The second glass of tea was almost gone before Zoya arrived in a cloud of perfume with strong top notes of shoe polish, that Galia felt sure was handy for both killing flies and removing stains.
‘Galia, my dear, I have solved the problem. You can relax: Romeo will be home before you know it.’
‘Zoya, it’s not like that, I keep telling you—’
‘You have no subtlety, Galia, and I’m surprised at you. Anyway, you must telephone my cousin Grigory Mikhailovich, in Moscow. He used to be … in the services. I can’t tell you which, it is a secret. He is old now, but he will know what to do. He will advise us on the best course of action. After all, we are weak women.’
‘But Zoya—’
‘Galia, you are exasperating me!’ and indeed Zoya did seem somewhat exasperated: her lower jaw and her fingertips quivered with the pulse of unusual energy, and her eyes rolled in her lollipop head. ‘You should never have taken this on. You should have known how it would all end. I told you the third house of Aquarius was rising in your moon. You should never have gone out last night. And that old fool Vasya – I read his palm last week, and told him to avoid excitement of all kinds!’
Galia looked into her glass of tea and sighed, her breath making small ripples in the remains of the brown liquid. So, cousin Grigory was to be the answer to the problem. Vasya and Boroda would be freed, and the world would be right. Galia had heard a lot about cousin Grigory over many years, and had assumed that he must be either dead or in a nursing home by now. She was not particularly heartened to hear that he was to be their saviour.
‘But, Zoya, my dear, what can Grigory Mikhailovich do? He is up there in Moscow, we are down here in the sticks. He is an old man! His connections, when he had them – and I’m sure he did – were with people who are now very old, or, er, even dead. How can he help us? I think maybe a trip to the State solicitor’s office would be of more use.’
Galia looked over at the oily deputy mayor, who was receiving something in a brown envelope from the manager of the Golden Sickle.
‘Or a loan for a bigger bribe, to be honest.’ Galia added.
‘How can you talk of bribes? Bribery is disgraceful, and also – very expensive. In truth, sister, it very rarely works – trust me. But you don’t know my Grigory. He is a sorter! He gets things sorted! Remember that holiday we went on, to Tambov?’
Galia remembered a while, and nodded. It had been a memorable excursion. Not least for the mosquitoes and lack of anything remotely fun to do.
‘He wangled that for us! Oh yes, you may well look startled! He got us on that holiday: none other.’
‘Well, Zoya, that was kind of him, but really, the holiday was quite dull. I said to you that I would have preferred the Black Sea.’
‘You did not! You were very grateful at the time!’
Galia hesitated. ‘Well, maybe I didn’t say it out loud, Zoya. But the clouds of mosquitoes—’
‘That was hardly Grigory Mikhailovich’s fault! And he organised the House of Culture visit to the Moscow Olympics. Remember, when we couldn’t get a booking for love nor money? He pulled some strings.’
‘Oh yes, Zoya, I remember that. I didn’t know he was involved with that.’ Galia took a moment to remember: the happy faces of Azov’s best as they clambered on to the coach to Moscow. The assistant vice-director of production at the factory, and his number two, had never returned. No-one knew what had happened to them: had they ever got to see the synchronised swimming?
‘Zoya, that was—’
‘And Grigory sorted out Pasha’s visit to the sanatorium at Kislovodsk, when he was poorly. No-one else could have got that. Only Grigory Mikhailovich. Now, what do you say? He’s our man, isn’t he?’
Galia didn’t say anything. She was somewhat surprised to learn that her old friend’s cousin in Moscow had arranged for her husband to be taken away to the sanatorium for a two-month stay and her friend had never mentioned it before. She’d had forty years to say something.
‘Zoya, you never told me that before. I never asked you to arrange anything for Pasha. What made you do that?’
Zoya stretched her face into something designed to look like a girlish smile, which actually made her look like a little dog – wearing lipstick – caught with its master’s slipper half-eaten in its mouth.
‘Ah, I’ve made a boo-boo, I can see.’ Zoya was agitated all of a sudden. Her translucent arm shook slightly as she attempted to spoon jam into her tea, and a big red clot flopped on to the table, splattering her smock with bright, sticky seeds.
