The Eyes of Lira Kazan (3 page)

“Again?”

“I just want to speak to my daughter for five minutes, not more. I don't want the phone-tappers to start taking an interest in her too.”

“What are you thinking?” Tanya said, suddenly more serious as she pulled on her jeans. “Of course they know everything about her already, including the name of her latest boyfriend in Paris! I've read your last article, you know – it's good, but you're looking for trouble.”

Lira didn't answer. She leant over the basin and ran some cold water, splashing it on her face. The water smelt of St Petersburg, of stone, metal, of the dark depths of the earth. On rainy days it flowed straight onto the pavements from the giant gutters of the old palaces. Her last piece. It had been so simple to write, no need for research, no long sentences, just a list of the dead from the North Caucasus opposition party: “Maksharip Aushev, Malik Akhmedilov, Zarema Sadulayevna and her husband, Alik Dzhabrailov, Natalia Estemirova.” There were shadows lurking behind all these murders, and one in particular, that of Sergei Louchsky, the strong man of the region.

“One day your name will be on that list,” Tanya grumbled as she laced up her trainers.

Lira brushed her blonde hair in front of the mirror above the basin. She liked that mirror and always glanced at herself in it after training. She saw in it the reflection of a fearless woman, with a few strands of hair clinging to a still sweaty forehead, the normally pale and hollow cheeks flushed and the eyes still sparkling from the exercise and the fights. She had been doing it for seven years. She was nearly thirty-five. Dmitry, her not yet ex-husband, had mocked her for it.

“Won't your neighbours let you use the telephone?” Tanya was asking.

“No, they say that it's because of me that the whole building is now tapped.”

“You swear it's just Polina you're calling?”

“Look, if you think I'd ever put you in the slightest danger, just forget it.”

“No, come on!” Tanya sighed, and zipped up her bag.

They left at the same time as the last of the men, including the famous Putin. It was ten o' clock and American music was drifting from the cafés. The men suggested a drink, but the girls declined the offer without even consulting each other, waved and turned on their heels. At the red light, with the crossing light showing eight seconds before it would change, they ran across and disappeared into the underground, carried down the escalators beneath the station's copper-vaulted ceiling.

“Putin's there,” Tanya suddenly said.

“I thought he went for a drink with the others.”

“So did I.”

“Maybe he just felt like going home after all.”

“Or maybe he's following us,” Tanya replied. “There he is, he's coming right towards us!”

“He's just in a hurry – he wants to overtake us.”

“No he's staring at us!”

Putin did indeed stop at their level on the lowest steps of the escalator. He smiled for the first time, and suddenly looked a lot less like the original version – almost sympathetic, even.

“I see we're going the same way. Where are you headed?”

“That way,” Lira said evasively, putting out her arm, worried that Tanya would give away her address.

“We get off at Lomonosovskaya,” Tanya said, lying with confidence.

They set off towards Line 3 with Putin still walking beside them. He talked about the training session, about how powerful the
yoko geri
move was, a killer kick if you put your strength right behind it. The girls' expressions seemed to say: “So how many people have you eliminated like that?” The corridors were emptier than at rush hour and there was a smell of stale reheated pastry. Tanya
seemed nervous. When they reached an intersection she tried to get away.

“Right, well… we're going that way.”

“So am I,” he said.

And so they found themselves still together on the platform, and then in the same carriage, holding on to the same bar, going nowhere.

“So do you live in the same place?” Putin asked.

“Not far from each other,” Lira replied.

 

There were long silences. At each station the girls thought he would finally get off. Putin hadn't said where he was going, they didn't even know his real name. Lira examined him surreptitiously: he had a flat forehead, receding hair, thin lips that seemed to forbid conversation, and no wedding ring. A woman would normally take that as a sign that he was available, but Lira simply assumed that an agent wouldn't burden himself with a family. It was a bit sad to be eyeing a man, no longer to see if he was attractive, but to find out if he was dangerous. This man was probably just a Russian like her, like all the others left behind by history, proud and ruined and, above all, lost. But Lira was well beyond any regrets for the past.

