Pravda (4 page)

Thirty-five minutes later, Isabella came back into Molly's bedroom, dressed now in her trouser suit and businesslike despite herself.

"Thanks for the bath, Mol. That was just what I needed." She fetched her cup from the little bedside table and dropped it into a brown paper bag. Reality poured back into the vacuum of the vanished humor. "I'll call tomorrow."

"Do."

Isabella's eyes met those of her friend a moment and then traveled around the room as if looking for further cups that required disposing of. "Shall I bring your laptop over?"

"Yes. Thanks. That's helpful. You'd better bring the power cable too, though." Molly shifted her weight. "The battery connection keeps cutting out. I'll plug it in down here."

The laptop was on the tiny desk by the window. Isabella moved smartly around the end of the bed.

"You know," Molly said, her voice gentle, her head following the passage of her friend. "You know, I've been thinking—you should put on those mini-concerts we keep talking about. Keep the momentum going—find some musicians who don't look and behave like social-problem children and persuade your friends to come along. Your thing for Sasha's birthday was cool. How many people? Two hundred. And everybody loved it. Everybody. And that was only piano and violin."

"I know," Isabella said. "But I'm not sure people would come—not if it weren't some kind of a special occasion."

"Oh, they would. Definitely. You have a pretty big e-mail list already."

The wires into Molly's computer were all twisted.

"All these things start small," Molly continued. "You could use the place on Eleventh again."

Isabella clicked her tongue. "Which one is the power here?"

"Sorry, Is—it's the thickest cable. You might have to unplug it
under the desk and feed it back up—otherwise that adaptor thing gets stuck. It's a pain."

Molly was right about the concerts, of course. But Isabella did not believe her neighbor really understood that such a course was far from easy. In the past twenty years (yes, since the Wall collapsed, dear, crazy Mother) modern life had speedily (and rather gleefully) drawn up and ranged all its best and biggest guns against anything remotely vocational. (Molly was the exception—and it had cost her dearly to find her niche.) The arteries of the world were becoming more and more sclerotic: if you were not creating money, then you were not creating anything. And sure enough, down on her hands and knees, Isabella heard herself citing the hoary old defense: "I've saved quite a lot, though—one more year and, well, I reckon I'll have enough for a six-month sabbatical rethink."

"If there's anyone who could rescue that kind of music, Is ... I mean, the classical audience is so pompous and self-regarding, such a bunch of pricks."

Isabella stood, glanced out the window, and leaned over the desk, trying to thread the freed cord up from behind.

"But you're not," Molly continued. "You're young and you're clever and you're ... capable. The only thing ... the only thing is to make a start."

So keenly was Isabella aware of her neighbor's change of tone (and the kindness behind it) that she suddenly felt embarrassed and could not bring herself to turn around. Embarrassed because she wanted both to embrace Molly and to run away from her at the same time. Embarrassed too that she might be guilty of in some way soliciting such sympathy. And worst of all, embarrassed because the acuity of the insight made her want to demur, deny, deflect, evade ... when actually she well knew that she was only being cheered and reassured—reassured that here was an understanding ear, if ever she needed it. And yet what was the point of talking about this or that, when really—the floor of her mind now cracked apart and rose up like a swarm of agitated wasps—when really the whole mess needed sorting: dropping out and then begging her way back into Cambridge; a false-start career in law—years wasted; a change of plan; unbelievable amounts of work; then not managing more than three months with the cultish children of Magog at Harvard Business School; this new farce of a career at Media Therapy, also very difficult to lie her way into, with these human simulacra for colleagues. Not forgetting a disastrous series of so-called relationships with infants, a violent cheating manipulative bastard for a father whom (subconsciously) she had crossed the Atlantic to get away from and whom she sometimes felt the urge to pretend (in her sickest moments) had actually physically abused her, so that at least she would have some factual and universally recognized problem to cite as the cause of all her ungovernable feelings of revulsion and nausea toward him. And now the letters. She turned.

