He spoons up the last profiterole.
“Sleep well,” he says.
/
On Monday morning the sky is dark. The air crackles, and my scalp seems to have tightened round my skull. Though I sense a storm is coming I decide to walk to Winterfeldplatz. When I asked Pavlo about icons at dinner on Saturday he was too distracted to tell me much. I want to find out more.
On entering the square it’s the Laundromat I notice first. I look through the window. A young woman is loading wet clothes into a dryer. Her dirty-blond hair is tied back in a ponytail, and her breasts push against a pink T-shirt that is a size too small. Gray sweatpants hang low on her hips. This must be Pavlo’s dream girl, Katya.
I move next door and ring the bell. After a few moments the Ukrainian emerges from a back room. He’s dressed in a white T-shirt and dark-blue jeans. The clothes look brand-new, as if he only bought them a few hours ago and has just put them on for the first time.
“Ah, Cheadle’s friend,” he says.
The gallery has plain white walls and spotlights in the ceiling, and there are about half a dozen icons on display. Behind it, through a narrow archway, is Pavlo’s office, as cluttered as the gallery is bare, with out-of-date computers, a dusty plant, and piles of unopened junk mail. Four mismatched chairs crowd round his desk, and several hands of cards lie facedown in a cleared space at one end, together with a couple of shot glasses and a full ashtray, smoke twisting upwards from a half-extinguished cigarette.
“Did I interrupt?” I say.
“Some friends were here.” Pavlo’s eyes drift past me to the open door at the back of the office and the cramped courtyard beyond.
Later, as I sip treacly Turkish coffee, he tells me that when he first started out he used to treat icons as simple merchandise. He just bought and sold. Did deals. Icons were known as “wooden dollars.” He chuckles. It was only recently that he began to look into their significance. I recall something he said at dinner about icons not functioning as paintings do, and ask him to elaborate. Icons are conduits, he tells me. Aids to contemplation. The person who truly “reads” an icon is able to pass beyond it and achieve a kind of spiritual communion with the prototype. For that reason people often refer to them as “windows on heaven.” For that reason, also, the names of icon painters are never mentioned, and are not to be found on the icons themselves. Painters are seen as servants of God. Mere vessels.
“There’s another aspect.” He ushers me back into the gallery and points at a Virgin Mary hanging a few feet away. “That Virgin, for example. Her gaze moves beyond you, into another world. Her world. It rebounds off reality, turns inwards. It’s like she’s looking in a mirror.” He steps closer. “You see the hand, how it seems to gesture? The Greek for it is hodegetria — ‘that which points the way.’ ”
I remember the outdoor screening in Rome, and how a random conversation between two strangers reflected me back into myself, revealing the path I needed to take.
A loud whirring starts up as a washing machine clicks into its spin cycle, and Pavlo’s eyes veer towards the wall his shop shares with the Laundromat.
“Did you see her?” he asks.
“She’s very pretty.”
“You think I have a chance?”
“No harm in trying.”
“How old would you say I am?” He stands up straighter, his chest swelling beneath his crisp white T-shirt.
“I don’t know. Forty-two?”
“Fifty-six!”
“You’re in good shape,” I tell him.
Eyebrows raised, he glances at his mobile, pretending my compliment is neither here nor there, but I see him carry it off to a place deep inside himself. He will pore over it later, in private.
I open my notebook. While I make a drawing of the Virgin’s hand, Pavlo tells me about the wanton destruction that took place during the years of the Red Terror. He once saw a piece of film footage in which Soviet officials emerge from a church with armfuls of icons, tear off the silver covers, and throw the actual icons onto a fire. He talks on. He’s a good talker, Pavlo. I imagine it comes in useful in his line of work. It might even be indispensable.
The gleam of gold leaf, the steady hum of the machine next door. The rain streaming down into the square.
Pavlo asks if I would like more coffee.
“No thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”
/
When I walk into Klaus’s apartment that evening I sense that he’s already home and that he has been waiting for me. The place fizzles with impatience; the air itself is on edge. Sitting in an armchair, he appears to be reading, but I’m sure he only opened the book when he heard my key turn in the lock and his eyes aren’t even focused on the page.
“You’ve been very kind to me, Klaus …”
In an attempt to avoid a gaze I know will be reproachful I move beyond him, to the window. The lights are on in the yellow gabled house across the street, but the rooms look empty.
“The time has come for me to leave,” I say.
“Where will you go?”
“Friedrichshain. I met someone who’s got an apartment there.”
“Who is he?”
“I didn’t say it was a he.”
“It is, though, isn’t it?”
“He’s like a father — or an uncle. He’s older.”
“Ah, so that was the problem. I wasn’t old enough.” Klaus laughs bitterly. “All this time you made me wait. You let me hope. Why didn’t you say something?”
I turn to face him. “How could I? I didn’t know.”
“Oh, you knew.”
“You’ve been lying to yourself,” I say. “You weren’t helping me or being generous. You were just out for what you could get.”
There’s an ominous silence during which he gathers himself. “If we’re telling the truth now, perhaps you’d be so good as to explain yourself.”
“Explain myself?”
He rises to his feet in stilted, loosely assembled sections, like a film of a dynamited chimney run backwards, then stands in front of me, swaying slightly, as if the film might start running forwards again, as if he might collapse. “Explain what’s been happening here,” he says.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He grips my upper arm. “You and your games.”
I didn’t imagine he could be like this. My eyes drop to his hand but he doesn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightens.
“Does it excite you, being violent?” I say.
He releases my arm, then swings away, one hand reaching into his hair. When he speaks again, he has his back to me. “Did you honestly think I wouldn’t notice?”
All of a sudden he has a calm authority. This must be the voice his patients hear, when they’re undergoing those costly procedures.
“Notice what?” I say.
“Don’t act so innocent. I saw you follow me.”
I had no idea that he knew — that he has known all along. He kept it cleverly concealed. Perhaps he wanted to see what my intentions were. Or perhaps he felt empowered — emboldened — by the knowledge. My deception gave him license: any advantage he took would be justified, forgivable. What to say in my defense, though? I can’t tell him that he is merely a starting point. He will hardly want to hear about his relative insignificance, his disposability.
Before I can find an answer, he whirls round again. “Did she put you up to this?”
“Who?”
“Valentina.”
“I don’t know anyone called Valentina.” I push him away but he weighs almost twice as much as I do and he doesn’t move more than a step. “Who’s Valentina? Your girlfriend?”