On his first morning in the dacha, Lazda takes Phocan on a trip to the Jumelans store, to help her with some shopping. It’s a ten-minute drive. Old wooden houses alternate with woods for the first stretch; then, as they near the town, new-builds pop up, great mansions lurking behind walls and electronic gates.
‘A Russian oligarch,’ says Lazda as an icing-sugar-pink palace slides by, its cameras eyeing their little car suspiciously. ‘And that one,’ she continues, pointing to a mock-Arabian confection on the road’s far side, ‘belongs to a pop star.’
Past these two, in a giant, dilapidated compound, a five-storey structure set on stilts, with terraces and balconies and long rows of tall windows half of which are broken, wrestles with the trees that have pushed into it, or even in some case grown inside it, their roots finding sustenance and purchase in cracked concrete and exposed iron beams.
‘This,’ Lazda tells him, ‘was a hotel for well-behaved Soviet workers. Only the good ones, party members, were allowed to holiday in Latvia. The rest had to go inland, away from the border. And this one,’ she slows the car down as they pass another gutted behemoth, ‘was an institute for Soviet chemists …’
On the way back, they detour to the beach. Phocan thinks he recognises the small factory they passed en route to the house yesterday, the derelict one whose brickwork shrubs and creepers are reclaiming. He’s right.
‘It’s the old stikla fabrika – the glassworks,’ she says. ‘It closed in the mid-eighties, before I was born. Here we are.’
They’ve come to the end of a narrow, overgrown track whose mud has given way to sand. Beyond it, unkempt marram grass dotted with more brick foundations, these ones crumbled right down to ground level, leads on to a beach whose sand looks large and smooth, almost transparent. The shoreline, hemmed by a long fringe of this marram grass on one side and black kelp and sea-wrack on the other, broken only by a little inlet thirty or so yards to the north of them, runs in a thin strip for several miles in each direction before jutting, to the south, the Riga Gulf side, in a point on which a lighthouse stands and, to the north, the open Baltic side, in what looks like a military installation or perhaps observatory, an array of satellite dishes and domed roofs silhouetted against the pale sky.
‘A listening station,’ Lazda says, seeing him peering out towards the latter. ‘This area was full of them. They were all decommissioned in the nineties – now, though, they’re up and running again.’
‘You must have come here as a child, to swim,’ says Phocan.
‘I did, but not my parents or my grandparents. It was forbidden. A good swimmer could get to Sweden from here, if the water wasn’t too rough. Along the entire Baltic coast, they kept the sand completely smooth, with brushes pulled by tractors, so that they could see if anyone had tried to cross it.’
Phocan squints towards the horizon, trying to make out some kind of bump or jag that might be Sweden, but can’t pick out anything beyond the normal sine-wave of the sea’s background frequency. When he looks back again, Lazda’s vaporised, collapsed into an empty jacket, shirt and pair of jeans lying at his feet. He picks her up again ten yards away, racing in underwear towards the water. September; fuck it; why not? He strips down to his pants too, streaks along her fugitive print-trail, past kelp margin and wavelets, on into a sea no Gulf Stream current seems to have warmed up. She’s a good swimmer; by the time he’s caught up with her she’s carved a big loop out beyond the surf line, parallel with the shore and back in again, plus run up and down the beach a few times to dry off.
‘You won’t,’ she tells him as he crumples to the strangely vitreous ground beside their clothes, ‘catch anything at that speed.’
Re-entering the car, before she starts the engine up again, she pulls a headband from her jacket pocket and slips it on, to keep her wet fringe from her eyes. Phocan, shocked by the cold and the exertion, undergoes a moment’s dislocation; slunk down into the passenger seat’s faux-leather, he forgets where he is, what he’s doing, what year it is. He might even doze for few seconds on the way back to the house; he’s not sure. Images of Lazda, her parents and her grandparents, of Lazda as her own mother or grandmother, head covered in a handkerchief or headband similar to the one she’s wearing now, face turned away towards the sea, the whole thing greyscaled like in old home movies, telescope away once more along vague avenues of memory, or of forgetting, merge with other memories perhaps his own, or perhaps not, flicker and fade into and out of focus with the houses new and ruined, institutions, wooden shacks all flashing intermittently through a rainbow-veil of autumn foliage. By the time his circulation has restored itself, his consciousness re-found its bearings, they’re gliding down the almost-intersecting tracks once more, then, passing the abandoned playground, pulling back into the garden, with the light-blue dacha looming above them to the left, aviary to the right, cubistic treehouse at the far end beyond the vegetables.
