Gorsky

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  He continued to turn his glass of vodka without drinking any. Gery ordered some champagne but did not drink it either. I alone was slowly getting tipsy on both vodka and champagne. After the waiters started bringing platefuls of sashimi, I was the only one eating too. I drifted in and out of their Bulgarian conversation.

  ‘And what do you do in London?’ Gery asked.

  ‘I am doing up a house by the Thames,’ Gorsky said. ‘And you?’

  ‘I work as a personal trainer and a nutritionist.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gorsky, ‘I need both …’

  ‘I take only one client at a time. That means I can be available to travel. People of excellence don’t like to drop their routine wherever they are. It would take a lot to tempt me to leave my client at the moment.’

  ‘I can offer a lot,’ Gorsky said. They both seemed deadly serious. It was difficult to know what exactly they were negotiating.

  ‘My client is a very distinguished lady. A lady of excellence. I am devoted to her. You put me in a difficult situation, Mr Gorsky. I am more comfortable with women. Professionally, I mean.’

  Her manicured hand now hovered above his lapel. Under the table, her foot was climbing up my shin and along my femur at an angle that only an Olympic gold medallist could accomplish.

  It was raining heavily when we walked out of the restaurant and took the car to Covent Garden. Along Piccadilly, tourists sheltered from the weather in shopping arcades. Gery sat between us looking – in her silver spangled outfit – as though she was part of the luxurious interior. Her left hand rested on my knee, her right on Gorsky’s. There was an unusual ring on her right hand, diamond-encrusted, in the shape of a snake. Her hair smelled of jasmine oil. For some reason, they chatted about chocolate and marzipan; how neither of them had tasted the good stuff until they were in their twenties. When she turned towards me her eyes shone in the semi-darkness with a mixture of life force and undisguised greed.

  The opera was tucked away modestly in a side street, dispensing with the panache of the grand European houses which sit proudly in the middle of their own huge squares and glimmer under their golden domes. Few things unrelated to battlefields seemed to merit proper squares in London; even parliament faced only a medium-sized traffic junction. Inside, too, the opera was pokier and less glitzy than I expected, and there were enough tourists with little rucksacks on their backs to make even my cheap jacket seem elegant. I had no intention of trying to upgrade my wardrobe to suit my new friends, and my clothes troubled neither of them in the least.

  As Gorsky took his place in the corner of his box and started flicking through the programme, I became aware how famous – infamous perhaps – he actually was. The lorgnettes from the stalls turned towards our box, as though in some costume drama. People stared while pretending not to look. He may have been the most discreet of London oligarchs – no Premier League football clubs to his name, no high-profile divorces, no attempted assassinations either of him or, as far as anyone knew, commissioned by him – but despite, or because of, his persistent absence, his parties, and the palace for which I was equipping the library, assured him regular appearances in the gossip columns. His face was as familiar as those of Abramovich and Berezovsky. The lack of a personal story became a story in its own right. Was he gay, perhaps? In a country like Russia no amount of money bought freedom from homophobia, journalists insinuated slyly, while disingenuously protecting their own liberal credentials. Why was he so determinedly alone?

  The noise of tuning instruments from the orchestra pit slowly rose above the murmurs of the audience. There was a roar of applause and the young conductor stood in front of the musicians. In deepest silence, members of the chorus dressed as Russian peasants gradually filled the stage and then the song of the field labourers rose towards the gods. The staging was amazing, like nothing I had imagined, although I knew the story well. There were two Tatianas. The older one sang about love and sorrow; the younger one danced, mute. She had yet to fall in love, yet to know the pain of it. I cast a furtive glance towards my companions. Gery’s eyes were fixed on the stage, her body leaned forward, her eyes moving from one performer to the other, but I could already sense her restlessness. This was not her scene. Gorsky was reclining, half hidden by the shadow of the red velvet that draped our box. His eyes were slowly welling with tears.

