Pravda Page 10

  The crowd congealed, forcing him to slow almost to a halt. He felt as if he were deep underwater now: he could not hear and people loomed, swam at him, disappeared on either side. He seemed to have lost time and connectedness too: the day past, the day present, all days future—impossible to believe in, impossible to experience, minutes swollen to years, hours shrunk to seconds.

  He had hoped to appear anonymous today, in blue jeans (wallet in the front, following the manner of his father, to counter pickpockets real or imagined), in cornflower blue shirt with breast-pocket cigarettes, in light brown running shoes, with black backpack over one shoulder, in sunglasses. A would-be tourist. Except ... except that it was such a beautiful day. And how could all these people not be aware? How could they not guess? He brought the heel of his hand to his cheekbone and dropped quickly into the dim underpass, away from the sun, moving to the outer stream of the throng, slowing, then stopping, then trying to press himself unobtrusively into the side shadow of the illegal-CD seller's stall, turning his face to the gray nothing of the wall, removing his glasses, bringing thumb and forefinger to bear additional pressure on his eyelids, already squeezed tight shut against this new leak.

  He was horrified that he had started. Somehow, with Connie tears were limitable, containable, there was someone to pull him out; but on his own—Christ. There was no control. He was terrified that he might cry forever.

  He had not slept a single moment. For all its kindness, the careless life of Yana's bedroom had become a kind of torture. The soft pillows, the posters, the photographs, the ancient teddy bear, the casual tangle on the dressing table. And so all through the long night, all he could think to do was smoke at the window. Because ... because it seemed as meaningless to speak as to cry, to pray as to wish, to sleep as to stare, meaningless even to feel. Nothing changed: she was dead, forever dead.

  No one in the underpass had noticed. But soon the storekeeper was sure to wonder what he was doing, part the side curtain, peer around and ask him what he wanted. No matter. He was already moving on, already emerging into the enthusiastic sun, already stepping past the old woman's cart of drinks, placed deliberately athwart the pedestrian stream on the pavement.

  There were bound to be bad moments, of course. On the first day. And it was only the first day—yes, it was bound to be bad. This much he knew. Had he not edited an entire issue of Self-Help! on this very thing? Grief comes in tightly bound packages, his experts said: vast at first—mighty deliveries that take days and nights to unwrap, waiting on the doorstep of consciousness first thing each morning; but they become gradually smaller, less regular. Or at least you learn how to deal with them. How to go on living despite.

  But if this wisdom meant anything, which he doubted, then he understood it only in the abstract, as a man understands that the Earth is hurtling through space. Simply, he did not feel old enough for this to have come to him yet. And he wished to God that he weren't so alone today. He just had to make it through until Isabella arrived. That's all he had to do. Hold it together.

  Most of all he wished he could trust himself again; he wished that his heart would stop playing tricks on him: one moment he was sure of it, the next a new reality would unveil itself and beckon him further within and he would find himself in a completely new place—suddenly steeled, or suddenly destroyed, or suddenly businesslike, or desperate, or resolute, or resigned, or full of a new despair, or madly joyful. And each time he thought he had entered the right and final chamber. And each time it was not so.

  Just now—past the bank and the tourist-crammed Literaturnoe Café—just now, for instance, he had felt as lucid as he could ever remember feeling in his whole life. His mind as sharp and clear as a ten-year-old swimmer's. Then he had turned right, off the Nevsky, the Triumphal Arch ahead, and suddenly he was fogged and reeling and seasick again. It was the other people passing by that did it—seeming to him to be no longer individuals, nor even crowds, but merely animate reminders of the context of his mother's death. It was all this evidence of birth, of life, of soon-to-come death, all this evidence of the teeming world that somehow made it worse, somehow drove the swelling sadness harder down the channels of his heart. And it was the sun in the great square ahead, the uncontrived beauty of a day she would never see—the incongruity (for surely there could not be such a loss on a day like this); the very azure of the sky; and yes, there ahead, before him now, the pale beauty of the Winter Palace. Let's see one more painting today—let's see what Mr. Rembrandt can show us about human nature. It was the other people. It was the sun. It was the Winter Palace. It was people, sun, and Winter Palace that sent him desolate against the cold stone walls and held him fast in the shadow of the arch.

