Pravda Page 6

  Yes, Nicholas was ignoring all thoughts save those directly associated with process and procedure. In these, at least, there was a kind of ease ... As six o'clock chimed back and forth across the steeply raked Parisian rooftops, there was even some satisfaction in the sound of his handmade soles upon the medieval cobbles of the Rue des Barres. Everything procedural was taken care of. Thank Christ. Her rent was paid for another six months and then the flat would simply be leased to another tenant and his problem no longer. Her possessions, such as they were, Gabriel and Isabella could have. Welcome to them. Under Russian rules, all the money in her bank accounts would be returned to him ... And even if this was not exactly the law, his solicitors could be instructed to make sure that it was done anyway. Who would challenge him? Surely nobody was going to fight him through the double jungle of a U.K. passport-holder (spouse, defector, repatriated) deceased on Russian soil. Not even Isabella. The Russian system could be relied upon to be as opaque as he required it to be. And what a relief that all could be conveyed through the Paris office; he had no wish to return to London. Even the wretched ache in his neck—a residual crick from his travels—seemed to have eased.

  Almost jauntily, then, as if to put this improvement to the test, he looked up for the first time in two or three years at the crooked fa¸ade of the old building on the corner of the Rue du Grenier sur l'Eau—the oldest building in the city, so they said, beam-warped and brick-crooked as the eight hundred years of history it had witnessed. Yes, sixty-two was not so bad. Still in good shape. Still in sound mind. Still thinking. And still very able.

  Yes, indeed: tout était dans l'ordre. Had he been carrying a cane to match his tailored linen suit, he might have twirled a spry thanks at the tourists now parting to let him make his way between their collective craning. Had he had a hat, he might have doffed it to the venerable old sisters now entering the mighty church of St. Gervais opposite. Good evening, sister, good evening, and a fine one too. Paris is behaving itself? The delicate scent of scandal, the salt tang of corruption, the sweet savor of vice—all vanished, all banished? Excellent. But now I must hurry home to my young friend, who has promised Tanqueray and tonic for my ills. And I am so very fond of him this evening.

  Slim and trim, neither tall nor short, with pale eyes and a thin mouth (which between them disguised a fine, disparaging intelligence and a lifetime of immoderate appetite), Nicholas Glover had the kind of demeanor that Dorian Gray might have developed if that asinine portrait had never been painted and the young fool had relied instead on the excellence of his genes and the incisiveness of his wit to see him handsomely through to his sixties. His hair was turning white, still thick but close-cropped; his skin was clean-shaven and well attended to. Indeed, the only thing Nicholas took pains to conceal was his crooked teeth, which in the upper case were uneven and shading to yellow, and which in the lower were at war in such a manner as to have forced one another into partial overlap and sudden protruding angles. For this reason, a smile seldom parted his lips.

  He stepped sprightly past the early diners at the café on the shallow steps and sprightly too across the main road, up onto the embankment, and so to the Pont Marie. The light was softening and even the lazy Seine seemed a little less raddled—the city's favorite older woman come out once more, dressed in the flattering colors of the evening sun, slinking through the town again, turning heads, remarked upon, while her most loyal admirers, the distinguished old buildings on the Quai de Bourbon (likewise lit most handsomely in shades of pale sand and amber-yellow and blanc cassé), kept their devoted station. Bonsoir, Madame Seine, bonsoir; our compliments. The air, softening too, he thought, linen loosened by an afternoon of love ... Ah, yes, he could see the satisfactorily large windows of his own apartment.

  Alessandro would most likely be in the bath, drinking wine, no doubt (and not something cheap, the grasping little shit), listening to that terrible music of his. Dear God, how he loathed Alessandro's music: some thirty-five-year-old ever-adolescent would-be chanteuse who couldn't sing or play or write or dance, popping along with her pigtails and her pout for the benefit of whom? Seven-year-old girls and thirty-five-year-old gay men; it was so bloody ... so bloody camp. And of course Alessandro would be singing out loud, planning all the while in that chichi little Soho head of his, planning what he wanted to extract from the evening. Nicholas sighed. Those childish emotional blackmails of poor Alessandro, those peasant clevernesses, which he no doubt considered compelling evidence of a subtle, emotionally attuned mind but which (hélas) were probably culled from the daily parade of inconsequence otherwise known as the "relationship" columns. Probably written by Gabriel. There was an irony. Nicholas narrowed his nostrils and exhaled slowly. He remembered (fondly) the time before that particular word achieved its current ubiquity; and he found it impossible even to think of it now except escorted by those two unyielding quotation marks: "relationship." Give me the sincerity of nakedness and the honesty of desire, O God, and deliver me from the turgid bourgeoisie and all their favorite phrases.

