Duel of Assassins (8 page)

“Marcus says it is a long story, but if you would like to
hear it, and I wouldn’t mind translating, he will gladly tell you. But to do
this properly, he also will need a little vodka.” She smiled faintly.

Arensky filled all three glasses. They toasted in Russian
and English, with Arensky demonstrating how to take the vodka in a gulp,
leaving the little glass upended on one’s nose.

Then the American began to tell of his adventures. It was a
tale, recast in the melodious voice of Eva Sorokina, such as Taras Arensky had
never before heard, a contemporary odyssey which both inflamed his jealousy and
captivated his Russian soul.

The vodka, a bracing, icy syrup on his palate, transformed
itself farther down his throat into molten lava. Marcus gasped for breath, then
grinned at the two Russians across the table. His lovely blond guide smiled
back, dimpling plump cheeks, plainly eager for the promised story of Marcus’
life; her sullen military cadet boyfriend, meanwhile, maintained his
inhospitable glare.
I love you, too, pal
, Marcus subvocalized, then
addressed Eva:

“Don’t translate all this stuff, or you’ll bore your friend
Taras to death. Just hit the high points. It starts with me being born in a log
cabin in Illinois, like Abraham Lincoln.”

“But this is not correct,” Eva said. “Abraham Lincoln was
born in Kentucky.”

“Are you kidding me? And all these years I thought I was
following in the big guy’s bootsteps. Anyway,
I
was born in Illinois, so
help me, and grew up in a one-gas-station town like some of the hellhole places
we passed on the train between here and Nakhodka.”

“Why you did leave?”

“Well, I didn’t actually leave, Eva. I’d rather not go into
all the details, okay? A fire burned my grandparents’ house to the ground,
killed both of them. My grandmother’s damn kiln started it, blew up one
afternoon when she was firing some of her china painting. Ted and Cassie were
my whole family, you might say, raised me from a little guy.”

Eva reached for his hand, but Marcus pulled it away. “Hey,
thanks, darlin’, but it’s past, and I’m not looking for sympathy.” Marcus had
caught the extra flare of jealousy in Arensky’s dark eyes at Eva’s sympathetic
gesture. And Marcus didn’t want to scrape away at the scar tissue of his own
feelings. Let it all stay safely buried, with his grandparents.

The Adventures of Marcus Jolly really began in the fire’s
aftermath anyway. He’d been left, after funeral and other expenses, with about
a thousand dollars insurance money and an empty feeling—like he no longer
belonged to the town, or himself. He had moved in briefly with school friends
to finish his senior year. But one morning he stuffed his backpack with food
instead of books and started walking west.

The direction felt right—following the sun. He hitched rides
here and there, mostly walked. Days and nights passed. He crossed into Iowa,
then Nebraska, slept in fields to save money. Gradually a plan took shape in
his mind. It was a scheme at once lazy and ambitious, grand and aimless enough
to match his mood. Why not just continue walking toward the sunset—till he’d
gone around the world?

He liked seeing what lay around the next bend in the road,
but was in no hurry, with no particular destination. Maybe when his footsteps
had circled the globe, he’d find his way back to Illinois and decide what to do
with the rest of his life. More likely he’d never come back. Probably jump ship
somewhere, Tahiti maybe, shack up with some little cocoa-skinned girl.

Eva rolled her eyes at that, then translated very briefly.
Marcus suspected censorship. When she signaled him with her eyes to proceed, he
did so.

As his adventurous plan took shape, Marcus had begun to feel
life flowing through him again. He would become a person nobody knew. A
mysterious stranger, like Clint Eastwood, the way he’d ride into a town with
that funny squint. He’d do things he’d read about, or seen on television. He
remembered them in handfuls. Crazy things. Go hang-gliding. Jump out of a
plane. Ride an elephant and maybe Gilley’s mechanical bull. Climb the biggest
pyramid in Egypt; if there was enough room up there, he’d unroll his sleeping
bag and spend the night. He’d run with the bulls in that place in Spain. And
survive a knife fight in a waterfront bar...

“You are total crazy!” Eva said to him.

“Hey, this was a couple years ago, remember? But yeah, maybe
I’m still a little ‘rad,’ as the surfers say. What the hell do you think I’m
doing here in Siberia ten degrees below zero wearing a pair of dumb cowboy
boots?”

