Pravda (21 page)

Isabella spoke first, her voice low but clear, as if she did not really care who heard: "Why can't we just bury her? What's going to happen in here? How long is it going to be? I want it to be
over."

Gabriel was cold in his shirt now they'd stopped walking. "I think they have to ... I think it's part of the service or whatever. Avery said you choose a rite and you have to go along with the whole procedure if you want a site here. Maybe the church people insist. Or the owners. God knows."

"I wish they would keep God out of it. It's just such
horseshit.
And it's making me hate. And I can't, I can't—"

"I know, I know, but Is ... Ssshhh." His voice was oddly calm. "It doesn't matter. You know that. Nothing we say or think or do here now comes even close to what is actually happening or what anything actually means."

"I feel like I'm dead. I feel like Mum's living and we're dead here. Stuck."

"It's just us, Is, and what we think she thinks. It's just her thoughts imagined in our minds. And ... I think ... I think she'd laugh. She'd laugh. At this. At us two. Wouldn't she?"

"I can't stand that fat priest or those awful women pretending to mourn. She's
my
mother." She bit her lip. "Why do we have to wait out here while they do whatever they're doing in there? She belongs to us, not to that fat bastard or those fucking witches."

"Sshh. Is, come on." His arm found his sister's shoulder.

"They're only here because they want someone to be there when they croak themselves." Her voice was thickening. "They're shit scared, all of them—cowards. I want this to be over. I feel like we're being buried here. And nobody is noticing."

"Hey, I'm noticing. I'm always noticing. I notice everything."

"Me too."

He bent his head and smiled gently at her. "That's the problem."

She blinked against her tears. "You're right. We should stop noticing everything."

"Learn to get over it," he murmured.

There was a pause, filled only by a snatch of wind. Then Isabella said, "I can't get over anything."

"Me neither. I can't get over anything at all. Not one thing that happens in the damn world can I get over." The doors scraped and clattered open and another cadre of black birds took to the sky. "You were right, Is—we should have done it ourselves. Driven out
somewhere quiet and far away. Burned her body on the steppe. It's not as if there's a shortage of lonely places."

Inside the small chapel, the walls were covered in dark icons. The priest walked around and around the open coffin. The old women held their candles in their left hand so that they could cross themselves with their right. And the chanting swelled and fell in a minor key that seemed to have journeyed west with the wind from far away, wherever the heart of Russia lay, somewhere in some sacred valley. Now and then, partially obscured by the trees as they moved outside, the sun came streaming in through the plain windows high above, so that there were dappled patches of shifting light on the floor, the walls, the mourners, the priest, on Masha's immutable face. She wore no veil.

Susanna (da se):

Scusatemi se mento, voi che intendete amor.

Susanna (aside):

Pardon me if I lie, all you who understand love.

—
MOZART,
Le Nozze di Figaro

An eight-thirty wind was howling up and down the darkened canyons of New York and seemed to eddy and squall on the corners, rapacious for like dominion over the cross streets. November—month of storms: men and boat lost out on the Grand Banks, ashen newscasters (laconic veterans of murder, blood, Israel and Palestine) finally in earnest, satellite pictures of clashing fronts, colliding systems, circling depression.

She had made up her mind.

All the same, it was almost impossible to move forward: the wind flattened her trousers against her legs, her hair was flung this way and that, and her skin felt as though it were being stretched. The worst storm since the last one. Skies of bitumen and creosote. There could no longer be any doubt about it: the planet was finally becoming angry—the wildest beast of them all goaded, poked, insulted once too often. You looked out of the grime-smeared office glass—what, once, twice, five times a year?—and sure, the Earth was still out there, but flooded and drowning, or frozen and blizzarding, or parched and burning up. She could smell the rain now, racing in on the wind.

What to say, though? What to write?

Never mind—see how it goes. Let's just get this done. She could always store whatever she typed in Draft and come back to it tomorrow.

