Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 39 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

So we left—Popchik in tow, paddling along excitedly with us, Boris shouting and delighted, waving at the car to go round the block and pick us up: “Yes, poustyshka, yes!”—to Popper—“That’s us! We have a car!”

Then all of a sudden it seemed that Boris’s driver spoke English as well as Boris did, and we were all three of us pals—four of us, counting Popper, who was standing on his hind legs with his paws propped on the window glass and staring out very seriously at the lights of the West Side Highway as Boris gabbled to him and cuddled him and kissed him on the back of the neck while—simultaneously—explaining to Gyuri (the driver) in both English and Russian how wonderful I was, friend of his youth and blood of his heart! (Gyuri reaching around his body and across the seat with his left hand, to shake my hand solemnly in the rear) and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?

“Yes,” said Gyuri gloomily as he made the turn onto Houston Street so hard and sharp I slid into the door, “it was the same with me and Vadim. Daily I grieve him—I grieve him so hard I wake in the night to grieve. Vadim was my brother—” glancing back at me; pedestrians scattering as he plowed into the crosswalk, startled faces outside tinted windows—“my more-than-brother. Like Borya and me. But Vadim—”

“This was a terrible thing,” Boris said quietly to me, and then, to Gyuri:—“yes, yes, terrible—”

“—we have seen Vadim go too soon in the ground. Is true, the radio song, you know it? Piano Man singer? ‘Only the good die young.’ ”

“He will be waiting for us there,” said Boris consolingly, reaching across the seat to pat Gyuri on the shoulder.

“Yes, that just is what I instructed him to do,” Gyuri muttered, cutting in front of a car so suddenly that I fell against my seat belt and Popchyk went flying. “These things are deep—they cannot be honored in words. Human tongue cannot express. But at the end—putting him to bed with the shovel—I spoke to him with my soul. ‘So long, Vadim. Hold the gates open for me, brother. Save me a seat up there where you at.’ Only God—” please, I thought, trying to keep a composed expression while gathering Popchyk in my lap, for fuck’s sake look at the road—“Fyodor, please help me, I have two big questions about God. You are college professor” (what?) “so perhaps you can answer for me. First question—” eyes meeting mine in the rear view mirror, holding up pointed finger—“does God have sense of humor? Second question: does God have cruel sense of humor? Such as: does God toy with us and torture us for His own amusement, like vicious child with garden insect?”

“Uh,” I said, alarmed at the intense way he was looking at me and not his upcoming turn, “well, maybe, I don’t know, I sure hope not.”

“This is not the right man to ask these questions,” Boris said, offering me a cigarette and then passing one to Gyuri across the front seat. “God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince. Now Gyuri—” reclining in clouds of smoke—“a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Will you look after the dog after you drop us off? Drive him around in back seat, wherever he wants to go?”

The club was out in Queens, I couldn’t have said where. In the red-carpeted front room, which felt like a room where you’d go to kiss your grandfather on the cheek after being freshly released from prison, large family-style gatherings of drinkers in Louis XVI–style chairs ate and smoked and shouted and pounded each other on the back around tables swagged with metallic gold fabric. Behind, on the deep lacquer-red walls, Christmas garlands and Soviet-era holiday decorations of wired bulbs and colored aluminum—roosters, nesting birds, red stars and rocket ships and hammer-and-sickles with kitschy Cyrillic slogans (Happy New Year, dear Stalin)—were slung up in exuberant and makeshift-seeming fashion. Boris (well in the bag himself; he’d been drinking from a bottle in the back seat) had his arm around me and, in Russian, was introducing me to young and old as his brother which I gathered people were understanding literally to judge from all the men and women who embraced me and kissed me and tried to pour me shots from magnums of vodka in crystal ice buckets.

Somehow, eventually, we made it to the rear: black velvet curtains guarded by a shaved-head, viper-eyed thug tattooed to the jawbone in Cyrillic. Inside, the back room was thumping with music and thick with sweat, aftershave, weed and Cohiba smoke: Armani, tracksuits, diamond and platinum Rolexes. I’d never seen so many men wearing so much gold—gold rings, gold chains, gold teeth in front. It was all like a foreign, confusing, brightly glinting dream; and I was at the uneasy stage of drunkenness where I couldn’t focus my eyes or do anything but nod and weave and allow Boris to drag me around through the crowd. At some point deep in the night Myriam reappeared like a shadow; after greeting me with a kiss on the cheek that felt somber and spooky, frozen in time like some ceremonial gesture, she and Boris vanished, leaving me at a packed table of stone-drunk, chain-smoking Russian nationals all of whom seemed to know who I was (“Fyodor!”) slapping me on the back, pouring me shots, offering me food, offering me Marlboros, shouting amiably at me in Russian without apparent expectation of reply—

Hand on my shoulder. Someone was removing my glasses. “Hello?” I said to the strange woman who was all of a sudden sitting in my lap.

