I have something else, the missionary said. He reached in and put a miniature Bible on the seat beside Darcy.
My mother says the Bible’s dangerous, he said.
It’s beautiful, said the missionary. He touched Darcy’s ear with his long pale fingers—softly, as if afraid to hurt him. The missionary’s face looked big in the window but Darcy liked the look in his dark brown eyes; they were glassy, as though he might cry.
Can you drive me home now? asked Darcy.
The missionary smiled to himself and nodded. Darcy moved over the gearstick to the passenger side, careful not to sit on the Bible. He opened it up and covered himself with it before the missionary got in. It sat on him like a small leather hat, the pages cool against his skin. The missionary started the car easily, put his arm along behind Darcy and turned his head to reverse back onto the road. Darcy felt safer when the car was moving. He watched the coil tattooed on the back of the missionary’s hand, the pale fingers around the steering wheel. His skin looked soft like he didn’t grow up on a farm. He turned into Darcy’s driveway and stopped.
You’re a good driver, said Darcy.
You’re a strange boy.
Darcy sensed he meant it nicely.
I should leave you here, the missionary said, so your mother won’t see us. He smiled, a gap between his two front teeth. He put on the parking brake and patted Darcy on the Bible. The church is going to be built on Two Bays Road, he said. Darcy nodded and watched him walk away, down the drive and onto the street. His mother was right; his pants were tight for a man.
Darcy stayed in the Austin. He looked for the Song of Solomon but it wasn’t that kind of Bible. It had a picture called ‘Jesus Christ visits the Americas’. Jesus was surrounded by Indians. Darcy hid the book in the car, behind the Melways in the glove box.
His mother still wasn’t at the window so he sneaked in the door, got to his room and took off his shoes. He put on his flares with the flap-over front, his short-sleeved navy shirt and cream cravat. He always dressed nicely when he put on clothes. The silk of the cravat felt soft against his neck as he looked at himself in the mirror. It was what he’d wear to church. He saw his mother behind him at the bedroom door; she’d been creeping. Her nipples showed through her nightgown.
Were you out on the road with nothing on? she asked. She’d brushed her hair but it didn’t look good, her skin was like pastry.
He knew he’d have to be careful with her, it was already afternoon. I’m dressed now, he said.
I’m not stupid, she said.
He waited for her to move into the room, for her open hand against his ear; the cold glass had been a warning. I had trouble with the car, he said.
You shouldn’t be driving, she told him. Instead of the slap she held him to her, her arms crossed over his back, her breath and lipstick in his hair. He was afraid of the smell of her nightgown, her salty, pretzel hands, sweat from her palms.
I saw him drop you off, she said.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Monday morning
Darcy squinted at Fin’s lime green travel clock. It was 10 am. The sound of Russian voices in the other room, but this time he knew it was only the radio. The bedroom door was open and the apartment ice-cold; the heater had gone from full steam to freezing. Fin? He waited. Nothing.
He got up.
Snow spilled down outside the sitting-room window and the pipes that ran along the wall were barely warm. No Svetlana in the kitchen opposite. He checked on the orange laminated counter that separated the kitchen from her living area. No note, no breakfast.
He dragged a poloneck and a windcheater from his duffel bag, pulled his black cords over his thermals. White letters painted on one of the hanging black dresses, a looping script: The mysteries of the clitoris. Had that been there last night? He folded her polaroid camera into itself, silver with inlaid wood, angles of a small architectural building, and slid it into his daypack. He grabbed some cheese-sticks from the fridge and an apple, ventured into the corridor. She’d left him no keys but at least she hadn’t locked him in.
He tested the door; he was now locked out.
Triangular stains on the walls the shapes of sconces, but no hall-watcher lurking at the dark end. He ate as he moved down the stairs and found the main entrance, the one they’d circumvented last night. Steel-rimmed swinging doors, glassed and unattended, an empty desk and chair. Why hadn’t she left a note?
Outside everything seemed bleak and deciduous, even the buildings were bare, the street covered in dove-grey snow, an arctic beauty. Darcy’d never seen a city so bathed in snow, was surprised by its silence—squat figures in fur walked with their heads down past the bleached alabaster structures. He decided to head back to the Byelorussian Station and try to retrieve his passport, see about his Pentax. Maybe that’s where she was. But as he examined his plastic foldout map it seemed too far to walk and the wind was like an icepick. He’d hail a taxi.
Out on the slush-covered boulevard a trolley bus passed, whining on its overhead wires; if only he knew where it was going. He turned to get his bearings. The distant Ferris wheel rose above the leafless trees in Gorky Park as promised, a couple of bundledup bodies suspended in air, small as frozen peas. In spring it might have held a certain beauty but the cold had crept deep into his feet already, through the sheepskin lining of his combat boots. He wasn’t bred for this, his skin and his blood were too thin, and the station suddenly seemed too difficult.
Across the street the low swinging gates of a local park that wasn’t Gorky, empty but for an elderly baba pushing at snow with a wooden scraper, a keeper of paths in the frost-bitten wind. He could take a picture of her in the avenue of bare elm branches that umbrellaed the pathway. Surely that wasn’t strategic. But as he reached for the camera a man glanced back at him nervously. Darcy wondered if this could be his shadower, but he led a narrow dog in a quilted tartan blanket, a whippet or miniature greyhound, the type Darcy imagined being walked by a gay man in New York, not a KGB agent. The man glanced back again. Striking aquiline features, dark for here, late thirties, slender-lipped and earnest in his horn-rimmed specs. Darcy heard Fin’s words: Be careful, the places you go. He heard his own promise but the intrigue already flitted about his consciousness, luring him like a finger seeking its hook inside his mouth, and he’d barely stepped out the door. He tried focusing elsewhere but the man loitered near a bench, averting his eyes, then he stared furtively. Intellectual, Jewish perhaps, thought Darcy, if you could still be Jewish here. He remembered the Spartacus Gay Guide only listed ‘outside the Bolshoi in summer’ under ‘Cruising in Moscow’, and warned against it. But it was winter now and this wasn’t the Bolshoi. The man removed his fur hat and Darcy received it as a signal. His hair was silver-flecked and wavy, a few strands flew up like a crest in the wind and the pleading in his eyes spoke a need that Darcy recognised, mirrored. Too cold to be hatless and waiting unless you wanted something badly.
The shivering whippet sat on the path like a statue, its head into the wind as if it were a dog at sea. Darcy waited for the man to make a next move but he seemed stricken with uncertainty, so Darcy, emboldened by nothing but a rush in his brain, turned off the track into a thicket of prickly evergreens. He realised he wasn’t so cold anymore as he pulled off a glove and held it under his arm and the man began fumbling, tying the windswept dog to the bench. He began to pick his way through the icy branches but as Darcy unzipped himself a figure approached, obscured by foliage. With neither a word nor a smile the Russian was panicking, backing away through the trees. Darcy shook his head—it was only the babushka, she couldn’t see them—but the man was already scaling a low metal barrier. Hands deep in pockets, he leaned into the wind and half ran towards the road. He’d forgotten his dog.