When he turned back, her hand was on him, her eyes bewitching him. And his kiss was chaste as pure intention.
21
The Bastard of Everything
The crane outside the window had begun to sink into the mud below, or rather had begun to subside, so that the long skeleton finger no longer reached true to heaven but listed dangerously toward their tower block as if enacting some strange and terrible slow-motion death strike.
Everything was sinking.
Everything was always sinking.
Back into the Neva. Back into the sea. The people, the city, St. Petersburg itself, forever sinking. And Henry’s guilt was as raw and saturating as the sewage marsh into which everything sank.
In those few moments back from the football—that gaping and ragged hole in the wall, the taste of grime on his lips as he opened the front door, the corridor strewn with masonry and rubble, his bedroom trampled and destroyed, his money stolen, the semidarkness as he entered their main room, the smell of sawn wood, his eyes adjusting, the piano vanished, Arkady on his knees—in those few moments, Henry had known that he must give everything he had left to his friend. Complete divestiture. Because that heap of jagged shards and the Russian’s ghostly face were the last scene of his life in its current incarnation. Nothing worse could happen. It was over. Something else must now begin.
Though he continued to lean against the wall and look out at the docks and the sea beyond, there was therefore urgency in his voice as he addressed his flatmate: “How will we know if the passport and the visa look real enough?”
Arkady lay on the sofa, half dressed in jeans and open shirt. “We won’t,” he said.
“Can we order a passport without specifying where we want the visa for?”
“It does not work like that. It is not a pizza.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Anyway, forget Paris. The bitch divorced him. He divorced the bitch.”
“Not necessarily.”
Aware that it was pointless to do so, Henry had found himself repeatedly pushing Paris as Arkady’s putative destination. Partly because that was the only sure address they had been able to Google immediately—through an expatriate bridge club. Partly because any conversation with Arkady was better than the ever-expanding silence, whatever the price. And partly for mortal fear that the Russian’s resolve would slump, that somehow there would be born between them some whelpish failure of nerve.
“Not necessarily.” Henry turned. “And you know, it might be easier to get into France for… for a Russian.”
“She lived here.” Arkady began to button his shirt. “He lives there.”
“We don’t know why they split. We mustn’t judge. There are—”
“Divorced. Separate. Different lives. They don’t f—”
“Actually, many people who are divorced remain in amicable contact with each other.” Through the crack in Arkady’s bedroom door, Henry caught sight of the woman moving inside. Suntanned legs. Dark pubic hair. He looked away and began walking in irregular circles around the sofa, stepping carefully over the fallen disks. “You don’t know, Arkady. And we have to try everything.”
“He is not my father. I am his wife’s virgin-fuck child. He gets a letter from me. He does not even wipe shit with it. Why would he care?”
“There are a million good… good people out there.” Henry stopped and retraced his steps around the back of the sofa, wanting to stay out of Arkady’s line of sight. Somehow, with the centripetal pull of the piano gone, the room felt hollow. And even as he continued to speak, he could hear the priggishness of his old self recolonizing his voice. Pompous Henry, prudish Henry, prim Henry—these old Henrys, they were all openly pursuing him now. He began again. “We can at least try a letter.”
“I think he does not know I exist.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We don’t know anything.”
“We do.” Henry could smell her cigarette.
“And if he does know that I exist, he does not want to know it.” Arkady’s voice became pure cynicism. “‘Hello, Mr. Glover—I am the bastard you do not know, the bastard of your wife, the bastard of everything. Very nice to meet you, sir. Now, please, I want money. Immediately.’”
Arkady adjusted the buckle of his belt.
Henry forced himself forward and approached the window again. He wiped three fingers through the film of wood powder and grime to make a new square to see through. The sea was covered in something not quite fog, not exactly smog, just a nameless haze that would soon itself be smothered by night. Thirteen stories below, he could see the drunks and the vagrants hunkered around their afternoon fire. They were still burning the larger splinters of the piano. Black smoke rose.
On the day after their break-in, and after nearly six hours of passport verification and bureaucracy, Henry discovered that he had just over nine hundred pounds left in his English bank account. Shocked to his core (and frightened now), he had that same night given Grisha everything he owed. Grisha had taken the money with a cheery leer that all but celebrated culpability. And immediately advanced him more. Henry took the extra, paying for it there and then, peeling off the thinning notes.
Henry’s new and panic-stricken plan was to buy passport and tickets for Arkady as soon as possible, to give everything he had left, to see his friend gone, and then… to quit. He had therefore accepted enough heroin for another twenty-five days (longer if he rationed it), because he knew that he needed sufficient to see the Russian well on his way. Without a good stash, he was certain that he would enter the scoring trance, he’d be crazy again, and he would not be able to trust himself to stick to this plan. No chance. He absolutely required the security of having lots of the drug to help him get off the drug later. He must take the drug to quit the drug.
After he had left Grisha, Henry had gone straight back to Vasilevsky to wait for Arkady to return from Maria Glover’s apartment. But Arkady had not come home. So the following day, the Friday, Henry had spent a windy afternoon staking out the canal while the clouds raced overhead. But he had seen nobody come and nobody go.
On the Saturday he had at last tracked down Zoya and paid her for her Maria Glover “file”—an utter waste of time and money. Stuff on orphanages, pages and pages of notes, times and dates of searches, bribes dispensed, a list of children called Arkady at Veteranov, and almost nothing on Maria Glover’s ersatz English family save for half a page in Zoya’s bad Russian scribble confirming what Henry already knew from his own conversation with Maria Glover: names, no addresses.
Arkady eventually showed up on the Sunday but did not utter a single word. So Henry, biding his time, retreated to his room and counted out his remaining funds. The Zoya file and his angel both paid for, he had less than two hundred pounds left. He realized he would have to borrow to secure the passport and visa. But so be it, he thought. This is where his long flight had led him. In his right mind or not (he did not care), Arkady was his vocation, and it now no longer mattered how that vocation had begun, whether the vocation was real or imagined, or what purpose the vocation had beyond itself. If this duty hastened him to zero, all the better. He would meet himself there afterward, when Arkady was on his way. He would meet himself there and try his mettle in that clear and empty ring. So be it. But momentum was all. For both of them. Momentum. Keep going.
He left his peephole at the window and set off on his circling of the room again. The tight dance of love and guilt.
“In my experience,” Henry said, “children often become very curious about their parents after they die. It is part of their grief. Shock, denial, anger, guilt, anxiety, depression. And curiosity. If not—”