Stray Dog Winter

by David Francis

  He glanced at a shadow in the doorway and was met by an exaggerated look. A man in his thirties with hazel eyes, Latin-looking, he seemed to smile but his lips didn’t move, and then he was gone. Darcy buttoned himself and left but the face stayed with him. Brows dark and full as caterpillars, golden skin despite the winter, his hair chestnut-streaked and slightly tousled.

  Darcy reached the top of the stairs and breathed himself back to the world above ground. To this new normality. The program-seller in her booth, almost asleep on her feet; smoke from a cigarette curling from her hand. It was as though he’d conjured the man with copper skin. Then Darcy noticed him walking across the tiles with easy strides in a herringbone coat and cream fur hat, a thick black scarf around his neck. As if in a trance, Darcy moved over the Persian carpets and through the vastness of the entrance hall, hoping the man was the sort who might look back.

  Darcy, he heard from behind him.

  Fin stood in her wrap, her coat over her arm in the shadows of the burgundy velvet curtains. She’d caught him in action. He took a last glance at his quarry despite her, the man gliding down the icy steps and into a fresh canopy of snow. He covered the ground so gracefully, Darcy wondered if he’d even leave prints.

  You took my binoculars, said Fin. She lifted them carefully from around his neck. Were you gone on safari?

  I just needed some air, he said.

  She motioned with her program, down towards the dark stairwell with the Russian sign for toilets. People usually go outside for air, she said.

  Darcy raised his eyebrows innocently. He barely understood it either, he just knew. He’d come here in part to avoid the old haunts and he was already finding new ones.

  Fin rolled her program and pulled on her coat. I once had an orgasm on a horse, she said, but I don’t hang out at the stables.

  It stirred up an image in Darcy: the missionary climbing the slope away from him, being left naked in the grass.

  You still go riding, said Darcy.

  Fin clipped her binoculars back in her purse. Not here I don’t, she said, as they walked out into the snow, Darcy remembered the nights he walked from school and visited the clearing, lay his shirt in the grass in a careful ritual, spread the arms out wide. Alone, he pushed against his arching back and recalled the salt smell of the missionary’s sweat, the sensory memory rising inside him and a prepubescent jolting, a strange euphoric recall in the grass among the butterflies.

  Mount Eliza, Summer 1969

  Darcy rode beside his father in the kombi, taking the long way back from the Yamala shops, Darcy changing the gears with his right hand while his father did the clutch, but Darcy missed third when he saw the missionary walking along Humphries Road. The kombi in neutral, his father just let it roll, half on the bitumen, half in the dust. Is that him? he asked, but Darcy said nothing. Roll down the window, his father said.

  The missionary stood with his white shirt sleeves turned up and a narrow black tie, loosened from his collar because of the heat. Darcy’s father leaned across Darcy to the open window. I’ll take you to the top of the hill, he shouted.

  The missionary opened the door, stepped up into the rumbling van. Make room, said Darcy’s father, and suddenly Darcy was sitting between them, putting the grocery bag down under his feet, and the missionary was saying a quiet American thank you.

  I believe you two know each other, said Darcy’s father, starting up the road, doing the gears on his own.

  The missionary removed a black baseball cap with risen letters that said UTAH. He ran his hand through his shock of thick hair. We have met, he said, yes.

  Darcy wanted to offer him grapes from the bag but he didn’t. He glanced over, saw the awkwardness sewn in the corners of the missionary’s eyes. Did you read the Book? the missionary asked him.

  Darcy turned his gaze to the floor, the missionary’s leather sandals, his dusty feet. I looked at the pictures, said Darcy.

  So you’re a Mormon, his father said, and for a moment Darcy thought he spoke to him, then he noticed the missionary nodding, fiddling with his baseball cap. Darcy stared at the tattoo of the thorns on the missionary’s arm, he felt his knee against the missionary’s pants and a ripply feeling spread over him. He thought of the Rose of Sharon that covered his mouth, the weight of the missionary rubbing against him.

  Are you married then? asked Darcy’s father.

  The missionary’s smile was slight. It’s not compulsory, he said.