Zhanna. Hi, Zhanna! What are you doing now? Not so much. You? Porn star, salon-tanned, surgically-augmented tits spilling out the top of her dress. Prophecy runs in my family: will you permit me to read your palm? Hey, sure: her English was pretty good though it was difficult to make out what she was saying with the racket in the club.

“I see you are philosopher by nature.” Tracing my palm with the Barbie-pink point of a fingernail. “Very very intelligent. Many ups and downs—have done a bit of everything in life. But you are lonely. You dream to meet a girl to be together with for the rest of your lives, is this right?”

Then Boris reappeared, alone. He pulled up a chair and sat down. A brief, amused conversation in Ukrainian ensued between him and my new friend which ended with her putting my glasses on my face and departing, but not before bumming a cigarette from Boris and kissing him on the cheek.

“You know her?” I said to Boris.

“Never saw her in my life,” said Boris, lighting up a cigarette himself. “We can go now, if you want. Gyuri’s waiting outside.”

viii.

BY NOW IT WAS late. The back seat of the car was soothing after all the confusion of the club (intimate glow of the console, radio turned low) and we drove around for hours with Popchik fast asleep in Boris’s lap, laughing and talking—Gyuri chiming in too with hoarsely-shouted stories about growing up in Brooklyn in what he called ‘the bricks’ (the projects) while Boris and I drank warm vodka from the bottle and did bumps of coke from the bag that he had produced from his overcoat pocket—Boris passing it up front to Gyuri every now and then. Even though the air was on, it was burning up in the car; Boris was sweaty in the face and his ears were flaming red. “You see,” he was saying—he’d already shouldered off his jacket; he was taking off his cuff links, dropping them in his pocket, rolling up his shirt sleeves—“it was your dad taught me how to dress proper. I am grateful to him for that.”

“Yeah, my dad taught us both a lot of things.”

“Yes,” he said sincerely—vigorous nod, no irony, wiping his nose with the side of his hand. “He always looked like gentleman. Like—such a lot of these guys at the club—leather coats, velour warm-ups, straight from immigration looks like. Much better to dress plain, like your dad, nice jacket, nice watch but klássnyy—you know, simple—try to fit in.”

“Right.” It being my business to notice such things, I’d already noticed Boris’s wristwatch—Swiss, retailing for maybe fifty thousand, a European playboy’s watch—too flashy for my taste but extremely restrained compared to the jewel-set hunks of gold and platinum I’d seen at his club. There was, I saw, a blue Star of David tattooed on the inside of his forearm.

“What’s that?” I said.

He held up his wrist for me to inspect. “IWC. A good watch is like cash in the bank. You can always pawn it or put it up in emergency. This is white gold but looks like stainless. Better to have watch that looks less expensive than it really is.”

“No, the tattoo.”

“Ah.” He pushed up his sleeve and looked at his arm regretfully—but I wasn’t looking at the tattoo any more. The light wasn’t great in the car but I knew needle marks when I saw them. “The star you mean? Is long story.”

“But—” I knew better than to ask about the marks. “You’re not Jewish.”

“No!” said Boris indignantly, pushing his sleeve back down. “Of course not!”

“Well then, I guess the question would be why…”

“Because I told Bobo Silver I was Jewish.”

“What?”

“Because I wanted him to hire me! So I lied.”

“No shit.”

“Yes! I did! He came by Xandra’s house a lot—snooping up and down the street, smelling for something rotten, like maybe your dad wasn’t dead—and one day I made up my nerve to talk to him. Offered myself to work. Things were getting out of hand—at school there was trouble, some people had to go to rehab, others got expelled—I needed to cut ties with Jimmy, see, do something else for a while. And yes, my surname is all wrong but Boris, in Russia, is the first name of many Jews so I thought, why not? How will he know? I thought the tattoo would be a good thing—to convince him, you know, I was ok. Had a guy do it who owed me a hundred bucks. Made up big sad story, my mother Polish Jew, her family in concentration camp, boo hoo hoo—stupid me, I did not realize that tattoos were against the Jewish law. Why are you laughing?” he said defensively. “Someone like me—useful to him, you know? I speak English, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian. I am educated. Anyhow, he knew damn well I wasn’t Jew, he laughed in my face, but he took me on anyway and that was very kind of him.”

