by Kim Wilkins
“Have a vodka, that will warm you up.” This was Aaron, the producer, who had worked with Daniel on another project four years ago. Was that the last television job he had done? No wonder he had trouble making the rent. Aaron thrust a drink into Daniel’s hand. Five other men sat on the bench or on the flagstones under the tree, and their voices echoed around the walls of the buildings which bordered the courtyard.
“Thanks.” He sipped the drink and tried to let Rosa go. “Does anybody know what times the trains run to St Petersburg from here?”
There was a loud snort of laughter. Aaron raised his eyebrows with a smile. “You’re asking us? You’re the train expert.”
Daniel bit his tongue. He had refused to fly from London with everybody else. He didn’t like to think of his aversion to aeroplanes as a phobia, but had to admit after five consecutive days on English, French, German and finally, Russian, trains only something as severe as a phobia could have led to such extreme measures.
“Why are you going to St Pete?” asked Richard, reaching for a cigarette and offering one to Daniel.
Daniel shrugged and took the cigarette. He wouldn’t call himself a smoker, but was taking alarming numbers from the crew at the moment. “To see an old friend.”
“You should drive,” Richard said. “Frank would let you take the hire car.”
Frank was the executive producer, stuck back in London in urgent meetings with the accountants. Richard meant that Frank would never know where the hire car ended up.
“No, I prefer not to drive,” Daniel muttered, hoping for a quick subject change.
“Afraid of driving too?”
“Wrong side of the road,” Aaron offered. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Before Daniel had to admit he was right, Aaron said, “Ask Em. She’s going up tomorrow afternoon. And she’s a Yank. They all drive on the wrong side.”
“I’ll just catch the train,” Daniel said, blowing a long stream of smoke into the afternoon air. “I wouldn’t know what to say to Em on a three-hour car trip.”
“She’s easy enough to get along with,” Aaron said, puzzled.
“Nah, I’m with Daniel,” Richard said. “She’s frozen solid under there, I’d bet money on it.”
“I can’t stand the silence,” Declan, one of the cameramen, said.
“The silence?”
“When you talk to her. She’s perfectly silent. No nodding, no ‘uh-huh’, no encouraging smile. Like she’s watching an actor perform.”
A laugh went around. Daniel joined in. It was a perfect description.
“I’ve heard that she had a man sacked for answering his mobile phone between shots,” George, the production assistant, said.
Declan threw his cigarette into the gutter. “I’ve heard she has a kid, back in America. She abandoned him when he was a baby.”
“I’ve heard she doesn’t just abandon babies, she eats them,” Richard said, finding this so funny that he doubled over with laughter.
Daniel smiled but didn’t offer any speculations about Em, concentrating instead on his cigarette and his vodka. Maybe if he was more like these men, he’d be able to get over Rosa easier. Laugh her off as crazy, as a good time gone bad.
Aaron shook his head. “Em’s not so bad. Sure, she’s a little odd, but who in television isn’t? Especially the really successful ones.” He turned to Daniel. “Really, Em would probably enjoy the company.”
Daniel finished his cigarette and his drink simultaneously. He couldn’t ask Em to drive him to St Petersburg; he couldn’t even work with her on editing. He made excuses and took her scripts away and brought them back unmarked. What could he possibly have to say to her? He was a boy in a thirty-year-old man’s body. These men around him had wives and children at home, self-assured swaggers and easy masculine friendships. They could probably fix cars and predict football wins and ask charming but cold women for lifts. Daniel stood and mashed his cigarette between two flagstones with his toe. “I’ve got some work to do,” he said.
Upstairs, he paused outside Em’s door. The walls were thin and he could hear her talking to somebody.
“Yes…well, I’ll send one over. I think there are three different types. Would you like one of each?”
Daniel reached into his pocket for his key. Was this the abandoned child in America?
“Absolutely,” she was saying. “Check with your father, but I’m sure he won’t mind.”
