‘Don’t look round. Don’t look round.’
Some instinct told me not to look. My heart was beating fast. I was naked. I felt extraordinarily alive. A captured wild animal alert to everything around me. Waiting for my chance. I turned my head slightly to look for a weapon.
He growled again, ‘Don’t look round.’
That should have been a clue. A stirring of memory. Something I had read about before. An ancient story. Someone else, was it a pregnant woman, had insisted on seeing . . . on coming face to face . . . and been destroyed by the wild lightning shock and voltage of the confrontation.
I did not look round. I thought of biting the arm. The danger was that it would produce a more violent response from him. He was stronger than I was. I was trembling. All the same I lashed out, punching at his face over my shoulder. He grabbed my hand and bent the fingers back. I pulled the hand away. No weapon nearby that I could see. Stalemate. We stood there in the dark. Me in the arm-lock. Both of us out of breath. Panting after the fight. Deadlock. Unmoving.
And then for the most fleeting of moments I had a revelation and with it a flash of envy. How extraordinary to be so truly free. To exist outside the shackles which bind the ordinary law-abiding citizen. What liberation. To break every rule and slip the bonds of humanity. The incredible daring of it. To step out of all those restrictions and moral structures and let them just fall away around your feet. The shedding of morality. How enviable. To be nothing but what the forces of nature demand. Elemental. To shake off every restraint laid down by decency and the law, those reins and harnesses all undone, leaving only this energy, this electrifying presence, this shocking electro-magnetic force field. How bold. How admirable. For a minute, behind me, stood an incandescent god. A golden god from the time before religion and morality became entwined. So this is what it means to be divine. Super-powerful and sub-human at the same time, divine and bestial. I understood, for the briefest of moments, that he had drunk the milk of paradise.
It was a strange epiphany, lasting only a few seconds. One thing was certain. This god had nothing to do with love. More like Tlaloc the Aztec god with his lightning axe, or Zeus himself. Nor was there a sense of a god who wanted to be worshipped. No adoration required. Not even approval. He would have despised people falling to their knees. What he expected was simple. Just to be acknowledged. A recognition of his existence. Nothing more.
And then those seconds passed. My mind raced back to the immediacy of the situation, my head in an arm-lock. What were the possibilities of escape? Every sinew and muscle was tensed and ready for action. I started to bargain. The ordeal went on for two hours. The balance of power shifted from one to the other. He escaped before it became light outside. I survived.
After the trial and the guilty verdict his defence lawyer said:
‘He is the most dangerous man I have ever come across in all my years at the bar.’
He was returned to the secure hospital.
Yes. He was a sad creature. Thinning fair hair. Broad forehead. Blue eyes. Yes. Terribly abused in childhood. Desperately neglected. Might be a paranoid schizophrenic but later they discovered that he was able to simulate those symptoms, able to assume the cloak of mental illness when it suited him. All the same, dragged through children’s homes and asylums. Poorly educated but possessing a degree of natural cunning. Never properly cared for. Abandoned many times as a child. Surely deserving of care and nurture. Pitiable really.
Or a god forgotten.
THE DOSTOYEVSKY HOUSE
Nikolai Timurovich Pestov knelt on the arm of the old sofa with his left ear pressed to the partition wall. Dammit. It had happened again. How many times had he shown his neighbour the trick of flushing the toilet cistern so that it would not leak? The gurgling and groaning he could hear through the wall meant that soon a damp patch would appear behind the sofa in his living room.
The Petersburg flat was a communal one. Nikolai and his family shared a toilet and kitchen with two elderly neighbours, the Korsakovs, and Nikolai longed to find enough money to buy them out. His wife too was feeling the strain. That morning, when he went out to the shops, she had been playing the theme tune from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on the piano, humming to herself with tears in her eyes which she hoped he would notice.
