by Rose Tremain
She turned her profile toward the window, where the last yellow flares of the sun were sinking through the dazzling lemon and amber spectrum of the glass. Then she turned back to Christy.
“Yes,” she said gravely. “I’d like to, too.”
Lev put down his fork. He held himself very still as he watched Jasmina and Christy lean in toward each other and cling together. The sight of Christy’s scorched hand clutching to his thin, white frame Jasmina’s plump, golden midriff moved Lev more than he could express, and when the couple kissed, he looked away. He let his gaze wander, once again, round Jasmina’s solitary accumulation of colored bottles. In any collector’s existence, he thought, there must come a moment when he or she says, “That’s it. It’s complete.” And he felt that such a moment had probably arrived.
20
Loans for Dreams
LEV WAS ON his way home from Panno’s at about one in the morning when he got a call on his mobile from Lora. He was by the gates to Highgate cemetery, where he noticed that someone had ditched a mound of rubbish in supermarket carrier bags. Ahead of him lay the darkness of Swains Lane.
Lora asked him to send more money. Her voice sounded far away. She said she was in despair about Rudi. Rudi’s depression now seemed to have got a hold on his body, making his bones ache and his muscles cramp and his feet sweat. She said he cried in his sleep.
Lev couldn’t stand to picture this. When he thought about his friend, he liked to imagine him laughing, arguing, drinking, slapping people’s shoulders with his huge paw of a hand. “I’ll send more,” he said right away.
“I hate to ask you, Lev. You’ve been generous to everybody,” said Lora. “But what I’m hoping, what I’m banking on, is if Rudi can get the Tchevi back on the road, he’ll stop feeling that everything’s over. Because that’s all he keeps saying to me: that our lives are kaput, like the car.”
Lev stood in the dark road, staring at the dim light shining in a window of one of the camper vans. He longed to tell Lora that his plan for the restaurant in Baryn was going to rescue them all, that Rudi would have an important role in it, but he didn’t dare say this, not yet, because he knew that his Great Idea had acquired no more real substance than when he’d first thought it up.
Lora now told Lev that she’d got a price on new tires and repair of the cooling system. If he could send £200, then the Tchevi could be back on the road within a week.
Two hundred pounds.
Already Lev was a week behind with Christy’s rent, two weeks behind with money to Ina. He began to walk down Swains Lane. He told Lora he could send the money after his next pay day, wondering as he said this how he’d live once it was gone.
He was level with the vans now. Saw, at the corner of his eye, two kids—one black and one white—come out from the dark space behind one of them, thought, It’s late for them to be on the street, thought they couldn’t be older than twelve, watched them go running down the road on the cemetery side.
“. . . he refuses to look out of the window,” Lora was saying. “He says he wishes someone would steal the Tchevi, so that he didn’t have to see it parked there . . .”
Into Lev’s mind streamed the memory of the Tchevi bumping down the sandy paths that led to Lake Essel and Rudi describing how he was going to stun the fish with its powerful headlights, and how the stunned fish had turned that odd electric blue—a poisonous blue?
“Lora, listen,” said Lev. “Make Rudi go to the hospital. He could be ill, not just depressed. Muscle cramps could be serious. It could be contamination from that trip we made to the lake.”
Lev heard Lora sigh. “He won’t see anybody. I wish you were home. You’d be able to help him, I know you would. But all I can think of at the moment is to try to fix the car.”
“Make him see a doctor.”
“Did you ever in your life make Rudi do anything?”
“Okay. Okay. But just remind him about the blue fish.”
“You know what I keep thinking, Lev? I keep thinking, If only we had a child. Then Rudi would have to keep going, wouldn’t he, for the sake of the child, just like you had to keep going for Maya’s sake?”
Lev began to remind Lora how long his own decline had lasted, then he paused as he saw the two kids running back up the lane toward him, running fast. He looked at their faces, the whiteness and the blackness of them emphasized by the shadowy light. He kept talking to Lora, but he heard his voice falter. He noticed that the white kid wore round specs, was shorter than the black boy, who had longer legs and could run faster. And now he understood, in a whirling, infinitely small moment of time, as the black kid slowed to let the other one catch up, so that they were running level, that the boys were going to charge into him, that he was their target, him and his phone . . .