“Isn't this where you get off?” he suddenly said.

They looked at each other, blushing, and jumped out of the train just before the doors shut.

“Was I distracting you?” Putin shouted.

And he disappeared with the train. They breathed a sigh of relief and burst out laughing.

“Your spy's just your average metro pick-up artist!” Lira giggled.

“Well, be careful. A Mata Hari can be a man. Anyway we're at the wrong end of town now. Back we go.”

Lira laughed nervously. She was on edge. It wasn't normal to have to take so many precautions just in order to ring her daughter. It wasn't normal to have to invite herself round
so late to the flat of her childhood friend, who was already exhausted by a long day at a museum ticket office.

“I'm sorry about all this,” she said.

“Don't worry. A little action doesn't do me any harm after a day of listening to creaking floorboards and old museum attendants' gossip. It was quite fun in the end.”

The train screamed through the tunnels and finally the right station appeared with its bright friezes and sculpted garlands along the white vaulted ceiling. Ploshchad Voss-taniya, or the Moscow station because that was where you took the train to the capital. Tanya and Lira ran up the stairs into the fresh air and the pale night, the sky still bright with a few soft clouds at eleven o'clock. On Nevsky Prospect, the last street vendors were still hawking “very good caviar not expensive” to lost tourists. A little farther on, a little old lady sat on the pavement selling apples, flowers and socks that she had knitted. She was also begging. She seemed like a ghost left over from the days of empty supermarket shelves.

 

Lira and Tanya had lived through those days when they were little girls, and then adolescents. They could remember the feeling of emptiness in this city where the avenues and squares seemed to have been designed by giants; the tarpaulin-covered lorries which would suddenly disgorge uniformed men, the crowded buses where you put your five kopeks into an iron container, watched by the other passengers who acted as conductors. It all seemed so far away. Now the black cars with tinted windows that drove along the Neva and the canals seemed to have appeared in direct succession to the carriages of the past, without the jolts of history, without the town having ever been called Leningrad. Tanya bought a bunch of flowers held by a rubber band from the old woman.

“For my mother,” she said.

She lived on Bakunin Prospect. The façade of the building was very fine, redecorated recently, like the whole town
centre. But it was another story once you went through the great door – black walls in the courtyard, a jumble of electric wires, cats like tightrope-walkers on the gutters and a permanently ingrained stink of urine. In the corridors flaking paint came halfway up walls on which the stories of love and hate that had passed that way were daubed in graffiti. Tanya stopped at the first floor. Her mother lived there in a
kommunalka
, one of the communal apartments inherited from a revolution that had outlawed all bourgeois comfort and respectability. She handed Lira her keys.

“Just come in and say hello, she'd like that. And then go on up. I'll stay here a bit while you telephone.”

 

Lira followed her. She had already gone in. In Room One Tanya's mother, in a flowery dressing gown, was dozing on a small sofa covered in old teddy bears. In Room Two was the old blind man who had tied strings across the room to guide himself around. Room Three was empty. In the kitchen were three basins side by side – each had their own, with their own dented pans hanging above it, although a homeless piece of soap sometimes wandered from one to the other. Tanya and Lira were greeted with a cry of joy from the old lady, whom they had woken up. They edged between the objects and pieces of furniture, a lifetime's worth, a faded and dusty collection of carpets, fringed lampshades, icons of the Madonna, family photos, a table from the early days of marriage, lace tablecloths. The mother, treating Lira like Tanya, took her face between her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Lira cooperated and then stepped back while Tanya replaced the dead flowers with the new bunch she had just bought.

They could hear objects falling down in the room next-door. The old blind man was coming to join them; nobody ever visited him any more. He appeared at the door near Lira, who was just leaving, took her hand and declaimed in a loud voice:

“A fish said to a man passing by: ‘I am the magic fish, I can make your wish come true.'

“‘Good,' said the man. ‘Supposing I want a million roubles?'

“‘I will give them to you, and a palace, too, if you want.'

“‘Good!' said the man, drawing up a list of wishes in his head.

