The sound of a siren at a crossing. The Albanian buying soup from the food-seller’s cart and, unhurried, sipping it direct from the bowl, his face rutted as a quarry. But for his fez, it could have been the face of an Australian farmer. A silver ring embedded on his swollen wedding finger. Darcy pictured a stark Albanian life, eking out an existence there, problems that seemed an epoch from his own.
The vendor pushed the trolley past with an expression that bore the blankness of obedience. Darcy’s underarms ached in the cold, his nerve endings raw. And this was supposed to be one of the mildest Soviet winters on record.
Fin had advised him to get out of Melbourne quietly and he’d left without telling a soul, not even his mother. That part was easy— he rarely told anyone much—but now the train guard, not the food-seller, observed him from between compartments, balancing where the carriages shifted on their couplings; the guard who still held Darcy’s passport because there’d been no transit stamp for Poland. Who knew Poland would appear in the night between Prague and Moscow? Fin had never mentioned this. It made him wonder if she knew what she was doing. Tell them you’re staying with me, she’d said, let them think I’m your girlfriend. They’d always been lovers of a kind, their spirit collusive, incestuous. The way she’d cleaved their family apart had somehow sewn the two of them inexorably closer. And still the train guard, unkempt and woolly in the fashion of Trotsky, stared.
Darcy breathed out a misty flute of air and stepped back inside the compartment. He prayed for Fin’s bright face at the station, enveloped in fur, her red karakul coat a flame in the crowd.
Mount Eliza
Autumn 1972
Darcy heard tyres on the gravel the afternoon Fin first arrived in Mount Eliza; a taxi edging up the drive. He watched through the sitting-room window, from between the high-backed chairs, as a girl emerged in an African print dress. Darcy recognised the woman she was with from photos—Aunt Merran, his mother’s younger sister, the one who’d gone back to live on the orange grove near Montecito, somewhere in California, where Darcy’s mother grew up.
Out on the drive, where the gumnuts fell on the gravel and you could smell the eucalyptus, Aunt Merran gave Darcy’s father a quick peck on the cheek, but his father didn’t move his face towards it. The girl observed Darcy in the window, a frozen moment, his feet stuck to the carpet. She looked like him, but her ears were pierced with glinting silver studs—like a gypsy, his mother would have said, but luckily she wasn’t home, just the girl presenting his father with a small wooden carving from the pocket of her dress. A gift received awkwardly, his father glancing back at the window, his free hand around the back of his neck as he saw Darcy watching, squinting through the glare.
Aunt Merran kissed the girl’s hair and jumped back in the taxi before his father could stop her. She waved through the back window as the girl stood stunned and then came to life, chasing the car to the gate. Darcy’s handsome flummoxed father hurried behind her as the taxi turned onto Baden Powell Drive. His father’s arm about the girl and then he was kneeling, consoling her, his big hands on her small shoulders like calipers, holding her there.
Aunt Merran’s taxi was gone, back to Humphries Road, towards Frankston and the suburbs, a knapsack left in the gravel like a small dead animal. While his father comforted the girl near the gate, Darcy crept out and collected it. The smell was stale and sweet. A pair of sandshoes, washed so the dust had yellowed them, a sweatshirt that had Banana Slugs written across it in yellow and a T-shirt that said Big Sur. In the front pocket was a blue American passport with an eagle in the coat of arms. Los Angeles Passport Agency and a photo of the girl with her hair loose. Finola Bright, the same last name as Darcy’s. Born 13 June 1960. A year before him. She was eleven and he was ten. He blinked to himself as the fact of it crystallised in him. Their mothers were sisters. Their father was the same.
As Darcy looked up, he saw the girl’s narrow shape at the end of the drive beside his crouching father. The sun was getting red as it lowered in the gum trees behind them. A secret had been delivered.
Moscow
Sunday evening
The platform of the Byelorussian Station was under a cavernous Quonset hut, bleak and foreign, not the elaborate halls Darcy’d seen in photos, no Stalin’s underground cathedrals. Standing on the cold train steps, waiting for his passport from the guard, he nervously scanned the sea of shapeless coats for Fin’s, anticipating her luminous face.
Fin’s hair had been redder than usual when he’d seen her last, but the only red here was in frosted banners that hung from the porticos, stiff in the breeze. People’s heads were well-covered, purple lips and pallid faces crowned in fur hats, enveloped by scarves and turned-up collars. It was colder than Prague, if that were possible. He’d read that if you cried in the streets in a Moscow winter your eyes might well freeze over. Where was she?
He put on his Ray-Bans to shield the sting and hitched his backpack over his arms; the money belt dug into his hip like an injury. The bearded train guard handed the Albanian a passport but offered Darcy nothing. With flat open gloves, Darcy gestured politely in the shape of a book. My passport? he asked. His was Australian for God’s sake, an innocuous country.
The guard just scowled, not understanding, then picked up Darcy’s duffel from the platform and hefted it. Special treatment, thought Darcy, unsure if he should be relieved. He pulled his woollen beanie down and followed, the glacial cement seeping through the soles of his Blundstones like chilblains, the air infected by a heavy smell of diesel and an icy staleness, distorted announcements screeching through loudspeakers. He rubbernecked for Fin as they shoved past a counter selling grease-papered sausages, lines of steaming people queuing for tickets to places whose names he couldn’t read, then the guard held open an iron door and motioned him inside. A sudden claustrophobic heat, an office with a sepia photo of Lenin hanging half in shadow, bearded chin jutting like a shovel. The guard dumped Darcy’s duffel on the floor and lazily saluted a puffy-necked inspector, handed Darcy’s passport over. The guard retreated out the door and Darcy glared after him, betrayed, folded his arms with mock impatience and searched for traces of Fin through the window.
The inspector, spit gleaming between his grey teeth, picked at the edge of the passport photo. Darcy’s hair cut shorter in the picture, still streaked back then, but his eyes were surely the same, keen and unmistakable, the feminine aspect to his features. He pulled his Ray-Bans off and met the guard’s expression as if unintimidated, a sinking awareness of how the photo was only glued on; typically Australian, he thought. An instinct to run welled up as the inspector read from a slip of morse-coded paper. Examining the photo, he sucked his teeth as if wondering what sort of creature would streak his sandy hair black. He looked up with bloodshot eyes and launched into a throaty lecture in what Darcy sensed was an attempt at French.
J’attends mon amie, Darcy interrupted, an attempt of his own, but he realised charm would get him nowhere. He pulled Fin’s address from his coat pocket and placed it on the desk. Dobrolyubova, 13-211 Ulitsa Kazakov, Moscow. The guard shaped the letters carefully, copying them onto the morse-coded paper, and Darcy felt the depth of his foreignness, the absence of language like dry ice sticking to his tongue.