What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  ‘No buts. There were other photos they left out as well, yes? And these other men are still breathing somewhere?’ Alex’s agitation was still plain. ‘Your mother was more important. While they were wrong about her, she’s gone, so they work on the son.’

  He slouched low in his chair. ‘My fucking mother.’

  Valentin stood. ‘I won’t allow you to be so disrespectful.’

  ‘You don’t know what she’s done to me.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I know enough,’ he said. ‘I know she loves you. She deserves your respect.’

  Valentin was the only family Alex had in Moscow. He didn’t want to offend him. He wanted and needed his friendship and assistance and guidance, particularly then. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

  Valentin gripped Alex’s shoulder. ‘Try not to worry,’ he said, forgiveness already in his voice. ‘I’ll make more enquiries. And you should celebrate the recovery of Peter’s ashes.’

  Alex picked up the wooden container. ‘I haven’t opened the lid yet.’

  Valentin drew back. ‘Don’t do it here.’

  ‘Are you squeamish?’

  ‘I don’t like cremation.’

  ‘Okay,’ Alex said, replacing the container on the floor.

  ‘Tonight I will take you to a movie. Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot, although they have dubbed it and given it the ridiculous title of In Jazz There Are Only Women.’ Valentin laughed. ‘But who cares about words? No translation, no matter how corrupt, could diminish that woman’s beauty.’

  Alex smiled. ‘What time?’

  ‘Six. I will shout you dinner as well.’

  ‘Thanks, Valentin,’ Alex said. He thought about the flat. ‘I might go to the park until then.’

  ‘Good,’ Valentin said. ‘Lie in the sun, sleep, leave the cap on your camera lens.’

  CONRAD

  27th July 1971

  Dear Alex,

  It must be late summer there by now, or has my letter been so long getting to you it’s already over? While neither of us have heard from you, we will keep writing. Valentin keeps me up-to-date anyway. He told us the great news about Peter’s ashes. Maybe you’ll have time to take a trip to Odessa? Maybe you already have? It would be wonderful to hear about it.

  The sea and the wind. Today I got wet and cold, and my lungs took a hammering. It seems winter is not my favourite season, nor the bay’s, its waters flecked like a madman’s spittle. A sou’-wester was gusting and squalling at the cyclone wire fence of the St Kilda Sailing Club (I refuse to call it the Royal Melbourne Yacht Squadron), behind which boats sit on blocks, some so old and in such disrepair it’s as if they were last winched up the slipway after the Olympics fifteen years ago, just before we left. Others were still rigged and the wind screeched through halyards and stays and lines like sirens were below decks, wailing that in dry dock their cries would lure no sailors.

  Such terrible weather is so very rare. The clouds of July are heavy and low, the light beneath them brooding, leaving the waters a slate grey and seemingly bottomless because of the murk. Autumn’s clouds were less ponderous and the wind less fierce. On a March or April morning the water’s surface can be as smooth as an ice rink. It has the same luminescent glow, although a sturdy metallic blue, and you’d swear it was underlit, the sun shining up from below. You’d swear, too, you could glide across it on a pair of skating blades.

  You would love it here, you and your camera.

  Come home.

  Love,

  Dad

  ALEX

  Sinead didn’t reply to the letter. Maybe it had been blocked and never got out of Moscow? Maybe the address was wrong? She hadn’t written to him at all. He didn’t know when she was returning, or if she would.

  By mid-September, a couple of weeks in to first semester, there was still no sign of her. A Frenchman had moved in to Sinead’s dorm room, assigned it for the year. Alex hung around outside her dorm and a couple of the other residential zones, waiting for her or anyone he recognised. He went to the library she usually studied at, caught the train in to the State Archives. Her faculty administration office wouldn’t tell him if she’d reenrolled. The university’s Foreign Department, the Inotdel, was not only unhelpful but openly suspicious of him. He found himself in the supervisor’s office without asking to see her. He’d heard about Lidiya Prokofyevna, her fire-red hair and her unblinking gaze. How did he know Sinead, she wanted to know. Why was he asking questions about her? He’d been told that paying Miss Prokofyevna compliments was the best way to get what you wanted, but it didn’t help. She either didn’t know if Sinead was back, or did and wouldn’t tell him. He was sure it was the latter.

