Pravda (2 page)

The truth was that he wished he had managed to get hold of Isabella last night instead of leaving a message. The truth was that he was no longer sure of the truth. And he trusted his sister to apprehend things precisely—to seek out the quiddity of things and, once grasped, never let go, to insist, to assert, to confirm. Whereas for him ... for him the truth seemed to be slipping away with each passing year, losing distinctiveness, losing clarity, losing weight. Duplicity, hypocrisy, and cant, the primary colors he once would have scorned, he now saw in softer shades. Perhaps this was the aging process: bit by bit truth grows faint until she vanishes completely, leaving you stranded on the path, required to choose a replacement guide from those few stragglers left among your party—Surly Prejudice, Grinning Bewilderment, Purblind Grievance.

The thin beep of his phone locating a network. He sat up smartly, let the cigarette fall outside the window, and pressed the last dial button. A child's unmediated eagerness ran through him. With every second he expected her voice ... But the ringing continued as if to spite him. And he began to picture the phone shrilling on the side table by the bay window—the dusty light, the red-cushioned casement seats, the chess set forever ready for action. He imagined her climbing from the bath, or hurrying from the shower, or fumbling with keys and bags at the door.

Eventually the line went dead.

He hit redial. They were coming toward Moskovskaya—he could see the statue of Lenin a little farther on, the right arm aloft—one of the few still standing. This time he listened intently to the exact pitch and interval of the ring tone. No answer. No bloody answer.

The line went dead again. She must be out. Maybe she was tired of waiting and he'd get there to find one of her notes on the table: "At café such and such with so and so, come and join"—as if he should know the café or the friend. Or maybe she was just refusing to pick up the phone for reasons she would soon be telling him—something dark and colossally unlikely involving organized crime, her time in the Secretariat. Redial. The fact was that he was utterly at a loss as to what she was really trying to communicate to him. The direct accusations, sly allusions, subject swerves, sudden changes of register that served (and were meant to serve) only to draw further attention to the preceding hints. Redial. Individual exchanges made sense, and yet when he got off the phone he could not discern what lay behind her pointed choice of subject, her denouncements,
her fabrications. He gave up as the line went dead the fourth time.
Why wasn't she answering the bloody phone?
And suddenly all his anger passed away. And he knew that he would do this forever if necessary.

His mobile had heated his ear and he put it down on the seat away from him as the driver slowed for the traffic again. And here they were crawling beneath mighty Lenin's arm. "That failure," she always said, "is our failure, Gabriel, is the failure of all of us. Such dreams expired. More dreams than we can imagine—all extinguished by that failure. Not just in the past but in the future too: and that's the real sadness, the real tragedy. We have—all of us, the whole world—we have all lost our belief in our better selves. And the great told-you-so of capitalism will roll out across the earth until there is no hiding place. And every day that passes, Marx will be proved more emphatically right. And all the men and women waking in the winter to the slavery of their wages will know it in their heart."

He stood for an anxious moment by the iron railings of the canal embankment, putting away his wallet and glancing up at the second-floor balcony. The tall windows were closed. But the curtains were not drawn. The driver struggled with the lock of the buckled trunk, the gusting wind causing his jacket to billow. Rain was coming. Gabriel could smell the dampness in the air. He took his bag and hurried across the street.

He reached the gates that blocked his way to the courtyard—like most in the old part of town, the flats were accessed from the various staircases within. And only now he remembered the need to punch in the security code. What was the number? He couldn't recall. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Maybe she had been in the bath when he rang. Or maybe her phone wasn't working. He simply hadn't thought about this. He'd assumed she would be home. And if by some strange chance not, then he had all the keys to let himself in ... but the security code? No. He'd forgotten all about the bloody security code.

He tried a few combinations at random. He jabbed at her buzzer repeatedly. Nothing happened. And there was no voice from the intercom. The first twist of rain came and he leaned against the gate to get beneath the shallow arch. Water began to drip onto his bag. Maybe he could try one of the other buzzers and explain ... But even if they spoke English—unlikely—there was no way on earth
they'd let him in; crime had seen to that. He pressed her buzzer again. He did not know what else to do.

No answer.

