The indicated life span of the man on the note was 1857–1934. He looked like a banker, but what had he done to be on a twenty-pound note in the twenty-first century? Lev stared at his determined jaw, squinted at his name written out in a scrawl beneath the wing collar, but couldn’t read it. He thought that this was a person who would never have known any other system of being alive but Capitalism. He would have heard the names Hitler and Stalin, but not been afraid—would have had no need to be afraid of anything except a little loss of capital in what Americans called the Crash, when men in New York had jumped out of windows and off roofs. He would have died safely in his bed before London was bombed to ruins, before Europe was torn apart. Right to the end of his days, the angel’s radiance had probably shone on this man’s brow and on his fusty clothes, because it was known across the world: the English were
lucky.
Well, thought Lev, I’m going to their country now, and I’m going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck. I’ve left Auror, and that leaving of my home was hard and bitter, but my time is coming.
Lev was roused from his thoughts by the noise of Lydia’s book falling to the floor of the bus, and he looked at her and saw that she’d gone to sleep, and he studied her face with its martyrdom of moles. He put her age at about thirty-nine. She appeared to sleep without travail. He imagined her sitting in some booth with earphones clamped to her mousy hair, buoyant and alert on a relentless tide of simultaneous translation.
May you help me, please? No. May I help
you
.
Lev decided, as the night progressed, to try to remember certain significant cigarettes of the past. He possessed a vibrant imagination. At the Baryn sawmill he’d been known, derogatorily, as a “dreamer.” “Life is not for dreaming, Lev,” his boss had warned. “Dreaming leads to subversion.” But Lev knew that his nature was fragile, easily distracted, easily made joyful or melancholy by the strangest of small things, and that this condition had afflicted his boyhood and his adolescence and had, perhaps, prevented him from getting on as a man. Especially after Marina had gone. Because now her death was with him always, like a shadow on the X-ray of his spirit. Other men might have been able to chase this shadow away—with drink, or with young women, or with the novelty of making money—but Lev hadn’t even tried. He knew that forgetting Marina was something he was not yet capable of doing.
All around him on the coach, passengers were dozing. Some lay slumped toward the aisle, their arms hanging loosely down in an attitude of surrender. The air was filled with repetitive sighing. Lev pulled the peak of his cap farther over his face and decided to remember what was always known by him and his mother, Ina, as “the poinsettia miracle,” because this was a story that led toward a good ending, toward a smoke as immaculate as love.
Ina was a woman who never allowed herself to care about anything, because, she often said, “What’s the point of it, when life takes everything away?” But there were a few things that gave her joy and one of these was the poinsettia. Scarlet-leafed and shaped like a fir, resembling a brilliant man-made artifact more than a living plant, poinsettias excited in Ina a sober admiration, for their unique strangeness, for their seeming permanence in a world of perpetually fading and dying things.
One Sunday morning some years ago, near to Ina’s sixty-fifth birthday, Lev had got up very early and cycled twenty-four miles to Yarbl, where flowers and plants were sold in an openair market behind the railway station. It was an almost autumnal day, and on the silent figures setting out their stalls a tender light was falling. Lev smoked and watched from the railway buffet, where he drank coffee and vodka. Then he went out and began to look for poinsettias.
Most of the stuff sold in the Yarbl market was fledgling food: cabbage plants, sunflower seeds, sprouting potatoes, currant bushes, bilberry canes. But more and more people were indulging their half-forgotten taste for decorative, useless things and the sale of flowers was increasing as each year passed.
Poinsettias were always visible from a long way off. Lev walked slowly along, alert for red. The sun shone on his scuffed black shoes. His heart felt strangely light. His mother was going to be sixty-five years old and he would surprise and astonish her by planting a trough of poinsettias on her porch, and in the evenings she would sit and do her knitting and admire them, and neighbors would arrive and congratulate her—on the flowers and on the care her son had taken.
But there were no poinsettias in the market. Up and down Lev trudged, staring bleakly at carrot fern, at onion sets, at plastic bags filled with pig manure and ash.
No poinsettias.
The great catastrophe of this now announced itself to Lev. So he began again, retracing his steps along the lines of stalls, stopping now and then to badger the stall holders, recognizing that this badgering was accusatory, suggestive of the notion that these people were
grays,
keeping the red plants out of sight under the trestles, waiting for buyers who offered American dollars or motor parts or drugs.
