Stray Dog Winter

by David Francis

  Aurelio, he whispered, glad his lips could still shape the word, but the name was drowned by a crackle from tinny loudspeakers hooked on trees, dirge music piping out into the morning as if it were Darcy’s own death being mourned a day prematurely. The venom from the general’s lips, the repulsive jolting, had Darcy starey-eyed out here in the wind, far from weeping, the fact of it grasping hold.

  He merged with a huddle fanning from the window of a Beriozka, where the proceedings in the square were being televised. On the screen, a tribune beneath the clock on Spasskaya Tower with a rose-wreathed casket, then a podium with dignitaries dribbling into their seats, waiting. Armoured vehicles motored past, columns marching with guns in the air past the striped onion domes of St Basil’s. Raincoats and umbrellas covered the square like a field of wet flowers. Alas, poor Yuri, thought Darcy. Vodka so cheap they cleaned their windows with it, called it Andropodka. Alas, poor everyone, he thought.

  If he steered them to Fin, he knew he’d not garnered himself any guarantees, just two venues and a couple of hours, a chance in hell. The KGB like a giant bear, pawing at him, no doubt suspecting he’d strung them along. His breath felt shallow, barely reaching his chest in the gathering crowd drawn down the avenue to assure themselves Andropov was gone. Craggy plaster faces strung on a line between the spindly birches and, beneath them, a mask seller who wore a plaster Brezhnev, secured by elastic. He wagged his finger at Darcy, making a speech, and a few people laughed brittle laughs.

  Darcy saw a young girl who cradled a big cream handbag leaning against her mother for warmth, and he yearned for her innocence. This quaint-faced girl examining those wooden dolls within dolls, Lenin inside Stalin, Khrushchev inside Brezhnev, men inside men, but there wasn’t an Andropov yet. She stared over at Darcy then moved in closer to her mother, spooked. He ate his second piroshki too fast, felt like he was gagging, the timid retreat of the child had him off-kilter, as if seeing himself from the outside. With a false possibility but not a real plan, just the sense enough would never be sufficient—it wasn’t just Fin they wanted, it was Jobik and his associates, and the general’s own desire to slam Darcy’s face into a smeared concrete corner. The same general at St Anne’s that first day, the Cuban bride whose smile lit up the sanctuary. She says he’s like an animal, Aurelio whispered, as if it were a good thing, but where was the new bride last night, her general on the end of Darcy’s prison bed? An animal, yes, but what sort exactly? How much did Aurelio know?

  Darcy tried to stop his mind, thoughts like the sails of spinning windmills. He looked up from the footprints before him to the distant Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, plastic roses in the snow beneath the eternal flame and a boy on the kerb in uniform chatting up a girl in a leather coat that had I Shot JR painted on the back. A Fin kind of girl, a photo if Darcy had still had his Pentax, but it was too late to capture the ironies now. He’d missed the Moscow he could have visited, the one he’d hoped for, the majesty of her winter, but the sight of the couple reminded Darcy it had existed all along, the distant swirl of confetti eddying about newlyweds in fur capes near the tomb, celebrating on a Soviet day of mourning. The sights invoked in him a strange invigoration as he rounded the corner into the square, to the pageant of Andropov’s funeral unfurling in real life, a quilt of wet umbrellas extending towards the domes of St Basil’s. The din of the dirge now eclipsed by a battalion of soldiers doing that straight-leg step across the frosted cobblestones; it gave Darcy that shivery feeling like Germany, the trammelling force of them, a thousand uniforms, generals. He waded into the depths of the crowd, weaving sideways but quietly forward, as if searching for Fin. The idea of disappearing seemed rash but suddenly possible—return to the apartment, the list of restaurants in Fodor’s. Find the Jaguaroff, get there alone. He knitted himself among dripping umbrellas, furs and stolid faces, his heart thumping up into his clamouring head. He hunkered, stock-still amid the rugged-up multitude, breathless, his eyes anchored on the distant platform, the casket wrapped in a rose-covered Soviet flag and, behind it, the rows of dignitaries.

