Pravda (53 page)

Now he stopped at a café and ate a light lunch—mussels in white wine—preferring not to risk the tiredness that heavy food might bring on. He needed to be alert. He tried to read
Le Figaro
and regretted his bad French. He drank a delicious coffee, smoked a perfect cigarette, and watched the passersby. He was beginning to feel more and more disengaged—freewheeling, almost—as he set off again. Perhaps it was Paris after all, his London self hushed, the personality appeasement of a foreign city.

At length, after the Place de la Bastille and the canal, he came
to the river and began walking north along the embankment in the direction of the Hotel de Ville and the Pont Marie. The weather was cold, but at least it wasn't snowing or raining. He was glad of his gloves. Maybe, he thought, if it were not for Isabella, then he wouldn't have bothered. Sure, he would have believed Arkady. He would have uncovered Nicholas's whereabouts. He would have written Arkady a second letter addressed to his father, bought the Russian a Eurostar ticket, and sent him on his way. Sorry, but I can't help. These people, whoever they are—these
relations
—they're an accident. Please, take what you need, do what you can, and good luck. Shout if you are ever in London again.

He came to the bridge and turned left, over the river, a slight wind cold on his right cheek. Or maybe Isabella was right: maybe you simply needed to know. Maybe you could not go anywhere, in any direction, unless you knew where you had started. As a human being, perhaps you had a deep and inescapable requirement to understand your history, your genesis, as clearly and as fully as possible, however painful, however unpleasant. And those who did not, or could not, come to this knowledge walked the earth as if inwardly crippled, forever compensating, forever uneasy, forever secretive. (Jesus, just look at it: Notre Dame like some mighty queen termite, belly-stranded in the middle of the river by the sheer volume of her pregnancy.) But strange that being human was never enough on its own. That the need went further. The need to belong. To belong to one tribe or the other. This is my land, these are my people, this is what we believe—which is where the trouble began. Why could we not be content with species-pride, the staggering good fortune of belonging to humanity itself? Mankind, the mother of all miracles. Wasn't that enough?

And here he was: the Café Charlotte. So this ... this must be the quay. He seemed to remember this street vaguely from a childhood trip. Ice cream. He turned left, looking up at the numbers as he went along. He had the odd sense of the day as intensely normal and abnormal at the same time—something like watching the closed-circuit footage on the news a week later: this is the station five minutes before the bomb. The sky was as many shades of gray as black and white could fashion. A little windier now, and a bite in that. Curiously, he had remembered the Seine as wider. But of course this was only half of it. This was an island.

Here.

He went under the arch and into the courtyard.

And now, now that he was actually at his father's address, his heart, his spirit, his mind, everything suddenly felt like a million maggots writhing. And he was astonished to find that there was no anger either—or no anger anywhere near the surface, no hostility, no upset, no sadness or seething. Instead there was only this overwhelming, excruciating sense of embarrassment.

He stopped at the bottom of the century-worn stairs. He felt painfully, agonizingly nervous, shy. He felt ashamed of himself. And it was beyond anything he had ever experienced before—terrible nerve-squirming embarrassment. Worse, he was not just embarrassed for himself but also, unbelievably, embarrassed for his father. Dear God. Despite everything, here he was, stuck still, empathizing with the old goat for having to enact
his
part in this ghastly meeting with so ridiculous a son.

He leaned against the wall in the semidarkness. He felt physically sick with it. Of all the reactions, he had least expected this one.

Time stalled. He could neither go up nor turn around. He became apprehensive that at any minute someone might come out of one of the other doors on the staircase and wonder what the hell he was doing. So, madly, he took his telephone from his pocket and began thumbing through the names in his address book for no reason. He had the idea that he might call someone. Might, in fact, call Isabella.

Christ, today was the wrong day. Maybe it was the train ride. But there was nothing there. No fury and no flame. No injury, no hurt. He was terrified that he wouldn't be able to remember what it was all about ever again, that he might go in there, go through with it all, and at no point do justice to whatever it was he had previously thought had been so traduced all his life. This was a new malaise altogether: standing in the shadows of his father's stairway, scared to move in case anyone heard him.

