You thought I was to kill you? the general said, smiling, and Darcy’s knee was bashed as he was thrust into the back seat of the Lada, the familiar tobacco smell, anise. He held a mitten to the eruption of pain in his neck, stunned and silent. Then he righted himself, clenched the ear that clamoured with the bullet that hadn’t been shot, and breathed as if he’d forgotten how, looking up for Aurelio—Aurelio who didn’t dare look around, doleful eyes caught in the rear-view mirror as the general hefted himself around to face Darcy, his great arm on the seat back. My son, Aurelio, he said with relish, his lips loose. You know him?
Darcy withdrew from the yellow-toothed smile, a cautious glance from Aurelio, stiff and uncertain, then silence. Aurelio was ballet dancer, said the general. Weren’t you, boy?
Aurelio didn’t suspend an elegant arm as he’d once done for Darcy but instead put the Lada in gear and stared out into the rough U-turn he made.
He drove now with lights, the Turk a dark blur behind them. Darcy, his sight blurred again, watched out through the drumbeat rhythm of wipers, unsure if he should be grateful. A passing clump of bare black forest. He blinked to focus, touching his lip, the burn, as both cars ran parallel with the silvery Moskva. Shabby wooden dwellings, the ways that wove down to the river. No lights of a skidoo. The general, two fingers pressed to an ear, listening for news from scratchy, faraway transistor voices. Aurelio’s downy dancer’s neck didn’t turn to see him, but the general leaned slightly sideways, kept watch with accusing eyes, extending his free arm along the bench seat, the pistol at Aurelio’s shoulder.
Fear snaked in Darcy’s veins like a system of rivers, Aurelio’s hands tight on the wheel, the general’s zealot eyes, bloodshot under the rim of his black fur hat. My son, he said as if Aurelio weren’t there. He never dance with Bolshoi. They only use him because he is strong, lifting ballet girls. He gestured with his big hands lofted in the air, the pistol held firm in one. But they don’t like Cubanos at the Bolshoi, do they? Nyet, nyet, nyet. He pushed the gun at Aurelio’s neck. Not specially the half homosex, half Cubanos.
Aurelio, mute, twitched his neck and drove on, rigid. Darcy avoided the general’s flecked vulture eyes, focused on the gun, the silencer, a memory of the same at Nikolai Chuprakov’s feet. Could it be the son-in-law’s gun or did silencers all look the same? Darcy felt dizzied, the sardonic thrum of traffic through snow as they passed beneath what he thought was the ring road. The general so big, the seat back seemed low, his square-jowled face turned around to Darcy again. He have a dancer friend. Then he turned to Aurelio, goading. What happened to him? Sergei Beloff, was this his name? He not dance anymore. Jew boy, blue boy. He can’t dance now. A violence in the last word, an act implied, the general sweating with wrath, or it could have been drink, and all Darcy thought of was size against frailty, being heaved at, the thought of a dancer blood-smeared against the cement. Aurelio still said nothing, just the slightest shake of his head in the rear-view mirror. Darcy saw cuts on his face.
The knife felt cold and small, folded in Darcy’s mittened hand as he slid it unopened up into his coat sleeve, a soundless ribbon of panic. The general with the fingers to his transistor ear once more and another almost indiscernible shake of Aurelio’s head. Had he seen the knife, sensed it? If it gouged the general’s pistol arm, into whose head would he shoot the bullet? The Lada would skid through the gnawing darkness, turning over like a surfboard.
The general jerked up his pistol hand. Lyevii, he said, nudged at Aurelio’s neck with the short black barrel, shouted gruff Russian instructions. Aurelio turned left down a dark road, turned off the lights. Darcy guessed the main road had taken them away from the river; they’d not crossed a bridge, but headed back now to where the vanishing river must be. We find your friends, said the general. We make visit. He turned to Aurelio. KGB, we know how to follow. Don’t we, son? First we already follow your little boy blue to his secret restaurant.
Aurelio’s silence scared Darcy. He drove like an automaton, only the shadowy parking lights of the Lada on what was now a narrow snowy track, the sound of the tyres crawling into the stillness. Dark in the car now, Darcy clasped the knife in the folds of his coat but the knife felt ineffectual. He’d need to strike the general’s eye, or his ear, but the general kept waving the gun like a finger, turning. With a canny smile, he offered a zippered bag to Darcy.