‘He’ll be in his study,’ Lazda says as they carry the supplies into the kitchen. ‘You can go there.’
Vanins is indeed in his study. It’s housed in the low-lying extension to the main house. Phocan knocks, and is called in. On a worktable are laid out several box files and bound manuscripts.
‘I’ve dug up some papers,’ Vanins informs him. ‘Some of my work touching on states of equilibrium. You’re welcome to consult them.’
For the next two hours, Phocan does so. They’re not wildly different from the ones the archivist found for him at Tehniskā Universitāte. There’s an article on Hamiltonian vs. Langrangian formulations; another on fictitious forces, non-inertial reference frames, the implications of the Coriolis effect for aerodynamic engineering … There are some lecture notes – in Latvian and Russian, but the diagrams and mathematical notation he can follow. From time to time, he looks up from them, out of the window just above the worktable. Through its panes, which have irregular consistencies, as though they’d come from different glaziers, he can see the stretch of garden lying between the vegetable patch and his misshapen treehouse. There’s a well that seems to still be in use, since it has a rope-coiled winch and bucket; next to this, a tree stump with an axe lying on it; behind this, a stack of chopped-up firewood about which small birds, presumably not Vanins’ but wild ones, hop and dart before retreating back into the furze of spruce trees that delineate a smudgy, incremental border between the property and the surrounding woods, which are made up of larger trees that Phocan can’t identify.
‘Aspens,’ Vanins tells him when he asks. ‘They’re general around here. For paper. You’ll have seen paper mills dotted around the countryside on your way out of Riga. Have you found,’ he continues, ‘what you’re looking for?’
Phocan hesitates before answering. Vanins is looking at him fixedly. He ventures tentatively:
‘There was something I saw back in Riga, in Tehniskā’s archive, that I didn’t quite understand …’
‘Go on,’ Vanins coaxes.
‘It involved,’ Phocan continues, ‘a small note you’d made, beneath a chart … dynamic properties of such-and-such an aircraft … I saw you’d drawn,’ he tries to keep his breathing steady, to suppress the tremor in his voice, ‘the figure 808 …’
Another roadblock? There’s no measurable pause, no slowing of the pace, but still there seems to be a kind of a glitch or stutter in the passage of the words, the information, through the air.
‘Maybe I had,’ says Vanins. ‘What of that?’
Phocan has thought through, both in dialogue with Garnett and alone, various scenarios, ways a putative conversation on this topic might go, the kinks and switchbacks down which it might cut its path. This one hasn’t been modelled, though. It seems as though Vanins is challenging him, inviting him almost: Go on, ask me for it … Or is this openness a kind of judo move, a going-with-the-flow, to let his opponent’s force expend itself, draw him off-balance? It’s too late for Phocan to pull back; before he’s even scripted the words in his head, he finds himself saying:
‘You knew Lillian Gilbreth …’
Vanins looks up, towards the window and the garden, before answering:
‘We met only once, in Zürich.’
‘But you corresponded.’
Vanins pauses again, then answers:
‘You are not the first to have enquired about this recently. And I suspect you will not be the last. What is it in my correspondence with Mrs Gilbreth that appears so important, now, for all of you?’
