“Can you hear me properly now? Is this line better?”
“Yes. Forget my mobile. It—”
“I couldn’t get through.”
“Sorry, Lina. Isabella called again.” This was only the second time they had spoken since the afternoon, and already he knew that Lina was his savior and that he would never ever be able to do without her, not for one day, not for the rest of his life.
“Okay—this is definitely Yana’s landline? I can use this.”
“Her mother’s, yes. Yes, I think it’s fine.”
“Will you be okay there tonight, Gabriel?”
“Yes… I don’t know where I… I will be all right.”
Her voice became even more measured. “Okay, now, listen. I have booked you into the Grand Hotel Europe, Gabriel, where we stayed. For tomorrow. It’s all on my credit card. I don’t want you to even think about the money. We can talk in the morning about whether you want to go there. But I think you should have somewhere as a base. I’ve booked a twin, so you can be with Isabella. If you prefer to stay at Yana’s mother’s until later, then fine, but it’s there if you want. We can talk about it tomorrow.”
“Lina. God, you don’t… Thank you. Thanks.”
“And you have spoken with the consulate?
“Yes. Yes, I have. A guy called Julian Avery there—he’s being very helpful.”
“So don’t forget, I can call people from here too. I can call anyone you need—if it helps, I mean. I will be here on standby in the morning. There’s a lot I can do from here.”
“Okay.”
Gentle now: “We have to be practical for the time being.”
“Yes.”
“You are sure that you are going to have the funeral in Petersburg?”
“Yes. It’s what Mum wanted.”
“Right. Well, I’ll try to get a visa first thing tomorrow and I will be there… Thursday, Thursday night. Latest, Friday. Okay?” “If you can. But don’t—” “You have enough money?” “Yes.Yes… it’s all right. I have money.” “You have some food for tonight?” “I’m not—”
“I know. But you should try to eat something. Will Yana’s mother get you something?”
“It’ll be okay, Lina.”
“Just don’t… Just take care of yourself. You need all that fierce strength of yours. And try to focus on whatever you need to do. Try not to think too much, Gabriel. Sometimes just doing stuff is best—you know, fool the days, or you’ll go crazy. When is Isabella there?”
“Tomorrow evening. She’s getting her visa now and then she’ll fly.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Sasha coming?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
A pause. “Is there anyone here you want me to call tomorrow?”
This, he knew, was Lina’s way of approaching the question of his father. He loved her for her delicacy and for knowing him so well. He loved her for her endlessly decent strong sensible saving kind humanity. He loved her. “No. There’s nobody to call, Lina. But… But I don’t know. Tomorrow we should… we should try to think. Maybe there’s some of Mum’s old friends or something.”
“What time is it there?”
“Ten thirty-five.”
“Okay. You go now. I am going to call again at eleven-thirty your time, okay, before you go to bed? I love You’very much.”
“Thanks. Thanks for everything, Lina. I love you too.”
Lina’s voice vanished but he did not put down the phone. There was stillness. Sudden. Silent. His eyes glassed again and he was gone. The courtyard outside seemed to him now a darkened rough-made stage set for some great play about to begin, the hero appearing in a shaft of light as the door was thrown open, the shadowy and conniving chorus ushering themselves off (never quite fast enough), chanting their collective exhortation: “Gentlefolk, behold this, our man, at such sore odds with himself and his times.” His dearest hope had once been that he would become a director—some bold reinvigorator of the London stage, teaching the silly actors to stop their acting. It was his mother’s most fervent wish for him too, though she had stopped talking about the prospect in the past few years. In art we are in conversation with ourselves across the generations, Gabriel; this is the lodestar of our humanity. The rest is chasing food and money…
When he came back to the surface, he found that he was snatching at his breath and there was the taste of salt in his mouth, but he saw that his fingertips must have lingered all the while on the handset. He had not spoken to Connie since the morning—already another lifetime ago. And he dialed the numbers now as if they were inscribed above the secret door to the other chamber of his heart.
