The Art of Waiting (4 page)

Katerina arrived home as the rain began to fall again in the dark. She looked across to where the boy had been that morning, the window now dark and empty, impenetrable with condensation. She banged on the door of her house but no one came. She thought about visiting the Mushroom Woman, then laid the fish on the step next to her. It had stiffened during the course of the day and lay in a rigid curve, its mouth still open. She nudged its tail and it rocked gently back and forth. There was a noise from across the courtyard. She looked up to see the door closing. A cat had been put out in the rain. It stood watching the door indignantly for a second or two and then crouched, chin low to the ground, coughing up fur-balls. Then it
scurried off. The door across the courtyard twitched ajar and Katerina saw a pale face watching her from within.

‘Hey, stupid,' she called out. ‘What are you looking at?'

The face didn't reply. The door closed slightly, then opened again, a little wider this time. The boy came out and walked tentatively across the courtyard to where Katerina sat on the doorstep of her home. ‘What's that you've got there?' he asked.

‘A fish.'

‘I know that's a fish. That . . . there.'

‘It's a spoon.'

‘Oh.'

‘Can't you see it's a spoon?'

‘Yes.'

‘So why did you ask me what it is? I got it at Mrs Ilieva's.'

‘You got it at Mrs Ilieva's?'

‘Is that all you do? Ask questions?'

‘No.'

He was already half-way back to his door. He went inside and the door closed and Katerina sat in the rain. She got up and went to the Mushroom Woman's shop but it was shut. She came back and sat on the step. A little while later the door opened again and the boy poked his head outside.

‘Why don't you go inside?'

Katerina considered the question beneath her dignity, too stupid to merit an answer.

‘Why don't you go in?' he asked again. ‘You'll get all wet there.'

‘I
am
all wet.'

‘Why don't you go in, then?'

‘Because I haven't got a key, you idiot. Why do you think?'

The boy came outside again, not venturing quite so close this time. He stood in the rain and looked at Katerina. He was a little older than she'd first thought, maybe around ten.

‘You've got teeth like a horse,' she said.

‘I know.' He shrugged. ‘What am I supposed to do about it? Anyway, you've got teeth like a rabbit.'

‘No, I haven't!'

‘Look in the mirror. Like a rabbit. I'm going inside. You can come in if you want.'

Katerina followed him in. She had never been in the house opposite before, not even when the Krilovs had lived there. Natalia Krilova had been a good friend of Katerina's mother, but the Krilovs had moved out a couple of months before and the boy's family had moved in. The other couple that lived in the house, the Ivanovs, had been there for years and were notorious in the neighbourhood. The husband, Vassili Ivanov, worked on ships and was away for months at a time. On his return, sales of vodka in the local shops and bars rose significantly and the ensuing disorder often woke the inhabitants of all the houses around the yard and required the assistance of the local officials to bring under control. It was because of incidents such as this that Mrs Krilova had never invited Katerina's mother to visit her at home.

‘You wouldn't like the neighbours,' she'd say, and would then go home to the shared kitchen and listen to the sailor's wife's long monologues of lament about her absent husband. And later in the evening the wife of Vassili Ivanov would lie in bed and think how much better it was when her husband was afloat somewhere far away on the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and she would contemplate with a heavy heart the remoteness of the possibility that he would fall overboard and be consumed by passing sharks.

Katerina followed the boy into his hallway and noticed a greasy stale smell of cooking. Two women were talking in a room off to one side, their voices rising and falling rhythmically, each jostling with the other for space in the conversation.

‘Oleg, is that you? Let the cat back in, will you?'

It was Oleg's mother.

‘The cat's gone,' said Oleg.

‘Oleg, let the cat back in, will you?' she repeated.

Oleg looked in through the kitchen doorway. ‘The cat's gone.'

‘Where's it gone? What do you mean gone?'

‘I don't know. It's gone, wherever cats go.'

Mrs Ivanova was sitting fidgeting in the chair opposite Oleg's mother, picking continuously at her fingers. She periodically looked at the table top with her mad, quizzical eyes, as if it might hold the answer to her questions. Vassili Ivanov, sharks permitting, was due home that weekend, and the woman's torment had arrived even before the ship had drawn into sight of the Baltic.