The first rope lashed at her face just as she ducked inside the store advertising free coffee, magazines, and Internet. Perhaps it was the
thought of Sasha, the cramp and claustrophobia of the apartment, of his childish neediness; the lack of personal space. But she knew that she could not do this at home, and work was likewise out of the question. Whatever the question, she had noticed, work was always out of it.

"One." She nodded in the direction of the back room. "Please."

The guy behind the till was talking on his cell. She guessed he was from Yemen or Saudi Arabia. He made a note of the time in his book, held up five fingers, and pointed to the second bank of terminals. She wondered what he was making of the American Dream.

Ignoring the coffee stand, she went over and sat down at the computer. The place was busy and smelled of cheap damp carpet. She shoved her bulging bag under her feet, slipped off her shoes, double-clicked, and waited for the sluggish connection. The young Muslim guy to her left—beard barely grown—was surfing what looked like soft porn in a double agony of pseudo-jocularity and not wanting to be seen; she could feel the waves of his embarrassment. The woman to her right, desperately out of condition and with her asthma inhaler beside her keyboard, was playing online poker with melodramatic intensity. Isabella typed in her password and clicked.

The woman broke off suddenly and made as if to throttle an invisible neck just in front of her screen. "Bitch. Bitch. Bitch." She looked over, shaking her head. "Another bad beat. How's your luck holding up?"

Isabella screwed up her nose. "Luck's okay. But my decisions suck."

The woman nodded.

"Where you from?" "London."

"Wanna play a hand for me? Can't do any worse than I'm doing. My ass is being beaten all over the planet by people I don't even know."

"Sorry. Not today." Isabella smiled sympathetically. "Gotta ask my dad if he killed my mum."

The woman nodded slowly. "Yeah, well, I need a fried chicken cool-me-down." She swiveled her chair around and looked directly at Isabella, taking a slow toke on her inhaler as if it were the last cigar before the shootout. "My advice: gets to the river and looks like there's some shit might be going on, then walk away. Walk right away. First lesson of life: walk away." And with that she stood up, put on a huge pair of sunglasses, and walked away.

Isabella's in box asked her if she needed a bigger dick and then offered her a loan to finance it.

All day she had sat through meeting after meeting, frustrated, irritated, exasperated, and finally bored beyond the realization of boredom. There was nothing quite so depressing, she had thought, as the slow November darkening of the stale-aired office afternoon.

Media Therapy had been attempting to seduce new clients, and the achingly pedestrian attempts of the men from the client firm to show off were matched only by the tedious duplicity of Marissa and Jo (her immediate boss and junior, respectively) in hoping to be desired. And then, of course, when eventually the men finally read the signals and began to come on to them a little, Isabella had been forced to suffer her colleagues' restroom pretense of being insulted and outraged, when in fact they were—Marissa and Jo both—very obviously brimming with satisfaction, affirmation, whatever it was they needed from men. Finally, at seven, concealing her indifference behind an expression of concern, she had closed the door behind her and taken the offered chair for the long-awaited one-to-one (conducted nonetheless for his part in the first-person plural, she noticed) with the head of the department, Timothy Robe—straight blond hair, expensive open-necked shirt, the smug manner of an exclusive tennis coach, ex-professional, ladies a specialty.

"We'll come straight to it, Isabella—we're worried about your attitude, especially in front of the clients. At the moment this is probably a perception problem. But maybe we also have aptitude issues to address in the short term and performance issues going forward. So, to be frank—I know you appreciate candor in..."

Robe was one of those people who found himself insightful because he considered the human emotions as if they were a range of competing brands, honesty being his proud brand of choice. And yet there was something about the word "frank," she always thought, that vociferously signaled its opposite.

"...We just wanted to see if there's maybe something we should be doing. That we are not doing. From our side. Maybe there is a way we can all work together to try and help you get your focus back ... It is a focus thing, right?"

