'What do you mean, "barracks bastard"?'
Schiller said, 'It's commonplace. How many German girls have had babies by foreign soldiers stationed here?'
Arkady said, 'Benz was born in Potsdam. You're saying his father was Russian?'
'That's what he sounded like,' Schiller said.
Peter said, 'All the stories you told me about defending Germany. You were a thief, first on one side and then on the other. Why didn't you tell me all this before? Why tell me now?'
The banker eased his feet into his slippers. He turned as completely to Peter as he could. He had that deadly combination of age: eggshell frailty and brutal honesty. 'It didn't concern you. The past was gone. Now it does. Everything has a price. If we can get our house and property back, if we can go home, Peter, this is the price for you.'
Peter dropped Arkady off at Stas's flat and tore off into the dark.
Arkady unlocked the door with the house key Stas had given him. Laika sniffed him quietly and let him in. He went to the kitchen and made a late dinner of hard biscuits for the dog, and tea, jam and cigarettes for himself.
Steps shambled up the hall. Stas leaned against the door jamb in mismatched pyjama top and bottom and regarded Laika and the biscuits. 'Slut.'
'I woke you,' Arkady said.
'I'm not awake. If I were awake, I'd be asking where the devil you've been.' At a sleepwalker's pace he staggered to the refrigerator and took out a beer. 'Obviously you think of me as the hall porter, the concierge, the elf who polishes your shoes. So where have you been?'
'With my new German partner. He has become wildly enthusiastic. In return, I've misled him as best I can.'
Stas sat down. 'You cannot mislead a German any more than you can lead a German.'
Nevertheless, Arkady had misled Peter by omission, by not mentioning Max because of Irina. By now Peter was convinced that his grandfather was the only connection between Tommy and Benz. 'I traded on his sense of national guilt.'
'If you can find a German with guilt, you should trade on it. Generally I have found this to be a country of widespread amnesia, but if you have found a guilty German, I can guarantee that no one on earth has ever had a larger sense of guilt. Correct?'
'Close enough.'
Stas tipped the bottle back so that it seemed to balance on his lips, then set it down empty. 'I was awake anyway. I was thinking that if I'd stayed in Russia, I probably would have died in a camp. Or maybe I would only have been pressed as flat as a blini.'
'You were right to get out.'
'As a result of which I've had enormous influence on world events. I make fun of the station, but Liberty's budget is less than the cost of a single strategic bomber.'
'Is that so?'
'Not to mention this is a tax-free situation for me.'
'That sounds good.'
Stas stared at the kitchen clock. The second hand dropped in audible clicks, a sound like a key turning over and over in a lock. Laika moved close to him and laid her shaggy head on his lap.
Stas said, 'Maybe I should have stayed.'
Chapter Twenty-Seven
* * *
In the morning a heavy fog brought out headlights. Bicycles appeared and disappeared as wraiths.
Irina lived a block from the park, on a street that mixed town houses, artists' studios and boutiques. All the buildings were dressed in fey Jugendstil but hers, which was plain and modern. Though her windows were set back, Arkady located her balcony, a chrome rail before a wall of vines, lush and bright in the wet. He stood at a bus stop at the end of the street, the most logical and least conspicuous place to wait.
Did the balcony lead directly to the kitchen? He could imagine the warmth of lights, the smell of coffee. He could also imagine Max having an extra cup, but he had to eliminate Max from the picture in his mind or slide into crippling jealousy. Irina might drive to the station. Worse, she might leave with Max. He focused on the hope that she was alone, was drying a cup and saucer, was putting on her raincoat, would take the bus.
A delivery van parked in the middle of the block. The driver climbed down from the cab, opened the rear doors, brought racks down to street level with a hydraulic lift and rolled them into a dress shop. The van's windscreen wipers kept time, though rain wasn't falling so much as hanging in the air in fine droplets. The traffic had a sheen. Arkady stepped off the kerb for a better view of Irina's house when a bus arrived and chased him back. Passengers boarded and cancelled their own tickets in an automatic punch box. Every single one of them – that was the amazing thing.
The bus pulled away and the delivery van drove off. It took Arkady a minute to notice that the vine-covered wall on Irina's balcony was a darker green, which meant that the lights of her flat were off. He watched her door for another minute, before he realized that she had left while the van had been blocking his view. He had expected her to use the bus in this weather; instead she had gone in the other direction towards the park and he had missed her.
Arkady ran the length of the street to the park. In the foreshortened view that accompanies emotion, umbrellas bobbed on either side. A Turk wearing a conical hat of newspaper cycled between the bumpers of limousines. Across the street the Englischer Garten began as a wall of giant beeches. Farther down the street, a woman in a white raincoat entered a park gate.
He darted between cars. The radio station lay diagonally across the park. Where he entered the gate, paths twisted left and right. The Englischer Garten was called the 'green lung' of Munich. It had a river, streams, forest, lakes – all veiled now by mist, giving the park a cold, close breath that made' Arkady gather his jacket at his neck.
