“Well, this is what I wondered,” said Lev. “I wondered whether Lora would like to work with me in the kitchen.”
“I’m not a chef, Lev.”
“Hey, but wait a minute, you make nice meals, babe,” said Rudi. “That’s a start. Isn’t it? And sometimes she has to make them out of heels of sausage and stale bread and God knows what kind of bitter leaves. Eh?”
“Exactly,” said Lev. “Now I can get you good ingredients, Lora, and teach you everything G. K. Ashe and Panno the Greek taught me.”
Lora leaned against Lev and put a tender kiss on his cheek. “We missed you so,” she said. “Didn’t we, Rudi?”
“Yes, we fucking did. Especially when we thought you were never coming back. Oh shit, I know it’s eleven in the morning, or whatever, but let’s have some drinks to celebrate. Vodka for sterilization!”
Rudi got up to fetch the glasses and the
vodichka.
Lev looked round at the familiar room and thought that he could sit there forever with his friends: let time drift and pass and never want to move from their side.
He reached for the vodka.
The next morning, Lev woke on Rudi’s sofa. The world was encased in ice. Droplets of the thaw had petrified into a million glinting pieces of glass. As the sun rose, the dazzle of this glass world was breathtaking to see.
Lev sat with Rudi and Lora at the kitchen table, nursing his hangover, drinking Fanta, munching stale rice cakes. Beyond the window, the ice trees tinkled in the northerly breeze, like a forest of chandeliers.
It was tempting to stay there, by the woodstove, not move for another whole day, to doze in the afternoon, to talk on and on with Rudi and Lora until a second night fell. But Lev was now longing to see his daughter.
This was the day when he would finally arrive home.
“Listen,” said Rudi, “let me go ahead, prepare Ina. Otherwise when she sees you, she’s going to fall over into the fucking woodpile. You follow along.”
“No,” said Lev. “I know where Mamma will be on a Sunday morning: church. I’ll wait for her outside. She’ll be full of sanctity so, with any luck, she won’t yell at me.”
“Yeah, but her heart may stop.”
Lev sighed. “Then it’s a good end. She dies in front of her church, knowing her Prodigal Son has come back, after all.”
Lev took a shower, then repacked his bag and set out. He walked slowly through the village. From behind closed windows, from behind lace curtains, he saw one or two people stare at him, a figure they almost recognized, wandering alone through the empty morning.
Now he stood in front of his house and looked at it. Nothing moved here: no sound at all. Even the machinery at the river had fallen silent. The boards of the wooden veranda were bleached gray-white with the passing of the seasons. A small purple bicycle was propped up against the wall beside the front door.
Lev found himself shivering. He wasn’t used to the cold of Auror. Found himself wondering how he’d ever survived all those winters at the lumber yard. This work now had in his mind something inhuman about it, as though it had been a form of unspoken punishment all along—punishment for the simple crime of being alive in a complicated age.
He went up the steps to his front door. At his back, he could imagine it, the floodwater rising, already swallowing whatever had been left lying on the ground—broken tools, sacks of rotted potatoes, plastic buckets, chicken bones left by the dogs—then beginning to wash round the walls of the houses, beginning to seem deep, beginning to look green and dark . . . And he thought, as he stood shivering outside his door, that it didn’t matter, that Auror was a place so lonely, so abandoned by time, it was right to drown it, right to force its inhabitants to leave behind their dirt roads, their spirit rags, and join the twenty-first-century world.
Instead of walking down to the church, Lev went into the house and crouched by the woodstove, trying to get warm. The room smelled of damp wool. On a wooden clotheshorse, some of Maya’s little clothes were drying. The doll she’d named Lili sat in a chair with her eyes rolled shut. Lev went to his bag and took out the presents he had brought for his mother and daughter and laid them out on the table, beside some plastic flowers Ina had stuck into a glass vase. He lit a cigarette and waited.
After what felt like a long time, he heard their voices, Maya’s light as an elf’s in the frozen air, Ina’s a low, anxious growl. He went to the door and opened it and saw them walking up the path. Ina let out a shriek and clutched her chest, wrapped in its black shawl. Maya stood still and stared at him. He didn’t know what else to do or say except smile and hold out his arms. Then Maya began a delirious shouting: “Pappa! Pappa!
PAPPA
!
