The body breaks when the mind won’t. Jack and I – we were both of us dead. I lay in that carpet-covered Moscow bedroom, still as a corpse. Why didn’t he take me with him? A wedge of yellow light widened and then narrowed as the bedroom door moved back and forth, clicked open and shut.
Sasha, Vladimir, Bill. Voices told the story of the coup again and again. How they waited at the White House for the attack. How women and children were sent home. A blackout was imposed. But then the coup leaders lost their nerve, fled. Then Gorbachev came back from the Crimea. This story was repeated until it could be believed, until it was real and the mind could digest it.
Sasha came, brought me a bowl of soup. He told me the faxes had gone through and that the newspaper had been produced in Voronezh and Nizhnii Novgorod. ‘What you did,’ he said, ‘it was very brave.’ I woke and slept, woke and slept. Gathered my limbs together under the duvet, stuck my fingernails into my leg to check I was still there. Brave. Everyone said that, while the light at the window changed from day to night and back again. A journalist friend of Rob’s wanted to interview me. But bravery, I thought, implies choice. And wherever I was that night, I was in a place far beyond choice. And yet still they said it. I’d become a heroine by accident.
Rob’s face appeared sometimes in the numb haze which surrounded me. His eyes hid from mine and he said nothing about bravery. Some fragment of memory from the night of the coup came into my mind. We’d been standing in the kitchen. His hand had gripped the collar of my shirt. His face was close to mine. Eva, where were you? What were you doing? You shouldn’t have gone out. You were crazy to go anywhere near that place. How could you? How could you? Amnesia-Rhodesia-catfever. Water splashing over the side of a sink. I had nearly become a woman who involved herself in politics in a way that was inappropriate. Above me, the five-armed lamp swayed and contracted like the tentacles of an octopus. Did that scene in the kitchen ever happen?
I slept and woke to find Bill bringing me some bread and cheese. I knew, although I couldn’t have said how, that Sarah had left him and gone back to America. His trainers were dirty and his smile brutal. A glass of vodka seemed to have become part of his left hand.
‘Wasn’t there shooting?’ I said to him. ‘And someone was killed?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Three people were killed. God only knows how it wasn’t more. A man was crushed right under a tank and another brought down by a ricochet bullet. Outside the American Embassy – that’s where the worst fighting was. But you know for me,’ Bill said, ‘the strangest thing was that no one here really knew what was happening. There you are, right in the middle of the damned thing, and you don’t have a clue. Truth is, I spent most of my time on the phone to New York trying to find out what was going on. And, you know, that’s why the coup failed. The plotters should have cut the power, or the international telephone lines. They didn’t understand that they needed to control information.’
Rob was dismantling our lives, packing our books, bundling clothes into boxes, taking pictures down from the wall. We talked briefly about whether he should try to change the flights. Would I be well enough to travel? I couldn’t think why he was talking about flights. What did that matter? He decided to leave the flights as they were. Above me, the five-armed light dissolved and reformed. I heard Rob on the telephone. Who was he talking to? My mother? He seemed to be repeating the same words again and again, and his voice had a serrated edge. For a moment I felt the whole flat falling away from us. I opened my mouth to shout at Rob, ‘Take care, take care.’ But no words came and I dropped back against the pillow, helpless.
The radio crackled, cut into silence, then a voice reported that the Communist Party had been banned and the headquarters of the KGB had been sealed off. The people working there had been told to leave, the building was being searched. The reporter described a statue of Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the KGB, standing in Lubianskaia Ploshchad’. It was being covered in a net of ropes and men were hacking at it with metal cutting equipment. A crowd had gathered, chanting, waiting for the statue to fall.
I woke and blue evening light shone at the window. Rob was sitting on a chair near the bed, reading a book. I watched his down-turned eyes flicking over the words. His hand moved to turn a page. His shoulders, his spine, his head, were twisted up, like pieces of metal after a car accident. A bottle of vodka stood on the floor beside him and he reached down and filled his glass. He looked up and saw me watching him. Are you OK? Yes, I’m fine. And you? How are you? Fine, fine, how are you? But that old refrain could do nothing for us now.
