Boyar, the woman said and Darcy looked up at her, tall above him in a full-length brown fur, her stunned blue eyes. Spasiba, she said.
Darcy stood and placed the leash in her slender gloved hand. I took care of him, he said and she nodded, her mouth set in a strange effort at a smile, her eyes moist and shiny.
She not speak English, the general said. He took her arm and guided her down the corridor, but as she turned the corner she glanced back at Darcy. I thank you, she said.
Lubyanka
Saturday noon
A narrow bed, wooden slats and a worn grey blanket, an iron door. The greasy floor powdered with lime. At the oil drum in the corner Darcy held his breath against the smell of those who’d come before him, pushed the lid free and peed, then slid the iron cover tight. He pushed his elbows against his aching rib cage, pressed his hands into his eyes. He’d passed a boy in the hallway in filthy fatigues and with almond-shaped eyes, Cyrillic letters on his cheeks, branded. A haunted sawn-off face shown on purpose, so Darcy could see what he might become. Outcast and emaciated, a foreign opuscheny a thousand kilometres east of here, no troika through the snow with Aurelio to a secret dacha in the Urals. He was here on this uneven cot, shawled in a stagnant blanket, staring up at a dim bulb on a wire that dropped from the cement ceiling. They watch from somewhere, he thought, though the door slot was covered. On the opposite wall was a heating duct covered with chicken wire, but it blew an icy breeze. His feet were still freezing.
He walked. Five short steps, he turned, then four. He remembered the night he arrived in Moscow, how they had passed this place in the taxi, a huge mustard building with a thousand cells inside. He remembered feeling young then, light and expectant. Fin had told him it’s good to seem naïve, spike your hair and be yourself. He lifted his numb feet and gleaned the difference—Fin only appeared naïve. A shriek from somewhere, a muffled sound like a belt buckle in a washing machine; Darcy conjured a consular official—a broad Australian face with a grim, hesitant smile—coming to collect him and feed him cheese and Vegemite sandwiches, a plane lifting off to that faraway, flyblown place where he’d never belonged but now yearned for. He felt a howling inside him. The raspy telephone voice of his mother: What are you into now?
He veiled his nose with the blanket to reduce the stench, kept walking in a kind of stupor. The welt of the general’s hand buzzed on his face and rang hollow in his ear, electricity came in surges, the bulb bright then struggling, the peephole still a grey flap of iron. He imagined Fin in a plane on a runway, some passport in her lap. At Monash, she’d always pretended everything was wry and amusing, how they’d taken the piss out of anyone studious, regu-lar, as they called the diligent dags from the private schools, the Asians kids haunting the library, buried among the metal reference shelves. Children who’d been raised to heed warnings, who hadn’t been quite so free-range, or adulterated.
Darcy slumped on the bed and closed his eyes tight to fake a prayer but he wasn’t sure what to ask, or how, his arms just hung like fallen branches in his lap. At a shift of the locks, the door lurched open and Aurelio stood in a drab felt suit, grey and unfashionable, a ladder-backed chair in his hand. Unshaven, his caramel hair slicked back, greasy. Darcy just stared, a sense of himself peering out bruised from the blanket like a junkie or a mendicant, a pulse in his palms, as if his heart had moved there for shelter. Aurelio moved into the room, his hazel eyes bloodshot and his cheeks slightly sunken. What happened to you? asked Darcy.
Aurelio sat in the chair and glanced back at the door, then reached to touch the welt on Darcy’s face. My father is cruel, he said, tears glittering in his eyes, but Darcy was dry-eyed, the sight of Aurelio like this, his brow damp with sweat and the yeasty smell of beer on his breath, clasping Darcy’s hands with clammy palms, not smooth and dry like they had been. Aurelio touched the cut on Darcy’s lip, almost childlike; he leaned forward wanting to kiss.
Not in here, said Darcy.
Aurelio sat back in the chair and clutched his elbows. Aurelio, who’d always seemed to make his own arrangements, the golden boy of Moscow, his eyebrows now made him look sad. He’d lost the look of privilege, swanning around the park, the costumes in the dress shop, his complexion sallow.
Aurelio, said Darcy, I need you to get me out of here.
My father knows about us, Aurelio said. And now Chuprakov is dead.
I know, said Darcy, but I need your help.
Aurelio arched his brows and delivered a loose sympathetic smile. Darcy felt an old allergy to drunkenness, watching his mother on the couch, knowing there wouldn’t be dinner. He pressed his hand to the welt on his cheek.
My mother met Castro, said Aurelio, but he is not my father. He reached into his jacket and produced a shiny black wallet, a photo. This is her, he said. A small colour shot of himself as a child, beside a woman. Darcy rested his eyes on it in the palm of Aurelio’s broad hand, his mother young and dark, lean, in a tropical dress, a magenta ribbon in her hair. She stood on wooden stairs. Aurelio beside her, a boy in a khaki suit and sandals, the same large eyes and luxuriant brows. I want you to have it, said Aurelio.
Darcy had a flash of Fin in her African print dress, unwanted in the driveway, under the flowering gum. I need your help, not your photos, he said.
I want you to remember me, said Aurelio.
Darcy rubbed his hands through his own matted hair—this was all Aurelio had for him. He took the photo and held it in a hand so pale it looked dead. His feet so cold, his boots as if lined with shards of frozen glass. Thank you, Aurelio, he said, but I need to get home. He stood up and walked again as if warmth lay in movement, afraid if his toes went numb he might never feel them again.
I am wanting to help, said Aurelio, but you must understand me. He swigged from a miniature vodka bottle, swallowing all that was left. I am in druzhinniki, he said. I working for my father, proving him I am not a homosex.
I—am—in—prison, said Darcy.
I see this, said Aurelio. But the maid at the dacha, she is my friend but my father pays her for confirm. And now he knows what we do. And then Comrade Chuprakov. That was my project.
Darcy sagged back on the cot, covered his face with his hands. All he remembered was the wild gaga girl with the spoon, Aurelio’s warm body in that upstairs shower; he’d seen no maid. He thought of the son-in-law splayed in the dark, his chest like a sump.
The general left Cuba when I was three, said Aurelio.
Darcy turned to him. Why are you telling me this?
Aurelio held the small bottle half under his coat as if it were a secret. So you will remember me, he said. I was young in the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. He announced it as fact, devoid of ego, extended a long left arm, allowed his fingers to hang in the air, the movement both weary and graceful. I was an artist too, he said, like you, but of dance.
Darcy felt as though bricks were being piled on his chest. He knew it was a special thing, for Aurelio to say it, but Darcy smelled the stench from the corner, felt the raw ache in his feet. He thought of the girl in the Hotel Ukraine and how he’d wanted to trust her, her disconsolate eyes when he asked for the dog. What this place did to people.
Aurelio gazed at the floor as if it held some marvellous pattern. I come into Moscow at fifteen, he said. To Bolshoi. We rehearse Spartacus. Composer was Khatachurian, and director Preben Montell.
Darcy shook his head, names he’d never heard of. He picked up the photo from the folds of the blanket, imagined Aurelio as a dark-haired boy at the ballet barre in Havana. Your father said the Turkish Consul-General wants to talk to me.