Stray Dog Winter

by David Francis

  It is Prokofiev, Aurelio said matter-of-factly, turning the volume down. Fin glanced back at Darcy but he chose not to receive her look, focused instead on the furry place at the nape of Aurelio’s neck where he’d buried his face only yesterday. Then he watched out into the leafless streets—the whine of the wipers with the lament of the requiem was hypnotic and it was beginning to snow. They stopped at a light near the frozen drainage canal where men perched on buckets on the embankment, bundled up like bears. They contemplated dark holes they’d made in the ice, their fishing poles draped into them. Wherever there’s water men are fishing, said Darcy, mostly to remind himself of his own voice.

  Aurelio turned back to Darcy, a desire for forgiveness in his eyes, but the music stopped abruptly and there came an announcement. Fin reached for the volume. Andropov’s dead, she said, wide-eyed. They all listened.

  How? asked Darcy, afraid it had been the Americans, but Aurelio smiled; he seemed pleased.

  He is been sick for months, he said. He wiped the fog from the window in front of him and put down his foot at the change of the light. The engine gushed as if it might flood. He drove faster now as if in his own world, making calculations.

  I just saw him on the TV, said Darcy.

  He’s probably been dead for weeks, said Fin. They play old footage.

  And they play dirge on radio to prepare the people, said Aurelio. Is hard to know what is real.

  Together Aurelio and Fin seemed to know everything, except perhaps about each other.

  Didn’t Andropov write to the American schoolgirl? asked Darcy. It was the only thing he could remember.

  He wrote romantic poetry, said Fin, and arranged the invasion of Hungary.

  He was two people, Aurelio said, turning to her. Like you.

  She’s more than that, thought Darcy.

  I’m an artist, said Fin. I’m allowed. A new torrent of their fluid-sounding Russian.

  No, thought Darcy. I’m the artist.

  The Monastery of St Peter rose up behind a high stone fence, a stepped belltower with a tapered green dome, a conglomerate of churches. Will it be Gorbachev’s time now? asked Darcy to break them up.

  Things get worse before they get better, said Aurelio, and Darcy heard them mention Chernenko’s name. He thought of the daughter, how she might become more influential now.

  News of Andropov’s death had pedestrians hurrying to the metro entrance at Prospekt Marksa as if there were things to prepare. Their movement was infectious. Aurelio said he’d have to drop the two of them off at the Pushkin because he needed to return to his office now. Darcy felt both relief and disappointment. He hadn’t imagined Aurelio having an office, just the dress shop.

  Can you drop us instead at the Beriozka on Petrovka? asked Fin as if a car was a bonus she couldn’t let slide. She pulled her netted perchance bag from the pocket of her coat.

  Aurelio watched Darcy in the mirror as if intuiting he’d still want to see the museum. I have some thing for you, said Aurelio with a certain sad amusement, dividing something into two separate words. He produced a small package from the sleeve in the door and handed it back to Darcy over the seat. More dull colour postcards. The Museum of Science and Achievement, the same shot of the arcing obelisk dwarfing the bright red bus. Captions in both Russian and English, the Atomic Energy Pavilion, colours unknown to nature added to the images like artificial sweetener. Pictures taken in summer. Aurelio looked in the rear-view mirror again, waiting for Darcy’s gratitude. To help for your painting, he said.

  Another shot of the People’s Friendship Fountain, the gold-leafed women holding bouquets, the water festooning, not frozen or smudged with snow. The grass a torpid green. Thank you, Aurelio, said Darcy. The sound of the name felt round on Darcy’s tongue.

  Fin asked if she could look but Darcy continued flipping. The Stone Flower Fountain, he said. The huge ornate petals that sprouted from rocks with high cascading flutes of water. He envisioned his canvas with the rocket-shaped monument bent and shining into the ether, mounted with the Polaroid of the prick-eared dog. Multimedia might be interesting here, he thought; both real and surreal, an ode to achievement and Laika heading into space on her own, the pavilions below. He could imagine it.

  Then he came upon a black and white picture, loose. Two men in a lavatory stall, shot from above. Had Aurelio left it accidentally? And then it dawned, a shadowed version of himself, his pained expression, eyes twisted closed, searching upwards. The one standing was Darcy. Shame and panic rose in a wave to his throat and came to his eyes.

