Pravda (52 page)

Isabella could stand it no longer.

"Arkady. Do you have the letter? I would like my brother to read it."

"Yes," Arkady said.

He took out the letter from the inside pocket of his old jacket and gave it to Gabriel.

"This is true," he said.

Saturday, five days before Christmas, minus three outside, the coldest December on record, and they were running out of places to be. So they were now sitting in the kitchen of Susan's house, back on Torriano Avenue. Arkady was at Gabriel's new place on Grafton Terrace. Gabriel had moved into Larry's spare room. Isabella was still the guest of Susan and Adam. And Susan and Adam had taken the children out to visit Santa Claus, who had set up unlikely shop on the Finchley Road.

The heating, presumably on some kind of a timer, had switched itself off, and Isabella didn't know where the control was and didn't dare fiddle with it in any case. It was absolutely freezing. They were hunched over on either side of the kitchen table, which was covered with coloring books, crayons, and children's activity centers. Indeed, the whole room—with snow sitting on every cross-pane of the window frame, with the bright red plastic fire engine in the corner, the huge yellow rag doll, the piles of Lego on the high chair—the whole place had a faintly surreal, grottolike atmosphere.

Isabella was speaking animatedly: "Christ, yes, of course I'm angry. I'm probably in shock. I'm probably in worse than that."

"Yeah, me too." In contrast, Gabriel's face wore a lugubrious expression. "Me too."

"We have been lied to," Isabella added.

"What's worse than shock—what's the next grade up, medically I mean? Trauma? Is it trauma?" Gabriel narrowed his eyes. "It is, isn't it?" He nodded to himself. "I'm in trauma. That's what I'm in.
Make a note. I am definitely in trauma. Or is it disbelief? Or terror? What's next? What comes after shock? What's top of the scale?"

"All our lives." Isabella shook her head with mild impatience. "All our lives, we have been lied to."

"We don't know that."

"Okay, maybe not. No. But that's why we have no choice but to go."

Gabriel held up his palms. "I've said I'm not arguing with you."

"So ... right, then. Let's go upstairs to the computer and I'll book you a ticket for later this afternoon."

"Was there anything back from this Henry?"

Isabella frowned at the diversion. "No. But I only e-mailed him this morning, and Arkady said he has to go to the café to check email. He may not get it for days."

"Okay." Gabriel eyed the olive-green Martians in the comic that was open by his elbow.

"And yes," Isabella continued, "we
can
ask him to play the piano, but don't you think that's going to be just a bit awkward? 'Excuse me, Arkady, thanks for coming all the way from Russia with no money and living in a shit hole for two weeks while we ignored you but could you just please play us the Goldberg Variations while we, experts that we are, check out your talent to our satisfaction?'"

"I'm not saying—"

"And what if he is brilliant? Does it change anything as far as we are concerned—as far as
our
lives go? No." She shrugged excitedly. "It may or may not mean we feel duty-bound to raise the money for him to finish his course. But it makes no difference to who our real mother is—or isn't. And if he's dog shit, the same. We still have to go. We have to know everything. We need the answers to some pretty fundamental questions here. And the only—"

"Arkady said he's not going to play anyway," Gabriel cut in. "Not until he knows about the conservatory one way or the other."

"He
what?"
Isabella's flow stopped abruptly.

"That's what the guy said when I tucked him in last night."

"Jesus."

Gabriel blew into his cupped hands awhile and then said, "Even if it's all true, it doesn't change much—Mum is still Mum."

"Of course, Gabs, of course." Isabella knitted her brow. "Come on, I'm not—"

"We've been adopted, that's all. Happens all the time. But she was
our mother all our lives. From the first moments of consciousness until ... until she died."

"Of course.
I'm
not arguing with
you
about that. I feel the same." Isabella softened, hooked her hair behind her ear. "I feel exactly the same. In one way, it changes nothing." She paused a moment. "But in another ... Anyway, Christ, come on—we don't even know if Dad is actually our dad. I mean, it's that basic, Gabs. We don't know the first thing about who
we
are. We might not—"

"Okay. Okay, I agree. You're right, we do have to know. But regardless of whether we have been lied to or not, the truth, as far as I'm concerned, is that Dad is Dad and Mum is Mum." There was another pause. Gabriel put his hands in his armpits. "Why don't
you
go?" he said. "Go now. You'll be at Waterloo in forty minutes."

