by Rose Tremain
“I need poinsettias,” he heard himself say, like a man parched with thirst or a petulant only child.
“Sorry, comrade,” said the market traders. “Only at Christmas.”
All he could do was pedal home to Auror. Behind his bicycle he dragged a homemade wooden trailer (built with offcuts poached from the Baryn lumber yard) and the wheels of this trailer squeaked mockingly as the miles passed. The emptiness of Ina’s sixty-fifth birthday yawned before Lev like an abandoned mine.
Lev shifted quietly in his seat, trying not to disturb Lydia’s sleep. He laid his head on the cool window glass. Then he remembered the sight that had greeted him, like a vision, in some lost village along the road: an old woman dressed in black, sitting silently on a chair in front of her house, with a baby sleeping in a plastic pram by her side. And at her feet a motley of possessions for sale: a gramophone, some scales and weights, an embroidered shawl, a pair of leather bellows. And a barrow of poinsettia plants, their leaves newly tinctured with red.
Lev had wobbled on the bike, wondering if he was dreaming. He put a foot down on the dusty road. “Poinsettias, Grandma, are they?”
“Is that their name? I call them red flags.”
He bought them all. The trailer was crammed and heavy. His money was gone.
He hid them under sacks until it was dark, planted them out in Ina’s trough under the stars, and stood by them, watching the dawn come up, and when the sun reached them, the red of their leaves intensified in a startling way, as when desert crocuses bloom after rain. And that was when Lev lit a cigarette. He sat down on the steps of Ina’s porch and smoked and stared at the poinsettias, and the cigarette was like radiant amber in him, and he smoked it right down to its last centimeter and then put it out, but still kept it pressed into his muddy hand.
Lev slept, after all.
He woke when the coach stopped for gas, somewhere in Austria, he assumed, for the petrol station was large and bright, and in an open bay to one side of it was parked a silent congregation of trucks, with German names written on them, lit by orange sodium light. Freuhof. Bosch. Grunewald. Königstransporte . . .
Lydia was awake, and together she and Lev got off the bus and breathed the cool night air. Lydia pulled a cardigan round her shoulders. Lev looked for dawn in the sky, but could see no sign of it. He lit a cigarette. His hands trembled as he took it in and out of his mouth.
“It’s going to be cold in England,” said Lydia. “Are you prepared for that?”
Lev thought about his imaginary tall house, with the rain coming down and the television flickering and the red buses going past.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“When the winter comes,” said Lydia, “we’re going to be shocked.”
“Our own winters are cold,” said Lev.
“Yes, but not for so long. In England, I’ve been told, some winters never quite depart.”
“You mean there’s no summer?”
“There is summer. But you don’t feel it in your blood.”
Other passengers from the coach were now wandering around the gas station. Some were making visits to the washrooms. Others just stood about, as Lev and Lydia were doing, shivering a little, onlookers unsure what they were looking at, arrivals who had not yet arrived, everybody in transit and uncertain what time their watches should be telling. Behind the area where the trucks were parked lay a deep, impenetrable darkness of trees.
Lev had a sudden desire to send a postcard from this place to his daughter, Maya, to describe this night limbo to her: the sodium sky, the trees unmoving, the glare of the pay station, the people like people in an art gallery, helpless before the unexplained exhibits. But Maya was too young to understand any of this. She was only five. When morning came, she would take Ina’s hand and walk to school. For her lunch, she would eat cold sausage and poppy-seed bread. When she came home, Ina would give her goat’s milk with cinnamon in a yellow glass and raisin cakes and rose-petal jam. She would do her homework at the kitchen table, then go out into the main street of Auror and look for her friends, and they would play with the goats and chickens in the dust.
“I miss my daughter already,” Lev said to Lydia.
By the time the coach crossed the border between Germany and Holland, Lev had surrendered himself to it: to his own small space by the window; to the eternal hum of the air conditioning; to the quiet presence of Lydia, who offered him eggs and dried fruit and pieces of chocolate; to the smell and voices of the other passengers; to the chemical odor of the on-board lavatory; to the feeling of moving slowly across wide distances, but moving always forward and on.
