Darcy looked down at the coat draped over his arm, covering the gun and the hand that had sliced up the face of Gorbachev’s friend and touched Aurelio’s cheek. He unveiled the pistol and stood, offered it to her, his palm splayed open, trembling.
Whose is it? she asked.
General Sarfin’s, he said. It was used to shoot Consul Tugrul and Nikolai Chuprakov. And maybe Aurelio Sarfin.
And your hands have been all over it, she said. She held out a cloth napkin and Darcy slid the gun onto it as if performing some ritual exchange, the velvet coat still hanging over his forearm. She wrapped it in the napkin and weighed it in her palm. She seemed somehow impressed with him.
I want to ask you a personal question, she said gently. Why did you really come to Moscow?
Darcy thought of the urgent tone in Fin’s voice when she called the first time, when she’d said she needed him here, a chance to be far from home, where he might avoid the new disease. He didn’t know what winter meant then. He raised his eyes to respond, searched the face of this immaculate woman, looked at her as if he really knew. I came to see my sister, he said, and to paint. It had been true back then, mostly. The word paint seemed to resonate.
Ulli de Breffny turned and looked back out her window, the gun in one hand, the telegram in the other. Only in a world without evil are the naïve devoid of guilt, she said.
Sheremetyevo Airport, Monday, 9 am
The Aeroflot 747 taxied. Darcy peered out nervously, past abandoned cranes like rusted mantises, old jets waiting for Lufthansa parts. The control tower thrust up through the earth like an ancient corrugated rocket. Almost as he’d envisioned it, yet not—the hum had fixed itself as a low note in his right ear, his hands were shaking, but he had a dressing on his neck and he’d showered, eaten, he was warm. He clutched his new blue passport and airline ticket, fearing still he’d not be allowed to leave the ground.
He examined the passport, the coat of arms and a sober photo, pieces of Fin in his face. His new name was Warwick Rawson, it seemed obvious as a made-up name, a reinvention, but it wasn’t Dobrolyubova. And it struck him now, deep in his core and his psyche, that he was leaving without her. He’d never known her, not really, and he’d never get to know Aurelio; there were only the pangs of longing and mistrust, a love that lay too close to destruction and a small colour photo, wrinkled now, of Aurelio as a boy.
Ulli de Breffny had held onto the telegram from Constantinople, the missive of death marches across Anatolia.
Whole villages of peasants herded into the sea. Words that still felt like the truth. She told Darcy about a commission on Armenia meeting in Geneva in June, assured him that she could arrange for delivery, and as the jet taxied to the runway, Darcy imagined the document traded for secrets, his brushes with history, and again he prayed for the moment the wheels would lift from the earth.
As the plane commenced its clatter down the runway, trembling in its overheads, Darcy held onto the seat arms and his ticket receipt shook in his lap. Aeroflot from Moscow to New Delhi, a Qantas connection through Singapore and back to Tullamarine. Twenty-nine hours, no evidence of any price or payment; the ticket and passport arranged overnight.
Ulli de Breffny had heard the general might end up blind in at least one eye and then she almost smiled.
Armenians, she said, were found dead near their dacha, three shot and one found frozen. The woman, she heard, was fast and light, had tried to skim across the river ice but disappeared. Darcy sensed he was being humoured with the possibility, but all he felt was emptied. As Ulli de Breffny bade him goodbye, she assured him he’d be officially notified. She shook Darcy’s unsteady hand and held it warmly, met his eyes. Our arms are wide, she said, and he wasn’t sure if it was more than a form of embrace, if it clothed an invitation, or merely a warning that he’d be within their reach. He didn’t ask whose arms they were, he was just grateful to be boarding a plane.
As the plane rattled up through steep slides of vertical mist, Darcy didn’t search for a glimpse of the Kremlin, the gold-domed churches, or the oxbows of the river. They were all enshrouded in a caul of fog. The city enveloped itself in its greyness like the culture had, concealing itself from itself, just listening. He imagined his mother’s frenetic telephone calls to Foreign Affairs, her barking whisky voice. Moisture streamed across the cold oval window and it reminded him of tears. That he’d left Australia without even telling her. He pressed his face against the icy glass and thought of the frosted window of the train that he’d come in on, the money belt against him. He’d never been truly innocent, not since the missionary and maybe not even then, and now he’d blinded a man who only deserved to live disfigured, but Darcy knew he’d also scarred himself.
Down to the right, a shelf of snow moved, an iceberg separating. It must have been a kilometre long, or perhaps it was just in the shifting of clouds, but he felt the fissure within him, the separation of past. He remembered the time he lay with Fin in the gully as a boy, looking up at the sun, and then he remembered Aurelio, only days ago, handsome, walking ahead through the snow to the dacha.
