by James Meek
I’d be a hell of a lot keener to learn it if you didn’t go stum every time I’m around, if you weren’t so ashamed of it. Christ talk to the baby in any language you like, only not behind my back. I just want to listen, even if I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t want to understand. I just want to be there.
You can’t be. You know where the book is, go and learn it, in a couple of years you’ll be perfect, but it’s not going to take any less, is it? How else can we …
What?
I don’t know.
How else can we what?
I don’t know.
Who is we?
You and me.
You meant you and the baby.
I did not.
You did. The officer is your friend. Let’s move to the country.
The country.
Then I’d be outnumbered two to one instead of two to a million and still outnumbered.
Cate turned away and shook her head. I don’t understand, she said.
At last! said Adam. He grinned. Good.
The Queen of Ukraine
Off Cape Hatteras the sea arched up to her, a gymnast too perfect to be had but wanting to be wanted. Only a detail of scale stopped the Queen of Ukraine sticking out a tonguetip to tickle the muscled water, make the sea plunge concave with a gasp. The ghost of the taste of salt filled the back of her mouth and she ordered Captain First Rank Gubenko to lower a champagne bucket over the side. A steward brought her the seawater on a tray and ladled it into a tumbler of Lviv crystal. It was grey and swirled with plankton and the dandruff of the deep. She took a mouthfull, swilled it round and spat it over the side, sending the glass after it.
Crystalware overboard, she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her gloved forearm, making a roadkill-crimson smear on the white satin. She walked towards the prow of the SS Lesya Ukrainka, pride of the Black Sea Shipping Company. Twenty-five knots in all weathers, your majesty, Gubenko said each night at dinner, morsing dots of red caviar onto a buttery trencher. Give them money and they could never find the place between vulgarity and frugality. In all Ukraine only the Queen knew where that was.
Forced to choose, of course, vulgarity every time.
She stood alone in the bows among the anchor chains, back to the bridge, and the officer of the watch eye-gorging on her. An optic nerve with fingertips and a mouth, tease the curve of her spine and swallow the fruit of it with a snap and a gulp. Cherry on a stalk. The west wind had a coldness. She drew her shawl, an embroidered tribute from the women of Lutsk, gold fleurs-de-lys merging into trezubi on white lace, more closely around her. The sun wasn’t long up. Through clouds like torn strips of sodden cardboard the redundancy of a lit barsign on the empty streets of dawn, or a gleam of noonday hustle from the other side of the ocean, while here, off the cape, night had dismantled America, which could, it seemed possible in the diluting blue, with nothing but a hazy code of buoys and lighthouses to remind it of the order of things when it went to bed, be obliged to build it all again.
From here they could see the justification of her insistence on the approach to New York by sea. Leonid Makarovich had begged her to take the Antonov. She’d been tempted. The pool was charming. How the institutes in Mikolayiv had laboured to find glass strong enough to floor the aircraft and hold the water in place! To plunge in and dive down through the water as the plane swooped towards Manhattan. It would be like flying by yourself, like Peter Pan and Wendy! And then to invite friends for a swim run down Grand Canyon. But it would have meant landing at John F. Kennedy.
The yacht, I think, she’d said.
Steamship, said the president under his breath, his loose jaw beginning to rock from side to side with anxiety. Your Majesty … Kennedy was a great man. A democrat.
I’m not a democrat. That’s your line of work. I don’t like him. I don’t like the way he treated Jackie and Marilyn.
But he was a great man.
I’ve known a few great men. You don’t understand, Leonid Makarovich, what it takes to be a great man. It can easily be good. Seldom great.
You mean love …
Love?
President Kravchuk’s forehead began to gleam. A single strand of white silver sprang erect from one of the perfect oily furrows on his scalp and coiled shyly into itself.
The sea crossing would take weeks, he said. You can’t be away for that long. Folk wouldn’t understand. Your Majesty knows the currency’s in trouble.
Am I an economist? Is this my problem?
The notes have your picture on them.
Print more.
That’s the trouble. There are too many already. It’s called hyperinflation.
So I’m popular. I don’t care. I’m not landing at JFK.
There are other airports in the United States.
You want the Queen of Ukraine to land at La Guardia?