  Two weeks into October he couldn’t wait any longer. He booked a single third-class rail ticket via Oryol and Kiev, leaving three days’ travel to reach Odessa on 7 November, the anniversary of Peter’s death. It seemed right to spread his ashes that day. It seemed important.

  That afternoon he saw Sinead on the bus. The 119 on which they’d met almost a year earlier. She kissed his cheek like he was her cousin. She’d started the year late and they’d moved her to a different dorm. She apologised for not being in touch, not replying to his letter, everything, and suggested they meet at the State Library cafeteria after his classes, since she’d be working there all day.

  Alex bought her a cup of tea and they squeezed into a small table near the window. A sheen of moisture covered Sinead’s forehead, as if she’d run to get there on time, rather than having waited for him outside. Her face was so different to the one that made him push through the crowd to buy her bus ticket. The promise he’d seen in her deep brown eyes, the quickness of her smile, both had dulled in the months she’d been away.

  ‘I wasn’t coming back,’ she said, staring at her tea. ‘Not because the extension hadn’t been confirmed but because I was pregnant.’

  Someone was trying to squeeze behind him and Alex shunted his chair sideways, its legs grating across the hard floor. He’d heard what she’d said though.

  ‘I said I was pregnant,’ she repeated frowning at him and raising her voice. People at the next table turned to stare. ‘I had to make up my mind what to do. Whether I wanted to have the baby, what was best for me.’

  ‘Were you going to ask me?’

  ‘No.’ She picked up her spoon and stirred her tea. There was no milk or sugar in it. ‘It wasn’t yours.’

  He remembered what Naomi had told him when Sinead had disappeared before Easter, about her coming in late and not alone. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘There were others, Alex. The baby wasn’t yours.’

  ‘How do you know it wasn’t mine?’

  She gathered her gloves, threading her fingers into them without the slightest tremble. ‘I know, all right. But since it wasn’t yours, it’s none of your business.’ She stood and lifted her coat from the chair back. ‘So I had an abortion.’

  She said the word loudly, roughly, like it disgusted her. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Could you please wait?’

  ‘What for? There’s nothing more to say.’

  ‘What dorm are you in?’ She began to walk away. ‘Sinead, please.’

  * * *

  3-11-71

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  I’m boarding a train tomorrow for Odessa, to spread Peter’s ashes from the pier.

  I know from Dad’s letters that you want me to come back. One thing that might encourage me is if you’d help me find my biological parents. Maybe you knew them once.

  Please let me know.

  Alex

  * * *

  Kursky railway terminal had been in a state of chronic disrepair since Khrushchev pulled down the statue of Stalin years earlier. The central hall with its Corinthian columns and Grecian arches was hidden behind so much scaffolding that the flow of passengers through it was as slow as a bread queue. A film of water covered the tiled concourse, following the same route as Alex towards his platform but running more quickly than he did
. He needn’t have worried about being five minutes late for his train, since it sat on the platform for another hour and a half.

  The first anniversary of Peter’s death, 7 November, Revolution Day, would be a Sunday. Alex had three days and two nights of travel ahead, which, if everything went to schedule, would deliver him to Odessa the evening before. He’d booked a bed in a hostel close to the waterfront, and would go to the pier early in the morning, do the right thing by Peter, then have the rest of the day free before starting the journey back to Moscow the following day. Not just the right thing by Peter, not just a duty to perform before rewarding himself with a day at the beach, spreading Peter’s ashes was something he wanted to do. Something that would bring him closer to his dead brother.

  Eleven hundred miles and three changes of train, in Oryol and Kharkiv (towns he knew absolutely nothing about since the family had always driven to Odessa on their holidays) and finally in Kiev. The ninety-minute delay leaving Kursky would test his schedule, leaving only thirty minutes before the train for Kiev left Oryol, assuming they lost no more time. He pulled out Power Without Glory, hand-picked by his KGB friends during their inventory of bourgeois possessions, and began to read.

