way to become of any account in other people’s eyes, if no longer in my own, was by a violent death. Which sounded silly. Clearly my good night’s sleep, peaceful awakening and subsequent contemplation of primordially unsullied mist was encouraging silly notions or at least most banal thoughts.
To stop thinking of Thursday, why not write letters to a few long-forgotten friends, touching on the future, and making Friday’s tragic news of my death the more poignant?
Leaving my tea, I went in search of a pen and wrote to the young divorcée in Moscow we had got to know while holidaying in the Crimea, exchanging a couple of affectionate letters afterwards.
Dear Tanya,
Forgive my not having written for so long. Life, after quietly disintegrating for the past two years, has now finally gone to bits. No work. No family. So I’m back at square one again with all paths open. “For the young our land has everywhere a road.” In a day or two I’ll think about my future. Meanwhile I mourn the past. Not in any very genuine sense, more in the traditional Orthodox manner we carry in our blood. And not exactly mourning – lamenting would be the better word. So when, in nine-and-forty days (or is it hours), I’ve done atoning and all the rest, I shall be thinking of heading Moscow-wards. It would be good to meet up and talk of old times and old friends. If you feel the same, write.
Address as per envelope.
Love, …
It practically wrote itself. I could have knocked off a dozen in the same vein, but didn’t.
The telephone rang.
It was my wife, drily announcing that she would be coming by car with a colleague to collect her things.
“In the red car?” I asked, but she hung up.
Rather than confront my wife and her “colleague” on this of all days, I quickly dressed, and left.
Still no let-up in the mist. Traffic feeling its way with yellow headlights. People looming strangely out of nowhere, only to dissolve in the general milkiness. A mystical as well as misty start to the day, the dawning of a different, a new world, where all would be well, and whither all might repair who had failed to find a place in the old.
I headed for the city centre with the intention of walking just as far as I could in the mist – to Podol and Fraternal Street. There was, perhaps, no sense in so doing, but with the valiant journeys of Chelyuskin and fellow explorers in mind, I sometimes felt the urge in these less heroic days to achieve, unseen by others, something comparable. Hence, on this last Wednesday of my life, this walk from one end of the city to the other in mist. The reward – a coffee, and coffee was something I would not be having much more of.
Two hours and a bit it took, and when I entered the café and approached the counter, it was, to be honest, with no sense of triumph. Mist deprives one of any sense of space or distance covered.
Out of the greyness into dim lighting. Apparently the first customer of the day, I sat at my favourite table in the corner. Valya had returned to her book behind the tall Hungarian coffee machine.
A girl wearing a leather cap and a shortish, dark grey old-style flying jacket came in.
She had a leather rucksack, and under her arm an artist’s portfolio. She brought her coffee to a table beside mine.
I would have liked to speak, make myself known, but seeing her deep in thought, did not.
Drinking up, I left, and roamed further afield in the mist. Though, it need hardly be said, with nothing like the touchingly naively joyous feelings of Wee Hedgehog of the children’s cartoon. Still, it cost no great effort to roam, letting one’s thoughts do the same. This, my last day, seemed likely to go down as my dullest ever, but I was not bothered.
9
Thursday
BY WEDNESDAY EVENING the mist had either dispersed a bit, or so merged with the darkness as to become less noticeable. Back at the flat, my spirits revived a little. Various bits and pieces of daily life were, I noted, missing, my former wife having, as it were, cleared up after her. Gone was the quartz alarm clock, as also were trinket boxes and hair brushes, leaving the flat just a touch more my own than hitherto. I breathed expansively as I made my round.
That night I had vivid dreams. I could not remember any of them, but so strong was my impression of their vividness, that on waking, I would rather have shut my eyes again and dreamt unmemorably on.
Still, I had something else to think about and get ready for.
I took a bath, shaved, did some ironing – I might have been going to act as witness at a wedding – then settled to my morning coffee.
And before I knew, it was evening, or what passes for it at 4.00 p.m., autumn or winter.
Two hours to go. No mad rush. Nothing more to do. All either done or not needing to be. A sense of elation almost. Proof at last of faith in myself and an ability to be cool and decisive. Not perhaps worth the trouble of a tragic solo performance never intended as a test of ability, but gratifying all the same.