Washington …
I’m going to New York. There’s only one airport there fit for the Queen. But the plane doesn’t put rubber to tarmac unless they change the name back to Idlewild. Do you know of any charismatic American politicians called Idlewild with an agenda for hope and a talent for martyrdom? I don’t think so. Prepare the royal train. I’m leaving for Odessa tonight.
The hairs were unfolding from their grooves quickly now, like a time-lapse film of the growth of an undersea vegetable.
We spent a fortune on the Antonov, said the president. Surly, pretending to be hurt. We made it nice for you. The walnut finish round the white kid in the royal suite, it wasn’t cheap. People won’t understand.
It’s not their business to understand. Who said I wanted to be understood? I’m the Queen. I don’t come with an instruction book.
Leonid Makarovich pursed his mouth, inhaled deeply and touched his knuckles together. Offended Buddha. The Queen rose and stood by the window, arms folded. She looked at the row of giant cement frogs lining the roof of the Horodetsky House opposite. Great men. Without turning round she asked about Mykola.
We haven’t found him, the president said. Everyone’s trying, the police, the SBU. Without a photograph, an address, it’s difficult, of course. If you could at least give us a surname.
He wears black, said the Queen. Tears crested her cheekbones and coasted chinwards. She bit her lip and sobbed.
Your Majesty, said Leonid Makarovich, pushing his chair back and trotting towards her over the nomenklatura-standard carpet. He took her in his arms and patted her on the shoulder with a soft palm like a child smoothing a snowman.
Buy a new carpet, she sniffed. It’s vile.
We will, said the president. The IMF’s coming next week.
The Queen’s fingertips plucked at the president’s jacket. She was sure that if she kept looking she would find an air valve and he would deflate, sighing.
Leonid Makarovich drew his head back and peeked, fascinated, at the eyeliner swirling down her face in the flood. Many men wear black, he murmured. Perhaps he’s a priest?
Mykola stretched his arm out and hooked a slice of tongue with the fork. He slid it over the china and flipped it up and into his mouth.
Gross, said Bohdana.
His head wasn’t touching it, said Mykola.
The grand chessmaster snorted in his sleep. A fleck of yellow matter left his nostril, squashed by contact with the plate of cold mixed meats. His head swayed, rose, turned, and fell again. He settled with his cheek resting snug on the salami, roulade and smoked ham and smiled. He began to snore.
Have some more, said Bohdana. Look, his head’s not touching it.
Waiters with faces like the corpses of the drowned moved in the distance, heavy, fragile, self-absorbed, rags hanging from their wrists, tight white shirts straining over paunches and shrunken ribcages, faintly blotched with stains hallowed by nightly boil washes. They had as much regard for the diners as Japanese troops for the Anglo-Saxon POWs who dishonoured themselves by surrendering rather than committing suicide. To pay to eat at the Dnipro was dishonou
r. There could be no service.
Mykola dipped the wrong end of a teaspoon into a Stolichny salad and lifted to his mouth a pea which had been canned under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Now a free pea in free Ukraine. He mashed it against his teeth and took a mouthful of sweet flat Crimean shampanskoye. A shudder hooped up his torso and the supersized bronzey plates set in the wall like bubblebursts shimmered.
I’m getting a fever, he said.
Everyone has flu, said Bohdana. The heating’s out in here.
Yes, it’s cold, and this shampanskoye’s so warm. You’ve got to help me. I had a bad night again.
The Queen? How did she look?
Oh, fabulous! She was on a royal yacht coming up the Hudson at dawn. She was in silver lamé. It looked great on her. Her hair was blowing in the wind, and the sun made her skin look as if it was reflecting torchlight. She was supposed to be at the Met for a Chernobyl benefit that night. Scenes from Zaporozhets Za Dunayem.
Supposed to be.
She was going to blow them off and head for Broadway. Tim Rice rewrote Evita for her. Don’t Cry For Me, Ukraína.
And then hit the clubs.
Yeah, and then the clubs!
Bohdana was nodding as she lit up. She ran her hands through her hair and exhaled. It wasn’t like her. The Peron reference had scraped something off, rubbed away a patch of Toronto mall girl. So do you do it with her? she said.
