The Wolves of Eternity, page 46
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘But I can take you home, if you want?’
‘I’ve already arranged with them,’ she said. ‘We just didn’t say what time.’
‘OK,’ I said.
We lay there in silence.
I couldn’t think of anything more to say. At least, nothing that wouldn’t sound stupid given the situation.
‘Goodnight, then,’ I said after a while.
‘Goodnight,’ she said.
Even though I was acutely aware of her presence and every little movement she made seemed to transmit itself to me, I must have fallen asleep straight away, because the next thing I knew the sun was pouring in through the window and her bed was empty.
I jumped to my feet, put my trousers on hastily and pulled on my shirt.
She wasn’t in the living room or the kitchen, and she wasn’t in the bathroom either when I went back up to check. Her toothbrush and rucksack were gone.
But the coffee maker was on, the pot was half full and the little lamp shone red.
Maybe she was sitting outside in the fine weather?
I poured myself a cup and went out to see.
There she was. Sitting at the garden table with her mug in front of her, a cigarette in her hand and her rucksack leaned against the table leg.
‘Been up long?’ I said, and sat down on the chair next to her. ‘Thanks for making coffee! Did you sleep all right?’
‘Not that long, and not really,’ she said. ‘But I’m going home now. They should be here soon.’
‘OK.’
She said nothing more, and I sipped my coffee.
‘It’s not just cocoa you know how to make,’ I said.
At the same moment, a car slowed down on the main road and turned up the drive, the sound of its engine rising as it approached.
‘That’ll be them,’ I said.
She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and got to her feet, put the packet in her pocket and picked up her rucksack.
I went with her round to the front. The white Escort pulled slowly up. Lisa waved to the driver, the same girl as before, by the looks of it, and then turned to face me.
‘Look after yourself,’ she said, and gave me a quick hug before opening the passenger door and getting in.
I followed the car with my eyes until it turned onto the road and drew away. I went back and got her coffee mug, then went quietly inside to make some breakfast.
YEVGENY
The young man who could only be the new helper was standing outside the office building when I came into work that morning. I turned into the parking area, and although it was as good as empty, I picked a space at the far end just so I’d have time to give him the once-over. He didn’t know who I was yet.
The snow still lay heaped up along the verges, packed hard after the long winter, glittering in the sunlight. The asphalt was wet, and behind the trees the ice on the river was retreating, the water gliding green and full through the wide channel that had already opened in the middle, and here and there what looked to be chunks of ice came bobbing.
I slammed the door shut and went towards him. He looked to be twenty at the most. Small and well built. Shaven-headed. Blue jeans, black boots, a grey hoody under a blue jacket. He stood staring at the ground with both hands buried in his pockets. As I came closer I noticed his throat was tattooed. His face was pale, not yet that of an adult, his cheeks a blotchy red.
I walked past him and went inside to the office, still barely a shed, where Stanislav was standing at the printer gathering the sheets of paper it was spitting out into a pile, while Natasha sat with the phone clamped between her cheek and shoulder and chewed her fingernails.
Stas turned round.
‘Yevgeny Pavlovich,’ he said.
‘At your service,’ I said, and sat down on his swivel chair. A grimace of annoyance passed over his face, but he said nothing.
‘What’s the plan for today?’ I said.
‘You’ve got a new man. He’s waiting outside. Viktor. You’re going to Kazan. I take it you knew.’
I smiled at Natasha, who smiled back.
‘I suppose I did, now I come to think about it,’ I said.
‘Then Moscow on Monday.’
‘Parquet staves?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Anything to bring back?’
He shook his head.
‘Just yourself and the lad.’
‘Where did you find him?’
‘He phoned the same day as Seryozha quit.’
‘And you just took him on?’
‘No, of course not. I interviewed him here last Friday. He came with some good references. Seems like a decent lad.’
‘You’re not the one who’s going to be sitting next to him every day.’
I stood up, took the documents Stas handed me and went back out. The lad took no notice even when I went up to him.
I lit a cigarette. Held the packet out.
‘Want one?’
He shook his head.
‘I’m Yevgeny,’ I said. ‘You’ll be with me.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, without sounding like he meant it.
‘I hear you’re a good worker. I like that. But what’s with the tattoo?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ he said, his eyes still fixed on the ground. ‘It’s just a tattoo.’
‘Of what?’
‘The FC Rubin crest.’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The lion that’s a swan! A football fan, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course you are. Do you play yourself?’
He shook his head, then turned aside and spat.
Crude and angry, the way short men often were.
‘But you go to the matches?’
‘Yes.’
I took a final drag and flicked the end away.
‘Right, let’s go,’ I said.
The lorry was where I’d left it the night before. There had been several then, and I’d parked between two others. Now it was on its own in the middle of nowhere and looked like it had been abandoned by a drunk.
