David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

Ulli de Breffny had held onto the telegram from Constantinople, the missive of death marches across Anatolia. Whole villages of peasants herded into the sea. Words that still felt like the truth. She told Darcy about a commission on Armenia meeting in Geneva in June, assured him that she could arrange for delivery, and as the jet taxied to the runway, Darcy imagined the document traded for secrets, his brushes against history, and again he prayed for the moment the wheels would lift from the earth.

As the plane commenced its clatter down the runway, trembling in its overheads, Darcy held onto the seat arms and his ticket receipt shook in his lap. Aeroflot from Moscow to New Delhi, a Qantas connection through Singapore and back to Tullamarine. Twenty-nine hours, no evidence of any price or payment; the ticket and passport arranged overnight.

Ulli de Breffny had heard the general might end up blind in at least one eye and then she almost smiled. Armenians, she said, were found dead near their dacha, three shot and one found frozen. The woman, she heard, was fast and light, had tried to skim across the river ice but disappeared. Darcy sensed he was being humoured with the possibility but all he felt was emptied. As Ulli de Breffney bade him goodbye, she assured him he’d be officially notified. She shook Darcy’s unsteady hand and held it warmly, met his eyes. Our arms are wide, she said, and he wasn’t sure if it was more than a form of embrace, if it clothed an invitation, or merely a warning that he’d be within their reach. He didn’t ask whose arms they were, he was just grateful to be boarding a plane.

As the plane rattled up through steep slides of vertical mist, Darcy didn’t search for a glimpse of the Kremlin, the gold-domed churches, or the oxbows of the river. They were all enshrouded in a caul of fog. The city enveloped itself in its greyness like the culture had, concealing itself from itself, just listening. He imagined his mother’s frenetic telephone calls to Foreign Affairs, her barking whisky voice. Moisture streamed across the cold oval window and it reminded him of tears. That he’d left Australia without even telling her. He pressed his face against the icy glass and thought of the frosted window of the train that he’d come in on, the money belt against him. He’d never been truly innocent, not since the missionary and maybe not even then, and now he’d blinded a man who only deserved to live disfigured, but Darcy knew he’d also scarred himself.

Down to the right, a shelf of snow moved, an iceberg separating. It must have been a kilometre long, or perhaps it was just in the shifting of clouds, but he felt the fissure within him, the separation of past. He remembered the time he lay with Fin in the gully as a boy, looking up at the sun through the branches, and then he remembered Aurelio, only days ago, handsome, walking ahead through the snow to the dacha. He gazed out into the ballet of clouds as if there might be a song to be learned but the aftertaste felt bitter now. He felt changed, like a soldier returning from war to pretend things weren’t all twisted, heading south and east to India, cloud mountains concealing the endless steppe.

Ulli de Breffny had bought him a pencil and sketch pad from the airport shop and now he felt the pencil in his hand, its CCCP insignia, the hands he’d scrubbed for twenty minutes. He didn’t draw, he wrote: What do you want now, Darcy Bright?

He began carving shapes on the paper. He craved to feel pure again, like the juggling boy, to paint for the pleasure of others, not to skulk in parks and putrid places, not to use sex to medicate memories. For some reason, he thought about butterflies, making love without facing each other, but without agenda or intrigue. Fin once told him that butterflies carried the souls of the dead. He imagined her now, floating up on thistledown wings; but it had been far from butterfly season. His hands shook unevenly and he tried not to think of her dead in the snow, or Aurelio, or the general, a blade in his eye like some horrendous miracle.

He tried to find a new space in his mind, an opening. I want to be able to love , he wrote haltingly, differently . But a love of a kind unknown to him seemed far off, someone who might wake up at his side and speak of simple things, be honest. Darcy looked back out through the streaming rivulets, above the cloud reefs, where painterly light skipped along the crests of cirrus. The footprints of this winter would trudge deep around inside him, wake him up on summer nights, but he could no longer lose himself. He could return to the College of Fine Arts with a new name, paint in watercolours—he’d paint a fierce young woman, running across the river ice, a small girl alone on a gravel drive wearing an African print dress, a dark-eyed boy on the steps with his mother in Havana, a colourful dress of her own, a juggling boy, rare butterflies, dawn. He’d paint eyes full of blood. Outside sky and earth joined as patterned wings, and Darcy felt hinged there between them, between a boundless, deathless infinity and the transient mortality below.

In the US, to Marion Rosenberg for reading and reading and for her unwavering support from day one. To my Los Angeles writing posse: particularly Janet Fitch, Rita Williams and Julianne Cohen for their ongoing input and guidance, and to Mark Sarvas for his friendship and literary know-how. To Jane Smiley for her encouragement, wisdom and humour, and to Les Plesko, who helped me find a voice in the first place. To Elaine Markson for embracing this book with such unflinching enthusiasm and to my friends at Macadam Cage—Scott Allen, Julie Burton, Kate Nitze, Melanie Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Khristina Wenzinger, and especially David Poindexter for his contagious commitment to literary fiction. Sincerest thanks also to Don Hunt, Lisalee Wells and all the folks at Fulbright for their enduring support.

In France, to Madame Felix Brunau and the Cite International Des Arts where this story first found its legs; to Penelope and Jobic Le Masson and the Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore for a home away from home; also to Marie Gaulis, George Walker Torres and Christel Paris, and to Jenelle Sanna and Greg Simpson and their lovely house in Barbizon.

In Australia, to the legacy and indelible memory of my mother Judy, my father Derry and to all who help on the farm at Tooradin, to my dear sister Sally and brother Peter, his wife Peta, and to Tristan, Josephine and Tim at Jeetho. To my aunt Margaret Street, Clare Gray and the burnished Hugo inspiration, Anna Sharpley (lest we forget!) and Wendy Abey, and also to Jane Turner for her friendship and for inviting me to Moscow in 1984. My deepest gratitude to the Literature Fund of the Australia Council and the Nancy Keesing Fellowship; to Jane Palfreyman at Allen & Unwin, who saw this book for what it might become; and to Barbara Mobbs who wasn’t afraid to represent it. Also to Ali Lavau and Alexandra Nahlous for their insightful and meticulous edit.

To my friend Caz Love for her counsel, spirit and art, and also to Jean Wingis, Peter Paige, Jane Nunez, Marta Ross and all those who help me find my way—you know who you are.

‘Elegantly written and grippingly suspenseful, David Francis’s Stray Dog Winter takes readers right into the heart of Graham Green country.’

‘David Francis has a surgeon’s cold eye and a poet’s heart; his prose is powerful, masterful.’