Her voice bore no trace of tenderness. She could have been talking to a business colleague. He got the key in the lock. Em’s door opened as his was closing.
“Did you want something?” she said.
“Sorry?” He opened his door wider.
“I heard your footsteps pause outside my door.”
He cursed the thin walls. “Oh, yes. I was wondering if…I need to go to St Petersburg and Aaron said…”
“You’re going to St Pete? So am I. We could share the drive.”
“I…uh…” Daniel forced his shoulders to relax. “I’m not used to driving on the wrong side of the road.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll drive. Tomorrow good for you? I have some time off.”
Daniel shrugged, surprised by her willingness. “Fine.”
“I’ll drop you off and spend some time in the shops. We’ll organise it in the morning, over breakfast.” She was already backing into her room, leaving Daniel in the hallway dreading a long car drive with a frosty woman he barely knew.
Rosa sat on the windowsill of her bedroom in Uncle Vasily’s apartment, gazing down at the night-time streetscape: grimy footpaths drenched with the afternoon’s rain, slats of wood covering potholes, groups of people moving past on their way to nightclubs and late-night restaurants, and the untidy tangle of tram cables spread above them. She could see it all but experienced it at a remove.
The door to her room opened slowly, the accompanying knock a few moments too late…the assumed intimacy of family.
“Rosa? Are you still awake?”
“Yes, Uncle Vasily,” she said, turning from the window and lowering herself from the sill. “I’m not sleepy.”
“I’m going to bed now.”
“Goodnight, then.”
He gave her a cautionary look and backed away, closing the door behind him. He would lie awake for twenty minutes, but eventually the stress of the day would claim him and he’d disappear under the layers of sleep, leaving her free to do as she pleased.
Rosa leaned her forehead on the window. The glass was cool. A lone figure waited across the road; an old woman with a faded blue headscarf, her hand extended to beg a few kopecks from passers-by. She had been standing there since nightfall. Rosa had watched her for hours, and the woman had not once looked up at the apartment block; yet, somehow, she knew the woman was waiting for her.
She pulled on her boots and red overcoat, untied her long black hair and sat on her bed to wait. By eleven o’clock she was certain that Vasily was asleep. She crept from her room and across to the front door.
It wasn’t that Uncle Vasily was a tyrant who wouldn’t let her out. She was twenty-seven, not seventeen; but to him she was a baby, the last memory of his sister, her mother. He would worry if he knew she was gone. She didn’t want him to worry.
The chill of the street jolted her. The amber glow of streetlights in puddles was thin and cold in the dark. A muddy Fiat drove past belching exhaust and techno bass. The figure across the road hadn’t moved. The scarf covered her face; her hand was extended like a collection plate. Behind her, a tall wrought-iron fence restrained a wild garden and an old cemetery. A dirty stone arch framed her. The sour smell of the street hung heavy.
Rosa pulled out a cigarette and lit it, taking a quick, unsure drag. She stayed on her side of the street, watching traffic go past, watching the babooshka as though the old woman were a statue.
Rosa finished her cigarette and threw the butt into the gutter. She crossed the road and the old woman looked up and smiled.
“Hey, grand
ma,” Rosa said in Russian, “have you any advice for me?”
The babooshka held out her hand. Rosa saw a collection of bent kopecks and a couple of rusted washers. “Silver,” she croaked. “I’ll tell you your fortune.”
Rosa reached into the pocket of her coat and fished out ten roubles. “I only have paper—” But the woman had snatched the note and stuffed it in her apron before Rosa could finish.
“You ought not smoke,” the babooshka said. “It could kill you.”
“With a bit of luck,” Rosa sniffed, shrugging. “Is that my fortune?”
“No,” she said. “Let me see your hand, beautiful girl.”
Rosa offered her palm, and the old woman’s callused fingers moved over it carefully.
“Oh, oh, I see a great love. I see many children.”
Rosa snatched her hand away. “That’s nonsense. Tell me what you really see.”
