“I don’t want to get drunk in front my family, my former family. It would be what they expect. But the fear of making a fool of myself drives me to the thing that’s guaranteed to make a fool of me. Nature is perverse.”
“God has a reason for giving you this problem. I know you don’t believe, but interpret it your way. This wedding is an opportunity, a key moment for you, Max. Sometimes in our greatest challenges we find our greatest resource. For me, it’s God. For you, perhaps you will discover just what that great resource is, some grace that will help you. Kindness, for example; just being kind even if they’re setting your arse on fire. Anyway, I shall pray for your sobriety.”
“Thank you.”
“Your daughter must love you, of course.”
“No. She never knew me.”
“Love is fixed in us, but we can’t choose who or what we love.” Max felt Masha’s shadow cross him. “You offered, she accepted. There is some tiny nut of love in there.”
“I don’t think it’s love, Father. Curiosity, perhaps. Maybe even vengeance.”
“And on your part?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Perhaps it will just be nice to see the old folks again.”
At the headland summit, a sea breeze suddenly warmed them. Through the heat haze oil tankers lay like slugs on a shaky sea. Both were short of breath.
“Masha talked of the depth of your daughter’s disappointment when you walked away. She described it as quite shocking in its intensity, she said it was like sitting with someone who had been touched by death.”
“Masha is melodramatic.”
“Why not act as if you love her? That’s an act of love in itself. You’ve offered this wedding, arranged the church, involved me, are preparing a feast. Don’t bale out half way, Max. Follow through.”
All the disappointment Max had caused down the years resonated in the priest’s adult encouragement. A million fingers wagged from the past.
“Masha says she has problems? Your daughter.”
“Problems?”
“Like yours.”
“Mine?”
“So, is it genetic?”
“Is what genetic?”
“Well, anyway, she’s one of those for whom Christ came to earth. And you can help her. An atheist can do Christ’s work.”
“Can he?”
“You’re not aware of the power you’ve been granted, Max. You can help her. As long as you stay away from the bottle yourself, of course.”
Max recalled HG Wells refusing to drive in France for fear the temptation to run down a priest might be too great.
“She has come to find out something.”
“She’ll certainly do that.”
“Don’t make it about yourself, Max. Make it about her.”
“For some of the guests it will be about me.”
“To hell with them. It’s about Lucy. And Jimmy.”
“Timmy.”
“They are the heart of the sacrament. They have come to you for grace.”
“Oh come on, Father Gregory. Biologically, yes, she’s my daughter; but in every other way, there is no connection.”
“’There is no time scale on it, no matter what has gone on. She is your flesh and blood, your line. She has been brought by the guiding hand of God. Even if she doesn’t believe. Some things are best not questioned.”
Max laughed. There seemed no argument with that. They stood for a while and absorbed the blue heat of the day. “Look, Father Gregory, I have nothing for her but a wedding gift. If I’m honest, I still don’t know why I did this. If I had a reason I’ve forgotten it.”
“You are an atheist doing God’s will. Of course it’s confusing. We don’t know why we do certain things, but we discover how to help as we go along, but you have to be there when the chance reveals itself. You know Goethe?”
“I’ve read a little.”
“He said, ‘The power is in the starting.’ Or words to that effect. I haven’t actually read him; a parishioner gave me the quote when we were discussing the church roof.”
Georgia – September 1999
The fear of her flying back to the bottle edged the trip with a nervous vigilance. The journey began to settle into looks and glances at the main player to see if there were signs of preoccupation or moodiness, and Lucy assumed the gravitational pull of a black hole, sucking the family in till they disappeared.
On a stopover in Vienna, Henry asked if she missed it. She realised she was under surveillance and cravings that had been dormant in the recent weeks erupted again and her hard chip started computing how she might shake them off and get to a hidden bar. The more she smelled their fear the more she wanted to drink to spite them.
But the cravings were real; they ambushed and held her hostage for long sections of the day, obliterating everything to the lurid dream, knotting her stomach and clamping her throat. Every second ticked past in a tussle with the aches of her body for its medicine, and she thought it would never end even though she knew it would.
“He drinks like a Georgian,” a Brit from the embassy in Moscow had said. What if her father and she got drunk together? They might find their relationship in drunkenness, the family outcasts bonding in the bottle. She might, however, see the shock in his eyes she had seen in countless others when the depth of her alcoholism was perceived. She made other drunks feel good about their drinking; she was the one whose capacity to continue into some psychosis of intoxication reassured them. “I’m not as bad as her,” they would say and order another. “You make me feel good about my drinking” was the line of gratitude she heard most in her life. Death in one of its forms waited in another drink: suicide, asphyxiation, varices haemorrhage, traffic accident, liver collapse, extinction through self-disgust; she didn’t have another recovery in her. She had made the long haul back and could now walk down the street and look in another’s eye without melting, she had left the other drunks, druggies and wrecks behind and was treated with respect by others outside the family, but these things were worthless beside the infinite beauty of another drink. “There is no mental defence against the next drink” the old timers would say, “Stick close to the programme.” When Timmy asked if there were meetings in Tbilisi, he got his ass bitten for his concern, but somewhere in those streets the programme waited for her. However, she had no intention of finding it. She had no time for meetings, too much to do, she was getting married. Again. And then, she was going to have a drink. Afterwards. Somewhere, sometime. She just knew it.