‘Shit!’ cried Zoya, the sound fleeing her in a crow-like caw, which again caused a brief lull in the clatter of cutlery.
‘Zoya! There’s no need for that language! Calm yourself, and tell me exactly how you were involved in packing my husband off to Kislovodsk, after which I might add, he was never the same again!’
‘Can’t,’ muttered Zoya in a low voice. ‘It’s classified.’
‘Classified?’ Galia’s eyebrows met her hair as her forehead concertinaed in disbelief.
‘Classified. Let’s not get distracted. Forget old history: it’s not important. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I just wanted to … The vital thing – the real issue here – is saving your poor innocent dog from that evil Exterminator, and freeing your boyfriend of course. It may already be too late, Galia! Why are we dallying? We need a plan: and for that, we need Grigory Mikhailovich. There can be no doubt – no really! Look at you! You’re no match for the organs of the State, are you?’
Galia briefly examined her reflection in the window and had to agree with Zoya: she was exhausted and dishevelled, and the thought of going into battle, alone, with the organs of the State, filled her with dread. She considered the options, and decided that pragmatism would have to win the day, for now.
‘Very well, Zinaida Artyomovna. We will telephone your cousin in Moscow. But I want to hear more about your involvement in Kislovodsk.’
‘It’s classified,’ Zoya rasped, screwing up her face. ‘And not important. What is important is Boroda – isn’t that true?’
Galia gave her friend a cool look. ‘Yes, Zinaida Artyomovna, you’re right. Let’s go. I can’t sit around here slurping tea with you all day. I’ve got a list of jobs to do.’
‘And we have a plan to hatch,’ chirruped Zoya, as both ladies rose from the table and started for the door, handbags held out like shields.
7
Grigory Mikhailovich
‘Kolya!’
Mountainous at the window, bedecked in dead flies and crumbs, Grigory Mikhailovich was beginning to foam. His pale blue eyes, once so sharp they could bore holes in glass, lapped damply at a point mid-way between the dirty courtyard and the cosmos. A crumpled paper lay in his lap.
‘Hey, Kolya!’
A draught fumbled at the old man’s collar as the jangle of the Kremlin clock floated from the radio.
‘He would be turning in his grave, if he had one,’ the old man growled. ‘If those bloody bastards hadn’t made his mausoleum a bloody circus. Did you know, Kolya, that there are miles of tunnels, and literally scores of laboratories, hidden under the Kremlin walls, under the Moskva River itself? All stuffed full of boffins regulating the temperature and humidity, so that he only gently decomposes. Did you know? You didn’t know!’
Kolya said nothing. He circled the kitchen in his brown plastic slippers, and wondered what the old man had done with the potato peeler.
‘But you know what the real joke is? He is made of wax. Wax – sixty percent, maybe seventy. It’s true! He was OK, not bad, just stiff, you know, until the Great Patriotic War. But then they had to take him to the Urals – Moscow wasn’t safe – and, well, the Soviets aren’t the Pharaohs and the preservation was … insufficiently robust.’ Grigory Mikhailovich enunciated the phrase with difficulty, as if the words were made of glue.
‘Our glorious brother, founder of our Soviet Union, the first and greatest communist state in the world! Kolya, it br
eaks my heart to say it, but he is well rotten. Sasha Gremyanchuk himself told me. He saw it. He did, don’t cluck at me, boy, he saw it! Saw it all. His nose turned black and squishy, his fingers fell off one by one, and as for his belly, well, the gasses and everything: messy, unpatriotic … so they just replaced it all with wax.’
‘Grigory Mikhailovich, where have you put your potato peeler? It is missing – again,’ said Kolya, his nose appearing round the door-jamb, and the words delivered in his strange, high-pitched twang.
The old man fixed him with a watery stare. ‘They preserved his brain though. This I know. It is no fairy story. It is there, with the boffins, under the Kremlin,’ Grigory Mikhailovich leant forward slightly, ‘waiting for us. We can reanimate him, Kolya. And we must! It is our duty! Comrade Sasha can help us. And old Petrov from the institute: he’s a scientist. They are ready, boy!’
