Pravda (8 page)

Or maybe this was all lies too. Maybe he was just making everything romantic, as he always, always did (the true sign of a monster). At the end of each of the culs-de-sac down which his mind careered, there was, he knew, a gaudy theater wherein savage satires were ever being staged. And to whom was he talking anyway? There was nobody left to tell. His wife was dead. He could not trust himself one inch.

Vanished entirely now was Nicholas's dapper manner, and though dressed the same, he appeared in the doorway of his own bedroom like a man who spent every day of his life fighting hand to hand through Hades and back.

"You're home!" Alessandro came out of the bathroom, steam chasing him, a towel wrapped around his waist and a dressing gown draped over his shoulders—an unusual modesty, Nicholas registered, and a symptom of uncertainty. Truly the young these days were so very, very obvious. Like the puerile century, they lacked charisma. But here at least was relief: the old salve of younger skin.

"Did it take all afternoon?"

"Yes, it did." Nicholas put his slim diplomatic case on the polished marble surface of his dresser. Life, the great distraction, was stirring sluggishly in his blood. And Alessandro's black hair was still wet and water ran from the curls on his forehead, causing him now
to wipe his forearm across his brow—a little too slowly, Nicholas noticed. Despite the robe and towel, there was still, as always with Alessandro, a flirtatious door ajar. Evidently, though, the poor man had no idea what mood to expect. Understandable. Nicholas knew well enough that people lived in constant trepidation of his moods. (Had his temperament always been so changeable, or had he made it so—in order that people would fear him? He couldn't remember. So much was dark beyond eighteen. All was secret and suspicious and ... and bloody
Soviet.)
In any case, it was obvious that Alessandro was waiting for his cue. So, disregarding the infantile whine of the abysmal music, Nicholas forced himself to smile his tight-lipped smile.

"But the good news is that I do not have to go to London. They can do everything through the Paris office."

"That's great, Nick." Alessandro fastened the gown but let the towel drop.

"And so tonight we are going to celebrate. Forget cooking. Forget that bloody concert." Nicholas hated to have his name shortened. Either Alessandro did it deliberately to annoy him, or he did it because he wanted to insist on some sort of parity. What a farce. Through forty years of impatience, Nicholas still could not make up his mind which was more annoying, the guile of straight women or the wiles of gay men. They were as bad as each other. A tragedy, really, when what one really wanted was a straight man. But let Alessandro have his junior satisfactions; Nicholas's mood at least was recovering.

"Le Castebin, I think." Nicholas forced another smile. "Shall we? You can have your
langoustines façon.
And their new house Champagne—from Troyes, Gaston tells me—is sublime. We'll dispatch a bottle each—why not? It's a while since we got ourselves well and truly tight. Brahms is such a terrible bore anyway." Nicholas realized that he had better show some interest. "And anyway, you ... you must tell me about Greece. I want to know all the details. Did you get to Delphi? Did the oracle have news for us?"

"I was in Santorini." Alessandro picked up the shirt lying ready on the bed. The dressing gown came off.

Nicholas looked, unreservedly. "You have caught the sun again."

"I topped up on the sun bed with Freddie at the gym while you were away." Alessandro enjoyed flattery more than anything else in the world and could tease it out of quick-drying cement if he applied himself.

The phrase "topped up" annoyed Nicholas, though. The word lurking behind it, the word "tan," annoyed him too. And the name Freddie somehow infuriated him. Campness. But the revealed body—ah, the naked body of this ... this other ... The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapors of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.

Arkady and Henry emerged into the deepening twilight of the northern sky and set off along the potholed street that ran between the six dilapidated tower blocks similar to their own. With the exception of three old women dragging home their heavy handcart full of cheap fizzy drinks and expensive fake mineral water, weaving oddly on their invisible route through the worst of the ruts, everybody was drunk: the half-dozen old men sitting on the weedy verge around their upturned crate on legless chairs, seating ripped from abandoned cars; the heavily made-up girl now leaving block two with her infant in an improvised sling, her three-year-old and her five-year-old—cigarette cocked and burning—all in sullen attendance and ready for the ride into town and another night working together with the tourist bar spill; the gang of boys, nine- or ten-year-olds, standing around an old metal drum that they had somehow managed to ignite on the corner and every now and then reaching in with tar-caked hands to chuck fume-spewing firebombs at each other or any passerby they did not recognize, then swapping their vodka-spiked drink tins from hand to hand so they could blow cool air on their blackened fingers.

