New Australian Stories 2

by Aviva Tuffield

  Aurora. I wondered if anybody had ever called her that. Had Spangle? I’d never heard it, all the time I’d been here.

  I wanted things spelled out. So you all knew, I said.

  What?

  That she’d done it.

  Again Slide shrugged.

  I spoke again, mainly to myself. That she, that Aurora, murdered the girl. I thought Slide’s look meant yes. I went on, Why?

  Slide still gazed at the bend in the river.

  Because, I said, Spangle had been on with the fisherman’s daughter, and that was the clue of the cheroot. And everybody knew Andrea had come to take her away. But he didn’t know she was going to kill herself.

  Well, said Slide. And I suddenly thought, he is disagreeing with me. Andrea did know. That was his kindness. And why nobody had run and got antivenene.

  So, I said, justice is done. Slide raised his eyebrows. I went on, softly, to myself, Aurora has paid, and Spangle is okay, except that he has lost his wife and his lover. And maybe his luck.

  Ah, said Slide, you think that possibly he will lose at cards now.

  Parting Glances

  SUSAN MIDALIA

  She knew it would be the middle of summer, but Moscow was meant to be swirling snow, luxurious furs, huddling by a fire with smoky tea from a gleaming samovar. Even the forecast she’d read at home, thirty degrees and humid, had failed to convince her: so she’d packed three jumpers, five pairs of fleecy socks and a hot water bottle. When she stepped off the plane, the heat rushed maliciously towards her. And then the stifling terminal, packed tight with prowling men straight out of gangster movies, and busty young women with peroxide hair and 1980s platform shoes. There was concrete everywhere and not a word of English on the multitude of signs. Twenty sleepless hours in the air to get here, and a four-hour wait in Dubai, where fat westerners had swarmed along rows of duty-free whisky, diamonds and Chanel. Petra had sat in a café and watched them, these waddling lords of the earth, coming at her like prehistoric beasts in logo-ed shirts. Now they waited with her in the terminal, their faces unsure, uneasy, in the relentless crowd.

  The immigration official was a stout young blonde with gold braid on her shoulder pads, a red star on her cap and a brittle expression. Petra tried one of the few Russian words she’d been able to learn, zdrahstvooytee, hello, in what she hoped was a friendly tone. She made a point of looking blank, remembering the advice of her translator friend, Marie. Don’t smile, she’d said. Muscovites think you’re simple, you know, a little retarded, if you smile at them. Petra handed over her passport, her official letter of introduction, her confirmation of hotel bookings for every night of her ten-day visit, her holiday with a difference. The official glared at her and then looked down at her papers, up again at her face, down again, up again, wordless and stiff, as if I’m a criminal, thought Petra. She’s taking her time, making me wait, shuffling my papers grimly. The woman glared at her again, held up a rubber stamp for ten, fifteen seconds, and then thumped it down on the passport. Petra felt her legs untighten. Ah, welcome to Moscow, she thought: mindless bureaucracy, state-sanctioned surliness. Two cultural stereotypes before she’d even left the airport; four if you counted the gangster men and the vaguely whorish girls. It was a relief to be dismissed with a toss of a head and a parting glance of official contempt.

  Finding the commuter train wasn’t any easier. There were forests of arrows on every wall, indecipherable signs. Petra remembered the word for train, poheest, two simple syllables, but people barged past her or shrugged their shoulders when she asked the way. Marie had warned her about this as well: notoriously unhelpful, even, at times, deliberately obstructionist. They don’t care about our tourist dollars. They’ve got plenty of tourists from the provinces, and a hell of a lot of oil. Petra’s suitcase felt suddenly heavy, despite its sturdy wheels, and she gave herself up to the surge of the crowd, let herself be pushed through a turnstile and hoped for the best. And there it was, a platform, open space, blue sky, a gaggle of English speakers, looking startled by their good luck. An overdressed middle-aged couple began consulting a map and quarrelling; two red-faced, swaggering young men were loudly thirsty for a beer. Petra cringed, her eyes fixed on the ground. I won’t say a word, she thought. I’ll be silent, unfriendly, un-Australian. She waited until they’d hauled their luggage up the steps of the train and chose a compartment further down the line.