  A truck ran past from the quarry and the kombi shuddered. We thought you’d have lots of wives, said Darcy’s father, didn’t we, son?

  Darcy stared straight ahead, concentrating on the white line, the electric touch of the missionary’s leg.

  I met your wife, said the missionary. She didn’t seem well.

  That’s none of your business, said Darcy’s father, his change of tone sudden. Darcy eased his knee away.

  The missionary turned the cap in his hands. I was on my way to see her now, he said.

  Darcy’s father stopped the van, leaned over past Darcy and opened the passenger door. I can take care of my family, he said.

  The missionary seemed shocked, stepping down to the roadside, mumbling something about trying to help.

  Then keep away from my boy, said Darcy’s father. He jumped the kombi forward before the door was barely closed. Darcy didn’t dare watch out the side mirror to see the missionary getting smaller in the dust. He probably just wanted dinner, said Darcy.

  His father pulled into the driveway and parked. I think I know what he wanted, he said. He got out and slammed the door and Darcy sat there, still as the sun through the windscreen, to see if the missionary would still walk past the end of the drive. Instead, he saw his father with a stick. With it, he propped open the bonnet of the Austin and unhitched the battery, removed the stick and let the bonnet crash down. He threw the battery in the incinerator. He’d taken out the Austin’s heart.

  Mount Eliza, Autumn 1972

  Fin had arrived and was already gone.

  Darcy pedalled his bike along the dark gravel roadside, hiding in trees from the headlights. His breath loud in his head as he wended down the Humphries Road elbow. He knew where Toorak College was, closer to the beach on Old Mornington Road. The bike had been brought home by his father so Darcy wouldn’t drive. His father who’d slipped away for cigarettes, which meant he was visiting one of his girls; his mother already too drunk to notice Darcy gone.

  He planted his bike in the bushes and clambered through a gap in the woven-wire fence. Anyone could have climbed through. He had a photo of himself in a Fair Isle cardigan, his hair swooped low over his forehead. He wanted her to have it, for her to understand he hadn’t wanted her to go.

  The boarding house was just a long corrugated bungalow painted green, down among the acacias. Fin, he whispered through the open window.

  He heard the rustle of girls, a cough of disapproval and then giggling. Country girls from sheep and cattle properties, more titillated than afraid. As he crawled in, one shone a torch in his face. What have we here? she said.

  All Darcy saw were green mosquito nets, girls pulling up their sheets. They sat up in their beds and whispered. Where’s Fin? he asked.

  America. It’s for you.

  Inside, Darcy walked between the narrow cots to find her. The bed without the net. She stared up at him with her pale green eyes as he held the photo he wished he hadn’t brought. He put it down beside her, along with a jar of barley sugar.

  Fin sat up in her nightie, her thin arms still tanned from a faraway sun, her hair matted and long, the colour of white sand. She searched Darcy’s face as he sat on the edge of her blanket. What are you doing? she asked. She looked at him like he was the one who needed care.

  I came to see you, he said.

  She sat up and kissed him on the forehead like a parent might. She smelled musty and sweet, just as he remembered. To him it was the scent of California. She told him she had been glad to get away. And somehow he
knew she was the lucky one. Then she looked at the photo in the dark.

  You look like a girl, she whispered.

  Darcy nodded. He lay on the floor by her bed and slept there, dreamed he was kneeling among the Indians, beseeching at the missionary’s feet, the missionary in a white robe standing up on the rock where Jesus stood, speaking his soft American, teaching of his return.

  Ulitsa Kazakov, Tuesday morning

  Darcy sat half-asleep at Fin’s laminated counter. He ate a version of All-Bran bathed in milk that tasted vaguely of tin. He looked out the window, the morning cold but crystalline. Fin in her bedroom doorway slipping on sheepskin gloves, heading out already. I need to get to the embassy, he said.

  I’ll take care of your passport, she said. She grabbed a scarf from a coat hook without noticing the dog lead dangling down the wall. You stay home and paint.

  Darcy drank down the remains from the bowl and stood. He didn’t see how they’d issue new papers to her, or how she could charm his passport back from the railway station without him, but she was snatching her patchwork coat and fur hat. Remember to lock yourself in, she said.

