by Sarah Dunant
She lay and listened to the night silence. Her bedroom was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. It was hard to believe there was a main arterial road just a few hundred yards away. Sometimes in summer, with the windows open, you could hear an owl. Tonight’s orchestration was less mellifluous though. A high-pitched yowl cut through the silence, followed by another, shriller cry, almost like a baby crying. It turned her stomach for a second until she recognized it as cats. Then came a fierce, fast clash of voices. Fucking or fighting? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The screeches continued, angry yelps, hissing war cries, cold, shrill, little screams. Fighting. Amazing the number of words you could use to describe the sound of a cat’s voice. She tried to think of all their equivalents in Czech. It was not like counting sheep. By the time the fight had stopped, she was wide-awake.
She was suddenly thirsty and in need of a glass of water, fridge-cold rather than tap. She pulled on a robe and went downstairs. As she turned the corner down the last flight she heard a noise from below, a slamming or falling.
The door to the kitchen was locked, a security device that she sometimes used when she was out or at night when she wanted to keep the cat from roaming around the rest of the house. (She had, almost without thinking, kept it locked most nights since Tom had gone.) She turned the key and flicked on the light at the same time. She was not, as far as she could make out, unduly frightened, certainly no more than one would expect after hearing a stray noise in the middle of the night. The kitchen was empty but not untouched. In the middle of the table the vase of flowers had been knocked over, scattering carnations and sprays of white mist all over the tablecloth, a small river of greenish water trickling down over the side and onto the floor. She stood for a second looking around. So much for the noise. What about the culprit?
“Millie?” she called softly. The animal responded with a sorrowful half-yowl from somewhere underneath the table. She squatted down and lifted the cloth. The cat was crouched right at the center of the darkness, trying to make itself smaller than it was. She put out a hand to reach it but it withdrew, hissing slightly. For some reason its fear seemed more frightening than her own and she turned quickly, checking around her, but there was nothing there.
“Come on, girl,” she said gently, coaxing again with her fingers, and eventually the cat came, bedraggled and war-wounded, a piece of left ear cut and bleeding, one paw held slightly off the ground.
“Oh, girl, no prizes for guessing who you’ve been in battle with,” she said softly as she picked it up and held it to her chest.
The fur was wet and clammy where the vase water had splattered it. To have been so clumsy the cat must have come in still in flight, going for the high ground of the table without thinking. But the black tom hadn’t followed. Unless of course, that had been the slam she had heard from upstairs—the cat door snapping shut again after an intruder. She looked in the direction of the French windows, but the light allowed her to see only herself reflected in the glass; beyond that, the darkness was total. She put on the outside light, and the patio and first half of the garden jumped into weak focus, empty, no sign of life.
She held the cat in her arms while she bathed the wound, then made herself a cup of tea and let Millie sit for a while on her lap licking catnip paste off her fingers. She talked to it softly, sweet nothings, not paying much attention to what she said. “Silly animal. Your trouble is you never learned to fight when you were growing up. And now it’s too late to teach an old cat new tricks.” The fingers of her free hand stroked and tickled the little body, working through the fur, loosening a little fur ball here and there, her nails snagging on the edge of the odd, infected flea bite. Poor Millie. She had been rather neglected of late. Born and brought up in a flat where the only taste of life on the ground was the view from a third-floor window, she had never really taken to freedom, preferring the cozy darkness between the sofa and radiator to the wild seclusion of the garden borders or the great expanse of lawn. “There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re supposed to like the dark, you know. He’s just a fat tom with an inflated sense of himself. If you can’t win by brawn you should use cunning. That’s all we girls have got.”
Millie stretched her body lazily under her touch, the pleasure clearly now outweighing the pain, and began to purr, a great motor of a sound, filling the night silence, rich and deep. See. All anybody needs is a little affection. She put her head back against the chair and allowed the animal’s sense of well-being to become her own. She thought about Tom and how hard it had been when they first split up, how each day had been about reinventing herself without him, and how long it had taken her to feel anywhere near normal again. She had done it though. And whatever happened there was no going back.
She thought about work and the book. A year ago they wouldn’t even have offered it to her. But part of the fallout of these last months had been learning how to put herself forward more. After Tom moved out, she had redone her résumé and started calling people rather than waiting for them to call her. The pushiness had paid off. From trade conferences and the odd literary novella to bestselling crime and punishment.
It hadn’t been that hard. Her Czech connections were good enough to ensure her advance warning of this particular novel and the contacts had paved the way for Charles at the book fair. As an old pal from university days, his gratitude had collided with his business sense and she had got herself an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“I tell you, Elizabeth, it’s got your name written all over it.”
“What? Six hundred pages of sex and violence? Thanks, Charles.”
“No, you know what I mean. You’ll do a brilliant job. You sure you’ve got the time?”
She had laughed. They had been sitting in a wine bar in Soho, acid colors, tubular chairs, and beautiful young men all around, and Charles was having trouble keeping his mind on the job. “Yes, I think I can squeeze it in.”
