Pravda (35 page)

Isabella laughed as she blew out her smoke.

"The same is true the other way around." The cigar went counterclockwise this time. "All those conservatives you both complain of—the family-values task force—flog the criminals, stop immigration, go to church, know your place, the worshippers of the class system, the rules and traditions ... Do you know what they want to do most of all in here?" He indicated his heart. "Cut loose. Be free. Escape the prisons of their own ridiculous rhetoric. More than anything else, deep down, they would like to
forget
their place, forget their wretched families, spend their Sundays in silk beds with beautiful Indian women, Ethiopian princes, Arabian concubines, high on Afghani opium, with a wasteful feast awaiting their merest whim."

"Have you ever taken opium?" This from Gabriel.

"The reason ninety percent of conservatives are conservative is not because they are conservative but because they cannot allow themselves to admit how much they want to be otherwise. They are afraid the world will end if they so much as loosen a finger's grip on their ideology. Meanwhile all your liberal-left ringleaders ... well, secretly of course, they ache for the big house, the car, those sons who become good straight citizens and of whom they can be proud—they ache for the security of money and the security of property, security and status, status and security."

Max nodded slowly. "No. Very, very few people have their inner and their outer selves aligned in any kind of meaningful way. We are all self-deceivers. We have to be to survive. Not just in the Soviet Union but in America and Europe too. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is the defining human trait. A clever chimpanzee or dolphin might have a sense of humor, mischief, or maybe mourn his dead fellow, he might use tools, language, and even fall in love, but he will no more grasp the concept of hypocrisy than a stone will understand Schubert. So don't judge anyone, not even Maria and Nicholas, too harshly by what they say, because what they say—in fact what almost anybody says—is most often what they need to hear themselves say.
Not
what they really mean. We are all forever in the business of persuading ourselves. And if you want to make people love you or fear you or admire you, then the simplest trick is to let them know that you
see their most private inner hypocrisy in all its contradictory tangle and guile and you do not think less of them for it. That's the secret, and that's what all great leaders do. They somehow let their people know that they understand the inner as well as the outer human life and that it's all right by them. And what power they have then, if they choose to use it ... Lesson over. No." He held up both his hands to stop them from coming at him with a million questions and arguments. "I have something I want to give you both. Then you can ask me anything you like, even about opium, Gabriel."

He picked up the bag that Zhanna had brought down. Isabella leaned toward the table to tap her ash. Gabriel flicked his into the fire. Max took out three parcels neatly wrapped in brown paper and handed two to Isabella and the other to Gabriel.

"The big one is a VHS video of the Kirov Ballet from the sixties and seventies, which I wanted you both to have. Keep it, Isabella. You can remember our trip when you watch it. The others are rings—one for you, Isabella, Siberian gold, and one for you, Gabriel, which you must give to the woman you eventually choose to be your wife. Keep them safe."

"God. Thank you." Isabella held the little package in her hand.

"Thank you." Gabriel took his, a little confused and embarrassed but aware that he was probably taking charge of something very valuable and that the fact that Grandpa Max had given it to him was all that really mattered.

"And here"—Max opened up his jacket and took out a slim wallet—"is fifty pounds each for the nightclub tonight. Don't tell a soul."

"No, it's the least I can do. This is what being a friend is all about," Molly Weeks said, and meant it, shuffling another of Isabella's boxes into a tiny gap on the highest shelf in the crowded living room.

They were in Molly's apartment amid pretty much everything Isabella owned—her clothes, her music, her books, crockery, pictures, and papers. Viewed from one vantage, depressingly little; from another, far too much for one woman to expect a friend to store indefinitely.

"But thanks, though," Isabella said again.

Molly spoke without looking down from the chair on which she was standing. "When everything starts going dodgy—that's when friends should step up. So stop stressing. I'm fine with it. Things are bound to be crazy and fierce for you for a while." She passed down three of her own shoeboxes full of music. "Stick those on the floor and pass me up one more of yours. I mean, leaving Sasha out of it for a moment ... well ... you know—you lost your mother, and that changes everyone—at the fundamental level. It's bound to. Right now you have to deal with the underlying stuff, the real stuff."