Oleg's mother noticed Katerina standing just behind her son. ‘Who's this, Oleg?'

‘A friend. She lives across the yard. She was locked out in the rain.'

Oleg's mother looked askance at the girl in the doorway. ‘What's a nice little girl like you doing locked out of her own house?' she asked, smiling less than sweetly. ‘I'm sure your mother wouldn't be happy if she knew.'

‘I'm not a nice little girl,' said Katerina. ‘And my mother lets me out on my own whenever I want.'

‘Does she really?'

Oleg's mother looked at Mrs Ivanova. Mrs Ivanova's twitching ceased momentarily and the two women silently communicated their disapproval of Mrs Kuznetsova's dereliction of parental duty.

‘Dreadful,' muttered Oleg's mother, to reinforce the point.

‘Utterly irresponsible,' concurred Mrs Ivanova, her fingers once more turning against themselves, working away at their own nails in a frenzy of neurotic jabbing.

‘She isn't irrespons—' Katerina failed to negotiate the unfamiliar word. ‘But she says you're a fucking whore.'

Mrs Ivanova's digits went into overdrive, like the claws of an overexcited, underfed fiddler crab. She launched herself up out of her seat, grabbed Katerina by the scruff of the neck, dragged her towards the door, flung it open, and threw the girl back out in the rain. Katerina picked herself up and went back to sit on her doorstep. She looked up at the window opposite and saw Oleg's pale shadow watching over her. He wiped the condensation from the glass and sat with her, separated from her only by the bleak walls of his home, the incessant rain and the darkness of the courtyard, until her mother returned with the infants and swept her inside.

The next morning, when her mother had left, Katerina looked out and saw the boy at his window again. She left the house and motioned for him to come outside. He quietly pulled the door ajar.

‘Come out with me today,' she whispered to him through the gap.

He looked appalled.

‘Come on, it'll be fun,' she said. ‘You know, fun.'

The word meant nothing to him. ‘My mum would kill me,' he said, swallowing hard.

‘Come on, I dare you. You can't just sit in there all day with that madwoman Mrs Ivanova. Go on, get your coat.'

He nodded uncertainly. ‘Well, perhaps . . .' He slipped out of the door and they dashed down the alley and into the street, Katerina striding out in front.

‘Right, follow me,' she said. ‘First I'm going to show you the Mushroom Woman's shop!'

But the shop was closed so they wandered along to the railway station and sat on a bench and watched the trains departing along the tracks.

‘Vassili Ivanov is a bastard,' said Oleg.

Katerina didn't reply.

‘It's terrible when he's around,' Oleg continued. ‘The last time he was home, we didn't sleep all weekend, he was shouting all night. He'd been out drinking, as usual. He's just a bastard.'

‘His wife's a whore, though.'

‘She's all right.'

‘I don't like her. I'm not surprised her husband drinks. And he's nice to me anyway – he even gave me sweets once.'

‘He never gives anything to anyone, unless it's something awful.'

‘Well, they weren't very nice sweets. He got them in England. I swapped them for a rabbit.'

‘A rabbit?'

‘Yes, a nice one. I called it Vassili.'

Oleg laughed.

‘Don't laugh! Vassili escaped and a dog ate him.'

‘Oh. It sounds like he should have stayed in his cage.'

‘I didn't keep him in a cage. He wanted to be free.'

‘It's your own bloody fault, then.'

‘It wasn't my fault! It was the bloody dog that ate him.' She scowled at him and he edged away from her a bit. They sat there in silence until she decided she would speak to him again.

‘Have you ever been on a train, Oleg?'

Oleg shook his head.

‘Me neither. Let's get on the next one that comes.'

‘What?' He screwed up his eyes to convey the idiocy of her suggestion.

‘Let's get on the next train,' she repeated, as an engine drew into sight around the bend.

‘What for?'

‘We can go somewhere.'

‘Oh yes, and where are we going to go?'

‘Moscow, and then abroad.'

