But if this wisdom meant anything, which he doubted, then he understood it only in the abstract, as a man understands that the Earth is hurtling through space. Simply, he did not feel old enough for this to have come to him yet. And he wished to God that he weren’t so alone today. He just had to make it through until Isabella arrived. That’s all he had to do. Hold it together.
Most of all he wished he could trust himself again; he wished that his heart would stop playing tricks on him: one moment he was sure of it, the next a new reality would unveil itself and beckon him further within and he would find himself in a completely new place—suddenly steeled, or suddenly destroyed, or suddenly businesslike, or desperate, or resolute, or resigned, or full of a new despair, or madly joyful. And each time he thought he had entered the right and final chamber. And each time it was not so.
Just now—past the bank and the tourist-crammed Literaturnoe Café—just now, for instance, he had felt as lucid as he could ever remember feeling in his whole life. His mind as sharp and clear as a ten-year-old swimmer’s. Then he had turned right, off the Nevsky, the Triumphal Arch ahead, and suddenly he was fogged and reeling and seasick again. It was the other people passing by that did it—seeming to him to be no longer individuals, nor even crowds, but merely animate reminders of the context of his mother’s death. It was all this evidence of birth, of life, of soon-to-come death, all this evidence of the teeming world that somehow made it worse, somehow drove the swelling sadness harder down the channels of his heart. And it was the sun in the great square ahead, the uncontrived beauty of a day she would never see—the incongruity (for surely there could not be such a loss on a day like this); the very azure of the sky; and yes, there ahead, before him now, the pale beauty of the Winter Palace. Let’s see one more painting today—let’s see what Mr. Rembrandt can show us about human nature. It was the other people. It was the sun. It was the Winter Palace. It was people, sun, and Winter Palace that sent him desolate against the cold stone walls and held him fast in the shadow of the arch.
Then he came jolting and shuddering and shaking out of it. And he was standing in the queue for his ticket, noticing details of other people’s clothing, breathing his way determinedly out of whatever latest insanity he had been in, and a rational coping-calmness suffused him. Not clarity this time, nor nausea, but yes, a curious, coping, soft-focus calmness. And he believed (with fervent relief) that he knew himself again. Christ, this must be shock, this must be it! And he realized that of course these others did not know his mother had died—how could they?—and that they did not suspect him of crying or grief or madness or anything else, and that they were just a happy French family, standing in line like him for a ticket to the Hermitage Museum, just a group of German students, just two old—what?—Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, he had no idea. Simply other people, neither hostile nor friendly.
A ticket for one, please. No concessions.
And then he went over everything coolly again, forward and backward: Lina, Isabella, Julian Avery (he jogged up the wide Rastrelli stairs), his gratitude to Yana. He must do something to thank her and her mother, and Arytom too. (Left past that ludicrous ceremonial coach that the tourists loved.) And Jesus—Yana’s face as she told him to leave the room and collect some of his mother’s fresh clothes while she wiped his mother’s body clean of dried saliva and the discharge he had pretended not to notice. (Left past the tapestries.) Then Yana, so young, urging him to leave the clothes, which smelled of his mother on the floor, and go! go now, Gabriel! go! and wait in the kitchen. And those unreal minutes staring at a Chinese-patterned tea caddy. (Ignoring silly little Cezanne.) Then Yana shouting that it was okay to come in now. (Moving from Winter Palace to Hermitage.) Then Yana in solemn, solemn Russian on his mother’s phone. The world’s most solemn language. (Toward the Peacock clock, which always made him smile, and so self-consciously forcing himself to do so three steps early, dreading that none would otherwise come.) And then their arms around each other (hanging garden to the left) as they sat there on the window bench in the middle of a rainstorm, waiting for the ambulance, his mother lying on the floor because he couldn’t bring himself to move her and had no idea where to move her to, except the bed, which seemed as pointless as the ambulance itself.
Turn right.
Rembrandt.
Portrait of Rembrandt’s mother.
Acquired for Catherine in 1767. Gabriel, look at her eyes: very slightly askew. Thin lips. Black silk dress. But she’s not looking directly back. And I don’t think she was really his mother.
He sat on the chair on which his mother always liked to stop, and closed his eyes.
12
Night Watch
The night was scratched forever on the thin varnish of his childhood; its exact disfiguring pattern likewise etched on every single pane through which he might look back. In the drafty old-fashioned kitchen in the basement of the Highgate house, the halfpast seven radio had predicted fog, predicted cold, predicted bad conditions for motorists. But father and children and the children’s two friends were all in other rooms, unconscious of flights grounded or the murky freeze fingering its way up the Thames.
It began just before eight.
First the record jumped; then the needle broke and the dancing stopped; then, slowly, the ruptured stump began to drag itself across the vinyl. The newly purchased speakers clawed, rasped, snarled, screeched, but all the same, he heard his father’s fury before Nicholas had even left his study in the room above.
Gabriel stopped dead still, his sister the same. A sidelight fizzed, then appeared to brighten, and the room seemed to stretch itself taut in terrified anticipation.
Next, too much rush and panic.
And somehow, as they scrambled over the improvised disco floor, Gabriel (in Superman socks) lost his footing on the polished parquet and—hands flailing to counter the slip—knocked the actual stereo, bounced the needle back onto the record, scratching the shiny black surface a second time and causing the speakers once more to yowl. Even as he was losing his balance, he saw his sister’s teeth sink into her lip in pursuit of a plan that might alleviate the worst of what was to come. By the time he had bounded up again—less than an instant later (denying himself even the luxury of a complete fall) and now with the same aim as Isabella—she was already moving past him toward their father’s vast vinyl collection. The needle was broken, but at least they could hide the record.
He fumbled with the deck. His father was on the creaking stairs. The needle arm wouldn’t lift for a moment, then freed itself. He swung around, looking for the sleeve. He wished with all his heart that he might magic his friends away. Instead they were frozen quivering-still, the realization that there was reason to fear out of all proportion to the damage done beginning to thumbnail itself into their faces.
Too late. As the storm broke through the door, Gabriel was only halfway to putting the ruined disk back in its sleeve and his sister halfway to setting a replacement on the turntable.
In truth, as Nicholas entered the room, he had already abandoned any adult restraint and was borne in a riptide of childish emotions. The evening’s wine had thinned his blood, flooding the labyrinths of his intelligence all the more easily. His evening hijacked, even in the midst of its resentful torpor, he had caught them at it: deceit. Deceit—on top of their standing on the furniture, on top of their dancing about the place when he had expressly told them it was forbidden for this precise reason, on top of their willful inability to play fair when he had chosen to ignore their disobedience for the past hour. On top of everything else. At moments such as these he felt too young to be their father, too close: a dangerous rival, not custodian. And he was quite unable to command himself, even in front of eight-year-old children. He stood glowering on the threshold, gripping the door handle with long fingers, scouring one face and then the next.