Hot Siberian (24 page)

The Mercedes went on being a scarlet dervish among the slow, drab traffic along Nevsky Prospekt. At Gogola Street Lev swung an illegal left with no protest from the
militsioner
stationed there. Two blocks over and a half block up Mayorova Prospekt they turned into an alley and came to a stop within the range of several sour-smelling garbage cans. Lev reached down and dug in under the edge of the car's floor mat. Not at all circumspect about it, he separated several U.S. twenty-dollar bills from a sheaf of foreign currency. He folded the twenties and slid them into his shirt pocket, then got out and went up the wide concrete steps that served the rear kitchen and delivery entrance of the Hotel Astoria. Seated to one side on the top step was a middle-aged man badly in need of either more beard or a shave. His eyes were sunken and sleepless-looking. The jacket and trousers he was wearing were from two different cheap suits and were baggy, badly soiled, buttonless. Nikolai scrutinized the man and took him at once for a
stukach
, a snitch, an informer for one of the government police forces. What gave the man away was his shoes. The
stukachi
never completed their disguise by wearing bad shoes.

Lev passed right by the
stukach
and entered the hotel's kitchen. Nikolai decided if the man already had something to tell his benefactors there was nothing that could be done about it. Might as well ignore him. He thought to while away the time he'd tell Kecia about this hotel, the Astoria, how it was Leningrad's best and was where Hitler had planned to stay when the city surrendered. But then Nikolai remembered Kecia didn't speak his language, and he didn't speak enough of hers to relate such things. Kecia stood up to stretch and give Nikolai's lap a rest. She leaned forward against the frame of the windshield. That put her tight, shapely buttocks level with Nikolai's eyes and well within range of his bite. He amused himself by debating with himself whether it should be her left or her right. Very tempted, he clicked his front teeth together, mentally delivering a nice little erotic snap. His imagination enjoyed the playful
ouch
that would undoubtedly have evoked.

Lev came out of the hotel, followed by two kitchen workers in white carrying sizable cartons, which they put in the car's trunk.

“Picnic,” Lev explained as he got in and started up.

It was a two-hour drive to the dacha, most of it over a shoulderless black-topped highway that passed through Kronstadt. The final five miles was a country road heaved up and deeply rutted in many places by the previous winter's severe cold and melt. Familiar landmarks told Nikolai the distance yet to go, and when they passed through a grove of tall white birches grown so naturally straight and evenly spaced they appeared to have been planted to measure and carefully tended, he knew the next thing that would please his sight would be the dacha.

Situated on a slight grade, it was rather bashfully set back beneath two enormous pines. A house of wood, reminiscent of those built in Russia as far back as the sixteenth century. The wood of its siding, shingles, eaves, and framing was left entirely bare to defy the elements for as long as it could. By now it was weathered to a golden color with streaks of black. Only the knots had remained immune. As though in an attempt to make up for its plain vulnerability, every inch of every surface and angle was repetitively embellished with carvings and cutouts, geometrics and scrolls. A two-story gingerbread house.

It wasn't locked. The dachas located in the more fashionable Komarovo area were frequently broken into, but such a thing was unlikely here. Nikolai hadn't been to the dacha since the first week of the previous September, and it was exactly as he'd left it. They went around and opened most of the windows and shutters, gave both floors of the house an airing. Kecia swept without raising a lot of dust. Lev took the cushions outside and beat them vigorously against one another, brought them back in all plumped and ready to give comfort. Nikolai turned down the beds, theirs and his. He'd spent a lot of his younger years enjoying this house but not nearly so much of his maturity, and over the past six years, since assignment to London, he'd hardly been there at all except to check on it. He felt the same change in his attachment here as he'd felt in the Leningrad apartment. It was as though the dacha had become impatient with him, lonely, angry, and he'd had a falling out with it, and only an extended time together might repair the schism. It was only a house, he told himself, but as he went down the stairs the creak of a tread that he couldn't remember ever having not creaked took exception.