“Connie.”
“Hey, lover. Are you in Petersburg?”
“I’m—”
“Jesus.” She sensed it immediately. “What’s happened?”
“Con, my mother has died.”
“Oh, Gabriel.”
And somehow with her, with Connie, he could turn on himself, reach up behind and sever the taut wires of control. Somehow with her he had the strength to actually say it. Somehow with Connie he could give himself up.
“Oh, Gabriel.” Nothing else. A whisper that contained all the compassion that one person might feel for another; a whisper that somehow understood the fragile geometry of his soul.
“Oh, Gabriel.” Nothing else.
And at last his tears broke. A quiet, desolate crying that juddered through him as if he were dragging a blunted plow through every organ, every muscle, every nerve.
8
The Good Things Trick
She lay across the central four seats at the back of the plane, the thin airline blanket pulled over her face, accepting nothing from the flight attendants, hearing nothing of the other passengers’ stir and murmur. She had never in her life been afraid on flights before. But this time, although her eyes were closed, she was wretchedly awake, rigid with stillness, feeling every plunge and shudder of wing and fuselage, her mind contracted on a single image: a row of white-painted bolts working themselves loose, one after another, on some load-bearing metal strut 35,000 feet above the storm-tossed Atlantic. Only with an intense effort—by somehow ripping up her fixated brain by the roots and setting it to think of every good thing she had ever known in Petersburg—did she conquer her urge to beg for whatever it was the crew was rumored to carry for passengers who went insane.
The Good Things Trick was a mental discipline she had learned from her brother twenty-five years ago, one night when their parents were screaming at each other in the front of the car—late, lost, and circling in the dark, miles from the holiday cottage. She had practiced and honed it many times since then. But she had not tried for at least a decade. And she wondered if she still had the will.
The images came and went, came and went, came and lingered, came and stayed, illuminating the vast and vivid screen of her fine imagination… The new blini restaurant on Kolkonaya, behind the Nevsky Palace Hotel, with hot pancakes, savory and sweet, where she and Gabriel had sat one Christmas and wasted the brilliant blue of a Boxing Day sky reading the thin, out-of-date St. Petersburg Times, ordering more and more, saying nothing, drinking coffee after coffee, plates piling up in droll testimony to something gross or affirmative or just plain alive; or here, years ago, Yana’s grinning face and the endless varieties of vodka they were drinking together, true friends, after-hours at the CCCP Café, just opened, Highway 61 Revisited turned up as loud as the stereo would go; or here was her twenty-four-year-old self, before the millennium turned, having some sort of a thing with Arytom, and they had nearly fallen in the canal because they were so drunk and stoned—except it was iced over—and they had crept in past Yana’s mother and Yana herself to Arytom’s tiny room at the back of the apartment and made love in absolute silence, bedclothes forever slipping off her shivery shoulders, he looking up, eyes wide in the darkness, holding her head in his hands, lips parting without a sound when the moment came; or here she was during the White Nights of the tercentenary year in the middle of the sheer frenzy at Troika opposite those shabby-grand shadowed arches of Gostiny Dvor, the midnight sky, the long day’s ghost; or, yes, the first time back to officially-Petersburg-not-Leningrad! as an adult, the January after her grandfather Max died, turning off the Nevsky, down by the Fontanka Canal, where she had walked that night with her mother, a girl of nineteen no more, and it had seemed to her then that all the old palaces were lit in great amber teardrops by the glow of the streetlamps, in pink and yellow, in silvery damask, in ivory and pearl, and there were skaters already dancing on the ice, torches lit and chasing back and forth like children’s souls, and later it was so cold in the rented apartment that when she climbed out of the camp bed to find her coat to lay on top of her blankets, she could see her breath passing from her lips in the dim blue of the pilot light, flickering hopefully on though all the pipes were frozen tight.