The Road Home (17 page)

“Right. What if their immediate future doesn’t turn out the way you predict?”

“It
will
turn out the way we predict. The knack with astrology is, you word everything in such broad fucking terms it can all be made to fit. But we just have to get in fast, before some other fucker gets the same idea.”

Lev smiled. “I’d like to know my future,” he said quietly.

“Yeah?” said Rudi. “Why? Something happen to you? You sound different.”

Lev was silent. He looked over at the clown, lying on the floor with its soft limbs in an attitude of surrender. “No,” he said, “nothing’s happened. Tell me more about Maya.”

Lev heard Rudi’s broken cuckoo blurt out three o’clock. Rudi coughed, then said, “She’s okay, Lev. Truly. No more goats stolen. Oh yeah, she lost another tooth. I told her she looked like a vampire. She said, ‘What’s a vampire?’ but I couldn’t fucking remember. My mind just wouldn’t conjure it. I said we might see one at the fair, but now I don’t know if we can get to the fair.”

“Tell her to write something to me, or send a drawing.”

“Okay. What d’you want the drawing to be of?”

“Dunno. The house, maybe. She likes drawing houses. Or a sunflower.”

“It’s not sunflower time, my friend, it’s nearly winter, in case you’d forgotten.”

“I hadn’t forgotten. She can imagine a sunflower. Tell me more news.”

“What news? You know nothing happens here. You tell
me
more news.”

“Well,” said Lev, “I almost heard a concert.”

“Almost heard? Is that some kind of new grammatical tense?”

Lev told Rudi, and Rudi laughed so loudly that he woke Lora, and Lev heard Lora’s voice in the background saying, “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Rudi told her. “Just hearing about Lev making his mark in London.”

“It’s three in the morning, Rudi,” said Lora.

“I know,” said Rudi. “So talk to Lev.”

Lora came on the line and said, “Lev, we miss you. So does Maya. She’s afraid she’ll never see you again.”

Lev was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Don’t let her think that, Lora. I’m going to be sending some toys.”

He dreamed of a woman. It was the first dream of its kind Lev had had for two years. He lay down in the snow with the beautiful woman and unwound the rags that covered her, and these rags were like a skin she was discarding to reveal a body soft and shining. He told her he’d forgotten how to love, and she said, “No, I don’t believe that for a second,” and she put a hand on his neck and pulled him down toward her and kissed his mouth.

He knew he shouldn’t name the woman. Naming her would break some unspoken bond, some tacit understanding. Yet he wanted to name her, to make her real to him in this way. He felt as though he’d choke if he didn’t say her name, but he kept a rein on himself and stayed silent.

When he woke, his phone was ringing. It was Lydia.

She said, “Lev, I’m trying hard not to be angry with you, but I think your manners are very bad.”

8

The Need to Shock

FROM AN IRISH stall on Holloway Road, Lev bought an anorak with a fleece lining and a trim of nylon fur round the hood. He put it on as soon as he’d paid for it and walked away, feeling warm and glad. Then he turned and went back to the stall and bought another one, in a child’s size but identical to his, and posted it to Maya. He knew that imagining Maya in her little identical coat was going to become a habit of mind with him as the winter passed.

Christy admired the anorak. He said, “I think it looks good on yer—and I’m sayin’ this stone-cold sober.”

He was trying to stay sober most of the time now. The court had granted him “chaperoned visits” to his daughter, who was living with Angela and her estate-agent lover in a loft conversion off the Farringdon Road.

“Trouble is, the chaperone is Angela,” said Christy. “I think that’s unfair. I can’t see Frankie without seeing the woman who took her away from me. D’you think that’s right?”

“No,” said Lev. “Maybe I can be ‘chaperone’?”

“Well, I wish. But they said it has to be the mother or some female social worker. And Angela never wants to go out anywhere. I said I wanted to take Frankie to the zoo, but there was a drop of drizzle in the air so Angela says, ‘No, we’ll get soaked going round the zoo.’ Then I suggested a film.” Christy pronounced it
fillem.
“But she says, ‘No chance. I’m not going up the West End, it’s too hideous.’ So all we do is, we sit there and do bits of coloring or Lego. And I try to talk to Frankie about school or about her friends. She answers me, yes-no, yes-no, but she won’t look at me. She looks down at the Lego, or up at her mother. And the light in that place is so glaring, it makes me eyes sore. One whole side of the living-room wall is glass, and there’s glass all above you in bloody enormous panels. God knows how it gets cleaned, and God knows how you sleep, with the rain clattering down and the light flooding in. I wouldn’t like to live there at all.”

