The Sky Is Falling (15 page)

Kopanyev laughed and laughed.

“And von Koren wears
yellow
shoes!” I said. “I think that's worse.”

“I do too! I am completely in accord! I would shoot any man first for wearing yellow shoes, second for wearing slippers in street. Then in ‘Three Years,' like you said, it is heartbreaking, devastating, that he imagines Julia limping on foot he's kissed. But sometimes it's just detail. I'm not convinced galoshes have special significance. Half year Russia's covered in snow, other half in mud.”

“In ‘Man in a Case' Belikov's ‘great claim to fame' was going around in galoshes.”

“Yes.” He stroked his beard. “Anyway, I enjoyed reading it very much.” He bowed forward to peer at my new runners, then lifted his own foot clad in an expensive-looking dress shoe. I didn't know what he wanted me to say about it so I said nothing.

“How's Russian coming along?”

“It's hard.”

“Stick out your tongue.”

“What?”

“Stick out your tongue. Just little. Come on.”

I poked the tip out and retracted it.

“As I thought. It's much easier if it's forked.”

When I returned home later in the afternoon, I saw that the next-door neighbour had replaced the stolen statue of the black servant with a vaguely malevolent gnome. When it had actually appeared, I couldn't say, but this was the first time I'd noticed his red-hatted presence, his pursed, painted lips, and—unbelievable!—
yellow
shoes. Pete's car was gone. He didn't come home that night. Sonia wasn't coming back until New Year's Day. While I certainly didn't miss Dieter, it was depressing to be alone in the house with a menacing plaster figure lurking on the lawn next door.

The Chekhov story I read that night seemed strangely coincidental. “My Life—A Provincial's Story” is about a young man in conflict with his father over his way of life. The son of a prominent, corrupt architect in a corrupt provincial town, Misail refuses to take the path dictated by his rank. He explains: “
The strong should not enslave the weak, the minority must not be
parasites on the majority, or leeches forever sucking their blood.
” His father despises him for working as a common labourer. Eventually Misail marries the rich daughter of a former employer, and together they move to the country, joining the back-to-the-land-type movement going on in Russia at the time. They set up as farmers but soon the farm and marriage fail. When Misail's sister, a consumptive whose whole life has been devoted to their tyrannical father, has an affair and becomes pregnant, she too is disowned. Yet Misail goes to see his father and, despite everything, tells him, “
I love you and can't say how sorry I am that
we're so far apart.
” The story ends with Misail steadfast in his convictions, raising his orphaned niece alone.

Sad
(
10
),
sadly
(
1
),
sadness
(
1
);
dissatisfied
(
1
);
unhappy
(
1
);
morose
(
1
),
morosely
(
1
);
depressed
(
3
),
depression
(
1
);
despondent
(
1
);
miserable
(
1
);
gloom
(
1
),
gloomy
(
3
);
sorrow
(
2
);
suffer
(
1
),
suffering
(
2
);
woe
(
4
);
lonely
(
4
),
loneliness
(
1
);
bore
(
1
),
boring
(
5
),
boredom
(
1
),
bored
(
6
);
monotony
(
1
).

Pete showed up the next night and, without explaining his absence, offered to cook me supper. Though I declined (I'd already eaten), I made an effort to sound friendly. I felt I understood him a little better. (Like Misail, he'd gagged on his silver spoon.) I felt I knew something about him. (He secretly loved his father.) It occurred to me, too, that perhaps he didn't even know this secret thing about himself. From my desk, new that day—a foldable card table—I could hear his noisy preparations. He even cooked like an anarchist. Banging, chopping, crashing, then smoke from the inevitable bomb of burning garlic.

Half an hour later he stomped up the stairs. “Come out with me, Zed,” he called through the door.

I got up and opened it. “Where?”

“I've got to do something. Right now. I promise it'll be fun. Can you drive?”

“Yes.”

“Really? You're full of surprises, Zed. Here.” He tossed the keys.

I had learned the previous summer, but hadn't been behind a wheel since. Pete got in the passenger side and helped me move the bench seat forward. I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs. “Where are we going?”

“We'll stick close to home tonight.”

“Why can't you drive?”

“It'll be easier if you do. I'm going to keep hopping out.” He began unloading things from his backpack onto the dashboard—Ronald Reagan mask, snaggled towel, a piece of manilla tag with letters cut out.

“You should drive,” I said.

Pete pointed to Kropotkin in his dress dangling from the rear-view mirror, as though that might bolster me. We both laughed and, strangely, I did feel braver. I started the car, turned on the wipers to clear the windshield. I shoulder-checked. Each of these steps I named and ticked off in my mind. Behind us, the wet street shone under the street lights, all our neighbours home, their curtains open, the light from their televisions blueing their living rooms. No sooner had I pulled from the curb when I braked, startled by the feel of the vehicle obeying me. We were tossed forward, and Pete, tucking his hair up under the rubber mask, struck the dashboard.

Then I was driving straight down the middle of the street, slower than a jog. From the corner of my eye I saw him remove an aerosol can from his pack. The little ball rattled as he shook it. “Are you going to deface something?”

His voice came out rubbery. “Zed. What a nasty mind you have.”

“That's spray paint, isn't it?”

“I'm going to modify some signage.”

It seemed to take a week to reach the corner. When Pete, or Ronald, called for me to stop, I hit the brake harder than I meant to, sending both of us lurching forward again. He plunged out of the car, towel in one hand, paint and cardboard in the other, leaving the door ajar. In fluid, practised movements, he swabbed the stop sign, slapped the cardboard on it, blasted it with paint.

STOP
the arms race!