‘Have you been in one of these before?’ I said after we’d climbed into the cab.
He shook his head.
‘Have you got a licence?’
Again, he shook his head.
I started the engine and threw it into gear before pulling away towards the exit.
‘I used to deliver cars for Lada,’ I said. ‘From Tolyatti to the nearby towns, often to Kazan, occasionally to Yekaterinburg or Moscow. After five years I was sick of doing the same every day, so I packed it in and came to work for Stas. It’s a bit more varied.’
I turned onto the main road and slowly picked up speed.
‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Where have you worked before? And why did you stop?’
He shrugged.
‘I worked in a storeroom. Got sick of it. Wanted to get out a bit more.’
‘Who told you about Stas?’
He shrugged again and gazed out of his window. Not much to look at there. Trees, trees and more trees.
I yawned and put the radio on.
‘It’s six hours there and six hours back,’ I said. ‘Were you thinking of staying quiet the whole time?’
‘I wasn’t thinking anything one way or the other.’
‘It’s OK with me if you’re not the talkative kind. What isn’t OK with me is if you’re just going to sit there in a sulk. You’ll appreciate the difference, I’m sure.’
‘I do,’ he said.
‘Good!’ I said. ‘Who told you about this job, then?’
‘I know someone who knows Sergei. He said he was packing it in and that I should ring and see if I could get his job. And now I’m here.’
‘Now you’re here, indeed. Do you live with your parents?’
He gave me a look like I’d made him fume, then crossed his legs as we crawled up a long, gentle incline.
‘Not seen them since I was sixteen.’
‘I left home when I was sixteen as well,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t stand living in the same house as my dad, so I moved in with my grandfather. He was a giant. His fist was as big as both of mine together. Four of yours! He was giving water to a calf once out in the byre. The weather was hot and there were flies everywhere. The calf was bothered by them and tossed its head, catching him hard as it did so. He was so incensed he actually punched the creature, killed it dead on the spot. Can you imagine that?’
He shook his head.
‘Anyway, I moved in with him. He was old by then and no longer the man he used to be. But I liked him. Six months later he had a stroke. I found him on the floor in the passage, he’d collapsed while he’d been putting his boots on. He was still alive. I called the ambulance and went with him to the hospital. He’d gone into a coma and they were saying it was a matter of days. But then that same night I had a dream. Three strange men dressed all in black, with black hats on, came into the house where we lived. They looked like Georgians, I remember thinking. My grandfather was there, sitting in a chair by the window. It was completely dark outside. We lived in a village, not far from here, as it happens. Fields and meadows all around. The men went past me as if I wasn’t there and went straight up to him. One of them grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him to his feet. He didn’t resist, but I did. I clung to him as they dragged him outside into the darkness. I couldn’t save him, even though I’m strong myself. It was no use. I was screaming and shouting. One of the men spun round and said, Who’s that making such a racket? He saw me then. How long’s the old man got left? he asked. A year, said one of the others. For a few good deeds. And then they went away.’
I said no more. The lad stared at me.
‘What happened?’
‘What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. It was just as the strange men in the dream had said. My grandfather woke up from his coma and lived one more year exactly.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
‘No. But you’re spinning tales.’
‘So you don’t believe dreams can be true?’
‘No.’
‘In that case I’m sorry for you.’
We passed through the last of the villages on the way, crossed over the bridge and followed the road down the hill until we came to the factory where they made the parquet staves. The river ran fast on the other side of the buildings, its waters white with foam, and snow lay heaped between the trees.
The lad worked hard and didn’t flinch as we loaded the heavy oblong cases into the trailer in their hundreds.
We each bought a coffee from the machine in the works canteen and sat down on top of some pallets in the spring sunshine before we got going again.
‘Any more tales to spin?’ he said after a while.
‘What, are you bored already?’
‘I’m never bored.’
‘That’s a positive attribute. But yes, I’ve got tales. Have you heard the one about the second-rate KGB officer who came to rule over all of Russia?’
‘Ha ha.’
‘You think I’m making it up? Well, my mother says we belong to the Romanov family, so by rights I should be claiming the throne. Her grandmother, my own great-grandmother, got pregnant when she was sixteen years old. Do you know where she was working then? The Winter Palace. They made her chuck it in, though not without handing her a very generous redundancy payment. All her life she refused to say who the father was. And what does that suggest? Someone paid her to keep her mouth shut. And in whose interest would that be? I’m asking, that’s all.’
‘So why don’t you claim the throne, then?’
‘It’s too hard to prove.’
‘No, it’s not. You could take a DNA test.’
‘But I’ve already got a good life as a lorry driver.’
