I return the invitation the following week – can’t very well not.
‘Sure, love to. Can I bring someone else?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Will this Saturday be convenient?’
Saturday, no classes, time stretches ahead. Any excuse to lapse into my old body clock. Early afternoon sun shines through chinks in the venetian blinds. Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I squint around my new bedroom.
I ease to the window, fumble with the cord. Whether through faulty design or my own lack of dexterity, the blind ruck to one side and the lowest frets snag slantwise. They at least afford a modicum of privacy. Punt Road passers-by now have an otherwise unimpeded view through my window. Indeed on bad days – are there good? – the flat seems a scorched-earth zone. Appliances unusable if not downright dangerous. The pear-shaped kitchen light jiggled loose one evening as I was shredding carrots, grazed my shoulder and smashed onto the linoleum. Its identical twin shot sparks across the bedroom the first and last time I switched it on. The pilled grey carpet is watermarked from an ancient plumbing catastrophe. Even the kettle poses conundrum. I fill it well over MAX and keep watch, not trusting it to switch itself off without burning the element. Two nights ago the knob broke off the toilet door, trapping me inside. Just as I reached the point of screaming for Anna, murmurs from the adjoining flat calmed me sufficiently to await daylight, then with thumbnail and forefinger worry the spindle till the snib slid free. Should I complain to the agent, exercise my ten pages worth of Victorian tenant rights spelled out in the lease? What would my father do?
Whatever his son couldn’t.
I sluice handfuls of basin water under my arms, down the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades. When will I learn to rely on running showers in all weathers? Nursing coffee – Nescafe Gold Blend with the nutty aftertaste – I sit down, stare at my diary. Too many impressions at once induce a kind of psychic indigestion, beyond disrupted sleep cycles. Flipping the diary face down, I sprawl over the divan, its velvet cover sticky with stain-proof spray. Pink undercoat, hastily applied, licks the wainscoting. Pale green wallpaper, knotted bamboo effect. From certain angles they resemble rabbits scratching their behinds. The flimsy rear entrance, flyscreen on plywood, wouldn’t deter a kamikaze mosquito squadron let alone a housebreaker’s burly shoulder. Draughts sneak through even when I lock all the windows and doors and push carpet snakes against thresholds. Evidently central heating is a northern hemisphere affectation. Although the total living area is about the same as our Moscow apartment, the niggardly door space and three and a half metre high ceiling bear down like a clamp. I’ve misjudged my predecessor. The flat itself repels occupation, will erase my presence as completely.
I don’t at first connect the floating roar of match day with the concrete stadium across Punt Road. It only intermittently resembles human noise – punctuations of applause amid puzzled lowing like fenced cattle. The allure of foreign ritual draws me over the grass towards the entrance gates. I sense the proceedings inside go beyond sport. This is the crucible of my new city, where its essence is forged.
I watch spectators disperse outside after the siren blast. Two sets of attire mingle. Black with a diagonal yellow stripe from shoulder to hip, or horizontal blue and white hoops. Blue-and-white straggle towards the railway station while yellow-and-black holler victory chants, ‘Oh, we’re from Tigerland’, amid parked cars. I wonder where is Tigerland… Collingwood?
Back inside the flat I wipe away the dust on the mantelpiece where Anna’s framed photograph stands. Beside the photo I’ve placed my Pushkin volume, its tassel, cherry-coloured like hers, marking where I left off rereading. She loves to recite Yevgeniy Onegin in a beautiful contralto, perfect pitch and rhythm. Yet the photo is in some subtle way unfaithful to the original. The features are true enough, but the play of light and shade pinches the curves of her lips, lends a brittle cast to the tilt of her nose, angularity to her jawline. It is an ambiguous talisman, at once challenging me to vindicate her tenuous faith and sustaining my neurotic isolation. I am the breadwinner. She is our rock. She should be here in my place, exploring our new life in Melbourne instead of enduring Moscow’s corrosive fear alone.
