The Way I Found Her (46 page)

I was getting wet up on the ridge, but it wasn't cold and I considered taking off my clothes and letting the drizzle wash me clean. When you're a hostage, water takes on a different significance. Then I was deflected from doing this by the sound of a door opening and an outside light being switched on. I didn't move. I wanted to drop down below the roof line but I knew I couldn't do this soundlessly, so it was better to stay still. Nobody looks up at their own roof, not unless they think there's something unsafe up there, or unless they're old Grisha with his head in the clouds.

After a moment, I heard a car start up. I knew it was a Citroën 2CV from the rattle that engine has. It reminded me of waiting in the school playground for Alice to remember me and drive over.

Then I heard something I didn't expect: it was a woman's voice, shouting in Russian. She sounded really angry and I waited to hear which one of the kidnappers she was angry with, but nobody answered her. She slammed her door. The Citroën's lights came on and the car was driven up the track towards the road. I saw it bounce and lurch, just like Alice's 2CV used to do, and I thought how odd it was that every single car in the world had become more advanced and smooth and sophisticated except this one crazy model.

At the road, it turned left, driving towards the Paris light. I watched it until it was out of sight and then I made my way silently, gripping the wet surfaces with my hands and toes, back to my hole and fanned the slates back into position above me, like closing a cunning little door.

I didn't tell Valentina that I hadn't been able to work out a way of getting down from the roof. I just described what I'd been able to see and that there was a road not far away. In the last few days, Valentina hadn't been on any walks and I knew this was a bad sign, a sign that she was depressed.

She started to talk about a dream she'd had. She'd been in Rome in the dream (Valentina always dreamed in this international kind of way) and looking at Raphael's tomb in the Pantheon. And through the hole in the Pantheon roof had started to come a great mass of birds.

These birds were black, like starlings or crows, and so many thousands of them came fluttering in that they began to fill up the whole gigantic space and Valentina knew that if she stayed where she was, looking at Raphael's tomb, she'd be suffocated by them. The thought of being suffocated by birds was terrible, but when she tried to walk away she found she couldn't move from the spot. ‘And what I realised,' she said, ‘was that I was going to die. I stood there and accepted it: the birds were Death and the person they'd come to get was me.'

I was silent for a moment. Just hearing her tell the dream had made me shiver. Dreaming it must have been quite bad. I said airily: ‘What you thought were birds in the dream weren't birds at all, or Death, or anything like that; they were Yves St Laurent dresses. Some of the dresses were black and had feathers attached to them, which is why they looked like birds, but in fact what you dreamed was the number of designer outfits you're going to be able to afford before you snuff it.'

After the rain, it got hot again. I could feel this heat coming through the slates and I could smell it in the sweat on Alexis's body.

He was getting anxious again. He took me to empty my shit pail one morning (he said Vasily was ill) and as he pushed me along the corridor, I could hear him gasping more agonisingly than usual and I could feel his arm shaking. He said to me in French: ‘I want you to know, if those people try to get clever, if they try to crap on me, I will kill Valentina and I will kill you.'

I was going to be sort of smart-arsed and say to him: ‘I don't know why you wanted me to know that, Alexis,' but I didn't. I needed information, so I asked him if Bianquis had promised him the money.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘promised. But if they think they can trick me, those rich cunts . . .'

‘When? When's the money going to come?'

‘I'm not telling you, Meaulnes. All I'm telling you is if they don't pay up, you and Valya are dead!'

‘Merci beaucoup,' I said. And then he hit me across the back of my head, so that I lurched forward and the shit pail fell out of my hand and bounced on the wood floor, and although I couldn't see anything through my blindfold I knew it had to be spilling all that remained of its contents that hadn't been soaked up by the famous faces in
France Dimanche
.

