‘I’m sorry,’ Aleksandr says. He indicates the half-eaten meal on his plate.
‘No problem.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. When he stands, Madis stands too, and walks with him to the door.
‘Goodnight, Madis,’ Aleksandr says on the threshold.
‘Goodnight, boss,’ Madis says. ‘If you need anything…I’m here, okay.’
‘Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.’
—
Without undressing, he falls asleep at some point, and wakes in the darkness later — is wide awake and knows he will not be able to sleep again.
Waking itself is a terrible experience. Everything still there, just as it was, there in the darkness.
Except for a second after he wakes there is nothing. An empty second. A sort of peace, for a second. And then it is over, and everything is there again.
He lies there in the darkness.
He is thinking of the last time he saw his father, in that hospital in Sverdlovsk, the nomenklatura hospital. The hospital seemed luxurious then. His father was proud to be treated there. He had told his son, when he visited him, who else was there — some well-known general — and it was almost as if he was happy to have had the heart attack just so that he could share a hospital with such a high-status individual.
And his son had enjoyed the sense of privilege too, sitting in his father’s private room. He had tried to impress his father by translating the German text on a packet of medicine. He was at university in East Germany then, and spoke German perfectly, and his father, who spoke not a word of anything except Russian, was impressed, and he enjoyed impressing him. And that was the last time he saw his father, since the operation went wrong somehow and he was in a coma for a few weeks, and then he died.
There was someone else in the room, he thinks, when he was translating the German on the medicine packet. Someone else was there. Who was it?
Strangely, he imagines Stalin, unshaven, silver stubble on his chin, doddering among plants with a pair of secateurs…
It is light in Surrey.
Light outside. Yellow leaves.
One more day.
He is still just lying there.
He feels numb.
And also tired. Just so tired. So tired of everything.
It was his uncle, he thinks, who was in the room while he was translating the German on the medicine packet.
His uncle, Aleksandr. Aleksandr, like him.
And ten years later he took his own life.
He had nothing left to live for. He had devoted his whole life to something, and it had failed.
What else did he have left to live for?
Nothing.
It was over.
That was it.
9
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
1
The next morning he needs to do the shopping. There is nothing in the house. He drives, as soon as it is fully light, at about eight, to the Lidl in Argenta. From the house, near Molinella, the main road points straight towards it. Dead straight, and lined in places with windy poplars. This is flat land. The horizon dominates here.
Argenta: a suburban fragment in the middle of the plain. He waits at a traffic light and passes through the centre, and then along the canal, its surface giving back the winter sunlight. The car park is empty this early on a weekday morning. He parks near the entrance and wheels a trolley into the bright warmth of the interior.
He knows where to find what he needs. When he was last in Italy, earlier in the year, he started shopping here. He pushes the trolley past the piled-up stuff, sometimes taking things, or stopping to look at what there is. He needs to put his glasses on to study the label on a packet of tea. Then he takes them off and nudges the trolley on to the next thing. He is evidently in no hurry. He takes a moment to remove his overcoat and fold it over the edge of the still nearly empty trolley.
He selects his fruit with care. He tears off one of the small plastic bags and then, after failing for a few moments to separate it open, starts to fill it with tangerines.
He turns his attention to the apples.
He selects, with inquisitively squeezing fingers, an avocado.
One lemon.
He takes his list out of the pocket of his trousers to make sure he has not forgotten anything in this part of the shop. Apparently satisfied, he pushes on, towards the drinks, where he spends some time comparing the prices of the various lagers they have, still packed on pallets. The prices of things hang on signs — loud yellow signs, with the price printed in a font that looks almost as though it has been handwritten with a marker pen. (He wonders, for a moment, whether the signs are, in fact, handwritten. No — too uniform.) He puts a six-pack of Bergkönig lager into his trolley and moves on. He ignores the wine. He would never buy wine here.
Non-foods is next, and he spends some time fussing with sponges and washing-up liquid.
The stuff in his trolley, the small quantities of everything — he has just taken a shrink-wrapped pack of two sausages from a fridge — suggest a man who is living alone.
And indeed he is here on his own.
He arrived last night at Bologna airport — the late Ryanair flight from Stansted. The taxi through the wintry darkness to the house. The house was cold. Entropic forces were gnawing at it. There were mouse droppings on the floor. Signs of damp, again, in the wall at the foot of the stairs. Still in his coat he sat down on the small sofa in the hall. He felt weak and frozen. His breath hung in the air in front of his mouth as he sat there, with the key still in his hand. He had to start the heating — to struggle with the oil-fired furnace. He had a small glass of grappa. He managed to start the heating.
It is nearly ten when he transfers his shopping from the trolley to his old VW Passat estate, and then wheels the noisily empty trolley back to the mass of others near the entrance. He asks himself whether there is anything else he needs to pick up in Argenta. Nothing much springs to mind, and he wonders, starting the car, whether to stop somewhere for a coffee. The Piazza Garibaldi. There are a few places there where it might be a pleasure to sit in the cold sunlight with a cappuccino and a newspaper for half an hour. He is undecided as he drives back along the canal. What decides it is the lack of parking space in the small piazza. He feels a faint pang of disappointment. It is not worth trying to find somewhere else to park, though, and soon he is out of Argenta again, among fields that stretch to the luminous winter horizon.
—
He thinks about death quite a lot now. It is hard not to think about it. Obviously, he doesn’t have that much time left. Ten years? In ten years he will be eighty-three. More than that? Well, probably not. So about ten years. Seen in one way, that is frighteningly little. It is terrible, how little it seems, sometimes. Waking at five a.m. on a December morning, for instance, in the large damp bedroom of the house near Argenta, the turquoise walls still hidden in darkness. The quiet ticking of the clock on the table next to the bed. It is terrible how little it seems. And since the operation two months ago he has understood that even ten years might be optimistic. He has had, since the operation, this strange permanent awareness of his heart and what it is doing, and this fear that it will suddenly stop doing it. He lies there, unpleasantly aware of its working, and of the fact that one day it will stop. He feels no more prepared to face death, though, than he ever has.
It is starting to get light in the large turquoise bedroom.