The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  On her way out, Tooly gazed down the empty staircase. If Venn walked up these steps (she looked to where he’d stand, and she smiled, seeing him grin at her), he could explain everything. Not just the muddle of her past but the muddle of her present, too—what to do now, where, and with whom.

  Tooly had no further commitments that evening. No children to drive, no one expecting her anywhere on earth. She walked to the Brighton Beach boardwalk as dusk fell, sat on a bench there; a blustery summer evening. Yelena’s son, who had finally fixed Humphrey’s TV remote, happened to be walking past, an Eastpack day bag slung over his shoulder. She wondered whether to say his name, and if it would carry through the wind.

  He noticed her. “Yo,” Garry said. “You’re the daughter of that old man.”

  “So they say.”

  He asked what she was doing there, just sitting, as if this were an insufficient activity. “The Starbucks is open late, if you’re looking for one.”

  She was not. He wouldn’t believe there wasn’t some object she required.

  Relenting, she said, “I wouldn’t hate a drink.”

  He contemplated this, then snapped his fingers badly. “You won’t like this place—I can show you.”

  It was the sort of terrible suggestion that immediately won her over.

  She realized as they approached the bar that Garry hadn’t intended to deposit her at its door (in which case she planned to sneak off to the subway) but to join her. The sign promised: “Russian & American nightclub: Live music and dancing every night starting 9 P.M.”

  “We’re early for the dancing,” she said.

  He opened the door. Eastern European pop music blared, the bartender chanting along. Garry ordered for them, switching impressively to his native Russian—“BOДKa!”—voice deepening as he did so. A carafe of vodka arrived. He waved away Tooly’s attempts to pay for her share.

  “Are you supposed to sip each shot?” she asked. “Or down it in one gulp?”

  He was inconclusive, so she tried both ways, alcohol seeping into her, pushing back the day.

  Would Humphrey be sleeping still? Or plodding around, discovering her note on the microwave, unable to find his glasses. Strange to think of him, so near yet following his own story line, separate from hers.

  No point badgering him with questions anymore, she decided. He had no answers for her. Time to erase this. All that matters is now. Nothing before. Stop thinking. Stop.

  As Garry drank, his deep voice became less baritone, and he responded to her humor, his distracted blue eyes fastening on her now, looking downward, since he was a tall young man, lean and long-limbed.

  “Do you have a patronymic?” she asked. “Like those characters in Russian novels.”

  “We also exist in real life, not only in Dostoyevsky books.”

  “I’m becoming aware of this. But is your proper name something like Vassily Petrovich?” she speculated. “I like the sound of that. Makes me feel like there’ll be a droshky waiting outside.”

  “Only the el train.”

  He put his hand on her knee, then, with the next shot, moved it to her thigh, then her hip, then her shoulder. “Are you climbing?” she asked.

  She enjoyed his kiss, though it was slightly odd, given that he was probably seven years younger than she. “You are a cougar,” he declared.

  “Am I? Not on purpose.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now what what?”

  “I still live at home,” he informed her.

  “Do you know that Chekhov story ‘The Kiss,’ ” she went on, “where this unlucky officer mistakenly—”

  “Not everything we Russians do comes out of Chekhov.”

  “Or Dostoyevsky.”

  “More Dostoyevsky, perhaps.”

  1988

  A BEER BOTTLE SWEATED on the café-terrace table. Beside it sat an extra glass for Tooly, so the ten-year-old could taste alcohol for the first time. Her deck shoes skimmed the pavement as she swung her legs back and forth, the plastic chair edge impressing a sweaty line under her knees.

  It was late, and she hadn’t returned home. Her heart sank at the thought of Paul. But if she mentioned him Sarah might take her back. Tooly closed her eyes, clutching the strap of her book bag.

  “No one will take that, I promise,” Sarah said.

  “Just, I’m famous for forgetting stuff.”

  “Are there valuables inside?”

  Tooly, normally private about her bag, opened it for Sarah to see: ring binder, Nicholas Nickleby, gym shorts and T-shirt, specks of grit mysteriously accumulated, her sketchbook. “You want to see my drawings?”

  “Are you a good artist?”

