Dmitri Savitski

P R E S E N T    I M P E R F E C T

(translated from Russian by Chris Jones )

PART II

Kim. Shuisky leapt from a train for the first time when he was eleven. It happened in Russia, in early autumn, on the platform of Saltykovsky Halt. The wind was driving the leaves and the bits and pieces passengers had discarded. In the vestibule between two cars the air was full of smoke. The acrid air was laden with beer fumes and the sweaty odor of morose badly shaved men. Back in those days the doors opened inwards and automatic locking controls hadn’t even been thought of. Kim was wearing trousers the color of the sky run up by his mother for his birthday. The right trouser leg had already, in April, fallen victim in the city to a bike chain and had been darned with gray thread. The faded, baggy striped sailor’s vest had been a hand-me-down from his cousin a student at the Naval Academy in Leningrad. Kim had a well –worn leather cap on his head from which protruded a refractory light brown lock of hair.

Standing in the open doorway looking at the speedily approaching platform, at the tall pines through which the sun, as yet at summer strength, flashed, Kim felt the dull curiosity of the adults on the back of his head.

He had long ago imagined that first step, leap, into nowhere. Many a night in succession in those summer months of dacha life - nights filled to the brim with the hum of mosquitoes, the song of frogs, the light of the moon pouring with the force of a waterfall through the low, shaggy fir branches - he had half thought, half dreamt, of how he would jauntily lean backwards and to one side, leap out onto the platform, dark blue with rain and, nonchalantly running on for two or three yards, come to a halt under the rapt gaze of all those still seated behind the still swiftly moving windows of the train.

With envy and a sinking heart he had observed several times how high cheekboned suburban types, soldiers on leave, clumsy guys who worked at the cement factory, would tumble out of the stuffy vestibule at full speed. Students from the officer’s flying school, powerfully built, in pressed uniforms with knife-edge creases would leap off in groups.

But the best of all was the famous footballer who would travel nearly every day to visit the high breasted golden haired general’s daughter who lived by the pond in a red rose brick fairytale palace overgrown with hollyhocks and peonies. The footballer, ungluing himself from the walls of the vestibule covered in four letter words, would shove his head out the door and the wind would thrust its outstretched hand in his hair and tear at the wide collar of his Dynamo shirt, baring his muscular throat and sunburnt chest. He would leap down lightly at the very edge of the platform while the electric train was still rushing along like a madman and the brakes were only just beginning to grit their teeth. At a certain moment he would be hanging in the air – cigarette between his teeth, hands in the pockets of wide sailcloth trousers – then he would gently land with a springy motion of his muscularly bent legs and, without taking a single step, turn his back to the train, remove the White Sea from his mouth, spit just for the beauty of it and vanish into the midst of the dusty elder bushes by the gap in the station fence.

That first time Kim spent too long watching the speed slurred platform.

What’s up, boy, you shitting your pants? Asked a hoarse voice from behind and Kim, not stopping to hear anymore stepped into the space that was flying to meet him and the world, turned head over heels, hit him from above and from the side and dragged him along a rough asphalt heaven. In Kim’s case scratches and bruises would usually mend as quickly as with a cat: a week would pass and under the scab brand new rosy skin would be gleaming. But this time palms, elbows and back took a whole month to mend. His mother made him chamomile compresses, bathed his wounds with pulp of aloe, smeared them with calendula ointment, but, to his great surprise, did not curse him out.

The following summer Kim had scarcely arrived at the dacha when, still pale from city life, on the second day of his vacation, he set off back, without buying a ticket, to Moscow, leaping off the train at each stop. Before he reached the capital itself his knees had started to shake and through eyes inflamed with tears he was seeing a lively rainbow of colors.

At fourteen, as a bet, he leapt from a train onto the platform with his eyes bound. “By Ear,” he explained to the curious. His best friend Boris (Borka) Zavadsky lost his bet and that very day had to forfeit to Kim his most prized possession - a pair of Zeiss binoculars, a war trophy of his father’s.

Kim and his mother lived in a corner room, in an old mansion in Zamoskvorechi. Its façade, growing gray with age, was adorned with three Ionic columns. Affixed to the front door was a notice indicating that here was to be found the employment office for disabled ex-servicemen. This office occupied the greater part of the house. One-armed men in threadbare overcoats, in army uniforms stripped of insignia, in worn body warmers, would smoke in the vestibule, casting melancholy glances at the statue of Diana grasping a fragment of spear; once marble, now painted a turbid bronze color.

Legless men would roll into the reception area on wooden casters; heads turned up towards the smoke stained ceiling. Chubby angels, riddled with bullet holes, gazed gloomily down through a brown film of grime. Above the side entrance leading to the communal apartments, there hung a faded placard “ Put the Moral Code of the Builders of Communism into Action in your Life!” and beneath it, handwritten in crooked letters, Wipe Your Feet!

The ornamental plasterwork on the ceilings of the old rooms was now cut up into geometrically incomprehensible parts: a result of the division of the mansion into small rented rooms. A half mantelpiece, a half mirror, and the legs of a goddess flying across the ceiling to a neighbor’s room had fallen to the Shuisky’s lot. They were small legs, enveloped in alabaster folds of drapery, and they too were also flying off to the neighbors. The floor in the corridor was laid with parquet but half of it had caved in like the keyboard of a piano gone to rack and ruin. The two windows in the Shuisky’s room looked out onto the courtyard where at the beginning of June sickly city lilac flowered whilst, in September, beneath sheets and flapping shirts hung out to dry on the lines, the heavy heads of blood red dahlias inclined.

Through the branches of the poplars, lying in a narrow and long since too short a bed, Kim would, with the aid of his Zeiss binoculars, observe the windows of the house across the way. In its windows there would swim, like jellyfish, the rust red or lemon sun shades, all identical, and on the window ledges amidst groves of cactus and hortensia cats would lie sleeping.

Immobile as a Buddha, in one, fourth floor window, was always seated a wrinkled old man, like a Chinaman. Next door, on the very same floor, just after ten of an evening, a woman in a white medical gown would make her appearance. Indifferent, gazing blindly into the yard, always with weary mechanical movements, she would undress. First the gown would vanish then, slowly, button by button, she would undo her blouse, would yawn and, before unfastening her bra, would raise her elbows to reveal the dark cavities beneath her arms. She would then extract the hairpins from her heavy bun and, shaking her head, let fall her hair. Next she would put her hands behind her back… Kim would grow hot and uncomfortable beneath the prickly checkerboard blanket… and, like the skin of an orange, she would peel the bra off of her breasts.