“This is the Far East, not Siberia, but anyway that is a good
question, about those high-heeled boots you are wearing. Taras thinks they are
from Texas.”

“You tell Laughing Boy there I got them from Tohei Films,
which is outside Tokyo, for two days of stunt work in a Japanese cowboy-samurai
movie. This here is genuine armadillo, something like that.”

“But how did you come to Japan?”

“I’m going to tell you that, too. First I need more vodka.”
Marcus fished ten rubles from his jeans and semaphored his arm at the waitress.
“Dyevushka!
More vodka!
“Bolshe, bolshe!
How’s that, teacher?”

“Fantastic!” Eva laughed. “And see, for you she comes
quickly!”

“Can’t help it if I was born beautiful. Now where was I?”

“Nyebraska?”

“Somewhere along there. Dreaming up adventures. Like Indiana
Jones. And what I figured was”—he tapped his blond head—“if I kept heading
west, eventually the continent was going to come to an end and I’d be staring
at nothing but ocean. See, I’d studied my geography in school.”

Marcus’ little joke perished somewhere in translation.
Neither Eva nor Taras cracked a smile.

“Anyway, I decided what I really wanted to do was cross the
ocean—the whole damn Pacific, preferably in some kind of a sailboat. I decided
this somewhere in Kansas, I think, which is pretty much like being out in the
middle of the ocean. And I’m thinking, why not? The whole wide world is out
there just waiting for me, and absolutely nobody cares what I do. I’m totally
free. I can do anything, be anybody, go anywhere. Understand?
Panimayesh?”

Like his last joke, this bit of vehemence seemed lost on
Eva, who now registered skeptical amusement. But Marcus detected definite
glimmerings of interest in Taras’ dark eyes. Following one’s own star was
obviously not a very Russian notion, he decided, but wanderlust certainly ran
rampant in the young people Marcus had run into, all the way from
Champaign-Urbana to Osaka. He thought of Yuli, a pimply Latvian teenager he’d
met on the
M/S Dzerzhinsky,
the steamer from Yokohama, who’d spent most
of the rocky two-day voyage listening to John Denver’s Greatest Hits on his
Walkman.

Anyway, with the Pacific always gentle on his mind, like in
the old song, Marcus had begun hitchhiking farther west, stopping for odd jobs
here and there to save up passage money—in case he couldn’t work or bum a ride
across the ocean. Again Eva hesitated in her translation.

“Hitchhiking, right?” he said. “You probably don’t do much
of it here. Not enough cars. I can just see some poor bastard standing out on a
lonely road till he freezes to death, waiting for a truck to come along.”

“No. We have many cars, even here in Khabarovsk. On Karl
Marx Street you see many, many. And we have a word for hitchhiking. But this is
not the way to cross a country like ours. Even driving, it is much too far.
Only the Rossiya Express or Aeroflot can cross the entire Soviet Union. Roads
and cars are for cities, or between cities and towns, or to drive into the
country.” She paused. “But ‘odd job’ is a more difficult word.”

He laughed. “‘Odd job’—‘strange occupation,’ I guess it
doesn’t make much sense.” He tried to clarify but apparently the concept still
posed difficulties.

In the Soviet Union, Eva explained, workers could obviously
not be allowed to walk away from their jobs without permission, simply in order
to work somewhere else. Anarchy would result. But there was one exception.
Those were the
shabashniki
, migrant workers or “moonlighters.” These
itinerant labor gangs, many of them Armenian, were sometimes hired in
emergencies, to help with harvests or on construction projects. “Perhaps this
is similar to your ‘odd jobbers’?”

“Close enough,” Marcus said. So, that’s what he’d been—a
shabashnik
—more
or less from Nebraska to Yokohama, in between the fun and games. He’d spread
and tamped asphalt on highway crews in Colorado. Done rough-framing carpentry
in Oregon and Washington. Even picked apples up there, real
shabashniki
work. A couple of the sleazier jobs he omitted from the account, like a weekend
of dancing bare-ass in a “boylesque” bar outside Reno.

