Pravda Page 26

  "I'm quitting." Even here, even now, Henry loved to talk about it: the subject warmed him, made him tingle, killed the remaining wheedle. They were leaning close together now. "I'm not a dealer, Arkady."

  "You will do anything when the time comes."

  "No. I told you, I'm going to stop." He meant it. But the strange thing was, he could say it with any kind of strength or conviction only when he was thinking about his next hit. "When what's left runs out, that's the end. You will be gone by then."

  "So you hope."

  "I believe it."

  "Great. We hope and we believe. We are impossible to defeat." Arkady curled his lip. "Here he comes. No English."

  Eyes red, nose streaming, face like a suppurating pumice stone, Kostya looked as if he had been at the baths all his life—beaten with the birch, then steamed, frozen, steamed, plunged, and steamed again. His gray-white overwashed Doors T-shirt was loose and clung damply here and there about his massive frame where the sweat slicked most copiously. He wore long, loose shorts and sandals, and the flesh on his feet, like the skin of his nose and ears, was cooked red and cracked.

  They spoke in Russian.

  "Kostya."

  "Piano." He embraced Arkady and then took a seat.

  "This is Henry."

  "Hello." Henry nodded. No hand was offered. Kostya's attention left him almost immediately and came to rest on Arkady's finger.

  "You fucked your finger."

  "Yes."

  "Bitch motherfucker bullshit."

  "I know."

  "What you going to do?"

  "It's okay. I can play most things with my cock." Kostya laughed out loud. Gennady too, from where he was hovering behind the bar.

  Arkady said, "We have money. We need a passport. How much?" The humor in Kostya's face disappeared like water into volcanic ash.

  "Good. I thought it might be about the shit." He waved about his head, indicating his surroundings, his customers, his life. "And that would have made me sad. Where you going?" Kostya looked at Henry.

  "Not him, me," Arkady said. "London."

  "Do you have a passport already?"

  "No." Arkady shook his head. "Not an external one."

  "Okay. Well, you're better off with a false identity anyway. Otherwise they can always check who you are. Better to be safe—be nice and rich so you are good to go." He shook his head. "But it's difficult these days, Arkasha. They have bar codes now. Computers are fucking everything up for everyone. It has to be right or you get yourself in a lot of shit. Only the..."He plucked at his T-shirt, separating it from his skin. "Only the networks get in and out easy."

  "Fuck." Arkady ran his hand back and forth across the beginnings of his beard, keeping the bandaged finger extended out of the way. "Maybe it's a stupid idea anyway."

  Henry cut in, speaking in Russian. "But can you do it?"

  Kostya turned to face him.

  Henry felt Arkady's eyes on him too. Searing. Henry's right hand was tapping rapidly over the knuckles of his left.

  "We can pay now," Henry said. "If you can do it."

  Kostya continued to scrutinize Henry for a long moment. Henry knew that the Kyrgyzstani would already have him down for a user, but he was counting on the fact that money counted. He knew that much about Russia.

  Kostya turned his heavy head slowly away and addressed Arkady. "The honest truth is that I cannot do it myself anymore and be sure. Not with the computers and not to Britain. If it was for someone we did not give a shit about, to some butt-fuck country, then yes, maybe. But it's you. So ... I myself cannot do it." He raised his finger and thumb to his red nose. "But if you are serious, then I know people who can do it—properly, I mean. But of course you have to pay their price—expensive."

  "How long will it take?" Henry interjected again. He wanted this done and no escaping from it; then he wanted to leave, to fly home to his ruined bedroom. His flesh was itching and crawling and cold.

  "A few weeks." Kostya only half turned this time. "My contact is coming here today—I can ask him to start immediately. Do you have the photographs with you?"

  "Yes. How much?" Now Henry had him.

  "Four hundred dollars today. Four hundred when you collect. Identity. Passport. Visa. Safe."

  "Okay." Henry reached inside his pocket.

  Arkady hissed, "Not in here. Sorry, Kostya. Can we go somewhere..."

  "Yes. Come." He pushed back his chair. "You are serious."

  "We are serious," Henry echoed.

  The fat man was singing again.

