Pravda (43 page)

And for him, sitting there, drifting through all this on screen after screen ... For him, another day of thinking in ever tighter circles. And no doubt about it, he was as implicated as anyone else. His world, his time, his life. Agreed, nobody expects meaningful every day or even every week, but intermittently worthwhile must surely be possible, right? How to make something of his life while he still had a chance, though? How to weigh in on the right side, whichever side that was? Before it all tapered down to feed, clothe, pay for, look after the children, hang on to the wife, get
through
it. Hey, Ma, you'll be proud: I got through it! I worked. I had some kids. Made some money! Yep, I really followed my own path out there. I'm a granddad! Anyway, it's over. Coming, ready or not. And how had he arrived in this position? (His hypocrisy he imagined like a mucous membrane around everything—everything he thought, said, did.) How had he become so very faithless and unfaithful? Hey, Ma, help me: what what what
what
do I really believe?

Phew, lunchtime.

He called Connie.

One good thing: eagerly, before he left, he replied to the e-mail from his mother's Russian friend suggesting that if this suited, Arkady Alexandrovitch should come around to his home this Sunday, for lunch—Gabriel's sister would be around then, and she would love to say hello too. He wanted a proper afternoon with the guy. Not some quick after-work thing. He wanted to hear stories of his mother.

The six o'clock call to Stockholm revealed all to be well, but on nights like these, when he wasn't supposed to be here, there, or anywhere, the corners of his eyes swarmed with dangerous people: unexpected encounters with long-lost friends ("It
is
you. I thought so. How are you? I must give Lina a buzz..."); chance escalator passings-by of her colleagues (puzzled faces, recognition, belated wave); yet another of her half-brothers covertly spotting him on the platform at Swiss Cottage. It was a slim chance that he'd run into anyone while out with Connie, but then, slim chances were the entire story thus far—
Homo sapiens,
evolution, gravity, the universe itself, one overwhelmingly slim chance after another.

***

Eight, and they were locked into yet one more urgent conversation in the bar at the end of her street in West Hampstead: lovers trying to be friends trying to be sensible trying to be good trying to be anything but lovers trying to be friends.

Midnight. And oh, but how the subtle logic of desire mocks the plodding reason of the mind.

Tuesday morning. He awoke beside her. Instantly he knew he wasn't going in to work.

They drank tea and talked and ate sweet pears with broken pieces of chocolate. And he watched her kneeling on the floor in her white sweater and nothing else as she watered her plants—all brought inside to protect them from the frost and placed on the money pages of the weekend papers, side by side, in their little pots beneath her bedroom windowsill.

"I still don't agree," she said. "When lies are thought to be okay—more interesting than being honest. And when what is true carries no weight—in the family, or in the country, or in the press, whatever; it's the same principle—when what is true carries no weight, then everything becomes equal and alike and there's no firm ground. Everything is everything. Everything is nothing. We can't find our way."

He sipped his tea. "And so what happens then?"

She turned to look at him and smiled. "If we are clever, we glamorize amorality as our defense. And we burnish this defense until it shines brighter than any other. We strip the truth of its privileges. And we become powerful. Because we can destroy anything we wish." She pointed the old kitchen spray bottle that she was using as a watering can at him. "As in the family, so in politics, so in the press."

He wanted to pick her up, carry her the three steps back to bed, kiss her pretty knees.

"You're right. In one way. Maybe it is a defense. But not against others."

"Against who, then?"

He reached out to touch her, but she kept her distance, weapon at the ready. "I think that when everything is everything, as you put it, then the result is not really power—no, it's more like obsessive
doubt. A distrust of all sides of the argument. Or a belief in all sides of the argument. It amounts to the same thing. Belief and doubt become identical twins."

"You're too clever and too stupid to deal with," she said.

"When everything is discredited—when everything is discreditable—then we are able to believe only to the extent that we can doubt. Neither one outbraves the other."

"But I like you." She met his eyes and held them. "This is the last time, Gabriel."

