What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

They crossed into Gorky Park, passing a couple lying on the grass in each other’s arms. Watching them, Sinead loosened her grip on Alex’s hand. ‘I would leave if it were me.’

  Alex folded his hands behind his back and kept walking. In the near distance he saw the eagle atop the pedestal where Peter had played his final game of ice hockey with Vashka Börteki. He stopped. ‘So about my friend from the apartment block,’ he said, ‘what should I do?’

  ‘Nothing you don’t already,’ Valentin said. ‘Be careful of what you say.’ ‘

  Should we search for the bugs?’

  ‘It is better to leave them, if they are there.’ Valentin was quiet for a moment. ‘Maybe I’m too suspicious.’

  They stood by a wide path that forked either side of the lake, no longer frozen, which Peter and Vashka had skated on. ‘It’s getting dark,’ Alex said. ‘We should go back and eat dinner.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Valentin said, as they retraced their steps. ‘I’ve made too much of this.’ He reached out to Sinead. ‘Please, forgive me for the fuss. I don’t want to upset you both, but it is better to be careful. At home, at the university, it’s better to be careful.’

  Alex felt Sinead tense up at his side. ‘At the dorm?’ she said. ‘Would that be bugged?’

  ‘Foreign students are always watched,’ Galina said.

  Sinead said to Alex, ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘No,’ he said, frustrated. ‘Would I have said the things I have in your room if I knew?’

  ‘I hate this place,’ she said.

  They were almost back to Leninski Prospekt. Sinead hung back and Alex slowed for her. She took his hand reluctantly and they walked on in silence. At the lights she said, ‘I’m going back to the dorm. I’ll see you later.’ She set off briskly towards the bus stop.

  ‘Go after her,’ Galina said. ‘Don’t worry about us.’

  Alex watched her walk away. ‘No. I’m going to have dinner at home with you two.’

  CONRAD

  9th April 1971

  Dear Alex,

  I’m not sure how long our letters take to reach you, so fingers crossed this arrives in time … Happy 19th birthday! I hope you’ve had or have planned a celebration. Your mother and I have been thinking about you – it would be wonderful to have you home. You could always pick up your final year here, rather than complete it in Moscow. That must be possible.

  My rant this time is about the joys of going barefoot. I wouldn’t have nominated barefootedness on my list of things I missed about Australia (if I’d been honest enough to admit I missed anything), but the idle life I live these days (a single walk leaves me exhausted and my lungs aren’t much improved) and the warmth here have led to my rediscovery of a long forgotten but everyday occurrence for a school-age boy living an outdoor life. I’m from Brisbane, remember, and I spent whole summers barefoot.

  There’s a simple yet mysterious comfort in each footfall, every one worth celebration even if I have to do them behind that wretched frame. There are so many textures to feel underfoot. The brush of my hardening soles against squares of warm concrete along the footpath, the cool smoothness of the tiled landing outside our flat, the fibrous, stiff-brushed scouring of the doormat, the powdery dry dust on the kitchen floor and the cool moisture of a low-cut lawn that tickles the softer skin at the instep.

  It sounds like I’m hiking all over town and I wish that were true, but these sensations are experienced between home and the corner shops. The beach is beyond me now, unfortunately. It takes me so long to cross the road that the lights have changed when I’m only halfway there. The locals seem bemused by the sight of a barefoot man pushing a wheelie frame, but they’re getting used to me. And I see it as therapy. My circulation is poor and my feet get very cold. Walking barefoot warms them up.

  Come home. Take me on barefoot walks.

  Love,

  Dad

  PS: Your mother wants me to ask whether Peter’s ashes have appeared … have they? I’m sure you’re doing all you can. Please write to us.

  ALEX

  The Friday after when Alex walked into the dorm with a bunch of red roses and hopes of taking Sinead to dinner, the old woman took one look at the flowers and decided that, for the first time in four months, she didn’t need to see his ID. She waved him through and smiled silently with either approval or pity, Alex couldn’t tell which.