  Aurelio had seen what Darcy uncovered. He pulled over outside the nondescript self-service market as Fin had requested. That is why there is a problem with your passport, said Aurelio.

  Darcy got out onto the pavement, stunned by the cold and the photo. He always knew there’d be a day of consequences. Fin stood behind him, watched the Lada motor away. I’m not convinced he’s on your team, she said. Darcy didn’t ask which team she meant. Let me see them, she said.

  Reluctantly, Darcy let her flip through the photos, waiting until she came to the black and white. A photo, not a Polaroid. The railway station in Prague, he said. Together they stared—the guy in his uniform, down on his knees, his army cap on the cistern. One of Darcy’s hands in the young man’s wavy hair, the other gripping his own abdomen as if clutching a pain.

  Fin gazed in disbelief. She’d warned him to be careful and yet there he was, captured from a hole in the ceiling. Darcy could feel her seething, an anger no doubt magnified by what she’d almost let happen the night before. They stared at the strange grey shapes. Darcy could hardly believe it himself; the shame of it made him feel woozy.

  Where was the money belt? she asked.

  Darcy pointed to his mid-section, just above the soldier’s head. That’s what Darcy was holding onto, the leather belt pulled up high, his arm hugged around it, holding himself, his face twisted up and his hair falling back from his forehead. He was too handsome to refuse, said Darcy. It was a thudding consolation.

  He was in uniform, she said. Are you crazy?

  Darcy didn’t answer at first. It could have been that he was.

  One minute you’re acting normal and the next you’re in a foul-smelling place with a stranger, risking everyone’s lives.

  At least I look happy, said Darcy, but he could feel his insides convulsing.

  No you don’t, she said. You look possessed, like you just injected heroin into a vein. He’d never seen her so incredulous. I hardly recognise you, she said. Look at your expression.

  It was true. He looked more desperate than he imagined, as though he’d forgotten to breathe. He wondered how his face would have looked last night if he’d been caught on film with Fin. Fin turned the photo over like it was some unwanted symptom. Lines of Cyrillic letters on the back. Her mouth set hard inside her balaclava. Your name, she said. My address.

  For a moment Darcy stood speechless; there was nothing to say in defence. It’s too cold to have this conversation in the street, he said, but he knew they couldn’t have it inside Beriozka and Fin wasn’t moving.

  Aurelio’s part of a network, she said.

  No kidding, said Darcy, then wished he hadn’t been glib. Aurelio so cruisy and European, his coat draped over his Cuban shoulders. He didn’t seem like he played by the rules, said Darcy.

  You didn’t think that odd? asked Fin.

  He said he was Cuban. Darcy knew it should have seemed odd; Aurelio had even shared that he was involved with the druzhinniki, the rounding up of hoodlums, yet everything had felt so foreign it was hard to register what would have been normal. What would be normal now?

  Fin slipped the photo into her pocket. I suppose you wanted something to happen, she said—well it has. She hugged herself against this new reality. The Soviets think homosexuals should be liquidated, she continued. They call it a psychic disorder. They treat it with electric shock. They’ve researched the transplant of straight men’s balls. It’s not like I di
dn’t warn you.

  You knew who I was when you invited me, he said.

  I did, she said, but you promised. She was on the verge of tears, overwhelmed by what all this meant. Darcy held her to him in the wind. Last night she had been apologising to him. For what? For leaving him, bringing him here? Using him? Kissing him? Now, she pulled herself free.

  I should have known you’d be trouble, she said.

  Then why did you bring me here?

  Because you were the only one I could trust.

  They looked at each other and Darcy knew it had been the truth. He also knew they’d severed that now. They were both in trouble, with each other and the world. What about last night? he asked.

  I don’t know about last night, she said, shaking her head in a sort of amazement. Her face frowned up in a manner that made her seem older. But this photo is bad for all of us.

  How many of us are there? asked Darcy.

