Pravda (55 page)

"I am sorry, Dad. I do not know you as my brother. Only as a father. Only as
my
father. This is all I know." The taste of bile was in
his mouth. "It may not be true, it may be founded on this lifelong lie, but that lie became my life. And for now, what is true is of no consequence. I have to go."

"The letter?"

"Isabella will take it. Don't—I can see myself out."

"Are you going to come back tomorrow?"

"Goodbye, Dad."

He leaned over the water and heaved his stomach inside out. The convulsions ripped through him, sudden paroxysms that gripped his body and emptied his mind. The river carried the sickness slowly away.

The next day, Sunday, the fifty filthy shades of gray were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniformly blue. A sharp winter's cold was on the lips, a soft winter's light on the cheek; the river walks were busy again beneath the embankments with people in striped scarves and coats and gloves; the drunks were out beneath the bridges, their stocks of brittle bonhomie briefly replenished; children were running ahead of chatty mothers, fathers in responsible colloquy two steps back, joggers; a blue-fingered juggler, a dozen walkers of a dozen different dogs, an elderly couple renewing their lifelong domestic hostilities, a slouch of teenagers (stereo thumping), tourists taking and retaking the same shot with a digital camera, and a man with white hair having considerable difficulty walking beside a young woman in an elegant pale coat.

And there ahead Notre Dame, a great leviathan, she thought, turned to stone by some gorgon of even greater dominion.

"Who is Alessandro?" she asked as her father drew up alongside. The Italian had just left them on the riverside walk and was climbing back up the stone stairs to the quay.

"He is a friend, Isabella, whom I pay handsomely."

"Strange friend."

"The most reliable sort."

They walked on. And she fell into something of a pattern: she would wait patiently for Nicholas until she sensed that his effort to make progress was crossing from authentic to performance. Then she would take two or three steps of her own, ignoring him awhile, before turning back to address him once more.

"Besides everything else, why didn't you tell us you were gay?"

Nicholas did not pause or look up but continued to concentrate on walking.

"I strongly dislike that ridiculous little word. Do you really want to talk about my private life? Is that why you came?"

"No ... no. I suppose I just want to ... to understand." She felt herself weakening and so repeated her pattern of going ahead for a while. "I want to understand why you treated Mum so badly."

He stopped, looked up, and raised his voice, as if the distance were at least double the three strides. "You think, at this late stage, that if I declare that I am conveniently homosexual, this will be a satisfactory excuse."

"No," she said. He genuinely did not care what other people thought of him; she would give him that.

"Well, then." Her father shook his head.

She did not know what else to say on this matter—suddenly there seemed to be nothing
to
say. Perhaps that was his skill. In any case, she had vowed to Gabriel, to herself, not to argue. So she fell silent, watched her father, waited, walked on, waited.

She had spent yesterday morning with Arkady. She had given him money for the train to the airport. And then she had caught a late-afternoon Eurostar. Gabriel had met her at the Gare du Nord, fresh from his ordeal. Blankets stolen off the beds and thus wrapped against the cold, they had stayed up most of the night, sitting on the tiny balcony of their small hotel room, looking down through iron railings on the Rue des Grands-Degrés, drinking red wine, water, hot tea. Talking.

"As far as the third bench up there." Nicholas brandished his cane.

"Okay."

They were side by side for a moment.

Softly he said, "I am very fond of you, Isabella. I admire your intelligence. And your pride."

She resisted the urge to take his arm.

"The pills, Zeloxitav, that you gave Mum—I looked them up. They have been withdrawn in this country—I mean in England—because they are thought to have side effects."

"Where? Where did you look them up?"

"On the Internet."

"I see." Nicholas dragged up his eyebrows in an expression of disdain.

She went ahead and turned her back on her father to look at the cathedral again. Gabriel had been right: every second was agony.

"It's astonishing how sharp the flying buttresses look in this light, isn't it?" he said from behind her. "So exactly defined against the sky."

"Yes." How did he know what she was thinking?

