by T. M. Parris
The next car along was the restaurant. Usually the dividing doors were locked at night, but not tonight. The man in front pushed the door open. Fairchild could be quick when he needed to be. He shoved him onto the floor and kicked back into the man behind, following up with a punch in the stomach. He slammed the door shut, separating the men. The man behind gripped his shoulders but he lurched and kicked, backing him up against the metal wall. They were in a tiny confined space between carriages, doors to the outside on either side. He couldn’t let the man’s hands go near his jacket pocket. He grabbed the man’s arm and levered down, twisting sharply, prompting an animal yelp. He delved into the jacket pocket. Once his hand was on the gun he realised the danger of using it in this small metal box they were in.
The door opened behind him. An arm circled his neck, wrenching him back. His finger, still in the other man’s pocket, found the trigger of the gun. He squeezed. A muffled blast, a shout of pain and the body in front of him crumpled. In the split second of immobility behind him he spun, jabbed up at the face and elbowed the large body. Two thoughts came to him. One, if he stayed on this train he would never make it off alive. Two, the doors were usually locked, but they weren’t tonight. With one hand he compressed the large man’s neck against the restaurant car door, and with the other he reached back. But the outside door handle needed two hands.
The man lunged. Fairchild rammed with his shoulder, slamming the man’s head against the door. He turned and launched himself at the handle, twisting and pushing at the same time. The door swung open and he dropped, hanging onto the handle. His shoulders wrenched. Freezing snow swirled up and around. His legs kicked out: nothing below. Only his arms held him over the moving ground. His grip on the handle was already slipping. The wind rammed the door back, jamming his thighs in the door frame. Strong hands grabbed his upper body and pulled, almost tearing him off the handle. He pushed his feet against the outer frame, propelling the door out against the wind. The door rebounded but he was ready this time. He twisted round and kicked into the carriage, knocking the guy onto his back. Now he was dangling over the moving ground again. He looked down, steadied himself, and let go.
His feet touched the ground. A force slammed him down and rolled him over and over. Something in his face cracked. The train thundered above him. He slowed and slid to a halt. His face was buried in gritty snow. The thundering lessened and receded. He lifted his face, coughing dirt from his mouth. Blood was dripping out of his nose. Snow fell thickly. He started to shiver. He was wearing only shirt sleeves. His skin was already wet. The railway track glimmered in the distance behind the vanishing train. He felt the presence of the forest beside him, a mass of darkness. There was absolute silence.
15
It was just a small gold-trimmed canopy over steps down to a basement. So exclusive it didn’t need a name. Black cars hovered, engines droning like bees, drivers ready at a moment’s notice while their silk-suited employers sat and drank champagne inside. Roman knew this place. It was just like all the others. So many of them now.
Down the steps and into the bar, the disco dance floor only had female dancers. They paid big sums to get into a place like this. He followed Evgeny through to a private room at the back. Evgeny persuaded the meathead on the door to step aside, and opened it. In a plush room, a blonde and two suits on either side of him, sat Roman’s son, legs apart, staring through the window onto the dance floor at a near-topless jiggling bimbo. He turned.
“Who let you in?” he asked. His bouncers finally woke up and stepped forward out of the corners.
“Evgeny did, as a favour. I’m an old customer.”
“You used to come to a place like this?” A smile spread across Alexei’s face.
“It didn’t use to be a place like this.”
“Evgeny is a fool. I won’t come here again.”
“He won’t mind. He says you haven’t paid for your last three visits.”
“He knows I’m good for it.”
“He told me how much it is.”
“I said I’m good for it.”
“Then pay him. Are you going to let me in?”
The smile faded. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to my son.”
“About what?”
“About Piotr.”
That made him pause. He nodded his suits away.
“Them too.” Roman pointed to the bouncers. “Unless you think you need protecting from your own father.”