  Fin didn’t say, she left him there outside the shop and walked off as if to tell him he was on his own. He felt as if he might stand there and wait for the night to come down over him. He was freezing, imbued with a deep sense of reckoning, a panic that stunned him quite still. If she’d trusted only him, she didn’t trust Jobik, but what kind of solace was that now? He looked at a bug-eyed plastic flamingo in the shop window. What now, Darcy Bright? A stab of anxiety spread through him. Aurelio had declared Moscow to be a place where nothing was legal yet everything possible, but little felt possible now, just a sense of this, his watershed day. The day when Andropov died. He pulled out his plastic map, an instinct to be pragmatic. He could analyse all of it later—his frailties would still be his frailties, but the disapproval on Fin’s face would haunt him, from when he’d kissed her through her tears last night, to the way she’d glared at him just now.

  The street before him appeared quiet as a frozen planet. Andropov’s death had everyone indoors now, burrowed in the buildings he passed. He imagined them around transistor radios, wary of a clampdown. There were no celebrations.

  He had marked the Australian Embassy on the map with a pen; he knew it wasn’t far. He could seek refuge there, request a replacement passport. He imagined climbing the fence and plopping like a fig into the cover of a garden. So he walked. The mind-numbing cold whipped off the river. A wintry expanse already lit from the rim of the parapet, a vessel marooned, resting against the cutwater, dark as a whale. And as he walked the experiences lined up before him with an unexpected clarity. The scene with the soldier was as it had been: gratuitous and easy, an adrenaline rush, it had been like a line of heroin. The poster in the Ming Wing when Fin did that test on him: CONNECT YOUR GENITALS TO YOUR HEART. In Prague it was more familiar, mouth to genitals, genitals to a vein in his arm. With Fin it had been different—tears on her cheeks and his anger, a wound somehow being mirrored. What he’d shared with Aurelio felt ridiculous now. How many red flags could one country fly?

  He walked on the sidewalks cleared of snow but still crunching underfoot, the image in the photo reverberating in the headwind. Maybe he’d betrayed Aurelio also, but he knew, most of all, he’d betrayed himself.

  When he looked up from the pavement and into the sulfurous cold, he wondered how many copies of the photo were out there, how one got into Aurelio’s hands. Not far from Kropotkinskaya Prospekt 13, he stopped. A tepid green Art Nouveau mansion behind a high-spiked iron fence. The gate was electronic and the cars inside were buried in snow. From beneath a bare elm, Darcy noticed what looked like a Soviet guard shut in a windowed sentry box. All Darcy had on him as picture ID was his International Driver’s Licence so he waited in case there were comings and goings, for a ruddy-faced attaché with a familiar accent, what a relief that would be. But the place might as well have been abandoned.

  The guard observed Darcy loitering and Darcy observed him, imagined being sentenced to stay upright all day in a kiosk the size of a phone box. He wished the gate was manned by some boy from the barracks in Sydney, standing alert in the wind, but Australia, he knew, was no Soviet ally. So he produced his cardboard driver’s licence and approached. What was left to lose?

  The guard slid the door of the sentry box open and regarded the document blankly. Darcy pointed to where it said Issued in Melbourne, Australia so the guard would know he was in the right place, but it clearly wasn’t his alphabet.

  Po-angliyski? asked Darcy.

  The guard shook his head so Darcy pointed at the photo, but in it his hair was longer and still streaked dark. The guard observed him with an indifferent suspicion. Pazpot? he asked.

  I-do-not-have-my-pazpot.

  The pistol nested in the guard’s holster caused a clamminess at the base of Darcy’s spine. There was no apparent phone or intercom, just a small oil heater to be leaned against, the smell of singed clothes. Not even a mail drop. Darcy thought maybe he had the wrong building. A flagpole on the roof but no suggestion of a flag, no familiar points of the Southern Cross or the Federation Star. He couldn’t throw a stone and see if he might hit a window; it wasn’t that kind of country and the ground was covered in ice. If he scaled the fence the bars would rattle and he’d be shot in the back. He motioned at the great stone house. Australianski? he asked.

  The guard glowered, not understanding, so Darcy shouted Hello in the hope that someone inside would hear his accent but the sound was lost in the wind. None of the curtains opened. The guard touched his pistol as a warning. Pazpot, he repeated. Darcy felt suddenly weary as he headed back towards Komsomolskiy Bulvar. For all he knew the Australian delegation had left—with Andropov dead, there could have been some coup or crackdown, or maybe the embassy was open by appointment only. If he could get into the Intourist Hotel he could ask at the desk for the telephone number but he wasn’t registered there, he had no Intourist guide, only Aurelio. But Aurelio was nowhere now.