  Tooly shook her head. She handed over the sketchbook, watching for Sarah’s reaction, the woman’s eyes smiling first, lips joining in.

  “It’s all noses,” Sarah remarked.

  “I can’t draw a whole face.”

  “They’re very nice noses.”

  “Can I see in yours, Sarah?”

  “In my nose?”

  Tooly laughed. “In your bag!”

  Sarah opened its clasps, baring the scents and treasures of the adult female: a compact, tissues, lipstick, cigarette pack, disposable lighter, a pair of underwear and a toothbrush, sunglasses, tampon, nail polish, chewing gum.

  “What’s that little hammer for?”

  “In case I get locked in somewhere and need to break a window.”

  “Sarah?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Is your bubble gum nice?”

  “Want to try? Take anything you want,” she said. “Are you liking that beer, by the way?”

  “It’s a bit sour. Not sour but … I heard once,” she said, “that if you get drunk it’s like being awake and asleep at the same time. Is that true?”

  “It’s lovely, being drunk.” Sarah swigged from their beer, arm draped over her chair, cigarette tip grazing the sidewalk, legs extended, crossed at the ankles.

  How odd that, a few hours earlier, Tooly had been in the school microbus, blocks from home, then swept off to Khlong Toey Market, now here. She took another frothy sip. “Can I ask a question?”

  “They’re the best thing to ask, my dear.”

  “You didn’t like school when you were little, did you?”

  “Hated it! Awful. Hardly went.” She had spent far more time with her father, Ettore, an Italian immigrant who moved to Kenya after the war to open a game park for his wealthy compatriots. Lacking capital and land, he’d married someone with both, a well-off English girl. Ettore and Caroline—“Now, they knew how to make cocktails on a hot day,” Sarah said—produced three daughters, of whom Sarah was the youngest and, to her father, the favorite. A handsome tanned man with a repository of bawdy jokes in six languages, he took Sarah everywhere, making her the official safari photographer at age eleven. Her sisters remained at the house, mastering domesticity and waiting until suitable gentlemen arrived to determine the course of their lives. Ettore considered his eldest daughters unseriously, an attitude Sarah absorbed, exchanging wry glances with him at dinner. Most of his clients were men, but it was their wives whom he bedazzled. By adolescence, Sarah found herself gaining charms of her own, appraised by men now, which both appalled and addicted her.

  “The English colonists hated our operation,” she recalled. “Now and then, one of our clients insisted on a submachine gun, or used nail boards to hunt the elephants, which was considered terribly uncouth.”

  “Did you live in the jungle?”

  “We lived in a house. A big house, full of junk. My mother collected pointless bits of furniture. We were in the middle of nowhere. Not ideal for young people. They’d hit a button at nine P.M. and everyone over the age of forty fell asleep.”

  “And how long have you lived in Bangkok?”

  “I’m just visiting, Matilda. Only got here a few weeks ago.”

  “Are you leaving soon?”

  “Don’t know yet. Depends.”

  “W
hy did you come?”

  She tucked Tooly’s long frizzy hair behind her ears. “Because of you.”

  Confused but shy about asking more, Tooly sipped her glass of beer, looked at the street, turned back. “Where do you live, normally?”

  “I don’t live normally. I’m on vacation from now till forever. The world is too interesting to pick one place and stick to it. Don’t you think? When you meet people like my sisters, who never move, who still live in the town where they were born—I’ll never understand it. They’re a different species. In life,” she stated, “there are people who stay and people who go.” She scrunched her empty pack of Kools, depositing it in Tooly’s palm. “Wait here, my dear. Must replenish.”

  Tooly watched Sarah disappear into the café. Were there people who stay and others who go? If Tooly could choose, she wanted to be someone who went. A hand stroked her face from the other side. “Success,” Sarah said, unwrapping the new pack, taking her seat.

  “I’m feeling asleep and awake at the same time,” Tooly said.

  “Put your head down, if you like.” Sarah laid her open hand on the tabletop, a pillow for the girl. Tooly released the book-bag strap and rested, closing her eyes.

