Darcy wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic but he didn’t care.
Where did you run off to? he asked, as if it had been a week, not years.
Queensland for a bit, she said, then California. I finished high school in Berkeley and did a year of college there. Her accent seemed more American. She wore a shining leather mini-skirt and hugged a satchel fronted with a square of butcher’s grass. Darcy felt uncool, like he was still from Mount Eliza. Why didn’t you write and tell me?
I had to get away, she said. I was dying here.
You were only fifteen, he said.
I knew you would have freaked, she said. And Jostler was afraid you’d come and find us.
Darcy stared back at the noticeboard to keep himself under control. Yes, he’d freaked, in a silence of his own that had lasted for years.
So what about you? she asked.
Not too much, he said. He’d painted and studied, read, won prizes at school, but mostly he’d been lonely; scrappy and dissatisfied. He rubbed his neck, aware of Fin watching, but he couldn’t pretend to feel breezy. So why did you come back? he asked.
To find you, she said, among other things.
Darcy felt like his clothes were too tight for how he was feeling. You could have sent a postcard. He could hear the hurt in his voice.
She swivelled her nose ring. I’m sorry, she said. I couldn’t risk it.
Risk what?
Family, she said, and they looked at themselves in each other’s eyes, but the time and distance had made Darcy feel more different, more left behind. His mother drinking herself into a deadening stupor, endless encounters at beats and then the parks along the Yarra, now here. How did you know I was here?
I phoned our father.
Our father who art in purgatory, said Darcy; he’d gone to live with Ranita, a woman he’d met on his egg run. How did you find him?
Through the egg farm. He told me you were majoring in art. Darcy was nodding at the faint freckles under her eyes, her bohemian perfume. His father whom he never visited.
Was Jostler with you in California?
She nodded. I studied Russian and psych at Berkeley, she said. Now I’ve transferred to this place. She looked about as if it were daunting but she didn’t look like she’d be daunted by much. And he’d imagined her up in Queensland all this time, never dreamed of her at Berkeley. He’d only been as far as New Guinea.
I’ve changed my last name to Dobrolyubova, she said. Finola Dobrolyubova. She seemed pleased with how it sounded. Dobrolyubov was a famous Russian social critic, she said.
Darcy watched the brightness of her new hair, the way she stood so easily in her tight black mini while the other Monash girls moved past in their three-quarter lengths, observing her.
I’m still Darcy Bright, he said.
Fin searched the noticeboard and smiled. Young? Communist? Or bisexual?
Darcy’s throat as dry as a branch. Mostly he felt unsure. Gay, he said. I’m gay.
Ulitsa Kazakov, Late Wednesday
Quietly Fin rested a large primed canvas on the easel, placed a concertina of faded tourist photos on the ledge. Without a word of goodnight she slipped off to bed, left him to it. On the duvet-covered couch, Darcy was smoking, staring out at the grey rectangle of well-stretched linen. The artist left to paint. He conjured the museum he’d viewed from Aurelio’s car—the snowbound spread of buildings and oversized fountains, Gothic and constructivist, the Monument to Space Flight sluicing the sky, and the way Aurelio’s arms had held him, the warm but slightly stale taste of him. Closing his eyes Darcy summoned bare-chested revolutionaries on dark Orlov horses galloping down through snow-covered trees and setting the museum on fire. An image seen clearly, but he knew he’d have to be more subtle.
He stood and brushed the canvas with his palms. Taut but soft, unspoiled, nice for drawing. He placed Fin’s gift of foldout photos of the museum on the end table. A sheet secured to the window now, tied to the hinges with shoelaces. He was alone. When the soul wants to manifest something, she throws an image out in front of herself and moves to catch it. He repeated it, tried to believe, imagined as he always did the rhythm of the arms of a juggler, the whoosh of the pins and the effortless reaching, the musicality of limbs. He imagined Aurelio dancing. Darcy rested his cigarette in Fin’s kabuki ashtray, lit one of her red candles.
He pulled her paintbox from behind the couch. Oils and acrylics mixed, a compartment of half-washed brushes, flat ferrule and oval shaped, the familiar smell of linseed. He sharpened a woodless carbon pencil. He figured if he drew in the candlelight, amid the smoke that wove from the ashtray, he might capture the movement of buildings, fake himself into feeling intuitive. Without a drink.
