“I wish they would keep God out of it. It’s just such horseshit. And it’s making me hate. And I can’t, I can’t—”
“I know, I know, but Is… Ssshhh.” His voice was oddly calm. “It doesn’t matter. You know that. Nothing we say or think or do here now comes even close to what is actually happening or what anything actually means.”
“I feel like I’m dead. I feel like Mum’s living and we’re dead here. Stuck.”
“It’s just us, Is, and what we think she thinks. It’s just her thoughts imagined in our minds. And… I think… I think she’d laugh. She’d laugh. At this. At us two. Wouldn’t she?”
“I can’t stand that fat priest or those awful women pretending to mourn. She’s my mother.” She bit her lip. “Why do we have to wait out here while they do whatever they’re doing in there? She belongs to us, not to that fat bastard or those fucking witches.”
“Sshh. Is, come on.” His arm found his sister’s shoulder.
“They’re only here because they want someone to be there when they croak themselves.” Her voice was thickening. “They’re shit scared, all of them—cowards. I want this to be over. I feel like we’re being buried here. And nobody is noticing.”
“Hey, I’m noticing. I’m always noticing. I notice everything.”
“Me too.”
He bent his head and smiled gently at her. “That’s the problem.”
She blinked against her tears. “You’re right. We should stop noticing everything.”
“Learn to get over it,” he murmured.
There was a pause, filled only by a snatch of wind. Then Isabella said, “I can’t get over anything.”
“Me neither. I can’t get over anything at all. Not one thing that happens in the damn world can I get over.” The doors scraped and clattered open and another cadre of black birds took to the sky. “You were right, Is—we should have done it ourselves. Driven out somewhere quiet and far away. Burned her body on the steppe. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of lonely places.”
Inside the small chapel, the walls were covered in dark icons. The priest walked around and around the open coffin. The old women held their candles in their left hand so that they could cross themselves with their right. And the chanting swelled and fell in a minor key that seemed to have journeyed west with the wind from far away, wherever the heart of Russia lay, somewhere in some sacred valley. Now and then, partially obscured by the trees as they moved outside, the sun came streaming in through the plain windows high above, so that there were dappled patches of shifting light on the floor, the walls, the mourners, the priest, on Masha’s immutable face. She wore no veil.
Part II
NOVEMBER
Susanna (da se):
Scusatemi se mento, voi che intendete amor.
Susanna (aside):
Pardon me if I lie, all you who understand love.
THE JOURNEY BEGINS
19
A Message
An eight-thirty wind was howling up and down the darkened canyons of New York and seemed to eddy and squall on the corners, rapacious for like dominion over the cross streets. November—month of storms: men and boat lost out on the Grand Banks, ashen newscasters (laconic veterans of murder, blood, Israel and Palestine) finally in earnest, satellite pictures of clashing fronts, colliding systems, circling depression.
She had made up her mind.
All the same, it was almost impossible to move forward: the wind flattened her trousers against her legs, her hair was flung this way and that, and her skin felt as though it were being stretched. The worst storm since the last one. Skies of bitumen and creosote. There could no longer be any doubt about it: the planet was finally becoming angry—the wildest beast of them all goaded, poked, insulted once too often. You looked out of the grime-smeared office glass—what, once, twice, five times a year?—and sure, the Earth was still out there, but flooded and drowning, or frozen and blizzarding, or parched and burning up. She could smell the rain now, racing in on the wind.
What to say, though? What to write?
Never mind—see how it goes. Let’s just get this done. She could always store whatever she typed in Draft and come back to it tomorrow.
The first rope lashed at her face just as she ducked inside the store advertising free coffee, magazines, and Internet. Perhaps it was the thought of Sasha, the cramp and claustrophobia of the apartment, of his childish neediness; the lack of personal space. But she knew that she could not do this at home, and work was likewise out of the question. Whatever the question, she had noticed, work was always out of it.
“One.” She nodded in the direction of the back room. “Please.”
The guy behind the till was talking on his cell. She guessed he was from Yemen or Saudi Arabia. He made a note of the time in his book, held up five fingers, and pointed to the second bank of terminals. She wondered what he was making of the American Dream.
Ignoring the coffee stand, she went over and sat down at the computer. The place was busy and smelled of cheap damp carpet. She shoved her bulging bag under her feet, slipped off her shoes, double-clicked, and waited for the sluggish connection. The young Muslim guy to her left—beard barely grown—was surfing what looked like soft porn in a double agony of pseudo-jocularity and not wanting to be seen; she could feel the waves of his embarrassment. The woman to her right, desperately out of condition and with her asthma inhaler beside her keyboard, was playing online poker with melodramatic intensity. Isabella typed in her password and clicked.
The woman broke off suddenly and made as if to throttle an invisible neck just in front of her screen. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.” She looked over, shaking her head. “Another bad beat. How’s your luck holding up?”
Isabella screwed up her nose. “Luck’s okay. But my decisions suck.”
The woman nodded.
“Where you from?” “London.”
“Wanna play a hand for me? Can’t do any worse than I’m doing. My ass is being beaten all over the planet by people I don’t even know.”
“Sorry. Not today.” Isabella smiled sympathetically. “Gotta ask my dad if he killed my mum.”
The woman nodded slowly. “Yeah, well, I need a fried chicken cool-me-down.” She swiveled her chair around and looked directly at Isabella, taking a slow toke on her inhaler as if it were the last cigar before the shootout. “My advice: gets to the river and looks like there’s some shit might be going on, then walk away. Walk right away. First lesson of life: walk away.” And with that she stood up, put on a huge pair of sunglasses, and walked away.
Isabella’s in box asked her if she needed a bigger dick and then offered her a loan to finance it.
All day she had sat through meeting after meeting, frustrated, irritated, exasperated, and finally bored beyond the realization of boredom. There was nothing quite so depressing, she had thought, as the slow November darkening of the stale-aired office afternoon.
Media Therapy had been attempting to seduce new clients, and the achingly pedestrian attempts of the men from the client firm to show off were matched only by the tedious duplicity of Marissa and Jo (her immediate boss and junior, respectively) in hoping to be desired. And then, of course, when eventually the men finally read the signals and began to come on to them a little, Isabella had been forced to suffer her colleagues’ restroom pretense of being insulted and outraged, when in fact they were—Marissa and Jo both—very obviously brimming with satisfaction, affirmation, whatever it was they needed from men. Finally, at seven, concealing her indifference behind an expression of concern, she had closed the door behind her and taken the offered chair for the long-awaited one-to-one (conducted nonetheless for his part in the first-person plural, she noticed) with the head of the department, Timothy Robe—straight blond hair, expensive open-necked shirt, the smug manner of an exclusive tennis coach, ex-professional, ladies a specialty.