Stray Dog Winter

by David Francis

  As the Chaika drove off, the two remaining girls stood in what had now become a slushy rain. But they are not right for everyone, Aurelio said. He turned and blew a plume of smoke at Darcy. The woman you see in the kitchen opposing your apartment will meet you the day after Andropov’s funeral, under the elm on your Fin’s street. It will be this car.

  We call her Svetlana, said Darcy.

  Aurelio smiled at the nickname, started the car. She will look after you, he said. Don’t be worry.

  They drove down past the two remaining transvestites, who were stamping their feet in the cold, one in a grey coat and matching scarf that looked like chinchilla, the other in black leather and fur. Outside too long, their cheeks were grooved and they were too tired to look pretty. Aurelio didn’t greet them. He pointed to the snowy verge, around a corner. Darcy made out the remains of an old apple orchard behind a high-tensile wire fence.

  Svetlana, as you are calling her, will tell you to wait here, he said. We think he will stop for you.

  Darcy wondered how they could be so confident, those who were listening. I need to think about this, he said.

  Aurelio pointed at the transmitter, his dark eyes narrowed, warning. If you think about it, you will be coming the first Australian opuscheny. He pushed his cigarillo into the pile of butts in the ashtray. And you see what happens to them.

  I trusted you, said Darcy.

  Aurelio put his hand to Darcy’s mouth. And you should trust me still, he said, but his fingertips felt sweaty and cold. Darcy didn’t kiss them. He turned away to the night outside and imagined the icy lips of the transvestites.

  Frankston Hospital, December 1983

  Darcy watched his mother from the door of the emergency ward. She looked like a tall palsied bird, propped up on pillows, her left arm against the wall behind her. The neurologist said she was suffering from neglect and it struck Darcy as ironic. As her left arm started to move it did unexpected things; flung itself over her head or unwittingly followed the movement of her leg. The nervous parting of her lips, the fierce narrow expression. He watched as she put on her cardigan backwards. Don’t ask me what day it is, she said. She knew he was there without seeing him. They’ve asked me fifteen times.

  What day is it? he asked. There wasn’t a chair and he was glad because he didn’t want to sit.

  December twenty-two, she said, Sunday, her speech slightly slurred. I only remember because the nurse just asked me. She said it with a hint of shrewdness in her smile.

  I brought your things, he said. He took her nightie from the pale blue overnight bag and placed it on the bed. It looked like a child’s summer dress. I’m only in overnight, she said. For observation.

  Next he placed her leather-covered radio on the table, but she didn’t look at it. So you can listen to the cricket, he said. She’d never been musical, except for ‘Moon River’—she preferred sporting commentaries, racing at Moonee Valley, cricket at the MCG. She was sliding down from the pillows behind her, so slow it was hardly noticeable. It made the hospital gown droop low on one side, her breast pale beneath her tan line. Have you been mean to the nurses? he asked.

  They’ve taken away my buzzer, she said. The skin on her neck sagged dark like a wattle. She clutched her Medibank Private card in her right hand as though it was her passport. I guess Christmas is up in the air, she said. She turned to look at Darcy now and all he heard was Fin’s voice on the phone from Moscow, urgent, Please come. And tonight he was driving to Sydney, to the College of Fine Arts, tomorrow his last chance to defer. He’d stay up there for New Year’s Eve. Now he thought of the things his mother would have planned for their Christmas, stealing the top of some small roadside pine and stuffing it through the sitting-room window, her getting sloshed on gin and Pimm’s, pretending it was fun.

  They won’t let me walk even though I can, she said.

  Where’s the doctor? asked Darcy.

  They only have nurses, she said, her small eyes on Darcy as if she knew something he didn’t. He thought of how the tickets had arrived in the money belt, and how he would stop off in Prague on the way, Wenceslas Square and the river whose name he could never remember, just that it wasn’t the Danube. He’d never seen cities in snow. Across the hall an Indian family clustered around a shape on a gurney behind a half-drawn curtain.

  People die in here, his mother said. Can you get me some Molly Bushell barley sugar from the chemist?