  Slav soul, I thought, with a dash of unjustified mockery, for while I was one myself, he was not, even though he was marinated in Slav culture. I had assumed that he was staring into the darkness above people’s heads, but then an instinct made me follow the line of his gaze across the auditorium towards the row of boxes opposite. Directly in his sights there was a group of young men and women, city types, looking at each other over their champagne glasses far more than they looked at the stage. One couple was sharing a kiss. In the smaller box to the left, there were just two people, a man and a woman. The man’s face was hidden by the programme. The faint blue light emanating from behind it suggested that he was examining his mobile phone. The woman was wearing a simple black dress, with no jewellery to offset its severity or shine against her translucent skin. She clutched a small purse against her chest. There was no doubt about it: unlike most of the rest of us, she was there for the music. Her familiar, beautiful Russian face was unmistakeable.

  5

  I heard about it from Victor, Fynch said. He told me it was almost Spartan by Gorsky’s standards, but the man was so discreet about his invitations that you wouldn’t be startled to find Putin lunching with Julia Roberts under the pines. The guest list had never been leaked to anyone: none of those vulgar little name-drops in gossip columns, ever. Not once. You wouldn’t know the island was there unless you looked at the map.

  Victor acted as a sort of caretaker for the oligarchs when they first arrived in London. I suppose you could put a first in Russian from Cambridge to better use, but rarely to a more profitable one. They came to Britain with suitcases loaded with cash; he helped them get a house, furnish it, put their children into the best schools, sort out everything from their visas to their parking fines. Ten per cent commission. They did not even notice it. A UK visa: how many would you need, sir? Your best friend’s daughter is coming to stay with you … alone? She is sixteen, you said? Will that be six months or a year? We’ll try our very best, sir. A new nose or a new pair of breasts for the lady wife who doesn’t speak a word of English? Certainly, sir. We’ll get a five-star hospital with a resident interpreter.

  Victor made a pretty penny but it all went to his first wife and her little place in Petersham, or so he said. And she didn’t even allow him to see the kids. He slept in Fynch’s bookshop for the best part of a month when she locked him out of the house. He was too depressed even to book a hotel at first, he claimed: dossing chimed with the state of his soul. Then Gorsky took a shine to him and ordered him to stay in his flat at the Barbican. This was when Victor was sorting out financial arrangements for the Barracks and dining out with the estate agent. Not that there was any danger of being gazumped, since Bill Gates and the Emir of Qatar were about the only other people in the world who could afford the place. At the Barbican, Victor flourished, took some girls out and then in, got over the divorce, updated his dance moves, pretended the flat was his. He wouldn’t hear a word against Gorsky. And, come to think of it, he had probably played his part in our book-buying commission: he and Fynch go back to the same house in that Thames-side school they never allowed me to mention in public. I sometimes wondered if Fynch might have known something about the library even before that day when Gorsky walked into the shop, but had neglected to mention it. He treated everything that Victor accomplished or promised as a joke. That he also refused to ‘talk shop’ with me would have been amusing, had the shop not been our shared business.

  I did not get to ask Fynch how formal he thought the island was. It was irrelevant, anyway. I wasn’t about to go shopping for clothes. I was flattered that Gorsky had invited me – to talk books and plans, he s
aid vaguely – but I was sure that he knew I wasn’t about to up the sartorial ante. I was broke.

  The day he issued the invitation was as drizzly as it gets in London and I had just spent a great deal of his money on some Russian incunabula which mysteriously appeared for sale in an auction, offered by an anonymous seller in Buenos Aires. Why not take a few days off, old boy? Why not relax? Gorsky suggested when he rang to congratulate me, though my achievement was simply in finding out the date of the sale.

  Over in Greece, for example, the temperature was already in the high twenties, he said.

  I hate travelling and I hate hotels, I responded, even the best ones, all that palaver, booking, transfers, hours and hours. I had barely left London in the last fifteen years. At first I couldn’t travel because of my papers, then the very idea of travel started to feel tiring. Gorsky just laughed.

