The Museum of Doubt

by James Meek

  He gathered up the vodka and a loaf of bread and filled a mug with some pickled cucumbers. He went out. On the way he passed Stella’s room. She was sitting on her bed, stroking Oleg’s forehead with one hand and fumbling inside his trousers with the other. The bloody towel lay on the rug. Mykola could see how her own forehead was messed up.

  My little sweetie, baby, I love you, I love you, she was saying. Oleg moaned. Oh don’t worry, be quiet, don’t speak, I love you and I know you love me, I couldn’t leave you, I couldn’t live without you, I’m going to be with you for ever, don’t worry, my sweet, my dear, I’m yours, you’re mine, just lie still, my love, I love you and I’m going to make everything all right.

  Mykola stepped out into the rotting darkness and into the lift. He leaned against the flimsy veneer walls as it spooled its slovenly way groundwards. He closed his eyes and stopped breathing. Like a heroin rush the memory of the scent of a stranger’s perfumed body in the Hamptons one hot blue and white day sluiced through him and burst, a divesplash from sphincter to shoulderblades. He was immersed in the cool sunlit shallows of lost time and shoals of sensation darted away from his fingers, dust motes carouselling in the beams slanting through the SoHo window and coffeemaking lovers architecting his days, the warm peppery air of Manhattan evening on his face coming out after a matinée.

  The yard was darker than before. Mykola called the conscripts’ names. A cat answered. Mykola clinked the bottle and the mug together.

  Come and get it, he said. He sniffed the air. In the interstices of decay and smoke bulged the smell of roses.

  The panther in the coal cellar. They had known what they were about, the makers of Soviet uniforms, aiding the assignations of adulterous admirals in the dimly-lit backyards of Sevastopol and Vladivostok. The Hard To See Fleet. Now he could make out buttons and faces.

  Hey, he said.

  The boys, suspicious again, came over. There was a playground with benches around it. They sat down, Mykola in the middle, the boys on either side. They passed around the spirit and zakuski. Taras and Mykola drank a few mouthfuls. Petya drained the bottle, belched and snatched a petal off one of Taras’ roses. He put it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

  Son of a bitch, said Taras.

  Dessert, said Petya. To make me sweeter for the girls. Nu, ready? he said, slapping Mykola’s crotch.

  I suppose, said Mykola.

  Brother, said Petya, the American wants service.

  Taras found Mykola’s zip. He got Mykola out, let go and looked at Petya.

  Couldn’t do it with my hand? he said.

  Business is business, said Petya.

  It’s OK, said Mykola, if he doesn’t want to.

  No! said Petya. A deal is a deal. That’s capitalism, isn’t it?

  Devil, said Taras. He turned his head, hawked, held the bouquet away from Mykola and went down on him. He started chewing like a dog on a bone. Mykola felt an icy touch on his scalp.

  Oho, said Petya. It’s snowing. He held the last cucumber out to Mykola. D’you want it?

  No thanks, said Mykola. He winced as Taras nipped a bit of skin.

  America, America, said Petya, chewing and nodding. I’d like to go there. I don’t understand why you came to Kiev. I’m a patriot, of course, but it’s shit here. Don’t you like New York? Are the girls pretty there?

  It’s a wonderful place, said Mykola. It’s the centre of the world. Everything is there. He pushed Taras’ hat off and ran his fingers through the boy’s hair, the snowflakes slipping between his knuckles. He came in the conscript’s throat. Everything.

  So why did you leave?

  So I could miss it.

  Taras got up, took his hat and walked away, coughing it up.

  So I could miss it, and so I could go back, said Mykola. It’s good to be there but it’s even better to keep on going back.

  Ah, Kolya, you don’t want to do that. It’s unlucky to go back. You shouldn’t go back if you’ve left something behind. That’s what happened to Yuri Gagarin. He went back, and he crashed his plane.

  People leave to change, said Mykola. But it works the opposite way. It’s like travelling at almost the speed of light. The faster and further away you go, the quicker the people you leave behind get old. It’s the law of Personal Relativity.

