The Road Home (52 page)

“Eat,” he said. “Like this.”

He picked up his own burger in his large hands and took an enormous bite. The smell of onions fouled the air and reminded Lev of riding on the London Underground. He wanted to walk away—from Rudi and from Ina. Weariness and frustration made his flesh feel shivery, yet peculiarly aroused. He yearned to be lying in a dark room in bed with a woman.

He watched Ina take up her burger. He saw her thin mouth open and a tiny corner of the burger disappear inside it.

“Nice, uhn?” said Rudi. “Succulent, uhn?”

She went on eating, nibbling like a sheep. Grease began to glimmer on her chin and Lev wanted to wipe it away, but he didn’t. He sat without moving, and into his tired mind came images of Sophie, which he tried unsuccessfully to banish.

Rudi finished his own burger, then began on Lev’s. Giving up on conversation with Ina, he turned to Lev and said, “Just noticed something when I went out: they’ve unveiled the new place next door.”

Lev felt his heart lurch. Everything that was going on in New Baryn would affect him. He knew his enterprise would succeed or fail, not only according to how good a chef he turned out to be, but also according to what happened round him in the city. He knew he was at the start of another complex and arduous road.

“No sign of any hymnals or corroded old oboes,” Rudi went on. “I guess that’s all under the earth with the former chain-smoking proprietor. But you’ll never guess what the place is now.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Lev wearily. “Another restaurant?”

“No,” said Rudi. “Wait for it. It’s an art gallery.”

At these unfamiliar words, Ina looked up. She belched quietly.

Lev went to Eva’s bed.

She lived separately from her mother now, in a rented room not far from Podrorsky Street. This room was high up, in the eaves of an old brick building. Pigeons, traipsing around on the roof tiles, performing vigils and courtships, made it noisy—as though rats were skittering about up there—and Lev slept badly.

In the light of early morning, he looked at Eva. A tilted nose. Dark hair strewn across the pillow. Small breasts, white and soft. He was reminding himself that, yes, Eva was beautiful, that, yes, he was lucky that she wanted him. And yet each time he went to her he felt guilty. Sometimes he found himself impotent, right there in her arms.

“Why?” said Rudi. “I don’t get it. She’s thirty-one years old. She’s got a smile like the Mona Lisa. And she adores you. What’s wrong with you?”

“Dunno,” Lev said. “It’s just like that.”

“Like what? Explain it to me, buddy. Because it’s not making any sense to me.”

It made sense to Lev, but it embarrassed him, made him feel slightly ashamed, so he couldn’t talk about it—not even to Rudi. At first, after he’d met Eva, he’d thought he might be able to love her. He’d wondered whether they might not have a future together. One night, with a full moon shining in through her tilted attic window, she whispered to him that she’d like to have his child.

“Lev,” she said, “wouldn’t you like that? To be a father again?”

He lay by her side and smoked a cigarette. The words he knew he had to find felt heavy and sour in him, like rye bread. He told Eva that being a father to Maya was difficult enough: he couldn’t imagine beginning the process all over again. He said that all he wanted to be a father to now was his restaurant, that this was the only thing that gave his life meaning. And when he’d admitted this, he felt light and flooded with sudden happiness, because he’d spoken the truth.

Eva began to cry. Lev watched her get out of bed and tug on her robe and stand at her window. Her flesh looked ghostly in the moonlight, and Lev thought, Yes, that’s part of the problem: making love to her is like making love to a ghost.

But there was another factor. Between losing Marina and finding Eva, there had been Sophie. What had happened had happened. Sophie had healed him and then wounded him again. And the truth, in Lev’s mind and in his dreams, was that she was still there, laughing, screeching, beating him with her fists. He could still taste her mouth on his, feel her skull pressing against his, bone on bone.

“I’m sorry, Eva,” he said. “I’m sorry . . .”

“So,” she said, “what am I meant to do? Leave Baryn?”

“You must do what you want,” said Lev. “You must do what feels right for you.”

Eva didn’t leave. She told Rudi that she thought Lev was still in mourning for Marina, but would come to love her—over time.

“But is she right?” Rudi asked him one morning, as they came out into Podrorsky Street to inspect the restaurant sign that was going up.

“No,” said Lev.