I rip a fresh sheet from the shopping pad stuck to the back door, transcribe into English Anna’s stern instructions for borscht: Boil meat on the bone. If no meat, use mushrooms. Dice onions, grate beetroot and carrots. Put olive oil in frypan and cook vegetables 15 minutes. Add salt and tomato paste, then lemon juice for colour. Cabbage and potatoes for stock. 2 bay leaves at the end. Plenty of salt! DON’T spoon in sour cream until ready to serve, or it will curdle! Mayonnaise is your second-best option.
What can go wrong?
Clutching two shiny carry-bags, one labelled Dimmeys, the other David Jones I walk along sun-spangled Punt Road pavement to Victoria Street, aware that the shops in Bridge Road are closer and probably cheaper. I am even better at wasting other peoples’ money than my own. Ritual claims me; it is as though I have spent all my courage to get here and there is none left for the small daily things. Perhaps I am not equal to this strange, sanguine city – this lively Vietnamese quarter I discover in Victoria Street for instance. In Moscow the Vietnamese wear communist tunics, their hair cut blunt. They stand together at the back of trolleybuses and peer about for roving gangs of blackshirts. Here I see neon flashes outside hairdressing salons and travel agencies. Men and women wear their hair fluffed or teased or gelled. Produce spills onto the streets. An air of exuberance, confidence, of having arrived.
At the shop counter I fumble for my list. The elderly Vietnamese shopkeeper takes abrupt pity on me and shepherds me around the stalls, selecting what I need.
Back at Punt Road I jab the vegetables on the carving board, blunt knife barely up to the job, gouging out ugly wedges that I trim before adding to the pot. Sipping the borscht, the texture is off. It’s too thin, but not smooth enough either, despite dollops of stock. Anna would never spoil such an easy dish. I want to ring her to check the recipe but I restrict myself to one call per two pockets full of coins, an hour per week set aside. Forbearance.
She did not telephone me at the hotel as arranged, nor could I call through to her. Three times daily I check my post box, forever clogged with advertising flyers and bills in windowed envelopes. Sinister possibilities multiply, run from the obvious via the fantastic to the unthinkable: the construction authorities, commencing their summer renovations early, have scrambled our local telephone exchange, call tariffs out of Russia have leapt to prohibitive levels, the institute still owes her three months’ back pay, someone followed her to the Western Union bureau where she collects my transfers and waited for her to emerge with the cash, Maria has contrived grounds for her eviction, she is injured, hospitalised, living with someone else. Meteorological sound effects – a howling blizzard, sonic surf, flames crackling along the line – defeated my first three calls. On the fourth attempt I got a female Russian robot. ‘Incorrect number. Incorrect number. Incorrect…’ Her jovial Telstra counterpart suggested I try again later when it wasn’t so busy.
I called my parents. The phone rang clear in space. On the sixth attempt I straight away wished I hadn’t. I wanted a few desultory words with my father, get that awkwardness over with then ask for my mother.
‘He’s not in a condition to talk right now,’ she repeated in her tired voice. No need to probe what that meant.
Three weeks into the lease, after an hour of frantic dialling (the longer Telstra takes to reconnect a home line to the flat, the more I consider leasing a mobile) Anna answers the phone. She can hear me – but my echo drowns her out. I shout my mailing address. Ask her to repeat, letter by letter, Punt Road Richmond. P-a-n-t R-o-d-e doesn’t reassure. The line fades in and out. ‘Punt not Pant. Oh, never mind, I’ll fax you the address!’ I bellow into silence. The connection rights itself. When I try to move the conversation beyond checking she is okay we veer into banalities. I hope Anna’s uncharacteristic dwelling on small talk – the price of carrots tripling in one week, a dead cat dumped on Maria Alexandrovna’s doorstep, the old woman leaving the bath running one day when she went to market, ruining the ceiling and sending the local telephone exchange haywire – is a veiled plea to accept the insurmountable barriers to intimacy. My panicky recapitulations, circling back to the beginning of sentences to salvage my intended meaning, only deepens our confusion. Then the treacherous connection splutters and fizzes, and I hang up bereft.