There was a point when she would become more animated and, to Kim, it seemed that, through the mobile shadows of the poplars, she was staring straight into his eyes. But her gaze would break off, the face be extinguished and, soon, so would the light in the window.

Only the old Chinaman would carry on sitting, with just a slight turn of the ear towards the street, as if listening to its nocturnal surf.

The Zeiss binoculars and the yawning stretching young nurse in the window provoked in Kim one spring evening a strange convulsion. His mother, fortunately, was not at home and he lay under the plaid, humiliated and stunned. His body, a part of his body at least, possessed, it seemed, a terrifying autonomy.

When he once more raised the binoculars to his eyes, standing in the nurse’s window, lighting a cigarette, was a bald, broad shouldered man in a blue T-shirt. Expelling smoke through the window he looked into the yard, said something, half turned towards the room’s interior, and abruptly drew the curtains.

Only the old man’s window, as always, remained illuminated till midnight. An old toad, he would sit just as motionless, with glassy, transparent eyes, smiling. It occurred to Kim that the old man was, perhaps, dead.

His mother told Kim at some point that she knew the old man. His name was Matvei and as a lad he had worked for her grandfather, not exactly a boilerman, not exactly a janitor.

In those days the whole house had belonged to their family.

***********

The winter of his call-up year Kim mastered the technique of leaping out onto ice-covered winter platforms. He would land lightly, on bent legs, hands held out at his sides and, just as the soles of his light summer shoes touched the ice, he would turn sharply a whole 180 degrees and slide backward after the braking train. This was high class, very chic, and was greeted by the public in general save, of course, for the station police with applause. He would wear summer shoes with thin soles. They would slide like skates…. The risk, however, was that, right up until the moment he landed, he didn’t know whether the ice, frosted over, had been partially dissolved by salt, made jagged by the action of spade or whether, beneath the seething blizzard, it had been strewn with red river sand.

Not infrequently Kim would be thrown sideways, lose his footing. Not infrequently, like a clown he would open his legs wide, twirl round on one leg, groaning out loud, in some unrecorded folk dance, using his other as a brake, trying to keep his balance. One March day, returning with Boris from Lianosovo, where they were earning some money unloading wagons, he leapt out onto half-thawed lumps of ice and was thrown off balance, so sharply, so violently, that he grabbed hold of the fox fur collar of a coat belonging to a woman hurrying past in the large warm flakes of falling snow.

She, laughing, slapped him rather hard on the hand but he managed to keep on his feet and, embracing her, by force of inertia he continued in her embrace right up until summer’s end

She lived near Moscow, near a small neat station, in a sleepy village where snow would still be lying until almost the first days of May. She was married but her husband was inside on a five year stretch for distributing books by certain prohibited authors and after his release he intended to get out and go to the States or Israel.

Most of her husband’s hoard of books she had managed to save from confiscation, contriving, after a phone call from Moscow, to move them to a neighbor’s empty dacha. During those few quick-flying months Kim read everything that, judging by life’s surface, did not exist. He had already known that an “Erica” typewriter was good for four copies, that you could be put inside for 1984, that there was a literary underground, but he had had no idea that an underground could consist of a roomy dacha attic with a dilapidated ottoman, a heap of old journals, rickety chairs and empty jars, neatly covered with an old blanket and newspapers, awaiting that great Jam Making Day…

Later he was astonished to learn that his friend Boris knew Mandelshtam’s Fourth Prose off by heart, as well as Elena Guró and Platonov and Pilnyak and the emigrant writer who was mad about young girls, the author of a popular road guide to America and even Svami Vivekananda,

In the course of that far off summer they began to speak the strange language of broken quotations. All that was needed was for one of them to spot, under the bridge at Belorusskiy Station, an old woman selling armfuls of lush freshly gathered lilac and the other was already racing off at the gallop - “ The painter has shown us of lilac’s the deep swoon…” Someone had merely to mention a razor blade and the memory would surface of “ the Gillette blade that bends but does not break…a neat note from a devil”

That was a year of changes. Boris was transformed from high cheekboned, angular lad into rosy cheeked timid young man who suffered from fits of thoughtfulness of such force that he would, literally, tumble headlong out of reality. A shout, a clap on the shoulder, would not bring him back out of his other world but would shove him into this one and he would look round him wildly, flutter his girlish lashes and mumble something completely beside the point.

The Zavadskys had a visitor from Peter, Zhenia Smokoff, balletomane, and manic lover of opera. Seven years older than Boris he had already had a thin tome published by some provincial publishing house; printed on gray paper almost like sand paper, it was all about Maria Callas, Donizetti and Bellini. Thanks to Zhenia they added to a passion for their native land’s literature a passion from elsewhere, for opera. Kim’s mother gave them Italian lessons twice a week. At school it had been English in which they had both swum breaststroke and crawl. It was at just that time, struggling with a dog-eared copy of Joyce, found by chance in a secondhand bookshop on Sretensky, that Kim had begun to call Boris “Kinch”.

“Come up, Kinch Come up you fearful Jesuit. Shall we walk to Sivtsev?

“Che dici?”

And spreading the pages of a battered libretto fanwise:

“Regnavo nel silenzio alta la notta e bruna”… Hey, that’s Frank Sinatra! The beginning of Strangers in the Night!” “ Regnavo nel silenzio…”

**********

August was rainy, pelting rain, dank. Returning from Maia’s to the city, throwing himself out onto the platform of Belorusski Station, Kim often risked breaking his neck. Not because his soles would slip on the wet platform, not because soaking cigarette butts, tatters of old newspaper and such like rubbish were more dangerous than ice-covered ground in March, but because an exultant weakness was eroding his body. For three years now he had been struggling in a dimly lit basement on Leningrad Avenue to perfect his combat skills and now, on the one occasion when accumulative speed and weakness knocked him off his feet, he deftly performed a roll, just as Master of Sport Gambulaev had taught him, protecting the heavy chrome Zenith in his outstretched arm: it was his first camera, from which he was now never parted.

The neighbours in the communal apartment agreed, at a Kitchen General Soviet held to the accompaniment of bubbling sounds from casseroles of divers caliber, to his having the cluttered closet at the far end of the psoriatic corridor for use as a darkroom. A twelve by twelve windowless cage with an organ-like cluster of damp pipes which burbled and rumbled away, from which the paintwork was peeling and hanging down in scabs.

