by Rose Tremain
“What? What are you talking about, Lev?”
“Don’t you remember? You told me about Elgar —”
“No, no. You’re absolutely wrong there. That was later. On the night of the concert. I told you about Elgar then, before you walked out on me. I think your memory is very bad.”
The night of the concert. That shameful night.
But she was right. Perhaps he was losing his memory as well as losing everything else.
“I’m like Elgar now,” he went on. “I’m in that sad piano shop.”
“Lev, I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand a word you’ve been saying. Are you drunk?”
“No. I just need help. I have to get to the next bit of my life, like Elgar did when he heard those sounds on the river, or wherever it was. I need to get to where I can be of some use to everybody back home.”
“So you’ve made a plan. But you haven’t told me what it is. You’ve just been sidetracked onto Elgar, for no reason that I can possibly follow. So I think I’ll go back to bed now. Why don’t you call me tomorrow—tomorrow U.S. time—when you’re sober?”
“No, Lydia! I’m not drunk. Don’t go. I’ll get to the heart of it.”
He heard her sigh. She said wearily, “What is the heart of it, then?”
He swallowed, took a breath, and said, “The heart of it is, I need ten thousand pounds.”
“What?”
“I need ten thousand pounds.”
There was a silence, into which Lydia released another quiet belch. Then she said, “Ten thousand pounds? Lev, what in the world is going on? Are you under threat from the Mafia?”
“No. There isn’t a Mafia here, as far as I know.”
“I expect there’s some kind of Mafia everywhere. But anyway, let’s not discuss that. Please just kindly tell me what is happening to you. Because I simply do not understand a word.”
He slid into it then, like a man may slide sideways, rather than head-on, into a confession: the narrative of his Great Idea. He summoned it back to him, told her he could see it, smell it, touch it, his restaurant in Baryn, a place where everybody would want to come, the first place of its kind to serve beautiful food, his place, dreamed out of his work in the kitchen of a famous chef, out of the lanes of Suffolk, out of all his joys and sufferings in England, the Restaurant Marina . . .
Lydia listened quietly to him. Down the phone, Lev could hear a police siren shrieking its way through the New York night. Then, when he paused in his “confession” and the siren had passed and gone, silence fell between them. There seemed to be something absolute about this silence, as though the connection between them had been broken. Yet he could hear her breathing.
“Say something, Lydia.”
“Well. I just can’t think of what to say. It’s completely, utterly crazy.”
“You don’t think my restaurant will succeed?”
“I have no idea. Maybe if you work hard enough. If you learn to be a good chef. But, really, Lev, you didn’t need to call me in the middle of the night to tell me about this wild scheme. A restaurant in Baryn! I don’t know where you dreamed up that plan.”
“I told you, it just came to me, I saw the logic of it.”
“Logic? Well, I have to say I don’t see any logic in it. Our people don’t care about good food. They never have.”
“Only because they haven’t had the chance, but I’m going to give them the chance.”
“All right, Lev. Sure. But, look, it really is very late, and we’ve got a heavy schedule tomorrow, with a concert at Lincoln Center. And I’m looking out of the bathroom window now and I can see dawn coming up. I have to go back to bed and try to get some sleep.”
“Okay. But will you think about it, about my plan, and see whether it might be something you could mention —”
“What? What did you say?”
“I only wondered if you might be able to mention the scheme to —”
“To Pyotor?”
“Yes.”
“My God. Is this what you’re proposing? Is that why you called me, to ask me to ask Pyotor to lend you ten thousand pounds?”
“I only thought . . . what seems so much to you and me might not seem . . . important to him.”
“Lev,” said Lydia, with a long sigh, “I have to admit that you disappoint me. More than that. In fact, really, I think this is just atrocious. It’s despicable! That, after all that I’ve done for you, you have the audacity to ask for this absurd sum.”
She was right. It was absurd. The whole thing was absurd.
