David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

No, said Fin. He could see the struggle in her eyes, but she was shaking her head. I can’t take you if Tugrul’s with them. The KGB has never cooperated with the Turks.

It’s not about that. They’ll kill me. Darcy was begging now, talking so fast he could feel himself spit. I wasn’t followed here, I promise, Fin, I wasn’t. I ran from the apartment through the dark to Pyatnitskaya, there was no car behind me, no footsteps. I caught a taxi at a light, got out halfway down Solyanka, then I walked, backtracked, waited in the dark near the church, no one followed me up the alley.

They’re the KGB , she said, it’s not hide-and-seek… I have to go back—alone.

To Jobik? asked Darcy. He clasped her hands over his plate of food. Fin, look at me, look at my face. I’m your brother. If you don’t help me, they’ll kill me. You brought me here. He fell silent, his teeth clenched, as the woman with the pendant appeared with Fin’s unordered food, a plate of herring and bliny, tomatoes and cheese. The woman retreated and the boy watched on from the corner like he was born reading lips, Darcy continued under his breath. They told me you drove Jobik to the Turkish consulate in Melbourne. Again he imagined the Corvair parked under elms alongside the Botanic Gardens. You borrowed my car. My mother’s car.

Fin stared down at her food, poured water from the carafe, then she looked Darcy in the eye for the first time. They killed more than a million, she said. She spoke with a purpose that seemed heightened; it almost didn’t sound like her.

That was 1915 , said Darcy.

It has to be recognised.

Darcy knew it wasn’t that. He felt something deep from their past, an anger that shook in his gut and pitted against the sadness in his chest—she’d been intoxicated by Jobik from the beginning, out of her depth in a way Darcy understood. A force of nature that had given her this acute, anxious radiance, the sheen of her great secret, and sex that was probably as violent as the terror she’d seen and concealed in her veins all these years.

He’s a killer, said Darcy.

Fin nodded. I love him, she said, unapologetically, as if that would explain it. And in a way it did. She pulled restively at the edge of a bliny, her fingers seemed smaller with no nail polish. Like Merran loved our father, she said.

What? asked Darcy. He hated the way she called her mother Merran, as if she was some friend from high school. He watched Fin pocketing bread from the small wicker basket, thinking.

Did you know that when she slept with him, your mother was in hospital, losing that baby?

Darcy cradled his neck as it throbbed again suddenly. He knew his mother had lost a three-day-old baby, but what did this have to do with anything now? Her name was Tilda, he said, the baby’s name was Tilda. That’s all his mother had said. Why are you telling me this?

You always want to know the truth, said Fin, so here it is. My mother flew out from Santa Barbara to be there for yours. That’s what she meant to do. But she ended up in the Frankston Hospital parking lot in the back of your father’s kombi, fucking him. That’s how I was conceived.

You call that love? said Darcy. He couldn’t believe he knew none of this, and he saw the vengeance in Fin’s verdant eyes as she told it, as if misguided conceptions produced difficult lives, but Darcy just thought of his own mother—the cruelty of it took him slightly sideways. He pushed his fingertips in under his eyes. The burring in his ears and the balalaika woman from the other room, malinka, malinka moia! It felt like a kind of madness.

This is what happens in our family, Fin whispered matter-offactly. You got the Mormon, and it fucked you up. Not the gay thing itself, but the way you do it. I got Jobik when I was only fourteen and then I got pregnant and he took me away. And then he got radical but I was in love. She broke off a piece of wax and played with it in the candle flame, moulded it. Maybe it’s a thing that runs in us like a kind of greed, she said. Like a gene. She reached for a chunk of cheese from Darcy’s plate. Eat, she said. You look like a heroin addict.

Darcy looked down at a forkful of the floury potato, thought of himself on the verge of having sex with her in the apartment only days ago, a thing that had brewed between them. He looked over at the wan determination in the green of Fin’s eyes, her lids red with fatigue. I don’t want to be like that, he said.

Like what? she asked bitterly.

Like you, he said.

Fin stood gradually, nodded slightly as if she understood. She pressed a telephone number into Darcy’s hand, a moment’s apology in those blood-grained eyes. Get to Ulli Breffny in the Australian Embassy, she said. She can help you. Darcy registered this as an admission that Fin no longer could, or would.

The cook now stood in the kitchen door, removing his headband as if that meant it was time. I need to get home, said Darcy.

Then do as I tell you, said Fin.

I already did that, he said. He stared at the candle flame, then up at the tiny crystals of ice on a visible edge of the hoar-frosted pane, the scattered scraps of their lives. The annoying sound of the balalaika woman laughing, her friends clinking glasses.

You can dial that number from here, said Fin, they’ll get you home.

Darcy envisaged how Fin’s life would end almost more clearly than he saw his own. It would be all of a sudden. He watched her slip out through the narrow vestibule of empty fruit cartons and stacked chairs, judged by the odd-looking boy. A lump left in Darcy’s throat, the usual sense of chaos in her wake, he wished he felt relief, or a surge of confidence. He sat there in a funnel of cold air as the cook received a ladder that was being folded down from a manhole, arms extending down from the ceiling and Fin going upwards, following the legs of the cook’s checked pants, his big biker boots, climbing up into the roof. Fin’s elfin feet seemed almost large in her Doc Martens, quietly ascending the rungs. The sight of her dematerialising brought back in Darcy a sense of loss that felt like childhood, a sadness that eclipsed all his fear. She’d been trained in disappearance.

May you be the one, he said.

He imagined her route across the icy rooftops, a pathway back to the thrall of Jobik.

Darcy stood, looked again at the phone number, the small distorted piece of wax she’d plied. He knew he had to find the phone, but he’d been overtaken by a kind of shock. He needed the lady with the pendant, to ask her, so he could go home, but as he reached for his daypack he caught a glimpse of shadows outside, through the filmy drapes. At first he thought it was Fin and her minder but he realised the balalaika had stopped, the two suited men were slipping away. The boy had vanished.

Darcy dashed to the kitchen but it was empty, just a pig’s head hanging on hooks and cabbages, leftovers, the sink full of dishes still. He searched frantically for the phone but couldn’t find one, nor a cash register. There was just an unnatural quiet. Pazhalsta? he asked. Please? Words met with hollowness, as though he was the only one left in the world. Out the back door there was no sign of the woman, just a grey-white mist, a panic ripping around in Darcy’s chest and the soundless night. He took a quick look down the side wall for the ferret-faced boy. He was there, staring up from the snow in his discoloured apron beside the rubbish barrel, dead, a cigarette butt stamped into his forehead like a small wilted horn. A wave of cold came over Darcy, a whisper behind him with a quick icy hand that clenched about his face like a vice on his swollen cheek, tight about his lips. He screamed for Fin into nicotine fingers that twisted his sore lips up and shut, forced him down to a kneel in the slush with an arm pulled up behind him. He writhed against the muzzle of a pistol pressed into the burn on his neck, an agony that blacked him out, suffocating on a hand. On a sister lost. Aurelio.