  Better put that away, or it’ll freeze, said Petya, patting Mykola’s prick. He got up and walked off. Thanks for the drink, he said.

  You’re welcome, said Mykola.

  Petya started running towards the archway, shouting after Taras. He stopped under the arc and called to Mykola: Whose was that law?

  The Queen’s, said Mykola. It was the Queen of Ukraine.

  The Queen stopped outside the door to the function room. Hrynyuk introduced her to the cluster of people: the hotel manager, the representatives of the fire department, the mayor’s office, Human Rights Watch, the Ukrainian National Assembly, the World Bank, the Ukrainian parliament’s finance committee and a couple of dozen lawyers. The Queen smiled at them all and shook their hands.

  They seem angry, she murmured in Hrynyuk’s ear.

  Don’t worry, your Majesty, we’ll sort it out after the presser.

  She walked into the lights and sat down. She began counting the lenses in the camera wall in the middle of the room. She lost track at twenty. Apart from Hrynyuk, she was alone. The ambassador hadn’t come. Natalie, Lieutenant Zagrebelny and Captain Gubenko were to have been in attendance. Their chairs were empty.

  Ladies and gentlemen, Her Most Royal Majesty, the Queen of Ukraine, will now take questions, said Hrynyuk, getting to his feet. He leaned down and whispered: I’ll slip outside and start spinning those lawyers. He vanished. The questions began. The Queen felt her lips cracking.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES: Hey, how’re you doing? I thought maybe you’d decided to stay out there for ever.

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. Naturally my people are suffering great hardships but with the help of our friends abroad, particularly in the United States, we are confident that the present crisis can be overcome.

  THE WASHINGTON POST: Good to see you, man. I’d forgotten what you looked like. Hey, you know how Meryl said she was going to keep your job open for you? Well, she didn’t.

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. My visit here is essentially private. I shall be meeting with some very dear acquaintances. Nonetheless, I shall be attending a number of public functions, most of them connected with my post as honorary chairman of important Ukrainian charities.

  THE BOSTON GLOBE: Son, we’re willing to overlook what’s happened, but how about you hold the gay deal for one weekend, and take your father bowling or something? He won’t mention you being a faggot if you don’t.

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. There are a number of pretenders and communists who dispute my claim to the title, and even question whether the monarchy has a role in Ukraine in the 1990s. I need only point to such stable, prosperous societies as Holland, Denmark and the United Kingdom to illustrate my conviction that it has.

  CNN: I was afraid this was going to happen. How can I put this? You’ve been away for so long and now you want just to jump right back in. We’re older now, we’re not as multi-partner as we were. I’m not saying I’m monogamous. It’s a kind of partial celibacy. I sleep around but I abstain from sex with you.

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. The story of my discovery in a wicker basket among the reeds of the Pripyat Marshes, my upbringing by a collective farm director and his secretly Banderovite wife, my teenage years in Brooklyn and the establishment of my descent from Ryurik of Kievan Rus are too well known to be retold here. In response to your second question, the documents mentioned in the Komsomolskaya Pravda article have been shown conclusively to be second-rate forgeries. There is no sex-change clinic in Yalta, and it is clearly absurd to suggest that anyone would attempt to change sex more than once. On gender, I reply as I always do: it is the privilege of a sovereign to strive to be loved without being desired, to be wedded to her people rather than a spou
se to a single person. That said, anyone may desire me, if they dare.

  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: You don’t find me interesting enough any more, is that it? Is that why you never call when you’re in town.

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. I do not accept comparisons with Imelda Marcos. It is not the quantity of shoes which matters, but the quality. I can assure you that in both respects I have left Mrs Marcos light-years behind. As for the economy, I hardly think that a proper subject for a queen to concern herself with. I can tell you that shortly before my departure I met with members of the government who assured me that they were increasing the production of money by all means at their disposal. I regularly go among the poor, dispensing small baskets of currency, but I am sure you understand my busy social schedule allows me to distribute money only to a limited percentage of the population. Alas, I cannot solve all my country’s problems singlehanded.