  Darcy pretended he was Russian, one of the pairs of myriad eyes that preyed on a distant Gorbachev, a tailored jacket in the front row, the purple stain on the brow just visible. He didn’t chance to check if someone pushed through behind him into the now-restless concourse. The speech at the funeral would be delivered by the new General-Secretary, the replacement, that’s what Aurelio had said. Gorbachev was the only man in the front row who looked under seventy-five, the Soviet saviour, but Darcy feared the general worked for him. He closed his eyes in a spell of giddiness, a sense of desolation, as if he could already feel a hand on his shoulder, a gun to his ribs. He focused on Gorbachev, Raisa beside him—he’d seen their photo in Pravda—then he made out Margaret Thatcher, her rooster’s face and hair in some elaborate rain scarf. He found himself yearning for the sight of his own hawk-faced prime minister, a rugged Australian frown, but Darcy’s doubting mind was riling up: why would they have let me plunge so deep into this crowd? Imagining the toxic feel of cloth over his nostrils, being hauled away from that wrong hotel, he gazed at a new row of artillery rattling over the cobbles, the chance of dissolving into this maze as the columns of soldiers turned like clockwork to salute the canopy of roses. A collective murmur as an old man struggled to the podium.

  Merde alors! said someone nearby.

  Darcy turned, the chance of a French reporter or exile, but a well-groomed woman met his glance. Svetlana, without make-up, in a fur scarf and cape, only three umbrellas away, her bitten hand cradled up into her coat and a glare that was chilling, the faintest shake of her head, a warning. Darcy’s own gaze dragged down to the icy cobblestones, slick underfoot, glinting as if they were precious. They were all over him. A piercing ache struck up in his glands, the giddiness again, but he focused on the pretence of Fin’s arrangement—he’d proceed to the exhibition, his painting up on a Soviet wall. He thought of Laika’s cocked head, a dog in a rocket hurtled through space, how they probably knew her capsule would explode, they knew before they sent her.

  Darcy looked over again but Svetlana was gone, just a voice that wheezed and echoed through loudspeakers, a face projected now on a huge gritty screen on the Kremlin wall, eyebrows combed up like seagulls’ wings, like Brezhnev’s. It was Chernenko, a glazed look in his eyes, puffy cheeks and rounded chin, white hair pasted back from his forehead. Medals and stars pinned on his jacket and a sudden grim silence crept through the mourners, their chance of change like grit in frozen teeth.

  Darcy stared paralysed, imagined the son-in-law sitting up for Sunday dinner in the company of this old asthmatic, pretending. The son-in-law who’d whispered smoke on Darcy’s toes, tried to warm them. As if some ill-omened blackmail could undermine this, accelerate history. The general, even if he worked for Gorbachev, seemed far more odious than the poor old salt from this man’s lips. The dull acceptance of the great harvest of people had Darcy wishing for this as their moment of revolt, a rush for the barricades, comrades mown down by the thousands. But no shout came from Darcy’s mouth, nor anyone else’s—they all knew it would be answered by the thuck of a silenced bullet. Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t even know their name. Darcy knew he’d be forced to pray for his own moment at the exhibition, in a crowd where he might be heard. There would be foreigners, artists, sympathisers.

  A half-hearted clap rumbled through the gloom like the muffled sound of a thousand books being shut, applause at a funeral. Chernenko’s speech finished as abruptly as it had started, the last gasps of the union petering to a halt, he’d run out of gas. Euphonious music now blared from the speakers, as if a new era had just been ushered in. Darcy hunted among the iced-over faces for the man who’d cursed in French, the vague hope of Aurelio, or even Fin and Jobik in some disguise, but those about him were dispersing already. Darcy just stood, his feet painful again, gazed up at the misted screen. Gorbachev reaching quietly for Raisa’s hand, leaning forward to congratulate the frail Chernenko. Darcy won
dered which of them really knew the general. Then he noticed Chernenko’s daughter behind her father, not hugging him or shaking his hand, just there. Tall, in the same full-length fur, her face strained as if in a trance. The only one really mourning. Darcy felt a kinship with her, the way he did with the sadness of women, as if she were Garbo in Camille.