Isabella offered her last box.

"You leave these bits and bobs here as long as you need to. You get on that plane and you stop worrying about the insignificant things." Molly began shoving and easing into the space created. "If you come back and live upstairs again, then easy. If you come back
to live somewhere else, then we'll move all this to your new place together. If you don't come back at all, then you just tell me where the hell you want them shipped and I'll ship them there."

"Of course I'll come back."

"You do what you have to do."

"Molly, I'm going to miss you like—"

"I have a big apartment is all." Molly twisted on the chair and looked behind. "Is that it, small box-wise?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Your books and kitchen stuff I will just mingle in with mine. So what have we got left?"

"Just those." Isabella indicated her clothes draped over the back of the sofa.

"We put that lot in my closet."

"But what about all your CDs?" They had pulled down about a dozen or so of Molly's neatly labeled shoeboxes to make room for Isabella's things.

Molly stepped carefully off the chair. "Well, I have got five thousands dollars' worth of stuff to go out before Christmas, so this will encourage me to get it done a bit faster. There'll be plenty of room. There's at least fifty orders that have to go to the U.K. by Friday."

On the spur of the moment, and because she felt uncomfortable whenever someone was being kind or genuine, Isabella said, "Well, listen, if you want to send all the British orders straightaway in bulk—in one go, I mean—then I'll give you the address of my mum and dad's old place in London. It's huge and more or less empty. You can store everything there for now. Then I can sort them and post them off individually from inside the U.K. next week."

"Thanks. But I should be fine." Molly had crossed to the table by the window. She walked back toward Isabella now, smiling mischievously. "I got you this—for the plane." She held up a CD.

"Molly."

"It just came in—it's nothing. Accept a little present with good grace, girl."

"What is it?"

"It's just alternative versions—outtakes—from the
Street Legal
sessions. You said it was your favorite album."

"It is." Isabella felt guilty and grateful and deeply touched all at the same time. "And my brother's. He'll be jealous."

Molly stood in front of her friend a moment. "I want to be hearing from you, though. I want news. And next time you can tell me the whole story top to bottom. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Okay, let's hang this lot up." She picked up an armful of Isabella's clothes from the back of the sofa. "Is this a
gold
miniskirt?"

The night lay heavy in its final hour. But his dreams were alive and restless, slipping back and forth across the borders of his consciousness, smuggling terror one to the other. One moment he was swimming against the Seine's current, desperate, lurching and gasping for breath, the side of his mouth somehow paralyzed, and the next he was beached in his bed, swaddled but immobile, head pulsing with a stretched and swollen pain that he could not relate back to his distress in the water. Then, suddenly, asleep and yet terrified of falling asleep. Then needing to drag himself up physically; the smell of Vaseline and excrement. Then back in the water, the numbness spreading, the whole right side of his body like the weight of some lifeless other, some dead thing. And then child-scared and thrashing ... And suddenly he was lying wide awake on his back in the swarming darkness, kicking and convulsing with his left arm and leg, adult-terrified and dizzy and his breath coming short. Except it was not like any waking he had ever known, and his brain seemed as if it too were a separate being—seemed to swell and labor in a strange sort of stupefied horror even as he thought that the nightmare must surely pass. And yet now, as he opened his eyes, it went on—no nightmare but something else, something worse, something real. The shadows of the room shifted and blurred, and he could neither raise himself to sit up properly nor clear his eyesight so as to see anything save these dark, indistinct shapes. He was wet with fear. And the fear and shock were already giving way to panic—panic that he could not move his right side, panic that he could not see, panic that the pain in his head seemed to be billowing outward, shadowing even the
retreating area of his mind that was able to panic. He was drooling onto his nightshirt, and he realized that his lip was sagging. And now he stopped thinking about anything but saving his own life. He began to call out for Alessandro, hoping that he was asleep in the guestroom but not knowing, not knowing, unable to remember anything. But trying to call out the boy's name over and over. (A stranger, a prayer, a piece of ass.) His own voice, though, sounded mad to him, sounded like the cry of a wild animal caught in some excruciating trap, dying in the night. He couldn't say the boy's name right. But he kept calling out. Any noise would do. As much noise as he could make. And if not ... if not, if Alessandro was away somewhere else, then he had to reach the telephone. (The pain in his head everywhere now, so that he had to think like a man seizing acrid breaths in quick pockets of air amid the rolling smoke.) His cleaner had the keys. (Cleaners, pieces of ass, whores.) All his strength and all his monumental will to live focused on the single objective: to reach the cell phone by his bed and communicate that he needed immediate help. He called out again. But the sound was a hideous distortion—vowels only, yowled and croaked. He was Quasimodo reborn, howling out—Paris deaf. And if he could not speak, if spoken words were gone, then he would have to send a message, thumb it in. Send for help. Come on, move, you bastard. Move. Even his name did not matter. Move, you bastard. Move. The will to live.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,
and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.

