Pravda (42 page)

"Who gives a fuck?"

"I need to speak to him to find out."

"No. No, you don t." Gabriel took half his Talisker at one sip. "You need to speak to him for oth—"

"Gabs, Dad has had a stroke." She lowered her eyes. "I went home to talk to Francis about storing some stuff there this morning. He told me. Dad has had a stroke. I thought you should know."

He walked within himself. And there was nothing about him to suggest that he was Russian and only six hours in the country—none of the usual giveaways, at least: not the luminous tracksuits of the poor, nor the leather jackets of the racketeers, nor the overdone designer suits and jewelry of the moneyed; nothing to suggest he was a foreigner at all save a barely detectable apprehension in the movement of his head, which turned too quickly this way and that, seeking to absorb as much of the vast, strange, teeming city as he could. He feared police, spot checks, authority. He was in his boots, his jeans, and an anonymous sweater—no coat, despite the gusting wind. Beneath, he felt as tense as a submariner under the ice. But his aim was invisibility.

After the Internet café—his first job to make contact—he had decided to attempt the exploratory journey from his hostel on foot, surreptitiously following the map he had printed out—eight cheap pages that did not quite meet at any of the borders. He did not expect anything back today, but he hoped that tomorrow, by noon, this Gabriel would reply.

Presently he stopped again, turned his back on the traffic, and leaned into an alleyway, trying to read the smudgy print. He had been sick on the plane—a terrifying experience that had left him knotted and shaking—and even now the queasiness lingered and he hunched rather than stood at his full height.

He reemerged and met the suspicious eyes of a man setting up a newspaper stand. He went quickly on. A muscle worked in the hollow of his cheek. The map appeared to indicate that the Harrow
Road flowed easily onto the Marylebone Road or crossed the thick-drawn Edgware Road at an obvious right angle, but there was no clear way through the giant intersections he had come upon, and the foot tunnels confused him further. So for half an hour he wandered around the Paddington basin, crossing and recrossing the pretty canal, which reminded him of home, except for the great glassy office developments and thunderous overpasses, which reminded him of Moscow. Eventually he saw a sign pointing to Paddington station. He followed its direction. At least the station would be a way of placing himself on the map again. From Paddington to Marble Arch looked easy enough.

Gone the tenebrous gray of the Russia he knew best—the suburbs, the orphanage, Vasilevsky's dilapidation. Gone the ruin and collapse. And gone the somber monotone of Russia itself. Instead, as he came to Oxford Street, his ears were full of the strange singsong beauty of the English spoken all around, and the air seemed to resonate with the chimes of a hundred different registers, voices, music. He could scarcely believe it. I am in London, he whispered to himself.
Ya v Londone.

The dusk swept in. He could not think what else to do, and the warmth and hum of the Soho bum-boy bars made him feel his foreignness and poverty too hard. So he stood in the doorway of a sex shop and read his map by the intermittent light of a flashing plastic cock. Then, resolved on his new direction, he set off to look at the South Bank.

Gone too the heavy brown assumption that had long smothered his life and that he had not known the shape or meaning of until now: gone the assumption that change was impossible. And nobody—no police, no militia—asking for his papers.

He crossed the river by Waterloo Bridge and stood for five minutes, staring in disbelief at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where so many of his heroes had played. He had imagined some great theater—something like the Mariinsky perhaps—not a concrete Soviet-style shit hole.

After a while he turned to face the blustery Thames and take in the abundance of lighted buildings on the opposite bank—old, new, grand, plain, stately, and grotesque—seemingly built without care
or reason, to his Petersburg eye, as if a drunk had long been in charge of planning, only sober once every fifth day.

He walked upriver The water relieved his apprehension a little. Faintly he felt the stirrings of new desires, appetites he had not known before. In the underpass he shook his head at a homeless young guy begging, who asked him, "What's so funny?" Then, all of a sudden, he came upon the exact picture he remembered from the history textbooks of his childhood. The bullshit Houses of bullshit Parliament. The light from the windows shimmering in the water.

Halfway across Westminster Bridge, he slowed and then stopped. The passersby were in hats and coats. He realized they must think it cold. He leaned on the rail. And he wondered if he had the nerve to stay—regardless. The water was black, but not as black as the Neva. The wind blew his hair this way and that.

