Rosa and the Veil of Gold

by Kim Wilkins

  Daniel felt like a beetle on a pin. His stomach twitched with embarrassment and self-loathing. Two days trapped in a car with Em, who was obviously annoyed with him for making her drive that far. The thought of letting Rosa down was worse. But neither of these things could persuade him to fly.

  “Don’t answer,” Em said. “Your face says it all. I’m sorry, I should leave you alone. I don’t understand, but I won’t judge.”

  “I’m really sorry, Em.”

  “It’s okay.” She returned to her packing. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have this fabulous lead to follow in the first place.”

  “So the others are flying up?”

  “Yes, this morning. They’ve got a suitcase for me and a suitcase for you. We’re overnighting in Vologda tonight, so borrow some more of Vasily’s clothes, and see if he has an overcoat. We might have to go out for food.”

  “Okay,” Daniel said. “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “We’ll get going around ten. I’ll take you past Rosa’s office on the way and you can drop in her keys and say goodbye.”

  “Thanks.” Goodbye. He supposed he’d see her again when they returned the bear and all the borrowed clothes, but he had to accept that Rosa would be out of his life again soon. An empty dimness crowded in on him.

  Em paused in her packing. “She’s really nice.”

  “Yes.”

  “You still love her?”

  He felt himself blush. “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you break up?”

  He had to laugh at himself. “I don’t know. She’s never told me.”

  Em returned to zipping up her suitcase. “Sometimes people change,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t feel the same things as each other.”

  Daniel had once been certain that Rosa felt the same for him as he did for her, and her tenderness and kindness towards him since he’d arrived in St Petersburg suggested she still felt the same way. So why had she left him? If she could look him in the eye and tell him she didn’t love him, then he might have a chance of moving on. But she was mysterious and refused to talk about it. That was why it was so painful. That was why it was impossible to give her up.

  Now, intimidated and bossed around by Em, about to take off on a round trip of more than a thousand miles for Rosa, Daniel grew angry. He was doing so much for her; the least she could do for him was answer him directly.

  As he packed his things and got in the car with Em, through traffic and right up to the door of Rosa’s office where he left Em waiting outside, he rehearsed the demand over and over in his head: “No excuses, no deferrals, Rosa. Tell me why you left me.” In his imagination, he sounded forthright and commanding. In reality, with her dew-drop beauty there to unnerve him, the question sounded petulant and shrill.

  “Daniel,” she said, as she pocketed the keys. “I’ve said I won’t discuss it. Now have a safe trip and—”

  “That isn’t fair!” he said. “You know it isn’t fair.”

  Rosa held a finger to her lips. “Everyone can hear you.”

  “I don’t care if they can hear me,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper because he actually cared very much. “You can’t keep fobbing me off like this. If you just said that you didn’t love me—”

  “Come on, let’s go to Vasily’s office,” she said quickly, ushering him ahead of her.

  When the door was safely shut behind them, she turned to him and said, “Daniel, why are you doing this? I thought we agreed to keep it light, not to talk about the past.”

  “No, I never agreed to it. Those were your rules not mine.”

  Her face flushed and he wondered if she was angry or embarrassed. “We split up more than six months ago, Daniel. You have to let it go.”

  “I can’t. And the reason I can’t is that you’ve never told me why.”

  “It wasn’t working. I told you that.”

  Daniel paused. She sounded so matter-of-fact, so reasonable. Perhaps it hadn’t been working; perhaps he had missed important signals and the whole love affair had taken place in his head. “I thought it was working,” he said hesitantly.

  Her body softened and she fixed him with her expressive blue eyes. “I don’t want to make you doubt yourself, Daniel. Not any more than you already do.”

  “Then swear on your life that you don’t love me, and I’ll let it go.”

  She gave a derisive laugh and looked away. “Swear on my life? That’s hardly valuable enough to swear on.”

  Daniel took a deep breath. “Swear on the golden bear. You think she’s enchanted. Swear on all her enchantments, on all her blessings and curses, that you don’t love me.”

  Rosa grew irritated and Daniel saw her hands involuntarily make a little cross. “Ne sglazi, Daniel. It’s dangerous to say such things.”

  “Not if you tell the truth.”

  “I won’t play this game.”

  “Tell me and I’ll let you go.”

  “You have to let me go anyway. You have no choice.” She strode to the door and held it open for him. “I won’t talk about it another moment. Just go.”

  “Rosa, this isn’t fair. I’m like a prisoner.”

  “It’s a prison of your own making. It’s over between us and has been for some time.”

  “Just tell me why.”

  A man in a hard hat holding a set of plans peered around the corner, alerted by the raised voices.

  “Miss Kovalenka? Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, Jamie. Daniel was just leaving.”

  “Do you want me to show him out?” Jamie said, his booming American voice infused with a male competitive tone so acute that Daniel was reminded of bulls in a paddock bellowing at each other over a prize cow. Daniel looked from Rosa to Jamie and wondered if they’d slept together. A bolt of intense jealousy speared into him. He calmed his breath and put his hands in the air.

  “I’m going,” he said. “Goodbye.” He left without another glance, blood rushing past his ears, the back of his neck tingling with angry electricity.

