Pravda (34 page)

Of course Masha was unable to ignore her daughter's specific appeal, and so, balancing a few more slices on yet another napkin, she came over with a thin smile.

"I know you all like the marzipan and you're just pretending to like the rest of it, so here are some marzipan bits." She laid them out on the little table. "Samantha?"

But Samantha did not answer and Masha did not manage to sit down, because just then the doorbell chimed.

"That, we must assume, will be Steve," Nicholas observed, lighting yet another cigarette.

"Oh shit," Samantha said. "Oh, sorry. Excuse the French. I'd love some more cake, Maria. But I'm going to have hit the road ... Thanks for the tea, though. In fact, thanks for everything."

"It's been a pleasure having you." Masha continued to stand. "Here, take this." She reached down and gave Samantha a huge slice. "They don't appreciate it anyway. They just pretend."

Isabella noticed the deeply disguised relief in her mother's voice that their pregnant young friend was finally going. Samantha rose. And there followed a chorus of byes and pleased-to-meet-yous as Gabriel escorted her to the door.

Masha sat down beside Isabella

It was obvious that Gabriel was angry from the instant he reappeared in the doorway. It was also clear that he did not wish to confront any one individual—and was feeling the weakness of this—and so he addressed the room at large, raising his voice to compensate.

"I can't believe you lot. I can't believe you were all
smoking.
I just can't believe it. My friend is
pregnant
and you're all sitting there smoking in her face."

He remained for a moment on the threshold. But his self-consciousness as he stood there—sixteen, acne, too much wet-look gel in his hair, a face of aggrieved incredulity—his self-consciousness undermined the vehemence with which he spoke. Worse, he sensed this and felt compelled to raise the stakes.

"My God, you people are ... are ... bloody unbelievable." He wanted to risk saying "fucking," but something held him back; it felt like a cliché to do so on his sixteenth birthday. "I mean, at the very least you could have shown
me
some respect, even if you are too rude to give a toss about my friends."

"Gabriel, please." Masha returned to her tea, which, in contrast to Nicholas, or by way of obscure counterstrike, she prided herself on drinking when almost cold. "You sound like something off the television," she added. "Sit down."

"And asking her all those rancid questions and treating her like she is some kind of a freak. God, it's disgusting. Just because she is an unmarried mother. Wake up, people, it happens."

"Climb down off your cross for a few minutes, Gabriel, and have some more birthday cake." This from Nicholas, who was actually smirking. "Seriously. Take a break. It must be agony up there all year. You can pop back up this evening. Don't worry, we'll get you some fresh nails."

"Dad ... just ... just..." Gabriel held his hands to his ears and shook his head as though trying to rid himself of some terrible pain. "Just shut
up."

But as ever, Nicholas's needle was exacting and precise as well as cruel. "It's fairly obvious that the only person who thinks your friend is a freak, Gabriel, is you. You'd imagine she was about to give birth to some new child of Zeus the way you're fidgeting around her. The rest of us couldn't care less if she was married, crippled, half Kazakh, or half pig. Look at us—your mother is a romantic old Marxist, I'm a lazy anarchist, your sister is a spiky little revolutionary, and your grandfather won't admit to anything. We don't give a damn. For God's sake, sit down. Have something to drink if you want. You are allowed."

"You're a bloody fascist," Gabriel muttered.

Gabriel was in the mood to have an individual fight with his father now. And these could be truly horrific. And above all else, Isabella did not wish to jeopardize the evening. She could restrain herself no longer. It was the first time ever that she had asked: "Dad, now that Samantha is gone, can I have a cigarette? And can you give one to Gabriel too? If you haven't guessed, we both smoke. And he's got really bad withdrawal."

Masha laughed out loud.

Max began to shake silently. "Now that is an interesting question."

Even Zhanna's face betrayed amusement.

Gabriel slumped back down, shooting his sister a dark look.

Isabella continued, a sarcastic smile hovering on her lips. "And don't give us all the not-in-my-house crap, please, Dad, because it really is pointless. We can just go down to the shops and buy them and smoke them all over the rest of the world if we want. It's legal. And you can't seriously be worried about the damage to the curtains. It's like a bloody diesel convention in here as it is."

For once Nicholas did not know what to say.

