Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

And there ahead Notre Dame, a great leviathan, she thought, turned to stone by some gorgon of even greater dominion.

“Who is Alessandro?” she asked as her father drew up alongside. The Italian had just left them on the riverside walk and was climbing back up the stone stairs to the quay.

“He is a friend, Isabella, whom I pay handsomely.”

“Strange friend.”

“The most reliable sort.”

They walked on. And she fell into something of a pattern: she would wait patiently for Nicholas until she sensed that his effort to make progress was crossing from authentic to performance. Then she would take two or three steps of her own, ignoring him awhile, before turning back to address him once more.

“Besides everything else, why didn’t you tell us you were gay?”

Nicholas did not pause or look up but continued to concentrate on walking.

“I strongly dislike that ridiculous little word. Do you really want to talk about my private life? Is that why you came?”

“No… no. I suppose I just want to… to understand.” She felt herself weakening and so repeated her pattern of going ahead for a while. “I want to understand why you treated Mum so badly.”

He stopped, looked up, and raised his voice, as if the distance were at least double the three strides. “You think, at this late stage, that if I declare that I am conveniently homosexual, this will be a satisfactory excuse.”

“No,” she said. He genuinely did not care what other people thought of him; she would give him that.

“Well, then.” Her father shook his head.

She did not know what else to say on this matter—suddenly there seemed to be nothing to say. Perhaps that was his skill. In any case, she had vowed to Gabriel, to herself, not to argue. So she fell silent, watched her father, waited, walked on, waited.

She had spent yesterday morning with Arkady. She had given him money for the train to the airport. And then she had caught a late-afternoon Eurostar. Gabriel had met her at the Gare du Nord, fresh from his ordeal. Blankets stolen off the beds and thus wrapped against the cold, they had stayed up most of the night, sitting on the tiny balcony of their small hotel room, looking down through iron railings on the Rue des Grands-Degrés, drinking red wine, water, hot tea. Talking.

“As far as the third bench up there.” Nicholas brandished his cane.

“Okay.”

They were side by side for a moment.

Softly he said, “I am very fond of you, Isabella. I admire your intelligence. And your pride.”

She resisted the urge to take his arm.

“The pills, Zeloxitav, that you gave Mum—I looked them up. They have been withdrawn in this country—I mean in England—because they are thought to have side effects.”

“Where? Where did you look them up?”

“On the Internet.”

“I see.” Nicholas dragged up his eyebrows in an expression of disdain.

She went ahead and turned her back on her father to look at the cathedral again. Gabriel had been right: every second was agony.

“It’s astonishing how sharp the flying buttresses look in this light, isn’t it?” he said from behind her. “So exactly defined against the sky.”

“Yes.” How did he know what she was thinking?

Another family was coming toward them. The parents, not much older than she, smiled as they passed, telling their children to take care, take care. Nicholas stood still until they had all gone by. Then on again he went, head down. There was something heroic in his effort, something almost ferocious. It occurred to her that he had taken on a similar air to the one she remembered Max having—that air of irreducibility. Although it was different, of course, with Nicholas, tinged with bitterness and anger—an irreducibility despite everything he was rather than because of everything. But the spirit had traveled—in the blood, in the manner. The genes passed on their codes, like it or not.

They walked on together for another ten minutes, stopping and starting in their odd fashion. They had covered less than fifty yards.

“Here, I have a handkerchief. You can wipe it dry.”

Isabella attended to the bench. She wished she had brought a hat. Her ears were cold.

Nicholas sat down.

She sat beside him, facing the river, her hands curling and uncurling in the slim pockets of her coat. Then, without turning her head, she said, “You probably killed her, you know. The pills were withdrawn because they caused strokes.”

“I loved your mother all my life.”

“You may even have done it deliberately.”

He looked across.

And now she turned in time to see his face attempt to express irritation and then fall blank again, though whether because the effort was too much or because he thought better of signaling enmity, she could not tell.

“But you can also be very foolish sometimes, Isabella. For all your intelligence, you continue to act on your emotions. Whenever the wind is full in your sails and you are careering forward, it’s your feelings powering you. You are wholly at their mercy. Until they subside, you have no choice but to race on. And if the wind changes direction, then you do too. You should learn to tack.”

“I didn’t come all this way to hear you talk rubbish, Dad.”

“Yes you did, I’m afraid.” He managed a smile and turned back to face the river, holding his cane in front of him, his sheepskin gloves perched together on top.

A pleasure boat was passing by.

“She was dying, Izzy, she was dying. And do you want to know something?”

“What?” Isabella raised her chin a fraction, watching the tourists sitting with their faces pressed up against the windows of the boat.

“By the end she was begging me to kill her. Day and night, she implored me to help her die.”

Isabella stiffened.

“That’s what we really talked about for those long three days—death,” Nicholas continued. “Death. That’s all we talked about. It was bloody terrible. The one thing she wanted most in the world was to die while I was still there. ‘To oversee it,’ she said. Everything, Izzy, everything—a game of chess, our trip to the Hermitage, each cup of coffee—everything was to be ‘for the last time.’ She would not do anything—she would not even lie down—unless we pronounced that it was ‘for the last time.’ And I had to go along with it. I thought… I thought if I played along, then I could take her to the Hermitage ‘for the last time,’ and that way I could get her out so that she would see life again, life outside, her favorite paintings, at least, and then maybe she would stop, come to her senses. No more death. But I was wrong. She did not stop; she carried on. ‘If you love me,’ she kept saying, ‘help me.’ She was scared. So scared. ‘If you ever really loved me, help me.’ She begged me when she was angry. She begged me when she was crying. She did not believe… She did not believe there was any point. It was beneath her dignity.” Nicholas raised his cane a millimeter or two and tapped it down after each phrase to lend his words emphasis. “But still I refused. I refused to allow her not to fight on. I arranged for her to see a specialist. I booked myself a flight back to Russia. I was determined that she should live.”

“I do not understand you,” Isabella said quietly.

“And those pills—those pills eased her pain tremendously. Those pills blocked out the suffering of her body. They allowed her to think and to talk again. When you are in serious pain, Isabella, you cannot do either. Those pills gave her back the privilege of her mind. The human privilege. No, Isabella—you do not consciously kill the ones you love. And I was then, I have always been, and I am still very much in love with Masha. She is the other half of what I am.”