Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Boris tossed back the rest of his vodka and then stood up. “Very well,” he said, twirling an unlit cigarette loosely in his fingertips. “Let’s get this nonsense over with, then.”

vi.

BORIS HUNG SO FAR back, when I was unlocking the front door at Hobie’s, that it was as if he thought my key in the lock was going to set off a massive townhouse explosion. His driver was double-parked out front in clouds of ostentatious fume. Once in the car, all the conversation between him and the driver had been in Ukrainian: nothing I’d been able to pick up even with my two semesters of Conversational Russian in college.

“Come in,” I said, barely able to suppress a smile. What did he think, the idiot, that I was going to jump him or kidnap him or something? But he was still on the street, fists in the pockets of his overcoat, looking back over his shoulder at the driver, whose name was Genka or Gyuri or Gyorgi or I’d forgotten what the fuck.

“What’s the matter?” I said. If I’d been less tanked, his paranoia might have made me angry, but I only thought it was hilarious.

“Tell me again, why are we having to come here?” he said, still standing well back.

“You’ll see.”

“And you live up here?” he said, suspiciously, looking inside the parlor. “This is your place?”

I’d made more noise than I’d meant with the door. “Theo?” called Hobie from the back of the house. “That you?”

“Right.” He was dressed for dinner, suit and tie—shit, I thought, are there guests? with a jolt I realized it was barely dinnertime, it felt like three in the morning.

Boris had slid in cautiously behind me, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, leaving the front door wide open behind him, eyes on the big basalt urns, the chandelier.

“Hobie,” I said—he had ventured out into the hall, eyebrows lifted, Mrs. DeFrees pattering apprehensively after him—“Hi, Hobie, you remember me talking about—”

“Popchik!”

The little white bundle—toddling dutifully down the hall to the front door—froze. Then a high-pitched scream as he began to run as fast as he could (which was not very fast at all, any more) and Boris—whooping with laughter—dropped to his knees.

“Oh!” snatching him up, as Popchik wriggled and struggled. “You got fat! He got fat!” he said indignantly as Popchik jumped up and kissed him on the face. “You let him get fat! Yes, hello, poustyshka, little bit of fluff you, hello! You remember me, don’t you?” He had toppled over on his back, stretched out and laughing, as Popchik—still screaming with joy—jumped all over him. “He remembers me!”

Hobie, adjusting his glasses, was standing by amused—Mrs. DeFrees, not quite so amused, standing behind Hobie and frowning slightly at the spectacle of my vodka-smelling guest rolling and tumbling with the dog on the carpet.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, putting his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket. “This would be—?”

“Exactly.”

vii.

WE DIDN’T STAY LONG—Hobie had heard a lot about Boris over the years, let’s go have a drink! and Boris was just as interested, and curious, as I might have been if Judy from Karmeywallag or some other mythical person of his past had turned up—but we were drunk and too boisterous and I felt that we might be upsetting Mrs. DeFrees, who though smiling politely was sitting rather still in a hall chair with her tiny beringed hands folded in her lap and not saying much.

So we left—Popchik in tow, paddling along excitedly with us, Boris shouting and delighted, waving at the car to go round the block and pick us up: “Yes, poustyshka, yes!”—to Popper—“That’s us! We have a car!”

Then all of a sudden it seemed that Boris’s driver spoke English as well as Boris did, and we were all three of us pals—four of us, counting Popper, who was standing on his hind legs with his paws propped on the window glass and staring out very seriously at the lights of the West Side Highway as Boris gabbled to him and cuddled him and kissed him on the back of the neck while—simultaneously—explaining to Gyuri (the driver) in both English and Russian how wonderful I was, friend of his youth and blood of his heart! (Gyuri reaching around his body and across the seat with his left hand, to shake my hand solemnly in the rear) and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?

“Yes,” said Gyuri gloomily as he made the turn onto Houston Street so hard and sharp I slid into the door, “it was the same with me and Vadim. Daily I grieve him—I grieve him so hard I wake in the night to grieve. Vadim was my brother—” glancing back at me; pedestrians scattering as he plowed into the crosswalk, startled faces outside tinted windows—“my more-than-brother. Like Borya and me. But Vadim—”

“This was a terrible thing,” Boris said quietly to me, and then, to Gyuri:—“yes, yes, terrible—”

“—we have seen Vadim go too soon in the ground. Is true, the radio song, you know it? Piano Man singer? ‘Only the good die young.’ ”

“He will be waiting for us there,” said Boris consolingly, reaching across the seat to pat Gyuri on the shoulder.

“Yes, that just is what I instructed him to do,” Gyuri muttered, cutting in front of a car so suddenly that I fell against my seat belt and Popchyk went flying. “These things are deep—they cannot be honored in words. Human tongue cannot express. But at the end—putting him to bed with the shovel—I spoke to him with my soul. ‘So long, Vadim. Hold the gates open for me, brother. Save me a seat up there where you at.’ Only God—” please, I thought, trying to keep a composed expression while gathering Popchyk in my lap, for fuck’s sake look at the road —“Fyodor, please help me, I have two big questions about God. You are college professor” (what?) “so perhaps you can answer for me. First question—” eyes meeting mine in the rear view mirror, holding up pointed finger—“does God have sense of humor? Second question: does God have cruel sense of humor? Such as: does God toy with us and torture us for His own amusement, like vicious child with garden insect?”

“Uh,” I said, alarmed at the intense way he was looking at me and not his upcoming turn, “well, maybe, I don’t know, I sure hope not.”

“This is not the right man to ask these questions,” Boris said, offering me a cigarette and then passing one to Gyuri across the front seat. “God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince. Now Gyuri—” reclining in clouds of smoke—“a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Will you look after the dog after you drop us off? Drive him around in back seat, wherever he wants to go?”

The club was out in Queens, I couldn’t have said where. In the red-carpeted front room, which felt like a room where you’d go to kiss your grandfather on the cheek after being freshly released from prison, large family-style gatherings of drinkers in Louis XVI–style chairs ate and smoked and shouted and pounded each other on the back around tables swagged with metallic gold fabric. Behind, on the deep lacquer-red walls, Christmas garlands and Soviet-era holiday decorations of wired bulbs and colored aluminum—roosters, nesting birds, red stars and rocket ships and hammer-and-sickles with kitschy Cyrillic slogans ( Happy New Year, dear Stalin )—were slung up in exuberant and makeshift-seeming fashion. Boris (well in the bag himself; he’d been drinking from a bottle in the back seat) had his arm around me and, in Russian, was introducing me to young and old as his brother which I gathered people were understanding literally to judge from all the men and women who embraced me and kissed me and tried to pour me shots from magnums of vodka in crystal ice buckets.