Does anyone speak English? he asked. Po-angliyski? His voice so dry with panic he repeated himself, but the locals either ignored his plea or observed him blankly in their stale cigarette air, winter storage smells, onion breath, pushing each other as the bus turned a corner. The paralysis of fear and the mind-numbing cold, taking their own troubles home. Darcy ducked down and looked out at what looked like the Maly Theatre; he pulled the cord, forged his way roughly to the door. He jumped out into the dark afternoon, hurtled through the headlights across the sleeted lanes of Prospekt Marksa and stood alone beneath a burgundy awning. A new uneasiness welled in his chest. He didn’t believe the general would let him get away.
Ulitsa Kazakov, Sunday, 3.45 pm
The snow began again, gentle as feathers, as Darcy mounted the shallow stone steps and kneeled under the portico. If he’d been tailed, no cars turned into the street behind the cab, not a soul, just the night and the sounds of families at home, someone practising violin, a couple yelling at each other, a crow picking dirt where weeds poked through the snow. A figure emerged from the mist across the frozen garden, the sound of snow crunching, a man with a suitcase who entered the front door.
Darcy skiffled around the side and into the courtyard, couldn’t see anyone, just a hole dug in the cement, dark as an animal trap; an old pneumatic drill leaned on a shed like a stork. Fin’s window above him was dark, the shadow of her pink-checked blanket draped where her hand had been, pressed against the glass. He ducked inside the back stairwell, crept two steps at a time, saw no watcher skulking in the corridor.
His key was still in the pocket of Aurelio’s coat, but the apartment was unlocked, the door not quite closed and Darcy felt suddenly afraid to enter, friends of Fin’s or friends of the general’s. Aware of the tremor in his arms, he edged the door open a hair. Fin’s umbrella in the entry hall, her quilted coat gone from its hook, the place still warm. Either Fin had been back and left in a hurry or others had been here, ransacking, books strewn about the rug, drawers upturned from the kitchen, utensils everywhere, the donkey painting tossed from the easel. Silence except for the windowpanes rattling, a television downstairs. He threw Aurelio’s coat over the heating pipes to dry, stood before the open fridge, the only light. A stump of dried-up salami and Solovyov’s Meaning of Love with a note paperclipped to it.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Forgive me.
The donkey painting for you. May you be the one. Fin xx P.S. Wretchedness and Inspiration are Inseparable.
He stared at it, unmoved. The postscript, did she think that was some parting gift? The sort of thing she’d paint on a peasant dress, but the dresses were gone and he wasn’t sure if forgiveness was in him. He pulled angry chunks of salami with his teeth, crouched among books, squinting at covers in the faded light: The Soviet Achievement, Quotations from Mao Tsetung, The Brothers Karamazov, no Fodor’s. He rifled through his duffel bag—clothes and drawing pads, charcoals, vitamins, a map of Prague. Without the restaurant he only had his roll of money, nowhere left to go. He searched busily under the couch, tried to remember. The list of restaurants, he’d checked it before he slept, the dog here with him, drinking milk then ruefully climbing up on the couch beside him. The dog and now Fodor’s gone.
He stared out into the dark afternoon, separated from everything he knew. Svetlana’s apartment closed up with metal shutters. Down below, an old woman under the courtyard lamp, the digging beside her almost archaeological. Darcy thought how Jobik and his Dashnaks must have channels, sympathisers, Fin in the back of some Armenian-owned lorry on the road to Yerevan, to a southern border, the Caspian Sea. Darcy left here as a sacrifice.
He thought he heard movement in her bedroom, stopped chewing and listened, but all he made out was the sound of his own breathing, then footfalls. Someone in the flat above. He stared up into the shadows where the ceiling fluted, a sense of being toyed with still.
He grabbed Fin’s Opinel knife from an upended drawer and quietly closed himself in her windowless room where he could turn on the light. The suet smell, lard containers, foil, art scraps, the ironing table on its side, empty wire hangers in the wardrobe, her clothes all over the floor. He felt light-headed, unclear if she’d been here last, or if the general’s men had come through after, if he was being watched from minute cameras. He tested the phone line; dead, as it had been since he’d arrived. Fin’s travelling clock said 4.04 pm. Time felt transitory, vanishing about him, as if his life were being stitched shut.