He pinned the concertina of images above the canvas, along the beam of the easel, eleven pictures, folding out one at a time. He recalled the sea of pavilions, acres of them jutting from the snow like mausoleums, the sharp silhouette of the obelisk. Aurelio and his private view as they sat in the Lada on the risen clearing, the reticent kiss, everyone’s signals confusing.
The carbon pencil ran well, gliding over the soft material. He swooped the lines of the shiny platinum form to the point where the gunmetal rocket would sit, a fin-shaped tower, bent and tapered. He drew with a juggler’s cadence, the meditative speed of the pins, his concentrated eyes. It summoned the memory of Laika, a televised image from childhood—the expression of the dog in the Soviet rocket, launched into a Soviet sky.
He took the Polaroid of the whippet and copied the lines of its face, its narrow back and nervous haunches, forelegs perched on a nose cone and an expression of forlorn hope. He added the bulbous tourist bus from the fold-out card at the base of the monument, realistic enough but also oddly proportioned. Postbox red. A touch of Basquiat. He tried to keep the rhythm before it got discordant, the softness of the pencil in his fingers, but he thought about Fin and felt the river of movement fading; this painting her ruse.
Still he was in it, drawing pavilions small and fountains and obelisk big, both realist and abstract, less concerned with perspectives and angles, knowing if he stopped he might never finish and that if he drew all night he could have something by morning. The Stone Flower Fountain with huge ornate petals sprouting from a mattress of rocks and high cascading flutes of coloured water: garnet, turquoise, lapis, emerald, amber. He turned to the foldout photo of the wedding-cake building, Doric columns and the star at the top of the gold-painted spire, red flags from the portico, an Aeroflot jumbo with its loading ramps down like a pair of splayed legs.
Darcy stood back. It was a long way from McCubbin and not quite de Kooning, and it wouldn’t exactly be Soviet Realism, the curious outlines and empty sky, too many shapes and juxtapositions; more like Soviet Surrealism. The candle on the end table collapsed down one side. He pushed his fingertip into the melted wax, felt the slight stab of heat as he stamped some red in the whippet’s eye. It dried like a seal on an envelope, the intricate web from his fingerprint. It gave the dog more life.
Darcy’s eyes were sore, his wrist and movement fading. This was all he could do now. He left the painting there, thought he should shower, but he wiped his hands on a rag and lay behind Fin in bed with his dark smudged fingers. He kissed her goodnight above the line of her T-shirt where the tattoo was, and then she was turning and he could sense that she’d been crying, her tears on his skin and her saying sorry as she kissed him softly, tears on his cheeks. I’m sorry, she said and he felt himself against her and thought of them as children, on the driveway at Mount Eliza, on the beach with Jobik with her legs up. She kissed him again and he thought of Aurelio and knew this wasn’t what he wanted, his sister like this, but her sorries and tears had aroused him, his face in her hair and the scent of her shampoo, a coursing of grief deep within him. On the verge of inside her, he suddenly wanted to get back at her, at Jobik or whatever his name was, at Aurelio who didn’t even want to kiss, but a sound came from Fin, far away as an island. No, she said. She was star
ing back at him through the dark, her lips parted, afraid. Not that.
Monash University, Winter 1982
Fin appeared in the smoke-filled dinge of the Small Caf, late as usual, wearing her calf-high boots with a short pleated tartan skirt despite the cold. They always met on Wednesday evenings, after his Portrait, Figures and Anatomy class and her Russian history. Afterwards she’d go to her psychology tute. Darcy watched her slide through the milling students, past the dopers at the big round table where they sometimes sat, everyone saying hi. Her hair plastered up on one side, flat against her scalp on the other. She fascinated Darcy, her punk-chic style, not unlike he imagined himself in drag. She flung her faux cowhide satchel over the chair, sat as if exhausted.
I need to do a psych test on you, she said.
Darcy sipped his coffee, pushed the second cup towards her. Must you?