  Em was waiting. She started the car as he got in.

  “You took your time,” she said impatiently.

  Daniel slumped into his seat, no energy left for conflict. “I’m sorry.”

  She had put the indicator on and was about to pull out when Rosa appeared and hammered on the window.

  “Wait,” Daniel said to Em.

  Em sighed and knocked the car back out of gear. Daniel wound the window down.

  “Daniel,” Rosa said, and her eyes were glassy but she wasn’t crying. “Did you mean it? Will you let me go if I tell you?”

  “Yes. Yes I will.”

  “Do you swear? No matter what I tell you, do you swear not to pursue me? Swear on your life? Swear on my life?”

  A sensation of dread crept over him. He had unwittingly waded into something darker and deeper than he imagined existed. His heart began to pound. A crowded tram rattled past.

  “I’m sorry,” Em interrupted, “but we really don’t have time for this.”

  “She’s right,” Rosa said. “It’s a long story, Daniel, and I want everything to be right when I tell you. But if you promise to stand by your oath, I’ll tell you everything when you get back.”

  Daniel was at once excited and bereft. “Yes, all right. If that’s how you want to play the game.”

  “It’s not a game,” Rosa said, her face serious. “It’s never been a game.” She kissed her palm and held it up. “Goodbye. Keep each other safe. Mind the bear.” She indicated the back seat where Daniel, as a joke, had tucked the bear into a seatbelt like a passenger.

  Em put the car into gear. “We’ll see you at the end of next week, Rosa,” she said. “If you need us in Arkhangelsk, we’re staying at Hotel Pamyat near the university.”

  The car pulled out, cold air rushed through the open window, and Daniel watched Rosa in the rear-view mirror until she disappeared from sight.

  FIVE

  Five hours out of St
Petersburg, Em was concerned about the car. The steering had felt loose and wobbly since their near-miss with the truck on the way from Novgorod, but the problem was worsening. Speeding around a tight bend, the steering dropped out altogether momentarily, threatening to send them into nearby trees. Then it engaged again, and she was back on track. The adrenalin burst was over as quickly as it had come.

  Daniel snapped his attention to her. He must have noticed. “Is everything okay?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Just took the corner too quickly.” She deliberately slowed, aware of how the car steered around the next bend. Soft, but still there. Given they had hundreds of miles yet to travel, Em decided they would be better off changing cars in Vologda. In the meantime, two things were important: drive carefully, and don’t let Daniel know how carefully.

  “Sorry I’m such a nervous passenger,” he was saying. “I hope it doesn’t put you off.”

  “Not at all. In fact, it’s quite rational to be afraid of driving. Many people die in cars.” Em wondered if this might be the wrong thing to say, and tried to fix it with a light teasing tone. “Much less safe than aeroplanes.”

  Daniel mumbled something about fear of flying being very common. Em couldn’t hear him clearly over the radio. They had been listening to it for hours, chasing stations across the dial as distance made them drop out and drop in. Now they were on a local news channel, which was helping Em build her Russian vocabulary. Words found their way into her head, lodged there and began to resonate with meaning. A few she asked Daniel about, but many she could deduce from context. The grammatical aspects were becoming clearer now too. The language was seeping into her consciousness: not a word at a time as teachers taught it, but rather like a symphony, where all the elements made sense only in relation to each other.

  Em turned the radio down and said, “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the radio.”

  “I said that fear of flying is extremely common, but people always treat me as though I’m really odd for being afraid.”

  “It’s common, but most people fly anyway,” Em said. The trees racing past in turn obscured and revealed the sun, casting flickering shadows in the car.

  “Then they’re not really afraid.”

  “I expect it’s all about probability. Plane crashes are rare.”

  “But they do happen. You can’t deny that people do die in plane crashes.”

  Em shrugged. “I suppose so. So you’ve never flown?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve flown.”

  “You weren’t always afraid to?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Em indicated the road ahead of her, the miles of coniferous woodland around them. “It’s a long trip.”

  “Well, I was never a really comfortable flyer,” he said, taking a deep breath and shifting in his seat. He took on the serious countenance of a seasoned storyteller working through some trauma by telling it over and over again. “I could always manage to get on the plane, especially if I’d had a drink or two. A few years ago, I was coming home from Australia. I’d been there working my way around in pubs and bars. We’d left Sydney, everything was fine. We stopped in Bangkok and a huge thunderstorm blew in. Everyone was uneasy getting back on the plane. It wasn’t just me.” He lifted his hands apart, make-believe wings which landed in his lap a second later. “Anyway, as we’re taxiing along the runway the storm is buffeting the wings, everyone’s getting more and more nervous. The flight attendants are still chatting in low voices, strapping themselves in for takeoff. Then the plane leaves the ground and twenty seconds later: bang!”

  “What happened?”

  “I still don’t know for sure. Maybe lightning hit us, but I thought I could see smoke outside and somebody else in the cabin said something about smoke, and then hysteria began to run through the cabin. It was like dominos falling over. Every head turned towards the windows. The rain was bucketing down, lightning flashing everywhere, the pressure under the wings making us pitch about. Then the plane dropped. Everyone screamed. A second later, it picked up again.

