Pravda (38 page)

Arkady stood up, holding the file. "I do not give a fuck what's right. Right means nothing to me."

Grisha was also back on his feet, cigarette burned down almost to his inner-tube lips.

Arkady crossed to Henry and began unclasping the Englishman's knuckles from the armrests of the seat. He bent down to face his flatmate, pausing for a moment to look into the vacancy of his pupils. Then he hooked the great magnitude of his hands under Henry's armpits and hoisted him forward to the edge of the chair.

"I need some fucking shit, Arkasha," Henry said, grimacing. Then again, half crying, half whispering: "I need some fucking boy."

Arkady put down the file a moment, turned his back and squatted, and reached behind himself for Henry's body. Then, grasping both legs, he dragged the Englishman from the chair and up onto his back. He bent awkwardly to gather the file and then stood up with the appearance of ease.

"Not this time," he said. "Not today. Not while I am here." He shifted his friend's body. "And you know, Seva, that if this passport does not work, I will kill you myself." He turned. "Grisha, open the door. We are going."

Saturday night. Second night back in London. And already she felt different. The fury and the apprehension were still there, but the long free fall was over. She had money for three months—four, at a stretch. And she was determined. For far too long, far too much crap had clogged her mind. (Her own, she readily admitted, as well as everybody else's.) And it was true, crap had a way taking over a person's days, little by little, until there was nothing
but
crap. Now, instead, to face with sober senses the real conditions of her life and her relations with those about her. No more false starts. No more mythology. She heard her friend's familiar voice calling up the stairs.

Five minutes later she stood in the large front room, two children at her knees, as Susan Thompson and her husband, Adam, backed parentally out of the front door onto Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town, London.

Susan spoke as she searched the pockets of her red coat for the house keys. "The terrible two will probably stay awake longer than normal, just because you're here and they're excited, but Joe should sleep straight. Fingers crossed. There are loads of books in their bedroom—you can refuse to read to them unless they get into bed. That's what Adam does. They like anything with monsters and a good story."

Adam shouted from halfway down the steps, "Monsters! Monsters do the trick. You'll have to read until they are both asleep, though, or they won't let you go."

Susan, having found her keys, added softly, "Any problems, just call the mobile."

"Same goes for you," Isabella said wryly.

Susan smiled and rolled her bright green eyes. She had shoulder-length midbrown hair and was pretty in a plain kind of way, or plain in a pretty kind of a way; medium height, medium build, and English all the way back to pre-Roman Gloucestershire. The two had known each other since they were three or four. They went their different ways for a while, during Isabella's turbulent college years, but they had also lived together for eighteen months before Isabella left for the States.

"Okay. So go. See you later on." Isabella put her hand on the head of the eldest, Mark.

"Be good for Auntie Isabella, both of you. If I hear of any trouble, then..."

"Bye, Suze. Go. Go on, go."

"See you later. Don't wait up if we're late."

"Oh, I'll be up. Jet lag."

"Bye-bye." Susan gave her children one more wave.

"Will you come
on?"
Adam shouted.

Susan widened her eyes as if to say "Poor man, he thinks he's in charge," and for a moment Isabella was aware of the curious effect of their shared surety of each other, something that seemed to affirm that long before Adam, the terrible two, or baby Joe, they were friends. A weird thing, Isabella thought as she shut the door, this sense of knowing someone of old. Seeing someone in the thick of her circumstances—woman, wife, mother—and yet being familiar with so much of what had led to these circumstances that the circumstances themselves seemed merely that: circumstantial.