Pat's Place was grotty even by Russian standards. And his morale had fallen on the long walk back, the elation vanished, the map driving him mad and the night wind bringing with it a return of his sense of foreboding and vulnerability. His moods were like the weather. He lived within them. And he no more thought of asking why he experienced one feeling rather than another than he would have thought of interrogating the snow.

A collapse of drunks shouted something to him as he crossed to the door beside the minicab office. The two sitting on the stairs outside were users. Inside, another—Turkish by the look of him—was lying on the floor of the landing, pretending to have lost his key, but Arkady doubted that he had ever had one. Scum—everywhere, scum. Bosnian bullshit. Albanian sewage.

If he did not eat, go anywhere, or do anything, then he had enough money for ten nights. His flight back to Riga was booked for the Sunday fourteen days hence. So somehow he was going to have to find somewhere even cheaper, or join the Turkish bear-fuckers on the landing. Unless tomorrow's reply contained the offer of an immediate meeting and plenty of money up front. Not fucking likely. Probably just a bullshit coffee and a bullshit conversation. In fact, the sooner this whole bullshit was over, the better ... Why was he even here? What a joke. What an embarrassment.

He walked softly up the narrow stairs to the second floor and stood framed on the threshold for a moment. He stepped within and moved slightly to one side so that the dim light of the corridor behind could better illuminate the small dormitory room. There were
four bunks—two on either side, with the narrowest of aisles between them. The one above his was empty. But he saw that those opposite were now taken. The window beyond was open. Hence the noise. Two tattered backpacks were propped up beneath the sill, a towel draped over one, a baseball cap on the other.

He checked under the bed. His greatcoat was still there. And his pack had not been touched. He was angry with himself. He would take no further risks.

He took off his sweater and his shirt and unbuckled his money belt. There were no covers, no blankets, not even a second sheet. Pat's Place provided beds, and beds only. And he had not brought anything to sleep under. He stood for a moment, considering. People were shouting in the street below. He pulled off the sheet, and the streetlight shone dully on the surface of the rubber pad beneath. At least here in London they tried to save the mattresses from the worst of the alcoholics. He put down the money belt where his head would lie and drew the sheet back over it. Then he turned to the window and fastened it shut.

He listened for a moment before stepping carefully out of his jeans and rolling them up. He removed a plastic bag of clean laundry from his pack, took out a T-shirt and pulled it on, then flattened the rest of the bag out to fashion a pillow. He laid his jeans across the top and the shirt he had been wearing over them. The room was too close. He needed cold air to sleep. He opened the window again, fastened the latch against the wrench of the wind. Then he placed his pack against the wall, picked up his greatcoat from under the bed, and laid himself down beneath it.

Yes, the sooner this bullshit was over, the better. All he had to do was survive two weeks. He wondered what he would do back in Petersburg. The thought of playing in the bars made him so angry that saliva poured into his mouth and he wanted to spit. Work for Leary. Make a fortune. That stupid bitch. He closed his eyes and turned to face the wall.

But he neither slept nor rested. Long after the other two returned (talking at normal volume in Moldavian accents before belatedly whispering when they became aware of him), and long after they had fallen asleep, he lay uneasily alert, watching the lights and the shadows on the wall sweeping, merging, steadying—swelling circles, diagonal lines, penumbras and silhouettes—the headlamps of the cars as they turned, the streetlights, the glow from the shop opposite, the fizz and flicker of the neon sign that advertised cosmetics. Apart from anything else, he wished that he were here as himself. There would be some comfort in that.

Mice moved in the wall. The elder of the two Moldavians began to snore on the lower bunk, less than four feet away. He set himself to listen to the city instead. But all the usual sounds—car doors closing, breaking glass, motorbikes, cans being kicked, drunken shouts, the muffled thump of angry music, the hiss and squeal of bus brakes, unnatural birdsong, a dog barking crazily somewhere on the edge of his hearing—all the city sounds seemed now to threaten and loom, alien and strange, as if each were just another moment in a gathering drama, the aural narrative of developing violence that would soon involve him and that would surely culminate in a vicious raid—gangs or, worse, the police bursting through the door. The blaze and stab of flashlights. Guns, snarled orders. The Moldavians panicking.

