Death and the Penguin (16 page)

Embarrassed, Nina sat staring at the table and the coffee cup before her.

“Don’t worry,” he said, getting up and smoothing her wet hair. “It’s all right.”

She nodded, but did not look up.

“I’ll be back late,” he said. “Don’t open to anyone. And here’s something in advance …”

He put two green $100 bills on the table, and left.

Before taking the Metro to Svyatoshino, Viktor wandered the city for a while. After several clearly fortuitous thaws, February had turned sharp again. The sun shone, the snow sparkled underfoot, and his hands were like ice in the pockets of his short sheepskin coat. Clutched, no less ice-cold, in his right hand, were the keys to Pidpaly’s flat.

This time, the cold lending wings to his feet, it took him about ten minutes to walk from the Metro to Pidpaly’s flat. Quickly letting himself in, he stamped the snow off his feet and went through to the kitchen. It was tidy, and only the combination of damp and stuffiness recalled the day when the ambulance he had summoned carried Pidpaly off for ever.

Something in the air made him sneeze.

He would have done better to die at home, he thought, gazing round at the ancient kitchen furniture, the stopped clock, the terracotta ashtray on the window ledge, obviously never used, either because the old man had forgotten about it or because he wished to keep it safe.

He entered the living room. Old-fashioned chairs were drawn up to the round table. A chandelier with five frosted-glass shades hung from the centre of the ceiling. Facing the door was a chest of drawers supporting three towering bookshelves. The books were concealed behind photographs and newspaper cuttings. There were also photographs on the walls, framed and redolent of the past. The whole furnishing of the flat was of a past age.

It reminded Viktor of the flat of the grandmother who had brought him up after his parents divorced and went their separate ways. Part of an old house in Tarasov Street, that had been old-fashioned too, in some respects, though he had paid no heed to it at the time. There had been a chest of drawers there, as well, only smaller, and standing on it a glass cabinet displaying Granny’s proudest possessions: the china vases presented to her for her achievements at work. There were five or six of them, each bearing her name and initials, the date, and a brief account of the occasion, neatly and painstakingly inscribed in gold ink. And there had been the same framed photographs of the same
epoch, that same recent but already so far distant past of a country that no longer existed.

He went over to the chest of drawers. In the bookcase photographs he recognized Pidpaly – with a woman, against a background of palms, and underneath was
Yalta, Summer 1960
. He looked closely – Pidpaly was then 40, 45, and the permed lady evidently of similar age. In another photograph Pidpaly was standing alone beside a swimming pool out of which a dolphin poked its head.
Batumi, Summer 1981
ran the legend.

The past believed in dates. And everyone’s life consisted of dates, giving life a rhythm and sense of gradation, as if from the eminence of a date one could look back and down, and see the past itself. A clear, comprehensible past, divided up into squares of events, lines of paths taken.

Here, despite the odour of damp books, and perhaps by virtue of being on the ground floor, he felt at ease and safe. These walls with their faded paper, the dust-laden shades of the chandelier, the rows of photographs, had something of a mesmerizing effect.

He sat down at
the table
, and again thought of his grandmother, Aleksandra Vasilyevna, who, when she was old, used to take a little stool and sit outside the block.
God grant I’m never paralysed, she would say, it’d ruin your life and lose you a wife
! He had laughed, but Granny, decrepit as she was, had wormed out of her neighbours the phone number of a flat-fixer. Two months later Viktor had a two-room flat, and Granny had moved to a ground-floor one-roomer in a Khrushchev slum, where, quietly, virtually unnoticed, she died. Social Security buried her, and her neighbours gave three roubles each towards a wreath. All of which Viktor had learnt six months later, returning home from the army.

Feeling like a cup of tea, he went to the kitchen. Darkness was falling. As he switched on the light, the ancient refrigerator rumbled into life. Surprised, he took a look inside. Green sausage, and an open tin of condensed milk. He took out the milk, and in the tall, narrow kitchen cupboard found a packet of tea.

His sensation of comfort, albeit someone else’s, was mixed with unease. He drank the tea, eating solidified condensed milk with it. The voices of people walking by outside alternated with the noise of a passing car.