“Great. But don’t go too hermitlike on it, will you. Have a bit of a life as well.”
“Charles! Have you been talking to Sally?”
“Certainly not. I’m persona non grata there at the moment. I tried to pick up the husband of her aromatherapist at a party.”
She had laughed. “You have no shame.”
“I know. After centuries of social repression it’s the least I can do. So, have I wooed you?”
“Not really. But I’ll do it.”
“Attagirl. I’ll make sure your name’s in bold type. And remember, the faster and the more American you can make it, the better the chances that I can flog your translation across the pond.”
“It’s all right, Charles. I promise it won’t read like George Eliot.”
She had taken it because it was a challenge, but also because she knew she could live up to it. After all, she knew her thrillers. Had read and seen a million of them over the years. She liked them as a form, warmed to their coldness, the way they divided the world into good and evil, the way the protagonists were often alienated from themselves and the world around them. She understood that feeling; as a child she had seen it in her father, a man wrenched out of one country and never entirely able to root himself in another.
“I wonder what your father would have made of it,” Charles had said to her that afternoon as he saw her off at the subway.
“I’m surprised you remember him.”
“I don’t really. But you do.”
“Yes,” she had said quietly, not for the first time taken aback by his perceptiveness. “You’re right. I do.”
So what would her father have thought about the book? Czech words with American sensibilities. He would have seen it as evidence of a culture twice destroyed, first by socialism, then by capitalism. Certainly the novel was unashamed in its homage to the West and in particular that hard-boiled tradition that America exported so well. Not easy to copy, though in this case the writer had made an effort: chronicling the devastation of a post-Soviet economy, drugs, and prostitution against the
Pinocchio charm of the Charles Bridge and the grandeur of Wenceslas Square. Even the story had a certain swing: good cop, bad karma, a man wading through violence driven by the memory of lost love.
For a translator its deliberate street slang was its own challenge. She was lucky, of course. For as far back as she remembered she had spoken Czech. Her father had never used any other language with her. Moving between the two tongues had been as normal as breathing. Until he took her to Prague when she was six, she thought they were the only two people in the world who spoke it, a secret language between father and daughter. It was only later that she understood how this was a way of confirming his identity. Teaching her was reminding himself. Their visit back was his first since the war. He had left a young man and returned old. Ten months later the Russian tanks moved in on the Prague spring and his exile became permanent. After he had his heart attack, when she had been in her first year at university studying—well, what else but Czech?—it was she who had written the letter to the few remaining relatives, a letter that turned into an elegy in his native tongue. It was fitting. Toward the end, all he had had were memories and a language that his daughter had helped keep alive for him. Sometimes, when she was at her worst, she wondered if that was what she was still doing now, helping to keep it alive as some kind of memorial to him.
She imagined him sitting at her shoulder reading the book with all its crude images of violence and decay. She didn’t need his disapproval to have her own. As a story the whole thing was shot through with a kind of careless misogyny. All acceptable within the genre, but nonetheless distasteful for that. How will I feel, she had thought when she had taken it on, sitting at night in an empty house translating scenes of women being threatened and abused by men who enjoy their pain rather than their sexuality? Rape, torture—it was so common nowadays that it was almost a form of punctuation for a certain kind of trash novel. Some of it would have to be cleaned up to make it to the screen. You can’t do those sorts of things to Irène Jacob and get away with it, even if it is Brad Pitt who gets to lick her wounds. As a translator she could make a decision not to wallow in it, but it still had to be made flesh in English. Well, she knew what she was doing. And if the images got too rough, she’d just make sure she worked on certain scenes only under the cover of daylight.
Not that darkness scared her. At least not the darkness of this house. That was what was so extraordinary about everybody else’s sudden concern for her. There was nothing in this house to make one feel bad. There never had been. She had known that from the moment she walked in off the street.
It had been the first property she’d seen after her mother’s money had come through probate, and she had been so certain that she asked the owners if she could phone Tom from there and persuade him to come straight over on his way back from work. They offered the asking price that very evening. The couple who owned it had lived there for twenty-five years and were selling only because it was too big for them now that the family had grown up and gone. They liked her, she could tell, saw a future rolling out before her like a carbon copy of their own: finding the right house, having the children, fussing and fighting as they watched them grow up, and then, suddenly, having to readjust as they found themselves alone again. She had been charmed by the image then, could almost share their sense of vision of herself.
And it would have been the perfect house for it. It was one of those mid-Victorian properties at the end of a terrace, financed by the speculative proceeds of the ones that came before and much grander than its neighbors, the builder showing off his success in bricks and mortar. It was built around a glorious staircase that spiraled up into the darkness from a wider than average hall, a house where all the rooms were generous ones, even up to the attic space under the eaves where, it seemed to her, a translator might work, happy and undisturbed, as the baby went down for its morning nap, content in the proximity of its mother.
