Pravda (36 page)

Concentrating on his footsteps—his old black leather Sunday service shoes utterly inadequate, the hole ever-worsening—he walked right toward the river, moving slowly through the crowds on the treacherous surface. Though indistinguishable on the outside from most others passing by, likewise bound in coats and hats and scarves and blinking snow out of their eyes, Henry was thinner now than he had ever been. And beneath his hat he had shaved his head.

He kept his eyes down and stared at the ground. He prayed rosaries by way of trying to claw back some calmness, mumbling to himself, his hands struggling to pat even where he had jammed them into his armpits. The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled gray ice. Pedestrians were squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the earth, it was virgin white.

Arkady's coat felt unendurably heavy, as though his skeleton might give way beneath its weight. And his bones ached as though they were being gnawed by emaciated rats from within. But the wind
—a capricious Beria to Stalin's steely cold—was coming down the river to tighten the regime (he could feel it now as he passed beneath the Admiralty), and to remove the coat was unthinkable. He had a sudden cramp in his gut and tightened his jaw's clench against it. He began to shuffle to avoid jogging his stomach more than necessary and to minimize the risk of slipping on his gripless soles. His toes were numb.

At the far side of the little park, he thought he heard someone behind him and turned ... He stopped a moment, his jaw working, looking back, standing by the railings beneath the Bronze Horseman, Peter's mount rearing against the snake of treason. There was nobody. He peered back into the snow, seeking if not the who, then at least the why and the how. But his past was all confused, fretful, restless. He could no longer find the main vein.

But it was there—beneath, beside, between all the other damaged tributaries of the blood, twisting, twining—the thread of his life.

Old Henry, Henry Stuart Wheyland, was the only issue of a loveless marriage, brought up by a mother whose latent Catholic piety rapidly ossified following not a divorce but a parting-of-the-ways trauma into a great and rigid structure of brittle dicta, observances, rituals matched only by the adoration she gave to her one and only holy child. Henry rewarded her with endless exam successes—a flare for chess, for reading, for doggedly enjoying choral music in the face of the wholesale mockery and ridicule of his fellows. He was altar boy and sacristan, teacher's pet, assiduous student, and seminarian—all before he dared to look himself in the eye.

Then his mother died. Called to Jesus one evening crossing the road outside the junior school, where she had been putting up decorations in preparation for the school play. Called to Jesus by a minibus driver with a belly full of cheap beer, navigating with his knees, one hand pincering a cigarette, the other clamping to the side of his head a cell phone in which could be heard the recorded voice of a woman promising all callers that her pussy was getting wetter and wetter.

And that was it for Henry. The gates opened, and ready or not, real life came swarming through. Faith was quickly revealed as a farce, belief a beguilement, the whole religious enterprise simply a mighty and mesmerizing distraction from the heart of existence. A colossal and redundant folly. The crisis was not a crisis, it was the termination. He had an audience with his bishop and told him that he could not go on.

Continuing to live in his mother's house, he retrained as a teacher. He read and read and read. He traveled alone to London—to concerts, spending his tiny inheritance on tickets, modest meals out, solo gin and tonics. Two years later he was qualified and teaching at a comprehensive school. But he was nervous, awkward, jittery, and the children could smell his fear. They savaged him. He drank cheap wine in the evening. His classes were a joke—the only quiet pupils were those who were openly doing their homework for another subject. He considered it a success if he could get through the week without any physical violence in his class. He started to drink at lunchtime. His afternoon rages quietened the children for a while. And he resorted to forcing them to read aloud. But still they mocked him, by breaking off whenever they felt like it. Emily Brontë sucks fat donkey ass, they said, what was the point? And he could not remember what he was supposed to say in response. Perhaps they were right: perhaps she did suck fat donkey ass.

He sold his mother's little home in the real estate boom, he paid off her little mortgage. He added the sum to her little legacy and set off for Asia, relatively rich. Good for at least as many years as he could see ahead, assuming he wasn't profligate. And for a while it worked. He was born again. He was still young enough, and nobody suspected the failed teacher, the seminarian, the skinny priggish schoolboy.