He could hear her, though; at least, he heard someone walking. Did he remember how she walked? Long strides, always sure of herself. She hated umbrellas, she hated crowds. He hurried after the echo, aware that any hesitation put her farther ahead. If she was ahead. The path kept trying to turn away. Overhead, beeches were monkey bars in a cloud. Oaks were shorter, as bent as beggars. Where the path crossed a stream bed, steam rose from the water, a ghostly floodtide. A creature resembling a large caterpillar sniffed around wet leaves. Closer, it became a wire-haired dachshund. Its owner crept behind, a yellow raincoat with a scoop and bag.
Beyond, Irina had disappeared – if it was Irina. Over the years, at a distance, how many women had he dressed in her features? This was the illusion of his life, the nightmare.
Arkady had the park to himself. He heard the slow condensation of mist on leaves, the thud of nuts from the beeches on to sodden earth, the dash of unseen birds. Where shadows faded, he found he had reached the edge of a wide meadow, completely lost in a circle of green. For a moment on the far side he saw a flash of white.
Running over the grass, he had the laboured breath and heavy feet of a farm horse. When he reached the spot where the brief sight of white had been, she was gone again. Now, though, he knew the direction. A path led along a russet screen of maples and the languid vapour of another stream. He heard steps again and, where the maples ended, saw her, a bag over her shoulder. Her coat was actually more silver than white, with a reflective quality. Her hair was uncovered, darker in the rain. She looked back and then continued walking, faster than before.
They walked at the same pace, ten metres apart, down a dark avenue of firs. Where the path narrowed to a strip that threaded a stand of birches, she slowed, then stopped and leaned against the white, papery column of a birch for him to catch up.
They walked on together in silence. Arkady felt like a man who had approached a deer. A single wrong word, he thought, and she would bolt for good. When she glanced at him he didn't dare try to hold her eyes or read them. At least they were walking side by side. In itself, that was a victory.
He was sorry that he looked so bad. His shoes were flecked with grass, his clothes damp and moulded to his back. His body was too thin, and probably his eyes had the glower of the chronically starved.
They came to the edge of a lake. The water wa
s black and still. Irina looked down at their reflections, at the man and woman looking up from the water and said, 'That's the saddest thing I ever saw.'
'Me?' Arkady asked.
'Us.'
• • •
Birds collected. The park was rich in them; velvet-headed mallards, wood ducks, wigeons and teal appeared out of the mist, breaking the surface of the water into spoons of light. Shearwaters flew as acrobatically as signatures; geese dropped like sacks.
They sat on a bench.
Irina said, 'There are people who come here every day to feed the birds. They bring pretzels the size of wheels.'
It was cool enough for their breath to condense.
'I sympathize with these birds,' she said. 'The difference is that you never came. I will never forgive you.'
'I can tell.'
'And now that you're here, I feel like a refugee all over again. I don't like that feeling.'
'No one does.'
'But I've been in the West for years. I've earned the right to be here. Arkady, go home. Leave me alone.'
'No. I won't go.'
He half expected her to rise and leave the bench. He would follow her; what else could he do? She stayed. She let him light another cigarette for her. 'A bad habit,' she said. 'Like you.'
Despair saturated the air. Cold penetrated his thin jacket. He heard his heart echo across the water. A walking collection of bad habits was what he was. Ignorance, insubordination, lack of exercise, dull razors.
So many birds arrived, some dropping wholesale in flocks, others wheeling individually out of the mist, that Arkady was put in mind of the factory ship he had spent part of his exile on, and how gulls mobbed the air above the stern for the overflow and refuse from the nets. He remembered standing in the breeze above the stern ramp fieldstripping a cigarette and a gull snatching the paper from the air and carrying it away as its prize. 'Find the Russian duck,' he said.
'Where?'
'The one with dirty feathers and a crooked bill smoking a cigarette.'
'There is no such thing.'
'But you looked, I saw you. Imagine when Russian ducks really do hear about this lake, a lake with pretzels, they'll come here by the million.'
'The swans too?'
A line of swans glided imperiously through the ducks. When a mallard resisted, the lead swan stretched out its long and creamy neck, opened its bright, yellow bill and snorted like a pig.
'Russian. He's already infiltrated,' Arkady said.
Irina sat back from Arkady to study him. 'You do look terrible.'
'I can't say the same for you.'
She bent the light her way. Mist sat on her hair like jewels. 'I heard you were doing so well in Moscow,' she said.
'Who did you hear that from?'
She hesitated. 'You're not what I expected. You're what I remembered.'
They walked slowly. Arkady was aware that she walked a critical millimetre closer and that their shoulders occasionally grazed.
'Stas was always curious about you. I'm not surprised you're friends. Max says you're both artifacts of the Cold War.'
'We are. I'm like a piece of marble you find in an ancient ruin. You pick it up, turn it around in your hand and ask, 'What was this? Part of a horse trough or part of a noble statue?' I want to show you something.' He took out an envelope, opened it and showed her the paper and the one word scribbled inside.
'My name,' she said.
'It's my father's writing. I hadn't heard from him in years. This must have been about the last thing he did before he died. You actually talked to him?'
'I wanted to reach you without causing trouble, so I tried your father.'
Arkady tried to imagine this. It sounded like a dove flying into a furnace, though his father had been a fairly cold furnace in his last years.