“‘But you should know that anything I give you I give two of to your neighbour,' the fish warned him.

“So the man put out one of the fishes eyes!”

And the old blind man, still holding Lara's hand, gave a little triumphant laugh, as though it were the jealousy of other men that had deprived him of everything.

 

Lira finally escaped and went up one floor. She knew her friend's apartment well, with the overloaded cupboard that threatened to crash over in the hall, the bedroom completely filled by the bed, the sitting room whose walls were covered with black-and-white photos taken by her elder brother, who had died in a car crash a few years ago, the cat who shed his fur everywhere, the collection of old American films. She had spent a few nights there at the time of her separation, sleeping on the sofa until she found an apartment. That was three years ago.

She had been the one to leave. She had taken advantage of her daughter's departure for Paris to go too. She had nothing against Dmitry, but for some time she had preferred being in the apartment without him, and she found herself staying later and later at the office. It was a sign that she no longer loved him and needed someone or something else. Behind her were almost twenty years of marriage, during which she had had two brief affairs when on assignments. They had not led to anything and Dmitry had never suspected anything, thinking her too serious, too passionate about her work and absorbed by her subject for that sort of thing. And there had sometimes been other meetings, other friendships that had dissolved without being forgotten
for all that. The job, for her, had always meant travel and departure; in the beginning, like so many others, she had imagined herself becoming a great reporter. She loved a scrap and thought she could liven up the dozy editorial offices. It took her some time to realize how inert a newspaper can be, and to learn to manoeuvre her way around sensitive areas and cowardly attitudes. She found herself writing columns instead of crossing frontiers; she covered news items, the politics and the economy of her own vast country, as well as her region and home city. Lira had finally realized that she was living in one of the epicentres of the world. And then, with one assignment north of St Petersburg and less than an hour spent at the site of a huge housing project, her life was turned upside down.

The workers there had downed tools when the management had announced the closure of the canteen and the end of subsidized meals. Such an explosion of anger was a sufficiently rare event in this country to make it worth going up there to have a look. Lira decided not to go through the manager's office to get to the site, she just followed the lorry-tyre tracks that led to the workers themselves. There she talked quietly to them about the empty canteens, all the while observing their torn work clothes and their rusty tools. She had only been there for twenty minutes when one of the management security men, alerted to her presence, grabbed her by the arm and threw her out, shouting “Journalists forbidden!” adding “Bitch” in the way those types did when a woman was not in her proper place. But Lira had seen enough.

It wasn't hard to find out who was backing this two-billion-dollar project. It was Sergei Louchsky, a man close to the top, with billions of dollars of capital, the owner of eighty companies; he controlled petrol, telecom and car companies, as well as several regions in the Russian Federation and a fiefdom in the Northern Caucasus – a nauseating stink of criminality permeated all his businesses. All this
was enough to excite Lira – she divided mankind into two parts, the “
sputniks
” and the others. Courageous people on the one hand, and then all the rest.

“Tread carefully,” her editor, Igor, had said, knowing as he said it how she would react.

“I know, we must all love the Kremlin, and keep telling them not to worry, we belong to them!”

“Well, I didn't quite say that…”

And then the anonymous phone calls began, the cars drawing up alongside her, the threats passed on by friends who thought they were helping and by others whose job it was to do so. Normally a billionaire wouldn't worry that much when an independent cultural weekly accused him of ill-treating his workers. Why make such a big deal out of Lira? Why did she bother Sergei Louchsky? She didn't let up. When Louchsky opened offices in Manhattan, when he bought an ailing British daily or mines in Africa, when he appeared with his family, with an ex-president of France or with his shirt open at Sochi on the Black Sea, Lira would be watching him, cutting out photos, interviews, financial pieces. She watched him over the years, growing and thriving, surviving all scandal, escaping all the purges. And that was how her life had been turned upside down. Sometimes one single question arose and buzzed through her head taking up all the space: now Louchsky was moving his empire into the City, and so Lira was going to London. “But on one condition, that you tell me who you see, what plane you're on, where you're staying. I want to know where you are all the time,” Igor had warned her.