Rising

by Fenek Solère

  ‘See you, friend!’ He waved as he threw open the door. Janssen tipped his cap knowingly, commanding the driver to move on. Tom strode into the lobby and made for the bar. Taking a seat, he ordered whisky with ice before taking a look around. Nearby, a group of young girls sat talking behind a palisade of Sobranie cigarettes. They were wearing bright leather jackets, tight mini-skirts, and high-heeled shoes. To their left sat two or three single girls, reading magazines and drinking herbal tea. One in particular caught his eye. She had the long limbs and javelin features of a model. Her hair was pulled back in an Arabian ponytail, a glossy copy of Tatler draped over her knee. After a few moments he turned his head to check for further shopping options. Three more women, high cheeked-boned, educated types, sat on stools in an adjacent booth. There was a redhead girl, a bleach blonde, and a girl with what he took to be a Chinese pedigree, hovering, looking for business. By the time his drink arrived, the girl in the blue top had come across. Her face, side-lit by the table’s candle flame, struck him as simply sublime. She had a fulsome mouth, shining eyes, and snowy skin.

  ‘If you want I can come to room for massage and sex’, she said, ‘One hundred euro!’

  ‘I don’t have a room.’

  Her smile subsided. ‘I know place, but it is twenty euro more.’

  ‘OK, please take a seat.’ She sat and watched him drink. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘What would you like it to be?’

  ‘Cecilia’, he ventured, remembering the shuddering frigidity of his former wife. A look of casual acceptance came over her face. ‘Private joke’, Tom ventured by way of explaining his choice. He noticed her glass was empty and ordered a celery juice which she gulped quickly, pulling threads from between her teeth.

  ‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff.’ His eyes watching her wet tongue caress her lips.

  ‘Good for skin and no calories’, she replied. Then she stood up, running her hands down her hips. ‘No thickness, you see?’

  ‘But it tastes like grass!’

  ‘But I look good, no?’ Tom was studying the loose cut of her Wranglers, its hang revealing the soft roundness of the girl’s flat belly and the top of a white cotton thong.

  ‘Then you do suffer for your looks.’

  ‘Better to have good face and nice figure in my business’, she suggested, wiggling her pert backside.

  ‘That is true. Tell me, are you an actress?’ It was a ritual compliment but it was appreciated.

  ‘Sometimes I have done TV’, she said, lying. He leaned forward to smell her perfume.

  ‘You smell expensive.’

  ‘Kenzo Flower’, she murmured sexily. ‘It is by Guerlain.’ Pulling at a red rubber band, she shook her hair out over slight shoulders. ‘You like?’ she asked provocatively.

  ‘I like.’ A pause. ‘Everything!’

  A few minutes later he found himself being led outside. Before him, the noble statue of Alexander, Prince of Novgorod, lit up yellow against a purple haze. Cars span around the junction, veering off along the Sinopskaya Riverside towards Smolny, the outer Perevozny suburbs, or back along Nevsky into the city past the Moscow railway station. The girl’s hand was a stone-cold pebble in his palm. She took him halfway down a small side-street and stopped in front of a tunnel. He could taste the dampness coming off the moss-covered walls and putrescent puddles. Silence entombed them. A streetlight burned bright to one side of the bleak entrance as the iron gateway scratched a well-rutted groove. Then his guide took him out of the light, disappearing into a landscape of empty echoes.

  In a small, cramped room at the top of a wooden staircase, she lay naked, long sleek legs akimbo, while Tom wrestled with his clothes in front of her. She reached out, picking up a packet of condoms, tossing them towards him.

  ‘You must use’, she ordered. He watched as she drew her knees up to her chin, revealing her innermost self to him, proffering temptation on the bedsheet. As he fumbled with the foil, she teased him in a jaded monotone. ‘I want you now, you crazy boy.’

  ‘I want you, too!’ he replied, peeling off his socks, balanced awkwardly on one foot, forcing a condom over his erection. Behind him, the city lights cut through the venetian blinds, beams refracting like orange tracer shot bouncing off her bony body. He knelt over her and she opened her knees to receive him. His stomach bucked against her stretched pelvis as they moved together like rowers in a river race.

  ‘Wait’, she breathed. ‘Condom is gone.’

  ‘What?’ he moaned, pushing hard, trying to reach climax.