Instead Masha spoke, her voice hesitant and kindly. "No, Is, no ... not just because it's this house; but because they are so bad for you and I don't want to encourage it. I'd feel awful."

"Hypocrisy reigns supreme." This from Isabella with raised brows and a look, which invited her brother to join in.

As always, Gabriel accepted his sister's olive branch and stepped back into the ring, though this time without real anger. "Apparently nine out of ten of the anarchists who were"—Gabriel made a sneering face—"on the barricades in Paris, on the barricades burning tires—nine out of ten anarchists are firmly against smoking."

Though as precocious as brand-new sixth-formers (which is what they were), the twins were a fearsome team when they got going. Which also made Masha secretly proud. She was smiling.

It was Nicholas's turn to shake his head. "Jesus, two minutes ago you were bawling at us to stop smoking. Now all you want to do is join in."

"We learn our consistency off you, Dad," Isabella said. "You are our beacon."

But Gabriel was still sore with his father. "That was different," he said. "We all have a choice."

"Oh yes, sorry, I'd forgotten. The little baby Zeus." Max cut in. "How about this?"

All eyes turned to him except Nicholas's. Even when Grandpa Max moved his head, Isabella thought, it was as if something of incredible importance were happening.

Max let the silence hang in the air with his cigar smoke. "You are both allowed to have a cigarette—one of my special ones—if you agree to spend half an hour talking to your Grandpa Max while you have it. But"—he lowered his head while keeping his eyes on both the twins—"this is a one-off occasion, because it's your birthday, and as such does not represent a precedent."

Isabella had the sense that her grandfather had been enjoying the entire day for reasons that she could not work out. Less to do with what was being said, and more to do with some obscure and fragile agency between all the people in the room that he alone understood.

A few minutes later Masha left, taking with her the tea and her ferocious, convoluted demands on existence. Nicholas followed, bound for his study with his packet of cigarettes and a compact disk of harpsichord music that he had been carrying around with him all weekend, as if hoping someone somewhere would buy him a CD player. Max addressed Zhanna in Russian too fast for either twin to understand. She nodded and rose silently. Isabella watched her brother watching Zhanna as she walked. There was silence as the
room realigned itself. The rest of the house retreated—their father's step on the creaking stairs, the kitchen door closing downstairs on their mother's incessant radio. And for a moment or two, now they were alone with him, Isabella experienced a strange feeling toward her grandfather: a feeling of closeness and yet a simultaneous feeling of the impossibility of closeness; calmness descending, decks clearing, silence, and yet still no clear sense of him as real, present; the calmness of a dense fog on a motionless sea. She wondered if her brother felt it too.

"Zhanna will bring us my very best cigarettes," Max said, and his eyes told them both to relax, as if he could stretch half an hour into years if he wished, or shrink a year into a minute and still have twenty-nine left over.

Gabriel stopped the last of his sulk and sat back in the chair across the fireplace previously occupied by Sam. Isabella kicked off her shoes, folded her legs, and perched on the sofa, her fingers kneading at the thick socks on her feet.

Like the bluish smoke from his Cohiba Especiales ("Fidel's favorite," as their mother had explained three dozen times), all the stuff they both knew and half knew continued to wreath about him—the myths, truths, legends, told to them mostly by Masha, of Max's life and work, of his membership in the Cambridge Apostles at university ("a serious secret society at a serious university, not this silly business you get now"). And all these stories that they knew and half knew, believed and half believed, mingled with all the other things that they had seen and half seen over their years: the endless winter-dark coldness between their father and their grandfather (Isabella had never once witnessed them alone together); the intense formality between Max and their mother (Gabriel could feel his mother recalibrating her tone even before she spoke to him, always of "the situation in Moscow," and never in Russian); the time, when they were very little, he had left the dinner table to take a telephone call and then run, physically run, straight out of the house with the keys to their father's car—Andropov dead, they learned the next day.

Isabella tried to copy her grandfather's trick of seeming not to be looking while she studied his face. He was watching the fire. She wondered if she could write an accurate report in ten minutes, as all good agents were trained so to do. Gabriel picked up a log and began to rebuild the fallen pyramid that Nicholas had constructed earlier in the day.

