The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  Lucy found an old cafe, solid in a proletariat past. Steel coffee machines and samovars hissed and dribbled; cakes turned stale in glass cabinets, and women in white bonnets brandished fleshy forearms pink with dishwashing at porcelain sinks at the back. It hadn’t changed since Stalin’s Five Year Plan had them dancing in the streets. But a cream éclair, like a queen bee on a white saucer spun a membrane of narcotic sugar and white noise between her and the outside world. She fought it till the door-bell clanged in half a dozen German office workers.

  “Does this have alcohol in it?”

  “No.”

  “And another coffee please.”

  The day tunnelled down to Big Bertha hovering the cream drug across to a fresh plate then hulking beyond focus into the background and the coffee machine. Saliva formed in pressure balls and squeezed Lucy’s tongue root. Her heel started moving up and down in a rapid flutter. All noise was baffled and distant; she could see the coffee machine and the slender black rope filling the cup. Time and space were warping. Einstein was right; he too was a cake-eater.

  The coffee was made. She lifted the cup and éclair, turned and shouldered through the Germans, across the cafe floor to the safety of her table and the relief as her teeth tore through the éclair.

  Four coffees and another chocolate hit after the éclair pulled her back to a familiar basin of despair. The power of this cycle suggested her weakness had more stamina than her strength and the optimism of the new sober and disciplined life was simply delusion. Normally she could call on a tribe of Alcoholics or Overeaters Anonymous members to talk her through whatever storm of self-destruction she induced. Once through these crises she seemed to forget things very quickly, her world became benign again and she felt safe, never questioning if the sense of grace she aspired to were as delusional as the despair that hounded her. Then a flare of temper, another sweet binge or just a feeling of uselessness fired her back to the dungeon it seemed her life’s work to escape. She was a psychological recidivist; out, back in again, out – this time it’ll be different – back again. Give yourself time they would say. How long she would ask, and they would just shrug, as long as it takes.

  Inevitably she found herself at her father’s window, cupping her eyes against the light. Imaginings of him playing the piano lazed past like fish. The room photographed on her mind. Over the river, hills began to bake. Should she haul out to the Black Sea? Her calls had been unanswered. The only transport was taxis; the road was long and dangerous and in this country financial empires had been founded on seed money from kidnapping. The arguments against banked up, then the silent tirade against her own fecklessness replied, citing another grand scheme that would achieve nothing more than a crater in her bank account: the babe who was all start and no finish.

  A firm decision not to make a decision till noon next day was made, but on a bench above the river, home began to reclaim her. She put on her Black Flies; white framed surfer lenses from Southern Cal, with its beaches, and abundance of AA meetings. East of the Brandenburg Gate the Fellowship was still a pioneering movement, hacking its way into the hinterlands of historical alcoholism. She had made one English language meeting in Moscow, stuffed with Brits, Americans and Russian businessmen looking for trade openers, where she remained discreet about her identity with the Americans, but made a British connection that led to a room at the Embassy. Under the disdainful stare of Her Royal Britannic Majesty, she was given her father’s addresses and asked not to let on where she got them.

  Maybe AA had reached Tbilisi; it usually followed Citicorp and MacDonald’s into the vacuum left by communism. The American Consulate would know; all she need do is lift the phone. But it seemed such an effort.

  Daily life for the Georgians was buoyed up on collisions of anger and resignation. The disappointments and abuses of the new freedoms were an insult and Lucy was aware of a dangerous rumbling discontent. She could almost smell the threat. The gulf between the new Mercedes class and the rest shuffling the downside of economic freedom was huge. For most, things were going the wrong way since the Soviet collapse. Answered prayers brought poverty, electricity and water shortages, and a corruption unmatched in the dead days of socialism.