All the while the wind was growing stronger, banging and slapping, rattling at the window. He turned and turned again back to the wall. He told himself that London was nothing compared to Moscow or Petersburg. In the long years he had waited for his place at the conservatory, though only on the fringes, he had seen more death than those of his fellow orphans who had joined the army. But the difference was that in Russia, he knew the face and weight of every danger; in Russia, he knew what they wanted, why, and how they planned to take it. Here, now, he had no idea. He was blind.

A woman screamed.

She sounded as though she were directly beneath the window. A car pulled away, engine straining. Doors slammed. He lay rigid. Voices. Men. Swearing.

He had heard the stories and believed them well enough—London, the European capital of organized crime: the Albanians, the Turks, the Croats and the Serbs, the Jamaicans, the triads, the Irish, the Islamic cells, other Russians, the Nigerians, the Colombians, the plain old-fashioned mafia; people smugglers, drug smugglers, weapon smugglers; prostitutes, heroin, explosives. The whole world liked to squat right down and do its nastiest possible shit in London. He was not afraid for his well-being or even his life (if only they would take it quickly, get the fucking thing out of the way), but he feared the police, he feared robbery, and most of all he feared violence.

Blue lights came swirling across the ceiling, sweeping from one side of the room to the other, then stopping directly above him, as
if spotlighting him for some provincial nightclub's amateur dance competition. The Moldavians were awake now. They would all be arrested as part of the raid or fight or whatever it was that was happening out there. He would be sent back. Before he had his chance. All three floors of the hostel, he knew, were heaving with people that even a blind Gypsy cocksucker would recognize as illegal—construction workers, cooks, waitresses, cleaners. He could not understand why the police did not raid it every night.

There was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, but going down, not coming up. He did not know whether to rise and dress or lie still. Where would he go? More voices outside—a man and a woman's, raised. Another, quieter voice answering. The older Moldavian got up from the bottom bunk. The sirens had stopped, but the blue continued to swirl.

Now there were footsteps coming up. If the money went, he would have to steal. If his passport went, he would never be able to prove he was the man he was pretending to be. But even that he could survive. It was physical violence that scared him to a tight and silent shiver. Not because he was physically afraid—he had faced a gun,
preferred
a gun—but because of his lifelong curse: he had to protect his hands. Simply, he could not fight back. He could not lift a single finger to defend himself. He could not risk anything. As long as he held to the identity of musician, he was as vulnerable as a limbless cripple. Oftentimes in his dreams he had hoped for some knife slash to sever the tendons, some hammer to crush his fingers, some axe to separate a joint, so that it would be over, the stupid hope, so that he could ball his fist just once.

The Moldavian spoke in his heavy accent, the sound of Russian comforting all the same. "The police are taking the woman away. It's okay, Mikhail, lie down. Just filthy British motherfuckers again. Cannot take their drink."

Monday. Worst day of the week the wage-slavery world over. But at least the wind had dropped And at least the next magazine—"You Meets You"—was a good while away yet. He looked idly through some of the putative cover questions:

"If you met yourself, would you like yourself?"

No.

"If you met yourself, what would you say?"

Fuck off, asshole, and sort your life out while you're about it.

"If you met yourself, where would you go for a romantic mini-break?"

Palestine. Rwanda. Or maybe East Timor.

"Why?"

Teach myself a lesson.

Aside from the worst piece he had ever read—"How to Be Single and Satisfied"—this was the entirety of the "You Meets You" issue thus far.

He did have an idea that he would like to commission: "How to Laugh about Everything in Your Life When It's Not Funny at All." But for this to work, it would have to be a spread, a good read, and that would require him to find a knowledgeable writer capable of an engaging style and a sophisticated grasp of tone and register. Fat chance. Anyway, bollocks to it—the deadline wasn't for two weeks and he was ahead of himself: he'd got the issue title, which was more than he usually had at this stage. He clicked on one of the news pages he kept as a favorite ... Another day here on Earth. Another
day of attrition, murder, beauty, and birth. Another day of six billion soloists at full lung, all hoping for some miracle of harmony.