Between This World and the Next, page 26
“Sovanna must stop the yama. And you will make her stop,” Song said finally.
Speaking in Khmer with him made her seem bolder. She had to speak without euphemism; there could be no question of diplomacy. Moreover, he found it difficult to set the tone. She relished the irony of this; she could have spoken to him in English, but he assumed her English was as broken as Sovanna’s and that his rudimentary Khmer was superior to it.
She could see Federenko was now calculating something. Would he deny Sovanna was a junkie? In the end, he thought better of it:
“I cannot stop how Sovanna is.”
Song summoned Viktor’s stillness, the way it radiated inner strength. “You take the yama away. You shut her in her room. And you make sure someone watches her all the time.”
“No, no.” Federenko put his hands on his hips. His left foot tapped quickly on the floor several times. What could irk a man who relished controlling everything more than his inability to meet a straightforward demand?
“It’s simple,” she said, knowing why he couldn’t admit otherwise. To do so would be to declare outright that Sovanna was being paid—no longer in money but in the yama she couldn’t survive without. He would have to profess he was no more or less than Vasiliev, that Sovanna and he were not, as he averred, real lovers. She saw Sovanna rising in the light of the television, her arms reaching up to the ceiling and entwining, her body lowering down, her head disappearing.
Federenko stroked his chin and put his fingers to his lips. “If you do this, it will hurt Sovanna very, very much. It might destroy her. Do you understand what you’re asking?”
Of course she understood: many a Naga girl had been lost in the fog of yama. She had seen the rage, heard the muffled pleading through the walls, the talk of fits and tremors, of dark nightmares, of slashed wrists. “I will be there,” she said in the harshest monotone she could muster.
Federenko started nodding. “Fine, fine!” he said brightly. “It will take a few weeks to get her better. So first we go to Bangkok. Then, somewhere else for a few days. When all these trips are over, we will start. Okay.”
Song reached out, put her fingers under the edge of the plate, and flipped it off the table, sending it smashing to the floor. Fragments of china scattered across the concrete, strands of curry sauce and sticky rice clumps splattering. “If it takes a week, we stay a week. Right here. We don’t move.”
Federenko glared at her, neck flushed and cheeks reddening. But what could he do? Start slapping her around? What Song carried inside her rendered her untouchable.
Bodies tense, the two of them faced each other, like the cockfights in the village she remembered from childhood: that moment before the birds fluttered and flurried and ripped with their sharpened spurs, when they were completely still, sizing each other up, their slick black feathers shining, their necks pink and stippled like white men’s balls.
Federenko shouted for the housekeeper to clean up the mess. When the woman came in with her dustpan and brush, Song resisted the impulse to get to her feet and help. Instead, as she listened to the tinkle of shards being swept across the tiles, she reached out and picked up the table knife that had been left for her. Holding it out no more than an inch above the table, she turned her gaze to its gleaming blade, not moving a muscle, just watching it catch the light.
Federenko didn’t know she cared about having the baby—and she would make sure he thought she hated carrying it. She would be unpredictable. Capable of anything. What was growing inside her was not only a child, but power—a force she had never felt and didn’t care for but would wield if she had to.
Federenko said nothing for twenty seconds, then turned away. He walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Early the next morning, the shouting began. She heard a fist beating on a door, then a bolt rattling in its strike plate. When Song rose from her bed and looked out into the corridor, Federenko was there, striding toward her. “You come here,” he said, beckoning her, as she rubbed sleep from her eyes.
In the small bathroom, he held up a transparent plastic bag, packed with lime-green and strawberry-red pills. After emptying them into the toilet, he pressed on the flush. As they watched the pills sink and struggle against the whirlpool, they heard thuds and cries coming through the wall.
“Okay?” Federenko said, holding up his finger. “But this week we go to Bangkok. The hospitals and doctors have things they don’t have here, understand? Downstairs the cook makes whatever you want. Go eat.”
