by Rose Tremain
After what felt like a long time, he heard their voices, Maya’s light as an elf’s in the frozen air, Ina’s a low, anxious growl. He went to the door and opened it and saw them walking up the path. Ina let out a shriek and clutched her chest, wrapped in its black shawl. Maya stood still and stared at him. He didn’t know what else to do or say except smile and hold out his arms. Then Maya began a delirious shouting: “Pappa! Pappa! PAPPA! PAPPA!” And she came pelting toward him, and he lifted her up and whirled her round, kissed her face, her head in its knitted bobble hat, then held her tightly, tightly against his heart, and told her he was home, home for good, and that everything, now, was going to be all right.
Ina regarded him from a distance, hugging her shawl round her, binding her arms, so that she could remain separate and aloof from him, keeping her anger intact. Lev saw that her face looked older and her eyes smaller. He saw, too, that she was trembling.
“You’ve put on weight,” she said.
Rudi and Lev drove to Baryn and put up at the Hotel Kreis. Lev had plans for a three-day visit. “In the daytime we look for premises,” he said. “In the evenings and at lunchtime we go round the restaurants and cafés, see what’s happening to the food.”
On the Baryn road Rudi drove like a man rushing to a longed-for date. He played the radio loud, talked through the din, told Lev that as well as being the face-of-the-place he could “gun the suppliers into line,” fill the Tchevi’s trunk with crates of guinea fowl and boxes of lettuce.
“They’re gonna fear the sight of this car!” he said. “If they’re not ready with their fucking tomatoes or whatever, they’re gonna wish they’d died in a salt mine.”
Lev suggested they buy a secondhand pickup, for hauling in the bulky items, but Rudi said, “I’m not driving a lousy pickup. Not as long as the Tchevi’s alive.”
“Okay,” said Lev. “I’ll drive the truck.”
“You don’t know how to drive,” said Rudi.
“I’ll learn,” said Lev. “Same way as you did.”
On the first evening, they decided to have dinner in the Café Boris, a familiar restaurant on Market Square.
When they got there, they saw that the Café Boris had been renamed the Brasserie Baryn, and Rudi said, “Uuh-uuh. I don’t like the look of that, Lev. Did some smart-arse chef already get a hold on this town?”
They went in. The interior had been repainted blue. A blue neon sign advertised German lager. In the four corners of the square room stood shiny potted palms. But the smell from the kitchen was immediately familiar to Lev, the smell of beetroot soup, nameless stews, seaweed ravioli. “I think we’re all right,” he said to Rudi. “I’m getting a whiff of Communist food. I can second-guess the menu already.”
The place was almost empty. They ordered two beers from a middle-aged maître d’ so tired of his job, so tired of the world, it seemed, that he dragged himself about the place holding on to the backs of chairs, as though the building were tilting like a train. The backs of his trousers looked varnished, his shoes were filmed with dust.
“Stupendous,” said Rudi. “What an advertisement he is! What a face-of-the-place!”
They began giggling like boys. Couldn’t stop once they’d started. And it was like this, hunched over with laughter, that Eva found them.
She walked like a dancer, carrying the beers on a wooden tray. She wore a black dress and a white apron, with a name badge pinned to it. Her dark hair was tied back with a velvet ribbon. Her hands, setting down the beers, were white and slim.
Lev and Rudi looked up at her and she smiled, watching them struggle to recover from their laughter. And they both had the one thought: she reminded them of Marina.
She went away and came back with menus encased in oily laminate. Her presence at the table was charged. Rudi and Lev took the menus in silence. Eva produced a piece of paper out of her apron pocket and said, “Would you like to hear what the special orders are this evening?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “We’d like to hear.”
“Well,” said Eva, “I’m sorry but there are only two specials tonight. There’s rabbit cooked with juniper berries, or there’s cold venison, served with boiled egg. Hard-boiled egg, I should say.”