In the bathroom, he looked at his face in the mirror, dabbing his cheek and lip with a damp cloth. The red welt of the general’s slap had swollen almost in the shape of fingers; pus scabbed damply on the burn on his neck. As he pressed the cloth against it, it stung as if hot cigarette embers still lay in his skin. He cupped his hands beneath the tap and kept drinking and drinking, the rusty taste like nectar. Then, as he quickly wiped his crotch and underarms, he noticed the book down in the corner by the lavatory, the Fodor’s cover with its scattered domes of St Basil’s. She’d left it for him, casual as toilet reading.
Frantically, he flipped to the section on the restaurants of Moscow, the bottom of the second page: The Jaguaroff. Traditional Russian Cuisine. In a lane off Solyanka, on the east side of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker. He ripped out the page and headed back into the sitting-room, reread her note. The donkey painting for you. May you be the one. He grabbed her canvas from where it had been flung against the wall and, in the dim light from the fridge, he lay it on the counter. The two sisters and babies in soft watercolours, the suckling donkey. He remembered Fin’s story, the sister syphillitic, how only one child would survive.
Ulitsa Osipenko, Sunday, 4.50 pm
Darcy watched out the taxi window, hazy car-lit air, the iced petroleum smell of the night. At a red light, he swung around, gazed into the snow-laden street behind him, the muffled beams of headlights, the poor visibility a good thing, he thought. An old man on a bicycle creeping along the gutter against the traffic, a red star on the sleeve of his coat as he passed, pigeons in a cage on the handlebars. Darcy recalled Jobik squeaking past in the cold, that night outside the jazz concert. The Pimpernel, he thought, or Papillon. Anyone could be anyone.
He glanced back up. Solyanka Ulitsa, he said, a reminder, his tone too anxious, he knew. He explored the clean-shaven back of this taxi driver’s head, afraid of being picked up by him especially. Darcy felt Fin’s knife in his boot, its fold-out hawk-bill blade; he’d never believed he had the potential for violence but the act of the general upon him had changed something. Could he slit a taxi driver across his Adam’s apple, like Jobik could?
Darcy left the painting behind on the counter, sneaked out through the shadows and down the unlit side street, then running for blocks, panting, he found this cab all the way over on Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa. It couldn’t have known he was coming. He stared out, thirsty again already. His chest so tight it felt like someone was chiselling at it, wondering if he shouldn’t have chosen GUM direct from the funeral, the maze of arcades and cross-walks, up and down stairs and escalators. Darcy knew he mustn’t keep searching out the back window, the silent driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, so he looked back down at the restaurant description in his lap. He’d read it three times already. No mention of Armenians or terrorists, just a throwaway reference to some fare from southern provinces. He stared back out into the grizzling night, trying to keep air in his lungs, as the cab crossed the drainage canal. A tug with sidelights searched the banks and bluestone drains, cutting through the shelves of ice. The gates of the old heated pool that Fin said was once the site of St John the Divine back when God was allowed.
Darcy had St Nicholas the Wonder Worker circled in biro on his plastic map, described elsewhere in Fodor’s as a small red-belfried church. Maybe it would be open, he could hide in there among the pews, pray for his own survival.
Sporadic lights from high metal poles shed their dim bluish sprays on the pavement. He could get out and walk among the
glazed-eyed men moving home through the Kitay Gorod with their vinyl briefcases, drift among the heavyset women with their just-in-case bags, see if he was being followed.
Stoitye, he said, thrusting too many notes at the driver, abandoning the taxi mid-block. He walked fast without looking back, paused in a windblown doorway, then walked on again until he noticed the dark portal of a church, sooner than he’d imagined. He couldn’t be sure the belfry was red, but a narrow cobbled lane branched off, unmarked, between two plain stone buildings. The church was locked. Darcy knocked timidly on the wood but God wasn’t home, not even his servants answered, so he leaned against the door, inhaling through his scarf, his fissured lips, the wind whining under the dark cover of eaves. You’re a beautiful child of God, said the missionary. Perhaps, thought Darcy, but a child nonetheless. And yet the need in the general’s eyes made the missionary seem like a first love, innocent as the Mount Eliza days.