He had time to brace himself, only that, then he felt a stinging slap on the left side of his face and a blow to his right shoulder. He staggered, tried to lunge at the black kid, who’d slapped him, then realized he was still clutching his phone as the boys sped on past him up the hill.
He turned, saw them pounding toward the cemetery gates, got the phone back to his ear, heard Lora saying, “What’s happening, Lev? What’s going on?”
“Kids,” he said. “Kids . . .” Heard his breath labored, like his father’s had been. “Tried to steal my phone. Jesus Christ!”
“You okay, Lev?”
“Yeah . . .”
He began to walk faster, wished he were nearer Belisha Road. At his back, he heard laughter, turned again, saw the boys grabbing bags of rubbish from the pile near the gates, saw them hurling the stinking bags into the air. Knew it wasn’t over.
He told Lora he had to go, told her to tell Rudi the money would soon be on its way, told her to go ahead and get the tires ordered, and the parts for the cooling system . . .
Thuk! A bag of garbage hit him in the small of his back. Almost winded him. He wanted to run, but knew twelve-year-olds could outpace him. Better to keep calm, go on with a firm step, get his phone safe in a pocket. Because perhaps it was just a game, one they liked to play late at night on strangers who chose this dark road. Perhaps they’d spurn his ordinary cheap mobile, probably stole iPods and BlackBerrys and God-knows-what all the time and wouldn’t think it worth their while to hurt him for this.
Thuk! Another bag. His shoulder now, the bag bursting and spilling as it hit him. And the bags were heavy, sharp-edged with empty tins and bottles, which clattered onto the pavement. Wouldn’t be a game any longer if one found its target on his head.
Anger welled in him as he heard the boys begin to run back down the hill toward him. Because just exactly what did kids like these—of whatever color—have as their excuse for attacking strangers? What, for instance, did they know about disadvantage and pain? Did their fathers work for starvation wages nine hours a day at some stinking sawmill? Had their mothers died of leukemia at the age of thirty-six? Were their homes threatened with obliteration? He turned again, but too late; they slammed into him and he lost his balance and lurched and went down, and now they were over him like carrion, pushing his face into the gutter, pecking at his clothes, gouging out the phone, tearing his shirt . . .
He tried to kick out at their legs, their skinny arses, their feet in stinking sneakers, but connected with nothing. Began yelling at them in his own language, as Rudi would have yelled, felt their scavenging hands pause just for a second as they registered the unfamiliar words, then a tide of abuse shouted into his ear: “Fuckin’ foreign shi’head!”
“Immigrant fuckin’ scum!”
Another slap on his face—just like the flat-hand blow of a school bully, petty, ignominious, stinging with insult, then everything being torn from him: keys, wallet, change, cigarettes, everything.
He thrashed out again, and his foot collided with something, and a hand cuffed his head and the swearing resumed: “Asylum-fuckin’-seeker!”
“Terrorist!”
“Cunt!”
Then he tasted dus
t in his mouth, heard the scuff of the rubber-soled sneakers as the boys got to their feet and ran away into the darkness.
He waited until he heard the running footsteps grow faint, then got up. He wasn’t hurt, but his face stung and his legs were trembling. He looked up and down the road, saw it deserted. The light in the van had gone out.
He staggered over to the cemetery railings and leaned against them. Felt in all his pockets to see what they’d left him, hoped at least to find his cigarettes. But there was nothing in the pockets. Nothing. No key to Belisha Road—and he knew Christy was at Palmers Green with Jasmina. No money for a night bus to anywhere . . .
