This time it was Isabella who came straight to it. “How did you know my mother?”
“I met her.”
“You met her.”
He sat forward. His voice dropped. “Yes. We met. A woman introduced us.”
“Who—I mean, what was her name? Was she one of my mother’s friends?”
“I don’t remember her name. Zoya, I think. She was a detective.”
“A detective?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean—why did a detective introduce you?” She searched his impassive face. “Was my mother in some kind of trouble? Was my mother involved in something?”
“I don’t know. Your mother—she hired a detective to find me.”
“To find you?”
“Yes.”
This time she was prepared to outwait him. She noticed his hands on his cup—big hands, nails pared right back. Even the cuffs of his sleeves were frayed.
He set his mug down by their untouched milk. “Your mother—did she ever say anything to you about her family?”
“What do you mean?”
Now he waited for her.
So she continued. “You mean, did my mother talk about her mother or her sisters? Her extended family? No, she didn’t say much about them. Why? I never met them.”
“I do not mean this. No.”
“Do you know something about my mother’s family?”
“Did she ever say to you anything about her life before she left Russia?”
“Yes. Sometimes she did.”
“About… about having a son?”
“No.” And now it gripped her, shook her, plunged her—that strange and sudden emotional vertigo of physically knowing what someone was going to say without her mind’s acknowledging that she knew.
“Did my mother have a son?” She was leaning forward, her voice as quiet as snow.
“Yes.”
“How do you know? I mean, do you know him? When did she tell you this? When was—”
“I am her son.”
She could not speak. She could only stare. She believed him utterly. Her mother’s eyes.
A moment of absence. From all that had gone before and all that was to come.
He spoke again. “I am her son. I am your mother’s only son.”
And then the world, her contexts, everything rushing back into the edges of the vacuum. “No… God, no. I mean, I… What you are saying cannot be true, Arkady. My God. It’s just that my mother… it’s just that I have…” She could not say “another brother.” “It’s just that my mother has another son—my brother, Gabriel. Of course you know that, you were there at his—”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Gabriel is not her blood son. And you, you are not her daughter.” His face was as full of meaning as any she had ever seen. “She is your mother, of course. That is true. I do not change this. Nothing changes this. But she is not your mother from your birth. This is also true. I am her son by blood.”
She was shaking her head, but no words were coming out.
“Here. I have a letter. You must read.” He began to unstrap his pack.
Everything around her seemed to warp and swarm—the last of the vacuum vanishing too quickly, the wide world’s daily normality layering itself upon her senses at the speed of light. People eating and drinking on a regular Friday night. Kentish Town, London. Date. Time. Place. Life itself unfolding, happening, every second, all around. And yes, just like when she had learned of her mother’s death: the strange inconsequentiality of the general moment when for the individual the moment’s consequence is everything, her whole life. And this is how news comes. A before, when you don’t know. An after, when you do. A moment’s glimpse of real life naked between its disguises. And stupid stupid stupid to look for it on the tops of yogic mountains or on your knees in the church or mosque or temple or staring at the setting sun, feet in the sand. When here it is all around you—in every view, in every instant.
He handed her the letter and said, “Maybe your father knows some of this.”
47
A Letter from the Dead
Dear Mr. Gabriel Glover, Ms. Isabella Glover,
If you are reading this letter, then my friend Arkady Alexandrovitch has given it to you. So I’m glad that he found you and I’m glad that he’s made it this far. It’s been quite a struggle! My name is Henry Wheyland. I live here in St. Petersburg. I am Arkady’s flatmate.
Before I go any further, I wish to convey my condolences. I lost my own mother some years ago, and I know that there is nothing anybody can say that makes the sorrow any less. You have my deepest sympathies.
I hope I can persuade you to believe that what follows is the truth as far as we know! What you choose to do or not do is, of course, up to you. I know Arkady well enough to be sure that he is too proud to ask for or expect anything that you aren’t willing to give. I’m pretty sure he won’t even read this. He wanted to make contact—just to meet you. The rest is mine. Anything you find presumptuous or thoughtless, therefore, please blame me, not him.
You’ll also have to forgive the fact that we don’t know how much of this you know! If you are already aware of everything that follows, then you might have decided that this is a part of your mother’s life you want to have nothing to do with. In which case, I am genuinely sorry for having brought up what may well be painful. If, on the other hand, you are unaware, then all of this is going to be an awful lot to take in, and I’m sorry that it’s through me this information arrives! My defense is that at least Arkady himself is there and will vouch for my best intentions.
This, then, is what I know about Arkady. He was born here in Petersburg. He grew up in the Veteranov orphanage, where he excelled at the piano. In 1985 he was chosen to play for Gorbachev. He was supposed to go to the Petersburg Conservatory sometime around 1988 or ’89, but when the country collapsed his scholarship went the same way. I think he waited for a few more years in the hope that he would still get his place. He then spent five more unsuccessfully trying to raise the money himself by playing in bars and so on.
Sadly, Arkady met his mother, your mother, only once. And I’m afraid he reacted angrily to their meeting. She would have liked them to become friends but had no desire to force herself into his life. Instead she offered him any kind of help he wanted. He refused this. I don’t think the meeting between them went well, to be honest. He has never talked to me about it beyond the barest outlines.
I met your mother twice. (I knew her as Mrs. Maria Glover.) The first time, some days after she had found Arkady. And then again, a few weeks after he started his course at the conservatory, when she approached me to ask if it was possible to listen to her son play. On this second occasion I spent two or three hours with her at her flat on the Griboedova Canal. This was when she told me the story of her defection, her new family, as she called it—her marriage to your father and her adoption of both of you. I understood that she had lived in London for more or less all her life since leaving Russia and that she and your father had no other, natural children. This life, she said, became her whole life.
So in fact it was my idea to ask your mother to pay for the course to get Arkady back on the right track with his music. It’s a strange thing to understand at first, especially of an outsider like Arkady, but an integral part of Arkady’s ambition is graduating from the conservatory. I didn’t appreciate this for a while, but it’s to do with his institutionalism. As a Soviet orphan, he has total devotion to the institution, which, I suppose, has always been his home, his surrogate parents, if you like. In some way, he doesn’t feel real unless he has passed through the system fully, passed the exams and been sent out officially stamped into the world!