Darcy leaned against the door of St Nicholas, the ache in his chest and arms like a fixture, knowing if he crouched he might sit and if he sat he might never get up. He closed his eyes and waited; the sound of footsteps and tyres compressing the snow, car engines, buses. Darcy appealed to a wonder worker: Keep me. He’d spent his life sneaking around, prayed he’d become good enough at it. If he’d been set loose on purpose, to think he was on his own, he prayed he might be now—he’d been quick across the streets from the apartment, no footsteps behind him, no cars following. He’d always run faster than anyone he knew, even racked with aches and pains. He listened out into the empty shadows; if he had led them to Fin, she’d left him no choice. He walked resolutely to the alley as if it held some final promise.
The lane was dark and wet and quiet, splitting around an angled wooden building a hundred yards up. He moved along a solid wall until he saw the sign in a draped plate-glass window and old-fashioned door. HET BXOH. He knew that meant ‘closed’ but knocked anyway. Through the curtains he thought he saw the dull shapes of small tables, some lit with candles, and there were vague kitchen smells, yet no one appeared at the window or door. A restaurant not open to everyone.
Darcy felt weak and fuzzy in the head as he ventured on along the side, skirting past crates and piled cartons, then froze at the sight of a pocked, ferrety teenager out in the cold, clad in a stained apron with a cigarette clasped between thumb and index finger, the way Jobik smoked. He smirked at Darcy knowingly and mumbled something Darcy couldn’t understand, then motioned him into a narrow-countered kitchen. The waft of cabbage and warmth felt like bottled rays of possibility.
Inside, pots of broth were set on a stove and a dish-filled sink, sepia pictures of vintage sports cars lined the walls. Jaguars! A cook in a traditional patterned vest looked up then returned to his chopping but, at the beaded archway into the dining-room, Darcy turned back and the cook stared him down, narrow hooded eyes set below an olive headband. Mozhna? asked Darcy. May I? He felt like someone walking in from the treeless plains of the north, emerging from moss and lichen after being mauled by bears.
The cook nodded deliberately and Darcy pulled back the beads. A dining-room with burgundy tablecloths lit only by candles in bottles, threads of dried wax draped from their necks. A boy sat alone in a chair in the corner, his old man’s eyes watchful and unblinking. Fat paper dolls on the sill. Then a sharp-faced woman in a print folk dress slipped through and showed Darcy to a booth beneath a coat of arms with a double-headed jaguar.
Darcy sat, didn’t yet mention Fin’s name, unclear if he should. Tabaka, kartofel, pomidor, the woman whispered respectfully, without producing a menu. Her eyes held a quiet understanding, her grey hair thickly braided, a minute silver star around her neck and a silk shawl with salmon-coloured flowers. Kvass, she added. These were not questions. Darcy noticed her star pendant had eight points—not a Star of David but a pagan or Balkan star, an Armenian symbol maybe. Did you know I was coming? he asked.
She retreated, nodding reassuringly, but Darcy guessed she hadn’t understood. Maybe she was Jobik’s mother, Jobik’s little brother sitting against the wall, his other brother smoking, keeping watch. Darcy’s ear hummed a low refrigerator sound, the jitter still in his hands as he took off his gloves. He left his coat on in case, pulled back a corner of curtain to spy out but the boy made a tsking sound, warning him, then shook his head quickly. Nyet.
That boy could be dangerous, thought Darcy. He was tempted to say the name Jobik, to see the boy’s reaction, but the woman returned with a jug on a wooden tray, a stern expression as she poured into a water-spotted glass. Kvass; the bread drink. Darcy took a sip and tried not to wince. She offered him a steaming brown cloth and he held it to his cheek and lip and said Spasiba. Then the hooded-eyed cook slid a plate before him and nodded: pressed chicken, potatoes and tomatoes, slices of ashy cheese. Darcy knew food served in minutes was a rarity here. He felt himself still as if for the first time in a week. Fin might never come but these people could help him; he pictured himself in a truck heading south to the Caspian Sea.