  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Just the person I need to settle this argument we’ve been having. Now I know Kiev is in Crimea, but where the heck is Siberia, is it Ukraine or Russia?

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. No. I am not an ambassador for my country. I am a hostage against my own reception. If America doesn’t love me, it’ll never see me again.

  NBC: Are you OK?

  HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. There is one man. His name is Mykola. I can’t tell you any more about him but if you want to write about love, write about him. Make it up. He does. Only make it up well. I know he’s there now, in the dark yard on Karla Marla, in the snow, thinking about me. Of course I wish he could have been with me when we sailed up to the lights of your island in the evening, with the crowd and the orchestra on the wharf and the helicopters squinting at us as we docked, but he chose to dine with a woman friend in the unheated hall of the Dnipro. He should have been with me in Kiev on my birthday, when we raced reindeer sleighs on the reservoir and roasted oxen on bonfires of old Soviet passports. He was here, watching L’Age D’Or in some arthouse fleapit. Does he care for me? I don’t know. I care for him. Perhaps he’s afraid of me. Perhaps he’s afraid of the scale of my style. I am difficult. I am beyond the limit. I am the Queen of Ukraine.

  Smoked

  I drank and slept and dreamed I was a poisoned angel, with feet like a bird’s, standing on the edge of a crater looking down at an ocean of clouds boiling with bruise-coloured folds. I was poisoned by the thought that in one of the alternative moments the angels lived through, God had made a world other than the one we knew, our existence where the only tendency was towards an infinite complication in artefacts and deeds. I asked him, he was everywhere, but he didn’t pay attention, he wasn’t even aware of the nature of the question. I watched the lightning shooting upwards into the firmament from the clouds, and other angels darting like gnats around the flashes. I’d shoulder-charged the ends of time and broken through to the circularity of it, meeting myself each way, and still there was no trace of the world, no clue God had ever made it, only a memory planted inextractably, like the traces of poison, of a blue and white sphere of seas and mountains and beings. I pushed myself off the rock with the sound of claws scratching against it and dived towards the clouds. I wanted to be the first angel to commit suicide.

  I woke up. I lay in bed petting my grief that something had been lost, something which could only be the world I suspected God of having made, in an alternative course the angels had been forced to pass by without looking back. I felt as bad as if a woman I loved without her noticing had told me about another man. A better man.

  Outside the window was the world I was mourning the loss of. The mountains were to the west side and the sea was to the east, the green fields to the north and the river to the south.

  There were two things I admired Helmet for: wearing a fox fur hat in bed, and teaching his dog to fetch his newspaper from the shop. I thought the hat was a pose before I found out how cold it could be where he lived. He lived in an old fisherman’s cottage near the stony beach. I could see it from my window on the hill. With some people the hat would still be a pose, even if they were cold, but he wore it because it was what he had. It wasn’t like he’d killed the fox himself, either. As for the dog, there must have been a lot of training involved. And if I’d seen him doing the training, I would’ve thought he was a right wanker. But I hadn’t. That’s the secret. Never let anyone see you practising. One day I was round and the dog burst through a flap in the door, trotted in, bounded up on the bed and laid a neatly folded copy of the Courier on Helmet’s lap. And it was like with the hat. Helmet didn’t make an issue of it. He put on a pair of reading glasses and offered to split the paper with me. He turned to the death notices first, hoping to find the old fisherman’s name there.

  He wanted the old fisherman to die and leave him the house. Helmet had been paying him ten pounds a week in rent for five years and they split the two-room effort down the middle but Helmet wanted more space for his records. Sometimes he left a few albums on the fisherman’s table by way of a hint but the fisherman would always find something in them that interfered with his sense of taboos and would throw them out the window, where they could carry a fair way if the wind was right. I once came across an astounding LP wrapped up in the dried kelp and bladderwrack on the beach. The cover was shot but the vinyl was fine. I kept it. All items washed up on the beach are the property of the Queen. If she ever comes round to pick it up, she can have it.