Another family was coming toward them. The parents, not much older than she, smiled as they passed, telling their children to take care, take care. Nicholas stood still until they had all gone by. Then on again he went, head down. There was something heroic in his effort, something almost ferocious. It occurred to her that he had taken on a similar air to the one she remembered Max having—that air of irreducibility. Although it was different, of course, with Nicholas, tinged with bitterness and anger—an irreducibility despite everything he was rather than because of everything. But the spirit had traveled—in the blood, in the manner. The genes passed on their codes, like it or not.

They walked on together for another ten minutes, stopping and starting in their odd fashion. They had covered less than fifty yards.

"Here, I have a handkerchief. You can wipe it dry."

Isabella attended to the bench. She wished she had brought a hat. Her ears were cold.

Nicholas sat down.

She sat beside him, facing the river, her hands curling and uncurling in the slim pockets of her coat. Then, without turning her head, she said, "You probably killed her, you know. The pills were withdrawn because they caused strokes."

"I loved your mother all my life."

"You may even have done it deliberately."

He looked across.

And now she turned in time to see his face attempt to express irritation and then fall blank again, though whether because the effort was too much or because he thought better of signaling enmity, she could not tell.

"But you can also be very foolish sometimes, Isabella. For all your intelligence, you continue to act on your emotions. Whenever the wind is full in your sails and you are careering forward, it's your feelings powering you. You are wholly at their mercy. Until they subside, you have no choice but to race on. And if the wind changes direction, then you do too. You should learn to tack."

"I didn't come all this way to hear you talk rubbish, Dad."

"Yes you did, I'm afraid." He managed a smile and turned back to face the river, holding his cane in front of him, his sheepskin gloves perched together on top.

A pleasure boat was passing by.

"She was dying, Izzy, she was dying. And do you want to know something?"

"What?" Isabella raised her chin a fraction, watching the tourists sitting with their faces pressed up against the windows of the boat.

"By the end she was begging me to kill her. Day and night, she implored me to help her die."

Isabella stiffened.

"That's what we really talked about for those long three days—death," Nicholas continued. "Death. That's
all
we talked about. It was bloody terrible. The one thing she wanted most in the world was to die while I was still there. 'To oversee it,' she said. Everything, Izzy, everything—a game of chess, our trip to the Hermitage, each cup of coffee—everything was to be 'for the last time.' She would not do anything—she would not even lie down—unless we pronounced that it was 'for the last time.' And I had to go along with it. I thought ... I thought if I played along, then I could take her to the Hermitage 'for the last time,' and that way I could get her out so that she would see life again, life outside, her favorite paintings, at least, and then maybe she would stop, come to her senses. No more death. But I was wrong. She did not stop; she carried on. 'If you love me,' she kept saying, 'help me.' She was scared. So scared. 'If you ever really loved me, help me.' She begged me when she was angry. She begged me when she was crying. She did not believe ... She did not believe there was any point. It was beneath her dignity." Nicholas raised his cane a millimeter or two and tapped it down after each phrase to lend his words emphasis. "But still I refused. I refused to allow her not to fight on. I arranged for her to see a specialist. I booked myself a flight back to Russia. I was determined that she should live."

"I do not understand you," Isabella said quietly.

"And those pills—those pills eased her pain tremendously. Those pills blocked out the suffering of her body. They allowed her to think and to talk again. When you are in serious pain, Isabella, you cannot do either. Those pills gave her back the privilege of her mind. The human privilege. No, Isabella—you do not consciously kill the ones you love. And I was then, I have always been, and I am still very much in love with Masha. She is the other half of what I am."

"I do not understand you at all."

"I do not ask you to."

She turned to him and searched his face. This was it—at last, this was it: the real questions behind all the other questions.

"Why—in God's name, why did you cheat on her so ... so openly, for so long, and with such
contempt?
Why torture her? How do you think that made her feel?"

"I tried not—"

"And why cheat on us? We could never trust you. Do you have any idea how it feels for a child to know that her father is fucking every man and woman who comes through the front door?"

"Yes, I have a very good idea of how that feels."