Phocan steels himself, lunges in further:
‘She seems to have grown excited about some of the research that you were conducting around 1969, ’70 … Something you both refer to as “the T.T. episode” …’
Vanins lets him run on, waiting to see how far he’ll go. It’s as he feared; the tactic works – before he knows it he’s completely lost his balance, hears himself blurting out:
‘Then there’s the mention of a wireframe motion model, one you made yourself after her method. I think it might even have been assigned a number in her own cataloguing system – you know: Box 128, Box 275, and so on …’
Now Vanins has him trapped, arm-locked: despite his slightness, the old man seems to tower above him, to demand submission as he asks:
‘And if this box existed, what would it change?’
Phocan returns the only answer he can think of:
‘Everything, apparently.’
Is this capitulation, or a counter-punch? Does this all-but-straight citation of the diary entry manage to wrest some of Gilbreth’s authority, to tap into it, enlist it? It’s having some effect: Vanins seems to be stepping off him now. After a while he asks Phocan, more gently:
‘Do you believe this?’
‘Did you?’ Phocan asks back.
Now Vanins really eases off, withdrawing into himself, lost in thought. Eventually he says:
‘We believed a lot of things. In this respect, we Soviet scientists were like assassiyun.’
‘Like what?’ asks Phocan.
‘Assassiyun. Assassins,’ Vanins answers. ‘The young men of Arabia who joined the Old Man of the Mountain’s cult, after they’d been lured up to his hideout, drugged and woken in a garden where wine gushed from fountains, music spilled about the air, and maidens, nymphs, attended to their every need.’
‘I don’t quite follow …’ Phocan says.
‘The young men,’ Vanins runs on, ‘thought that it was paradise, entry to which only the Old Man could guarantee; and so they joined his cult, became assassins. But it was all fake: a stage-set, levers pumping wine and sound-tubes piping music from an unseen chamber. The assassiyun themselves would have been operating it: last year’s recruits, the year before’s …’
‘The same ones,’ Phocan plays along, although he still can’t see where this digression’s heading, ‘who’d been tricked by the illusion previously?’
‘Exactly,’ Vanins nods. ‘Why would they do this? Once they’d seen how it all worked, how they’d been fooled, why didn’t they turn on their deceptive master and denounce the whole arrangement?’
‘Maybe,’ Phocan tries, ‘the stage-set operators got a kind of upgrade: better perks, more wine, regular access to the nymphs …’
‘That,’ concedes Vanins, ‘would be an explanation – a cynical one, though. And besides, an “upgrade” is small compensation for the loss of paradise. No: I like to think that at some level, on some scale, they must have carried on believing something. That, even if the larger story wasn’t true, they saw it as a useful fiction, that enabled something else to operate: something good and necessary – something even miraculous, perhaps …’
He looks out at the garden again for a while before continuing:
‘The Soviet era was a good one for scientists – those of my generation, at least, who weren’t threatened with imprisonment. We, too, believed in something. Not the Revolution, nor the truth of Lenin’s vision, nor whichever five- or ten-year plan we were engrossed in: it was something bigger and more abstract. Maybe it was the orchestration itself, its implicit promise that society, the world, could operate as one giant apparatus – that this apparatus, this intricate machinery, could transform experience and knowledge, elevate them to a higher state …’
‘… remade as an unbound potentiality,’ Phocan quotes.
Vanins starts, surprised.
‘I see you’ve done your homework.’
He’s quiet again for a while, as though running the old article’s phrases through his mind. Then, slapping its remembered pages shut, he tells Phocan:
‘You’re too late, though. All that was a long time ago. Whatever elevation, transformation … whatever “miracle” we thought we might be bringing about – that has evaporated now. Like fountains when their pumps have been shut down once and for all.’
He turns his hands out, palms up, as though to come clean about their emptiness, his generation’s bankruptcy, and adds:
‘Everyone stopped believing, and the apparatus ran itself down. By the end the only question was what bits of the machinery the operators, or their supervisors, could steal …’
The two men stand in silence by the desk, beneath the window. Then Vanins asks:
‘What do you believe in, Dr Phocan?’
Phocan answers without hesitating:
‘Geometry.’
Vanins, scrutinising him with a mixture of interest and something approaching affection, repeats:
‘Geometry?’