Feeling a tickle in his throat, he poured himself a second cup, drank it, and returning to the living room, switched on the light. He looked into the study – all bookshelves and bookcases – went over to the desk, and lighting the table lamp, also ancient and with a marble base, sat down on the black leather chair.

The desk was scattered with notebooks. Noticing a thick diary beside the lamp, he leafed through it – pages of hurried minuscule handwriting interspersed with paper markers. The diary opened by itself at one such marker – a newspaper cutting. He moved closer to the light. It reported Britain’s gift to Ukraine of a station in the Antarctic. The report ended with an appeal for sponsors,
without whose financial support it would not be possible to send Ukrainian scientists there
. A telephone number was given for inquiries, and a bank account number for donations.

What, wondered Viktor, had the Antarctic to do with Ukraine?

There was, he saw also, a receipt in respect of a postal draft. Examining it, he almost doubted his sanity. Pidpaly had sent the Antarctic Appeal five million, in the grossly inflated national currency, probably the pathetic total of his savings.

Putting receipt and cutting aside, he studied the old man’s notes, but could decipher only a few odd words. Pidpaly’s
thoughts were encoded and inaccessible to the outsider, by virtue of his writing.

Again he had a sense of unease and an itching in his finger-tips, as though from contact with something incomprehensible, inexplicable.

He had not forgotten his promise to the old man, but preferred for the moment not to think about it. And although he had come not thinking about it, it was after all what had drawn him there, the cold keys in his cold hand guiding him like a compass.

And here he sat amid things and papers that were no longer anybody’s – in a whole world left without its creator and master. The old man had wanted no outsiders to have contact with it, or to see the destruction of a cosy little world three or four decades behind the times.

He gave a deep sigh and had a sudden urge to pull out the desk drawers or rummage in the chest of drawers in search of something to salvage as a memento. But the frozen integrity, the immobility of Pidpaly’s little world prevented him. He sat contemplating the cutting and receipt, the diary and other notebooks.

The street was silent now, and the combined silence of street and flat stirred him into action. He put the newspaper cutting in his jacket pocket.

He looked round at the study walls, but didn’t touch anything else. He fetched matches from the gas stove in the kitchen. In a small wall cupboard in the corridor he found a bottle of acetone, which he took back to the study. Closing his mind to what he was doing, he splashed acetone over the books on the lower shelves and on a pile of old newspapers under the desk. Half the pile of newspapers he took into the living room and put
under the dinner table, throwing the tea-stained cloth to join them. He then went around setting light to the papers and anything that would burn. Flames hissed in both rooms, but as yet too feebly to engulf that doomed world. Discovering sheets, pillowcases and towels in the chest of drawers, he added them to the blaze, together with Pidpaly’s raincoat from its peg in the corridor.

In a whirl of black smuts, the air grew hotter, filling the room with smoke and sparks and forcing him out into the corridor.

The crackle of burning grew steadily louder. Flames had already penetrated the table top and were now licking at the legs.

Feeling for Pidpaly’s keys, he made for the door, but darted back to switch off the living room light. The fire glowed a deeper red in the dark, more beautiful and terrible than before.

He locked the outer door behind him.

He made a circuit of the block, then stopped opposite Pidpaly’s windows and watched the flames shooting up to the ceiling. He looked up at the first floor. No lights were showing – the people there were either asleep or not yet back.

He took another look through the window at the dancing flames.

So that was that. He had kept his promise.

But his hands were shaking and cold shivers were running up and down his spine.

Turning away, he spotted a telephone at the corner of the neighbouring block, and from here he called the fire brigade.

Glass shattered, as if the fire were forcing its way out. A woman screamed. Five minutes later he heard the wail of fire-engine sirens. With two appliances on the scene and their crews bustling about, rolling out hoses and shouting. Viktor took a last look
at the now doomed flames, and set off at an unhurried pace to the Metro.

He had the taste of smoke in his mouth. Snowflakes fell lightly on his face, but before they could melt, were blown away by an icy wind.

“Your hair smells of bonfire,” Nina whispered sleepily as Viktor slipped into bed.

