It made sense—the light in Aurelio’s hair. Were you up in the box with Anyetta Chernenko? asked Darcy but Aurelio just looked vague and smiled, didn’t answer.
Were you?
Aurelio turned off the road where a track opened onto a snow-covered mound and there was a view of the Museum of Science and Achievement. She’s a friend of the general’s, he said. A tone in his voice that sounded sad made Darcy wish he hadn’t asked. He looked out at the distant obelisk, the crescent shape from Fodor’s.
The Monument to Space Flight, said Aurelio. It shone in the clouded distance and bent up like a moon to the sky, a rocket on top of it. Your friend Fin, she told me this is what you wanted to see. He searched Darcy for surprise.
Darcy thought of how little of this he understood, Fin’s flurry of Russian in the street. He stared out at an artificial lake slick with ice that housed the gilded fountain. I’m supposed to paint this, he said. He tried to imagine it in summer, the central marquee with its star-topped spire, columns like the Bolshoi, structures set against lawns, but all he could think about was why they hadn’t been more sexual.
Is best from this distance, said Aurelio. He opened the Lada’s window. The spread of pavilions, more theme park than museum. Darcy tried to sketch them in his mind, their angle and shape combinations, imagined their colours on a bright day, but the sun felt like a distant memory.
I wish we’d met in Havana, said Darcy.
You would be trouble there. He pointed out across the frozen landscape to a colonnade. That is the Serf Museum, he said, his breath a white river in the air in front of him. The only real colour now in the red flags that dotted the landscape like berries spilled in the snow. Aurelio showed Darcy the distant Atomic Energy Pavilion, as if hoping the structures might meet Darcy’s expectations. Has a model reactor inside, said Aurelio. The Soviets were the first to make harness for atomic energy in peaceful purposes.
I hope it works better than their toasters.
For a moment Aurelio was offended but then he laughed. He moved in closer, his shoulder almost touching Darcy’s. If it were summer we could lie in the grass, said Darcy, then jolted as a large squawking bird left a nearby tree. He watched ice shaking from the branches. Aurelio put a large comforting arm around him. Don’t be afraid, he said. If your friend is only an artist, there is no worry for you here.
A sudden thread of fear coiled up in Darcy’s throat like a tendril as Aurelio leaned across to kiss him, cold lips on his, soft but dry, barely open, and Darcy tried to meet them evenly, the cool stale taste of Aurelio’s smoky breath and the insinuation, no worry for you here. Still, Darcy opened his mouth to share all he had, but Aurelio drew away slightly and Darcy sensed he’d been too keen, too ready. Aurelio nuzzled him gently about his cheek, then held Darcy’s head against him, a cold bronze button of his coat against Darcy’s eye. I have not often kissed with men before, Aurelio whispered.
New Guinea, Summer 1975
Darcy’s mother on the deck in her folding chair. Darcy crouched in the shade behind the engine room, too pale for this part of the world. He read Lolita, tried not to be seasick. The trip his father promised for a year wasn’t what Darcy had expected—this rickety boat out from Rabaul, the motor smoking like a bush fire, out on the rough island waters, a native captain drunk and swearing in pidgin English. His mother silent since the plane left Brisbane—Qantas to Port Moresby, Air Nuigini to Rabaul— when all Darcy could think of was Fin and Jostler up in Surfers or Maroochydore, how his father wasn’t taking them up there like normal people.
The sway of the boat and a sweet sickening smell like compost made Darcy nauseous. It was the scent of the tropics. His shirt sticking to his back and the salt spray from the water, his arms already burning even in the shade. The biting lips of the sun. Darcy’s father in a safari jacket surveying the sea, as if he knew how to swim or might decide to buy an island. Darcy buried himself back in Lolita, let the pages get smattered by droplets, the faraway world of Humbert Humbert.