“I
need
poinsettias,” he heard himself say, like a man parched with thirst or a petulant only child.
“Sorry, comrade,” said the market traders. “Only at Christmas.”
All he could do was pedal home to Auror. Behind his bicycle he dragged a homemade wooden trailer (built with offcuts poached from the Baryn lumber yard) and the wheels of this trailer squeaked mockingly as the miles passed. The emptiness of Ina’s sixty-fifth birthday yawned before Lev like an abandoned mine.
Lev shifted quietly in his seat, trying not to disturb Lydia’s sleep. He laid his head on the cool window glass. Then he remembered the sight that had greeted him, like a vision, in some lost village along the road: an old woman dressed in black, sitting silently on a chair in front of her house, with a baby sleeping in a plastic pram by her side. And at her feet a motley of possessions for sale: a gramophone, some scales and weights, an embroidered shawl, a pair of leather bellows. And a barrow of poinsettia plants, their leaves newly tinctured with red.
Lev had wobbled on the bike, wondering if he was dreaming. He put a foot down on the dusty road. “Poinsettias, Grandma, are they?”
“Is that their name? I call them red flags.”
He bought them all. The trailer was crammed and heavy. His money was gone.
He hid them under sacks until it was dark, planted them out in Ina’s trough under the stars, and stood by them, watching the dawn come up, and when the sun reached them, the red of their leaves intensified in a startling way, as when desert crocuses bloom after rain. And that was when Lev lit a cigarette. He sat down on the steps of Ina’s porch and smoked and stared at the poinsettias, and the cigarette was like radiant amber in him, and he smoked it right down to its last centimeter and then put it out, but still kept it pressed into his muddy hand.
Lev slept, after all.
He woke when the coach stopped for gas, somewhere in Austria, he assumed, for the petrol station was large and bright, and in an open bay to one side of it was parked a silent congregation of trucks, with German names written on them, lit by orange sodium light.
Freuhof. Bosch. Grunewald. Königstransporte
. . .
Lydia was awake, and together she and Lev got off the bus and breathed the cool night air. Lydia pulled a cardigan round her shoulders. Lev looked for dawn in the sky, but could see no sign of it. He lit a cigarette. His hands trembled as he took it in and out of his mouth.
“It’s going to be cold in England,” said Lydia. “Are you prepared for that?”
Lev thought about his imaginary tall house, with the rain coming down and the television flickering and the red buses going past.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“When the winter comes,” said Lydia, “we’re going to be shocked.”
“Our own winters are cold,” said Lev.
“Yes, but not for so long. In England, I’ve been told, some winters never quite depart.”
“You mean there’s no summer?”
“There is summer. But you don’t feel it in your blood.”
Other passengers from the coach were now wandering around the gas station. Some were making visits to the washrooms. Others just stood about, as Lev and Lydia were doing, shivering a little, onlookers unsure what they were looking at, arrivals who had not yet arrived, everybody in transit and uncertain what time their watches should be telling. Behind the area where the trucks were parked lay a deep, impenetrable darkness of trees.
Lev had a sudden desire to send a postcard from this place to his daughter, Maya, to describe this night limbo to her: the sodium sky, the trees unmoving, the glare of the pay station, the people like people in an art gallery, helpless before the unexplained exhibits. But Maya was too young to understand any of this. She was only five. When morning came, she would take Ina’s hand and walk to school. For her lunch, she would eat cold sausage and poppy-seed bread. When she came home, Ina would give her goat’s milk with cinnamon in a yellow glass and raisin cakes and rose-petal jam. She would do her homework at the kitchen table, then go out into the main street of Auror and look for her friends, and they would play with the goats and chickens in the dust.
“I miss my daughter already,” Lev said to Lydia.
By the time the coach crossed the border between Germany and Holland, Lev had surrendered himself to it: to his own small space by the window; to the eternal hum of the air conditioning; to the quiet presence of Lydia, who offered him eggs and dried fruit and pieces of chocolate; to the smell and voices of the other passengers; to the chemical odor of the on-board lavatory; to the feeling of moving slowly across wide distances, but moving always forward and on.
