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

Arkady’s business: he wanted names and addresses… He wanted contact with her family. And through contact, he wanted money. Not just a few thousand stolen rubles but the kind of money that would change his life—money to pay for the next two years at the conservatory, of course, but in his fiercest imaginings more than that: money to pay for a decent apartment, a proper piano, travel in Europe, flights to the U.S., big hotels in which he could fuck and sleep until four in the afternoon after all the hundred concerts he would play… The kind of bank-account-swelling money that the shit lice at the British and American embassies would consider enough to make him “safe” for visa approval. No more of this bullshit existence. He wanted the full life that was rightfully his. He wanted the life that she had denied him, the life to which he was entitled. Legitimacy. Everything or nothing.

With the curtains closed, there was no sense working in the dark. So he crossed over to the desk and bent to follow the flex of the lamp, his gloved fingers seeking the switch. His eyes had grown used to the dimness and he blinked a little when the room suddenly declared itself in detail: paintings of landscapes and a portrait of someone he did not recognize on the wall, a chandelier, thick rugs on the floor, another lamp by the chaise longue, a stack of English-language magazines on a low table he had not seen between the chairs, an expensive stereo with twin freestanding speakers in front of the wall opposite, which was, he now saw, one vast bookcase, crammed and bursting.

He turned back to the desk. The surface was empty save for a map of the Moscow underground and some lens-cleaning solution. There were no photographs… Another car was passing along the embankment. He stiffened, listening. But the engine note did not change; it was not stopping. He breathed in sharply through narrowed nostrils. He opened the drawers. They were all empty. He slid them shut, stood back, and looked around. A single courier’s shipping carton lay on the floor by the side of the desk. The label simply displayed the number six. He took off the lid: newspaper clippings, bills, official-seeming letters in English that he did not understand, but no personal correspondence. Obviously somebody had already been here and started clearing up.

He walked around the room, treading softly in his soft shoes, searching more closely. A small wooden box on the bookshelf caught his eye, but inside was only an expensive-looking mahjong set. Fuck. It felt like she lived here alone. Was she divorced? Was her husband dead? It didn’t matter: someone close to her had been here… And whoever it was—child, husband, friend—they would see that hole in the window when they came back. So now he would have to take something valuable to obscure the real reason for his coming. Thanks to that fat swine-fucker. Because if they thought that the burglar had come not for money but some other reason, they would be alerted, and when he later turned up asking for a new life, they might just work out how he had come to find them. He could say that she had given him their names and addresses, of course, but he could not afford for them to think of him as even possibly suspicious.

The heating pipes stirred again, but this time he paid them no heed. Frustrated, he began to go through the books, hoping for a handwritten name inside one of the covers—a gift which the giver had signed. He had a dangerous urge to find some music—to play something as loud as the stereo would go. He bit his tongue. He cursed Oleg again. He’d try the other rooms, but chances were that boxes one to five were already gone. All he needed was names and addresses. What about the kitchen or, better, the bedroom? Or—or maybe the photographs… for names, at least.

The light in the entrance hall did not work, so he had only the residual illumination thrown through the doorway from the main room to see by. But it was enough. He had not realized the extent of the display before. The entire wall was covered—a big map, pictures of dancers, icons, the Romanov family, a clown, other figures from history he did not recognize; but it was the photographs nearer the light that drew him, held him.

He knew nothing of the people framed there—nothing save that which he now saw for the first time. His eye devoured these pictures: a family, the moments of a family’s story captured. He stood close in, his head turning this way and that, transfixed. He snagged again on the faces of two children in school uniforms—a boy and a girl, no more than seven or eight, both smiling, the girl in front. They looked strikingly similar. Next, a photograph of four people taken, presumably, on holiday—this time the boy and girl were awkward and not smiling, thirteen or fourteen, and there was a thin man with fair hair and tight lips staring back into the lens, and her …

He stood back again. Here it all was on the wall in front of him: the life he did not have, the child he had never been, the story that was no this… Here was the boy in a university gown. Here, the girl in a red bridesmaid dress—long dark hair, pretty. And again the four of them, outside a big old house, the boy and girl grown up, none of them smiling this time, the thin man in jeans looking away, a sports car. Here was the thin man talking into a telephone—older this time, smoking, white hair. Here she was with the thin man when they were both very young, sitting somewhere on a bench, with a pram. Here the boy with his head sticking out of a tent. And here a woman about his own age, with short black hair, standing facing the photographer with the sun in her eyes and her arms spread out on railings behind her—it was the same girl as in the other pictures. And behind her—that was New York. His eyes swarmed the wall. He read the words below the pictures—Nicholas, Gabriel, and Isabella. Names. At Cambridge. Down in Devon. Highgate. In the study. Paris. Camping in the Black Forest. Moscow. New York. He leaned in again. And his eye settled on the smallest photograph of all, just off the center of the display: a portrait of… of his mother —proud, clear-eyed, and untroubled in some uniform he did not know from the old times. She was young: twenty, twenty-one. More than a decade younger than he was now. The thought whispered in his blood: she may already have been carrying him inside her. His mother. His mother. He had never allowed those syllables to form, even in the deepest caves of his most secret mind. He turned away.

His throat felt tight and he wanted to screw up his face for some reason. He… He… He needed something to steal. Down here must be her bedroom. Where was the light switch? This place was so dark. He had the names. Fuck the addresses. Maybe there was some jewelry in here. Take something valuable. And get out of this terrible place… He found the switch and the light came blazing on, horribly bright, and he forced himself to take another step into the room, squinting a little, and then… And then he saw her piano.

But even now, standing stranded, motionless in the bedroom of the mother he had never known, Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov did not recognize the prickling in the corners of his eyes for what it really was. Like everybody else in the thinking world, he assumed he was going mad.

They walked behind the funeral cart in a deep and painful rut of self-consciousness. The wind was harrying in from the east, causing the clouds to race and the sun to come and go and come and go as if dashing from one to the next. Neither Gabriel nor Isabella could absorb or respond to or even quite believe what was happening in front of their eyes. Instead they made their way—reeling, disciplined, half apologetic, half aghast—like two intelligence agents plunged unexpectedly into the bloody bayonet business of life-and-death on the frontline. Indeed, the whole extremely-bright-sunlight-then-sudden-shadow day had thus far been as alien as any they had ever experienced.