  Sinead’s light was on. He knocked on her door. No desk chair scraped on the floor, no mattress springs squeaked. He turned the handle but it was locked. Naomi couldn’t help him.

  ‘Her light is on,’ he said. ‘Have I just missed her?’

  She shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her for days.’

  ‘Do you know what’s happening with her supervisor?’

  Naomi had no idea Sinead had been having problems with her supervisor, or that she was thinking of quitting.

  ‘We don’t talk that much,’ she said. ‘She’s out a lot.’ She sounded disapproving, or like they’d had a falling out.

  ‘Maybe I should try the library?’

  ‘Maybe, but it closes in an hour.’ She hesitated. ‘She comes in a lot later than that and she’s not always alone.’

  Alex persuaded himself that she was lying; that she held a grudge over the Christmas night raid, the story Sinead had told about her and his own rudeness to her. Before leaving, he found an empty jar in the communal kitchen, filled it with water and stood the roses in it. He left them at Sinead’s door and slid a note underneath.

  Hope to see you this Sunday night. Love, Alex

  * * *

  He didn’t go looking for her at the library and she didn’t come to his flat that Sunday night. Valentin brought a box of chocolates to dinner, which Galina encouraged him to save for Sinead. The following evening her room was in darkness, the door locked again. He left the chocolates with a note bearing only his name. Although Naomi’s light shone under her door, he didn’t knock. Had Sinead already quit her course and gone home to England? Was that it?

  Over the next few weeks he studied, worked extra shifts, made trips to the crematorium on Thursday mornings and tracked his dogs around the Metro, keeping an eye out for Joseph. Every day he had to fight the desire to go back to Sinead’s room. On the occasions he gave in, it seemed as if the same people saw him climbing the stairs each time, probably appearing as lovesick as he felt. Without flowers, the old woman had at least gone back to squawking at him for his ID.

  Two days before Easter he arrived home late to find a note under his door.

  Sorry I’ve been elusive. There’s a party in my dorm this Friday if you want to come. 9 p.m. Sinead xxx

  * * *

  There was a ringing in his ears. It wasn’t because of the noise, although Alex was surprised how much volume the portable record player could produce. Where did they get it from, anyway, the seemingly straight-laced American couple who held the party? They didn’t seem the type who’d have access to the black market. And the music: The White Album (‘Back in the USSR’ was on high rotation), Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. Stuff he’d only read about in Rolling Stone. LPs. He’d never seen LPs before. Where did they get it?

  It must have been the vodka that put the little siren in his head. Whenever any soul or R&B was played, Sinead would find him and drag him up to dance. Dianna Ross and The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, she loved it all, and she always had her hand firmly around the neck of a vodka bottle. She was a much better dancer and rewarded his efforts to try by not laughing at him and moving closer and pouring more vodka down her throat and his. He was excited by this version of Sinead, and as they shared more vodka and he relaxed, Alex started to believe he looked good beside her. So he drank more vodka and, at some point, the pennywhistle began to blow inside his ears. Not loudly, he didn’t mind it, but constantly.

  Late in the night the party’s host, Jim Talbott, pressed his way through the crowd, lifted the tone arm on the turntable and, after the p
rotests had died down, announced that there’d be an Easter egg hunt. People were drunk enough and chocolate was coveted enough that the idea was greeted with hoots of approval. Six golden wooden eggs had been hidden under pillows in different rooms. One wasn’t painted but instead gilt with real gold leaf. Whoever found it would win a huge chocolate egg, something so rare no one stayed to listen to how it had been procured.

  Sinead grabbed Alex’s hand and dashed down the hall. She dragged him inside, closed and locked her door and pushed him onto the bed. ‘I don’t care about golden Easter eggs, I don’t care if there are bugs in my room,’ she said. ‘Even dissidents have to fuck.’

  They lay in bed the following morning, too fragile to climb off the mattress and draw the blind against the first bright and cloudless day of spring. Although awake, they kept their eyes closed and faced the wall.

  ‘Did you get the flowers I left at your door?’ Alex asked.

  Sinead was behind him. When she didn’t reply, he thought she’d gone back to sleep. ‘Sinead?’

