by Rose Tremain
‘When? When’s the money going to come?’
‘I’m not telling you, Meaulnes. All I’m telling you is if they don’t pay up, you and Valya are dead!’
‘Merci beaucoup,’ I said. And then he hit me across the back of my head, so that I lurched forward and the shit pail fell out of my hand and bounced on the wood floor, and although I couldn’t see anything through my blindfold I knew it had to be spilling all that remained of its contents that hadn’t been soaked up by the famous faces in France Dimanche.
I felt really angry that Alexis had hit me. It was the kind of anger I’d felt about that stealer at school, only magnified about a hundred times. I regained my balance and turned round to punch him in his shrunken stomach, but he knew exactly what I was going to do and grabbed my arms and wrenched them down. He held me pinioned, so close to his trembling body that I couldn’t move. His hands were bruising my arms and I could hear the gasp in his lungs very close to my ear. And all I could think about was trying to get away from him. So I spat at him, with as fat a gob of spit as I could dredge up out of my dry mouth, and there was a split second’s pause as the spit landed somewhere on his shirt. Then he kicked my feet from under me and let me fall.
I tried to get up. I knew I was sitting in a puddle of urine. Then I heard Valentina start to yell at Alexis through her door and it was at this moment that he went completely wild, kicking out at the overturned bucket and beating his fist on the wall and screaming in Russian. It was like he was screaming about everything in his life, everything in his world, like he was tearing open his lungs and his heart and letting all the anger and misery come deluging out. You couldn’t tell, after a minute, whether he was screaming or crying or both, or what. He was just making sounds, and they were like no other sounds I’d ever heard in my life.
Later, I said to Valentina: ‘Do you think that’s what people heard in Leningrad, that winter when the siege was on and they knew they were dying – a kind of noise like that?’
‘Not specially, darling,’ she said. ‘In Russia, that is what they hear all the time.’
We didn’t see Alexis again for two days. I wondered if that woman I’d seen getting into the Citroen was taking care of him.
I climbed out on to the roof again, and on this night the moon came and went behind streaky clouds and revealed to me something I hadn’t found the time before: at the back of the house, between it and the thicket of trees, was a barn.
I hadn’t discovered it because it was quite small and low, and to see it you had to edge down the roof, nearer to the gutter line. It was one of those places that looks as if it’s been built in a day, as if the farmer just decided in the night, ‘I’ll put a barn there tomorrow’, and then went and bought a lot of corrugated iron and some old wooden posts and some nails and erected it without anyone noticing. But this farmer had been quite lazy. He wasn’t like Hugh, worrying about views and windows and ways of laying brick; he hadn’t wanted to lug the sheets of iron one centimetre further than he had to, so he’d put his barn as near to the house as possible.
I calculated that the distance between the wall of the house and the barn was about 1.5 metres. To get on to the barn roof from the lowest point of the house roof involved a drop of approximately three metres. The corrugated iron would have some give in it: it would be more springy than concrete or slate; and the sheets had been laid almost flat, just tilting up slightly to the left, so that the rain could run down and away. Once we’d landed on the roof of the barn, getting to the ground would be easy, because the barn was full of hay and broken bales of it had spilled out all around. All we’d have to do was let ourselves fall down on to the hay.
I crouched on the roof, looking at the barn for a long time. The moonlight shone on the iron ridges of its roof. The question of shoes bothered me. I knew the hardest thing would be trying to steady ourselves on the slates, poised for the leap, and that this would have been far easier wearing trainers. Grip and steadiness were prime and we’d both be hampered, because presumably all Valentina had with her were the white sandals she’d worn that day she left to have lunch with Grisha. And I imagined her naked feet, with their beautiful convex toenails with just a vestige of red nail polish remaining on them, standing where I was now, trying to grip the slates, and her whispering to me in the dark: ‘Hold on to me, darling. Don’t let me go . . .’
The next time I saw Alexis was the night of the storm.
He was calm. The storm had come in at dusk and now it was exploding and flashing right over our heads, and in the midst of it Alexis was calm and quiet. It was like the storm was grumbling and protesting for him and allowing him to be still.
