Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

That morning I slip into a trance, scarcely aware of my fellow passengers and oblivious to the landscape we’re passing through. I don’t talk to anyone, nor do I make a single entry in my notebook. There’s a force at work, something I failed to anticipate. Since the place I’m heading for is clear in my mind only as an idea, and isn’t, therefore, strictly speaking, a destination, I’m beginning to suspect that my eventual surroundings, whatever they might turn out to be, will have little or no relevance. The country I have chosen is hardly incidental, but this is not, at heart, a physical journey. It’s more like a journey back in time — or sideways, into another dimension. If the English couple in the cinema were messengers or heralds, pointing the way, then everything that has happened since is the fruit of those few moments — a gathering up, a realignment, a kind of distillation. My life is light and tidy now, like a rucksack that holds nothing but the bare essentials. The letters I wrote may have had their faults but they were as honest as I could make them. There will be no returning — at least, not in the geographical sense. This is a one-way ticket, a permanently ebbing tide.

  /

  As the train rattles northeast, through endless, leafless forest, my father floats back into my thoughts. I can visualize the apartment on Via Giulia, though the blue sky is becoming harder to believe in, more unreal. There he is, standing on the roof terrace in a shirt and shorts. On his feet are his favorite red leather slippers, which he bought in Morocco. Kit, he mutters. A vertical crease appears between his eyebrows. He is holding my first letter — the short one — and he is clearly vexed. It’s quite possible that the meeting I have proposed is inconvenient. He might be working on a story that means he has to be elsewhere, in which case flights, accommodation, and interviews will already have been arranged. Should I have given him more notice? A choice of dates? Maybe I’m asking too much of him. Maybe all the letter will do is confirm his current view of me — namely, that I’ve become demanding and unreasonable, and that I seem determined to disrupt his life.

  Still, I think he will travel to Berlin. It’s not so much that he loves me or feels responsible for me — or rather, those considerations won’t be in the forefront of his mind. No, I have presented him with a mystery, one he won’t be able to resist the urge to solve. My letter will back up anything Massimo might have said. What’s more, it’s brief and to the point, employing the kind of language he’s used to. It resembles an assignment, in fact. I have appealed, unwittingly, to the part of him he values most, the part that can be relied on.

  Yes, he’ll go.

  I see him booking himself onto a flight that arrives on the sixteenth, the day before our rendezvous. At the outset his journey echoes mine — Termini, then Fiumicino. He might even leave his umbrella on the train! During the flight he looks at mainland Europe far below and smiles because he’s once again in transit, but then he remembers the reason for the journey, and his mood sours. No, he won’t have any “hot or cold snacks.” No, he doesn’t want “a beverage.” No, he isn’t “interested in purchasing” any cigarettes or fragrances or teddy bears dressed up as pilots.

  Kit, he thinks. What are you playing at?

  On landing, he takes a taxi straight to the InterContinental. Since my letters were written on hotel stationery he might assume that I am still a guest, but when he asks for me at reception the woman with the doll’s eyes tells him they have no one by that name. He shows her my letter, dated October 9, and asks her to check her records. The natural emptiness of her gaze adds tension to the twenty-five or thirty seconds she spends scanning her computer screen. Katherine Carlyle stayed for two nights, she says at last, arriving in the early hours of October 8 and departing at midday on the ninth. She takes another look at the letter. She thinks she remembers posting it.

  My father leans on reception, inviting a confidence. “Was she alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she seem upset?”

  The woman considers him.

  “Was there anything unusual about her behavior?” my father says.

  “Not that I remember —” She starts. “Someone spoke to her, just after she gave me the letter.”

  “A man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it him?” He shows her the photo of me and Oswald.

  “No.”

  “Do you know who the man was?”

  “No. He gave her a card. She threw it in the bin.” She looks past my father, towards the lift.

  Oddly enough, for all his anxiety and irritation, he sleeps well that night.