"You're right, Mol, I know. I should call the guy again. That place on Eleventh is perfect. But ... but it's not as if I'm going to do this job for more than another year, maximum. I think I just had to get the green card and, you know, find a proper footing here after all the arsing around. If there's one thing about America these days, it's that you have to be legal. Land of the free and all that."

She passed the computer with both hands.

Molly placed it beside her on the bed and looked up, her face a picture of understanding.

And instantly Isabella felt the urge to share something real with her friend. It was cruel to push people away all the time.
Give
something. Anything.

"I had an argument with Sasha last night, is all. After I got back from the work thing."

"Was it hard-core?" Molly was almost disappearing with delicacy and the countereffort not to seem overdelicate for fear of further drawing attention to any tenderness.

"No. No, not really. Just stupid." Isabella likewise was almost disappearing, but for burgeoning shame at having raised the subject at all. "He can be an idiot. And—you know this whole thing—he doesn't work. Well, I suppose he does. But not in the way that we ... that is conv—"

"Happen often?"

"No. Hardly ever."

"Feel like a normal argument that a couple would have?"

"It was just about space. You know." Isabella found a rueful smile.

"Yes, well, it's tricky up on your floor. The apartments are half this size."

Though she knew the time well enough, Isabella glanced deliberately at the old clock. "Damn. I really have to scoot. Here, let me plug you in." She bent and then came up again all bustle and haste. "I'll message if I'm up Thursday morning. It's unbelievable—I'm going to be late again and I have a nine with the Snicker himself."

"Go, lady, go." Molly frizzed her hair. "Thanks for breakfast.
And really, come down whenever. If I am alive enough to make it to the door, you can come in."

Isabella looked sympathetically at the ankle. "You'd better take it easy on the ski-jumping and stuff today, Mol. You done with your tea?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

Isabella put her friend's cup into the brown bag for the recycle bin and collected the rest of her things for work.

"Okay. Bye," Isabella said.

"See you," Molly called after her. "Soon as I'm fixed we're going to check out those sluts."

Isabella let herself out, careful with the door and gratefully aware that Molly had chosen not to pursue her any further. One day, she resolved, she would sit down and tell Molly everything, instead of all this endless slipping and sliding around the edges. Sort Sasha. Sort work. Sort everything. Just get clear long enough to achieve a reasonable perspective and then...

It was twenty-four minutes from her building on East Thirteenth between Second and Third to the offices of Media Therapy on Greene. And she was in the habit of walking to work. It wasn't so much that she liked the exercise, or the routine, or the therapeutic affect of witnessing firsthand the sheer size and scale of the city's endeavors (indifferent to her own)—though all of these. It was more that in some only half-acknowledged way, she continued to take the visitor's simple pleasure in a foreign city. (What was her father's phrase? "Expats make the best natives." Something faintly sinister like that...) She had lived here in New York nearly two years and three before that on and off (as much as various visas permitted), and she had been staying with Sasha at his mother's place down on Murray on September 11. And though the wide-eyed tourist was long departed, there lingered a related sense of satisfaction at the recognition of certain places, or buildings, or institutions, or instances of what she sometimes termed to herself (for want of a better expression) New Yorknesses. No, it wasn't the Empire State or the Rockefeller or any of that stuff anymore, but instead it was the pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap furniture shop run by grumpy Poles. Or it was the fact that she could find what she wanted quicker than the ever-changing sales staff in St. Mark's Bookshop. Or that she liked to cross Third just here and walk through Astor Place where the East Village kids jostled around that big black cube. Or that she was as near indifferent to Washington Square as any New Yorker. Or that, best of all, she recognized some of the owners at the dog run. Same time, same place tomorrow? So their glances seemed to say. And in her mind she would return their query with a most dependable civic nod.

You bet.

