The driver presses a business card to his palm – Victorian Taxi Directorate embossed in ridged blue – together with the change.
‘Keep it handy. I don’t know your situation but as we say back home, even your grandmother doesn’t know if it will rain or snow.’
QF418 holds second place on the arrivals board as QF454 from Brisbane leapfrog up the list. Still time for a present. Anna is a fickle recipient; even roses provoke accusations of wastefulness or poor choice of scent. She’d spurned my telegraphed offer to book a meet-and-greet service for her transfer from Aeroflot to Qantas at Sydney Airport.
QF454 is first to unload. I wish we had a Plan B but her terse telegram hinted that the Russian telephone system was close to outright collapse and extended conversation under such duress could itself undo the most careful arrangement. As I vacillate between tea-tree oil and jojoba lotion the voiceover announces QF418’s arrival. I race towards the exit doors. Bags plop on the floor besides embracing relatives, blocking my way. The crowd thins.
Hair loose, she is wearing a mandarin jumpsuit I don’t remember. Half pushing, half kicking her suitcases, dazed and blotchy she collapses into my shoulders. I ease her onto a soft vinyl bench. Everyone else has dispersed or moved on. We are completely alone – as much as a reuniting couple can be in a major airport. I disentangle myself, stand up.
‘Mind our things. I’ll grab a trolley.’
‘Vasya!’ She turns to face me, clasps my hands. ‘What I have to tell you can’t wait. After you left your father got so bad your mother told me she had no choice but walk out. I said she could stay with me. Then I got a call from Rita at English Plus. He hadn’t been to work for two weeks and the place was in chaos. I dropped everything and rushed to their flat. When I got there an ambulance van was parked outside their building entrance. They were already carting him away. Probably heart attack, the driver told me. He couldn’t be sure because the body had been lying there overnight and they were only called when the smell seeped into the neighbour’s flat. But when Teresa and I were clearing out his effects we found an empty bottle of tablets, and a note. I have robbed the past to pay for the present. This all happened last Friday, six days before I flew out. All week I tossed and turned over whether, how, when to tell you, but decided to do it in person rather than risk being misunderstood on a dodgy phone line, or a letter going astray. We buried him at Kaluga cemetery behind the church, near my parents’ graves. If we had told the priest about the tablets he would not have permitted the burial at all. A terrible insult to an atheist, but believe me there was nowhere else. Apart from the gravediggers and the priest, your mother and I were the only ones there.’
The floor lists. I sit down so as not to fall down. In a stupor I stare at a blown-up poster of Sydney Harbour Bridge in the foreground, Qantas plane overhead. A tremor spreads out from my solar plexus. Shock setting in? Anna is beside me all the while, clasping my hand, calm – or glazed over too? Side on I can’t tell.
By the time we hoist each other up, shuffle to the trolley, push the luggage through sliding exit doors, hail a taxi, set off in silence for Richmond, Qantas has flown back to Sydney. This driver is a taciturn Ethiopian, thank God. We are incapable of small talk.
★
CHURCH OF THE HOLY VIRGIN’S PROTECTION
★
Despite its bristling fortifications – every home a verdant citadel, cookie-cut nature strips, bluestone fences needing a stepladder to scale – South Yarra’s almost life-size appearance draws me in; a decent snowfall away from a gingerbread village. I take out the directory page, peer at sundry landmarks. The Church of the Holy Virgin’s Protection I marked with a big blue X. Moore Street kinks to a tessellated alleyway, twin bollards halt cars.
Since that evening service at the Holy Trinity, the day Anna’s telegram arrived, I’ve been sidling up to faith. The A-to-Z of Martyrs book Anna brought to Melbourne confirms that Saint Tatiana was a pretty deacon the Romans tossed to the lions around 350AD. Tatiana’s icon captures an abashed expression, uncertain of her paragon status, hinting at a life outside her good works. Plus, she is the patron saint of students. That Tatiana happens to be Anna’s mother’s name seems almost superfluous.
In truth religion has lurked in the background all my life at pivotal moments. For years my mother surreptitiously attended the Church of St John the Warrior where she and Anna met. One afternoon when I was seven, going on eight, she whisked me from school without warning or explanation, hurried me down the metro escalators, shushed my questions with ‘You’ll see.’ My child-self understood this was a rare glimpse of an alternative mother: hip-hugging maroon skirt, matching stilettoes, brocaded blouse, pumping stride – all business. When we reached St John’s side entrance, concealed behind straggly twin poplars, she rapped on the door. It opened to a dusty back room. A nervous blond priest in black cassock and cross, absurdly young and three or four older adults greeted us. On a wooden table in the centre of the room was a large bowl half-filled with water.
‘Father Alexey will baptize you, darling. All you have to do is let him dip your head in the water three times while he says some prayers.’
The priest loosened my collar, placed my head over the bowl and lowered it in. The water was ice-cold but with a pleasant mineral scent. His sing-song intonation further muffled the prayer’s meaning, what little I could understand when my ears were above the surface. After the third immersion my mother dried my hair, thanked the priest and witnesses hurried me outside. On the street she took my shoulders. ‘Whatever happens from here, you are part of the church. Don’t say a word about this to your father. Or anyone else. Big, big trouble. Promise?’
I kept my word, but it still leaked out. The following evening my parents had a shrieking, plate-hurling argument like never before or again. I hid in my room, expecting the authorities to arrive. They subsided, went to bed. Neither ever spoke about it. Until Anna arrived on the scene, religion was a verboten topic in the Kurguzikov household. No doubt my father considered its banishment a resounding victory.
When Anna and I announced our engagement my mother pushed for Father Aleksey, by now her confessor, to preside over the nuptials. Family battlelines were redrawn. Alliances shaken up, others cemented. Anna promised me her silent support, pointing out that in the last few months several of her colleagues had come out as Orthodox, even wore crosses without apparent repercussions. But, as putative daughter-in-law who couldn’t even contribute financially to the nuptials, at the family table she kept her opinions to herself. Marriage would secure her propiska. There was also the awkward fact that Anna had no relatives she could invite. For once I lined up with my father – an expedience we preferred to play down.
I wanted to stretch my wings and found parental cohabitation stifling. Anna conceded we had no time and space to ourselves. One or both of my parents always hovered, and she could hardly invite me to her student dormitory. Nowhere to rendezvous in between. We joked that, putting into practice my copy of Spock’s Guide to Sex, at this rate we would complete Chapter One on turning forty. The sooner we married, the quicker we could move into the apartment near Park Kultury Metro that my father found for us. Newlyweds jumped the public housing queue.
My mother’s plans were whittled down to the standard fifteen-minute affair at our local ZAGS. The celebrant, scarcely our age, bumbled through a homily on sexual continence and associated virtues, one virgin to another. At a table inside the entrance to the registry hall, plates with bread and salt were laid out, plus four shot glasses of vodka. We each bit bread, yeasty and aromatic. I sneaked a glance – was Anna also trying to take the bigger bite, thus establishing herself as the head of the household in keeping with tradition? Yes, the contest was on.