Chapter 2
Grigory Ivanovich Brovkin stands at the edge of the cold pool in the Tulskaya baths, gazing at the flat sheen of the undisturbed water. The slap of flesh surrounds him: feet sticking to the wet marble floors, the large hands of the old masseurs pounding and kneading thick wads of skin in the adjoining treatment rooms. All men, mostly older than he is, walking with a certain gait, paunches swaying, shoulders bent back, chests out, bodies freed from restrictions, uniform white bath towels cosseting their waists, corners flipping around their knees from their languorous stroll. To his left, two men play chess, partially obscured in the steam, half the pieces ivory white, the same colour as their skin. The pieces gathering condensation, looking as though they too were sweating out their impurities.
The pool water inert and translucent, so clear he can see the tiled bottom, six feet below, so solid-looking that the idea of it opening itself to him, parting to his weight, seems absurd.
The day has been a long one and it’s not finished yet. He climbed out of bed at 5:25. He stood at the window in the cobalt light and watched as the day unfurled, the morning growing paler, routine activities billowing out: bakers checking on bread rising dutifully in ovens, janitors pulling on their overalls, mechanics in depots tinkering with delivery trucks, testing the engines patiently until they greet the day with spluttered complaints.
He leaned his forearms against the glass and watched as a pigeon lifted above some beech trees, its outstretched wings gathering invisible currents, carrying a heart disproportionate to its body size. Such contradictions that nature can hold in its effortless order.
He has always appreciated order. It was this aspect of his nature that probably, on reflection, drew him to surgery. In the operating theatre, he takes great comfort in the physical rituals. The tools being handed to him in a specific way, held at a particular height. Placed into his hand with just the same amount of force. Everything scrubbed and disinfected. Everything shining clean. A room that is beyond, if not error, then carelessness, everything in it the result of careful deliberation.
He showered and ate a breakfast of black bread and two boiled eggs and drank some tea. He put on his suit and tied his tie, ran a comb through his gradually receding hairline; the years moving ominously forward.
His thoughts had a bitter taint to them this morning because it’s his birthday today, he’s thirty-six years old. Skilled. Respected. Alone. A chief of surgery with a failed marriage behind him.
He chose a set of cufflinks from the drawer of the bedside locker and stared at the empty bed, the discarded blankets funnelled along one side, as though there were a body underneath them, as though she were still there, that they had emerged from the raging arguments, their love made stronger through the heat of their marriage; refined into something purer, more enduring. But the shape in the bed was merely a reminder of her absence, one which he feels most acutely in the mornings; from when he wakes in the same position as he did in the years she was there—cradling nothing now—to when he turns the key in his door, facing the day without Maria’s tender words of encouragement.
He walked to the hospital. Forty minutes from his apartment. He likes to take in some air, even though his path is mostly along the third ring road, with traffic spitting out its fumes. Snarling. Even at such an early hour. He stopped in the centre of an overpass and looked down on the motorway, holding on to the metal rail. A truck bellowed as it passed underneath him, and he felt the urge to spit on it, a habit from childhood which he thought had been extinguished, but it turns out it was lying dormant all the time, only to rise up in him now, on the first day of his thirty-seventh year.
A man stood at the far end of the overpass taking photographs of a gravelled section that overlooked some scrubland beyond the boundary wall. He’d never seen anyone in this spot before, as it has no practical use, an unnecessary extension alongside the stairway that drops to the footpath. Grigory walked towards him. He was curious to see what the man was photographing, but there was also the fact that the stroll provided a slight aberration from his usual routine, an acknowledgement of this particular day.
Before Grigory reached him, the man with the camera turned and nodded in greeting and descended the stairs. Grigory continued to the boundary wall and leaned on it. The sky had almost fully lightened, the sun cresting the horizon. Grigory knew he was running later than usual. He liked to get a couple of hours of office work done before the committee meetings and the rounds and the demands for his signature and the funding applications and the consultations and the operating theatres. All of it racing along. His days streaming by. He crossed his fingers and thumbs to form a rectangular frame, a viewfinder, something he hadn’t done in years, but the idea of someone taking a camera to such an indistinct place intrigued him.
A nothing place of scorched grass. A pylon planted in its centre. A crumbled wall.
Then Grigory looked down, almost directly underneath, and dropped his hands from his face to take in the whole sight, trying to see it in its entirety, framed by the field, the perimeter walls beyond which traffic streamed along, oblivious to the image.
A grid of shoes, a whole cityscape of shoes, it seemed, was decked out before him, evoking a sensation that he couldn’t quite articulate. How many shoes were here? Perhaps a thousand? All neatly lined and spaced.
He was no longer in a hurry. These shoes were placed there, carefully, to be looked at. And so he looked at them. The leather stitching or plastic moulding, the laces and flaps and the contours of the openings, the finely curved lines. There were slippers and ballet shoes, work boots with exposed steel toecaps, children’s sandals. The shoes not filling the landscape but emphasizing absence, such personal items, as if a whole battalion of people had been ghosted away. There was, he was sure, a rational explanation for such a sight. Maybe it was a memorial of sorts, or perhaps the work of some radical artist. He was sure he’d hear about it at some point. But for now he could stand and marvel at what you could stumble across, just off an anonymous motorway, on a routine morning. Aware all the while that he himself formed part of the scene, a forlorn figure in a worn suit, staring at this wonderful absurdity.
He rarely thought of how he looked to others. It was a side effect of having the responsibility of delivering grave news. Walking into a room to meet fraught parents, or a wife who hasn’t slept for a week, requires only an outward gaze. You lose all authority, all assurance, if you worry about how you’ll be perceived. He thought how the life that had silently formed around him seemed such a solid thing now, how rarely he ever brushed against the element of surprise anymore.
Down, to the right, almost outside his range of vision, his attention was drawn to the sheen of a pair of glossy black stilettos. A regular staple of her wardrobe. The sight of it transported him to the night at the river. The night of their first real encounter. Grigory’s younger self, hunched alone on the frozen surface, only a paraffin lamp for guidance. A small wicker stool, the same one on which he sat many years later in the eye of their unhappiness. A rod. A hole in the ice.
THE PLACE IS KURSK. The river named after the city. He’s a junior registrar in the hospital and a new arrival. He comes to the river to rid his brain of Latin terms, of the smell of the wards, antiseptic still clinging to his skin. Nothing to concentrate on other than the dark circle before him, half a metre in diameter, his line plunged into the ambiguous depths. He holds the rod loosely in his hand, engrossed in his waiting. A glass bottle rests between his thighs and he puts it to his lips but receives nothing, his supply exhausted. He shakes his head in annoyance and places it under the stool, resuming his position.