The snow began again, gentle as feathers, as Darcy mounted the shallow stone steps and kneeled under the portico. If he’d been tailed, no cars turned into the street behind the cab, not a soul, just the night and the sounds of families at home, someone practising violin, a couple yelling at each other, a crow picking dirt where weeds poked through the snow. A figure emerged from the mist across the frozen garden, the sound of snow crunching, a man with a suitcase who entered the front door.
Darcy skiffled around the side and into the courtyard, couldn’t see anyone, just a hole dug in the cement, dark as an animal trap; an old pneumatic drill leaned on a shed like a stork. Fin’s window above him was dark, the shadow of her pink-checked blanket draped where her hand had been, pressed against the glass. He ducked inside the back stairwell, crept two steps at a time, saw no watcher skulking in the corridor.
His key was still in the pocket of Aurelio’s coat, but the apartment was unlocked, the door not quite closed and Darcy felt suddenly afraid to enter, friends of Fin’s or friends of the general’s. Aware of the tremor in his arms, he edged the door open a hair. Fin’s umbrella in the entry hall, her quilted coat gone from its hook, the place still warm. Either Fin had been back and left in a hurry or others had been here, ransacking, books strewn about the rug, drawers upturned from the kitchen, utensils everywhere, the donkey painting tossed from the easel. Silence except for the windowpanes rattling, a television downstairs. He threw Aurelio’s coat over the heating pipes to dry, stood before the open fridge, the only light. A stump of dried-up salami and Solovyov’s Meaning of Love with a note paperclipped to it.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Forgive me.
The donkey painting for you. May you be the one. Fin xx P.S. Wretchedness and Inspiration are Inseparable.
He stared at it, unmoved. The postscript, did she think that was some parting gift? The sort of thing she’d paint on a peasant dress, but the dresses were gone and he wasn’t sure if forgiveness was in him. He pulled angry chunks of salami with his teeth, crouched among books, squinting at covers in the faded light: The Soviet Achievement, Quotations from Mao Tsetung, The Brothers Karamazov, no Fodor’s. He rifled through his duffel bag—clothes and drawing pads, charcoals, vitamins, a map of Prague. Without the restaurant he only had his roll of money, nowhere left to go. He searched busily under the couch, tried to remember. The list of restaurants, he’d checked it before he slept, the dog here with him, drinking milk then ruefully climbing up on the couch beside him. The dog and now Fodor’s gone.
He stared out into the dark afternoon, separated from everything he knew. Svetlana’s apartment closed up with metal shutters. Down below, an old woman under the courtyard lamp, the digging beside her almost archaeological. Darcy thought how Jobik and his Dashnaks must have channels, sympathisers, Fin in the back of some Armenian-owned lorry on the road to Yerevan, to a southern border, the Caspian Sea. Darcy left here as a sacrifice.
He thought he heard movement in her bedroom, stopped chewing and listened, but all he made out was the sound of his own breathing, then footfalls. Someone in the flat above. He stared up into the shadows where the ceiling fluted, a sense of being toyed with still.
He grabbed Fin’s Opinel knife from an upended drawer and quietly closed himself in her windowless room where he could turn on the light. The suet smell, lard containers, foil, art scraps, the ironing table on its side, empty wire hangers in the wardrobe, her clothes all over the floor. He felt light-headed, unclear if she’d been here last, or if the general’s men had come through after, if he was being watched from minute cameras. He tested the phone line; dead, as it had been since he’d arrived. Fin’s travelling clock said 4.04 pm. Time felt transitory, vanishing about him, as if his life were being stitched shut.
In the bathroom, he looked at his face in the mirror, dabbing his cheek and lip with a damp cloth. The red welt of the general’s slap had swollen almost in the shape of fingers; pus scabbed damply on the burn on his neck. As he pressed the cloth against it, it stung as if hot cigarette embers still lay in his skin. He cupped his hands beneath the tap and kept drinking and drinking, the rusty taste like nectar. Then, as he quickly wiped his crotch and underarms, he noticed the book down in the corner by the lavatory, the Fodor’s cover with its scattered domes of St Basil’s. She’d left it for him, casual as toilet reading.
Frantically, he flipped to the section on the restaurants of Moscow, the bottom of the second page: The Jaguaroff. Traditional Russian Cuisine. In a lane off Solyanka, on the east side of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker. He ripped out the page and headed back into the sitting-room, reread her note. The donkey painting for you. May you be the one. He grabbed her canvas from where it had been flung against the wall and, in the dim light from the fridge, he lay it on the counter. The two sisters and babies in soft watercolours, the suckling donkey. He remembered Fin’s story, the sister syphillitic, how only one child would survive.