‘Ur ar waririt?’
‘You just get off of that floor, dad, though I shouldn’t be calling you that any more by rights. I should be calling you rotten drunken bum and filthy bastard, but I’m keeping my temper, dig, and this is more in sorrow than in anger. All I want is just you out of it and that’s the end, dig, the end end end end.’
Paul knew who that was. Putting out blind and dithering fingers, he felt all about him. Cancer of the brain, that was what he had, excruciating pincers nipping at the frontal lobes and the medulla oblongata and the pia mater, while the heavy shelled body just sat. He was indeed on a floor; he was fully dressed except for his denture and jacket; his jacket was a sort of pillow; the sharp brittleness under his right ear was the dark glasses he normally kept, this weather of terrible light, in his breast pocket ready for use. Getting them out now was like tonging an isotope from its leaden bower. He spent whole palsied seconds shifting them to his nose. Then he raised his ruined head up towards an Alex all twitched up in controlled disgust. Paul’s heart filled the universe with its noise. There was a great pet dragon crouched somewhere, metrically thumping the scaly horror of its tail on the floor and raising dust. He coughed and choked with this dust. His mouth was Fleet Ditch, filled with leprous fat, rancid rags, tumbled-in night-soil; it was that rubbish dump called Hell outside Jerusalem. Like someone passed on who, at a seance, desperately tries to send a message through a moronic medium, Paul asked and asked for a drink of something. But he was not understood.
‘I kicked you and she kicked you,’ resumed Alex, ‘before we went out to work. Yes, kicked you, dig, like some big fat drunk snoring animal, that’s what. But we couldn’t make you budge. You just lay there and went honk honk. And do you know what time it is? Eh? Have you any idea what the time is, lying there in your filth? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s three o’clock. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, dig, that’s what it is, you boozed-up bum.’
‘Hrink,’ begged Paul. ‘Hrink, hrink.’ He could see very dimly a forlorn dull-shining clump of unwashed glasses on the little table by the cold stove. He began painfully to crawl towards it.
‘That’s right,’ said Alex. ‘On all fours like some sort of a dirty animal. Go on, then, crawl.’ Paul’s body was remembering all sorts of odd acts of violence. He reached the table, groped up, felt around in a dull clinking, then brought trembling down a tumbler that seemed not entirely empty. He squinted at it; the smell was sickening and raw. But he took his medicine like a good boy. He gulped whatever it was, panted as if dying, held back his gorge, then climbed up to the seat of the cane chair. ‘God,’ he whispered, sitting, creaking, ‘God God.’
‘Yes, dad,’ said Alex, ‘you do well to call on your square and bourgeois God, dig.’
‘Time. Time irrit?’
‘Three,’ danced Alex. ‘I told you three, didn’t I? Just one minute ago I said three, so now it’s one minute past three, dig? And now you’re to get out of it. Come on.’ Paul now noticed that his three suitcases—the fourth was with Belinda—were piled on the unmade bed. His heart lunged at his chest, using a hefty shoulder again and again, battering.
‘Hofpital.’ But he couldn’t rise. In the breast pocket of his sports shirt he found his little denture. He inserted it, but his gum was terribly sore. ‘My wife,’ he said.
‘It’s you,’ said Alex, ‘who need that. You need to die on the operating table, dig, you unpleasant drunkard.’
‘Please,’ said Paul. ‘Please. I’m ill. I’m sick. Be kind.’ He had a swift Christine image of himself, dying. Vinegar on a sponge. There was vinegar in that cupboard over there. He got up in pain to totter towards it. Alex said:
‘What is it you want then, bum?’ Paul told him. Alex made a vomiting noise and rummaged among the pathetic cans and packages that made up his stock of provisions. He pulled out a black bottle labelled Uksus, a sucking, soothing sort of name. ‘Here,’ he said, thrusting it at Paul, ‘you get sober, dig, so I can say what I think of you, you filthy decadent limey.’ Paul drank from the bottle, shuddering. The vinegar carved into his crapula very painfully. He tottered back to the cane chair and fought for breath. Then he said:
‘Yes? Yes. What happened? What did I do?’ He raked away at his brain, rattling clinker. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘That window. I might have died.’
