Betrayal

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘There. What do you think?’

  He lifts his glass, toasts her, and drinks off the vodka. ‘Wonderful,’ he says. ‘You look wonderful. Come here.’

  ‘Be careful, don’t crush the skirt –’

  ‘I’m not crushing anything, I’m just – you look beautiful, Anna. Really beautiful.’

  ‘Let’s dance.’

  ‘I can’t dance without music.’

  ‘Yes, you can. One-two-three, one-two-three …’

  They waltz with little steps around the table where Kolya does his homework, past the piano and back through the door that connects to the living room. He’s forgotten how soft she feels when they dance. He smells the new dress and the scent of her body.

  ‘Careful of the desk,’ murmurs Anna as they dance towards the window. They’re hardly moving at all really, just swaying together. He smells of hospitals and vodka. She reaches up, touches his cheek with her lips, and then finds his mouth.

  ‘I could get drunk just from kissing you,’ she says, and he laughs. They dance on. She steals a glance at him and sees that the lines of strain are leaving his face. His eyes are closed, his feet out of time. He was never a good dancer, but he feels lovely –

  The outer door bangs. Kolya. They spring apart. The next moment he pushes open the living-room door, frowning.

  ‘What’re you two doing? Your dress isn’t done up at the back, Anna.’

  ‘That’s because I haven’t finished the fastenings yet.’

  He notices the Stolichnaya bottle on the table, and gives them both a stern look. ‘What’re you drinking that for?’

  ‘I just had a couple of glasses,’ says Andrei. Good God, he thinks, here I am explaining myself to Kolya, as if he were the parent.

  ‘Well, you’re the ones who are always lecturing me,’ grumbles Kolya, ‘and here you are drinking in the middle of the day.’

  ‘It’s not the middle of the day, it’s after six.’

  ‘All right, it’s after six. Were you dancing?’ he asks as if this were a custom he’s heard of but seldom observed.

  ‘Just practising for the ball,’ says Anna lightly.

  ‘Without music!’

  ‘Well, you can count the steps.’

  ‘I could play you a waltz if you liked. It was a waltz, wasn’t it?’ He grins at her, knowing that the waltz is the only dance Andrei can do with confidence.

  ‘That’s very good of you, Kolya,’ she answers sharply, ‘but the moment’s past.’

  They are eating their stew when Kolya suddenly asks, ‘How is that boy doing?’

  ‘Which boy?’

  ‘You know, the one you’ve been talking about with Anna. The one that’s having his leg chopped off –’

  ‘Really, Kolya, can’t you be a bit more …’ breaks in Anna.

  ‘A bit more what? It’s what’s happening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Andrei. ‘He had the operation this morning. It went well.’

  Kolya nods slowly, then attacks his food again. He’s not insensitive really, Anna knows that. It’s the way they all talk. Kolya chews and swallows a couple of mouthfuls, then says dreamily, ‘I think I’d rather die than have my leg cut off.’

  ‘He thought that, too,’ says Andrei, and this time there’s an unfamiliar edge to his voice. Kolya glances at him, and then down at his plate.

  Andrei thinks of Gorya on the trolley, before he went into theatre. He was sedated, but his eyes were open. There was a short delay; something to do with the preparation of the anaesthetic. A nurse was standing by the trolley; she put her fingers on his wrist and took his pulse. Gorya’s pupils were dilated, and his mouth was slack. Andrei said, ‘It’s all right, Gorya, I’m here just like I promised. Everything’s going to be fine.’ He thought the boy tried to smile, but he wasn’t sure, and then it was time.

  He’d said to Brodskaya that he would come back when the boy was in the recovery room.

  ‘He’s really taken a fancy to you,’ one of the nurses said. ‘Kept asking if he was going to see you before he had his operation.’

  Andrei went to Radiology. There were X-rays he had to check, and files to be ordered from Moscow, for his research. He ought to be thinking about presenting a paper by the middle of next year. They would have finished the transaction of the muscle by now. They’d have reached the distal femur. Brodskaya was very capable. She would ensure the most effective muscle reconstruction around the bone end. Someone had been messing around with these files – they were out of order. Wouldn’t have been Sofya … The difference that the quality of the surgery made to patient outcome was enormous; people didn’t understand that. They thought that cutting off a leg was cutting off a leg. If they wanted to think about it in the first place, which they didn’t. But as usual it was the detail that made the difference between a painful stump which would never adapt successfully to prosthesis, and one which would enable the patient to walk again.

