The Road Home (8 page)

Plumbed into the wall of Kowalski and Shepard’s flat was a standpipe with a drain underneath it and a coil of garden hose looped over the head of the tap. Lev crawled out from his hiding place, crept over to the tap, and listened. A few cars went by in the street, but he knew that it was still early; no sound from inside the flat and no sign of the tabby cat. As modestly as he could, Lev pissed into the drain, then turned on the tap and rinsed his hands, splashed water on his face. Then he returned to his sleeping place and lay down again with his head on Ina’s sweater, which, he remembered, was known as a “jumper” by the English, and he couldn’t imagine how this word had come into being. He lit a cigarette.

He lay and smoked and listened for the opening of the yellow door. He wasn’t afraid of the moment when he’d be discovered, only curious to see Kowalski and Shepard. He half-wondered whether he’d ask them to let him stay there, in return for looking after their plants, but heard Rudi laugh derisively and say, “Oh sure, Lev. They’ll be delighted to have a complete fucking stranger using their wall as a toilet and messing up their coal hole with his human form—all for a couple of minutes hosing down their pot plants. In fact, I think they’ll believe this is really their lucky day!”

After a while, the silent rain ceased and the sun began shining on the wet leaves. The street was noisier than before and Lev felt the pulse of the city beat faster as people gathered themselves for the working day. He was certain now that, whoever they were, Kowalski and Shepard weren’t there; they’d left everything tidy, with the hose neatly coiled and the brass door knocker shined up, but they were somewhere else.

Ahmed was raising the grille over the front of his kebab shop when Lev came walking along with his bag.

“Good,” said Ahmed, with one of his toothy smiles. “My leaflet man. Ready for a new day?”

Lev asked Ahmed if he had a washroom he could use, and Ahmed showed him through the fly curtain into a dark passage, piled up with cartons of cola and paper plates, and off the passage was a tiled lavatory with a washbasin and a plastic mirror. The room had no window, and the floor, recently washed with disinfectant, had been spread with pages of newsprint to encourage it to dry. On one of the pages, near the basin, there was a photograph of a topless woman.

Lev shaved his face and washed his body. The presence of the near-naked woman troubled him. Since the death of Marina, he couldn’t stand to think about sex. He had told Rudi one night, “I could be a monk now. I wouldn’t care.” And Rudi had said, “Sure. I understand, comrade. But that will pass, because everything fucking passes. One day, you’ll come alive again.”

That day still seemed far off. Lev stared down at the photograph. How could such a picture be in a national newspaper? The model had ridiculous breasts the size of pumpkins, and lips fat and wet, and all she was wearing was a spangled G-string. He wished the girl was dead. He wished the person who’d photographed her was dead. He wished copulation had died out, as a thing to do, like collecting old postage stamps, like sticking up pictures of Communist leaders on your wall . . .

Twenty-first-century man is a dog, he thought, a vile, raunchy dog, with its teeth bared and its cock purple and hard and strands of stinking drool falling from its greedy mouth . . .

He ground his heel on the picture, to tear it. Took his towel from his bag and dried his body. He stared at his face in the plastic mirror and tried to see in it some glance or trait that he could admire, but in the ugly light of this toilet his face looked yellow and ghostly, barely human. There was no light in his eyes.

And he could feel it overwhelm him then—as it seemed to have to do from time to time—his sorrow for the death of Marina. Just thirty-six years she’d lived.
Thirty-six years.
She was a beautiful woman with a voice that was full of laughter. She went to work every morning at the Procurator’s Office of Public Works in Baryn, wearing a clean white blouse. In the evenings, she put on a striped pinafore and sang as she cooked supper. She rocked her child to sleep in her tiny bed, patient as a madonna. She danced the tango on a summer’s night, wearing red shoes. She fashioned a rug from rags, over months and months of time. She made love like a crazy Gypsy, with her dark hair falling around Lev’s face. She was perfect, and she was gone . . .

Lev knew this wasn’t a good place in which to start crying.

He tried to act as Rudi would have acted, to start swearing or stamping his feet to stop any tears welling up, but they were choking him, they had to fall. Lev pressed his damp towel to his face and prayed the heartache would pass, like a brief storm, like a nightmare from which it’s possible to wake. But it wouldn’t pass, and so he stood there weeping, and after a while—he didn’t know how long—he heard Ahmed bang on the door.

