Thinking of Sergo made her cry again, but she wouldn’t let herself give in to it for long. She pulled her hands out of her bag and wiped each eye irritably – so then so – on either sleeve of her jacket, then went back to her task.
Push. Click. Slide. Press …
SHE was scared. So scared, in fact, that when she had walked away from the westerner that afternoon she had wanted to look back at him standing outside the office block – had wanted to go back to him – but if she’d done that he would have known she was afraid, and fear, she had been taught, was something you must never show. Another of her father’s lessons.
So she had hurried on to her car and had driven around for a while without thinking until presently she had found herself heading in the direction of Red Square. She had parked in Bolshaya Lubyanka and had walked uphill to the little white Church of the Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir, where a service was in progress.
The place was packed. The churches were always packed now, not like in the old days. The music washed over her. She lit a candle. She wasn’t sure why she did this because she had no faith; it was the sort of thing her mother used to do. ‘And what has your god ever done for us?’ – her father’s sneering voice. She thought of him, and of the girl who wrote the journal, Anna Safanova. Silly bitch, she thought. Poor silly bitch. And she lit a candle for her, too, and much good might it do her, wherever she was.
She wished her memories were better but they weren’t and there was nothing to be done. She could remember him drunk, mostly, his eyes like worm holes, his fists flying. Or tired from work at the engine sheds, as rank as an old dog, too weary to rise from his chair to go to bed, sitting on a sheet of Pravda to keep the oil off the cover. Or paranoid, up half the night, staring out of the window, prowling the corridors – who was that looking at him? who was that talking about him? – spreading yet more sheets from Pravda down on the floor and obsessively cleaning his Makarov. (‘I’ll kill them if I have to …’)
But sometimes, when he wasn’t drunk or exhausted or mad – in the mellow hour, between mere inebriation and oblivion – he’d talk about life in Kolyma: how you survived, traded favours and scraps of tobacco for food, wangled the easier jobs, learned to smell a stoolie – and then he’d take her on his lap and sing to her, some of the Kolyma songs, in his fine Mingrelian tenor.
That was a better memory.
At fifty he had seemed so old to her. He always had been an old man. His youth had gone when Stalin died. Maybe that was why he went on about him so much? He even had a picture of Stalin on the wall – remember that? – Stalin with his glossy moustaches, like great black slugs? Well, she could never take her friends back there, could she? Never let them see the pig state in which they lived. Two rooms, and her in the only bedroom, sharing first with Sergo and then, when he was too big and too embarrassed to look at her, with mama. And mama a wraith even before the cancer got her, then turning to gossamer and finally melting to nothing.
She’d died in eighty-nine when Zinaida was eighteen. And six months later they were back at the Troekurovo cemetery putting Sergo in the earth beside her. Zinaida closed her eyes and remembered papa, drunk, at the funeral, in the rain, and a couple of Sergo’s army comrades, and a nervous young lieutenant, just a kid himself, who had been Sergo’s commanding officer, talking about how Sergo had died for the motherland whilst rendering fraternal assistance to the progressive forces of the People’s Republic of –
– oh, fuck it, what did it matter? The lieutenant had cleared off as soon as he decently could, after about ten minutes, and Zinaida had moved her things out of the ghost-filled apartment that night. He had tried to stop her, hitting her, sweating vodka through his open pores, stinking even more like an old dog from his soaking in the rain, and she had never seen him again. Never seen him again until last Tuesday morning when he had turned up on her doorstep and called her a whore. And she had thrown him out like a beggar, sent him away with a couple of packs of cigarettes, and now he was dead and she really would never see him again.
She bent her head, lips moving, and anyone watching might have thought she was praying, but actually she was reading his note and talking to herself.
‘I have been a bad one, you’re right. All you said was right. So don’t think I don’t know it –’
Oh, papa, you were, you know that? You really were.
‘But here is a chance to do some good –’
Good? Is that what you call it? Good? That’s a joke. They killed you for it and now they’re going to kill me.
‘Remember that place I used to have, when mama was alive?’
Yes, yes, I remember.
‘And remember what I used to tell you? Are you listening to me, girl? Rule number one? What’s rule number one?’
She folded away the note and glanced around. This was stupid.
‘Speak up, girl!’
She bowed her head meekly.
Never show them you’re afraid, papa.
‘Again!’
‘Never show them you’re afraid.’
‘And rule number two? What’s rule number two?’
You’ve only got one friend in this world.
‘And that friend is?’
Yourself.
‘And what else?’
This.
‘Show me.’
This, papa. This.
In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing dexterity –
Push. Click. Slide. Press –
*
SHE had left the church when the service ended and hurried down into Red Square, knowing what she had to do, much calmer now.
The westerner was right. She didn’t dare risk her apartment. There wasn’t a friend she knew well enough to ask if she could stay. And in a hotel she would have to register, and if Mamantov had friends in the FSB –
That only left one option.
It was nearly six and the shadows were beginning to collect and deepen around the base of Lenin’s tomb. But across the cobbles the lights of the GUM department store blazed brighter by the minute – a line of yellow beacons, it seemed to her, in the gloom of the late October afternoon.