But both Eva’s and Taras’ eyes lit up when he told about
joining up with the traveling carnival. It turned out they thought it was a
tsirk
,
a circus, something all Russians apparently adored; they even had one in
Khabarovsk.

Marcus hated to disillusion them. There’d been no elephants,
no trapeze girls, trained bears or clowns. Just a bunch of old trucks and
trailers that, in a day’s gut-busting labor, could be slammed together into a
neon midway, freak show, shooting gallery, three-for-a-buck tosses, tattoo
parlor, Ferris wheel, Big Whip and other lose-your-lunch mechanical rides.
Marcus’ drove a truck, helped with the setup and takedown, hung out with the
other roustabouts, did a little barking.

But when the caravan hit Oakland, and Marcus got his first
glimpse of San Francisco shining across the Bay, and the vast Pacific through
the Golden Gate, he walked away from the sawdust without looking back, just the
way he had left his hometown.

The land had finally run out; it was time to go to sea.

But how? He wasn’t about to join the Navy or Merchant
Marine. He didn’t want to spend his hard-earned money on a passenger berth. He
wanted to sail. There were sailing schools, he found, but they were for rich
hobbyists, too expensive and too slow. Besides, Marcus never played by normal
rules. His method was always to jump in and learn by doing.

The next morning he showed up in the Sausalito marina, in
the majestic shadow of the Golden Gate. He went sauntering along from one slip
to the other, wherever he saw people readying boats to go out, chatting, asking
if they could use some extra crew.

“Sorry, not today,” was the usual answer, though several
inquired if he had any experience.

“Nope. But I work hard and learn quick.”

“Some other time maybe.”

After an hour he’d found himself standing on the dock,
watching longingly as, one after another, the nifty little sloops and ketches
and yawls followed each other out of the channel. “I was totally frustrated,
like the kid stuck outside the candy store,” he told Eva. “So guess what I
did.”

She couldn’t.

“Simple. I got so desperate that I took off my jacket, my
shirt, my shoes and socks and jeans—everything, right down to my Jockey
shorts—and I jumped into the water. Let me tell you, San Francisco Bay is
frigging cold, even in the summer, which it wasn’t. And I swam out into the channel.
So I’m out there treading water, freezing my ass off and a few other parts, and
as each boat comes by, I’m waving like this. And people are standing up and
grabbing their life rings and shouting, ‘Hey, are you okay? Do you need help?’
And I’d shake my head and yell back, ‘I’m fine. Need any crew?’”

The fourth or fifth boat had picked him up—a fat, bearded
ex-Marine Marcus had talked to earlier on the dock. Five minutes later, toweled
off and wearing borrowed, giant-sized foul-weather gear, Marcus was learning
how to bring a genoa across the bow and winch it tight in five knots of wind.

“You liked this?” Eva asked.

“I loved it.”

Within a year, he told them proudly, he was not only a
pretty fair country sailor; he was actually skippering sailboats up and down
the Pacific Coast himself, from Vancouver to Acapulco.

As this was all being relayed to Taras, Marcus detected a
different kind of envy, almost admiration, in the Russian’s eyes. Marcus stood
up.

“The moral is—be sure you translate this, Eva—the moral is,
find out what you want to do in life, and then jump in feet first, goddammit!
And do it!”

“But Marcus, where are you going?”

“Let’s take a break here. I’m tired of talking and I’m tired
of sitting, and in case you didn’t notice, this place is turning into a sauna.
Aren’t you supposed to be my guide? Let’s go see something. Let’s go back and
watch the old farts fish through the ice, I don’t care.”

“Of course you are right, Marcus. I am not doing my duties.

Taras also is here for the first time, and there is much to
be seen in such a fine city as Khabarovsk. But,” she added, her blue eyes
flashing as Marcus narrowly beat Taras in helping her on with her heavy coat,
“we wish to hear more of your adventures.”

“That can be arranged.”

And so the three bundled up and went out into the brutally
cold day, then quickly squeezed into Eva’s tiny, apple-green Moskvich.

Many of the recommended sights of Khabarovsk—those to which
Intourist guides invariably drag their helpless victims—are lugubrious in
character. And Eva Sorokina did her cheerful utmost to conduct her two young
men to as many of these as possible.