  Once outside, Henry went ahead, desperate to return to his room and walking as fast as he could. A little way through the larger courtyard, the sound of the gulls began again. He glanced up. A short, squat figure in a hood was coming toward him, walking squarely on the plastic-bag path.

  Henry stepped aside, ankle-deep in the filth.

  Grisha grinned. "Hello, cunt," he said.

  27 Grandpa Max

  It was the November weekend of the twins' sixteenth birthday. The family was gathered at the Highgate house. Nicholas was back from his latest business venture in Edinburgh (an art magazine that he was setting up, editing, publishing, sort of). Masha had taken a few days off and resynced herself to the daytime hours. Most exciting of all, Grandpa Max was over from Moscow—partly for the occasion, partly for some meeting with a select cabal (chaired by the lady herself) about perestroika and the implications thereof.

  Unusually, Max was also staying the night in the master bedroom, which was always kept ready for him in case he so wished, but which he rarely occupied, more often preferring residency in one of the old London hotels. He was traveling with his secretary, Zhanna, a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman with the carefully tended comportment of a wronged princess and a limitless silence to match—a silence that seemed to harbor disapproval until directly examined, at which point it was always found to be entirely neutral and somehow pristine.

  "Probably Armenian or Azerbaijani," Nicholas had conjectured, in answer to Gabriel's question.

  "No more than thirty-five," Masha had added, in answer to nothing that anyone else had heard.

  Zhanna was in the spare room. They never discovered if she spoke English, as Max addressed her only in Russian.

  The twins' main party was, of course, elsewhere—guest-listed later that night in a place called K-Rad, a filthily cool nightclub near South Kensington, famous most of all for the queues outside. But five of the twins' closest friends had also been invited over for a birthday lunch that Masha had spent three days assembling: some delicious blini topped with mushrooms, cheese, and herbs unknown, followed by kulebyaka, a salmon pie with more mushrooms, spinach, rice, kasha, all topped with smetana and fresh tomato sauce—a challenge that only Gabriel, his friend Pete, and Grandpa Max himself had really engaged with in any meaningful way. Nicholas had left his untouched, pushed back his chair, and started smoking almost immediately. Isabella had refused more than a single slice, her plate deliberately full of lettuce and spinach from the salad bowl to frustrate her mother's vigilant generosity. Susan, Isabella's best friend, was allergic to fish and so was having another course of blini—a route through the meal of which Zhanna (cutting the kulebyaka with much concentration into smaller and smaller pieces) was quietly jealous.

  In the way of sixteenth-birthday gatherings, the entire day had been excruciating, and then absolutely fine (fun, almost), and then excruciating again, the whole party sweeping slowly from exhilaration to tension and back again in the manner of an emotional sine curve. On the up, Gabriel and Isabella were both excited by the occasion, the general busyness of the house, and, in particular, their collusion (and that of their five friends) in the knowledge that the hideously out-of-touch parents had no idea where they were really going for the night or what they were really going to be doing there. (Weed outside. Cocktails inside. Cigarettes throughout.) On the down, both twins were in a state of residual agitation, if not rebellion, as a result of the various confrontation
s of the week just past, during which they were met with an ongoing and bilateral refusal of permission to allow them to stay out until the club shut at four. They were to be back by one-thirty, latest, no negotiation. The reason given by both Nicholas and Masha—in rare accord—was that it was not often they saw their Grandpa Max, and if they stayed out, they would not be seen out of bed this side of Sunday lunch and there would be no chance of a family walk in the morning.

  In addition to these two amplitudes of euphoria and seething, they were both suffering, despite themselves, from the generic difficulties attendant on turning sixteen: adult, not adult; precocious, trying, but supersensitive to precocity and trying; cringing with embarrassment at everything, knowing everything; knowing nothing, knowing that there was nothing more embarrassing than cringing itself, still cringing.

  Thus the day so far.

  Now they were all gathered in the lounge at the front of the house. Max, Nicholas, Masha, Zhanna (all smoking or between cigarettes), Gabriel, Isabella, and Samantha, the last of the lunchtime five to leave, since she was not going to be coming to the club and would not therefore be seeing them later.