  If he does fly to Berlin it seems inevitable that he will read my second letter. I imagine him at the table where I used to sit, near the mirror with its pondlike glass. The atmosphere, as always, is restrained, bookish, faintly erotic. The second letter is hard for him to stomach, but he reads it twice, from beginning to end, and then looks up. The opposite direction. What do I mean by that? Unless he manages to trace either Oswald or Cheadle — and I can’t see that happening, not given the entirely coincidental nature of my encounters with the two men — he has no way of finding out where I have gone. The trail will go cold in Berlin — even, possibly, at the Einstein. But wait. What about Lydia? He’s a reporter with a keen intuitive sense and decades of experience. He looks at Lydia and wonders what she can tell him.

  He looks at Lydia —

  The train stops abruptly, jolting me forwards in my seat. We appear to have reached the border with Russia. I take out my passport and my letter of invitation and place them neatly on the table by the window, ready for inspection. The muscles in my stomach have tensed up. My mouth tastes of coins.

  When the Russian border guard steps into my compartment I say good evening — Dobry vyecher — then I look straight ahead with my hands in my lap. He opens my passport to the page that holds my visa. I can hear his breathing, thick and steady, as if he’s asleep. A chill clings to his dark-green uniform; drizzle pearls his gray fur hat. At last he hands my passport back with a brisk nod. Outwardly I remain the same — calm expression, folded hands — but inside I’m bubbling over. My visa is still valid. He has let me in.

  Even before the train begins to move again I’m back in the Einstein. My father signals to Lydia and she walks over. Her smile is professional, as usual. There’s an extra element, though — an intensity or luster. She knows she’s in a story, and that he’s part of it. Is he as attractive as she expected him to be? And what does he think of her?

  He questions her as she stands beside the table, her left hip only inches from his right shoulder. She answers thoughtfully. He looks up, charmed by the freckles scattered across her nose. There is no way of avoiding the hackneyed line. What time do you finish work? When he leaves a few minutes later he insists on paying. She gets to keep my money.

  At the end of her shift they meet outside the café. Though they don’t know each other at all, and are facing different ways, looking for a taxi, they are connected by something so vibrant that it’s almost visible. When I wrote my letter, did I know that it would throw them together?

  In less than half an hour they are in his room at the InterContinental, with its wide bed, its floor-to-ceiling window, its soaring view over the Tiergarten. It’s all so obvious and effortless. Seamless, really. As the gap between their faces narrows, I turn away. It’s as if I’m standing at the window, looking out. Gray clouds swirling, trees stripped of all their leaves.

  Later, he reaches across her bare shoulder for my letter. The hairs on his forearm glint in the light from the bedside lamp. The window black, the rush-hour traffic murmuring below. He begins to read. Halfway through, he puts the letter down.

  “So you didn’t actually know my daughter …”

  Lydia rolls on to her back and looks at him. She’s still wondering who he is, this glamorous older man she has allowed into her life. This stranger.

  “I saw her three or four times,” she says.

  “You think she was staying nearby?”

  “It’s possible.”

 
; “She didn’t mention a hotel?”

  “No.”

  “What about the last time you saw her, when she gave you the letter? Did she tell you where she was going?”

  Lydia thinks back. “She said she couldn’t come to the café again. I had the feeling she was leaving that day. She looked at her watch. She was in a hurry.”

  “That was two weeks ago?”

  “Not so long. Eight days maybe.” She lifts herself higher on the pillows. “There was a kind of — I don’t know — Engültigkeit about the way she talked.”

  “Engültigkeit?”

  “Something final. She seemed to know what she was doing — in the future. It was all decided.”

  My father stares at the ceiling, a knotting in his chest, around his heart. I know what he’s thinking, but he’s wrong. Then a new question occurs to him. “Was she always by herself?”

  “Yes,” Lydia says. “Except for one time. There was a man with her.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Pale, quite thin. In his twenties.” She pauses. “He was German.”

  My father reaches for the envelope that held the letter and shows Lydia the photo.

  She nods. “That’s him.”

  “His name’s Oswald.” My father pronounces it the English way, as you would an Anglo-Saxon king.

