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

“I was there. The week before she died. She was very ill. Cancer.”

“I know she was ill. I guessed it was cancer. I didn’t know you visited.”

“We spent three days together.” Nicholas raised his face once more, and this time Gabriel saw an unfamiliar expression—but whether it was the effect of the stroke or some twisted contour of grief, he could not tell. “We even managed to go to the Hermitage for a few hours. I knew she was in agony, but I didn’t really appreciate the sheer… the sheer incapacity of serious illness—not until this.” Nicholas gestured with his cane. “The damage it does to your sense of self, your mind. The courage you need.”

At last he collapsed heavily into his leather chair. “I couldn’t go back. Not after that. And—selfish, perhaps—but I have better memories this way. Masha lecturing me on painting techniques—those eyes of hers, shining.”

Gabriel took the chair opposite. There was a side table between them. And the radiator beneath the window caused the hot air to quaver as it reached the draft. He let his eyes go to the river, hoping to bathe his mind clean. Then he reached across to stop his father’s cane from falling and prop it against the chair.

“Thank you. She forgot the pain, I think, for a few minutes each day. I sourced some excellent pills for her—they don’t sell them here. Cox-2 inhibitors, they’re called. I tried to persuade her to come back. I was prepared to return to London and see her properly cared for. We could live together in the old house. But she said, of course, that she was already back. Typical. Headstrong. I don’t think she really had a chance. In any case, I can’t take bloody funerals. Make sure they burn me, won’t you, Gabriel?”

Gabriel flinched inwardly.

The door opened and Alessandro appeared, carrying a pot of tea on a tray with two mugs. He had the manner of a bit-part actor who wished the audience to know that they were witnessing not so much a play (by whoever, about whatever) as one of the great injustices of modern casting. Nonetheless, Gabriel found himself grateful for the simple speed with which the guy moved.

“Thank you, Alessandro. Thank you for waiting in,” Nicholas said.

Alessandro seemed to make a point of ignoring his father and instead addressed Gabriel. “I wasn’t sure whether to go for Russian Caravan or Lady Grey or Higgins Afternoon. In the end I thought Russian Caravan.”

Nicholas said nothing.

Gabriel said thank you.

Alessandro said, “De rien.” And began to faff with the table and then with the tea.

Gabriel’s eyes returned to the river. The problem, as ever, was that both things were simultaneously true. His father was struggling more than necessary, Gabriel was sure, but the stroke, the indignity, the difficulty, were genuine. His father was playing out his charm, but Gabriel sensed there had also been real relief and pleasure in his greeting. His father knew that he would not have been welcome at the funeral, but he also genuinely had not wished to be there. And now, most duplicitous of all, Gabriel could not escape the feeling that his father’s revelation of a reconciliation with his mother was calculated to hurt as much as to heal. Sly, always sly; but steadfast too—never gave in. You think you’re dealing with slime, you shut your eyes, you hold your nose, and just where you plunge in your hands, you hit granite. Perhaps after all his father had loved his mother, but he had also treated her like… like shit. For decades.

Alessandro was about to leave. This was it. Speak now; use the fact that the Italian was still in the room and his father’s manners would require him to wait until they were alone. Speak. First. Speak now. No more of your theater, Father. No more. Now.

“Who is Arkady Alexandrovitch?”

His father’s pupils contracted. “Arkady is probably your mother’s son. Has he turned up? I thought he might.”

“Don’t speak in riddles, Dad.” Nastier for the casualness, Gabriel thought. “Just tell me the truth. Who is he?”

“I am doing so. Masha had a son. Before I met her.”

“And so you think Arkady… Why probably?”

“She was unmarried, of course. She was attacked. Or close enough to make no difference. She never discussed it with me.”

That expression again on his father’s face: the pain of memory, of movement?

“Why probably?”

“She never spoke of the matter at all. It was her secret. The father was somebody high up in the Party, I think. I really don’t know. Assuming that this person, Arkady, is not lying, then it’s probably him. That’s why probably. I can’t be sure.”

There could be nobody else in the world who understood how to make a general nonchalance hurt so precisely.

“How do you know any of this?” Gabriel deliberately withheld what he knew of Arkady’s story. He wanted to know if his mother had told his father that she had met her son again in Petersburg.

“Grandpa Max.”

No, she hadn’t.

“Grandpa Max,” Nicholas continued, “took great care to tell me all about it when he knew I had fallen in love with her. He was that kind of a man. I’m afraid you didn’t… But he mis calculated. If anything, it caused me to love Masha more. She was working for the Party then. She probably had to go and see the bloody brute who got her pregnant every day. Some fat fake Communist in a uniform. They were all such fakes. Except good old Joe. Oh, he meant it. Every minute. You want to know what I think?”

Gabriel said nothing.

“I think she tried to have the child aborted and there was some horrific botch job and—”

Gabriel’s eyes reached for the river. “That’s why she couldn’t have children.”

He forced them back, dark as ink but incandescent, as if they might set fire to whatever they beheld, and he fixed them directly on his father. “Who am I, then? Who is my sister?”

“Don’t worry. You are twins.”

“Don’t speak to me facetiously.”

“Don’t ask me these questions as if I am some kind of Old Testament mystic, then.”

“I’m asking you as your son. You are my father. Answer me as a father.”

“No. That’s just it.” Nicholas was unflinching. “I am not your father.”

“We were adopted.” Neither did Gabriel’s face change. “I accept that. But you are still my father.”

“And yet I can’t speak to you as if you are my son. I have never been able to. That is our problem. That is what lies at the root… the root of all these twisted branches between us.”

“Who am I?” Still Gabriel held his father’s hollowing gray eyes.

“As a brother, though, maybe as a brother…”

“For Christ’s sake, please, just tell me the truth. For once. As a fellow human being.”

“Your real father is my father. Your real father is Max.”

Only now did Gabriel let himself look away a moment. Then back. “And my mother?”

“Your real mother’s name is Anastasiya. She was one of… one of our father’s lovers. There were many.”

Gabriel felt his blood prickle, as if her very name were causing it to seek the surface.

Nicholas said, “I have a single letter she wrote. It was in his papers. It’s in Russian, of course. She refers to you as Maxim and Anna. Masha changed your names. She wanted to invent you all over again. As hers.”

“How old were—”

“Not yet a year old.”

“What—”

“I never met your real mother. I was at Cambridge when they began their affair, and she was not at any of the parties when I went back—or not that I knew. I don’t have any photographs—I am sorry. You might want to look at some of the pictures of the Kirov from that time. She was in the chorus for a while, I think. A bad dancer.”