Calamity drew up a chair to the desk, sat down and opened her notebook.
‘For many years,’ began Uncle Vanya, ‘I was a cartographer. I explored a wild and marvel-filled terra incognita, criss-crossed by rivers that scorned the puny attempts of man to navigate them. Though many men had passed before me and tried to fathom its secrets, all had failed and that dark centre remained on the map as a white expanse marked merely with the supposition that there might be dragons living there. It was a crazy realm containing extremes of joy and misery; troughs of despair, and peaks of felicity. I traversed its oceans of longing, I crawled on my slimed belly through the dark caves of its terror . . . I charted it all. You will by now have guessed the continent to which I refer is the human heart.’
We both nodded to signify that this thought had indeed occurred to us a while back.
‘I was the first to apprise mankind of the exact boundaries of this landscape. I traversed it all in that train wagon named after a Czarist prime minister, a man whose death was foretold in 1911 by Rasputin but who is now remembered by posterity chiefly for giving his name to a railway carriage. That particular contrivance that was to convey those vast armies of the damned, swept up in the terrible purges of the thirties, to the precinct of their damnation along the banks of the Kolyma River and other sundry hell holes of the Siberian prison system. I am referring of course to the Stolypin car.’
He turned to Calamity and said, ‘S, T, O, L, Y, P, I, N.’ I had not yet made up my mind whether he was sane or not. I’ve learned it doesn’t pay to jump to conclusions in this respect, but I admired his grasp of detail. You could tell that in his museum the cards that labelled the artefacts were yellowed round the edges to exactly the same degree; that nothing was written on those cards that couldn’t be absolutely verified by the latest scholarship; and he typed them all himself, at home in the dim light of a forty-watt bulb amid the fug given off by socks drying next to the fire, while his loving wife placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and set a dish of cabbage soup down before him. If a man could speak typeface this man spoke Pica at ten characters per inch.
‘It may be that I make an error in bringing my story to you. It may be that the vessel of your heart is not sturdy enough to accept the dark wine of my woe. The Russian heart is vast and contains multitudes. Is it really possible to pour out its contents into the puny vessel of your Welsh heart? I see you people selling your toffee apples and renting out deckchairs and I ask myself: where are their parricides, their swindlers, their crazed monks and dark malfeasant convicts? Where is the mother whose love is so great that she strangles her own babe in the crib to save it from the cruel death of hunger?’
‘Tell us about the sock,’ I said.
‘I was just about to.’
‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ said Calamity.
‘The sock is from the Hughesovka Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering. I used to be the principal curator. As you know, this museum charts the centuries of tyranny and oppression that caused that great Welsh Moses, John Hughes, to throw off the imperialist yoke and lead his people out of servitude to the promised land.’
‘Is there really such a place as Hughesovka?’
‘You ask such a thing of me?’
‘We learned about it in school; they told us it was the only Welsh-speaking community east of the Greenwich meridian – it always struck me as improbable.’
‘In our schools we found tales of Aberystwyth equally hard to credit. But please!’ He pointed to the sock as if to remind me of his true business here. ‘After the long arctic winter of suffering I found a short-lived but intense degree of happiness. I met Lara. I was employed for a while as an assassin for the Hughesovka criminal underworld. I first set eyes upon Lara while staring down the telescopic sniper scope of the rifle with which I was commissioned to shoot her. Ah! If I were as richly endowed in gold as I am in woe I would commission a statue to that great man, Carl Zeiss of Jena, who fashioned a lens of such perspicuity that tragedy was averted. Just as I was about to pull the trigger she turned and smiled directly into my cross hairs. A smile like the break in the clouds after forty days of rain in the time of Noah. In short, I forbore to squeeze the trigger and took instead an arrow in the heart.’
He paused and took a sip of tea.
‘Our union was blessed with a little daughter, Ninotchka, and for a time my happiness was complete. But then I was arrested and sentenced to penal servitude in the labour camps north of the Kolyma River. This was in 1950 when little Ninotchka was barely two years old. Being torn away from my family by the cruel men of the State Security Apparat caused me suffering beyond the power of words to describe. But also it gave me strength: every day in exile I thought of my little daughter and the day when I would see her again. And then in 1955 I received a strange letter from my wife. There had been an outbreak of diphtheria in Hughesovka and in order to protect our daughter she had kept her at home and prevented her from playing with the other children. Naturally little Ninotchka was cast down and in order to lift her spirits my wife bought her a little Welsh doll from the Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering. Whereupon a very strange thing happened. Ninotchka acquired an imaginary friend: a little Welsh girl. This is of course a familiar and often charming aspect of many childhoods, but Ninotchka’s friend was no happy playmate with a funny name and odd ways for whom we were required to lay an extra setting at supper. She was a fiend. Her name was Gethsemane Walters and she claimed to be the spirit of a dead girl who had been murdered in Wales, in a town called Abercuawg. She tormented our poor daughter with shocking and grisly tales of death in a small town in Wales far away. How could she know of such things? My wife pretended for a while it was just a figment of her imagination. Gethsemane is a Biblical name which she could have overheard somewhere, and Walters is a common surname in Hughesovka. This is how she consoled herself. But to tell the truth she didn’t really believe it. Imaginary friends are usually called Mr Bumpy or something, not Gethsemane. She called a doctor, she called in priests who baptised and blessed and tried to drive out the evil spirit. She took Ninotchka to a special school for psychic investigation.’
He paused and removed a white handkerchief from inside his tunic and unfolded it with the meticulousness of one who intends refolding it exactly as it was. He dabbed the sweat from his forehead.
‘I did not expect Aberystwyth to be quite so warm,’ he said.
‘It’s not normally sunny in August,’ said Calamity. She stood up and walked over to the window to open it further. It was already as wide as it could go. Vanya continued with his story.
‘Not long after receiving this terrible news, I undertook a daring escape and after many adventures I arrived back in Hughesovka and into the bosom of my family. Ninotchka’s first words when we met were to tell me I was not her daddy. And then something happened that caused the imaginary friend to disappear for a while. It was 1957 and a little dog became famous around the world. It was Laika the first dog in space, a supreme achievement for Mother Russia. For a time Ninotchka became entranced with the fate of this little dog and forgot all about her fiendish playmate. And we rejoiced.’ He stopped and looked at me wistfully. ‘But, as you know, those clever scientists who sent the dog aloft had made no provision for her safe return. She died after a few hours, from heat exhaustion. Her death fell like a thunderbolt upon the roof of our house and destroyed the happiness that we had built. Even now, more than thirty years later, it is too painful for me to recall in detail what took place. The death of Laika affected Ninotchka terribly. The imaginary friend returned and took over completely. She refused to answer to the name of Ninotchka and insisted she was Gethsemane, and she denounced both her parents as impostors. There was a scene. A terrible scene involving vodka and violence during which, I regret to say, I raised a hand of violence to my wife. I was thrown into prison for murder. And I never saw my daughter again. This was all many years ago. I will not waste your time with the details of where I went or who I saw during those years. It is enough that you understand that there was never a day when I did not think of this terrible story.’ He stopped and looked at me, eyes full of agonised appeal, as if my task was clear.