He came into my room with Vasya and they inserted the light bulb and set up the chessboard. I didn’t know what time it was, but I knew it was quite late, like ten o’clock or something, and I thought, perhaps Alexis is really afraid of the storm and he wants to play chess all night to distract himself.
He was wearing his monkey mask. His hair that came down to his shoulders looked cleaner than the last time I’d seen it and I thought, I expect that Russian girl, whoever she is, has been cooking him meals and sucking his cock and lying in the bath with him, shampooing his hair.
As he set out the pieces, he said in French: ‘What d’you want, Meaulnes, if you win? Your Concorde book? Exploding Peanut Theory: very clever!’ And he laughed his girl’s laugh. What the laugh said was that he knew my chances of winning were completely useless.
I let a long moment pass. The last time we’d played, Alexis had said he didn’t have my notebook, but I made no reference to this. I knew he lied about everything; Valentina had told me he did. What I said was: ‘I don’t expect I’ll win. But if I do, I want Valentina.’
Both Alexis and Vasya raised their heads from the board and stared at me through the holes in their monkey masks.
‘Oh yes?’ said Alexis. ‘She belongs to you like your notebook?’
I said: ‘No. What I mean is, I want you to let her sleep in this room, just tonight, while the storm lasts. That’s all.’
‘So you’re afraid of the storm? You want your “mummy”?’
‘Yes.’
Alexis and Vasya both laughed then and said something in Russian and then laughed again. I didn’t look at them. I just concentrated on setting out my side of the board and, as I put each piece in place, tried to imagine the chessmen like an army, like my troops, about to begin their fight for my freedom.
I knew Alexis wouldn’t agree to any request of mine yet. He liked to keep you waiting for everything – even for water. Only when the game was over would he refer to it.
Like last time, Vasya hung around, watching us. He brought in a third chair and sat at the table, staring at the board, before either of us had made a single move. I hoped his eyes wouldn’t go wandering up to the roof and notice that one section of baton had been cut through and wedged back in place with folded newspaper.
We were about to begin, when Alexis snapped out some command in Russian to Vasya and he got up obediently and went out. He went sort of slowly, tearing his eyes away reluctantly from the vacant board, and so I knew he was playing his own game in his mind and the chances of him looking up at the roof were small.
He came back with a half-full bottle of whisky and one glass and put these near Alexis. Valentina had told me that drinking whisky could sometimes make Alexis mellow and kind and sometimes make him cruel and you never knew which of these moods was going to come.
When he poured some out, the smell of the whisky reminded me of being in Scotland, with my Scottish grandmother, Annie, who lived alone in Edinburgh and spent most of her money on bingo and booze. She always asked for ‘small’ drinks, which she sometimes called ‘wee’ drinks – ‘Hugh, dear, will you pour me a wee whisky?’ – but she had so many wee ones that the quantity she got through became immense and not ‘wee’ at all. And she smelled of this whisky and her rooms somehow smelled of it, even her bedroom, and I suppose this was why we saw m
ore of Gwyneth and Bertie than we did of her. When I asked Alice if she missed her, she said: ‘No. Never.’
This time, as I waited to begin, I didn’t feel nervous. My mind was concentrated and cool. I knew Alexis wouldn’t expect me to repeat my pawn-to-king-four opening, so this is exactly what I did. Alexis hesitated. I saw him surveying the centre and I expected him to try to crowd me out there like last time, but he didn’t. He just pushed a pawn one square forward on the flank: pawn to king’s knight three.
I thought, that’s interesting, he’s leaving me the centre, so I started to grab it, with pawn to queen four. Automatically, Alexis developed his bishop with bishop to knight two. And I was just getting happy with my dominance of the centre, pushing my pawn to king’s bishop four, when Alexis tipped his monkey mask up above his mouth, took a long gulp of whisky and then just lazily pushed his central pawn to queen four.
I kept my body very still, surveying my big centre and not wanting to relinquish it. I could hear the storm continuing, noisier than ever, and I thought, imitate the storm, persist in the centre. So I kept on pushing my pawns, but, each time I pushed, Alexis blocked and after about a dozen moves I realised my king was vulnerable, with a Black knight and a Black bishop moving steadily in.