  ‘Stop’, she urged, trying to force him out.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Condom is gone’, she squirmed. Tom started moving faster, his orgasm imminent. She screamed, pushing him off. He rolled away feeling angry because he had not come and guilty that he had ignored her the first time. For a moment she sat hunched back against the headboard, fingers fishing inside her vagina. Sleek and wet, her digits reappeared, nail varnish dripping, clutching the ruptured latex. She sat bolt upright. ‘Turn light on!’ she insisted. He reached over, hitting the button. ‘Look’, she said, ‘this is bad, very bad!’

  ‘Don’t you take the contraceptive pill?’

  ‘Not pill, you idiot’, she raged contemptuously, ‘you give me HIV!’

  ‘No, I’m clean’, he said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Who knows? I fuck. Fucking gives illness. Condoms stop disease. That is why you should always wear this!’ She held the drooping protective between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Do you think this is a turn-on? AIDS kill my friends, many friends . . .’

  ***

  The concierge passed Tom a message straight after breakfast in the Borsalino bar. It seemed some people were waiting for him at reception. He sipped his americano and agreed for them to join him. Soon, he was sitting opposite two serious-looking characters observing him through narrow, suspicious eyes. Arkady was wearing an expensive Z-Zegna wool-mix suit. The bull-necked Bogdan, even larger-framed than the muscular Arkady, was bursting out of his jacket, his head shaved, nodding in open challenge.

  ‘I am glad you agreed to speak with us’, Arkady began, almost respectfully.

  ‘Not at all, I always try to make myself available. How can I be of assistance?’ The two Russians gave each other knowing looks as the girl returned with two white pots and cups to match. They waited a few moments, making small talk about the weather.

  ‘You see’, Arkady started to say, ‘we do not generally have a high regard for your country. Maybe you will be different, I can hope so?’

  Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘Gentlemen, you intrigue me . . .’

  ‘We think you are better’, Bogdan chipped in incoherently.

  ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Grigori’s Belarussian friends like Alexey Dzermant and Dmitry Dyomushin’s Soyuz lunatics!’

  ‘In what way, better?’ Tom began to sound defensive. Bogdan’s mouth was spitting tea.

  ‘Well, our people don’t want anybody like the National Democratic Party to succeed. We don’t agree with Rossiya, Rossiya, Rossiya, messiya gryadushchevko dnya.’ Tom’s eyes widened. Arkady translated, ‘O Russia, the messiah of the coming day’. Then, adding, ‘In fact we hold opposing views and would prefer if the conference was boycotted!’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘That you become indisposed.’

  ‘’You don’t want me to speak?’

  ‘It is not personal, we are approaching all people scheduled to talk!’

  ‘Well, that’s alright, then’, Tom laughed.

  ‘Can I report that you will be unavailable?’ The academic touched his fore-head with an index finger.

  ‘I have never been in better health!’

  ‘Let’s hope it stays that way!’ Arkady said, levering himself out of the booth. ‘The hospitals here have poor survival rates!’

  Production of Mebendazola is increased ten-fold to offset the growing prevalence of Central Asian diseases like ascariasis and entrebiasis
;

  Outbreaks of Urban Cutaneous leishmaniasis, ethinococcis, and toxocarciasis are reported to have crossed from the Stans into Rostov Oblast;

  Zoonotic parasitic infections and vector-borne protozoan infections become common in Svetlograd, Novopavlovsk, and Ipatovo;

  Multiple deaths from Middle East respiratory syndrome occur in Kalmykia.

  He met Ekaterina standing on the quayside in front of the Winter Palace. Her hair hung wet, gusting in the wind, flecks of corn blowing against a gun-metal sky. The high pitched cries of piebald gulls pierced the cloud line. She took him by the hand, and he used the opportunity to kiss her cheek respectfully before walking down a clanking iron footbridge onto a small motor-launch. Ekaterina haggled with the captain before Tom handed over a 500 rouble note, and they stepped onto the oil-stained decking.

  The Neva travelled as far as the eye could see. To the west was the Gulf of Finland. To the east, Archangel and the Barents Sea. The sky welded the iron span of bridges, structures straining to make each shoreline. Steel and stone shoulders broke under the oppressive weight of infinite grey. Passengers gathered below a cream awning, watching the propeller twist into action, arcing white water edging the vessel out into the brown river. Ekaterina pointed to a flight of wildfowl drifting over the shoreline on the Petrograd side as the pounding of a canon’s mechanical recoil echoed from the fortress.

