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

So then an almost crazed euphoria had seized him. He retuned the radio to the Russian thrash-rock station and smoked thick and deep out the window, looking at the Russian Museum—a strange echo of the White House or vice versa, he did not know. He did not know anything. (He had said this all his life, facetiously, but now at last he knew he really meant it: he did not know anything.) But it didn’t matter. The worst that could happen was that he might die—not so bad. Happens to everyone. If she could do it, so could he.

Five minutes later he had calmed, gathered, reordered, found some Chopin, and lain down. But just as sleep was ushering him away from himself, Avery had called, and he had begun (absurdly) pretending to have a cold as he rehearsed his thanks over and over, insisting on being as well as he could be, in the circumstances. Holding up. In the circumstances. And unthinkingly, mind all over the place again, surfing his mad excitement that Isabella was coming, he had made the arrangement to meet up with Avery at eleven-fifteen in the lobby bar.

So next, feeling freshly vulnerable, he had called Connie… And had been so touched and taken aback at her sheer human kindness and wisdom and perception and support (when really all he had ever been to her was a pointless heart-clawing complication) that he had begun to choke again—not this time for his mother, but because he couldn’t believe that Connie could be so good to him, couldn’t believe that he knew a woman this selfless and compassionate. And soft-spoken Connie had talked him all the way back to steadiness, so that when he hung up he had felt able to call Lina again and thank her for everything and tell her, in a stable voice, that he was okay and the hotel was such a huge relief and that Isabella was due and that the funeral was already being organized, and that they hoped for this Friday, and that if it went ahead on Friday, then she, Lina, need not be crazy and fly out because he’d be home Saturday, in three days, since there was no way he was going to hang around, and had she got her visa back yet? And yes, he was okay. And speak again tonight, before Isabella arrived.

After that he had taken a bubble bath, listening to the news on BBC World—wars, famine, armies on the march, and then all of a sudden the bomb, and hell seemed loosed again, outside, inside, everywhere—and so he’d climbed out to see the pictures, and then, exhausted, distraught, appalled to the point of epilepsy, he’d turned everything off and tried once more to sleep. And that’s when he had fallen to thinking that perhaps his mother’s death had begun directing his only-just-subconscious in a new and unwanted direction… that each reluctant step he was being forced to take away from her as a living reality was in fact leading him back toward the shadow of his father. But not to sleep. Not to sleep. Rather, it was as though grief’s corrosion had somehow rusted over his eyes so that he couldn’t open them even had he so wished.

“Hey, Gabs, you awake?”

He started, catching his knee on the table.

“Is—Jesus. You scared the shit out of me.”

He stood up, drowsy and confused.

And so they faced each other, standing in the selfsame square meter of the swarming planet at last, the selfsame genes, the selfsame history: Isabella with her hair longer than usual, curling a little against the pale cream of her scarf; Gabriel with his shorter than when they had been together last, clean-shaven and thinner too than he had been for a long time.

“I made it,” she said.

“Jesus, Is, I think I passed out… I thought you had… I thought something…” But he could not marshal words to sense.

“I’m sorry. Security stuff.” Isabella speaking softly, her usual hint of subversive humor banished entirely. “How you doing?”

“I’m actually okay—I’m just… I’m just really tired. I should have slept this afternoon. But…”

And for the first time in their adult lives, brother and sister embraced. There was no thinking; it was pure compulsion—too quick for the ruthless intellectual habits of their nature, their nurture. But when they parted, neither was visibly distressed—Gabriel’s dark eyes ever unguarded, Isabella’s slightly smiling—as if they had silently agreed that for tonight at least, process and organization would be their joint enterprise. As if tears were for people much less tired than they. As if all that might have to be said could wait.

Instead, Isabella smiled, openly and freely, as she did only in her brother’s company.

“Sorry, Gabs. My phone doesn’t work, or I would have called you again. There was a security nightmare in Berlin. Some complete wankers on a stag jerking around. And we lost another hour. But I couldn’t face going back to buy another phone card. I just wanted to get here.”

“You seen the news?” he asked.

“Yeah, it was on the TV while we were waiting to board. And Pulkovo was like an army barracks when we landed. It’s awful—weird.”

The nature of death itself, or death’s meaning, had somehow changed.

“The Russian TV has stopped showing it,” Gabriel said. “Nobody knows who is in charge or what is really going on.” He shrugged heavily, and Isabella saw how extraordinarily tired her brother was. There were broken blood vessels in his eyes. And his face was blank. He really was exhausted. She had wondered how she would behave when she arrived. Now she knew: a reaction to her brother’s evident wretchedness—she was going to be all competence and coping.

They were still standing. Isabella glanced around. “Okay, well, I think I’m going to grab a shower and then let’s get—”

“Julian Avery is coming over,” Gabriel interrupted, still a little frenetic but seemingly unable to moderate anything. “Now, in fact—in five minutes. We’re meeting him here. Sorry, but I wanted to—”

“The guy from the consulate?”

“Yes. They’ve been—they’ve been brilliant. I mean, Christ knows what would have—”

“Don’t.” Isabella bit her lip. “Shit. I think that’s him.”

Isabella looked behind her. A short, surreptitiously overweight man was crossing the lobby toward the bar. Julian Avery moved with surprising alacrity, his walk a double-time waddle. He had not seen them.

Isabella drew a deep breath. “Okay. Right. So…” She hooked her hair behind her ear. “Shall we all get some coffee, then?”

“Good idea.” Gabriel nodded. “I was wondering what to drink.”

“Hang on a sec.” She put down her bag on one of the chairs.

Gabriel spoke softly. “They are being very can-do. Because of Grandpa Max, I suppose. God knows how they have even heard of him. It must be fifteen years since he left.”

“They remember everything in the Foreign Office.” Isabella took off her scarf. “They will have known exactly who Mum was too, since she had a British passport. You know how it is. They always know everything, somehow. Okay, let’s go.”

Avery had begun flicking through his briefcase, which he had propped on a stool. Now he stood smartly to greet them. He wore a blue, round-necked, fine merino wool sweater and beige slacks, and Isabella guessed his age as late thirties, but he had one of those fair English faces that appear to change hardly at all between the loss of freckles and fifty-five. His features were genially unremarkable, she thought, save for his hair, which was wound in the tightest possible curls, and his unusually large ears.

She introduced herself, her name sounding strange as she said it out loud. She felt suddenly very British, the granddaughter of Maximilian Glover.

“Julian.” He took her offered hand with a demure nod. “I can’t say how sorry we all are. My condolences. It must be a very difficult time.”