  Drab, industrial Podolsk, a little over twenty miles south of Moscow, was the first stop. For two miles beyond the station, boxy factories and warehouses toiled beside the tracks until they vanished from view as abruptly as a shift-ending whistle, replaced by a procession of tumbledown villages that punctuated the first day of his journey until dark. Low picket fences fringed drunken rows of log cabins, so bent they might have been built that way. Every chimney exhaled a thread of black smoke that unravelled as soon as the heat from the hearth fire was overcome by the cold. Roads between huts were already quagmires before winter; the rims of cart wheels had carved sticky brown waves of rutted mud. There were no cars, nothing motorised, only wooden carts and sleds. Children and women filled buckets at the village wells, some carrying them home with a wooden yoke across their shoulders, geese and chickens skittering about their feet to avoid each lurching step.

  It was when Alex retrieved a deck of cards from his bag that he met his surveillants. They wore cheap suits – one brown, the other black – and interrupted him as he laid out a game of solitaire across the empty seat opposite.

  One man blocked the aisle. ‘Vy puteshestvuyete v Oryol? You are travelling to Oryol?’ asked the other as he sat opposite, legs outstretched and crossed. Alex felt hemmed in.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Through there.’ Power Without Glory lay on bench beside him. He was glad he hadn’t chosen Cancer Ward.

  To his surprise, a story his mother had once told came to mind, of two men in suits who’d knocked at their door in Type Street, in those Australian days before he could remember. But there in the train, he had no door to shut against them.

  ‘So you have plenty of time? Do you play poker?’ Brown Suit asked. He was younger than Black Suit, although still much older than Alex. His smile, so thin on his lips, was absent from his eyes.

  ‘Where are you two headed?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Same as you,’ Brown Suit said. ‘Good for many hands of poker. But don’t worry, we have matches – we won’t take your money.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ Alex said.

  ‘I am Sasha,’ Brown Suit said, like it was the answer to a question, ‘and this is Valery.’ They both wanted to shake hands.

  The trip to Oryol, just under eight hours, was then only one hour old. ‘So,’ Alex said, ‘poker it is.’

  They weren’t bad company, their questions mercifully scarce once it was established that Alex’s ultimate destination was Odessa, for the purpose of spreading his brother’s ashes. He talked up Odessa and the family’s trips there, to fill the silence. Sasha and Valery didn’t ask why he was travelling alone, where his mother and father were, any of the usual small talk fellow travellers might engage in. What do you do? A student, what are you studying? You must be looking forward to a few days of sunshine … They probably already knew. And Alex had nothing to ask them. He was sure he understood enough. They wore suits and carried no luggage. He was their destination.

  Hour after hour, they played poker, breaking only to visit the dining car to redeem the coupon that credited them each a plate of Hungarian goulash and a mug of tea. Then it was more poker, right through to Oryol where, from the size of his matchstick stack, they declared Alex the winner, shook hands again and wished him well.

  After fifteen minutes in the transit lounge, shared mostly with farmers accompanied by their pigs and chickens, Alex boarded the train for Kiev. It was a toss-up what he was most surprised by, Sasha and Valery apparently not boarding, or the pigs and chickens that did, under their farmhand’s shepherding. They departed at six-thirty, on time. Outside was darkness, squares of window-framed firelight witnessing his clattering journey west. The carriage, older and less comfortable than the one that had carried him from Moscow, was lit by faint yellow light, and the flat wooden bench seats were as well suited to chickens as any other species of passenger. If they kept to schedule, Alex would pull into Kharkiv at four in the morning.

  He unstrung the earflaps of his fur-lined cap and tied them under his chin, rolled changes of underwear inside a shirt and fashioned a pillow which he wedged against the window frame. The wooden container carrying his brother’s remains sat on the floor at his feet, inside his travel bag. He tried not to think about Sasha and Valery, or Sinead and the aborted child she claimed wasn’t his, or his parents, or who James Johnson might have become if his parents hadn’t given him away. Or who Peter Murphy might have become if he hadn’t killed him.