“Thank you,” said Lev. Then he added quickly, “Could you bring us the wine list while we decide on our food?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, and tell us what you would recommend, would you? The rabbit, perhaps?”
She blushed, feeling the eyes of the two men on her face, then flickering down, just for one irresistible moment, to her slim body in its waitress’s uniform.
“I think the rabbit is nice,” she said.
She went away, and Lev and Rudi began to drink the German beer. They said nothing for a while. Their laughter was gone. They studied the plastic menus and looked about them at the empty room and the handful of other diners and the maître d’ now standing motionless by the bar counter. The neon sign kept lighting and relighting his face with a ghostly flare of blue.
Rudi said, “D’you remember Lake Essel?”
“Yeah,” said Lev. “Of course I remember Lake Essel. We’ve probably been dying all this time.”
“We have been dying all this time,” said Rudi. “That’s what I feel. But now we’re going to recover.”
Eva came back with the wine list and Lev took it. He saw that half the wines listed had been crossed out. “What happened to all these?” he asked.
Again, he saw her blush. “I don’t exactly know,” she said. “I think maybe the French wines dried up. Sorry, I don’t mean literally dried up, but just didn’t get as far as here.”
Lev nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Rudi smiling. Suddenly he turned and said to Eva, “Have you heard about the dam at Auror?”
“The dam at Auror? Yes. Everybody knows about the dam. I guess you’re not from round here. They say the Auror Dam is going to change our lives.”
“Do you think it will?”
“I hope so.” She looked round the empty brasserie. “I hope it’ll bring more people, more prosperity. In time . . .”
She was standing very near to Lev, her hips level with his shoulder. There was a lovely scent about her—something astringent yet seductive.
They’d planned to spend the dinner discussing their itinerary for the following day. They had three premises to see—all shops that had closed. They’d brought along a map of the city so that Rudi could work out the route. But silence had somehow fallen. Neither of them could say Marina’s name, speak the thought about Eva’s resemblance to her, but it was understood between them that something disturbing had happened, like an old piece of music suddenly starting up in a place where no music had ever been heard. Only later, lying wide awake on hard twin beds, listening to the night trams, Rudi said, “She was a good waitress, Lev. Perhaps that’s something we should do while we’re here: take the contact numbers of people you might employ later on.”
In the morning, with a light snow falling, they drove back and forth along the narrow streets of Baryn, parking the Tchevi wherever it could fit, often with two of its wheels mounted on the pavement.
“I hate to see her like that,” said Rudi. “She looks like a tart car hitching up her fucking skirts, or like a dog pissing in the gutter. It’s demeaning for her. So listen, comrade, it’s no use getting premises where the parking’s crap.”
The three shops they were shown, empty since the summer or since the previous year, felt damp and dark. None of them bore any resemblance to the piano shop of Lev’s dreams. The only thing that cheered him was that rents were low. He’d begun to hope that the money he had—almost £12,000—would go a long way in this city.
They were heading back to the Hotel Kreis, in late afternoon, when Lev said, “I’ve just remembered something. Lydia told me about a real piano shop, somewhere off Market Square. Let’s try to find it.”
“Lev,” said Rudi, “I thought you said you’d stopped being a dreamer.”
They parked on the square, outside the Brasserie Baryn, and asked a man who resembled the former Tchevi owner, the professor of mathematics, if he knew of a music shop in this bit of town.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s right there, on the corner.”
They went in through a heavy door, whose movement set off a jangling bell above. The place was small and old and cramped, fitted with tilting shelves from floor to ceiling. These were stacked with sheet music, ancient 33 r.p.m. records, and what looked like religious books or hymnals. On a central oak table two violins and a tarnished saxophone were displayed on a velvet cloth. The elderly proprietor of the shop sat silent on a wooden chair.
Lev looked around, then back at the proprietor, who hadn’t moved a muscle. He thought, If Pyotor Greszler made an appearance in this shop, this man would get up from his chair and come forward, amazed and flattered, transformed by sudden, ardent emotion.
