She fell silent for a while in the empty room. I had no heart to ask about her plans for the future; she seemed too bewildered to have any. I was trying to make sense of her confession. The telling details and her tone took me aback more than the revelations it contained. I could hear the Romanian outside, turning the van for its journey east, then honking once or twice. There was a little stub of a pencil on the floor and Natalia bent down to pick it up. She rolled it on her palm for a while, examining it, then put it in her pocket. She added one final, by now unsurprising, sentence to her story:
‘The following day I flew back to Moscow and then on to London to my husband, but it was on that evening that my daughter was conceived.’
11
I bought back my parents’ apartment in Belgrade for a sum much lower than I had sold it for fifteen years earlier, smaller in numerical as well as real terms. The property market has been dead here for years. You can buy an entire town for less than the price of Gorsky’s palace. No one buys. No one sells. No one has any money.
I run an English language school for children whose parents dream of Natalia Summerscale’s lifestyle for their progeny, who dream of money and escape. I have a girlfriend, a local girl and an English teacher, fifteen years younger than me. We have been living together for over two years. She visited London once. She tells me that she walked from her hotel in Bloomsbury all the way down to Piccadilly and on into Mayfair. When she came to the edges of Hyde Park, she assumed that there was nothing worth seeing beyond it and turned back.
She doesn’t want to revisit England, which is fine by me. She is tired of Europe, she says. She talks of India, Nepal and Bhutan, and she quotes nuggets of New Age wisdom about the purpose of life and the secret of happiness. She does not envy anyone, because envy is toxic, she says. It eats the vessel it is stored in. She cycles, and she does yoga, and she aligns her chakras. She breathes in deeply, she holds her breath, and she exhales.
In the mornings, I run by the Danube to keep fit. In the evenings, I sit by it with a glass of local wine in one of the many cafes that line its banks, watching its waters flow endlessly towards the Black Sea.
I read a bit, after work, though nowhere near as much as I used to. I am about to finish Macaulay’s History of England. Before that I read a book about big game hunting which took several weeks. I can’t remember its author. I gave the volume away. We have no library because we declutter religiously. My girlfriend has pinned a card above my desk which reads: Do not be afraid to let go. She is still a child. How can she know that I had, for a long time, found it impossible to hold onto things?
When I think of London now, I think of Gorsky. London was once an imperial city, then it was, for a while, just another European capital with good museums and bad hotels, inhabited by a nation that was once capable of great things. Finally the city unmoored itself from its nation and became a home to arrivals from all over the world, best suited to those who had millions and those who had nothing. People like Gorsky made it temporarily a great Russian city, the second St Petersburg, the new Moscow. Their children, now being educated in expensive British boarding schools, will never know the same thirst. In time, they too will become like the English. The new conquerors will come from India and China, to spend and to buy as the Russians did. The city will be their lover for a moment, then give herself to the next wave.
Strange to say, but I am at peace. My girlfriend talks about the power of now, about the importance of keeping your thoughts anchored in the present. Neither the past nor the future exists. To please her, I sit next to her on her yoga mat and, far from the sea, we meditate together to the pre-recorded sound of the waves. I follow her prompts. I inhale as deeply as I can, I hold my breath, I let go. I close my eyes and I see a plume of white powder floating over the Thames. The world stands still.
A NOTE ABOUT THE NOVEL
No reader can have got this far without realising the debt I owe to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but I still wish to record my gratitude. Readers familiar with Russian literature will have noticed references to a list of writers and poets too long to repeat. Their works have been a home from home all my life. Natalia Summerscale picks up the stub of a pencil in the empty room at the end of Gorsky because that room is filled to the brim with the spirit of Anton Chekhov and I feel for her.
Although Gorsky is a Russian name with variants in many Slavonic languages, my inspiration came from my mother tongue. Very early on, while I was searching for the requisite echo of Gatsby, I remembered the title of the great nineteenth-century epic, Gorski Vijenac (‘The Mountain Wreath’) by the Montenegrin Prince-Bishop Petar Petrović-Njegoš. The association seemed fortuitous. Njegoš was ordained bishop in St Petersburg in 1833. In 1837 he prayed on Pushkin’s grave at Sviatogorsky Monastery in southern Russia, and he dedicated a collection of his verse to Pushkin. No one can overstate the depth of Montenegrin and Serbian feeling for Russian culture.
As a one-time Serbian medievalist, I was also influenced by the rather appropriate name of the great Belgrade-based Byzantinist, George Ostrogorsky (with its suggestion of eastern-Gorsky), who was himself from St Petersburg.
There is another Gorsky in the making. A doctoral student of mine, Nebojša Radić, is writing a novel which couldn’t be more different from this. It does, however, have a character called Alex Gorsky. We discussed the coincidence when he sent me his first chapters. I did not want Alex to change his name. It is perhaps proof of our shared Serbian origins and interest in Russia, linked by some Jungian correspondence of thought.
It could be argued that my main character is not Roman Gorsky but London. It is the city in which I have lived, and which I have loved, for almost thirty years. The London of Gorsky, however, is a place of imagined details. The Laurels and the Barracks do not exist, and neither does Fynch’s bookshop (although I very much wish it did). Many other places and all of the main characters are similarly fictional: this is, after all, a novel.
I am fortunate to count both native Russians and Russian scholars and experts among my friends, but I have not consulted them, and they are not to blame for anything that may be wrong with this book’s portrayal of Russia and its people, any more than my London friends are for my take on our city. For what is right with it, I am grateful to my editor Clara Farmer, my agent Faith Evans, and my first reader, as always, Simon Goldsworthy.
VESNA GOLDSWORTHY is the author of Inventing Ruritania, the memoir Chernobyl Strawberries, and the Cranshaw Prize-winning poetry collection, The Angel of Salonika. She lives in London.
Printed in the United States Copyright © 2015 The Overlook Press
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Author photograph by Jonathan Greet
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