It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (16 page)

Karen came back into the room and lay beside me, propped on her elbows. “I wasn’t meaning to be rude about your friend.” “That’s all right, I’m sure he deserves it.”

“He’s probably feeling rather lonely these days.”

“Maybe.”

“And foolish too.”

I looked at her.

“I mean, with everything that’s happened in the world. Like someone who put all their money on the wrong horse.”

“Oh . . . No, I doubt whether he’d look at it like that. . .”

I got up and went to wash. From the bathroom I stepped down the corridor to look at Sophie. She lay peacefully asleep, her hands either side of her head like two little starfish. I stood for a moment, thinking of Karen’s last remark. It was something 1 might easily have thought myself, but it disturbed me oddly to hear it voiced. Privately, I had observed the events in the countries beyond what had once been the Iron Curtain with mixed feelings; it had been strangely unsettling to find myself somehow vindicated in the caution, the capacity for endless equivocation, the final attachment to comfort and prosperity that had delivered me to where I was today. It had felt like getting away with a crime, on the grounds that the crime had suddenly been made legal. “It’s all right,” history had seemed to whisper complicitly in my ear, “you have nothing to be ashamed of. . The peculiar economy of my conscience had apparently come to depend on the supposition of a universe violently opposed to my own. Without it the thought of my own life was sometimes strangely suffocating.

Under the cotton blankets Sophie’s little chest rose and fell just perceptibly: up, down, up, down, each motion regular and predictable, and yet still surprising to me. As always when I observed it, a feeling of urgent protectiveness came into me. It was more or less superfluous, however, considering the bars on the cot, the thick pile carpet beneath it, the baby alarm, the thermostat. . . Not knowing what to do with it, I went quietly from the room.

Karen had turned out the light in the bedroom. A glow from the pale sodium lamp in the communal garden threw shadows of the cherry tree’s knuckled branches against the thin fabric of the curtains. I remembered when we had first come to look at the house. It must have been almost exactly two years ago because the tree was in full blossom. Karen was pregnant, and 1 had just made the move from community to shipping law that had dramatically raised our income. We had both laughed in disbelief at the sight of the tree from the bedroom window. The extraordinarily abundant clusters of blossoms bursting out from even the thinnest twigs had seemed comical, a massive overcalculation of nature, absurd and benign, like an enormous bank error in one’s favor.

The pub was gloomy and quiet when I arrived. A pale gleam from the brass-bracketed lamps lay coldly over the cumbrous furnishings. Empty chairs and stools stood around like giant chess pieces.

A figure in the corner of a horseshoe booth gave a casual wave of his hand. “Paul, hello.”

“Dimitri!”

For a moment I hadn’t recognized him. His hair, longer now and unkempt, had lost its color, and his face was gaunt and sallow. He wore a lumpy gray coat open over a T-shirt, with a thin white scarf around his neck.

“Good to see you, Dimitri.”

“You too. You’re looking well.”

I saw Dimitri take in my suit and overcoat with a faint sardonic glimmer.

On the table before him was a pint, a tumbler of whiskey, and a pouch of rolling tobacco. The drinks were fresh, but he accepted when I offered to get him another of each.

“Cheers,” he said as I returned with three glasses.

“Cheers, Dimitri.”

We drank rapidly. Dimitri was forthcoming at first, with none of the aloofness of his behavior in Leeds. He had been out of the country for much of the past decade, he said, working for a coffee-growing collective in Nicaragua until the fall of the Sandinistas, then in Cuba, where he had traveled with other members of his party, the WPSR, at the invitation of the government.

“That sounds impressive.”

Dimitri shrugged, licking the gum on a cigarette paper.

“It was interesting, I suppose.” He began to describe his travels, though as he spoke, I had the impression that the experience had become remote from him. His words sounded spent, somehow. He broke off.

“Actually I don’t believe in the idea of individual countries anymore. Cuba or anywhere else.”

“Oh?”

“As far as I can see, a nation is just an expression of the human inability to give a shit about the life or death of other humans beyond a fixed limit. Or put the other way round, it’s a way of organizing and instituting people’s apparently limitless desire to grind their heels in other people’s faces.”