‘Better if you had died, dig.’ Alex sat on the table’s edge, looking down on him, his nose bunched up in distaste. ‘It wasn’t the vodka, though that was bad enough. It was your filthy sexual habits. How do you think I can ever look them in the face again—my friends, that is, dig? You and your horrible decadent sex.’
‘I don’t remember. I just do not remember. I cannot recollect a thing.’
‘So that’s all that goes on in the West, my friends say. Getting drunk and shouting and nasty decadent sex. How do you expect, dig, to get a man into orbit that way?’
‘Please,’ said Paul, ‘tell me,’ in pain, ‘what happened.’
‘I don’t dare talk about it even. Anna was disgusted.’
‘Anna?’ It was coming back. ‘So Anna’s been telling tales, has she? Well,’ said Paul, ‘let me tell you that she was as much to blame as me. She was all for it, that she was. There was nothing one-sided about that, let me tell you.’
Alex put on a look of intense shock and horror and turned himself into a film-still. Comets of agony and nausea meanwhile shot all through Paul. Alex said at length, ‘What I should really do is to lash you. I should get a steel whip and raise big bruises and weals all over your dirty body. So you tried your sexual lust on that poor girl too, did you? And she wanted no trouble, so she said nothing of it. Well … And to think what that poor girl has suffered from her husband. But,’ and here he smiled contemptuously, his nose-wings well spread, ‘you got nowhere. If you say you got anywhere you’re a liar.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Paul. ‘I couldn’t. It’s the way I am. What I mean is,’ he amended quickly, ‘is that, yes, I’m a liar. Just as you said. I was just lying, that was it. I didn’t know what I was saying. I never tried anything, not a thing.’
‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘Of course not. Because you’re not made that way. What you like, dig, is your own sex, and that’s what’s so filthy and disgusting.’
‘What precisely …’ Paul stared, feeling his eyeballs start to crack. ‘Go on, let’s have more.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Alex, ‘that was your real self coming out, wasn’t it? When a man’s drunk, dig, he shows himself as he really is. There you were, chasing Vladimir round the room, and then it was Pierre you were after, and you got nowhere with any of them, because they’re not decadent like you are, dig.’
‘God,’ said Paul. ‘And did I chase anybody else?’
‘Yes, you did. You tried your dirty sexiness on Pavel, and you even tried it on me, but all you got out of that was a big punch in the gut, dig.’ That, then, explained a pain which Paul had thought to be a kind of extruded dyspepsia. There were other pains, too, and patches of tenderness; he was not greatly interested in pursuing their origins. ‘And then,’ said Alex, ‘you said you were going to have Opiskin.’
‘But Opiskin’s dead.’
‘Oh, being dead or alive wasn’t going to stand in your way,’ said disgusted Alex. ‘And all I want now is you out of this pad and quick too, because I can’t look my friends in the face again, not after telling them that you were a good guy even though you were a sort of a capitalist.’
‘Where do you get that capitalist idea from?’
‘Coming over here with all those bourgeois clothes to sell, but too much concerned with your sexuality, dig, to really get down to a bit of hard work and sell them. And boasting last night about having a big capitalist shop full of silver and jewels back in England. Everybody was like disgusted.’
‘Not everybody would understand what I was saying.’
‘Oh, you got down to speaking Russian pretty good by the time you were trying to tear the clothes off of people. So now I’m having
you out and now, yes, now now now, because you’re horrible and filthy and uncultured.’
‘Uncultured, eh? That’s a good one, that is.’ Paul tried to stand up, but the appropriate departments of his brain were unable to carry out the order. He sat down again. He said, ‘You can’t just throw me out, not just like that. I’m a sick man. I can hardly move. Besides,’ he added, ‘I’ve no money. I gave you my thirty roubles and you spent it all on drink.’
‘Drink,’ said Alex, ‘which you drank, dad. Though I shouldn’t call you dad.’