  “You think he’s her boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know.” My father studies the photo. “What do you think?”

  “No,” Lydia says. “She’d be with someone more good-looking.”

  “Because she’s good-looking?”

  “Yes.”

  Despite the circumstances they can’t help smiling at each other. In talking about me it seems they have also said something about themselves.

  I turn to the window. A wall runs parallel to the railway, its concrete covered with graffiti. The words look squeezed from a tube. In the background is a row of grim apartment blocks.

  Moscow.

  /

  No snow has fallen in the city but a shiver goes through me as I step down onto the platform. I’ve been traveling for twenty-seven hours. Before I left Berlin I booked into the Peking Hotel, which is near the station, and though it’s after midnight I decide to walk. The weather is cold and overcast. Still, at least it isn’t raining.

  Once outside the station I make for a tunnel that leads beneath a raised main road. Two mismatched chairs stand by the entrance, against the wall, as if the tunnel usually has guardians who charge a fee. One is a gray office chair with wheels. The other has spindly legs and a plywood seat. A dense yellow glow seeps from the lights in the ceiling.

  I’m halfway through the tunnel when a group of figures appears at the far end. One of them is freakishly tall, in a coat that has a patent-leather glint to it, and he holds his arms out in front of him, at right angles to his body, like a zombie. Another wears a Pussy Riot balaclava and a frothy tutu. Her black calf-length boots bristle with silver studs. A third carries a bottle of vodka and a scythe. They surround me before I can retrace my steps.

  “Tourist?” one of them says, in English.

  I nod. “Da, eto pravda.” Yes, it’s true.

  The Pussy Riot girl stands in front of me, one hand on her hip. “You speak Russian?”

  “Nyet.” No.

  That gets a laugh.

  “You want to come to a party?” The girl speaks English with a languid American accent. In the yellow light her eyes look bloodshot.

  “It’s late,” I tell her. “I need to check into my hotel.”

  “We prepare for Halloween,” the zombie says. “Here in Russia Halloween is — how you say — not legal.”

  “We are protesters,” says the boy with the scythe.

  “What if the police see you?” I ask.

  The Pussy Riot girl shrugs. “We escape.”

  She offers me a cigarette. I shake my head, then watch as she lights up. She sucks the smoke deep into her lungs and holds it there. I look past her at the boy with the scythe, his vest and bare arms spattered with fake blood.

  “You look great,” I say. “I really like the outfits.”

  “We look great,” the zombie says.

  The Pussy Riot girl asks where I’m staying.

  I hesitate. “The Peking Hotel.”

  “Nice,” she says, “but this is not the way.”

  She walks me back to the station, then points across the square to a gap between a bar’s yellow neon sign and a slowly pulsing green cross that looks like an all-night chemist. The Peking is down that road, she says. Ten minutes. There’s no reason not to believe her. I thank her, then say goodbye.

  As I move away, a man’s voice floats up into the air behind me. “Maybe we visit you, in your hotel …”

  Then only the rush of late-night traffic on the raised main road, and two taxi drivers on the pavement, arguing.

  /

  The next day, after breakfast, I approach reception and tell the man on duty — Vladimir — that I need a travel agency. Is there one nearby? As Vladimir consults his computer he makes a curious monotonous humming sound, then writes down a name and address on a sheet of paper. It’s two stops on the Metro, he tells me. Or I could walk. He gives me directions. It will take half an hour, he says.

  Out on the street the air has a bite to it but the sun is shining and the sky is a vast unexpected blue. I follow Vladimir’s advice and set off down Sadovaya, my breath making pale clouds. When I woke, at half past six, I parted the tall bronze curtains in my room and stood at the window, staring out. I thought of my next port of call, Cherepovets, and pictured Anna as a young girl, her hair as yet undyed, her teeth still white. At that moment I somehow understood that Cherepovets was an unnecessary distraction and could be dispensed with. I will head for Arkhangel’sk — preferably by air.

