Gorsky

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  I was standing on my own watching a son et lumière show, which depicted the story of Russian art from Kievan Rus to the present, when a pair of hands covered my eyes. In her severe black dress with a little white collar, Gery Pekarova looked like a schoolgirl and laughed like a boy whose voice had just broken. She embraced me as though we were the oldest of friends. Her dress was covered in sequins, which crackled faintly against my body like rice-paper confetti.

  ‘I haven’t seen Mrs Summerscale in such a long while. Is she here?’

  She looked puzzled.

  ‘You must be joking. Natalia coming to a Russian party! Her Russia is all abstract – art and music, mist and mirrors – but when it comes to the Russians it’s always Nyet spasibo – no thank you. They remind her of all the things she wants to forget, she says. I am not sure if she even opened her invitation. I had to cadge mine as someone’s companion. Some Russian guy I shook off the moment we passed security.’

  ‘You know it’s a Gorsky party, don’t you?’ she continued. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it if I had to kill to get in – and probably some of the guests have done just that! The whole of London talks about his parties. Last year he hired one of those huge clubs in Pall Mall and had the façade covered in trailing orchids. Then there was that ice rink they created in Kensington Gardens, buried in a nest of pine and holly: like a huge Christmas wreath, dark green, with shiny red baubles. It was January thirteenth, the Russian New Year’s Eve. They encouraged people to take the baubles away at the end of the evening. A tipsy Bulgarian friend of mine flung several into the Serpentine; stone skipping, she said, silly fool. A few days later someone told her that each was worth a couple of thousand pounds.

  ‘Another time he flew people on private jets to Italy and took them sailing on his yacht, all the way from Genoa to Sardinia. I mislead you when I say he took them: people kept guessing when he was going to turn up, but he stayed in the Highlands, playing golf in the rain. You don’t see him anywhere. They say he watches his own parties via webcam. Well, so long as it floats his boat …’

  She looked up towards an imaginary security camera and cupped her little breasts. Her English was accented yet determinedly colloquial, and her gestures were charmingly incongruous too. She nodded to mean no and shook her head to mean yes, in the unique way that Bulgarians do, but her hands, with their bony fingers and long crimson nails, moved like the hands of a rapper.

  ‘You get used to money in this town,’ she added, ‘but Gorsky’s money is beyond all dreams of wealth. No one knows exactly how he made it. Some say oil, some say weapons. Russian or Chinese. I’ve heard people suggest that he is a Russian spy and that he is a fugitive, hunted by Russian agents. Friends tell me that he was once arrested in Bulgaria while trying to deliver weapons to Serbia – or possibly export weapons from Serbia, I can’t remember – and that he bribed his way out of jail. I heard that he studied in St Petersburg with the Bulgarian president and that they are the best of mates. Or was it the Romanian one? Who knows, Nick? Who cares?’

  She produced her business card from a tiny clutch bag and tucked it into my trouser pocket. Her fingers remained there until she felt my penis move, and then she beamed at me and walked away. I made no effort to follow. Her dress caught the light and shimmered like a bituminous pool on her suntanned skin.

  As I walked back towards Kensington Gore, the silver limousine drew up in front of me. A man sitting next to the driver jumped out and held the back door open.

  ‘Mr Kimović?’ he said. ‘If you please.’

  I saw the familiar figure of Roman Gorsky inside. He patted the seat next to him.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed the party.’ He nodded towards the screen in front, which was broadcasting scenes from the place I had just left.

  ‘I have never seen its like.’

  ‘Did you meet any friends?’

  ‘No, unless you count my boss and Gery Pekarova,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, the gymnast,’ Gorsky interrupted. ‘I may have had the honour. I am old enough to remember her as a young girl, gold medal around her neck. She was so pretty. The steroids have wreaked havoc, but she is still most striking, I believe. Isn’t London strange, the way it brings us back together? You are from Belgrade, you said? I was often in Belgrade in the nineties. Difficult times. Everything rationed. No electricity. Military helicopters flying low above the town ferrying wounded from the battlefields. The hospitals lacked everything, even the most basic supplies.’

