A quick wave of stunted laughter.
The guys are all older than Iakov. Even Yevgeni can see that Iakov is struggling in their company. They have bicycle spokes shoved into their potatoes, and they hold on to the end of the rod and slowly turn the potatoes over the flame, taking them off every now and again for inspection or to blow off any embers that look as if they have potential. Yevgeni can smell burnt oil and metal and rubber or whatever they are using for fuel, and a faint tint of crispy potato skin dancing over the stench.
“How many times do I need to tell you this story? Hanging on to the gym rope, his cock dangling in the wind, and Sukhanov down below with that crazy worm vein on the side of his head practically exploding he was so fucking mad.”
Illumination all round, rods going vertical so they can turn and get a look at him.
“Hey, you’re the kid.”
A few cuffs around the head, loose-wristed though, friendly.
“That Sukhanov used to make me sweat out the contents of my ball sack.”
“Sukhanov would make his own mother bleed.”
“Up there for three hours, I hear,” Iakov says.
Yevgeni knows he can’t have been up there for more than five minutes, but he lets the story develop its own pathways, lets them stretch it whatever way they want: it’s their story now, not his. He looks down and smiles. You don’t smile in front of them. Be respectful. Know your place. You’re only a hero so long as you don’t know it.
“Hey, kid, this one’s done. Take it.”
They flick him a potato, a short backhanded whip that makes it twirl through the air towards him. Yevgeni palms it and then bats it between hands, tapping and blowing, way too hot to hold.
Iakov gives Yevgeni a wink and a sideways nod: show’s over, time to go home.
Yevgeni walks off, still blowing the potato, scuffing his soles off the concrete, because he’s done good, kept his mouth shut, stuck one to the man.
“Fucking Sukhanov. Let him come round here, I’ll show him a fucking headstand.”
Chapter 22
Pavel calls and invites her to a party, and Maria finds herself standing in an old bakery, with iron window frames divided into squares of frosted glass and the night outside coming through in a lustrous wash. Above her, on shelves and ledges, dozens of candles sit on cracked dishes, flames wavering, shadows running up the walls, sculpting the darkness of the high wooden roof.
She is one of the early ones and she curses herself for looking too eager, and she’s borrowed a dress from Alina—nothing striking, a plain black cotton dress with a dark felt shawl—but she looks as if she was born in another century from the people milling around the room, in their torn jeans and denim jackets, and the click of her heels pierces the conversations and she is nervous of slipping on the tiled floor. The feeling dissolves eventually as others arrive and, after some staggered conversation and a barrage of compliments, she relaxes. She is who she is, and not being dressed like everyone else is not exactly a situation she is unused to.
One of the old bread ovens still works, and they’ve turned it on and left the door open to heat the space, and everyone gathers on the other side of the room to avoid the blast of arid air, and they press close and talk easily, shedding layers of reserve, the conversation becoming less sporadic, words flowing easily, stories and darting wit and a studious consideration in many faces.
Everyone talks about the pilot. The whole city is talking about the pilot.
The facts are consistent. He’s nineteen. He’s a West German. He was wearing a red flight suit. This is what made the news. This one had to make the news—half the city saw him land. The West German government has already appealed for clemency.
They stand and talk. The talk is that the air defence command were afraid to take him out of the sky: three years ago they shot down a Korean civilian airliner that had drifted into Soviet airspace. They thought it was a spy plane. An international embarrassment of incredible magnitude.
So, the talk is that no one was prepared to give the order.
A few in the room are saying he’s a genuine emissary, sent from the West, a modern-day Messiah. Already they are being mocked.
The official line was that the Moscow radar was down due to routine maintenance work.
Maria wonders where the hell Pavel is. She talks to a tall, slim guy in a black sweater with holes where the shoulders should be. He’s a botanist, midtwenties with deep-set eyes, and he talks without expecting a response, and she sips her vodka, half interested, and tries not to look at the door.
“We took him to be a weather balloon.”
Some people in a circle in the corner are doing impressions of the generals readying their excuses for Gorbachev.
“There was impenetrable, low-hanging cloud.”
Each one elicits a round of laughter, and Maria smiles wryly. Their intonation is pitch perfect: they slur their words, speaking like Neanderthals, and a couple of them take on the persona of gorillas, chewing their knuckles, wrists bent, scratching themselves, elbows at unlikely angles.
“His flight pattern replicated low-flying geese.”
The laughter builds with each enactment.
There’s a box in the basement of their apartment block, stacked together with Alina’s husband’s belongings. Letters, photographs, a restaurant bill, cinema stubs: all the detritus of her marriage that she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. It’s too difficult, too obscure, to think of Grigory out there; Maria has no reference points, no landscape to imagine. And she hasn’t told Alina what she knows. Her sister would respond with practicalities, tell her glibly that she’s loading herself with unnecessary worries, try to reassure her with all those bullshit news reports. So, instead of dwelling on the possibilities, she thinks of the box instead, fills it with all the unspoken words which they’ve yet to exchange.
A man wearing a dark cap arrives to ironic cheers, and he carries with him a large bag. Some of the group huddle around him and help him unpack, and they join metal pieces together until Maria realizes it’s a movie projector that he’s been carrying, and he displays the tin can containing the reel to everyone as if it were a bottle of fine wine, and there’s a hushed murmur of approval and Maria is annoyed that Pavel never mentioned that a film would be the focal point of the evening, and where the hell is he? An hour late is too much, even for him.
The movie is Solaris by Tarkovsky. They sit on whatever is available and lean against the far wall, and the botanist has managed to manoeuvre himself beside her, but he’s timid enough to keep his hands to himself and Maria isn’t anticipating any problems. They have to aim the image over the ovens, and because of this the picture is elongated as if the figures in the film are in a hall of distorting mirrors. Maria kind of likes this element, the way the mouths and noses stretch out in close-ups, which makes her consider what an odd thing the human face is in its configuration, how strange in its regularity, all the billions resembling each other.
They stop the reel, and there is some mumbling and fiddling with the projector and the man in the dark cap announces that his speakers are blown so there won’t be any accompanying sound, and there are boos and hisses amongst the crowd, who are getting into the crowd spirit, but Maria can tell nobody really cares, they’ve all probably seen it anyway and know the plot, and the lack of sound somehow enhances the stretched-out picture, makes it all the more curious, and the heat is still blasting from the oven and the industrial taint of the noise it makes is oddly appropriate to the images. They watch people speaking with no sound, and Maria finds herself considering the tongue action and lip movements, and it can’t be denied that it provides a faintly erotic twist.