Delicate Indecencies

by Sandy Mccutcheon

  ‘The final act of this little drama is going to be most enjoyable and you have a starring role. Unfortunately, just after you kill Jane you will also be dead. But we want a great performance from you. So I suggest you rest while you can.’

  Rusak slipped a cigarette into his mouth and waited while the Wraith lit it for him. ‘You don’t know Ilya Ivanovich, do you? No, I didn’t think so. He speaks good English. He is an educated man, a scholar, a poet. It is a pity you will be dead for I know nothing better than to sit and listen to him read poetry. Like me, he also loves the theatre. But he is a harsh critic. I once saw him strangle an actress whose performance was less than pleasing to me. So, no theatrics while I’m away. I want a great performance and I will be very angry if there is the slightest hitch, the slightest nakladka, okay?’

  Teschmaker didn’t bother to react to the threat. He had the distinct feeling that if he moved his head even slightly he would vomit, so he remained motionless as Rusak and his driver left. His arm still throbbed from the blow earlier in the evening but, thankfully, the side of his face had gone totally numb. The blow to his face had been hard, but it was probably his head hitting the floor that had concussed him. Rusak was right, he decided, this was not the right time for theatrics.

  After a while the nausea subsided and he let his eyes move around the room. Only one of the oil lamps was lit, creating a small pool of yellow light, while the rest of the room swam in perpetual twilight. The Wraith came over and pushed a cup of something warm into his hands. Teschmaker realised they were trembling but no matter how he concentrated was unable to avoid slopping the hot liquid down his shirt. He waited until his hands steadied and brought the mug to his lips. It was tea; hot and sweet. He managed a mumbled ‘thank you’ which Ilya ignored.

  The Russian waited until Teschmaker had finished the tea then took his cup and indicated a single mattress on the floor by the door to the adjoining room where, Teschmaker assumed, Sydney Morris was still being held. He struggled to his feet and, though he was still feeling very unsteady, managed to make it without falling over. Theatrics, he thought, I do need some theatrics. But he made the mistake of letting his eyes close and though he told himself that he was just resting, he went straight to sleep.

  It was some hours later when he woke. He realised that he must have rolled onto his injured arm and the pain had dragged him from the chaos of his dreams. He was happy for the reprieve. He had been lost, not in some pseudo reality, not in memory, but in an abstract realm of shapes and grainy images; everything too big for him, too wide, too tall, too black. Each time he tried to steady the images in a desperate attempt to recognise what they were, the grainy phantoms dissolved into individual dots and swept over him like blackened hail or showers of lava. At times he felt himself falling in a colourless maelstrom; the very absence of colour threatening in itself. Vertigo competed with a paranoia intensified by the lack of any recognisable or tangible threat. It was a dream he had endured before, or maybe the recognition was simply part of the dream. He wasn’t certain of anything until the pain rescued him and delivered him back to the world of colour and solidity. Teschmaker lay still for a moment, letting his eyes feast on his surroundings; even in the dim light, the faded colours of the room seemed rich and satisfying. The pain in his arm was diminishing, the sharp twinges replaced by a dull but constant ache. He raised his head and looked down the length of the room. The Russian was hunched over a book in a wicker chair by the door, the one oil lamp on a table by his side. There was also something on his head. Teschmaker squinted and saw that it was a set of headphones, the cord running down to a portable CD player lying on the floor at his feet. Teschmaker lay back, wondering which he preferred — the grey phantoms in his head or this wraith-like individual by the door. He decided that, for the time being at least, he preferred the latter.

  ‘Is there a toilet I can use, Ilya Ivanovich?’ He addressed the man politely in his best Moscow Russian. It had no effect at all so he decided to risk an insult. ‘Ty mne van’ku ne val’aj.’

  This time he caught Ilya’s attention and the man pushed the headphones off. ‘What did you say?’

  Fortunately for Teschmaker the man hadn’t heard anything over his music, so he repeated the polite version of his request for a toilet.

  ‘Through the old man’s room.’ Ilya didn’t bother to get up. He replaced the headphones but didn’t return to his reading. He kept his eyes firmly on Teschmaker as he got gingerly to his feet.