  A shudder. He had reached the far side of the bridge—the Île St. Louis. Home. In the middle of the river. Two young policemen cycled by, and he slowed to watch their saddles until they disappeared past the Librarie Adelaide on Rue Jean de Bellay. Then he raised his small leather document-holder to return the wave of the waitress from the Café Charlotte, white skirt swaying above pretty brown knees. Would she let him paint her one day? He thought so, if he went delicately about it. And so he turned left, along the quay, until he came to number 15, once the residence of Emile Bernard, Créateur du Synthésisme (so the plaque said), where he popped the lock, entered the cool of the courtyard (cedar scent and the clove perfume of basil in bloom), and climbed the wide stone stairs of staircase D, dipped in the middle from four hundred years of just such footsteps.

  But the interior gloom of the stairwell recalled the sorrow and heaviness of his recent journey (his mind racing down avenues he had not sanctioned, as it always did). Anger and sorrow. His deepest consciousness had always felt this way—a churn wherein anger and sorrow were mixed and remixed and mixed again with the ceaseless salt of his lust. Oh Christ, his wife was dead. Masha was dead. Marushya. No longer fundable as a living and breathing woman, as the only woman to whom he might have confessed himself. And already, as quickly as the evening was falling through the sky, the entirety of more than three and a half decades of his life seemed to him implausible. All the things he had never said. Or rather, all the things he had said, all the things he was always saying, but only to himself.

  I am a bloody fool, Masha. A bloody, vain, and self-denying fool. Could you have understood this ... this idle carcass of mine? Or did you always understand, despite my silence and deceit? I think you did. Could I have told you everything? I think I could. Even the worst of it? The very worst? Could I have told you and would you have understood? I tried ... once or twice, I tried. But I was afraid you would not be able to bear it. Not want to hear it. I was afraid you would leave me. I was afraid of everything. I lived in chaos. I lived through chaos. I lived on chaos. And Christ, you never asked. Masha, you never asked ... And I suppose I was grateful for that. I loved you because you didn't ask. I loved you dearly. The others ... All those hundred others, they always wanted something answered. Something settled. "How can you?" "Why do you?" "Why can't you?" "Why don't you?" They wanted me to provide "clarity"; they wanted me "to be honest." Clarity—can you believe it, Masha? Yes: you would understand. I know you would. Because you know how difficult it is to hold the line against the thousand daily surrenders this craven new world requires, to keep on coming back for more, heart in pieces, soul in rags. Clarity! Oh, Masha ... As if I ... As if I, one man shuffling through all the disgusting piss and filth of this twenty-first century, one man at the tail end of a million desperate and profoundly unclear generations, none of whom have ever known the first thing about who they are, why they are, where they came from, what they are made of, where they it in, if they it i
n, why they are alive, why they die—as if I could provide anyone with any kind of clarity. But time and time again, Masha, I have been forced to this conversation: "Oh, but you can't live like this, Nicholas," they say. "Like what?" I ask. "With all this uncertainty and—you know—messing around." "Messing around? You call this messing around? No, Christ, this is not messing around. This is the very opposite of messing around. This is as in earnest as it gets: you and I, naked and alone, here and now, in this bed, the rest of time and space irrelevant. The soul's exchange, the body's vow, the mind's reprieve. Our most human nexus. I take this extremely seriously. It's the only thing I take seriously. It's the only thing I can take seriously." (Is this hurting you? Should I stop? For four years I was only yours. I swear it. Not much in a lifetime, but it was four years. I swear to you. My best years.) "Come on," they say, "be honest with me, Nicholas." And then, Masha, I have to fall to silence as the questions rain down upon me ... Because what you cannot say, what you must not say, is that you are living your whole life enacting the only honest, clear fact that you do honestly and clearly know: that nothing is honest and clear. (My God—you are smiling. You do know all this. You knew all along.) The cells, the DNA, the molecules of the blood—they all—they all—have different opinions, different opinions on everything, from euthanasia to the Hippocratic oath, from Israel to Palestine, from God made man to Man makes gods. They do not agree. There isn't even a consensus. Not within me. And certainly not out there. Half the world is screaming for water and freedom when the other half is ordering cocktails and complaining about the service. (Didn't you always say that, my Masha?) And what could I say to them about me? What could I tell them about what I feel? The head distrusts the heart. The heart ignores the head. The balls want to carry on regardless. It's a total and utter mess. Chaos. "Come on: be honest with me, Nicholas, tell me what you honestly feel about the situation." But what they really meant was "Be simple with me, Nicholas." Be uncomplicated. Be straightforward. And simplicity—simplicity is the new code for ... no—what am I saying?—simplicity actually means stupidity. What they're really asking is "Be stupid with me, Nicholas." The only way we can get through this is to be stupid: work, marriage, the war, God, love, and television. If we can just stay stupid, it will be okay. We promise. Honesty! Honesty—Masha, is it not the most monstrous piece of excrement that mankind has ever come up with? Human nature, consciousness itself, is famously indeinable, mysterious, mobile, responsive—is gloriously less constant, less intrinsic than the imaginings of rocks, trees, sheep. That's the whole point. No, no, no—you get three goes at it, Masha: birth, death, and that little moment of both. The rest of the time you are fooling yourself and everyone around you. If you are alive and thinking and still interested in being alive and thinking, then you are necessarily unclear and you do not honestly know anything—you're guessing, hunching, hoping. And that's it. What I honestly feel—what I honestly feel! I could not write down what I honestly feel if I started now and did not stop till the last syllable of recorded time. And yes, I loved you, Masha, because you never once asked me to be clear or honest. Because you understood what being human actually means. And you weren't afraid of it. Were you?

  Or maybe this was all lies too. Maybe he was just making everything romantic, as he always, always did (the true sign of a monster). At the end of each of the culs-de-sac down which his mind careered, there was, he knew, a gaudy theater wherein savage satires were ever being staged. And to whom was he talking anyway? There was nobody left to tell. His wife was dead. He could not trust himself one inch.

  Vanished entirely now was Nicholas's dapper manner, and though dressed the same, he appeared in the doorway of his own bedroom like a man who spent every day of his life fighting hand to hand through Hades and back.

  "You're home!" Alessandro came out of the bathroom, steam chasing him, a towel wrapped around his waist and a dressing gown draped over his shoulders—an unusual modesty, Nicholas registered, and a symptom of uncertainty. Truly the young these days were so very, very obvious. Like the puerile century, they lacked charisma. But here at least was relief: the old salve of younger skin.

  "Did it take all afternoon?"

  "Yes, it did." Nicholas put his slim diplomatic case on the polished marble surface of his dresser. Life, the great distraction, was stirring sluggishly in his blood. And Alessandro's black hair was still wet and water ran from the curls on his forehead, causing him now to wipe his forearm across his brow—a little too slowly, Nicholas noticed. Despite the robe and towel, there was still, as always with Alessandro, a flirtatious door ajar. Evidently, though, the poor man had no idea what mood to expect. Understandable. Nicholas knew well enough that people lived in constant trepidation of his moods. (Had his temperament always been so changeable, or had he made it so—in order that people would fear him? He couldn't remember. So much was dark beyond eighteen. All was secret and suspicious and ... and bloody Soviet.) In any case, it was obvious that Alessandro was waiting for his cue. So, disregarding the infantile whine of the abysmal music, Nicholas forced himself to smile his tight-lipped smile.

  "But the good news is that I do not have to go to London. They can do everything through the Paris office."

  "That's great, Nick." Alessandro fastened the gown but let the towel drop.