‘You’re breaking your promise, too,’ Paul said. ‘How about the people I was going to be introduced to who were going to buy my drilon dresses, eh? You Americans and Russians are all the same. You promise things and you don’t keep your promises. You just can’t be trusted, that’s what it is.’
‘Yes,’ said Alex, ‘I expected that. I expected just those very words from you, dad. Well, history will show that it wasn’t me who did any of the letting down. You let us all down by behaving like a decadent pig. But I’ve kept my promise.’ He began digging in the inside pocket of his thick sports coat, bringing out his empty wallet and masses of paper rubbish. ‘There was no work this morning,’ he said. ‘There should have been an English party going round the Hermitage, dig, but they didn’t turn up. That was a good thing,’ he said, still shuffling through old bills and letters and cryptic squiggles, ‘because I would have gotten mad with them all and called them decadent drunken bastards.’
‘And it was also a good thing,’ Paul suggested, ‘because you couldn’t have been feeling any too well yourself.’ He could see more clearly now, the vinegar doing its work; Alex had a minimal tremor and looked haggard and bloodshot.
‘Here it is,’ said Alex, frowning at a bit of what looked like toilet-paper. ‘This man’s name is S. S. Nikolaev. And don’t think I’m doing this just to help you, dad, because what I’m really doing it for is the money. I need that money, dig.’
‘Which money?’
‘The protsyent. The percentage. That’s what I’m entitled to.’
‘I don’t see how you’re going to get it from me if you’re going to throw me out.’
‘Oh, I get it from this man Nikolaev. Don’t you worry about that, dad—which I should not be calling you. I’ll get it all right all right. He’ll keep it back from you and give it to me.’
‘But how much is he willing to pay?’
‘That’s for you to sort out with him, dig. You know the Dom Knigi?’
‘That’s the House of Books. That’s on Nevsky Prospekt.’
‘Well, what he said was for you to meet him outside there and bring the stuff with you. This afternoon, he said. Look, it’s afternoon now and you’d have been snoring and honkhonking still if I hadn’t come back to the pad. At five o’clock. I said that would be the best time.’
‘But that’s mad. I mean, that’s on a public thoroughfare with all of blasted Leningrad looking on.’
‘That’s what he said. Perhaps he’ll take you some place else then and do the deal nice and private, dig.’
‘Why couldn’t he come here instead? I mean, nobody would have any suspicion that anything was … I don’t like the sound of this at all,’ Paul said.
‘There it is,’ said Alex indifferently. ‘You and him must do things as you think fit. But I’m not having any of this illegal stuff, dig, here in my pad.’
‘You’ve become very conformist all of a sudden,’ said Paul. ‘Just a good son of the Establishment.’
‘It makes you that way,’ Alex said, ‘when you see what Western decadence looks like. All filth and sexuality.’ His tone became savage again. ‘Get yourself cleaned up and shaved and try to look like a man, dig. I don’t want you here by the time Anna gets home. It will just make her sick to look at you, poor chick.’
‘I’m ill,’ said Paul. ‘I can’t possibly carry all that baggage as far as the Metro.’
‘I’ll help you,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll speed you off the premises and only too glad, dig, to see your backside.’
5
A READING PEOPLE; MORE, A BOOK-BUYING PEOPLE. AND THE books they were buying in the bookshop which made up the ground floor of the Dom Knigi were not high-coloured toadstool paperbacks; they were black tomes on, Paul guessed, aerodynamics, afforestation, agronomy … The buyers were mostly grim working-men, straight out of the Corresponding Societies of nineteenth-century Britain; but there were many gaunt browsers, in subfusc overcoats despite the sunny late afternoon, who looked like retired clergymen. Paul made a stool of his two dangerous suitcases (the other he had left at the Metro) and sat down near the cash-desk. He was still far from well—giddy and very tired and sick—and out in the street was no place for resting. Besides, it was only ten minutes to five and he did not think this man Nikolaev would come early.
