David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

A grey-uniformed woman with a clipboard and a wrinkled bark face talked at him in cacophonous Russian. Darcy Bright, he said huskily. He had no identity card like the locals, no idea what would happen if he didn’t get in, but a snub-faced man in a full-length leather coat, holding a walkie-talkie, rested his pale rapier eyes on Darcy, nudged the woman as if it was okay. The woman smacked a silver star onto the lapel of Darcy’s coat and the man stamped him with a withering stare. With it came a wave of nausea, as Darcy moved self-consciously into the monstrous anteroom, furnished with a bust of Lenin that rose twelve feet high. A red flag billowed behind him, rippled by a fan. A group of poorly dressed, low-level officials, warmth, but not the artists and diplomats Darcy’d imagined. Still, he found himself quietly whispering the word help with each exhaled breath, a prayer or a mantra, in case a sympathetic ear might guess he was Western, in trouble.

He passed Michelangelo’s David, a fake that towered in an alcove, and Darcy whispered upwards at the curves of the great white thighs and the small marbled phallus, the white ruff of pubic curls. Nearby a zaftig woman in a large tan smock with black braided hair turned at Darcy’s mumble, averted her face and moved on despite the plea in his eyes as they met hers. A man in a loose-fitting pinstriped suit and ponytail swanned between pillars, glanced oddly at Darcy then slipped beneath a rope to join the dignitaries grouped about a rough marble bust of Chernenko. Darcy went over to the rope and saw the prosperous few without the restless many, cordoned off, hobnobbing Soviet-style, right on the heels of the funeral. Waiters in evening attire with silver trays circled the anaemic statue of Chernenko made younger, his cheeks chiselled. Darcy held a sleeve up near his face and loitered near the archway, scanning for his painting, or the unlikely advent of Fin. He had a sense he was just being played with, tested. He both hoped Fin would emerge somehow and prayed she’d know it was too dangerous.

She might once have burned manifestos in an incinerator here, in this place where Khrushchev or Brezhnev made a famous attack on abstracts, but where was she now?

In the middle of the other room amidst the privileged, a monstrous depiction of Brezhnev hung, buffalo eyebrows and bulbous cheeks, in the fashion of a bad Soutine. Then Darcy saw through to a far wall, The Museum of Science and Achievement, small by comparison, the oil and wax shiny under the lights. Laika, half wax, part photo, part gold, perched on the nib of the obelisk rocket. The pinstripe man was pointing to it, explaining to a group. Perhaps he was the curator, Fin’s friend.

Darcy stepped to the entrance of the cordoned-off section as if he too might be ushered through, drink champagne, but the stonefaced guard ignored him. Darcy wanted to tell the curator the wax had been applied with a small travelling iron; a new medium, a new technique. Then he realised Chernenko’s daughter stood among the little set of those listening, her hair now uncovered, swooped up in a barrette, not ten metres away. Had she worn this pale blue evening gown under her coat to Lubyanka, then to the funeral? She didn’t seem in mourning now. She turned to reach for a passing flute of champagne and for a second they locked eyes and Darcy thought she might come over, but the general appeared beside her, in the same black suit, and Darcy’s hope turned to stone, a rush of sweat forming like a liquid skin.

Darcy sidled away, pretended to look at a plain canvas of a rocket launch, an oil pipeline threading across the Siberian snow. He hated Soviet Realism, its lack of heart or dimension, the sense of his own talent commandeered by Fin. He turned to check who tailed him, noticed Fin’s Achievement in Bronz e on a low pedestal in a shadowy corner. The butcher’s grass, the structures and obelisk, the melted foil and bronze leaf, small Soviet flags atop each building, hoisted on gilded toothpicks. A tide of regret rippled through him, his shoulders heaving just slightly, contracting his gut, as if weeping, but he had no tears, just hurting eyes and the fact of her before him, the vague smell of lard. Despite everything, it had been finished somehow, as if it could keep her from suspicion.

Darcy sensed his minutes of freedom being sliced down into seconds. Then a shadow clung to the corner of his eye, a slip of a figure in a dark coat receding between pillars; dressed like a babushka but moving too fluidly, her head covered in a lavender scarf. The distinctive briskness to the footfalls as she vanished past a mosaic of St Basil’s. Had she meant him to see her or had he conjured her? She’d spotted him and smelled trouble, now she was breaking away—Darcy half running towards the great double doors, out into the darkness, chasing a shadow, expecting a first quick bullet in his back. He heard the guard on his walkie-talkie but leapt ahead down the steps—let them shoot me right here in the square—with the violet scarf fading into the rush hour, down into the shadows of the ramparts. Voices from behind, he bolted through the commuters, pushing past a queue, skidding through slush underfoot, unsure what he wanted, to get away or to go with her, find her, desperate for a flash of that colour, tripping, hands in snow and up again, winded, a siren in his head or on the streets he wasn’t sure—then a flash of violet inside a trolleybus, caught like a flame in a street lamp, wires up into the fading light. Darcy slid among those boarding a back door, ignored the honesty box, got a glimpse of the flat-faced agent swimming through the crowd towards him but the doors were shutting, the bell sounded and the bus lurched forward unhindered. The agent’s angry puckered face left out in the dark and the colour that had caught Darcy’s eye, the lavender scarf, just a blue plastic bag against the bus window. Not Fin, but a sinewy-faced old man leaning his head on it, watching Darcy with a corrugated frown. Maybe he’d led them to her after all; or maybe he’d imagined her. He stood in the aisle, breathless, a pain now deep in his chest like the dull, patchy lights of the stifled city.

Does anyone speak English? he asked. Po-angliyski? His voice so dry with panic he repeated himself, but the locals either ignored his plea or observed him blankly in their stale-cigarette air, winter storage smells, onion breath, pushing each other as the bus turned a corner. The paralysis of fear and the mind-numbing cold, taking their own troubles home. Darcy ducked down and looked out at what looked like the Maly Theatre; he pulled the cord, forged his way roughly to the door. He jumped out into the dark afternoon, hurtled through the headlights across the sleeted lanes of Prospekt Marksa and stood alone beneath a black awning. A new uneasiness welled in his chest. He didn’t believe the general would let him get away.

The snow began again, gentle as feathers, as Darcy mounted the shallow stone steps and kneeled under the portico. If he’d been tailed, no cars turned into the street behind the cab, not a soul, just the night and the sounds of families at home, someone practising violin, a couple yelling at each other, a crow picking dirt where weeds poked through the snow. A figure emerged from the mist across the frozen garden, the sound of snow crunching, a man with a suitcase who entered the front door.

Darcy skiffled around the side and into the courtyard, couldn’t see anyone, just a hole dug in the cement, dark as an animal trap; an old pneumatic drill leaned on a shed like a stork. Fin’s window above him was dark, the shadow of her pink-checked blanket draped where her hand had been, pressed against the glass. He ducked inside the back stairwell, crept two steps at a time, saw no watcher skulking in the corridor.