  She awoke sharply, frightened by the noise, the neon. Two more empty beer bottles sat on the table. “I have to go,” Tooly said. “Is it late?”

  “It’s supposed to be late. Where we’re going doesn’t start till after dark.”

  “I was thinking about those kingfishers you let out of the cage.”

  “Lovely, wasn’t it?” She kissed Tooly’s hand. “So,” she said, standing. “Ready?”

  “Maybe I should go home.”

  “Do you really want to?”

  Their tuk-tuk buzzed down the road, bouncing over each pothole. Car headlights streaked past. Taillights peeled off left and right before them, and faces on the sidewalk whooshed by. “That’s the market where we were before,” Tooly noted. They drove down a deserted soi, and the tuk-tuk stopped. A shadowed alley lay ahead.

  “You won’t get in trouble,” Sarah said, rightly guessing Tooly’s thoughts. “I’m looking after you. Okay?”

  As they walked into the dark, a trio of young guys appeared. One approached Sarah, saying they were on vacation from West Germany and had heard about an underground bar around here. Without breaking stride, she claimed ignorance—but not without a flicker of a smile that dragged the three boy-men in her wake. She cupped her hand behind Tooly’s head as they walked, telling the guys, “This is the person you should be talking to. She’s the one in charge.”

  Grinning, they crouched beside Tooly and begged, “Come on, little girl. Please, please, show us!”

  Tooly pressed her lips tightly together, breathed through her nose, hurrying alongside Sarah.

  “Hey, I can hear music,” one of the Germans said.

  A disco beat pulsated in the distance. The buzz of conversation grew louder. They entered a concrete garden with high walls on either side, and behind it a house in near-ruins. Revelers stood outside, drinking from plastic cups, shouting to be heard.

  Sarah pushed through the crowd, greeting acquaintances as she went, then stopped before the front door, waving to two huge bouncers.

  “Is this music your fault?” she asked the one with the skinny leather tie.

  “It’s Venn who wants this sappy shit.”

  “You can’t let Venn pick the music!”

  The other bouncer shrugged. “He’s the boss.”

  The crowd inside—mainly foreigners, but Thais among them—swayed, flirted, anticipated punch lines, stared glassy-eyed, fixed cleavage and looked down it, searched for toilets, lined up at the bar. Amid the mass of bodies was an aluminum stepladder against which drinkers propped themselves. An upright piano by the far wall served as a makeshift table, and a disk jockey with headphones bobbed before Technics turntables. Light from a twinkling disco ball sprinkled white dots and, every few seconds, a gust pushed through the crowd as the floor fan rotated, clothes rippling, cigarette ends glowing. Tooly held tight to Sarah’s bangles, bumping into strangers’ hips, elbows, behinds. At the turntables, Sarah greeted the deejay with a kiss to his cheek, then raised the needle off the record, prompting both jeers and cheers. She flipped through a crate of records. “Guess I should have found something before I did that,” she remarked, amused by the discontent. “What do you want to hear, Matilda?”

  Tooly knew nothing of music. Paul never listened to it, so her awareness revolved around what she had encountered at school: sheet music from band, where she played the ukulele, her specialty being “Three Blind Mice”; plus the horrible pop cassettes Mr. Priddles put on.

  “This one?” Tooly asked, pointing to the only familiar album cover.

  “I adore you and will do nearly anything you ask,” Sarah said. “But Ghostbusters is where I draw the line. Actually—fuck it. Ghostbusters it is.”

  The record crackled, loudspeakers hissed, and the first eerie notes kicked in. The crowd groaned, causing Tooly to look around in fear. But Sarah was greatly entertained and hurried her toward the bar, looking back as a mob converged on the deejay, who rapidly put on Def Leppard.

  A long table served as the cash bar, buckling under all the sticky booze bottles. The bartender, a Uruguayan named Jaime, raised both arms in greeting. “¡Hola, chica!¿Qué tal? You good?”

  “Muy good,” she answered, helping herself to a Singha. As Sarah and he chatted, Tooly considered the grown-ups everywhere. She had never been the sole child among this many adults. It was so muggy in here, and her shirt stuck to her, the book-bag strap cutting into her shoulder. She took Sarah’s icy beer bottle in both hands, tilted it, froth spurting just as her lips arrived, liquid dribbling down her chin. “Sorry,” she said, looking up.