  Max sat in the deepest chair with his back to the windows, the smoke of his cigar so thick that Isabella was aware that she could really see him clearly only now and then, when the many house drafts conspired. Masha was handing out cake, though with napkins rather than plates, which somehow infuriated Zhanna, which in turn might have been the reason for Masha's refusal to make the trip back to the kitchen for crockery. Zhanna was beside Max but on an upright chair, dressed in strict secretarial two-piece, twenty-dernier pantyhose, shoulder pads, serious heels, and wearing eyeliner and big hair as if she might be called upon at any moment to represent the very distillation of fashion. Gabriel too found the lack of plates unreasonably annoying, but more on behalf of Samantha, toward whom he had adopted a self-consciously chivalrous air throughout the last hour. Like most of their friends, Samantha was seventeen, a year older. (To Masha's eternal satisfaction, both Gabriel and Isabella had been moved up a year at infant school.) And she was waiting for her boyfriend, Steve (eighteen, soft-top MG), to pick her up. Steve was late. He was a dental technician and (for reasons undisclosed) dental technicians seldom ran on time on Saturdays. But it was somehow clear—to the Glovers, at least—that the next phase of the day, whatever that was, could not begin until Steve had been and gone.

  It was perhaps for this reason, and as if to apply the broom a little harder, that Nicholas now brought the conversation to Samantha directly.

  "So when is the baby due? Have you thought about a name?"

  "Not really, Nicholas. I mean, I have had some thoughts, but I dunno if it's a boy or a girl yet. Got a feeling it's a boy."

  For what felt like the thousandth time that day, the twins flinched mentally—they knew their father hated their friends' calling him by his Christian name. And yet they loved Samantha all the more for doing so.

  "Must be exciting." Nicholas seemed curiously untroubled, though—polite, interested even. "We are biased, of course. We like the Russian names. How about ... how about Tatiana if it's a girl, Eugene if it's a boy?"

  Masha got up and began rather noisily to pour the tea from the samovar on the side.

  "I was thinking more like Dominic or Stephen ... or maybe Alison. Dunno." Samantha smoothed her stomach, enjoying the attention. "It's going to be a surprise."

  "Wonderful." Nicholas sighed. "A little tiresome, isn't it, though? That it's always one or the other—boy or girl, girl or boy. You'd think just once we'd come up with something new. Shame, really. Pregnancy is never that surprising in the end."

  "Nobody takes milk, do they?" Masha addressed the room by addressing the wall loudly.

  "Yes, Mum, I still do. As I always have. Since I was two," Gabriel answered. He turned to his friend. "Sam?"

  "Erm ... Not sure if I've got time, Gabe. Steve will be here any minute."

  "Have some and just leave it if he comes," Gabriel said quietly, before directing his voice to where his mother stood waiting quizzically for the outcome of his consultation. "One for Samantha too, please, Mum. With milk."

  "Okay." Without saying or doing anything at all, Masha somehow transmitted to the room her disapproval of milk-takers (a class of person quite beyond hope) and began to hand out those cups already poured to Max, Zhanna, Isabella, and Nicholas, the worthy ones.

  "I think it's refreshing, anyway—having children young." Nicholas reached up for his and sipped immediately. He took some strange pride in being able to drink his tea at boiling point. "Good for you."

  "Samantha doesn't need your approval, Dad." This from Gabriel.

  Masha left the room, presumably to fetch some milk.

  "Oh God, no. Lucky thing too. Because I don't approve of anything, Gabriel, as you know." Nicholas winked at Samantha.

  Gabriel shook his head in adolescent disbelief.

  On the sofa, Isabella was torn between wishing that her brother would stop behaving so painfully and wishing that her father would shut up. And all of a sudden she was dying for a cigarette. Ideally, one of the thin Russian ones that her grandfather smoked when he wasn't on cigars. Perversely, the more the birthday normalized (and normalized all the people in the room), the more she wanted to escape, to feel and to be exotic. Indeed, from within the prism of her sixteen-year-old sensibility, it seemed to her a waste that her grandfather should be forced to witness such domestic tedium. She imagined that Zhanna felt the same and found herself empathizing with the secretary's scornful silence. Presents, parochial friends, cars, new computer, clothes, tea, cake, this dumb conversation, sixteen itself. She was embarrassed on Grandpa's behalf. And this new embarrassment lay uneasily, like a wriggling blanket, over all the other embarrassments she was feeling. A cigarette would help. It was strange, though: Grandpa Max could sit so still that he almost disappeared.