  Then he came jolting and shuddering and shaking out of it. And he was standing in the queue for his ticket, noticing details of other people's clothing, breathing his way determinedly out of whatever latest insanity he had been in, and a rational coping-calmness suffused him. Not clarity this time, nor nausea, but yes, a curious, coping, soft-focus calmness. And he believed (with fervent relief) that he knew himself again. Christ, this must be shock, this must be it! And he realized that of course these others did not know his mother had died—how could they?—and that they did not suspect him of crying or grief or madness or anything else, and that they were just a happy French family, standing in line like him for a ticket to the Hermitage Museum, just a group of German students, just two old—what?—Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, he had no idea. Simply other people, neither hostile nor friendly.

  A ticket for one, please. No concessions.

  And then he went over everything coolly again, forward and backward: Lina, Isabella, Julian Avery (he jogged up the wide Rastrelli stairs), his gratitude to Yana. He must do something to thank her and her mother, and Arytom too. (Left past that ludicrous ceremonial coach that the tourists loved.) And Jesus—Yana's face as she told him to leave the room and collect some of his mother's fresh clothes while she wiped his mother's body clean of dried saliva and the discharge he had pretended not to notice. (Left past the tapestries.) Then Yana, so young, urging him to leave the clothes, which smelled of his mother on the floor, and go! go now, Gabriel! go! and wait in the kitchen. And those unreal minutes staring at a Chinese-patterned tea caddy. (Ignoring silly little Cezanne.) Then Yana shouting that it was okay to come in now. (Moving from Winter Palace to Hermitage.) Then Yana in solemn, solemn Russian on his mother's phone. The world's most solemn language. (Toward the Peacock clock, which always made him smile, and so self-consciously forcing himself to do so three steps early, dreading that none would otherwise come.) And then their arms around each other (hanging garden to the left) as they sat there on the window bench in the middle of a rainstorm, waiting for the ambulance, his mother lying on the floor because he couldn't bring himself to move her and had no idea where to move her to, except the bed, which seemed as pointless as the ambulance itself.

  Turn right.

  Rembrandt.

  Portrait of Rembrandt's mother.

  Acquired for Catherine in 1767. Gabriel, look at her eyes: very slightly askew. Thin lips. Black silk dress. But she's not looking directly back. And I don't think she was really his mother.

  He sat on the chair on which his mother always liked to stop, and closed his eyes.

  12 Night Watch

  The night was scratched forever on the thin varnish of his childhood; its exact disfiguring pattern likewise etched on every single pane through which he might look back. In the drafty old-fashioned kitchen in the basement of the Highgate house, the halfpast seven radio had predicted fog, predicted cold, predicted bad conditions for motorists. But father and children and the children's two friends were all in other rooms, unconscious of flights grounded or the murky freeze fingering its way up the Thames.

  It began just before eight.

  First the record jumped; then the needle broke and the dancing stopped; then, slowly, the ruptured stump began to drag itself across the vinyl. The newly purc
hased speakers clawed, rasped, snarled, screeched, but all the same, he heard his father's fury before Nicholas had even left his study in the room above.

  Gabriel stopped dead still, his sister the same. A sidelight fizzed, then appeared to brighten, and the room seemed to stretch itself taut in terrified anticipation.

  Next, too much rush and panic.