Abruptly the full force of his panic returned—a tightening in his throat, a clamping of his teeth at the back of his jaw, the sound of his own blood coursing in his ears. (The fear—yes, that was what it was—the fear in her voice on the telephone.) He looked around, face taut now, hoping for a car or another resident approaching. Someone to open the gate. Where
was
everybody? The whole of the city had vanished. This was insane. Over on the other side of the canal, two men were sprinting for shelter. They ducked down the stairs into the café opposite.

Yana. Of course. Yana would know the code. Yana's mother was in and out all the time—cleaning, officially, though mainly consuming expensive tea and gossiping. Oh please Christ Yana's working today. He picked up his bag and dashed across the bridge.
The Kokushkin Bridge on which poor Rodya stared into the murky water to contemplate his crime—Gabriel, can you imagine it?

He was across. He dived down the café stairs, slipped on the wet stone and nearly fell, reached out for the door to stop himself, and somehow bloodied his knuckle as he crashed inside. But he cared nothing for the eyes that were on him as he walked over to the bar cursing under his breath.

"Is Yana here? Do you speak English?"

"Yes, I do." The girl at the bar had a staff T-shirt: "CCCP Café: The Party People."

"Is Yana here? Yana."

"Yes. She is. What—"

"Can you get her?" He had not seen this girl before; he tried to ameliorate his manner, but to little effect. "Sorry. I'm sorry. Can you tell her Gabriel is here? It's about Maria—she'll know."

"Okay." The girl had registered his urgency and locked the till as quickly as she could. "Please. Wait here."

"Yes. I'll wait." He glanced at the walls, which were pasted with lacquered old editions of
Pravda:
Khrushchev kissing a dead astronaut's son, Andropov, Old Joe himself—always a shock to see that, yes, he was a person of flesh and blood and conversation—leaning forward to say something to the woman seated beside his driver as the state car processed down Nevsky Prospekt. How many times had he and Isabella tried to read these walls and recreate in their minds what it must have been—

"Gabe. Hi. Hello. How are you? I did not know you were coming back. Katja says you are a man who lost it."

"Sorry. Yana, I'm just—I can't get in." He raised his thumb to indicate behind himself. "What's the combination? The security gate. Do you know it?"

"Yes, of course." She told him the number, becoming conscious of the alarm in his eyes. "Is everything okay? How long you here? I didn't know you were coming back. It's lucky you came today, though—I am going to Kiev tomorrow. I have to—"

"It's a flying visit." He interrupted her. "I just got in. But I'll be back later. Promise." He was already turning for the door. "We'll go out. Definitely. You can tell me about what is really happening—the news isn't clear."

The rain had soused the cobbles but this time he crossed the bridge at a flat sprint, all the while keeping his eyes on the window above the balcony. Nobody paid him any attention—the random autumn flurries of wet weather that came squalling in off the Gulf of Finland often caused old and young alike to scurry and dash. A woman holding a magazine above her head left the shelter of the hairdresser's canopy and scuttled to her car door.

He was back at the security gate. He pressed in the numbers. The metal doors began to swing open jerkily: a moment to marvel at how the simple fact of knowing the right combination was all the difference and then he was through, into the courtyard.

The rain was slicking his hair onto his forehead and causing him to blink. The cars within looked more numerous than the last time. He was unashamedly thinking with her voice now:
There you go—capitalism's pubescent little triumphs on every hand, see how they vaunt it.
Water was gushing down the side of the building where the guttering was broken. His mind would not focus. But his heart was pestling itself mad against the mortar of the present, suffering now from some inarticulate dread—a terrifying feeling that came at him as he reached the staircase in the corner of the quadrangle, grinding his very quick to powder.

The stench of cat urine assailed him, slowed him, as he hit the stairs. She was a little demented, perhaps. Admit it. That's why he couldn't get at what she meant, what she was really saying to him. She contradicted herself twelve times a day, twelve times an hour, and who can believe someone who ... Distraction, though, distraction, he breathed: back to now, back. Up we go. Up we go. Why wasn't he running anymore? Maybe she was refusing to answer
the entryphone on purpose. And the telephone. In two minutes she would be taking her perverse Petersburg pleasure in telling him how the criminal gangs were now calling door to door in the afternoons in the hope of being admitted without the need for time-consuming breaking-and-entering procedures.
It's not as bad as Moscow, but it's very dangerous sometimes here, Gabriel. And there was another murder just over in Sennaya...