He gazed out into the ballet of clouds as if there might be a song to be learned but the aftertaste felt bitter now. He felt changed, like a soldier returning from war to pretend things weren’t all twisted, heading south and east to India, cloud mountains concealing the endless steppe.
Ulli de Breffny had bought him a pencil and sketch pad from the airport shop and now he felt the pencil in his hand, its CCCP insignia, the hands he’d scrubbed for twenty minutes. He didn’t draw, he wrote: What do you want now, Darcy Bright?
He began carving shapes on the paper. He craved to feel pure again, like the juggling boy, to paint for the pleasure of others, not to skulk in parks and putrid places, not to use sex to medicate memories. For some reason, he thought about butterflies, making love without facing each other, but without agenda or intrigue. Fin once told him that butterflies carried the souls of the dead. He imagined her now, floating up on thistledown wings; but it had been far from butterfly season. His hands shook unevenly and he tried not to think of her dead in the snow, or Aurelio, or the general, a blade in his eye like some horrendous miracle.
He tried to find a new space in his mind, an opening.
I want to be able to love, he wrote haltingly, differently. But a love of a kind unknown to him seemed far off, someone who might wake up at his side and speak of simple things, be honest. Darcy looked back out through the streaming rivulets, above the cloud reefs, where painterly light skipped along the crests of cirrus. The footprints of this winter would trudge deep around inside him, wake him up on summer nights, but he could no longer lose himself.
He could return to the College of Fine Arts with a new name, paint in watercolours—he’d paint a fierce young woman, running across the river ice, a small girl alone on a gravel drive wearing an African print dress, a dark-eyed boy on the steps with his mother in Havana, a colourful dress of her own, a juggling boy, rare butterflies, dawn.
He’d paint eyes full of blood. Outside, sky and earth joined as patterned wings, and Darcy felt hinged there between them, between a boundless, deathless infinity and the transient mortality below.
O
With howling of a dog frost-bitten,
The moon will freeze on iron heels,
And stuffed like liar’s jaws with lava
Of breathless ice each mouth congeals.
Boris Pasternak, from Winter Skies,
translated by Eugene M. Kayden
Acknowledgments
In the U.S., to Marion Rosenberg for reading and reading and for her unwavering support from day one. To my Los Angeles writing posse: particularly Janet Fitch, Rita Williams, Julianne Cohen, and Josh Miller for their ongoing input and guidance, and to Mark Sarvas for his friendship and literary know-how. To Jane Smiley for her encouragement, wisdom and humour, and to Les Plesko, who helped me find a voice. To Elaine Markson for embracing this book with such unflinching enthusiasm and to my frien
ds at MacAdam/Cage—Julie Burton, Melanie Mitchell, Dorothy Smith and Scott Allen, as well as Kate Nitze and Khristina Wenzinger for their meticulous edit, and my profound appreciation to David Poindexter for his contagious commitment to literary fiction. Also, my sincerest gratitude to Don Hunt, Lisalee Wells and all the folks at Fulbright for their enduring support.
In France, to Madame Simone Brunau and the Cité International des Arts where this story first found its legs; to Penelope and Jobic Le Masson at the Red Wheelbarrow for a home away from home; to Marie Gaulis, George Walker Torres, Clayton Burkhart and Christel Paris for being there; and to Jenelle Sanna and Greg Simpson and their lovely house in Barbizon.
In Australia, to the legacy and indelible memory of my mother Judy, to my father Derry and to all who help on the farm at Tooradin, to my dear sister Sally and brother Peter, his wife Peta, and to Tristan, Josephine and Tim at Jeetho. To my aunt Margaret Street, Clare Gray and the burnished Hugo inspiration, and also to Jane Turner for her friendship and for inviting me to Moscow in 1984. My deep gratitude to the Literature Fund of the Australia Council and the Nancy Keesing Fellowship, to Jane Palfreyman at Allen & Unwin, who saw this book for what it might become, to Barbara Mobbs who wasn’t afraid to represent it, and to Ali Lavau and Alexandra Nahlous for their loving and insightful edit.
Lastly, to my friend Caz Love for her counsel, spirit and art, and to James Hunter, Jean Wingis, Peter Paige, Jane Nunez, Marta Ross and all those who help me find my way—you know who you are.
About the Author
David Francis is an Australian lawyer and former international equestrian who lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the acclaimed novel The Great Inland Sea, which was published in seven countries. David received the Australia Council Literature Fund Fellowship to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2002.
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