by Mick McCoy
‘Thank you,’ Conrad said. ‘And could you tell Ruby one day?’
‘About the Cohiba?’ Valentin handed it back to him.
‘No.’ Conrad sipped at the cigar, waited, released. ‘About the reporting on us, and what you report.’
‘I will,’ he said. ‘But please, Conrad, concentrate. Can you taste the coffee, the cocoa?’
‘Vanilla,’ he said, although he could detect nothing of the sort, nor coffee or cocoa. He could taste the smoke and that was about it, but that was a big improvement on the foulness and odour the paraldehyde left lingering in his mouth.
‘Yes, you’re right, vanilla.’
‘I was kidding. I can only taste tobacco.’ The hospital room was growing thick with white cigar smoke. ‘Ruby will be shocked about the reporting, you know that.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why? Have you already told her?’
‘No, but she will understand, just as you did.’
‘Are you saying I should have told her already?’
‘Yes.’
Conrad stared at his friend. ‘I hope they’ll go home.’
Valentin took the cigar from him. ‘To Australia? Then I will help them to do that.’
‘I don’t doubt your influence. If you could help …’
‘Consider it done,’ he said. ‘But I will miss them.’
‘There’s something else.’
‘You’re in the mood for it tonight, aren’t you?’
Conrad swallowed deeply. ‘I fabricated some of the troubles I had finding a job back in Australia. After the royal commission.’ Valentin looked surprised. ‘I made it seem worse than it was. It was bad, but I made it seem worse.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘I wanted to leave. I wanted to come here.’
Valentin was silent. He leaned back in his chair. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘That was stupid. Truly stupid.’ He sat up, took another drag on the cigar and handed it to Conrad. ‘Does Ruby know?’
‘No.’ Conrad brought the Cohiba to his lips but couldn’t bring himself to smoke.
‘You must tell her.’
‘I will,’ Conrad said. ‘Please take this. I’ve had enough. It is good, but enough.’
‘It’s not me who you must confess to.’ Valentin took the cigar, used the clippers to trim the glowing foot, dropped it into a small boot polish tin Conrad had given him many years earlier and pressed down the lid.
‘If I live long enough,’ Conrad said, ‘I will.’
Valentin returned the tin to his pocket and put the trimmed cigar inside the bedside drawer, next to the whisky and the shot glass. He sat back in his chair. ‘I’m going to ask your nurse on a date. Your Galina Romanovna.’
‘You should,’ Conrad said.
Valentin grinned. ‘I tell you, it could be love.’
‘Hope so.’ The two men smiled stupidly at each other. Conrad nodded at the drawer. ‘If Ruby knew about that, she’d kill me.’
‘It could be worse,’ Valentin said. ‘If Nurse Romanovna knew, she might kill me.’
‘Or invite you home.’
‘That would be a merry Christmas.’
Conrad breathed, as deeply as he had in months. ‘Good luck.’
‘I will come again,’ he said from the doorway, switching off the overhead light.
Conrad smiled at him and closed his eyes.
* * *
Later that night, it might have been fifteen minutes or several hours, Conrad was suddenly awake. His room was dark but light seeped in from the hallway. He gazed at the shadows and the waves of paint peeling from the ceiling and caught the scent of something clean and salty on the air. As he wondered what it meant it swelled nearer, like a tide rushing in.
ALEX
A gusting wind, invisible in the night, rattled the window frame of Sinead’s dorm room. They lay naked on the single bed, tangled sheets and blankets covering their legs. Sinead faced the wall, her back to Alex. With his fingertip, he traced the arc of her ribs from spine to breast, his touch light and slow, lifting off and hovering, before touching down somewhere new. She reached for his hand, their fingers interlocked as she clutched him tight under her chin. He hadn’t known it was possible to be so tired and happy at once. Had he not caught that bus at that time on that day, he would not be lying beside this girl. All they had in common was that they were westerners studying at MSU. She was twenty-two, a post-grad on exchange from St Anthony’s College at Oxford. He was eighteen, in the first year of his undergrad photography course. Their lives would not have intersected, except for them being thrown together on a crowded bus by the grumpy owner of a huge muddy dog. That Christmas night, which could have been the most solitary he’d known, was instead the most intimate. In Sinead’s dorm room with its single bed pushed to the wall, its desk too small to work at, its overflowing clothes rack and piles of women’s shoes and underwear at the opposite wall, there was no concealment or secrecy. There was only closeness and truth.