  The journey felt heavy with the whoosh of the engine, the guttural words of passengers, the images on an overhead TV displaying Gucci, Armani, Dolce&Gabbana. Through the window Petra glimpsed brutal, decaying high-rise apartments and then, unexpectedly, flashes of leafy, graceful trees streaked by the afternoon sun. Were they elms or poplars, silver birch? She’d never been good with nature. It could easily have been England, where she’d lived for a year half a lifetime ago. She let herself blur with the passing of the trees, remembering the green and pleasant land where she’d backpacked and worked and fallen in love, where she’d cried at the airport when it was time to go home, cried in the plane for hours. She’d been clinging and desperate, a chain-smoking wreck; he’d looked relieved to see her go. I know we’ll meet again, he’d said, like an old war movie, trying to be kind, with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. They hadn’t been in touch for ten or fifteen years, and, of course, they’d never met again.

  The train braked and sent her lurching into the seat in front. She was aware of a man staring at her, his eyes slitted, and she clutched her handbag more tightly to her chest. She reached her hotel in a daze of traffic and taxi-driver shouts, registered at reception with surprising ease, hardly saw her threadbare room or felt the baking, stuffy heat as she levered off her shoes and slumped down on the single bed. She was asleep in less than a minute.

  What would she write to those back home? Three days in Moscow and an email was due, one of those generic travellers’ tales she’d become quite skilled at devising. The sights, of course, in some detail; the food, the weather; a witticism or two, perhaps a bad translation to amuse her literary friends. Like the sign in the hotel bathroom, exhorting guests not to steal the towels: EARNEST REQUEST written in bold capital letters. People seemed to like her emails: interesting, amusing, they said, although she preferred writing postcards, enjoyed selecting images for particular friends. Postcards are for old ladies, her niece had declared, and then blushed with what might have been contrition. So Petra would be electronic, would comment on the food (rather too salty and potatoes with everything) and mention her health for the sake of her elderly mother, say she was fine, walked everywhere briskly. Anything to avoid the underground, despite what her nephew had told her. They’ve got marble floors and whopping great statues of the workers! Stained glass and massive chandeliers, you have to see it, Aunty Pet! But she would not see it, none of it at all. In London, in her youth, she’d been groped in the underground, a hand sliding up and down her groin. She’d felt sick with the press of humanity and fled from the station in shame. And those were the days of the IRA, bomb scares and actual bombs, urgently wailing sirens. She’d tried again to take the Tube but had stood on the platform, unable to board a crowded train, crying like a fool. A woman had stopped to ask if she could help and Petra had said, stupidly, I’m Australian. Now, here in Moscow, she felt the trains shuddering beneath her, imagined the long, steep escalators crawling slowly down into the earth.

  But she would try to describe the city for her nephew. Matthew was her favourite, a history boy, fifteen, her sister’s youngest. Smart, restless, dying to see the world, he said. No one in his family had ever travelled further than Bali (twice), and when Petra told him of her trip to Russia, he’d taken books from the library and shown her what he’d found. Moscow razed to the ground by Napoleon’s army and then rebuilt, a stricken giant resurrected. St Petersburg, a miracle built on water and, according to legend, constructed in the sky by Peter the Great and then lowered like a giant model onto the ground.

  In the airport café Mattie had sat slumped and deject
ed, kicking one sneakered foot against a chair until his mother snapped at him to stop. He’d finally voiced his longing, how all his life he’d wanted to see Lenin’s tomb. He’s decomposing, Aunty Pet, he’d explained, leaning forward on the table. In a few years’ time he won’t be there at all. He’d ignored his sister’s shrieks and his mother’s look of alarm. He changed the course of history and you can see him, in the flesh. How amazing is that? Before she knew what she was saying, Petra had made an arrangement: I’ll go and see Mr Lenin, and if he’s still there in two years’ time, I’ll take you to see him for yourself. Her sister had looked even more alarmed, and Petra had smiled, the extravagant spinster sibling, the self-indulgent maiden aunt, who’d taken early retirement as a teacher and decided to see the world. She’d gone at two-year intervals to the predictable destinations — Paris, Florence, Rome, each time with a different friend — and had found each journey instructive (she had photographs to prove this). But no one wanted to travel to Russia: it was, apparently, too dangerous, and none of her friends could see the attraction. Petra had found it difficult to explain. Russian novels and Dr Zhivago (all that swirling snow); a long-ago lover who had told her stories of imperial treasures; some unformed, melancholy sense of a suffering history. At the airport, she’d clasped Mattie’s hand. I promise, she’d said, knowing her sister thought she was mad, knowing that was part of the pleasure.