Before leaving the flat, I pocketed my identification document and the letter I had written. For a moment I stood in the passage, wondering what else to take to give whoever turned out my pockets after death some clue as to the nature of the crime. But nothing suggested itself.
I gave the door a farewell bang, aware of the absurdity of so doing. Nerves, clearly.
Outside it was dark and very cold.
Leaving the metro at Contract Square, I passed the Skovoroda memorial with its benches of courting couples. A curious venue for budding or brief romance. Its appeal for the young maybe owing something to the hippy-like way-outness of Skovoroda himself.
But time was getting on and I wanted a double-strength coffee – for me, inveterate café-goer, equivalent of the smoker’s last cigarette and just as sacrosanct.
A tram overtook me, shedding feeble yellow light into the blackness of Fraternal Street, until it swung off towards the Dnieper. Again, total blackness, apart from the odd dimly lit window. Only one block to go now, and half an hour in hand.
I slowed my pace. Ten minutes would be enough for coffee.
But Podol blocks were of a length that was quickly walked. I was welcomed by Shufutinsky on tape at much reduced volume. My seat was free. In the small first room, men drinking vodka, and a canoodling couple in the corner. The second room sounded busy. Taking my coffee to my table, I slipped off my watch, and placed it in front of me. The coffee was good and strong, as if Valya, divining it to be my last, had made a special effort.
Fifteen minutes to go. My hands were shaking.
Two girls came in and ordered liqueurs.
“No sitting on over them,” said Valya as she served them. “Today’s my son’s birthday and I’m closing early.”
Twelve more minutes.
I drank my coffee and got up to get another.
“Bit shaky, eh?” Valya observed sympathetically. “Overdo it last night?”
I nodded.
“Vodka’s the thing for that.”
“No money.”
“This is on credit,” she said, pouring generously.
I thanked her and returned to my table.
“Drink up and go, everyone,” Valya announced edgily. It was now 5.55.
The men went like lambs, followed by the inebriated from the inner room.
I sat staring fascinated at the open door through which they all went, but no-one came in.
“Come on now,” said Valya standing over me.
I was, I saw, alone in the place.
“One good turn deserves another. My Vasya’s 18 today, and I’ve got the sa
lad to see to.”
I drank up, and on my way out collided in the door with a man in a short leather jacket.
“We’re shut!” shouted Valya, as I stood aside for him.
“Just one vodka,” I heard him say as I walked away.
It was too dark to see the watch I was holding, but it was, I felt sure, 6.00 exactly, and distant chimes confirmed it.
I headed slowly back to Contract Square, listening for any sound of pursuit from the man, wanting to look back, but not daring.
Arrived at the tram turning point, I did look back, but there was no-one.
My fear left me, but so did my other senses.
Mind a blank, doing no more than breathe, I sat on an empty seat at the Skovoroda monument.
How lonely he was up there.
Some were born to be lonely, even in death.
By my watch: 6.40.
Forty minutes of unlooked-for life.
I sat for half an hour or more, then walked up to Kreshchatik Street, and coming on a novice prostitute the worse for drink, took her back to my flat, promising to pay in the morning.
10
Friday
IT WAS A night of dreams, now nightmarish, now idyllic, which depending on whether I was holding in my arms a girl whose name had escaped me, or edging away to the far side of the bed. Next morning I woke with a headache. I got up, leaving my visitor deeply asleep, and sat drinking instant coffee in the kitchen. Several times I looked into the bedroom, only to be surprised by how deeply she was sleeping. The last time I took a closer look at her – we had, after all met in semi-darkness and bearing in mind the state I was in, I couldn’t help admiring her courage, and I felt concerned. Before I arrived, she might have been driven off in the car of some sado-masochist!
The logical conclusion was that I had done well, very likely saving her from being beaten up, possibly worse. At which point I remembered promising to pay, though not how much. I felt bad, and glad she was so deeply asleep. Still, something had to be done. I might have to borrow. Borrow? To pay off a prostitute? Had I really sunk that low?
A Matter of Death and Life Page 2