Watching the flat fields and the shimmering poplars, the canals and windmills and villages and grazing animals of the Netherlands going past, Lev felt so peaceful and quiet that it was as if the bus had become his life and he would never be asked to stir from the inertia of this bus life ever again. He began to wish Europe were larger, so that he could linger over its scenery for days and days to come, until something in him altered, until he got bored with hard-boiled eggs and the sight of cattle in green pastures and he rediscovered the will to arrive at his destination.
He knew his growing apathy was dangerous. He began to wish that his best friend, Rudi, was with him. Rudi never surrendered to anything, and he wouldn’t have surrendered to the opium of the passing miles. Rudi fought a pitched battle with life through every waking hour. “Life is just a system,” Rudi often reminded Lev. “All that matters is cracking the system.” In his sleep, Rudi’s body lay crouched, with his fists bunched in front of his chest, like a boxer’s. When he woke, he sprang and kicked away the bedclothes. His wild dark hair gleamed with its own invincible shine. He loved vodka and cinema and football. He dreamed of owning what he called a “serious car.” In the bus, Rudi would have sung songs and danced folk dances in the aisle and traded goods with other passengers. He would have resisted.
Like Lev, Rudi was a chain-smoker. Once, after the sawmill closed, they’d made a smoke-filled journey together to the distant city of Glic, in the deep, purple cold of winter, when the sun hung low among the bones of trees and ice gleamed like a diamond coating on the railway lines, and Rudi’s pockets were stashed with gray money, and in his suitcase lay eleven bottles of vodka, cradled in straw.
Rumors of an American car, a Chevrolet Phoenix, for sale in Glic had reached Rudi in Auror. Rudi lovingly described this car as a “Tchevi.” He said it was blue with white and chrome trim and had only done two hundred and forty thousand miles, and he was going to travel to Glic and see it, and if he could beat the owner down on the price, he was going to damn well buy it and drive it home. The fact that Rudi had never driven a car before didn’t worry him at all. “Why should it?” he said to Lev. “I drove a heavy-lifting vehicle at the sawmill every day of my fucking life. Driving is driving. And with American cars you don’t even have to worry about gears. You just slam the stick into the ‘D-for-drive’ position and take off.”
The train was hot, with a fat heating pipe running directly under the seats. Lev and Rudi had a carriage to themselves. They piled their sheepskin coats and fur hats into the luggage rack and opened the vodka suitcase and played music on a tiny, shrieking radio, small as a rat. The hot vodka fug of the carriage was beautiful and wild. They soon felt as reckless as mercenaries. When the ticket collector came round, they embraced him on both cheeks.
At Glic, they stepped out into a snow blizzard, but their blood was still hot and so the snow seemed delectable to them, like the caress of a young girl’s hand on their faces, and they stumbled through the streets laughing. But by then the night was coming down and Rudi announced, “I’m not looking at the Tchevi in the fucking dark. I want to see it gleaming.” So they stopped at the first frugal guesthouse they found and sated their hunger with bowls of goulash and dumplings, and went to sleep in a narrow room that smelled of mothballs and linoleum polish, and never stirred till morning.
The sun was up in a clear blue sky when Le
v and Rudi found their way to the Tchevi owner’s building. The snow all around them was thick and clean. And there it was, parked alone on the dingy street, under a solitary linden tree, the full extraordinary length and bulk of it, an ancient sky-blue Chevrolet Phoenix with white fins and shining chrome trim; and Rudi fell to his knees. “That’s my girl,” he said. “That’s my baby!”
It had its imperfections. On the driver’s door, one hinge had rusted away. The rubber windshield-wiper blades had perished to almost nothing in successive cold winters. All four tires were worn. The radio didn’t work.
Lev watched Rudi hesitate. He walked round and round the car, trailing his hand over the bodywork, scooping snow from the roof, examining the wiper blades, kicking the tires, opening and closing the defective door. Then he looked up and said, “I’ll take her.” After that, he began to haggle, but the owner understood how great was Rudi’s longing for the car and refused to lower his price by more than a fraction. The Tchevi cost Rudi everything he had with him, including his sheepskin coat and his fur hat and five of the eight bottles of vodka remaining in the suitcase. The owner was a professor of mathematics.