***

Maximilian Glover was a thin and craggy old man—his sun-accustomed skin lined deep, scored, crosshatched, but papery soft when he kissed them, as he always did on leaving, on arrival. His hair, which was white-brown-gray, he wore at an almost untidy length, and it kinked and curled and everywhere stood up, so that his silhouette might look like a cockatoo's. His lower teeth were a little crooked, like his occasional smile, but his back was as straight as a cold steel sleeper, lending him the bearing of a taller man. Close up, he could come across as either much older or much younger than he looked from a distance—a question of emphasis, since his eyebrows were wiry, white, and insane while his eyes danced a dark dance of playfulness, wit, and collusion. Until they stopped. Then his gaze, when it fell, felled everything. In these moments he gave the impression that if you engaged him in anything—argument, business, love, chess, a wager, or a race—you would lose. And always in his bearing there was some quiet but indissoluble attitude that seemed to say, Whatever you have thought and done with your life, I could have thought and done with mine, easily, and I chose not to; but you could not do or think what I have done and thought if I gave you ten more centuries of trying. More and more, as they were becoming adults, the twins felt this strength about him. They had begun to notice how other people, old and young, responded to him. They had seen him, when he chose, be the magnetic north of a room—at parties in London and more recently on their permitted yearly visits to Leningrad; and yet they were also beginning to notice (as remaining at the family table became more interesting than running off) that he could turn this force field up or down at will. As if his spirit had done some secret trade and ceded all foreign policy decisions to his mind. And this skill, though as yet only glimpsed intuitively, they found glamorous and unconsciously copied when they were out with their friends. He was also, plain and simple, their grandpa. Their only grandparent. Grandpa Max. Kindly, wise, their greatest ally, their greatest supporter; patron, correspondent, friend, and comrade.

Zhanna returned bearing a gold cigarette case and a small leather bag.

Max thanked her in Russian, said something else neither of the twins understood, and then sat forward. He opened the case. Zhanna left quietly. Isabella and then Gabriel came forward and picked out their treats. The cigarettes were thinner than the standard English ones they had started smoking, ivory-white with gold filters, as decadent as the Winter Palace itself. Both had the same thought: that they wished they could take an extra one to bring out that evening at the club.

He spoke as they used his lighter. "Well, now, you two are a ferocious pair, aren't you?"

Isabella smiled.

Gabriel said, "You would be too, Grandpa, if you had to live in a fascist regime." He had heard the stand-up comics use the phrase on TV and enjoyed deploying it ambiguously whenever he could, to mean both home and the nation at large.

Max laughed silently. "Masha has been telling me that you are both obsessed with politics. She's worried that you will end up fighting each other to become prime minister."

"Gabs has no views of his own. He just hates Margaret Thatcher."

"So do you."

"That's not personal," Isabella said. "It's political."

Gabriel abandoned an attempt at a smoke ring a fraction too late. "The problem is that all the parties are a joke at the moment."

Max nodded. "Well, that is always true, I'm afraid. I shall be sure to let the prime minister know your feelings."

Isabella felt her head go light from the cigarette. She loved it that her grandfather was who he was. And wished that she could go and live with him in Leningrad and learn Russian properly and be his secretary and stop pissing about in London with all these trivial people.

"Let me tell you both something that I have learned since I was young and cross. A little secret, which very few people know, and which will help you both become prime minister." He held up his cigar hand to prevent them from jumping in, but perhaps also so that they could see him as he spoke. "All the conservatives that you will ever meet ... Deep down, guess what? They all turn out to be secret liberals. That's their core." He inclined his head slightly. "And all the liberals—guess what? Deep down, they all turn out to be conservatives. Yes. It's true. And the more liberal they want you to think they are, the more conservative you can be certain they are inside." He smiled his crooked smile. "You might, for example, find yourself in the most anything-goes liberal-left house imaginable"—his cigar made a tight circle—"all art, all sexualities, all genders, races, and religions insistently equal, but look closely at the teacups and taste the cake. Or wait for the minute your liberal friends have children
and just watch them scramble and scrape to get their little ones away from the rabble and into the very best schools they can find. Observe how slyly sensitive they are to accent and background. And give them a homosexual son or an illegitimate child and, my God, the whole family will barely be able to breathe for shame and panic."