In the Midnight Bar where she met Gia, Henry poured out his anxieties about Lucy to Timmy. There was an agenda in Henry that was slightly off-message. Lurking behind the concern something had Timmy wondering what Henry was really up to and what other reason he had for the trip.
“Personally I don’t know how I’m gonna react when I see him. There’s so much wound up in it all.” confessed Henry, “There was a time when I would quite happily have shot him.”
“You and two hundred million others.”
“With me, it was personal.”
“Everything’s personal.”
“I was family. That was enough. I wasn’t fired, just demoted to a position so menial it was guaranteed to have me walk. All of us who were close to him were regarded as security risks. Classic ass covering. Fire someone else.”
“You weren’t fired. You walked.”
“As good as.”
“If you stayed you might be running the Agency.”
“I don’t think so.” Henry had no time for banter. Timmy could see he was onto another problem, “Maybe we shouldn’t have coerced Peg into coming. Life’s been tough enough for her.”
“She’s okay now with Arnold.”
“What affects her will affect him too.” He pushed his
glass out of the sunlight that bisected the table. “I’m quite anxious that Peg might do something crazy.”
“Like go back to him?” It was meant as a joke but Henry wasn’t having humour. Timmy’s reactions were an irrelevance; he was just a presence who saved Henry the embarrassment of talking to himself.
“Maybe we’re sticking our heads in the lion’s mouth. Or certainly sticking Lucy’s in. Maybe we shouldn’t have forced the issue.”
“I didn’t force the issue. It was you and Lucy who were so fuckin’ keen.”
“Yes, I suppose she would have come anyway.”
When she had emerged from her relapse a place called Kosovo was on television more often than Sunset Beach, but in Tbilisi little marked the year that had passed. The dog garden haunted the street; Joseph’s car sat where it was when the child’s screams sucked her into the garden as if time moved nothing and her fall to an LA gutter was a dream. The constancy soothed her, but Joseph’s spurned invitation from the previous visit nipped her refurbished conscience. It wasn’t much of an offence compared to what she put her family through, but an offence against a stranger sits more awkwardly than one against the family. In this country where courtesy flowered strongly despite the corruption and violence, it was an insult of some proportion, and any opportunity to practise the amends step of her AA programme might diminish the urges to have a drink.
Joseph’s big hairdresser wife, looming in the hall shadow like a cigar store Indian, answered the door. At first she was unable to recognise her visitor, but when Georgia recalled the day of the dog, she seemed to buckle slightly, and made way for the American guest.
In the front room Sony badges and Chinese electronics gleamed under tinted photos of men in red caps and solemn women staring out at unimaginable futures from washed green backgrounds. Eight-inch busts of Lenin peeped between displays of patterned plates in a glass corner cupboard. The several ages of Joseph gleamed across a Yamaha upright piano in silver frames, tracing him from the young Frank Zappa tribute in a white wedding suit and cascades of black hair, through the receding years to the cropped version with his son under the Ferris wheel in Stalin Park, the pale amber of his eyes burning in the low winter light. The skinny woman beside them was the sapling into which the current mighty oak had grown.
The photographic collection was complete. Joseph was dead. She had kept her promise, but a year too late, and her shock was tinged with predictable self-reproof. The dog’s weight twisting the fork out of her hands, the cloud like a foot treading above them, briefly reclaimed her. She had killed a dog with an enemy whose decomposing body was found with five Russian mercenaries in a Kosovo village. The widow blamed NATO and western arrogance. She had raged at American and English businessmen in the street and at Joseph for making a widow of her.
“Why do you support people like that?”
Lenin’s gimlet eyes drilled into Lucy. She had no opinion. History didn’t happen in Santa Monica.
“They treated Serbs the way you treat your blacks.” A small motorbike whined past. “You think the world is your schoolyard; you bomb Belgrade and Baghdad but send senators to the Irish.”
It wasn’t the time to defend her country or deconstruct Milosovic and his ethnic cleansing as insatiable ego needs and unresolved childhood issues, so she sat and took it, and tried to give Joseph’s death meaning, but it had none. He had dramatically entered her life one morning then died doing what males love doing. The fall out of this masculine obsession scattered from the silent valleys of Kosovo to the classrooms of Denver, while on prime time they kept pushing the product – increases in defence budgets, NRA rationalisations, the Hollywood love affair with the handgun as penis substitute. Hunched across a table was what the soap opera boiled down to: a weeping hairdresser.