But it was not to be. Maybe it was the very perfection of the image that had turned it barren. Although the house itself had not been to blame, she was sure of that. In fact, as the relationship had started to deconstruct itself and the thought of children receded, so the house had become a kind of surrogate dependent, wanting them, needing things, growing, responding to love and affection. And money. Like a child, it had proved expensive. It had gobbled up the remainder of her mother’s money within the first two years, what with redoing the roof, decorating the attic, even creating a new kitchen with a warm wooden floor and wide countertops. The final alterations had cost so much it had caused them to take out a joint mortgage, a statement of alternative commitment that came too late to save either of them. Without him she now paid it all herself. But still she never thought about selling. The house was her home, and she loved it. If money got tight later she’d get herself a lodger, some French or Spanish student who would appreciate the house’s specialness and remember it in years to come. No. This was where she was staying. And it would take more than a few mislaid CDs, even if they had been spirited away by malice, to turn her against it.
Gently she eased Millie off her lap. She put her back down on the chair and turned off the light in readiness for going upstairs. But before she could close the door the cat curled its way between her legs and bounded up to the landing above, and was looking down at her. Clearly tonight they were going to sleep together.
“Oh, well,” she muttered. “As of now I haven’t had a better offer.”
Together they mounted the curling staircase to her room. It was 2:10 A.M. by the clock. On the bedside table the receiver was buzzing angrily, British Telecom’s way of telling you you’re out of contact. She replaced it and this time it stayed silent. She went over to the window. The world outside was silent. The light of a half moon had opened up the garden to a series of shadows. On the back wall something was moving, but it was too dark to see what it was. Black against black. Poor Millie. She was either going to have to find the will to fight back or admit defeat. The cat had curled herself up at the end of the bed. It seemed she had already made her choice.
three
When the state stops paying the garbage collectors, the garbage stops being collected.
The street was awash in litter. Some of it would be recycled. Most of it you wouldn’t want to use again. Like the condoms and the needles. The decay suited the surroundings. Veer off any tourist track in this city and it isn’t long before old style turns to new shit and you hit the gulags: suburban wastelands of Soviet architecture—the result of Stalin’s steel mills pumping out industrial crap for the satellite states to buy—modern housing for modern workers. Poor fuckers, thought Jake, seven years into capitalism and there wasn’t much gain for their pain. At least in America if you were born into shit it didn’t mean you had to die there, too.
Still, they had done their best. Most windows had their own touch of pathetic individuality: the lace curtain, a vase of scrubby flowers, the odd figurine. Nobody gave much of a fuck about second from the left on the top floor, though. This window was so filthy you wouldn’t need to draw the curtains at all. Junkie town. Jake had seen it all before.
Inside, the room was so dark they had the light on, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Its glare did the woman no favors. She was sitting on a kitchen chair, her legs slightly apart, hands on her knees, not quite relaxed. She was probably in her late thirties, attractive, with shoulder-length blond hair and an English rose complexion on the edge of losing its bloom. She was wearing a T-shirt, expensively casual, tight, accentuating the heavy pull of her breasts, and a short black skirt. On someone less good-looking it would be the outfit of a hooker. On her it still had the gloss of Western style. Until you looked closer. On the floor beside her lay a pair of tights.
She slid both hands slowly up her legs and under her skirt, shimmying her ass down to help her reach the top of her panties. She teased them loose, letting them slip down onto the floor and stepping carefully out of them. She pushed a lock of hair back from her face and l
ifted her right foot onto the chair, the skirt pulling up high over her thighs to reveal a line of naked leg right up to the curve of her buttocks. Then, slowly, she slid the fingers of her hand up into her crotch.
She moved her way inside for a moment, probing, playing, all the time keeping her eyes fixed on the man who was sitting opposite. Her face showed no signs of pleasure, no emotion at all, just a cool expressionless stare.
He kept on looking. He was thin and sallow-skinned, a man who hadn’t seen the sun for so long he had started to feed on darkness. His eyes flicked between her face and her fingers, lips parted in a half-smile, his breath an echo of sound.
After she had played for a little longer she slowly removed her fingers. Between them she held up a thick plastic tube, six or eight centimeters long, glistening, its covering slightly wet. She tossed it across the room. The man caught it neatly, lifting it briefly to his nose before peeling off the wrapping. Released from its covering, a heavy little bag unfolded, packed with white stuff. He held it up, weighing it casually in his palm.
“Ninety percent pure,” she said softly, as if amused at the ritual, both his and hers. “A thank-you from Jerome. He says to remember who it came from.”
“Tell him I already have,” he said quietly. “I’ll also remember from where.”
She nodded, then sat back down and reached for her panties: the gesture this time more ordinary, more self-absorbed—a woman getting dressed after the show, regardless of who was watching her.
“Uh-uh.”
She glanced up at him, as if surprised to still find him there.
“Why don’t you open your legs again,” he said quietly.