I felt really angry that Alexis had hit me. It was the kind of anger I'd felt about that stealer at school, only magnified about a hundred times. I regained my balance and turned round to punch him in his shrunken stomach, but he knew exactly what I was going to do and grabbed my arms and wrenched them down. He held me pinioned, so close to his trembling body that I couldn't move. His hands were bruising my arms and I could hear the gasp in his lungs very close to my ear. And all I could think about was trying to get away from him. So I spat at him, with as fat a gob of spit as I could dredge up out of my dry mouth, and there was a split second's pause as the spit landed somewhere on his shirt. Then he kicked my feet from under me and let me fall.

I tried to get up. I knew I was sitting in a puddle of urine. Then I heard Valentina start to yell at Alexis through her door and it was at this moment that he went completely wild, kicking out at the overturned bucket and beating his fist on the wall and screaming in Russian. It was like he was screaming about everything in his life, everything in his world, like he was tearing open his lungs and his heart and letting all the anger and misery come deluging out. You couldn't tell, after a minute, whether he was screaming or crying or both, or what. He was just making sounds, and they were like no other sounds I'd ever heard in my life.

Later, I said to Valentina: ‘Do you think that's what people heard in Leningrad, that winter when the siege was on and they knew they were dying – a kind of noise like that?'

‘Not specially, darling,' she said. ‘In Russia, that is what they hear all the time.'

We didn't see Alexis again for two days. I wondered if that woman I'd seen getting into the Citroen was taking care of him.

I climbed out on to the roof again, and on this night the moon came and went behind streaky clouds and revealed to me something I hadn't found the time before: at the back of the house, between it and the thicket of trees, was a barn.

I hadn't discovered it because it was quite small and low, and to see it you had to edge
down
the roof, nearer to the gutter line. It was one of those places that looks as if it's been built in a day, as if the farmer just decided in the night, ‘I'll put a barn there tomorrow', and then went and bought a lot of corrugated iron and some old wooden posts and some nails and erected it without anyone noticing. But this farmer had been quite lazy. He wasn't like Hugh, worrying about views and windows and ways of laying brick; he hadn't wanted to lug the sheets of iron one centimetre further than he had to, so he'd put his barn as near to the house as possible.

I calculated that the distance between the wall of the house and the barn was about 1.5 metres. To get on to the barn roof from the lowest point of the house roof involved a drop of approximately three metres. The corrugated iron would have some give in it: it would be more springy than concrete or slate; and the sheets had been laid almost flat, just tilting up slightly to the left, so that the rain could run down and away. Once we'd landed on the roof of the barn, getting to the ground would be easy, because the barn was full of hay and broken bales of it had spilled out all around. All we'd have to do was let ourselves fall down on to the hay.

I crouched on the roof, looking at the barn for a long time. The moonlight shone on the iron ridges of its roof. The question of shoes bothered me. I knew the hardest thing would be trying to steady ourselves on the slates, poised for the leap, and that this would have been far easier wearing trainers. Grip and steadiness were
prime
and we'd both be hampered, because presumably all Valentina had with her were the white sandals she'd worn that day she left to have lunch with Grisha. And I imagined her naked feet, with their beautiful convex toenails with just a vestige of red nail polish remaining on them, standing where I was now, trying to grip the slates, and her whispering to me in the dark: ‘Hold on to me, darling. Don't let me go . . .'

The next time I saw Alexis was the night of the storm.

He was calm. The storm had come in at dusk and now it was exploding and flashing right over our heads, and in the midst of it Alexis was calm and quiet. It was like the storm was grumbling and protesting for him and allowing him to be still.

He came into my room with Vasya and they inserted the light bulb and set up the chessboard. I didn't know what time it was, but I knew it was quite late, like ten o'clock or something, and I thought, perhaps Alexis is really afraid of the storm and he wants to play chess all night to distract himself.

He was wearing his monkey mask. His hair that came down to his shoulders looked cleaner than the last time I'd seen it and I thought, I expect that Russian girl, whoever she is, has been cooking him meals and sucking his cock and lying in the bath with him, shampooing his hair.