She made her purchases quickly, starting with a knee-length black cocktail dress of raw silk. She also bought herself sheer black tights, short black gloves, a black purse, a pair of black high-heeled shoes and make-up.
She paid for it all in cash, in dollars. She never went out with less than $1,000 in cash. She refused to use a credit card: they left too many traces. And she didn’t trust the banks, either: thieving alchemists, the lot of them, who would take your precious dollars and conjure them into roubles, turn gold into base metal.
At the cosmetic counter one of the salesgirls recognised her – Hi, Zina! – and she had to turn and flee.
She went back into the boutique and took off her jeans and shirt and tugged herself into her new dress. It was hard to fasten the zip – she had to twist her left arm half way up her back and push her right hand down between her shoulder blades until her fingers touched, but it fastened eventually, pinching her flesh, and she stepped back a pace to look at herself – her hand on her hip, her chin tilted, her profile turned to the mirror.
Good.
Well: good enough.
The make-up took another ten minutes. She stuffed her old warm clothes into the GUM carrier bag, slipped on her leather jacket, and headed back into Red Square, tottering on her high heels over the big stones.
She was careful not to look at the Lenin mausoleum, nor at the Kremlin wall behind it, where her father used to take her when she was a girl to file past Stalin’s tomb. Instead she walked quickly through the gate in the northern edge of the square, turned right and headed towards the Metropol. She wanted to have a drink at the hotel bar but the security men wouldn’t let her through.
‘No way, darling. Sorry.’
She could hear them laughing as she walked away.
�
�Starting early tonight?’ one of them called after her.
It was dark by the time she reached her car.
WHICH was where she now sat.
Strange, she thought, looking back, the deaths of mama and Sergo – these two little deaths. Strange. They were like two small pebbles at the start of an avalanche. Because not long after they went, everything went – all the old, familiar world slid after them into the wet ground.
Not that Zinaida took much notice of the politics of it all. The first couple of years after leaving papa were a haze in her memory. She lived in a squat out in the Krasnogorsk district. Got pregnant twice. Had two abortions. (And not many days had gone by since when she hadn’t wondered what they might have been like, those two – they’d be nearly nine and seven now – and whether they could have been any more clamorous than the spaces they’d left behind.)
Still: if she didn’t notice the politics, she did notice the money that was now beginning to appear around the rich hotels – the Metropol, the Kempinski and the rest. And the money noticed her, like it noticed all the Moscow girls. Zinaida wasn’t one of the most beautiful, maybe, but she was good enough: sufficiently Mingrelian to have an almost Oriental sharpness to her face, sufficiently Russian to have a padding of voluptuousness despite her skinny frame.
And as no girl in Moscow could earn in a month what a western businessman might spend in a night on a bottle of wine, you didn’t have to be a genius at economics – you didn’t have to be one of the hard-faced management consultants drinking at the bar – to see there was a market in the making here. Which was why one night in December 1992, at the age of twenty-one, in the hotel suite of a German engineer from Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Zinaida Rapava became a whore, tottering down the corridor after ninety sweaty minutes with $125 hidden in her bra, which was more money than she had ever even seen.
And shall I tell you something else, papa, now that we’re talking at last? It was fine. I was fine. Because what was I doing, really, that ten million other girls don’t do every night, only they don’t have the sense to get paid for it? That was decadent. This was business – kapitalism – and it was fine, and it was like you said, I only had one friend: myself.
After a time, the trade moved out of the hotels and into the clubs, and that was easier. The clubs paid protection to the mafia, collecting a percentage from the girls, and in return the mafia kept the pimps out of it, so it all looked nice and respectable and everyone could pretend it was pleasure, not business.
Tonight, almost six years after that first encounter, hidden in her apartment – which was bought and paid for, by the way – Zinaida Rapava had nearly $30,000 in cash. And she had plans. She was studying law. She was going to be a lawyer. She was going to give up Robotnik, and Moscow with it, and move to St Petersburg and become a proper legal whore – a lawyer.
She was going to do all this until, on Tuesday morning, Papu Rapava had turned up out of nowhere, wanting to talk, calling her filthy names, bringing with him from the street the familiar, stinking dog’s breath stench of the past.
SHE listened to the ten o’clock news, then switched on the ignition and drove slowly out of Bolshaya Lubyanka, heading north-west across Moscow to the Stadium of the Young Pioneers, where she parked in her usual spot, just off the darkened track.
The night was cold. The wind whipped the thin dress tight around her legs. She held on to her bag as she stumbled towards the lights. She would be safer inside.
Outside Robotnik there was a good crowd for a Thursday night, a nice line of rich western sheep all waiting to be fleeced. Normally her eyes would have flashed as sharp across them as a pair of shears, but not tonight, and she had to force herself forwards.
She went round to the back entrance, as normal, and the barman, Aleksey, let her in. She checked her jacket into the cloakroom and hesitated over her bag but then gave that to the old woman attendant as well: the floor of the Robotnik was not the wisest place in Moscow to be caught carrying a gun.