His first shot was of the Kremlin. A Kremlin drowned and washed in waves. Its reflection. It was a sunny day with light feathery clouds. The Zenith’s wide angle lens took in the whole of the Kremlin, from tower to tower: Ivan the Great bell tower, the Cathedral of the Assumption, the traffic rushing along embankment, the kids, the pensioners walking their dogs under the high walls, and the drawn out, askant, reflection in the river - towers, roofs, cupolas, crosses, battlements and the clouds above the golden onion domes.

In developing his photo Kim kept just a lower, magnified, part of it - the reflection of the Kremlin in the river’s delicate ripples - and, putting it in a walnut frame which had formerly held a group portrait of the actors in some Chekhov play, he turned the photo upside down – placing the crosses and cupolas at the top.

The drowned Kremlin, phantom of our native land’s history, drew from his mother’s lips a completely uncharacteristic cry of concern. Regarding the sepia group of Chekhov players she said, turning aside and loudly blowing her nose in a checked handkerchief – “ That was near Alupka in the Crimea. Your Grandfather’s family, the Shuiskys. They had a summer place down there…” and hiding her hankie in her apron pocket she concluded: “ Chekhov! My God! Chekhov! It was an idiotic play which nobody does anymore.”

Kim’s father was still living. He lived on the embankment across from the Kremlin, in a stalagmitic Stalin-style skyscraper and was chauffeured everywhere in a black limousine. They never saw one another. He was a dramatist, wrote plays. Only one of them was ever put on in either Moscow or the provinces - Midday Stars - and that had been written before the war.

His mother assured Kim that his name had nothing to do with the acronym for the Communist Youth International and that his father Innokentiy Shiusky had chosen the name out of a love for Kipling.

“And because of his primary occupation,” she added venomously.

*********

It was certainly not of his own volition that Kim was now jumping at full speed onto the all terrain vehicle of the army: Kalishnikov grasped in right hand, greatcoat skirts tucked up, kit-bag and sapper’s shovel on his back, deep Siberian mud, trampled wild grass or blue tinted snow beneath his feet.

He was jumping with the aid of a parachute too and at the end of the second week’s training, as the result of a bet with a still inseparable Private Zavadsky, he managed to unbutton his jumpsuit, pull aside the straps that encircled his body and direct downward a steady stream which, pulverized instantaneously, splashed his face.

The thirty-seven months in the service dragged on interminably. His second army summer Kim was sitting pretty, working as garrison photographer at the social club. Inspections on the huge concrete parade ground, firing practice, cleaning of weapons, P.E, changing the guard, the regimental band and cleaning the barracks:- “Everything that,” in the words of Deputy Political Officer Rudenko, a short red-haired Ukrainian once and forever stunned by the success of his career ( he was only thirty) “ought to find embodiment in black and white and, when we have the luck, in color, for exhibition stands and future publication…”

On the photos of that epoch which still retain the smell of simulated leather and cheap cologne, a dazzling shine emanates from the polished buckles, buttons, boots and the painstakingly scraped chins of both conscripts, the “ pheasants” as they were called, and the old hands. The first year rookies weren’t worth wasting film on; they looked slovenly and wretched. The rank and file in general, even in optimal conditions with everything according to Kozyrev’s manual, always looked, in the slanting rays of a setting sun, a hundred watts dimmer than the sergeants and officers. The rookies always looked simultaneously ferocious and asleep on their feet – the army hadn’t, as yet, managed to set its greasy paw-print on them.

On Kim’s photos the regimental band, a band of alcoholics turned out upon the town every Saturday by order of headquarters to play at dances, is reflected in full on the tubing and bell-mouth of the helicon: dwarves and giraffes in service caps on a checked background of barracks windows. Tacked up on the wall of the garrison clubhouse basement were photos of wilting lime trees, marching in goose step a la Pasternak, staring at the back of each other’s heads. Spray painted green for the big day when the brass hats from Moscow arrived for their inspection they held on to life one whole week after their departure. There was also, distorted by a 19mm lens, the head of the garrison horse, Doll (known officially as Little Star) pulling a cartload of empty boxes towards the guardhouse. There was Big Daddy, Colonel Razgulin, hair shorn like a hedgehog’s bristles, broad-shouldered but, despite his massive stature, as light as a girl. Taken on a nighttime firing practice, someone was giving him a light and he was shielding the flame, his healthy looking hands curved in the shape of a small boat. There was no tripod in the club’s equipment and Kim, wedging the East German Praktika between two cartridge cases took shots with long exposures, from 30 seconds to two minutes, repelling mosquitoes gently so as not to topple the improvised construction.

The night sky in these shots was lashed fanwise with light trajectories and on one of these a slightly blurred Big Daddy - he’d moved - was standing next to the unit’s jeep, smiling at Sarymoff, the head of the medical detachment, His simulated leather boots, lit up by the explosions of a hand held machine gun, shone in the tall grass next to a strip of cold coarse-grained sand strewn with empty cartridge cases. Big Daddy had a copy of that photo framed. It was in his office at Headquarters, next to the phone. Lt. Sarymoff a swarthy complexioned, thick lipped Tartar cured many of the lame by using one very unorthodox method and for that reason the sickbay was no berth for skivers.

Kim’s film came in reels of a hundred feet or so and he certainly didn’t economize. The Praktika honestly caught scenes of everyday life which were seditious in the eyes of the garrison wall newspapers and the local rag but priceless for Kim’s own archive: the regimental drum upon which the skiver-musicians played furious six-handed games of cards: the enameled mugs full of sixty per cent proof contraband liquor clashed in a forgotten toast above a mountain of butts in cartridge cases standing on the thick-cheeked physog of Khruschev or the barracks in the dead hour after dinner, rows of double bunks, lit by dusty shafts of summer sunlight beating through the high wide open windows, upon which muscular adolescents contended in a type of sport not played at the Olympics – who could make the most loudly resounding smack on his stomach with his child-producing organ, pulled out and held like a cigarette …

The 35 mm Leipzig manufactured lens clipped from the tedious drag of the everyday the backs of the heads of the rookie recruits lit up by the lights of a cinema projector, Gérard Phillipe’s twice holed camisole (the screen was a torn sheet) the heavy simulated leather boots in the black mud of the autumn roads, boots, boots, boots – stretching to the far horizon, to where the mud of the earth met the mud tumbling from the sky…

He took shots of the dark smoke-stained walls of the drying rooms where, just below ceiling level, uniforms and foot-cloths hung. A guitar was grasped in freckled hands and there was the blonde head of Corporal Yushchenko just starting to sing, closing his eyes and wrinkling his narrow forehead, “Oh, she has breasts like little pumpkins…”

Also in the annals of that photo epoch was a scene in the baths; the turbid hell of a huge hut with a low steamy ceiling and flaking walls covered in large glistening drops of sweat, with rusty pipes, barred windows – God knows why they were barred – and hundreds of rawboned vacillating shadows some with tubs in their hands some without, some queuing for hot water, some looking for a space on the crowded benches, some rubbing water over the backs of friends. The center of the scene, the axis around which the swarm of shadows reeled was Major Karachaiev a goodhearted old man of about sixty. He wasn’t wearing either waistband or uniform jacket. He was standing in his birthday suit under a bare 30-watt bulb. The major’s stomach lay in folds down as far as his groin, as far as the loofah with which he was scrubbing between his legs – mouth wide open as it could get and eyes rolling in their sockets. Krachai as the soldiers called him was a widower and though he had the use of an apartment in the city he eat slept and washed in the barracks.