  I’m coming with you, said Darcy. He rugged himself up with his own scarf and gloves, reached for his fleece-lined oilskin coat, but by the time he had pulled the door closed behind him there was no sign of her. He ran down the stairs and out through the main glass entrance, caught sight of her in the ice-covered street getting into a small battered car. It was driven away by a man Darcy couldn’t quite see, a man who must have been waiting.

  Darcy forged through the whistling cold to the corner in hopes of a cab, fumbling for his foldout map in his ski gloves. He knew the embassy was across the river so he walked in that direction. At the lights he waited beside a man with a greatcoat draped over his shoulders, European-style, then he recognised the black roping eyebrows and golden skin, the man from the Bolshoi, his caramel hair now covered by a brown fur hat. He heard Fin’s warning—There’s no such thing as coincidence here—but he was already imagining the possibilities. A choreographer, perhaps, or a poet from the Caucasus, a diplomat from Portugal. Darcy put the map away, didn’t want to appear like a tourist, and the man acknowledged him, as if he recognised Darcy too.

  Darcy entered the park, the same one as yesterday, and when his friend followed without even hesitating Darcy felt a pang in his underarms. They threaded each side of a young woman who pushed a primitive baby carriage with a fogged-up plastic cover. His suitor stopped, kneeled to coo to the baby, but looked up at Darcy, the smile for the baby still on his face. Darcy divined being escorted to some embassy, drinks on a heated terrace overlooking the Arbat, introduced to local envoys. Perhaps he’d get his passport that way. He waited at a railing, trying to keep his senses, watched the cold light play where the pond was frozen. He knew this was a country where they tortured men for being with men, the warning in Spartacus was clear: Severe penalties under Soviet laws.

  He focused on the end of the pond where it had thawed to a tinged green, a spurt bubbling up from a pipe, but in Darcy’s side view the man stood a few feet away, watching him almost blatantly, fingers still clasping the edges of his coat.

  Darcy looked away at a pair of ducks floating motionless in the reeds. At first Darcy thought they were decoys— the ducks should have flown south by now—but then he realised they were real, hovering near a pipe that spurted steaming water. Darcy turned slowly; he couldn’t help himself. And the man was smiling almost cheekily, his teeth too white to be from here, a small scar that broke the line of his right eyebrow saving his face from being too perfect. I saw you at the Bolshoi, ventured Darcy.

  The man made a little gesture with his brown eyes as though such things were not unexpected. He seemed to understand. Faint smudges shadowed below his eyes as if he hadn’t slept, a shadow of moustache above his untasted lips, his sideburns shaped and close-shaven. He didn’t look Russian. Are you a dancer? asked Darcy.

  I was once a dancer, the man said. A curiously accented English.

  And now?

  Now I look at you, he said. He allowed a disarming, pursed smile. Darcy thought of the uniformed boy in the railway station in Prague, the searching, desperate eyes, his cap on the cistern and how he made him feel; he thought of the man from yesterday, not far from this same place. But there was nothing afraid or desperate about the one who stood before him now. This was something different.

  Is this part of Gorky Park? asked Darcy.

  Mandelshtam, the man said, a word that sounded like a compound sentence.

  Darcy moved along the railing and stopped nearer the winter ducks, and he was followed like a courted bird.

  Mandarins, said the man, motioning with his chin at the pair of ducks, their bluish-green feathers and a crest of orange. One kept wetting its head and then shaking it. They are being a long way from China.

  They are being that, thought Darcy. Many of us are far from home, he said. The ducks manoeuvred among the reeds where the ice had melted. Where are you from? he asked the man.

  Cuba.

  Made sense, Cubans in Moscow, Vietnamese and Libyans, Nicaraguans, Angolans, the patronage statues on bridges. Darcy’s feet were getting numb with cold but a nervous pulsation ran through the depths of him, the man’s coat sleeve almost grazed his ski glove as they walked. Darcy contained his desire to brush against him. They looked at each other dead on. In Moscow, all is connected by politics, said the man.

