Katherine Carlyle (15 page)

Since I told him I’m not going to sleep with him he seems to have become stronger. More of a man.

“I’ve got a free place to stay,” I say, “if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“Are you —” He checks himself.

“Am I what?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re jealous.”

He gives me a look.

“You can’t have me,” I say, “so you want me gone.”

“There could be some truth in that.” He smiles wistfully down into his drink. “But it wasn’t what I was about to say.”

Later, on Britzerdamm, a white stretch limo glides past, tires trickling on the tarmac. A window opens. A pale hand waves. I’m reminded of the night I last saw Massimo, the boys with
their Roma scarves and their loud mouths. Sometimes, when I think of where I am, I shiver, and I’m not sure if it’s terror or delight.

“I’m going home,” Oswald says.

It will take me an hour to get back to Cheadle’s apartment, and dawn isn’t far away. “Oswald, can I sleep at your place?” I pause. “Just sleep, I mean.”

After the way I spoke to him earlier he probably can’t believe what he’s hearing, but when I keep looking at him, too tired to be capable of anything manipulative, let alone flirtatious, his gaze drops to the pavement and he shakes his head.

“Come on, then,” he says.

/

When I walk into Cheadle’s apartment the next day, I find him sitting at the kitchen table with Anna. Dressed in a black coat with a fake-fur collar, she is showing him a series of images on a digital camera. In the daylight she looks even paler, and the pores show in her cheeks and in the sides of her nose.

“Where did you get to last night?” Cheadle says.

“I stayed at a friend’s house.”

“The dentist?”

“No.”

Cheadle and Anna exchange a look.

Anna reaches sideways into a bag and takes out an unsealed envelope. “Your visa,” she says, “and a letter of invitation.”

My heart leaps. “That was quick.”

“I told you. We have a contact.”

I open my passport and find the visa, which occupies an entire page. The date of entry is October 10. The visa expires on November 9.

“Thirty days,” I say.

Anna nods. “Yes.”

“And if I stay longer?”

“It’s illegal. If the police stop you, you will have big problems. Also when you try to leave the country.”

I turn to the letter. Since it’s written in Russian I can’t understand a word, but I spot my name in the middle of a paragraph, surrounded by Cyrillic script, like a ship in rough water. I ask Anna what it says. Cheadle answers. The letter is from an acquaintance of Oleg’s, who remembers having met my father at a conference in Geneva. He has invited me to stay with him and his family in Arkhangel’sk, and assures me of a warm welcome.

“This man never met your father in Geneva,” Cheadle goes on, “or anywhere else, for that matter, and there will be no warm welcome. When you get to Arkhangel’sk you’ll be on your own.”

I nod, then turn to Anna. “Perhaps I will also visit your hometown.”

Nothing shows in her face, though I sense rapid thoughts beneath the surface, a kind of scurrying, like rats inside a wall.

“You’re from Cherepovets,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “But it’s a steel town. Very industrial. Not so much to see.”

“There’s always something. You just have to look.” I glance at my Russian visa. “I can’t thank you enough for this. You’ve been very kind.”

Anna’s eyes glint, as sequins do when they catch the light, and she says something to Cheadle in Russian. Her words have a flat interrogative sound.

“In exchange for the visa,” Cheadle says, “Anna will require your services.”

In the kitchen no one moves. Even the fridge seems to be holding its breath.

“My services?” I say.

“It won’t take up more than a few hours of your time.”

I swallow. “What’s involved?”

“You’ll go to a hotel — the Kempinski — where you’ll meet a man called Raul. You’ll be his companion for the evening.”

Raul
. I’ve heard the name before. In the restaurant on Schlüterstrasse.

“Who is he, this Raul?”

“That’s none of your concern,” Cheadle says.

The fridge shudders, then begins to hum.

“What about Tanzi?” I say. “Wouldn’t she be a better choice?”

Cheadle smiles. “She doesn’t have what it takes.”

“I’m sure you understand,” he tells me later, when Anna has left, “that my Russian friends are not the sort of people who would give you something for nothing.”

“No,” I say. “I see.”