He and Lev sat on the porch with a bottle of raspberry brandy. They drank from inexpensive stemmed glasses. The sun was still above the trees that edged the clearing. Kecia had removed her clothes and was now down at the stream leaping from the smooth gray exposed belly of one rock to another. She appeared entirely caught up in her ballet
au naturel
, but every so often she paused, put a hand to her brow like a visor, and squinted up to the porch to verify that she wasn't being ignored.

Lev and Nikolai raised their glasses to her and drank some of the
eau-de-vie
. Like a vaporous specter lurking within the delicate raspberry personality of the clear liquid was a potency that transformed their stomachs into little hells and immediately ran molten through all the tributaries of their bloodstreams. Nikolai blew out a long whistling breath, like a safety valve letting off excess heat. Not being able to hold his alcohol well was another change. Back in the days when he and Lev had been on the run together a half-dozen of these brandies would have been nothing, but not now. He wouldn't even try to keep up drink for drink with Lev.

“Remember when you were into Finns?” Lev said.

Nikolai remembered.

“How superstitious most of them were? Well, this one believes the most enjoyable love is made when her head is to the north.”

“Does she carry a compass?”

“No, but she has an amazing sense of direction.” Lev grinned. He remained pleasant when he said, “She will go home next week, or surely the week after. She hasn't even mentioned it yet but I can feel it with her.”

“Perhaps this one will come back.”

“No, she won't come back, but neither will she forget.” Lev said it as though he considered it an even trade. “Are you still with that English lady?”

“Vivian.”

“I know her name. I wanted to hear it from you. The way a man says a woman's name when he's far from her is as much as a confession.”

“And what did I just divulge?”

“That most of your heart isn't here.” Lev tilted his face to the sun, which was still too bright for his eyes to remain open. “Why is it the same sunlight feels so different here in Russia? It seems to contain more benevolence. Has it ever struck you that way?”

“Yes.” Nikolai thought of the illegal passports he'd come across in Lev's cowboy boot. “Have you been traveling a lot lately?”

“To Milan a couple of times. And Paris.” A single sardonic scoff. “They've had me calling on perfume makers, taking orders for ambergris.” Lev kept his eyes closed while he spoke.

Nikolai took stock of his friend's face. The ridge of his brows exaggerated by scar tissue, the left cheekbone asymmetrical from having been fractured, the broken and re-broken nose. Nikolai's memory superimposed the unmarred face that had been Lev's as a boy, before all the injuries from hockey sticks and pucks and punches. Nikolai also noticed the way Lev's face was pulling at itself, the mouth and eyes and forehead not in accord about what they should feel. It was the sort of thing that only a person who cared would see. Nikolai had noticed it before, but it was even more pronounced to him now. What he felt came out. “You shouldn't take such chances,” he said.

No comment from Lev. He stood, unbuttoned his shirt halfway, and then impatiently yanked the tails out of his trousers. Pulled his shirt over his head and off, then sat and resumed his sunning, eyes shut. Lev was ignoring the remark he'd just made, Nikolai thought. But after a moment Lev told him: “You think I didn't see that
stukach
on the Astoria steps? I spotted that scum before you did.”

“That's what I mean. You saw him for what he was but you still flashed all that hard currency.”

“What I really wanted to do was shove a bunch of dollars down his throat.”

The flaunting of the red Mercedes down Nevsky Prospekt, the deliberate indiscretion with the
stukach
, the rather careless hiding of the passports—Lev seemed to be asking for the worst kind of trouble. Black-market profiteering with hard currency, any kind of foreign money, was
spekulyatsiya
, a crime considered as serious as murder in the Soviet Union, punishable by a life sentence in a labor camp or by death. Judges didn't fool around with it, just dropped the hammer hard. Lev surely knew that. What could be done to help his friend give up this self-destructive course?

Lev opened one eye to see Nikolai's concern. “Don't worry,” he said, lightly brushing it off. “Any worry will just be a waste of time. I know what I'm doing.” He smoothed his light-brown hair with both hands, harshly cupping his scalp from forehead to nape. He raised his legs, extended them straight out stiffly, and flexed his feet. Nikolai heard the soft snap of Lev's ankle joint. Even that brought Vivian to center stage in his mind. Almost every night she lovingly removed the unrealized tension from his hands by yanking his fingers one at a time, making the hingings of them snap like that.