“Yet it’s not over, my friend, is it? Because I know you still spend nights in her bed.”

“Yes,” said Lev, “I do. But that has to end. I’m not going to go there anymore.”

“But remember when we met her?” said Rudi. “That night at the old Café Boris. Remember?”

“That’s all I am, Rudi—memory,” said Lev. “I don’t need reminding of one single other thing.”

Now they were looking up at the sign:
MARINA
. The lettering was silver on a dark blue ground. Two workmen were bolting it to the wall.

“Looks nice,” said Rudi.

Lev stared at the sign. And he thought how, day after day, year after year, this word, this ghostly name Marina, would be kept alive on the breath of the city, and how, for him, this was too melancholy to be borne.

“Take it down,” he instructed the workmen. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Rudi dragged him to a new Italian coffee bar on the square where, in this mild autumn, people still lingered outside on metal chairs, drinking lattes and cappuccinos. When Lev sat in this place, it wasn’t difficult for him to believe he was still in London.

“So, what’s going on?” said Rudi, when they were settled with their coffee.

Lev rubbed his eyes. “Rudi,” he said, “just be my friend, okay? Just be that.”

“What d’you mean? I am your fucking friend.”

“Don’t be this . . . inquisitor anymore. Just stay with the friendship.”

“You doubting my friendship—after all this time? After all the shit we’ve shared?”

“No.”

“Then what? What?”

“You know
what.
I need to move forward, not back.”

Rudi ladled up cappuccino foam into his mouth, spoonful after spoonful, till all the messy froth was gone. His eyes were heavy with—what? Fury? Incomprehension? He swallowed the rest of the coffee, slammed down money on the café table, and stood up. “I don’t get you,” he said. “It was always going to be Marina. You said you had the name before you had anything else. And now you’re betraying the name.”

“No,” said Lev. “I’m trying not to betray my future.”

“You talk in riddles,” said Rudi. “You think you’re some kind of philosophical genius, or what?”

He pounded off across the square and Lev followed slowly.

He caught up with Rudi in Podrorsky Street, where he found him planted in front of the art gallery that had replaced the old music shop. He was staring in at the window, where a brightly lit sculpture, resembling a human torso sliced in half, turned slowly on a circular, mechanized dais.

“Look at that shit!” said Rudi. “Look at that bit of waste. You recognize what they’ve made it with?”

“Metal,” said Lev.

“Auto parts!” exploded Rudi. “See that gut area? Those are radiator hoses. Fuck them! Those ‘arteries’ are sparkplug leads. That ‘heart’ is a fucking distributor. Degenerate arseholes!”

As Lev stared, he saw the gallery owner, dressed in a well-cut suit, move toward the window and stand there, smiling, as though Lev and Rudi might be potential purchasers of the installation in his window.

Rudi saw him, too, and said, “He can get out of my sight! I spent half my fucking life going in search of auto parts. I lay awake at night worrying myself to death. And now what? Some arsehole sculptor just squanders them—as though they had no value. As though nothing had any value anymore.”

Lev stood very still. He watched the gallery owner disappear back into the shadow.

“How has anyone ever been able to calculate value?” he said. “Only by the price people are prepared to pay.”

Lev’s restaurant opened in deep winter.

It had no sign, no real name. People just came to know it as Number 43 Podrorsky Street.

Sometimes, as he inspected the table settings, examining the glassware for cleanliness and shine, Lev would see people staring through the doors in the middle of the afternoon, as darkness was falling. “The gawpers,” Lora called them. But in time, it seemed, most of the gawpers became diners. This was still a small town, despite all the new building going on, despite the new enterprises obliterating the old, and rumors about the good food you could eat at Number 43 Podrorsky Street, for reasonable prices, swept round New Baryn like a long series of favorable weather forecasts. By the end of the winter season, bookings were running two or three weeks ahead.

Rudi—who nightly pirouetted from dining room to bar to kitchen and back with an air of seductive authority, like a conjuror, and whose interpretation of his role as the face-of-the-place led him to frequent, startling fits of generosity with free drinks—quickly commented that the place should have been larger, but Lev said no, this was right, this was what he’d wanted: this number of tables, this menu, this consistent adherence to fresh produce, this feeling of intimacy and light . . .