Though she knew Amos had seen her devouring the breakfast, when Federenko looked in, Song picked at it sullenly.
From time to time, she glanced at Amos, trying to detect what Fearless had seen in him: someone who was more capable of sympathy and human decency than the others. After breakfast—following orders or unilaterally, she couldn’t tell which—he beckoned her gently and led her to Sovanna’s room. Inside, a guard loomed over the bed—though they had already handcuffed Sovanna’s hand to the supporting post of the headboard. “Give them a m-m-minute,” said Amos, waving him away.
Song pulled back the hair that hung over Sovanna’s face, leaned over, and brushed her lips on her cheek. Then, as Amos went to the window and looked out, she climbed onto the bed and spooned her as best she could. She wanted to get closer, to hold her tight, to somehow find a way through Sovanna’s unresponsiveness. She didn’t know if Sovanna was asleep or not, but she whispered in her ear, summoning up the happiest things she could think of—like the memory she’d had of the time they were all together, eating buffalo meat, all four of the family.
But then, the next day, Sovanna was wretched and bitter again.
“That buffalo story of yours is nonsense. Don’t you remember? You and Ma had gone to visit Uncle and there were soldiers fighting around the fields. Pa and me lay down on our stomachs in the furrows. Bang bang bang. Shooting the walls of the house. The buffalo was caught in the crossfire and killed.”
“That can’t be right.”
“I was the one who worked the fields.”
And so it went on for those first three days: Sovanna was confused and exhausted. She couldn’t think straight. There were bouts of screaming and ardent pleading. Catatonia. Sweat. The rancid smell of vomit. Only very occasionally tenderness.
“Remember—you chose this,” Federenko reminded Song.
The atmosphere in the house grew fractious and tense. The men, with nothing to do, were starting to get crotchety. They were below decks on a ship being tossed on Sovanna’s emotions, waiting for the cycles of storm and doldrums to pass.
While they scowled and grumbled, Song thought on her strength, and plotted, and worried about how amenable Sovanna was to Federenko. She found that her singing could calm Sovanna at her worst and tip the balance of the scales in her favor. When she had sung all the old songs, she would make up her own, little hums and vowels and sweet words with choruses that she would repeat and refine with each repetition.
When Sovanna was less fretful, she would rock her in her arms and whisper in her ears that all her suffering was Federenko’s doing.
“He’s the one who’s torturing you, Sovanna. I begged him not to, but he won’t give in.”
She had never lied to Sovanna before—the thought of it disgusted her—but this was not the real Sovanna, Song told herself—not yet. In time, she would uncover the true one, just as she had uncovered her scars. And she would make that happen by any means necessary.
44
Larissa, Wish’s favorite, was dead, found in a Hong Kong hotel room, face down beside the corpse of an Austrian investment banker. In the International Herald Tribune that Fearless bought in Istanbul Airport, he happened across the syndicated report: multiple stab wounds; a crime of passion; unattributed sources. There was no mention of prostitution or links to Phnom Penh, no more information on Larissa except that she was a Russian national under thirty.
By the time he touched down in Odesa, darkness had fallen; in the taxi from the airport, he couldn’t tell if the city had changed since Laure and he had visited here three years ago. “I must show you,” Alyosha had said to him back then, “what we are building with your money—don’t you think?”
While most of the people they knew lived in dour Soviet blocks, Vera and Federenko were building a detached property, directly opposite one of Odesa’s cemeteries, sandwiched in the shadow between two concrete towers. They lavished Laure and Fearless with hospitality that evening, insisting that they take their double bed while they camped out in one of the unfinished rooms: “Once we have a baby, this will be our nursery,” Federenko had said. Laure and Fearless slept only fitfully, thinking of them huddling on the dusty floor among drip-smeared paint pots and sheets of Uryadovy Kuryer. Fearless remembered thinking how much he admired Vera and Alyosha’s stoicism: cast out from Moscow, where they had wanted to settle, they were making the best of the opportunities they had. Laure had thought to bring a small gift—a set of delicate china bowls—that drew a bright smile from Vera.