Isabella followed the two children (already racing ahead) to their playroom upstairs, watched them go inside, and then entered Adam's tiny office. She turned the computer on and waited for it to come alive. She was grateful that she had not been enlisted in the evening herself. Adam had cheerfully invited her, and Susan had been required to slip her deftly from the noose. There were going to be ten or so other guests at the dinner party, "singles as well as couples," Adam had said encouragingly, so he thought. Increasingly, though, Isabella found the very idea of a couple annoying. Not because she herself was now "single"—another word she could hardly even think, let alone say, without retching—but because to her mind the whole (previously interesting) female dialectic between being part of a "couple" and being "single" seemed to have somehow metamorphosed into this sprawling, transatlantic, society-wide giant squid of
a cliché that insisted on stinking and dripping all over more or less everything—most viscidly of all at dinner parties. It wasn't the blithely impoverished fiction or the dumb TV series that killed her the most (though these were surely written by the soulless undead) but the fact that so many women she met seemed to reach so quickly for the tentacles of this mighty cliché, the better, they believed, to swing into their conversations. Indeed, so tightly did they seem to cling to these tentacles that it was as if the very fact of their being alive at all had become secondary to their being "single" or "coupled up" or married.

She had no good mail. An invitation to buy more Viagra so that she could go harder for longer more often, and a chance to own a pair of little Suki's freshly worn knickers. She surfed some news sites awhile, then looked idly at one-bedroom flats to rent in North London, then went to Molly's home page, then typed Molly a simple "Hi there, it's me—made it so far" e-mail.

Feeling at a loose end and yet with too much energy, she got up, left the computer on, and went to check on the baby. He was safely asleep. She wondered for a moment why her own mother had not had any more children. Then she wondered who would be the father of hers. She bit her lip and half smiled. After all the remonstration and dissent, perhaps she would just offer herself to the most handsome and intelligent doctor she could find. Get the good genes and the delivery care all done in one go.

She shut the door quietly and returned to the playroom, there to behold the baffling multilayered miracle of her oldest friend's son and daughter playing two characters in their computer game version of
The Lord of the Rings.

She had a moment's misgiving, trying to remember if they were allowed to play on the console, and if so, which games. But both children seemed so adept at what they were doing—butchering orcs—that she could only assume this was normal.

"Okay. You two. You're allowed to play for another half an hour, then your mummy says you have to help me make hot chocolate and popcorn."

Girl hit pause. Boy sighed.

"We're not allowed." This from Louise.

"What?"

"Popcorn." This from Mark.

"Why not?"

"Mark made a right mess when we did it last time and spilled everything on the floor and nearly burned the whole kitchen down and the house."

Mark made a face of profound older-brotherly scorn. "No I didn't."

"You did. Mummy basically had to ring the firemen."

Mark: "No."

Louise: "Yes."

"You are such a liar. Mum did not have to ring the fire
brigade."

He took a six-year-old's pleasure in knowing the right word. And Isabella observed his emphasis take the wind out of four-year-old Louise's tiny new sails.

"Well, your mum said it was okay to try again as long as I helped this time. So—you guys carry on for a bit. I'm going to be upstairs on the computer if you want me. And after the hot chocolate and the popcorn, we can decide what story you want."

"Hobbit," Mark said, turning back to the screen.

"It's the prequel," Louise added, nodding assuredly.

The slaughter of orcs began again with renewed vengeance.

She decided to compose a letter on the computer. She could write it out by hand tomorrow. Francis would have the address. If she could get something down, then she could post it straightaway. Two days maximum to Paris. No sense delaying. And e-mail clearly wasn't getting through. She sat down, refreshed the screen, and felt her entire body go tense.

My dear Isabella,

Thank you for your last three e-mails. And I am very sorry not to have replied until now. The reasons for my silence are both silly and rather more sobering. Simply, I did not have my computer for much of November and so missed your first and second of earlier that month; and then, unfortunately, I suffered a stroke, and so missed your third until yesterday. Fortunately, I am home from the hospital now, and the individual who had the loan of the laptop has returned. And so, what a welcome surprise to hear from you, the first name I saw on my first day back.

Of course there is so much that I wish to write—in response to your thoughts about your mother's death, your curiosity regarding her life, and in response to your oblique, but no less kind for that, inquiry about my circumstances. But forgive
me if I plead a twofold pardon for the moment: though I am very lucky—the stroke was relatively minor, and recovery has been frustrating but steady—it is still rather difficult for me to concentrate (or type) for too long; and, second, well, there is so very much I would like to talk to you about that it seems altogether overwhelming to begin here on e-mail.