Reluctantly by-passing the oil refinery, machine-tool
factory and other shining examples of local industry, she drove Marcus and
Taras to a succession of war memorials. There was one honoring the fallen Amur
Sailors; another (erected over a ravine where mass executions had taken place)
commemorated civil war victims; and a tower beside the Amur River marked the
spot where Hungarian and Austrian prisoners had been shot for refusing to play
the imperial Russian anthem. Only the most vocal opposition from her charges
dissuaded Eva from driving them fifty kilometers over icy roads to view the
wonders of the Volochayevka Battle Museum.

By the time they returned to the Tsentralnaya, on the
inevi-table Lenin Square with its inevitably monumental statue of V.I. Lenin,
both young men were out of sympathy with slaughtered martyrs. And they did not
brighten when Eva pointed out the tombstone nearby of four soldiers killed in a
long-ago skirmish with the Chinese.

Taras had plainly had enough, and said so in a muttered
protest, which Eva translated for Marcus:

“It seems Tarushka is now angry with me. He would rather
hear about your trip to South Seas, and also about those bad Tahiti girls.”

For the first time since the restaurant, the two men
exchanged smiles. Boredom had temporarily allied them, much as vodka had done
earlier.

“However, while you are telling us more naughty things you
did,” Eva said, “let us visit our famous Museum of Local History. It is in the
Park of Culture above the Amur. There are no graves, I promise, but two tigers,
some sea otters and other most interesting exhibits.”

*

As they wandered the overheated corridors, peering at
stuffed Siberian tigers and the artifacts and handicrafts of various northern
tribes, Marcus resumed his narrative. He told how the westward urge had carried
him on to Hawaii, and how, for a short time, he had even rowed tourists in a
Waikiki outrigger—an unusual job for a haole, or Caucasian. He’d spent part of
a summer operating a skip-loader on Maui, helping to rape paradise for a
Japanese construction company. Which had in turn paid for a winter of hanging
out on Oahu’s North Shore, where he’d learned to surf—and been damn fool enough
to get himself wiped out on a twenty-foot storm wave at Waimea Bay, and just
lucky enough to survive.

“How high in meters this is?”

“Maybe three times higher than that doorway over there. And
about a ton of water, which is, shit, a thousand kilos or something, all
falling on my head. Pretty stupid, huh?”

Eva agreed vehemently.

They gave short shrift to the dusty, upstairs displays
dedi-cated to agrarian and industrial progress achieved in the Far East under
socialism. By then both Eva and Taras were caught up in Marcus’ adventures on a
sixty-foot gaff-rigged ketch he had helped crew all over the South Seas. They
followed his long strides over to a Pacific wall map and watched his finger
trace a zigzag route across the vast blue expanse. South from Lahaina to the
Marquesas, east to Tahiti, Moorea and Bora Bora, northwest to Samoa, then on up
through Micronesia and Guam to Yokohama. Nine glorious months.

“You see no Tahiti girls?” Eva teased.

He’d seen his share, but none to play with. No pretty island
playmates of any kind, unless he counted a couple of unattached New Zealand
girls he’d met on Ponape, living aboard their uncle’s big schooner in Jokaj
Harbor. Kiwis were islanders, after all. But Eva didn’t want to hear about
them.

Finally, two and a half years after leaving home, Marcus had
arrived in Japan. He’d spent the last six months mostly in Tokyo, doing more
“odd jobs,” including teaching English and trying his hand at movie stunt work.
He’d also managed to climb Mount Fuji and acquire a brown belt in aikido and
Japanese fencing along with a taste for raw fish.

As the trio returned to the museum’s ground floor, Marcus
brought his story up to date. Next, as they knew, he intended to head west on
the Trans-Siberian, stopping twice along the way—in Irkutsk to see Lake Baikal,
and at Novosibirsk. He’d go on to Moscow and Leningrad. After that, he had no
idea.

Then, as they were on the verge of leaving, Marcus paused to
look at some old photographs. Eva explained they were actually stills from a
recent Soviet film about a famous explorer and ethnographer of Eastern Siberia,
Vladimir Arsenyev. There was, in fact, a plaque honoring this same Arsenyev on
the museum wall.