He grinned, but turned his head quickly to look out of his window so as not to give me the satisfaction.
‘You do know they can cut and paste DNA now?’ I said. ‘This friend of a friend of mine breeds dogs. He’s started experimenting with it. One night we were out at his place. He showed us how far he’s got. As soon as it went dark he took us outside to the pen and called the dogs. They all came running, but only one stood out in the murk. It was luminous. He’d made a luminous dog.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Haven’t you heard about it? They take the genes from a luminous microorganism, then put them in the dog’s semen and the pups all light up in the dark.’
‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘I saw it with my own eyes. I can take you there, if you want, so you can see for yourself.’
‘So he’s a scientist as well as a dog breeder, is he?’ he said with a sneer.
‘You don’t need to be a scientist. It’s all simple now. You can order everything you need off the internet and do it yourself.’
He looked at me, raised his eyebrows, then looked out of his window again.
Clearly those endless plains were more interesting than me, I thought.
Yellow and sodden and uninspiring though they were.
Huge, factory-like farm structures here and there, then suddenly the Volga. Wide as a lake, chopping in the wind, glittering in the sunshine.
Nineteen years old and as angry as that. It didn’t bode well for the young man’s life.
‘Tell me, Vitya,’ I said. ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’
‘None of your business,’ he said without looking at me.
‘So you haven’t then.’
He said nothing and I decided to leave him alone. It was almost better not talking at all than talking to him.
After unloading at the facility in Samara we stopped at a roadside cafe and had some dinner before carrying on home as darkness fell. It was just gone nine by the time I parked the lorry, locked it and went over to the car having asked him first if he needed a lift, an offer he blankly refused. I’d got nothing on for the weekend, so I drove straight to Kalashnikov’s and got well and truly drunk. My lights went out around three, I can’t remember anything after that until waking up with a thumping headache around twelve the next day.
What did it matter?
I lay on the sofa watching old movies one after another until it got dark again and I fried myself some potatoes and boiled some spaghetti for my dinner. Maks didn’t care much for being at mine, so in a way it was OK not seeing him. I looked forward to the weekends when it was my turn, but there was no getting around the fact that it was a strain having to keep him happy the whole time.
With a good bit of ketchup on it and a beer to wash it all down it was a fairly decent meal that at least filled my stomach ready for another night out. Out of habit I pressed the button for the lift even though it had been out of order for three weeks, and when suddenly it started up from one of the floors below it still took me a moment to realise it was working. Someone must have been and fixed it, unlikely as it sounded.
A gang of youths were sitting leaned up against the wall of the landing, drinking and playing tinny music on their phones. Once I got outside I understood why. The temperature had plummeted, the asphalt was a glassy film of ice from all the water that hadn’t run off after the big thaw. I decided to leave the car and walk it instead. It wouldn’t take more than half an hour. The jacket I’d put on was too flimsy, but if I walked briskly enough I’d stay warm, so I didn’t think it was worth the effort going back up to change.
The pavement was so slippy I had to walk on the soil of the verge. Above my head the starry sky was like a frozen eddy, cold and clear. I got the feeling I often had as a kid, that I wasn’t looking up but down. That I was standing on the edge of a huge dark well whose frozen water had captured all these tiny air bubbles.
I hadn’t been born when Gagarin went into space and I’d been too young to remember when he died. Nevertheless, it was like he was everywhere when I’d been growing up, and all I’d wanted was to be a cosmonaut, nothing else would do.
I lit a cigarette as I got down to the main road. I was looking forward to the pub more than usual. The warmth, the smoke, the thrum of voices that would hit me when I stepped inside, like walking into a wall. A bit of vodka to get going, then a few rounds of billiards and take it from there. All in the hope that it was going to be one of those nights that kept on giving, when it seemed like door upon door kept opening in front of you, so by the time Sunday came round you could spend your entire day reconstructing each and every room you’d entered, and the order in which they’d presented themselves.
* * *
*
The journey to Moscow was fourteen hours if you didn’t stop. Normally I did it in sixteen, so in order to get there before the facility closed for the night I’d told Viktor we’d be making an early start Monday at five o’clock. I wasn’t sure he’d turn up, I had to admit.
But then just before five he came walking in the haze of the road lights. I was already in the cab with the engine running. He climbed up, opened the door and got in. His face was half hidden by his hood, but I could tell straight away that something was wrong.
‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, looking the other way.
‘Have you been in a fight?’
‘Thlipped on the ithe,’ he said.
‘Let me have a look at you.’
He didn’t move for a second, but then grudgingly he turned towards me.
Christ almighty.
He was sporting a great big shiner, a swollen, bloodied nose and bulging lips. He looked a right mess.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ I said. ‘Someone’s given you a beating. Who was it?’