She said something but he heard no more than a soothing, muffled hum. When he didn’t reply she asked him again. ‘Are you reporting on me?’
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘what did you say?’ He let go of her hand and pushed up onto his elbow.
She rolled onto her back and fixed her eyes on him. ‘Are you reporting on me?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘My God, no. Do you think I would do something like that?’
Sinead reached for the blankets and took her time to straighten them, but then threw them back again to the foot of the bed. Despite the snow and wind outside, the dorm room was stuffy from the central heating. Her unfocused gaze followed the length of her body, uncovered to the knees, more confident than Alex with being unclothed in the presence of another. ‘Naomi told me photography schools are training grounds for KGB.’
Alex swung his legs to the floor. Naomi, what was it with her? He couldn’t share Sinead’s bed without the dorm pass she’d given him. He’d have no chance of getting past the crone guarding the entrance, wrapped in her headscarf and coat and bitterness, waiting to shout, ‘Gde u vas propusk? Where is your pass?’ Even if you had it ready for her, she’d shout at you. Even if you showed it to her two, three times a day, every day for weeks, or months, she’d still shout at you. And with a whole floor of KGB in the building it was pointless testing her. They could probably hear her from their offices, screeching like a cantankerous parrot. Where is your pass? Where is your pass? But two weeks ago Naomi moved into the next room and found the previous occupant’s dorm pass tucked at the back of the drawer of the bedside table. With no need for it, she gave it to Sinead, and so Alex became Greg Staunton, twenty years old and on exchange from Michigan State. Having once been James Johnson, he could as easily be Greg Staunton. And while they didn’t look particularly alike – they shared hair colour and a similar jawline but not Alex’s hooked nose or pale eyes – the grainy black-and-white ID photo, the bad light in the entrance foyer and the old woman’s failing eyesight combined to earn him safe passage.
But now Naomi claimed he was a KGB trainee? Maybe she was an informer. Alex snatched up his underwear and trousers and began to dress.
When he felt Sinead’s palm on his back, he dropped down again to the edge of the mattress. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘How could you think it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, resting her head on his shoulder. ‘I don’t know anyone else like you, Alex. Like your family. Foreigners here to live. Not just to study or work, but to live.’
‘There are plenty like us. Political immigrants with Red Cross papers, and I think my mother knows every one of them. There’s always someone at the flat with an American accent. Or English. Or Kiwi or Australian,’ he said. ‘We’re like half-bloods, though. The Russians are suspicious of us.’ He paused. ‘And so are you.’
He wasn’t hungry but he stood and picked at their uneaten dinner, sliced sausage and onions and garlic, cooked in an electric frying pan on Sinead’s small desk and lo
ng since gone cold. ‘They’re not my family, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m adopted.’
After a silence Sinead said, ‘That doesn’t mean they’re not your family.’
He cleaned his grease smeared his fingers on a sock. ‘I only found out the day Peter died,’ he said. ‘The day my father collapsed in the bathroom, got taken to hospital and started to die. So I don’t know what being adopted means and I don’t feel like I can talk about it with my mum and dad because they kept it secret so long they obviously didn’t want me to know. And because of everything else that’s happening.’
Sinead grabbed at the blankets and hauled them round her shoulders. ‘They kept it secret from you?’
‘Yep.’
‘But if all this time you didn’t know, and you’ve lived with them and your brother as a family, and they’ve loved you and your brother as sons, then that’s what you are,’ she said. ‘Family.’
He shook his head. ‘Since Peter died, we’re not family. We’re just three people who know each other. Two people, soon. My brother was what we had in common.’