“Lev,” Rudi whispered, “wrong place, eh? Let’s go.”
“Yup,” said Lev. But then, embarrassed, he turned to the proprietor and said, “Sorry. We made a mistake. We heard there were some premises to let here.”
The old man took up a home-rolled cigarette and reached for a box of matches. His hand shook. “Come again next year,” he said, in a scratchy, smoke-afflicted voice. “I’ll be dead by then.”
Lev gaped.
“Meanwhile, ask next door. Number forty-three. The garage is closing down. They used to sell East German cars. But no one wants those pieces of tin anymore.”
Lev thanked the proprietor of the piano shop, and they went out into the windy street.
“Shit,” said Rudi. “Hadn’t we better give up smoking? I don’t want to get like him.”
They stood outside Number 43 Podrorsky Street—a road named for the President in his own lifetime. Then they went in and found two mechanics working underneath a ramp, servicing an ancient Citroën Déesse. The smell of engine oil woke Rudi from his late-afternoon torpor and he began to look around eagerly. “Hey,” he said, after a few moments, “lots of space here, Lev. And no problems with parking or access . . .”
The building was old. Had probably been a dozen different things in its time, just as the street might have had a dozen different names. Bits of it—half of the first floor—had been ripped out to accommodate the garage, but the building had retained a kind of worn-out grandeur. Steel girders now held up the high roof.
On the left-hand wall there was a bulky brick structure, and Lev walked toward this. It was, as he’d thought, a chimney breast, and he began to caress the cold brickwork with his hands. The two mechanics ignored him. But Rudi, seeing Lev lost in his love affair with an imaginary fire, approached the men. Lev heard him tell them he owned a Chevrolet Phoenix, and ask whether the garage could get parts for the car.
“No, sorry, comrade,” said one of the men. “We’re closing down next month. What’s a Chevrolet Phoenix, anyway?”
“Tchevi,” said Rudi. “Big American car. Never seen one of them?”
“Nah,” said the man. “How’d it get here? Fly?”
They decided to go back to the Brasserie Baryn for dinner.
Eva smiled her shy smile. They ordered beers, and when Eva brought them, she said again, “Would you like me to tell you about the specials?”
“Let me guess,” said Lev. “Rabbit cooked with juniper, and cold venison.”
“Well,” she said, “the rabbit is cooked with mustard seeds tonight.”
“Right. So what would you recommend?” Lev asked.
“Well . . .”
“We had rabbit yesterday evening. It was a bit . . . stringy.”
“I don’t know, really. The seaweed ravioli is nice.”
“Yes?”
“Although my mother makes it better.”
Rudi lifted his brimming tankard of beer. “Here’s to your mother!”
“Right,” said Lev, taking up his own tankard. “To your mother!”
Eva giggled, and looked sideways to see whether the maître d’ was watching her.
Then Lev said, “Do you also like cooking, Eva?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m lazy. I live with my mother, so I let her cook for me—or I eat here.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“About a year.”
“D’you like this job?”
“It’s okay. But I’m looking forward to the New Baryn, when there’ll be more work for everybody.”
“The New Baryn?”
“Yes. When the dam’s been built, they’re going to change the city’s name. It will be officially named ‘New Baryn.’ ”
When they’d eaten their meal of beetroot soup and seaweed ravioli, and they were the only customers left in the brasserie, they invited Eva to have a drink with them. She sat down and sipped the white wine they had ordered, and Lev found it difficult not to stare at her. He longed to ask her to undo the velvet ribbon that held back her hair.
After some moments of small talk, Rudi began telling Eva that they were from Auror.
She stared at them, suddenly dismayed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said about the dam . . .”
Lev took this opportunity to reach out and lightly touch her arm. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ve got plans. Big plans. We’re going to be part of the New Baryn.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah. Aren’t we, Rudi?”
“We’re going to be the New Baryn! We’re going to embody its new spirit.”