Phocan nods.
‘Same as Mrs Gilbreth.’ Vanins smiles approvingly. ‘You may stay tonight as well, if you wish.’
In the afternoon, while Vanins siestas, Lazda takes Phocan to the aviary. She trots on ahead of him, ducking behind bird boxes and plants, then reappearing in another spot off to the side, behind him or further ahead still, as though she knew a set of worm-hole shortcuts linking disparate parts of the space together. It becomes a kind of game, a hide-and-seek or catch-me-if-you-can, just like the morning’s beach chase. This time, he catches up with her beside a sofa set into a little nook surrounded on all sides by leaves.
‘Did you find what you’re looking for?’ she asks.
‘He’s reticent,’ he says, thinking that she’s referring to his research-note quest, or, since all pretence otherwise seems to be collapsing, directly to Box 808, the T.T. episode … His answer makes her laugh – either because that’s not what she meant or perhaps because it was, but not what he was meant to understand, or to acknowledge having understood, or … The sense of dislocation’s coming on again. This time, when he reorients himself, she’s got her arms around his neck; they’re kissing, sinking to the floor, the beach, the sofa, and the clothes are crumpling in a pile again, underwear this time joining them. Afterwards, they both briefly nap. The aviary’s birdsong infiltrates his dozing; in his dream, the twills and chirps are voiceovers laid down by commentators, or accusatory statements made by prosecutors, at a trial, or in a newspaper report, or a similar kind of post-hoc assessment that, through some quirk of anachronism, is being applied even as the scene that it assesses is playing out. The sound of a buzzsaw wakes them: aspens being cut down, perhaps, for paper in the woods nearby, or maybe just a neighbour chopping logs. Sunlight’s streaming through the windows; the birds dart around it, vanishing into their boxes, perching on the white-streaked tops and ledges to peck seeds and chirp more.
‘How come,’ Phocan asks her, tracing with his index finger the outline of a birthmark on her back, ‘it’s you taking care of him?’
‘My parents,’ she tells him without turning round, ‘both died when I was young. He and my grandmother raised me.’
‘And when did she …?’
‘In 2001. Since then it’s just me.’
This last reflection seems to snap her back into the present. She swivels to her feet and says:
‘We should get dressed; he’ll be up soon.’
At dinner, Vanins seems sombre. Does he know what they’ve been up to while he was asleep? Over small glasses of black-balsam liquor, he reminisces about Jumelans neighbours; he and Lazda speculate as to which of these were KGB-conscripted; together they decry the lot of academia in Riga, the state of its libraries and halls of residence …
‘The Tehniskā’s archive building, when I visited,’ says Phocan, ‘seemed quite empty.’
‘Everyone’s left,’ says Vanins. ‘Or they’re leaving.’
Lazda collects the plates and carries them through to the kitchen. When she’s gone Vanins leans close to Phocan and murmurs:
‘You could take her with you.’
‘To Riga, you mean? When I go back? Are you happy for me to stay just a little …?’
‘You won’t find it,’ Vanins cuts him off.
‘Won’t find …?’
‘It,’ Vanins repeats. ‘There’s nothing.’
‘I don’t …’
‘Equilibrium … suspension … stasis … all of that. It’s just bodies, in space …’
His words trail off and he sits quite still, looking ancient, voided, shrunken, hands folded in front of him in mortuary style. Then he adds, as an afterthought:
‘And geometry has its assassins too.’
Phocan’s about to ask him, again, what he means; but Lazda comes back in bearing a cidonija pie, and Vanins leans back and looks away from Phocan, placing their last exchange under embargo. He retires to bed soon afterwards. Lazda and Phocan spend the night together in the treehouse. She speaks Latvian to him as they make love – small words and phrases here and there for which he doesn’t request a translation; they seem kind and happy. They sleep for an hour or so just before dawn, then set out early on another outing to the little general store in Jumelans.
‘A third dinner,’ she says, ‘then I’ll drive you back to Riga. I go there tonight as well. You can stay with me if you like, in my flat.’