  Ah, here was the plate he’d been looking for. Not a very good image; surely there was a better one? He’d ask Sofya. The leg would be gone by now. Andrei never uses the word ‘amputee’, even to himself. If you talk about patients like that, you have already turned them into another species.

  ‘Will he have a false leg?’ asks Kolya, as he mops his plate with bread.

  ‘Yes. He’ll be on crutches until the wound heals, and then we’ll fit him for a prosthesis.’

  ‘A false leg …’ Kolya shakes his head. ‘I wonder where you’d put it at night.’

  ‘Kolya –’ says Anna.

  ‘The thing is, people say, “a false leg”, but they don’t think about the practicalities.’

  Or the reality, thinks Andrei. You don’t consider that until you’ve got to.

  There’s a silence, and then Kolya asks, ‘Can I have some more stew, Anna?’

  ‘There isn’t any. You’ve eaten the lot.’

  Kolya visibly switches off. One finger taps a rhythm gently on the table. His eyes half close, gazing inward. The only sound is the scrape of Anna and Andrei’s spoons.

  ‘Shall I play something for you?’ asks Kolya abruptly, in a quite different voice from before.

  ‘That would be lovely,’ says Anna, ‘after you’ve put the plates by the sink.’

  ‘Do you know, I’m the only boy in my class who does all this housework?’ observes Kolya as he collects up plates and cutlery with his usual dexterity and scarcely a chink of china.

  ‘ “All this housework”,’ Anna repeats. ‘I wish I were you, Kolya. Anyway, how do you know? Have they had a questionnaire?’

  ‘I just notice these things,’ says Kolya darkly. ‘In Lev’s kommunalka you have to queue for the sink. There’s an old bitch who’s always hogging it.’

  ‘Don’t use that word,’ says Anna automatically.

  ‘Lev can’t believe we haven’t been allocated another family here. Anyway, he never does a hand’s turn at home, because he’s never at home. Right, that’s done. Only I suppose you’d much rather I washed up than played you a beautiful nocturne.’

  ‘Really a nocturne? Go on then.’

  It’s a peace-offering. Through the open door she sees Kolya settle on the piano stool, flex his fingers and throw back his head in the way that’s always reminded her of a horse being put in harness. He’s no great fan of Chopin.

  ‘Why don’t you like Chopin, Kolya?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just annoys me. He tries to get you to feel the things he’s already decided you’re going to feel. It’s like being grabbed by a fat lady and pressed to her bosom while she sobs in your ear.’

  She closes her eyes as the notes begin to move. Kolya’s fingers are strong now, even the ring finger on the left hand, which is always the weakest, he says, and the most difficult to move independently. It’s because they are strong that he has such control and the notes can fall as lightly as drops of rain. Underneath them the swell of the nocturne rises and subsides.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she says as he finishes.

>   To her surprise he comes back to the table and stands behind her chair. He puts his hands on her shoulders and rocks her gently from side to side. ‘You are so soppy, Anna,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you hear me mess up that last trill?’

  ‘Mmm, yes, I did notice the fingering was a bit slapdash.’ She glances up at his surprised face, and laughs. ‘I got you there, didn’t I?’

  ‘Next time,’ he says grandly, ‘it will be a piece of my own composition. That’ll learn you.’

  Andrei hears them, but doesn’t listen. His mind is full of Gorya Volkov. Why has this boy got under his skin like this? Some patients do, and you have to expect it. The tension around Gorya is like a force field. Rules are broken and people who thought they were averagely brave turn out to be someone they don’t want to know. Policemen settle themselves in the corridors as if they’re guards patrolling a jail. In the middle of all this there’s just a child.

  Volkov said, ‘You don’t have a son.’