She could always pretend to be someone else when she came to the club, and apart from the money that was the other good thing about it. (‘What’s your name?’ they would say, trying to make some human contact. ‘What name do you like?’ she would always reply.) She could leave her history at the door of the Robotnik, and hide behind this other Zinaida: sexy, self-possessed, hard. But not tonight. Tonight, as she stood in the ladies’ toilet, freshening her make-up, the trick didn’t seem to be working, and the face that stared back at her was indisputably her own: raw-eyed, frightened Zinaida Rapava.
SHE sat in one of the shadowy booths for an hour or more, watching. What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.
Just after half-past eleven, when the place was at its busiest, she made her move.
She circled the dance floor, smoking, holding a bottle of mineral water. Holy Mother, she thought, there were girls in here tonight who barely looked fifteen. She was practically old enough to have given them birth.
She was coming to the end of this life.
A man with dark curly hair poking through the straining buttons of his shirt came over to her but he reminded her of O’Brian and she side-stepped him through a cloud of aftershave, in favour of a big south-east Asian in an Armani suit.
He drained his drink – vodka, neat, no ice, she noticed: noticed it too late – and he got her on the dance floor. He quickly grabbed her backside, a cheek in either hand, and began digging his fingers into her, almost lifting her out of her new shoes. She told him to cut it out but he didn’t seem to understand. She tried to press her arms against him, push him back, but he only increased his grip and something gave in her then, or rather joined – a kind of merging of the two Zinaidas –
‘Are you a good Bolshevik, Anna Safanova? Will you prove it? Will you dance for Comrade Stalin?’
– and suddenly she raked the fingers of her right hand down his smooth cheek, so deep she was sure she could feel the glossy flesh clogging beneath her nails.
He released her then all right – roared and doubled over, shaking his head, spraying beads of blood around him in a series of perfect arcs, like a wet dog shaking off water. Someone screamed and people rippled away to give him space.
This was what they had come to see!
Zinaida ran – across the bar, up the spiral staircase, past the metal detectors and out into the cold. Her legs splayed like a cow’s and gave way on the ice. She was sure he was coming after her. She dragged herself back up on to her feet and somehow made it to her car.
THE Victory of the Revolution apartment complex. Block Nine. In darkness. The cops had gone. The little crowd had gone. And soon the place itself would be gone – it had been jerrybuilt even by Soviet standards; it was going to be pulled down in a month or two.
She parked across the street, in the spot where she had brought the westerner the night before, and stared at it across the roughened, freezing snow.
Block Nine.
Home.
She was so tired.
She grasped the top of the steering wheel with both hands and laid her forehead on her bare arms. She was done with crying by then. She had a very strong sense of her father’s presence, and that stupid song he used to sing.
Kolyma, Kolyma,
What a wonderful place!
Twelve months of winter
Summer all the rest …
And wasn’t there another verse? Something about twenty-four hours of work each day and sleeping all the rest? And so on and on? She knocked her head against her arms in time to the imagined beat, then rested her cheek against the wheel, and that was the moment that she remembered that she had left her bag with her gun in it back a
t the club.
She remembered it because a car, a big car, had drawn alongside her, very close, preventing her from pulling out, and a man’s face was staring at her – a white blur distorted through two panes of dirty wet glass.
Chapter Eighteen
SILENCE WOKE HIM.
‘What time is it?’
‘Midnight.’ O’Brian yawned noisily. ‘Your shift.’
They were parked beside the deserted highway with the engine off. Kelso could see nothing, apart from a few faint stars up ahead. After the noise of the journey the stillness was almost physical, a pressure in the ears.
He pulled himself upright. ‘Where are we?’
‘About a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty miles north of Vologda.’ O’Brian snapped on the interior light, making Kelso flinch. ‘Should be about here, I figure.’
He leaned over with the map, his big fingernail pressed to a spot that looked entirely blank, a white space split by the red line of the highway, with a few symbols for marshland dotted on either side of it. Further north the map turned green for the forest.
‘I need a piss,’ said O’Brian. ‘You coming?’
It was much colder than in Moscow, the sky even bigger. A great fleet of vast clouds, pale-edged by the moonlight, moved slowly southwards, occasionally unveiling patches of stars. O’Brian had a torch. They scrambled down a short bank and stood urinating, companionably, side by side, for half a minute, steam rising from the ground before them, then O’Brian zipped up his flies and shone his torch around. The powerful beam stretched for a couple of hundred yards into the darkness, then dissipated; it lit nothing. A freezing mist hung low to the ground.
‘Can you hear anything?’ said O’Brian. His breath flickered in the cold.
‘No.’
‘Neither can I.’
He switched off the torch and they stood there for a while.
‘Oh, daddy,’ whispered O’Brian, in a little boy’s voice, ‘I’m so scared.’
He turned the light back on and they climbed the bank to the Toyota. Kelso poured them both more coffee while O’Brian lifted up the rear door and dragged out a couple of the jerrycans. He found a funnel and began filling the tank.
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