Kim captured these things on the hoof, in secret, calculating the length of exposure and depth of field beforehand and friends in the motorized section kept the negatives safe as a precautionary measure. Some of the negatives suffered from annoying defects – inexplicable spots, dots, and asterisks. At first he had thought it was the poor quality of the film but once he been on guard duty in the underground sections of the city, A-Tomsk, he knew it was the effect of radiation.

From time to time he was able to make a little money taking shots of manly and alert faces with arresting eyes … The guys would pose with Kalashnikovs, their caps set jauntily over one ear or, sometimes, in silky-looking boxer shorts with seventy odd pounds of dumbbell held aloft in their arms. The barracks mess kept them half starved so, with the money they earned on the side, they would, maybe once or twice a month, have their own little banquets, the two of them, locked in the darkroom: sprats, potatoes, real cheese and sausages, washed down with Bulgarian Cabernet. Kim went into the city himself to do the shopping, directing his request for a pass to the officer of the guard: he was always running out of fixative, of paper and the red lights were always burning out. Wine and spirits fit for drinking were punctually supplied by Statsinsky the helicon player, smuggled in in the brass womb of his boa constrictor.

The sweet life lasted till the end of September. On the last Sunday of the month Kim and Boris, having obtained a pass that meant they could stay out till ten, went out on the town spick and span as two dancers in a ballet. The town was just a town in name. It was really just an industrial zone where the workers and engineers lived in their underground factories. There were few distractions in town, apart from the Siberian alcohol; you were more likely to catch a punch in the face than one of the dubious fish to be found in the local lakes and rivers. Statistically speaking there was one good-looking girl for every twenty guys and, of an evening, there was the inevitable collective performance of obscene songs," low-down” as Boris would say, and fisticuffs. As for the fish, those caught in the locality were dubious for a very good reason: the local white salmon and carp, like everything else besides would send a Geiger counter into fits with readings in the thousands of Bequerels…

In a tiny apartment the walls of which were whitewashed country-fashion (almost blue that is) two autochthonous tenth graders were awaiting them. They had picked them up at the garrison club on a night when the whole town had been invited along. That evening, to the horror of the political section, Boris had given a reading of his vers libre while Kim had played around with his new flash. Galya and Valya having stayed for the dance were, not without resistance, dragged off to the darkroom and, having drunk some pure alcohol laced with blackcurrant juice permitted the valiant Soviet Army to explore their magnificent topography.

That, however, was that as far as fraternization with the local populace was concerned. Though Boris and Kim were invited to supper at the end of the month hurrying back to barracks before lights out they swore to not to cut up rough with their superiors, to give their boots a good polish and to, in future, to obtain passes by honest means.

On that bright Sunday evening in September they were both, for the second time in their lives, bidding farewell to their stockpile of virginity. Boris on a soft bed whose mattress slumped down to meet the floor and Kim in more complicated battle conditions in a kitchen cluttered with dirty dishes. The two tenth graders, violent and muscular Siberians both had marriage in their sights, that’s to say Moscow: they just wanted to get the hell out of the zone, away from the barbed wire, the radiation, Siberia. The problems of sex they approached very simply, without any complicated flourishes – it was their advance payment.

For Boris and Kim these two girls were the first real live women in two years of army life. They got happy drunk and as almost soon as they were out on the street had a punch up with a patrol of building site police. Everything would have turned out fine, they had both done some boxing and they had to do a three mile run every morning but, having managed to disentangle themselves, they decided to get some more to drink and, since every store in A-Tomsk, that’s to say the single grocery store, was shut and the local chemist’s where you could buy a miracle- working herbal cure for coughs and sprains on the brains likewise, they proceeded to break into the operation ward section of the hospital through a carefully knocked in first floor window, knowing for certain that the disciples of Aescalapius never ran short of spirit.

At one in the morning Boris in a white hospital gown tied up crooked at the back, wearing rubber gloves with thumbs like blisters and a gauze mask through which a cigarette was poking out, proposed to Kim that he remove his, good for nothing in this life, appendix . Both of them found this excruciatingly funny.

Naked to the waist, breeches unbuttoned, but still wearing his boots Kim lay down on the operating table which was cold enough to give you gooseflesh whilst his childhood friend, lance-corporal Zavadsky, also known as Zavad, or Zavadilo even, giggling through a gauze mask which was smoldering thanks to its being in contact with his cigarette, holding in one hand a glass of spirit diluted with warm water from a faucet and in the other a blue scalpel, made in the lower right hand corner of the abdominal cavity, red with as yet undried iodine, a light and, to his mind, imaginary incision. He really was just joking and he moved the scalpel through the air, almost. No blood spurted out immediately. At first there were just a few red pearls. When Kim, however, with a glass of “anesthetic” in his hand, tried to raise himself to have a look blood really did start to spurt and both of them were suddenly sober.

Woken by the sounds of laughter and shouts the duty medic, cursing in Latin, managed to staunch the bleeding and inserted a clamp (?)

When Boris went to visit Kim in the barracks hospital two weeks later his lips looked pinched, his face was red and wind beaten, his eyes inflamed, as red almost as his face, but he was carefree and his humor was malicious, telling his friend about his unloading cement wagons as if he had been talking about a vacation in Sudak.

**********

On his getting out of the hospital Kim gave up the photo lab to a sleepy moustached re-enlisted man in admin, set fire to some three hundred of his photos in an old bucket, and, at the first opportunity - Sergeant Lozine was off to Moscow to bury his father – sent a reel of negatives home. He spent ten days in the glasshouse and was transferred to guard duty at State Underground Installation Number 17, “top secret.” He had to stand, a Kalashnikov slung across his back, by the entrance to Room 33-A checking the passes of all the workers donned in their radiation suits, himself sweating in a protective mask and breathing in accumulative doses of radiation.