  She explained how the Neva’s origins lay in the far north and how Lake Ladoga’s frozen surface cracked in May, sending ice floes down the full length of the river, finally dissipating into open sea. Salty marsh islands crystallised at its mouth, and lowland swamps formed which would often be submerged beneath the swelling water. Here, millennia before, the Izhora people had settled, and legend had it that Prince Rurik built a stronghold at Novgorod and Prince Oleg struck out for Kiev to found a new state. Hence, the great Varangian trade route from the Viking Baltic to the Black Sea was born and the Neva was its life source.

  To the west, Kastelholm stood like a proud master over the Alands. The castle’s walls marked the borderlands between Finland and Tsarist Russia. From Kattegat to St Petersburg, the southern shore was mined for amber, the legacy of the resins deposited by the ancient Lake Ancylus, which drained away to form the gravel beds that were later to mould rivers like the Vistula and the Bug. These treacherous lagoons and fenlands proved death traps for the Teutonic Knights as they waged their northern crusades around Riga. Even today, the dark sentinels of the Karnan and Kronborg strongholds still stood out sharply against the dark cliff faces that dropped suddenly into the sea.

  ‘Kronborg was built to defend Helsingor on the Danish side’, Ekaterina was saying as if this may interest her guest. When he shook his head dumbly, she laughed. ‘English called it Elsinore. You must know Shakespeare’s Hamlet?’ Now it was his turn to laugh.

  ‘I have forgotten my classes.’

  Moving on up the river was like travelling back in time. He imagined an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable larch and pine forest. Round-topped wooden huts sat on the indented shore and salted fish hung from poles. His mind was full of tribal people like the Sami, Setus, and Karelians fighting over the best hunting grounds and farmland. The warlike Aesti gave ground to the Viking surge which followed the collapse of Rome’s western empire. Their dragon prows drew east to the Black and Caspian seas.

  Salt air tingled nostrils. There was no joy in the winter sunshine, just the chorus of sea birds to mark their passage. You could still smell the sweat of the serf labourers digging the foundations of the Peterhof, toiling through the mud and soil, backs breaking under the overseer’s whip. In the distance, long stretches of waterway ran on ahead like a stained-glass highway. They were staring into the reflected images of domes and spires, lost in rippling tides. On silver-grey sandbanks, dead rats and effluent lay side by side. The water flowed through and past them, washing away memories, thought of time, and any sense of space. Long ago, the Swedes under Jarl Magnusson, Catholic Germans, and the Hanse merchants had navigated these stretches. All were seduced by the power of the river. Women were beguiled and men bewitched by its meandering rhythms.

  In midstream, the captain nodded to the crew from the small cabin, and they began serving platters of zakuski. This consisted of smoked sturgeon, garlic sausage, potatoes, and mushrooms in sour cream. Tom and Ekaterina were offered chilled shots of vodka. He toasted their meeting.

  ‘To our voyage of discovery.’ The cabbage pies were unlike anything he had ever encountered. Ekaterina was eating enthusiastically. ‘This is domashni piroshki, you say homemade.’ They were looking intently into each other’s eyes. ‘The water always gives me an appetite’, she smiled, ‘You like?’

  ‘It’s all the fresh air and the smell of the wind.’ She offered a salted herring on the end of a fork. He declined with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘I’ve got enough, thanks.’

  They watched as a lone woman walked down to the shoreline on the Petrograd embankment. Ekaterina waved, and the distant figure returned the compliment with a lazy, slow jerk of the arm. It seemed to Tom that it was almost an involuntary reflex response. St Petersburgers, unlike Muscovites, were naturally more communal. Regardless of their state of mind or how busy they were, their inclination was always to be more civil than those from the capital. Perhaps it was because the inhabitants had faced such barbarism, either from their own rulers, or invaders who targeted the city and singled out its people for special attention.