  “I’ll check if he’s there,” Sarah was telling the bartender, and took Tooly by the hand, chasing her up the stairs, sending her into giggles. Tooly burst onto the upper floor into another boisterous crowd. Sarah peered out the windows up there—that is, four large holes in the second-story wall—scanning the back patio, where partygoers hung out before a wall fresco of a dolphin. “Nope,” she muttered, turning on her heels, slapping away the fug of smoke. “Anyone seen Venn?”

  They came upon a sixtyish man sitting alone at a card table, a vinyl chessboard laid out, his hand lingering over a knight, then pulling back. He scratched his sideburns, which were like strips of burned toast. A handwritten sign hung from his table, fluttering each time anyone passed. IF YOU WIN ME, it read, YOU WILL BE VERY STRONG CHESSPLAYER. In a storage room behind him were piles of boxes, videotapes, fax machines, broken televisions.

  “Humphrey!” Sarah said.

  This man—the oldest person at that party by decades—continued to stare downward, his eyes hidden under a dark balcony of eyebrows. He wore a polyester dress shirt, tie yanked to the side, blue tennis shorts over a modest potbelly, laceless white sneakers.

  “I can’t find Venn,” she said. “Where is he?”

  Still the old man contemplated the chessboard.

  Sarah touched his arm and Humphrey flinched, then—perceiving who it was—his face lit up, transforming with pleasure. “My dear darlink!” he said to Sarah in a strong Russian accent, plucking out earplugs made of balled-up toilet paper.

  “Who’s winning?” she asked. “You or you?”

  “Yes, sure—you making fun of me.”

  “Meet my personal bodyguard.” She parted Tooly’s hair to bare her face.

  “Hello, bodyguard. Nice to meeting.” He took her hand, sandwiching it between his. “I can tell only from looking that you are intellectual. Large ears, high on head. When high up, this means ears holding heavy brain.”

  Doubtfully, Tooly asked, “Do ears hold up your brain?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “This why I have famous large ears. This means intellectual. One day, if you very lucky, you have big ears like me.”

  The prophecy was not entirely auspicious, for the
old man’s ears were not only large but prodigiously hairy. Nevertheless, she thanked him.

  He released her hand and turned to Sarah. “Nyet. I do not see Venn. But I keep my eyes plucked.”

  “You’ll keep your eyes peeled,” Sarah corrected him.

  “How I can peel my eyes? No, no—I am not doing this.”

  “What else do you have to tell me, Humph? Things good?”

  “How are things? Just look,” he lamented, indicating all the boxes behind him. “This is out of control. How I can live here? He just take over. I cannot allow. These items—you know where they come from? If authorities find, they say I am responsible. Is no good.”

  “You going to talk to him about it?”

  “Talk? What is purpose? I leave.”

  “No! You’re going? When, Humph?”

  “Tomorrow, first thing.”

  “You couldn’t bear to leave me,” she teased. “Listen, if you see Venn, say I’m on the prowl, okay? And don’t dare leave Bangkok without saying goodbye.”

  Humphrey nodded, inserted his earplugs, and returned to the chess problem, his features resuming their dour configuration.

  “Well, then. Think I’ll let you explore a bit,” Sarah told Tooly, kneeling to kiss the girl’s forehead. She turned toward the steps down. “Now, where is he?” Through the banisters, Tooly watched Sarah disappear into the crowd below.

  Tooly was unsure even where to look now, where to place her hands, how to stand. She gripped her book bag and stared down the staircase in case Sarah sprang back up. After an incredibly long time (four minutes), Sarah had not returned, so Tooly went downstairs herself and stepped into the crowd, dodging gesticulating hands, lurching knees. She stood on her tiptoes, leaning one way and the other, but could not spot Sarah. She pushed ahead, catching snippets of speech as she went.

  “Must say,” a man remarked, sipping from a straw plunged into a coconut, “must say I find it more than a little galling, having been locked in bamboo by the Japs, to take orders from them now. We beat the fuckers, didn’t we?”