On a roll, he addressed my mother. ‘Teresa Maximovna, I would have loved to bring a pavlova. Now there’s your Australian-Russian hybrid. Anna Pavlova was a sensation Down Under when she toured in 1926, and a local chef – Australians say he was from Sydney though New Zealand stakes a claim – came up with a sponge cake with thin meringue crust. Light and airy like Anna’s dancing. Strawberry or kiwifruit wings, depending on which side of the Tasman Sea you hail from.’
My father pounced. ‘You will come with me to the dacha tomorrow? With or without pavlova. Ha!’
So, there we were in the Trabant. My mother had begged off the trip. Summer holidays halfway through and dragging, nor did she want me mooching about, jiggling to Smoke Over Water. DOOF doof doof, DOOF doof doof-doof. DOOF doof doof… DOOF-doof on air guitar. She packed meat and marinade for shashlyk, onion rings, butter in wax paper, tubs of orange and black caviar, a bottle opener. My father took care of the liquid refreshments.
‘Roads better in Australia?’ my father inquired. We bucked over potholes marking the turn off to the dacha. ‘A rhetorical question.’
‘Deserving an honest answer. About the same.’
‘Impossible. I don’t believe you. We have ice between November and May, communism year-round. You have neither.’
I helped take out the food and overnight bags.
‘How about a banya before dinner? Sauna with birch twigs.’ My father lowered his voice, reverting to English: ‘I prefer dry steam Finnish-style. But don’t say that too loudly around here.’ He indicated the pine outbuilding. ‘I’ll lay the coals, and we’ll start the shashlyk.’
I took the cue to disappear upstairs. My father had banked on a getting-to-know-you men’s retreat, sauna, beer and shashlyk, minus a teenage hindrance. Skewering the meat chunks, sliding on the onion rings, brushing on marinade was my father’s sole culinary domain. I struggled to thread the lamb lengthways and leave the right amount of space between cubes.
To practice my English I had bought back-copies of Time magazine, way over my head even with pictures and an Oxford pocket dictionary. I plodded through two, put them away and turned to a translation of Jack London’s White Fang. It wasn’t a great translation – stilting, pedantic. Thirty pages in I gave up. A buzz saw from the neighbour’s block started up, slicing the silence. Through the open window the shashlyk smelt divine. I could hear my father and David discussing possibilities to reciprocate, not bothering to censor themselves, a bubbling excitement.
‘Hungry, son?’ my father called.
‘Maybe later. I’ll take a wash first.’
When I came down it was almost dark. The men were sitting on a log before the spit, lingering over the last morsels. Over fragrant coals they had bonded, flogged each other with birch and juniper switches until their real selves oozed out.
‘Vasya,’ my father announced, ‘I am invited to Australia.’
I saw the glassy-eyed start of a binge. The evening could go two ways. I hoped for everyone’s sake I would not have to drag him inside. Many a time I’d tripped over him on the bathroom floor. It was up to me to stage a diversion, avert serious embarrassment.
I crept behind the sauna to the blind side of the barbecue where a path cut through long grass. Blackthorns slashed my arms. I blundered on, falling over roots, stirring up crickets. Too late to sneak back.
‘What the hell,’ my father, aroused. ‘Might be a feral dog. I’ll go get the torch.’
‘Wouldn’t be a bear, would it?’ David said.
‘Relax. Bears haven’t been sighted in these parts for twenty years. You’d sooner see a kangaroo in Red Square. But we’d best take all the food inside and under wraps.’
I heard my father enter the house, check upstairs, stride towards the sauna. The sweeping arc of the high-strength beam toyed with me, dared me to bolt. It fastened on me. My father kept the light in my eyes. I felt the relief of a deserter who hadn’t got away and only wanted the court martial over and done with. My shirt was torn halfway around the upper left sleeve. A month’s salary.
No one spoke. Discomfited, David scratched his chin. I would come to recognise this not-knowing-where-to-look expression, foreigners confronted with practices defying explanation. I slunk to bed.
Much later I woke to someone bounding up the stairs. My father grabbed both my shoulders, shook for all he was worth, hissed in my ear. ‘You little turd. If my Australian invitation is withdrawn, I will conscript you to Afghanistan. Escort you all the way myself if I have to. At gunpoint.’
Anna comes up two stairs at a time, turns on the light, flops down alongside me.
‘Thought you’d both still be there when I came down to breakfast.’ I realise I’m jealous. Don’t be ridiculous I admonish myself; she does the opposite of flirting, milking him for laughs.
‘You don’t give me much credit for taste, do you? If you really want to know, it was like being stuck in an elevator with a tramp. He’d maunder for a week over his lost youth, given half a chance. Why do you think your mum went to bed early? She saw it coming, always does. He’s not your rival, right now he’s not even your boss, he’s just a sad old man who happens to be our host. And your father. Get some sleep.’
We leave straight after breakfast to beat afternoon gridlock. I wind down my window for the pine-scented breeze, wind it back up as clouds burst and rain thuds the windscreen. I tinker with the mirror. Once again my father’s fingers are splayed over the seat top, fingers kneading Anna’s neck through her blouse collar.
I wait to pass a kink in the road, slam the accelerator hard as brakes. Boris farts a backfire and roars into overdrive, every needle on the dashboard flown to MAX. My father withdraws his hand. Anna’s in wide-eyed shock, my mother inscrutable. Anna grabs my shoulder as Boris fishtails along a crumbly camber. The gauges sink to zero, the engine slackens, and we roll to a halt on the roadside.
My father clambers out to inspect under the bonnet, flips up the boot, rain plastering his hair to his temples. ‘Where’s the toolbox?’ Straightens up. ‘No fucking toolbox. Lucky you didn’t blow a tyre. Got a screwdriver?’
I shake my head.
My father returns to the bonnet. Twiddles a wire coil, steps back. ‘Try now.’
I twist the key. A listless throb.
My father fiddles with the alternator.
‘Once more.’
This time a steady idle. Climbing back inside, he whistles between clenched teeth, snarls into my ear as we set off, ‘The Soviets reared three generations of handymen. You’re the exception that proves the rule. Pack a toolkit next time.’
★
MOSCOW (USSR)
NOVEMBER 1990
★
November is the skol’zkiy season – black ice and treacherous pavements. Anna sashays around patches of slush like the dancer she might have been. Pummelling circulation into each other’s arms, we wave at boys road testing a toboggan on a gentle slope. The remorseless geometry of residential blocks gives way to hummocky parkland. Here and there frosted carapaces of wrecked Ladas, Moskviches, Zaporozhets tip sideways. Residential towers – like military columns marched in from Poland – mass ahead. Broad stripes run down their vertical edges; burnt orange, toilet-tile green, Prussian blue. Two black poodles, the long-legged Moscow kind, gambol after each other, trailing their leads.
The street widens into a boulevard of elms, lower trunks daubed white. We pass a row of kiosks with snow patties sparkling on brass eaves. Old pipes and discarded scaffolding protrude at the rear like rusty entrails. Drunks gather at a keg to refill jars with moonshine. I glimpse token foreign goods glowing through the sliding windows: a nuggety Pepsi bottle, Mars bar, eau de cologne. Five real Ecuadorian bananas, instead of the pulpy, algae-green Cuban variety.