When Lev asked about the owner of the loft, Angela’s lover, whose name was Tony Myerson-Hill, Christy said, “The less I hear about him, the happier I am. His furniture’s ugly: big black-leather sofas, tubular-steel tables. And everything has to be in its right place or he has an epileptic fit. How he can put up with a five-year-old, I’ve no idea. And the shower’s weird. Big walk-in thing, tiled in gray granite, but with no door on it. No privacy at all. What kind of interior design is that? I think the man’s a fashion victim of the first fucking water.”

Then he told Lev that once when he was visiting Frankie all Frankie wanted to do the whole afternoon was polish stones.

Tony Myerson-Hill had bought a stone-polishing machine and said he would pay Frankie 10p for every stone she polished. Then she laid the newly shined stones in a line along the walls of the granite shower and she said Tony would be “really, really happy” about this arrangement and might take her to the zoo at the weekend.

“Get that,” Christy went on. “The zoo! I suggested the bloody zoo the very first time I went to that place. So either Frankie had no memory of it, or else she said it just to hurt me. God knows. I look around that effing glass house and I see the huge plasma-screen TV and the seven hundred and seventy-nine CDs and DVDs and the three computers and I think I’m done for. I think about this place and that little shop in your room that Frankie never played with, and I see that Myerson-Hill and loft conversions in ECI are the future and I’m the past. As far as Frankie’s concerned, I’m pretty much over.”

Lev barely knew what to say to this. He remembered his father, Stefan, saying that life had moved on and left him behind—and he had been proved right. So he knew this wasn’t a thing that he could mention to Christy. Instead—as some kind of appropriate response to the desperation Christy was feeling—he began talking about a trip he’d made with Rudi to the Kalinin Mountains, a year after Marina had died.

Christy sat down in one of the wicker chairs. “Yeah, tell me, fella,” he said eagerly, as though he was glad not to have to talk about Frankie anymore.

Lev explained that the trip had been Rudi’s idea. Rudi had told him that he, Lev, needed to walk, to lose himself, to stop lying in his hammock, sunk down in sadness. Lev had said that he was all right in the hammock, but Rudi said no, it was time to get up now, time to set himself some kind of test. And Rudi had this “test” already planned and funded, so arguing with him against it was going to be fruitless.

They packed rucksacks with supplies and sleeping bags and strong boots and bought lengths of rope. Neither of them knew how to climb a rock face. Rudi said that their destination was a cave on the lower slopes of the Kalinin range. If they could reach the cave, they would have achieved their objective. When Lev had asked what that objective was, Rudi had replied, “To embrace something.”

They took three days of their leave entitlement from the lumber yard. It was early spring in Baryn, and cold, and the new green on the larch trees was a pale dust, barely visible to the eye. But even as they set off, Lev had felt his heart lift. To be traveling somewhere was, after all, better than staring at Ina’s yard, and he liked the idea of going into the mountains and becoming lost in a place where there were no people.

To reach the cave, they followed the line of the Baryn River to its stony source. There was no path, only narrow tracks here and there, made by mountain goats. Underfoot was slippery schist and ragged clumps of heather. The steady ascent made Lev’s lungs burn and he had to stop frequently to recover his breath. During these moments of rest, he looked about him and saw the snowcaps way above him and, below, the long, beige scars on the hills where pine and fir had been felled for the Baryn mill. The air was damp and clean and fragrant in a way it no longer was in Auror, and Lev became aware of a feeling of poise within himself that he hadn’t known for a long time.

After four hours Rudi and Lev stopped again and drank tea from a flask and ate bread and smoked herring, packed by Lora. They sat on a lichencovered boulder, smoking and staring at a lone bird, turning and dipping, turning and dipping toward some invisible prey. Rudi’s plan was to reach the cave before nightfall, make a fire, and sleep there on its earth floor. To keep them warm in the night, he’d brought a flask of Ukrainian brandy.

“Ukrainian brandy,” Christy interrupted. “What the hell’s that like?”