  Gorya said of Kolya, ‘But he isn’t really.’ Isn’t really your son, he meant. Andrei’s come across this before. Some of the young patients get possessive and they don’t want to think about ‘their’ doctor going home to his own healthy children. They don’t even want to think that you have a life outside the hospital. But the truth is that Kolya is not his son.

  He looks across the table at Anna and Kolya. They are laughing, but he doesn’t know what about. Their eyes go into the same shape when they laugh. Kolya is often rude to Anna, rarely to Andrei. He doesn’t wrap his arms around Andrei’s neck like that. But that’s natural, Andrei tells himself quickly.

  The suturing of the wound closure has to be meticulous. Large folds of skin will cause trouble later on. Friction from the prosthesis on a carelessly sewn stump can leave it red and raw. You get sores, infections and even weeping abscesses – but Brodskaya’s good. She’s careful. My God, it’s bad enough without some surgeon messing it up so the boy has no chance of ever getting about on anything but crutches.

  An image flashes across Andrei’s mind. A legless boy he saw once, propped on a wooden trolley by the entrance to a courtyard. Waiting for someone, or something. It was a cold day, between sleet and rain. Maybe they were going to take him somewhere.

  Gorya doesn’t look much like his father. If you met him without knowing who he was, you’d just think, ‘a nice boy’. No one in his right mind would envy Volkov, but all the same he’s able to say, ‘My son.’

  ‘That’s enough now, Kolya,’ says Anna, ‘you’re pulling my hair.’ Her face is flushed and happy. She frets when Kolya ‘hides himself away from us’, as she calls it, and loves it when he teases her.

  ‘Time I was on my way,’ says Kolya, and Andrei has to turn away from the disappointment in Anna’s face.

  ‘Oh – I didn’t know you were going out.’

  ‘Meeting the others. See you later – where did you put my cap, Anna?’

  ‘I haven’t had it.’

  ‘People are always moving my stuff,’ Kolya grumbles. They hear him rooting in the box under the coat pegs, and then the outer door slams.

  ‘Don’t be late!’ calls Anna, a second too late. He’ll be halfway down the stairs by now. He has a way of going down at full pelt, only just in control, only just not falling.

  ‘Summer nights,’ says Andrei. ‘I wonder if he’s got a girlfriend yet.’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t!’ says Anna indignantly.

  ‘He’s sixteen.’

  ‘Sixteen – that’s still too young.’

  ‘He’s not a child. In fact, Kolya’s old for his age.’

  ‘He’s still just a baby sometimes.’ She goes over to the mirror on the wall. ‘Look what he’s done to my hair.’

  ‘I like it,’ says Andrei, and smiles at her, but she looks distracted. He’s tired. The warmth of the vodka has drained away. He ought to work for a couple of hours, but he’s stupidly left the files he needs at the hospital. Perhaps he ought to go back for them. He could call in and see how the boy is doing.

  ‘You’re tired,’ says Anna, coming over to him and framing his face with her hands. The touch of her fingers is warm and familiar, but at the same time he seems to feel nothing. ‘You’re worrying about that man,’ she says. ‘Don’t. Let’s not let him in here.’

  ‘He’s in here already.’

  Her hands fall to her sides. She looks around the room, ‘familiar to the point of tears’, as her father used to say, quoting some poet no doubt. He knew so many poets. He had so much by heart, because it couldn’t be written down. There is the table; there’s the low chair without arms where her mother used to sit, her father said, when she was feeding Anna. The paintings on the wall are full of the stories Anna used to make up about them when she was a little girl. The cracks on the ceiling hold memories of nights of shelling. Even the damp stain is an old friend. It was too high for her to climb up there and whitewash over it. They were going to borrow a ladder, but it never happened. Andrei is far more practical than her father was, but he has so little time.

  ‘What if someone else came to live here,’ she says aloud. ‘They’d never know –’

  ‘Know what?’

  She shrugs. ‘Oh, I don’t know. How we lived here, I suppose. They wouldn’t be interested, anyway. They’d be busy with their own lives.’

  He nods. ‘Anna, I’ve been thinking about your father’s manuscripts. Are they all still in the desk drawer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think we should give them to somebody to look after. Just until all this is over. Who do you think would be best?’ Safest, he means.