“I only wondered,” Lev stammered, “whether it might be something Maestro Greszler would be interested to fund. Then, when he came to Baryn —”
“He never comes to Baryn. It’s not a place he likes at all.”
“No. But if he ever came . . . and —”
“Lev, I’m sorry, but I have to go now.”
“Don’t go, Lydia. Don’t be angry.”
“No? You don’t see what a wretched thing you’ve just done? I’m sorry, I really am, but I’m hanging up now. And I shall certainly not mention your request to Pyotor. I wouldn’t want him to despise you. Good-bye, Lev.”
The line was cut. Downstairs, in the garden, the dog was yelping in the hot morning. Lev stood very still, staring at the pale sky. He thought, Jasmina was right. Dreams make you reckless, pitch you down roads you’d never normally take.
But what was there to cling to apart from this dream?
He put it to Christy: “I don’t know how else to think about the future.”
“I see the dilemma,” said Christy.
They were cleaning the flat for Jasmina, who was going to come and stay for the first time. They were on to the kitchen: two “nurses” shining everything up before Lev embarked on making the meal. But Christy kept being distracted by opening cupboards and finding things in them he didn’t remember he’d ever possessed.
“Will you look at this?” he said, hauling out a tarnished copper fondue set with six meat skewers. “Never been used. Probably a wedding present. That’s what doomed it.” Later, he found a silver toast rack, also blackened by time. “Heirloom!” he said, plonking it down on a worktop. “Gift to me ma from some snooty Limerick auntie. Straight outa the pawnshop.”
Christy looked at this toast rack for a long time and then said that he was going to get rid of every material possession that belonged to his past, “every last stitch of it,” so that he could feel he was beginning his life all over again.
They worked until it was time for Lev to walk to Panno’s.
Before leaving, he surveyed the clean kitchen, stood for a moment admiring the glistening surfaces, inhaling the scent of bleach. Then he set off. These days, he took another route, up Junction Road to Archway and left to Highgate, avoiding Swains Lane and the cemetery. The weather was warm. As respite from his anxiety about the future, he sometimes let his thoughts circle back to the days of the asparagus picking and the violets growing in the rough grass and the unstoppable laughter of Jimmy and Sonny Ming.
Hor-hor. Winna bar birriards, Rev!
Hor-hor-hor-hor!
He decided to cook kleftiko for Jasmina. He bought the lamb shanks cheap from the Greek butcher on the corner of Belisha Road, seared them in oil, then made a pungent tomato and rosemary sauce to simmer them in, let them sit in it for hours in a low oven—exactly as Panno had shown him—till they were as tender as veal. He’d serve the shanks with saffron rice and a Greek salad with olives and feta cheese. For pudding, because Christy had told him Jasmina adored sweet things, he was going to make a rich chocolate tart.
Rolling pastry, stirring melted chocolate and cream, on the quiet Sunday afternoon, he felt his mind suddenly at ease once more. He was sure the tart—one of Waldo’s recipes—was going to be good. But he also knew now that the thing he’d chosen for his future was the right thing, right for him. Knew he could get to love cooking more than anything he’d ever done. Suddenly told himself that if you love a thing en
ough, then, somehow, you make it happen . . .
Next door, Christy was hovering nervously about, setting out scarlet paper napkins on the table, arranging and rearranging white carnations in an old crackle-glazed brown jar. He kept coming through to the kitchen and asking, “How’s it goin’, fella?”
“Going good.”
“Should we have some little appetizer nibble things, like she made for us?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, Christy. I make some baby cheese tartlets with my leftover pastry.”
Christy lingered and said, “Next thing I have to do after tonight, if that goes all right, is to introduce Jasmina to Frankie.”
Lev threw more flour onto his shortcrust, rolled it thinner. “Jasmina will like Frankie.”
“Yeah, but will Frankie like Jasmina? That’s what I worry about more. Myerson-Hill could be a feckin’ racist. That air of certainty the man has. That all-white loft. And it could’ve rubbed off on Frankie.”