She dropped her small oval sunglasses on the table. It’ll only take a minute, she said. She extracted a set of ink-blotted cards from her satchel. All you do is tell me what you see, she said. She placed a card on the tabletop. The first thing that comes to mind.
Darcy was used to her talk of Chomsky and Jung, he usually just smoked and listened to her random diatribes, thought about where he’d go later for sex. Now he strained to examine the patterns inked on a card.
Monkeys playing drums, he said. He looked up at her, wondering what he was supposed to see.
Look at the cards, not me, she said. She flipped over a new one.
A wildebeest with wings, he said, trying to impress her. He drank more coffee. The face of a startled cat, he said next. Aren’t you supposed to take notes?
Fin stared at him through the smoke, kept turning cards.
Blood in the rain, he said, when he saw obvious lips. Two mirrored butterflies. She turned them faster. Purple lingerie on the torso of a man. Iguanas fucking. Twin vaginas, he said when they could have been more butterflies. She splayed the last card on the table. An orchid. It wasn’t his first response; he’d seen another vagina.
Fin shook her head as if disappointed, gathered up the cards and shoved them back into her satchel. She flattened her skirt and lit a Camel with her neon lighter.
What does it mean? asked Darcy.
She turned and dangled one leg over the other, a boot extended, as though feigning her version of a therapist. I’d say you live in your shadow, she said. She licked her top teeth as if they might be stained with lipstick, conjuring something more. You contain an inherent duality.
Darcy wondered if she’d been stalking him. Tell me something I don’t know, he said.
Okay, she said. I think I want to make art.
Darcy felt glad for the change of subject. He’d never heard the expression make art; it sounded American.
I want to do installations. Like Judy Chicago. You know, like ‘The Dinner Party.’
Darcy had seen a photo of the triangular place settings meant for the women omitted from history. Sappho to Georgia O’Keeffe, he said.
But I’m going to do my own thing, she said.
Darcy thought how little she asked or knew about his art. The series he was painting from photos he’d taken, the rain-slick streets around the back of Ascot Vale where the abattoir smell lay in the air like a transparent fog. That’s cool, he said. He had listened to her lectures about movements and struggles in places he’d barely heard of, Eritrea and Azerbaijan, the second wave of feminism, deforestation in Brazil, but she hadn’t yet told him where she lived. She refused to discuss their family. And now she wanted to muscle in on his territory. Make art. He watched her blow cigarette smoke into the hazy cafe air, off in her own thoughts. She reminded Darcy of his mother, the way she let her head fall back.
There’s something I think about, he said.
She looked at him, gauging him, the fuming green of her pupils.
Why did you really leave Mount Eliza?
She touched the corner of her mouth with the little finger of her cigarette hand as if there was something to flick from there. Then she cast her eyes over at the stoners with their bags and surreptitious bowls. Because I was pregnant, she said. If you must know.
Darcy felt the weight of their underlives, how they spilled over into each other, the memory of her through the sand grass, taking it deep on the beach at Flinders, the way one of her legs went up at an angle. Jostler? he asked.
A flush of pink under her eyes. Well, it wasn’t you. She laughed in a husky way that didn’t sound normal and then looked back to the veil of weed smoke that puffed above the next table.
Darcy was thinking about how she’d only been fifteen. Did you have the baby? he asked.
Yeah, right, she said. She pulled on her cigarette.
Where’s Jostler now? asked Darcy.
Here and gone, she said, but her expression altered at the mention of him, clouded. He’s become very political, she said. Don’t ask me where he is now.
I don’t even know where you live, said Darcy.
She pulled out a postcard and looped a telephone number on it. Darcy watched the grace of her white fingers as she handed it to him. I got this for you, she said. Large square letters adorned by a drawing of a penis with an arrow to a big, red heart. CONNECT YOUR GENITALS TO YOUR HEART.
Darcy stared at the card in his hand. Why? he asked.
Because you ask questions like you don’t have secrets of your own, she said.