PAPPA
!” And she came pelting toward him, and he lifted her up and whirled her round, kissed her face, her head in its knitted bobble hat, then held her tightly, tightly against his heart, and told her he was home, home for good, and that everything, now, was going to be all right.
Ina regarded him from a distance, hugging her shawl round her, binding her arms, so that she could remain separate and aloof from him, keeping her anger intact. Lev saw that her face looked older and her eyes smaller. He saw, too, that she was trembling.
“You’ve put on weight,” she said.
Rudi and Lev drove to Baryn and put up at the Hotel Kreis. Lev had plans for a three-day visit. “In the daytime we look for premises,” he said. “In the evenings and at lunchtime we go round the restaurants and cafés, see what’s happening to the food.”
On the Baryn road Rudi drove like a man rushing to a longed-for date. He played the radio loud, talked through the din, told Lev that as well as being the face-of-the-place he could “gun the suppliers into line,” fill the Tchevi’s trunk with crates of guinea fowl and boxes of lettuce.
“They’re gonna fear the sight of this car!” he said. “If they’re not ready with their fucking tomatoes or whatever, they’re gonna wish they’d died in a salt mine.”
Lev suggested they buy a secondhand pickup, for hauling in the bulky items, but Rudi said, “I’m not driving a lousy pickup. Not as long as the Tchevi’s alive.”
“Okay,” said Lev. “I’ll drive the truck.”
“You don’t know how to drive,” said Rudi.
“I’ll learn,” said Lev. “Same way as you did.”
On the first evening, they decided to have dinner in the Café Boris, a familiar restaurant on Market Square.
When they got there, they saw that the Café Boris had been renamed the Brasserie Baryn, and Rudi said, “Uuh-uuh. I don’t like the look of that, Lev. Did some smart-arse chef already get a hold on this town?”
They went in. The interior had been repainted blue. A blue neon sign advertised German lager. In the four corners of the square room stood shiny potted palms. But the smell from the kitchen was immediately familiar to Lev, the smell of beetroot soup, nameless stews, seaweed ravioli. “I think we’re all right,” he said to Rudi. “I’m getting a whiff of Communist food. I can second-guess the menu already.”
The place was almost empty. They ordered two beers from a middle-aged maître d’ so tired of his job, so tired of the world, it seemed, that he dragged himself about the place holding on to the backs of chairs, as though the building were tilting like a train. The backs of his trousers looked varnished, his shoes were filmed with dust.
“Stupendous,” said Rudi. “What an advertisement he is! What a face-of-the-place!”
They began giggling like boys. Couldn’t stop once they’d started. And it was like this, hunched over with laughter, that Eva found them.
She walked like a dancer, carrying the beers on a wooden tray. She wore a black dress and a white apron, with a name badge pinned to it. Her dark hair was tied back with a velvet ribbon. Her hands, setting down the beers, were white and slim.
Lev and Rudi looked up at her and she smiled, watching them struggle to recover from their laughter. And they both had the one thought: she reminded them of Marina.
She went away and came back with menus encased in oily laminate. Her presence at the table was charged. Rudi and Lev took the menus in silence. Eva produced a piece of paper out of her apron pocket and said, “Would you like to hear what the special orders are this evening?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “We’d like to hear.”
“Well,” said Eva, “I’m sorry but there are only two specials tonight. There’s rabbit cooked with juniper berries, or there’s cold venison, served with boiled egg. Hard-boiled egg, I should say.”
“Thank you,” said Lev. Then he added quickly, “Could you bring us the wine list while we decide on our food?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, and tell us what you would recommend, would you? The rabbit, perhaps?”
She blushed, feeling the eyes of the two men on her face, then flickering down, just for one irresistible moment, to her slim body in its waitress’s uniform.
“I think the rabbit is nice,” she said.
She went away, and Lev and Rudi began to drink the German beer. They said nothing for a while. Their laughter was gone. They studied the plastic menus and looked about them at the empty room and the handful of other diners and the maître d’ now standing motionless by the bar counter. The neon sign kept lighting and relighting his face with a ghostly flare of blue.
Rudi said, “D’you remember Lake Essel?”
“Yeah,” said Lev. “Of course I remember Lake Essel. We’ve probably been dying all this time.”
“We
have
been dying all this time,” said Rudi. “That’s what I feel. But now we’re going to recover.”