She was on Mercer not far from the Angelika—Sasha's favorite cinema—when her cell phone started ringing. She didn't notice at first because an ambulance was howling and her remaining attention was partially on an English tourist buying a silly John Lennon beret from the street stand (So
that's
who buys them...) and partially on an advertisement for shampoo that infuriated her every morning with its phony tone (Aren't we just such close girly-girlfriends who just
so
understand each other, oh what secrets we share, oh how very much we know about each other's lives—it was the insidious advertiser's assumption of mutual intimacy that really killed her). And then, when she did realize that it was indeed her own cell that she could hear, she had to rummage in her bag (which she absolutely
must
get around to emptying) before she could find it. And next her mind became preoccupied with fabricating some excuse for being late—and how ridiculous it was that she probably woke up before all the other employees in the whole place and yet she was most likely the last to get in to the office. And when she finally looked at the screen, there was a generic message indicating that the caller was unknown. And the line was terrible. And she had to stand still and press the phone hard against her ear because of all the noise in the street and all the noise in her head and that's how news comes: standing on the street on a morning like any morning talking to your brother, who's saying that your mother is dead. Is really dead.

The most significant hours of Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov's life had taken place two years ago, on a day when a cold and pelting rain was filling the million St. Petersburg potholes with a thick and sickly yellow mud and the air tasted more than usual of corrosion.

Late, silent, unshaven, he had splashed his way through the back streets to the appointed café, a recently opened place up from Moskovsky station near the Militia House of Culture, where women liked to showcase their hair and hold their mugs of coffee the wrong way round and never by the handles, the greater to emphasize their empathies. His own hair was wet and straggling. His greatcoat was sodden and heavy. And he knew full well that his boots and jeans were filthy and leaving marks of dirt as he made his way across the parquet wooden floors between the pale pine tables beyond the marble bar, water still streaming down his face.

"Arkady Alexandrovitch?"

It was the same fat, square-faced, red-haired woman who had called at his flat three days earlier. He stopped where he was but said nothing.

She came toward him along the length of the bar.

"Hello again. I'm so pleased you came. Good."

He did not return her greeting, nor take her hand (momentarily offered, instantly reemployed), but met her eyes until she looked away. He had guessed that she was some sort of professional finder, maybe even thought of herself as a private detective. She spoke with a slight Georgian accent, which she tried to hide. She had a flashy
cell phone, which she clasped in her hand as if it were jewelry. And today the dark tracksuit was gone; instead she was wearing the usual bullshit with which ugly women tried to fight the truth: an expensive crocodile bag, matching shoes, designer suit. Obviously she hadn't been fucked in years.

Determinedly ignoring his silence, she continued: "Come this way. We have a quiet table at the back. I was only waiting at the bar because you might not have been able to see me."

She sounded relieved. She was certain of her fee now. He followed, still silent, ignoring the looks from the two women sitting with their department store bags.

"Maria is not here yet, but she will be joining us in a few minutes. What would you like to drink? Some coffee or maybe—"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure?"

A barely perceptible nod.

"Okay. Well..." She was at a loss for a moment.

He took off his greatcoat and placed it over the back of his chair. Then he sat down, leaving her standing awkwardly.

"Well, I am going to make a call and just check that Maria, your mother"—he watched her yank a false smile up across the rusting hulk of her flat face—"is on her way. So I'll be back in two seconds. Please order whatever you want. Lunch is on us today!"

He was silent and he made no move. He was here only because he had nothing better to do.

Back then, Arkady was living with two others—one a fellow musician in his band of that time, Magizdat, the other a friend from the orphanage—in two rooms next door to one of the hostels behind Ligovsky Prospekt. When Zoya (for this was the finder's name) had turned up at the door for the second time, he had decided to be in. He had come out with his shirt open, in scruffy jeans, unwashed, bare feet covered in powder. He had been in a good mood. He had been fucking the would-be actress from the cinema kiosk all morning. And he had been struck by the sheer physical difference between fair-skinned Polina and the swarthy pig-truck in front of him.