As he set out the pieces, he said in French: ‘What d'you want, Meaulnes, if you win? Your Concorde book? Exploding Peanut Theory: very clever!' And he laughed his girl's laugh. What the laugh said was that he knew my chances of winning were completely useless.

I let a long moment pass. The last time we'd played, Alexis had said he didn't have my notebook, but I made no reference to this. I knew he lied about everything; Valentina had told me he did. What I said was: ‘I don't expect I'll win. But if I do, I want Valentina.'

Both Alexis and Vasya raised their heads from the board and stared at me through the holes in their monkey masks.

‘Oh yes?' said Alexis. ‘She belongs to you like your notebook?'

I said: ‘No. What I mean is, I want you to let her sleep in this room, just tonight, while the storm lasts. That's all.'

‘So you're afraid of the storm? You want your “mummy”?'

‘Yes.'

Alexis and Vasya both laughed then and said something in Russian and then laughed again. I didn't look at them. I just concentrated on setting out my side of the board and, as I put each piece in place, tried to imagine the chessmen like an army, like my troops, about to begin their fight for my freedom.

I knew Alexis wouldn't agree to any request of mine yet. He liked to keep you waiting for everything – even for water. Only when the game was over would he refer to it.

Like last time, Vasya hung around, watching us. He brought in a third chair and sat at the table, staring at the board, before either of us had made a single move. I hoped his eyes wouldn't go wandering up to the roof and notice that one section of baton had been cut through and wedged back in place with folded newspaper.

We were about to begin, when Alexis snapped out some command in Russian to Vasya and he got up obediently and went out. He went sort of slowly, tearing his eyes away reluctantly from the vacant board, and so I knew he was playing his own game in his mind and the chances of him looking up at the roof were small.

He came back with a half-full bottle of whisky and one glass and put these near Alexis. Valentina had told me that drinking whisky could sometimes make Alexis mellow and kind and sometimes make him cruel and you never knew which of these moods was going to come.

When he poured some out, the smell of the whisky reminded me of being in Scotland, with my Scottish grandmother, Annie, who lived alone in Edinburgh and spent most of her money on bingo and booze. She always asked for ‘small' drinks, which she sometimes called ‘wee' drinks – ‘Hugh, dear, will you pour me a wee whisky?' – but she had so many wee ones that the quantity she got through became immense and not ‘wee' at all. And she smelled of this whisky and her rooms somehow smelled of it, even her bedroom, and I suppose this was why we saw more of Gwyneth and Bertie than we did of her. When I asked Alice if she missed her, she said: ‘No. Never.'

This time, as I waited to begin, I didn't feel nervous. My mind was concentrated and cool. I knew Alexis wouldn't expect me to repeat my pawn-to-king-four opening, so this is exactly what I did. Alexis hesitated. I saw him surveying the centre and I expected him to try to crowd me out there like last time, but he didn't. He just pushed a pawn one square forward on the flank: pawn to king's knight three.

I thought, that's interesting, he's leaving me the centre, so I started to grab it, with pawn to queen four. Automatically, Alexis developed his bishop with bishop to knight two. And I was just getting happy with my dominance of the centre, pushing my pawn to king's bishop four, when Alexis tipped his monkey mask up above his mouth, took a long gulp of whisky and then just lazily pushed his central pawn to queen four.

I kept my body very still, surveying my big centre and not wanting to relinquish it. I could hear the storm continuing, noisier than ever, and I thought, imitate the storm, persist in the centre. So I kept on pushing my pawns, but, each time I pushed, Alexis blocked and after about a dozen moves I realised my king was vulnerable, with a Black knight and a Black bishop moving steadily in.

This was the kind of moment in a game where you either panic or else, because you've almost accepted defeat, a weird calm comes over you and you become reckless, like a tennis player charging and volleying. And this is what happened. I just experienced this icy calm and remembered a thing Julian used to say about pawns: ‘If you push them, it's for life'; and I thought, that's it, I've just got to keep pushing, even now. It's for life.