  ‘I left long before the worst. Who could have guessed it?’ I was cautious. I hardly wanted to cross him inadvertently.

  ‘Anyone could,’ he countered. ‘The second the Wall went down in Berlin, it was clear. Your nation is a victim of the Cold War, Mr Kimović. Much misunderstood. Like mine. At least mine can stand up for itself.’

  We drove slowly past tall Victorian façades that shimmered like sea cliffs in the moonlight. Behind them, people dined, watched television, made love or slept. They knew about men like Gorsky only from the gossip columns. He surveyed the streetscapes as he spoke and occasionally asked the driver to slow down so that he could take in a portico or a row of high windows.

  ‘I love architecture,’ he said. ‘Remember that when you are buying books for me. Robert Adam’s studies of Diocletian’s palace perhaps? I saw a sketch in my university library; long before I thought I’d ever see the Adriatic. Nothing too technical, though. I am a mathematician by training. Mathematics is closer to poetry than to the other sciences, perhaps. Or to philosophy. Pure abstraction. Like money, you might say.’

  He did not expect a reply.

  ‘I used to teach in Leningrad, before all this. I wrote a doctoral thesis about the discovery of transfinite numbers. Some of those mathematicians got a bit carried away by abstraction. They became Name Worshippers: they believed that the name of God is God himself – the very “word” that opens the Bible. Rationalism taken as far as it would go, so far that it turns into its own opposite, into mysticism. I had problems because of that work. It was seen as the study of religion, not mathematics. I nearly lost my job and, in Russia, you know, you never just lose your job, you have to make all sorts of compromises.’

  He waved his right hand as though he was chasing the thought away.

  ‘Don’t you just love London? Centuries of uninterrupted cash-flow. All that historic, uncountable money, chests and chests of it, from the four corners of the world …’

  His head turned towards the Natural History Museum.

  ‘But I don’t like the English,’ he continued. ‘They have an amphibian quality, a slipperiness that comes of their squatting on an island, able to evade the grasp of their neighbours.’ I expected him to elaborate. I was fond of the English on the whole and it did not seem that he had anything much to do with them, but I was not going to argue. He fell silent.

  The interior of the car smelled of wood and leather and, wafting from the front seats, an expensive eau de cologne. The driver or the bodyguard, I couldn’t tell: both their suits and their hair were more impressively cut than mine. The two men stared wordlessly ahead as we changed lanes or overtook other vehicles. They exchanged a quick whisper in Russian only when a cyclist rested his hand on our car at the traffic light. The insouciance seemed staggering. The bodyguard glanced into the side-view mirror on his left. His right arm moved. I saw his shoulders flex then relax. I looked back as we pulled away. It was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, his pale face under the cycle helmet so freckled that it looked like a speckled egg under the streetlamps.

  Gorsky was too absorbed by the bluish screen in front of us to notice anything. It was transmitting the end of the party. He nodded at the driver and the car filled with the music of Bach. The sound quality was ethereal. Although it was far from loud, we heard no other noise. As we glided along the streets people tried to look inside. Some paused at the kerb and took photographs of the vehicle.

  Gorsky searched in the glove compartment built into the wide armrest between us and produced a
small box which he handed over, snapping it open. A medal rested on a dark satin cushion.

  ‘Have a look. See what it says at the back.’

  I lifted a familiar white cross.

  ‘To R. B. Gorsky, from the grateful Serbian nation’, read the engraving in fine Cyrillic calligraphy.

  He took the medal from my hand, examined it for a moment as though he was about to share its story, but instead laid it carefully back into its box, which he closed again with another soft snap.

  At some point in my life, I ceased to care about its course sufficiently to take any decisive action. Something in me became unmoored; I disengaged. I made no virtue of escaping the Yugoslav wars by a whisker. Had my mother not refused my call-up papers, had I been mobilised, I would have gone to shoot and be shot at.

