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

So she must be in.

She must be in—because there was no possibility that she’d leave that padlock undone if she had gone out. She must be in. But he turned his key and entered the apartment in silence because he could not bring himself to call her name.

The light was dim. The wooden floor smelled of polish. He stepped onto the narrow carpet that ran down the center of the hall. And now he stopped moving altogether. The familiar pictures—his father in Paris in 1968, Isabella in New York, the Highgate house, his father on the telephone with a cigarette, Nicholas II and his family, he and his sister as babies in a pram, some famous clown white-faced in Red Square, the map of Europe stained with the brown ring mark of a wineglass over the Balkans, the icons, especially the bloody icons… These familiar pictures seemed suddenly remote, alien, unconnected with him, as though he had wandered into the flat of a vanished stranger whose life he must untangle.

Someone dropped something in the apartment above. He let his bag fall and ran, left, toward her bedroom. The door was open. The heavy curtains drawn. Her books piled untidily on the floor by her fallen lamp. Flowers thirsty in the vase. Her favorite shawl spread across the floor by the chest. A full mug of black tea by the bed. Pills. The upright piano. The bed itself empty. He ran back down the corridor, pushing doors as he went—bathroom, kitchen, study… But he slowed on the threshold of the last, the drawing room, as she called it—high ceilings, grand, with my tall windows for the White Nights, Gabriel, for the cool air in the summer, for the best view in all of Petersburg, where our history is made.

His mother was lying on the floor by the desk. He was on his knees and by her side in an instant. Her eyes were open but shrouded somehow in a shimmering film of reflected light. And when he called her name out loud at last and raised her up, her body was cold and slight. And she seemed to have shrunk, to be falling down—down into herself, down into the floor, seeking the earth. And there was neither voice nor breath from her lips.

Her dreams came just before dawn, stealing past the watch of the New York City night, slipping past the sentries of the heart. And this was a bad one. More of a nightmare, if truth be told. She flopped back down and closed her eyes and let old respiration soothe her modern nerves, concentrating on the out breaths, waiting for the chemical, physical, and emotional residue to drain away. And how real, she thought, this response of the body to the counterfeiting of dreams.

Isabella Glover stretched out to her full five-seven. Her hair, which reached almost to the shoulder, was so black that by some lights it looked almost blue. But her eyes were not quite as dark as her brother’s, nor so undefended, moving quickly beneath a protective sheen of silent laughter. She was thin, but no longer painfully so; light on her feet, gamine; the reluctant possessor of that rare quality, the precise opposite of blond, which seems to grow more intense the longer its presence remains in a room. And she had one of those not-immediately-beautiful-but-on-reflection-actually- very -beautiful faces that you see in Renaissance paintings of young Italian noblewomen carrying bowls of fruit.

She stared at the fault lines cracked across her ceiling. It was the letters that were causing all the trouble, of course.

Oh, shitting hell. Might as well get up.

She kicked back the sheet and sat on the side of the bed. She felt hot. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck. Yes, these winter pajamas, she now admitted to herself, were a totally unnecessary choice—more a statement than anything else: Don’t touch me, Sasha; the secret codes of our relationship have all been changed; I am not touchable by you—to touch me is now a violation punishable by outrage and complete withdrawal. (Men and women with their constant signals-intelligence chatter back and forth and all of it so unreliable.) She stood up and moved toward their little dresser to take a swig of the mineral water, which, she was pleased to discover, had lost its irritating sparkle overnight.

Unnecessary because of course Sasha never would touch her after an argument—his side of the bed was empty. He would be splayed out on the couch on the other side of the door. After an argument, he hadn’t got the nerve even to sleep in the same room as she, never mind anything else. So why bother with the pajamas? Just in case he suddenly transformed his entire personality and popped his head in to say sorry for shouting and being so rude and then promised never to be such a selfish, self-centered, self- obsessed two-year-old again? She took another, deeper swig. Or because she wanted to walk past him thus armored in the morning? To make visual the rupture? Intimacy and its withdrawal as a weapon… Not very subtle, Is, not very subtle.

She bit her lip.

So no, she would not go parading past in her bloody silly pajamas; she would not go banging into the bathroom; she would not make a sound. Lights would stay off. The kettle would not be boiled. There would be no statement, deliberate or otherwise, of her going to work—as I do every morning, by the way, Sasha, every single morning.

She looked across at the alarm clock again—a self-satisfied digital with lurid red numbers calling itself “The Executive.” His clock. It was only quarter past six—normally too early to call on Molly, her downstairs neighbor, except that three days ago Molly badly twisted her ankle and so was not sleeping and there was every chance she would be awake, the same as on Sunday, when the emergency text had come in: “In agony and bored.RUAwake?” This time, Isabella thought, she would text Molly—on the way to Veselka’s, just to check. Fetch the tea and whatever else Molly fancied and bring it back for her. A civilized breakfast before work, some lies about their boiler being broken, and then a bath (oh God, yes, a bath instead of that dribble of a shower) in Molly’s glorious tub. And, oh shit, she’d better remember to call her mother from the office this morning, before Petersburg went to sleep.

Her eyes went back to the latest communiqué, set down askew on top of the books on her bedside table and energetically inhabiting the envelope on which her mother’s calligraphic hand had rendered her own name in crimson ink. With deepening confusion, she had read it for a second time last night directly before going to sleep—a good way of distracting herself after the row with Sasha and his subsequent (rather protracted) storming out.

The new letter was a single page only, but far stranger than the previous one. Isabella crossed back to the bed and took it from the envelope. A Finnish stamp—like everyone else, her mother used one of the hotel mail services via Helsinki. Some stuff about the president, a disparaging mention of her brother’s so-called career in contract publishing, news of a bomb in Moscow and ten more people “ripped limb from limb” by the “bastards” in Chechnya, and then this: “So, dear Is, be sure to visit me first, before you visit your father. It is better that you understand from me Oh, you know how scheming he is, and he’ll be sure to distort everything. He will want to be certain that you love him, especially now he is getting older.”

Leaving aside the lingering oddness of her mother’s writing style—“I am a Russian never forget, Is, forced to slum it in second class with this fat little ruffian English, so full of himself and yet so empty and vague”—this new letter was seriously weird because Isabella had absolutely no intention of visiting her father, nor indeed of finding out where he was. Neither she nor her brother had spoken a single word to Nicholas Glover for more than ten years. Not since the death of Grandpa Max (when her father had turned up only to make sure he got all the money). And Isabella was certain that her mother knew this. So what the hell was she going on about? Seriously weird too because what was there to understand? What was there to distort? It was extremely difficult to tell what was real and what was fantasy, given the background level of histrionics and exaggeration that her mother liked to live with, and she was certainly not above coming on all portentous in order to secure a visit or whatever obscure point she had set herself to make.