  As the darkness gathered, swathes of the city had disappeared. Patterns of light broke out only in patches and across acres of darkness the hideous high rises on the edge of town where the residents had rigged illegal taps into the electricity systems, glowed dimly. Moscow was rough but eager to seize the capitalist dream, her classical streets garish with neon, but Georgia, once regarded as the California of the Soviet, was reeling from the shock of freedom. It had first brought a brief, bloody civil war that left parts of the city a mosaic of bullet holes; architectural war wounded reminding the visitor that the juncture of a corrupt past and a corrupt present was a graveyard.

  As an addict Lucy understood the hit of cruelty, how hatred makes junkies of mankind and how killing was the greatest high of all. When placed beside that greater addiction, her problem was insignificant. She had survived the excess of her own nature; thousands of innocents had been swept away by others’ insatiable habits of violence. The town touched her sentimentally; both were slowly dealing with their own historic rubble.

  As a child, she had taught herself Russian and infuriated her mother who wanted all links to her former husband erased. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Gogol, Gorky, Pasternak, Turgenev, Lermontov were pored over without necessarily being understood. She couldn’t talk about this in the Valley; anything beyond Mork and Mindy was cause for persecution. She had written to Solzhenitsyn and never received a reply; watched Eisenstein, listened to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and wondered if her father listened to the same composers. She had never known he was musical. Her mother had soaked him in mystery, the various houses of her peripatetic childhood painful with unasked questions, and above everything squatted the unpatriotic fear of a war with Russia that might kill her father.

  The brown Mtkvari river beneath her slowly mesmerised her on its long way to the Black Sea. She should take something back from this place; not dismiss it because of its unfortunate association with her father. It had a sense of surviving everything that history threw at it. She would ask the hotel where the monasteries were – perhaps pick up a repro icon for Timmy her cartoonist fiancée. She should ring him, she should find a meeting, she should do this, do that; ‘shoulds’ buzzed like wasps. She switched them off and stretched. The morning was bright and lovely. The trees made zigzag silhouettes against the river and the sun boiled up the hills.

  Just as her buttocks and calves began to smart from the gradient, she heard a dog snarling and felt a burst of adrenalin, but pushed on praying to her Higher Power for protection. Foreign dogs always had rabies. Then she thought she heard a sharp, helpless sound like a desperate puppy or even a child.

  Her senses sharpened; she could hear wind spreading leaves in the park a hundred yards downhill. The gradient pulled her butt, “Keep going – this is doing you good,” she exhorted and bent into the hill but a scream yanked her straight. Fifty yards up the slope to her right was her hotel basement, to her left the terrace of houses stepped up the hill. A car was parked in front of one house. The first house had a walled garden stretching down the hill from the gable end. Trees draped over the cracked facing of the wall, rusted hinge pins fanged an empty doorframe and the throaty vibrato of the dog roared somewhere in the garden. She whipped herself on, no one would blame her for walking past, but another yell drew her into the garden, scanning bushes, vegetables, fruit trees, freshly turned earth, seeing nothing, then a big, ugly shadow at the bottom wall violently shaking something. From her place in the light, she couldn’t distinguish what it had in its jaws then she heard the child’s screams again.

  She shouted for help in English and Russian. A woman sprinted in from the street and started pelting the dog with shopping from a string bag, then anything
she could get her hands on. Its nose crinkled out of shadow and the sun highlighted blood on one fang. The mother rained oranges and onions, clods and flowerpots on the fiend’s head; a plover defending its chick against an eagle, drawing it as far from her child as she could. The little girl soughing in a red and white dress at the foot of a tree began repeating a word from some half alive retreat of pain and shock. Lucy dashed back to the gate as if to fetch someone, whom, she didn’t know, but on cue a police car drew up. “In here! Mad dog!” she bellowed in Russian. The cops rolled up their window and stared. “You cunts!” she screamed in English.

  Like rubbish rolled by the wind, the child bowled along the wall for a couple of turns into sunlight, then stopped, her self preservation instinct dying. Against the other wall the mother fended the beast off with an old canvas and tube chair. It flipped like a fish and was at her again. From the safety of their car, the police sucked radio.

