She was gone, like the flu. It was the first Tuesday in November. I was on my own again. Winter was on its way. There were two tentative falls of snow that quickly thawed.
Looking from my window, I felt as if I had dropped out of the march of time and needed to catch up. But how?
Opting for simplicity, I betook myself to the reading room of the Housing Office Library, and sitting next to a nosy old pensioner, looked through the last fortnight’s newspapers. And on the back page of Evening Kiev I spotted, framed in black, condolences for one Shustenko, Nikolay Grigorievich, sometime Chief Engineer, Artyom Works, on the tragic death of his son, Konstantin. The Kiev Gazette for the same date went into where and how he had been murdered. The militia were treating it as a vengeance killing directed at the father, currently Chairman of the Independent Real Estate Exchange. There had been an attempt to blow up his car, followed by two arson attacks on his flat.
The Kiev criminal news for the other days was in the same vein: murders, bombings, roughings-up – the daily norm of any big city.
So I’d not missed much being ill. The only difference was the weather. And the snow which I had never thought to see again.
To mark my continuing hold on life, I decided to go to my Fraternal Street café.
Apart from the rather strange girl I had seen once before, in black leather cap and shortish flying jacket, with artist’s portfolio, it was empty.
“Would you care for a vodka?” I asked.
“I would,” she said, looking up, “and some chocolate if there is any.”
Bringing another 100 grams for myself, I sat down for a chat, but after downing the vodka and pocketing the chocolate, she made ready to go.
“Sorry to rush, but I live way out at Borshchagovka,” she said.
She was Anya, in her final year at the Institute of Arts, of which I had once heard that no-one normal got accepted there. Still, it’s the abnormal who are the more interesting. Dangerous company they may be, but never boring.
At 6.30 Valya made plain that it was time I took myself off.
It was snowing.
21
THE NOVEMBER 7 celebrations passed unnoticed, although next evening as I entered the block I found a medal-bedecked veteran, last of the Mohicans, standing incapably drunk and as if for ever at the door of the lift.
I had got home feeling cold, only to discover that the flat was, too.
Throwing off my quilted anorak, I set to work. Last year we had draught-proofed at the beginning of October, when my wife had been in charge, quietly suggesting what should be done, and rather than endure sulky silence, I had done it. This year winter had caught me on the hop, in an on-my-own state happily punctuated by the comings and goings of Lena.
My divorce case proceeds were dwindling. Kostya’s $50 were still safe in his wallet, and likely to remain there when what I had was gone. They were not mine to touch. Like the other souvenirs of that rainy night, which now and then I laid out on the table, still not reading the letter, but studying the photograph of the weary wife with her baby. Now she would be even wearier.
Sometimes it seemed that these were things I had found and should be taking back to the address on the envelope. Going through Kostya’s pockets was something I had forgotten, though not the fact of having done so. I kept having the strange sensation that what had happened had been nothing to do with me. I had simply been walking along, found the wallet lying in the street, and now had to return it. I could do it by post.
I would sit drinking tea, looking at the photograph of mother and child. In this whole affair she was the one innocent victim. The child was, too, but it would be some years before it became aware of the fact. Of Kostya I thought less often. His chosen employment would have been the death of him sooner or later. In a sense, lives would have been saved by his early death. Or would they? No. His death would merely provide additional employment for his fellow hit men.
I made up a paste, stuffed foam rubber into the gaps around the window frames, and stuck strips of newspaper over. Half an hour and the job was done. No draughts, but it was no warmer. Still, everything takes time – heat from my radiators especially.
Drinking tea in the kitchen, I looked out at the cold, uncommunicative winter evening.
Tomorrow children would be snowballing, grown-ups telephoning the militia to collect from the bus stop the frozen corpse of a drunk. Winter I endured in much the spirit of a ferryman waiting for his river to unfreeze.
What, I wondered, would Kostya’s widow be thinking about, also perhaps gazing out of the window, baby asleep beside her, as snug and warm as she was cold and lonely.
Maybe one day I would get to know her. “By chance.” After all, I had her photograph and address. If it so fell out, I would try to help in some way.
And what was my wife doing now? Where? Who with?
No, no problem there – she wouldn’t be lonely.
Weighed down with weariness and a craving for warmth, I went to bed.
22
SEVERAL DAYS PASSED. The flat warmed up, and was cosy to return to from –15°C outside. So for the greater part I stayed in, drinking tea and reading the same old free Advertisers, which was dull. My days consisted simply and solely of waiting for Lena to ring. We had not seen each other for a week. Usually she rang towards evening, but this time it was noon when she called. She was at home with a lousy cold, and would call me when she was better.
Before I had time to wallow in self-pity, the telephone rang again. Dima. “Come tonight and have a glass or two.”
Eight p.m. saw us shut in the little boutique, warmed by an electric fire. Dima laid out the usual fare, switched on a cassette player, and poured lemon vodka.
“Heard what happened to Kostya?” he asked after our second glass.
“I saw in the Gazette.”
“Seeing that he didn’t do the job, he owes you.”