  Darcy had hoped for something more intimate. I’m not here for the politics, he said.

  The man raised his eyebrows with a false inquisitiveness. So why you are here?

  I’m a painter, said Darcy, but he immediately thought of the money belt, how he was afraid he’d been a smuggler too.

  Ah, said the man knowingly, like your friend. He laughed.

  Darcy’s breath seemed to stop in the air, stunned in front of his mouth. He gathered his thoughts as he picked up a stone and skimmed it out across the glassy ice, but the stone slid further than he’d planned, not far from the ducks. They winged up into the white winter air. How do you know about her?

  I am to be keeping an eye on you, he said. So I know a little.

  Darcy’s heart skidded like the stone. How much? he wondered. Maybe he knows what I need to find out. He tried to keep breathing normally, standing before a row of iron placards set up on frosted posts. He brushed the cold rusted letters with his glove. They appeared to be in braille; a nature walk for the blind.

  For those who do not see, the man said philosophically, right beside him, but there were no blind children reaching to touch the leaves, even the ducks had flown, everything bare and frozen save for toxic water steaming from the pipe. Are you supposed to speak with me? asked Darcy, aware of his keeper’s lips. Part of him wanted to kiss them and part of him wanted to run.

  No, he said, nonchalantly, but I like the look of you.

  Are you having somewhere you want me to go? asked Darcy.

  I go to a wedding soon, said the man, his eyebrows raised again, full as cats’ tails. It wasn’t an answer Darcy had expected. My friend Sofia marries the general. I work for him. I introduce them.

  They were walking now, chatting like friends in odd conversation. What kind of work is that? asked Darcy.

  I am sometimes druzhinnik, he said, head of patrollers for hooligans and blues—then I wear an armband. He pointed to his empty sleeve, his coat still draped over his shoulders.

  Darcy asked him what blues were.

  Homosexes here are called blues, he said, but they have no official existence.

  They passed a statue clad with what looked like medieval armour and Darcy realised it was a cosmonaut. And what are you called? Darcy asked.

  His friend’s ungloved hand appeared for the first time, his fingers dark and long, his nails polished-looking. I am Aurelio, he said. Darcy took off his ski glove and his hand was shaken firmly, the warm fingers inviting him, a complicity in his touch. My house is near, he said. His eyes now see
med to have an almost olive quality, where Darcy would have sworn they were hazel before. Come with me, he said. Why not? You are in Moscow!

  Together, they drifted back through the avenue of empty elms. An old woman raked the path. It was the same babushka from yesterday, even though he had entered the park from a new direction. The baba tucked her woollen scarves into her coat and leaned on her rake for a moment as if she was trained to look out for the likes of the two of them. The Cuban smiled at her, unconcerned, as if he knew her or wasn’t fussed, but she didn’t smile back.

  She works for me, he said. Darcy thought about yesterday, the man in the trees and the tremulous whippet, the Polaroid.

  On the street they wove elegantly among the bulky pedestrians who shuffled through the snow, leaden-faced, bodies bent forward with the weight of plastic bags. Darcy felt light by comparison, walking with Aurelio, excited about his prospects. Serve Fin right, he thought, off on her own frolic. He’d get to see a wedding on his second day in town. Darcy grew wary, though, as they turned down a narrow lane. He’d followed strangers into alleys before, but not in a country like this. Yet Aurelio seemed more preoccupied than dangerous, jingling his keys at a door under a tattered awning at the back of an old brick building. An adventure, he said, sensing Darcy’s apprehension. No?

  Inside was not what Darcy expected. The walls were stacked high with rolls of cloth and cobwebs, a long sewing table, racks of garments and scarves on hangers, a troubadour’s outfit. Costumes for the Bolshoi, Aurelio said. He grabbed a pinstriped jacket from a hanger, long and grey like a funeral coat. Try this.

  Darcy removed his coat, pulled on the pinstripe and checked himself in an ornate full-length mirror. In a Goth sort of way it worked with his cords and combat boots, his black and white Collingwood beanie. Do not be worried, said Aurelio, it’s a come as you are when the ship went down. Darcy assumed that was a Cuban expression.