Andrea Bennett - Two Cousins of Azov

‘Darling, I’m sure Gor doesn’t want to hear—’

‘Don’t interrupt me, Mama, I—’

‘Ladies, please!’ He held up his hand, a slim barrier between his ear and Albina’s mouth. ‘I must concentrate on the road. Let us have hush at this early hour,’ he spoke firmly, but not unkindly. Albina flopped back onto her seat.

A few minutes later Gor gave into habit and began pressing the buttons on the radio. It clunked into life, and after a thorough search, Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ roared through the speakers, rattling the windows with a metallic buzz.

‘Ah! Classical!’ Sveta winced. ‘How lovely.’

Albina glowered from the back, radiating disgust.

They crossed the bridge over the wide, black river, headed for Rostov and then turned off, taking a deeply pot-holed road to the left, following it out into the country. An assortment of broken-biscuit buildings and the occasional battered wooden cottage passed them by. Chickens quivered at gate posts. Dogs in empty yards scratched fiercely at their fuzzy necks. The car slowed to a crawl as the lane narrowed and the pits and furrows in its surface widened. They bounced over hardcore and swallow-holes of mud. No one spoke, but the radio could not drown out Sveta’s yelps and the thuds as Albina’s head collided with the passenger window.

‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Gor. Checking the rear-view mirror, he caught Albina’s eye. She had become bored with being disgusted, and now mouthed something at him that he could not make out. He ignored it. He heard shouting, and looked back.

‘What?’ he mouthed over the music. She repeated it. Still he couldn’t hear. She was filling her lungs to bellow once more when Sveta’s finger shot out and prodded the radio into silence with a single jab.

‘Oh!’

Sveta smiled. ‘My head, Gor.’

‘Were you a bank manager?’ Albina shouted over both of them. ‘A long time ago?’

Gor winced. ‘Yes. As you know.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘Yes. I—’

‘It sounds boring to me.’

‘Ah, well, you’ll forgive me for pointing this out, but you are fortunate enough to be young, Albina. Many professions must seem dull to you, at the moment, when life is a blank sheet ready to be coloured. I expect you want to be a ballet dancer or a scientist or a cosmonaut when you grow up?’

‘No,’ said Albina, frowning. ‘Why would I want to do that? Loads of work, no money. I want to go into business: import-export, you know? I’m going to make a bundle. So that I can buy whatever I want.’ Then she added, with a sly smile, ‘Just like you.’

Gor glanced over his shoulder, surprise elevating his eyebrows. ‘Like me?’

‘Come on, Mister Papasyan, everyone knows!’ Albina’s eyes were wide, but her mouth curled to show her blunt white teeth.

‘Now, malysh , you’re not being polite,’ Sveta cut in, a dull blush patterning her cheeks.

‘Knows what?’ asked Gor, his eye twitching.

‘That you’ve got gold hidden in the cistern of your toilet!’

‘What?’

‘And shares in all the oil companies! And jewels hidden under the bed! And—’

‘Albina!’ Sveta’s voice cracked across her daughter’s babble. ‘Enough!’

Gor smiled, using only half his face. ‘Everybody knows this, Albina?’ he asked softly.

‘Oh yes. Mama told me , but… everyone in Azov knows. Probably everyone in the world.’

Sveta squirmed in her seat. ‘I didn’t tell you that, did I, Albina? You were listening to my private conversations. And that was before I’d even met Gor. Oh look, baby-kins! Some rabbits! And a goat!’

‘Is that a fact?’ Gor did not look at Sveta, and ignored her pointing finger. He observed Albina in the rear-view mirror. ‘What else do you know , Albina? Any other pearls of wisdom you would like to share?’

‘Nope,’ she said, and then, after staring at a chewing goat for some moments, added, ‘only that we’re all going to die, so we may as well make money in the meantime.’

‘Well,’ Gor said, ‘that’s a point of view. But—’

‘Because of the hole in the ozone layer, I mean. That’s the layer of gas that protects the earth from the sun. And it’s being destroyed by rockets and space ships going through it all the time to get to the moon and stuff. It’s full of holes, like a sieve. So we’re all going to fry.’ She shrugged. ‘You may as well get spending, Mister Papasyan.’

‘Ah,’ said Gor, ‘wisdom indeed.’ He folded his lips, eyes on the road, shoulders hunched. Sveta said nothing, her gaze scanning the foamy grey sky as if looking for holes.

The road followed the steep bank of a tidal waterway. Silence filled the car as they zig-zagged on. Up ahead crows crowded around a crumpled, brown-furred body reclining on the verge. Sveta turned away as Albina pressed her nose to the glass to examine it. The crows barely raised a tarry eye, and Gor had to swerve to avoid them. A few minutes more and the water emptied out into wide, khaki flats shining like a greasy pan under the autumn sky. They had arrived: here before them on the open plain, looking out towards the brown, windswept sea, rose the pitted cadaver of the Vim & Vigour sanatorium.

Gor slowed the car to a crawl, observing the faded warning symbols depicting residents intent on jumping into the road. Not a soul stirred. Not even a crow. He parked the car on the muddy gravel space at the foot of the building’s crumbling concrete steps, and Albina jumped out. The adults sat side-by-side, surveying the grey façade, its entranceway hung with aged red flags that were now no more than tattered ribbons, trembling silently in the breeze.

‘I’m very sorry, Gor.’

‘Don’t be.’

‘Albina was rude.’

‘Children repeat what they hear. And evidently, that is what they hear about me.’

‘Well…’ she began to shake her head and pursed her lips, but deflated suddenly, her ready denial pricked by Gor’s single, raised eyebrow. ‘I am sorry. I was one of the gossips that spread tales about you. But that was before I’d met you. And, well… everyone thinks you have… wealth, and gold and jewels… and things. Hidden.’

‘Gold and jewels? Ha!’ He slapped his hands on the steering wheel and snorted, before taking a long, slow breath and turning to her. ‘And what do you think now, Sveta? Now you know me better. Do you think I have hidden treasure?’

‘Well, um…’ Sveta’s eyes darted across the windscreen, her hands, the floor of the car and the windscreen again. She recalled the worn shirts, the empty cupboards and lack of light-bulbs in his apartment. ‘You told me you’re not a millionaire. It seems to me that you have nice things, but that you have to… live within your means. And your means are not terribly considerable.’

‘Hmmm!’ he nodded his head. ‘Well, you are more astute than the rest of Azov.’

She smiled.

‘“Not terribly considerable” is a fine phrase.’

‘Gor, I didn’t mean to—’

‘I can barely scrape the roubles together to buy bread. In fact, you should know, as a person, as a citizen… I am ruined.’ He continued nodding his head but his eyes, dark and wide, never left her face. Sveta swallowed.

Twin fists hammered on the window behind her head. ‘Are you ever going to get out of the car, Mama? I’m getting a cold! Look – I have no gloves!’ Albina brandished her pork-chop hands in the autumn air.

‘We should get out of the car,’ Gor said.

The Vim & Vigour sanatorium had once been a Soviet jewel: a fitness hotel, a health spa of the workers, designed to give rest and rehabilitation to those who toiled hard, paid for by councils, employers and unions alike. Now they could no longer afford it, and it received guests on a thoroughly haphazard basis: it had become a cross between a holiday camp and an asylum. In the off-season, most of it lay empty. Only the truly frail remained.