Mykola grinned. Fear and age stayed in his eyes. No, he said. I don’t know. I’m not certain she’s a man. I’m not sure she’s me. In the dreams I move in and out of her, watching her, then being her, then watching her again. She’s always alone, because she’s never together with anyone she loves. Sexually she’s like a stone that changes colour when you turn it in the light, always the same stone, always beautiful, but different colours. Is that strange for you? The more aroused I am in dreams, the faster the object of desire changes, but when it changes, it changes to something different. The Queen of Ukraine isn’t like that. She changes but she’s still the Queen. She’s a woman, she’s a man, she’s a woman with a dick, she’s a man with a hole, she’s me, I’m her as a woman, I’m her as a man, she’s me dressed as a woman wanting a woman dressed as a man.
D’you want to know what I dreamed about last night? said Bohdana, stubbing the cigarette half-smoked. A slice of Brie on warm French bread. She folded her arms and looked down at her lap, letting her fringe hang over her eyes.
Mykola wasn’t listening. Freud, you see … he thought it was all to do with sex and instinct. He didn’t get to grips with the human urges of space and time. He didn’t understand the lust for forms other than sexual forms. He didn’t get the longing for places and the past. He didn’t understand longing or grief, or light. People will tell you it was a sense of sexual inadequacy that led Hitler to invade Poland, but what about the men who sleep around because they’re incapable of territorial conquest? Did you ever hear of a shrink diagnosing geopolitical inadequacy as a source of sexual problems? When I’m in New York I dream of the Queen in Ukraine, and when I’m in Ukraine she’s always visiting New York. If you told me it’s me mythologising places I love when I’m not in them, I’d be offended, because that’d sound like me not being a sexual man. But then if you said it was all about sexual desire that’d be wrong too, because what’s sex got to do with the sunlight on her skin reflected off the windows of Manhattan, or her riding to wolfhounds with her court down the frozen Dnipro, trotting in between the ice fishermen, and them not knowing whether to lift their hats or bow?
The Queen of Ukraine’s the part of you that’s left behind, the part you romance the locals with, said Bohdana, an inner lid raised from her eyes, which were bright now and saw the world. In the States you want them to see you as the one who dared to submit your soul to the hard struggle of Ukraine, and in Ukraine the cool American. You try so hard in New York to look as if you’re brooding about Kiev and in Kiev as if you’re out on loan from the Museum of Modern Art. You’re like all the perfectionist lovers. You pretend you’re longing for love when really you’re in love with longing.
Perhaps, said Mykola. But she’s still the Queen of Ukraine.
There isn’t a queen of Ukraine.
For me there is.
Lieutenant Zagrebelny slipped into the royal stateroom, clicked his heels together and bowed his head from the shoulder as she had taught him. He looked superb in the black leather parade dress of the marines, with the collar and shoulder tabs in white and royal blue suede. The Queen crossed her bare legs, stretching out from her ivory chiffon chemise, and nodded at Natalie to leave.
The Statue of Liberty, ma’am, said Zagrebelny. You asked to be told.
Do you have the photographs? Bring them over here.
The lieutenant brought over a slim black album. The Queen drew a cigarette from the gold-chased basalt box on her dressing table and looked up at the officer. He leaned down with the lighter. The Queen took in smoke, looking into the lieutenant’s eyes. He was looking straight ahead. The Queen reached out with her left hand and squeezed the long bulge in Zagrebelny’s trousers with her fingertips.
Ever anally penetrated a man, lieutenant? she asked.
He looked down at her. For a second a boy seemed to be there and she weakened. Then anger that she couldn’t tell whether it was eagerness in his eyes, or ambition.
No ma’am, he said.
Oh, you poor thing, said the Queen, pursing her lips. Well, never mind. They say New York is a wonderful town.
She opened the album. The happiest day of her life! The day-long Freedom Parade of a thousand floats down Kreshchatik, and the carnival queen a real queen, at the head of her people, Donbass miners in gold overalls with silver helmets carrying bouquets of coal-black tulips, Crimean Tatars in azure and crimson robes with curled and scented beards, Zaporizhzhya Cossacks on chestnut mares, their khokhli waving like horsetails as they sang, their spurs and harness and scabbards loosened to make them jingle. A dozen perfect Poltava girls on a float themed Broken Hearts, all weeping together, an amazing sight. A procession of blind minstrels, led by river fleet cadets from Izmail in white blouses, singing Taras Shevchenko ballads. Hutsul pipers from the Carpathians, gipsy dancers from Uzhhorod, nuclear workers from Chernobyl with a model of the power station under a giant condom and a banner proclaiming: Safe Nuclear Power, Safe Sex. Free borshch, cherry varenyki and Pearl of the Steppe wine on Andriyivsky Uzviz and an all-night rave in Hidropark in the middle of the Dnipro where by dawn all the Poltava girls’ broken hearts were mended, and broken again.