The babooshka turned her wizened face up. Rosa saw for the first time the deep crevices of age scarring the elderly woman’s cheeks. Rosa touched her own cheek and wanted to wail for the violent brevity of beauty.
“What did you dream about last night, beautiful girl?”
Rosa thought hard. Dreams tended to disappear the moment they had played out. Something about Vasily, and a thudding noise…
“A horse,” she said at last. “A black horse.” The dream returned to her afresh. “I dreamed of a black horse beating at the door of his stable, but then I knew I was dreaming and I woke up into another dream where my uncle was sitting in the dark crying and wouldn’t tell me why.”
The babooshka clicked her tongue, and Rosa felt a crushing sense of déjà vu. Echo upon echo. Her fingers itched to reach for another cigarette. “What does it mean, grandma?” she said.
“A black horse is wild and bad and you cannot control it. To dream within a dream is the worst misfortune: chaos, confusion, darkness descending.” The old woman’s hand crept out again. “If you give me more money, I will tell you what to do.”
Rosa found another note and pressed it into the woman’s hand. “Take this, but I don’t need you to tell me what to do. I know that nothing can be done.”
“God bless you, beautiful girl,” the babooshka said, baring a mouthful of stained and rotted teeth.
“Eat well, grandma,” Rosa said, leaving her behind and heading for the bright lights of Nevsky Prospekt.
She began the long walk past the glittering shopfronts, the crumbling buildings, the endless ice-cream carts, the beggars, the bitter-scented metro stations, the Western tourists in bars, and the fast-food restaurants, their cheerful logos rendered alien by Cyrillic letters. She soaked up the atmosphere of the damp city, longing for something that she couldn’t put into words, some thrill or jolt which would remind her she was alive now.
Daniel was coming tomorrow. She wished she could say that she hadn’t thought of him in the six months since their affair imploded. But she had thought of him a lot. She had thought about his hot, trembling caresses and his uncertainty-smudged dark eyes, and she had thought of another life that might have been. But then the thoughts made her sad; the angry-sad she had felt since the day her mother got sick.
Rosa crossed the bridge over Fontanka Canal and took a right turn down a less well-lit street, then right again, then paused on the corner.
Dark. The noise of the main street echoed in the distance, muffled by stone buildings. The bitter-earth wet-metal scent of the city was acute here, and puddles gathered on the uneven flagstones. A drainpipe dripped and sputtered. She saw the glow of a cigarette and heard voices. Focused her sight down a long alley between two buildings. Two men stood smoking in the dark; shadows clung to their faces. No light reached the alley. No crowds of people or zooming cars belching exhaust traversed it. It was perfectly dangerous. Rosa could taste it.
She turned and ambled towards the two men. They murmured. She was certain they had noticed her. The kick of adrenalin was mild, but she relished it. They paused in their conversation as she approached.
“May I have a cigarette?” she said.
The larger man reached for his packet, the other for his lighter. Within seconds she was inhaling.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling, then continued down the alley, vulnerable and alone.
They did nothing. Rosa emerged at the other end in a public garden where lovers pressed their bodies against each other and rubbish gathered around picnic benches. She crossed between the trees and joined the traffic and bright lights again, feeling strangely deflated.
She slumped on the stone windowsill of a closed bakery, thinking about what the babooshka had said to her. Chaos, confusion, darkness descending. It was the truth, and Rosa already knew it.
But nobody else did. Not yet.
TWO
At mealtimes, it was apparent how comprehensively Crazy Adelina’s guesthouse had been colonised by the English. Apart from a hapless family of German tourists, every other body in the room wore a Great Medieval Cities T-shirt. They queued at the buffet for blinis and fried eggs, complained loudly in English about the lack of good food in Russia, and sat muttering together at the tiny round tables about the weather and the football. Twenty-one men and two women, Megan and Lesley, clinging to each other at a table in the corner. Em was nowhere in sight. Daniel loaded up his plate and sat at the spare corner of a long wooden table.