—
KARL MARX,
Communist Manifesto

Cold was crawling through the city like an invisible fog, crawling into every cranny, crawling into every cubbyhole, across the slums, up through the tower blocks, down along the Neva, elbowing aside all other concerns, crawling up the fat legs of its familiar winter throne. In three days the tyranny would be established anew. And those in the converted palaces and executive apartments would be forever on the threshold of their homes and offices and restaurants, forever putting on or taking off their heavy cloaks and furs and gloves and brightly colored department-store scarves; those on broken chairs watching TV in their subdivided rooms had already donned their redarned sweaters, their shawls, their ancient coats for the duration; and those lying in the lean-tos beneath the shadow of the power station now rose swaying to their feet and came out like thin sickened jackals scavenging for new cardboard, rags, rubbish to burn in their oil drums.

Henry lingered, shivering in the swelter of the superheated bank. He kept patting at himself—hand to knee, hand to cheekbone, one hand on the knuckles of the other. The first snow was falling on the Nevsky outside, and a filthy quagmire of evil gray was already caking the ground. He had mistimed it. In the past few days he had been forced to use only twice. The sickness was beginning, and he wasn't sure he could last. He wanted Arkady
gone.
Go, you bastard, go. He needed that passport bought and paid for. The train left at eight. He needed to be alone, back in his cell, the door barred against himself. Belly full of sleeping pills. He had absolutely no faith in his endurance, nor in his spirit, least of all in the veracity of his intention to actually stop. He had done this only once before, and had lasted less than twenty-four hours. And he was afraid, terrified.

He closed his eyes, seeking other thoughts, another Henry. But for a moment there was no other Henry to turn to. Addiction was his entirety. He was sweating—sweating, shivering, shaking. His last hit had been more than thirty-two hours ago. His nose was running. And the roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums. He bit his cheek. Maybe he should buy one last hit—Leary might even give him some. He wanted wanted wanted wanted. He could not trust himself with this money as far as the end of the Nevsky. Just get home for now. Then maybe buy some. No. No no no
no.
No, come on, Henry.

The worst of the nausea wave passed and he screwed himself up and stepped through the door. The road was striped from the center with gray sludge—plain gray, dark gray, darker gray, and black gray, churned and squashed and churned again by the endless traffic. The blackest gray at the edge where the exhausts of the filthy buses disgorged their worst. The snow not as a blanket, he thought, but as some kind of blotting paper instead, revealing at last the colors of the truth. He pulled his collar up and his woolen bobble hat down. Buried deep in the inside pocket of the huge greatcoat he wore was the very last of his money and his passport. He would not tell Arkady, but he had borrowed right to the limit of his meager overdraft.