“So what, now he’s no more?” I asked, uneasy lest my voice betray me. Dima stared, licking his fat lips as if they were dry. So convinced was I that he knew, that I poured myself another and drained it at a gulp.
Reaching into an inner pocket of his denim jacket, he kept his hand there so long that I felt suddenly I was past caring. What must be, must be, and if tackled, I’d tell the truth.
His hand, when eventually it emerged, held some dollar bills which he laid on the table.
“Kostya and I worked on trust,” he said, still staring. “He was never one for cash in advance. So now I’ll have a word with someone else if you like.”
“No longer any need.”
He nodded, sighed and drank.
“Were you and he on friendly terms?” I asked.
“No such thing nowadays. Just business relationships. Kostya was trustworthy. Nice bloke. Still, can’t be helped. That’s life. Another will take his place.”
Repeating the phrase to myself, I wondered what exactly he meant. The words doubled their meaning, even deconstructed themselves. It was nothing whatsoever to do with the lemon vodka. Just the richness of Turgenev’s “great and mighty” Russian language asserting itself.
Disconcertingly sober, I poured myself another, and one for Dima, although he was already well gone.
The dollars were nearer his hand than mine. Better for them not to have been there at all, claiming my attention in a way that Dima’s half-closed eyes were humorously aware of. Taking a larger glass and pouring in the contents of his own, he filled it from the bottle, and with a wry grin and a “Down the hatch!” drank the lot. Then, screwing a $20 bill into a ball, he sniffed it.
I didn’t respond. Maybe I wasn’t expected to. Dima was drunk, too far gone to be caught up with. All I wanted was to go home and sleep.
23
I SURFACED LATE next wintry morning with no headache, surprisingly fresh, but hard put to recall more than snippets of my conversation with Dima. But there, in my jacket pocket, were the dollars, screwed up $20 bill included. How, Dima being drunker than me, they ha
d got there, God alone knew.
Beyond my frost-patterned windows fluffy snow flakes were falling.
Breakfast. To tick of wall clock and boiling of kettle, I munched a sausage sandwich, feeling at peace. Dima knew nothing. How could he? And now I could safely ask further about Kostya and his wife of the haunting face, whom, reality yielding to fancy, I felt sure I knew already.
Cold shrinks, reduces volume. I remembered that much from physics at school. A precept that seemingly embraced the non-physical, now that winter was shortening, compressing my day, making me spend most of it at home in the warm. Winter, clearly, deepened a sense of loneliness, loneliness not being governed by the laws of physics.
Loneliness was now the air I breathed, taking charge of my dreams, foisting the same one on me several times in succession, turning nights of repose into moralistic object lessons. These dreams, like TV soaps, had their themes, their heroes and a certain attractive, ethereal, green-eyed, blonde heroine, of whom, when no longer dreaming, it was a relief to be rid of. It was not that I preferred reality to dreams, rather the reality of imagination to the animated cartoon.
For if life be no more than to contend with loneliness, then what cheaper and more dependable form of alleviation than imagination?
As I drank my tea, my thoughts were of her to whom I felt so deeply obligated, while knowing nothing of her, not even her name.
*
That evening I went to Podol to see Dima and glean what I could about the family that, as a result of my recent depression, was a family no longer. It was still snowing. The fluffy, leisurely flakes created a Christmas fairy-tale aura of tranquillity.
In the small area between the two rows of kiosks and boutiques more people were about than usual. Nearing Dima’s boutique, I stopped dead in horror – it was now no more than a burnt-out shell drifted over with snow, exciting the curiosity of passers by. “Burned down this morning,” said a bent old woman with an astrakhan collar.
“I saw it . Young fellow chucks in a bottle of petrol, his mate flips his cigarette after it, and whoosh! Up it goes, and out rushes the assistant, jacket ablaze, and rolls in the snow.”
Again my world had shrunk, contracted, and to next to nothing. I had no idea where to find Dima, having neither his address nor his telephone number.
Soon tiring of watching the snow efface all traces of the fire, I set off for Fraternal Street, in search of the familiar.
The café was quiet. My table was taken by a silent elderly couple, quaffing vodka as if their lives depended on it. They were smartly dressed. Maybe they had suffered some misfortune.
Valya greeted me with a smile.
I sat over 100 grams of vodka until the café closed.
24
DAYS PASSED. NO-ONE rang. With amazing persistence a never-ending torrent of snow floated down in feathery flakes past the window.
As often as I stopped to look, the sight enthralled me but sent thought scuttling into hiding, as if in fear, leaving me to confront the torrent more in the manner of an animal – a wolf or hare – than a human being. Something within me died, and I might stand ten or 15 minutes at the window until distracted by some sound or other. At which point the ordinary thinking human that was me would revive and put the kettle on for tea, think thoughts again and shape his mood accordingly. Usually it was his loneliness that he thought about, and those who might have rescued him, extricated him from it, but hadn’t. Then women in general, and this on the strength of his believing Woman’s sacred duty always to have been to combat Man’s loneliness. The moment would come for a deep sigh and a cry of “Rubbish!”. And in the lull that followed, into his mind’s eye would steal the image of a woman he knew, and was not averse, even a little glad, to see appear. One that he dwelt on and carried with him.