He waved them off too. Roman sat on the leather armchair next to Alexei’s. Through the window hips and buttocks wiggled and swayed. The women sat together and started to look at their mobile phones.
“You’re going to introduce me?” asked Roman. “Is one of these ladies your new wife?” They glanced up and laughed, looking at Alexei, not him.
“Kamila is at home,” Alexei said. “This isn’t her kind of place.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
He looked annoyed. “Not any more. You want some champagne?” He waved at a bottle on ice on the table. There were no clean glasses and he didn’t offer to get one. The room was too warm. It smelled of leather and ladies’ perfume.
“This is what Morozov is for now?” Roman couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. “This is what you’re spending the money on? Champagne and prostitutes? The obschak isn’t for this. It’s a fund for security, to help people who need it. Not for your pleasure!”
Alexei glared at him. “Who’s telling you I’m spending the obschak? This isn’t obschak. This is profit. I’m making a success of your outfit, papa. Realising the potential. No more shopping bags and slippers. I’m making real money.” He reached for the champagne bottle and drank from it, wiping a dribble off his face.
“Drugs?” Roman asked. “You’re selling heroin now?”
Alexei laughed, a cackle Roman had never heard before. Alexei used to laugh so easily, so freely, when he was a child.
“Is that what you asked Piotr to find out?”
Roman banged his fist on the table. The glass top cracked. The girls looked up.
“Piotr’s dead, Alexei! You’re laughing at that?”
Alexei’s face reset. Roman sat back, arms folded. The girls went back to their phones. Alexei picked at the label on the champagne bottle.
“You asked him to spy on me, didn’t you? Poke about in the business.”
“You blame me, Alexei? I gave you full control but I never hear what you’re doing. You don’t tell me, you don’t ask me, you don’t return my calls, you refuse to see me. It’s a dangerous business. You know that as well as anyone. I thought – I thought you would want my help.”
Alexei looked at him with those pale blue eyes that were once so trusting. “You thought I’d come running to you in a panic? Defer to your wisdom? Ask for your fatherly advice? It’s you who got Piotr killed, papa. You compromised him. His blood is on your hands.”
“So it was you who ordered it?”
“No! No, of course I didn’t! You think I’d do that? He was a family friend! He knew my mother!” He turned away, disgusted.
“Then who did?”
Alexei didn’t answer.
“Your new government friends?” He was hiding something. “Those people have no code, Alexei. To them there’s no difference between friends and rivals. They put everyone to work to serve themselves.”
“You never minded doing business with government men, Father.”
“Bribing a border guard? Persuading a customs officer to wave through a consignment? This is different. It’s not some stupid unworkable ideology that everyone has to pretend to believe in. We filled the gaps, got the goods where they needed to be when the state was too useless to do it. These days the government has purpose. They want to direct everything, the oligarchs, the other syndicates. Now everyone should dance the Kremlin’s dance.”
Alexei shrugged. “So? What’s good for Russia is good for all of us.”
“Oh, my son! Sell
ing off state oil and gas to a handful of businessmen at rock bottom prices? All for Yeltsin’s election campaign? Good for Yeltsin, bad for Russia. Now it’s even worse. Theft and corruption everywhere. They’re bigger criminals than we are, stealing from their own people! Those men you’re drinking with tonight, who are they? Those suits?”
Alexei waved his arm. “Businessmen. Authorities. Colleagues.”
“Your minders were asleep. Wake them up, Alexei. If you want to stand apart you need to know your people are there. You need to protect yourself.”
“We’re doing business together. Helping each other. This is how things are now, Father. You don’t understand.” He lifted the bottle to drink again.
“And Piotr? Did he understand?”
The bottle paused in the air, then he drank and turned his eyes to the dance floor where a tart in hotpants was angling her crotch directly at the window.
“Do you even think about what your mother would say about all this?”