Lucy was not surprised by man’s inhumanity to man; she was surprised there wasn’t more of it. What surprised her was decency. Higher Powers and God and all the quasi Christian AA spiritual propaganda had withered on the back streets of Venice CA. She no longer believed in the natural goodness of man any more than the absurdity of original sin. She knew that nothing is more selfish and uncivilised than a baby, and in the pain of her recent disillusionment had learned the hard way how nurturing is a process of saving humanity from itself.
Joseph’s gift to her was a brief sense of the authentic; they had no time to develop the nonsense between them; for a morning things were uncontaminated by her wayward nature and the world’s bullshit, and she cherished him for that, and thanked him in his own front room, in a small, silent prayer between his widow’s diatribes.
Small things in the room booked space in her memory: a burn on the carpet, dust on the television screen, and no photos of the son beyond childhood. It was not the time to ask if the widow had lost both males in her life. Her grief was palpable, pressing its great weight down on the room, so Lucy sat in silence wondering where Joseph’s Kalashnikov was. Kosovo? Decommissioned by NATO? In the kitchen?
When the wedding was mentioned, the widow became the marriage fairy; matrimony was a joy to her, a sacred blessing on the human condition, and Lucy wondered if her enthusiasm stemmed from happy years fattening up with Joseph and watching his hair thin, or if it were another example of the human propensity to value something only when it has gone.
As for the couple next door it had all been much ado about nothing. The dog had been dead for a year but mother and daughter survived. “Rabies?” snorted the widow. “It was just a bad dog.” In the street Lucy stared at the new garden gate and felt cheated.
A feeling of universal insignificance sometimes descended on her and she saw humanity scrambling for dignity against the odds, insects with philosophy and insurance. God put lemmings on Earth as an example, not as role models. Alone in the tea bar, on the banquette she had shared with her father, the reason for the trip suddenly seemed false, and as far as Peg was concerned, unnecessarily cruel. An important part of the exercise was the pain she knew it would cause her mother. The thought shocked her.At a corner shelf over a tawny tea, a man flaunted a brocade waistcoat and yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, obviously gay in a sedate, Georgian way.
“Where’s the Cossack doorman?” she asked a young waiter.
“His brother’s place. In Nice.” The waiter added “France” because she was American.
“Is he a real Cossack?”
“He was a cavalryman. He fought Hitler on a horse and got seven years in the Gulag for it.”
On the road from Tbilisi, trucks and cars hurtled over the ruts and potholes without regard for life and released a torrent of demands from Peg to slow down; she didn’t come to this backwater to die. The tattered upholstery in the old minibus-taxi infected Peg’s sensibility with the stink of nicotine and the sweat of a thousand peasants. They stopped for a break in an ancient place with buildings older than Christ, and their driver swelled with pride at his penurious country’s rich heritage. But as far as Peg was concerned medieval ruins did not excuse medieval bathroom facilities.
Gradually changes distracted her: a stretch had a look of California, another a twist of Colorado. A large bird floated down a valley beside them. Sheep scattered on slopes, goats shuffled along gullies, domed churches slipped past. Passing landscapes hypnotised her, and a bright flare on Lucy’s hair lifted away time. One of Peg’s tail-chasers, long decayed into a decayed past, had christened Lucy ‘light-bulb’ because her hair was so bright. But her baby hair had been a corona of Max’s colour that started shedding immediately.
She remembered more about her mother the morning Max defected than she did about the husband who was in the process of abandoning her. But her mother always made sure she was the one everyone remembered. Peg heard Max mumble angrily in the lobby as he left and those last, indistinct sounds haunted her for years. As soon as he was gone she was subjected to her mother’s dissertation on the reprehensible tr
end towards breast-feeding. “You were brought up on a bottle” was one way of daring her daughter to say she was wrong.
She had got up and gone to the kitchen. Lucy wanted more and Peg reconnected her. The kitchen sank into silence and she had sat in it content, not knowing his absence had begun to insert itself between her giving nipple and her child’s sucking mouth.
They pulled up for a hitching peasant, granddaughter and dog. Arnold and Henry calmed her objections; in these parts transport arrived with the kindness of strangers. She turned away from the walnut face and the dog flat on the floor in submission to American aid, but with the loquacity of the socially unaware the old man embarked on an explanation of the tea fields slipping past, and ribbed them about the American aversion to his crop and its subtle flavours. If every American drank one cup a week, the Georgia tea economy would boom and he could travel by taxi. Arnold declared he would drink a cup of tea a day forthwith. Henry apologised that he just couldn’t get into the stuff. Peg sat dizzied by the peasant babble and the double translation into Russian then English, and dreamed of the ease of the hometown mall; the rest of the world was such an effort. But the little one’s eyes stayed fixed on the gloriously made up old face; a nut brown sun child locked onto an old exhibit preserved in air conditioning, and finally talks were brokered by the Jar Jar Binks T-shirt tucked into the child’s burgundy shorts. Yes, she had seen Episode One. Yes, Jar Jar Binks was her favourite. No, she had not seen the original Star Wars films.
The UnAmericans Page 16