With a sudden clarity I understood that he knew about the party and the lake and the ice. I said, ‘You talked to my mother?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And we sat in the half-darkness, staring at each other with horror growing in the reflected light of our eyes.
‘Your father nearly killed you,’ Rob said. ‘He took you out onto a frozen lake. But your mother never told you that, and she never told me. I didn’t even know he was a manic depressive. There was always some story about him being ill … But what I can’t believe is that your mother thought she’d get away with it, and that neither of us would ever find out.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Yes, I know.’ Rob and I both know. The facts sink through our skin, and right down into the marrow of our bones. But we don’t want to know, and the only way to hide from that knowledge is to hide from each other. And really that’s how it’s always been.
‘I asked her the question directly,’ Rob went on. ‘When you were ill over the summer I rang and I asked her several times, because I’d always wondered. And I said then, “Tell me, is there something specific? Is there something I need to know?”’
I should have walked over to the chair then and gathered him into my arms. Pain brings people together – isn’t that how it’s meant to be? I knew that it was worse for Rob than for me. I’d probably always known, at some level, that my mother would lie to me, but Rob had believed in her entirely. I watched him shift in his chair – that twist in his body, that wince which he suppressed. For him, the world had always been so simple. On one side stood the dramatic and unreliable – my father, his mother, Maya. And then on the other side stood the good woman, my mother. But now the plastic soldiers had all been mown down and lay scattered on the carpet.
‘I thought that the truth would somehow be splendid,’ I said. ‘I thought it would be spectacular.’ Those were my words, but I wondered even as I spoke what I had really expected. After all, whoever heard of a happy secret? The human mind is so very ingenious in its unending games of hide and seek. I looked at Rob and knew how it must be for him, and I wanted to save him from it, but it was already too late. Far too late. From that night when I’d first met Jack, when he’d touched my spine, questions had started and now they could never be stopped.
Rob and I talked then about who was to blame for what happened that night. My father took me out onto a frozen lake. Maya encouraged me to follow him. My mother failed to stand up to Maya. For a moment we found comfort in this dry analysis, but our words soon stuttered and came to a halt. Apportioning blame was only a way of denying the pain my parents must have lived through. All we knew for sure was that my mother shouldn’t have lied to me afterwards. But how do you tell your daughter that her father nearly killed her?
‘But your mother must have known,’ Rob said. ‘She must have known what the effect of that he would be.’
‘I don’t know. She was frightened I’d finish up like my father. But I’m not ill, and I never have been. I don’t even have asthma. All I’ve ever suffered from are the effects of living in a world where the truth couldn’t be spoken.’
Rob stood up and moved over to the bed. We wanted to hug then, or kiss, but both of us felt so tainted that we couldn’t bear to touch. It seemed that the whole of our relationship had been based on some misunderstanding. We were neither of us the same people we had been before. So Rob turned away and continued to pack shoes into a box. What else was there to do? We needed to move on. Impermanence was the only home we knew. I saw myself walking through the ungrasped days in yet another city, waiting endlessly to turn a certain corner, waiting to think, Oh yes, this is it, the place where I was always meant to be.
Our lives went on, driven by the necessities of each day. And all the time I wanted to help Rob, or at least to talk. Even to say honestly that I had no help to offer. But we were held in an ancient silence, trained from childhood not to know, not to see. We lacked the vocabulary of emotion. Our minds were heavy with shame. We’d been failed, but we’d also failed each other.
Rob, who had always been so vigorous, moved slowly through the flat. He held a tie or a book in his hand and stared at it. Standing at the window, he looked down into the courtyard with unseeing eyes. He lost the ability to take small decisions. Was it worth taking the bookshelves with us or should we buy new ones later? The discussion about that went back and forth. Yes, no, yes, no. What did I think? What should we do? In Rob’s voice I heard a rising note of panic.
One endless night as we lay in bed, side by side, not touching, he turned to me and said, ‘You know, you’ve been very brave.’
‘What – the faxes?’ But I knew he didn’t mean the faxes.
