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

She said his name. First in a question, then almost a shout, then in her most tender voice. “Gabriel? Gabriel. Gabriel.” But he was too far gone to turn or to speak, in a convulsion of sleep and starts, shivering and staring and stiff in all his bones, and long past answering even if he had wanted to. So then she tried to pick him up, as if he were still a baby, and somehow she managed to lift his legs enough to get them outside the car and swivel him around and raise him toward her, all this while saying his name over and over. But one step backward and his knees gave way and she had to catch him. His hands were frozen but his forehead was searing hot.

“If you think you can do it, then do it,” Henry said.

“I can do it.” Arkady was hunched on the piano stool, his back to the keyboard.

“But I don’t like it.”

“I do not ask if you like it. You tell me that she has family. This is how we find them.”

“How do you know there is nobody there?”

“I know.”

Henry met the other’s eyes but found no reciprocity and so sent a scrawny hand back through the point of his widow’s peak. It was Wednesday, early evening, and this was the first time Arkady had said anything other than monosyllables all day.

“I can go and see Zoya. Maybe she will give us something—an address—if I go and see her in person.”

“Zoya does not care one fuck about it.”

“I could pay her.”

Arkady did not respond.

Henry raised himself from the sofa and walked toward the window. Though he kept it out of his voice, he had little enthusiasm and less money for this idea. (He must find some new pupils. Build it up all over again. How had he let his teaching shrivel so far?) Things were still okay: he had just over three thousand dollars in cash, plus a few more scraps and scrapings in his old English bank account. He had paid Grisha for his regular score—though, admittedly, he had not settled for the extra so enthusiastically advanced and Arkady was right: he should not have accepted it. He planned to skip a pickup and use the oversupply for the two weeks after his regular ran out. Still, he knew he should sort things out soon if he wished to avoid falling into Leary’s debt, through contrivance or otherwise. He probably should have gone down to Stavischek a few days ago. But too much of immediate importance had been happening: the canceling of the weekend’s follow-up gigs and Arkady’s subsequent silence; a delegation of Mongeese (minus Yevgeny, who perhaps knew better) arriving in the morning and nobody getting anything out of Arkady; Sergei himself turning up at lunchtime, waving a newspaper review (to no effect) and then weighing in with various threats and bribes and curses until Arkady finally manhandled the fat manager bodily out the door while Sergei, suddenly afraid, started bleating and moaning until he was safely outside, whereupon he began shouting and swearing again—that he would get his money back on the lost takings and that Arkady would never play again in Petersburg. So Henry had contented himself with sending Grisha a text message. He’d be down with the money for the rest on Friday. Dear Lord, he loathed it that the wretched creature was so much in his life. When those moments of clarity came, it was Grisha’s face that spoke most powerfully for coming off.

Henry turned back to face the room. “I could pay Zoya to give us whatever she has on file relating… relating to Maria Glover.” The name sounded horribly grating as he uttered it.

Arkady took off his cap, leaned forward, and balled it in his fist. “Zoya is bullshit. You leave message and message. She never phones you. She knows nothing. Because if she knows something, then she calls you back so you know she is ready to be paid again. This is how it works.” He raised his eyes and spoke through the fall of his hair. “She knows nothing. If you see her yourself and you pay her, you will only find this afterward. Forget Zoya. She is Gypsy scum. You should have made friends with the real bitch when you had your tongue in her ass.”

Henry sat back down on the sofa and seemed to fold in on himself like a bat trapped in a room too long in daylight. He did not know what to do, or how best to be, or help, or anything. And he was becoming agitated. It was past his time.

“This term is almost certainly paid,” he began again. “Therefore I reckon we need… we need twenty thousand dollars, more or less, to get you through to the end of the third year.”

Arkady was staring at the backs of his hands, which were still clasped around his cap.

So Henry continued. “Twenty thousand may not be so much to them. Or it may be that she has left it to you in her will. We should hold on. She’s only been dead a day or two. We should see what comes next. Her relatives might get in touch any time now.” His words were sounding prissy even to his own ear. He pressed on hastily. “We have until Christmas—assuming the money is settled for this term. We should wait for news.”

Arkady straightened up, the better to scoff. “We wait for nothing. We do something. Or we sit here playing with our balls like fuck-monkeys.” He turned around to face the keyboard. Slowly he shut the lid. “This family, they do not know me. Nobody knows me.”

Henry had never felt Arkady’s anger hang so full and naked in the room; the air seemed to be choked with emotional cordite. A power of projection he had not properly understood until now.

Arkady addressed the score open on the stand. “I do not continue if I cannot finish. I do not waste my time and my life anymore. It’s bullshit.” He stood up. “We write a letter to say I cannot play for a month. I hurt my hand. I will go only to theory lessons. And in the meantime, we do what we must do. This way we find out what there is to know. We get information. Then we decide. I am tired of wasting time.”

“But you can still play. You can still practice. Why do we need to pretend that you—”

“No.”

Henry’s right hand patted rapidly but softly at his knee. There was no point arguing anymore—about Arkady’s hand, about the plan, about anything; it was like disputing with the weather. “Okay. If you can do it without risk, then do it.”

Arkady went into his bedroom, then reappeared a moment later wearing his greatcoat. “I have to find a friend of mine and see what he is doing tomorrow night. A man called Oleg maybe will phone your mobile. Take his number.”

Henry nodded, hand still patting, conscious that the credit on his phone was running out. “You coming back before? Or shall I meet you at the ground?”

They had a long-standing plan to watch Zenit Petersburg play. Arkady, Yevgeny, and a few others were going.

“Meet there.” Arkady picked up and pocketed the few ruble notes that Henry had put down on top of the piano and then turned on his heel.

Henry listened to the Russian leave, feeling the sudden amplification of self-recrimination now that he was alone. He had no tolerance for his own emotions. He simply could not endure them, their terrible power to consume him. He rose quickly, passed into his bedroom, and closed the door.

“Says it’s beef on the packs, Is, but we did an undercover defrost and it’s not.”

“What, then?”

“Larry says it could be some kind of rat from Peru. They got big fuckers out there.”

“Wish I had taken a year off. Sounds brilliant.”

“We’re going to try and write about it for the local paper.”

“Thought you wanted to be a theater director, not a journalist.”

“Larry’s secretly filming it—for a documentary. I’m telling him what to film. How is it going at college? What’s it—”