Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Dear Lin, old mate. Scorp and me have gone jungle. We’re searching for this guru, to lift the curse. Naveen gave us a good lead, and we’re starting on the canals of Karnataka tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Love you, mate.

I thought it was a happy, hopeful letter, and I was glad. I didn’t realise that it was a cry for help. I dropped the letter on my table, put good reggae music on my bad sound system, and we danced. Oleg danced for the fun of it, I think, but maybe the smiling Russian had demons of his own to release. I was thinking of the fight with Concannon, and I danced for absolution from victory: for defeating a foe, and regretting it.

The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we’d done in life, and what we’d lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone.

Oleg moved in. He asked if he could sleep on my couch, and I agreed, which meant that I had to buy a couch. He went with me, and it took him a long time to make up my mind. The one he chose was in green leather and long enough to stretch out on, which he often did, soon after it was delivered.

When he wasn’t a field agent, with spike, chasing down lost loves with Naveen and Didier, he was on the couch, his hands folded across his chest, and talking issues out of his own psychological steppes. The Tuareg would’ve loved it.

‘Did you say that you could change your dreams, the other day?’ he asked me, stretched out on the couch, a week after he started at the bureau. ‘Actually in the dream, while you’re dreaming it?’

‘Of course.’

‘You mean, while you’re dreaming, and completely asleep, you can alter the course of your dream?’

‘Yes. Can’t you?’

‘No. I don’t think many people can.’

‘Let me put it this way, a nightmare is a dream I can’t control, and a dream is a nightmare I can control.’

‘Wow. How does it work?’

‘I’m writing a story here, Oleg.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, his bare feet tapping against one another at the other end of the couch. ‘Go back to work. Utter silence from me.’

I was working on a new story. I’d thrown the happy story away. It didn’t end well. I was sketching some paragraphs about Abdullah, and thinking about a couple of stories built around him. There were eagles of narrative in him, each tale a winged contradiction, but I’d never written anything about him.

That afternoon I felt compelled to capture him, to paint him with words, and the writing came fast. Paragraphs bloomed like hydrangeas on the pages of my journal.

Years after that sunny afternoon at the Amritsar hotel, a writer told me that it was bad luck for the living, to write about the living. I didn’t know that then, and I was happy, in the pages I had on Abdullah: happy enough to forget about threats and felonies, enemies who hide in a smile, Kavita and Karla, and everything in the world, so long as nothing disturbed me, and I could keep writing.

‘What’s the story about?’ Oleg asked.

I put the pen down.

‘It’s a murder mystery,’ I said.

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about a writer, who kills someone for interrupting him while he’s writing. You wanna know the mystery part?’

He swung his legs around, and sat with his forearms on his thighs.

‘I love mysteries,’ he said.

‘The mystery is why it took the writer so long.’

‘Sarcasm,’ he said. ‘You should read Lermontov. The Caucasus is notorious for its sarcasm.’

‘You don’t say?’ I said, picking up the pen.

‘Can you really change your dreams?’

The pen in my hand drifted toward him, hovering above my elbow on the desk. I was hoping that it would turn into a caduceus, and I could use it to make him go to sleep.

‘I mean, how does that work? I’d love to change my dreams. I have some dreams, you know, that I’d really, really like to put on repeat.’

I closed the pen, closed the journal and got two cold beers, throwing one to him. I sat back in my chair, and raised my can in a toast.

‘To mysteries,’ I said.

‘To mysteries!’

‘Now, sit back, relax, and tell me what’s up, Oleg.’

‘Your Karla,’ he said, taking a sip of beer. ‘I know what you’re feeling, because I have my Karlesha, back in Moscow.’

‘Why aren’t you back in Moscow?’

‘I don’t like Moscow,’ he said, taking another sip. ‘I’m a St Petersburg boy.’

‘But you love the girl.’

‘Yes. But she hates me.’

‘She hates you?’

‘Hates me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She paid her father to have me killed.’

‘She had to pay him? What is he, a banker?’

‘No, he’s a cop. A pretty big cop.’

‘What happened?’

‘It’s a long story,’ he sighed, looking toward the breeze of white curtains, fluttering on the sunlit balcony.

‘Fuck you, Oleg. You killed my short story. You can fill the space with your long story.’

He laughed bitterly. One of our purest expressions, a thing of our human kind: the bitter laugh.

‘I slept with her sister,’ he said, staring at his beer.

‘Okay. Not classy, but there are worse things that people do to people’s sisters.’

‘No, it’s complicated. They’re twins. Non-identical twins.’

‘Where are you going with this, Oleg?’

There was a call from the hallway. It was Didier.

‘Hello? Are you home, Lin?’ he said, as he walked through the open door.

‘Didier!’ I said happily. ‘Grab a seat, and have a beer. Oleg is venturing into territory beyond my couch, and you’re just the man to guide the way.’

‘Lin, I am afraid that I have many appointments, and -’

‘My girlfriend in Moscow hates me,’ Oleg said flatly, helplessly, ‘because she’s a non-identical twin, and I slept with her and her non-identical sister, at the same time.’

‘Fascinating,’ Didier said, settling himself into a chair. ‘If it is not an indelicate question, Oleg, did they have the same… aroma?’

‘Indelicate?’ I mocked. ‘You, Didier?’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Oleg muttered, searching Didier’s face. ‘They did have the same smell. Exactly the same smell. I mean, the same smell… everywhere.’

‘That is indeed a rare phenomenon,’ Didier mused. ‘Exceedingly rare. Did you happen to notice the length of their ring fingers, compared to their index fingers?’

‘Can we get to the part where her father tried to kill you?’ I suggested, thinking that I had writing to do.

‘Marvellous,’ Didier said. ‘Tried to kill you, eh?’

‘Sure. See, it happened this way. I was in love with Elena, and nothing ever happened between me and her sister, Irina, until one night, when I was very drunk, totally razbit .’

‘ Razbit ?’ Didier asked.

‘Smashed, man, I was totally smashed, and Irina sneaked into my bed, naked, while Elena was at the neighbour’s place.’

‘Wonderful,’ Didier enthused.

‘It was completely dark,’ Oleg continued. ‘Very dark. We had blackout blinds on the windows. She smelled like Elena. She felt like Elena.’

‘Did she kiss you?’ Didier asked, a master of sexual forensics.

‘No. And she didn’t speak.’

‘Precisely. That would have given her away. She’s a clever girl.’

‘Elena didn’t think so, when she came back, switched the light on, and found us making love.’