  This was simple. A car to Battersea, then the helicopter, then the private plane. And a fresh bottle of champagne at each stage if I wanted it: by the time we reached the airport I no longer knew which airport I was in, though I could see it wasn’t Heathrow. Judging from the architecture it could have been Stansted, but it was empty. My meagre luggage was whisked away. I was left with a panama hat which I had bought at some expense at Bates in Jermyn Street and which I now held in a dark blue tube like an Olympic torch.

  I had my own UKBA checker at what passed for a passport desk. And a newsagent all to myself. I didn’t even have to pay, just sign off for the papers with my flight code. I was a solo traveller, it seems. At one point I noticed a woman coming through a huge sliding door. Someone carried several hat boxes a couple of steps behind her. She was tall and she looked even taller because of her vast turquoise turban. I couldn’t guess her ethnicity. Her face was so taut her skin could have been stapled at the back. That was the only non-uniformed person I had come across since Gorsky’s driver buzzed on my front door to collect me. She did not even notice me: why would she?

  The jet was something, too. Two hostesses waited on standby to strap me into my armchair for take-off. I could have chosen a chaise longue, but the recliner seemed good enough for a four-hour flight. I fell asleep while the pilot was still reciting the names of some Belgian and German towns we were going to fly over, and I woke up above the bluest sea, the European mainland nowhere in view, just an archipelago of small islands with white houses scattered on them like sugar cubes. There was still time for the blonde stewardess with her coquettishly tilted red toque to recite a choice of light refreshments. I asked for a bowl of pineapple sorbet and she delivered it with a silver spoon and a crystal glass of icy vodka on the side. The linen napkin had the initials RBG embroidered in silver thread: the same familiar monogram I spied on the cuff of her white shirt. It would have reminded one of slave ownership, but for the fact that they all appeared so thrilled to serve.

  The Greek airport seemed even more deserted than the one I had left in Britain four hours previously. The true luxury of wealth is to be solitary in places where you least expect it. There was no luggage carousel. There was no passport check and no customs. I walked through an empty, heavily air-conditioned building holding the tube containing my panama hat, feeling faintly ridiculous, towards another exit and another helicopter which flew me to Hesperos. There I was met by a golf buggy driven by a handsome Australian man in cricket whites. He delivered me into the hands of a stunning-looking Asian woman who walked me to my lodgings. I had long since lost count of the numbers of people Gorsky kept in full-time employment: three or four hundred perhaps, without even counting those in Russia who might actually be producing whatever he was trading in.

  I was left in a low stone bungalow, a squat building hidden among flowering bushes, their crimson flowers so huge that they looked, on their perfect green lawn and against the perfect blue sea, like the set for a Greek episode of Teletubbies. I showered with what felt like sparkling water and splashed myself with a few drops of aftershave which I found in a glossy silk bag waiting on my bed. Welcome to Hesperos, Mr Kimović, read a card attached to it. Inside was a collection of goods one might need on a Greek island if one was a high-class rent boy who liked to travel extremely light: toiletries, suntan lotion, two pairs of swimming trunks, one minute and black, one baggy and printed in fetching blue and white stripes, flip-flops, a pair of white espadrilles, a slim camera and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. Everything came in my size, and from the kind of luxury brands I considered an utter waste of money. There was even an almost exact copy of my own panama hat.

  Another card listed activities available on the island and daily excursions from it, and urged me not to hesitate to ask for snorkelling and scuba-diving equipment, wetsuits, sea-boarding and kite-surfing gear … a space ship, well … whatever took my fancy.

  My bedside telephone rang. A female, sounding Scandinavian and apologetic, announced that dinner would be served in the main house, unless I preferred to dine alone. Out of curiosity, I resisted a temptation to stay on my own veranda with a tin of caviar from the fridge. I wanted to see who was sharing my Arcadia. But for the noisy lunacy of the crickets I could have been alone on the island.

  When I found my way to the main villa, I was taken by its simplicity. Victor was not far wrong. By Roman Gorsky’s standards, this was indeed an ascetic dwelling. It had once been an Ottoman pasha’s palace, an Irish butler explained as he mixed my drink. In its simple symmetries, it could have been a stone house from a child’s drawing: six windows on the first floor, four on the ground floor, two on each side of the wide green double doors in the centre, which were opened wide to reveal a wall-hanging with a hunting scene, flanked by tall candelabra on which shone a multitude of thick beeswax candles. Their scent blended with the wild thyme and tobacco smoke outside.