Kolya slid back into the kitchen, wishing that the radio had not mentioned Lenin, again. He located the peeler some minutes later deep inside the vibrating sarcophagus that passed for a fridge: it was beneath a heap of something resembling cheese, or fish. He got to work on the potatoes as the old man argued with the radio. Throwing the stinky black and yellow bits on to a newspaper, Lenin’s nose rose before his mind’s eye. Lenin was not the only one who was rotting. He smirked and dropped the peeler on the floor, the sound echoing around the flat.
‘That bloody Yeltsin. Standing on that tank in ’91, cheering them on. Kill the Soviet Union! Kill it! Independence for all! Drunken bloody Urals bastard.’
‘Grigory Mikhailovich, do not upset yourself. You won’t be able to digest if you are upset.’
‘I can’t digest! Our brothers and sisters of the Soviets died for the cause. They donated their lives in their thousands to enrich the Soviet Union and he sold their bones for a bottle of vodka. He sold his mother for a shot and his granny for a gherkin. The dirty Urals bastard! Lenin would be turning! We have to raise him up!’
The old man pawed softly at his watery, blood-shot eyes and hacked a cough. A tiny glob of yellow slapped gently on to the window, clipping a drowsy fly. Kolya wrapped up the rotten potatoes and, stepping gently around the bulk of the old man, took them out to the rubbish chute. It was blocked again, and Kolya clasped his free hand across his nose. He left the package on the floor next to the chute. Perhaps someone would find a use for them.
‘And that bloody perestroika. Perestroika my arse. What idiot thought up perestroika? Ahh, what was his name? Grom … no, not him … Pri … no, it’ll come to me. Anyway, we didn’t need Perestroika, we needed Lenin. He had guts and brains! Before, I mean, when he had real guts and brains, not wax guts, ha! No, he had guts! And a brain!’
Kolya examined the sarcophagus for something edible. After some time, he found a bottle of preserved mushrooms. He would pad out the potatoes with them.
‘Kolya! Hey, Kolya, get me the phone will you, lad, I need to call my comrade Sasha. We must make plans. Now!’
Kolya sighed, placed the casserole dish on the table and stalked out to fetch the phone from its box in the hall. He plugged it in next to the old man. How many years’ worth of wasted spittle were encrusted on the mouthpiece, he wondered.
Grigory Mikhailovich’s bloated pink fingers hovered above the handset for a second, when suddenly the phone went off like a hand-grenade, making both men quiver with shock.
‘My God, Kolya! It’s ringing! Who is it, Kolya? Who is ringing me in the middle of the afternoon?’ roared the old man, momentarily stupefied.
‘Grigory Mikhailovich, you need to answer it to find out who is calling you,’ replied Kolya with a smirk.
‘Clever dick! Don’t give me those clever-dick answers! Have some respect, you market monkey!’ Grigory Mikhailovich fumbled with the phone, eventually separating the handset from the dial.
‘Hello? I’m here! Hello?’ Spittle plumed in every direction as Kolya retreated, too late, into the kitchen to finish supper preparations as the old man roared. A movement through the window caught his eye. A pretty girl in a red coat was walking an ugly dog in the courtyard. She was tall, and young, and gazed about her, as if she was bored, or lost.
‘Yes! Grigory Mikhailovich speaking! Zinaida Artyomovna, how very surprising to hear from you! In the middle of the afternoon! But what a great pleasure, and honour …’
Kolya registered, absently, that the timbre of the old man’s voice had changed slightly: it could have been respect, or fear, or something else entirely. He continued gazing at the young woman, and the dog, which he found a little disconcerting. It looked like the kind of pedigree canine that would pee on your shoes and fart on your dinner. It had a curly tail, a strange, pushed in nose and a very definite, pronounced frown. He wondered if this dog brought the pretty girl any pleasure at all.
‘The problem is profound. I am glad you referred it to me. As you know, I have connections.’
Kolya observed the girl’s chestnut hair as she stood about waiting for the dog to take a crap. Suddenly, she looked up directly towards him, and Kolya dodged back behind the window frame with a jolt, heart beating fast.
‘Kolya! Get me out of this chair! We’re going!’
‘Grigory Mikhailovich, where are we going?’