Through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, then by plane to Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, from Egypt to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Greek islands for a summer; then back east to India—India east, south, west, and north, an odyssey within an odyssey. He acquired the dusty disguise of the traveler And for a time, at least, the chugging contentment of momentum was his. A quiet beer on the go from noon where possible, his sipping spirits where not.

And yet all the while a shadow of awkwardness continued to track him, forever at his back—however far he went, however fast he went there. Shy, clumsy, tongue-tied and graceless with the women, ignored by the men, he was forever ill at ease among his fellow travelers, save for a brief half-hour between inhibited sobriety and introverted drunkenness. Gradually, gradually, the truth that his youth had failed to grasp stole upon him: that no traveler alive yet escaped himself. And this realization caused his mind to falter and slump, and he began to see the world in its old familiar ways again. But worse: because now, he realized, he had replaced his former parochial hopelessness with the hopelessness of entire continents; the futility of addressing himself to schoolchildren had become the futility of addressing populations. Everywhere humanity seemed to seethe and shriek before him, redder yet in tooth and claw than nature ever dared to be. The Hindus hate the Muslims, it whispered, and the Muslims hate the Hindus; the Jews hate the Arabs and the Arabs hate the Jews; the Protestants hate the Catholics, the Catholics hate the Protestants; the Sunis hate the Shiites and the Shiites hate the Sunis; Animist versus Orthodox versus Islamic versus Hindu versus Buddhist versus Hindu versus Sikh versus Islamic versus Jew versus Christian versus Jew versus Islamic versus Orthodox versus Animist—caste, creed, and capital, the unholy trinity and the keenest blades of the cutting world. Too many fucking people fucking. And so, one multicolored afternoon, to a certain dragon's lair with Anthony, a fellow teacher of English as a foreign language.

The exact moment of his fall was never clear to Henry. Perhaps the first pipe. Perhaps the hundredth. Perhaps later. In any event, he stopped drinking altogether. If a balm for the eczema of his spirit was all this time what he had been seeking, then this was a better balm than his wildest imaginings. He never touched booze again. He went north with Anthony, where it was easier. They crossed into Pakistan—Lahore, Gujranwala, Islamabad. They fell in with others. They passed east into Kashmir. Anthony went to Thailand. But (cool now, relaxed) Henry made his home in a commune of sorts with Dutch, American, Scots, French, and various Scandinavians. Others passing through. Captain Charlie and his wife, Anjum, ran the place, had been there since 1965. There were other teachers, aid workers traveling, an English-language Web site designer, bad musicians, lapsed missionaries, students, wasters ... Henry and his new friends sat high on escarpments and looked down the iridescent valleys while their pipes bubbled. He dreamed of paradises lost and found. He laughed and was at ease with the women and the men alike. Nine months passed. He worked a little at teaching again, happy to have rediscovered a vocation. One May day he was paid well to go to a young lawyer's home village, near the border with Jammu, to help two younger brothers with their English. The commission was for a month. But Henry became sick after four days and had to go back to the commune and return the money. He did not even realize that he had withdrawal symptoms. It was one of the Scots, Craig, who told him that he was hooked.

In the late summer there were new rumors of helicopters. People began to leave. The military was said to be arriving. Police. Some of
the local boys stopped coming for the cricket at Captain Charlie's pitch; Charlie blamed the Americans "for ruddy well polarizing the ruddy world." One afternoon the little Internet place in town refused to let Henry use the computer. Meanwhile, Craig and Amy, a New Yorker pretending to be Canadian, were going north in three weeks. There was a road open. They could get forty-eight-hour transit visas.

Henry caught the bus with them. Overnight, in Kabul, Amy acquired a cache of unopened syringes—from the army, she said. You needed less, much less, this way. It was better than smoking and cheaper.

And so Henry moved on.

Dushanbe, Tashkent, Qaraghandy, Astana ... and eventually to Russia. Omsk. Their chief difficulty not scoring but the supply of clean needles. Henry was lucky. He had good veins.

