She finished the bitter cup, draining its last drop onto her tongue, then walked slowly to the hairdresser, to have her hair washed, her nails painted, in preparation for the evening. She sat with her fingers splayed on the towelling cushion while dark red lacquer was applied.
What would happen to her if she tried to get out? Hitherto, she had only thought of the horror of Anatoli’s leaving her, preparing for the pain of the knife, severing the link, on which she felt her existence depended. Now, she considered the reverse. As the manicurist bent over her nails, painting each one with meticulous care, she thought of the javelin thrower’s hand smoothing the paper. Had it been held down, as hers was now, for the punishment to be performed? She imagined the butcher’s hatchet blow, chopping through the joints, leaving the strings of the tendons and the splintered bone.
She shuddered and her hand jerked slightly. The manicurist tutted and, with the delicacy of a surgeon, applied a pencil to eradicate the slip she had made.
When you had cut off the digits, did you immediately call a doctor to staunch the blood, or was the victim left to deal by himself with the results of the crime and the punishment, she wondered. The stumps had looked strangely natural, rounded off, like shortened, nailless fingers. Perhaps his crime was that he had simply wanted to get out. They had cut off the fingers that had scrabbled to find an exit.
Could she escape? Could she leave this hairdresser’s shop, take a taxi to the airport and fly… Where? She never felt that she had any hold on Anatoli. He came and went of his own will. But when she thought of escape for herself, she saw that she was so closely entangled with him that she could only get away by becoming someone else, starting again. She would have to cut herself off, abruptly and brutally, chopping off the fingers of her right hand. She would leave the flat She would never again touch her bank accounts. She would begin again with nothing. She would need a new name, a new persona, a new place. It was impossible. She could not face the pain.
Her nails were finished. Each one formed a neat, blood-coloured oval.
27
The party that night on the Avenue Foch was not a normal Russian evening. Anatoli had left her the address and told her to arrive about nine. He would be unable to come home to accompany her, so she would have to make her own way. She had assumed it was to be a dinner of the kind she often sat through, with a group of his Russian friends, eating and talking for long hours around the table. Although her Russian was not really good enough for her to join in, and she made little effort to do so, she enjoyed these evenings. Plates of zakuski, salads, cold meats, smoked fish would be laid out in front of them. Then would come little dishes of hot mushrooms in cream, fried aubergines. Talking and sipping vodka, the guests would take a little of one thing, then of another, then return to whatever it was that had been particularly good. That would take a good hour and a half. Next would come the soup, which would be tasted and discussed like a fine wine. The main course, grilled meat, would be disposed of quite rapidly, in preparation for the final orgy of discussion, which would take place over the dessert, the bowls of fruit and plates of tarts and cheesecakes, with which they drank more wine, sweet this time, or tea. Sometimes Anatoli’s Russian friends brought women with them, always ones remarkable for their beauty, with whom Julian refused to make any common cause. She would sit, faintly smiling, amid the haze of cigarette smoke and Russian conversation, watching Anatoli and waiting for the end, when they could leave together.
This evening was something quite different. The door on the tenth floor was opened by a white-coated man servant and she found herself in a reception room which, although it contained some twenty-five or thirty people, still looked empty. It was very dimly lit, with groups of candles on distant tables. She could not see Anatoli and no one came forward to greet her as she made her way down a few steps, into the room. At first she had an agreeable sensation of anonymity, then in the dimness someone waved and she realised that she had met many of the guests before at one time or another in Anatoli’s company. She saw Igor standing in one corner, deep in conversation.
A tray of drinks was presented to her. The choice was a cultural one between vodka and champagne. She chose France for safety’s sake. Music was playing and she moved into a previously hidden section of the room to see a grand piano in one corner. She walked slowly through the gloom, among the groups speaking in Russian, French, English, to the pillar behind the piano. A new level revealed itself here and she went up the three steps to look over the space with a professional eye. The room was almost V-shaped and the point of the V was composed of walls of glass, partly drawn back to give onto a wide terrace. There must be magnificent view. She could see a few people standing outside in spite of the cold, clearly discussing business. Anatoli still had not arrived.
Below, the golden light concentrated on the piano distracted her eye from the darkness of the rest of the room with its star-like candlelight. She watched the lyrical movement of the playing hands on the keys. She wandered back, down the steps and out onto the terrace where a strong wind was blowing. It buffeted her sharply and she thought of retreating, but, as usual, she could not resist going to the edge.
She placed her hands on the stone parapet, leaning inwards and directing her eyes straight ahead. She could see the Arc de Triomphe illuminated, perpetually encircled by moving lights. Irresistibly, she was drawn to look down at the broad ribbon of Avenue Foch with its streamers of headlights. On either side of the main avenue ran broad strips of greenery. From above, the tree-tops had the spongy, reticulated texture of brains; the paths ran across the grass like veins. Her breathing became shallow and rapid and, feeling a weakness in her legs, she leaned over the balustrade. The earth below seemed to leap towards her. She became conscious that someone was standing beside her. Igor.