  And somehow, as they scrambled over the improvised disco floor, Gabriel (in Superman socks) lost his footing on the polished parquet and—hands flailing to counter the slip—knocked the actual stereo, bounced the needle back onto the record, scratching the shiny black surface a second time and causing the speakers once more to yowl. Even as he was losing his balance, he saw his sister's teeth sink into her lip in pursuit of a plan that might alleviate the worst of what was to come. By the time he had bounded up again—less than an instant later (denying himself even the luxury of a complete fall) and now with the same aim as Isabella—she was already moving past him toward their father's vast vinyl collection. The needle was broken, but at least they could hide the record.

  He fumbled with the deck. His father was on the creaking stairs. The needle arm wouldn't lift for a moment, then freed itself. He swung around, looking for the sleeve. He wished with all his heart that he might magic his friends away. Instead they were frozen quivering-still, the realization that there was reason to fear out of all proportion to the damage done beginning to thumbnail itself into their faces.

  Too late. As the storm broke through the door, Gabriel was only halfway to putting the ruined disk back in its sleeve and his sister halfway to setting a replacement on the turntable.

  In truth, as Nicholas entered the room, he had already abandoned any adult restraint and was borne in a riptide of childish emotions. The evening's wine had thinned his blood, flooding the labyrinths of his intelligence all the more easily. His evening hijacked, even in the midst of its resentful torpor, he had caught them at it: deceit. Deceit—on top of their standing on the furniture, on top of their dancing about the place when he had expressly told them it was forbidden for this precise reason, on top of their willful inability to play fair when he had chosen to ignore their disobedience for the past hour. On top of everything else. At moments such as these he felt too young to be their father, too close: a dangerous rival, not custodian. And he was quite unable to command himself, even in front of eight-year-old children. He stood glowering on the threshold, gripping the door handle with long fingers, scouring one face and then the next.

  "What the bloody hell is going on?"

  The children could find no place to look, so bowed their heads.

  In three infuriated strides he crossed to his new stereo.

  "What the bloody hell have you done?" This spoken under his breath but so that the room could well hear—as (with his infinite sympathy for inanimate objects) he detached the broken needle, revolved it between finger and thumb, and laid it gently down.

  He turned, his voice rising in a steady climb to a furious shout: "I've just bought this, Gabriel." This was true, though the money was not his and had been meant for a very different purpose. "And it is not for you to be messing about with. Do you hear? Have you any idea how much these things cost? Have you any bloody idea?"

  Only now did he see the ruined record in the boy's hand: two deep scores the color of sun-bleached bone in the shape of a jagged V.

  "You little shit."

  Though Gabriel knew well what was coming, he was caught by the speed of the strike and took the first blow full across the ear. The second caught him awkwardly coming the other way, across the opposite cheek, before he could raise his arm to protect himself. The pain delayed a moment, then rushed at him. Tears surged to the corners of his eyes and he was lost to the torture of fighting them back in front of his friends, face spun toward the wall.

  Fury was heaving through Nicholas, gorging and swelling on itself, raging back and forth far beyond this moment, out across his whole life, annihilating all ancillary thought save for the resounding certainty of his own outraged conviction: that this—this night after night of staying in and looking after these bloody children—this had never been part of the bargain, that he had been cheated, that he (and he alone) was the victim of gross and iniquitous injustice. He was visibly swaying. Isabella was standing still in front of him, clasping the replacement record two thirds unsleeved across her chest, her wide eyes looking up at him, unblinking. The effort required not to say what he bloody well wanted to say almost defeated him. Serve the old bastard right And yet ... and yet, as always, something—something about Isabella, perhaps, or something in the expressions of the other two, or something residing in the deeper terror of what he would do or become or have to face without the money, without the house, without the daily collateral—something held him back. Instead he cuffed the girl lightly across the top of her head.

  "Right, get your bags, get your things—you two, Susan, Dan, you are both going. Right now. Bloody move."

  The friends had been motionless in their terrified tableau vivant since he had come in: the one standing unnaturally upright with hands strictly by his side, a child soldier traumatized to attention in front of the old fireplace; the other on the sofa, aware that her feet had been all this while on the furniture and so awkwardly half crouching as if in the act of disguising this fact. Now, released from the spell, the two gave themselves fully to efficiency and haste, as if unconsciously glad of the emotional cover they provided.