‘Alex, you can’t think like that.’
What would she know? ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But you’ve got to talk to your parents.’
‘I shouldn’t have told you.’
She slid in close, wrapping the blanket around his bare shoulders. ‘I’m glad you did.’
A girl at his side, her skin on his, the intimate scent of her hair – it was all beginning to feel real and good again when there was a knock on the door.
Naomi burst in. Naomi was from Israel, heavy-hipped, with a man’s large-pored nose. Alex wasn’t pleased to see her. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Bed check,’ she said. She grabbed Alex under the arm. ‘Inspectors. Get out.’
‘What?’ Alex said, shaking himself loose. ‘It’s fucking Christmas!’
‘That’s why it’s on tonight. C’mon,’ she said. ‘They’ll know where your pass came from if they find you. And I’m not getting kicked out because of you.’
‘Hide in the kitchen,’ Sinead said, while Alex scrabbled about the floor for his clothes and boots.
‘Put the light on,’ he said.
‘Too late for the kitchen,’ Naomi said. ‘I just came from there and they locked it right behind me.’
There was running in the hall, voices calling out in different languages, heavy rapping against flimsy doors and growled demands for entry.
Alex pulled on his jacket, his feet still bare. ‘It’s not a bed check,’ he said. If he was an informer, he was thinking, he might’ve known this was about to happen. If Naomi really thought he was, she wouldn’t be rushing him into hiding.
‘The balcony,’ Naomi said.
‘It’s freezing out there,’ said Sinead.
‘It’s the police,’ Alex said, ‘Or KGB. Not fucking university admin.’ They’d be demanding more than just dorm passes. Socks on, shoes in his hand, he opened the balcony door. ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ he said to Naomi as she pushed him out, shut and locked the door behind him.
Sinead’s room was on the twelfth floor. On a clear day you could see not only for miles but for centuries, the middle distance dotted with villages of bent and crippled log cabins and mud and cobble paths. But it was neither clear nor day.
Wind gusted flurries of snow at him. He dropped to the floor below Sinead’s window for long enough to tug his boots over ice-crusted socks. There were two other dodgers further along, crawling away from Alex towards a door that lead to the kitchen. He followed them but the door was locked. The balcony ended at a bricked-in cul-de-sac, two yards by two, so the fugitives were at least protected from the elements on three sides. But snow swirled in and piled up against the blind walls and corners. Without speaking they began to scoop at it. Alex had gloves in his jacket pocket. He put one on and gave the other to one of his comrades.
A demonstration was planned for the next day at Pushkin Square, in solidarity with an imprisoned journalist, Alexander Ginzburg. That’s what the raid would be about. The police would be searching for placards or anything else that might implicate people, and foreign students were always among the first to be targeted. That’s why there was a floor of KGB in the building. There’d be no search warrants, no permission asked or reason given. Alex might have gone to the demonstration, with his camera, had he not met Sinead and had something better to do. But he wouldn’t have been out on that frozen balcony had he not met her, either. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, like he was, you didn’t need to be a dissident student to be convicted as one, regardless of whether you had a Russian half-blood’s Red Cross card.
Alex pulled his cap lower and buttoned his jacket to the neck. Scooping at the snow reminded him of pre-breakfast exercises from his boarding school days. At seven each morning they were all at the gymnasium, every last student, for half an hour of burpees and rope climbs and sit-ups and complaining. Turns in a shuttle run were completed with a finger touch to a painted line and a squeaking of rubber soles that echoed under the high roof, mixing with the memory of shouts from the previous day’s handball games. Instead of shuttles you could run a lap of the track outside, and a particular group of boys would always venture out in any weather, Alex with them. At the end of the lap they’d pick up handfuls of snow in their bare hands and rub it into their arms until the skin was one long glove of deep red and purple blotches from armpit to fingertip. Winter mornings it could be minus thirty outside; once you raced back inside the gymnasium it was like jumping into a hot spa, your skin tingling and flushed with the rushing blood beneath it.
