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

“Remember, you are a nut case, Isabella. The rest of the world is just going to work, the supermarket, on holiday. We are the ones with the problems.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I do. That doesn’t help either.”

Chumps, the pub cat, an intelligent-looking ginger with bright eyes and a languid manner that spoke of a happy, untroubled life full of food and the loving whispers of some latter-day Aphrodite in both his ears, blocked Gabriel’s route to his chair on his return. Man and cat exchanged glances a moment; cat accused man of crimes innumerable, man pled guilty and enduring disgrace; then cat set off at a contemptuously slow pace toward the kitchen, allowing Gabriel to put down the drinks at last.

“Did you get any letters?” Isabella asked.

“No. Only one or two ages ago. Like I said, I used to get phone calls. More or less every night…”

“I don’t know if that is more or less weird.”

“It was pretty harrowing… she wouldn’t let me go. She kept me on the phone for hours.”

Last orders had been called. The men at the other table had left and they were alone in the room. One of the candles was guttering on the mantelpiece. Jesus seemed to be slouching a little above them. And the alcohol was deep and warm in their veins. Their conversation had ranged and wandered, but now there seemed to be nothing else worth talking about.

“What did she say in her letters?” Gabriel asked. “I’d love to read them. I get scared I am forgetting her.”

“You won t. You never will.”

“I wish I’d recorded her voice or something.”

“Don’t you hear her all the time in your head?”

“I used to—a lot,” he said. “But now… now it’s changing. Now I talk to her, but she doesn’t talk to me so much. You?”

“I catch myself all the time—thinking with her mind, almost. Thinking her thoughts. But no, you’re right—I suppose I don’t hear her voice specifically.”

Gabriel picked at the dried wax on the neck of their candlestick-bottle. “What did the letters say?”

“Nothing, really… Well, that’s not true.” Isabella sipped her pepper vodka. “Just all mixed up, you know—about the Russian government and Chechnya and all of that… America going backward too, the stuff I told you about—Jefferson—that the Founding Fathers were great men who believed in all the right things and how disgusted they would be if they could see what was happening. And you—she talked about you a lot… About your work and what you were going to do and how you had to be shocked into something radical.”

“I wish.”

“And other stuff. About how…” Isabella’s latest cigarette seemed to make her cough. “About how she loved Dad. And how I was supposed to go and see him.”

Gabriel looked up, his eyes liquid black and shimmering in the candlelight. “What for?”

Isabella frowned, lowering her brows as if to duck the direct question that she feared he might ask. “She said… She said that he would… She said that he was a little schemer or something and that he would be sure to distort everything.”

He kept his gaze on his sister, compelling her to continue.

“She said that he would want to be certain—”

“About what?”

“Certain that I… that I loved him, Gabs, especially now that he was getting older.”

“He made her life a wasteland of misery and suffering for over thirty years. Every good thing she offered him, he sneered at, he scorned, and he trampled upon. He can be certain that—”

“But distort what, Gabs?”

“Who gives a fuck?”

“I need to speak to him to find out.”

“No. No, you don t.” Gabriel took half his Talisker at one sip. “You need to speak to him for oth—”

“Gabs, Dad has had a stroke.” She lowered her eyes. “I went home to talk to Francis about storing some stuff there this morning. He told me. Dad has had a stroke. I thought you should know.”

He walked within himself. And there was nothing about him to suggest that he was Russian and only six hours in the country—none of the usual giveaways, at least: not the luminous tracksuits of the poor, nor the leather jackets of the racketeers, nor the overdone designer suits and jewelry of the moneyed; nothing to suggest he was a foreigner at all save a barely detectable apprehension in the movement of his head, which turned too quickly this way and that, seeking to absorb as much of the vast, strange, teeming city as he could. He feared police, spot checks, authority. He was in his boots, his jeans, and an anonymous sweater—no coat, despite the gusting wind. Beneath, he felt as tense as a submariner under the ice. But his aim was invisibility.

After the Internet café—his first job to make contact—he had decided to attempt the exploratory journey from his hostel on foot, surreptitiously following the map he had printed out—eight cheap pages that did not quite meet at any of the borders. He did not expect anything back today, but he hoped that tomorrow, by noon, this Gabriel would reply.

Presently he stopped again, turned his back on the traffic, and leaned into an alleyway, trying to read the smudgy print. He had been sick on the plane—a terrifying experience that had left him knotted and shaking—and even now the queasiness lingered and he hunched rather than stood at his full height.

He reemerged and met the suspicious eyes of a man setting up a newspaper stand. He went quickly on. A muscle worked in the hollow of his cheek. The map appeared to indicate that the Harrow Road flowed easily onto the Marylebone Road or crossed the thick-drawn Edgware Road at an obvious right angle, but there was no clear way through the giant intersections he had come upon, and the foot tunnels confused him further. So for half an hour he wandered around the Paddington basin, crossing and recrossing the pretty canal, which reminded him of home, except for the great glassy office developments and thunderous overpasses, which reminded him of Moscow. Eventually he saw a sign pointing to Paddington station. He followed its direction. At least the station would be a way of placing himself on the map again. From Paddington to Marble Arch looked easy enough.

Gone the tenebrous gray of the Russia he knew best—the suburbs, the orphanage, Vasilevsky’s dilapidation. Gone the ruin and collapse. And gone the somber monotone of Russia itself. Instead, as he came to Oxford Street, his ears were full of the strange singsong beauty of the English spoken all around, and the air seemed to resonate with the chimes of a hundred different registers, voices, music. He could scarcely believe it. I am in London, he whispered to himself. Ya v Londone.

The dusk swept in. He could not think what else to do, and the warmth and hum of the Soho bum-boy bars made him feel his foreignness and poverty too hard. So he stood in the doorway of a sex shop and read his map by the intermittent light of a flashing plastic cock. Then, resolved on his new direction, he set off to look at the South Bank.

Gone too the heavy brown assumption that had long smothered his life and that he had not known the shape or meaning of until now: gone the assumption that change was impossible. And nobody—no police, no militia—asking for his papers.

He crossed the river by Waterloo Bridge and stood for five minutes, staring in disbelief at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where so many of his heroes had played. He had imagined some great theater—something like the Mariinsky perhaps—not a concrete Soviet-style shit hole.

After a while he turned to face the blustery Thames and take in the abundance of lighted buildings on the opposite bank—old, new, grand, plain, stately, and grotesque—seemingly built without care or reason, to his Petersburg eye, as if a drunk had long been in charge of planning, only sober once every fifth day.