The Turk, he kill for this, he said. His tongue glistened as it lay on his teeth and Darcy thought of Lubyanka, and the ferret-faced boy lying dead behind the restaurant—he knew how the Turk had killed. The burn still throbbed like the head of a spear broken off in his neck as the general’s mammoth ungloved hand dangled the evidence bag over the seat like another last promise.
Did Tugrul tell you about Tbilisi? he asked. Your sister in Tbilisi? Just day before yesterday. Maybe we find her any minute. Family reunion…with fireworks.
A horrible dryness returned to Darcy’s mouth, his teeth as if covered in cloth; he didn’t want to know any more. The prospect of a fire on the river ice, he and Aurelio lined up with Fin and her dissident Armenians. Darcy searched the shadowy back of Aurelio’s head, his shoulders still rigid, unyielding as a costumer’s dummy. The general dropped the bag down in Darcy’s lap. It was light, almost floated. Just paper.
I can’t read, said Darcy.
Aurelio cleared his throat but the general barked at him sharply, scolding, then turned back to Darcy. It is English, he said, placing his elbow over the seat. He cocked a silver cigarette lighter, his face like a ghoul’s in the fluttery flame, and Darcy thought to stab those fingers if the flame came near his face. He cagily held up the evidence bag, the thought of it burning, a decoy for Aurelio, a chance, but in the jittery light a date: July 13, 1915. American Ambassador, Constantinople. Typewritten, faded, beige letterhead frayed in the folds and corners. Old and authoritative.
You know this? asked the general. Is it original or forgery?
Darcy looked at the cream paper behind the plastic, the ridges of the seal. Index Bureau, stamped with an official seal, to Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State.
I never saw this.
A copy is left with the body of the dead Consul Turk in Tbilisi. The general a shifted personality, not the drunk transgressor but probing. This one they try to deliver to manuscript museum in Yerevan. You ever go to Yerevan?
Darcy didn’t answer, felt the night crawling by, his life, the lives of dead Armenians. He wasn’t even sure where Yerevan was but he was drawn to the undulating typeface. Persecutions assuming unprecedented proportions. Uprooting, tortures and wholesale expulsions accompanied by rape, pillage and murder turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. Levitical-sounding words. Initials above a signature stamp. Lawrence Andersen, United States Ambassador to Turkey. In the margin he read Classified. Could it not be real? He directed his eyes to the general, who looked back at him with a predatory disdain.
You bringing this to Moscow, he said. Strapped to yourself like suicide. But you never saw it?
Darcy felt his own head shake, dubious and slow, as he lifted the plastic flap, the page where it creased, and knew it could have been folded, sewn into the lining of the money belt. In the pit of his stomach he believed it was true.
You very clever, said the general, or very stupid. He flicked the lighter off and muttered into a miniature speaker between fingers, men out in snow flurries still tracking Fin. Darcy heard her phone voice, the night she’d called in Melbourne, offering him a chance, sensing his suspicion, her faith in his need to escape that world, believing he’d come. And he had known even then it was stupid. Now, he cradled the old document in the dark, its red stamp embossed like the burn on his neck. If he’d been part of something, that something was over.
Aurelio stopped the car where the track dead-ended, glanced up at the rear-view mirror but Darcy couldn’t make out his eyes, just the sound of the other car pulling in quietly behind them. He felt a strange surrender, a momentary transcendence o
f fear. Aurelio? he said softly, but Aurelio still didn’t turn, it was the general who swung over the seat back, dark wild eyes and his pistol shoving at Darcy’s face. You never speak with him, he said. You hearing? You do what I tell. Darcy reefed back from the small black barrel, his eyes so tight they burrowed deep inside him until he could feel his lips open, but he heard no shot, only words. You will walk through those trees. You will see a house. You knock on door.
Stoitye. Aurelio’s muffled voice, and Darcy looked up as the general grunted, pistol-whipped his son against the driver’s door, and Aurelio lay there, one arm draped over the wheel, horribly still. Darcy’s instinct to run out into the darkness, out through the shadows of others, out of their cars, the Turk and the pastel-eyed henchman, men in black felt coats. The general half-turned.
Look what you do, he said, a quaver in his voice. He try to save you. But he cannot even save himself. As the general opened the door to get out, the interior light sparked on Aurelio’s face and Darcy’s eyes filled with a sudden revulsion—the cuts in Aurelio’s cheeks like mutilations, not fresh from the pistol, but his mouth, scabby and black, sliced up his cheek on one side, sewn together by rough string stitches. Darcy understood why Aurelio hadn’t turned—too proud to be seen, a mouth so wounded he didn’t open it except to shout stop, to lunge at his father’s pistol arm. The general regarded Aurelio, mumbled in Russian, an oath or a prayer, then closed the door.