  Finding the door to the next room ajar, Teschmaker pushed it gently open and looked in. Sydney Morris was asleep, an oil lamp glimmering beside the bed, its wick turned right down, the arc of light spilling onto his face and washing it in a warm glow. The old man looked far better than he had on the previous occasion; colour in his cheeks, less marasmic.

  Teschmaker tip-toed past the sleeping man and found the door to the bathroom off to the right. When he returned, the old man was stirring, his eyes open.

  ‘Hello Mr Morris.’ Teschmaker, not wanting to alert Ilya, crossed the room and crouched beside the bed. He kept his voice low. ‘You probably don’t remember me —’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re another one of those people that came to interrogate me.’

  ‘No. I came and spoke with you. But I’m not with them.’ Teschmaker wondered just how selective the man’s memory was if he remembered his visit but couldn’t recall whatever it was that both Rusak and Laverov wanted from him. ‘Mr Morris, I’m a friend of Jane’s. I want to help you, but I can’t unless I know what it is everybody wants to talk to you about.’

  ‘Everybody’s a friend of Jane’s when they want something from me.’ The old man brushed a thin wisp of hair out of his eyes. ‘What about me? What about what I might want?’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Tea. I would like a cup of tea.’ The old man’s eyes sparkled. ‘And a pretty young thing to come and change the sheets and tidy this place up. I’m sick and tired of this place. It’s a bardak!’

  ‘A brothel?’

  Sydney Morris looked at him for a moment, searching his memory. Then it dawned on him. ‘Of course. You are the young man who spoke passable Czech. And a word or two of Russian?’

  Teschmaker nodded. ‘I’ll see if I can talk Ilya Ivanovich into making tea.’

  ‘That khokhol? Da na ego na khuy — to hell with him. That pizd’uk couldn’t make tea with a tea bag and hot water.’

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Teschmaker smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He went back into the main room and found that Ilya hadn’t moved from his position on the chair by the door. But, just in case Teschmaker had been entertaining any ideas of trying to leave, the Russian now had the pistol prominently displayed on his lap.

  ‘Mr Morris would like a cup of tea,’ Teschmaker said. He waited until the headphones came off and repeated the request. But it appeared that the Wraith was not in a mood to oblige.

  ‘Mne po khuy — I don’t give a fuck.’ He slipped the headphones back in place and gestured to the small stove and the kettle. ‘I will have tea also.’

  ‘What did your last slave die of? Devotion?’ Teschmaker asked quietly.

  ‘You like this?’ Ilya said loudly and thrust a CD case at him. ‘That’s me!’

  ‘You think?’ It would need one of those warped mirrors in a sideshow to make Ilya look even vaguely the same shape as Meatloaf.

  ‘No. Bat out of hell.’ Ilya grinned at his own perceived cleverness.

  ‘Of course. You’re a bat out of hell. Must be very nice for you.’

  ‘What?’ the Russian shouted, competing against the noise of the music in his ears.

  ‘Great. Splendid!’ Teschmaker shouted back and, feeling he had done enough bonding for the time being, set about making the tea under Ilya’s watchful eye. The Russian’s head was moving in time to the music and, disconcertingly, every now and then he would sing along with the lyrics.

  After a time the batteries in the CD player expired. Fr
ustrated, Ilya yanked the headphones off and, tucking the pistol in his belt, stood up and stretched. He walked over to where Teschmaker was proving that the old adage about watched pots was doubly true of kettles. Ilya hunkered down beside the little stove and warmed his hands. For a while he didn’t say anything. Teschmaker thought they must look like a couple of soldiers around a campfire. He remembered Rusak’s remark about the actress and wondered if it was to be Ilya’s job to kill him. Death seemed such a bizarre outcome. No, he dismissed it, that had been just talk. He lifted the lid from the kettle and cautiously dipped his finger in the water; it was only a degree or two above tepid. As he replaced the lid he felt a nudge and twisted around to see the bottle that the Wraith was offering. He took it, drank from the bottle, wiped the rim and passed it back.