Ulitsa Kazakov, Thursday morning
Darcy woke up alone, feeling strangely hung-over. He got up and stood in the bedroom doorway. Fin was watching the Winter Olympics, adjusting the wire coathanger she’d rigged as an antenna. His sketch sat on the easel but Fin didn’t mention it—she didn’t mention anything. On the television, a Soviet cross-country skier with toes secured and ankles free, scooting through powder and into the trees. Sarajevo, said Darcy. He couldn’t tell if it was snowing there or if the reception was poor. Then a woman was poised on the ledge for the slalom. Dark pencilled eyebrows and wisps of dyed blonde hair sticking out from under her ski cap. Fin translated the commentary, stony-faced. Ida Bogdanova, nineteen, from Moscow, three months pregnant.
The skier covered her face with Carrera goggles and a foghorn sounded. She plunged amid whistles and ringing and Fin leaned forward on the couch. The figure hurtled, bouncing between the pegs and leaning, scouring snow, then hit a mogul sideways and flipped end over end, skidded into orange netting. Onlookers scattered and the coverage switched to curling. Fin sat back deep in the sofa. What would that do to a baby? she said.
A Soviet curler rippled his stone smoothly across the ice. It floated off-course then drifted back, stopped close to the tee.
Abortion is the most common contraception here, said Fin. They call it Three Nights in Sochi.
Darcy felt a sadness creeping about him. That he’d wanted to slip inside her as a twisted revenge. He thought of Sochi, a town on the map, on the Black Sea. A resort town. Darcy sat down beside her on the couch. Have you ever been to Sochi? he asked.
They both stared at the screen. No, she said, I had my afternoon in Brunswick.
He thought of her at fifteen on the Smith Street tram with Jostler, the set of her teenage face as they dug up inside her. Remnants of that face now watching the snow-blown trees in the televised forest. Another Russian langlaufer swished grimly by and then swung from sight, absorbed into the pine trunks.
Why didn’t you tell me, asked Darcy, back then?
Tell you what?
That you were pregnant.
I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone. I keep my promises. She looked at Darcy as if for the first time. Let’s never mention last night.
Darcy felt an undertow of secrets held for those they were fucking or almost had. He found himself nodding. If you tell me what you’re really doing here, he said.
Fin stood as if drawn to the window. She pulled at the sheet that half covered it. Come look, she said. Your Cuban’s in the courtyard. And there he was, the telltale drape of his coa
t about his shoulders, his prints fresh in the snow behind him. He was headed to the building opposite but he turned, as if sensing them. Maybe he’s come for his coat, said Fin sarcastically.
Aurelio was motioning Darcy down to join him and Darcy grabbed his greatcoat and beanie, happy to end their conversation, but Fin did the same, pulling on her sheepskin coat and fur hat. I don’t trust him, she said.
Darcy knew the truth—they no longer trusted themselves. They hurried downstairs, relieved by the distraction.
Aurelio leaned against the double-parked Lada, the collar of his Kensington framing his chin like the petals of a big, dark tulip, the shadow of his sideburns slightly thicker down his jaw than yesterday, smudges etched more deeply below his eyes. You were headed to the wrong building, said Darcy.
Aurelio regarded Fin cautiously. I was not sure, he said. He took his keys from his coat. You have been to the Pushkin? he asked. The Tretyakov Gallery? He’d turned from watcher to seducer to Intourist guide.
Fin said she’d love to go and broke into Russian. She got in the front seat and Darcy found himself getting in the back like an afterthought, deciphering only occasional names and movements: Kandinsky, Chagall, Isaak Brodsky, realists, avant garde. Aurelio didn’t meet his eyes in the rear-view mirror; he slid his gloves from his long fingers and fiddled with the radio dial.
Darcy felt disoriented. He’d wanted to talk with him about last night’s jazz but his mind was swamped with what almost happened with Fin. In the mirror he caught a glimpse of his own face; his hair stuck out like a shelf from being slept on, his Australian tan already gone. Aurelio kept his colour despite the winter and Fin kept hers too, porcelain white, pristine against her fresh morning lipstick, but even paler this morning, drawn, as she chatted away as if all was on the level.
They wended the wet streets to the river, a dirge crackling through a speaker attached below the glove box, vibrating near Fin’s knees—the place where Darcy’s legs should have been. In the front they continued their exchange with such passion their Russian sounded like the quarrelling of lovers. Darcy listened to the music. I’m not crazy about Shostakovich, he said, to get them back to English.
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