Alex removed his single glove and began shovelling at the snow with his bare fingers, laughing quietly to himself. He glanced across at the disbelieving faces of his fellow outcasts.
‘Take it off,’ he said in English to the one he’d lent the glove. ‘When you put it back on it’s like a bath of hot water.’ Alex continued digging, faster than before.
‘Take it off?’ came the reply. ‘Non, c’est stupide.’
Alex shrugged. When enough snow had been excavated he slid the glove back on and hunkered down in the dark corner, squatting on his haunches beside the other two. He smiled at them but they were too cold or nervous to return it. Alex remembered the loaves of bread the baker would throw up to their open dormitory window, directly above the kitchen, at eleven o’clock each night. Three or four boys hung through the unlatched windows; the loaves were shared democratically among everyone in the dorm. He remembered the trading that went on between students, under trees at the edge of the school grounds and in blind balconies like the one he found himself now, for stamps or badges or bags of lollies that tasted of pure citric acid.
The snow continued to squall into the balcony, glowing yellow in the light that bled from the row of dorm-room windows. Lights were on in every room, even though it was past midnight. The wind was frigid, the pitch of its whistle rising and falling as it continually changed its course, but he didn’t feel too cold. And while he had both hands deep inside his jacket pockets, digging at the snow had made them feel warmer.
‘Excusez-moi,’ he said, ‘pourrais-je avoir mon gant?’ He thought that was about right.
The French-speaking boy might not have heard him for the lack of reaction. His face was grim and constant, and he kept the glove. Instead Alex tried to listen past the wind for raised voices or the clatter of searching from inside the kitchen or anywhere else in the dorm, but nothing could compete with the squally night.
There was no further talking between the three squatters. The fact that they were huddled together on the balcony meant they all had something to hide. Alex didn’t know whether the other two were friends, but something in the alignment of their shared silence told him they were. Even with people you knew, it was wise not to give away too much. Secrecy was the best protection and the three balcony outcasts, fleeting allies, didn’t need reminding.
They’d bee
n out there just over half an hour when Sinead opened the kitchen door. Alex took her hand and let her lead him back to her dorm. Naomi had heated some water and poured it steaming into a wash bowl. He took off his coat, speckled with snow and ice, and sat.
‘Are they gone?’ he said through suddenly clacking teeth. ‘Have you checked?’
‘Naomi followed them down,’ Sinead said, ‘and watched them drive away.’
‘Did they take anyone?’
‘Previr, an Indian boy. In his pyjamas.’
Alex began to eat the reheated dinner with his fingers. ‘I’m not KGB. I’m just not. Fuck. I would never be,’ he said, glaring at Naomi. ‘And I hate being accused of it.’
‘I didn’t think you were,’ she said, with a quizzical look at Sinead. ‘I should go,’ she added when there was no reply. ‘I hope you warm up.’
‘Thanks for the tip-off, though,’ he said.
He sat and chewed and shivered inside his blanket. He’d been outside much longer than the time it takes a pack of boys to run once around a track, and the cold, he was discovering, had penetrated far deeper than his skin. Sinead sat beside him, watching him eat.
‘She can’t really think I’m KGB if she tipped us off,’ he said.
‘She doesn’t. I made that up because I was unsure and I wanted to know.’ There was no hint of apology in her voice. ‘But I didn’t want you to know I doubted you.’
‘Okay,’ Alex said. ‘But I’d have denied it even if I was KGB.’
Sinead’s silence weighed on him. ‘It’s understandable,’ he said, although he didn’t really think so. ‘I’ve never spoken about it with any of the other students but we’ve all taken pictures that, for anyone else, would be seen as a punishable offence. Subversive. Dissident.’
‘The photos of the street people?’
He shivered. ‘Can we get back into bed?’
Sinead switched off the light. Alex threw the blanket over the rest of the bedclothes and climbed in beside her.
‘Once I took a picture of a cop, several pictures,’ he said. ‘That was stupid. He was just standing around, not doing anything violent or even suspicious.’