The E.P. , end product, was transported away from the zone in a powerful truck covered over with a black tarpaulin and escorted by three armored personnel carriers, two jeeps and a KGB Volga.

Enriched uranium was the main product of the underground plant; its collateral products were leukemia, suicide and chronic fear.

***********

Boris, reduced to the ranks, got depressed and, though he only had eleven more months to go, he decided he would try getting himself classified as a psycho, unfit for service. He sent a letter to Moscow, to Professor Snezhevsky, questioning his latest paper on “ torpid schizophrenia” in the journal Health. The upshot was that he was sent to a nearby funny farm from where he scribbled long Kafkaesque letters, dispatched with the assistance of a driver he knew, describing the queers, “coupled together like so many wagons” who were being treated with hormonal injections and a great beanpole of a tractor driver who had got drunk and indulged in intimate relations with a goat.

The tractor driver was convinced that the goat had given him some awful disease and assured the doctors that his guts were teeming with pullulating worms, The poor man begged that they “open him up right away and clean him out” and for this he had been packed off to the funny farm. He twice tried to open his belly up himself: - the first time with some stolen scissors, the second, in solitary as a result of his first attempt, with a shard of broken glass.

“ Dr. Slavchuk” wrote Boris, “ is a regular psycho himself, with a face that’s been warped once and for always trying to find out why the tractor driver thinks a common or garden Soviet goat has given him some vile disease. The shy beanpole, owner of a pair of huge red paws and white, almost albino eyes, turns away and mumbles that the goat “when they were consorting together was kind of unhappy.” “The fatal encounter with the goat” Boris’ letter concluded, “ took place on the tractor driver’s brother’s wedding day and apparently, the brother was getting hitched to the albino’s sweetheart. Our Hercules got drunk and, on a narrow forest path, met up with his horned fate whose eyelashes were fluttering…”

Kim had had every opportunity of seeing such village weddings during the maneuvers that they swept this whole region like waves of the ocean. Big enamel buckets full of vodka would be stood in the barn entrance or on the porch steps.

***********

Towards New Year Boris actually was cashiered and returning to Moscow he went into a real tailspin of depression - no joking this time - and for over two months nobody heard a word from him. When he got out of the clinic in Pokrovo-Streshnevo he sent Kim a gloomy letter, the words of which crackled like bits of dirty cotton wool. “They got us for three whole years of our life…” was how his letter ended.

Kim was demobbed at the end of November. When he changed trains at Novosibirsk it was snowing heavily but in Moscow the rain was icy and the traffic was wading through thick brown mud. How to start living again? That was the puzzle.

*********

After army boots town shoes seemed as light as feathers. It was not onto a platform but onto an embankment, into grass full of dandelions and spurge that Kim sprang one July morning in ’69. The express from Moscow to Kharkov did not stop at the inconspicuous little halt near Kursk, straight from the pages of Bunin, where a clear-eyed girl, a student at the Stroganov Academy for Art and Sculpture was spending the summer. In October she married Kim in the cheerless registry office of the Mosvoretski district of the capital. April, the following year, in the same depressing official establishment but this time on the ground floor, she would have a forty-minute wait while their divorce was processed.

********

His habit twice saved his life. The first time from a knife attack on a night time suburban train ride when near Dolgoprudnaia two melancholy drunk muscle men chased him into a corner of a spit-filled vestibule. Having been at the receiving end of several short sharp blows he saw them, severally, produce first a knuckle-duster then a homemade knife. With a kick Kim opened wide the door which had been swinging from side to side. The night was damp and pitch black but the train hadn’t yet picked up speed and Kim knew that having passed over a short bridge ( the wheels’ thunder betrayed its crossing) there was a gently sloping embankment covered with gravel. Keeping his eyes fixed on the knife he feinted a lunge while grabbing hold of the damp door handle with his other hand and feeling with his foot for the step. As soon as he felt it he took a pace backward into the darkness and fell, his head tucked into his shoulders, turning head over heels, and taking on his back and butt the blows of invisible roots and clods of earth, teeth clenched tight with suppressed rage.

But his decision had been the only valid one: he feared the knife more than the bullet and even a wooden one in the hands of red-haired Captain Tsriolnikov during training had scared him shitless.

The second time his technique of catapulting himself from trains saved him from going to prison when he threw himself from a KGB Volga while it was taking the corner near the Rossiya Hotel where the old Stock Exchange building gapes with the black holes of its countless passages and galleries.

He was arrested -after a bit of mild intimidation and a paternal admonition to behave himself - for having organized illegal photo exhibitions. His Russia in black and white with its small provincial towns, its barracks, its ruined and vandalized churches, its street drunks, its railway station whores as ugly as sin, its majestic bureaucrats with their hats pushed down as far as their jutting out ears, its non conformist artists on a bender, has long since become a classic in the West.

His two hundred page album The Other Side of the Red Mirror was published in Frankfurt, then Paris, London, New York, everywhere…

Kim would have preferred a simple book of photos without commentary but Lutz Schafuss, compliant, generous and attentive in Moscow unfortunately furnished the book with a text written by a famous dissident who, impelled by a chronic and savage megalomania, wrote with feeling but without finesse; in a way his commentaries were very like Pravda editorials but sporting the badge of the opposing ideological camp.

Captain Kolomyets a pleasant brawny fellow with a boxer’s broken nose and the eyes of teenage girl waved his police identity card at Kim in pretty much the same way as a street porn merchant does when he touts for customers for his dirty postcards.

The police search was fruitless, though the members of Kolomyets’ team, all of them looking like clumsy grandpas, turned the Shuisky’s place thoroughly upside down. They even had a look in the half fireplace, behind the half mirror, pulled up a few floorboards and fanned their way, one by one, through all the books on all three bookshelves.

They did find some photos though. One of them showed a young woman with her hair down running through tall grass, and running to meet her in attack formation was a heavy sky torn to shreds by a thunderstorm. She was laughing; her head thrown back and her arms stretched out as if she were about to fall. Drops of rain or perspiration were running down her long slender, bird-like neck, her youthful breasts and her just slightly distended belly; she wasn’t wearing a stitch.

In the same envelope were one or two photographs of Boris: by the church of St. John the Warrior; on Dmitrov Street; on a tennis court at Sokolniki; his face made up and wearing a wig (it was a New Year’s party with friends from the Foreign Language Institute) - a tanned Parisienne, Yvonne, with rounded lips was blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke towards the lens. A photo of his mother a few days before her death stood on the mantel. She was sitting, by the window overgrown with potted fig and lemon trees, propped up by pillows, with a French book slipping off her knee. She was looking beyond the camera, beyond the window, beyond the lilac bushes whose color foamed against the backdrop of black fig leaves.