  The sound of snow-sweepers returning to work, like gigantic beetles belching fumes, the bearded city kneeling by the solid river, the burnished cupolas of the beautiful church muted in the failing light. Darcy felt his pyrrhic promise of Fin unravelling quietly ahead of him, like the early aubergine darkness climbing down over the square, a sense that all had been building up around what wasn’t here, gravity pulling things inward. Darcy hugged himself, nowhere to go but on to the Ploshchad Revolyutsii. He almost understood these people as they headed home to demonstrate behind closed doors. A snow shovel leaned against a barricade and he wanted to wield it like some crazy Bedlamite, slam it down against the stones and let it clang, let them come for me, let them come. But he knew instead he should be listening to his instincts, in case he was given his moment, or it was given to Fin or Aurelio to magically steal him away.

  Still, he moved across the well-worn stones amongst these dry-eyed people as if being herded towards a corner. The distant funeral platform was emptying, none of the brass had been targeted by Jobik, in the name of Jesus or genocide, the Turkish Consul-General no doubt skulking in the back, preening.

  Andropov’s coffin remained like an afterthought, upstaged, the military battalions marching away like mechanical ants towards the river. A snaking line to Lenin’s Tomb was already re-forming, comrades returning to their roots for solace. The ornate facade of GUM like a stage-curtain backdrop facing off against the Kremlin walls. The distant clock said twelve. It seemed to have stopped. Darcy surged with a last-ditch desire to run, get inside the infinite department store and get lost amongst a new crowd. The best place to lose a tail is GUM, Fin had told him. She said the KGB will run over you in cars if they have to, but they can’t do that in a department store; you go up and down the stairs between floors. Darcy understood now why she’d known such things. She’d pointed out wreaths around the busts of heroes in the shadows of the Kremlin battlements and quoted Trotsky and Lenin. They labour in vain in the vineyards of equality. But Fin was too cunning to run; she just disappeared.

  Darcy felt himself shivering harder now, walking on to a place where Fin wouldn’t be. Death might come as some kind of release, he thought, the silenced shot. The last thing he’d see would be pigeons roosting in a bare tree like dull grey ornaments beneath the Hotel Moskva. He stared up at the featureless building, everything at right angles, not quaint or leaning like he’d imagined Europe, but windows from where his bullet might come, singing through the air. The burn on his neck throbbed, the memory of the cigarette shoving him forward, Fin’s carrier pigeon, the sight of the ripped-open money belt in that Turk’s brown hands, the hundreds of rooms now glaring down; a city surveyed from the safety of windows, naked eyes squinting into their binoculars. His only hope would be darkness.

  Darcy ate his third piroshki, full now but thirsty. And then a Cyrillic banner came into view, hanging above the portico of the Exhibition Hall. The opening of We are Building Communism. The entrance loomed, well-guarded but not crowded, and Darcy wished he were arriving under other circumstances—his first piece in an international exhibition, albeit under Fin’s name—but as he walked up the stone stairs, ashamed of the general’s welt on his cheek, it felt as if he were being shunted by transparent bayonets.

  A grey-uniformed woman with a clipboard and a wrinkled bark face talked at him in cacophonous Russian. Darcy Bright, he said huskily. He had no identity card like the locals, no idea what would happen if he didn’t get in, but a snub-faced man in a full-length leather coat, holding a walkie-talkie, rested his pale rapier eyes on Darcy, nudged the woman as if it was okay. The woman smacked a silver star onto the lapel of Darcy’s coat and the man stamped him with a withering stare. With it came a wave of nausea, as Darcy moved self-consciously into the monstrous anteroom, furnished with a bust of Lenin that rose twelve feet high. A red flag billowed behind him, rippled by a fan. A group of poorly dressed, low-level officials, warmth, but not the artists and diplomats Darcy’d imagined. Still, he found himself quietly whispering the word help with each exhaled breath, a prayer or a mantra, in case a sympathetic ear might guess he was Western, in trouble.

  He passed Michelangelo’s David, a fake that towered in an alcove, and Darcy whispered upwards at the curves of the great white thighs and the small marbled phallus, the white ruff of pubic curls. Nearby a zaftig woman in a large tan smock with black braided hair turned at Darcy’s mumble, averted her face and moved on despite the plea in his eyes as they met hers. A man in a loose-fitting pinstriped suit and ponytail swanned between pillars, glanced oddly at Darcy then slipped beneath a rope to join the dignitaries grouped about a rough marble bust of Chernenko. Darcy went over to the rope and saw the prosperous few without the restless many, cordoned off, hobnobbing Soviet-style, right on the heels of the funeral. Waiters in evening attire with silver trays circled the anaemic statue of Chernenko made younger, his cheeks chiselled. Darcy held a sleeve up near his face and loitered near the archway, scanning for his painting, or the unlikely advent of Fin. He had a sense he was just being played with, tested. Darcy both hoped Fin would emerge somehow and prayed she’d know it was too dangerous.

