Pravda (20 page)

He turned back to the desk. The surface was empty save for a map of the Moscow underground and some lens-cleaning solution. There were no photographs ... Another car was passing along the embankment. He stiffened, listening. But the engine note did not
change; it was not stopping. He breathed in sharply through narrowed nostrils. He opened the drawers. They were all empty. He slid them shut, stood back, and looked around. A single courier's shipping carton lay on the floor by the side of the desk. The label simply displayed the number six. He took off the lid: newspaper clippings, bills, official-seeming letters in English that he did not understand, but no personal correspondence. Obviously somebody had already been here and started clearing up.

He walked around the room, treading softly in his soft shoes, searching more closely. A small wooden box on the bookshelf caught his eye, but inside was only an expensive-looking mahjong set. Fuck. It felt like she lived here alone. Was she divorced? Was her husband dead? It didn't matter: someone close to her had been here ... And whoever it was—child, husband, friend—they would see that hole in the window when they came back. So now he would have to take something valuable to obscure the real reason for his coming. Thanks to that fat swine-fucker. Because if they thought that the burglar had come not for money but some other reason, they would be alerted, and when he later turned up asking for a new life, they might just work out how he had come to find them. He could say that she had given him their names and addresses, of course, but he could not afford for them to think of him as even possibly suspicious.

The heating pipes stirred again, but this time he paid them no heed. Frustrated, he began to go through the books, hoping for a handwritten name inside one of the covers—a gift which the giver had signed. He had a dangerous urge to find some music—to play something as loud as the stereo would go. He bit his tongue. He cursed Oleg again. He'd try the other rooms, but chances were that boxes one to five were already gone. All he needed was names and addresses. What about the kitchen or, better, the bedroom? Or—or maybe the photographs ... for names, at least.

The light in the entrance hall did not work, so he had only the residual illumination thrown through the doorway from the main room to see by. But it was enough. He had not realized the extent of the display before. The entire wall was covered—a big map, pictures of dancers, icons, the Romanov family, a clown, other figures from history he did not recognize; but it was the photographs nearer the light that drew him, held him.

He knew nothing of the people framed there—nothing save that which he now saw for the first time. His eye devoured these pictures:
a family, the moments of a family's story captured. He stood close in, his head turning this way and that, transfixed. He snagged again on the faces of two children in school uniforms—a boy and a girl, no more than seven or eight, both smiling, the girl in front. They looked strikingly similar. Next, a photograph of four people taken, presumably, on holiday—this time the boy and girl were awkward and not smiling, thirteen or fourteen, and there was a thin man with fair hair and tight lips staring back into the lens, and
her
...

He stood back again. Here it all was on the wall in front of him: the life he did not have, the child he had never been, the story that was no this ... Here was the boy in a university gown. Here, the girl in a red bridesmaid dress—long dark hair, pretty. And again the four of them, outside a big old house, the boy and girl grown up, none of them smiling this time, the thin man in jeans looking away, a sports car. Here was the thin man talking into a telephone—older this time, smoking, white hair. Here
she
was with the thin man when they were both very young, sitting somewhere on a bench, with a pram. Here the boy with his head sticking out of a tent. And here a woman about his own age, with short black hair, standing facing the photographer with the sun in her eyes and her arms spread out on railings behind her—it was the same girl as in the other pictures. And behind her—that was New York. His eyes swarmed the wall. He read the words below the pictures—Nicholas, Gabriel, and Isabella. Names. At Cambridge. Down in Devon. Highgate. In the study. Paris. Camping in the Black Forest. Moscow. New York. He leaned in again. And his eye settled on the smallest photograph of all, just off the center of the display: a portrait of ... of his
mother
—proud, clear-eyed, and untroubled in some uniform he did not know from the old times. She was young: twenty, twenty-one. More than a decade younger than he was now. The thought whispered in his blood: she may already have been carrying him inside her. His mother. His mother. He had never allowed those syllables to form, even in the deepest caves of his most secret mind. He turned away.