  He passed the doors of St Nicholas the Weaver, its tent-roofed belltower and golden cupolas shining against the lacklustre sky. A city where churches were being converted to museums of atheism. A cardboard box flew up and scraped along the wall, tore off around the corner. Those still in the street had their hands in their pockets as they leaned into the squall. A siren interrupted, sharp as the wail of a wounded dog, then it was as quiet as a curfew except for the slush of the cars.

  In the alley at the back of Aurelio’s dress shop a sapling bent as though trying to hold onto its long lost leaves and a brindle cat leapt between square metal rubbish bins, its fur blown flat. Darcy couldn’t see much through the half-painted window, just the mirror where he’d examined himself as he first pulled on Aurelio’s coat. Scraps of material and a bodice on the work table, but no sign of life. Darcy banged loudly and shouted zdrastvuytye, the syllables butchered, all of them engulfed. He stood back in case someone appeared in the window above, Aurelio’s mother perhaps, the friend of Castro, but there was just a filmy curtain bunched at one side. He shouted Aurelio and suddenly wondered if that was really his name.

  A stocky man appeared in the mouth of the alley and, without being sure who it was or if he’d even been noticed, Darcy found himself running. He hurtled down a barely lit side street, narrow compared with the broad boulevards, past two stone lions atop a gatehouse, buildings with low gargoyles, an old part of the city. When he stopped for breath he kept walking on an empty lane with shopfronts. A washing machine in the window of one and a stack of folded blankets topped with a bouquet of plastic sunflowers. It wasn’t as cold away from the river.

  He sheltered in the doorway of a store with stuffed birds in its window, dead hawks and falcons, a display so dusty it could have been there since the time of the tsars. A horse’s neck and head was mounted beside them. It was carved from a tree trunk, cut straight across its shoulders, part of it covered in bark. Then Darcy realised it was real, not a carving, but so old the horse’s hair had fallen out and the leather was peeling. Its ewe-neck bowed upwards as if it stared at the moon, reaching for something, its Roman nose high and a wildness in its m
arbled eyes. He saw himself in the photo, even though he’d strained up with clenched eyes; with Fin they’d been wide open, reaching for something else.

  In a cul-de-sac behind him he heard a dull thumping, a boy juggling bowling pins in the dark, three at a time. Some trick of the faded light or a dream, the image he conjured to paint was appearing in real life. The young boy on his own, a bicycle leaned against a tree and a patterned handkerchief tied on his head. The boy’s ragged canvas pants and his fervent concentration on the rhythm of the pins had Darcy entranced. A secret response to the General Secretary’s passing. Everyone lying in wait. The boy tumbled the pins much higher, then dropped one and slapped himself on the thigh, more self-aware than if he were alone.

  Darcy looked up into the blank apartments, imagined inhabitants standing in darkness behind the shutterless windows or kneeling on beds they used as divans in the daytime, pillows laid along the walls, watching. If it was a subtle celebration of Andropov dying, for Darcy it was something else. If he’d believed in a god he’d have thought it a sign. But of what? Hope or innocence, or both of them lost?

  Darcy wanted to dig for his pad and sketch the lines of the juggler but he just watched, intoxicated by the boy’s gypsy flair, his circus pants, the bandana. His evocation of purity. Then the boy began swinging pins from ropes wound on his wrists and curled through his hands, and he spun them in opposite circles, flipping them fast and then faster, surrounding his body as he swayed. Whizzing like propellers extended from his arms.

  Darcy had thought that everyone here looked lonely, that he could almost smell their disappointment, but the boy seemed different, reaching and dipping, possessed by a passion. Darcy used to imagine teaching horses to dance on a rumbling wooden floor so their steel shoes made a tapping sound that blended with flamenco music. He’d wanted to paint the Lipizzaners doing airs above the ground. But he’d become lost along the way. He searched up into the new-fallen afternoon dark like the horse did beside him, as if there’d be a moon through the low-ceilinged clouds. He was close to the age the Mormon had been when he appeared at the door on Baden Powell Drive, and the thought made Darcy feel strange.