This was the kind of moment in a game where you either panic or else, because you’ve almost accepted defeat, a weird calm comes over you and you become reckless, like a tennis player charging and volleying. And this is what happened. I just experienced this icy calm and remembered a thing Julian used to say about pawns: ‘If you push them, it’s for life’; and I thought, that’s it, I’ve just got to keep pushing, even now. It’s for life.
I threw another pawn forward. Alexis paused, wondering what on earth I was doing, then snicked out my pawn sort of daintily, as if he was taking a sugar lump out of a china bowl. Next, I gave up my knight, and even though I didn’t look up I knew both Alexis and Vasily were staring at me, thinking, what kind of chess is this? But Alexis grabbed it, as I knew he would. He grabbed it fast and greedily, like the computer would have done. He was snapping up lots of material and enjoying this and it was like he didn’t notice, until he saw my queen land on rook six, until it was almost too late, that his king was exposed.
It was a race then. Alexis began rushing over everything in sight to defend his king, but I had enough men left and I was their steel-cool commander-in-the-field. I got to checkmate in ten moves.
There was a silence in the room. Vasya was staring at Alexis, like he couldn’t believe this had happened. Alexis finished the whisky in his glass and got up. I thought he might kick over the table or something, but he didn’t. It was as if he was mellowing out with the whisky and didn’t really care. He said: ‘I will ask Valya if she minds sleeping near to your shit bucket,’ and he went out.
I was left alone with Vasily, who seemed to be in shock. He said to me in French: ‘Who taught you to keep pushing pawns like that?’
‘Somebody called Julian,’ I said. ‘Long ago.’
He was laying the chessmen carefully in their wooden box. Next door, I could hear Alexis talking to Valentina in Russian. I sat in my chair, waiting.
Vasya went out, taking the chess set, and switching off the light as he went, and after the brightness of the unshaded bulb the darkness in the room seemed absolute, like it used to feel when I was a kid. I was never afraid of it exactly, but I used to get angry with it, it felt so pointless. I once said to Grandma Gwyneth: ‘What’s it for?’ And she said it was for the birds, so that they could rest their throats before morning.
I stayed still, resting my brain after the chess game. I could hear the storm continuing in a circle, not being able to make up its mind to move away, but the rain had stopped. Part of me was thinking about how slippery the slate roof would have become after this torrent of rain and the other part was thinking, if Valentina comes and sleeps in my room, I’m not going to attempt any escape, not tonight; I’m just going to lie down beside her.
I don’t know how long I sat on the chair in the darkness. What I remember next was that my door was opened again and the light was snapped on and Alexis was there, still wearing his monkey mask. He looked round for me on the mattress and seemed surprised that I was still sitting at the table. ‘Go to bed,’ he said. ‘Valentina is coming in a while.’
‘When?’ I asked. ‘How long?’
‘Go to bed. Go to sleep. Then she will come.’
I reckoned he was lying. He didn’t have to do anything for me or give me anything, even though I’d won the game. He could make any old promise and not keep it. And he liked taunting me. He thought I was a rich, spoilt kid whose brilliant future was all mapped out. He probably had moments of wanting to drown me in a rock pool. At my age, so Valentina had told me, he had a job as a cemetery sweeper at Père Lachaise. The thing he hated most in the cemetery was the bindweed that grew everywhere and stuck to your arms.
I got up slowly and lay down on my mattress. The damp and cold from the roof seemed to begin seeping through into the room now and I felt as cold as I’d been on my first night in here, when I’d puked on the floor. I pulled my blanket round me and lay with my eyes open, listening.
The house had gone quiet, like the monkeys were downstairs, and no sound came from next door. Tentatively, I tapped on Valentina’s wall, but no answering knock came. I put my ear close to the wall, but there was nothing to be heard, only the storm fretting on and on above us, moving near and moving away, then moving near again, like something that wanted to go somewhere but couldn’t find its way.