The first snow started that afternoon as they climbed Parliament Hill. Though they had left her bed only an hour earlier, it was past four and the light was fading. They walked side by side. There was almost nobody else abroad, and even the path ahead was vanishing as they went on. Despite the cold, his hands felt warm and his blood was easy. They reached the top and halted, standing together. London lay before them, but disappearing now, house by house, quarter by quarter, as the city wrapped itself deeper in its shroud. A fresh flurry bent in from the north, heavier still, and she let go of his hand to pull up her hood so that all he could see as he turned to her was her face framed, and the snow alighting in the escaping wisps of her fair hair, half melting, running clear down her cheek to her lips, which beckoned as though the very pair to his own. And gradually it seemed to Gabriel that once again the world itself was fading—that time and space themselves were in retreat, and that there was only he and she standing there alone in the holiness of the snowfall.

Later, when they came to a place where the path was muddy and there was no way around, even though she insisted that there was no need, he bent and lifted her onto his back because he wanted to carry her across. He held her legs in his arms and he felt her warm breathing by his ear, her body against his; and if he could have halted everything, if he could have commanded the world to cease its turning and all creation to end, he would not have hesitated. Without a moment's pause, he would have stopped the beating of every other creature's heart—all in the name of his selfish certainty that he would never again know a moment as pure and replete with happiness and love as that instant.

My dear Isabella,

I write with a proposal. Why don't you come here for Christmas? You don't have to answer straightaway. But do have a think about it. I need hardly sell you Paris as a "destination." (Aren't they awful, these words the journalists come up with? I assume it's they. It usually is.) Do you remember the Île St. Louis—the place where we used to have those ice creams? It's just upstream from Notre Dame. I can't remember the last time we were all here together. I think it must have been when you and G were much younger. Twelve, ten? I daresay you've been here many times since then, though—probably know the city inside out. In any case, everywhere is nearby, and you must feel free to bring whomsoever you choose so that you can do as you please. There's plenty of room. And I'm very lucky: it's a beautiful apartment—the original buildings date from the 1400s, though there have been one or two rebuilds since then. You should see the place for yourself: the front windows face the Seine, and the guest bedroom (yours whenever) looks out over the courtyard. It's really no great leap of the imagination to see the horses drawing in and the servants bustling about and all of that. Perhaps I am spending too much time indoors—I cannot get out without help at the moment—but you know what I mean, I think.

No word from you for a while ... Perhaps you are away or busy at your job. I confess, ever since your last, I have been looking forward to hearing from you. How is New York? I
find it hard even to imagine your life there. I've started to think I might never see the place ... I'd love to have your impressions—though I suppose they are more than that now. How long have you been there—four years, five? America needs a fundamental rethinking, I would say. They all seemed so much happier over there in the sixties and seventies. Maybe it's just the folk that make the news bulletins these days, but suddenly the country seems so terribly adolescent again. It's as if they're going backward. (This was a favorite idea of YKW, of course...) The new Americans all seem so embattled and apprehensive and overwrought all the time. Whatever it is that they feel they have to assert, defend, uphold, it doesn't appear to be doing them any good. I'm going on, I know.

Frustratingly, my recovery is much slower than I had first hoped. It seems to go in stages. Quick spurts and then nothing tangible for a week or two. I still can't really walk properly, though my speech is almost fully recovered, thank god. I can't describe the sheer
irritation
that comes with not being able to do at all that which only a few weeks back one could do without thinking.

Anyway, I don't know what your plans are, and you may well have something lined up for Christmas by this stage. If so, New Year's? It would be lovely to see you. I know you will be cross, but my circumstances are different now, and I feel that I can claim the invalid's privilege of directness. I am happy to pay for your flights (and those of your friend), and if you really do not wish to stay here (and I would quite understand), there is a fine hotel just around the corner; I'm sure I could arrange for you to stay there.