'He told me what a hero you were, how they tried to break you but you forced the prosecutor's office to take you back, that they gave you the most difficult cases and that you never lost. He was proud. He went on and on. He said he saw you often and that you'd write to me.'
'What else?'
'That you were too busy for women, but women were always chasing you.'
'None of this rang a false note?'
'He said the only problem with you was that you were a fanatic and that sometimes you put yourself in God's place. That some things only God could judge.'
'If I were General Kyril Renko, I wouldn't have been so eager to see the face of God.'
'He said he thought about you more and more. Did you have women?'
'No. I was in psychiatric cells for a while, then I was in Siberia on the move, and then I was fishing. There was limited opportunity.'
She stopped him. 'Please. I remember Russia. There's always opportunity. And when you got back to Moscow, you must have had a woman there.'
'I was in love. I wasn't looking for women.'
'In love with me?'
'Yes.'
'You are a fanatic.'
They walked along a pond that bore snowy down and fine drops of rain like little pearls. Was it the same lake as before?
'Arkasha, what are we going to do?'
• • •
They left the park for a university café that had stainless-steel machines hissing into pots of milk and posters of Italy – ski slopes of the Dolomites, colourful tenements in Naples – on the walls. The other patrons were students with open books and bowl-sized cups of coffee. They took a table by the window.
Arkady talked about working his way across Siberia, from Irkutsk to Norilsk to Kamchatka to the sea.
Irina talked about New York, London, Berlin. 'Theatre work in New York was good, but I couldn't join the union. They're like Soviet unions – worse. I waited on tables. In New York, waitresses are fantastic. So hard and so old you'd think they waited on Alexander the Great or the pharaohs. Hard workers. An art gallery. They wanted someone with a European accent. I was part of the gallery ambience, and I started getting involved in art again. What no one was interested in then was the Russian avant-garde. You know, you expected to see me in Russia and I expected to see you walk into an art gallery on Madison Avenue, dressed in a proper suit, good shoes, tie.'
'Next time we should coordinate dreams.'
'Anyway, Max was visiting the Liberty office in New York. He produced a show on Russian art and happened to interview me and said if I was ever in Munich and needed work to call him. A year later I did. I still do some work for Berlin galleries. They're always looking for pieces of Revolutionary art because now the prices are phenomenally high.'
'You mean the art of our defunct and discredited Revolution?'
'Is auctioned at Sotheby's and Christie's. Collectors can't get enough. You're in trouble, aren't you?'
'I was in trouble. Not now.'
'I mean with your work.'
'Work has its difficult moments. The good people die and the wrong people walk away with the spoils. My career seems to be in a shadow, but I'm thinking of taking a holiday, a vacation from professional pursuits.'
'And do what?'
'I could become a German. Transitionally, of course. First, I'd turn into a Pole, then an East German, finally a fully mature Bavarian.'
'Seriously?'
'Seriously, I will wear different clothes every day and walk into your life until you say, 'This is just what Arkady Renko should look like; this is the proper suit.'
'You wouldn't let go?'
'Not now.'
Arkady described how the breath of a reindeer herd crystallized and fell like snow. He talked about salmon runs on Sakhalin, the white-headed eagles of the Aleutians and waterspouts that danced around the Bering Sea. He had never thought before of what a catalogue of experiences his exile had brought to him, how unique and beautiful they were, what clear evidence that on no day could a man be sure he should not open his eyes.
They had a lunch of microwaved pizza. Delicious.
He told her how the first wind of the day approach
ing through the taiga made the million trees shiver like black birds taking flight. He talked about oilfield fires that burned year-round, beacons that could be seen from the moon. He described walking from trawler to trawler across the Arctic ice. Sounds and sights not afforded most investigators.
They had red wine.
He talked about workers on the 'slime line', the dark hold where fish were gutted in a factory ship, and how each individual was a separate mind with a fantasy unconfined by gunwales or decks – a defender of the Party who took to the sea in search of romance, a botanist who dreamed of Siberian orchids, each person a lamp on a separate world.
After finishing the wine, they had brandy.
He described the Moscow he had found on his return. Centre stage, a dramatic battlefield of warlords and entrepreneurs; behind it, as still as a painted backdrop, eight million people queueing. Yet there were moments, the occasional dawn when the sun was low enough to find a golden river and blue domes, when the entire city seemed redeemable.
The warmth of patrons and the steam of the machines had produced a film of condensation on the window that diffused the light and colour of the street. Something caught Irina's eye and she wiped the glass. Max was outside. How long had he been looking in?
He entered and said, 'You two seem to be getting on like a pair of conspirators.'
'Join us,' Arkady offered.
'Where have you been?' Max asked Irina. His manner was alarmed, relieved, alarmed, in three rapid steps. 'You haven't been at the station all day. People were worried about you; we were out searching for you. You and I were supposed to go to Berlin.'
'Talking to Arkady,' Irina said.
Max asked, 'Have you finished?'
'No.' Irina took one of Arkady's cigarettes and lit it. She made it a drawn-out gesture of unconcern. 'Max, if you're in a hurry, go to Berlin. I know you have business there.'
Red Square Page 29
