David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

No you don’t, she said. You look possessed, like you just injected heroin into a vein. He’d never seen her so incredulous. I hardly recognise you, she said. Look at your expression.

It was true. He looked more desperate than he imagined, as though he’d forgotten to breathe. He wondered how his face would have looked last night if he’d been caught on film with Fin. Fin turned the photo over like it was some unwanted symptom. Lines of Cyrillic letters on the back. Her mouth set hard inside her balaclava. Your name, she said. My address.

For a moment Darcy stood speechless; there was nothing to say in defence. It’s too cold to have this conversation in the street, he said, but he knew they couldn’t have it inside Beriozka and Fin wasn’t moving.

Aurelio’s part of a network, she said.

No kidding, said Darcy, then wished he hadn’t been glib. Aurelio so cruisy and European, his coat draped over his Cuban shoulders. He didn’t seem like he played by the rules, said Darcy.

You didn’t think that odd? asked Fin.

He said he was Cuban. Darcy knew it should have seemed odd; Aurelio had even shared that he was involved with the druzhinniki , the rounding up of hoodlums, yet everything had felt so foreign it was hard to register what would have been normal. What would be normal now?

Fin slipped the photo into her pocket. I suppose you wanted something to happen, she said—well it has. She hugged herself against this new reality. The Soviets think homosexuals should be liquidated, she continued. They call it a psychic disorder. They treat it with electric shock. They’ve researched the transplant of straight men’s balls. It’s not like I didn’t warn you.

You knew who I was when you invited me, he said.

I did, she said, but you promised. She was on the verge of tears, overwhelmed by what all this meant. Darcy held her to him in the wind. Last night she had been apologising to him. For what? For leaving him, bringing him here? Using him? Kissing him? Now, she pulled herself free.

I should have known you’d be trouble, she said.

Then why did you bring me here?

Because you were the only one I could trust.

They looked at each other and Darcy knew it had been the truth. He also knew they’d severed that now. They were both in trouble, with each other and the world. What about last night? he asked.

I don’t know about last night, she said, shaking her head in a sort of amazement. Her face frowned up in a manner that made her seem older. But this photo is bad for all of us.

How many of us are there? asked Darcy.

Fin didn’t say, she left him there outside the shop and walked off as if to tell him he was on his own. He felt as if he might stand there and wait for the night to come down over him. He was freezing, imbued with a deep sense of reckoning, a panic that stunned him quite still. If she’d trusted only him, she didn’t trust Jobik, but what kind of solace was that now? He looked at a bug-eyed plastic flamingo in the shop window. What now, Darcy Bright? A stab of anxiety spread through him. Aurelio had declared Moscow to be a place where nothing was legal yet everything possible, but little felt possible now, just a sense of this, his watershed day. The day when Andropov died. He pulled out his plastic map, an instinct to be pragmatic. He could analyse all of it later—his frailties would still be his frailties, but the disapproval on Fin’s face would haunt him, from when he’d kissed her through her tears last night, to the way she’d glared at him just now.

The street before him appeared quiet as a frozen planet. Andropov’s death had everyone indoors now, burrowed in the buildings he passed. He imagined them around transistor radios, wary of a clampdown. There were no celebrations.

He had marked the Australian Embassy on the map with a pen; he knew it wasn’t far. He could seek refuge there, request a replacement passport. He imagined climbing the fence and plopping like a fig into the cover of a garden. So he walked. The mind-numbing cold whipped off the river. A wintry expanse already lit from the rim of the parapet, a vessel marooned, resting against the cutwater, dark as a whale. And as he walked the experiences lined up before him with an unexpected clarity. The scene with the soldier was as it had been: gratuitous and easy, an adrenaline rush, it had been like a line of heroin. The poster in the Ming Wing when Fin did that test on him: CONNECT YOUR GENITALS TO YOUR HEART. In Prague it was more familiar, mouth to genitals, genitals to a vein in his arm. With Fin it had been different—tears on her cheeks and his anger, a wound somehow being mirrored. What he’d shared with Aurelio felt ridiculous now. How many red flags could one country fly?

He walked on the sidewalks cleared of snow but still crunching underfoot, the image in the photo reverberating in the headwind. Maybe he’d betrayed Aurelio also, but he knew, most of all, he’d betrayed himself.

When he looked up from the pavement and into the sulfurous cold, he wondered how many copies of the photo were out there, how one got into Aurelio’s hands. Not far from Kropotkinskaya Prospekt 13, he stopped. A tepid green Art Nouveau mansion behind a high-spiked iron fence. The gate was electronic and the cars inside were buried in snow. From beneath a bare elm, Darcy noticed what looked like a Soviet guard shut in a windowed sentry box. All Darcy had on him as picture ID was his International Driver’s Licence so he waited in case there were comings and goings, for a ruddy-faced attaché with a familiar accent, what a relief that would be. But the place might as well have been abandoned.

The guard observed Darcy loitering and Darcy observed him, imagined being sentenced to stay upright all day in a kiosk the size of a phone box. He wished the gate was manned by some boy from the barracks in Sydney, standing alert in the wind, but Australia, he knew, was no Soviet ally. So he produced his cardboard driver’s licence and approached. What was left to lose?

The guard slid the door of the sentry box open and regarded the document blankly. Darcy pointed to where it said Issued in Melbourne, Australia so the guard would know he was in the right place, but it clearly wasn’t his alphabet.

Po-angliyski? asked Darcy.

The guard shook his head so Darcy pointed at the photo, but in it his hair was longer and still streaked dark. The guard observed him with an indifferent suspicion. Pazpot? he asked.

I-do-not-have-my pazpot .

The pistol nested in the guard’s holster caused a clamminess at the base of Darcy’s spine. There was no apparent phone or intercom, just a small oil heater to be leaned against, the smell of singed clothes. Not even a mail drop. Darcy thought maybe he had the wrong building. A flagpole on the roof but no suggestion of a flag, no familiar points of the Southern Cross or the Federation Star. He couldn’t throw a stone and see if he might hit a window; it wasn’t that kind of country and the ground was covered in ice. If he scaled the fence the bars would rattle and he’d be shot in the back. He motioned at the great stone house. Australianski? he asked.

The guard glowered, not understanding, so Darcy shouted Hello in the hope that someone inside would hear his accent but the sound was lost in the wind . None of the curtains opened. The guard touched his pistol as a warning. Pazpot , he repeated.

Darcy felt suddenly weary as he headed back towards Komsomolskiy Bulvar. For all he knew the Australian delegation had left—with Andropov dead, there could have been some coup or crackdown, or maybe the embassy was open by appointment only. If he could get into the Intourist Hotel he could ask at the desk for the telephone number but he wasn’t registered there, he had no Intourist guide, only Aurelio. But Aurelio was nowhere now.