  ‘Ostohuitel’no! Excellent.’

  ‘He who dies from vodka does not die in vain,’ Ilya intoned slowly, then drank and lapsed into silence. After a while he rocked on his heels and grinned at Teschmaker. ‘I have not always been a bat out of hell. I used to listen to classical and jazz. But times change and the people with them, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Teschmaker took the bottle again. The vodka was raw and strong and he felt it register in his brain before it seemed to have had time to reach his stomach. It was peculiar, he thought, that they should be like this — the killer and his victim, caught in this sepia moment. There was a timelessness to the scenario. He imagined the door opening and a photographer coming in with a large plate camera. The moment of comradeship would be captured in the silver salts — the small fire flaring white, the gaunt Ilya, enveloped by shadows, and himself . . . But his fantasy didn’t seem to run to self-inclusion. He recognised the mood, the rising melancholia, and the fact that the previously taciturn Ilya Ivanovich was wanting to talk and would need little encouragement.

  ‘Tell me, Ilya Ivanovich, how do you come to be so far from your motherland? And what is a poet doing with a man like Rusak?’

  There was no reply, but the bottle came his way again. As he was already feeling light-headed, he drank cautiously. It had been a long time since he had eaten and Teschmaker knew it was important that he remain alert. Simply because his mind couldn’t envisage his own mortality didn’t mean he wasn’t going to grasp any opportunity to remove himself from the situation. Then Ilya began to speak.

  ‘No one ever reached the climax of vice in one step . . .’

  ‘A few years ago, just after I had graduated, a friend of my father’s rang and said he could get me some work. He said he knew of somebody who wanted a handyman to take care of a dacha outside Moscow. The idea appealed to me, so I applied and got the job. I didn’t meet the owner, but one of his men gave me a key and instructions that I was to do any repairs and always have the house ready for the boss to arrive. I asked who it belonged to but was told very firmly to mind my own business.

  ‘So I set out and found the dacha, located in the forest beside the Moscow river just the other side of Kubinka. It turned out to be a beautiful modern dacha, not traditional at all, but open plan divided by sliding screens. It felt the way I imagined a Japanese house might. The windows had more glass than I had seen in a single building before — triple-glazed floor to ceiling on the side facing the river, and many smaller windows on the others. There were three small guest rooms out the back and a big master bedroom with wonderful views up a flight of stairs off the living room. At the centre of the house was a huge stove built from stone, with a fireplace front and back and a small bread oven built into one side. But best of all, the house was full of books. Not just Soviet but English, American and foreign ones, in languages I couldn’t understand. There were all the great poets: Mandelstam and Blok, Mayakovsky and Pasternak. Of course I knew these well, but there were others; forbidden gems that I had heard of but never seen. A copy of Akhmatova’s Requiem, Tarkovsky’s Before the Snow, Fazil Iskander’s Mountain Paths and even a tattered original of Vasily Belov’s My Forest Village. There were other books too; books with pictures. Can you imagine, a book full of photographs of Harley-Davidsons? Another one of nude women, from every race on earth. I swear I had never seen anything like it.

  ‘It was late spring and the forest was bursting with life. I would walk out every day into a wonderland of berries, mushrooms, wildflowers and the noisiest birds on the planet. Every now and then a fighter would take off from the military airfield at Kubinka. Sometimes they flashed overhead while I lay in the long grass near the river spitting out sunflower-seed husks. For a few minutes the forest would be silent, as though every bird had glimpsed the red stars on the wings and fled in terror. After a time they would start again, tentative at first, regaining their voices, and soon the cacophony of birdsong would reign until another silver bird roared into the air.

  ‘I had been there only two weeks when I met her. Her name was Anna, but she told me everyone called her Anechka. She was about my age, narrow blue eyes, high cheekbones and her hair in plaits like an Uzbek girl. Around her neck was her Pioneer scarf. She had knocked on my door and seemed surprised to see me. After I explained why I was at the dacha, she told me that the owner had said she could have some of the baby potatoes from the garden and some dill. I hadn’t explored the vegetable garden properly, so I went out with her and together we discovered that there were only a handful of potatoes big enough to eat. We talked for a bit and then she asked if I would like to come over later and share the potatoes. I had planned to spend the evening exploring the library, so I left it open.

