Pravda Read online

  He reached the gates that blocked his way to the courtyard—like most in the old part of town, the flats were accessed from the various staircases within. And only now he remembered the need to punch in the security code. What was the number? He couldn't recall. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Maybe she had been in the bath when he rang. Or maybe her phone wasn't working. He simply hadn't thought about this. He'd assumed she would be home. And if by some strange chance not, then he had all the keys to let himself in ... but the security code? No. He'd forgotten all about the bloody security code.

  He tried a few combinations at random. He jabbed at her buzzer repeatedly. Nothing happened. And there was no voice from the intercom. The first twist of rain came and he leaned against the gate to get beneath the shallow arch. Water began to drip onto his bag. Maybe he could try one of the other buzzers and explain ... But even if they spoke English—unlikely—there was no way on earth they'd let him in; crime had seen to that. He pressed her buzzer again. He did not know what else to do.

  No answer.

  Abruptly the full force of his panic returned—a tightening in his throat, a clamping of his teeth at the back of his jaw, the sound of his own blood coursing in his ears. (The fear—yes, that was what it was—the fear in her voice on the telephone.) He looked around, face taut now, hoping for a car or another resident approaching. Someone to open the gate. Where was everybody? The whole of the city had vanished. This was insane. Over on the other side of the canal, two men were sprinting for shelter. They ducked down the stairs into the café opposite.

  Yana. Of course. Yana would know the code. Yana's mother was in and out all the time—cleaning, officially, though mainly consuming expensive tea and gossiping. Oh please Christ Yana's working today. He picked up his bag and dashed across the bridge. The Kokushkin Bridge on which poor Rodya stared into the murky water to contemplate his crime—Gabriel, can you imagine it?

  He was across. He dived down the café stairs, slipped on the wet stone and nearly fell, reached out for the door to stop himself, and somehow bloodied his knuckle as he crashed inside. But he cared nothing for the eyes that were on him as he walked over to the bar cursing under his breath.

  "Is Yana here? Do you speak English?"

  "Yes, I do." The girl at the bar had a staff T-shirt: "CCCP Café: The Party People."

  "Is Yana here? Yana."

  "Yes. She is. What—"

  "Can you get her?" He had not seen this girl before; he tried to ameliorate his manner, but to little effect. "Sorry. I'm sorry. Can you tell her Gabriel is here? It's about Maria—she'll know."

  "Okay." The girl had registered his urgency and locked the till as quickly as she could. "Please. Wait here."

  "Yes. I'll wait." He glanced at the walls, which were pasted with lacquered old editions of Pravda: Khrushchev kissing a dead astronaut's son, Andropov, Old Joe himself—always a shock to see that, yes, he was a person of flesh and blood and conversation—leaning forward to say something to the woman seated beside his driver as the state car processed down Nevsky Prospekt. How many times had he and Isabella tried to read these walls and recreate in their minds what it must have been—

  "Gabe. Hi. Hello. How are you? I did not know you were coming back. Katja says you are a man who lost it."

  "Sorry. Yana, I'm just—I can't get in." He raised his thumb to indicate behind himself. "What's the combination? The security gate. Do you know it?"

  "Yes, of course." She told him the number, becoming conscious of the alarm in his eyes. "Is everything okay? How long you here? I didn't know you were coming back. It's lucky you came today, though—I am going to Kiev tomorrow. I have to—"

  "It's a flying visit." He interrupted her. "I just got in. But I'll be back later. Promise." He was already turning for the door. "We'll go out. Definitely. You can tell me about what is really happening—the news isn't clear."

  The rain had soused the cobbles but this time he crossed the bridge at a flat sprint, all the while keeping his eyes on the window above the balcony. Nobody paid him any attention—the random autumn flurries of wet weather that came squalling in off the Gulf of Finland often caused old and young alike to scurry and dash. A woman holding a magazine above her head left the shelter of the hairdresser's canopy and scuttled to her car door.

