Darcy saw a young girl who cradled a big cream handbag leaning against her mother for warmth, and he yearned for her innocence. This quaint-faced girl examining those wooden dolls within dolls, Lenin inside Stalin, Khrushchev inside Brezhnev, men inside men, but there wasn’t an Andropov yet. She stared over at Darcy then moved in closer to her mother, spooked. He ate his second piroshki too fast, felt like he was gagging, the timid retreat of the child had him off-kilter, as if seeing himself from the outside. With a false possibility but not a real plan, just the sense enough would never be sufficient—it wasn’t just Fin they wanted, it was Jobik and his associates, and the general’s own desire to slam Darcy’s face into a smeared concrete corner. The same general at St Anne’s that first day, the Cuban bride whose smile lit up the sanctuary. She says he’s like an animal, Aurelio whispered, as if it were a good thing, but where was the new bride last night, her general on the end of Darcy’s prison bed? An animal, yes, but what sort exactly? How much did Aurelio know?
Darcy tried to stop his mind, thoughts like the sails of spinning windmills. He looked up from the footprints before him to the distant Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, plastic roses in the snow beneath the eternal flame and a boy on the kerb in uniform chatting up a girl in a leather coat that had I Shot JR painted on the back. A Fin kind of girl, a photo if Darcy had still had his Pentax, but it was too late to capture the ironies now. He’d missed the Moscow he could have visited, the one he’d hoped for, the majesty of her winter, but the sight of the couple reminded Darcy it had existed all along, the distant swirl of confetti eddying about newlyweds in fur capes near the tomb, celebrating on a Soviet day of mourning. The sights invoked in him a strange invigoration as he rounded the corner into the square, to the pageant of Andropov’s funeral unfurling in real life, a quilt of wet umbrellas extending towards the domes of St Basil’s. The din of the dirge now eclipsed by a battalion of soldiers doing that straight-leg step across the frosted cobblestones; it gave Darcy that shivery feeling like Germany, the trammelling force of them, a thousand uniforms, generals. He waded into the depths of the crowd, weaving sideways but quietly forward, as if searching for Fin. The idea of disappearing seemed rash but suddenly possible—return to the apartment, the list of restaurants in Fodor’s. Find the Jaguaroff, get there alone. He knitted himself among dripping umbrellas, furs and stolid faces, his heart thumping up into his clamouring head. He hunkered, stock-still amid the rugged-up multitude, breathless, his eyes anchored on the distant platform, the casket wrapped in a rosecovered Soviet flag and, behind it, the rows of dignitaries.
Darcy pretended he was Russian, one of the pairs of myriad eyes that preyed on a distant Gorbachev, a tailored jacket in the front row, the purple stain on the brow just visible. He didn’t chance to check if someone pushed through behind him into the now-restless concourse. The speech at the funeral would be delivered by the new General-Secretary, the replacement, that’s what Aurelio had said. Gorbachev was the only man in the front row who looked under seventy-five, the Soviet saviour, but Darcy feared the general worked for him. He closed his eyes in a spell of giddiness, a sense of desolation, as if he could already feel a hand on his shoulder, a gun to his ribs. He focused on Gorbachev, Raisa beside him—he’d seen their photo in Pravda—then he made out Margaret Thatcher, her rooster’s face and hair in some elaborate rain scarf. He found himself yearning for the sight of his own hawk-faced prime minister, a rugged Australian frown, but Darcy’s doubting mind was riling up: why would they have let me plunge so deep into this crowd? Imagining the toxic feel of cloth over his nostrils, being hauled away from that wrong hotel, he gazed at a new row of artillery rattling over the cobbles, the chance of dissolving into this maze as the columns of soldiers turned like clockwork to salute the canopy of roses. A collective murmur as an old man struggled to the podium.
Merde alors! said someone nearby.
Darcy turned, the chance of a French reporter or exile, but a well-groomed woman met his glance. Svetlana, without makeup, in a fur scarf and cape, only three umbrellas away, her bitten hand cradled up into her coat and a glare that was chilling, the faintest shake of her head, a warning. Darcy’s own gaze dragged down to the icy cobblestones, slick underfoot, glinting as if they were precious. They were all over him. A piercing ache struck up in his glands, the giddiness again, but he focused on the pretence of Fin’s arrangement—he’d proceed to the exhibition, his painting up on a Soviet wall. He thought of Laika’s cocked head, a dog in a rocket hurtled through space, how they probably knew her capsule would explode, they knew before they sent her.
Darcy looked over again but Svetlana was gone, just a voice that wheezed and echoed through loudspeakers, a face projected now on a huge gritty screen on the Kremlin wall, eyebrows combed up like seagulls’ wings, like Brezhnev’s. It was Chernenko, a glazed look in his eyes, puffy cheeks and rounded chin, white hair pasted back from his forehead. Medals and stars pinned on his jacket and a sudden grim silence crept through the mourners, the chance of change like grit in frozen teeth.
Darcy stared paralysed, imagined the son-in-law sitting up for Sunday dinner in the company of this old asthmatic, pretending. The son-in-law who’d whispered smoke on Darcy’s toes, tried to warm them. As if some ill-omened blackmail could undermine this, accelerate history. The general, even if he worked for Gorbachev, seemed far more odious than the poor old salt from this man’s lips. The dull acceptance of the great harvest of people had Darcy wishing for this as their moment of revolt, a rush for the barricades, comrades mown down by the thousands. But no shout came from Darcy’s mouth, nor anyone else’s—they all knew it would be answered by the thuck of a silenced bullet. Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t even know their name. Darcy knew he’d be forced to pray for his own moment at the exhibition, in a crowd where he might be heard. There would be foreigners, artists, sympathisers.
A half-hearted clap rumbled through the gloom like the muffled sound of a thousand books being shut, applause at a funeral. Chernenko’s speech finished as abruptly as it had started, the last gasps of the union petering to a halt, he’d run out of gas. Euphonious music now blared from the speakers, as if a new era had just been ushered in. Darcy hunted among the iced-over faces for the man who’d cursed in French, the vague hope of Aurelio, or even Fin and Jobik in some disguise, but those about him were dispersing already. Darcy just stood, his feet painful again, gazed up at the misted screen. Gorbachev reaching quietly for Raisa’s hand, leaning forward to congratulate the frail Chernenko. Darcy wondered which of them really knew the general. Then he noticed Chernenko’s daughter behind her father, not hugging him or shaking his hand, just there. Tall, in the same full-length fur, her face strained as if in a trance. The only one really mourning. Darcy felt a kinship with her, the way he did with the sadness of women, as if she were Garbo in Camille.
The sound of snow-sweepers returning to work, like gigantic beetles belching fumes, the bearded city kneeling by the solid river, the burnished cupolas of the beautiful church muted in the failing light. Darcy felt his pyrrhic promise of Fin unravelling quietly ahead of him, like the early aubergine darkness climbing down over the square, a sense that all had been building up around what wasn’t here, gravity pulling things inward. Darcy hugged himself, nowhere to go but on to the Ploshchad Revolyutsii. He almost understood these people as they headed home to demonstrate behind closed doors. A snow shovel leaned against a barricade and he wanted to wield it like some crazy bedlamite, slam it down against the stones and let it clang, let them come for me, let them come. But he knew instead he should be listening to his instincts, in case he was given his moment, or it was given to Fin or Aurelio to magically steal him away.