David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

His key was still in the pocket of Aurelio’s coat, but the apartment was unlocked, the door not quite closed and Darcy felt suddenly afraid to enter, friends of Fin’s or friends of the general’s. Aware of the tremor in his arms, he edged the door open a hair. Fin’s umbrella in the entry hall, her quilted coat gone from its hook, the place still warm. Either Fin had been back and left in a hurry or others had been here, ransacking, books strewn about the rug, drawers upturned from the kitchen, utensils everywhere, the donkey painting tossed from the easel. Silence except for the windowpanes rattling, a television downstairs. He threw Aurelio’s coat over the heating pipes to dry, stood before the open fridge, the only light. A stump of dried-up salami and Solovyov’s Meaning of Love with a note paperclipped to it.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Forgive me.

The donkey painting for you. May you be the one. Fin xx

P.S. Wretchedness and Inspiration are Inseparable.

He stared at it, unmoved. The postscript, did she think that was some parting gift? The sort of thing she’d paint on a peasant dress, but the dresses were gone and he wasn’t sure if forgiveness was in him. He pulled angry chunks of salami with his teeth, crouched among books, squinting at covers in the faded light: The Soviet Achievement , Quotations from Mao Tsetung , The Brothers Karamazov , no Fodor’s. He rifled through his duffel bag—clothes and drawing pads, charcoals, vitamins, a map of Prague. Without the restaurant he only had his roll of money, nowhere left to go. He searched busily under the couch, tried to remember. The list of restaurants, he’d checked it before he slept, the dog here with him, drinking milk then ruefully climbing up beside him to sleep. The dog and now Fodor’s gone.

He stared out into the dark afternoon, separated from everything he knew. Svetlana’s apartment closed up with metal shutters.

Down below, an old woman under the courtyard lamp, the digging beside her almost archaeological. Darcy thought how Jobik and his Dashnaks must have channels, sympathisers, Fin in the back of some Armenian-owned lorry on the road to Yerevan, to a southern border, the Caspian Sea. Darcy left here as a sacrifice.

He thought he heard movement in her bedroom, stopped chewing and listened, but all he made out was the sound of his own breathing, then footfalls. Someone in the flat above. He stared up into the shadows where the ceiling fluted, a sense of being toyed with still.

He grabbed Fin’s Opinel knife from an upended drawer and quietly closed himself in her windowless room where he could turn on the light. The suet smell, lard containers, foil, art scraps, the ironing table on its side, empty wire hangers in the wardrobe, her clothes all over the floor. He felt light-headed, unclear if she’d been here last, or if the general’s men had come through after, if he was being watched from minute cameras. He tested the phone line; dead, as it had been since he’d arrived. Fin’s travelling clock said 4.04 pm. Time felt transitory, vanishing about him as if his life were being stitched shut.

In the bathroom, he looked at his face in the mirror, dabbing his cheek and lip with a damp cloth. The red welt of the general’s slap had swollen almost in the shape of fingers; pus scabbed damply on the burn on his neck. As he pressed the cloth against it, it stung as if hot cigarette embers still lay in his skin. He cupped his hands beneath the tap and kept drinking and drinking, the rusty taste like nectar. Then, as he quickly wiped his crotch and underarms, he noticed the book down in the corner by the lavatory, the Fodor’s cover with its scattered domes of St Basil’s. She’d left it for him, casual as toilet reading.

Frantically, he flipped to the section on the restaurants of Moscow, the bottom of the second page: The Jaguaroff. Traditional Russian Cuisine. In a lane off Solyanka, on the east side of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker. He ripped out the page and headed back into the sitting room, reread her note. The donkey painting for you. May you be the one. He grabbed her canvas from where it had been flung against the wall and, in the dim light from the fridge, he lay it on the counter. The two sisters and babies in soft watercolours, the suckling donkey. He remembered Fin’s story, the sister syphillitic, how only one child would survive.

Sunday, 4.15 pm

Darcy watched out the taxi window on Ulitsa Osipenko, hazy car-lit air, the iced petroleum smell of the night. At a red light, he swung around, gazed into the snow-laden street behind him, the muffled beams of light, the poor visibility a good thing, he thought. An old man on a bicycle creeping along the gutter against the traffic, a red star on the sleeve of his coat as he passed, pigeons in a cage on the handlebars. Darcy recalled Jobik squeaking past in the cold, that night outside the jazz concert. The Pimpernel, he thought, or Papillon. Anyone could be anyone.

He glanced back up. Solyanka Ulitsa, he said, a reminder, his tone too anxious, he knew. He explored the clean-shaven back of this taxi driver’s head, afraid of being picked up by him especially. Darcy felt Fin’s knife in his boot, its fold-out hawk-bill blade; he’d never believed he had the potential for violence but the act of the general upon him had changed something. Could he slit a taxi driver across his Adam’s apple, like Jobik could?

Darcy left the painting behind on the counter, sneaked out through the shadows and down the unlit side street, then running for blocks, panting, he found this cab all the way over on Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa. It couldn’t have known he was coming. He stared out, thirsty again already. His chest so tight it felt like someone was chiselling at it, wondering if he shouldn’t have chosen GUM direct from the funeral, the maze of arcades and cross-walks, up and down stairs and escalators. Darcy knew he mustn’t keep searching out the back window, the silent driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, so he looked back down at the restaurant description in his lap. He’d read it three times already. No mention of Armenians or terrorists, just a throwaway reference to some fare from southern provinces . He stared back out into the grizzling night, trying to keep air in his lungs, as the cab crossed the drainage canal. A tug with sidelights searched the banks and bluestone drains, cutting through the shelves of ice. The gates of the old heated pool that Fin said was once the site of St John the Divine back when God was allowed .

Darcy had St Nicholas the Wonder Worker circled in biro on his plastic map, described elsewhere in Fodor’s as a small redbelfried church. Maybe it would be open, he could hide in there among the pews, pray for his own survival.

Sporadic lights from high metal poles shed their dim bluish sprays on the pavement. He could get out and walk among the glazed-eyed men moving home through the Kitay Gorod with their vinyl briefcases, drift among the heavyset women with their justin-case bags, see if he was being followed.

Stoitye , he said, thrusting too many notes at the driver, abandoning the taxi mid-block. He walked fast without looking back, paused in a windblown doorway, then walked on again until he noticed the dark portal of a church, sooner than he’d imagined. He couldn’t be sure the belfry was red, but a narrow cobbled lane branched off, unmarked, between two plain stone buildings. The church was locked. Darcy knocked timidly on the wood but God wasn’t home, not even his servants answered, so he leaned against the door, inhaling through his scarf, his fissured lips, the wind whining under the dark cover of eaves. You’re a beautiful child of God , said the missionary. Perhaps, thought Darcy, but a child nonetheless. And yet the need in the general’s eyes made the missionary seem like a first love, innocent as the Mount Eliza days.