  I realise that this is a strange way of explaining how – or why – I started seeing Gery Pekarova. The correct – blunt – thing to say would be that she started fucking me. I wasn’t actively attracted, but I didn’t mind her company, which is more than I can say about most people. I think she felt the same for me. She must have sensed that I was the sort of man who did not mind being summoned, did not mind doing as he was told, particularly if it involved no hard work. I became her phone-in, takeaway friend.

  She was an amoral creature, and that was clear to me from the start. I am not sure how she came to live in a largeish council flat with a view of St Luke’s in Chelsea, the sort of property that would cost a seven-figure sum if it were sold on the open market, but you could safely bet it involved telling more than one lie. I sometimes saw her jogging along in the side streets, dressed in a zipped Lycra body suit, like a deep sea diver. Like everything about her, her hard feline shape was simultaneously attractive and repellent.

  We bumped into each other in Waitrose on the King’s Road. Her shopping basket contained a box of sprouting broccoli and a bottle of vodka, mine an Indian meal for one.

  ‘Nikita,’ she gurgled. I realised that her Mick Jagger face must have resembled Nastassja Kinski’s when she – and Nastassja – were younger.

  ‘We must get together again, Nikita, go out, dance, have fun.’

  So we got together. We went to a cheap Bulgarian grill off Green Lanes, then to an expensive Bulgarian club in a basement off Piccadilly Circus.

  The first was full of men who looked like pub bouncers and who munched mouthfuls of meat mournfully while staring at a huge TV screen which belted out the music of homesickness from the corner. Gery pushed a piece of grilled chicken around her plate while urging me to consume the mountain of pork and lamb she had ordered for me.

  The club, when we reached it soon after midnight, was heaving with beautiful people, sharply dressed and self-consciously elegant – a different Bulgaria altogether – handsome dark-haired men and women who looked as though they were auditioning for the role of James Bond and his latest squeeze. Most of them seemed to know Gery. She was an amazing dancer. I wish I could say the same about myself. Before we entered that place, I thought us a reasonable match; the balance, if anything, was on my side. Here, I suddenly wondered what she was doing with me.

  At four a.m., she took me home. She took me. I am not a vastly promiscuous man, but I have had enough lovers to appreciate Gery’s love-making skills; indeed, with her assistance, I demonstrated my appreciation four times between four and eight, when I finally fell asleep, somehow hitting the mattress with a thud and feeling as though I was continuing to fall at the same time.

  I once read a biography of Mrs Simpson, ordered by one of Fynch’s most faithful customers. The author hinted slyly at a bag of tricks the future Duchess of Windsor had picked up from the brothel culture of Shanghai. I imagine that they had something akin to Gery Pekarova’s knowledge of male anatomy in mind, but the Duchess could not have rivalled Gery’s feats of internal gymnastics. Gery could do things that I did not think physically possible. Our ‘love-making’ was heavy on tricks and light on connection: we remained two separate people masturbating together.

  ‘We are friends with benefits, aren’t we, Nicky?’ she said, with that self-congratulatory smile she adopted whenever she appropriated an English cliché. Now she kept the English word for benefits but used the Bulgarian for friends. It was practically the same as in my mother tongue. The sound alone triggered a wave of warmth starting somewhere around my solar plexus. I took her head in my hands. This felt more intimate than anything we had been doing moments before. She pushed me away, laughing.

  ‘Don’t go soft on me now, Nikolai,’ she said. ‘It’s too late.’ Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  We awoke at midday and rested on her enormous bed listening to church bells. She laughed when I told her I thought she was a lesbian when we first met.

  ‘Perhaps I am, too … Perhaps I like you because you are such a girl’s blouse, Nikita.’

  She stretched her long body and then lifted her right leg into the air, whistling a Serbian – or perhaps Bulgarian – tune. Each muscle took shape individually under her taut skin. Her toenails were covered in black varnish. A thin white line cut across her hips, the stencil of a thong. She held my chin, kissed me and went to take a shower.