“Lev,” Ahmed called softly. “What’s up with my leaflet man?”

“Nothing,” stammered Lev.

There was a moment’s silence, and then Ahmed said, “When men cry, it is never for nothing—and that’s not one of my proverbs. That’s the truth.”

In the midst of his sorrow, Lev also felt foolish. “I am sorry,” he said. “I am sorry.”

“Okay,” said Ahmed. “I’m going to make you coffee. You take your time. Then you come out and drink the coffee. All right?”

Lev heard Ahmed go away. The offer of coffee moved him, and he thought, Twenty-first-century man is a dog, but sometimes, like a faithful dog, he remembers the trick of showing affection.

One more day.

He told Ahmed he’d work one more day delivering leaflets, but after that he’d have to find a job that was better paid.

Ahmed said, “I understand. My pay is shit, I know. I am a very small outfit with a very big fucking rent. But what job are you going to get?”

“I don’t know,” said Lev.

“You go to the Job Center, I’m telling you, my friend, they won’t help you.”

“They won’t help me?”

“No. Catch-twenty-two. You know what this means?”

“No.”

“Lose-lose, it means. American slang for lose-fucking-lose.”

“Yes?”

“To get any job, you must be on Benefit for one year. To get Benefit, you must have worked for one year in this country. Funny, eh? You see? Catch-twenty-two.”

Lev fumbled to roll a cigarette with the new tobacco he’d bought. His hands were still shaking from his outbreak of grief. He remembered the word “benefit” from his English classes, but knew that it had about it a complexity of meaning he’d never been able to unravel. He struggled to recall what his teacher had said as he watched Ahmed hack the torn remains of his meat cone from the spit, throw them into the trash bucket, and start cleaning the grease from the spit mechanism. Lev completed rolling the thin cigarette and lit it, and the taste of the Virginia tobacco was unfamiliar, like the sugar-tainted breath of a stranger.

After a while, Ahmed wiped his hands on a stained dishcloth and turned back to Lev. “Coffee good?” he said.

“Yes. Thank you, Ahmed. You are kind.”

“I’m a good Muslim, that’s all. In Heaven, at least a few virgins will be mine.” Ahmed laughed.

Lev wondered whether, in his mind, these “virgins” had breasts like pumpkins and oily lips. Then Ahmed searched around on a crowded shelf underneath the counter, pulled out a crumpled newspaper, and put it down in front of Lev.

“
Evening Standard,
” said Ahmed, tracing the two black words with his thumb, “London newspaper. You look in here, Lev. Look very carefully. Find the pages “ESJOBS.” Also hundreds of rooms to let. Today you do my leaflets. Tomorrow you find a job right here in this paper. Job and a room. Okay? Then you’ll be right as rain.”

When his day reached its end and Ahmed had paid him another £5, Lev couldn’t think of anywhere else to go except back to his hiding place in Kowalski and Shepard’s yard. This time, his supper was a loaf of brown bread and a packet of salami. Of the £5 he’d earned, only £2.24 remained. He hardly dared to think about the cost of everything. To quench his thirst, he drank water from the tap on the wall.

Night came and the flat remained dark. Lev sat in his hole under the pavement and smoked and brought out a flashlight from his bag and began to study the columns of jobs in the newspaper:

Hod carriers req Croydon; commissioning mangrs build serv mech or elec exp; dryliners and ceiling fixers Sydenham; LUL traffic marshal perm pos; plumber own tools Corgi reg . . .

His brain yearned for rest. He lay down. He kept the torch alight and shone its narrow beam onto the hydrangea flowers, and this electric blue reminded him of a time when he’d gone night fishing with Rudi and they had made one of the strangest discoveries of their lives.

They’d driven in the Tchevi to Lake Essel, which was a cold, still lake miles from Auror, surrounded by firs and pines, where, Rudi had been told, you could stun fish with electric light and pick them out of the water with your hands. “It’s because,” Rudi had explained to Lev, “that lake is so remote. Those fucking fish have never seen man-made light before, so they come to take a look and then—too late, brother!—they’re killed by curiosity.”