I smiled. This sounded more like the old Dimitri.

“Do I detect a note of disenchantment?”

“With what?” A surprisingly hostile glare faced me.

“With . . . the human race, I suppose.” Which was not quite what I had intended to say.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Dimitri turned away, looking irritated. He finished off his pint, then downed his whiskey and stood up to buy another round.

“And what about you?” he asked, returning with the drinks. “I ran into John Mackenzie.” John had lived in our house. “He said you’d become a barrister. That must have been a slog . . .”

“It was hard work, yes.”

“But they pay you well for it?”

I nodded, warily. “The money isn’t bad.”

“Mackenzie said you’d bought a house on one of those private squares in Holland Park.”

“That’s true. Not one of the very big houses . . .”

“He said you’d told him you took home over two hundred grand. In a bad year.”

He grinned at me. 1 felt myself turn abruptly red.

“It’s .absurd, I know, but what can I say?”

“Good luck to you! That’s what I say.” Dimitri raised his glass, still grinning.

The pub began to fill up a little. As if jostled awake, a jukebox blinked and started pumping out music energetically. It crossed my mind that Dimitri had summoned me tonight because he needed money. I began to try to formulate a position. What could I lend him without upsetting Karen? A thousand pounds? Perhaps just a few hundred. Or perhaps better just to refuse altogether, politely but firmly, offer to help in some other way . . . He finished his drink. I pointed at the empty glasses.

“Get you another?”

“Thanks.”

I bought drinks and returned.

“You still haven’t told me what brought you to London.”

Dimitri frowned. “What brought me to London?” He reached for his tobacco pouch. “Let’s see now . . . Boredom. I think that’s what it was. Yes, boredom, as far as I remember.”

I looked at him, saying nothing.

“Not much going on in Leeds anymore. The WPSR fizzled out. They still exist, nominally, but we couldn’t afford to run the building or the paper anymore.”

“Oh dear—”

“Yes, isn’t it a shame?” Dimitri’s eyes glittered acerbically. “But there we are.” He spit a shred of tobacco from his tongue and lit his cigarette, which flared, sour and pungent.

“And what do you do with yourself?” I asked. “Where are you living?”

“I live around the corner. Luxury pad. Floor. Ceiling. Doorknobs on the doors ... As to what I do with myself ... I, ah”^he dragged on his cigarette—“actually I’m editing a new magazine.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I thought you’d find that interesting. Always makes things easier if our friends have a project or two on the go, otherwise why would they be our friends?”

I smiled uncomfortably.

“What sort of magazine?”

“Oh . . . International. Utopian. Socialism in the post-Soviet era. Communism after the death of communism . . . That sort of thing . .

“Good for you!”

“Funny how many people say exactly that when I tell them about it... as if I’d volunteered to rescue a child from a sewer . . .” I felt that he was getting close to making his pitch for a loan, and I decided impulsively that I would surprise him with my generosity. No sooner would he ask than I would be writing out a check for whatever sum he named. I could already feel the impending satisfaction of doing this swelling pleasantly inside me. “Does it have a name,” I asked, “the magazine?”

“
Demos.
It’s modeled on Jean Jaures’s paper,
L’humanite.
Do you know Jaures? He was the leader of the French Communists in 1905. Called himself a Marxist-idealist, which was a deliberate contradiction in terms, given that Marx dismissed personal idealism as an irrelevance ... As I point out in my first editorial—ha! That sounds impressive—Marx himself was in fact totally confused about this. On the one hand . . .”

Another wave of volubility took hold of Dimitri, rather unnerving this time. He spoke with a strange energy, reminiscent of his student days except that what had once been a straightforward zealous enthusiasm seemed to have turned into a kind of caustic inversion of itself. . . His eyes, red-rimmed now, narrowed harshly, as if he were trying to exorcise some vague disgust or at least exasperation, directed equally at me, his magazine, and himself.

“Jaures described Marx’s vision of the human race as a sleeping person floating down a river, just carried along with the flow. According to Jaures, this may have been true enough once, but now the sleeper had been woken by the turbulence of history and was going to have to take responsibility for itself if it didn’t want to sink. What I ask in my-—in my editorial is whether Jaures mistook his own personal energies, which were titanic, for a more definitive awakening of the species than was really the case. Because as far as I can see, we’re already exhausted with our little spell of consciousness, and we just want to go back to sleep . .