Nikolai detached himself from the wall and stood up. For a moment he confronted himself in the mirror, a fifty-two year old actor with floppy black hair and lop-sided features that gave his long face a naturally comic appearance. He wore only a grey vest t-shirt and some checked cotton shorts. His reflection told him nothing he did not already know and he crossed over to the table to inspect the food his wife had left out before she went to work: a large dish of cold soup made from beans and tiny cubes of cucumber, four slices each of salami and cheese and half a loaf of black bread. As he put the kettle on and sat down to eat, he heard the key in the front door. His thirteen-year-old daughter Sonya was back from school. She was an odd elfin creature with a crooked face, dark intense eyes and a determined selfishness about her that called to mind some of his older Tatar relatives in Kazan. Sonya walked past him swinging her satchel, went straight to her room, and slammed the door.
‘Food’s on the table,’ he called.
No reply. He could hear the reedy sound of music from her headphones. He went to shut the front door which she had left ajar. Creeping across the shared lobby was Mr Korsakov who flashed Nikolai an obsequious smile before letting himself rapidly out.
He sat down again to eat. Next to his right hand was a rolled-up newspaper he kept to combat the plague of flying ants that had invaded Petersburg that summer. He was about to take a swipe at one or two of the pests flitting near his head when he spotted something in the small print of the newspaper. It was a notice from the European Union offering a substantial grant to Russian writers and illustrators for work that promoted moderation and tolerance in accordance with the values of the European Union. They had to send in applications. Nikolai read it with interest. He would show it to the small group of writers and artists whose meetings he attended whenever his work as an actor allowed.
At five thirty he shouted goodbye to Sonya, took his bicycle, and set off for the theatre. Tonight was the last night of an adaptation of Gogol’s The Nose. Nikolai was playing The Nose. After that there would be no more income except from his wife’s work as a canal-boat tour guide. The theatre was part of the building complex that housed the Dostoyevsky Museum. With the newspaper in his pocket Nikolai cycled along the canal paths in the warmth of the summer afternoon.
Standing in the doorway of the Dostoyevsky building, as Nikolai approached, was Pyotr Stepanovich, curator of the Dostoyevsky Museum and warden of several other apartments in the building – a plump, silver-haired man with a cherubic face and an expression of jovial disrespectful humour.
‘Ah, my dear Kolya.’ He bubbled over with impatience as Nikolai dismounted from his bicycle. ‘Those idiots in apartment No. 7 have blocked the ventilator. I’m just having it fixed. They’ve always been pests. Last winter when the heating broke down they tore up all the parquet flooring and set fire to it.’ Pyotr continued without pause: ‘But what’s worse is that some corporation wants to open up a chain of replica Dostoyevsky apartments all over town with underground skating rinks or car parks or something. They are frightened that another firm will poach me and they want me to sign a document saying I don’t exist and that I’ve never existed.’
‘Don’t sign it,’ said Nikolai. ‘You’ll do yourself out of a job. Have a look at this.’ He pulled the newspaper out and showed the advertisement to Pyotr.
‘Phew.’ Pyotr raised his eyebrows and looked impressed. ‘That’s interesting. The group is meeting tomorrow night. Why don’t you bring this along? The usual place, Vasili’s apartment in Mokhovaya Street.’
Nikolai made his way into the theatre. His colleague Fyodor was already applying make-up in the cramped dressing room.
‘I’ll be glad to be doing this for the
last time,’ Nikolai said as the dresser strapped him into an enormous prosthetic nose, then helped him into the costume of a state councillor, plumed hat, gold-embroidered uniform and breeches.
As the play reached its climax a member of the audience shouted out to somebody across the auditorium: ‘Oh for God’s sake stop rustling those sweet-papers.’
A voice from the stalls shouted back: ‘It’s my birthday and I’ll eat as many sweets as I want to.’
The actors continued stoically and took their final bows.
After the performance, Fyodor and Nikolai, friends since the days they had been brought from the provinces as pioneers to train as actors in Leningrad, went for a meal at a Ukrainian restaurant around the corner.
A sulky old man in the scarlet baggy trousers of Ukrainian national dress sat by the entrance.
‘How is Ukraine?’ Nikolai asked with concern.