He tried not to stare at Orpheus, the young local guide, who now leaned against the cabled boat railing, the blue wrap around his waist against his mahogany calves. Darcy took out his Staedtler pencil and began to sketch him, a blank page at the end of the book. The shape of the boy, blue and black against the high infernal sky, the white glare of the pitiless sun. Darcy wanted to remember this for a canvas when he got home. He pencilled the dark Melanesian face, the smooth jaw and watery eyes, unruly twists of frizz. Orpheus noticed and smiled but Darcy just shaded his eyes, drew the dry lips and tawny teeth. He wondered how old Orpheus was; fourteen maybe, fifteen, about his age. He’d noticed earlier how the skin connected between Orpheus’ toes in a pinkish membrane that almost looked webbed. Darcy’s father had said it was because he came from a tribe of watermen, spending their lives fishing.
Our guide’s a mermaid, said Darcy’s mother, the first thing out of her mouth all day. Now she watched Darcy, winked at him, a nudge of her cigarette in the air. Darcy stopped his sketching, returned himself to Nabokov and tried to ignore the captain’s cursing and the rutting of the engine. In his own head, he thought how Fin had left without even calling, Benton at the prize-giving night, acting like Darcy no longer existed.
He put down the book as they anchored in a cove off an island, climbing down into a dinghy. His mother with her sun umbrella, whingeing about her lumbago and how the doctor had told her to stay on her back, Orpheus helping her, confused, and Darcy felt embarrassed at being here. He’d always felt himself different but never privileged.
They splashed through warm shallows and traipsed across a deserted driftwood beach, dugout canoes as if planted for effect, the late afternoon, a trail through the rows of coffee plantations and coconut palms, heading to a sing sing, a clearing with huts and a small crowd of native women in dry grass skirts, breasts drooping to their waists. Isn’t it marvellous? said Darcy’s father.
His mother rolled her eyes and Darcy looked at Orpheus, aware of their imperialism. A man up a tree with a mask like a toucan, native men appearing from the forest. At first, Darcy thought they had bloodshot teeth because they had bloodshot eyes, or because they’d just eaten raw meat, then he realised it was something they were chewing. Betel nut, his father called it. Orpheus tied his cloth differently now so it sagged like a loose-pinned nappy, open as his smile.
Darcy’s mother threw a stick at Darcy, told him to watch the limbo competition.
His father held the broom. One woman got so low her back touched the ground; one of her breasts got caught on the broomstick. Darcy’s father’s face gleamed peculiarly as he flipped the stick so the bosom fell down beside her, almost to the dirt. The native men laughed, the betel nut red on their teeth. Darcy’s mother shook her head and sat bored in her folding chair, lit a cigarette. Darcy went for a stroll. Orpheus followed as though it was his job to ensure no one strayed and then they stood together nervously behind a hut.
Orpheus put two fingers to his lips and touched Darcy’s nose with them, returned to the festivities as if nothing had happened. Darcy’s mother stood up carefully, folding her beach chair. She put her hand in the small of her back for support. Chronic she called her lumbago, but Darcy’s father had insisted, as if this weird trip would make her forget about Fin. She carried her gin and tonic in a thermos and took Halcion. She told Darcy halcyon was really a bird that floats in its nest on the sea. She sometimes pretended her bed was a nest and after she swallowed a tablet she went on voyages. She said it felt better then.
As they walked four abreast back through the plantations, small plots of taro and sweet potato, Darcy wanted to reach over and hold Orpheus’s hand, stay here on the island, away from these stupid white parents. But Orpheus walked with his broad feet bare in the leaves, his twisted hair and red stained teeth, walking as though they’d not had their moment.
The natives must think your father’s an idiot, said Darcy’s mother as if his father wasn’t with them. Dressed up like Albert Schweitze
r, gawking at their women. An angular dog with a gash on its flank, sniffed along behind them. Darcy’s mother shooed it away with her folding chair.
I think it went well, his father said, in his rah-rah voice. Everyone seemed to like us. He didn’t notice the betel nut spat all over his safari shirt. Orpheus said nothing. Darcy wanted to give him the sketch inside Lolita.
You didn’t include Darcy, his mother said.
Darcy’s father looked at him, almost surprised. You had fun, didn’t you, son?
Darcy nodded but not at him, held the book to his chest. I was doing my own thing, he said.
You certainly were, said his mother.
When they got to the beach and Orpheus said goodbye, Darcy wanted to tear out the sketch but he didn’t. His father was plying the boy with Australian notes, explaining the coat of arms, the emu and kangaroo.