Lev had two quick drinks, tossed them into himself as though they were needed. Then he said quietly: “A new spaceman came around last month.”

“Oh?” “Spaceman” was their term for the government flunky who made rounds checking that the legal maximum of 12.1 square meters of living space per person was not being exceeded.

“He wanted to measure and go through his routine, but I'd just gotten in from a trip and was tired so I gave him a plastic shopping bag from Printemps, some stationery from the Hotel Plaza Athenée, and a promise that next time he came I'd have a good, solid Italian toilet seat for him. He insisted that I watch while he changed the number of occupants on his form from two to twelve by putting a one before the two that was already there. For good measure, pardon the pun, I gave him fifty rubles on his way out.”

“You spoiled him.”

“I suppose, but I wanted him out. I'll say this for him—he didn't bow and scrape.”

“Not even a thank-you?”

“He recited a justification.”

“Which one?”

Lev imitated with a monotone in a lower register: “We pretend to work, the government pretends to pay us.”

They laughed. It seemed to Nikolai that their laughter met midair, combined, and, together, was brighter.

The sun dropped itself behind the trees and the air was at once colder. Bearable but no longer comfortable.

Kecia scurried up the steps to the porch, her skin beaded wet and goose-bumped. She grabbed up the bottle of
eau-de-vie
for three large consecutive swallows. Nikolai watched them go like lumps down her throat and thought it was an advertisement for Finnish women when she didn't wince afterward.

They went inside and had an early dinner at a rectangular wooden table that ran along the wall beneath a window. They shared a bench with nude Kecia in the middle dispensing equal attention left and right. It was a long indulgent meal made up of the delicacies Lev had obtained
na levo
, on the side, as they say, from the kitchen help of the Astoria. There were crab claws and the little meat dumplings called
pelmeni
stuffed with the best lean meat and various types of the most desirable mushrooms prepared in different wonderful ways and a fresh-baked loaf of
borodinskii
, the dark sweet bread crusted with caraway seeds that Nikolai's taste buds now told him how much they'd been yearning for. They finished with sticky-flaky slabs of baklava and glasses of tea and off-color jokes that Kecia laughed at only because she believed they must be funny.

It was a spring day, one of the longer days when time was not as much in the sky as in the body. Lev and Kecia got up from the table and headed up to their bedroom. Partway up the stairs they turned to Nikolai, and he understood they were wordlessly inviting him to join them. He declined by remaining as he was and smiling softly, and they continued on up.

Moments later Nikolai heard one of Lev's shoes hit the floor above, then the other. He heard the bed. He heard the silence that would be kissings and touchings. A spill of giggle from Kecia curtained his visualizing. He reminded himself that he'd be in London tomorrow and thought how good it was that by choice he was now alone.

He went to the spare room off the kitchen where infrequently used tools were kept. He found a stone-cutting chisel and a small steel-headed mallet. He checked a flashlight. It was weak but, he decided, working well enough. He put all three items into a net string bag and went out the back way and across the clearing to a grassy bank that had a summer cellar built into it. The rusted hinges of the cellar's door resisted and gritted stridently. Two creatures ran across Nikolai's feet. His first thought was that they were rats, but he saw they were chipmunks. He clicked on the flashlight, ducked down, and went in to spiderwebs and the jumps of frightened crickets. The cellar was about ten feet deep by six wide. The board shelves all around had become as gray and dry as its walls. On one shelf were several forsaken corked bottles of dandelion wine and on another some jars of apricots his mother had put up that probably by now contained enough botulin to kill everyone in the world. He cleared away the jars on two of the shelves in the rear. Using the mallet, he banged the shelves free. He stood them aside and stepped out of the cellar to let the dust settle. He couldn't wait long enough, went back in.

He knew the exact spot on the rear wall, realized now as he kneeled and looked at it how firmly he'd held it in mind all this while. Twenty-five years ago this coming August he and Grandfather Maksim had been together there in the summer cellar, the idealistic, czarist-hearted old man only a year before his death, the boy Nikolai a year before adolescence. The two had knelt as if in prayer next to one another on this bare, dry-parched ground and created their secret.