  ‘Yes, I got them,’ she said. ‘And the chocolates. Thank you.’

  The fatigue in her voice might have been a hangover, but he didn’t think so. He had all the words in his head, an apology, his willingness to let their relationship play out however she wanted, as long as he could still see her. But he also knew he had nothing to apologise for, and that she already set the terms and didn’t need him to agree.

  ‘Did you sort things out with your supervisor?’

  Feeling laughter at his back, he began to roll towards her, but she put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I’m staying. Until summer. That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? But please, can we sleep?’

  She came to Sunday dinners again, but wasn’t prepared to stay at Alex’s flat after all the talk of bugs, so when Valentin and Galina left, they’d walk back to her dorm. As the weather improved, they took their books to the park to study, strolled alongside the Moskva River in the evenings, and ate at the street stalls on Leninski Prospekt.

  On Friday nights they’d go to Vtoroe Dykhanie, a vodka bar a short walk from the Novokuznetskaya Metro. Second Wind was old Moscow, in Pyatnitsky Lane, under a yellow sign and down a set of narrow stairs. The floor was filthy with a thick layer of ancient dirt. High iron tables crammed the single room, each bearing a tin-can ashtray that was always overflowing. It was full of hippies and singer-songwriters, people Alex hadn’t known existed in Moscow, who didn’t seem to care about informers or the KGB. That month was how he’d pictured his life could be. It was why his decision not to go back to Australia had been so easy to make, but summer holidays and Sinead’s return home were approaching. And Peter’s ashes had still not appeared.

  Every Thursday morning since his parents left, Alex had walked through the square above Leninski Prospect Metro, found Gregory, woken him up and updated him on the search for Joseph. There was never any good news so he made something up – someone he’d spoken to had seen a dog fitting Joseph’s description – or gave him a snippet of the general information he was gathering week by week about his Metro dogs. Either served to ease Gregory’s fear that his best friend was dead in a gutter. He’d buy him a glass of kvass and a hot pirozhki bun, and sit with him by Joseph’s empty cushion, which Gregory kept scrupulously clean.

  Afterwards, Alex would set out for Donskoy Cemetery and the crematorium. The front counter was always unmanned so he’d knock at the door to the anteroom, only crossing to pound on the crematory door when no one came. It never got to the point where the fierceness of the furnace’s roar beyond that final door didn’t fill him with awe and apprehension. He’d check how fully the shelves were stacked with the trays of cremated bones, and whether a mechanised grinder had been installed on the opposite bench. There were only ever pestles and mortars, and the shelves never seemed less empty, although progressively later processing dates were written on the paperwork.

  ‘Not yet,’ the attendant would say when finally he appeared, no longer reminding Alex to wait for a letter. When Alex told him six months had passed since Peter’s cremation, the news was met with a shrug. He wasn’t unfriendly but he wasn’t going to make any extra effort either, not even when Alex brought vodka the last two times.

  ‘What if I try to find my brother’s tray?’ Alex said. ‘It’s probably down the bottom or at the back of a shelf.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  He didn’t want to, either. So he left, but he vowed to himself that he would come back every morning, rather than once a week, even if he had to leave Sinead’s bed to do it. She was due to fly out to England that weekend but he couldn’t succumb to yet another reason not to do what a brother should. His persistence didn’t work and by Sunday night, with Sinead gone, he was not good company. Even after Valentin had left him with a bottle of rare Estonian Viru Valge vodka, Alex expected nothing more than the same lack of interest from the nameless attendant the following morning, but that’s not what he got.

  Waiting for him on the counter was a wooden container and paperwork bearing Peter Conrad Murphy’s name. When he knocked on the door, the attendant answered quickly and even managed a smile.

  ‘I brought this for you,’ Alex said, handing him the vodka, ‘but maybe I didn’t need to.’

  ‘You should have brought it sooner.’ The attendant tapped the bottle’s label. ‘I’ve heard about this.’

  Alex shook his hand, thanked him and left.