Off Leningradsky Prospekt, Wednesday night
It was almost ten in the evening when Fin took Darcy out to see jazz. A concert held in secret, she said, because jazz wasn’t sanctioned in Moscow. They glided up endless escalators, through marbled caverns of an opulent under-ground, tentacles probing the skin of the earth. Fin seemed edgy again. But what did you actually tell him? she asked.
Nothing he didn’t already know, Darcy said. Even though it was probably true, an itchy disloyalty slipped over him.
Did he want to have sex in the end? she asked.
Darcy wasn’t sure if it this was a joke, sex in the end, but she didn’t look like she was joking. She wore black and her make-up was subtle, no flashes of colour tonight. He was too busy showing me the museum, he said, and the half-lie buzzed about his mouth like a wasp. I’ll still need to get some pictures of the buildings. The shapes were interesting, that rocket spire, and the pavilions.
A cluster of workers trundled down the other side of the escalators. Their jutted brows and wide-set eyes came and went between the bronze-encased lanterns that hung from canopies like fruit bats, a muted waterfall of cast-down faces. At first Darcy wished he had his camera, then he just wanted to be where there was light. He thought how it would be stinking hot in Melbourne.
Out in the night he extended an umbrella for Fin. The Sports Palace loomed, a dark iceberg lit blue in the distance, but they headed around the back of the station, past drunks who leaned on each other for balance. Fin covered ground without appearing rushed, cut abruptly between prefab concrete high-rises, structures bathed in snow, poorly lit, windowless, unearthly. They wove through patchy darkness, down a concrete stairwell to a bolted red iron door. Fin knocked in a rhythm.
People like us can ruin things like this, she whispered. The lock was wrenched and they slid inside, the mouldering smell of an underground place. Fin shoved roubles into a palm that extended from the shadows and they stepped down into a spare, smoke-ridden basement where a small crowd sat on rugs and cushions spread along cement ledges that rose up like opium beds in front of a makeshift stage. An upright piano stood as something holy. The mood, so suppressed and intense, surprised Darcy, giddied him. Guys with button-fly Levis and long hair smoked papiroses; one wore a baseball cap, another wore a bandana and tongued his woolly-sweatered girlfriend. Darcy was suddenly keen to be here, behind the veil of the culture, the curtain behind the curtain, but where was Aurelio now?
Look comfortable, said Fin. She removed her hat and mussed up her spiked hair; she didn’t mind being noticed now she was inside. Darcy took off Aurelio’s coat and looked about at the people in every available space, arranging pillows and sheepskins to protect themselves from the concrete. A couple nearby on a raggedy couch drank vodka, and a tape of Thelonius Monk played ‘Straight, No Chaser’ from a yellow boom box that sat like an animal on the piano.
Darcy squatted beside Fin on some kind of skin with faded chartreuse cushions, her fur hat now beside her like a sleeping black cat. Darcy reached for one of her Gauloises and lit it. She’d said you can tell foreigners by their imported cigarettes.
A man with a ponytail took the boom box away and as the lights dimmed Darcy caught Fin watching the door. A latecomer in thick corduroys and a long leather jacket edged his way along their makeshift row, ran fingers through a shock of jet-black hair. Jobik. What kind of name was that anyway? Fin quietly picked up her hat and Jobik crouched beside her, then sat. He put on his glasses and gave Darcy a wink that prickled Darcy’s skin.
The pianist appeared and perched at the piano in meditation, his arms still in his lap, then flung his hands abruptly at the keys. In the surging discordant rhythm Jobik edged closer to Fin, sharing her pillow. As he pulled his scarf free she slipped an envelope into it. Jobik caught Darcy noticing and reached past her to shake his hand, but there was even more meanness in the curve of his smile and a challenge in his sinewy grip. His hairline seemed lower, his widow’s peak, black eyes even in daylight. Darcy still remembered how it felt being left out in the waves to drown. He’d always assumed Jostler was Greek but maybe he was really some Tajik or a Kazak, a separatist. He didn’t seem moved by the music. Darcy struggled to remember his last name, could almost see it on his father’s lips.