Lake Essel was hard to find. The Tchevi squeaked and growled as Rudi drove it down this track and that, and the overhanging branches of trees thrashed at the car roof and the wheels spun in the ruts of sandy mud and fallen pine needles. Sometimes Lev and Rudi could see the lake in the distance, with the moon glancing down on it, but then the track would run out and there would be nowhere to turn, so the Tchevi had to roar backward with its engine screaming and Lev told Rudi he could smell burning.

“Burning?” snorted Rudi. “That’s not fucking burning. That’s protest! That’s a beautiful engine telling you it doesn’t appreciate being treated like a pickup truck. It’s like a racehorse getting frisky when you ask it to pull a cart. You just have to master it.”

When they found the lake at last, Rudi parked the Tchevi right down on the shoreline, on a curve of sand, so that they could shine the headlights onto the water. “The fish will never have seen lights that huge,” said Rudi. “Every fucker in that water is going to swim over.” The back seat and the trunk of the car were loaded with plastic buckets, and the plan was to fill these with live fish, then drive to Yarbl and sell them at the early-morning Saturday market. Live fish always sold better than dead ones, and there were rumors that these were carp—considered a delicacy in this region. Rudi said, “Even if they’re not carp, we’ll call them carp. Unless they’re fucking eels. Then I guess we’ll have to call them eels.”

Lev and Rudi got out and looked at the moon on the water and listened to the sounds of the night and the small wavelets breaking on the strip of beach. Then they built a fire and sat by it, drinking vodka and smoking and cooking dumplings, made by Ina, in a little black stewpot hooked up to a curving branch. It was a summer night and moths came drifting to the fire and the moon fell out of sight behind the firs as Lev and Rudi ate the dumplings, which were floury and delicious. With their bellies full and the vodka and the cigarettes easing their minds, it was tempting to go on sitting there, talking about the world, and not bother to start catching carp. Only the thought of the money they could make at Yarbl made them turn their attention to their night mission.

They filled the buckets with lake water and set them in a line near the breaking waves. Then they turned on the headlights of the car. They took off their shoes and rolled up their trousers and stood knee deep in the freezing water, with their heads bent low, waiting for the carp to swim into the blazing beams of light.

“It’s good the moon’s gone down,” whispered Rudi, “or they might get confused. Fish aren’t that intelligent.”

Nothing happened for a while. Then they began to see peculiar flashes and shimmerings of blue light under the water. These came and went and came again, and Lev and Rudi stared at them. “What the fuck are they?” said Rudi. “Is this lake full of aliens? Is that why no one comes here?”

But Lev soon saw what they were: they were the fish. Where the light touched them, their bodies gave off a neon-blue shine.

“Shit!” said Rudi. “Why blue?”

“Perhaps they’re Russian fish,” said Lev. “Russian gay carp.”

“Blue” was the word Russians used to denote gay men, and Rudi sniggered, but now they both felt there was something troubling about the sight of this blueness. And the fish were small—they didn’t look like carp: they looked like exotic creatures that belonged in an aquarium, and though a few of them were now swimming very close to Lev’s and Rudi’s legs, neither wanted to try to pick them up.

After some useless minutes of staring, Rudi waded ashore and turned off the Tchevi’s headlights to see what would happen, and what happened was that, in the darkness, the blue fish remained illuminated, like slow-flickering gas flames, irradiating the water all around them, and Lev thought he’d never seen anything as strange and surprising as this sight. He reached down and tried to seize one of the fish in his hand, but the fish jumped clean out of the water in a dazzling arc, like a blue shooting star, and now ten or twenty fish began to jump, making a neon fountain all around them, which after a while subsided, and the blue began to fade and fade, until all that was visible to Lev and Rudi was the black surface of the lake.

They sat by the remains of their fire, drying their feet. Both of them wondered whether they’d had some kind of vision or waking dream, but after a while Rudi said, “It was real, that color. There’s got to be something wrong here. Radiation from somewhere. I reckon those fish are contaminated.”

“Well,” said Lev, “they’re too small to sell, anyway. Aren’t they?”

“Nothing’s too small to sell,” Rudi said, and Lev agreed. In Yarbl market you could sell hairpins, you could sell pine cones. So they sat there, looking at the buckets lined up, and thought of all the things they could call those small fish, like “freshwater sardines” or “Essel blue grayling,” but then they remembered the dumplings they’d eaten, cooked in the contaminated lake water, and wondered whether they were already marked out for illness or death, and so they emptied the buckets in silence, piled them back into the car, and drove home.