“I know these pictures,” Marcus said. “They’re from
Dersu
Uzala
. A great movie. I saw it in Tokyo in a Kurosawa film festival, with
some of his old samurai movies—like
The Seven Samurai
and
Yojimbo
.
Sorry, Eva, but it’s Japanese, not Russian.”

“Dersu Uzala,
yes, it is the title. But this is a
Soviet film. Mosfilm.”

The museum director emerged from his small office to shed
light on the matter. His name was Serdyuk, and he was a thin, schoolmasterish
fellow with round, rimless eyeglasses that miniaturized his watery-gray eyes.

“You are both correct,” he said in singsong English. The
film had been a Russo-Japanese co-production, made in the Far East in the early
Seventies by the very well-known Japanese director. Indeed, certain of the
events depicted had taken place in the vicinity of Khabarovsk. For many years
Arsenyev had worked in this very museum, and his house was still standing not
far away. And Dersu—the native hunter who was Arsenyev’s loyal companion on
many expeditions—had been buried just south of the city, near what was now the
Korfovskaya Station along the Ussuri River.

Marcus remembered passing this stop on his train up from
Nakhodka. He was becoming excited. “This is what they call serendipity,” he
told Eva.

“What is this?”

“Travel surprises. Stuff that can’t happen to you if you
never leave home, or don’t take a chance. Okay, for instance, I saw this movie
Dersu
only because I went with a guy I met in aikido class, which I took mainly
because the teacher, Master Kobayashi, was the brother-in-law of this big
Buddha head I knew in the Islands, the one who also got me the ride on the ketch.
And here we are. That’s serendipity. You go with the flow.”

When Marcus expressed interest in seeing where Kurosawa had
filmed, Serdyuk went back to his office and came out with the address of a
local trapper, who, he thought, had been a technical adviser on the film. In
fact, this man claimed to be a descendant of Arsenyev. Whether or not this was
so, he was certainly knowledgeable about the filming, and about the
taiga,
the great Siberian forest.

*

A half hour later, propelled by Marcus’ enthusiasm—and quite
against Eva’s sober judgment—they found themselves several kilometers outside
Khabarovsk along the Ussuri, inside an old peasant cottage, or
izba
. The
trapper, whose name was Kostya, turned out to be a big, wild-eyed man with
doughy skin and stringy, shoulder-length brown hair. He was apparently unused
to company, and rushed about ineffectually, till Eva took charge. In a few
minutes, under her supervision, the samovar was heating up, and they were
seated on chairs and benches before a large, tiled stove, listening to the
trapper describe, in the most agitated and grandiose tones, his obviously
insignificant role in the filming.

Rather, Marcus and Eva listened, prompting with further
polite questions. But Taras Arensky leaned his wooden chair against the log
wall and focused far off through the windows, watching the early winter
twilight deepen into darkness.

Actually, he was again mired in his frustrations. If only
the damn American cowboy would go away, get on the morning train to Irkutsk! As
incredible as Marcus’ stories had been—and Taras admitted he’d been carried
away for a while—he couldn’t stand another day of them, watching Eva staring up
in doe-eyed admiration. And
tw
o more days of the bragging, swaggering
foreign bastard would definitely call for murder.

Besides, all those adventures couldn’t possibly be true, not
even half of them. It was impossible. Giant waves! Mountain climbing!
Hang-gliding! Lumberjacking! Sailing ships! Japanese sword-fighting and
samurai-cowboy movies! And he’d done it all in, what, less than three years?
And the crazy kid was only a year older than Taras. Shit on all of it! Either
this Marcus Jolly was a superman, or a pathological liar. Or maybe a criminal,
a dangerous American hooligan on the run from the police. But Evushka, the
silly, gorgeous goose, believed every word.

She might even be in love with the perpetually grinning
stranger. Taras thought about that—and of how he might distract her from Marcus
and tell her about all the fencing medals
he
, Taras, had won at his
sports club—as he fingered the pocket which imprisoned the sacred lock of her
hair, that hair which he beheld across the cabin, gleaming buttery gold in the
light from a single overhead bulb. How raptly she was listening to Marcus,
telling another of his Sinbad stories. Beside her the wild-eyed trapper was
also listening, waiting for her translation as Taras had done all day.