The pianist stabbed at keys and hammers, and the open-fronted upright jumped. The audience feasted on what must have been rare, worth risking freedom. A people who’d learned to measure consequence. Darcy knew he hadn’t mastered that. And if he’d risked his freedom bringing in the money belt, it was a risk he was now certain he’d taken for Jobik—Jobik who looked over and gave Darcy a narrow-eyed smile—and Darcy wished he didn’t understand why Fin ran away with him. Darcy would have done the same; they shared a lust for dangerous people.
The jazz player flung a sweater in the hull of the piano and it dulled the shrillness, but when he used his wrists and elbows on the keys the off-putting chords and Jobik there with Fin became too jarring. Darcy grabbed the umbrella and whispered something akin to izvinitye before Fin could stop him, and made his way through the smoke. He closed the heavy red door behind him and stood on the steps. In the shock of cold air he waited, leaned against heat from a grate behind the concrete railing. The smoky discharge mixed with the frigid air. As Darcy lit a cigarette, he thought of Aurelio and how being with him had both buoyed and unnerved him. The jolting cadence of muted piano thumped dully behind him, a ghostliness about the looming buildings, a landscape worthy of paint. Perhaps he was here for moments like this, for inspiration.
Don’t stand up there, Fin whispered from the bottom of the steps. She motioned him deeper into the stairwell and took a cigarette from her pocket, ignited it from his the way she always did. She hunkered with him as if they were outside a gig at Monash, taking a breather away from the others. But Darcy felt like he was the other here.
Where’s your mystery guest? he asked.
Her lips pressed around her cigarette as a slow-moving figure pedalled through the dark on an old-fashioned bike, rising from the seat to push through the slush and snow. A leather bag was suspended from the handlebars so that it looked like a scene from after the war. That’s him, she said.
At first Darcy didn’t believe her, he’d assumed it was someone old, but she told him there was a separate exit, that Jobik could never stay long. She held onto her wrist as she smoked and watched the deliberate, languorous progress of the bicycle out to the ill-lit boulevard. It merged with the colour of the night. Fin watched with the stifled anguish of a woman in a situation. Darcy could see the precariousness in the redness of her eyelids. Jobik had somehow dulled the green of her eyes, dug into her deeply and latched her darkness onto his. Darcy imagined the pungent pleasure of their sex, a cause she’d hitched her wagon to because of it.
I thought he was Greek, Darcy said casually, back home. An old man stooped through the snow with a wheelbarrow of boxes. Where’s he from really?
Fin raised her eyebrows with her own false nonchalance. It’s all the Soviet Union now, she said. She reached for a stray bottle top from the stairs, her cigarette balanced between her lips.
I saw
the envelope, said Darcy.
The slightest tightening in her jaw. I wrote him a letter, she said, and it seemed plausible, yet Darcy put his money on a lie.
Is that what I smuggled in? he asked. Love letters? He flicked his cigarette.
Fin was silent. She pressed the bottle top into the leather of her glove, examined the corrugated imprint. Applause rippled dully from inside as the piano banging ended, clapping dampened by the closed iron door. Will he leave you out in the cold? asked Darcy.
Fin half-smiled at his attempt at spy talk. She spun the top in the air like a coin and it planted itself in the snow. Will you? she asked.
Monash University, Winter 1982
Darcy stood in his sheepskin vest, staring at the noticeboard. Flyers for the Young Communists and the Bisexual Alliance stapled side by side. Each had the caption We know you’re out there. That’s how he felt: just out there, floating. A year and a half and he hadn’t made a friend he could be bothered with, save for a few minutes at a time among the stalls and glory holes in the basement of this Ming Wing, or huddled with some footballer in a shower stall at the uni gym, cowering unnoticed against the tiles as the bursar appeared with prospective students, showing off the new facilities. Darcy turned, drawn back down the basement stairs to check for that Sephardic boy from law, giving head with his yarmulke still pinned on. But Darcy felt a presence close behind him. A soft patchouli smell.
Deciding between politics and love? A voice that chilled him, filling him with a wave of astonishment. He looked at her speechless, confused. Fin smiled, her lipstick brown, the same white skin but short, spiked hair, a stud in one ear only and a fine silver nose ring. Seven years since. She lifted her John Lennon sunglasses up into her hair, and the same green eyes gazed down at Darcy’s snug tartan trousers, the flare and lavish cuff. Nice pants, she said.
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