The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  She picked her way down the slope under the dripping tress, went back into her father’s kitchen and put the unopened bottle back behind the cleaning fluids.

  In daytime, the track was dusty, but in the dawn was damp and earth clung to her feet. She would wash them in the sea. As she climbed, that same signature of quiet, long curves became visible on the barn doors above her. His work stood in a Santa Monica bedroom as a memorial to their joint talent for doing the wrong thing. The memory of him had angered her, but now touched her. When she first asked Shota about the mechanics of his death it was clear he knew about her and Gia, and if he knew, the whole village knew. Moscow hoods had been his explanation. “We’ll sort them. Don’t worry.”

  “Why did they kill him?”

  “Bad taste in wives.”

  “Come again?”

  “Bad taste in other men’s wives.”

  She left at that point since she supposed she was one of the other men’s wives.

  Light delicately lay on bare work surfaces. Tool racks hung empty in shadows. One end of his workshop was partitioned off with hardwood frames and chain link wire and was fastened with a heavy padlock. It was empty but for a piece of paper curled on the floor, lying as if he had left some final message. As her eyes adjusted she saw it was a page from a nudie calendar.

  Behind the barn were wooden racks under a tarred, felt roof where he had weathered his wood. The grass still bore the yellow marks of long standing wood stacks. Peeping through the windows and around the racks offered a glimpse of a life beyond his own confusion, where everything was clear and simple. There still seemed a trace of him, wandering between the shadows and diffused light from the windows and skylights. Here something had his entire attention until it reached the form and grace he wanted. She could visualise him with his back to her, unaware of her watching, bent over a detail of a table or a chair.

  In her current state, the empty barn conveyed a sense of peace to her, though she knew this was probably a preference of her imagination. Human comfort needs what made the dead content and not what tormented them. His workplace seemed his sanctuary away from the madness that menaced him outside, and she felt pleased he had found somewhere. This was where her chest of drawers had been conceived and made, where he had waxed his guilt into the grain and spent time and skill on a beautiful apology. Finally she felt grateful.

  Below her, the village houses were becoming visible round the bay and the headland. Light green trees were still dull on its steep slopes against the grey sea, and beneath them Max, Shota, Masha, Mother, Arnold and Uncle Henry slept; her little world, imperfect, dysfunctional to the point of being an essay in human incompatibility snoozing away beneath her. Away to the right, in Max’s separate house, lay someone who had dedicated his life to her twice. She did love him, she thought, she must. She really was unsure what love was. It was carried through her life as another unbroken code. And it was difficult living with a decent person; she hadn’t much practice. A breeze breathed over her and through her hair. Things didn’t seem so bad at that moment; they were just another fractured American family.

  The door to Gia’s house was the same wood as her chest of drawers now wrapped in the orange darkness of a Santa Monica night. Perhaps this was his favourite wood. It glowed in the creeping light. Tourists now slept in Gia’s old home; no trace of him would be left. A person is washed from the fabric of a home with a coat of paint, or a change of curtains.

  A car of some European type she did not recognise stood near the door, wet with the night’s moisture. She crept quietly up to the main window. Inside everything was neat, but there was an absence of his own furniture. The subtle curve was missing from this room. Gia had never favoured himself with his own gift, and that made absolute sense to her. She could look straight through the room to huge viewing windows on the other side, and a mile away on the cliff top a plume of dark cedars mantled a peeling church dome glowing dully through the mist. For a second she experienced a brief sense of fondness.

  Epilogue – Spring 2002

  On the road from the airport, Max’s face loomed from a litter of billboards, ten metres high, shuffled among ads for German cars, Gucci and cosmetics. His expression was studious, but the photographer had caught a something in his eyes that conveyed a subtle lightness and humour. An image of his book was cleverly worked beside him to suggest an open door, throwing light on a hidden past, inviting the reader in, and inscribed around it were endorsements from celebrities of the literary and academic world.

  “Oh my God.”

  His driver Valya grinned at his discomfort. “Rubs against the grain for an old spy does it? You’ve been blown now.”

  “I’ve been blown for a long time.”

  “You’re plastered across the ones for the conference too. All over Moscow. You and that French writer. The one who’s always drunk.”

  Max put his head in his hands. “Its just weird seeing yourself over and over again.”

  “I’d kill for that kind of publicity.”

  In the two and a bit years since the wedding, there had been many changes. He had reacquired status but a very different strain to what he had known in his Communist heyday. It glowed from a joyously elitist world where he was a fashionable component among the champagne and lifestyle interviews that garnished it. His was a unique position as he had managed to straddle the old way and the new – “a colossus between epochs” as one gushing journalist put it – and for this he was in constant demand on TV and at all the glittering events of a society fast growing in love with itself. But the bustle of publicity that pasted his face onto billboards, buildings and TV sets from Paris to Phnom Penh kept him wary. The ghost from the past with the eyes of the devil still rose to haunt him now and again. And now he was back in the killer’s hometown, soaring along a dual carriageway. He had been here before; nothing had happened. The anxiety was diluting, but he kept his radar switched on. “You’re too big to kill now,” was Shota’s optimistic conclusion. But no one was too big for the Mafia.

