It’s a kind of lifeline.
/
They have come for me. They’re milling around downstairs, in the lobby. I can’t see their faces and I don’t know their names, but I can hear them murmuring. They ask Olga for my room number, then they gather by the lifts and draw lots. They use cigarettes, some with filters, some without. The losers will have to climb the stairs. They want to cover all the bases, make sure that I don’t slip away. One of them steps forwards and presses the call button.
I need to leave my room as soon as possible but I’m only half-dressed and I can’t find my shoes. They’re not in the cupboard or the bathroom. I kneel on the floor. They’re not under the bed. Was I even wearing shoes? I can’t recall. And all the time the lifts are rising through the building, and the footsteps in the stairwell are growing louder. Is there another way out? A fire escape? It’s the law, surely — even here. The notice on the wall next to the door is written in Cyrillic. I manage to decipher the words EVACUATION — FIFTH FLOOR but can’t make sense of the floor plan. It bears no relation to the hotel I’m staying in. For what seems like minutes on end I move my fingertip from one room to another, from one stenciled box to the next, trying to discover how it works, trying to orient myself, but I can’t even tell which room is mine, let alone find an emergency exit.
I look again, more closely. There must be something I have missed. Then I realize. It’s the floor plan from a different building altogether. An office block maybe. A shopping mall. Why hasn’t someone brought it to the management’s attention? How can people be so careless? I’m wearing a T-shirt and nothing much else. My feet are numb. I wish I could go back to sleep but the lift doors are opening and there are voices in the corridor. A red light wobbles through the window and settles in the room.
I jerk awake. The room is cold but I am soaked in sweat. My T-shirt clings to me. The red light is coming from the supermarket’s neon sign. Shivering, I wriggle out of the T-shirt. I drop it on the carpet, then I dry myself on a towel and drink some water from the bathroom tap. It’s five a.m. I’m worried that Yevgeny might appear at the Dvina — or that someone might. What are the chances of that happening? Practically zero. But I can’t afford to take any chances at all.
/
After a breakfast of tepid semolina and hard-boiled eggs I pack my case and take the lift down to reception. A woman I don’t recognize is on duty. I ask for Olga.
The woman seems offended. “Olga not here.”
When I tell her I want to check out she consults her computer. “There is problem?”
“No problem,” I say. “I just need to leave.”
“What is problem? Room?”
“Room good. Room OK.” I smile and give her the thumbs-up. “Skólka stóit?” How much do I owe?
She doesn’t answer. Instead she picks up the phone and dials a two-digit number. While she talks she keeps looking at me, her eyes magnified by her glasses, like goldfish when they swim too close to the side of their bowl. Not long after she hangs up a door opens behind her and a man appears. He is short and bulky and his gray suit jacket, which is shiny, almost lacquered, is tailored in such a way that it makes his upper body look square. Between his lips is a wooden toothpick which he maneuvers using just his tongue and teeth. This man has the patient lethargic air of somebody whose job is to resolve disputes. He’s probably the manager. Outside it has begun to snow.
“You book two nights,” he says.
I nod. “Da.”
He seems to inflate like a prosecutor who has exposed a flaw in a defendant’s case. “You book two nights, you pay two nights.”
“No problem,” I say. “I pay two nights.”
After more discussion, during which the two hotel employees break off once or twice to stare at me — did they expect me to argue, lose my temper? — they allow me to pay. I say goodbye, then leave through the revolving doors.
I make for a travel agency I noticed the day before, when I was returning from my walk along the river. The light is muffled, gray. Soon there won’t be any light at all. I feel drunk, even though I haven’t had a thing to drink. Heads turn as I pass. A snowflake settles on my tongue and melts.
The woman in the travel agency speaks broken English and has an unlikely tan. She was recently in Sharm al-Sheikh. Behind her are two shelves of souvenirs from her travels.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Elena.”
“I’d like to go north, Elena. I’m looking for a place that is very far away. Obscure.”
“Obscure?” She doesn’t know the word.
“A place with not too many people.”
She glances sideways, through the window. “Not so many people here.”
“Smaller than here.”
“Smaller?”
“Like the end of the world,” I say. “Like nowhere.”
She tilts her face upwards and backwards until she seems to be looking at me through the bottom of her eyes. Though her gaze is eerie I take it to mean that she is confused by my request. Also that she’s beginning to understand what I’m after.
“Where can I go,” I say, prompting her, “that is farther north?”
It’s so quiet in her office that I hear her spine click as she turns in her chair. She begins to tap away at her keyboard. A map of Northern Europe and the Arctic appears on her screen.
“Maybe here,” she says at last.
I lean over the desk, my head next to hers. She has zoomed in on a cluster of islands with shattered or serrated coastlines.
“Svalbard,” she says.
I have heard of Svalbard, but the name sounds fantastical, like El Dorado or Atlantis.
“This.” She points to a settlement located halfway down an inlet and surrounded by miles of nothingness.
“What’s there?” I ask.
“Very small place. Very —” and she makes a humming sound that reminds me of the man in the Peking Hotel “— very obscure.” She gives me a thin smile. She seems daunted by her own suggestion.
“How many people?”
“I don’t know. Maybe three hundred.” She frowns. “They look for coal.”
“It’s a mining town?”
“Mining. Yes.”
“And the name?”
“Ugolgrad.” She explains that although the archipelago belongs to Norway the settlement is Russian.
My heart leaps as I look at the screen again. I didn’t realize such a place existed. “How do I get there?”
“Not so easy.”
A complicated journey, then. Good.
While Elena makes phone calls and trawls through the Internet I stare out over the rooftops. The next step of the journey is taking shape. All I have to do is leave as soon as possible, before the people in my dream catch up with me. I hope it’s not too late in the year to be going so far north. I hope I have sufficient funds.
The travel arrangements take hours — Elena also books me into a new hotel — and when I finally step out onto the street it’s dark again. The lack of daylight makes me feel giddy, breathless, as if time itself is speeding up. I cross Chumbarovka, with its historic houses and its young mothers pushing prams. Fog thickens the air, reducing visibility. Elena told me to catch a bus on Troitsky Prospekt. The number 61 goes directly to my new hotel, which is over a bridge, in a different part of the city. The two connecting flights have cost me close to twenty thousand rubles but I know it will be worth it. The only drawback is I have to wait four days.
I come out onto Troitsky Prospekt. On the far side of the road is a church, its walls caged in scaffolding, two golden domes abandoned on the ground. A bus with purple curtains in the windows comes to a standstill near me. Behind the misty glass is Yevgeny. When he sees me his features widen. He points towards the door, then signals that he will get off at the next stop. As soon as the bus surges away from me I double back and cut down a side street, my suitcase bouncing behind me on its tiny wheels. I take the first left turning, past a sauna, then turn left again onto a path that divides two rows of old wooden buildings.