“Beyond life,” thought Kim, fingering the dull pain.

The drowned Kremlin, his first photograph, fading and glued together with a fading strip of adhesive tape was lying under the ottoman along with a nutshell and a dusty handkerchief from God knows when. Picking up the hanky between two fingers and shaking it Kolomyets offered it to Kim. It was a gray silk slip, property of some unknown beauty.

***********

Smiling tenderly Kolomyets, shyly accused Kim formaly of the manufacture of pornographic material: the art school student running through the water meadow grass could, apparently, provoke unhealthy convulsions amongst the masses.

“Well, in that case” said Kim, “you should have more care for the health of your masses.”

“There wouldn’t be enough aspirin to go around “ retorted the captain.

In the Volga Kim was seated between two of the granddads but just by the big grocery store on Ordynka one of them jumped out and Kim – who had been having a cordial conversation with Kolomyets about the latest film from Pasolini. “Had he crossed the line between the passable and the impossible?” - slipped unnoticed towards the left side door. He was in luck, just as they got to Zazhadie the granddad with the cigarette clenched between his teeth slipped across the seat to cadge a light from Kolomyets and, at that very moment, just as the blue flame lit up his purple stubbled peasant face Kim, in a single movement, opened the car door and threw himself under the wheels of an approaching taxi. The taxi swerved, hit a concrete waste bin, and with a screech of its brakes bumped up onto the sidewalk and behind them, sounding its klaxon like a steamboat, jamming the Volga in and blocking up the street came an Intourist bus.

Kim, at first on all fours, flaying his hands, then on two legs tore up a staircase. He knew the old exchange like the back of his hand. Dashing along the upper gallery with its notary offices and secondhand dealer’s stalls closed for the night, he then flew down the marble steps to find himself in the quiet evening dark of an alley. Then he cut through an inner courtyard with its poplars and benches, passed the neat rose-colored church dedicated to St Peter and St. Paul and emerged on Krivkolenny. There, behind the third window from the corner there lived a fanatic of cool, a giant of jazz, a pianist at the Aragvi restaurant, Sania Monk (originally it had been Goldstein). Monk was a friend he could trust. He gave Kim two hundred rubles without even thinking and undertook to pass on a letter to Schafuss as well as assuring Comrade Shuisky that he was certain to receive an invite from Aunt Ida who lived near the derelict Turkish train station in the warm city of Beersheva.

Thirty hours later Kim was lying on a mattress of hay, beneath low Cimmerian skies, listening as, evenly and powerfully, one after the other, the breakers rolled in, waiting to hear the news from London. The newsreader, speaking in a strange neutral accent concluded the item from Moscow with the standard, “ from reliable sources in the Soviet capital we have learnt that there is to be feared that the well-known Russian photographer…”

Kim turned off the Spidola radio without waiting for the end of the item “ Schafuss is in luck” he thought. “ He’ll be bringing out a fourth, fifth, and if they put me inside probably a sixth, seventh … twelfth edition….”

A few weeks later transformed by the sun into his own negative with an abundance of long dyed wild hair and a curly beard Kim received a bizarre letter at the village post office: It was in a long, non-Soviet, envelope which had a window in it in which appeared his name and address. On paper whiter than any he had ever seen before, in Cyrillic letters more legible than he had seen before, there was printed the laconic communication that Mira Solomonovna Shuisky was impatiently awaiting her nephew Kim Innokentevitch for a family reunion in her native city of Haifa. The invitation was authenticated with a red silk ribbon affixed with a red seal.

It was only a few years later when Kim met up with Monk on the corner of Canal and Broadway that Monk hadn’t had the opportunity to get him any invite to Israel: the cops had raided his place that same night and he had spent the next four years playing accordion in an amateur band in a highly cohesive community lodged and fed at the expense of the men with blue epaulettes, somewhere north of the 78^th parallel.

**************

“With a name like yours you’re going to Israel!” Kolomyets was taking big crisp bites of an apple and looking up at the ceiling. “ What sort of fantasy world are we living in! A thoroughbred Slav turns out to be a Jew! Volkonski, I suppose, came from a long one of rabbis! Rimsky-Korsakov lives in Tel Aviv now! Officially, at least… the Baratynskys have discovered they’re related to the Levys. And now a Shuisky, the last of the Shuiskys, is on his way to Zion!

He bit into his apple with such force that its juice spurted down over his thick lower lip and then down his neat little chin. Still looking up at the ceiling Kolomyets produced from a pocket of his mufti trousers a neatly pressed checkered handkerchief, wiped his mouth, and skillfully lobbed the core into the wastebasket beneath the General Secretary’s portrait.

“ You are going nowhere!” he said with a change of tone as he stood up from behind his desk. “Aren’t there enough naked women in the USSR for you? Isn’t the light good enough? Is the sun at the wrong angle? Or is the film too grainy? You signed the official secrets act didn’t you? You’re not allowed to travel abroad, are you? Your country isn’t a shirt, Shuisky. You can’t take it off and change it!”

“The military official secrets act is only valid for five years,” Kim looked with amusement at the captain. He was either drunk, had been snorting some confiscated tooth powder, or was a much better actor than Smokturnovsky.

“For five” Kim repeated, “and that was seven years ago.”

“Your neighbors won’t be going over there.” Kolomyets went on, not paying him any heed, his face relaxed now, his eyes blinking. “ Look at the Shushunovs! And the neighbors of your neighbors, the Buchkins, they won’t be going, either!

He turned away towards the window, outside was a bare asphalt courtyard, scarred and patched, and said, beating with his fist on the pane, not too brutally, without turning to face Kim.

“ We won’t let you go because of your father. It’s ridiculous! Shuisky’s own son, Innokentiy Alexandrovich’s son! You get it? And that is that!”

He turned toward Kim, balancing on his heels, a childish grin spread from ear to ear.

“Goodnight sweet prince” he said with a bow. Kim bared his teeth, got up and left.

***********

There was a smell of bleach and valerian in the corridor. In the waiting room, under the eye of a slowly rotating camera, sat an obese old woman her huge legs, swollen with varicose veins, set wide apart. In her vicinity it didn’t smell of bleach or valerian but of mothballs.

***********

If not for the Kremlin stars looming in the evening sky through the window one might have thought this was happening in the West, in London or, possibly, Amsterdam. Shuisky the elder was a head taller than Kim, broad shouldered he had the face of a powerful bulldog ; his gray hair was neatly combed back from his forehead. He was sitting, leaning almost imperceptibly forward, in the subdued light that penetrated a silken shade, beneath a Benois watercolor in a pale gilt frame.