The old man shrugged: ‘It’s all the same to me. I’m going back to Canada in two weeks’ time. I live there now. I’m just dressed up like this to help my brother-in-law.’
The two actors pulled chairs up to a table under the window and ordered marinated herrings with boiled potatoes, some raw red onion rings and a beetroot salad. Nikolai tucked into his herrings:
‘I still think the old ways were best, ensemble work with permanent companies.’
Fyodor shook his head:
‘No, we got stale. Now we can experiment. Try new stuff. What’s the matter with you, Nika? You didn’t like communism, now you don’t like capitalism.’
Nikolai grinned and banged his fist on the table: ‘I’m Russian. Nothing pleases me. Have you got any work coming up?’
‘I have,’ replied Fyodor. ‘I’m working for an oligarch. He’s making fake documentaries on the Ukraine for Russian television. All I needed was to be able to do a Ukrainian accent. Half of his estate has been made into a vast tank training ground scarred with caterpillar tracks. Tanks are hired and blown up. It’s quite something.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I don’t know. We all address him as Midas.’
Nikolai was impressed: an oligarch so elevated that he had no name.
Fyodor continued: ‘He’s intending to run for president. I expect he’ll choose a name then. He seems quite friendly – comes down to watch the shoot and we chat. Apparently, his advisor has told him he needs to spend time in prison to boost his credentials as a dissident in opposition. I could probably get you a job working for him too.’
Nikolai pulled the newspaper from his pocket: ‘Thanks, maybe, but I’ll try this other little project first.’ He showed Fyodor the advertisement.
‘Good luck with that,’ said Fyodor.
The friends finished their meal and waved each other an affectionate goodbye on the canal footpath.
Nikolai cycled along the embankment past the façades of the Italianate buildings. It was that time of year when the pale sun still shone late into the night. In the summer light the mustard yellows, dusky pinks and pistachio greens of the house fronts reminded him of the chalk pastels he had used as a child at school in Kazan. A boy sitting at the side of the road unfolded his accordion which suddenly burst into blossom with a Strauss waltz. Nikolai cycled on home, his spirits raised.
The Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels, rose up like a sparkling cliff against the blue sky.
A black limousine with tinted windows drew up in the forecourt, forcing a tiny old woman pushing a bicycle to give an eccentric cat-leap to one side to avoid being knocked down. Out of the car strode a short balding man bristling with purpose. Up the ramp he went at phenomenal speed and disappeared into the building.
A few minutes later Madame Ursula Schultz, a neatly coiffed, blonde woman in her forties, wearing a blue and white neckerchief, stood outside looking up at the glittering mega-block where she was due to attend a meeting about her next posting to Russia.
Once inside the building she was assigned an escort, a bright breezy young woman with long legs. Madame Schultz’s stride was shorter. Her calves ached as they raced along the carpeted corridors. Just as the guide was telling her how easy it was to understand the layout of the building, a lift stopped beside them. The doors opened to reveal a group of people shouting and waving their arms:
‘We are lost. Help us. We are lost. Which floor is the—’ The lift doors shut and the lift continued on its downward journey.
The escort ushered her into the conference room and departed. Committee members were gathering. Madame Schultz found her name-card at the large oval table and sat down, placing her handbag carefully at her feet. In front of her a fixed microphone reared up like a single black spermatozoon on a thin curved stalk.
The Director of Commission, Mr Jan Jesek – the very same balding man who had catapulted out of the limousine – now appeared in the doorway. He sat down at one end of the table and leaned towards his microphone.
‘Good morning to you all. As you know, our function here is to implement the decisions taken by the European Parliament. Parliament is anxious to rein in Russia after their behaviour in the Ukraine and to bring them round to our way of thinking. This has meant the imposition of sanctions and the cancellation of some of our Russian projects. Funding for the construction of the sludge incineration plant in Petersburg, for instance, has been withdrawn.
