I wasn’t trying to be clever when I told Stepanych that I didn’t want to go to Piter—it’s terrifying and dangerous, though to some degree there was a plus-side as welclass="underline" Yura. Yura was wearing a suit now, and it looked like an expensive one (he didn’t sit down, but waited for me standing), but there was a time when he wore ripped jeans—it was his style, to get out of his father’s car wearing ripped jeans. (The ripped jeans weren’t the style, they were simply ripped jeans.) I was waiting for the wonder of recognition—the same whimper and joy with which my heart greeted the Rumyantsev Garden with its gloomy, forgotten column and empty summer stage, and the littered backyards of the academy, and the view of the shipyards: a flock of steel-blue birds which had alighted on some carrion—but no, Yura was simply a benevolent operator, and it’s frightening to share memories with people like that. I gave him the photographs and envelope. As we were getting ready to part, I told him “Thank you,” and he said, “I haven’t done anything yet,” but I thought that there was something to be grateful for—the fact that he didn’t stop to see if it was all there. Yura left; I was still sitting on the bench, smoking. A cold wind was blowing, the sky was clear, like porcelain. Given the chance, I would have burst into tears at the impossibility of dissolving without a trace in the icy, still transparency of Petersburg.
Stepanych called me precisely at that moment.
“Listen, Stepanych, you told me yourself to sit on my ass quietly and not show myself. To let you know if they start following me. And now you ask me what I’m doing? I’m sitting quietly on my butt.”
He burst out laughing. “You’re a chip off the old block. He’d lie there with his legs raised for several months too, and then he’d move like a whirlwind, you couldn’t keep up with him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Excuse me. I liked your dad a lot… Well, if something comes up, call me.”
I hadn’t been gone for long—I went out to buy some oranges and a fresh baguette—but when I returned my bed was made and the glass had been washed. It was disgustingly quiet in the apartment, and to keep from hearing this silence (it’s funny, but Stepanych was absolutely right: the main thing for me now was to wait for the call from the guy in the Lexus—I didn’t doubt for a moment that he would shrug off my warnings), I went to bed. On the pillow next to me lay several of her hairs, I gave them a good sniff and it seemed that maybe, just maybe, the pillow really did still carry the sweet secret of Isolde’s scent.
I hung out at Toasted every night (even Miss Piercing stopped turning her nose up at me), so it’s quite possible that certain events got shuffled around in my memory, either on that same day, or altogether: that night I woke up with the sense that I wasn’t completely awake and made my way to the club as though I were in some sort of milky fog (while I was sleeping, the wind pounded the rain, and once again it was drizzling), and what’s more, while I was walking I even glanced a few times at my palms, to make certain that I wasn’t walking in my sleep— somebody had told me that you can’t look at your own palms in a dream. It was probably that night, just after I’d taken a seat at the bar and stuck my finger in the bottle, when her voice announced from the stage that among us there was a private detective and that she was dedicating her performance to him—and after that she sang for an entire hour “Sway,” “Put the Blame on Mame,” “Amado mio,” and for some reason “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas.” I was intimately familiar with all of them—down to the last note. That evening or some time later she sang “the Buddhist song about the right way to die” again—I’m not sure when. In any case, it was definitely one of those evenings, because I wouldn’t have remembered it from hearing it the first time.
Occasionally she would come down from the stage and sit with me, but we didn’t drink as much as we had that first night—not that night, or later on. All the more so as that night I ended up getting my call, I went outside to talk (the guy was mumbling with exaggerated bravado; I understood at once that everything had come together, and without even thinking I set up another meeting in the Rumyantsev Garden), and after that I never went back to the club; as I was saying goodbye to the “financial analyst,” I noticed the bald old woman on the other side of the street.
At first I automatically took several steps in her direction, but then I lost sight of her for a moment. When she appeared again, I began to catch up with her—I needed to get a look at her face, but I felt a bit awkward: maybe it wasn’t the woman. I walked for a fairly long time; the opportunity to get a casual look didn’t present itself—she wasn’t hiding her face, it simply didn’t work out. In the end, she disappeared, she suddenly dove into a gate or a door; after taking a look around, I heaved a deep sigh as I straightened myself: I could just make out the archway of New Holland in the violet darkness.
As I was crossing back across the bridge (maybe I had sobered up, or maybe it was on account of the old woman—in any case, I was in a real shitty mood) it occurred to me that New Holland and the Rumyantsev Garden could be (or to be more exact: had always been) the heads of two screws with which my Petersburg had been joined to nonexistence, to the Neva. New Holland—empty, overgrown, almost in ruins, with its cyclopean triumphal arch—it might be that it was the only thing left of imperial, Rome-like Petersburg, and it would only take a greedy bat with his shitty investments to get to it to build some disgusting Hamburger Bahnhof for the whole city, with a gnashing sound, to become set loose from this swamp and, listing to one side, take on water, and float out into the open sea.
Later Nadya laughed, as if to say, Do you always give a girl the keys to your apartment right away instead of giving her your telephone number? I said I only did it when the girl knew the right way to die, but the compliment seemed to fall flat. That was the next day, when I photographed her. After the meeting in the Rumyantsev Garden, which I observed from the kitchen window, I understood that I needed photographs of her. A black BMW with tinted windows pulled up, the pale financial analyst got out from the backseat. At first he walked around the column, then he started to phone (the phone on my table blinked silently). After twenty-five minutes he glanced in the direction of the car, nodded, and slowly walked back, but just a few steps away from the vehicle he jumped up and took off running in the direction of Repin Street. The car doors slammed shut twice, the guy made an angry gesture with his fist, and as he flew down the street, he came crashing down headfirst on the curb. The Beemer pushed off with a quiet swoosh.
I photographed Nadya first in the club—on the stage, at the bar, and she came out dark on a dark background, the thing wasn’t cooperating (I hadn’t bothered to read the instructions)—and then later in my apartment; there I managed to get her unawares in the bathroom flooded with halogen light on the background of ceramic tiles as white as teeth—just the thing. She slammed the door shut with a crash, and I chose the shot in which she had just turned around and hadn’t had time to open her mouth— and I dialed Yura’s number. First I dictated the license plate number of the Beemer, and then I asked how the document was coming.
“It’ll be taken care of tomorrow, why?”
“I need another one.”
“What the fuck! Do you want to be Sovereign of the Seas as well?