‘He not coming,’ said Vasya, unexpectedly reaching out to touch Dmitri’s hand.
‘Then we will return tomorrow,’ declared Dmitri, clutching the bottle, somehow finding his feet. ‘And tomorrow after tomorrow after tomorrow until we meet great man.’ He swayed towards the lake, caught himself then announced, ‘But first we toast.’
As I poured out the last of the champagne, he embarked on a convoluted tribute to Gorbachev. He took so long about it that my arm grew tired. A wave lifted itself from the placid water to rock the sailing boats moored along the shore. Their rigging chimed like St Basil’s bells and an evening breeze stirred the purple bougainvillea. The corgi peed on my shoe. I looked at my watch. I didn’t understand a single slurred word.
After he finished and we’d drunk to whatever, Vasya picked up the corgi.
‘I forgot to ask, what’s the dog’s name?’ I said.
‘Winston,’ replied Dmitri.
‘Winston?’ I repeated in incredulity.
‘Like your dead prime minister,’ he explained, rather unnecessarily.
Long ago I’d written about another Winston and the coincidence delighted me. When I explained he declared, ‘My friend, this calls for another toast!’
And so it was that beneath the night’s first stars, Dmitri Denisovich lifted his bottle for the last time and called out to anyone who would listen to him, ‘To all God’s creations, may they never die.’
On reflection I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation to spend the night in the spare bedroom. It wasn’t the promise of steam showers and crisp Egyptian cotton that seduced me, but rather my fascination with power. In the lap of luxury I lay in bed unable to sleep, and not because the filet mignon had been overcooked. I gazed out of the open French windows at the dark water ringed by a necklace of light, wondering about that inherently corrupting force.
Globalisation had empowered a new elite, leaving the rest behind. Eight billionaires now own the same wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people. Russia’s richest 10 per cent possess 87 per cent of the country. In the United States twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all the kindergarten teachers combined. By 2030 a top 1 per cent are predicted to have amassed two-thirds of global assets.
The unequal distribution of wealth has shaped our age. In many parts of the world, the have-nots’ bitterness – and racial resentment – has been channelled into a kind of class war. In voting for Donald Trump, Fidesz, Brexit and Alternative für Deutschland, millions of ordinary men and women believed – and believe – that they are taking on the establishment, that they can return to an imagined golden (white man’s) age. Once again, the truth is otherwise. The newly rich have simply tapped into public frustrations, masking their own ambition as a battle between the little guy and a corrupt elite. It is a power game, pure and simple, between new money and old. To both of them ‘the people’ will always be bydlo. The rabble. Pawns. Scum.
Whether or not Dmitri deserved his success, he was savvy enough not to squander his luck. He had the resources to ensure that – if civil disorder overwhelmed Europe, if Gieves & Hawkes was acquired by Primark – he’d be all right, Jack. He’d get out of town to look after Numero Uno (and their dog). He’d neither take responsibility for society’s future nor search for solutions to inequality. Instead he’d fortify himself against his fears.
When I finally fell asleep I dreamed that dozens of rats were nesting in my bed, curled around each other in a tight ball at my feet. I kicked them away, shearing off their moulting coats, streaking grey and black hair across the sheets.
In the morning I didn’t join Dmitri at the park bench. I had a last flight to catch and two final meetings to make. Later I heard that he never met Gorbachev. He never received the old man’s blessing. Nor did he assuage his deep anger at those whom he suspected of looking down at him. Soon afterwards he and Vasya moved to the southern hemisphere to breed sheep, watch movies and await doomsday. As far as I know neither man ever returned to Europe.
BRITAIN
35
Jolly Ol’ England
When I arrived in England his letter was waiting for me. I caught a train north from Euston and changed at Preston. Six out of the ten poorest areas in northern Europe are in the UK and his Lancashire market town is in one of them.
Its muddled high street was drowning under a fury of rain. Late-evening shoppers huddled in a bus shelter outside the sham Gothic town hall. Pale boys in soaked hoodies slinked by the grim black rectangle of a closed factory. A hard-eyed woman gazed at a glossy mobile phone window display. I splashed past boarded-up stores, payday lenders and Poundland. Once this mill town had helped to clothe the world, now it boasted the most charity shops in the county.
I found the Blue Nile in a redbrick cul-de-sac behind Gala Bingo.
‘In Calais me and two brothers cut the wires on the hatch when the driver went for a piss,’ said Sami, as lean and lithe as ever, his dark brown eyes gleaming again in his slender face. ‘We climbed out of the cold and into the warm chocolate. It felt good at first. We was holding onto the rim of the hatch with one hand and the other on the next man’s shoulder. But we couldn’t touch the bottom. If we lost our grip we’d go under. We panicked when the tanker started to move.’
A young couple stepped out of the rain and Sami paused in his telling to take their order, limping between counter and fryer, wrapping their chicken and doner specials in waxy white paper. I leaned back into the plastic chair to watch, touched once again by his wounded-animal walk.
‘Like I said, we started to panic,’ Sami went on after the door had closed behind them. At the corner table a crop-haired drunk dozed over his half-eaten kebab. ‘But like always I didn’t give up. When things got hard, when my knees started to buckle, I kept going, kept moving my legs so as to not get totally sucked under.’ To reach England he’d almost drowned in a tanker of molten chocolate while waiting to board the ferry. ‘Man, it was only twenty minutes till the tanker stopped but I was so near the end. We stayed cool for as long as we could, stayed cool then pushed ourselves out, one by one, pulling against the chocolate. It was sticking like glue. It kept sucking us back down. But we got out, thank God, and we was on the ferry and the ferry was going. We’d made it.’
At Dover, Sami had stowed himself in the luggage hold of a London-bound coach. He’d walked from Victoria to his uncle’s address in New Cross and slept for three days straight. At the asylum screening unit in Croydon he’d applied to be recognised as a refugee. He wanted to continue his studies, he’d said. He still hoped to become a bookkeeper. The caseworker told him no, he could not work. He had to get by on £37.75 a week. The application process would take at least six months. Sami spent the first payment on a last-minute ticket for Thriller Live in the West End. He rode the 273 bus from Lewisham to Foxbury Manor, the Chislehurst mansion where Michael Jackson had planned to live until his sudden death. Then he went north.
‘So here I am. Here I am.’
The takeaway’s door opened again, and again. It was pub closing time and the pre-midnight rush. His manager Nigel – a sour Mayfield School dropout – sauntered in from the Britannia and turned up the deep-fat fryers. Sami stood at the vertical grill, scorching the rotating kebab cone, shearing off thin slivers of meat. He knifed open toasted flatbreads and filled them with greasy lamb shavings and sliced tomato. Most nights the queue of customers stretched out onto New Cheap Street.
In the doorway three lads in their late teens clutched tins of Carlsberg Extra, chasing every other mouthful with swigs of vodka, a potent mix judging from their eagerness to chat. They were apprentices, they told me, but not for long.