‘However, Parliament believes that we can still influence Russia through culture. And the purpose of this meeting is to welcome Madame Schultz, who has left her posting in Brazil and is now the new Head of Co-operation in our Russian delegation in Moscow.’
A faint ripple of applause went round the table.
‘Madame Schultz will be in charge of implementing the cultural co-operation project. With regard to Russia, we want to encourage and disseminate our values of tolerance, our sensitivity to ethnic differences and, above all, our respect for moderation. We in the European Union want to make the world a better place. So we will promote magazines and graphic works challenging extremism and the problems of corruption and xenophobia apparent in Russia today.
‘The contract will fall under the Respect programme’s outreach strategy for value-driven pedagogical tools. The grant will be put up for tender in the usual way and will be given to whichever group of Russians earns the approval of the Evaluation Committee. The European Union will contribute 80 per cent of the total – that is 70,000 euros – and the other 20 per cent must be raised by the Russians themselves. Madame Schultz, may we all wish you well.’
The meeting over, Mr Jesek gathered his belongings and left the room. The other committee members gradually dispersed.
Madame Ursula Schultz lingered to breathe in the air of her new responsibilities. It would be up to her to give a gentle tweak to the tail of the Russian bear and lead it in the direction of moderation and Western-style democracy. She rather wished now that she had not exaggerated the extent of her Russian speaking abilities on her CV. But she determined to remedy that with study and a new dictionary.
The next day she flew to Moscow.
Over the years a small group of writers and artists in Petersburg had built a nest in Vasili Babikov’s second-floor apartment in Mokhovaya Street. They had started as the Rehabilitation of Obscure Poems Society. This flourished until a ferocious argument about the merits of a certain lyrical poet resulted in one of their number saying goodbye after dinner and throwing himself out of the tall casement windows onto the cobbles below. Since then the group had met, squabbled, read each other’s work and submitted various stories and poems for publication in magazines – while always keeping the casement windows shut. They had been thus engaged for over thirty years.
The footpath along Mokhovaya Street consisted of mud baked hard by the heat with a few sparse shoots of grass poking through. Nikolai lifted the latch on a pair of heavy wooden doors with iron struts that led into Vasili’s apartment building. The badly-lit entrance lobby with its stone walls exuded a smell of damp and mould. F
acing him was a circular stairway with wide pitted stone steps. Grey light filtered through the large dirty window on the first-floor landing opposite. A glass jar half full of cigarette ends stood on the window sill. He made his way up to the second floor.
He had, in fact, glimpsed Vasili Babikov a few weeks earlier. Nikolai had fallen asleep on the metro and overshot his stop. As he ascended the escalator he caught sight of Vasili, dressed as usual in black, like an undertaker, descending on the downward escalator:
‘Oi. Vasili. I thought you’d retired.’
‘No. Died,’ came the response as Vasili, without looking up, was swept down to the depths of the station.
Nikolai rang the doorbell. Vasili opened the door and ushered him inside. Nikolai noted two silvery moths clinging to the lapel of Vasili’s jacket. And this was a man who used to be immaculate and was even known, in his youth, to have made sure that a trouser press was available before getting in to bed with a new lover.
The apartment consisted of one large high-ceilinged room with casement windows and a small balcony. Opening off this room were four or five doors leading to quarters which the Babikovs let out to various lodgers. At the far end was a parrot in a cage covered by a green brocade cloth. The room contained an oval mahogany table surrounded by chairs and a small side table holding an electric samovar.
The core group of writers was already assembled. Shimon Simonov, a tall stooping ex-alcoholic who considered himself an expert on Pushkin, was seated next to Pyotr Stepanovich from the Dostoyevsky Museum. Egor Dudnik, a man with a bristling black moustache, who was easily brought to the point of seething, was standing near the table. Egor had a chip on his shoulder about his name. He was convinced that his name was only suitable for a village idiot. A talented cartoonist, he made his living carving tombstones. The cemetery business was booming, with the new middle class favouring black marble headstones. Every day, Egor Dudnik resented having to inscribe names more impressive than his own.
The Master of Chaos Page 5