"Then all the more so—why? I knew. Gabriel knew. Dad, you had people—you had lovers
to the house.
You rubbed our noses in your ... your ... your—"

"I could not leave. I had made a deal. I had made a commitment to your father, to Ma—"

"Rubbish. You could've left. You could have worked it out with Grandpa—with Max. Left for good. Properly. Split up. Gone. We could have visited you at weekends or whatever. You could've spared Mum—you could've spared us all—the torture of having to know you and ... and
witness.
You
wanted
an audience."

His eyes held hers.

She did not look away.

"Isabella, I cannot explain any of this, least of all to you." "Why not? I would say that it is specifically to me that you owe an explanation."

"Because the answer is not rational."

"But only a moment ago you said that I was the queen of the emotional high seas, that—"

"Because—" His voice raised, he cut her short. "Because you are who you are—my daughter, in every important way." He looked away, then softened, speaking again to the river. "And if I even begin to attempt to explain myself to you, it will only make you ... only make you dislike me all the more. No child likes to hear of her parents' true lives."

But she was mesmerized by the moment. And involuntarily, her hand reached sharply for his sleeve, as if to grasp hold of something within her father that she had not seen or touched before.

"For Christ's sake, Dad, please stop. Stop shielding me. Stop acting for me. Stop trying to control everything. Let me decide. Let me
know. Let me deal with whatever I have to deal with. It is not for you to worry about me—if that is what this is."

"You sound like Gabriel's bloody magazine."

"Forget that I am who I am. Forget that we are who we are. Forget everything. Just try to tell me the truth, as one person to another. A stranger, if it helps."

"Clever of you to understand that strangers help. Your mother saw that too." Nicholas sucked his crooked teeth, then turned to face her again. "Very well." He drew his cane toward him so that his chin was almost resting on his hands and half turned, speaking into the space between them. "All my life, for reasons that I do not know, Isabella, I have wanted—no, I have
needed
—the intimate company of other human beings. Dear God, believe me, I have thought that it was psychosis, I have thought that it was insecurity, I have thought it was loneliness, madness, vanity, selfishness, lust, anger, depression ... And it's all of these things, I admit it. I admit it to you—as surely as those idiots on that boat would admit that they wished they had paid the extra for the headphones instead of pretending to themselves that they can speak French. But more than any of these, much more, it's actually to do with feeling alive. And I can say that now and really mean what I am saying." He inhaled heavily through his nose, as if to emphasize how much he had come to value every breath. "This fact your mother understood. Intuitively. Yes, it is to do with feeling life's only meaning close up. You know—the chaff and chatter all stripped away, the naked beauty of creation right there and present and real. Action and reaction, the body and the mind, offer and response. Where words end and even freedom itself flags, that's where the act of love begins. And I know, of course I know, that for some people—for most people—a single other is enough, is all they want, is satisfaction. But for me—for me, not so. Again, your mother understood this. And there was shelter in her understanding. And I loved her for it. I never wanted ease or comfort or familiarity or affirmation or the certainty that bills would be paid and children fed. I did not want any of life's kindly smothering disguises. I could not be contented like that." His voice strengthened, and he raised his head as if to address the river itself. "No, I wanted life naked and truthful, and I wanted to gaze upon its revealed face over and over again by the changing light of a hundred different souls. I wanted to feel its brutality, its gentleness, its recklessness, its caution, its power and its weakness, its give and its take. I wanted to fix it in my arms and see it shining in every pair of eyes I lay with.
I can't play the violin or—Christ knows—paint, I really
cannot
paint, Isabella; I can't write; and I have neither the hands to work the land with nor the obsequiousness required for any kind of office. I can't teach or heal or make." He seemed to wince against some new pain. "Forgive me, Isabella, but the act of love was—is—as close as I could get to life's disappearing quiddity. I was born that way. Or I became that way. Born or made—who knows? You can answer that question better than I. But every nerve of mine asks me to it again and again. Even now, it is what forces me to take each one of these tortured steps. For me, it
is
life."