  ‘“Well,” she laughed, “if you want to, you can find me.”

  ‘I returned to the library. Much later I realised I was hungry. I remembered the woman’s invitation and, without any real idea of where she lived, I set out in the dusk. Fortunately I found a path that took me directly to her small cottage, less than half a kilometre from the dacha. It was small and pretty and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a melancholy Turgenev landscape. Anechka welcomed me in and, after ordering me to take a seat, returned to stir a pot of borshch as red as the scarf around her neck. A scarf, I was to learn in the next few days, that she never took off. Even though the evening was warm she had lit a fire, and a battered old samovar was bubbling away in one corner of the room. I had brought a bottle of vodka and we started on dill-pickled cucumber and then had huge bowls of borshch soaked up with fresh bread. I couldn’t have eaten another thing, but I jokingly asked her what had become of the potatoes and she clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.

  ‘“Oh, God! I forgot all about them.”

  ‘She got up from the table and ran over to the samovar. I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing but, as she said, why waste the water? To this day I cannot drink tea from a samovar without imagining I taste potatoes. A couple of times I asked her about the owner of the dacha, but she avoided answering, or said something vague about him kindly letting her stay in the cottage in return for doing odd jobs for him every now and then. To my delight, that was the only thing she was reticent about and we became lovers. I was not particularly experienced with women, but Anechka was a great teacher, and kind enough to tell me that I was going to graduate with distinction.

  ‘The summer came, the weeks went by and each day I worked at keeping the dacha spick-and-span, and in the evenings I continued my lessons with Anechka. One night we made love on the banks of the river. For the most part it was wild and rocky, but in the middle there was a deep channel which, in the moonlight, became a ribbon of silver set in onyx. I told her that we should swim out and let it float us all the way to the monastery at Zvenigorod.

  ‘Anechka laughed and said that she had always dreamed of visiting a monastery but she would rather wait until winter when we could skate. I promised her that one day we would go. I remember that night very clearly because the following morning the owner arrived with two of his colleagues. They were intending to stay the week and so I was moved into the smallest of the back rooms for the duration. I was not a great student of politics, but I reco
gnised the owner as a minister in the Duma. His friends, or maybe they were business acquaintances, were very different. Rough men. The Slob and the Weasel, I called them. One fat and lazy; the other skinny and jumpy, always looking over his shoulder as though someone was about to attack him. They seemed to be a little in awe of the owner and always waited until he suggested something, never volunteering anything themselves. A lot of the time they were locked in discussion in the living room, but on the final night the owner asked me to go and tell Anechka that she was invited for dinner. I was pleased to get the chance to see her as I hadn’t had an opportunity since the men arrived.

  ‘The party started well. I worked in the kitchen, but I could hear that there was a lot of laughing, singing and drinking. Anechka had smiled at me when she arrived, but distantly, as though she was wary of showing the feelings we shared for each other. Then I noticed that Anechka and the Slob were missing. I must have been very naive in those days because I didn’t guess what was going on. After dinner the owner moved from the table to sit beside the fire and asked me to make some coffee. When I brought it in I saw the Slob was back but now the owner had vanished. There was still no sign of Anechka. Then the Slob asked me if I wanted a turn.

  ‘“A turn? How do you mean?”

  “With the little pizda upstairs.” He leered at me, watching my reaction.

  ‘The other man, the Weasel, ran his fingers through his slicked-back hair and laughed. “Not ’til I have had her.” He was very drunk and had been singing raucously through much of the evening.

  ‘I felt nauseated. Was that what she was? And all that time she had been playing me along. I sat in the kitchen, alternating between anger and self-pity. I helped myself to the vodka and was on my third glass when I heard the argument break out. I went into the living room to see what was happening and found the owner and the Weasel shouting at each other, but what was more horrifying was that the Weasel’s hands and shirt were covered in blood. The owner suddenly realised I was in the room and, turning to me, ordered me to follow him upstairs. I’ll never forget that sight.