“Yes? How?”
Lev’s hand was still resting on Eva’s arm. He kept it there, and Eva didn’t pull her arm away. The maître d’, blue-lit at his post, stared at her. Rudi said, “Our plans are secret at the moment. But, hey, would you like to come for a ride with us, in my big American car, and we can whisper them in your ear?”
Now she blushed. She lifted her arm from Lev’s touch. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to get home to my mother, or she worries about me. But perhaps you’ll come here again and . . . try the cold venison?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “Tomorrow night?”
It was late when Lev and Rudi left the brasserie but, on a whim, Rudi drove them out to the Perimeter Zone, on the north bank of the river.
They parked the Tchevi and got out into the light snow that was falling. They saw that the garbage dump had been cleared away and that five apartment buildings were going up.
They stared at the building works and at the water of the river, lit by the icy moon. And both of them had the same thought: that, despite all their ardor for the restaurant plan, it was difficult to believe their lives were going to be lived here, on the decrepit edge of the city, in a place that still stank of its waste. Lev looked around him at the mounds of earth and debris, at the puddles choked with yellow silt, at the rusty cranes and the stockpiles of flimsy cinder blocks. “Hard to imagine this as home,” he said.
“Yup,” said Rudi.
They stood there in silence, letting the snow fall on them. And Lev felt his heart brim with sadness for Auror, for their old, dilapidated, careworn village.
24
Number 43 Podrorsky Street
ON THE DAY they left Auror forever, Ina, dressed in her widow’s black, walked out of her house, past Lev and Rudi, who were loading the last of the furniture into Lev’s secondhand pickup, and lay down in the dusty road. The two men stared at her, but neither of them moved.
“Is she saying some kind of prayer or what?” said Rudi.
“I don’t know,” said Lev. “I never know what she’s doing or thinking.”
They went on with the loading. They saw Ina’s hands scrabbling at the earth, gathering up dirt and letting it fall and scatter on her shoulders and on her head. Then she began to wail.
Lev stood still, leaning on the truck. He’d seen it coming, known in his heart, in spite of Lydia’s reassurances, that his m
other was going to be the one to wreck the future. He pounded his fist on the truck roof, and the sound echoed in his head like an explosion. Anger welled up in him, an anger bitter enough to taste. He felt, at this moment, that he wanted to trample on Ina’s outstretched form till he heard her neck snap. When Rudi said, “Shall I go and help her up?” he replied, “No. Leave her there.”
Maya came out of the house, clutching the doll Lili. When she saw her grandmother lying in the road, she began a strange little gyrating dance of agony. Lev went to her and held her and said, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
But Maya was rigid, pale as ash. How could everything be “all right” when Ina had fallen into the dust?
“Hey,” said Lev to his daughter, “shall we get Lili settled in the truck? Make a nice comfortable space for her?”
But Maya just stuck her face into Lev’s side, couldn’t look at anything, couldn’t speak. He stroked her hair, which she wore, these days, scrunched back into a funny little knot, secured with some vivid lime-green elastic thing. This knot was troubling to Lev. He felt it made Maya’s face seem too wide, too vulnerable and unprotected. And what he did now was to unwind the green elastic and let Maya’s dark hair fall forward over her ears. Soon it was damp and sticky with her tears.
Exhaustion hit him. He’d been working fifteen, sixteen hours a day, trying to get the restaurant up and running, either sleeping there, at 43 Podrorsky Street, on a mattress among the builders’ rubble, or driving back to Auror in the early hours, making lists in his head, lists and more lists of all that was still to be done, of all that had not yet been sorted or acquired. And worried all the time that he was neglecting the prime thing: his cooking. When, at last, the restaurant was ready to open—if his money didn’t run out, if it wasn’t eaten away by all the gray sweeteners he was being forced to find—his mind might be a blank. He might be unable to remember one single recipe. The part of him that had yearned to become a chef might be dead.