‘Moscow is miles away. We can't go there. And abroad is probably even further.'

She stood up and moved with the crowd along the platform, Oleg following a few steps behind.

‘Katerina, you can't go on the train.'

‘Yes, I can.'

‘You haven't got a ticket. And how do you know where it's going?'

‘I don't.'

She stepped up into the carriage and found a seat by the window. She looked at Oleg through the glass and smiled. He looked around. The guard was at the other end of the platform. Oleg looked back at Katerina. She gestured to him to get on board. The whistle blew and the doors of the carriages were each in turn pushed shut by the guard as he advanced down the platform. The train began to tremble and Katerina mouthed urgently at Oleg through the window, ‘Come on, Oleg!'

He stepped up into the carriage, and sat down next to her. They watched the platform slide past as the train left the station behind
and trundled out of the city centre, through the industrial areas and out into the flat open countryside.

‘How long till we get to Moscow?' asked Oleg.

‘How should I know? I'm not an expert on everything, you know.'

‘You're not an expert on anything.'

‘What?'

A little later the guard came round and Katerina and Oleg were put off the train at Kolpino. They reached Leningrad again as dusk was falling and arrived home in the dark. Katerina sat on the step outside her empty house and listened as Oleg ventured inside his own. She heard the shrieks and squawks that ensued as Oleg's mother welcomed him home with a succession of cuffs and blows that sent him scurrying upstairs and past the room in which Mrs Ivanova sat in the darkness picking at her nails and muttering incomprehensibly in futile preparation for the return of Vassili Ivanov.

Vassili Ivanov

Leningrad, winter 1928

Vassili Ivanov had been at sea for several weeks, the last two without a break, and he was going to make the most of his first night back home – he and all the others. The vodka had come out long before they disembarked and, as they made their way through the dark streets and along the icy lengths of the Fontanka Canal, they were already itching for violence. They found the steps of the drinking den and stumbled down past the women who lingered on the stairs, Vassili in the lead, bellowing. He shoved past a group of men near the door, noticed their uniforms too late, swore at them anyway as he passed. He had come across them before, right here, in the very same place, the last time he was home. They had blocked his way then too, as if they had the right, just because of those uniforms. He rubbed his head as he entered the bar, smearing his hair back across his scalp, feeling the lumps and bulges beneath, the places where life had battered him. He took his usual table near the bar and the others crowded in, jostling for the stools. Vassili Ivanov sat and looked at his hands, ran a thumbnail across the tabletop. He looked at the black grime beneath the nail and scraped it out again with the corner of a tooth, rolled the knot of dirt across his tongue and spat it out onto the floor. Then he stood up and roared at the barman. He shoved past the men who were blocking his path. Then he saw their uniforms, inside the building now, waiting for him to make the mistake he had just made, one indiscretion too many, an obvious lack of respect. He swore at them again, pushed away the hand that tried to hold him, pushing his way along the bar now, shouting at the barman still. Then more hands were on his shoulder and he was
near the door, the OGPU men shoving him out, out into the well of the stairs, down onto the ground as the women looked on and his mates still squabbled over the stools inside. Then a knife came out and it went into him and the OGPU men looked at each other.

‘Look what you've gone and done,' one said.

‘He deserved it.'

‘Yes, who cares?' said the other.

‘You'll care if the truth comes out.'

‘Who's going to say anything? Them?' He glared at the women on the stairs. They turned away. ‘Come on, let's go.'

They went up the stairs and along the canal.

‘Have you got the knife? Chuck it in the canal.'

‘I left it.'

‘You what?'

‘I left it. Back there.'

‘You fucking idiot. Go back and get it. It's evidence, isn't it?'

The man hesitated.

‘I said go! It's evidence!'

‘He's right,' said the other. ‘Go get it, bring it back and chuck it in the canal.'

He hurried off, avoiding the women's gaze as he stumbled down the stairs. He found the knife at the bottom, picked it up and hurried away.

‘Here it is,' he said, as he got back to the others.

‘So chuck it, then. Into the canal.'

He chucked it. It clattered across the ice.

‘Fuck it,' he said. ‘The water's fucking frozen.'