  The hotel’s internet café was full of high-spirited backpackers who glanced briefly at her lined face as she entered, at her too-youthful summer dress (yesterday’s desperate purchase in the searing heat). And then she was invisible, free to compose her news. The days had been very hot, she wrote: diminutive Japanese tourists huddling under bright umbrellas, pretty young women sweltering in stockings and lace. Her hotel room was adequate, and served up ancient episodes of Skippy, ludicrously dubbed, on Russian TV. The ubiquitous babushka dolls were, well, ubiquitous. And, no, there were no cunning pickpockets or Russian mafia on the streets. The only sign of organised crime was the McDonald’s near Red Square, which charged exorbitant prices for indigestible food. She’d queued for hours to see the Armoury: the coronation robes and thrones, studded with turquoise, rubies, pearls, lapis lazuli, were marvels of excess, but the Fabergé eggs she’d found rather crass. The jewel-encrusted wheels of the imperial carriages could have fed a million serfs. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts was, unfortunately, closed. Churches everywhere were being restored as part of a religious revival, and she’d never seen so many crucifixes — gold, silver, diamond — in so many conspicuous cleavages. She’d lingered in a bookshop to watch a man talking to a group of eager listeners. He was tall, with endearing pixie ears, and had his audience eating out of his smoothly gesticulating hands. They laughed, applauded, laughed some more; one man even toppled sideways in his chair. Petra thought the pixie man must have been a comic writer, or at least an amusing speaker, but either way, of course, she had understood nothing, not a word. As she recalled it now, she remembered how this had pained her, how she’d felt like an impostor, a fraud.

  And she had to confess that in the brightness of daylight, Red Square had felt curiously blank. She’d tried to picture it — the tsar and his milling, worshipping subjects; the famous military parades; the jubilant workers’ rallies; even, as her niece had enthused, the thousands who’d cheered Paul McCartney and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But she saw only endless, dull paving bricks, tourists being posed for photos — the provocative minx, the scowling son, the squirming toddler — and, flanking one side, the world’s largest shopping centre, smoothly marbled, blandly bourgeois, GUM, pronounced Goom, as in book. St Basil’s Cathedral was an architect’s bad joke, its psychedelic onion domes like something out of Disneyland. And, no, she hadn’t yet visited Lenin’s tomb, guarded by impossibly handsome young men, all high cheekbones and military bearing, in sleek dark uniforms. But she had promised Mattie; she would go tomorrow, on her last day in Moscow. As she sent off her email, she had an image of her nephew, long-haired, curious, excited, sitting opposite her at breakfast. They would puzzle over the menu and plan the day’s itinerary; he would ask strangers to take their photo in front of famous buildings. It pleased her to imagine such things.

  After another hotel dinner of borscht and dumplings (she’d always been unadventurous with food, indeed took little interest), Petra retired to her room. She’d planned another evening walk in Red Square, where it stayed light until eleven, packed with desultory strollers, entwined young lovers, parents with pushers and skipping children. She’d enjoyed her walk the night before, its aimlessness, the pearly sheen of the sky, even the garish lights of GUM, a neon galleon sailing in a sea of happy crowds. Such endless light, such a radiant sky: here, for once, something, some marvellous trick of nature, had briefly met her vague desires. For as she brushed out her hair (looking rather lank, she saw in the mirror, in need of shampoo), Petra had to admit that Moscow had somehow failed her, had not lived up to her expectations, such as they were. She lay down on the bed, the hairbrush hanging loosely in her hand, too tired to meet the evening, wondering why she had come here, where history was mocked by American cafés and icons of Elvis Presley, where waiters ignored her, where she couldn’t speak the language. Her feet ached from so much walking and her head was throbbing from too much sun. Petra felt weighed down, tiny as she was, a short, thin, insubstantial woman looking up at the ceiling, knowing she must get up in the morning, have breakfast and queue to see Lenin’s tomb. The forecast said thirty-four degrees, and she would have to take the day more slowly, measure it out before catching the overnight train to St Petersburg, already booked, a first-class compartment. She thought of all this and wished she could stop thinking, could fall asleep, fully clothed, her face unwashed, unsoothed by her night cream, fast running out. She had to remember to use it sparingly; they didn’t seem to sell her brand in Moscow.