He attempted to run back up the hill, but his heart began to pound so hard he felt it almost stall. He slowed, tried to hold himself up, to still his anger, tried to remember those little English punks were no worse than the underage petty criminals of Baryn, who hung about the market, nabbing small change, who nicked ice skates from the decaying old openair skating rink, sold them back for cash in some market bric-à-brac stall, and bought drugs wherever they could find them. They were just poor kids, that was all. Poor kids from poor homes, silted up with prejudice and misery. Poor kids whose parents were smashed or stoned or full of rage—or all of these. Poor kids who were already screwing up their own future.
He managed to run the last block to Panno’s. Saw a light still on in the kitchen, began hammering on the door.
Panno appeared, his melancholy face lit up with alarm.
Panno agreed to advance Lev some money against next week’s wages. He told him he was lucky, relatively lucky: his skull could have been broken by a bottle. And Lev knew Panno was right about the luck, yet he was still jittery. He felt that some part of himself had been broken.
He acquired a new phone. When he held it in his hand, he didn’t know now how he’d managed to exist in the world for so long without a mobile. Then, moments later, it rang, and it was G.K.
“Got preliminary costings for you,” he said. “Come at two-thirty tomorrow.”
Set out on the familiar table, where the air still smelled faintly of the previous night’s crostini, was a single page of figures. This time G.K. offered Lev fresh lemonade.
“I typed the figures,” said G.K., “so you can see everything clearly. Take a look.”
Lev held the paper with hands that trembled. He began to read:
six-burner professional cuisinières (2) with double ovens: min
£2,200 each new, or ex-restaurant secondhand £400 each (?)
salamanders (2): £500 each
steam extraction system: min £1,000
professional gas grill: £650
dishwasher and sinks: £900
storage and worktops: min £3,000
knives and blocks: £300
pans, cutters, strainers, bowls, boards, etc., etc.: £300
tables and chairs for 40 covers: secondhand? Price unknown
cutlery and glassware: £500?
linen . . .
Lev got to the end of the list and didn’t dare look up. He started again at the top, saw in his mind one of the beautiful six-burner cuisinières with its obedient blue flames, and longed, longed, to be standing there in front of it. But when he’d read down the schedule a second time, he stopped when he got to storage and worktops. He just couldn’t bear to have to take it in again, such a shocking accumulation of expense.
Lev felt G.K.’s sympathetic gaze on him. “That’s only the matériel,” said G.K. “I really don’t know how much it will cost you to fit out the premises. D’you know tame carpenters and electricians? Will those people still work for packets of Marlboro or shipments of panty hose? Or is it going to be an hourly rate?”
“Hourly rate,” said Lev. “But quite low.”
“Okay. Well, I still can’t estimate how that’s going to come out. Depends on the premises you find and what’s in place already.”
Lev was silent, staring at the bottom-line figure: £14,000.
Now he saw his Great Idea for what it was: a wild imagining, a thing of no substance. As a boy, he’d been a perpetual dreamer. “Concentrate, concentrate!” his mother and father had often had to bleat, as he’d stumbled on the way to school or down the path to the river. “Stop staring at clouds.” And now he’d been dreaming again, gawping at shadows again, that was all. Except that, this time, his future and that of the people he loved most in the world depended on the dream. Now he felt sick with fear.
“Have some lemonade,” said G.K.
Lev drank. Loved the tang and sweetness of it. Thought how, if you were a real chef, you could anticipate and provide the tastes and textures that people would find consoling, even if only for moments at a time. Reflected that, in the end, life—and the memory of life that ran with you hand in hand—was made up of such fugitive spots of time.
“You have to remember, Lev,” he heard G.K. say, “that I have no idea what stuff costs in Baryn. This figure is the minimum figure you’d need to equip a working kitchen here, assuming you can get a few items secondhand, but in your country, it would certainly be less. If you lower it to, say, ten K, to take account of the differential, you might be about right.”
Ten thousand pounds.
The whole enterprise was a pure fantasy. Even after his next pay check, Lev was stuck with less than £40 in his pocket once he’d sent something to Ina and the £200 to Lora for the Tchevi. And he owed Christy £180 . . .