  "I'm sure yours will be a fine child whatever you name it." This at last was Max himself, his voice deep, like sand in hot wax from the years of smoking. "You are young and you are fit. That's the main thing."

  Zhanna pursed.

  Masha reentered the room just in time to see her do so.

  "It's Sikhism tea," said Nicholas as Masha came over with the last two cups, "scientifically proven to help in nine out of ten pregnancies. We all drink it religiously—just in case."

  Gabriel reached up to take charge of Samantha's cup.

  Masha did not sit down but returned to the samovar and began to cut secondary slices of the cake.

  And Isabella was now certain that her mother was drawing out her tasks to avoid any serious interaction. But whether something in particular was causing this newfound domestication, she could not determine. Certainly it was unlike her mother not to come into the heart of the conversation, especially when her father was rehearsing his prejudices or behaving like an idiot. Perhaps it was Grandpa's presence. Perhaps it was the subject matter. Whatever, her mother's evasion aroused her curiosity. And so, believing her initiative to be a further example of mature social skill, she spoke up.

  "Mum, nobody wants any more cake. Leave it. Come and sit down. You've done enough."

  Of course Masha was unable to ignore her daughter's specific appeal, and so, balancing a few more slices on yet another napkin, she came over with a thin smile.

  "I know you all like the marzipan and you're just pretending to like the rest of it, so here are some marzipan bits." She laid them out on the little table. "Samantha?"

  But Samantha did not answer and Masha did not manage to sit down, because just then the doorbell chimed.

  "That, we must assume, will be Steve," Nicholas observed, lighting yet another cigarette.

  "Oh shit," Samantha said. "Oh, sorry. Excuse the French. I'd love some more cake, Maria. But I'm going to have hit the road ... Thanks for the tea, though. In fact, thanks for everything."

  "It's been a pleasure having you." Masha continued to stand. "Here, take this." She reached down an
d gave Samantha a huge slice. "They don't appreciate it anyway. They just pretend."

  Isabella noticed the deeply disguised relief in her mother's voice that their pregnant young friend was finally going. Samantha rose. And there followed a chorus of byes and pleased-to-meet-yous as Gabriel escorted her to the door.

  Masha sat down beside Isabella

  It was obvious that Gabriel was angry from the instant he reappeared in the doorway. It was also clear that he did not wish to confront any one individual—and was feeling the weakness of this—and so he addressed the room at large, raising his voice to compensate.

  "I can't believe you lot. I can't believe you were all smoking. I just can't believe it. My friend is pregnant and you're all sitting there smoking in her face."

  He remained for a moment on the threshold. But his self-consciousness as he stood there—sixteen, acne, too much wet-look gel in his hair, a face of aggrieved incredulity—his self-consciousness undermined the vehemence with which he spoke. Worse, he sensed this and felt compelled to raise the stakes.

  "My God, you people are ... are ... bloody unbelievable." He wanted to risk saying "fucking," but something held him back; it felt like a cliché to do so on his sixteenth birthday. "I mean, at the very least you could have shown me some respect, even if you are too rude to give a toss about my friends."

  "Gabriel, please." Masha returned to her tea, which, in contrast to Nicholas, or by way of obscure counterstrike, she prided herself on drinking when almost cold. "You sound like something off the television," she added. "Sit down."

  "And asking her all those rancid questions and treating her like she is some kind of a freak. God, it's disgusting. Just because she is an unmarried mother. Wake up, people, it happens."

  "Climb down off your cross for a few minutes, Gabriel, and have some more birthday cake." This from Nicholas, who was actually smirking. "Seriously. Take a break. It must be agony up there all year. You can pop back up this evening. Don't worry, we'll get you some fresh nails."