I was almost asleep, as if in the cradle of the storm, when my door opened and I saw, from the light in the corridor, Vasily and Alexis both standing there. They came in and switched the light on again and I had to shield my eyes from it. Then they began to move things around in my room. They lifted the table and put it and the two chairs against the back wall, behind me. They stuck my shit pail under the table. Then they went out and came back, dragging a mattress, and laid this down by the far wall, where the table had been.
I sat up and watched them. They did everything in silence, with their masks still on, and when they’d put the mattress in place Alexis turned to me and said: ‘In chess, if I lose, I always pay my debts.’ Then they switched off the light, took the bulb out of its socket and went out, but they didn’t close my door and I could hear them standing outside and talking.
I’d been cold, but now a weird burning feeling welled up in me and I could hear my heart pumping. I sat still, holding on to my knees.
After a few minutes, Alexis came back and behind him was Valentina. He led her forward into my room and she stood there, peering at me in the dark, and Alexis looked at me and said, ‘Here’s “Maman”,’ and then he closed the door and bolted it shut.
She came and knelt down by my bed. I couldn’t really see her, only feel that she was there, and I reached up with my arms outstretched, like kids reach up with their eyes all wide, like they know the world is going to be given to them there and then. I held on to her and pressed my face into her neck and kissed her and breathed her in and I could feel her arms going round me and clasping me to her, my chest to her breasts and my face into the soft hollow of her shoulder.
She rocked me and she let me cry. I felt her hand on my head, stroking my hair. I thought, I’m going to stay like this for ever and I’m going to cry for ever, and I knew that no moment of my life had ever been like this one. I couldn’t say anything. The power of speech had drowned inside me. All I could do was just hold on to Valentina and weep.
The storm finally went away and when I opened the gap in the slates, a pallid sliver of moonlight came in, like a ghost that had been waiting there for a place to haunt.
By this ghostly light, Valentina and I looked at each other, and when our eyes had readjusted themselves in the grey shadows we saw that all our rue Rembrandt smartness had completely gone and what we resembled now were street people with no home. ‘Darling,’ said Valentina, ‘did you e
ver see an old movie called The Mudlarks? About the river children by the Thames? Well, you look like one of those mudlarks, you know!’ And she laughed.
She was still wearing the black-and-white dress. In the moonshine, all I could really see were the white bits and the white plaster on her broken arm, but the sight of that dress, which had been there at the centre of all my anxiety and all my longing for so many days and weeks, somehow choked me. I stared at it. It was creased and filthy and the hem of the skirt was torn and hanging down. I said: ‘Your dress is a bit dirty, Valentina.’
‘My dress, darling?’ she said. ‘Oh yes, so it is.’
She began to laugh unstoppably then. And it wasn’t a hysterical, frightened laugh; it was her old infectious laugh that was sort of filled with lightness. I joined in and we fell on to the dusty floor, holding on to each other and flailing about with laughter, like morons. I wondered if Alexis could hear us and, if so, whether this laughter would piss him off and he’d rush in and take Valentina back to her cell. But no one came to the door, and when we’d recovered from our giggling we sat side by side on my mattress, with our arms round each other and our heads leaning in together. Round Valentina’s head was tied the ‘Ypres’ scarf and it was sort of lolling down over one ear, like a slipped bandage. I knew she’d put it on because her hair would be dirty and there might be too many grey bits coming through for her liking, but at the back of her neck some little blonde wisps were straggling out and I reached up and touched these and stroked them between my finger and thumb, and the touch of her hair was as soft as I’d always imagined it to be.
After all our conversations through the pipe hole, we seemed to have run out of things to say. We just sat there and the moonlight got brighter as the storm clouds began a kind of race across the horizon, reminding me that the night was passing and that all my planning was coming to its moment of crisis. Before the morning came, while Alexis and Vasily slept, I knew that we had to climb out on to the roof, make our daring leap across to the barn, tumble on to the hay and walk to our freedom up the road. Except I didn’t want to move. It was like I no longer believed in my plan. The hours I’d spent sawing through the batons, patiently moving the slates on their pins – they all seemed really futile, like the imaginings of a film-maker who hasn’t got the plot properly worked out.