Then again, later, he said, ‘I understand it now. When I was a child, and I came to stay with you, my father would always say, “Take care of Katarina and Eva now, won’t you? Be sure to take care of them.” But I just thought it was something he said.’
One morning Rob was on the telephone, making calls for more than an hour. I listened to the radio. The celebration was over now and the hangover had set in. The radio reports pointed out that only fifty thousand people had defended the White House, which was nothing in a city of ten million. Then it was rumoured that Gorbachev had organized the coup himself in order to flush out the right wing. Perhaps more food was now on offer in the shops, but inflation meant that people couldn’t afford to buy it.
Rob came into the bedroom bringing a cup of tea. ‘Listen, Eva. We’re not going to Zagreb.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘I decided against it. But it’s a bit complicated. They’ll give me a post in Geneva instead, but I have to go to Zagreb until Christmas, until they can appoint someone to the post there.’
‘Geneva?’ I thought of small dogs, pen-knives, money laundering.
He shrugged, put some papers down on the top of a case, and began to push it shut. ‘Actually, I think it might be quite interesting. But the problem is, they won’t let you go to Zagreb.’
‘Oh. OK. Yes, I see.’
The moment had arrived when I needed to stop all this. I had a reason to do it now. Rob hadn’t helped me when he should have done. He’d believed in my mother instead of me. I had a perfect right to say, Actually, you can go to Zagreb, or Geneva, or wherever, but I’m not going with you. But I couldn’t summon up the courage to hurt him. I couldn’t bear to see him brought down. I wanted to make him into the person he’d been before. I’d lost two men I loved and I couldn’t lose a third. For better or worse, he was all that was left.
And then the phone rang and it was someone from Geneva. They’d heard that Rob was moving there and they wanted to know if he’d like to take over the lease of their flat. It was a one-bedroom flat in a 1950s’ building with a view over the lake, not far from the centre, light and spacious, in good repair. He’d get it painted for us when he moved out. Rob said, ‘Sounds quite good, what do you think?’
Buy a flatpack life, read the instructions and fix it together with an Allen key. I should be able to manage that, I thought. I’ve done it often enough before. Geneva sounded as good a place as any for a posthumous life. So Rob booked me a flight and he organized for our boxes to be sent there. Shake up the world and pick out a city. Hope that when you arrive you won’t find yourself there.
I woke to hear a voice with a long American drawl. Harvey. I pulled myself further down under the sheets. Rob’s voice in the kitchen was muffled. I heard the clink of china. Then that brash voice again. ‘You know, we’re moving on as well. Going back to Massachusetts. We’d have gone in two years anyway, but this recent upset … No, no, thanks. Sugar but no milk.’
Then I heard – Jack Flame. I sat up in bed.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t you know?’ A cough, a shuffle, the clatter of a cup. ‘At first they thought he’d just committed suicide, but now they think he was killed. Murdered. Someone else had been in the flat. Seems he had information which somebody wanted and they were even prepared to kill for it.’
I was out of bed, listening at the door, but Harvey had moved back towards the kitchen. I leant my head against the frame of the door. It was just as Jack said: There’s nothing as mysterious as someone with nothing to hide. People believe in incredible stories when the real ones are too hard to accept. Even in death Jack was distrusted and misunderstood. Harvey’s voice sounded again, as he emerged into the hall. I could see his broad back in its well-cut suit. ‘Of course, you know that wasn’t his real name? No one ever thought it was.’
Rob and Harvey were standing with their backs still turned. ‘Now you must give me your address in Geneva. Maya won’t forgive me if I don’t get that address.’
Rob went into the sitting room, searching for a pencil.
‘Oh, and I nearly forgot,’ Harvey said. ‘Eva left this coat last time she was around at our place.’ I saw the coat as he lifted it from the bag. The top of it was stiff as though a person might still be inside it. I pulled my head back from the door. I hadn’t left that coat at Maya’s flat. I’d left it on a chair near where Jack lay. Why did Harvey have it now?