The bottle slammed onto the table. “That’s your problem, isn’t it? That’s why you hate me! Mother was killed in the shooting, but I survived. Your beloved, perfect, Russian wife shot dead in the street, but somehow your puny, weak little son managed to crawl away! Oh, how you wished it was the other way round! You never forgave me, did you? That’s why you made me serve in the army. You could have got me out of it like so many others did, people who cared about their sons, but you wanted to punish me. Punish me for being alive. For not being more like you! For not being Mother!”
The two bimbos had looked up from their phones. When Alexei was done, they turned back to their screens.
“I wanted the army to make a man of you. Like it did my father. And me.”
Alexei started to laugh, giggling like a girl. “A man of me? A man? Don’t you know? The army takes men and turns them into beasts! You have no idea. You think a shoot-out in the streets of Irkutsk is like Grozny? You think that anything that happened during those days was as bad as a month in a training camp? You think that honour meant anything there? That there were rules, or codes? You know nothing. You’re an old man, Father. That’s what you said when you gave the firm to me. It’s time I took over, you said. Time for you to retire. You were right. Hey!”
He called the girls over. They draped themselves on either side of him. One nibbled his ear and pressed her tits against him. His hand traced her body down her back. The other one started to stroke his thigh. Through the window the music thumped and more bodies twisted and thrust. Alexei’s eyes glazed over as he watched. He reached for the champagne bottle and drained it. He dropped it on the floor and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The woman feeling his thigh worked her hand into his crotch.
“For God’s sake, Alexei!”
“Go home, Roman,” he said, still watching the thrusting women.
Roman stood to go. His son had never called him Roman before, never addressed him as an equal. At the door he turned. Alexei’s head was tilted back and his eyes were closed, while the women handled him and the dancers danced on.
16
Something was burning. Crackling, popping noises worked their way under Fairchild’s eyelids. He moved; fibres scratched against his chin. A soft stiff lump was massed under the back of his head. He opened his eyes. Wooden walls blurred into thin rugs, pans next to a stove, a figure sitting in a chair. He lifted his head. Something in his stomach swam upwards. His ears roared. He lowered his head again. He was warm: a rough heavy blanket coated him. He pushed it away. He was wearing thick brown work clothes he’d never seen before. The figure in the chair leaned forward and a round red face looked at him. A high-pitched laugh, the laugh of a girl. Then a stream of sounds, some garbled, some words.
“…of course she said her house was best, but I told her…not cold in here. Only when the east wind blows the snow through the hole in the roof. How can she, Olga Petrovna,….the fond idiot she thinks I am. I can put her down when….ten years, it’s been. Ten years!”
The words danced and tumbled. Why was he struggling? His Russian was flawless. And why were there dots in front of his eyes? He closed them. What was the last thing that happened before this? Come on, man! Nothing.
Wood scraped on wood as the woman pushed herself off the chair and shuffled towards him. “Have some borscht. My borscht is very good. They all said…best in the village. My husband and my son and my daughter and her son… I kept them healthy. Please! Please!”
The tiny old woman was holding out a bowl of steaming purple liquid. He couldn’t seem to lift his head – too dangerous. She bent, wheezing, and put it on the floor next to the narrow little cot he was lying on. He managed inside his head to form a sentence in Russian:
“What is your name?”
“Ha! My name, my name is Olga Grigorievna.” She pulled her chair round so that it faced Fairchild and settled as if about to tell a story. “This is my house. I’ve lived here all my life. I was raised here, and I raised my family here, and they did the same. But now it’s only me.” That seemed to be the end of the story for now.
He got more words out, but seemed to have forgotten how to form a sentence. “How … come here?”
Olga tilted her head. “You’re not Russian? Yet you speak Russian. And you’re so pale!” This caused confusion. “Estonian?” Fairchild didn’t contradict. “Estonian! And your name is?”
“Ivan,” after a slight hesitation.
“Ivan. An Estonian called Ivan! Well, well, well!” She rubbed her hands.