He muttered some reply, turned away and fell asleep immediately, totally exhausted.

He woke at about ten, hearing Sonya conversing with Misha beside the bed.

“Sonya, where’s Auntie Nina?”

“Gone. We had breakfast and then she went. We’ve left you something.”

On the kitchen table he found two boiled eggs and under the salt cellar, a note:

Screwing up the note, Viktor felt the eggs. They were cold. He made himself some tea and breakfasted.

He went back to the bedroom.

“Fed Misha, Sonya?”

“Yes. He’s had two fish today, but he still seems unhappy.
Why, Uncle Vik?”

He perched on the settee.

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I think they’re only happy in cartoons.”

“All animals are, in cartoons,” Sonya said with an airy wave of the hand.

He noticed, looking at her, that she was wearing a new emerald-coloured dress.

“That’s new, isn’t it?”

“Present from Nina. Yesterday on our walk we went into a shop … That’s where she gave it to me. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“The penguin likes it, too.”

“You’ve asked him, have you?”

“Yes. But he’s not happy. Maybe it’s bad for him here.”

“That’s probably it,” he agreed. “What he likes is cold, and here it’s warm.”

“Perhaps we could put him in the fridge.”

He looked at Misha standing beside her, rocking slightly on his feet, chest rising with each breath.

“We mustn’t do that – he’d be too cramped, you see. I expect he wants to go home, but home’s a long way away.”

“Very, very far?”

“The Antarctic.”

“Where’s that?”

“Think of the earth as round. Can you do that?”

“Like a ball? Yes, I can.”

“Well, we’re standing on the top, and penguins live at the bottom, almost underneath us …”

“With their feet in the air?”

“In a way, yes. But we seem to them to have our feet in the air when they think of it … Do you see?”

“Yes,” she declared loudly. “And I can stand with my legs in the air!”

And resting her back against the edge of the settee, she had a go at standing on her head, but couldn’t keep it up.

“But I can do it,” she said, sitting down on the carpet again. “It’s just that I’m heavier after breakfast.”

He smiled. This was the first time in these several months that he had chatted with Sonya so easily and without secret irritation, and it seemed strange. For he had not lost the feeling of Sonya’s being someone else’s and accidental to his own life. She had, so to speak, been dumped on him, and he had been too good-natured to take her to wherever dumped children get taken. Of course, it hadn’t been quite like that. He had been guided by an odd sense of duty towards her. It was to him that Misha-non-penguin, whom he had hardly known, had entrusted her when danger threatened. Had he lived, he would have come and collected her. But now there was no one to come. Misha-non-penguin had made no mention of Sonya’s mother. Friend-enemy Sergey Chekalin’s half-hearted, half-cock attempt to take her had ended in his making off without a word. And now, here was Sonya at home in his flat, and not being specially disturbing or tiresome. Thanks, it was true, to Nina, who, but for Sonya, would never have come on the scene. In which case he and Misha would have gone on as before, and life would have been neither bad nor good, just ordinary.

Nina arrived at about three. From Sergey’s mother’s she had gone back to the shops, and now unpacked curds for Sonya, frankfurters, cottage cheese …

“Do you know,” she said, as Viktor came into the kitchen, “Sergey rang today from Moscow. He’s OK.”

She kissed him.

“And you still smell of bonfire!” she added, with a smile.

Several days passed. Quiet, monotonous days. Viktor’s sole activity during this time was the changing of the two door locks. He did the buying and changing himself. The feeling of satisfaction lasted several hours, but then boredom set in again. He had to do something, but there was nothing to do. And he didn’t feel like writing.

“Uncle Vik!” Sonya cried delightedly, standing at the balcony window. “The icicles are crying!”

The thaw was back. And not before time – it was the beginning of March.

He was waiting for spring, as if warmth might prove the solution to all his problems. Although when he actually fell to thinking about his problems, he realized that he had practically none as such. He had money for the moment, especially since the Chief’s mysterious night-mail repayment. And up on the wardrobe, in a bag together with the revolver, there was still a good fat bundle of $100 notes, which, though they were Sonya’s, he had a moral right to a share of as her unofficial guardian.