  Outside, a drizzly afternoon hung half-heartedly above Chelsea like a semi-deflated balloon. I stared at the ceiling, composing, as I so often did these days, my shopping list for Roman Gorsky. I had just acquired pristine first editions of À la Recherche and Ulysses, and a rare Soviet samizdat typescript of Dr Zhivago in a walnut sewing box carved especially to hide the sheaves of fading carbon copy. Under an ornate lid, the top chamber still contained needles, threads and thimbles, and a half-finished sampler of embroidery.

  Such finds notwithstanding, the Russians remained a problem. The whole Modernist canon was published on cheap paper. Mid-century books were yellow and brittle and fell apart, newer stuff came in inferior bindings – neither had the look my patron was after. Given the amounts of money I had at my disposal, I could order books to be set, in a print-run of one, especially for him, in Belgrade. My university friends were now working as printers for two hundred euros a month. Gorsky was spending more each second.

  ‘A kopek for your thoughts.’ Gery stood in the doorway wrapped in a white towelling robe.

  ‘Gorsky,’ I said. ‘I wonder why he wants the library.’

  She curled next to me and sighed.

  ‘Do you think I stand a chance? I know they like sixteen-year-olds, people like him – fresh cunt – but they must get bored with those fuckwits. I’ve been to one or two parties where they had teenage girls lined up along the wall, like those seafood displays in French brasseries, yet those men just kept talking about their business, paying no attention. Gorsky looks like a cold fish to me, but he is not married apparently. A woman can get used to loneliness inside a marriage given other compensations. What do you think, Niki? I know his world well. What does a sixteen-year-old know?’

  I couldn’t imagine any other woman weighing her chances with the richest man in London so openly and so soon after she had made love to me, but, with Gery, this made absolute sense. I was, almost, charmed by her lack of pretence.

  I wasn’t sure if I was doing him or her a favour when I invited her to join me at the opera. The tickets were a present from Gorsky. I had just managed to secure a first edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin dedicated to Prince Dolgoruky. Gorsky wanted it, but so did a number of other oligarchs who entered the bidding. Fynch’s commission for that purchase alone was not unadjacent to our usual annual turnover. Gorsky was so delighted to have the volume that I was granted a rare glimpse into his personal life.

  ‘A woman who means a great deal to me knew … knows still, perhaps … the whole of Onegin by heart.’

  He hesitated for a moment, on the brink of saying more, but changed his mind and proceeded to tell me how he had donated ten million pounds to the Royal Opera on condition that they close the season with Eugene Onegin. We gathered a couple of hours before the performance in one of t
hose grand hotel restaurants in Mayfair which seem forever empty when you look in from the street. Gorsky had a private salon. He was already seated when I arrived, turning a thimble of vodka around its axis in his long, elegant hand. The digits on his watch kept catching the light. His head was so majestic when he was seated in that way that he looked even taller than he was. The mirrors reflected his blond crown and his black jacket in a sort of mise en abyme, as though he was at the heart of a kaleidoscope.

  The waiter was still fussing with my coat when Gery made her entrance. She was wearing a tight silver dress – another sequined number – which made her look like a mermaid. She wore heels so towering that although she was five inches shorter, they made her seem taller than me. Her teeth looked even more brilliantly white than usual because her skin had bronzed considerably since I saw her the day before. Her long black hair was held in a silver net, through which individual curls fell as if by accident. She looked more like a transvestite than ever: the effect was somewhere between stunning and ridiculous.

  ‘Roman Borisovich Gorsky. Gergana Pekarova,’ I introduced them to each other. Gorsky stood up and kissed her outstretched hand. If they had met before, neither signalled it.

  I don’t know how many languages he spoke. Each seemed almost perfect but none sounded like his mother tongue. He peppered both his English and his Russian with French and Italian. In his car, after the Serpentine party, I heard him answer a telephone call in fluent German. He now spoke Bulgarian, with a soft Russian accent, but fluently nonetheless.

  ‘Oh, I lived in Sofia for three or four years,’ he explained when she expressed surprise on hearing him address her in her mother tongue. ‘You would have been in Germany by then.’

  Gery did not seem taken aback by his knowledge of the details of her defection. She was barely out of her teens and still a world champion when she slipped her minders in Munich, she had told me. He did not explain what he was doing in Sofia.