His throat felt tight and he wanted to screw up his face for some reason. He ... He ... He needed something to steal. Down here must be her bedroom. Where was the light switch? This place was so dark. He had the names. Fuck the addresses. Maybe there was some jewelry in here. Take something valuable. And get out of this terrible place ... He found the switch and the light came blazing on, horribly
bright, and he forced himself to take another step into the room, squinting a little, and then ... And then he saw her piano.

But even now, standing stranded, motionless in the bedroom of the mother he had never known, Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov did not recognize the prickling in the corners of his eyes for what it really was. Like everybody else in the thinking world, he assumed he was going mad.

They walked behind the funeral cart in a deep and painful rut of self-consciousness. The wind was harrying in from the east, causing the clouds to race and the sun to come and go and come and go as if dashing from one to the next. Neither Gabriel nor Isabella could absorb or respond to or even quite believe what was happening in front of their eyes. Instead they made their way—reeling, disciplined, half apologetic, half aghast—like two intelligence agents plunged unexpectedly into the bloody bayonet business of life-and-death on the frontline. Indeed, the whole extremely-bright-sunlight-then-sudden-shadow day had thus far been as alien as any they had ever experienced.

A wiry gray-haired man wearing a threadbare liveried tunic sat up high, driving two skin-and-bone black horses, all three reluctant: the horses to walk, the man to use his whip. The horses pulled a cart. And on the cart was a pale wood coffin, in which the body of their mother must surely be feeling every jolt. Gabriel came along behind and to the right, dressed in hastily bought cheap black trousers and a dark shirt; Isabella was on the left a little way off in her black work suit, black hose, and her office shoes—used to cabs, sidewalks, and lobbies, not gravel, not potholes. Behind the twins, Yana and Yana's mother, both in the long skirts of Russian mourning. And behind them, four near-strangers all wearing their most svelte and somber tailoring—Avery, officially representing their father; Avery's wife, Sophie (in sunglasses); and two others from the office, whom Julian had introduced but whose names neither twin knew nor would ever remember.

Surprised alike by the formality of what the rite required and the Dalísque actuality of the horses, and yet way past both surprise and actuality, the twins had met with the others at the main entrance to the Smolensky cemetery. They had now been walking five minutes and already it was absolutely unendurable and absolutely had to be endured.

Gabriel had desolately (and happily) concluded that everything that ever happened was far, far beyond his control. Likewise, he had long since abandoned any attempt to apprehend the narrower significance and implication of what losing a parent actually meant. Each moment manufactures itself into a vast and hideous writhing universe-wide reality regardless, he thought; what business could it be of his? Nobody had the slightest idea what was actually going on. The horses were sweating steadily and the smell came and went on the gusts of the wind. His mother had always hated animals.
We have enough excrement in our cities.
Meanwhile the cart bumped and banged and the coffin shifted an inch here, back a few centimeters there, and he worried that perhaps it might slide right off and dive nose-first onto the gravel, splintering the wood, two dead legs shooting out the end, buckling, body following, crumpling, snapping, folding under its own weight. What was the flexibility of lifeless human sinew? What was the elasticity of death? At any moment he expected his mother to sit up and harangue them for such uneven treatment.

If anything, Isabella was even further away from reality, her thoughts droning around and around like a maddened bee trapped in an empty jar—amazed, upset by, resigned to, and yet bitterly angry with the numbness of her own head as she smacked it repeatedly against the invisible borders of her new circumstances. Give me something in here to sting and I will gladly give up my life to sting it. Only this
has
to stop. (Besides that, her feet were starting to hurt.) Her only real feeling, she felt, was that she could not feel. The best she could manage was the strange sensation of imagining that she was an old woman, older than her mother, sitting somewhere on a retirement home couch watching events as if they were footage of her thirty-two-year-old self in Petersburg—footage that had somehow become part of a documentary film about the legacy of defection. Or estrangement. Or the working life of animals. They were passing under trees, and another cloud had obscured the sun, and
the semidarkness was as mad as the intense light that had caused her to squint only a second ago. The horses had become even more reluctant, so that the pace slowed even further ... They might as well have crawled to the grave on their hands and knees. Would have been quicker. She wanted it over. She wanted it done.

