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

“It was lonely,” he said after a moment.

“Hmmm… I bet your father wasn’t very good at expressing his emotions.” Alessandro’s face betrayed thought. “And you know, probably that’s why you don’t like expressing emotions. No, seriously. You were not allowed to feel, so you learned to touch. These things”—he rested his chin on his cupped hands—“they so get passed on.”

Nicholas smiled tightly. Perhaps he had Alessandro wrong after all. Perhaps there was an intelligence in there, lurking beneath all the crème caramel.

“I have no idea,” he said. “We hardly spoke to each other for the last thirty years of his life.”

“Anyway,” Alessandro continued, as if it were all part of the same thought, “I still think being an art dealer is pretty glamorous and enigmatic, and your father made a lot of money in his business, didn’t he?”

“Business.” Nicholas finished his wine. “What exactly is business?”

“You told me he even conned the president into swapping a picture. Buy them as bargains, sell them as treasures.” Alessandro tilted his head first one way, then the other. “Equals make a tidy profit.”

“The general secretary, not the president. And not the general secretary himself, but his dealer.” Nicholas sighed. “Yes, he did, Alessandro. He made a lot of money shafting everyone. He understood corruption intimately and it was the one thing he was very good at. Probably because he believed in absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not even art. A curious sort of freedom. But he must have surprised even the Russians with his venality.” Nicholas looked directly at his lover again. “Let’s go to Berthillons and get an ice cream. I want to walk. I’m tired of sitting. And you are not really listening.”

But Nicholas was wrong. Alessandro had been listening as never before. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, this was the most interesting conversation they had ever had—the first emotional confidences that Nicholas had shared. And the first real hint, therefore, that he, Alessandro, might have acquired some purchase on what was going on inside. (The display of feelings: very important.) The only problem being, Alessandro reckoned, as he now stood up and squeezed the side of his tongue hard between his perfect teeth, that the moment to ask for an allowance had gone. Maybe later, though—maybe on the walk down the quay. Or maybe tonight was a bad time altogether. Hard to judge. Maybe all of this was because Nicholas was—would you believe it?—upset. Now that was a new one.

The two men, thinking very different thoughts about their very different lives, walked side by side until they came to the Quai de Bourbon, where they turned left, homeward, once more along the river’s edge. And now, oblivious of the covert impatience in Alessandro’s self-conscious step, Nicholas began to linger a little, looking out across the river toward the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville and the lights of the city rising red beyond. He had started feeling old again. His knees hurt with pain he dared not have confirmed or named, and sixty-two— sixty-two —sixty-two felt… plain elderly. Neither wiser nor mellowed nor yet magnanimous, but merely elderly. Infirm, unwise, uncertain—as though he personally had seen the world repeat the same mistakes too often, leaving him with no intelligent choice but faithlessness and nothing to do about it but await the onset of failing faculties.

They were approaching their entrance when he stopped and exhaled slowly. “You go on in, Alessandro. I’m going to wait out here. I want to… I think I want to watch the river or go for a walk or something.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

Alessandro nibbled at his cone. “What do you—”

“Or go out, if you want to. Out to a club, I mean.” Nicholas raised his hand to his lover’s back, aware (with the slim fraction of his mind that he allowed to think about it) that Alessandro would be secretly relieved by this sanction but would have to pretend not to have had the thought. A thin grimalkin disappeared beneath a fat black car. To hasten the process, Nicholas turned to face Alessandro and found his most conciliatory tone. “I’m serious. I’m no good tonight. Go. Phone your friends and have fun. I don’t mind. Really.”

Alessandro was now at a loss. His earlier reading of the evening was melting with the last of his ice cream. Yet still he was beset by the urgent need to achieve his goal while everything remained possible. He bent his head childishly toward Nicholas’s chest, a gesture executed for no better reason than to buy time in which to decide whether or not now was the moment to ask. Oh God. No. No—discretion was the better part of, he thought, best to leave it. Best not to risk it. And so why not? Why not go out? After all, maybe Nicholas actually wanted to be alone. A bonus evening! But best not to get back too late and better make sure nothing happened. God, the old general might even cry in the night, and he’d really better be there for that.

Nicholas fed him what was left of his own ice cream, wanting the whole charade over quickly, wanting to save Alessandro even the necessity of saying anything else, wanting desperately to be alone. “There’s a cab coming. I’ll stop it for you. Here, take…” He reached for his wallet.

Alessandro would have liked to have changed but realized that the delay would seriously annoy Nicholas. He patted his pocket, seeking the reassurance of his mobile phone. “Are you sure, Nicholas? I mean, I am happy—I had no plans to—”

“I’m probably going to walk… down to Notre Dame or something.”

“That will be nice. Clear your head.”

“Yes.”

Alessandro accepted the money with studied casualness.

The cab pulled up and wallowed by the curb.

“I won’t be late.” Alessandro kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them on Nicholas’s cheek.

And Nicholas turned back to the river.

The Seine was as dark as history itself, and only the faint sound of its lapping at the embankment below gave the lie to its seeming stillness. Nicholas leaned forward onto the stone wall so that he could see down to the narrow bank-side path. The trees had been pollarded that afternoon and the night air was scented still with sap. He raised his eyes. The severed branches like great misshapen agonized limbs. And above them, the brightest of the stars—names he had learned and forgotten, learned and forgotten—needling their pinpoint antiquity through the city sky. Paris would be cooler tonight. But he knew he would not be able to sleep, and he knew that neither whisky nor coupling would help. For the first time in more than thirty years, Nicholas wanted the company of his blood—not the amicable converse of friendship, not the parley of a lover, but the marrow-talk of kin and consanguinity.

But there was no kin anymore. No kin save for Gabriel and Isabella, and neither, he knew well, could be persuaded to say so much as a single word to him, even were he to pay them in sweat or tears—not in letter, not by telephone, and never again in person. And he could not blame them. He had never once tried to talk to them.

Though wasn’t it true that he had not been allowed to talk to them? Not about anything that really counted. Masha had strictly forbidden it. And she was their great protectress. (In some way, he thought, her Russian pride actually measured its strength by keeping secrets.) Then again, he could never quite be trusted. Whatever the cause—fatally distracted, indifferent, drunk, indolent, dissipated, dissolute, or preoccupied, he knew not what—the fact was that he had surrendered all familial sway to her in return for his savage freedom. Ah, grandest of all ironies: that she had been the one to care for them—their minds, their health, their hearts, the well-being of their twin susceptible souls. And thank God, for that was perhaps the only noble act in his entire life that he had managed to stand by. But still, perhaps a call… No. It was too late, and there was no way to begin. Profoundly, Gabriel and Isabella did not understand him, did not know him—neither as a man nor as a human being. Did not even know who he really was. After all these years… Christ, the bloody madness of it all. The bloody mess.