‘What did you chuck it there for, then?'

‘You told me to.'

‘Not there, you idiot. At the edge, where the ice is thinner, right by the wall. They'll find it now, won't they, in daylight. Blood on it and everything. Fingerprints.'

‘What now?'

‘You'll have to go out and get it.'

‘Get it? Are you joking?'

‘Crawl out on the ice. Go slowly and you'll be all right.'

He looked at them. ‘Are you sure?'

They looked back at him.

‘Go. And that's an order, as if from Comrade Stalin himself.'

‘All right, all right, I'll go.'

He clambered over the wall and onto the ice and gingerly lay flat. The ice creaked and groaned. He moved across it, a foot or two, then stopped. It groaned again, then split. Down he went.

‘That's him gone,' said one.

‘Stupid idiot,' said the other.

‘The knife's still there.'

‘Leave it. No one will bother with it.'

‘What about him? What will we say?'

‘Don't worry, I'll think of something. Some sort of accident. I know the right people. No questions asked.'

‘A noble end, I suppose. Sacrificing himself like that, for the good of others.'

‘Exactly, comrade. I couldn't have put it better myself.'

Katerina looked at the face of Vassili Ivanov as he lay in his coffin in the room above the kitchen in Oleg's house. They were alone in the room, accompanied only by the sound of Mrs Ivanova's voice drifting gaily up the stairs from the kitchen where she sat and trilled away, like a canary released from a lifetime down the coalmine, at Oleg's mother regarding the happy practicalities of the funeral. And no one really cared too much about the funeral. The next day, Vassili Ivanov would be transported to the gateway of the hereafter, leaving the dwellers of this earthly dimension in something a little nearer peace – and that was all anyone really cared about, except, if the truth be told, Katerina Kuznetsova. As she looked at the becalmed body, the dark shroud of his beard and the battered shaven skull, she thought of his blue eyes, how they had smiled at
her as he gave her unpleasant-tasting sweets from distant lands, and she knew, though not at all on a conscious level, that she had lost some sort of kindred spirit, someone who had also recognised a part of himself in the girl on the step in the rain, and whose cold eyes had melted just a fraction when they alighted upon her because he had seen no fear in her face as she fixed her own stare upon him. Now she reached out towards the corpse and lifted an eyelid and saw a blue eye looking back at her, but he was gone now and she quickly closed the lid again and remembered how he had been when he was alive. And by all accounts he had been truly terrible, a living hell for almost anyone who crossed his path, but she had seen another side of him and that was the only side she could ever see.

‘Bet you wouldn't have dared be alone in a room with him when he was alive.'

It was Oleg, standing in the doorway.

‘Why not? I wasn't afraid of him, you know.'

‘Should have been. Everyone else was.'

Katerina left the body in the room and went downstairs with Oleg.

‘Are you going to his funeral?' she asked.

‘Don't suppose so.'

‘Suit yourself.'

The next day, Katerina followed the coffin through the streets and into the cemetery and between the brambles that suffocated that part of the graveyard. Mrs Ivanova's solitary tear was prompted by relief not grief, and her fingers rested calm and motionless around a pristine handkerchief. When they had finished, everyone soon went back about their business with nothing to remember Vassili Ivanov by but their brutal memories and their scars.

Katerina went back home and knocked on Oleg's door. ‘Do you want to come out? We could go to the Mushroom Woman's shop.'

‘I can't,' he said.

‘Why not?'

‘I'm busy.'

Katerina looked at him dubiously.

‘Really, I'm busy. I'm going to my ballet class.'

‘Your what? Ballet?'

‘What's so funny about that?'

Katerina stopped laughing. ‘I can't imagine you . . .' She laughed again. ‘It's for girls, anyway.'

‘No, it's not.'

‘Yes, it is. And for queers.'

Oleg closed the door rather less gently than usual. Katerina sat on her step and waited a few minutes until Oleg emerged again.

‘What are you looking at?'

‘Nothing,' she replied.

He walked towards the alleyway, then turned round to face her.

‘You can come with me, if you want.'

She considered the invitation for a moment, then jumped up and followed him along the alley towards the street.