She hadn't told them the whole story—i.e., death. She had left it at "ill" and come back without changing the news much beyond an upgrade (as Robe might say) to "seriously ill." As far as she was concerned, her mother wasn't the issue. Or rather, she was, but not in a way that could be unraveled for these people.

To the question of focus, therefore, Isabella bit her tongue and tried to think of something appropriate to say, some complaint that maybe Robe might have come across in one of his management "away days." She settled on the word "unchallenged," since she had heard Robe himself use it during some hideous life-insulting inanity of a presentation. And sure enough, "unchallenged" did the trick. Robe hit his stride almost immediately and talked thenceforward without the need for any further reciprocation.

Meanwhile she absented herself entirely from the situation and returned to the troubled Kremlin of her mind ... remembering a phrase of her father's that had not made sense to her before (delivered in a rare good mood after one of his innumerable firings from some magazine or other): "Watch out for the clichés, Izzy. They're not lazy, they're malicious—they're out to get you." Something to that effect. Only now did she realize he was talking about the clichés of life rather than those of speech. And how strange, she thought with a jolt, that so many apparently random things that her parents had said to her (and that she did not remember for years), how strange that they came back like this. Her mother too, in the midst of one of her ludicrous anti-West rants, delivered (she now recalled) with punctual timing on receipt of the news of Isabella's acceptance to the Harvard MBA course: "One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel, Izzy, but whatever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view. Remember that. Who would you rather be listening to on your deathbed, Bach or the chief executive?"

At first she had thought that nothing had changed, that the death of her mother was having next to no effect on her. Indeed, for the first few days she had entertained the view that maybe she was just one of those ascetics who didn't (or couldn't) respond to loss—or, for that matter, anything. Emotionally cauterized, to use one of her brother's less glib phrases.

Not that she was entirely fooled by herself: she was wise enough to recognize shock for what it was, and she saw too that it must eventually wear off. So regardless of the temporarily blank screens, she had been monitoring herself with close attention ever since arriving back in New York. But it was the stealth with which shock
slipped away and the disguise in which grief arrived that had caught her out. Because of all grief's many masks, she had not expected anger.

It had begun as an almost friendly perplexity at her own numbness, which had increased somehow to impatience with herself, increased again to resentment against her mother—for the cryptic distancing, the idiotic, adolescent, unnecessary attempts to manipulate and pose with those bloody letters when, oh God, she must have known that she was seriously ill; until finally, yesterday, it had become the tumultuous fury from which she was now suffering. And yet only this lunchtime, during an e-mail exchange with Susan, her oldest friend back in London, had she realized—bang!—that this was it: that fury was the reaction. At last. And only later (while smoking on the fire escape to get away from the Jimmy Choo chat) had she recognized her error, that the precise opposite of that which she had imagined was in fact true: when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass. And from here on in, it would be frontline, hand-to-hand: her against them. You think that your journey from birth to death is a journey away from the clutches of your parents, but in fact it's the reverse. Life is a journey
toward
mother, father. Because as a child, though you live by their hands, you understand not a single one of their decisions, not a single action, not a single response. But each year that passes, through adolescence and beyond, you begin to grasp more and more, you grow a little closer, start to see what they see, think what they think, realize what they have realized, believe what they have believed. Am I right, Mum? Am I right, Dad? And don't it make you sick.

The Internet café continued its very global and yet simultaneously very local existence. She curled and uncurled her toes. Then she clicked on Compose—a button designed to flatter if ever there was one—and began to type, careful to avoid the greeting because she knew that she would not know how to start, deliberately trying not to think, aiming only to communicate the essence of what she wanted to say.

I just wanted to let you know that the funeral went okay. Some people from the consulate turned up. You know this, of course. Gabe is okay, I think. I'm in New York at the moment
—surviving. E-mail to this address if you ever intend to visit Petersburg. I'll give you the details—it's the Smolensky cemetery. Is.