A week or so later, Amy went one stage further and got married for money. So Henry caught the train for Moscow with Craig.

The relationship was no longer casual. He had to take it seriously. Time to settle down. Become a creature of habit. He taught a little in Moscow, rented a place with Craig in a clean and decent flat near the Ismailova Park. He used twice a day. He still had plenty of money. New Henry was ... cool.

By the time he made his first visit to Petersburg six months later, Henry was shooting up only to return himself to normal. The drug was having no other effect. He went back again and again (on what he called the Anna Karenina train), and each trip to Petersburg enchanted him further—the easier size of the city, the relative safety, and its beauty. The music. (So much music so close by.) At some point in the interim Craig started stealing from him. So before the winter came, he decided to move again, taking his two ballasts with him—the satchel and the scag bag—to keep him on an even keel. He found a generous and reliable dealer. He fell in love.

Henry came now to the wide-openness of the river, where the wind was driving the snow obliquely, closer in, so that the cars were forced to slow and loomed one after another out of a closing veil of yet more gray. Already there were swirls of thickened water in the Neva below, ice forming in darkening slabs, the remaining river running strange and contrariwise in channels in between. He went on, face turned away from the angle of the snow. Momentum.

On the far side of the bridge he slipped and fell awkwardly on his
side, twisting his knee and scraping his hand despite the gloves. The accident ripped him from his silent rosary to the full consciousness of the present, and he was forced to take off his glove to suck at his hand, where he had somehow drawn blood. He swore, a litany of the worst words he knew. He had come far enough on foot. But he had no money, he had no money,
they
had no money. Actually, yes, he had money. He had all this money in his coat. No, he had no money. Yes. No. Yes. No. Just get home. And then. He turned left toward the warship, walking with some difficulty along the embankment. Now the snow was really sticking, each flake seeming to outlast the previous. He did not have the strength, he knew it. He did not have the strength for anything. But he struggled on, arguing with himself, praying, then cursing.

He was assailed by a sudden surge of panic: that his inner pocket had given way during the fall. He turned his back to the snow, bit off his glove, painfully undid two of the buttons, and reached inside with numb fingers to feel for passport and the plastic wallet they had given him at the bank. Both were still there.

He buttoned up and went on, shuffling forward, hands jammed under his arms. He had noticed that the urge toward self-sacrifice was growing more and more powerful the weaker he became—something to do with purgation, he thought, or with providing his life with meaning. And the fact of his own blood amazed him. Astonishing that it carried on circulating so devotedly when he had long ago ceased to care for its welfare. Yes, the harder things became, the more he wanted them to become even harder. Test me then, you dead, dumb, deaf little god. Test me. See if I care. See if I value this life you claim to have given me. Perhaps this state of mind was the secret of all holy men and women. The urge to make a life mean something. Yes, what the prophets really wanted—Christ, Muhammad, Moses, and the rest—was to give their lives
meaning.
And what a feat of persuasion, if you could pull it off: my words are God's words, my life redeems all humanity for all time, my life is the only guide, my life is the example for eternity. Selfish, histrionic little narcissists. He had no more money. Zero. He was going to kick his baby, his bitch, his beautiful angel, his boy. Arkady was going to get the passport he needed. And go. Don't let him down now. Don't you dare let him down, Henry Wheyland.

But he could walk no farther and he had come far enough and the point, if there was one, was that he should not injure himself or be late on account of sticking to a smaller vow when the larger sacrifice
was what really mattered. A ride from here would make little or no difference; Arkady would have a few rubles, surely. What were a few rubles in so many thousands anyway? Yes, he had come far enough. He crossed the road and stuck out his arm. A brown Lada skidded to a halt almost immediately, bald tires gliding through slush. Henry climbed in, rubbing at his knee. Across the river, the buildings of the English Quay watched him through the snow.

By chance or design, Arkady was already waiting on the curb when the Lada drew up—boots on, mittens and some giant old and ugly striped sweater that Henry had never seen before. Christ, he's going to be cold, Henry thought; and then he remembered that he himself was wearing his friend's coat.