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

“Is she alive?”

“No. She died. Our father ruined her life. He gave her money. And of course she was reported. Not very intelligent.”

“How do you know?”

“I know that she is dead. I do not know how she died. In Max’s will there is a provision for a certain sum of money to be paid annually for flowers. I went through everything when I went out there after he died. It was not an insubstantial amount. The solicitors gave me the name of the recipient of the money. It was a family of florists at Troitsky. It turned out that Max had arranged for them to put flowers on a woman’s grave once a week. I called them pretending to know all about it. They were happy to tell me where it was—I went to see for myself. The grave is there. The flowers too. The name on the headstone is the same as that on the letter. She never married. I am sure she is your mother.”

“Thank you.” Gabriel dropped his eyes a moment. His face was expressionless. But inside he felt as though his lifeblood were reversing direction. He was empty. He was full. He wanted to suck air into his lungs. He wanted to be sick.

Nicholas put down his cup. “The funny thing is that I never thought I would have this conversation with you. I never thought I would be saying any of this, Gabriel, I really didn’t. It was the one principle, the one silence I set myself to honor. For your sake. For Izzy’s sake. For Masha… And yet now, all of a sudden—now I find that it’s the only conversation I have ever wanted to have. Indeed, I realize I have been thinking about it all my life. Ever since the day I first saw you—here in this city, not two miles away. You and Is, side by side, crammed together in a single pram on the corner of the Rue des Islettes.”

Gabriel, his eyes back on the river, gave no sign that he was still listening, but above the din of the revolution burning through his body, he was hearing something in Nicholas—his father, his brother —that he had never heard before, and he was stuck fast to his seat, pulled equally between his ferocious desire to leave forever and his need to stay close to the sound of something true, to hear every last word.

“You were less than a year old, and… and you were helpless, Gabriel, totally helpless.” Nicholas let out a tightened breath. “I had been with your mother some time then—let’s call Masha your mother, because that is what she is. There were difficulties. She could not have the children she wanted. I had my own troubles. We were also very poor. Excruciatingly so. We were enjoying our lives in Paris, but we needed to find work. I had not heard from my father since I left Russia with your mother. Then, out of the blue, he sent a message—we did not even have a phone—he sent a message, with a messenger—can you imagine that?—sent a message that he was in Paris. He had come for a visit, he said. And just like that he arrived at our tiny apartment on Goutte d’Or.”

Gabriel’s face was still turned slightly toward the window. He was rigid against the waves of sickness within. He realized what it was: it was fear stalking his father. His father was afraid. As simple as that.

“But actually Maximilian had come to strike a deal with me. Do you want a real drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Look, Gabriel.” Nicholas grasped his cane. “I know you cannot forgive me, and really I don’t ask you to—I am not interested in forgiveness—but I would like now to tell you at least some part of what my life has been. No excuses and no self-exoneration—I am not a fool. I know… I know that we are all of us able to choose, and my choices have been, with no exception I can think of, selfish. I do realize all of that—and such as they are, I stand by my choices. I and no other am responsible for my actions.”

He sought Gabriel’s eyes again, as if to fix them with an intensity that he could not evade.

But Gabriel, aware perhaps of their keenness, continued to look steadily away, his gaze on one particular turbulent spot in the moving water.

Nicholas, exasperated, sat back, his knuckles white around his cane. “In essence, the old bastard offered me the house in Highgate and an annual sum for maintenance—I’m giving you all the details —to adopt you two as my own. Your mother was desperate to have children anyway. I saw no grave harm in the idea. You were my brother and sister, after a fashion. I bore you no ill will. I never have. Our father would pay for your education and upkeep. For the rest of my life, I would be free to pursue what I was interested in rather than forced to work for work’s sake. I said yes. And I—we, all of us—have been living with the consequences of this deal, for good, for bad, ever since.” Now Nicholas also looked out. “That was the choice I made. I could have said no, of course. But I did not. I was offered a life of relative ease. I took it.”

Gabriel felt his breathing becoming shallow. There was acid in his throat. He had faced all he had come to face. He was exhausted.

“I also rescued you. And I never once went back on… I never went back on my bond to you. However bad a would-be father I have been, I never once—though sometimes circumstances screamed at me to do so—I never once broke the spell. Not even when I was drunk and furious with you, with Isabella, your mother, myself.” The cane fell with a clatter. “I kept to it. I kept you believing that she—that fine, fine woman—was your mother, and that I—I was your father. I have always wanted you to believe Masha was your mother.” He held his shaking hands out in front of him over the table, staring, as if appalled that they belonged to him. “I did it… I kept the necessary secrets… I did it as much for your mother’s sake as for any other. I knew she was capable of loving you as her own. And I wanted… I wanted her always to have you two—you two pretty, clever, troublesome children—to love and to care for. In her exile. And you both to love her in return, as if she were your own flesh and blood. To love her without distance, bridle, or complaint. Unequivocally. Since… since I have always known that I would be a failure in this. I did it for my wife.”

Gabriel looked down at his father’s trembling hands for a second, then abruptly stood. His vision was suddenly blurred. And his heart was traveling too fast, ricocheting from fury to confusion to numbness to exhilaration and back again. He could not trust himself anymore. He had to leave. And no, he was not ready to agree to this last devious bargain: to accept his father as a brother was to absolve him as a father, and this he could not do. When in fact nothing was changed. Not a single cruelty was excused. Not to him, his sister, or his mother. No, there could be no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness.

“I am sorry, Dad. I do not know you as my brother. Only as a father. Only as my father. This is all I know.” The taste of bile was in his mouth. “It may not be true, it may be founded on this lifelong lie, but that lie became my life. And for now, what is true is of no consequence. I have to go.”

“The letter?”

“Isabella will take it. Don’t—I can see myself out.”

“Are you going to come back tomorrow?”

“Goodbye, Dad.”

He leaned over the water and heaved his stomach inside out. The convulsions ripped through him, sudden paroxysms that gripped his body and emptied his mind. The river carried the sickness slowly away.

The next day, Sunday, the fifty filthy shades of gray were all gone, unimaginable, and instead the sky was uniformly blue. A sharp winter’s cold was on the lips, a soft winter’s light on the cheek; the river walks were busy again beneath the embankments with people in striped scarves and coats and gloves; the drunks were out beneath the bridges, their stocks of brittle bonhomie briefly replenished; children were running ahead of chatty mothers, fathers in responsible colloquy two steps back, joggers; a blue-fingered juggler, a dozen walkers of a dozen different dogs, an elderly couple renewing their lifelong domestic hostilities, a slouch of teenagers (stereo thumping), tourists taking and retaking the same shot with a digital camera, and a man with white hair having considerable difficulty walking beside a young woman in an elegant pale coat.