  Some impulse rushed Lucy over the seedbeds, releasing earth smells around her and she swore at the soft soil for ruining her Birkenstocks. While the mother blocked the dog to her right she went for the kid, now cursing that she had not been born athletic and panicking like a slow catcher going for the line, knowing an avalanche of defence is about to bury her. Her breath exploded in hisses and half screams and she berated the child for lying there so she had to stoop to grab her, “Make it fucking easy!” but the child was an inert, useless weight not helping in her own rescue and Lucy yanked the arm hard so it would hurt the little fucker who had got her in this trouble, and turned for the escape hatch to the street a thousand miles across the garden.

  Dragging the kid like a rag doll towards the street and the cops she saw in the corner of her eye the lacerations in the child’s neck and arms widening with each pull and the little thing’s eyes Exorcist up in their orbits, then the dog baling off the mother. Now she was caught. The dog raced at her and the stolen prey. It was happening, and she felt mesmerised, like she did in a vertigo attack. A garden fork by a vegetable bed presented itself, she lifted it and lunged at the savage blur ripping towards her and the load of the prongs bursting into the dog’s chest knocked her onto her knees. The animal convulsed into an epilepsy of shock and whined its pain into the Tbilisi morning and the fork spun and perforated her palms with splinters, but she held tight and watched the prongs yaw and widen the wounds as the dog fought to free itself. Suddenly the prehistoric racket faded. The dog put a paw up to dislodge the thing in its chest. Some primitive instruction told her to push; she sank its hindquarters into the soft earth and on the edge of her vision, saw the mother skedaddle off with the bloodied parcel, saw the police open their car doors and get them inside, then heard an engine rev.

  “Don’t fucking leave me!!”

  The dog convulsed back in zigzags, she slalomed with it into a haze of stinking breath pleading with it to die but it was still unbelievably strong and whisking her closer to malignant teeth. She was beginning to lose. Then a stocky, crop haired man bounced over the wall at the bottom of the garden, and spat a command along a huge automatic rifle.

  “I don’t speak Georgian, you cunt!”

  “Take him that way!” he said calmly in Russian. She dragged the dog flank on. Foam blurred its jaws.

  “Shoot the fucking thing!”

  The detonations were very fast and loud. She felt the ground convulse, the dog dropped like a stone and the fork was wrenched from her hand. She knew it was dead before its big ugly body hit the earth, but he kept firing and she watched the sudden perforations in its hide and the bullets exit through the other side in little bursts of fur. The firing stopped and she was in the suffocation of cordite and burnt dog hair, seeing the man’s mouth move, hearing nothing through the fire alarms in her head. The bullet holes were tiny and there was no blood.

  A strong hand gripped her upper arm and pulled her away from the dead dog. It was one of the policemen. The man with the rifle shoved the dog with a toe. Words babbled under the ringing in her ears. There was blood on the lower part of her dress. A cloud shaped like a human foot drifted slowly over the gable.

  The drive to the hospital was all horns and swerves. The dog’s eyes accused her of murder. In a room of antique cabinets and medical equipment, she watched her blood fill a hypo and felt the edge of mortality. God won’t give you anything you can’t handle, they say. How about rabies?

  Then she was out with Joseph the rifleman into the afternoon sunshine, ricocheting between feeling lucky and worrying about infection and death. They progressed through Dopplers of horns along a wide avenue by the river. On the other side the town lifted from dark wooded banks to hot roofs wedging out of blue shadow. Hazy figures drifted across a stone bridge.

  Among chrome dryers and oscillating fans at his wife’s hairdresser’s shop Joseph told the story while Lucy waited in the car. The door was open because of the heat and Lucy watched two women in aprons flicking their cigarette ash onto the linoleum and a third, tall, sturdy woman with dyed black hair stepping into view and putting her hand over her mouth. The solitary customer rotated in her nylon bib in shock, then like an under funded Greek Chorus they turned and peered at Lucy. The big one looked the way only a wife looks at a blonde. A tie-dye coloured comb rose from one fist like a small cleaver.