He turned to take the third flight. The seconds were stalling. He noticed details he had never noticed before. The filth and the smell, the colors, the lack of colors, the chipped and broken sad stone stairs, the million cigarette butts underfoot, the unconcealed pipes all caked thick with dust and grime forever wheezing and choking up and down and back and across the stairwell, the metal-slabbed apartment doors riveted with legions of bolts and locks and tarnished somehow—despite the steel—by nameless cats or poisonous leaks or dogs or rats ... Her thick exterior padlock was undone.

So she must be in.

She must be in—because there was no possibility that she'd leave that padlock undone if she had gone out. She must be in. But he turned his key and entered the apartment in silence because he could not bring himself to call her name.

The light was dim. The wooden floor smelled of polish. He stepped onto the narrow carpet that ran down the center of the hall. And now he stopped moving altogether. The familiar pictures—his father in Paris in 1968, Isabella in New York, the Highgate house, his father on the telephone with a cigarette, Nicholas II and his family, he and his sister as babies in a pram, some famous clown white-faced in Red Square, the map of Europe stained with the brown ring mark of a wineglass over the Balkans, the icons, especially the bloody icons ... These familiar pictures seemed suddenly remote, alien, unconnected with him, as though he had wandered into the flat of a vanished stranger whose life he must untangle.

Someone dropped something in the apartment above. He let his bag fall and ran, left, toward her bedroom. The door was open. The heavy curtains drawn. Her books piled untidily on the floor by her fallen lamp. Flowers thirsty in the vase. Her favorite shawl spread across the floor by the chest. A full mug of black tea by the bed. Pills. The upright piano. The bed itself empty. He ran back down the corridor, pushing doors as he went—bathroom, kitchen, study ... But he slowed on the threshold of the last, the drawing room, as she called it—high ceilings, grand,
with my tall windows for the White
Nights, Gabriel, for the cool air in the summer, for the best view in all of Petersburg, where our history is made.

His mother was lying on the floor by the desk. He was on his knees and by her side in an instant. Her eyes were open but shrouded somehow in a shimmering film of reflected light. And when he called her name out loud at last and raised her up, her body was cold and slight. And she seemed to have shrunk, to be falling down—down into herself, down into the floor, seeking the earth. And there was neither voice nor breath from her lips.

Her dreams came just before dawn, stealing past the watch of the New York City night, slipping past the sentries of the heart. And this was a bad one. More of a nightmare, if truth be told. She flopped back down and closed her eyes and let old respiration soothe her modern nerves, concentrating on the out breaths, waiting for the chemical, physical, and emotional residue to drain away. And how real, she thought, this response of the body to the counterfeiting of dreams.

Isabella Glover stretched out to her full five-seven. Her hair, which reached almost to the shoulder, was so black that by some lights it looked almost blue. But her eyes were not quite as dark as her brother's, nor so undefended, moving quickly beneath a protective sheen of silent laughter. She was thin, but no longer painfully so; light on her feet, gamine; the reluctant possessor of that rare quality, the precise opposite of blond, which seems to grow more intense the longer its presence remains in a room. And she had one of those not-immediately-beautiful-but-on-reflection-actually-
very
-beautiful faces that you see in Renaissance paintings of young Italian noblewomen carrying bowls of fruit.

She stared at the fault lines cracked across her ceiling. It was the letters that were causing all the trouble, of course.

Oh, shitting hell. Might as well get up.

She kicked back the sheet and sat on the side of the bed. She felt hot. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck. Yes, these winter pajamas, she now admitted to herself, were a totally unnecessary choice—more a statement than anything else: Don't touch me,
Sasha; the secret codes of our relationship have all been changed; I am not touchable by you—to touch me is now a violation punishable by outrage and complete withdrawal. (Men and women with their constant signals-intelligence chatter back and forth and all of it so
unreliable.)
She stood up and moved toward their little dresser to take a swig of the mineral water, which, she was pleased to discover, had lost its irritating sparkle overnight.