Eva came back with the wine list and Lev took it. He saw that half the wines listed had been crossed out. “What happened to all these?” he asked.
Again, he saw her blush. “I don’t exactly know,” she said. “I think maybe the French wines dried up. Sorry, I don’t mean literally dried up, but just didn’t get as far as here.”
Lev nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Rudi smiling. Suddenly he turned and said to Eva, “Have you heard about the dam at Auror?”
“The dam at Auror? Yes. Everybody knows about the dam. I guess you’re not from round here. They say the Auror Dam is going to change our lives.”
“Do you think it will?”
“I hope so.” She looked round the empty brasserie. “I hope it’ll bring more people, more prosperity. In time . . .”
She was standing very near to Lev, her hips level with his shoulder. There was a lovely scent about her—something astringent yet seductive.
They’d planned to spend the dinner discussing their itinerary for the following day. They had three premises to see—all shops that had closed. They’d brought along a map of the city so that Rudi could work out the route. But silence had somehow fallen. Neither of them could say Marina’s name, speak the thought about Eva’s resemblance to her, but it was understood between them that something disturbing had happened, like an old piece of music suddenly starting up in a place where no music had ever been heard. Only later, lying wide awake on hard twin beds, listening to the night trams, Rudi said, “She was a good waitress, Lev. Perhaps that’s something we should do while we’re here: take the contact numbers of people you might employ later on.”
In the morning, with a light snow falling, they drove back and forth along the narrow streets of Baryn, parking the Tchevi wherever it could fit, often with two of its wheels mounted on the pavement.
“I hate to see her like that,” said Rudi. “She looks like a tart car hitching up her fucking skirts, or like a dog pissing in the gutter. It’s demeaning for her. So listen, comrade, it’s no use getting premises where the parking’s crap.”
The three shops they were shown, empty since the summer or since the previous year, felt damp and dark. None of them bore any resemblance to the piano shop of Lev’s dreams. The only thing that cheered him was that rents were low. He’d begun to hope that the money he had—almost £12,000—would go a long way in this city.
They were heading back to the Hotel Kreis, in late afternoon, when Lev said, “I’ve just remembered something. Lydia told me about a real piano shop, somewhere off Market Square. Let’s try to find it.”
“Lev,” said Rudi, “I thought you said you’d stopped being a dreamer.”
“No. I never said that. Dreams are what’s got me by.”
They parked on the square, outside the Brasserie Baryn, and asked a man who resembled the former Tchevi owner, the professor of mathematics, if he knew of a music shop in this bit of town.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s right there, on the corner.”
They went in through a heavy door, whose movement set off a jangling bell above. The place was small and old and cramped, fitted with tilting shelves from floor to ceiling. These were stacked with sheet music, ancient 33 r.p.m. records, and what looked like religious books or hymnals. On a central oak table two violins and a tarnished saxophone were displayed on a velvet cloth. The elderly proprietor of the shop sat silent on a wooden chair.
Lev looked around, then back at the proprietor, who hadn’t moved a muscle. He thought, If Pyotor Greszler made an appearance in this shop, this man would get up from his chair and come forward, amazed and flattered, transformed by sudden, ardent emotion.
“Lev,” Rudi whispered, “wrong place, eh? Let’s go.”
“Yup,” said Lev. But then, embarrassed, he turned to the proprietor and said, “Sorry. We made a mistake. We heard there were some premises to let here.”
The old man took up a home-rolled cigarette and reached for a box of matches. His hand shook. “Come again next year,” he said, in a scratchy, smoke-afflicted voice. “I’ll be dead by then.”
Lev gaped.
“Meanwhile, ask next door. Number forty-three. The garage is closing down. They used to sell East German cars. But no one wants those pieces of tin anymore.”
Lev thanked the proprietor of the piano shop, and they went out into the windy street.
“Shit,” said Rudi. “Hadn’t we better give up smoking? I don’t want to get like him.”
They stood outside Number 43 Podrorsky Street—a road named for the President in his own lifetime. Then they went in and found two mechanics working underneath a ramp, servicing an ancient Citroën Déesse. The smell of engine oil woke Rudi from his late-afternoon torpor and he began to look around eagerly. “Hey,” he said, after a few moments, “lots of space here, Lev. And no problems with parking or access . . .”