  And already Nicholas felt himself tiring. His wretched circumstances at the age of thirty-eight, the thought of his wife out at her self-righteous work all night ("My own money, Nicholas, I make my own money, to spend how I will"), the house itself—all of it pressed in on him now, corralling him back to the more subdued ire of his habitual corner. The torrent was receding. His intelligence was re-emerging, asserting itself. And he could sense the shadow of his rage smirking at the histrionics of its master. Still, he had bound himself into the entire tedious performance—furious parent disciplines disgraceful children for the duration of an entire bloody evening. So he set his face.

  "What the hell are you waiting for, Isabella? Get in the bloody car."

  Gabriel sat in the front, the seat belt too high and chafing at his neck. His father was driving—the contortion of face and body far worse for being imagined rather than directly looked upon—driving with undue gesture and haste, braking too hard for the pedestrian crossing, accelerating unnecessarily as he pulled away.

  Nicholas swore, then swerved hard into a petrol station. He got out to dribble another teacup's worth into the tank; he ran the car perpetually on the brink of empty and there was never enough for there and back.

  Gabriel shifted for the first time and took the chance to look into the back. His sister's gaze was fixed on his seat, as if she expected smoke to coil any moment from the point of her stare. The others too were unnaturally still: a grazed knuckle on the armrest of the door, a disco girl's polka-dot-painted fingernail digging into the fake suede of the upholstery.

  "Your dad is mad." White-faced, Susan mouthed the words and whirled her index finger at her temple.

  There was nothing Gabriel could say.

  They drove on. And the silence in the car seemed a worse agony than the shouting and the striking that had gone before, seemed to hold them all rigid as surely as if they were each pinned with a hundred tacks through pinches of the skin. And Gabriel felt instinctively, without the restrictive formality of articulation, that it was neither fear nor resentment that kept them all from meeting any other's eye; it was the shame. The livid, writhing embarrassment of every moment now being lived through: the shame of the blows—witnessed blows—henceforth indelible in their individual histories; the shame of what lay ahead, of what he and Isabella must both face at school, of what would be known about them; and, worst of all, lurking beneath all these like some poisoned underground lake, the shame of the discovery that their father—champion, guarantor, backer—had turned out not to
be the idol of their public boast but a public betrayer instead. This the most painful shame. And a shame he felt without the adult luxury of the long view, of independent resource—though immortal all the same for that.

  But it was not the ride to Acton that Gabriel remembered most of all when he shut his eyes. It was the rest of the night.

  Nothing had been eased and nothing spoken ninety minutes later, when the vast Victorian house reared up in the headlights. His father turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, his distance the shortest to the front door. But Gabriel sat very still, watching his sister walk around the hood while Nicholas fumbled for his key. Without looking back and expecting him to follow, they both disappeared inside, leaving the door ajar and a narrow triangle of light on the frayed gray mat.

  But Gabriel did not move. Something held him there.

  It was not exactly his conscious intention. But a minute passed and he simply remained motionless.

  Then another minute came and went.

  And still he did not shift to unbuckle his seat belt. But found himself staring dead ahead: the porch light, at this exact position of parking, somehow revealed the otherwise invisible smears on the windscreen left behind by long-vanished rain.

  Three minutes passed in this observation and his attitude did not change—upright, legs together, as if ready for a new journey, selfconsciously breathing through his nose. And though yet without plot or purpose, the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And with each additional second, his resolve seemed to be hardening; yes, the more he sat, the more he knew that he had to go on sitting. And the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And that was all there was to it. Somehow he had become a fugitive from his own decisions—a boy in an adventure story, locked in the basement, stock-still, ear to the door, listening to the baddies decide what they were going to do with him.