“How could you work for that guy who wanted to kill my dad?”

“He didn’t want to kill your dad! That is not true, or fair. Only to scare him! But—yes I did work for him, almost one year.”

“What did you do for him?”

“Nothing dirty, believe or not! Assistant for him only—message boy, run errands back and forth, like this. Walk his little dogs! Pick up dry-cleaning! Bobo was good and generous friend to me at bad time—father almost, I can say this hand on my heart to you and mean it. Surely father more to me than my own father. Bobo was always fair to me. More than fair. Kind. I learned a lot from him, watching him in action. So I don’t mind so much wearing this star for him. And this—” he pushed his sleeve to the biceps, thorn-pierced rose, Cyrillic inscription—“this is for Katya, love of my life. I loved her more than any woman I ever knew.”

“You say that about everybody.”

“Yes, but with Katya, is true! Would walk through broken glass for her! Walk through Hell, through fire! Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again—not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But—” pushing his sleeve back down—“you should never get a person’s name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.”

ix.

I HADN’T DONE BLOW since Carole Lombard left town and there was no possibility of going to sleep. At six-thirty in the morning Gyuri was spinning around the Lower East Side with Popchik in the back (“I will take him to the deli! For a bacon egg and cheese!”) and we were wired and chattering in some dank 24-hour-a-day bar on Avenue C with graffiti-scrawled walls and burlap tacked over the windows to keep the sunrise out, Ali Baba Club, Three Dollar Shots, Happy Hour 10:00 AM to Noon, trying to drink enough beer to knock ourselves out a bit.

“You know what I did in college?” I was telling him. “I took Conversational Russian for a year. Totally because of you. I did really shitty in it, actually. Never got good enough to read it, you know, to sit down with Eugene Onegin—you have to read it in Russian, they say, it doesn’t come through in translation. But—I thought of you so much! I used to remember little things you’d say—all sorts of things came back to me—oh, wow, listen, they’re playing ‘Comfy in Nautica,’ do you hear that? Panda Bear! I totally forgot that album. Anyway. I wrote a term paper on The Idiot for my Russian Literature class—Russian Literature in translation—I mean, the whole time I was reading it I thought about you, up in my bedroom smoking my dad’s cigarettes. It was so much easier to keep track of the names if I imagined you saying them in my head… actually, it was like I heard the whole book in your voice! Back in Vegas you were reading The Idiot for like six months, remember? In Russian. For a long time it was all you did. Remember how for a long time you couldn’t go downstairs because of Xandra, I had to bring you food, it was like Anne Frank? Anyway, I read it in English, The Idiot, but I wanted to get there too, to that point, you know, where my Russian was good enough. But I never did.”

“All that fucking school,” said Boris, plainly unimpressed. “If you want to speak Russian, come to Moscow with me. You will speak it in two months.”

“So, are you going to tell me what you do?”

“Like I told you. This and that. Just enough to get by.” Then, kicking me under the table: “You seem better now, eh?”

“Huh?” There were only two other people in the front room with us—beautiful people, unearthly pale, a man and a woman both with short dark hair, eyes locked, and the man had the woman’s hand across the table and was nibbling and chewing on the inside of her wrist. Pippa, I thought, with a pang of anguish. It was nearly lunchtime in London. What was she doing?

“When I ran into you, you looked on your way to jump in the river.”

“Sorry, it was a rough day.”

“Nice set up you’ve got there though,” Boris was saying. He couldn’t see the couple from where he was sitting. “So you guys are partners?”

“No! Not like that.”

“I didn’t say so!” Boris looked at me critically. “Jesus, Potter, don’t be so touchy! Anyhow that was his wife, the lady, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said restlessly, leaning back in my chair. “Well, sort of.” The relationship of Hobie and Mrs. DeFrees was still a deep mystery, as was her still-extant marriage to Mr. DeFrees. “I thought she was a widow for ages but she’s not. She—” I leaned forward, rubbed my nose—“see, she lives uptown and he lives downtown, but they’re together all the time… she has a house in Connecticut, sometimes they go out together for the weekend. She’s married—but. I never see her husband. I haven’t figured it out. To tell you the truth I think they are probably just good friends. Sorry I’m going on. I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“And he taught you your trade! He seems like nice fellow. Real gentleman.”