He broke off with a grimace, standing up abruptly, as if his own words irritated him, and went to buy another round.

“Sure you won’t have a whiskey?”

“Yes, thanks.”

He returned from the bar a moment later. “I appear to be a couple of quid short.”

I reached for my wallet with alacrity and gave him the money. When he came back with the drinks, he was once again taciturn. There was a prolonged and uneasy silence between us. I began to feel oddly apprehensive. I had the sensation of being out of my depth.

“You know, I didn’t expect to see you again,” I heard myself say, “after our last meeting.”

Dimitri knitted his brow, apparently trying to remember. He looked quite blearily drunk.

“When I came to visit you in Leeds.”

“Oh.”

“I had the feeling you’d written me off as a lost cause.”

He frowned again, turning away.

“It was a hell of a surprise to get your letter. Very nice, but pretty unexpected.”

Suddenly he gazed straight at me. Here we go, I thought. I felt surreptitiously in my coat pocket; there was the little leather case containing my checkbook. Dimitri sat upright, breathing heavily through his nose, his broad chest heaving up and down under his coat. Slowly, with great deliberation, he laid one outspread hand and then the other on the table before him, and gripped the edge. For a moment he looked rather deranged, as if he were about to turn the table over. Then a sudden malevolent glitter appeared in his eyes.

It’s Beginning to Hurt

“I read a book about ants recently,” he said. “Made me think of you. There’s a species called honeypot ants who feed off honey-dew. You can’t get honeydew, whatever the fuck that is, in the dry season, so they’ve had to invent a storage system. They have a whole class called repletes, compulsive eaters who’ve evolved this pouchy gullet that can be distended to gigantic proportions. In the wet season the workers stuff these repletes with honeydew till their abdomens swell up like balloons. They can’t walk or do much of anything at all at this point, so what happens is the workers hoist them up and hang them upside down from the roof by their back claws like those bottles there”—he pointed at the upside-down bottles behind the bar—“and in the dry season just tap them for a snifter whenever they’re thirsty, by stroking their heads. Easy as shoving a tumbler up at an optic.”

He gave a chuckle.

“That’s me, is it?” I said. “A replete?”

“Have to admit, it fits you pretty well, all things considered ... No offense.”

I smiled, trying to appear unperturbed. However, I could feel the insult traveling into me with a peculiar force and velocity, as if there were nothing inside me to resist it.

Having delivered it, Dimitri seemed to lose interest in further conversation. I couldn’t quite believe he had summoned me here simply in order to insult me, and yet he appeared to have nothing else to add. Perhaps it was just the belligerence of the alcohol, I told myself, and in an effort not to end the evening on a sour note, I tried to change the subject.

“I didn’t mention I’d become a father, did I?”

“No.”

“Little girl, Sophie, seventeen months. Very lovely”

Dimitri looked at me vaguely For a few minutes I kept up a conversation about fatherhood, more or less one-sided. Last orders had been called, and as I ground to a halt, Dimitri yawned and stood up, buttoning his coat.

“Time to head off.”

We went outside. I turned to him, trying to prepare a suitable goodbye, one that would convey my disappointed fondness without stooping to rancor.

“You can have a copy of the magazine if you want,” Dimitri said, before I could formulate my words.

“Oh .. . Thank you.”

“Come up, I’m just over the road there.”

I followed him across the road to his building. An uncarpeted wooden staircase led up from a narrow entrance that smelled of stale food. We climbed four flights and walked down a corridor to a bruised metal door. Inside was a room about the size of our breakfast room, with a mattress on the bare floorboards and a yellow-streaked basin over by the window.

Kicking off his shoes, Dimitri pointed to the far corner. “There, you can take one.”

There was a pile of papers stapled in bunches of about thirty pages. I stepped over and saw the word “Demos” stenciled in large black letters on the top sheet.

“It’s been out a couple of years. I’m trying to get another issue together. Maybe you’d like to write something.”