By the time the cloud had settled, he was back in the car telling me to drive.

“I start to get this itchy feeling, Zed. It's unbearable. I have to act. Can you possibly go any faster?”

“No,” I said.

He rocked side to side in the same rhythm as the windshield wipers. “Stop then,” he said the second before he jumped out, arms and legs pumping below the grotesque cartoon head, all the way to the next stop sign. When I pulled up beside him, the job was done. He opened the door, said, “Bayswater,” and took off running again.

Bayswater Street was busier. I had to pull over to let a car pass, which was when I finally noticed the wipers shrieking against the dry glass and shut them off. Two blocks ahead, under the street light on the corner, Pete was lingering at the scene of the crime. He waved, then darted across, forcing me, if I wished to follow, to turn onto Point Grey Road where there was even more traffic. For the whole long block until the fork onto First Avenue, I held my breath. By then I'd lost him. One moment he was streaking ahead of me, then he wasn't. I drove all the way to Trafalgar Street, but the sign there was intact.

The neighbourhood looked unfamiliar through a windshield. I was lost just blocks from the house. I considered abandoning the car and walking back, but didn't know how I would face Pete later, so I carried on, trawling the treed streets, avoiding the main arteries, alert in my peripheral vision. Other nocturnal creatures popped up green-eyed in the headlights—a cat, a raccoon. A man with a dog crossed the road and, while I waited, I read the street sign. Balaclava. Not the face mask. The Crimean War. There was a Blenheim, too, a Trafalgar, even a Waterloo. The streets were all named after famous battles. It was the first time that I noticed.

I came to more stop signs that had been changed and, confident I was on his trail, kept driving, a full five minutes before something else occurred to me. He was intentionally evading me. He'd promised fun. Was this what he meant? A game of tag? I pulled over and shut the engine off. Kropotkin revolved slowly in his dervish's robe while I huddled, thinking of Ruth, how Pete had humiliated her, how he was humiliating me now.

A loud smash, like something had dropped out of a tree and landed on the trunk. I swung around. Nothing. When I faced forward again, I screamed. Ronald Reagan was pressed up against the windshield, doubly grotesque.

Pete got in the passenger side, laughing and breathing hard.

“You scared me!” I said. “Take that off!”

He tossed the mask onto the dash, shook his hair out. He looked elated.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“I was right behind you. Here. Slide over. I'll drive.”

It was awkward switching places. For a moment, when I was almost in his lap, he seemed to hug me. I could feel the bellows-like movement of his chest. He turned in the seat. “What's wrong? You seem angry. Are you angry, Zed?”

“Let's go.”

“Are you angry?”

“Stop it!”

“Are you?”

“Yes!” I said.

When I wouldn't meet his eye, Pete took my face in both his hands. I was too rattled to pull away. I thought he was going to kiss me. He seemed about to, but then he didn't. “Sonia wants you in the group,” he said. “She brought it up at the last meeting. Do you want to help save the world, Zed?”

It turned out that the liveried garden statues were more than booty. They were functional too, propping the flip-chart agenda against the fireplace,
Warm Up: Sonia
the first item of business. Last week, when Sonia returned from Christmas holidays, I'd been shocked by her advancing thinness; now, as she got to her feet, she actually had to hoist her pants. She looked around at our expectant faces—Pete and Dieter, Belinda and Carla, Timo (the facilitator that night), me (spurting sweat)—and began to sing. “If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands . . .”

Sonia wasn't the singer I'd heard so often closing their meetings, the one with the shivery voice, but soon the others drowned out her off-key warbling. They clapped and stomped and danced around the living room, taking wild swings at each other with their hips, giving up a rousing
Yeehaw!
when the song dictated. They were at ease with each other. They knew each other. I knew no one, barely myself. Yet I wanted to be there. I'd been dragging my loneliness around for too long. Also, I didn't want to die. When it was over, after Belinda had, to my mortification, implicated me in a polka, and everyone had collapsed on the floor, a silence fell, or rather everyone stopped laughing so the only sound was our common struggle, at that particular moment the struggle for oxygen. I lay panting, inhaling everyone's commingled exhalation, and vice versa, feeling close to these people, at least closer than I had to anyone in years.

We resumed our places, me on the chesterfield buffering Sonia from Dieter, Timo perched on the hearth, a giant baby in overalls, cheeks flushed from the warm-up. He was the only one in NAG!, the only Nagger, I hadn't been introduced to, the one with the big rubber boots and blond, dessert-like lashings of hair, and that curious affectation—the right pant leg rolled. As he read over the rest of the agenda, some of the words stalled in his mouth. It seemed arbitrary which ones would trip him up. “Does anyone have anything to aaaaadd?”

Hands went up and, while Timo wrote new names on the agenda, Belinda, who was leaning against the beanbag chair Pete sprawled in, gathered her hair from behind her and tossed the scarf of it over her shoulder, striking Pete full in the face. I saw him flinch, then lift the hair that had fallen across his chest. He examined the ends, sniffed them. Then he put them in his mouth and, suddenly, he seemed so vulnerable, like a kitten weaned too young.

My acceptance in the group had been contentious, I was pretty sure of that. Nevertheless, when my name came up on the agenda,
Welcome Jane!
, they came over and one by one initiated me with a hug. I really hated this part. I didn't want to die but neither did I want to be hugged all the time. There would be no escaping the hugs. Timo was the softest. Pete crawled across the dirty shag and laid his golden head, heavy with ideology, in my lap. Carla presented me with a Guatemalan peace bracelet she'd woven herself. And here was proof that Sonia had diminished over the holidays; while still in her skeletal embrace, I decided I would be the one to fatten her up.