  I locate the travel agency, on the first floor of an office building, arriving before it opens. As I take a seat in the hallway, next to an old man in a black leather cap, he doubles over coughing. I offer him some water. He waves a hand, meaning no. He has white hair and thick black eyebrows, and the lines that curve past his mouth are so deep they look carved.

  Finally the coughing fit passes and he asks where I am from. I tell him I’m English.

  “Yes,” he says. “That is what I thought.” He touches his cheek with his fingertips. “The skin.”

  He speaks English haltingly, as if the inside of his mouth is sore, but his command of the language impresses me.

  “Moscow.” He shakes his head. “Too many cars. I can’t breathe.”

  I murmur something sympathetic.

  “You’re a tourist?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  He stares straight ahead, his mouth turned down at the corners.

  “What about you?” I say. “Why are you here?”

  He tells me he has spent the last three weeks with his mother, and that he’s now returning home, to Arkhangel’sk.

  “But that’s where I’m going!” I say. “I’m about to try and book a flight.”

  “I also need to book a flight.”

  “Perhaps we could travel together. It would be much easier for me.”

  “If we travel together,” the man says, “I can practice my English. I haven’t spoken English since I retired ten years ago.”

  We introduce ourselves. His name is Yevgeny. When I tell him I’m Misty I feel like a fraud, and also faintly ridiculous, but he doesn’t seem to find it strange. He asks what I will do in Arkhangel’sk. I’ll be spending a few days with a colleague of my father’s, I tell him. I’m studying languages at university, so I’m hoping to pick up a bit of Russian. Yevgeny believes everything I say — but then, why shouldn’t he? It sounds plausible enough. All the same, I’m glad he doesn’t ask who my father’s colleague is. Arkhangel’sk isn’t exactly a metropolis. If Yevgeny knows the man, my cover story will collapse.

  In the travel agency Yevgeny talks to a woman who gives off an Addams family glamour — long black hair, pa
le lips, black blouse unbuttoned to reveal a silver crucifix. She answers at some length and he translates for me. There are no direct flights to Arkhangel’sk until Tuesday, he says. We could change planes in St. Petersburg but that will be expensive.

  He puts his head in his hands and groans. “Another four days in this terrible place.”

  The woman toys with her crucifix, indifferent.

  Yevgeny asks about trains. She tells us there’s a sleeper from Yaroslavsky station, with seats available tomorrow. It’s a long journey — twenty-one hours — but we will be in Arkhangel’sk early on Sunday morning, and it will cost a third of the price.

  Yevgeny turns to me, eyebrows raised.

  “Let’s go by train,” I say, then ask if he could book me an extra night at the Peking Hotel.

  Later, out on the street, I thank him for all his help, and we agree to meet at the station, an hour before the train departs.

  /

  With Yevgeny gone, I hesitate, unsure how to spend the day. I feel a surge of impatience, then a kind of lethargy, and I’m reminded of the time I drove to the south of France and sat by a pool, waiting for something to happen. One thing’s certain: I won’t be seeing any sights. Moscow is a staging post, not an end in itself, and I can’t allow it to make too much of an impression.

  In the Metro I take the gray line, going north. With their marble hallways and their elaborate chandeliers, the stations astonish me, but I’m content with glimpses. I leave the train at the last stop, Altufevo. There are underground kiosks selling painkillers, warm pies known as pirozhki, and woolly bobble hats. No trace of chandeliers or marble now. I think of Oswald, who took me to the edge of Berlin to show me something that wasn’t there. He thought it was worth looking at and he was right. I should send him a postcard, as promised.

  I set off up a main road, passing bus shelters papered over with adverts and flyers. Old women squat on low stools by the curb. There are jars of pickled vegetables for sale, and tiny cloves of garlic, and pink-bellied river fish laid out on sheets of cardboard. The men are dressed in black leather jackets and jeans. Most of them carry bottles of beer. There are no ordinary houses or shops, only supermarkets and tower blocks. On the flat grassy areas in between are birch trees, and also trees I don’t recognize, with clusters of red berries dangling from their branches.