“Huh?”

“Your boss.”

“He’s not my boss! I’m his business partner.” The glitter of the drugs was wearing off; blood swishing in my ears, sharp high pitch like crickets singing. “As a matter of fact I run the whole sales end of things pretty much.”

“Sorry!” said Boris, holding up his hands. “No need to snap. Only I meant it when I asked you to come work with me.”

“And how am I supposed to answer that?”

“Look, I want to repay you. Let you share in all the good things that have happened to me. Because,” he said, interrupting me grandly, “I owe you everything. Everything good that has happened to me in life, Potter, has happened because of you.”

“What? I got you in the drug-dealing business? Wow, okay,” I said, lighting one of his cigarettes and pushing the pack across to him, “that’s good to know, that makes me feel really great about myself, thanks.”

“Drug dealing? Who said drug dealing? I want to make things up to you! For what I did. I’m telling you, it’s a great life. We would have a lot of fun together.”

“Are you running an escort service? Is that it?”

“Look, shall I tell you something?”

“Please.”

“I am really sorry about what I did to you.”

“Forget it. I don’t care.”

“Why should you not share in some of these good profits I’ve made from you? Reap some of the cream for yourself?”

“Listen, can I say something, Boris? I don’t want to be involved in anything dodgy. No offense,” I said, “but I’m trying hard to get out from under something and, like I said, I’m engaged now, things are different, I really don’t think I want to—”

“Then why not let me help you?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean—well, I’d rather not go into it but I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, I want to put them right. That is, I’m trying to figure how to put them right.”

“Hard to put things right. You don’t often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.”

The beautiful pair had risen to leave, hand in hand, pushing aside the beaded curtain, drifting out together into the faint cold dawn. I watched the beads clicking and undulating in the slipstream of their departure, rippling with the sway of the girl’s hips.

Boris sat back. He had his eyes fixed on mine. “I’ve been trying to get it back for you,” he said. “I wish I could.”

“What?”

He frowned. “Well—this is why I came by the store. You know. Am sure you’ve heard, the Miami stuff. Was worried what you’d think when it hit the news—and, honest, was a little afraid they’d trace it back to you, through me, you know? Not any more, so much, but—still. Was up to my neck in it, of course—but I knew the set-up was bad. Should have trusted my instincts. I—” he dipped his key for another quick snort; we were the only people in the place; the little tattooed waitress, or hostess, or whoever she was, had disappeared into the sketchy back room where—from my very brief glimpse—people on yard sale sofas appeared to be gathered for a screening of some 1970s porn—“anyhow. It was terrible. I should have known. People got hurt and I’ve come up short, but I learned a valuable lesson from this. Always a mistake—here, wait, let me hit the other side—like I was saying, always a mistake to deal with people you don’t know.” He pinched his nose shut and passed the bag under the table to me. “It’s the thing you know, that you always forget. Never deal with strangers on the big stuff! Never! People can say ‘oh, this person is fine’—me, I want to believe it, it’s my nature. But bad things happen like that. See—I know my friends. But my friends of my friends? Not so well! It’s the way people catch AIDS, right?”

It was a mistake—I knew, even as I was doing it—to do any more blow; I’d done way too much already, jaw clenched tight and blood pounding in my temples even as the unease of the comedown had begun to steal over me, a brittleness like plate glass shivering.

“Anyway,” Boris was saying. He was speaking very fast, foot tapping and jittering under the table. “Have been trying to think how to get it back. Think think think! Of course I can’t use it myself any more. I’ve burned myself with it but good. Of course—” he shifted restlessly—“that’s not why I came to see you, exactly. Partly I wanted to apologize. To say ‘sorry’ to you in my own voice. Because—honestly, I am. And partly, too, with all this stuff in the news—I wanted to tell you not to worry, because maybe you are thinking—well, I don’t know what you’re thinking. Only—I didn’t like to think of you hearing all this, and being afraid, not understanding. Thinking it might be traced back to you. It made me feel very bad. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you. To tell you that I’ve kept you out of it—no one knows of your relation with me. And moreover to tell you, that I’m really, really trying to get it back. Trying very hard. Because—” three fingertips to forehead—“I’ve made a fortune off it, and I would really like for you to have it all to your own again—you know, the thing itself, for old times’ sake, just to have, to really be yours, keep in your closet or whatever, get out and look at, like in old days, you know? Because I know how much you loved it. I got to where I loved it myself, actually.”