  The queue for Lenin’s tomb was already long by ten a.m., the day already hot. Petra was prepared: she’d had a nourishing, familiar cereal and orange juice for breakfast, put sunscreen on her face, neck, arms. But even though the summer crowds were down (the global financial crisis), there were still plenty of tourists to annoy her, for that’s what she was feeling now, annoyed, irrationally so, she knew, for was she not one of them, impatient in the blistering sun amid the pushing and shoving and gabbling about their stock-market losses, the mile-long queues and their latest camera with an automatic zoom, the one they were forced to leave at some check-in that no one had told them about, how they’d wasted an hour while foreigners barged in front of them until they got angry and barged right back. At least she didn’t carry on like this, at least she wasn’t an overstuffed pig drinking Coca-Cola and complaining, at least not out loud. She felt herself sighing, a sigh that seemed to keep her up long enough to move forward as people elbowed her along, past the security screen, unencumbered by a camera, released at last from the crowds.

  She wandered through the grounds of the mausoleum, looking at the granite busts of Soviet heroes. There were scores of them, and most she’d never heard of. Generals, her guidebook said, political leaders, astronauts, writers, their names carved in the Cyrillic she wouldn’t even try to translate. Somewhere, she knew, she would find the bust of Stalin, but what would it matter if she saw him or not, came face-to-face with his hawk-like eyes and imposing moustache, with his dates of birth and death carved mightily in stone. To tell her friends, tell Mattie, she had seen the image of the brutal tyrant, to be able to say, I was there, I saw it, all these unknown luminaries, the red carnations on the tombstones, the squealing teenage girls tottering on high heels, their disrespectful chewing of gum. She’d wanted to feel the weight of history, wasn’t that why she came here, to this place that everyone warned her would be difficult and dangerous, a silly old woman flaunting her rebellion, her scorn of package tours and cruises, her fling with the mysteries of East-meets-West. For it was a fling, she saw it now. What did she think she was doing, standing in a mausoleum, surro
unded by the busts of the glorious and infamous, feeling nothing more than irritation. She was no better than the silly girls, the fatly moaning tourists, Miss Prissy High-and-Mighty, she’d been this way all her life, unable to feel what she wanted to feel, whatever you were meant to feel, that even now, especially now, eluded her. Oh, she had friends, she loved reading, of course, she’d had a decent career of sorts, and now her travels, belated, some kind of treat or reward for something, for endurance, perhaps, when all was said and done. Her sister had admonished her: You should be more careful with your money. Petra had laughed, as she often did in her sister’s company. Don’t worry, she’d said, you won’t have to pay for my funeral.

  She reached the black marble steps leading down to Lenin. She was here now; she should make the effort to see, even if it struck her, as it surely had her niece, as rather ghoulish, voyeuristic. V.I. Lenin, the man of letters he had called himself, a man of the people, who had asked to be buried next to his mother. Even in death he had been cheated, thought Petra; revered, embalmed, preserved for posterity, opposite the modish merchandise of GUM. Stepping down, grateful for the cool, the dark, the unusual silence, she drew in her breath. Around a corner it came into view — deep red drapes, a marble coffin, the body laid out, a ghostly, creamy face in profile. You were not allowed to stop, you had to keep walking in a mute semi-circle, tourists in front of you, tourists behind, you had just enough time to catch a glimpse of the past. As she came face to face with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Petra saw that one of his hands was clenched, the other loose, and that his face was small, almost dainty and oddly alive, his brow slightly furrowed. It made him look perplexed, as if his dying thought had been a quizzical question, some faint, persistent stirring of desire. Petra felt the hush of her surroundings, the cool of the room on her drying skin, and for just a moment, just the smallest rush of time, the circle of people dissolved around her, everything solid melted into air. She was utterly transfixed, touched by the curled-up hand; the smooth, almost boyish complexion; the expression, above all the expression, of Lenin lost to some dream of history, even, perhaps, to himself.