The door opened.

"Okay ... I have to go," he said to nobody, into the receiver of his telephone, before making a show of pressing a button to end the call.

"Gabriel. I thought it must be you."

The figure in the doorway looked nothing like his father. He was an old man, completely white-haired, with rheumy eyes, and thin, very thin; and now, as the door was pulled back, Gabriel could see that this old man moved with great difficulty and with a cane.

"Gabriel."

The shock. "Hello, Dad."

Nicholas smiled, a little lopsidedly, but abruptly Gabriel saw that it was there—the light, the old familiar animus. It was as if the stroke had left his father with a death mask as his default face; as if eerie blankness was where he must begin and must quickly subside; and it was only when he physically, consciously willed himself to move his muscles that expression returned, flooding into his features.

"Sorry." Gabriel was conscious that he was already apologizing. "I just had to finish a call."

"Come in. Come in." Nicholas beckoned, his arm extended. "It's freezing out there."

Conscious too that he was apologizing for something that he hadn't actually been doing at all, something that was not in fact true. So it began.

"It's not too bad. I walked here."

"From London?"

"From the twentieth."

"Ah, shame—thought you might be able to teach me how to walk on water so that I can annoy my doctor. He's a very difficult man to impress. Danish. But walking-on-water-and-bugger-the-cane would do it, I imagine." Nicholas closed the door and turned. "It's very good to see you, Gabriel."

The charm was there yet. But for these two men, for whom physical contact and human touch meant so very much, there was no embrace. Instead Gabriel merely stood looking around at all the wood, the paintings on the walls, the elegance.

"How are you, Dad?"

"I'm fine. It's taking me longer to recover than I had hoped, of course—it sort of goes in fits and starts. I was quick at first, but not so now. Still"—he dragged his lips into a smile—"I'm able to get out of the apartment as of this week, and my walking
is
improving. I'm aiming to go all the way to Notre Dame and back by the end of the month. A pilgrimage. I count myself lucky. Very lucky. My speech wasn't really affected. The Dane says I'll be passing myself off as normal soon enough."

His face fell to nothing again and he shifted his weight onto his cane.

Gabriel remembered what his mother had once said about his father, about him being a man of so much energy, about that being
what had attracted her to him. And now, a man of so much energy so reduced. He spoke to stop himself from sympathizing any further.

"These are beautiful rooms." They were in a paneled antechamber with three double doors leading off, ahead and to either side. Everything smelled of rosewood and furniture wax. The walls were hung with paintings by artists Gabriel assumed to be famous but whom he had no hope of recognizing. He looked about self-consciously. He focused on the fabric of the building instead: the slight bulge between the wooden beams of the ceiling, the slight slope of the parquet floor.

"When was this place built?"

"Bourbons." His father's eyes actually twinkled. "As haute bourgeois as I could manage. Here, give me your coat and gloves. And you go on through." He gestured to the door on the right. "We will sit in there—you can see the river. Though it's miserable on a day like this, I like to keep an eye on it just the same."

Gabriel took off his coat and handed it to his father and watched him turn slowly and half shuffle, half walk toward the stand. He didn't know whether to wait or go, so he waited. Nicholas hung his coat on a wooden hanger, but it was awkward for him using only one hand, the other on his cane.

As if reading Gabriel's mind, Nicholas spoke over his shoulder. "I have someone here to help every day." He raised his voice. "Alessandro?"

Then, his cane like the center point of a mathematical compass, he turned, one quarter at a time. "He comes by twice every day, which is useful. I told him to wait for you, so he could make us some tea or something. Do you want tea? Or would you rather—"

"Tea is fine." Though he said it lightly, Gabriel suddenly felt severe, like a puritan or an overearnest college sportsman. And he had forgotten his father's extraordinary ability to make every gesture count, every word weigh, as if there were always some underlying contest to each encounter, an underlying score to be kept, advantages gained, points lost, positions suspected, held, or revealed as false—the results of which somehow showed exactly what sort of person you
really
were. He felt compelled to add, "Tea is fine. I had a heavy night last night."