“I wonder what you’re thinking about?” asked a voice. And it was Lydia, pausing suddenly in her new task, which was knitting.
Lev stared at her. He thought it was a long time since anybody had asked him this. Or perhaps nobody had ever asked him, because Marina had always seemed to know what was in his mind and tried to accommodate what she found there.
“Well,” said Lev, “I was thinking about my friend Rudi and the time when I went with him to Glic to buy an American car.”
“Oh,” said Lydia. “He’s rich, then, your friend Rudi?”
“No,” said Lev. “Or never for long. But he likes to trade.”
“Trading is so bad,” said Lydia, with a sniff. “We shall never make progress as long as there is gray trade. But tell me about the car. Did he get it?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “He did. What are you knitting?”
“A sweater,” said Lydia. “For the English winter. The English call this garment a ‘jumper.’ ”
“A jumper?”
“Yes. There’s another word for you. Tell me about Rudi and the car.”
Lev took out his vodka flask and drank. Then he told Lydia how, after Rudi had bought the Tchevi, he drove a couple of times round the empty streets of the apartment estate to practise being at the wheel, with the professor of mathematics watching from his doorway, wearing an astrakhan hat and an amused expression on his face.
Then Lev and Rudi set off home, with the sun gleaming down on the quiet, icy world, and Rudi put on the car heater to maximum and said this was the nearest he would get to Paradise. The car engine made a low, grumbling sound, like the engine of a boat, and Rudi said this was the sound of America, musical and strong. In the glove box, Lev found three bars of Swiss chocolate, gone pale with time, and they shared these between cigarettes, which they lit with the radiant car lighter, and Rudi said, “Now I have my new vocation in Auror: taxi driver.”
Toward afternoon, still miles from their village, they stopped at a petrol station, which consisted of one rusty pump in a silent valley and a freckled dog keeping watch. Rudi honked the horn and an elderly man limped out of a wooden hut, where sacks of coal were on sale, and he looked upon the Tchevi with fear, as though it might have been an army tank or a UFO, and the freckled dog stood up and began barking. Rudi got out, wearing only his trousers and boots and checked shirt, and when he slammed the driver’s door behind him, the remaining hinge broke and the door fell off into the snow.
Rudi swore. He and the pump attendant gazed at this mishap, for which there didn’t seem to be any immediate remedy, and even the dog fell into a nonplussed silence. Then Rudi lifted up the door and attempted to put it back on, but though it went on all right, it wouldn’t stay on and had to be tied to the seat fixings with a frayed bit of rope, and Rudi said, “That fucking professor! He knew this would happen. He’s turned me over, good and sweet.”
Rudi stamped about in the snow, while the tank was filled with gas, because it was beginning to freeze again and Rudi had no coat or hat and the falling of the door had pricked his bubble of happiness. Lev got out and examined the broken hinges and said, “It’s just the hinges, Rudi. We can fix them back home.”
“I know,” said Rudi, “but is the fucking door going to stay on the car for the next hundred miles? That’s my question.”
They drove on, brimming with the petrol Lev had paid for, going west toward the sunset, and the sky was first deep orange, then smoky red, then purple, and lilac shadows flecked the snow-blanketed fields, and Lev said, “Sometimes this country can look quite beautiful,” and Rudi sighed and said, “It looked beautiful this morning, but soon we’ll be back in the dark.”
When the dark came on, ice formed on the windshield, but all the worn wiper blades would do was crunch over this ice, back and forth very slowly, making a moaning noise as they moved, and soon it became impossible to see the way ahead. Rudi drew the car to the side of the road, and he and Lev stared at the patterns the ice had made and at the faint yellow glow the headlights cast on the filigree branches of the trees, and Lev saw that Rudi’s hands were trembling.
“Now fucking what?” Rudi said.