The first thing Kim noticed about this man, who was an absolute stranger to him, was his hands. His long fingers were jerking nervously, clasping and unclasping as they lay on his knees, fingering the fine material of his trousers as if evaluating its cost, then mounting his tweed jacket towards the knot of his tartan tie only to fall once more to his knees, palms uppermost as if to emphasize their defenselessness then, however, immediately throwing themselves at each other with a dull crunch of cartilage.

A pretty maid in a coquettish apron wheeled in a chrome trolley which shone as splendidly as an operating table. Shuisky the elder was drinking a sixteen-year-old malt whiskey. Shuisky the younger vodka on the rocks poured out of a green carafe decorated with little devils and inscribed in running script with the motto “ Drink! Drink! You’ll see demons!”

**********

Shuisky’s “Midday Stars,” the play which had brought him fame, a Stalin Prize and, of course, money was a sort of smokescreen, a cover, a fire curtain behind which the huge well-oiled wheels of quite a different life turned.

In fact he had written a hundred plays none of which were known to the critics of Moscow or Petersburg, These plays were acted out not on any stage or film set but in real life.

The scripts were the real McCoy: if the scenario said a handsome man with jet black eyes seduces a slightly scatty blonde then the blonde ends up in bed with him and gives him, as a token of her love some sort of flora or fauna. And if in another or, maybe even the same scenario Shuisky’s X should suddenly die of a heart attack, of a suddenly revealed malignant tumor - then X would die in real life.

Usually, however, it was an accident in the street or on the subway and most often of all, it was two bullets fired at point blank range into the back of the head. Some really did die of a heart attack or cancer – but that took a lot of time.

Shuisky the elder was officially the head scriptwriter, house dramatist to department K. He had at his beck and call a team of talented young people busily engaged in collecting and sorting and processing the raw material, the information that the boss required for his scripts. They prepared for him detailed reports about the topography of far distant cities, their climates, the characteristics of their citizens. Then there were the characters of those involved in the play, their nearest and dearest, the layout of their apartments, the make of the cars they drove, the cigarettes they smoked, their favorite apéritif. These characters, the players that is, willing unwilling, were the agents, their adversaries, their subsidiary assistants, their counters and pawns. Their roles and their capacities were drawn up by Shuisky, his own particular sense of humor vying with his love of jargon.

Aurora was an agent – a sleeper until needed, hibernating, getting accustomed to everyday life in a foreign country, getting under the skin like a tick. The Mercs, like Mercury, were the messengers of this scripted world, the links slaloming from country to country, changing names and faces, sometimes sex, with actorly professionalism, knowing how to dissolve in any surroundings, without a trace, much like instant coffee, at the first signal of alarm. The Execs were the executioners, the hit men, If Shuisky had to give them a hand it was his left he used and if they happened to have a drink together he would pour it with his left.

There were also the techies experts in mechanics and electronics, capable of turning a sewing-machine, a wheel chair and some window blinds into an aircraft, all in half an hour. Or, if necessary, slip a mike into the caecum of a famous baseball player. During the match, what’s more … The techies had been lab workers doing research. But there were also specialists in very narrow fields- experts in Milan fashions, Spiga????? the manufacture of rare alloys or the cultivation of a certain small shrub, erythroxylum coca, the leaves of which, having been turned into a paste and evaporated produce a brilliant white powder, C 17 H24 NO 4 which, when dissolved in the bloodstream transforms the world into a pulsating rainbow…

Instead of the Russian word istochniki, Shuisky would employ the English Sources. By Sources he usually meant natives; these were either bought or turned, had had the frighteners applied to them or were timid souls from the day of their birth; they could be bitter by nature or skillfully made so ; there were both genuine idealists amongst them and adventurers ready to do anything for dough, brass, the green stuff or avid for young, sinfully young, flesh - the committee had inexhaustible stocks of the latter.

Climate meant the specific political situation at a given time and place. Circumstances were the sum of the data about a particular person, be they a Source, a Piston (someone who puts ideas into practice, gets things done) or a ZHM j’aime, alas, a prospective stiff. Décor was everything: the topography of the cities, their back alleys, squares, underground passages, the layout of apartments, restaurants, offices, stations, public conveniences and of course, the car parks. When he worked on one of his plays Shuisky knew from which door his source would enter, what table he would sit at, in which restaurant, And at which moment (and why) he would change from being, say, Kevin Watson to being a stiff or would vanish like an illusionist’s assistant.

Section K received magazines and journals by the ton from all the ends of the earth and brochures, catalogs, posters, flyers, ads, travel office leaflets. There were telephone directories from every capital city on the globe, and if there was a page torn from the Paris yellow pages a photostat was immediately dispatched by diplomatic courier.

Shiusky the elder worked on an ordinary Mac upon which was stored all the data necessary to his scenario. He loved it when he was called Dumas-père and he would feel thrilled and coldly satisfied cultivating the cold ragged carcass of his synopsis and making it living human flesh.

He knew his value. Though “they” at the top, just a floor up, were doing exactly the same thing – tailoring and setting up (lacking in talent though “they” were) scenarios for a global market he, Innokenty Aleksandrovich, was entrusted with those urgent ops requiring surgical skill, rescuing “them” from disaster, patching up their mishaps, doing rewrites on their ill conceived prologs and grotesque finales and he knew that it was he who had been and would be the unseen Number One.

In the control room were a dozen satellite TV screens, powerful short-wave sets; video machines and slide projectors constantly on stand by; teletype ribbons rustled restlessly. A leather-upholstered door led off to a small but cozy projection room. Sometimes Shuisky let some leading actor, someone with a star role, play with all these toys which were needed to coach them in the details, in the secondary ins and outs, the intricacies of this or that country. They were made to watch adverts, video clips, get acquainted with the local TV shows, study the jokes of their egghead presenters and their tastes in blue movies,

But mostly Shuisky would stay late with the Boss, a desiccated four-eyed Greek from Kherson, following the reactions of their American opposite numbers to one of their latest blockbusters and, if need be, they would modify, the living, pulsating scenarios “on the hoof ”

The chief wasn’t one to unbutton his lips in a smile but listening to the surmises of his European competitors or to those of the American pundits, the commentaries of their Kremlinologists and, sometimes, to those of the actors in the blockbusters themselves he would bare a set of tobacco stained teeth and emit a dry bird-like screech.