But perhaps it was not the horses, nor the threadbare livery of the driver, nor the uneasy trees that most prevented the two from finding a way to access whatever feelings they had both imagined the funeral of their mother would evoke. Perhaps instead it was the old women ... For waiting ahead at the main cemetery crossroads were five such, swathed in heaviest black. And without acknowledgment or query, these old women now filed slowly into step on either side of the coffin, flanking bewildered Gabriel and furious Isabella. Who they were and where they came from, nobody appeared to know. Neither did anyone wish to take responsibility for asking, or for telling them to go back there. (Part of the arrangements? Part of the package? Normal? Not normal?) And for the next ten minutes, these five walked beside the cart as well—now sighing, now incanting, now silent, continually crossing themselves. Some final delegation dispatched from the twilight fringes of the living to murmur Maria Glover to her judgment.

And for all anyone cared, Isabella thought, they could indeed be her mother's sisters. Because the fact was, they knew next to nothing about their own mother's family. They had never met a single living soul who shared their mother's blood. (How much farther? How much farther?) Just an austere photograph of a severe woman: Russian Granny, Oksana. That a life could end like this. That this is what it all came down to. Who
was
this woman they were burying today? Who were all these people already buried? It was all too hasty; there was no time even to attempt to find her mother's family, no time to do anything; the whole business felt mad mad mad and Isabella wondered if Gabriel was right to insist on having it all done here and so quickly. But then, what did it matter? And where else could her mother be buried? And what family? And what friends? At least they knew for sure now that their father could not show up. Not unless he was planning a surprise at the open grave.

And for all anyone knew, Gabriel thought, these old women might simply be actresses sent in as part of the day's skillful conspiracy to
subvert its own crazed reality—a conspiracy of which he was well aware but could do nothing. (The October wind was fresh, though, and took away the smell of the horses, and that was good. They must be nearly there. How much longer? How much longer?) And it was amazing how swiftly life could come at you when it felt like it. You thought you were moving fast—seasons passing unmarked, anniversaries barely celebrated, numbers careering forward on all the checks you had to write—but then these sort of things happened and you realized that Time hadn't even got out of first gear. You realized that when Time really opened up and hit the gas, there was no telling how fast it might go—famine and floods crammed into the working week, entire lives passing away and forgotten in five short days, the heavens and the earth fashioned in six. Jesus, the incredible speed of it all—a routine Sunday night in Tufnell Park, the telephone, Monday in the visa queue, Tuesday hop on a plane, and by Friday
this.
And when time was racing, everything became impossible to understand or process or deal with. Of
course
it did. And, dear God, the utter intolerableness but utter necessity of what he had been required to talk about, consider, decide upon these last days—and mostly through Yana's honest and well-meaning translations: "Do you like that we see your mother's face for our praying, or do you like she keeps a special mask, like a wail, for the dead faces—so we can see but Masha is still little bit covered, like a wedding ... a wedding material from the brides ... It's a wail, yes? You understand?"

They came around a shallow kink in the path and out from beneath the trees again. The way ahead, the last few hundred yards, was smoother underfoot, or so it seemed—marked out by manicured roses and thorns and fourteen crooked white headstones. If he did die up there on Calvary, then the last thing he would have wanted was resurrection. Not this, Father, not this shit
again.

There was an awkward delay before they were allowed to enter the chapel. (Lid back on one coffin and haul it out the back; lid off a new one and haul it in the front.) So for a while they were all required to stand around outside, at a loss, as the sun kept on coming and going, coming and going, and the swaying trees appeared taller than ever. Nobody knew the name of the black birds that wheeled against the sky. But something like a robin settled on an iron cross close to where the twins now stood a little apart.