In a little slit of mirror in one of the shops he had passed, he had seen himself, unshaven despite Alex’s rough counsel, also bruised below the right eye and with a red cut just by his mouth. Quite a party, then. Alex he could not understand. He still could not understand Alex. Money, he had said: it was commission he was after; and yet he had put Paul quite tenderly on the tube-train, handing him the ticket he’d insisted on buying, shaking his head at him in sorrow and something like pity, as if the earlier show of disgust had been all a pretence, saying farewell with something like regret.
Paul did not think this choice of a crowded street, outside a crowded shop, was at all a prudent one for an illegal transaction. This man Nikolaev would surely want to count the goods, haggle, then tell out his notes with a wet thumb. But, as Alex had said, this rendezvous in public might merely be the prelude to something more satisfyingly furtive. Perhaps they would cross over to the Kazan Cathedral; perhaps Nikolaev knew some empty store-room on one of the floors above (the House of Books was huge: it contained publishers’ offices, busy translators of geology textbooks into Mansi, Chukchi, Evenk and Eskimo, thirty-million-copy editions of a zoology primer awaiting forty railway vans). Still, it was all very queer. In the meantime, the best thing to do was to sit, watching the open door for a short man with a cap on (so Alex had, perhaps insufficiently, described Nikolaev), and try to read the titles of the English classics in the Foreign Books section. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Three Men in a Boat (let Belinda dream or read those; he just couldn’t make the hospital today; he might perhaps ring up later; all he wanted was a good sleep in a hotel bed and later some borshch and perhaps a nice hot plate of beef Stroganov; she could wait till tomorrow); Oliver Twist; Angel Pavement; Martin Eden; the Complete Works of A. J. Cronin. He watched, too, the people queueing up at counters as patiently as Englishmen had recently queued in English bookshops for those cognate bestsellers The New English Bible and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The West wanted sex and avatars; Russia the opium of progress. Ah, nonsense. The State was a twisted wire coronal a child would wear on its head. People were people.
Outside the front door a man in a cap stopped, looked round in a burly way, then thrust a papiros with a twisted stem into his mouth. He used up five bad Russian matches to get it alight, and Paul watched him cautiously. He was short all right, also neckless. He stood there quite patiently, looking into the passing crowds with pale eyes, occasionally stamping his feet as though it were cold. That would undeniably be Nikolaev. Now that the moment had come Paul found himself paralysed; he sat on his two cases huddled up, as before a fire with the knowledge that bone-cutting cold awaits outside. He waited till Nikolaev had finished his cigarette and thrown the crushed-up cardboard stem to the pavement. Then he slowly walked out, a case in each hand.
He and Nikolaev looked at each other in a slack hopeless sort of way. Then Nikolaev said, ‘Mr Gussey?’
‘Ah, you speak English,’ said Paul. He put the cases down. There was no sense, with all these people passing up and down the Prospekt, of naked danger. It was a good idea, after all, to meet here.
‘Not match English,’ said Nikolaev sadly. ‘We do this quick, y
es? How much you want?’
‘Surely,’ said Paul, frowning, ‘you want to know how many … What I mean is, you haven’t even seen——’
‘I know, I know,’ said Nikolaev crossly. ‘Like Mizinchikov. Fifteen rouble for one, yes? Clothes, how many?’
‘Let’s say,’ said Paul, ‘nineteen dozen. Nineteen dozen at fifteen roubles each …’ He should really have worked all this out before. ‘Let’s call it twenty and then we can subtract. Let me see …’
But Nikolaev was impatient. He took a thick envelope from the side-pocket of his old jacket, which was the colour of rather mouldy brown bread. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘is …’ He shut his eyes tight; his lips computed rapidly; the higher numbers of a foreign language are always the hardest thing to learn. ‘… Is tree tousand, is tree tousand …’ He cursed; he couldn’t manage the other numerals.