  Darcy took a last look at her, her hand freckled and dark around the blue insurance card. Sure, he said, I’ll bring it in tomorrow.

  Ulitsa Kazakov, Late Thursday

  The apartment felt hostile. Fin on the couch in her sage green overalls, one side fastened over a T-shirt. Darcy wasn’t sure if she wanted him here or not, uncertain of everything now. As he shut out icy air behind him, he noticed the sheet off the window hinges, heaped on the floor. The easel was bare, the Laika painting removed.

  Fin watched for Darcy’s response. The only good thing he’d accomplished since he’d arrived, gone. The curator was here, she said. She stood; her lipstick was smudged. He liked the painting a lot, she said. Thank God. She spoke as if their near lovemaking had happened in a parallel universe but Darcy knew it was right there between them, a branch that scratches at the window if the wind blows, or a wolf that might follow them more closely now, cunning and patient.

  A rivulet of water crept around the sash of the window, steamed as it met the heating pipe, and Darcy noticed the walls were naked too, the canvas of the mastectomy scar he’d tried to convert, the Polaroid of the babushka in the park just a square where less dust had gathered.

  They confiscated what wasn’t authorised, said Fin, following his eyes almost maternally, as though she hadn’t meant to send him away. They own the insides of the walls, she added, that’s what it’s like being an artist here. Folding her arms about the bib of her overalls, she told Darcy they’d taken her peasant dresses too, the one she’d lettered with quotes from Tolstoy, the one with the dream about drowning inscribed on the front.

  Outside, the snow had transformed into a pelting, perpendicular sleet, nails being hammered from the sky. At least your painting will be in the exhibition, she said. A tarnished silver lining. You can add it to your resume, she added, I won’t mind.

  He thought of the other things he could add—brother, lover, hustler, spy—but a world where people had resumes seemed distant. His father once said it wasn’t what was served up but how you experienced it, but how was he supposed to experience this, this cold mean place, these circumstances? He’d arrived with desires but this wasn’t how he’d dreamed of Fin in the snow. It’s not what you want, it’s how it comes at you, he thought, how you catch it and fold it into your arms, if you can catch it at all. He remembered the juggler, spinning his wooden pins with a sensory joy, but self-contained. Darcy knew that his own joy lay in art and not sex, but he felt as if art was escaping him now. And he knew the Laika painting would never stay with him, not physically, but it had become like a junction box.

  It didn’t have a name, he said.

  I told him it’s called Dogs in Space, said Fin.

  But it had been more than just that—it had been a line back into himself.

  Fin looked at him sympathetically from behind the safety of her folded arms. We’re guests of the Soviet government, she said, that’s the arrangement…it’s just lucky he liked it.

  Did you see the words along the rocket?

  Yes, she said, but I’m never sure what forgive me is supposed to mean. Accept me? She observed him with a sorrow in her face that was becoming familiar. If you ask me, she said, people want forgiveness so they can forgive themselves. All I asked was that you contain yourself here. I told you it was too dangerous. She moved the easel off to the side as if that part of the discussion was over. Of course, now they want another piece, she said.

  Not from me, said Darcy. He poured himself a mug of kvass from a jug on the counter. The steam and fear had made him thirsty. Shouldn
’t we talk about last night? he said.

  No, she answered abruptly, a flare in her eyes. She shook her head, asked where he’d been all evening, and then she went silent as Jobik appeared like a spectre from her bedroom and Darcy understood. This was who she was hostage to, more than listening devices or any regime, and more than Darcy.

  Jobik kept from view of the window, took off his black-rimmed glasses and wiped them, looked over at Darcy with his deep-set mahogany eyes.

  Are you the curator too? asked Darcy.

  I’m not an artist, he said in a strange part-American accent. I’m sorry for your troubles here. He pushed a hand through his unruly black hair and raised an eyebrow to Fin, and with a nod let her know it was time to go. All it had taken was a nod and she was leaving with him. Darcy watched them rug up for outside and had a flash of the hookers standing frozen in the snow.

  Aurelio’s enlisted me, he said.

  They turned simultaneously. Jobik’s pupils deadened but a shock of moisture glistened in Fin’s eyes.