  She told him how 300 years before, Peter the Great had planted his seed here. He was the illegitimate offspring of old Russia and the European Enlightenment. It was a new Russia of majestic palaces, lamp-lit streets, and a regulated police force. There were refuse collections and a strong sense of civic pride. Residents living near the river were punished for polluting the waterways and taxes were levied to fund municipal services. Gone were the days when bears and wolves roamed free, but savage dog packs were still common. With the flesh around their snarling muzzles drawn back, fangs dripping saliva, they attacked tourists on the streets. It was certainly wild, but in a different way than the ‘time of troubles’ centuries before. Then a priest blundering on the black ice, frowning under his flapping cowl, would hold his arm aloft, crude wooden crucifix in hand, exorcising the bleak soul at the heart of this pagan wilderness. The locals had long forgotten the Lion of the North, Gustavus Adolphus, but under the surface, the past still flourished. Nature-worship and Piasts fought for supremacy. The primitive still lingered.

  Along the embankment, scores of couples walked hand -in-hand. The Professor felt that if he had been looking at the scene from the deck of a merchant’s skiff 200 years earlier that his eyes would have witnessed a similar performance. The blue and yellow ensigns of Swedish brigantines were long gone. This was Russia’s Paris now. A city of passion, mystery, and deep-seated romanticism, but still forever a stranger in its homeland.

  The captain cut the engine, letting the boat drift so as not to disturb the fishermen casting out from the river’s edge. Tom watched the slow, gentle flight of lines fire out in the thin light, reels whirring, the plop of lead weights taking the hook below the surface. Then the engine started up again and they went on into the great grey silence, along empty reaches, around still bends, between the high walls of tall buildings, with only the sounds of the motor to soundtrack their progress. Stone upon stone, millions of them, massive, immense iconic structures towered as they pulled through the narrow canals. The metal screw turned, churning mud-coloured waves, sending them crashing headlong into the embankment. Flapping birds trailed the boat, calling for scraps.

  The vessel was aiming for the yawning mouth of the Fontanka Canal. The Summer Gardens came into view, the ornamental grille railings framing a giant vase rising out of the trees and hedges. Before them, the intricately decorated Summer Palace stood proud, looming over a tea house. ‘Trezzini built this in 1712’, she was saying. ‘Peter the Great died here in 1725.’

  ‘The park is beauti
ful.’

  ‘Many writers liked to walk here, Taras Shevchenko, Zhukovsky, Gogol, and Alexander Blok.’

  ‘I once visited the Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, where Darius Stoyan studied’, Tom said.

  ‘You have been to Kiev?’ Her eyes flashed. There was a hint of jealousy in her voice.

  ‘Twice, actually. The first time I was invited to give a memorial lecture for a man called David Lane. The second time I was presenting on Western perceptions of the politics of Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stus, and Dymtro Pavlychko.’

  ‘I would love to visit this city’, Ekaterina gasped. Then, ‘If I remember correctly Franko wrote Beyond the Limits of the Possible?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. My favourite line is: “anything that goes beyond the frame of the nation is hypocrisy from people of internationalised ideals which serve to provide for ethnic domination of one nation over another . . . .”’

  ‘It’s like a prediction’, she replied.

  ‘Certainly is.’

  Their eyes were drawn to the sculptures of Cupid and Psyche, then the scoured marble representations of the Roman Emperor Claudius, his wife Agrippina, and her mad son Nero. Tom was wondering how many demagogues had fiddled while this megalopolis burned under incendiary attack. Leaning on the metal railings, they watched the boat swing to port side and enter the Moika. They chugged past the Swan Canal and Mikhailovsky Castle, where one paranoid Tsar was strangled to death in his own bedchamber.

  Gliding around the curves under steep concrete canal walls, they advanced below the Police Bridge. Above and all around, people moved to and fro, bodies swaying, laughing, lighting cigarettes on coffee breaks from the office. Young men stood arm-in-arm with their girlfriends. Old lovers escaped the watchful eyes of neighbours, illicitly meeting among the tangle of iron and jagged masonry. Here in the heart of the city, the pulse of life was strong and fertile. You could buy anything at a price. The menu was wide open, deals were made, and transactions done quickly. This was no place for hesitation or uncertainty, it diminished credibility. Everything was about respect and the ability to pay your way. In the very cradle of Communism, money was king again. The cycle was turning, repeating itself with the inevitability of the Sun’s rise and set, the Moon’s waxing, and begging bowls in Africa.