“If you feel uncomfortable about it or if it seems too high a price to pay you don’t have to do it. But your visa will be rescinded.”

I say nothing.

Cheadle picks up a big glossy bag off the floor and hands it to me. “Something to wear, when the time comes.”

Inside the bag is a golden dress by a designer I have never heard of and a pair of matching high-heeled sandals. I hold up the dress.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. “Where’s it from?”

Cheadle shrugs. “Anna brought it.”

/

That evening I sit on my bed and sketch a section of my room — the transom window, the car tires, the cracked yellow wall. It’s my aunt Lottie who first inspired me to draw. When I was a child she showed me her notebooks — she designs costumes for theatre and film — and talked about the importance of recording your ideas and your experiences. Later, I started keeping notebooks of my own. The fluorescent tube light sizzles overhead, its frosted plastic cover filled with dead flies. My door is ajar, and the smell of roasting meat creeps up the corridor and through the gap. Tanzi’s cooking.

Putting my notebook down, I open the silver heart I carry everywhere with me. The two locks of my mother’s hair lie curled into the tiny musty space, one fair, one dark, and I think what I always think:
before and after
.

There was a period of about a year when it seemed she had made a full recovery. Chemotherapy was over, and the operation to remove a tumor from her ovaries had been a success. Her doctors had found no evidence of metastasis. Apart from the scar on her abdomen and the color of her hair she was the same Stephanie Carlyle. That was how I saw it anyway. But I was only twelve. Looking back, I think she behaved as if her time was limited, the pleasure she took in things disproportionate, nostalgic. Somehow the present
was no longer the present; it was already past. She loved Rome as you love a place you’re about to leave. She walked the streets with her face tilted towards a sun she no longer took for granted. She sat on the rounded lips of fountains and dangled her bare feet in the cool green water. She touched every plant she saw, as if hoping to leave an imprint of herself, as if prompting them to remember her. Even the air she drew into her lungs was treated as a luxury. Even the simple act of breathing. Everything was precious all of a sudden, me included. Her love could feel like a weight.
Love me less
, I wanted to say, though I could never have put such a complex feeling into words, not at the time. She was always drawing attention to the world — the beauty of this, the power of that — when all I wanted was to read my books or think my thoughts. She was exhilarating to be around. She was exhausting. Though she was approaching fifty she didn’t seem to have an age anymore. The gap between living and dying, usually so unimaginably wide, had narrowed to almost nothing. She would not grow any older. The face she woke with every morning was the last face she would ever have.

My poor brave darling.

In her final months she became capricious, and I would sometimes feel she was usurping territory that should have been my own. I was the adolescent, after all.
Let’s go shopping
, she might say. Or equally,
Let’s go to Venice
. She appeared to have such energy. Only later did it occur to me that it wasn’t energy at all but hunger. Only later did I realize how hard-won these seemingly whimsical projects were, and how much they meant to her. We often argued. We weren’t always the good friends people took us for.

One Friday afternoon she picked me up from school as usual but instead of taking me home she drove out along Via Nomentana,
the road narrowing as it moved northeast, the dusty verges lined with pizza places, umbrella pines, petrol stations, and washed-out pink apartment blocks. There were stalls stacked high with ripe fruit — apricots, cherries, watermelons — and the jammed cars ahead of us sparkled and vibrated in the heat.

I asked her where we were going.

“Switzerland,” she said.

We crossed the border that same night — my mother loved long drives — and by the afternoon of the next day we were walking along the shore of Lake Zurich, the air drowsy, the partially snow-capped mountains showing through the haze like pieces of white lace. She had been an au pair here once, she told me, before she met my father. This was a time I knew nothing about, and could not imagine.

On Sunday she bought a local paper. There was a cruise, she said, with live country-and-western music.

“A country-and-western cruise — in Switzerland!” She was laughing. “You couldn’t make it up.”

On the boat that evening two women stood out from the Swiss holidaymakers. They were both elderly, in their late sixties or early seventies. One had squeezed herself into a backless leopardskin-print dress. Her hair was a frizz of bright-orange candyfloss and she smoked nonstop. Her companion’s dress was made from a shiny electric-green material that resembled satin. They looked like extras from
Priscilla Queen of the Desert
. By eavesdropping on their conversation we learned they were from Naples.