After checking in to his room at the Londonskaya on Primorsky Boulevard—an imposing, Petersburgian building with thick carpets and marble columns—Fearless went out on his own into the city. In the dark, he wandered among the crumbling grandeur of baroque buildings, their dirty pastel colors powder gray in the moonlight. A few blocks from the sea, he found a basement bar called Gambrinus where he relished the heavy food, a big stein of beer, and the booming klezmer skank of an accordion and violin.
Ten hours later, in morning light so bright it needled his eyes, a taxi took him from the hotel to a quiet, deserted street. Maintained immaculately, the single-story house and its garden were now finished, its flower beds bursting with red carnations, its dwarf fruit trees full of the small talk of birds. Still unsure of what he would say, Fearless lingered in the street in the shadow of a lime tree. Federenko had maintained that he would always do right by Vera; what could make her take Fearless’s word over his?
A door opened at the side of the house and Vera appeared, carrying a basket of washing. Over the hedge he could make out her shoulder-length red hair, the outline of her trim body through the loose clusters of privet, her simple V-neck sweater and stonewashed jeans as she bent and stretched and pinned clothes to the line. There were no men’s shirts, he noted. No children’s vests. Her fingers were nimble, clipping pegs to legs and shoulders. Something about her brisk, easy manner gave him hope.
When he knocked on the front door a minute later, she cracked it open and stared out with narrowed eyes.
“It’s me, Vera. Fearless,” he said in English, waving his hands across his growing curls. “Do you remember? We visited—Laure and I—three years ago.”
She opened the door wider, and he moved a half step forward, smiling broadly.
“Fearless?”
Her obvious surprise was a relief: no one had warned her.
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve had a long journey. Can I wash my hands? It’s through there, yes?”
He walked confidently into the house, taking off his jacket. Inside the bathroom, he ran the taps, in case she had decided to listen outside.
Swiftly, he opened the bathroom cabinet. The glass shelves confirmed what the clothes on the washing line had already told him. No razor. No aftershave. Only one lonely toothbrush. No sign of Western beauty products or designer perfumes: if Federenko kept her, it was within a limited budget.
As soon as he emerged, Vera appeared at another door. She had quickly brushed her hair and applied lipstick—not that she needed to: the delicate beauty that had once captivated Federenko had not been dimmed by time but burnished by it. “Why are you here?” she asked again, with a mix of hesitancy and guarded suspicion.
He gambled that she didn’t know he had seen Federenko recently and also that he had told her nothing about Laure.
“I’m trying to find Lyosha. I haven’t seen him since Laure died. Did you know that? Laure—she was killed in a car accident.”
Her mouth opened. “What?”
“A terrible crash. Over a month ago.”
“Bozhe moy,” she said, making the sign of the cross on her chest. “What are you saying?” She approached and walked past him down the corridor.
Following her, he passed an open door, through which he glimpsed a small room with a bunk bed and toy cars queuing in a line at a tiny service station. Then they entered the kitchen, where she pulled out a chair. He saw her shoulders rise up, pause, then fall. He remembered now, sitting in the garden outside after dinner. Alyosha had taken him there to smoke cigars—how ridiculous, he had thought—on cheap plastic chairs. Fearless had looked back at Vera and Laure talking at this very table, sharing some kind of confidence in the golden light inside. “Women,” Alyosha had said to him. “What’s the phrase you have in English? As thick as thieves, yes? I love this expression!” Laure cast an easy intimacy. He was so used to that gift he had forgotten its magic.
“I was scared to meet her,” Vera said now, looking up at him, as Fearless took a seat at the table opposite her. “I thought she would be here”—she raised her hand up above her head—“and she will think I was nobody. But she wasn’t like that at all.”
“She was humble.”
“She knew people. She understood their character. Let me make some tea for you. I will take one too.”
Everything in the kitchen, he noticed, was simple and spare—a far cry from the fussy interiors he had usually experienced in this part of the world. This was not a bold, stylistic choice, he sensed, but something that derived from Vera’s personality—an asceticism, a simplicity, a lack of interest in excess—perhaps the result of her stint in prison. As she spooned tea leaves from a metal tin, he noted colorful drawings stuck to the fridge beside a handwritten shopping list and a calendar.
Vera brought the tea and they talked more of Laure. Despite his determination to steer the conversation, he couldn’t resist the urge to unburden himself. It was something about the way Vera allowed him enough silence and the sense of her own sadness merging with his. By the end, tears had started to well in his eyes.
“I should have been there,” he said.
“Ah—but she loves you.”
“I see now that the being-there is everything. It’s what counts. It doesn’t matter what excuses you have or how good your intentions are.”
He looked over to the open door, as though expecting Laure to walk in, as if it had all been a test. Then Vera asked: “Why come here? Why come all this way? Tell me the truth.”
A look of fear passed over her face as he reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out the videotape. He hoped his air of sleeplessness and vulnerability would make him somehow more believable.
“I didn’t want to show you this. But it’s serious, I’m afraid. I am worried about Alyosha. He’s involved with bad people.” He laid the tape on the table and pushed it toward her.
Vera’s cheek twitched. But behind the face that had melted when they were talking about Laure a defiance and obduracy now reemerged.
“This is not my business. I never see Alexei now. From time to time he phones. But I leave him to his work.”
She pushed the videotape back, the black plastic box almost sliding into Fearless’s lap.
“Shall we eat something, yes? There are plums from the garden.”
She got up from the table and went back to the counter.
Shortly, Fearless himself rose and took his tea to the window. He had one more card to play. “You have children?” he said, raising his teacup to the garden, where a small plastic slide sat on the concrete patio.
“My nephew and niece come one time a week.” A chink of light broke through the cloud of unease he’d cast. She rinsed the plums in an old enamel colander.
Casually, he moved toward the papers stuck to the fridge. “So these are their drawings, then.”
“Last year we ski in France.”
Fearless pretended to admire the felt-tip chairlifts as his eyes scanned the other papers on the fridge. There was a number written in red pen that caught his attention—a string of thirteen characters that matched the ones in Hossein’s notebook.
“It’s a shame you and Alyosha never had kids yourself,” he remarked, his heart beating faster as he scrambled to memorize the numbers. “A shame for the world—two lovely people.”
As she lifted the dripping colander, she didn’t look up, but he could tell she wasn’t uncomfortable or offended. He bet no one dared ever mention her childlessness. He grimaced, thinking of the blow he could strike.
“Alyosha told me that you came close one time,” he added.
She reached for some bowls. “Yes. We tried for many years.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It changed things, maybe.”
“He told me it was tough for you. That you thought it was your fault.”
She turned off the tap. “Did he say that it is me?”
Fearless said nothing.
She shook her head, opened the tap, and rewashed the plums. “It is never something with me,” she murmured.
Fearless felt as if he’d been walking in the shallows on a beach, only to find the seabed fall away. They lingered on the edge of icy waters that swirled with the yearning for things that had seemed impossible.
He had set everything up, but the situation was worse—or better—than he had imagined: what would he do with it? If he revealed right now that Federenko was having a child with a prostitute, then that would surely challenge her loyalty. But who would he be if he manipulated her like that?
Fearless looked at the plums in the bowl she handed him. It was one of the bowls Laure had given Vera on their visit. Laure had been wary of Alyosha, right from the beginning, while both he and Vera had loved and trusted him.
“I guess Alyosha lies about a lot of things,” he said. If he couldn’t get what he wanted without cruelty, it wasn’t worth it.
Vera laughed gently and shook her head. “Tell me. Did he ever speak of the time he and I meet?”