They stop by the beach again. It’s colder than yesterday: the sun is gone; the autumn’s pressing in. Chasing her out past the kelp- and surf-lines once more, he wonders if she’d come to London with him. Is that what Vanins meant? Maybe he’ll try to press him in his study, if he’s welcomed there again when they get back; or over dinner – revisit his mutterings, unpack them, see if they can be rearranged into some kind of sense. Stasis, suspension; waves and sand … He catches Lazda sooner today; maybe she’s letting him; this time they warm up one another, looking out towards a Sweden that’s still un-discernible, although the water’s calmer, blacker …
There’ll be no third dinner. Turning off the ditch-lined track into the garden this time, they observe, first little sign that something’s out of place, two plovers and a sandpiper idling about the lawn; then, that the door to the aviary is open – not unlatched or ajar, but agape. Birds of all kinds are spilling from it freely. Lazda, whose sudden paleness he attributes, like his disorientation yesterday, to the sea’s coldness, jumps from the car without turning off the engine and dashes towards the building – he presumes to seal the door and stem the birds’ flow, their mass breakout. But she runs straight through it, leaving it wide open: her concern isn’t the leakage but something beyond, within. A shrill squawk issues a few seconds later from the high-windowed barn’s recess – a birdlike, or at least not human-sounding shriek, that Phocan thinks at first might be a peacock’s, though he can’t remember seeing any in there. Reaching over, turning the ignition off himself then stepping from the car unhurriedly, he ambles through, closing the door behind him slowly, as though casualness might set up its own roadblock, bar disaster from its hatching, or at least its broadcast. But it can’t: after two turns he comes across her, and him. She’s kneeling on the ground inside their little bower; he’s floating above her like a saint or cosmonaut – or, rather, since the rope running between him and the beam, quite visible, belies the illusion of weightlessness, a Bergen acrobat, if you subtracted all the energy and motion.
Over the next few hours, lots of people come. There are ambulance crews from Riga, like their vehicles seasonally streaked in brown and yellow; more sombre blue-clad policija personnel; white plastic-sheathed forensics teams; pathologists and miscellaneous others. It’s Lazda who deals with them. He’s asked to give a statement to some kind of sergeant who speaks English, to corroborate (although there can’t really be any doubt about what’s just occurred) the statements being constantly solicited from her. She’s surprisingly composed: organising and receiving seems to keep her going, to infuse her with purpose. Phocan, redundant, is reduced to brewing the strange black tea that they drank on his arrival and serving it out to any takers; then, when there are no more of these, to hanging about the lawn. By mid-afternoon he has recorded, mentally, a) that Latvian ambulances, like London school buses three decades ago, bear their labels, their descriptors, in unreversed form on their fronts; (b) that the treehouse in which he’s sleeping is skilfully constructed, using stay rods and tension fasteners to grip its beams to the trunk, thereby avoiding any need for bolts and kingpins; and (c) that quinces, on the tree, are all but indistinguishable from pears.
How much significance does he attach to these small observations? About the same amount as the pathologist, who, mounting a ladder to undo the rope from its beam, does to the fact (visible only from this elevation) that the bird box closest to him, one of dozens dotted about the aviary, differs from the others in having only two (rather than four) walls and no roof. Inside, a kind of bird-nest shape has calcified: a central twig that rises from a brackish mass of smaller ones, droppings and seed-husks and, once risen, banks into an anticlockwise turn; then, on completing this, reverses its direction to bank back the other way, clockwise, thereby describing in the air a kind of double-helix before dropping to rejoin its starting point. Beneath this twisted mass, on the bird box’s floor, three curvy white lines, lying side by side near the front edge, describe their own loops: one, the central of the three, a distended circle, or ellipse; the two bookending it more convoluted figure-eights that traverse their own paths and curl back, like the twig above them, to their own beginnings. These lines are old and faded, grey as much as white. As for their constitutive material, their ‘medium’: it could be paint, or it might just be bird shit.