  She might once have burned manifestos in an incinerator here, in this place where Khrushchev or Brezhnev made a famous attack on abstracts, but where was she now?

  In the middle of the other room amidst the privileged, a monstrous depiction of Brezhnev hung, buffalo eyebrows and bulbous cheeks, in the fashion of a bad Soutine. Then Darcy saw through to a far wall, The Museum of Science and Achievement, small by comparison, the oil and wax shiny under the lights. Laika, half wax, part photo, part gold, perched on the nib of the obelisk rocket. The pinstripe man was pointing to it, explaining to a group. Perhaps he was the curator, Fin’s friend.

  Darcy stepped to the entrance of the cordoned-off section as if he too might be ushered through, drink champagne, but the stone-faced guard ignored him. Darcy wanted to tell the curator the wax had been applied with a small travelling iron; a new medium, a new technique. Then he realised Chernenko’s daughter stood among the little set of those listening, her hair now uncovered, swooped up in a barrette, not thirty feet away. Had she worn this pale blue evening gown under her coat to Lubyanka, then to the funeral? She didn’t seem in mourning now. She turned to reach for a passing flute of champagne and for a second they locked eyes and Darcy thought she might come over, but the general appeared beside her, in the same black suit, and Darcy’s hope turned to stone, a rush of sweat forming like a liquid skin.

  Darcy sidled away, pretended to look at a plain canvas of a rocket launch, an oil pipeline threading across the Siberian snow. He hated Soviet Realism, its lack of heart or dimension, the sense of his own talent commandeered by Fin. He turned to check who tailed him, noticed Fin’s Achievement in Bronze on a low pedestal in a shadowy corner. The butcher’s grass, the structures and obelisk, the melted foil and bronze leaf, small Soviet flags atop each building, hoisted on gilded toothpicks. A tide of regret rippled through him, his shoulders heaving just slightly, contracting his gut, as if weeping, but he had no tears, just hurting eyes and the fact of her before him, the vague smell of lard. Despite everything, it had been finished somehow, as if he could somehow save her from suspicion.

  Darcy sensed his minutes of freedom being sliced down into seconds. Then a shadow clung to the corner of his eye, a slip of a figure in a dark coat receding between pillars; dressed like a babushka but moving too fluidly, her head covered in a lavender scarf. The distinctive briskness to the footfalls as she vanished past a mosaic of St Basil’s. Had she meant him to see her or had he conjured her? She’d spotted him and smelled trouble, now she was breaking away—D
arcy half running towards the great double doors, out into the darkness, chasing a shadow, expecting a first quick bullet in his back. He heard the guard on his walkie-talkie but leapt ahead down the steps—let them shoot me right here in the square—with the violet scarf fading into the rush hour, down into the shadows of the ramparts. Voices from behind, he bolted through the commuters, pushing past a queue, skidding through slush underfoot, unsure what he wanted, to get away or to go with her, find her, desperate for a flash of that colour, tripping, hands in snow and up again, winded, a siren in his head or on the streets he wasn’t sure—then a flash of violet inside a trolleybus, caught like a flame in a street lamp, wires up into the fading light. Darcy slid among those boarding a back door, ignored the honesty box, got a glimpse of the flat-faced agent swimming through the crowd towards him but the doors were shutting, the bell sounded and the bus lurched forward unhindered. The agent’s angry puckered face left out in the dark and the colour that had caught Darcy’s eye, the lavender scarf, just a blue plastic bag against the bus window. Not Fin, but a sinewy-faced old man leaning his head on it, watching Darcy with a corrugated frown. Maybe he’d led them to her after all; or maybe he’d imagined her. He stood in the aisle, breathless, a pain now deep in his chest like the dull, patchy lights of the stifled city.