“As you would expect, poor quality,” said Lev. “But very cheap. And in cold air you don’t taste difference.”

“Okay,” said Christy, “I get the drift.”

Lev sat down opposite Christy. He lit a cigarette. He told Christy that they had come to the rock face below the cave in early afternoon, with an hour or two of remaining light. Set into the rock was an iron ladder, which went almost vertically upward for a hundred feet, and near the base of the ladder, they discovered, among the scrub and stones, rusty tins that had once contained liver sausage and sardines and condensed milk. They examined these objects, to which faded labels still clung in spite of their scorching by time and weather. Then they looked at the ladder. It was as rusty as the tins, and the bolts that held it to the rock face were missing in places. Several of the rungs were broken. But neither Lev nor Rudi had commented on the ruinous state of it.

“I will never forget going up there,” said Lev. “All around me space and air. Nothing to hold. Only the ladder, so broken. But I say to Rudi, ‘I am going first and you stay on the ground until I reach cave.’ If one of us is die, I want it to be me.

“So I climb. And my pack feels very heavy. Heavy like a child on my back. And each moment I think, Now the air takes me and I fall and that is end of me. But you know something, Christy? For all that time I am climbing I don’t think about Marina. All I think about is getting to cave. Like cave is made of gold or something. You know?”

“Well, I never believed in caves of gold meself,” said Christy, “but I can see how that might take your mind off everything else.”

“On I go,” continued Lev, “my arms in pain. Pain everywhere. How many steps? I don’t know. We never counted. But many, many. I think to myself, This have no end.”

Above the ladder, in front of the cave’s mouth, was a broad ledge, and it, too, was strewn with old food tins and plastic bottles. Lev hauled himself onto this ledge and lay facedown among the debris, breathing hard. Up here, the wind was strong and dust swirled at the cave mouth.

Lev didn’t want to go into the cave before Rudi arrived. He let his rucksack fall and knelt at the top of the ladder, facing the void, watching Rudi climb. Rudi was heavier than he was. Lev heard the metal sing, could feel it shudder as the weight of Rudi’s boots fell on each rung. It was at this moment—with Rudi halfway up the ladder—that he heard himself whispering to his friend, “Don’t look down . . . don’t look back . . .” and he felt that he suddenly understood why Rudi had brought him here and that the thing he had to embrace was the idea of perseverance.

The mist had cleared by the time Rudi and he went into the cave. By the last rays of the sun, they could see something lying on the cave floor. They crept toward it, and then they stopped. There lay a huddle of human bones, clothed in what looked like a dusty military uniform, stained a deep brown. Lev and Rudi stared at the place where the skull should have been, but there was no skull. Resting on the rib cage, where the buttons of the uniform had once shone gold, was an old Kalashnikov rifle. On the ground beside the bones lay more empty tins and a metal spoon.

“Jesus Christ!” said Christy. “Didn’t the body stink?”

“No,” said Lev. “Flesh gone.”

“What about the head? Did you find it?”

“No. But pieces of bone. We think he put rifle here, under chin, and shot his head away.”

Christy got up and went to the window. He looked out at Belisha Road, where a police car was shimmering by, lit up by its blue, shrieking light. Then he turned back to Lev and asked, “Who was it? Did you ever find out who it was?”

Lev sighed. He said, “Well. It was me.”

Christy stared at Lev. The flashing police car could be heard accelerating up Junction Road, toward Archway. Christy opened his mouth to ask another question when Lev said, “Rudi knew this dead man was there. A colonel or general from Communist time before our country’s new era. And this colonel or general, he couldn’t make any progress with his life. He was ended. He lay in the cave—like I lay in my hammock—and ate food out of tins. And when tins ran out, he shot his head away.”

Christy’s hands were shaking as he lit a new Silk Cut. After a while he said, “That fella Rudi: he goes to some lengths to make a point, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “But he helped me. From this time, I didn’t lie in hammock anymore.”

“Well,” said Christy with a sigh, “that’s a nice thing. Survival’s always nice to hear about.”

Sophie’s friend Samantha was bone-thin, with boyish hair, colored white-blond. In the noisy pub, she was wearing a short, low-cut black dress and purple snakeskin boots. Everyone called her Sam. Sophie told Lev that Sam Diaz-Morant was becoming a famous name in the world of hat-making. Her youngest clients were the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.