  Narrow streets spewed them into a square. A drink winked, a drug, something to wash away the morning’s contamination. She asked to be let out; the hotel offered nothing but solitude to brood, here she could feel the crowd and let them tease her back to life.

  Joseph’s ease with the gun and his unfussy calm alarmed her. She sensed old survivals haunting her companion, milliseconds where death whips past and the sensation of life sharpens. Someone standing on another experience of life, looking down at her innocence and naivety. But she sensed his interest in her. It was innocent, devoid of the usual sexual charade she expected from men. His nut-brown head gleamed through the sunroof teasing her to shoot the breeze and unload her father on him over a Georgian coffee, but the words stayed locked up and it didn’t matter.

  The passing citizens and groups at café tables became background to a sensation of owning a moment, as if time had slowed just for them. Who or what her bullet headed companion Joseph was, was of no importance. Perhaps he was named after the fourteen-year-old Stalin, the local boy who came to this square from his seminary to read Darwin and a hand written copy of Das Kapital, before growing the other most hated moustache of the twentieth century. It didn’t matter. None of the old nonsense mattered to her at that moment. Everything felt clean and pure, and free.

  “I could have shot the thing. Its been hanging around for days. It went for a guy last night in the street. He stood on my car roof to get away from it. ”

  She saw faint claw marks on the bonnet. Joseph was shaken with guilt.

  “Don’t be hard on yourself.” She could imagine him teasing the little girl and doing his bit to help her enjoy being a child.

  “Who is this Monica Lewinsky?” He lit a cigarette with a match from a box, swirling with tiny Cyrillic. “And Judge Starr”, he smiled, “Ringo Starr” and laughed his way into a mild smoker’s cough. His head was almost spherical; his hair cropped to stubble to disguise his baldness, his huge, prominent eyes the colour of amber resin. She felt close to this stranger.

  “Pretty matchbox.”

  He offered it to her but she declined politely.

  “Most people wouldn’t have done what you did.”

  Courage was beyond her understanding. She felt a pair of invisible eyes on her wherever she went, judging every action, and a horror of publicly exposing her cowardice had pushed her through the gate. But in the garden she had experienced the urgency of survival and it was exhilarating. Killing a dog had made her feel authentic.

  He suggested they meet; insisted he and his big hairdresser wife would take her to a real Georgian restaurant where they ser
ved good Georgian wine. It wasn’t the time to say she didn’t drink, but it reminded her that she was an alcoholic who hadn’t been to a meeting for too long.

  Joseph gave her his card and she accepted his emphatic invitations. He made her promise she would call next day. He was offering friendship. She promised. She could see how much her acceptance meant to him.

  “Don’t forget your Kalashnikov in the trunk.”

  The dried blood blended with the burgundy leaf patterns of her dress. Now the city’s bullet holes made a visceral sense; she felt connected. But as his car left the square she knew she wouldn’t call him.

  Down in that part of the city where the electricity was rationed, a principle stirred in Max when touched by the ‘people’ and their struggle. The broken streets where they dream of a second Stalin had grip on some withered corner of his imagination, and whenever possible he shopped among the ‘people’ in stores where candles guttered over a few hanks of rope or tins of olives under no credit signs and portraits of Uncle Joe. Then he would haul back to his respectable neighbourhood and listen to Bach.

  He progressed out of the candle nebulae towards the boulevard brightness up the hill where native Georgian played host to the tiny vanguard of European and American businessmen. The evening crowd streamed past, music tinkled from battery-powered radios, scooters revved, herbs and cooking engulfed the wheezing Peoples Hero in smells and teases of alcohol. A coffee would help – the hangover was still strong – a coffee would gee up everything.

  At the point in the descent to the chair where the bony buttocks hit the seat with a happy bump, he heard American voices. His quadriceps reflexively strained him vertical and hauled him two cafes distant from his former countrymen. A boulevard of pavement tables and lamps scattered up the hill to dark trees melding into an indigo star swung sky. There was no power cut where the tourists and foreign businessmen hung out.