“Can you tell me how I got here?” That was better. The brain seemed to be working better but the mouth was thick.
“Well, Olga Petrovna said that I was going mad. But she always says that. Olga Petrovna says that I shouldn’t wander off walking in the snow in case I forget who I am and how to get back. But that’s all nonsense. So I still walk in the snow and through the forest where I can think about those times back then, when we were all here together. Sometimes it seems like a dream, it happened so long ago. Only me now.”
“You found me?” Memories were starting to stir. Two men on a train, a fight, a gun.
“I almost missed you but I tripped over your boot and fell!”
“Near the train line?”
“Near the train line! You looked very peaceful lying there. But I’ve lived here all my life. All my life! So I know what that means, when someone is lying peacefully in the snow. I shook you and shouted, but you didn’t wake up. Then I broke off a birch stick and prodded you hard. Very hard.”
Could he risk trying to sit up again? He got half way; his stomach stayed tame. A sharp pain jabbed him in the ribs. He felt the skin, tender and bruised. Olga pursed her lips.
“Yes. Very hard. And you woke up. But when you tried to stand, you fell again. So I came back to the village. And at first no one believed me, because of Olga Petrovna and what she says about me. But they came to look, and then they saw. And then we went back to the village and brought the cart that Maria Kasparova uses for her apples, and we put you in the cart!”
Fairchild stared at his diminutive hostess. “You lifted me onto a cart?”
“Well, it was myself and Maria and Aleksandra Larionova, and Svetlana Ivanovna and Anastasia Rusakova. And even Olga Petrovna herself came to help to push it up the hill. And then I said that you must come to my house, even though Svetlana’s house was nearer and Anastasia’s house has more space, and Olga Petrovna said that her house was the warmest, although it is not. Please. The borscht.”
Now he was sitting all the way up, leaning back on the wall. Some kind of background humming came and went. There were no straight lines anywhere. Olga heaved herself out of the chair to reach down and pass him the steaming bowl. He took it. It smelled – cabbagey.
“Please.” She gazed, nodding, waiting. His gut churned thoughtfully. He picked up the spoon, half-filled it with the dark red fluid and drank.
It was good.
“See! I told you!” She nodded, satisfied, and pulled
herself back onto the chair. Fairchild drank some more. A growl from below. That would do, for now. He put the spoon down.
“Ten years,” he said. “Earlier. You said ten years.”
Olga looked sad. “The last one was Larionov. He was the last. That was the vodka. It was the vodka with most of them. But also the war, the gulag.” A regretful smile.
“The last what?”
“The last man, of course! Only us women left now, going on ourselves, for who knows how long!”
“There are no men in this village?” He was starting to doubt his Russian again.
“Not for ten years. Twenty years in this house. Ha! Twenty years! Husband, son, grandson. The war, the gulag, the vodka. The—” She stopped mid-word, closed her eyes and shook her head. “Other things.”
Other things. That history again. Black crows, a hammering on the door in the middle of the night, a room at the end of a long corridor. A slow starvation by a window overlooking fallow fields. A scream, a gunshot, a place just outside Moscow. Nothing left, flat ground. Other things.
Her eyes were open again. He pulled the blanket fully aside.
“These clothes I’m wearing…”
“My husband’s. I kept a few. I don’t know why.”
“You really didn’t need to…”
“But your clothes were wet. They are drying in front of the stove. And it’s good to know that I still remember how to undress a man.” She giggled, a girl again.
“When did you find me?”
“Two days ago. But I don’t know how long you were there. The trains come through daily. We sometimes find things that have been thrown off the train. Not people, though!”
Fairchild smiled, though it was painful. “I was mugged. On the train. They took everything and threw me off. I went into the forest. After that I don’t remember.”
“You were going to Moscow?”
“Yes, Moscow.” The room lurched. He remembered the chapel. Dimitri, poor Dimitri. The humming came back. His soup slopped over the rim.