  He tried to sleep, but time was not kind, replaying itself. At Kharkiv there was temporary relief. Off the train to a waiting room, then onto a different train, where time picked up where it had left off, repeating its loops, inviting him to revisit the same fears and self-blame and insecurity, not behaving linearly or expectedly, until light fell and heavy rain embraced the trundling, track-bound train. Finally they arrived at Kiev. Eighteen hours of travel left him slow and in desperate need of sleep, but he’d been in his room, pre-booked in a tourist hotel for foreigners, only two minutes when the telephone rang.

  ‘Vy dolzhno byt golodny -priyezzhayte v nashu komnatu.’ Sasha said. ‘You must be hungry – come to our room,’

  Alex was more irritated than surprised to hear his voice. ‘Ya deystvitel'no ustal. I’m really tired.’

  ‘I’ve sent Valery to get you.’

  He was still on the phone when Valery knocked on his door. Back at their room, a cart arrived laden with food and three bottles of vodka. Sasha signed for it but asked Alex for a tip.

  ‘You invite me and I have to pay a tip?’

  ‘Fifty kopeks will be enough.’

  ‘Why?’

  Sasha held out his hand. ‘Fifty kopeks.’

  Alex didn’t want to be there, he wasn’t hungry and it was money he hadn’t planned to spend, but he paid the tip.

  As usual, Sasha did the talking, the same questions he’d asked on the train.

  ‘Why are you asking me all this again?’ Alex said, but even as he asked he understood. The train hadn’t been bugged but the hotel room was. They wanted a record, that’s why they’d paid for the meal. It was a business expense, while the tip would have come from their own pockets.

  ‘Was what you said before untrue?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘No,’ Alex said. ‘I can tell you again.’ Nothing he had to say could implicate him of any wrongdoing, any dissident or bourgeois thought. They were onto the third bottle of vodka, after midnight, before the fresh questions started.

  ‘How did you know Gregory Yevchenko?’

  ‘Did I know him?’

  Sasha cleared a space among the plates and glasses and laid one of Alex’s own photos on the table. Gregory, the companion of Joseph.

  ‘This is Gregory Yevchenko?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Okay, I know him.’
>
  ‘You know he is dead?’ Sasha said.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘So how did you know him?’

  ‘He slept at the Metro station. He had a dog called Joseph.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you were there,’ Sasha said. ‘It has been reported.’

  ‘Do you think I did it?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘He was dead when I got there. That should be in your reports, if they’re accurate.’

  ‘The reports are verified.’

  ‘Good,’ Alex said, his exhaustion stronger than his anxiety. ‘I’d like to go back to my room and get some sleep.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sasha said. ‘We can continue tomorrow.’

  Alex explained he’d be on the train to Odessa. Sasha offered to drive him there, all three hundred miles. Alex thanked him but declined. They let him go but, as tired and drunk as he was, he didn’t sleep.

  He arrived back at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi, the central station, early the next morning and sat on the platform rather than board the train, to better witness Sasha and Valery’s arrival. They didn’t come.

  The passage out of Kiev was less than an hour in when the train stopped. How far had they come? Thirty miles? Over the previous two days the trains had often stopped, for wandering cattle to be herded off the tracks or for reasons he didn’t know or care about. He closed his eyes and thought again of the child Sinead had aborted. It had to be his. He didn’t believe there had been other men. Aborted. Was that better than being born and unwanted? Better than being adopted? Better for whom? How did Sinead really feel about it? He wondered whether his parents had received his letter and whether they’d help him find his real mother and father.

  Half an hour passed, then an hour, then two. The carriage was full of people heading to the seaside. The next day was Revolution Day. They’d arrive in Odessa by mid-afternoon. How long would they stay? The luggage rails below the carriage roof were full of suitcases, travel bags, loose jackets. They must be staying longer than the weekend. He slid his bag from between his feet, unzipped it and studied the lack of clothing and toiletries, and the wooden container filled with his brother’s remains, then zipped it closed again.