I stared at him. In the fresh sparkle of the drug, what he was saying had begun, at last, to sink in. “Boris, what are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“No I don’t.”

“Don’t make me say it out loud.”

“Boris—”

“I tried to tell you. I begged you not to leave. I would have given it back to you if you had waited just one day.”

The beaded curtain was still clicking and undulating in the draft. Sinuous glassy wavelets. Staring at him, I was transfixed with the obscure, light sensation of one dream colliding with another: clatter of silverware in the harsh noon of the Tribeca restaurant, Lucius Reeve smirking at me across the table.

“No,” I said—pushing back in my chair in a cold prickle of sweat, putting my hands over my face. “No.”

“What, you thought your dad took it? I was kind of hoping you thought that. Because he was so in the hole. And stealing from you already.”

I dragged my hands down my face and looked at him, unable to speak.

“I switched it. Yes. It was me. I thought you knew. Look, am sorry!” he said when still I sat gaping at him. “I had it in my locker at school. Joke, you know. Well—” weakly smiling—“maybe not. Sort of joke. But—listen—” tapping the table to get my attention—“I swear, I wasn’t going to keep it. That was not my plan. How was I to know about your dad? If only you had spent the night—” he threw up his arms—“I would have given it to you, I swear I would have. But I couldn’t make you stay. Had to leave! Right that minute! Must go! Now, Boris, now! Wouldn’t wait even till morning! Must go, must go, this very second! And I was scared to say to you what I’d done.”

I stared at him. My throat was too dry and my heart had begun to pound so fast that all I could think to do was to sit very still and hope it would slow down.

“Now you are angry,” said Boris resignedly. “You want to kill me.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I—”

“What do you mean, switch it?”

“Look—” glancing around nervously—“I am sorry! I knew it was not a good idea for us to get wired together. I knew this would end up coming out maybe in some ugly way! But—” leaning forward to put his palms on the table—“I have felt really bad about it, honest. Would I have come to see you, if not? Shouted your name on the street? And when I say I want to pay you back? I am serious. I am going to make it up to you. Because, you see, this picture made my fortune, it made my—”

“What’s in that package I’ve got uptown then?”

“What?” he said, his eyebrows coming down, and then, pushing away in his chair and looking at me with his chin pulled back: “You’re kidding me. All this time and you never—?”

But I couldn’t answer. My lips were moving but no sound was coming out.

Boris slapped the table. “You idiot. You mean you never even opened it up? How could you not—”

When I still didn’t answer him, face in hands, he reached across the table and shook me by the shoulder.

“Really?” he said urgently, trying to look me in the eye. “You did not? Never opened it to look?”

From the back room: a weak female scream, inane and empty, followed by equally inane hoots of male laughter. Then, loud as a buzz saw, a blender started up at the bar and seemed to go on for an excessively long time.

“You didn’t know?” said Boris, when the racket finally stopped. In the back room, laughter and clapping. “How could you not—”

But I couldn’t say a word. Multilayered graffiti on the wall, sticker tags and scribbles, drunks with crosses for eyes. In the back, a hoarse chant had risen of go go go. So many things were flashing in on me at once that I could hardly get my breath.

“All these years?” said Boris, half-frowning. “And you never once—?”

“Oh, God.”

“Are you okay?”

“I—” I shook my head. “How did you know I even have it? How do you know that?” I repeated, when he didn’t answer. “You went through my room? My things?”

Boris looked at me. Then he ran both hands through his hair and said: “You’re a blackout drunk, Potter, you know that?”

“Give me a break,” I said, after an incredulous pause.

“No, am serious,” he said mildly. “I am alcoholic. I know it! I was alcoholic from ten years old, when I took my first drink. But you, Potter—you’re like my dad. He drinks—he goes unconscious while he is walking around, does things he can’t remember. Wrecks the car, beats me up, gets in fights, wakes up with broken nose or in whole different town maybe, lying on bench in railway station—”

“I don’t do things like that.”