“You don’t know . . .”
“No, I don’t know it, but some things you can just surmise.”
“Frankie will like Jasmina. She’s a lovely woman, Christy.”
“Well, I know that. And so do you. But now I want everyone else to know it, too. I want the whole world, including me daughter, to worship at the hem of her garment.”
She arrived at seven, parking her old Renault Clio on the other side of the dusty street. Christy had put on a clean white linen shirt, above which his face looked anemic with worry and excitement. The small flat smelled of furniture polish and chocolate.
Jasmina was dressed in a blue sari, and she’d bought some new spectacles with blue frames. Lev thought, with her clear skin and her big eyes and the neatness of her hairline, she looked like an advertisement for those spectacles. Through them, she peered at the carnations in the crackle-glazed jar, at the red paper napkins now stuck into wineglasses.
“Very nice, Christy,” she said.
“It’s a bit empty everywhere,” he apologized anxiously. “Angela took a lot of stuff.”
“I think it’s very nice.”
“See the rest of it, will you?”
“If I’m allowed.”
“You show her, Lev. I’ll open the wine.”
Lev guided her from room to room. She didn’t cross the threshold of Christy’s bedroom, or of the bathroom, only peered through the doorways and nodded her quiet approval. But when they reached Lev’s room—Frankie’s room—Jasmina tiptoed in, almost as though there might have been a child asleep in the bunk bed. She stood very still at the window, looking out at the sky, then picked up one of the soft toys that still sat on the windowsill. It was a tiger. Jasmina stared at this tiger and said, “You know, I’ve no idea how to be any kind of mother or stepmother to a child. But I hope I’m going to get the chance to try.”
“You will,” said Lev. “For sure you will.”
“I comfort myself that Frankie’s a girl. With a boy, I think I might be all at sea.”
Everything was eaten, including most of the rich chocolate tart. Jasmina sat back in her chair, with her neat hands folded on her stomach, and commented, “My God, I’m stuffed. You’re a good cook, Lev. You’ll make your restaurant project work, for sure.”
Silence followed this remark. The newly washed net curtains at the window moved gently in the night breeze. Christy poured out more white wine and took a hefty swig.
“If the project were U.K.-based,” Jasmina went on calmly, “you might qualify for a small-business loan. The Hertford and Ware might even be able to help you. We’ve diversified now, beyond mortgage-style funding. I could become your business adviser!”
“That would be nice, Jasmina.”
“Yes, it would be jolly good fun, wouldn’t it? But the H&W won’t touch anything outside Britain. That I know for sure. So you have to look at the structure of what’s here for you officially.”
Lev was lost now. What did she mean by “the structure of what’s here”?
“Okay,” said Jasmina. “I’m talking about capital incentive schemes originating in your country: basically subsidy for new inward investment. The Eastern-bloc countries are hungry for all Western-style business projects, even small-scale ones, so they presumably like to fund individual enterprise where they can. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, here’s my thought. Why not go to your embassy and ask whether any loan system exists that you could qualify for?”
“Go to the embassy?”
“It’s the logical place to start. Explain your project and the likely cost of your start-up. See what reaction you get. See if they know about any kind of scheme that could help you.”
“ ‘Loans for dreams,’ ” said Lev.
“Sure,” said Jasmina, letting her features break into that transforming smile of hers. “But it’s an okay dream. Isn’t it, Christy?”
“Definitely,” said Christy. “It definitely is. I’m totally in favor.”
Lev looked at Christy, whose head was lolling comfortably against the back of his chair. But Lev felt sure that Christy’s mind had sped far off the subject of loans and subsidies, far off any subject at all, in fact, except the thought of the approaching night and the body of Jasmina beside him, at last, in his own bed.