  He was back at the security gate. He pressed in the numbers. The metal doors began to swing open jerkily: a moment to marvel at how the simple fact of knowing the right combination was all the difference and then he was through, into the courtyard.

  The rain was slicking his hair onto his forehead and causing him to blink. The cars within looked more numerous than the last time. He was unashamedly thinking with her voice now: There you go—capitalism's pubescent little triumphs on every hand, see how they vaunt it. Water was gushing down the side of the building where the guttering was broken. His mind would not focus. But his heart was pestling itself mad against the mortar of the present, suffering now from some inarticulate dread—a terrifying feeling that came at him as he reached the staircase in the corner of the quadrangle, grinding his very quick to powder.

  The stench of cat urine assailed him, slowed him, as he hit the stairs. She was a little demented, perhaps. Admit it. That's why he couldn't get at what she meant, what she was really saying to him. She contradicted herself twelve times a day, twelve times an hour, and who can believe someone who ... Distraction, though, distraction, he breathed: back to now, back. Up we go. Up we go. Why wasn't he running anymore? Maybe she was refusing to answer the entryphone on purpose. And the telephone. In two minutes she would be taking her perverse Petersburg pleasure in telling him how the criminal gangs were now calling door to door in the afternoons in the hope of being admitted without the need for time-consuming breaking-and-entering procedures. It's not as bad as Moscow, but it's very dangerous sometimes here, Gabriel. And there was another murder just over in Sennaya...

  He turned to take the third flight. The seconds were stalling. He noticed details he had never noticed before. The filth and the smell, the colors, the lack of colors, the chipped and broken sad stone stairs, the million cigarette butts underfoot, the unconcealed pipes all caked thick with dust and grime forever wheezing and choking up and down and back and across the stairwell, the metal-slabbed apartment doors riveted with legions of bolts and locks and tarnished somehow—despite the steel—by nameless cats or poisonous leaks or dogs or rats ... Her thick exterior padlock was undone.

  So she must be in.

  She must be in—because there was no possibility that she'd leave that padlock undone if she had gone out. She must be in. But he turned his key and entered the apartment in silence because he could not bring himself to call her name.

  The light was dim. The wooden floor smelled of polish. He stepped onto the narrow carpet that ran down the center of the hall. And now he stopped moving altogether. The familiar pictures—his father in Paris in 1968, Isabella in New York, the Highgate house, his father on the telephone with a cigarette, Nicholas II and his family, he and his sister as babies in a pram, some famous clown white-faced in Red Square, the map of Europe stained with the brown ring mark of a wineglass over the Balkans, the icons, especially the bloody icons ... These familiar pictures seemed suddenly remote, alien, unconnected with him, as though he had wandered into the flat of a vanished stranger whose life he must untangle.

  Someone dropped something in the apartment above. He let his bag fall and ran, left, toward her bedroom. The door was open. The heavy curtains drawn. Her books piled untidily on the floor by her fallen lamp. Flowers thirsty in the vase. Her favorite shawl spread across the floor by the chest. A full mug of black tea by the bed. Pills. The upright piano. The bed itself empty. He ran back down the corridor, pushing doors as he went—bathroom, kitchen, study ... But he slowed on the threshold of the last, the drawing room, as she called it—high ceilings, grand, with my tall windows for the White Nights, Gabriel, for the cool air in the summer, for the best view in all of Petersburg, whe
re our history is made.

  His mother was lying on the floor by the desk. He was on his knees and by her side in an instant. Her eyes were open but shrouded somehow in a shimmering film of reflected light. And when he called her name out loud at last and raised her up, her body was cold and slight. And she seemed to have shrunk, to be falling down—down into herself, down into the floor, seeking the earth. And there was neither voice nor breath from her lips.

  2 Isabella Glover

  Her dreams came just before dawn, stealing past the watch of the New York City night, slipping past the sentries of the heart. And this was a bad one. More of a nightmare, if truth be told. She flopped back down and closed her eyes and let old respiration soothe her modern nerves, concentrating on the out breaths, waiting for the chemical, physical, and emotional residue to drain away. And how real, she thought, this response of the body to the counterfeiting of dreams.