  He has my passport, said Darcy, I saw it—but to get it back I have to be with a man so they can take photos.

  What man? asked Fin.

  Darcy drank some more of the kvass. Chernenko’s son-in-law, he said. If I don’t he said they’ll prosecute. He showed me the opuscheny.

  What do you mean? asked Fin.

  It is what happens to the gays in the gulag, said Jobik. They get treated like dogs.

  Can you help me? Darcy asked. Jobik? I brought the money belt.

  But Jobik was shaking his head; he was leaving. Not now, he said. I can’t now.

  Fin stayed for a moment and Darcy saw the distress in her eyes. Jobik has problems, she said, and as she closed the door Darcy knew they were her problems too.

  For a moment Darcy was left in an aloneness he remembered from far off, a boy in a garden before Fin had even arrived, a feeling he’d since avoided, and then he remembered last night. The thought of a drink almost repulsed him but he still found himself scavenging in the fridge for vodka. All he found were soft-skinned apples and, in the freezer, a sketch. Hidden from the curator. A sketch of a peasant woman kneeling with a baby in her arms, the infant held forward, suckling on the teat of a donkey. It had nothing to do with the landscapes of Moscow. Darcy held the icy picture and examined it. The rounded shape of a baby swaddled in white, its face disappearing behind the donkey’s narrow thigh. The lines thoughtful, softer and more representational than Fin’s usually were. Perhaps she’d copied it, traced it from a print to prove herself. A faint second figure was drawn in the background, squatting on a milking stool with a second baby in her arms.

  Darcy thawed it with Fin’s hairdryer, enough so paint would take. He didn’t know what else to do. With a palette of her watercolours and a fine brush, he coloured where the dress fell from the woman’s seated knees and looped along the stable floor. A light powder blue. The surface still wet so the colours bled nicely, there was no need to mix with water. He painted the donkey, its face, accepting the baby so placidly, one ear forward and one back. The nativity gone awry. He painted it softly like Munnings or Stubbs, forgetting about everything. It felt comforting to work in watercolours, to paint sober. Hints of pink in each mother’s face. It calmed his nerves.

  He was still painting in details, cream touches of straw on the stable floor, when Fin finally returned. She entered quietly and stood, her face swallowed in the entry hall shadows. Darcy didn’t look at her. It’s based on a story, she said and came closer, not seeming angered by what he was doing. It’s a woman with syphillis who had twins, she said, but Darcy knew it had to do with the two of them, something she’d wanted to say but couldn’t. She pointed to the figure on a milking stool, her dress now hinted with colour. The sister was a healer, she said. Her manner was soft now Jobik wasn’t here; maybe that alone was her forgiveness.

  Darcy applied a touch of pink to the second baby’s face while Fin stood at the uncovered window. In the story, she said, they used donkey’s milk because the mother’s was infected. Then she approached the painting conditionally, as if it wasn’t quite hers. Donkey’s milk is more like a mother’s, she said, from the teat it’s the purest. She touched the infant’s face.

  How do you know all this? asked Darcy.

  It was in a village near Archangelsk, she said.

  A myth or a story? he asked. He dabbed at the dress with the remnants on the paintbrush. Again he’d left part of the picture bare.

  What does it matter? she said. It was just that I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I drew it.

  What happened to the babies? asked Darcy.

  One died, she said.

  He kneeled back to get a sense of it, the ghostly shape of the sister healer, crouched on the stool, unfinished.

  I think it’s about our mothers, she said.

  Darcy drew his head back. He doubted Aunt Merran had ever looked out for his mother. He smudged some colour onto the manger with a linseed cloth. Maybe it’s about us, he said.

  Fin walked back to the window and looked out into the night and its new depth of snow. You shouldn’t have kissed me like that, she said as if it were his fault. She stared into the gloom. It doesn’t mean I don’t love Jobik.

  Darcy remembered her and Jobik together, an image that was always slightly intoxicating.

  He needs me in ways you wouldn’t understand, she said, but she sounded to Darcy as if she was convincing herself. He’s the one who believes in something.