  The fisherman was in his late seventies but didn’t seem to be about to die. Helmet claimed he had no relatives but I told him there was no law that property passed to a tenant on the owner’s death. I said he’d have to be nice to him. Helmet didn’t say anything to that, he folded his arms across his chest and looked through the window at the sea.

  He never even helped the old boy build his smoking shed. The fisherman had decided he would supplement his pension by making smokies on his back green like they did in Arbroath. He did build the shed, about the size of an outside toilet, but he never organised a proper fish supply and used to go to the fishmonger for packets of filleted haddock and fix them to racks with clothes pegs. Then he’d start faffing round with firelighters and bundles of firewood from the filling station. We came into the kitchenette once and found him trying to eat one of his smokies. It looked like a lung cancer autopsy. And Broughty Ferry wasn’t about fish. It was about gardening, retail and sheltered housing. The old fisherman was as popular with the neighbours as a naked aborigine walking onto the stage of Sidney Opera House during a performance of Die Niebelungen and asking the audience to leave so he could reestablish the site of the Kookaburra Dreaming.

  My work as a seal counter left me with time on my hands. I was supposed to bike over to Tentsmuir every day at dawn and count heads but I found it easier, after a few hours’ research in the library, to work out a likely population curve and fabricate the figures on a daily basis. When I went down the Ferry I’d use the people I passed to incorporate a random element. A young child meant fecundity among the seals. Two white-haired pensioners together meant a low death rate. A good-looking boy or girl meant a population explosion or a deadly epidemic. If I fell stricken in love on the street I intended to create billions of seals. I was waiting to be stricken. I was expecting it. If she wasn’t interested, I could always kill them later.

  The morning after the dream Helmet called to see if I was coming over. He asked me to buy some pies on the way, and a couple of strawberry tarts. At the counter in Goodfellow & Steven the girl handed me the bags, I paid and left the shop. A gull sprang off the edge of the pavement, perfectly white, and stroked my jacket with the edge of its wing when it spun up towards the cloud. I stopped and looked in the bags. The baked goods nestled in unchanging twos. I went back inside.

  I didn’t ask for these, I said.

  The girl put her hands on the counter and stood on tiptoe, peering into the mouths of the bags.

  I made them up for you, she said. Did you want something different?

  It’s what I wanted but I didn’t ask
for them.

  The girl settled back on her heels with a squeak of shoeleather and a rustle of her smock and we looked at each other. These seconds would be the best of the day. The seals were to have a hard going of it later.

  You come in here every morning and ask for exactly the same thing, she said. Two pies and two tarts.

  I looked at her.

  I was trying to save time, she said.

  Everyone does that here. You can’t, though. It loses its value.

  That was how I found out that Helmet never left the house. He lived off a pie and a tart and tapwater six days a week. I was keeping him alive.

  He came to the door bare-chested, wearing the grey leggings and the fur hat. We went through and lay side by side on the bed in his room. He’d been in it. He had a beautiful narrow chest, and a flat stomach, not by exercise, but by luck. He had tiny hard nipples sticking up like the backsides of buttons. I often felt like laying the flat of my hand on them, to see what it felt like, but I never did, not because I was afraid he’d think I was a poof, or’d scream or SAS my windpipe, but cause I was afraid of my bigoted future self giving me a good kicking for it ten years down the road.

  I arranged the baked items between us on the bedcover and we lay on our sides on one elbow.

  I dreamed about God last night, I said.

  Did he tell you to kill a fisherman? said Helmet.

  No.

  Helmet hooded his eyes and tore off a piece of pie with his teeth. There was a thunder of jet engines over town as the fighters from over the river headed out to sea.

  Helmet’s dog came in with the Courier and we divvied it up. The room had two windows, one looking on to the shore and the other into the back green. The old fisherman was to be seen pottering about so it was pointless for Helmet to be checking the deaths.