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

A young woman rising in the Party, you see this Englishman gallivanting through your cities: Maximilian Glover, whoremonger, embezzler, art thief, traitor… Or, my god, perhaps you were sent to him… Perhaps you were sent to my father.

Nicholas sat back, let the letter dangle again, and swallowed slowly, concentrating on the burn of the Talisker down his throat and into the pit of his stomach.

But you… you… you marry the son instead. You can serve your masters better that way. My God. Surely you weren’t spying after all? How many times did we talk about this? Laugh. Fantasize. Pretend. You loved to make things up, of course, and this I celebrate. But was the final joke on me? Was I distracted? Was I double-fooled? Oh, Masha, is this your little secret?

He drank again and this time held the spirit in the cradle of his tongue. (The chain of thought was long familiar to him. But he fingered the links now with a new concentration.) You study your ruffian English so very, very carefully. You take your terrible job as a lowly copy editor—a miserable checker of grammar and facts on the newspaper of record, as you liked to call it. You work the night shift. You work weekends. You work whenever you are told. And there are whispers, of course, in the canteen, up and down the editorial floor, there are whispers everywhere; more than this—there are tales and conversations and rows, all the hundred truths that cannot be printed are heard out loud, bandied back and forth across the desks every day; and then there is all that copy they cannot run; and you see it; you sift the in box while you’re waiting for the idiots to file their illiteracy; and you hear the political correspondents boasting in the lifts and the diplomatic editor confiding on his way to conference; foreign desk, crime, health, and defense—you hear them all; and there are politicians and there are artists and there are captains of industry, stars of this and experts in that, and they are all in and out of the editor’s office, day and night, like Japanese businessmen through a brothel. And you are there all the while, as decades pass, listening, reading, sitting quietly at your workstation, Maria Glover, the efficient copy editor.

And I wager you never took a penny There would be no trace of it. No money. Just love. You passed without being asked to do so. And I wager you never asked if any of it was useful, or appreciated, or even relevant. You simply passed information. Dutifully. Loyally. Even when they stopped acknowledging your drops. Because, yes, one day, just as you are sitting there, the Wall comes down. And it seems as though it has all been for nothing.

What then? Do you go on regardless? Or do you turn slowly from the great struggle to the personal? Is there one last thing, a private thing—though the bourgeois scum are teeming gleefully through—is there one last thing that you can still accomplish? You can return the money to your son. You can return what is owed to Russia. You would enjoy that last bitter little irony, wouldn’t you, my clever, clever Masha?

He weighed this new idea, pleased to have hauled it from the mirrored lake of his life, pleased that there was hidden treasure at the end of the chain after all.

If this is the way we must play, then play this way we will, you think. If it’s all about the money, then let it be so: let’s start again, but let’s start fair. Yes, let’s start again: oil, labor, and technology—the East will rise once more in a monstrous aping of the slobbering West. Harder, careless, and more ruthless yet. And this time the West will beg for mercy.

Or am I wrong? Am I wrong about all of this?

His eyes reflected the flames. The ice had melted in his glass.

Work was easy.

She asked for a sabbatical.

They refused.

She said that she was sorry but she was going back to the U.K. to deal with some family issues anyway. And that she would therefore be tendering her resignation.

They said, oh, they hoped it was nothing serious, they would be sad to lose her, but she should definitely drop in when she got back and they would see where they were then.

She said that, yes, it was serious, her mother had died.

They looked at her with faces of sudden concern and expressed their sympathy. They asked her when her mother passed away.

She took a private moment to dislike their choice of euphemism and then, as planned, said that her mother’s death had been yesterday rather than almost four weeks ago. This so that they could not stop her from leaving immediately, now, this very lunchtime.

They did not know whether to comfort her or become even more professional.

She could tell they were alarmed at her calmness. She wanted to say, Don’t worry, so was I; it passes.

They shook their heads and meant their platitudes.

She was sorry for them for having to deal with this. Death gave them focusing issues to address in the short term and mortality issues going forward.

They asked her if there was anything at all they could do to help.

She told them no, thanks, and that seeing as she would be dropping by in six months, and given the circumstances, she wouldn’t be working her notice and she had to go pretty much straightaway. They said, oh, and then, of course.

She didn’t gather her small collection of things at her desk. And she did not stop to consider whether it was she or they who had the perception problem on her way out.

Her father, though, was the hardest task she had faced in her life. The hardest task since the last e-mail. Her twenty-second draft read:

Dad,

I am coming to London. Please don’t feel that you have to write back. I really don’t wish to interfere in your life in any way. I suppose I just wanted to let you know that I will be dropping in to Highgate to see Francis—I assume he is still there; neither Gabs nor I have heard anything to the contrary. I need to store some stuff if he is okay with that…

I have to admit, it feels strange to be writing to you like this. I’m not even sure you read e-mail. (Forgive me btw: Julian, at the consulate in SP, gave me this contact. I suspect that you still prefer letters but I’m afraid that I don’t have your postal address.) I know we haven’t been in touch for years… and yet, now that Mum is dead, it all seems a bit sad. Of course Gabriel and I talk all the time. But you knew Mum before we were born, you knew Mum when she was a young woman, you knew Mum better than anyone else. And I think this whole thing is affecting me more than I thought it would. Time will pass, and I’ll get used to it. But I suppose I would like to know more about Mum—and, yes, you too, Dad.

At the funeral, out there in Petersburg, I became more conscious than ever of who I am: half you, half Mum. And how little I know about either of you really… Dad, I have been thinking back a great deal—it’s natural, I suppose, at times like this—and if there is anything you would like to say to me now, about your life, about who you are, then I want you to know that I am ready to listen. Just that.

But having gone through the e-mail again, for the twenty-third time, she found it a cringing agony still. No matter what she did, she could not rid her words of their phony tone, their dishonest designs, their awkwardness. The plain truth was that she could not plainly ask her own father anything that she wished to ask him. She squeezed her eyes shut. What was it with some people—that the very idea of them prohibits certain questions from ever being asked? How does their power, their charisma—if that’s what it is—cast such shadows in other minds, even if they are halfway around the world?

Shitting hell.