Damn them all. I push the letter aside. What did they expect? At least I can be proud that I resisted their pressure to change into someone I am not.
I have to get out of the house. I pick up my stick and set off down the Romford Road. It is a typical English June day, blustery, the sky weighted with grey clouds. It starts to rain. Women huddle under bus shelters, adjusting their hijabs.
My sore kidneys twinge and the filthy air makes me wheeze more than usual. In the far distance seagulls wheel over the Barking dump, reminding me of my far-off days on The Wave.
As I pass a kebab shop I catch the eye of an acquaintance through the window. He rushes to the door:
“Vanya! Where are you going?”
“Hello Grisha. For a walk.”
He falls in beside me. Grisha arrived a couple of years ago with his family. He usually takes great care of his appearance but this morning he is unshaven and his clothes are crumpled.
“I’ve left home. To teach them a lesson. My wife and her mother ganged up on me again. All I wanted was a Mercedes, for God’s sake. I’m a man, aren’t I? I can get credit but they said we couldn’t afford it. I know my mother-in-law wants to humiliate me. She doesn’t respect me.”
Neither do I. But I like Grisha’s mother-in-law and by giving Grisha a place to stay for a while I’ll be lifting a burden from his family’s shoulders. Besides, for once I feel like some company.
“Grisha, let things calm down. You can sleep on my sofa.”
“Vanya, you’ve saved my life,” he claps me on the shoulder.
We pass a supermarket. To cheer him up I suggest: “How about a bottle?”
The next few days are a blur. I wake up at the foot of my stairs with my pockets empty and my walking stick broken. My bones ache as though I’ve been beaten by a whole station of policemen. Grabbing the banisters, I haul myself up to my room. After swallowing the pain-killers my doctor gave me, I lie down.
The horror approaches. I stare into it like a rabbit transfixed before a cobra. I have to act while I can still think.
I call a friend, a young girl from Rostov. “Irina, I’m going to die tonight for sure. Call a taxi and take me to hospital.”
“Ivan Andreyevich, you know the hospital won’t admit you again.”
“Excuse me for troubling you.”
I put the phone down just in time. The mouthpiece has started to crackle with sounds I identify as Voice of America.
Irina is right. Since being in this country I’ve dried out in hospital four times. The detox clinic won’t take me again either. Not that they’re much use. They insisted on talking about my past, how I related to my father and other nonsense. They expected me to bare my soul to some young whelp with no knowledge of life. I begged them to give me injections, to knock me out while I got over the worst of the dt’s. Surely the West must have discovered a cure for alcoholism; it is impossible they don’t have that drug in their arsenal. But they refused me. They probably thought I was a drug addict to boot. So I drank all the mouthwash I’d brought with me and that wasn’t enough. I managed to get to a phone and call Grisha, who brought in a hot-water bottle full of vodka. Somehow the doctors found out I’d had a drink and ordered me to leave. I lost my temper and raged at them but they would not relent.
Hours pass and with every minute I feel more scared. If only I can ride this one out I’ll stop drinking for a while and then keep things under control like I managed to in Georgia. The TV flickers. Silent cues shoot coloured balls across the screen. They are not enough to distract me. Rain patters on my window. The street lamp outside my room casts a yellow pool onto the wet pavement. Tiny devils frolic in the gutter. If I drop my guard they’ll climb up the drainpipe and slip in under the window frame.
I close my eyes and wait for night. Alarms wail in the distance. Cement mixers roar up and down the road. A sharp pain jabs through my leg; I sit up in time to see a devil running across the floor, squealing and brandishing his fork. I yell and Grisha hurries out of the kitchen with a bottle in his hand. Cradling my head in his arm, he wedges a pen between my teeth, unscrews the bottle cap and puts the neck to my lips.
Afterword
Ivan’s funeral is held at a North London crematorium. His friends want a Russian Orthodox priest to officiate, but none can be found. In the end a Greek priest comes from Kentish Town. Sunlight streams through the windows, illuminating the blue and gold of the priest’s robes. Incense burns. We hold candles while St John of Damascus is read. In turn we step up to speak. One woman, Elena, can hardly force words out through her tears: “Why did such a lovely, generous man have to suffer so cruelly?”
When Father Constantine hears Ivan’s story he returns his fee.
Forty days after Ivan’s death Elena invites me to his pominki — his wake — in a flat on the North Peckham Estate.
I take the bus from Elephant and Castle to Camberwell Green, and then walk through back streets, past posters of the missing and the wanted.
Elena lives in a low-rise seventies building. She buzzes me in through metal security gates at ground level and again on her walkway. My path is blocked by a track-suited woman leaning over the railing: “They throw their chicken bones over the balcony,” she yells at someone on the ground: “I’ve told the council but they do fuck all. They want evidence. I’ll show them fucking evidence…” I squeeze past her backside to reach Elena’s door.
She leads me into a room full of books and plants. A table is piled with salads in cut glass bowls. Solemn guests are seated around it. I recognise them from the funeral –Tatiana, Irina, Slava, Andrei, Vadim — young Russians whom Ivan did his best to help.
A teenage boy lumbers in. Elena introduces him as her son. He sports a black eye. He says he got beaten up at school for being Russian. “And they murdered a black kid, Damilola Taylor.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“Everyone knows who did it; the police know, but they haven’t got evidence. The killers walk around like kings.”
I wonder if this place is really worth leaving Russia for.
Ivan’s photo sits on the mantelpiece. I recognise it as one I took on the day we visited his beloved Cutty Sark together. The finest ship ever built, he said.
“He was extraordinarily handsome as a young man,” sighs Elena, “he showed me a photo once.”
“I keep thinking I see Ivan in the street, out of the corner of my eye,” says Irina.
“It happens to me too,” I say. I catch myself peering hopefully at short, grey-haired men with walking sticks.
“He was so kind,” Elena wipes away a tear, “like a grandfather to my boy.”
“To Ivan,” Slava proposes. We raise our glasses.
Mine contains water. Alcohol no longer has the desired effect and I know it never will again.
Slava sits opposite me. I marvel as he drinks his wine then refills his glass with orange juice.
A debate starts over Ivan’s ashes. The women say they should go to his sister in Chapaevsk so that they can be placed beside those of his parents and brother; the men say he would have wanted them scattered over the sea. The women win.
“Are you going back to North London?” asks Vadim, a serious young man in glasses and a grey suit who works in software design. “I’ll walk with you to the bus.”
It is dark now and I am glad to have a companion. We set off through the estate to Camberwell Road. On the way Vadim explains that he comes from Moscow. He is in the UK on a work visa. He lives in the London suburbs — zone six. A world away from Ivan.