Fuck you all, he thought. His gaze wandered to the
over-mantle trophy. A double set of antlers, locked together. Two red deer,
Kostya had explained, wapiti bucks, had fought so violently over a doe they’d
become entangled and unable to wrench apart, and were thus linked forever in
death. A perfect symbol, Taras thought. It could be Marcus and himself,
fighting for Eva. Like the American, Taras had come nearly half around the
world to be here tonight, in this smoky little room. And he hadn’t come all
that way to back off and lose Eva to any rival.

The excitable Kostya hurried off to an adjoining pantry,
returning with four chipped mugs and a liter of local vodka. Then there were
toasts, and, at Eva’s insistence, Taras joined in. To America. To Russia. To
health, freedom, peace and international fraternity! To
Abragam Lyeenkuln
and
Zhon F. Kennedy
, to Arsenyev and Dersu! Down the hatch and bottoms
up!

Food was brought out, unwrapped, passed around. Salted
herring, black bread, sausages. The trapper began telling how a caged tiger had
been carried into the taiga for the movie, although there were many Siberian
tigers still lurking in the area. He found this enormously funny for some
reason. The food and talk made them all thirsty, and the grinning trapper
triumphantly produced another bottle.

Soon they were singing Russian songs. Marcus, who of course
didn’t know the words, fished a small harmonica from under his sheepskin jacket
and began to accompany them—with a skill that impressed both Eva and Kostya and
aggravated Taras.

“But this is a toy, anyone can play it,” he said.

Marcus tossed him the instrument. Taras blew into it with
all his force, producing an ear-splitting squeal, till Eva snatched it away.

Taras protested: “But that was Shostakovich!”

When they all laughed, Taras was swept into the party
despite himself. Another bottle materialized. It became somehow obvious that
there was to be no trekking back to Khabarovsk this night. Snowflakes were
sifting silently against the windowpanes, and Taras saw, pushing back filthy
lace curtains, a powdery mantle covering the little Moskvich coupe.

Eva’s protests were strongly worded, but only half-hearted.
Intourist at the Tsentralnaya would be worried over Marcus’ absence. Not to
return would be an itinerary violation, and she would be held accountable. If
only there were a telephone... But Kostya sloshed more vodka into her mug,
which made her lose her train of thought, which in turn made her quite furious,
and then helplessly giggly.

So, Taras thought, cocking his head, his darling Evushka was
also tipsy. Tipsy, and so girlishly desirable that it made him ache to look at
her yet not be able to touch her, the way he had done last summer.

Outside, wind-whipped snow was now swirling in every
direction. Inside, time had begun subtly to alter, speeding up, then slowing
down, like a clockworks with slipping gears. Events lost continuity, ran together
in a bright blur, then stood forth in a series of sharply etched, bizarre
vignettes. Marcus juggling three, then four potatoes, finally dropping them all
and collapsing himself in a cackling spasm. Eva, childishly demonstrating some
silly upside-down yoga posture, with her head on the floor and woolen legs
kicking the air, toppling sideways to resounding male laughter. And Kostya,
grinning and pouring, looking more and more like Rasputin with his deranged
smile and ragged, greasy hair.

One moment stood out. Marcus had stumbled outside in the
snow, leaking vodka. Then Kostya also vanished, either into the pantry for more
food, or also outside, to fetch more stovewood. In his sodden state of mind
Taras did not immediately grasp the enormity of the moment. Then all at once he
realized, and slid off his bench and onto the wooden floor beside his beloved.
After the wretched eternity of the day, here he was—suddenly and
miraculously—alone with Eva. Yet the others might come back at any second.

He couldn’t restrain himself an instant longer. He reached
for her, pulled her close, drowned his face in the intoxicating golden mane of
her hair, snuggled against her.

“Evushka, Evushka,” he had whimpered, all his pain coming
out. “How I adore you, Evushka! I think of nothing but you, always. I must have
you!”

If she answered, he could not hear it. He began kissing her
passionately, demandingly, throwing his arms around her. She cried out as they
tumbled over. He remembered kneeling astride her, looking down at her, blind
with desire and then confusion, as she had screamed over and over. He had
shaken her, simply to make her stop. She had wrenched away from his grip, then
scrambled off to the darkest corner of the shadowy room, where she huddled,
weeping.