By then the royal train had reached Odessa, where the Joke Festival was breaking up and the last laughers were rolling down the Potemkin Steps towards the Black Sea in the dawn, smashing empty shampanskoye bottles as they went and wrapping themselves hysterically around the ankles of ascending cohorts of Orthodox rabbis just disembarked from the Haifa roro. The royal quay had been resanded and varnished and blue and yellow pennants flew its length. The Cossack guard of honour presented sabres as the royal party stepped from its dazzling azure carriage and boarded the Lesya Ukrainka.
Look, ma’am, said Zagrebelny, touching her on the shoulder and pointing through the porthole. A green woman hanging from a torch on a little island.
You’re too familiar with me! said the Queen in a rage. Take your fingers off my shoulder! The devil, who made you one of my officers?
Zagrebelny stood straight, clicked his heels and bowed. He began to apologise.
Never apologise to me! Never! said the Queen. There can be no apologising. You have to be an apology.
Ma’am.
You’ll find what you need in there, she said, nodding to a box of silver filigree and birchbark on the pink granite coffee table. One of the Rivne labourers who had manhandled it into place had crippled himself doing it. She’d made sure he had a comfortable pension. Or had she? She’d certainly intended to.
The Queen stood up and moved over to a larger porthole. There was a soft, plu
mp couch under it, upholstered in black silk, with details from Caravaggio rendered in dark grey thread which only showed when the light caught them, and were more felt with the fingertips than seen. She knelt on the cushions with her back to the stateroom, elbows on the wooden rail below the porthole, and watched Liberty doing her duty. Behind her she heard Zagrebelny open the box. There was a pause while he sniffed and cleared his throat. She smiled. She heard his zip and slippery, sticky noises as he lubed up. He walked towards her.
What do they know of liberty here? said the Queen.
Land of the free, said Zagrebelny, lifting the hem of her chemise. She felt the cautious invasion of a nicely-manicured finger.
I hope you don’t think you’re going to be some kind of court favourite, she said. I don’t have them. Especially if they don’t know what’s a rhetorical question.
Like, What’s it all about?
That’s what you’re going to try to show me. We’ll make another statue for the Americans. Like our monument to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. We distilled freedom into pain and pleasure while the Americans still drink the mixture. We should teach them. Not a Statue of Liberty. A Statue of Liberation.
Lieutenant Zagrebelny did his very best to show the Queen what it was all about.
Mykola left the hotel alone. The doorman who reared up to abuse anyone trying to get into the restaurant, like an old blind farm dog still chasing cars, watched him pass, the bottomless spring of hate bubbling up within him. In the suspended influenza of Kiev’s March nights, impregnated with the fragrance of damp, smouldering coal, the depeopled crescent Kreshchatik shrank back from its own weak streetlights, shamed by its dark, blind shopfronts and its freakish towers, cupolas and friezes. Mykola began to walk home.
He entered the tunnels under Kreshchatik and strayed. Stunted teen souls in cheap Turkish leather and woollen hats shivered in the yellow-tiled catacombs, drinking bottles of Obolon. Moist scarlet mouths glistened in white faces and they laughed, shivering and tapping their heels with the cold. The flower-sellers squatted on camp stools, ziggurats of layered clothing. Trash burned and smoked in bell-shaped cans and a crowd horseshoed round a guitarist and a trumpeter playing selections from Soviet films of the 70s and 80s. The trumpeter was playing the theme from A Stranger At Home, At Home Among Strangers. A pair of naval infantry conscripts from the Black Sea Fleet marched down the tunnel, faces ravaged by acne, boots two sizes too big, sleeves of their greatcoats hiding their hands, synthetic fur hats pushed back nearly vertical. They were small and crooked in the middle and the brass buttons on their greasy black coats swung loose like the eyes of old toys as they strode past bandylegged, chickenwise.