  A wide pergola ran along the length of the veranda. From it trailed an old vine, its grapes still tiny and green. Half a dozen men had already gathered in its shade. Three sat in wicker armchairs half facing each other, three at an enormous stone table playing cards. I vaguely recognised a couple of British faces from the newspapers – the scion of a famous Jewish family who ran a lobbying firm but was more famous for his supermodel wife, and a former central banker who regularly cropped up on Newsnight. The lobbyist was suntanned, as though he had been on Hesperos for a while; the banker was as red as a freshly boiled lobster – the pages of the Financial Times he was leafing through paled beside his skin colour. There was a third man whom I took to be Spanish from his face and his raven-black hair, slickly oiled and combed close to his cranium, only to spill down over a gleaming white collar in a profusion of unruly locks.

  The card players were indisputably Russian. They sat in shorts and tracksuit bottoms and an assortment of football shirts belonging to famous European clubs. They might have been at a holiday camp in their homeland, their synthetic sportswear comfortably accommodating their stocky forms, but here I wondered if they actually owned the teams. Clouds of cigarette smoke hung above the table. They looked up and nodded as I approached, barely interrupting their game. The Spaniard alone stood up. His heels clicked as he shook my hand. His stomach was as flat as a matador’s. The banker and the lobbyist introduced themselves, then asked a few polite questions about the weather in London, without feigning any interest in my responses. The lobbyist’s name was legendary – like Rothschild or Hilton. You did not assume there were people around who bore it, people you could actually meet. The banker’s name was English and as monosyllabic as the man himself. His entire demeanour seemed intended to show that his visit to Hesperos was to be brief and that its purpose involved nothing other than business.

  The Russians cursed vilely. One of them produced a thick wad of five-hundred-euro notes from a deep pocket in his tracksuit bottoms, and slammed it on the table, sending his cards into the bushes. Within seconds, an Indian man in a Mao jacket materialised and started to collect them. We were clearly being watched all the time, our desires guessed before we knew we had them.

  I nursed
my drink and looked down through the pines at the little port. A motorboat appeared as if from nowhere, with three women on board. They disembarked and climbed up the stone path towards the house. I could pick out their Russian conversation, the clicking of their heels on the stone and the rustle of the large, shiny shopping bags they carried. They did not even nod in my direction as they arrived. Each kissed a Russian man and each had her bottom groped or slapped proprietorially, and none seemed to mind. I wish I could say they were vulgar, but they were young and as interchangeable in their beauty and their elegance as their partners were in their cheerful crassness.

  Gorsky was nowhere to be seen. Not that first evening, not the second, nor even the third. I lounged in a hammock, took a couple of scuba-diving classes and read thrillers from a small library in my bungalow. The lobbyist and the banker were getting more and more restless. The latter was on his phone all the time. The Russians occasionally dipped into the sea where they barked amicably at each other like a small group of walruses, then slumped in deckchairs, smoking and staring at the horizon. Their wives disappeared in their motorboat every morning and came back with more shopping from God knows where.

  Finally, on my last evening, there was a barbeque party. Small boats brought guests from yachts moored across the archipelago. There were dozens of stunning young men and women who drank champagne, took cocaine, quite publicly, from silver boxes full of powder, and swam in the red glow of the dying sun. There was music from somewhere behind the trees – live, discreet music.

  One of the young women gestured at me. I followed her along a path under the pines until we came to a low stone bench sheltered by wild jasmine. She lifted the hem of her white shirt-dress and pointed at her naked cunt. I had just enough time to register the low slit, rising barely a centimetre up her crotch, when she turned around and wiggled her bottom, then turned back again, pointing at her lips, pausing each time to raise an enquiring eyebrow. When she pressed her index finger on her cunt the second time, I nodded in consent, like an idiot at a fish stall. My trousers were beginning to hurt me.