My mind was running towards a precipice. I watched it, but there was no way I could stop it. I flung myself back into bed and lay with my arms wrapped around my head, my face pushed into a pillow. I was trying not to think about anything at all, but words pushed through to the front of my mind. All the time I had thought that Jack was the one living on borrowed time – but really it was me. I should have died twenty-five years ago. My life had ended then.
In the kitchen, rubbish bags bulged beside the bin. The nails were still in the walls where our few pictures had hung. Rob and I were ready to go, but we still had an hour to wait. My flight to Geneva was earlier than Rob’s plane to Zagreb and so he’d arranged separate taxis.
The sitting-room curtains, which Rob had taken down when he arrived, had been put back up. The bottoms of them hung six inches above the windowsill. A stain, no different from all the other stains, marked the carpet near the armchair where Rob had spilt a glass of red wine. Fluff lurked on the carpet behind the chairs. On the windowsill, circular stains marked where my pot plants had stood.
Mr Balashov came down and said that he wanted to show me something before I left. I trailed up the stairs after him. He’d been arranging things, tidying up. A little of the junk had gone and he had dusted and cleaned. Mrs Balashova’s bottles of pills were ranged neatly on the table. The blanket which had covered her chair had been pulled straight. On a low table near the television, a range of objects were laid out as though exhibited in a museum. Her knitting was there, carefully wrapped up so that the stitches wouldn’t slide from the needles, along with rings and her watch. A magnifying glass lay next to a pair of diamanté earrings. Different coloured wools were twined around folded scraps of cardboard.
Mr Balashov gave me two tiny dolls, a man and a woman, stitched together. I realised from the miniature veil which the female doll wore that they must be getting married. I kissed him goodbye, suddenly wanting to cling to him. Then I wrapped the dolls in my handkerchief and put them in my bag – the one souvenir of Moscow I’d always keep.
I went back downstairs and walked through the four rooms of the flat saying goodbye to each of them. The table where Rob and I had eaten so many suppers was wiped clean and pushed against the wall. The corner of a note remained stuck on the door of the fridge under a slanting strip of Sellotape. In the bathroom, steam still hissed from that defective tap and the mirror was still propped on the sink at that same drunken angle. The doors to the balcony were shut and the junk which had always lived there was back in its place. In a panic I searched for us, for Rob and me. Our feelings, our words, must be somewhere, encrypted into the walls or hidden behind the doors. But no, this was just a flat – tables, windows, doors, a bed.
We walked through the flat again and again. Both of us longed to be gone and we longed to stay. We had had all the conversations we could possibly have. Yes, I did have my passport. Yes, I knew the address in Geneva where I needed to pick up the keys. Yes, it would probably take some time to get the phone in Geneva put into my name but, of course, we’d keep in touch. Yes, I had the address of the office in Zagreb.
We stood near the sitting-room window, staring down into the courtyard. ‘You know,’ Rob said, ‘I’m going to have to phone your mother. I left things unclear. Practical things …’
‘Like what?’ I was running my finger around the circular stains on the windowsill.
‘Well, you know, she’s probably still organizing things.’ I looked up and saw him searching for words. For a moment, I imagined my mother in her sewing room, pins held in her pursed lips. She was hurriedly sewing seed pearls on to a cream satin dress. This time the curve of the neck would be absolutely even, this time she would get it right.
‘Perhaps I should just say we’re going to delay?’ Rob said. ‘Because, after all, it’ll be hard to sort things out while I’m away.’
‘Yes, why don’t you do that? That’s a good idea.’
I thought back to that evening nearly a year ago when he’d asked me to marry him. And I’d sat at the kitchen table turning that coin in my hand. Heads, tails, heads, tails. Surely something must have changed since then? But it hadn’t done.
Down below, I saw the taxi man waiting for me under the arch. ‘I must go.’ We stood staring at each other. Surely all this must come to some conclusion? But no. We kissed each other with an awkward shuffle of cheeks, and arms and knees. And, like people in an unconvincing play, we said, See you soon, I’ll miss you, not long to wait. And Rob stood watching me go down the stairs, and inside I was weeping for him, and for us, and for the wretched pointlessness of it all. But all I could do was turn back to him, summon a smile, raise my hand, wave.