  ‘I’ll take them down to the dacha on Sunday,’ she says. ‘That way, we don’t need to bother anyone else. I’ll bury them. Not that they’re compromising, of course they’re not,’ she adds hastily. She is flooded with guilt. She knows that she has no intention of burying the diaries and sketchbooks.

  ‘That old biscuit tin would do,’ says Andrei. ‘The skating-girls one. If we seal the edges with tape, the manuscripts should be all right in there for a while.’

  ‘I could bury it under the compost heap.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘It needs forking over anyway.’ She looks at him, her brow furrowed.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, Anna. This is just a precaution.’

  ‘I know.’

  At that moment the doorbell rings. A long, steady peal. Someone’s holding their finger down on it. Anna and Andrei stare at each other.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ she whispers.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Anna.’

  He walks through to the hallway, and opens the door. It’s the Weasel.

  ‘Good evening,’ says Andrei.

  Without responding to this, the Weasel taps the pile of folded paper he’s holding. ‘We’re getting up a petition,’ he says, looking not at Andrei but at a point to the side of his head.

  ‘A petition?’

  ‘Regarding unnecessary noise emanating from this apartment at unsocial hours. I shall be distributing copies around the building, with the permission of the caretaker.’

  ‘Allow me to read it,’ says Andrei. With a quick movement, he reaches out and takes the papers. He riffles through them. There are ten or twelve copies. Typewritten top copies, and carbons.

  Anna has come up close behind him and is scanning the ‘petitions’. ‘Have you a typewriter at home?’ she asks pleasantly.

  ‘No, I –’ and he stops, realizing this may be a trap.

  ‘So, you had them typed for you at work?’ says Anna. ‘In my workplace that would not be permitted. The use of State property and the labour of State employees for private purposes during working hours are strictly prohibited. Obviously things are different in your department.’

  Malevich sniffs uneasily and makes a jabbing movement as if to snatch back his petitions.

  ‘Ve-ry interesting,’ Anna continues. ‘Do you know, someone once told me that it’s perfectly possible to identify the typewriter that ha
s been used to type a particular document?’

  ‘Give them back to me. These are not the final copies. I have some additions to make – alterations to the text –’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ says Anna politely, ‘but we’ll keep one of these, since you were good enough to bring it round for us.’

  Andrei removes the top copy, gives it to Anna, and hands the rest back to Malevich. They close the door on his pale, uneasy face, and go back into the living room.

  ‘My God,’ says Andrei, ‘how did you come up with that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was so angry, it just flashed into my mind that I had to frighten him, and there’s only one way to do it – fight fire with fire, I mean. But it’s disgusting, all the same. Look at me, my hands are shaking.’

  ‘You were fantastic.’

  ‘Hmm. I just went down to his level, that’s all. But I don’t care. I’m not going to let him do this to us. Once he’s stopped Kolya playing the piano, it’ll be something else. You end up so you hardly dare breathe.’ Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes glitter. She’s clenched her hands to stop them from trembling. ‘I don’t care any more,’ she repeats, ‘I just don’t care. I’ll do anything.’

  ‘Anna …’ He takes hold of her hands, shakes them gently. ‘It’s all right. He won’t bother us again for a while.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she says feverishly, ‘it’s not safe to keep all those papers in the house. And Kolya’s got to be more careful, too. The things he comes out with sometimes –’

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t dream of coming out with them at school. He’s no fool.’

  ‘Yes, but at this age they get reckless. Besides, it’s not just what he says: it’s what he doesn’t say. Andrei, do you really believe the boy will be all right?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re not sure.’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ he says in some irritation. ‘How can I be? I’m not a faith healer. I can’t control the multiplication of cancer cells. That’s the problem with a man like Volkov. He’s used to demanding the impossible, and no one dares tell him he can’t have it.’

  Anna nods. ‘I’ve had an idea. I’ll bury this so-called petition as well, then if Malevich comes after us again I can tell him it’s been put in safe keeping. That’ll keep him worrying. Wait a minute, I’m sure that tin is in the back of this cupboard – unless I’ve left it at the dacha – no, here it is.’