Daniel glanced around the room while he ate. At his table, a group of five men were heads-together in conversation, organising the work for the day at the archaeology site. He didn’t join in. The series had been in production for years, and the company had been filming at other locations for nearly eighteen months, but Daniel was only employed for research on the episode about Novgorod. While the rest of the crew knew each other well and would continue their friendships after Russia, he knew he would remain an outsider, soon forgotten.
Aaron slid into the seat next to him and reached across for the salt. “Glad I got you on your own,” he said. “Frank phoned last night. I need to talk to you.”
Daniel tensed, immediately assuming he’d done something wrong.
“Hey, relax,” Aaron said, laughing. “It’s good news. A colleague of his is putting together some travel-based language videos. They’re starting with French and Russian. You do both, don’t you?”
Daniel shrugged. “My French is rusty.”
“They’re keen as mustard to have you on board,” Aaron said through a mouthful of fried egg. “I put in a good word. Could be an ongoing position as research co-ordinator if you impress them. How’s that? A permanent job? Ever had one of those?”
Daniel felt a moment of alarm. “No, I haven’t.” So what had he done with his twenties? He scratched at a piece of dried food stuck to the red-and-white plastic tablecloth. A half-finished Masters in Russian history, two half-finished novels and a half-finished screenplay, a backpacking tour around Australia, three well-paid but casual television jobs, countless bar jobs, and that was pretty much it.
“You do want a permanent job, don’t you?”
The men at the table were getting rowdy. Somebody was telling a joke about an archaeologist and a mummy. Daniel tried to focus on his conversation with Aaron. “I don’t know. I like to leave my options open.”
Aaron raised his eyebrows. “So what do you want me to tell Frank?”
“Don’t tell him anything yet. I’ll think about it.”
A moment later, Em was there at his shoulder. “Daniel? Can I interrupt?” She crouched, resting her small pale hands on the table.
“Morning, Em,” said Aaron. “Day off today?”
“Yes, Daniel and I are driving up to St Petersburg. I’ll need you to sign off on the car for me.”
“That’s fine.”
“Daniel, I’d like to leave just after one o’clock. That’s not too late for you?”
“No, no,” Daniel said, though last night he’d spent the hours until he fell asleep fantasising about meeting Rosa for a long, languid lunch which ende
d with sex.
“Good. I’ll drop by your room.” She stood and delicately plucked a roll from the bread basket before withdrawing.
“Does she ever join the rest of them for breakfast?” Daniel asked Aaron.
Aaron watched her go. “Not really. Same with other meals. She’s not a people person.” He turned his attention to Daniel. “But you needn’t be so afraid of her.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” Daniel said dismissively.
“Well, I don’t see you having too many script meetings with her.”
“She doesn’t need my help.”
“Everyone can use a bit of help.” Aaron refilled his mug from the teapot on the table.
“Maybe I am a little intimidated,” Daniel admitted. “She’s famous, she’s attractive, she’s clever…and she’s a bit cold.”
“No, not cold. Just professional. And she’d probably appreciate some help with her Russian.” Aaron laughed. “Though not for long.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every shoot we’ve been on for this series, she’s picked up the local language in a couple of weeks.”
“Maybe she already knew them.”
“No. Czech, Turkish…she was speaking Italian in six days.”
“How well?”
“Well enough. Language is no barrier.”
Daniel shook his head. “If she’s a genius, she definitely doesn’t need my help on the scripts.”
“Humour me,” Aaron said, taking his mug and readying to leave. “Do what you’re paid to do. We’re old mates. Don’t make me have to get heavy with you.”
Aaron left and Daniel poked at his blini, feeling like an ineffectual fool. Was it any wonder Rosa hadn’t stayed?
“Why so glum, Daniel?” This was Richard, breaking away from the group and turning his chair to Daniel. “Work troubles? Or girl troubles?”
“Both. Neither,” Daniel said. “I think the problem is me.”
Richard shrugged. “You can’t escape yourself,” he said.