Inside, the pianist was playing Chopin and had begun to sing. She had a beautiful contralto voice and was singing in French. Julian did not grasp the words, but the meaning was clear: women love, men leave, love does not die, it lives on, unreturned. The gallic combination of cynicism and sentimentality was instantly comprehensible. When Julian hummed the song to me later, I came to the conclusion that its power lay not in the words or the music, but in the emotion invested in it by Julian herself. At one moment it had been just a song, at the next its banality had become a personal truth.
She turned into the reception room and felt at her back the sharp wind, contrasting with the warm air of the apartment. Anatoli entered and stood at the top of the steps, looking over the company. He did not see her. The pianist was playing again and Julian sensed rather than saw his reaction. Only someone acutely attuned to his moods would have noticed anything. She saw that his slow movement down the stairs and across the room was full of purpose, even though he allowed himself to be halted en route. He shook hands, patted shoulders, embraced, but still drove forward throughout the song. She thought that his determination was directed at a fellow guest, someone she did not know, something to do with the ever-present rivalry with the Uzbek. Only when she realised that the object of his journey across the room was the piano did she understand.
The pianist, leaning forward over the keys, swaying back with her eyes closed, was concentrating on her words and music. Julian watched her self-absorption. It was a sort of masturbation, she thought, a self-induced ecstasy, taken while the mind created a vision of the absent lover, for whom the pleasure was intended. The pain was like a knife, worse than a knife. Later, when the mugger’s weapon penetrated her, she did not realise what had happened, at first felt nothing. The pain of understanding was sharper and more immediate. She instantly read the future in that meeting.
Anatoli waited until the song had come to an end, then approached the musician. She rose to speak to him. The light shone on the keys of the piano and did not reach their faces, illuminating only their handshake. Julian could see his large palm, marked off by the abrupt white line of his cuff, enclose the leaf-like hand of the pianist.
‘Thin
, dark, ugly.’
She was as Igor had described her, and probably sexier than she had been twenty years ago. She now had a scrawny French elegance for which beauty was really unnecessary and carried with her a whole past of suffering and survival.
So Julian never got round to finding out whether she had the strength to quit. Anatoli went first. The end came silently, no rows. He simply left a few weeks later and did not return. He departed in the early hours to catch the morning plane to Moscow. He kissed her cheek as she lay dozing and she put up one arm to embrace his neck. She heard the door close. The finality of the sound cut through her sleep and she knew he would not return. Yet she still waited for the phone call, announcing his arrival. After three weeks she began to stay in the apartment most of the day, in order to be in when he came. Then she forced herself to go out, so that she could hope to discover him there on her return.
But there was no sign. No Anatoli. No Igor. No answer to her calls and faxes. She did not know where he was, why he had disappeared. He could have been assassinated, for all she knew. She sometimes imagined him lying in a Moscow street, at the entrance to the Bank’s offices in Gorky Street, blood ebbing from the hole in his back. He could have had his visa removed, like the Uzbek. There could be any number of explanations. But in her heart, she knew what had happened.
All she could do was wait.
Part 4
Art and Perception
28
Held captive, belted to my seat, my knees jammed into the chair back, I had time to consider what I had learned about Julian in the past weeks, since our return from Paris. There is something about airplane cabins that leads to self-examination: the enforced immobility, the sense of barely moving when you are in fact flying at six hundred miles an hour, the abruptness of the transfer from one existence to another.
Julian’s account of her life with Anatoli, once she had decided to give it to me, had flowed freely. It was a solace for her. She recounted incidents, apparently for no other reason than that to mention his name gave her pleasure. She refused to investigate her own suspicions, only hinting at what she feared. The effect for the listener was of a reflexion in a triple mirror. The frontal view was a laughing Anatoli, full of generosity and good humour, but the wings offered glimpses of a harder profile. Although she spoke of him in the past tense and never made explicit her feelings in the present, she had no need to. She had not changed her mind or her heart since her first meeting at Francesca’s party. I felt no jealousy. Her loyalty to him, even after he had abandoned her, only made me admire her the more. Her devotion confirmed her contrast with Emily who, like Anatoli, had so arbitrarily and disloyally withdrawn her attachment.
All this was very muddled thinking and being suspended at 25,000 feet above Eastern Europe did not make things any clearer. Even then, with the false sense of detachment produced by air travel, I realised there were some unresolved elements in the picture, but I did not linger on them. Through the porthole I could see a floor of cloud suspended below us. It did not move and nor did we. It had a dense, compacted solidity that made it appear we could land on it I only allowed myself to think of the pleasure of Julian’s companionship at the conference I was about to attend and not why she wanted to come. We were on our way to Moscow.
The conference on Art and Perception had been in the planning a long time. Its dates had wavered for a time and finally been fixed for March. Why anyone should choose, years in advance, to have a conference in Moscow in March was easily explained. It had to be Russia to show solidarity with a country newly entering the world of art scholarship in a way that it had not done before; it had to be March because June, the more agreeable month originally chosen, had proved inconvenient for various important participants. So we had to put up with the cold and dark of the late winter in Russia.
Moscow had been on my programme before Julian. When she had realised where I was going, she had said, half-joking, ‘You can find out if he’s all right. You could give him a message.’