He wanted to laugh at himself. Ten thousand pounds! He saw a foolish person who once believed he could advance human happiness with a few poinsettia plants, a pathetic figure who, toiling home with stolen bits of wood, had been knocked off his bicycle by a hay bale and lain in the ditch like a crucified man. He was forty-four and his plan—his Great Idea—was a farce. In a year’s time, his home would be under water. There would be no restaurant named Marina.
And what would happen to Ina? On his way back from GK Ashe this worry, above all the others, began to torment Lev once again. Because he understood at last that his mother was immovable. Auror was her life. If Auror was going to be drowned, then she would go to the bottom of the reservoir with it.
“Mamma,” he’d pleaded on the telephone, “the flats in Baryn may be quite nice. They will have electric heating. I’ve heard some of them will look out on the river, and we’re going to try to get one of those.”
“I don’t care what they look out on. I’m seventy years old. I intend to die in my village.”
“Mamma, think of Maya, how she needs you.”
“No. You think of Maya. She’s your child. Come home and be a father to her and let everybody leave me in peace.”
“Mamma, please . . .”
“I’m tired, Lev. Too tired to listen to you. Just let me be.”
She could break him with this kind of talk. She knew it only too well. But he asked himself, Why did she want to break him? Why was she so angry with him?
Because he was a FAILURE. This was the word with which, as Lev got on his Northern Line train to Tufnell Park, he answered the question. He imagined it printed on some tube-station poster, graffitied on some soot-laden wall: an assertion visible to all.
The following morning he did what he always did when he reached an impasse: he called Lydia’s mobile.
Lydia was in New York, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and it was five in the morning. Maestro Greszler was lying asleep beside her.
“I’m sorry, Lydia,” said Lev. “I didn’t know you were in the States. I thought you’d be in daytime somewhere.”
He heard her pad out of the room and into another of those echoey, light-filled bathrooms that so gladdened her heart. She told him to hang on while she put on her complimentary toweling robe over her silk pajamas.
He wanted to start by telling her about the attack in Swains Lane and how this had shaken him, but now he decided against it. He knew Lydia would remind him there was really nothing special about this kind of mugging, that these things happened every day, in every city across th
e world.
“Well,” she said, “what did you want, Lev? I’m very tired.”
He began talking about the thing that pressed hardest on his heart: his mother’s hints at suicide. As he talked, he could hear something clinking, and he sensed that Lydia’s attention was wandering, probably toward whatever the clinking sound might be.
“What’s that noise, Lydia?”
“Nothing. I’m just making up some Alka-Seltzer. Go on.”
“Are you ill?”
“No. But you know, in America, the food portions are very large. I ordered a simple grilled Dover sole—my favorite dish—for dinner, but it was a huge fish and already I’d eaten some crayfish tails with tomato relish as an appetizer, and that was after the salad they always bring you when you sit down, and some ciabatta dipped in olive oil, and of course Pyotor ordered some lovely Sancerre to go with my sole and I drank quite a lot of it. Just let me take the Alka-Seltzer and then you can go on about your mother. But you know, as I’ve already told you, Lev, that woman is engaging in emotional blackmail. You should stand up to her.”
He heard Lydia drink and belch.
“Okay,” he said, when the bout of belching seemed to be over. “I didn’t really call to talk about Ina.”
“So why did you call?”
Lev had never heard Lydia sound more weary or reproachful. He took a breath, cursed himself for stumbling upon the middle of her night. “I called to tell you,” he said, “that I’ve made a plan for the future.”
“Yes? You have? What plan?”
“Well . . . I think it’s quite a good plan. But it won’t work without money.”
“Nothing works without money, Lev. I thought you’d know that by now.”
“I do know it. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Okay. So what is this plan? You’d better tell me.”
He heard her yawn, and this silenced him. He saw the whole restaurant scheme as she would see it—as an absurd, arrogant fantasy. Yet he ploughed on, hoping to touch her heart. “D’you remember,” he said, in a quiet and serious voice, “on the bus, you told me about Elgar and the piano shop?”