Watching the flat fields and the shimmering poplars, the canals and windmills and villages and grazing animals of the Netherlands going past, Lev felt so peaceful and quiet that it was as if the bus had become his life and he would never be asked to stir from the inertia of this bus life ever again. He began to wish Europe were larger, so that he could linger over its scenery for days and days to come, until something in him altered, until he got bored with hard-boiled eggs and the sight of cattle in green pastures and he rediscovered the will to arrive at his destination.
He knew his growing apathy was dangerous. He began to wish that his best friend, Rudi, was with him. Rudi never surrendered to anything, and he wouldn’t have surrendered to the opium of the passing miles. Rudi fought a pitched battle with life through every waking hour. “Life is just a
system,
” Rudi often reminded Lev. “All that matters is cracking the system.” In his sleep, Rudi’s body lay crouched, with his fists bunched in front of his chest, like a boxer’s. When he woke, he sprang and kicked away the bedclothes. His wild dark hair gleamed with its own invincible shine. He loved vodka and cinema and football. He dreamed of owning what he called a “serious car.” In the bus, Rudi would have sung songs and danced folk dances in the aisle and traded goods with other passengers. He would have
resisted
.
Like Lev, Rudi was a chain-smoker. Once, after the sawmill closed, they’d made a smoke-filled journey together to the distant city of Glic, in the deep, purple cold of winter, when the sun hung low among the bones of trees and ice gleamed like a diamond coating on the railway lines, and Rudi’s pockets were stashed with
gray
money, and in his suitcase lay eleven bottles of vodka, cradled in straw.
Rumors of an American car, a Chevrolet Phoenix, for sale in Glic had reached Rudi in Auror. Rudi lovingly described this car as a “Tchevi.” He said it was blue with white and chrome trim and had only done two hundred and forty thousand miles, and he was going to travel to Glic and see it, and if he could beat the owner down on the price, he was going to damn well buy it and drive it home. The fact that Rudi had never driven a car before didn’t worry him at all. “Why should it?” he said to Lev. “I drove a heavy-lifting vehicle at the sawmill every day of my fucking life. Driving is driving. And with American cars you don’t even have to worry about gears. You just slam the stick into the ‘D-for-drive’ position and take off.”
The train was hot, with a fat heating pipe running directly under the seats. Lev and Rudi had a carriage to themselves. They piled their sheepskin coats and fur hats into the luggage rack and opened the vodka suitcase and played music on a tiny, shrieking radio, small as a rat. The hot vodka fug of the carriage was beautiful and wild. They soon felt as reckless as mercenaries. When the ticket collector came round, they embraced him on both cheeks.
At Glic, they stepped out into a snow blizzard, but their blood was still hot and so the snow seemed delectable to them, like the caress of a young girl’s hand on their faces, and they stumbled through the streets laughing. But by then the night was coming down and Rudi announced, “I’m not looking at the Tchevi in the fucking dark. I want to see it gleaming.” So they stopped at the first frugal guesthouse they found and sated their hunger with bowls of goulash and dumplings, and went to sleep in a narrow room that smelled of mothballs and linoleum polish, and never stirred till morning.
The sun was up in a clear blue sky when Lev and Rudi found their way to the Tchevi owner’s building. The snow all around them was thick and clean. And there it was, parked alone on the dingy street, under a solitary linden tree, the full extraordinary length and bulk of it, an ancient sky-blue Chevrolet Phoenix with white fins and shining chrome trim; and Rudi fell to his knees. “That’s my girl,” he said. “That’s my baby!”
It had its imperfections. On the driver’s door, one hinge had rusted away. The rubber windshield-wiper blades had perished to almost nothing in successive cold winters. All four tires were worn. The radio didn’t work.
Lev watched Rudi hesitate. He walked round and round the car, trailing his hand over the bodywork, scooping snow from the roof, examining the wiper blades, kicking the tires, opening and closing the defective door. Then he looked up and said, “I’ll take her.” After that, he began to haggle, but the owner understood how great was Rudi’s longing for the car and refused to lower his price by more than a fraction. The Tchevi cost Rudi everything he had with him, including his sheepskin coat and his fur hat and five of the eight bottles of vodka remaining in the suitcase. The owner was a professor of mathematics.