As you see, I have managed to write a fair amount without addressing a single one of your questions about Masha, our lives together, or anything else! I'm sorry, but I don't think I yet have the energy to write all that down in an e-mail. It seems so cold, apart from anything else. But I would dearly like to talk to you again—about that, about everything. So do please have a think about my offer, and maybe I will see you for Christmas!

Yours with love,
Nicholas

The following Saturday, the sky was like the underbelly of a sick gray seal. They were out searching for he did not know what—a desk, new covers for the futon that matched the old, stripy tea towels, a fashionable garlic press? He could not remember. Camden Market was as thoroughly wet and cold as he had ever known it. Damp saturated the bones and the winter rain fell—unremitting, unenthusiastic, unwholesome. The old brickwork of the arches above the bigger stores seemed to be cold-sweating out two hundred years' worth of fever and toxins; the awnings of the smaller stores sagged and threatened calamity; the hot-food booths were lost in steam, and it was impossible to see any of their offerings through the glass counters for all the pinguid condensation.

Somehow time had managed to crawl as far as three-twenty, and Gabriel was now crammed up at one end of a damp bench, thigh to thigh with a family of tourists from Salford. Doggedly, he was forking his way through a medley of multicolored Chinese food, all the favorites thrown in together—sweet and sour, black bean, oyster mushrooms, nonprawn prawn, reconstituted chicken, debeefed beef. Imagining that he was an astronaut helped: then it tasted kind of interesting, and he felt oddly grateful, appreciative of human science.

It seemed as if it had been three-twenty for ages; as if the whole day had subsided at three-twenty and now lay in a slag heap of wet dust, rubble, and contorted masonry. It felt as if old Father Time himself—exhausted, depressed, sick to the back teeth of the endless tick-follows-tock of it all—had simply downed tools (at long last) and strode offsite, bound for the recruitment agent's office—I want
to switch dimensions, chief, I'm through with the fourth; it's not a job, it's bloody slavery, that's what it is. It's about time I traded up. Something out of the range of these ignorant bastards, please. I hear the ninth is cushdie.

The last other time Gabriel could remember was seven-seventeen, when he had been woken by Lina's alarm clock. She liked to set it three minutes before she wanted to get up. And about three hours before he did.

The outer edge of the nearest plastic awning did not quite cover his table, and an uneven veil of runoff water was dripping onto the heads of the poor tourist children opposite as they waited for their oblivious parents to finish ramming spring rolls into themselves. Lina had disappeared.

He returned his attention to his own carton. He wondered how far from an actual chicken a piece of chicken in a Chinese chicken dish could go and still get away with being called a piece of chicken. Of course, these nameless cubes (tasting of chalk and chamois leather) had nothing to do with young hens roaming around the farmyard; nothing to do with the main bits of even a battery bird, not leg nor breast; and nothing to do with the secondaries either—the wings or the feet; nothing to do with livers, gizzards, or neck; nothing to do with bones or beaks or feathers. No—at best, it was just about possible that these bits he was now eating had once been on the same factory floor as other meats that had known a few chicken pieces in their youth. And that was probably all the acquaintance with chicken they had ever garnered. So you had to credit them for their audacity—they were quite prepared to go out into the world armed with nothing by way of a briefing save these old-timers' stories of what chicken used to be and just ... just fake it, just belligerently pretend. Come on, then, you fuckers, if we're not chicken, then what are we? Huh? If we're not chicken, then don't eat us. Ha ... see ... you are doing it! You're eating us! Fucking A.

They had been attempting to have their lunch together amid the busy food booths in Camden Market because it was here that Lina had arrived at the end of her endurance. Having wandered from place to place all the way up Camden High Street, turning down each with some (admittedly accurate) remark on the decor or menu or staff or seating plan, she had become so hungry that she could barely speak. And for some reason her hunger increased at the same rate as her annoyance, so that by the time they arrived at the Old Stables booths at
the Chalk Farm end, she was furious. She could go no farther; she had to eat. Like Joan of Arc sacrificing herself (for God, for France), she had thrown herself into the midst of the antiprawn prawns in sauces unnamed and unnamable. Do unto me what you will; I care no longer.