  “The captain’s voice comes over the intercom, telling all the flight attendants to hurry down to the cockpit. You know how you always look at the flight attendants to see if they still look calm?”

  Em shook her head. “I don’t.”

  “Well, I always used to,” he muttered, “but they looked worried. When they came out of the cockpit, one of them was trying not to cry. The captain’s voice came over the intercom again to tell us that they were experiencing a technical problem and had to make an emergency landing. In the storm.”

  “But you landed safely,” Em said.

  Daniel took a second to answer. “Yes. But it was terrifying. They got us all off the plane. We sat for two hours at the airport, only to be put back on the same plane. Where we waited another three hours on the tarmac. People were praying as we took off.”

  “And that was the last time you flew?”

  “Yes. On the way back to London, I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the miles and miles of sky beneath my feet. I kept thinking about how we were all stuck in a metal tube in the air. I walked around the cabin, obsessively checking through windows where I could, looking for loose nuts and bolts, wondering if people were hijackers, or if there were bombs in the cargo hold.” His voice became constricted and his words fell over each other. “One of the flight attendants offered me a shot of whisky to calm me down, but I didn’t want to be calm. I wanted to be alert in case something happened. It was torture. Fourteen hours like that. The idea of getting back on a plane makes me ill. I can’t even walk into an airport.” He laughed self-consciously. “I’m getting edgy just talking about it.”

  “I can hear that. But you know, fear’s not very productive,” she said. “It makes people unnecessarily vulnerable.”

  “You act like it’s something I should be ashamed of.”

  “Not at all,” Em said, reminding herself to choose her words more carefully. “People always take things I say the wrong way.”

  “What are you afraid of then?”

  As if on cue, the steering wheel wobbled under her hands. “Nothing,” she answered.

  “Nothing? Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing I can think of.”

  “Spiders? Snakes?”

  “It would depend on if they were poisonous, or likely to bite me.”

  “Heights? Being trapped in a lift?”

  “No. Although, again, if I were likely to fall or to suffocate, I wouldn’t just accept it blithely. I have a survival instinct, like anyone. But I tend to think that whatever gets you in the end will probably be the thing you least expect. You know, you could spend your whole life avoiding planes and end up getting hit by a bus crossing the road for a coffee.”

  “Thanks,” Daniel murmured. “That’s heartening.”

  Em’s stomach growled conspicuously. “Speaking of survival instincts, should we stop soon for lunch? What’s the time?”

  Daniel checked his watch. “Nearly three.”

  “No wonder I’m hungry. Check the map. Any little towns nearby that we can detour through for food and gas?”

  Within half an hour, they had found a tiny spot on the map which consisted of a convenience store, a petrol station, two streets and a car park surrounded by tall pines. They pulled into the car park next to a bent telegraph pole and Em gratefully opened the door and stretched out her legs.

  “Are you going to fill up?” Daniel asked.

  “On the way out. I need to eat first. But there’s something I want you to do for me, Daniel.”

  He turned to her, his dark eyes puzzled. “What is it?”

  “Your Russian’s much better than mine.” She reached over to the glove box and pulled out the rental papers for the car. “Can you phone the car rental company back in St Pete and ask them if they have a service outlet in Vologda?”

  Daniel took the papers. “Certainly. But why?”

  She tried
to sound light, almost dismissive. “It’s probably nothing, but the steering has felt a bit soft since we had our little incident in the ditch. I’d prefer to exchange the car if we could.”

  Daniel nodded vigorously. “Yes, that would be safer. What do you mean, soft? It’s not going to fail is it? You just mean it feels wobbly? It’s still working though?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Nothing to worry about.” She pointed to the phone booth outside the convenience store. “Tell them we’ll want to change cars tomorrow morning, around eight. If we can get away from Vologda before nine, we can be in Arkhangelsk at a reasonable hour. We’re due to start shooting first thing the following morning.”

  Em locked the car and walked across the car park to the toilet block. The washrooms were filthy, but it would be hours before they reached Vologda and the comfort of a clean hotel room. So she endured it, and also accepted that the convenience store only made two kinds of sandwiches, both with meat that was obviously not fresh. She took her sandwiches and juice back to the car and watched Daniel at the phone booth in his grey pullover and slightly-too-large jeans. His dark curls caught the sunlight which was spearing between the spruce peaks. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the length of time the call was taking indicated that he was being bounced between one operator and another, explaining his story over and over. Bureaucracy was generally an inconvenience; Russian bureaucracy was a nightmare.

  A breeze moved gently in the treetops, and there was no traffic around to break the lazy quiet. Em finished her lunch and rested her head on the back of the seat to close her eyes for a few moments. Sunlight made patterns on her eyelids. She felt calm and positive.

  “Em!”

  She opened her eyes. Daniel was calling to her from across the car park. He’d finished his phone call.

  “What’s up?” she shouted back, leaning out of the car.

  “I’m just going to buy something to eat.”

  “Take your time.” Em was growing used to Daniel and his nervous nature, even growing to like him. She leaned back, her eyes flicking to the rear-view mirror which, at this angle, reflected the back seat.