Darcy stared back at the noticeboard to keep himself under control. Yes, he’d freaked, in a silence of his own that had lasted for years.
So what about you? she asked.
Not too much, he said. He’d painted and studied, read, won prizes at school, but mostly he’d been lonely; scrappy and dissatisfied. He rubbed his neck, aware of Fin watching, but he couldn’t pretend to feel breezy. So why did you come back? he asked.
To find you, she said, among other things.
Darcy felt like his clothes were too tight for how he was feeling. You could have sent a postcard. He could hear the hurt in his voice.
She swivelled her nose ring. I’m sorry, she said. I couldn’t risk it.
Risk what?
Family, she said, and they looked at themselves in each other’s eyes, but the time and distance had made Darcy feel more different, more left behind. His mother drinking herself into a deadening stupor, endless encounters at beats and then the parks along the Yarra, now here. How did you know I was here?
I phoned our father.
Our father who art in purgatory, said Darcy; he’d gone to live with Ranita, a woman he’d met on his egg run. How did you find him?
Through the egg farm. He told me you were majoring in art. Darcy was nodding at the faint freckles under her eyes, her bohemian perfume. His father whom he never visited.
Was Jostler with you in California?
She nodded. I studied Russian and psych at Berkeley, she said. Now I’ve transferred to this place. She looked about as if it were daunting but she didn’t look like she’d be daunted by much. And he’d imagined her up in Queensland all this time, never dreamed of her at Berkeley. He’d only been as far as New Guinea.
I’ve changed my last name to Dobrolyubova, she said. Finola Dobrolyubova. She seemed pleased with how it sounded. Dobrolyubov was a famous Russian social critic, she said.
Darcy watched the brightness of her new hair, the way she stood so easily in her tight black mini while the other Monash girls moved past in their three-quarter lengths, observing her.
I’m still Darcy Bright, he said.
Fin searched the noticeboard and smiled. Young? Communist? Or bisexual?
Darcy’s throat as dry as a branch. Mostly he felt unsure. Gay, he said. I’m gay.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Late Wednesday
Quietly Fin rested a large primed canvas on the easel, placed a concertina of faded tourist photos on the ledge. Without a word of goodnight she slipped off to bed, left him to it. On the duvetcovered couch, Darcy was smoking, staring out at the grey rectangle of well-stretched linen. The artist left to paint. He conjured the museum he’d viewed from Aurelio’s car—the snowbound spread of buildings and oversized fountains, Gothic and constructivist, the Monument to Space Flight sluicing the sky, and the way Aurelio’s arms had held him, the warm but slightly stale taste of him. Closing his eyes Darcy summoned bare-chested revolutionaries on dark Orlov horses galloping down through snow-covered trees and setting the museum on fire. An image seen clearly, but he knew he’d have to be more subtle.
He stood and brushed the canvas with his palms. Taut but soft, unspoiled, nice for drawing. He placed Fin’s gift of foldout photos of the museum on the end table. A sheet secured to the window now, tied to the hinges with shoelaces. He was alone. When the soul wants to manifest something, she throws an image out in front of herself and moves to catch it. He repeated it, tried to believe, imagined as he always did the rhythm of the arms of a juggler, the whoosh of the pins and the effortless reaching, the musicality of limbs. He imagined Aurelio dancing. Darcy rested his cigarette in Fin’s kabuki ashtray, lit one of her red candles.
He pulled her paintbox from behind the couch. Oils and acrylics mixed, a compartment of half-washed brushes, flat ferrule and oval shaped, the familiar smell of linseed. He sharpened a woodless carbon pencil. He figured if he drew in the candlelight, amid the smoke that wove from the ashtray, he might capture the movement of buildings, fake himself into feeling intuitive. Without a drink.
He pinned the concertina of images above the canvas, along the beam of the easel, eleven pictures, folding out one at a time. He recalled the sea of pavilions, acres of them jutting from the snow like mausoleums, the sharp silhouette of the obelisk. Aurelio and his private view as they sat in the Lada on the risen clearing, the reticent kiss, everyone’s signals confusing.
The carbon pencil ran well, gliding over the soft material. He swooped the lines of the shiny platinum form to the point where the gunmetal rocket would sit, a fin-shaped tower, bent and tapered. He drew with a juggler’s cadence, the meditative speed of the pins, his concentrated eyes. It summoned the memory of Laika, a televised image from childhood—the expression of the dog in the Soviet rocket, launched into a Soviet sky.
He took the polaroid of the whippet and copied the lines of its face, its narrow back and nervous haunches, forelegs perched on a nose cone and an expression of forlorn hope. He added the bulbous tourist bus from the fold-out card at the base of the monument, realistic enough but also oddly proportioned. Postbox red. A touch of Basquiat. He tried to keep the rhythm before it got discordant, the softness of the pencil in his fingers, but he thought about Fin and felt the river of movement fading; this painting her ruse.
Still he was in it, drawing pavilions small and fountains and obelisk big, both realist and abstract, less concerned with perspectives and angles, knowing if he stopped he might never finish and that if he drew all night he could have something by morning. The Stone Flower Fountain with huge ornate petals sprouting from a mattress of rocks and high cascading flutes of coloured water: garnet, turquoise, lapis, emerald, amber. He turned to the foldout photo of the wedding-cake building, Doric columns and the star at the top of the gold-painted spire, red flags from the portico, an Aeroflot jumbo with its loading ramps down like two splayed legs.
Darcy stood back. It was a long way from McCubbin and not quite de Kooning, and it wouldn’t exactly be Soviet Realism, the curious outlines and empty sky, too many shapes and juxtapositions; more like Soviet Surrealism. The candle on the end table collapsed down one side. He pushed his fingertip into the melted wax, felt the slight stab of heat as he stamped some red in the whippet’s eye. It dried like a seal on an envelope, the intricate web from his fingerprint. It gave the dog more life.
Darcy’s eyes were sore, his wrist and movement fading. This was all he could do now. He left the painting there, thought he should shower, but he wiped his hands on a rag and lay behind Fin in bed with his dark smudged fingers. He kissed her goodnight above the line of her T-shirt where the tattoo was, and then she was turning and he could sense that she’d been crying, her tears on his skin and her saying sorry as she kissed him softly, tears on his cheeks. I’m sorry, she said and he felt himself against her and thought of them as children, on the driveway at Mount Eliza, on the beach with Jobik with her legs up. She kissed him again and he thought of Aurelio and knew this wasn’t what he wanted, his sister like this, but her sorries and tears had aroused him, his face in her hair and the scent of her shampoo, a coursing of grief deep within him. On the verge of being inside her, he suddenly wanted to get back at her, at Jobik or whatever his name was, at Aurelio who didn’t even want to kiss, but a sound came from Fin, far away as an island. No, she said. She was staring back at him through the dark, her lips parted, afraid. Not that.
Monash University
Winter 1982
Fin appeared in the smoke-filled dinge of the Small Caf, late as usual, wearing her calf-high boots with a short pleated tartan skirt despite the cold. They always met on Wednesday evenings, after his Portrait, Figures and Anatomy class and her Russian history. Afterwards she’d go to her psychology tute. Darcy watched her slide through the milling students, past the dopers at the big round table where they sometimes sat, everyone saying hi. Her hair plastered up on one side, flat against her scalp on the other. She fascinated Darcy, her punk-chic style, not unlike he imagined himself in drag. She flung her faux cowhide satchel over the chair, sat as if exhausted.