  Isabella Glover stretched out to her full five-seven. Her hair, which reached almost to the shoulder, was so black that by some lights it looked almost blue. But her eyes were not quite as dark as her brother's, nor so undefended, moving quickly beneath a protective sheen of silent laughter. She was thin, but no longer painfully so; light on her feet, gamine; the reluctant possessor of that rare quality, the precise opposite of blond, which seems to grow more intense the longer its presence remains in a room. And she had one of those not-immediately-beautiful-but-on-reflection-actually-very-beautiful faces that you see in Renaissance paintings of young Italian noblewomen carrying bowls of fruit.

  She stared at the fault lines cracked across her ceiling. It was the letters that were causing all the trouble, of course.

  Oh, shitting hell. Might as well get up.

  She kicked back the sheet and sat on the side of the bed. She felt hot. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck. Yes, these winter pajamas, she now admitted to herself, were a totally unnecessary choice—more a statement than anything else: Don't touch me, Sasha; the secret codes of our relationship have all been changed; I am not touchable by you—to touch me is now a violation punishable by outrage and complete withdrawal. (Men and women with their constant signals-intelligence chatter back and forth and all of it so unreliable.) She stood up and moved toward their little dresser to take a swig of the mineral water, which, she was pleased to discover, had lost its irritating sparkle overnight.

  Unnecessary because of course Sasha never would touch her after an argument—his side of the bed was empty. He would be splayed out on the couch on the other side of the door. After an argument, he hadn't got the nerve even to sleep in the same room as she, never mind anything else. So why bother with the pajamas? Just in case he suddenly transformed his entire personality and popped his head in to say sorry for shouting and being so rude and then promised never to be such a selfish, self-centered, self-obsessed two-year-old again? She took another, deeper swig. Or because she wanted to walk past him thus armored in the morning? To make visual the rupture? Intimacy and its withdrawal as a weapon ... Not very subtle, Is, not very subtle.

  She bit her lip.

  So no, she would not go parading past in her bloody silly pajamas; she would not go banging into the bathroom; she would not make a sound. Lights would stay off. The kettle would not be boiled. There would be no statement, deliberate or otherwise, of her going to work—as I do every morning, by the way, Sasha, every single morning.

  She looked across at the alarm clock again—a self-satisfied digital with lurid red numbers calling itself "The Executive." His clock. It was only quarter past six—normally too early to call on Molly, her downstairs neighbor, except that three days ago Molly badly twisted her ankle and so was not sleeping and there was every chance she would be awake, the same as on Sunday, when the emergency text had come in: "In agony and bored.RUAwake?" This time, Isabella thought, she would text Molly—on the way to Veselka's, just to check. Fetch the tea and whatever else Molly fancied and bring it back for her. A civilized breakfast before work, some lies about their boiler being broken, and then a bath (oh God, yes, a bath instead of that dribble of a shower) in Molly's glorious tub. And, oh shit, she'd better remember to call her mother from the office this morning, before Petersburg went to sleep.

  Her eyes went back to the latest communiqué, set down askew on top of the books on her bedside table and energetically inhabiting the envelope on which her mother's calligraphic hand had rendered her own name in crimson ink. With deepening confusion, she had read it for a second time last night directly before going to sleep—a good way of distracting herself after the row with Sasha and his subsequent (rather protracted) storming out.

  The new letter was a single page only, but far stranger than the previous one. Isabella crossed back to the bed and took it from the envelope. A Finnish stamp—like everyone else, her mother used one of the hotel mail services via Helsinki. Some stuff about the president, a disparaging mention of her brother's so-called career in contract publishing, news of a bomb in Moscow and ten more people "ripped limb from limb" by the "bastards" in Chechnya, and then this: "So, dear Is, be sure to visit me first, before you visit your father. It is better that you understand from me Oh, you know how scheming he is, and he'll be sure to distort everything. He will want to be certain that you love him, especially now he is getting older."