  “You know, my mother was a great fan of yours,” said Valya, overtaking everything. “In the old days, when you were a Hero of the Soviet Union. Yeah, she thought you were very handsome. You could have had your way with her, Max. When you were younger.”

  “If only I’d known.”

  “Is there any way you could sign a book for her?”

  “If we get there intact.”

  “Thanks. That’ll take her mind off the incontinence.”

  “Anything to help, Valentina.”

  Valya was one of the many new faces of Moscow, one with rings, studs and tattooed lesbians in acts of grotesque carnality customising her body parts. Her head was shaved up to the summits where two spreads of thick, flaxen hair sat like birds wings incubating a giant egg.

  “Do you set off airport security systems?”

  “It’s a laugh. I’ve got them everywhere. Oh yes, there too. Especially there. I have to strip to show them. They don’t know what to make of me.”

  She was a stand-up comedienne with a strong line in sexual confusion, “I have this prosthetic cock that I take out and pee all over the stage. It’s really realistic, really well made and you can see they think they’ve got me sussed, then that pulls them up and they’re confused, calls their assumptions into question, you know. Gets a barrel of laughs. Especially if they’re out of their trees.”

  Max wondered what Lenin would have made of it.

  “I do the driving to subsidise the stand up,” added Valya, “Irina, you know, who’s running the conference? She’s my squeeze.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know Irina was…”

  She laughed. “Yeah. We don’t all look like me. You never can tell, can you?”

  The car was a huge Mercedes, a courtesy car from a dealership that was partly sponsoring the event. Fifteen different a
uthors of fiction and non-fiction had been gathered from all over Europe for an authors’ conference loosely bound by the theme of the alienated society and the written word. But Max was undoubtedly the star turn. Apart from the Frenchman who was rarely sober enough to turn up.

  “Poor bastard. I picked him up this morning. He was in such a state. He asked me if I’d go down on him. I said ‘only after the opening address’.” She laughed again, happy, joyous and free.

  Max’s memoirs were a bestseller before they hit the bookshelves on both sides of the old Cold War divide. Henry had stoked curiosity with carefully placed excerpts, press releases and serialisations. The righteous and the patriots of his old country were appalled. The furore whipped up advance sales, an attractive infamy, and drew crowds at signings and interviews across Europe. A Scottish company made a documentary for the BBC, filmed at the little house by the sea, the apartment in Tbilisi, the Kremlin and several other old Soviet locations. He even got on well with the CIA operatives sent to check him out.

  Now he was a guest on everything from quiz shows to history documentaries. His life had a new dynamic, and there was money and he liked it, although the scale of his celebrity sometimes frightened him. His own safety was still a concern, but he couldn’t shut himself away, he had to operate on the assumption that the killer had just not recognised him or decided to let sleeping dogs lie. Gia’s case had advanced not one whit from that awful morning when Max found him in the sea. There was now enough money to take up Alexei’s offer, but things had changed. Henry had made him a celebrity. The day in a Tbilisi tea bar with an unwelcome daughter had brought surprising blessings. Did he want to put those at risk by setting up a contract on the life of a cheap Moscow hood? In the moments when he was still empowered with grief, it was not easy to stick with the sensible decision. The word ‘loyalty’ kept repeating on him as if that last meal with Gia remained undigested. His sad eyes, his demeanour, his questioning had haunted him till the book was published; then those memories began to miraculously fade. With circumstances so radically different, and all that money now, all the risks protested. Now he had something to lose.

  The timing of his success was perfect too. The rednecks were swarming out of the Washington woodwork. Now Russia was weak, all restraint was gone and there was no one to stand up to them. The America his father pined after had arrived and Max felt vindicated again. Delivered with understatement and an emphatic sympathy for those who had been lost on 9/11, whom he defined as the innocents who had paid for decades of deviant American foreign policy, he was once again part of the political debate.

  Henry and he kept in regular touch and he always asked after everyone. Lucy was pregnant again after a first miscarriage and, she assured him, doing fine, but Max only pretended to believe her. He was daunted by the idea of a grandchild, but glad to have family again, and glad they were half way across the world – an ideal cushion, tucked away in the comfort of the mind and not in his face. The occasional phone call or postcard buoyed up the sensation that his world was re-populated. They were a screwed up bunch but what family is not?

  He also had taken the precaution of drawing up a will. Everything would go to Lucy apart from a couple of reasonably valuable antiques that would decorate Shota’s restaurant. Partly for his own safety and partly because he had finally grown tired of the little village where he spent so much time, a permanent move to Prague was being contemplated. He would be safe to invite Lucy, Timmy and his grandchild there – if there ever were a grandchild.

  “You know Prague?”