  Darcy could tell she talked less of a faith than a crusade and he heard the subtle comparison. Does he believe in something good? he asked.

  Fin stared out as if that remained to be seen. An ashy pallor seemed to veil her face all the time now. The shine had been washed from her. I hope so, she said. Did you know he’s an Orthodox Christian?

  Darcy was wary of anything orthodox, especially in the name of Jesus. The missionary had taught him that. You need to get away from him, said Darcy. We need to go home.

  Fin’s eyes turned back and fixed on the curious painting, nodding as if she knew. There’s something I still have to do, she said. The more vulnerable she seemed, the grimmer their chances appeared. She was scared to death. He reached to hold her, afraid of how fragile she’d feel in his arms, but she pulled away.

  Ulitsa Kazakov, Friday morning

  Darcy slept fitfully, aware of a vague fear of waking, visions of the petrified face of the man in the park, his yearning eyes carved out of wood, empty sockets, the stare of Aunt Merran’s blind ram. He woke to murmurs of Russian in the hall, a vague ache edging around his head. He lay fully dressed under the duvet on the couch with a panic that had seeded in him overnight, sprouting like an infestation of jittering insects.

  Fin stood behind the couch. Svetlana will be waiting, she said.

  Darcy stood, looked out the window at the apartment opposite. A figure appeared in the kitchen, an elderly baba who opened the window and sprinkled seed on the sill.

  Fin opened Aurelio’s overcoat. He inserted an arm at a time, an ache in his underarms already, the place where confusion and anxiety seemed to dwell. Outside, sparrows swarmed to Svetlana’s sill.

  Keep your wits about you, said Fin.

  What about you? he asked.

  Jobik will look after me, she said.

  Darcy turned and looked at her with a sudden sense he might not see her again. There are those in more imminent danger, she said. It looks like you’re working for Gorbachev’s people. Think of it as a cause. For something like freedom.

  She let him hug her this time. She spoke like an American and sometimes he forgot that part of them was. In the name of freedom and hardly breathing he held her for an extra second, felt her body tight and narrow and volatile, and yet he had a sense her core was stronger than his. We are just butterflies, his mother had whispered long ago, slightly tipsy, as she’d played with Darcy’s hair.

  He stowed the stab-and-pick can-opener in his sock, wrapped in three hundred roubl
es. He didn’t show Fin, she would laugh. She sent him out but wouldn’t look at him.

  Alone in the hall, he had a momentary thought of fleeing down the back stairwell and then taking his chance, the scaling of fences out into the winter. There may have been those in more imminent danger, planes going down in the Urals, sinking boats in the Bering Straits, abominations, but Darcy just stood there as if his life had flown away. The bull-headed neighbour at the end of the corridor, observing with a dampened expression, eyes dug deep beneath his brow. Just sex with a stranger for a passport, thought Darcy, and then let me go.

  Outside, a white gloom draped the morning like a drop cloth. A low porcelain sky, not even the ghost of a sun. Darcy glanced back up at the apartment window. A shirt hung stiffly next door and then he noticed Fin’s small open hand pressed to the glass. It seemed melodramatic from where he stood, unlike her, but it reminded him of the part of her he loved. He wanted to wave but feared if he lifted his hand he might not make it. He pulled his beanie down over his ears.

  In the small car park there was no Lada, just a beige Zhiguli. Svetlana inside it, heavy mascara and smoking, her fringe in strands like frosted vines from under a thick polka-dot scarf. She pushed open the passenger door.

  You ready? she asked impatiently, a clotted ‘r’ and an absence of humour.

  As Darcy slid inside she didn’t say anything, just started the car. There’s an old woman in your apartment, he said. She was feeding the birds.

  Svetlana expelled smoke into her corner of the windscreen then reversed. I am finished there, she said, and Darcy looked at her light pink lipstick, her lime dress with a vague pink pattern under a heavy coat, a pair of dark glasses pushed up high on her scarf as if it were a different season. Not in the mould of police or militia.

  She considered Darcy almost sympathetically. Do not be so afraid, she said with a hint of apology, and Darcy wondered if it was her job to make him feel safe.