  This called for a celebration. Having neglected Gregory the previous Thursday he decided to go to the Metro station and buy him as much kvass as he wanted. On the way he hatched a plan. When Sinead came back in late August they’d catch the train together to Odessa for a few days in the sun. She could help him spread Peter’s ashes from the pier. He’d write to her as soon as he got back to the flat, so she could come back early enough for them to make the trip.

  There was more noise than usual on the Leninski Prospekt concourse, more people. A crowd had gathered near the station entrance and with so much shouting Alex couldn’t pick out what anyone was saying. He kept one eye out for Gregory, the wooden container tucked tightly under his arm as he joined a huddled ring, five or six people deep. At its centre, two men were crouched over the body of a street dweller.

  ‘It’s almost summer, he can’t be dead.’

  ‘Too much vodka will kill you in any weather.’

  ‘Is he just asleep?’

  ‘He’s not breathing, idiot.’

  People were used to dead bodies in Moscow. Men and women living rough, pedestrians hit by cars or trucks. Bodies were left where they’d fallen until word got back to the family that their father or mother or brother was on the side of Leninski Prospekt or in a back lane. Ambulances never came and if the police did, everyone else would leave. Another body on the square was a diversion, nothing more.

  From the outside of the huddle Alex continued to cast around for Gregory until, between the sea of legs and bodies, he caught a glimpse of Joseph’s cushion beside the pile of rags.

  ‘Gregory!’ Alex pushed his way through. ‘I know this man. His name is Gregory.’

  Someone knocked his shoulder roughly, the wooden box slipping. ‘Chto by vy znayete, mal’chik? What would you know, boy?’

  Alex managed to keep a grip on Peter’s ashes and reached for Joseph’s cushion, no idea why, no plan for what he’d do with it.

  ‘Leave it. This is a crime scene. Leave it.’

  He dropped the cushion, pushed his way back out and ran from the square.

  * * *

  He stood at the front door to the flat, breathing hard, trying to settle his lungs so he could listen. All was quiet, but the cigarette butt three yards away on the living room floor wasn’t one of his father’s Salems. It wasn’t a Winston, the brand Valentin and Galina smoked, and Alex only smoked when someone gave him a cigarette. It was a Stuyvesant, his mother’s brand. For a brief moment he wondered if she’d come back for him, but she’d never
have pressed a butt into the linoleum under the sole of her shoe, leaving a smudge of grey ash spilling from its tip, in the very middle of the living room.

  It was a calling card. Whoever had left it wanted it to be seen. Alex picked up the butt and sniffed it, examined it, as if it might tell him something. He scanned the room, stepping softly as he went, even though the flat was obviously empty. His camera sat where he’d left it on the living room table. The rolls of film beside it were unmolested. Four photographs had been removed from folders and neatly arranged across the tabletop. In the bathroom his photographic and darkroom equipment and chemicals were untouched. Three books had been left on the pillow in his room: Orwell’s 1984, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory. They were less polite about his music, pulling the tape from cassettes and leaving the player broken on the floor.

  Back in the living room, he took a closer look at the photographs they’d selected. Two were of Gregory, two of other vets who also slept at Leninski Prospekt Metro. Trembling, he grabbed his camera and Peter’s ashes and left.

  Half an hour later he sat in Valentin’s tin shed, tools and parts strewn across benches and around the floor. ‘Don’t touch the bugs,’ Valentin reminded him. ‘Don’t even try to find them, but if you do, and if you find them, leave them. Don’t break them. It is admitting you have something to hide.’

  ‘I thought this was over,’ Alex said. ‘I thought you’d fixed everything.’

  ‘It’s never over.’

  ‘What about the photos of Gregory?’ Alex said. ‘Could they have killed him with a plan to pin it on me?’

  ‘Alex, I mean this as a compliment. You are unimportant. As unimportant as Gregory.’

  ‘But they laid out photos of him on the table while he was lying dead at the station.’

  Valentin shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t kill a man simply to have something to pin on you. He died of old age and alcohol.’

  Alex was more than happy to be unimportant. ‘I didn’t really think so, but …’