The general emerged from some reverie. You do not know that, he said.
Darcy looked out at the half-lit factories, then down at the gun, the way it was pointed at him. He is your son, he said.
The general nodded resignedly. But he was not a man, he said. I could not trust him. He gestured with the weapon for Darcy to turn from the river and pointed up a narrow street, carved between cedars, an area of compounds.
We have invitation, he said, but Darcy didn’t believe him, wondering if he could slide the car off the road and turn it over without being killed. But he was halted by a guard who appeared from a booth between stone gateposts and the general leaned forward in the torchlight to be recognised. The Lada was saluted through.
Someone wanting to meet you, said the general.
But it didn’t make sense, everything short-circuiting: Aurelio abandoned out in the night and a driveway opening up to a pale two-storey mansion. A lantern by the door threw a triangle of light on the walls like a Magritte and Darcy recognised it from the photo, the garden now in winter, the stones clawed with deciduous ivy in the dark. In the general’s photo Anyetta Chernenko had stood on the lawn. And Darcy in this car with the general, fresh from his Black Sea honeymoon, his new wife nowhere to be seen, untouched by his newly dead son. Talk, thought Darcy, make yourself seem human.
What do you want from me? he asked.
Just be polite, he said. She is my friend. Wanting to meet with the artist. He checked himself in the rear-view mirror, removed his hat and pushed his hand through his buzz of white hairs. Darcy stopped the Lada without the handbrake, let the tyres lodge in the slough, and he stared out in the way he’d learned when his mother was drunk, when dealing with someone irrational, but it hadn’t equipped him for this. Did you never love Aurelio? he asked.
The general reached for the keys and placed them in his pocket. You do not know that either, he said, magnanimous, perverse, and with his gun he motioned Darcy into the cold and Darcy wondered fearfully what he was being spared for. He opened the door to a narrow avenue of poplars, trimmed as thin as pencils, and for a moment Darcy hoped he’d be sent in alone, to knock on the door like a soldier returned from the trenches, the lapels of his coat and the knees of his jeans wet with snow, to take refuge in a woman’s face. Maybe Fin by the fire, wrapped in a mohair blanket—perhaps it was all a surprise. The panelled door opening, a tall figure silhouetted and the whippet bounding down. Darcy knelt to nuzzle its warmth against his hands and it pushed its face against him like a cat might. The general strode past and was ushered inside by the widow.
Darcy looked up at her waiting for him in the chill of the threshold, in the same evening gown and a silver fox stole, her eye shadow Elizabeth Taylor blue. Can you help me? he whispered, but she bent her head towards him puzzled, not hearing, not wanting to, as they both watched the dog lift a leg in the snow.
Thanking you again for caring him, she said softly, is very kind. She observed Darcy as if trying to take him in, but he didn’t understand. Her husband was dead and she’d been out in bright colours, socialising.
Help me, he whispered, he pulled down his collar, tried to show her the burn but she glanced away, and together they watched the gossamer dog, a fine Gucci belt fashioned as its collar, and Darcy remembered the Borgward, the sadness in the son-in-law’s eyes. I’m sorry, he said, but the woman shook her head, it wasn’t the time, and still Darcy wanted to ask her for sanctuary but the general loomed in the doorway, tuxedo shirt and holstered gun, a Western bolo tie, his formal clothes beneath his coat all along. Come on, he said, smiling. Is cold.
Boyar, said the woman and the whippet bounded inside, but the general stayed, smiling, waiting. He swung his black-rimmed glasses by an arm of the frame, as though he were the man of the house, and the sight of it disturbed in Darcy a morbid loathing. He looked up as if seeking help, at a face in an upstairs window, an old man, wrinkled and unshaven, and for a moment their eyes met and Darcy wondered why he’d really been brought here, if there was hope in this house.
In an entry hall he removed Aurelio’s black fur hat but not his coat. He noticed the general’s velvet dress coat on the hallstand, hung like a pelt. The general was already in the next room, a lavish parlour, but the widow stood waiting, watched Darcy, her oldfashioned Soviet elegance like something from a silent film. She pointed humbly at the Laika painting leaning against a low bench, her whippet’s slender shape atop the obelisk, Finola Dobrolyubova scrawled across the lower right-hand corner in black. Darcy looked up, disconcerted.
Your dog, he said tentatively, acknowledging the canvas.
She smiled shyly as if she knew. Your painting, she said, as if she also knew it wasn’t Fin’s, and Darcy searched her eyes for something, recognition or deliverance, the way he trusted women.
I arrange it for her, the general interrupted from the adjoining parlour, and through the archway, past her, Darcy could see him standing by a fireplace, and as the widow now joined him, Darcy felt the need to protect her, to hurt him. He remembered her appearing in Lubyanka, through the grate in the interview room, but he couldn’t tell what she’d been told, how much she knew. He checked down a narrow corridor, searching for exits, but a maid in a black dress and white apron stood there, holding a tray, observing him from the shadows with dark cynical eyes. She watched as if she was the one who knew things, the old man from upstairs now sheltered behind her in a doorway, a craggy face, a valet or apparition.
Darcy stood in a kind of stunned abeyance, like something dragged in from the night, uninvited in his sodden coat, too grimy to enter and join the couple as they chatted by the fire, the whippet curling comfortably into a shallow wicker basket at their feet. Darcy took in the room as if the furniture might warm him, anchor his longing for beauty, a pair of floral sofas, a low table. Silk flowers, irises and hyacinth. And art. A Hockney swimming pool on one wall and a Rothko, mournful and abstract. Replicas, probably, but Darcy didn’t know; he looked at his own canvas, the image of the stray found by the river replicated from the dog in the other room. The general leaned in towards Anyetta Chernenko, their heads close together, bald and caramel blonde, he was telling a story with words Darcy recognised—Dashnak, Jobik, Nikolai, Garabed,
Armenia—seducing or using her. The general’s eye fixed on Darcy like a bear might eye a fish that flopped about on shore.
Tell her about Aurelio, said Darcy, but his voice was so raspy no one heard except the maid, who surfaced unexpectedly, as though on cue, and offered Darcy herring on bread and a tumbler of vodka poured from a jug. Darcy drank then ate voraciously, wanting another, more, but she glided into the main room, the general accepting drinks with Anyetta Chernenko as if Darcy had not been at his wedding to somebody else, or been pressed against the cement wall in Lubyanka, and now things undreamed of, unhinged, bodies mounting up in the woods, by the river. Then he heard his name, the general calling Darcy, as if they were friends, and Darcy looked over. You can be showering, said the general. My friend says you can be shower here. How you are so dirty? The drink raised in the general’s hand.
Darcy felt a wave of nausea, the promise of clean you up suddenly reverberating, had him sweaty again, clean you up pretty… like a real Polish boy. Next time. But why here? The general issuing orders to the maid in Russian, Anyetta Chernenko looking on, bemused, and Darcy taking another vodka from the maid’s tray, chugging it, and the shiver of it ran through him, familiar; afraid that’s what the general wanted: him loosened, clean, spared to be cut like Aurelio, or worse.