‘I could give him a message to make sure you are not stalked and mugged and burgled any more.’
‘I don’t think he’s the person to deal with that. He needs to be warned about what’s going on. He ought to get out while he can.’ She had made her announcement while we were at a concert. The orchestra was seated attentively and just before the conductor entered she leaned over to me and said into my ear, ‘I’ve booked my ticket. I’m coming with you to Moscow.’
Applause broke out. A tiny figure was making his way to the podium. She turned away from me, shutting her eyes, enclosed by the music and unreachable by my frowning protest. I might feel no jealousy of Anatoli, but I did not relish the idea of her seeking him out. I watched the glowing golden shapes of the string section, the patterns of curves and reverse-curves cut across by the piercing lines of the bows, and hardly heard the music.
She would do whatever she wanted. I had no thought that I could persuade her to do anything else. This guided my reasoning. Perhaps she was right after all, reaching Anatoli to tell him of what she had experienced might put an end to the risks she was facing in London. It would also be an opportunity for her to draw a line. If she could say goodbye, she might be able to put the idea of him aside and concentrate on me.
The first half of the concert allowed me to work myself round to her point of view, one that I would have to accept in any event. In the interval I took her arm and led her out of the hall.
‘Is it sensible?’ I asked her. What good can it do, for you or for him?’ We did not walk towards the bar, but to a corner of the foyer where the stream of the audience moved past us, leaving us isolated.
‘It could save him,’ she said. Her face turned full on me, illuminated with feeling, unlike her normal, unrevealing expression. ‘He must get out. He often talked about when to quit. The money that was stashed away in off-shore accounts and in property around the world wasn’t just in case politics in Russia went bad. He always knew there might be a time when things went wrong in other ways and he would have to go. And he must see that it’s now.’
‘This is crazy, Julian. He leaves you to face attacks here in London and now you must go to Moscow to save him.’
I pointed out to her that Moscow was not the safest place for her. She brushed this aside as irrelevant. If you can be stabbed outside your own front door in London, she said, why worry about what could happen to you in Moscow? And selfishly, I felt happier that, if she was at risk in either city, she was with me rather than left behind. I felt a deep unease, but was forced to accept her plan.
It was a long time since I had visited Russia. The chief thing I remembered from that visit, apart from the Serovs, which I had gone to see, was the lack of advertising. It had made me realise how visually important in western cities are the images, the colour, the wit of advertisements. Moscow then had only huge hoardings or giant frescoes painted on the sides of buildings with long exhortations read out to me by my voluptuously attractive guide. The workers and peasants depicted were heroic versions of her, with sturdy legs and shoulders and deep chests. The slogans were puzzling. ‘Electrification is the Dialectic of the Masses’ my guide had translated for me.
‘But what does it mean?’ I had asked.
She had looked at me as though trying to discover the motive for my wilful stupidity. ‘It means electrification is the dialectic of the masses.’
This time there were no superhuman heads of Lenin dominating the street corners. More brilliant, even more cryptic in their own way, were the illuminated signs in Latin script, Rothmans, Marlboro, Sanyo, Daewoo. Otherwise, things were the same as I remembered them ten years earlier: the looming buildings, somehow overscale in comparison with the trudging figures in the streets, who were not stick-like Lowry ants, but thickset and rotund as trucks. Last time I had stayed in a modern international hotel with pretensions it could not live up to. This time I had chosen an old hotel, which had recently been refurbished by western firms to great acclaim. It was in t
he city centre not far from the Kremlin, which I thought would be strategically more useful for Julian.
What she intended to do in Moscow I knew only in the sketchiest terms. Her plan was to see Anatoli, to persuade him to disengage himself from the Bank and to leave the country, thereby saving himself and, presumably, her. She had not told me how she was going to achieve this end and I could not see how, given that he had apparently abandoned her, anything she said could have any bearing on his decisions. However, it is no good telling people things they do not want to know. Julian would find out his reaction for herself and the experience might help to reconcile her to his loss.
The safety of Moscow in comparison with London looked doubtful as we waited to check in at the hotel. Doormen of a size remarkable even among Russians let us into a foyer of light and warmth. On a sofa sat a man, a caricature of a capitalist from a Communist propaganda sheet. Between his teeth he clenched a cigar at a priapic angle. His formidable paunch rested in front of him, gently encircled by his arms. Standing on either side of him were his bodyguards, muscular young men with longish dark hair and gold bracelets hanging over the backs of their hands. They were both dressed in dark suits and ties, but their metier as wrestlers or shot-putters could not be disguised. So much ostentatious protection made me nervous and I hustled Julian into the lift and up to our room.
‘You’re having dinner with someone this evening,’ she said as she dropped her handbag on the bed and unwrapped herself from her sable coat.
‘Yes, there’s someone from the Rijks Museum I’ve arranged to see. I’ve got the name of his hotel, so I’ll give him a call. He might join us here.’
‘I’m not sure what I’m doing.’
‘You can’t expect to see Anatoli tonight, Julian.’
‘No, not Anatoli. I’m going to phone Igor.’
The Art of Deception Page 20