"I'm not going. I can't. I..." Isabella tailed off and dipped her head to bury the lower half of her face in the scarf she was wearing. "Dad ... Dad makes me feel so ... so nauseous." The scarf dropped from her chin as her head came up again. "And anyway, look at the state of me. I can't be calm. I can't even pretend to be calm. I will row with him. I will. I'll start a terrible argument. I'll be absolutely furious from the minute I see him. I will be storming out before I've even stormed in. I can't hide it like you can. I haven't got your ability to ... I can't ... I can't make myself unreadable like you can. I'm polished glass to Dad."

Gabriel said nothing.

Isabella pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "And you know, the thing is that Arkady is ... He is kind of like a solution. Not a problem."

"I'm not saying the guy
is
a problem." Gabriel grimaced. "Jesus, can't you do something about this intense cold?"

"Sorry, no." Isabella bit her lip. "I know you're not saying he is a problem, Gabs. But he's more than not a problem. Think about it. He's the answer. He's kind of brought us back from the brink—well, he's brought me back to my senses, anyway. You may well be past help." She smiled. "I mean, the guy has got nothing at all. He's totally fucked. He has absolutely nowhere to stay. He's got no money. He was actually saying that he needed to start
walking
to the airport for his flight tomorrow because the trains are too expensive."

"They
are
too expensive." Gabriel's eyes ran around the room and back to meet his sister's. "How long is his visa?"

"Six months. But that's not the point. He can't afford another ticket if he misses the flight. That's it. He's stuck."

"We'll buy him one if he wants to stay."

"More than that, he's given us the excuse we need, Gabs. He's the reason. Now you
have
to go."

"Now I have to go? Why me?"

"And..." Isabella dipped her head into the scarf again. "And he does look like her."

"Does he?"

"More than we do. Come on. He's got Mum's eyes."

"What do you mean,
I
have to go? If I am going, you are going."

She hesitated. "I don't know if I can stand it—even being in the same room. Seriously. We need to make him talk. Not fight."

"Is, if I am going, then you are going. At least to Paris."

"What about Arkady?"

"We give him some money, obviously. He can stay at Grafton Terrace if he wants. Or he can fly back tomorrow as he planned."

"But what do we tell him about the course? The conservatory."

"That depends." Gabriel stood up. "Can we make some tea, at least? We need
something
that's warm in here to focus on. I've got a bitch of a hangover, and I've been at the police station since eight trying to convince them that I haven't been robbing myself."

"Yes. Make tea. Why do they think that?"

"Divert attention from my robbing everyone else, apparently."

"Makes sense." Isabella smiled again. "Depends on what? What does what we say to Arkady depend on?"

"On whether it's all true. If Arkady is Mum's son for real, then Dad is going to pay for him to finish his course and a whole lot more. Whether the bastard fucking well wants to or not. Even if I have to walk out with an armful of his precious paintings to raise the money."

This, then, is what it came down to: a dribbling and diminished old man sitting in silence beneath a blanket beside an easel on which there was a portrait he could not paint while a dirty winter's rain fell into the raddled old Seine outside.

Waiting.

Waiting for the light to thicken. Waiting for the day to end. Waiting for the week to pass. Waiting for a son who was not his son, a daughter who was not his daughter. Waiting, in essence, for the second stroke of death that surely must be coming—any night soon.

And suddenly now so fearful. Fearful of everything, even as it existed in his own imagination. Fearful of stagnation, fearful of travel; fearful of speed, fearful of stairs, fearful of the sea; fearful of other races, of the street-corner young, of every neighbor's real intentions. And every stranger suddenly an attacker, terrorist, swindler, or thief; every pavement a desperate, seething deathtrap of violence and crime; every ache or sneeze the herald of plague. Fearful of his own bones grown too brittle, his body too slow to heal, his mind too narrow, obsessive, or stale. Fearful of too much company, fearful of none. Fearful of conversation.