Darcy was eating, shovelling food but stopped dead when he heard men’s voices in a small adjoining room. They entered by some other door and Darcy caught glimpses of them through a slender archway as they stood in dark suits by a mantelpiece, filled and raised vodka tumblers, then laughed as a girl with a balalaika began singing for them. Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka. The boy in the chair watched Darcy as if guarding his corner, folding napkins. A cracked-glass fixture in the ceiling shed light in sections that divided his face. He smiled at Darcy and nodded as though the men and the entertainment were just part of the ruse. Darcy heard murmurs in the kitchen and then Fin appeared in the doorway like a mirage. She glanced at the men being serenaded, then at the window, and Darcy felt his chest constricting as she gestured to him not to move. Without make-up she looked softer but worn down, a dullness to her eyes with no mascara, nervous, pale and beautiful. Her face mostly hidden by a black beanie, she wore a man’s grey argyle sweater. Darcy half stood but then didn’t as she walked over; all he did was hold onto himself as she perched on the edge of the banquette. He watched her in the flickering candlelight, in a new light, knowing why she was in this city, why she’d called him to this winter. He’d been her faithful, gullible pigeon. Her pigeon and her painter.
Fin acknowledged the boy in the chair, leaning now on its back legs against the wall. The boy glowered as though he’d been taught that foreigners were trouble. Darcy had never seen Fin so drawn, the dye faded from her eyebrows, the pale translucence of her skin seemed almost ashen. She took a quick sip of the silty dregs of Darcy’s drink then, registering his bruised face in the wavering light, she winced.
What did they do to you?
They took me from the Hotel Ukraine, he said. His voice sounded strange even to himself, without its usual lilt. He didn’t mention the call to his mother. They held me in Lubyanka, he said. He dabbed a paper napkin in his water and unveiled the burn, pressed the napkin on his neck.
Who did that? she asked. She leaned in close, not the way his mother would strain to see sores as if there was nothing, but concerned, as if distressed by what she’d wrought.
Darcy examined the round stamp of blood on the napkin. The Turkish Consul-General, he said. He heard her short, almost imperceptible breath and raised his eyes. What colour had been left was blanched from Fin’s cheeks, her concern focused suddenly inward. What was his name? she asked.
Consul Tugrul, said Darcy.
A small fridge nearby jump-started and Darcy jolted. A new sound hummed to accompany the one that sang in his head, but Fin didn’t react.
What did you tell them? she asked.
It’s what they told me, said Darcy. He held her gaze with a mix of dashed hopes and welling fury. You brought me into this, he said, knowingly. He reached and grabbed her sleeve and the cook appeared in the kitchen doorway. Fin turned and shook her head at him like she could handle it.
You must be important, said Darcy.
If the KGB is coope
rating with Turkey, she said, you can’t go with me. There’s too much at stake. Where’s Aurelio?
He’s in trouble, said Darcy. I have to come with you. It’s not just that they want Jobik. The general’s a madman. In the night he tried to rape me. He said he wanted to fuck me in pieces. I saw what happens to the likes of me in the gulag. Darcy gripped her narrow wrist tightly, the other hand pulling her sleeve. I’m not going back there, he said.
No, said Fin. He could see the struggle in her eyes, but she was shaking her head. I can’t take you if Tugrul’s with them. The KGB has never cooperated with the Turks.
It’s not about that. They’ll kill me. Darcy was begging now, talking so fast he could feel himself spit. I wasn’t followed here, I promise, Fin, I wasn’t. I ran from the apartment through the dark to Pyatnitskaya, there was no car behind me, no footsteps. I caught a taxi at a light, got out halfway down Solyanka, then I walked, backtracked, waited in the dark near the church, no one followed me up the alley.
They’re the KGB, she said, it’s not hide-and-seek…I have to go back—alone.
To Jobik? asked Darcy. He clasped her hands over his plate of food. Fin, look at me, look at my face. I’m your brother. If you don’t help me, they’ll kill me. You brought me here. He fell silent, his teeth clenched, as the woman with the pendant appeared with Fin’s unordered food, a plate of herring and bliny, tomatoes and cheese. The woman retreated and the boy watched on from the corner like he was born reading lips, Darcy continued under his breath. They told me you drove Jobik to the Turkish consulate in Melbourne. Again he imagined the Corvair parked under elms alongside the Botanic Gardens. You borrowed my car. My mother’s car.
Stray Dog Winter Page 20