For now, then, let me say that I am well enough, the computer thief has become my carer by way of recompense, and so I am looked after. That I continue to live here in Paris. That I am awed by your being so long in New York and would love to hear more about this and the rest of your life. That, most of all, I am sorry we have been incommunicado for so long and hope this change is a permanent righting of that wrong. And, finally, that I think of you every day.

More very soon,
Nicholas

It seemed to Arkady Alexandrovitch as if the night itself had grown hoarse. He lay sideways across the wear-smoothed wooden seats and listened to the clank and thunder of the train heading west, his bag a pillow, his coat a blanket. He had not been able to sleep properly but wandered back and forth, sometimes wakeful, sometimes in deep reverie, never quite gone from himself. There was little purpose now—the border could not be far off.

He heard everything distinctly: the whir of the heater in his compartment, the chatter of the shutters where they refused to fasten down, the low rumble of the wheels as they plundered the uneven track and the creak of the carriages as they concertinaed through the slow curves, the grate and scrape of every road crossing, the clink of points, the jangled wail of station bells rushing by, the grunt and snort of the engine itself, the sudden press and whoosh of the tunnels, the heavy breath of spur lines, and, beneath it all, the bass croak of the sleepers. If there were such a thing as music's jealous rival, then this train, on this December night, was it.

There was nobody else in his compartment. He had extinguished all the lights and pulled down all the screens so that he lay in darkness save for the passing of shadows. The heater was feeble—might even have been blowing cold—and he kept himself still so as not to disturb the pockets of warmth beneath his greatcoat.

The carriage jolted over some unknown junction and he pressed his hands deeper into his armpits. He had never left Petersburg in this direction before. He had never left Russia before. But he did not feel afraid—there was nothing further that the world could really
do to him. All the same, though he did not recognize the feeling to give it a proper name, he was lonely.

The plan was to take the train through the Baltic states as far as Riga in Latvia. There he would transfer to a direct flight to London Stanstead on the new route operated by some bullshit British airline. It was the cheapest way, Henry said, and Stanstead was easiest. Henry had purchased his train ticket, Henry had paid for the flight, Henry had given him thirty pounds, but the two hundred and forty dollars that Arkady had in the money belt strapped to his chest were his own—secret money he had saved.

In reality, Arkady did not expect to make it as far as Riga. He expected the whole thing to go to shit as soon as he came to the Latvian border. His passport to be laughed at, confiscated, ridiculed as counterfeit. Or perhaps he might be able to bribe his way through. But that would be all his funds gone—then he'd be refused his place on the plane, and he'd have to walk or hitchhike all the way back, probably though Estonia, and hope to slip home into Russia crosscountry through the forests, the only fool going the other way. He was glad of his boots and his coat.

He shut his eyes. The train hammered on. His mind wandered close by sleep again. His imagined hell was a quasi-religious one (the memory of the dormitory whisperings of the secret "our savior" cabals): a black and broiling landscape as far from the white of a Petersburg winter as possible; nameless long-necked creatures flying across a red moon that rode out as quickly as it disappeared; a discarded sickle by the banks of an oozing yellow lava stream; and a narrow path that climbed the caldera, snaking through the smoke and sulfur, one switchback after another, people lying by the side, people crawling, people pressing in beside him, all of them dressed in rags and dying of thirst, nothing but disappearances and desolation spoken. And whatever they hissed, it was his curse not only to expect three times worse on this journey but also to encourage it—as if to prove, again and again, that neither luck nor God existed. Though why he had to demonstrate this to himself when he knew it for a fact of experience—as surely as he knew that there was blood on some of the sheets at the orphanage and that it never quite washed out—he did not know. With the piano gone, perhaps the only thing that was saving him from vodka (as he became aware of the engine altering pitch) was the thought that he needed to stay alive to hunt down Leary if his bullshit papers failed.