While we were eating the “English-style” meal — grilled meat, baked potato, baked beans — my mother noticed a Swiss couple pointing at the Neapolitan women and sniggering. Her lips
tightened. She put down her knife and fork, rose to her feet, and walked over to where the Neapolitans were sitting.

She spoke to the woman in the leopardskin outfit. “I just wanted to tell you.
Stai benissimo
.” You look great.

“Sì, è vero,”
the woman said.
“Hai ragione.”
Yes, it’s true. You’re right. She gestured at her friend. “E
lei
?” And her?

“Anche lei,”
my mother said. She looks great too.

Sitting down again and flushed by her behavior — she wasn’t usually such an extrovert — my mother poured herself more wine.

“To Neapolitans,” she said. “In fact, to all Italians.”

“Except Berlusconi,” I said.

We clinked glasses.

Clouds veiled the mountains and the water was dense as mercury. White mansions lined the southern shore. Their decks were made of dark wood and the green lawns sloped down to jetties where speedboats were moored.

After dinner three short men in tartan shirts appeared on a low stage. They played famous songs like “Night Train,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” and “California Blue,” and everybody had drunk enough by then to sing along. My mother sang too, one hand pressed to her collarbone. The boat seemed to have speeded up. Lights blinked and glittered all along the edges of the lake.

When the cruise was over we lay on a grass bank and stared up at the stars. The warm, almost brackish air lifting off the water. The tiny lazy waves collapsing …

My mother’s mobile rang. She glanced at the screen and hesitated, then she answered.

“No, we’re in Switzerland,” she said.

“Switzerland?”
I heard my father say, his voice so small and pinched it sounded comical.

My mother stood up and walked a few paces. “She’s not going. She’s ill.” She listened again, then said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be home tomorrow.”

“You told him I was ill,” I said when the call ended.

“Well, you are,” she said. “Look at you. You’re in a terrible state.”

We both laughed, then she stared out across the lake into the blackness and sighed. “Perhaps we should go back.”

“But you’ve been drinking.”

“I only had two glasses.”

We drove through the night, stopping at a motorway hotel outside Milan. I went to school on Tuesday. Three months later her cancer returned and this time it proved too strong for her.

Tanzi appears in my doorway, making me jump. “The chicken’s ready. You want to eat with us?”

/

At the beginning of October the sky lowers over Berlin and an east wind whips dead leaves into vicious spirals. Angela Merkel embarks on her third term in office after victory in the elections. Uncontrolled Gypsy migration from Bulgaria and Romania is causing tension, and the last existing stretch of Hitler’s motorway network — the A11 — is to be resurfaced. On Paul-Lincke-Ufer a black umbrella leaps from a man’s hand and somersaults into the canal. I have a Russian visa but can’t use it yet. I feel thin-skinned, irritable. There’s the sense that I’m treading water. Marking time.

One afternoon I meet Oswald in Café Einstein. He starts talking about life at KaDeWe, and he’s being so outrageous that the waitress with the chestnut hair stops at our table to listen. Oswald’s supervisor — the burly woman — has been seen leaving an infamous nightclub in Mitte, but he isn’t overly surprised. A day job handling meat, a nocturnal fixation with leather. It’s only to be expected, he says. He has often felt the urge himself. We’re all still laughing when my phone vibrates. It’s Cheadle and he comes straight to the point. My services will be required that evening.

By the time the call is over the waitress has moved away and Oswald’s texting.

“Who was that?” he says.

I stare at the screen. “No one special.”

“Your mood’s changed completely. You’re like a different person.” Head cocked, he considers me. “Your phone
never
rings.”

Back at the apartment I wash my hair and shave my legs. Later, I slip into the clingy golden dress and the high heels. Standing in the hall by the front door I study myself in a dusty full-length mirror.

“You look great.” From where he’s sitting, in the kitchen, Cheadle can see all the way down the corridor.

“I look like an escort,” I say.

“High-class, though. Top of the range.” Cheadle rolls the tip of his cigar against the edge of the ashtray and reaches for his beer.