The Eyes of Lira Kazan (23 page)

He had come to meet her at Gare du Nord. A friend of Félix's had told him the day and time of her arrival, ringing from a telephone box. He didn't greet Nwankwo, and just gave him a cold stare. They set off at once, driving south, towards their daughter. She didn't tell him anything about what had happened since she had left the hospital, and he didn't ask. He had put that morning behind him when the ambulance and the plane had been left waiting. But he did tell her about the political climate in Moscow, where Louchsky was growing stronger and stronger, and was now regarded as someone both influential and respectable. She could hear the challenging tone of his voice. He wanted to hear her admit that she had lost the
game and that she been wrong all along, ever since they had separated.

“You're more angry with me than with him, aren't you, Dmitry?”

“One is only angry with those one used to love, Lira.”

 

They drove for more than three hours. It was a long journey, punctuated by petrol stations and neutral remarks. The silence was disguised by the roar of the motorway. They were buried in their own thoughts. Dmitry brooded on the things he was not allowed to say, and his feeling that his life had been wasted. Lira was dreading the moment when she would have to tell her daughter that she couldn't see her, but she also dwelt on the strange and agreeable memory of her night with Nwankwo. Behind her dark glasses she almost seemed to be watching the passing landscape. When her head flopped to the side Dmitry knew that she was asleep.

Eventually the road began to wind along the edge of deep gorges, causing a sort of agitated electroencephalogram in Lira's brain. Dmitry drove slowly and carefully: he was not used to this rugged Cévennes landscape. However, the more dangerous the roads, the safer they were. The two lost Russians, Dmitry and Lira, knew nothing of the history of this mountainous area, which had held out against Julius Caesar and sheltered all manner of heretics and rebels, whose tombs are scattered along the hiking paths. Now the landscape was littered with yurts and banners denouncing the folly of the modern world. But the ancient stone walls of the houses and the streams rushing down to the villages also told their story: the sharp ridges of the Cévennes hills delineated the fortifications around a land of rebels and refugees.

“It's beautiful here, I can feel it,” she said.

“Very beautiful. Breathtaking,” he replied.

The car now passed an ancient wash house with a sign saying “drinking water”, and crossed a narrow stone bridge. Lira knew this because she could hear the river rushing beneath her. They passed some houses – a few dogs barked as the car went by – and then pulled up a steep hill, out of the village and onto a rough and rocky road.

“What does she know?” Lira asked again.

“I've already told you… I said you had been attacked, that you were wounded, but I didn't mention your eyes. That's what you wanted isn't it?”

“Yes…”

The car stopped. “Wait for me here,” Dmitry said, getting out. She heard him walking away, knocking on a door, and then quickly becoming angry and returning to the car. “Polina's not here any more.” Behind him came his friend, the invisible man, explaining that it wasn't the first time she'd gone away. “She always comes back to ask if you've written, Madame. Good evening, I'm Jacques. She can't sit still here, your daughter, she senses that something isn't right and I can't very well lock her up. She's made some friends in the village, that's where she goes…”

They turned round and went back down. Dmitry was in a rage. He stopped at the bar and asked a few questions. Eventually they got an address and soon were knocking at the door.

“Get out with your stinking lies!” Polina screamed from behind the door.

“Polina, your mother is here with me, she's waiting for you in the car.”

Then the floorboards creaked, the door opened and Polina flew out into the corridor without a look at her father. He watched her androgynous blonde figure disappear down the stairs. He looked into the smelly apartment and saw an open laptop. She must have Googled her mother's name and found out everything. Polina was already outside. She opened the car door and threw herself at Lira's neck,
hugging her and crying “Mum”. They had not seen each other for six months.

“Polina, listen, I must tell you—”

“I know, Mum.”

“What do you know? No, don't take my glasses off, it's not very…”

But Polina firmly removed them. She wanted to see what had been kept from her, what had been stolen: her mother's eyes, the first eyes that had looked at her, the eyes that saw everything. There was nothing there, just two peeled, withered eyelids, glued shut. Not a hint of the light that had watched over her, that flashing shade of blue that she had inherited, not a glimmer, not a spark. A spasm of horror went through Polina's body. It was as though she too had had lost something – all her life had been contained in those eyes. Lira could sense her daughter's every convulsion. She wanted to say something, to hide, but Polina didn't give her the time. She seized her mother's face between her hands and kissed her eyes, the right hand one and then the left.

Dmitry stood on the pavement, watching them from the other side of the street. They still hugged each other in the same way as before, Polina on Lira's knee, with her legs folded and her arms around her neck. They slotted together perfectly, whatever their ages, whatever the moment, whatever Lira had done wrong. But who was comforting whom down here in the bottom of a forgotten valley in a country far from home?

Dmitry walked over, gently pushed Polina's legs down and shut the door. He got back in the car and drove the two women in his life back up to the invisible house.

