Cold Blood (12 page)

I'm referring in this context to my tram journey up Nevsky.

T
HE IDEA
of freedom from the system of Tsarist government was infectious. To be living in St. Petersburg during those confused weeks after Lenin's coup was like being among children let out of school early.

So when the light fingers first took a pinch of my trousers, the inside leg no less—but let me go back a moment, to the tram stop.

At long last a no. 5 rounded the statue of Alexander III. There was a crowd of us waiting, and more came running out of the shadows as the tram glided to a halt in its creaking galleon style. Its rubber jaws peeled back with a yawn and I elbowed my way inside with all the others. There was no reason why I should have paid attention to any of them.

The cigarette smoke, the gabble, the steam rising from the unwashed bodies and the liveliness written across those faces were glorious. It was the Russia I loved. I surveyed it happily from my six foot two as we all swayed, lurched and jolted to the same tempo. Like a firework party, screeching and throwing off squibby blue sparks, the tram bore us north-west up Nevsky.

But not for long. As we rattled over the intersection with Liteyni Prospekt, the usual happened and the pole connecting us to the overhead wires flipped out of its socket. People went on with their chatter or mocked the conductor, whose job it was to climb the outside steps onto the roof and fiddle the pole back in with a rubber-handled trident kept up there for the purpose.

He passed the strap of his scarred leather change-pouch over his head and locked it in his cubbyhole—bending awkwardly
since its key was on a ring at his waist. He buttoned his jerkin, said something with a laugh to a babushka, and went out.

The roof groaned beneath his footsteps. We all stared upwards, not convinced that we wouldn't suddenly see the studded sole of his boot and perhaps his ankle appear through the metal.

Two sailors wearing
Aurora
bonnets were telling everyone around them, whether they wanted to listen or not, about the shell that the cruiser had fired as the starting signal for the Revolution.

I looked down at the
shapkas
and shawled heads, at the flat naval bonnets, at the beards and the sunken eyes and the blanched northern faces. I smelt the odours lifting off them— onions, tobacco, horses, oil, humanity. So where was a woman's perfume to be found in our new Utopia? Nothing was the same nor ever would be without the possibility that on entering a room one might catch the drift—of which one? Elizaveta had worn Soir de Paris and none other. Had Glebov smelt it on her when he—

Ting-ting! It was the conductor who'd come in from the roof, removed his gloves and thumbed the bell. He opened his locker and slung the change-pouch over his shoulder. He pushed his way through to the woman he'd been called away from, the babushka wearing pink mittens. They resumed their conversation.

A child was squirming his paw through the press of bodies to anchor himself to his mother. I felt it snag my left trouser leg.

The tram stopped: more people piled on. I held my ground. We were squashed up against each other like herrings in a barrel. I was unable to move. I was standing with my arms folded across my chest, like Octavian at the Battle of Actium when he saw Cleopatra's flagship turn tail and bolt.

Extinct! I'd show that gravedigging swot what Rykov spunk could do. When I'd sired a large and boisterous family from the docile Swede who was waiting for me in Chicago, I'd bring them all back and parade them in front of the fellow. I'd ask him how the research for his book was going, play with him for a bit. Then I'd push the children forward and say, “There, there's extinct for you, Mac.”

It was at this very moment, when the organs of reproduction were on my mind, that those fingers again visited my trousers. The first time the pressure had been so fleeting that it could have been the child. He was right under my nose, a well-dressed lad wearing a little-man soldier's cap, a fancy thing from a nursery. But this, this was lingering and deliberate. No six-year-old was that interested in what my trousers were made of.

It wasn't an itch.

Nor was it an insect, all of which have learned to be delicate walkers.

It was fingers.

Fingers at my trousers: an inch closer to my manhood.

My immediate instinct was to look for Cynthia Zipf. She'd said she desired me. The approach would have been in her style.

I looked carefully down at the people within range. But none bore the remotest resemblance to Cyn. And I'd have heard her voice a mile away: she'd never have been able to hold back on her extraordinary brand of Russian.

It had to be one of four: anyone else would have had to make too long an arm. The candidates were the child and his mother, an elderly man with a rheumy nose, and a woman turned away from me, her expression unascertainable.

I ruled out the old fellow. What could he have hoped for from me?

The tram stopped again, at the Public Library. The boy was dragged out by his mother. The old man was now facing me at close range. His eyes were pouched and cloudy. They touched briefly on mine, acknowledged that we were at closer quarters than either of us would have wished, and passed on.

Which left the remaining woman, who had her back to me.

Can anyone think poorly of me if I say I was flattered?

I could see nothing but thick black tendrils drifting out from beneath a blue woollen headscarf. Her coat was made of a decent material and its colour was in good taste—deeper than tan, the brown of early autumn. Her shoulders were slim. I got the idea that with shoulders like that she'd have a narrow, bony face, cosseted eyebrows and an expression that was supercilious.

I saw her shoulder twitch and the next I knew—but there was a problem: my trousers were made of thick winter wool. However, this only increased the work rate of my imagination. I thought of a pastry cook with fat pink arms caressing the dough. I thought, God, what a woman can do with dallying fingers. I eased my loins forward, invitationly...

Then the fingers were gone—not abruptly, but drifting away, sliding down the barrel. She made a slight adjustment to her shoulders—to the outer point of her humerus. She gave a little toss to her blue headscarf and inched backwards. I felt the mound of her right buttock against my leg. Had my arms not been trapped across my chest by the pressure of the other passengers, I could have got a grip on her.

I tried to peer round the blue scarf. I tried to find her reflection in the window, but it was completely fugged up. Was she a whore? Or had she been dispatched by Shansky the jeweller to capture the fortune I was carrying in my boots?

The tram slackened speed. There was a general stirring down the car. It was the stop for Kolomenskaya, the poor area to the west of Nevsky.

She got off without a backward glance. Her shopping bag was in her left hand, which tallied with her movements in the bus. She hefted it into her right hand. It was clearly heavy. So she'd got up early, had been lucky in the shops, had gone to her work and was now returning home. She'd better watch out, especially if it was meat she was carrying. Kolomenskaya was a tough area where everyone was always hungry. I tucked myself in about twenty yards behind her.

She had a quick decisive step. Her plain wide skirt swung with her stride, grazing the top of her black polished ankle boots. Her feet turned slightly outwards as she walked. She had a good carriage: I could have balanced a wine glass on top of that blue scarf.

She never looked back. I expect she learned to distinguish my footsteps. After a while the two of us were the only people on that street.

Then it struck me. These were hard times. So she was the family's breadwinner, it made absolute sense. I was going to take my pleasure and then be obliged to deal with the husband
or her brothers. Maybe she'd cry out in such a way that the listener behind the screen could accurately gauge the tariff of ecstasy. Maybe it was her mother who did the bargaining. Maybe it was yet more sinister—a roomful of cripples or sufferers from some ghastly disease of the poor who'd strip me of every single possession and turf me out naked, perhaps dead and naked.

My next thought: bet she's as plain as a drainpipe living out here. So far I'd seen only her nose, from both sides, as she turned the corners. She was wearing glasses.

Again I watched the go of her. Sensible and balanced, as any decent woman should be... hang on, Charlie! She was no slut. A librarian, that's what she was with those glasses. There were plenty of possible reasons why she'd got on at the Nicholas Station and not at the Public Library, where presumably she worked. She'd had enough of books for the day. She wanted some fun. A woman was entitled to think like that.

At no. 12 she stopped. She put the bag between her ankles, took a key from her coat pocket and inserted it into the lock. Her fingers still on the key, she turned and looked straight at me.

The street light was directly above her head. Everything about her was clear.

A little over thirty. A triangular, small-featured face. Clean complexion, in the sense of sleeping well and being free of doubt. General skin colour: milk and vanilla. There was nothing buxom about her, nothing remotely whorish that I could discern. No jewellery, no make-up, no pretensions towards elegance.

Her spectacles had wire frames. She regarded me over the top of them—they'd slipped a little down her nose. For the first time I saw her eyes. They were lovely and large, atropine green, not deadly at all.

So this was she, the librarian who rode the trams and took risks with men.

Chance, it has a sweetness and purity all of its own.

O
UR BOOTS
were muffled on the stone stair treads. She led the way, two steps in front. I watched the sway of her skirt. Underneath she was wearing woollen stockings. The seams at the heel of her ankle boots were as polished as the rest of them. A meticulous miss, my librarian.

An argument between two men was taking place in the rooms on our left. Above and on the right someone was practising a violin to a woman's piano accompaniment. “Cock your wrist more,
malenkiy.
Remember what your teacher said.”