It was money. It was well over a thousand nicker. Paul put his hand out greedily, then he stopped. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about Mizinchikov? How do you know of my connection with …’ Then he spotted them, across the road in front of the Kazan Cathedral—a parked Zis, two men, his old friends Karamzin and Zverkov. ‘Why,’ said Paul, ‘this is a put-up job, this is bloody treachery …’
‘Quick, quick, you take.’ And Nikolaev tried to thrust the bundle into Paul’s hand. Karamzin and Zverkov were just starting to cross the road. Paul cracked, burst, went mad. As lithely as in a PT exercise, he bent to one of his suitcases. He opened it up, disclosing brilliant drilon—gold, crimson, lime, cinnamon. He dipped in, he drew out, he shoved three or four dresses into the arms of a staid and astonished middle-aged couple who were about to enter the Dom Knigi. ‘A present,’ he said, ‘a podarok.’ The couple would not take: infected, infected, their shooing arms seemed to say. But two plain teenage girls in deplorable summer dresses came up swiftly to examine the offerings. They chattered eagerly to each other. ‘Skolko?’ They wanted to know how much. ‘Podarok,’ repeated Paul, ‘a gift.’ Though in the land of Baba Yaga and sputniks, they gaped incredulously. ‘It’s the truth,’ said Paul. ‘Pravda.’ Queer that pravda should mean the truth, this sort of truth. The girls took daringly, thanked like mad, then went off chattering round the corner towards the canal. Paul dipped in for more. Nikolaev tried, as Paul bent, to thrust the money down the back of his shirt, but Paul was too quick for him. Urgency and excitement were curing his hangover fast. He pushed away Nikolaev’s hand, at the same time kicking Nikolaev’s foot, which had come down on the unopened suitcase. A crowd was collecting; there were some murmurs against Nikolaev. Here, it seemed, was a mad but good-hearted foreigner giving things away; it was hardly decent of this native-born one to attempt first to buy, second to steal. Paul’s inspiration boiled up into the words ‘I give to the Russian people …’ Translation into Russian was difficult; he flicked through declension tables as a thumb flicks comb-teeth, then decided, ‘To hell with grammar.’ ‘… On behalf of their comrades the British people.’ And then, dipping, throwing gorgeous colours into still bewildered faces, he called, ‘Angliyskiy narod dayet!’ Nikolaev had been pushed back by the women and was hitting, trying to get through, waving his envelope of money, shouting angry words. An inward tram and an outward tram seemed to have converged and stopped: Karamzin and Zverkov were not yet across. ‘Gifts, gifts,’ called Paul, ‘from the British people to the citizens of Leningrad.’ He had an old image of children’s eyes full of wonder, gaudy balloons in their arms like new-born babies. He dipped and threw. Men and women were momentarily turbaned, sashed, cloaked and bibbed in hurled streaks of primrose and vermilion. One little old woman tugged at Paul’s shirt, saying, ‘Moya doch, moya doch—svadyba zavtra.’ So her daughter was getting married tomorrow, was she? Paul piled her arms with gentian, maroon, lemon, midnight blue. Then he threw daffodil, gold, orange, a lone virginal white at the crowd—he threw them like benedictions in a ceremony of aspersion. It was the most satisfying orgasm he had ever known: spilling this stuff of life in what only appeared to be an altruistic act, he revelled in and was ashamed of his total nakedness; he felt a frightful embryo guilt. But, seeing the dark Slav eyes reflect brilliance from the colours they drank and the well-shaped lips move and move in excitement, he thought, ‘Why don’t we do this more often?’ That was an old song: the tune ran through his head gaily. He tried to remember the rest of the words and was still trying to puzzle them (—‘Just what we’re doing today’—) out when Karamzin and Zverkov at last pushed their way through and confronted him. He did not at first recognize them and said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry, I mean vinovat. There aren’t any more.’ And, as if this were the end of some Russian film, ‘Konyets.’ Then he separated their faces out from the rest of the now diminishing crowd and said, ‘Ah, gentlemen. Treachery, eh? And now, presumably, dear little Alexei Prutkov doesn’t get his cut after all.’ He grinned down at the empty cases, much kicked, and at uncomfortable Nikolaev, who now held the envelope of money by one corner, like something dead or dirty.