The two turned right, away from the few feeble street-lamps that would have taken them in the direction of Primorskaya metro station. Instead they walked toward the Smolensky cemetery, a woodland, half wild, half kempt, with winding paths, dense thickets, and sudden glades that sat square in the center of Vasilevsky Island—a shortcut on their way into town.

Still in silence, they came to the gap in the railings and the unofficial path, which led off the road and into the cemetery. Despite the sudden showers throughout the day, the ground underfoot was damp rather than muddy and they were able to walk with relative ease between the trees. Arkady carried his concert shoes around his neck, dangling by the laces; he was still wearing his cap; and he had rolled up his jeans a little to accommodate his boots. Henry, meanwhile, looked as incongruous as ever, his hooded top inside his arm-patched corduroy sports jacket, his black jeans cut too narrow.

At length they emerged onto one of the main cross-paths through the cemetery and Henry felt the need to speak. "Will the newspapers be there?"

"I forgot—Grisha came today," Arkady said, as if it were he, not Henry, who had begun. "This morning, when you were teaching."

Henry's eyes went across, though his head did not turn. "Actually, I wasn't. I was ringing up hotels and restaurants and nightclubs in London for little Ludmilla." He had been supplementing his diminishing capital for five years with a haphazard income from teaching English as a foreign language, but he'd let the contacts shrivel. And though his habit was cheaper here than anywhere save Afghanistan itself, he was now down to a few thousand and he knew that something had to be done about money and soon. "My last pupil is leaving to join her friends, and her mother needed her teacher to argue room rates at the Covent Garden Hotel for two hours."

"All your little bitches go to London. The British must believe Russia is made only of millionaires' daughters. Or whores."

"What did Grisha want?"

"A salsa partner."

"I do not owe him any money," Henry asserted, though whether to himself or to Arkady wasn't clear. "He oversupplied me. I told him. I have paid him for what I asked for. I don't need the extra he gave me. I told him that three times. He more or less forced me. So he can't get all cross now if I am—"

"You understand well what he wants."

"I don't even know these people he seems to think I'm friends with. Not anymore. Most of the English, French, and Germans I used to hang around with have left or gone to Moscow or run out of excuses for doing nothing and returned home. People move on. Especially the foreign kids. The new crowd, whoever they are—Grisha probably knows them as well as I do."

"Did you give him your shit back?"

"No." Henry wished that he had taken measures to rectify the hole in his old black brogues. "How could I? I just won't get any more for a while."

Arkady's eyes narrowed for a moment, then swept the sky. "I need a piss," he said.

He stepped to the side of the track, where a once grand but now untended grave with an elaborate wrought-iron Orthodox cross was being choked by weeds.

Henry walked on alone toward the crossroads where the track that led to the central chapel met their own. It was thoroughly dark now. Ahead, the trees overhung in a complete canopy, branches shifting, though Henry could not feel any wind. An owl was hooting somewhere close by. He thought he saw its shape perched on a headstone. But it was only a trick of the ivy. Some cat or rat, rabbit or badger—he had no idea what—was rustling through the undergrowth to his left.

Unexpectedly, a cast of primitive superstitions he believed long forgotten revealed themselves in the forefront of his imagination. He smiled nervously to himself, drew rueful breath, and shook his head. Silly. Nonetheless, there was something about the Smolensky (and the answering crack of a twig) that caused him to wonder whether the place affected Arkady in the same way. After all, here they were, in a cemetery thronged with the Petersburg dead, a cemetery that had been built on the agonized bones of all those who had perished in hauling the city up from the marsh, and a cemetery whose perimeter was this very night ringed by their living and disendowed descendents—the desperate and the diseased—here they were, and Arkady was pausing unconcernedly to piss on an unknown headstone. One thing for certain: these ornate Old Believer crosses seemed to afford purchase only to the weeds. More places to bind and swathe.