  Leaving aside the lingering oddness of her mother's writing style—"I am a Russian never forget, Is, forced to slum it in second class with this fat little ruffian English, so full of himself and yet so empty and vague"—this new letter was seriously weird because Isabella had absolutely no intention of visiting her father, nor indeed of finding out where he was. Neither she nor her brother had spoken a single word to Nicholas Glover for more than ten years. Not since the death of Grandpa Max (when her father had turned up only to make sure he got all the money). And Isabella was certain that her mother knew this. So what the hell was she going on about? Seriously weird too because what was there to understand? What was there to distort? It was extremely difficult to tell what was real and what was fantasy, given the background level of histrionics and exaggeration that her mother liked to live with, and she was certainly not above coming on all portentous in order to secure a visit or whatever obscure point she had set herself to make.

  For Christ's sake—Isabella collapsed onto her back again, holding the letter aloft—the very act of writing on paper, in crimson ink, and using the mail was theatrical these days. There were times when she marveled (as if she herself were not involved) at her mother's ability to target her sense of ... sense of what? Shame? Guilt? Loyalty? Indebtedness? Conspiracy? Daughterliness? It was as if her own genes were coded to recognize and instantly respond to the parental call regardless of her private will as a separate thirty-two-year-old individual. All the same...

  All the same, maybe this time it was something serious. And given that she had not written back after the two previous letters, she really had better call today. As soon as she got in.

  She puffed out her cheeks, kicked herself up again, crossed the room, and locked the letter in her private drawer with the others. Then, without opening the blinds, though conscious that the light was already sharpening against the skyline, she slipped on her sweat pants and sneakers and an old top. Amazing, really, that the New York birds still bothered with a dawn chorus.

  Now the task was to get out without waking Sasha.

  She opened their little closet—too shallow to hang anything in—and unhooked her charcoal suit. She felt relieved that the day was under way. She could be honest about her motives, too. She was leaving without waking him not because she feared further fighting, nor reconciliation, nor a silent standoff. It was less personal than that. She was leaving surreptitiously because she did not want to have to respond to, or negotiate with, another consciousness. No; what she wanted, above all else, was to start this day without his hijacking her psyche and making her cross or remorseful or resentful or mawkish or forgiving or having any other response she didn't want to
have to experience. For now, she wished only to be by herself in her own mind—a reasonable thing for a woman to wish for every so often. And when she was clear, when she was centered, then she would talk to Sasha. Really, it was just silly anyway.

  She approached the door of the bedroom and inched it open. His head (at the end of the couch) would be just the other side. She stopped a millimeter before the point where she knew the creak would begin. And then she slipped through.

  But all the long and narrow way past the sofa, taking care not to tread on the plate or the glass or knock over the bottle of armagnac that he had so affectedly taken to drinking, she knew that he was awake, pretending to be asleep. And after four years together, he knew that she knew. And she knew that he knew that she knew and so on and so on and so on and so why the bloody sham? And why, a second later, was she frowning with concentration as she tried to judge the exact force required to pull the front door of their apartment shut while making as little sound as possible?

  Abruptly, and with a sickening feeling, she realized that her heart had a false floor and had been concealing its contraband throughout: she had been aware all along that he would be wide awake, and she had been aware that she would pretend he wasn't. Jesus, was there no subject on which heart and mind might be candid with each other?

  She slammed the door.

  And then none of it mattered because she was hurrying down the tight stairwell, down the narrow corridor, down the steep stoop, and onto the freedom and anonymity and endless possibility of the sidewalk. New York's forgiving embrace—inclusion in the shared idea of a city, however true or untrue. A union of states. The infinite context of America.

  But just the same, she dared not allow her mind to look up, for she sensed that the tattered images of her dreams were still hung high on the masts of her consciousness like the ragged remainders of sails flapping after a storm.