"Good French wine, I hope."

"Couscous, mainly."

"This is the age of the tureen."

"I am staying with people obsessed with couscous."

"These are the creatures of the twentieth?"

"Friends, Dad."

A man about his own age but pretending to be younger appeared from the opposite door.

"Alessandro, we're going to have tea. Could you bring it through and ... and a jug of milk?"

The reminder of his father's many pathological subversions allowed Gabriel to recover himself, fortify himself. Though he disliked the trait, he was, he knew, fearsomely equipped with a similar arsenal. Updated, though. The next generation.

"Of course, Nick. Hi." The man waved as if to suggest that he was too busy or too discreet to come over. "I'm Alessandro. You must be Gabriel. I have heard so much about you."

Lies, Gabriel thought as he said a polite hello.

Five minutes later Gabriel stood by the high river window of the drawing room, waiting for his father to make the unbearably incremental journey from the door. In his mind's most secret eye (wherein he had foreseen that this time would eventually come), he had long imagined that they would sit down face to face, that he would mentally shuffle his papers, and that he would then begin—solemnly—to ask a series of questions, which Nicholas would—candidly—answer: the penitent former foreign secretary finally facing the nation's great journalist; why did you really invade, you oleaginous bastard, and what in the name of the living fuck did you think was going to happen once you were in there? But he had no chance to marshal his teeming thoughts—half hostile, half appalled; half compassionate, half desperate; halving and halving again every time he managed to fix on any single one in particular—no time to recover from the simple shock of the past three months, of everything, no time before Nicholas preempted him.

"What was the funeral like?"

"Surreal."

"On Vasilevsky?" Nicholas stopped two steps in, steadied himself, and looked up.

"Yes. The Smolensky."

"Surreal. Hmmm."

"I mean ... it happened so fast ... everything. Five days, I think. Isabella stayed longer, but I couldn't—I ... I had to get back."

"It is a shame Isabella could not be with us today."

"The consulate was helpful. More than that."

"Of course." Nicholas moved forward. Cane. Pivot. Plant one leg. Shuffle the other. "You know that Masha always wanted to be buried there? In Petersburg."

"I didn't know that."

"No reason why you would." He stopped again. A crooked effort at a smile. "Yes, she was most enthusiastic about it. Very macabre woman when she wanted to be." Forward. "Well, I'm glad that there was a proper burial and that she was where she wanted to be, even if we did have to pay the bloody church for the privilege of using her own soil. I'm glad it went to plan." Nicholas bowed his head and concentrated on his walking.

Gabriel did not know whether he was supposed to apologize for not inviting his father to the funeral or thank him for taking care of the expenses, chivvying the consul, paying the hotel, all of it. So he stood and watched his father's labored progress and said nothing. Christ, why did he feel as though everything was always,
always,
a chess game with his father? And why did all available moves somehow always look disadvantageous? Zugswanged—that was the word. (Cane forward. Plant. Pivot. And shuffle.) Even in the most innocuous of conversations, it was impossible to escape the impression that his father had some great elliptical plan—had somehow foreseen this moment and made his moves in Petersburg the better to pin son and daughter when this precise and well-foreseen configuration arrived. Check ... I think you will find that the only place you can go is there. But I'd like to think about it, Dad. Fine, but only one move is available, I promise you. Fine, but I'd still like to think about it. Perhaps that was one way to beat him: to refuse to move. Play for a time victory. His clock had a three-decade advantage. At least, he thought (as his father stopped again), at least it made him angry that it was always chess. At least
this
experience was customary. Even if all the rest—stroke, Paris, this apartment—was not. This anger he recognized. And he welcomed its return like that of a long-lost brother. Again, though, before he could harness his thoughts to speech, Nicholas surprised him.

"I was there. The week before she died. She was very ill. Cancer."