‘Boy, don’t argue! Look!’
Kolya looked. In the distance, over the uniform rooftops, heavy skies were gathering.
‘Get me out of this chair. We must get to the Duma. Zinaida Artyomovna and some other woman … wait … no, I forget her name. Anyway, they are meeting us there. We must protect them. No – wait! We must get to the Lubyanka! That’s where they will have taken him. Of course! Dead of night, into the car – they’ll have taken him to the Lubyanka, not the Duma!’
‘Who, Grigory Mikhailovich? Who has gone to the Lubyanka?’
‘Some friend of Zoya’s. Some dog rustler, or breeder, or something. I don’t really know, she did explain but … the main thing is, they took him – in the middle of the night. It’ll be the Lubyanka. It might already be too late of course … they may already have beaten it out of him … but we have to try, boy! To the Duma!’
Kolya was startled by Grigory Mikhailovich’s clear intent to set off for the Lubyanka, or the Duma, without dinner.
‘But what about the potatoes?’ The boy indicated the makings of the evening meal heaped on the table.
‘Damn the potatoes!’
‘We’re having them with mushrooms,’ Kolya added softly. Grigory Mikhailovich hesitated, licking his lips.
‘And what about them?’ Kolya mewed, arching an eyebrow.
‘Them?’
‘Them.’
‘Them,’ said Grigory Mikhailovich, blankly.
His bottom lip quivered gently as his watery eyes slid across Kolya’s placid face. He thought he ought to know to whom ‘them’ referred, but for a long moment it escaped him. A vague recollection was just forming behind his forehead, when a sharp knock at the door made him jump, sending slight ripples through his chins and expelling the memory like a small egg from a chicken’s arse.
‘It’s them,’ purred Kolya.
‘No!’
‘They must have heard. You should keep your voice down, Grigory Mikhailovich. Shouting about the Lubyanka and the Duma and them. Things have not changed as much as you may think. You stay there, in your chair, leave them to me. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. I am young, and innocent, after all!’
Grigory Mikhailovich subsided back into his chair, unknowingly curling his fingers into the newspaper. He felt dread, and didn’t know why.
Having wiped his hands on his jeans and straightened his hair in the hall mirror, Kolya peered through the spy hole. With shaking hands, he pulled open the door.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello!’
It was the girl from the courtyard, the ugly dog at her side. She was tall as a birch tree and smelt spicy as bark, her scent overpowering the rubbish chute and the dog. He could feel her heat like a radiator in mid-winter. Kolya trie
d to keep his eyes on her face. She peered at him from the dimly lit hallway.
‘Are you the resident?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ Her jaw slackened slightly below the red lips.
‘But can I help you?’ Kolya prompted.
‘Well, I was calling round to say hello. I’ve just moved in next door, and I’ll be having a little party later, a little house-warming. I just wanted to let the resident know, and to invite them round, if they’d like to come?’
‘They wouldn’t, I’m afraid. No. He’s old, and sick.’
‘Oh.’
In the next room, Grigory Mikhailovich was being eaten alive by worry. Clutching the arms of his chair, he heaved his weight up and forward, tottering on his great paw-like feet.
‘You know, when I said I don’t live here, I kind of do. He is elderly. I help him out. I’m here a lot. I practically live here, in fact. I’m his next of kin.’
‘Oh. Well, maybe you could come?’
‘Yes, yes, maybe I could. I definitely could, actually.’
‘Kroota! Just bring some drink and snacks, yeah?’
‘Of course! Would champagne be OK?’
‘Kroota!’
‘Yes, kroota!’ Kolya laughed down his nose and a small blob of mucus exploded from the end of it, landing on the girl’s fine red coat. ‘Ah!’
With a rough stick in each hand, Grigory Mikhailovich eased himself haltingly towards the hall. He could make out a strident female voice, and Kolya, speaking softly.
‘About eight, then?’ the girl was unsmiling.
‘Eight is good. Nice to meet you!’
She turned on a sharp heel and disappeared into the murk of the hallway. Kolya clicked the door shut and leant his forehead against it. His whole body felt electrified. He closed his eyes. ‘I think she liked me.’
Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story Page 8