He reached the crossroads and stood waiting. He often paused here on his way into town, by the main track down which the hearses came, day after day, followed always, he had noticed, by that stubborn delegation of white-haired women, forever in black, forever wailing, as if there were not time enough left in the world to get all the mourning done. But how quickly the generations forgot: his own father's father, Henry had hardly known, and his great-grandfather not at all, no more who he was than where he was from. In so many brief years we become strangers to our own blood.

His pocket was vibrating.

Someone was trying to call him. No: there was a text message on his phone. Grisha. He thumbed it open. In Russian: "Your sugar bitch is dead."

But in the time it took for him to turn and look for her son, he made the decision not to tell Arkady. Not until after the concert.

Ten-thirty in Petersburg. Seven-thirty in London. And the worst night of his life was squatting black and heavy in the shabby courtyard outside. He sat motionless in the window of Yana's mother's apartment, his face a picture of mute and frozen shock, staring out like some child marquis on the place where they had lately guillotined his mother. Opposite his vantage, the locksmith was closing up on the ground floor and the builders, two brothers from Belarus, worked with naked bulbs suspended from naked joists in the room above. A cat held mangy station at the bottom of the adjacent stairs, its back to the bags of sand. He continued to hold the phone in its cradle. Isabella would call back any moment and he would suddenly become animate again, everything would start over, everything would race and swerve and dart and fall. Yana's mother was due to return from her gathering of special supplies. After their surreal trip to the hospital, Yana had gone back to the CCCP Café. But she would be home soon too. As would Yana's brother, Arytom, carrying his endless manuscripts and proofs.

Gabriel let it ring once. His focus seemed to journey in from far away; his head lowered a moment, and abruptly he had the handset to his ear and he was back in the storm and swell of the present.

"Can you hear me properly now? Is this line better?"

"Yes. Forget my mobile. It—"

"I couldn't get through."

"Sorry, Lina. Isabella called again." This was only the second time they had spoken since the afternoon, and already he knew that
Lina was his savior and that he would never ever be able to do without her, not for one day, not for the rest of his life.

"Okay—this is definitely Yana's landline? I can use this."

"Her mother's, yes. Yes, I think it's fine."

"Will you be okay there tonight, Gabriel?"

"Yes ... I don't know where I ... I will be all right."

Her voice became even more measured. "Okay, now, listen. I have booked you into the Grand Hotel Europe, Gabriel, where we stayed. For tomorrow. It's all on my credit card. I don't want you to even think about the money. We can talk in the morning about whether you want to go there. But I think you should have somewhere as a base. I've booked a twin, so you can be with Isabella. If you prefer to stay at Yana's mother's until later, then fine, but it's there if you want. We can talk about it tomorrow."

"Lina. God, you don't ... Thank you. Thanks."

"And you have spoken with the consulate?

"Yes. Yes, I have. A guy called Julian Avery there—he's being very helpful."

"So don't forget, I can call people from here too. I can call anyone you need—if it helps, I mean. I will be here on standby in the morning. There's a lot I can do from here."

"Okay."

Gentle now: "We have to be practical for the time being."

"Yes."

"You are sure that you are going to have the funeral in Petersburg?"

"Yes. It's what Mum wanted."

"Right. Well, I'll try to get a visa first thing tomorrow and I will be there ... Thursday, Thursday night. Latest, Friday. Okay?" "If you can. But don't—" "You have enough money?" "Yes.Yes ... it's all right. I have money." "You have some food for tonight?" "I'm not—"

"I know. But you should try to eat something. Will Yana's mother get you something?"

"It'll be okay, Lina."

"Just don't ... Just take care of yourself. You need all that fierce strength of yours. And try to focus on whatever you need to do. Try not to think too much, Gabriel. Sometimes just doing stuff is
best—you know, fool the days, or you'll go crazy. When is Isabella there?"