Darcy stared straight ahead, concentrating on the white line, the electric touch of the missionary’s leg.
I met your wife, said the missionary. She didn’t seem well.
That’s none of your business, said Darcy’s father, his change of tone sudden. Darcy eased his knee away.
The missionary turned the cap in his hands. I was on my way to see her now, he said.
Darcy’s father stopped the van, leaned over past Darcy and opened the passenger door. I can take care of my family, he said.
The missionary seemed shocked, stepping down to the roadside, mumbling something about trying to help.
Then keep away from my boy, said Darcy’s father. He jumped the kombi forward before the door was barely closed. Darcy didn’t dare watch out the side mirror to see the missionary getting smaller in the dust. He probably just wanted dinner, said Darcy.
His father pulled into the driveway and parked. I think I know what he wanted, he said. He got out and slammed the door and Darcy sat there, still as the sun through the windscreen, to see if the missionary would still walk past the end of the drive. Instead, he saw his father with a stick. With it, he propped open the bonnet of the Austin and unhitched the battery, removed the stick and let the bonnet crash down. He threw the battery in the incinerator. He’d taken out the Austin’s heart.
Mount Eliza
Autumn 1972
Fin had arrived and was already gone.
Darcy pedalled his bike along the dark gravel roadside, hiding in trees from the headlights. His breath loud in his head as he wended down the Humphries Road elbow. He knew where Toorak College was, closer to the beach on Old Mornington Road. The bike had been brought home by his father so Darcy wouldn’t drive. His father who’d slipped away for cigarettes, which meant he was visiting one of his girls; his mother already too drunk to notice Darcy gone.
He planted his bike in the bushes and clambered through a gap in the woven-wire fence. Anyone could have climbed through. He had a photo of himself in a Fair Isle cardigan, his hair swooped low over his forehead. He wanted her to have it, for her to understand he hadn’t wanted her to go.
The boarding house was just a long corrugated bungalow painted green, down among the acacias. Fin, he whispered through the open window.
He heard the rustle of girls, a cough of disapproval and then giggling. Country girls from sheep and cattle properties, more titillated than afraid. As he crawled in, one shone a torch in his face. What have we here? she said.
All Darcy saw were green mosquito nets, girls pulling up their sheets. They sat up in their beds and whispered. Where’s Fin? he asked.
America. It’s for you.
Inside, Darcy walked between the narrow cots to find her. The bed without the net. She stared up at him with her pale green eyes as he held the photo he wished he hadn’t brought. He put it down beside her, along with a jar of barley sugar.
Fin sat up in her nightie, her thin arms still tanned from a faraway sun, her hair matted and long, the colour of white sand. She searched Darcy’s face as he sat on the edge of her blanket. What are you doing? she asked. She looked at him like he was the one who needed care.
I came to see you, he said.
She sat up and kissed him on the forehead like a parent might. She smelled musty and sweet, just as he remembered. To him it was the scent of California. She told him she had been glad to get away. And somehow he knew she was the lucky one. Then she looked at the photo in the dark.
You look like a girl, she whispered.
Darcy nodded. He lay on the floor by her bed and slept there, dreamed he was kneeling among the Indians, beseeching at the missionary’s feet, the missionary in a white robe standing up on the rock where Jesus stood, speaking his soft American, teaching of his return.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Tuesday morning
Darcy sat half-asleep at Fin’s laminated counter. He ate a version of All-Bran bathed in milk that tasted vaguely of tin. He looked out the window, the morning cold but crystalline. Fin in her bedroom doorway slipping on sheepskin gloves, heading out already. I need to get to the embassy, he said.
I’ll take care of your passport, she said. She grabbed a scarf from a coat hook without noticing the dog lead dangling down the wall. You stay home and paint.
Darcy drank down the remains from the bowl and stood. He didn’t see how they’d issue new papers to her, or how she could charm his passport back from the railway station without him, but she was snatching her patchwork coat and fur hat. Remember to lock yourself in, she said.
I’m coming with you, said Darcy. He rugged himself up with his own scarf and gloves, reached for his fleecy-lined oilskin coat, but by the time he had pulled the door closed behind him there was no sign of her. He ran down the stairs and out through the main glass entrance, caught sight of her in the ice-covered street getting into a small battered car. It was driven away by a man Darcy couldn’t quite see, a man who must have been waiting.
Darcy forged through the whistling cold to the corner in hopes of a cab, fumbling for his foldout map in his ski gloves. He knew the embassy was across the river so he walked in that direction. At the lights he waited beside a man with a greatcoat draped over his shoulders, European-style, then he recognised the black roping eyebrows and golden skin, the man from the Bolshoi, his caramel hair now covered by a brown fur hat. He heard Fin’s warning—There’s no such thing as coincidence here—but he was already imagining the possibilities. A choreographer, perhaps, or a poet from the Caucasus, a diplomat from Portugal. Darcy put the map away, didn’t want to appear like a tourist, and the man acknowledged him, as if he recognised Darcy too.
Darcy entered the park, the same one as yesterday, and when his friend followed without even hesitating Darcy felt a pang in his underarms. They threaded each side of a young woman who pushed a primitive baby carriage with a fogged-up plastic cover. His suitor stopped, kneeled to coo to the baby, but looked up at Darcy, the smile for the baby still on his face. Darcy divined being escorted to some embassy, drinks on a heated terrace overlooking the Arbat, introduced to local envoys. Perhaps he’d get his passport that way. He waited at a railing, trying to keep his senses, watched the cold light play where the pond was frozen. He knew this was a country where they tortured men for being with men, the warning in Spartacus was clear: Severe penalties under Soviet laws.
He focused on the end of the pond where it had thawed to a tinged green, a spurt bubbling up from a pipe, but in Darcy’s side view the man stood a few metres away, watching him almost blatantly, fingers still clasping the edges of his coat.
Darcy looked away at a pair of ducks floating motionless in the reeds. At first Darcy thought they were decoys—the ducks should have flown south by now—but then he realised they were real, hovering near a pipe that spurted steaming water. Darcy turned slowly; he couldn’t help himself. And the man was smiling almost cheekily, his teeth too white to be from here, a small scar that broke the line of his right eyebrow saving his face from being too perfect. I saw you at the Bolshoi, ventured Darcy.
The man made a little gesture with his brown eyes as though such things were not unexpected. He seemed to understand. Faint smudges shadowed below his eyes as if he hadn’t slept, a shadow of moustache above his untasted lips, his sideburns shaped and closeshaven. He didn’t look Russian. Are you a dancer? asked Darcy.
I was once a dancer, the man said. A curiously accented English.
And now?
Now I look at you, he said. He allowed a disarming, pursed smile. Darcy thought of the uniformed boy in the railway station in Prague, the searching, desperate eyes, his cap on the cistern and how he made him feel; he thought of the man from yesterday, not far from this same place. But there was nothing afraid or desperate about the one who stood before him now. This was something different.