The snow whirled, and my sense of loneliness mounted infinitely faster than small coins in the piggy-bank Father gave me as a child. I remembered breaking it open, and helped by Father, reckoning up my capital. I remembered, too, Mother’s loud, mannishly coarse complaint that that wasn’t enough for half a new piggy-bank.
My thoughts turned to the dollars given back to me by Dima. As I put them on the table, I felt suddenly that I must wash my hands. It was a physical urge, more on the part of my hands than myself, a dichotomy so ridiculous as to prompt a smile. Washing one’s hands after handling money – dollars at that! – savoured of the puke-making, moral reading prescribed in a distant past in the pages of the Literary Gazette.
Calmer, I did in the end wash my hands before considering the dollars further. After long trying to decide not so much where I stood regarding them, as where they stood regarding me, I hit on words that said it all: they were someone else’s, not mine. And at once all stress vanished, the unpleasant sensation in my fingers ceased.
Dirty money it might be, but what money, other than the freshly printed, wasn’t? The fate of any currency being to pass through the hands of rogues, criminals and bribe-takers. So, ownership established, to restore it was now only a question of time and of resolution on my part.
It was still snowing. And I was thinking no longer of the money, but of the woman who was unaware that it was hers. The woman of the photograph beside me and my cooling cup of tea.
Night was descending over the city, together with the snow.
25
TWO FURTHER DAYS of snow and loneliness, during which I finally resolved to discharge a real, if self-appointed, duty.
The dollars from Dima and the $50 from Kostya’s wallet I put into an envelope on which I wrote the latter’s address.
At midday, I set out to walk, expecting to take about an hour and a half.
Face smarting from the intense cold, I walked slowly, having lost something of my initial resolve, and was not sorry to see a food store with cafeteria and people drinking coffee. I went in and joined the queue.
The coffee was stewed and would have been better left undrunk, but masochistically I took my time over it.
Arriving at the block and finding the right door, I hoped that there would be no-one on the other side of the blue-painted plywood. I pressed the bell, intending to wait only a minute.
Footsteps. Inspection of my tense expectant self through the spyhole, then a woman’s voice asking guardedly, “Who do you want?”
The question caught me unawares, and the distorting spyhole would not have shown me to advantage.
“I’m a friend of Kostya’s,” I said uncertainly.
The door opened a little, and there was the face of the photograph, fresh-complexioned, not in the least weary, reddish brown hair shoulder-length and silky. Her long black skirt and bright red blouse suggested, to my relief, that she was on the point of going out.
“I owe him money … I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Marina,” she said, extending a hand.
“Tolya.”
“Come in,” she said. “But quietly – Misha’s asleep.”
We made our way to the kitchen.
“Would you like some coffee?”
I said I would, adding that I had been sorry to hear what had happened to Kostya, and that it must be hard for her.
Turning from the stove, she looked at me wide-eyed.
“It’s funny,” she said slowly and wearily, “but you are the very first to offer condolences. Any number of people phoned when he died, but only to confirm that he had. As if they thought there was some trick about it. And when I said that he had, end of story – no commiseration, no inquiry after us … Did you know him well?”
“To be honest, no. Only through business …” I laid my envelope on the table. “But he was always reliable … Always ready to help …”
For a while there was silence, then she sat down opposite me, and we drank our coffee. She looked at the envelope, and then inside.
I expected some reaction – gratitude, if not verbal then in manner – but there was none.
“It’s difficult, very difficult without him,” she sa
id slowly, looking into her cup. “It wasn’t always easy when he was here, but nothing like this. Now I’m stuck here like a caged animal. Baby can’t go out in this weather, and I can’t go out and leave him. Kostya’s parents don’t ring. Thinking I hate them now he’s dead.”
“Maybe I could help.”
“Very kind,” she said. “Things will be easier once we’re through the winter.”
She was far more beautiful than the black-and-white photograph had suggested. But the fatigue I had seen in her face was still there, in the way she spoke, moved and sat at the table.
Finishing my coffee, I got to my feet.
“May I leave my phone number – in case you need any help?”
She thanked me, and I wrote it in her book.
It occurred to me, as I walked away, that I had failed to get her number. Glancing back at the five-storey Khrushchev-era block, I tried to decide which of the third-floor windows were hers, but could not. I had not noticed what they looked out on. Still, that was not important. Any more than not having her telephone number. Maybe she would ring me. I walked on.
26
IT HAD NOT till now occurred to me that duty done and a debt repaid might have some effect on mood, so notional a concept being the stuff of the young revolutionary and legend. “Debt”, when not of the financial kind, had been a word delivered with a touch of sarcasm. Financial debt was something I had always tried to avoid. Now, in my thirtieth year, here was the word acquiring its full and conventional meaning for me, a me not only easy in mind, but also experiencing a new sense of satisfaction or contentment. And on the strength of this sense of a duty discharged, albeit in monetary guise, I began to think well of myself. Which may have been why I started the day unusually early, mooching about my one-room flat, bursting with energy and at a loss what to do with it.
It was dark, but day was breaking, hastened by the appearance of lights in the block opposite.
A Matter of Death and Life Page 5