  "And so tonight we are going to celebrate. Forget cooking. Forget that bloody concert." Nicholas hated to have his name shortened. Either Alessandro did it deliberately to annoy him, or he did it because he wanted to insist on some sort of parity. What a farce. Through forty years of impatience, Nicholas still could not make up his mind which was more annoying, the guile of straight women or the wiles of gay men. They were as bad as each other. A tragedy, really, when what one really wanted was a straight man. But let Alessandro have his junior satisfactions; Nicholas's mood at least was recovering.

  "Le Castebin, I think." Nicholas forced another smile. "Shall we? You can have your langoustines façon. And their new house Champagne—from Troyes, Gaston tells me—is sublime. We'll dispatch a bottle each—why not? It's a while since we got ourselves well and truly tight. Brahms is such a terrible bore anyway." Nicholas realized that he had better show some interest. "And anyway, you ... you must tell me about Greece. I want to know all the details. Did you get to Delphi? Did the oracle have news for us?"

  "I was in Santorini." Alessandro picked up the shirt lying ready on the bed. The dressing gown came off.

  Nicholas looked, unreservedly. "You have caught the sun again."

  "I topped up on the sun bed with Freddie at the gym while you were away." Alessandro enjoyed flattery more than anything else in the world and could tease it out of quick-drying cement if he applied himself.

  The phrase "topped up" annoyed Nicholas, though. The word lurking behind it, the word "tan," annoyed him too. And the name Freddie somehow infuriated him. Campness. But the revealed body—ah, the naked body of this ... this other ... The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapors of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.

  6 The Disendowed

  Arkady and Henry emerged into the deepening twilight of the northern sky and set off along the potholed street that ran between the six dilapidated tower blocks similar to their own. With the exception of three old women dragging home their heavy handcart full of cheap fizzy drinks and expensive fake mineral water, weaving oddly on their invisible route through the worst of the ruts, everybody was drunk: the half-dozen old men sitting on the weedy verge around their upturned crate on legless chairs, seating ripped from abandoned cars; the heavily made-up girl now leaving block two with her infant in an improvised sling, her three-year-old and her five-year-old—cigarette cocked and burning—all in sullen attendance and ready for the ride into town and another night working together with the tourist bar spill; the gang of boys, nine- or ten-year-olds, standing around an old metal drum that they had somehow managed to ignite on the
corner and every now and then reaching in with tar-caked hands to chuck fume-spewing firebombs at each other or any passerby they did not recognize, then swapping their vodka-spiked drink tins from hand to hand so they could blow cool air on their blackened fingers.

  The two turned right, away from the few feeble street-lamps that would have taken them in the direction of Primorskaya metro station. Instead they walked toward the Smolensky cemetery, a woodland, half wild, half kempt, with winding paths, dense thickets, and sudden glades that sat square in the center of Vasilevsky Island—a shortcut on their way into town.

  Still in silence, they came to the gap in the railings and the unofficial path, which led off the road and into the cemetery. Despite the sudden showers throughout the day, the ground underfoot was damp rather than muddy and they were able to walk with relative ease between the trees. Arkady carried his concert shoes around his neck, dangling by the laces; he was still wearing his cap; and he had rolled up his jeans a little to accommodate his boots. Henry, meanwhile, looked as incongruous as ever, his hooded top inside his arm-patched corduroy sports jacket, his black jeans cut too narrow.

  At length they emerged onto one of the main cross-paths through the cemetery and Henry felt the need to speak. "Will the newspapers be there?"

  "I forgot—Grisha came today," Arkady said, as if it were he, not Henry, who had begun. "This morning, when you were teaching."

  Henry's eyes went across, though his head did not turn. "Actually, I wasn't. I was ringing up hotels and restaurants and nightclubs in London for little Ludmilla." He had been supplementing his diminishing capital for five years with a haphazard income from teaching English as a foreign language, but he'd let the contacts shrivel. And though his habit was cheaper here than anywhere save Afghanistan itself, he was now down to a few thousand and he knew that something had to be done about money and soon. "My last pupil is leaving to join her friends, and her mother needed her teacher to argue room rates at the Covent Garden Hotel for two hours."