Darcy sat inconsolably still in the blackness. Aurelio? he said, but Aurelio just hummed as if soothing himself, and Darcy began to rock as he’d done as a boy, side to side, holding his body together. Are you okay? he asked, but only heard humming. He closed his eyes tight, didn’t look at Aurelio, then he turned to the window, the sight of the general peeing in the snow, in front of his men, delivering instructions. Painting a yellow dog, Fin had called it, pissing in the snow, the same name as the flowers. He yearned to reach through the dark and touch Aurelio now, trace about his eyes, the scars, but instead he just rocked and stared at his friend’s silhouette, the snow as it kissed the window beside him, the murmuring of the KGB men outside, unaware. Then he heard the howl of a dog, far off, calling out through the snow, and the onslaught of something, grief, or a love that had lost its way, rested about the edges of Darcy’s eyes, as if on the lip of a dam, and then he was keening, swaying like a branch, and howling softly with the dog but the door was flung open and the general’s hand slapped him from it.
You listen to me, said the general, panicky, grabbing Darcy’s collar, ripping it against the burn as Darcy stuffed the document inside his coat. You will walk into these woods and show your friends this paper. You will see their faces, he said. Then he said something in Russian that stopped Aurelio’s hum. He reached into the front seat, ripped the fur hat from Aurelio’s head as if he were a mannequin, and Darcy saw that Aurelio’s head had been shaved.
Get out of this car, said the general, pushing the hat down over Darcy’s beanie. The sound of the dog, like a distant calf bawling, stayed in Darcy’s head as he fought being pitched like a leaf out into the night among men who stamped their feet, their breath fogging in front of them. Darcy felt strangely unbalanced, the snow wet against his face, indistinguishable from his tears. The Turk, hugging himself in the cold nearby, black eyes gleaming. The Opinel knife felt blunt as a stone as Darcy looked back at Aurelio, splayed against the car door.
The general patted the waterproof evidence bag stowed up under Darcy’s coat. They will see what you have, said the general. You give it back your friends if you want. It can burn with them. The general’s shrug was in his eyes. Just let them know we have it. And that we have you.
Darcy’s mind closed in on itself for protection, from the cold that already seeped into his veins, from these grim men warming themselves. He would be their mascot, but of sacrifice, and he felt the strangeness of life as death approaches. Aurelio’s gutted mouth plastered like membrane to Darcy’s blinking eyes, the stitches; the distant dog had gone silent, just Aurelio’s tune in Darcy’s head, a Cuban song maybe. The general poked his pistol in Darcy’s ear. Be a good boy blue, he said, shoving him forward in the wake of the powder-eyed driver.
What about Aurelio? asked Darcy, and the general ran a rough, wet-gloved finger from the corner of Darcy’s mouth up the side of Darcy’s cheek. It is a punishing, he said, we call it smiling. And a cry sank voiceless down inside Darcy. For being like you, he said, buffeting Darcy into the shapeless night.
Darcy picked his way through the black-haired pines as if walking through a bitter cold river, his coat turning to stone and death inviting as a face before him: come, it will be easier, come, like the face in the waves on Bushrangers Bay, the winter wants you to itself. He looked back but the Turk was right there behind him, nudging him on to follow the driver and his winking torchlight, KGB men swarming shadowy in their coats through the slender trunks. He looked back again just to see Aurelio, but instead caught the Turk’s beady eyes from under the brim of an astrakhan hat.
Give me the document, he whispered but Darcy hugged the plastic-covered evidence against himself, as if that was all he had, evidence of Trebizond, Thousands forced onto ships and dumped into the Black Sea, islands of innocent people. Darcy didn’t weep for them now, he was drowning himself. Give it to me, the Turk’s voice through the snow, I can help you. The driver glanced back, whispered fiercely in Russian, gesturing to a following guard to keep Darcy coming, Darcy uncertain who was in charge, the Turk was summarily motioned aside. The joint operation felt like a death march, Darcy sandwiched in the dark, on through crunching undergrowth. He didn’t believe there was help out here, no Armenian snipers swept down from these trees, no withered hand of God. The icy damp had already curled up in Darcy’s skin as he cradled the grim inevitability, his feet brittle as frozen coral. If lust was the cause of all sorrow, what had love done, what had it done for any of them? Herded out here to die, Aurelio an opuscheny. Fin weaving her way to some hut in these same woods, unsuspecting. Her departure up through that restaurant roof with not even a word of goodbye, just a telephone number in Darcy’s wet jacket pocket, her snowmobile lights switched out on the dark ice river. They’re the KGB…it’s not hide-and-seek.