Boris sighed. “Right, right, but your memory goes. Just like his. And, I’m not saying you did anything bad, or violent, you are not violent like him but you know, like—oh, that time we went to the play pit at McDonald’s, the kid pit, and you are so drunk on the puffy thing the lady called the cops on you, and I got you out of there fast, standing in Wal Mart half an hour pretending to look at school pencils and then back on the bus, back to the bus stop, and that night you don’t remember any of it? Not one thing? ‘McDonald’s, Boris? What McDonald’s?’ Or,” he said, sniffling lavishly, talking over me, “or, that day you are totalled, wrecked, and make me go with you for ‘walk in the desert’? Okay, we go for a walk. Fine. Only you are so drunk you can barely walk and it is a hundred and five degrees. And you get tired of walking and lay yourself down in the sand. And ask me that I leave you to die. ‘Leave me, Boris, leave me.’ Remember that?”

“Get to the point.”

“What can I say? You were unhappy. Drank yourself unconscious all the time.”

“So did you.”

“Yes, I remember. Passing out on the stairs, face down, remember? Waking up on the ground, miles from home, feet sticking out from a bush, no idea how I got there? Shit, I emailed Spirsetskaya one time in the middle of the night, crazy drunk email, stating she is a beautiful woman and that I love her completely, which at that time I did. Next day at school, all hung over: ‘Boris, Boris, I need to talk to you.’ Well, what about? And there she is all gentle and kind, trying to let me down easy. Email? What email? No recollection whatsoever! Standing there red in the face while she is giving me xerox from poetry book and telling me I need to love girls my own age! Sure—I did plenty of stupid things. Stupider than you! But me,” he said, toying with a cigarette, “I was trying to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It’s different.”

“Why do I feel like you’re trying to change the subject?”

“Not trying to judge! It’s just—we did crazy things back then. Things I think maybe you don’t remember. No, no!” he said quickly, shaking his head, when he saw the look on my face. “Not that. Although I will say, you are the only boy I have ever been in bed with!”

My laugh spluttered out angrily, as if I’d coughed or choked on something.

“With that—” Boris leaned back disdainfully in his chair, pinched his nostrils shut—“pfah. I think it happens at that age sometimes. We were young, and needed girls. I think maybe you thought it was something else. But, no, wait,” he said quickly, his expression changing—I’d scraped back my chair to go—“wait,” he said again, catching my sleeve, “don’t, please, listen to what I’m trying to tell you, you don’t at all remember the night when we were watching Dr. No?”

I was getting my coat from the back of my chair. But, at this, I stopped.

“Do you?”

“Am I supposed to remember? Why?”

“I know you don’t. Because I used to like test you. Mention Dr. No, make jokes. To see what you would say.”

“What about Dr. No?”

“Not that long after I met you!” His knee was going up and down like crazy. “I think you weren’t used to vodka—you never knew what size to pour your drink. You came in with huge glass, like so, like water glass, and I thought: shit! You don’t remember?”

“There were lots of nights like that.”

“You don’t remember. I would clean up your vomit—throw your clothes in the wash—you would not even know I had done it. You would cry and tell me all kinds of things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like…” he made an impatient face… “oh, it was your fault your mother died… you wished it was you… if you died, you would maybe be with her, together in the darkness… no point going into it, I don’t want to make you feel bad. You were a mess, Theo—fun to be with, most of time! up for anything! but a mess. Probably you should have been in hospital. Climbing on roof, jumping into the swimming pool? Could have broken your neck, it was crazy! You would lie on your back in the road at night, no streetlights, no way for anyone to see you, waiting for a car to come and run you over, I had to fight to get you up and drag you in the house—”

“I would have lain out in that godforsaken fucking street a long time before a car came by. I could have slept out there. Brought my sleeping bag.”

“I am not going to go into this. You were nuts. You could have killed us both. One night you got matches and tried to set the house on fire, remember that?”

“I was just joking,” I said uneasily.

“And the carpet? Big burned hole in the sofa? Was that a joke? I turned the cushions so that Xandra wouldn’t see it.”

“That piece of shit was so cheap it wasn’t even flame-retardant.”

“Right, right. Have it your way. Anyway, this one night. We are watching Dr. No, which I had never seen but you had, and I was liking it very much, and you are completely v gavno, and it’s on his island, and all cool, and he presses the button and shows that picture he stole?”

“Oh, God.”

Boris cackled. “You did! God help you! It was great. So drunk you are staggering—I have something to show you! Something wonderful! Best thing ever! Stepping in front of the television. No, really! Me—watching movie, best part, you wouldn’t shut up. Fuck off! Anyway, off you go, mad as hell, ‘fuck you,’ making all this noise. Bang bang bang. And then, down you come with the picture, see?” He laughed. “Funny thing—was sure you were bullshitting me. World-famous museum work? give me a break. But—it was real. Anyone could see.”