We crawl in the slow lane to the off-ramp, three right turns to the Rouse Street address. I do not cavil at the ten-dollar tip. I find a payphone on a street corner and ring Anna to expect me early.
At the follow-up consultation a fortnight after Anna’s discharge, the doctor dispenses tinctures of optimism. By creeping up on our respect, discarding formalities by degrees, she earns her licence for cheek. ‘Anna, at last examination you had a fifty-year-old's womb. Six months better diet, cleaner air, whatever else, has won back a decade.’
‘So, a second chance. Who knows for how long.’ She twinkles. ‘You’re flying back to Russia soon, aren’t you? Better get busy!’
We do – up to a point. Sooner than ideal. Anna’s pre-stillbirth self is slowly fighting its way back, and some gynaecological problems reappear. But we know there isn’t a day to lose. In between packing up and an argument about the photograph on the morning of our departure. Anna’s idea. She wants Nikolai in the frame.
‘Why wallow?’
‘So where do we put him? Anna counters. ‘On the mantelpiece? Hidden in the drawer? He will be there even if he isn’t there.’
Heat and venom. A healthy sign after weeks as cohabiting ghosts. Back and forth we go, proxy omnibus arguments, ten rolled into one. At last I concede the point.
The camera’s time-delay facility allows us to be both photographer and subject. I insist we lean inwards, a tepee triangle with its long axes awry. For backdrop, curtains bevel an oblong slit of fathomless Australian sky. We smile parallel smiles, fidget endlessly, do not hold hands, rock Nikolai in unwitting parody of a cradle. He – the lock of hair Anna snipped while still in hospital – is snug in his little papier-mache palekh box with its lacquered village scene, heigh-ho toboggans, peasants making merry. I bought it as a homesick cure along with my Sergey icon.
We goad each other to this or that pose. Photo by committee threatens to ensue – and does. Her captured expression, a sagging rictus, tells the world she bears the brunt. To look at me, night time taxi driving is the elixir of youth.
Like all failed compositions, attention does not gravitate to its rightful subject – whatever that is. Certainly not Russians made good in Melbourne, showing off the fruit of their loins like a prize watermelon. How about Vessel for your parents’ disappointments, idiot savant in a wooden box, you nail the lie.
★
HOME
★
Above Moscow six thousand metres down from ten thousand cruising speed and oscillating. A female automaton advises the cabin that the outside temperature is –35C, repeats the announcement louder. My screen estimates ground level temperature at a sweltering –20C.
Singapore, where we had booked a day room to ease time zone transition, was +32C in the shade. In between buying my mother jellied jubes and a coffee-table book of Australia featuring spectacular places we had never heard of let alone thought to visit – though she was adamant she wanted one thing and one thing only – and checking the departure board updates, to the measured whirr of a ceiling fan we made tentative stiff-jointed love like the old people we have become.
Through the seat of my pants the plane grinds a too-tight loop. I picture the plane hovering until fuel runs out. Essay landing on a paddock. The stewards prowl the aisle, glare at anyone who so much as shifts in their seat. To worried passengers asking what is going on they affect not to hear. No detectable panic – yet.
Time for one last diary entry before we are smithereens. Should it survive the catastrophe intact it will record that, kopek wise and rouble foolish, I fell for a dangling one-and-a-half-thousand dollar one-way fare discount from Russia’s national airline, neck-and-neck with Indonesia’s Garuda for fatal crashes. Aeroflot is about to edge ahead. This is the moment to confess my lethal technophobia, being incommunicado when it mattered most. But I don’t. And Anna’s ambivalence towards a male heir. Our family’s shadow history too, best interred.
My mother said not to return without a passenger. Well, we can claim we kept our side of the bargain. So how is Nikolai travelling? I pluck the palekh from the mess inside Anna’s bag. The lid takes some prising open. Nikolai’s locks have not darkened. I let their golden tips tickle my fingers one last time.
Swooping over, the plane girds against vicious sidewinds. Stewards disappear. The countryside is a glaucous blur. Fields assert their boundaries. Roads wire circuit-board suburbs together. Shearing lurch onto the runway, six bounces blam blam blam blam blam blam bonk. Purchase on the seventh. Relieved applause.
Now for the longest fifty-metre walk in our lives – much longer for me than the reverse twelve months ago. Even for a few steps across the tarmac, in woollen jumper, long cotton undergarments and nylon zip-up, the fur flaps of my shapka ushanka tied under my chin, having packed them away for a year basking in warmth and upwards, I am underdressed. –20C hurts.
We climb metal stairs to the airport proper. The infamous cake-tin ceiling, barely three metres high, says everything about the bad movie set that is Sheremetyevo Airport. Moscow’s current mayor once quipped that potential foreign investors’ first five minutes on Russian soil costs the country billions annually. If this was Melbourne it would be classified heritage.
We stand at the back of the queue for returning citizens. Russian, as ambient sound, sounds alien. An elderly couple breaks into a Slavic tongue of which I can decipher one word in three. There is a separate line for citizens of former Soviet republics, about the length of ours but slower. Another for foreigners conversing warily in English, German now and again. Ours takes about ten minutes per passenger. A supervisor hovers by the booth. The guards, unisex, average age around twenty-one, exude lassitude. Kids with aged, defeated pallor. Flying home appears a dreadful mistake, voluntary readmission to a vast open-air prison. Anna rummages in her bag.
When our turn comes I place both passports on the counter window. My Chechen-terrorist passport photo. Why, why, why didn’t I act on good advice and change it? The guard, all of eighteen, sticky countenance and wide-set, froggy eyes, glances up from each, leafs through to the visa stamps, keeps us sweating just for fun, finally wields his stamp in a crisp one-two. The bored ones are the most dangerous. We might be the highlight of his week.
‘Vy russkiye, ne tak li?’ You’re Russian, aren’t you?
‘Da.’
Unconvinced, he hands back the passports and we proceed to baggage collection.
Lean and vulpine the customs colleague pounces. ‘Open it.’
A tremor passes through my bowels. Impassive Anna unzips her bag, removes lipstick, cotton balls, foundation and blush, depilatory cream and other mysterious accessories. Sanitary pads as praetorian guard. The officer hesitates a moment, flips up the palekh lid. Is he nonplussed by its contents? Or disappointed.
I dare not move. One sneeze or a door slams, and Nikolai will become floor sweepings.
The man closes the palekh and replaces Anna’s cosmetics one by one. His brusque hand-over-the-shoulder gesture moves us on. Deliverance via green channel.
We scan faces. My mother appears. Gone is the maddened frizz and black drapes. In their place is a sleek bob with a coppery side-lock, maroon pants, outsize cross nestling in a matching cashmere coat. She wheels our luggage all the way to the carpark, though it stacks taller than she. Made over too, Boris flaunts pristine chrome fenders, his rear view mirror welded fast.