“Kay!” Nwankwo shouted out loud.

A message had just appeared on the screen before him. It was the old code that he had used back there in the past:

The people around him raised their heads briefly when Nwankwo shouted, and then returned to their silent communion with their screens. For several days he had been coming back to this Parisian Internet café, charmingly called “Brave New World”. He had been watching for news, for any sign from the network of coded messages that circulated among the rebels in the Delta, any indication that Tadjou had given the memory stick to the uncle, and that the uncle had handed it on to Kay. For days he had come out empty-handed, thinking that he should have known that Brave New World would be the most useless of places, and that once again everything was fucked.

And now Kay, that ace who could crack any password and cover any traces, had finally responded. He must still have been hiding in one of the containers in the port of Lagos, where he lived with a friend, two tables and three laptops linking him to the world outside. Nwankwo replied, thrilled:

He then remained seated there, his eyes gleaming behind his heavy spectacles, unable to leave this Brave New World.

 

 

They had done a swoop on the back room of some business premises in Lagos; their mission had been to discover the roots of Nigerian spam as it was known, a new kind of virus that had spread through the mailboxes of millions of Western computers. It began with an appeal for help from a widow of an officer, doctor or lawyer; she needed help to withdraw a huge sum of money, promising a commission – all you needed to do as a preliminary was to supply your bank details. Of course it ended badly for anybody fool enough to respond: they had their account emptied. A lot of Americans had been suckered in this way. An African offering money – it made such a change from Africans asking for money! Of all the fraudsters arrested that day, Kay was by far the youngest and cleverest. Nwankwo and Uche had saved him from going to prison, in exchange for information, and he had become a useful ally. Now, hidden in the port, he worked on his own account and in cahoots with the opposition, and probably with the smuggling fraternity as well. He changed his container every month – he was like a cat prowling the dark corners of the docks.

Nwankwo, sitting in the Brave New World, could hear the hooting of the ships' sirens as they entered the port, the
creaking of badly oiled cranes and hooks, the containers as they were unloaded, with a crash of sheet metal, and then piled up to wait, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for ever. There were fifty thousand containers heaped up, each needing twenty signatures and twenty different bribes before they were allowed through the customs. He could hear it all, they were sounds he would never forget, always carried inside his head. He felt jubilant at the thought that his revenge was being planned in that faraway and uncontrollable hellhole, where everything finished up, riches and rubbish, millionaires and the pirates in their pay. And there, in a rusting metal cube buried deep in the terminal of No. 2 Quay, Apapa in Badagry Creek, in the midst of thousands of other abandoned containers, in the boiling heat of filthy, pillaged, rubbish-strewn Africa, there, at the fingertips of a friendly little street urchin, was the detonator that would blow everything sky-high. It was a good feeling.

Another message appeared on the screen:

Kay had just given the detonator a Twitter name – it would be called Uche.

Once he was back in the street, Nwankwo couldn't help watching all the people around him. They were getting on with their lives, walking, bicycling, running, kissing each other, exercising the dog, arguing over trifles. He wanted to tell them all that a small guided missile was about to make the headlines, and that it would be arriving from Africa, that miserable continent where the inhabitants, long long ago, had believed that the first white men they saw were spirits,
to be feared and respected. Nwankwo, so well brought up and respectable, was nonetheless almost drunk with anger. He was alone now with only Uche for company, and there was nothing more for him to do; but, like the worm in the middle of the fruit, he was close to his target.

He felt calmer the next day, sitting by the window on the TGV. He was leaving Paris after his three solitary days there. He closed his eyes, thinking about his son, who had fulfilled his mission, about his little girls and Ezima who were about to go and join him, about Lira and the strange night he had spent with her, about her extraordinarily direct way of speaking – he could never have talked like that, women just had this gift for seizing life as it came. He thought about his mother, travelling by train with her to visit the family when he was little. It had been a huge event, like going into space, for a child who had only known stony paths until then. That train had wound through a threatening landscape, peopled in his child's imagination, and perhaps in reality too, by ferocious wild beasts and moving spirits; at every station along the way his heart had beaten louder, echoed, it seemed, by the puffing of the train.

Eventually Nwankwo opened his eyes to see the French plains sailing past; the train ran like a well-oiled conveyor belt. Forests here were no more than thickets, and the only reminder of darker forces were the few grey church towers inhabited by an exhausted deity. There were too many comforting certainties in this landscape.
Don't you agree, Uche?

 

THE SUN TSAR AT VERSAILLES

 

 

When Steffy started telling him about how a lesbian friend of his, Pascale, had been inseminated with his sperm, and about what the custody arrangements would be if it succeeded, and how he was expecting the results of the pregnancy test at any moment, which was why he kept looking at his mobile, Félix finally exploded: