Queen K, page 14
‘It’s weird how you are always staring at them,’ the skinny girl said. Even the boy with tufty hair started to avoid her.
As part of their end of term tests they each had to stand up in front of the class and give a presentation. The subject was What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. Kata didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. She only knew she wanted to be different from how she was now. But she had to talk about something. What might Margaret, Deborah, Rachel want to be? What might they think was cool? Kata decided to say TV presenter. As her turn approached she got more and more nervous. Her, TV presenter. They would laugh at her. They would all laugh at her. Deborah had said lawyer. Rachel had said journalist. She felt sick. But in the five-minute break before her turn Margaret and Rachel passed her on their way back from the bathroom and Rachel said, ‘Oh, you’re up next, Kata,’ and Margaret stepped forward and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be great,’ and stroked her on her back, just beneath her shoulder blade.
She stood where she was and watched them return to their desks, the air around her bright with something and a warmth and tingling still on her back and then it came, waves of ease and rightness rolling through her body and out from her, and there was no longer any fear about standing up and talking about being a TV presenter. When she stood up they were looking at her from the back row, smiling at her, giving her all of their attention, and as she said the things she had prepared to say about being a TV presenter they nodded and smiled even more and it all felt so right, yes, she would grow up to be a TV presenter if that’s what they thought she should do, maybe it had changed the way they felt about her, maybe they would talk to her in the next break. They were allowed to write notes for their speech on the blackboard and when she turned to look at hers she heard a swell behind her, she turned back round and the faces of all her classmates were twitching and smiling, the boy with the tufty hair was frowning and looking concerned.
She continued, talking about how when she was a TV presenter she would live in a big house and have her hair and make-up done every day and tell people about all the important things happening in the world. She turned back to the blackboard and this time the swell rolled out until it was the sound of lots of people laughing, and then the teacher was looking very angry and saying, ‘Stop it, you should be ashamed of yourselves.’ The teacher came towards her and put her hand on her back, where Margaret’s hand had been; she pulled something off and threw it in the bin, she rubbed Kata on her back and looked at her kindly and Kata wanted the teacher to stop rubbing her there, her touch was erasing Margaret’s touch, she wanted the memory of Margaret’s touch.
After the lesson when everyone had gone she picked the crumpled piece of paper out of the bin.
Russian Freak, it said.
*
Winters in Brooklyn weren’t as cold as winters in Ust Labinsk. She forgot the winters in Ust Labinsk. Summers in Brooklyn were hotter. Several summers came and went. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to wear short skirts in summer once she turned twelve and lost her skinny childishness.
They never forgave her open and hungry fixation on them.
Russian Freak. The name stuck. After a while they dropped the Russian and she was just Freak.
Her mother had never told her about it and she didn’t have any girlfriends to tell her about it and so of course, on the day she got her first period, when she pulled down her pants and saw all the blood, she thought she was going to die.
Help me, she said to herself, sitting in the toilet cubicle and staring down at her pants. She pulled her pants up and ran out into the schoolyard. Deborah was there. Deborah was the first person she saw so she said, ‘Help me,’ to Deborah.
‘I’m bleeding.’ She pulled up her skirt. It was spreading through her white pants and down her legs.
‘Oh my God,’ Deborah said, and took a step backwards, a look of disgust on her face. Kata sank onto the floor, pulling up her knees, too terrified to care about Deborah’s look of disgust. She raised her head and said, ‘Help me,’ and saw that something in Deborah’s face had changed. Deborah came towards her, sat down beside her; she felt Deborah’s arm around her, she heard Deborah calling to Rachel and Margaret.
‘Look!’ Deborah said when they came over. ‘She has it!’
Margaret got down on the floor as well and put her arms around her; they sent Rachel off to call an ambulance.
It was a rare disease, it struck here and there, in the neighbourhood and the nearby boroughs. Deborah had known a girl on the next street who’d had it, Patricia Silverman. She’d died within twenty-four hours. ‘You have to be brave, Kata,’ Deborah said. ‘Shh, shh, it’s OK. Once you get to the hospital it will be OK. Because they’ll put you on morphine and then at least you won’t feel the pain. You’ll just go into a deep sleep. And your family will be with you. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure your family are with you.’
Kata closed her eyes and leaned her head into Deborah’s chest as Deborah held and stroked her. She felt her body against Deborah’s body, Deborah’s hand caressing her hair, her cheek. Through her terror – she was dying – came a joy that was visceral, all-encompassing and complete. In her death, all the barriers that kept her from the Deborahs and the Rachels and the Margarets of the world had fallen away. The great fact of her death had in one swift moment swept away their disgust, and she was with them. They were holding her, they were gentle and tender, she was floating in the milk of their kindness and pity and love. It was worth dying for.
*
The scent of roses hung in the room and the candle sent flickers across the wall. Kata sat huddled in her slanket, staring at nothing.
Alex knew she was supposed to comfort her mother and so she did, she said, ‘I’m sorry those things happened to you, Mama.’ She held her mum in her arms as if she were the mother and Kata the child.
But there was an awful feeling in her chest as she did it, an awful feeling in the whole room, in fact, mixed in with the smoke of the candle now gone out. It was the feeling that she should not have heard these things about her own mother, that Kata could have told them to anyone else in the world but that she should not have told them to her. Her mother’s experience at school and her own experience at school combined to make the world too dangerous a place. She felt her mother’s helplessness as if it were penetrating her, pushing itself inside her against her will.
Alex was still comforting her mother but she wasn’t sure if it was helping or if her mother even noticed it because she still had that blank look on her face, staring into space.
‘That’s why I wanted so much for you to make friends,’ Kata said.
She turned to Alex and her facial features rearranged themselves out of blankness into something more definite.
‘That’s why it upsets me so much, to hear that you have no friends. You will try harder, won’t you, to make friends? For my sake?’
Some of the anger and disgust she had read in her mother’s face when she had raised herself from her stool in the Harrods oyster bar had returned. It was an anger and disgust whose helplessness matched the helplessness of everything Kata had just told her. Alex saw a woman held hostage, but that didn’t make it any less horrible, or any less unfair.
*
When Kata was nineteen the family went back to Ust Labinsk, where they were from and where Kata had been born, to visit relatives. The trip was possible because Kata’s uncle Alexei, her father’s brother, had in the last couple of years become rich.
She barely even knew what to expect from Russia. She’d been so little when they’d left.
Alexei was waiting for them at the airport. He was older than her dad, by about two or three years; he looked older, much older in fact, but also more robust. He was bigger. He hugged his brother. He hugged his sister-in-law, he hugged Kata. He bundled them into his car, an ugly box of a car that stank of cigarettes but of which he seemed very proud. It was a long drive from the airport. They’d changed planes in Moscow and flown into this little airport. She was very tired, in the back of the car. She half drowsed and listened to her dad and Alexei talk. Alexei was saying something about an aluminium plant – she had no idea what that was – and some business, some consulting, recycling wires, how much things had changed in the last two years, all the new opportunities.
‘I was studying,’ he said, ‘for a while, even though I’m an old man like you. I was in Moscow.’
The car jolted as it turned off the main road, manoeuvred over bumps and ruts.
Her dad and Alexei lowered their voices; Alexei glanced back at the women in the back seat. ‘Don’t worry,’ Kata heard him say, ‘Ivan takes care of all that.’
*
She noticed Ivan because he was the only other person her sort of age. Her grandparents’ kitchen was often filled with people: her father’s cousins; Alexei; Alexei’s friends. Ivan was only four years older than her.
She felt as much of an outsider here in Russia as she had in America. The older people in the kitchen teased her about her American accent just like the people over there had teased her about her Russian accent. She was unfamiliar with the chores her grandmother expected a girl of her age to be able to do. The way she prepared the food, it seemed very complicated. ‘American girl!’ her grandmother and the other women would say, shaking their heads and tutting whenever she chopped something the wrong way. But Deborah and Rachel and Margaret had not thought she was an American girl. They had despised her foreignness. She had been Russian to them. So, which was she? She did not seem to be able to do anything without making someone shake their head and laugh, to say something to the person next to them in a code she did not understand. It was like the world was made up of clubs and secret societies and everyone was a member of one, everyone except her.
When Ivan was in the kitchen, she noticed that when he said something, everyone would go quiet and listen, even though the other men were older than him, much. It was Alexei who had brought him to Ust Labinsk, after they finished their studies at the Institute of Steel and Alloys in Moscow. ‘He helped me,’ he said one time in the kitchen, to the women slicing and chopping for the evening meal. He had brought him to Ust Labinsk to introduce him to the people he knew at the aluminium plant. Kata wasn’t sure exactly what it was they did because a couple of months later from what she overheard it seemed like they were buying metal and selling it abroad.
When they’d been there three months her father told her that they wouldn’t be going back to America. Alexei had offered him a job, helping him; there were more opportunities here now than there were back there.
She was used to doing what she was told. She was told there was a secretarial position for her at the plant. She went and did it. She was told they’d be moving, she and her mum and her dad, into their own house nearby, and that’s what they did.
The other girls at the plant asked her lots of questions about America but at the same time they quite openly talked about her in a dialect she didn’t understand. One of them, especially, the one who seemed to be the loudest and most confident, would often look in her direction and say something to make the others laugh.
Same as it ever was.
She would walk through the streets on her way home from the plant, past scrubland and the old houses and the place where cranes were moving and new buildings were being built, through the town centre, and every now and then she would see Ivan and she noticed that he was never alone. There were men with him always, surrounding him, following him through doorways. She knew the name of one of them because he’d come by the house once. Vova he was called, Ivan had brought him to Ust Labinsk from the faraway place they were both from. Vova had not come into the house with Ivan, he had stood outside by Ivan’s car. She wondered sometimes if Ivan would go back to that place right in the south of Russia – she could never remember the name of it – or if he would go back to Moscow. She hoped he would not go.
She had felt it from the first time she had seen him in her grandmother’s kitchen, and every time she had seen him since had reinforced that initial impression: if he was in a room, he was its centre. He didn’t have to do anything in order to be the centre. He just was. He didn’t have to raise his voice, or jostle. There was an Easter lunch. He came in quietly. Everyone turned to him: ‘Ivan, what will you drink, where will you sit?’
She always hoped on these occasions that it would be her, sitting next to him. His dominance radiated in a circle from him and she felt that anyone within that circle was protected. ‘How is your job?’ he would ask her, or, ‘Did you make this?’ and even if her grandmother was within earshot she would not butt in and make some joke about how Kata had made a mistake, put in too many onions which had made more work for her, had meant she’d had to add more stock and water. Her grandmother would stay silent and listen to Kata’s answer without any of her usual sharpness or sarcasm. In fact, there had been much less sharpness and sarcasm from her recently, and Kata knew it was because her grandmother had observed how she and Ivan often sat next to each other at gatherings; she had seen her grandmother watching them and it gave her a feeling of great satisfaction and triumph to see her grandmother watching them like that.
Everyone respected him.
And because she knew that everyone respected him it was as if he was their representative: he was everyone, so when he turned his attention to her it was not just his attention on her, it was everyone’s, the whole world’s, validating her and accepting her, and she was resting in that place, the only place she had wanted to be in, more than anything, for as long as she could remember.
She began to long to run into him on her way back from the plant, to long for his visits to the house. And when she did run into him he would always come and greet her, and the men surrounding him treated her like he did, they were tender and polite and she felt them like a shield. ‘What is it like, working for Alexei and my father?’ she asked Ivan once, as they walked the length of the street from the town centre to the outer houses, the people they passed nodding to him as they always did. He laughed at her question, but when he replied his voice was gentle as always and forgiving of – pleased by, even – her girlish ignorance. ‘Alexei and your father work for me,’ he said.
After she had been in Russia for two years the plant was thrown into chaos. People were buying up all the things that had been owned by the state, just like Alexei had said was going to happen, everyone was talking about it, the girls at the plant were worried and excited at the same time, but nothing would happen to their jobs, would it?
‘What are you looking so worried for?’ one of them said. ‘Go back to America if you’re so worried. No one asked you to come here.’
It was an icy morning, absolutely frozen, when he came round to show her his new Mercedes. There was a solid sheet of ice on the steps leading down from the front of the house. She was hesitating, uncertain how to navigate them. He came around to the side of the steps, opened his arms and told her to jump. She jumped and felt his arms catch her, she was pressed against his chest and her face was in the exposed skin of his neck. She walked all around the car, touching it, and then she got inside and touched the leather, asked him to show her all the different gadgets, unlike any car she’d ever seen. It seemed natural to her that he owned this car, and so she had not shrieked or clapped her hands to her mouth when she saw it. She just went and touched it and smelled it and walked all around it and got inside it. She sat in the Mercedes in the fullness of the moment, with no other realities pulling her towards them or competing for her attention. She saw Ivan looking at her and she told him, ‘Smell the leather,’ and he bent his head down to smell it.
The moment with the car had become family myth. Ivan himself had told it to Alex many times when she was little. As a child she loved to ask, ‘How did you and Mama meet?’ and he’d always tell this story of the car. He told it to her when she sat in his lap in the house in Chukotka. ‘She actually made me smell the leather of the car seat. I did and then I sat up and I’ll never forget the way she was looking at me, your mama.’
‘I think,’ Alex said, ‘that was the first time he really, properly, realised that he was rich.’
Because he was rich by that point, very. It had happened in just the last year.
With the capital from his metal export business he had bought a record number of vouchers.
The girls at the plant in Kata’s secretarial pool said: ‘Well, did you hear, it’s been confirmed, the plant’s really been bought, we have a new boss.’
And Kata had looked at them, without saying anything, just savouring inside, very privately, what she knew to be the most satisfying moment of her life. They would find out in time.
Their new boss was Ivan. He’d had enough privatisation vouchers to buy a massive stake in the plant. He was one of the biggest individual shareholders after the Russian state, and a dollar millionaire. And she was lifted, forever, above the laughter of those girls at the plant, above the laughter of anyone, because on the evening after Ivan had shown her his new car, he had asked her to be his wife.
15
Oliver made his appearance the following morning. He came at 9.30, which just happened to be when Ivan could be found in the apartment each day, before he headed downstairs to Anton’s or Vova’s apartment to work.
Alex and I had settled down to lessons when we heard the doorbell ring. When she heard Oliver’s voice, she put down her pen, stood up and went over to the bedroom door. I didn’t try to stop her. I wanted to hear what was going on as much as she did. She opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. I followed her to the door. We could hear Tatiana’s voice in the hall. ‘It’s OK,’ she was saying, to Irina or to Sebastian. ‘He’s expected.’