In Lev’s kitchen—his adored domain—the gas flames burned an obedient blue, leaped to yellow on sudden, triumphant command; the salamanders glowed and shimmered to violent vulcan red. And the sight of all this rainbow heat could often wake in Lev a feeling of joy as absolute as anything he’d ever felt. Because he’d
mastered
it. At long last in his life, these roaring, unquantifiable wonders had become obedient to his will.

He slept only a few hours each night, rose early, and went out to the markets. He remembered G.K. saying, “You’ll have to
delegate,
Lev. You won’t be able to prep and cook
and
collect poultry and listen to game hunters’ reminiscences all in the space of the same day.” But delegation wasn’t always possible. Rudi, who was drinking and eating a lot each night, liked to sleep late. And not even he—happy as he was in his role as maître d’—shared Lev’s ardor for the enterprise. No one else shared it. And so it was often Lev himself who drove into the mountains to pick up game from isolated homesteads, or made long, arduous journeys to Jor to buy wine. Yet, he didn’t mind. He was still on fire for his Great Idea. He still felt in his heart its hot, scintillating thrill.

On the road, he sometimes passed long-distance coaches, going south toward Glic and the border. Catching the reek of their black exhaust, he allowed himself to remember his long-ago journey across Europe, staring at a British twenty-pound note under dim lights, drinking vodka from his flask, eating eggs and chocolate with Lydia at his side.

Lydia.

He’d written a letter to her parents’ house, telling her about the restaurant, enclosing a menu, offering her and Pyotor Greszler a free dinner any time they chose. In his dreams she appeared at the door of 43 Podrorsky Street. She walked in, on the arm of the maestro. The clientele stood up and applauded as Greszler and Lydia were shown to their table by Rudi. Then Lev came out from his kitchen to greet them, and he held Lydia close and she whispered some words to him, always the same words:
I forgive you, Lev. I forgive you.

But, in fact, they never came. And when Lev told Rudi the whole awkward saga of his friendship with Lydia, Rudi said at the end of it, “The thing that amazes me, comrade, is that you
expect
her to turn up.”

“I know,” said Lev. “When I asked her for ten thousand pounds, I guess that was the last straw.”

“Yeah,” said Rudi, “it must have peeved her. But that’s not why she doesn’t come. She doesn’t come because she’s afraid of what she still feels for you. So you just have to accept it and forget her.”

Lev thought about this. Across so much of his past life, he had attempted to lay some kind of enshrouding darkness. But the people and places underneath this darkness had an obstinate vibrancy. They kept calling to him. They were robed in bright colors. On them, the seasons still cast their alternating light.

One of those who called to Lev was Christy Slane.

Christy had married Jasmina in a registry-office service in Camden Town, and Jasmina had worn a white-and-gold sari, and Frankie had been her bridesmaid, dressed also in a little sari that she kept winding and unwinding as the long day of feasting went on.

Christy wrote that his wedding to Jasmina had been “the most thrilling day of my life” and told Lev that he was replanting the garden at Palmers Green and going to yoga classes. The flat in Belisha Road was let. Christy was done with North London: he was suburbanman now, specializing in kitchen fitting. He was getting fat on Jasmina’s chicken
korma
.

Then, in the early summer of the year that Number 43 Podrorsky Street opened, Christy called to say that he and Jasmina had decided to take a holiday in Eastern Europe and they wanted to include in their itinerary a visit to Baryn. On the telephone Christy said, “Jasmina knows that one of the few people I miss, Lev, is you.”

They arrived in Baryn one Friday morning in August, driving a rented car. When Christy walked into Number 43 Podrorsky Street, he said, “Holy shit! Looks like you did somethin’ special here, fella.”

The two men embraced. The old tar smell of Christy’s nicotine habit was gone and not a trace of eczema remained on his pink face.

Jasmina threw her arms around Lev’s neck. “Congratulate me, hey?” she laughed. “I’m the new Mrs. Slane.”

“Welcome, Mrs. Slane,” said Lev. “Welcome to my shop of dreams.”

When they’d toured the restaurant, admiring the cornflowers in slim vases on each table, and the glinting cutlery and the leather chairs by the fire, and the well-stocked bar, Lev led them to the back table and Rudi opened champagne.

To Rudi, Christy said, “It’s hard for me to believe you’re a living being. You have mythic status in my mind.”