Fitting, though. Well shaped. He would give the Fates that. Those three squint-eyed goddesses, spinning their threads, black shawls about their heads, reckoning and rectitude in their every callused fingertip. Clotho: that he who had so traduced the family now had none. Lachesis: that he who scorned convention should feel convention's scorn. Atropos: that he who would so rudely take life's secret
temperature in the bodies of a thousand lovers should now be left so cold and unconnected.

And yet. He felt no remorse. There were things he owed to Gabriel and Isabella. There were the duties of the truth. And he would pay these now—for in his own way he loved them both. He was the only father they had known. If they came, he would tell them everything. He would give them all the explanations they required. But no ... no excuses.

For still he felt it—the old defiance, the lifelong
no.
Sluggish, furred, but undiluted and stirring in his blood still. That great and resolute
no,
swimming the wrong way around his heart. Perhaps this was what had caused the clot in his brain. One day this
no
of his had simply grown too gnarled and swollen to pass along the channels of his lifeblood. The same
no
that had kept him alive all these years was now trying to kill him. His eyes swept the sodden ashes of the winter's sky.

The train rolled through those somber fields of northern France, the rain hanging in the air, the sky all bruised, low, lowering, washed-out purple giving way to gunmetal gray, the farms here and there, the narrow roads riding the slight rise and fall of the ground, and he sat by the drizzle-straggled window, bad coffee cooling, and thought the same thoughts he thought every time he passed this way: about the two generations of soldiers, unimaginably heroic, those who dug themselves into this mud and those who, twenty-odd years later, hurried back and forth across it, pursued or pursuing. Men dying for a cause, right or wrong. And this imagining kept his thoughts from anything else. Kept him silent and still, imagining most of all the sadness of all the million unwitnessed moments, the horror and the terror and the pain that a certain man might see or find himself amid, for just a second, utterly alone, with no other to corroborate the experience, testify. The loneliness of that second. Then, immediately, more fighting, or death. What generations they must have been.

And this led him to thinking of his own grandfather, Max, and how little he had talked to him—twenty-six-year-old Max, already working for the British with the Russians against Hitler. Or so the story went. But perhaps none of it was true. All that could be certain was that his grandfather lived in Russia, in Moscow and then in Petersburg, doing who knows what for most of his life. Weighing in on one side or the other, or both, and thereby canceling himself out. He wondered what his grandmother had made of it all. Dead thirty years now. Perhaps the real difficulty was that life was far too short.
Just as one generation learned their lessons, they died; and the next had to step forward and start again from scratch, with nothing to work from but those anonymous deep-coded atavistic imperatives, the secret commands of the genes, and whatever few cogent guidelines they had managed to rescue from the minute-by-minute demonstration of human contradiction, confusion, and hypocrisy that was their parents. Or guardians. Childhood: it was like trying to chart an entire continent by the brief flare of a firework. Except that you had no idea that this was your only chance to explore for free, and instead you spent the five seconds of precious light gawping at the sky, stuffing treacle into your mouth. And then it went dark again.

He could not love Paris. Because his father lived there and the whole place seemed to exude his father's manner. This was ridiculous, of course, and he knew it; but then, underneath he had started thinking that everything was ridiculous, so why discard one notion and hang on to others? Nonetheless, he decided to walk to his father's flat and see if the Christmas streets would make him happy, sad, angry, or full of goodwill to all men. He had the notion that he should start treating himself as a human experiment, an ongoing private investigation into the effect of environment on the emotions. Maybe even take some notes. A purpose, at least.

After arriving late yesterday afternoon, he had gone straight to the place he was staying, at the top of the Rue de la Chine, up in the twentieth. His friend Syrie, Anglo-French aspiring actress turned massage therapist, had given him her spare room; they had done a play together years and years ago.

Syrie had gone out early that morning with her boyfriend, Jean-the-physiotherapist. She had left him a map, but he knew the way, more or less—down to Gambetta, past Père Lachaise, and then in along the Chemin Vert. He had set off at twelve, in plenty of time.