  “I did a lesbian comedy festival in Prague. Magic place.”

  Valya’s postmodern approval tickled him. The book’s success and the money had replaced the despondency he felt at the end of the old century with the prospect of an exciting future, even at his ripe old age. He had discovered that there is little to compare with the pleasure of the unexpected Indian summer. His pocket and his pride replenished together; he had taken a long and strange route to respect and celebrity; hated and feted, a hero and a villain, a rogue or an old fashioned man of principle who had run against the current – he was a topic of debate.

  Writing the book, however, had mysteriously brought everything into question, because on each page Max was nagged by the notion that the great risks he took as a young man were taken because there was some other, greater risk he could not take. Something flickered in the corner of his eye, but like the borealis, disappeared whenever he turned to look at it. The events and characters of his youth were remembered with complete clarity; he was scrupulously honest about everything, but when he looked back for his younger self, there was no one there. He could recall no sensation of how it was to be the young Max. So he had to fictionalise himself, but in a sense that was what he had always done.

  “D’you come here a lot?”

  “Couple of days here and there. Usually for some bit of work.”

  The return to Moscow always dumped more old memories on him, too late for the book now, but vivid and significant: memories of how after hard nights on the vodka he was drawn to watch the suicides being fished out of the river at dawn; of an artist in the Arbat reeking of chipped and re-lit cigarettes, a stick man in a stained green suit from a rag stall, without vest, socks or shoes selling him a tiny oil painting he could fit in his hand, and which had a kind of miracle in it. It showed a birch tree on tawny grass backed by pines under a high autumn sky and this miniature landscape suggested something of the unfathomable mystery of Russia to him. It reminded him too of that strange day lying under a tree in Alexei’s childhood killing fields. He would take it with him to Prague, as a reminder.

  “You been to the Metropol?”

  “In the old days.”

  “You won’t recognise it now. Five star. You’ve got a suite there. You just come down in the lift and you’re in the conference.”

  “It seems to get more expensive every time I come back here.”

  “Maybe it needs another revolution, uh?”

  He looked at her and saw the twinkle. “You really are a comedienne.”

  Alexei and Petra joined him for the meal in the Metropol and Max was pleased to foot the radioactive bill. It was wonderful to resurrect their relationship after the years of separation. Time had cladded Petra’s extraordinary beauty with more weight and faded Alexei to a shocking frailty that saddened him. The old star who had them sitting up in the corridors of the Kremlin and the Lubyanka was a ghost. They had all lived through exciting times but they were anachronisms in the new world.

  The next morning Valya and Irina took him downstairs to join the other writers for breakfast. The controversial Frenchman was already drunk. Then the great reading public of Moscow streamed in. Poles, Czechs, Latvians numbered among the locals. The new Russians took to books as if they were a designer drug. The signing was so brisk that Max’s hand seized up several times.

  At three o’ clock, he gave his talk and for the reading selected a short chapter about a trip he and Alexei made to interview a very old Party member called Ivan. A senior official was retiring and it had been decided to collect reminiscences from all his old companions and gather them into an album as a memento of his service to the People’s Soviet. Old Ivan was a survivor from the Revolution itself and was the retiring official’s first departmental head in one of the many ministries that honeycombed the old bureaucracy. He had known Lenin, had waded chin deep through freezing rivers at night to ambush White Russians and had helped push tank production through the roof in the war against the Nazis. All in all, he was a man from the heart of revolutionary history, an eyewitness and participant at its key moments, but when Alexei and Max got to him he couldn’t remember a thing. “Stalin? Joseph Stalin?”

  Senility had wiped Ivan clean as a slate. History had gone from him. So, rather than disappoint anyone, Alexei and Max made everything up, and when the album was presented to the
retiring official, he was particularly moved by old Ivan’s recollections and sent him a letter of thanks that Alexei had to intercept and reply to.

  The chapter brought the house down. Laughter detonated through the hotel, and in the front row by Petra, Alexei wet his cheeks with tears of laughter and pride at his moment of celebrity. His former pupil had caught that mischievous streak and preserved it for posterity. Max’s readers would discover Alexei and grant him a kind of eternity. Max could see how thrilled he was and felt grateful he was able to give something back for all the years of friendship.

  Then came the Q and A with the usual complement of awkward questions from the right-wingers who could never forgive what Max, Marx and their ilk had done to world freedom. But Max had the easy wit to undermine this line of self-righteousness and get the audience back on his side.

  “Hey, Max, you could do stand-up. You floored those fucking hecklers like an old pro,” said Valya.

  “I am an old pro, Valya. What’s your mother doing this evening?”

  He stood beside Alexei in his chair joking with some readers who had bought copies of the book and scribbled his greeting across the frontispiece in English and Russian. That evening Max was speaking again at a dinner, to which Alexei and Petra were invited, and he suggested meeting them in the bar in twenty minutes for cocktails. “Just want to freshen up, change the suit and all that.”