21
Looking at Photographs
THE EMBASSY OCCUPIED a tall, white-stuccoed house not far from Earls Court Road, where Lev had once worked for Ahmed. Though the exterior paintwork of the house was fresh, the entrance hall overwhelmed Lev with its unaccountable darkness, its scent of things neglected. This darkness and neglect seemed both unnervingly familiar and yet shockingly out of place in an ambassadorial building.
Lev saw that a yellowing notice on the wall instructed visitors to report at Reception, located in a room to the left of the hall, where a young woman sat behind a steel desk, shaped like a kidney, beneath a portrait, blood-colored in tone, of the country’s President Podrorsky. The desk squatted on a faded old Afghan carpet, its heaviness mauling the carpet’s shape. The drapes at the tall windows matched the blood tone of the portrait and were partially drawn across the bright summer day.
At the other end of the room was a bar. Lev stared at it, saw a huddle of dark-suited men leaning there, drinking vodka and smoking. It was tenthirty in the morning. The bartender stood with his arms spread out, as if measuring fabric along the counter, his head inclined into the arena of smoke. As Lev came in, the bartender’s eyes flicked upward and all the heads turned and looked at Lev and immediately looked away. The drinkers were able to decide at once, it seemed, that here was a person of no account.
Lev hadn’t prepared what he was going to say. Wished now that he could remember better what Jasmina had told him about loan systems and start-up capital. As he approached the desk and the cold stare of its occupant, inhaled the smell of dusty furnishings pomaded with smoke, he thought how all of this reminded him of Procurator Rivas’s office in the Public Works building in Baryn and resurrected in him the hatred of Rivas he’d never been able to conquer. Part of him wanted to turn straight round and walk out again.
The young woman said in English, “How may I help you, sir?”
Her ultracorrect pronunciation made Lev think of Lydia—which he would have preferred not to have to do at this moment. He stood at the desk, made mute by memory and guilt. His stomach felt uncomfortable. He wondered whether the only thing he was going to utter was some inquiry about the location of the lavatory.
The woman stared up at him. Her hair was strangled back into a tight bun. Her skin was bone white, her lips a slash of glossy carmine. Despite the brightness outside, it felt cold in the room, as though sunlight had never entered there.
Lev cleared his throat. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. “I came to ask . . .” he began.
The young woman screwed up her eyes, as if in pain.
“I came to ask . . . is there a . . . department . . . in this embassy
that deals with commercial enterprises?”
“I beg your pardon?” said the young woman.
“It’s just an inquiry. I was advised to come here . . . to see whether the embassy might be able to give me any help.”
“Yes. Help with what?”
“Well. With a commercial venture.”
The eyes didn’t relax. The woman remained in pain, her skin stretched to such an excruciating pallor that it looked, to Lev, as though it had been nailed to her skull behind her ears.
“I don’t understand you. What is the precise nature of the help you need, sir?”
“I just wanted to ask whether—at any level, in any department, the embassy is sometimes able to help with . . . matters of business.”
“I’m sorry,” said the young woman. “You are going to have to make yourself understood better. Would you prefer to speak in English?”
Lev allowed a thin smile to touch his lips. “No,” he said. “I would not prefer to speak in English. All I wish to ask is, is there someone I can talk to about applying for funding to set up a commercial business in Baryn?”
“In Baryn?”
“Yes.”
“This is the London embassy.”
“I know it’s the London embassy.”
“We’re here to help our citizens in cases of personal or diplomatic difficulty. Are you in diplomatic difficulty?”
“Well,” said Lev, “I seem to be in diplomatic difficulty right now, in this room, in that I’m not making myself clear to you. Perhaps I could make an appointment to see somebody a little higher up, somebody who might be able to answer my questions.”
“I can answer your questions. What is it you wish to know?”
Lev sat down on a leather chair—very like the chairs in Rivas’s office—and pulled out his cigarettes.
“No, no, sorry,” said the woman, shaking a finger at him. “You can’t smoke here.”
Lev gestured to the suited men. “Everybody there is smoking.”