‘Where's your ballet school, then?' Katerina asked as they walked.

‘Not far. Past the Mariinsky Theatre.'

‘The Mariinsky! Are you really good, then?'

‘I said
past
the Mariinsky. Do you think they'd let the likes of me dance there?'

‘Oh,' she said.

A short time later they passed the Mariinsky and paused outside to look through the tall windows at the canvas pictures of dancers that hung from golden ropes in the foyer.

‘That'll be you one day,' she said, pointing to a dancer in mid-flight.

He laughed.

‘What are you laughing for?' She was annoyed now. ‘Why shouldn't it be you?'

‘Why
should
it be me?'

He looked at her and laughed again, an embarrassed disbelieving little laugh.

A few minutes later they stopped outside an old building. ‘This is it,' said Oleg. ‘My teacher's called Mrs Andropova. She's very beautiful, but also very fierce.'

Oleg pushed the door open and Katerina followed him up the stairs and into a large hall. Katerina sat on a bench by the window while Oleg and the other students began their warm-up, Mrs Andropova's voice pursuing them terrified around the room. Then she noticed Katerina sitting on the bench, watching from the sidelines.

‘You, girl! What are you doing sitting there?'

Katerina looked up, petrified.

‘Are you deaf as well as lazy? What are you doing sitting there on your own? Come on, join in, we've already started!'

‘But I'm not . . .'

‘What?'

‘I haven't got the right clothes.'

‘What? Speak up! I can't hear you if you don't open your mouth. Carry on, you lot!'

She marched over to Katerina.

‘I haven't got the right clothes. I just came to watch my friend. Him over there. Oleg.'

‘Nonsense! You can't just sit there watching. The others won't be able to concentrate, and if they can't concentrate, they can't dance and I can't teach.'

Katerina stood up and began to walk towards the door. Mrs Andropova watched her go.

‘Wait! Girl! Wait! Come with me.'

She took Katerina into a side-room and began flustering about in a cupboard, muttering irritably to herself as she did so. ‘Here, put these on, and come and join the others. Quickly now!'

She placed a bundle of clothes in Katerina's arms and went back into the hall which rang once more with her voice and the drumming of little feet on the wooden floor. Katerina felt the unfamiliar fine touch of the fabric of the tights and the heavy padded comfort of the socks and she looked at herself in the mirror. She put on a white sweater, smelling of dust and age, and edged back into the hall. Oleg caught her eye.

‘Come on, hurry up!' called out Mrs Andropova.

Katerina scuttled across towards Oleg.

‘Only for queers, is it?' he smiled.

She glared at him, then frowned, and concentrated on mimicking the movements of the others in the room, but she was always out of time, leaping as they fell, falling as they leapt.

An hour later Katerina and Oleg were passing the Mariinsky Theatre once more and they stopped again to look through the windows.

‘Look, there you are again,' said Katerina, pointing at the dancer in the picture.

‘And that's you there,' he whispered, stumbling over his words.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘You and me.' She looked for a moment at the ballerina, cast in hues of blue and grey in the stage lights, her face raised towards the sky, a pale slender arm reaching out to something unseen. They walked on a little further.

‘Oleg, could you do me a favour?'

‘It depends.'

‘You see, Vassili Ivanov . . .'

‘Hmm . . .'

‘I'd like a photograph of him.'

‘What are you asking me for? I haven't got one.'

‘I know. But you live in the same house.'

‘Not any more, I don't.'

They walked on in silence until they got to the courtyard.

‘See you,' said Oleg.

Katerina didn't reply. Oleg went into his house and closed the door. Katerina sat on the step and waited. A few minutes later Oleg came back out and ushered her over to the alleyway. ‘Close your eyes,' he said. ‘All right, now open them.'

She looked at the photograph for several long seconds. ‘Thank you, Oleg! Where did you find it?'

‘Where I expected – in the bin. Your mum not back yet?'

‘No,' she sighed.

‘Come in, then. We can sit in the kitchen until she gets back. You'll be warmer in there.'

‘Thank you, Oleg. You're my best friend.'