Darcy pushed a wet coat sleeve over his face, his footing unsteady as they crossed the end of a white stone culvert, he almost collapsed, a new pistol held to his neck in the dark like a branding iron. Then, in a knot of black furs, the torch ahead turned into darkness and the driver crouched beside someone waiting in the shadows with binoculars. A clearing. A small wooden dacha not a hundred feet further, a figure through the branches in the lamplit shelter of the doorway, the new gun barrel pressed deep in Darcy’s ribs to silence him. With his bare eyes Darcy knew it was Jobik, alone in the cone of lamplight, wrapped in a blanket, his thick black hair pushed back from his beaky face, waiting. The Turk looked over at Darcy, his dark face wet and weathered, his glasses fogged. He removed them angrily, cleared the lenses with his fingers, his narrow eyes, antsy, and the general with them now, from out of nowhere, short-winded. The fear in Darcy that he’d be sent out into that no-man’s-land to pleasure the general’s imagination. Into that painterly stillness.
Jobik was drinking from a mug, the steam from it wafting in the funnel of light, just him beneath a hanging basket made from rope and the wet sound of the snow on the leaves, the soft hail hammering like winter storms climbing in off the Tasman Sea. Darcy’s mouth struck dry as a figure appeared up a path from the river. Fin, like a vision, delivered. The general’s bestial smile. We follow good, no? he whispered like a friend.
The sight of Fin had an instinct well deep in Darcy, their secret call from school, elly elly etdoo, the warning from outside her window, but now he could barely walk, the sight of her returning, wet through as a child coming in from a rainstorm. Jobik, as he opened the door like a husband might, relieved she’d made it home. If Fin had found love, Darcy felt forgotten, like something forfeited, out here among these dripping tre
es and guns. His loyalty washing from him like rain as the lamp was snuffed and he looked into the spattering snow from a forest full of crouching men, waiting for their signal.
Go to the door, the general beside him now, whispering. You congratulate them on Tbilisi, he said. Showing them what you holding. Make it a ceremony.
Darcy looked up at the barbarous smile, then into the speckled dark. A door to be kicked in, planks hanging from hinges. The Turk’s bared teeth, the gold in them almost visible—he seemed to know it as lunacy too. His reluctant nod still held its invitation. Darcy stared again at the general’s massive face. Aurelio, as he’d known him, was gone.
You are primitive, said Darcy, and the general looked out into the night as if he knew.
Darcy turned and walked from them, no sound but himself, no barking dog now, just the rhythmic contraction of his heart as he scraped his way through dripping tree trunks, his feet on pine spindles in dark quilted snow, waiting for a shot in his back or a battle cry, in a godless zone among histories and atrocities he barely understood. He didn’t hurry, he couldn’t; the porch lamp wasn’t there for him like it had been for Fin and if he were noisy Jobik would hear, the dogfight would begin. All of them killers, warming themselves on the blood of others. He tried to remember Aurelio’s face as it had been, a last memory to hold, piecing his way through sodden branches, snow like gauze.
He wasn’t sure why, but he drifted, drawn to a pine-encased window, he stood there, divided. Waiting. A gap in the blind, a simple, dimly lit kitchen, old cream cupboards and faded wooden floors, a washboard and enamel sink, the black worn through to a flea-bitten grey. A last window. He made no sound as Fin came in and pushed life into the fire with a poker, watched the embers ignite. A kettle on the rusted iron of an ancient Aga, a yellow-painted mantelpiece. She warmed herself by the flames for a moment, before she closed the stove door. Just her and Darcy, and muffled voices from the other room, the innocent chitchat of terrorists. The kettle began its whistle and she poured herself tea, black with a dash, how she liked it. She opened an iron drawer below the ash-catch at the bottom of the stove and took out a shallow tin, then sat at the end of the table, warming her hands on her cup. Darcy knew he’d not see her apartment again, but in a way he’d been happy there. Above her a cross with a carved wooden Jesus hung on the wall, shadowed behind from the light. It had given the Saviour a dark side. Fin put her tea bag on the table and watched it form a small brown puddle on the wood. And Darcy felt the restlessness behind him, preparing.
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