Lev took off the woolen scarf he was wearing and put it round Rudi’s neck. Then he got out and opened the trunk and took out one of the three remaining bottles of vodka from the straw and told Rudi to turn off the engine, and as the engine died, the wiper blades made one last useless arc, then lay down, like two exhausted old people fallen end to end beside a skating rink. Lev wrenched open the vodka, took a long sip, then began pouring the alcohol very slowly onto the windshield and watched it make clear runnels through the ice. As the frosting slowly vanished, Lev could just make out Rudi’s wide face, very close to the windshield, like a child’s face gazing up in awe. And after that they drove on through the night, stopping to pour on more vodka from time to time and watching the illuminated needle of the petrol gauge falling and falling.
Lydia paused in her knitting. She held the “jumper” up to her chest, to see how much farther she had to go before casting off for the shoulder seam. She said, “Now I’m interested in that journey. Did you reach your home?”
“Yes,” said Lev. “By dawn we were there. We were pretty tired. Well, we were very tired. And the gas tank was almost empty. That car’s so greedy it’s going to bankrupt Rudi.”
Lydia smiled and shook her head. “And the door?” she asked. “Did you mend it?”
“Oh sure,” said Lev. “We soldered on new hinges from a baby’s pram. It’s fine. Except the driver’s door opens violently now.”
“Violently? But Rudi still drives the Tchevi as a taxi, with this violent door?”
“Yes. In summer, he has all the windows open and you can ride along with the wind in your hair.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t like that,” said Lydia. “I spend a lot of time trying to protect my hair from the wind.”
Night was coming down again when the coach arrived at the Hook of Holland and waited in a long line to drive onto the ferry. No berths had been booked for the passengers of the bus; they were advised to find benches or deck chairs in which to sleep and to avoid buying drinks from the ship’s bar, which charged unfair prices. “When the ferry arrives in England,” said one of the coach drivers, “we’re only about two hours away from London and your destination, so try to sleep if you can.”
Once aboard the boat, Lev made his way to the top deck and looked down at the port, with its cranes and containers, its bulky sheds and offices and parking lots, and its quayside, shimmery with oil. An almost invisible rain was falling. Gulls cried, as though to some long-lost island home, and Lev thought how hard it would be to live near the sea and hear this melancholy sound every day of your life.
The sea was calm and the ferry set off very silently, its big engines seemingly muffled by the dark. Lev leaned on the
rail, smoking and staring at the Dutch port as it slipped away, and when the land was gone and the sky and the sea merged in blackness, he remembered the dreams he’d had when Marina was dying, of being adrift on an ocean that had no limits and never broke on any human shore.
The briny smell of the sea made his cigarette taste bitter, so he ground it underfoot on the high deck, then lay down on a bench to sleep. He pulled his cap over his eyes and, to soothe himself, imagined the night falling on Auror, falling as it always fell over the fir-covered hills and the cluster of chimneys and the wooden steeple of the schoolhouse. And there in this soft night lay Maya, under her goose-down quilt, with one arm thrown out sideways, as if showing some invisible visitor the small room she shared with her grandmother: its two beds, its rag rug, its chest of drawers painted green and yellow, its paraffin stove, and its square window, open to the cool air and the night dews and the cry of owls . . .
It was a nice picture, but Lev couldn’t get it to stabilize in his mind. The knowledge that when the Baryn sawmill closed Auror and half a dozen other villages like it were doomed kept obliterating the room and the sleeping girl and even the image of Ina, shuffling about in the dark before kneeling to say her prayers.
“Prayers are no fucking good,” Rudi had said when the last tree was sawn up and shipped away and all the machinery went quiet. “Now comes the reckoning, Lev. Only the resourceful will survive.”
2
The Diana Card
THE COACH PULLED INTO Victoria at nine in the morning, and the tired passengers stepped off the bus into the unexpected brightness of a sunny day. They looked all around them at the shine on the buildings, at the gleaming rack of baggage carts, at the dark shadows their bodies cast on the London pavement, and tried to become accustomed to the glare. “I dreamed of rain,” said Lev to Lydia.