Shuisky the elder was considered by the Chief to be his right hand man. More than once he told him that “power is the art of controlling the imagination” and that Shuisky’s genial imagination out of the hands of the “organs” would be too dangerous for the country”;

Innokenty Aleksandrovich got to play with live actors and that was much more exciting than writing plays for the Moscow Theatre. His dream, which was, alas, not to be realized, was of an artistic alliance with the man he considered to be his secret mentor, the man who had shaken him to the core once and for all with his powerful and free-ranging fantasy, the author of The Master and Margherita … Thanks to his parents and a childhood spent drifting for some time in the stormy waters of an empire not yet repainted red he knew half a dozen languages and his library rivaled that of a decent university – Lille or Keele. He knew all the keys to spy writing. Sometimes he envied Le Carré. He valued Forsythe. But he was firmly convinced that his own plots were of a distinctly higher order.

Sometimes they showed him films taken by concealed cameras: a buxom whore astride the Minister of Defense of Bogobogoland, three kids with spears dancing around the charred remains of a helicopter or some gentleman walking down an alleyway who suddenly exposed his kit and, unable to believe himself capable of such a thing would sit down in a small Brooklyn puddle in a light July drizzle.

Sometimes it was just a soundtrack and Shuisky would sit gripped in a pair of stereo headphones listening to a running translation, chuckling and senselessly rustling the paper on his desk then, suddenly, freezing and significantly shaking his head: “Yes!”

Sometimes he would arrange rehearsals, would shout at his actors, shake his gray head and order them to “get off pat “ some complicated business like cadging a light on a London street or, and this was no easier, pretend to be a barman in a gay dive in Munich. His plays, unlike those in theatres, always brought about concrete results: test tubes containing a sample of soil, a spool of microfilm, information hidden on a cassette between two chords played on a piano – in other words millions and millions of dollars were involved; more rarely someone’s disappearance, someone’s death.

All this was registered in the account book of another organization but neither that nor who the bookkeeper was counted for much with Shuisky. He was one of the old school and the principle of art for art’s sake was of more importance to him than the triviality of somehow obtaining the secret technology behind the production of superconductors…

*************

Kim knew all about this from an English book about his father, The Red’s Grey Eminence by Major Glukhov, a former control room operator; a specialist in Iceland who became, after his defection, Potential Stiff Number One. Glukhov states in his foreword that western diplomats and visiting defense ministry officials would regularly go to see the play “Midday Stars” in an attempt to divine Shuisky’s secret. The play itself was the usual run of the mill Stalin-era stuff, party committees, activists, a dig at bourgeois morals and an arson attack on a Worker’s Club. There was one solitary provincial critic who, during the Khruschev thaw, dared to write that the play was in fact, possibly, a horribly grotesque satire, a farce, a caricature of “progressive” society. Glukhov had concluded that Shuisky, who had voluntarily returned from Berlin to live in Moscow had wanted to demonstrate his solidarity with the regime, contort his conscience and show, like everyone else that he had sincerely come over to the winning side.

*********

Kim, sitting in the folds of a huge leather armchair opposite this man, however hard he tried, however hard he teased the flabby muscle of filial feeling, felt nothing for him, except, possibly, curiosity.

He thought of his mother and tried to recall the early images he had of her when she had possessed such magnificent braids of hair, braids she would build up into a intricately woven crown on the top of her head and the rustle of her the wide skirts of her coats…

But neither her light summer-dacha crêpe-de-chine dresses, nor her bronzed shoulders, nor her cameo brooch pinned on a black velvet ribbon, nor her seamed stockings of silk slipping from the back of the worn velvet armchair, to lie on the floor next to the program, souvenir of an evening at the ballet – Giselle- none of these would consent to appear in his father’s presence,

In that corner of his memory that he so tormentedly, so insistently stirred up, she was sitting by the window wrapped in an old tartan plaid, a pillow propping her head up, forever clasping a book on her knee and staring blindly out the window.

Kim tried - its what you do with a double exposure- to put the two images together or, at least, he tried putting them side by side, uniting them as in a collage: one transparent, on badly scratched stock, the other the still opaquely solid image of a well-groomed old man calling up on the phone in the early morning for the first time in his life and saying in the old fashioned way, hesitantly, “Shuisky here” and inviting him round for a chat -no a talk- at about ten this evening…

In order to put these two images together you had to make them take each other by the hand, hug each other, equalize the light, lighten his mother’s image and tone down the gentleman in his tweeds. But even that wouldn’t have worked. To get them together some other force was needed –forgiveness- and not a single one of those three or, more accurately two, possessed that force.

*************

“And what do you” he hesitated at the word you, “ intend to do abroad, may I ask?” Shuisky the elder finally inquired,

“Live” said Kim, reaching out for the carafe.

“And where exactly? Not in Haifa, surely?”

“ I’ve no idea. In New York, in Haifa, in Katmandu, I don’t know.”

“Languages?” The elder Shuisky’s right hand scrabbled across the incrusted ivory of the coffee table and felt for his silver tobacco case.

“I don’t understand.”

“ What languages do you know? Speak English?”

“Oh, yes. English, of course.” Kim tilted the carafe. “Some French – vraiment pas trop.”

The vodka was made with macerated blackcurrant berries which one after the other flopped heavily into his glass. Kim put the carafe back in its place, replaced its cut glass stopper and with a toothpick he took from a gilt goblet began harpooning the berries floating in his glass, They had a pleasantly bitter taste. He raised his glass until it was level with his eyes, swirled it about and, without proposing any toast, threw it back…

Shuisky the elder rose and walked towards the bookcase.

“As I understand it” he said, without turning round, “ you don’t, however, propose to change profession?”

He turned a key and opening the door just a fraction drew out a heavy glossy in-folio edition of the album Red Mirror. He went back to his seat beneath the soft warm light of a lamp and finding his glasses which were somewhere by his side, opened the album up on his knees. Big Daddy’s broad back, his belly band flashed into view, the garrison horse, Little Star, in its gas mask during a nuclear alert, a dacha swing with a bare-kneed girl covered in freckles, and that ever-red Square in a snow storm, the heaving chest of a beach bum with a tattoo of Stalin, a tough looking customer with two string bags full of empty bottles, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, the face of a young woman framed in a trolley-bus window lashed by rain.

“ A serious piece of work,” Shuisky the elder slammed the album shut. “ Three quarters of the book could be published here. Tomorrow even. Do you want,” he suddenly started to use the much more intimate second person singular, “ to work for Novosti? Or Tass?” His arms stretched out and froze. “You’d still get to see Paris, New York, Katmandu, as you say… But without any irrevocable break …Without the problems …You could come back when you wanted to. Home… To Moscow…”

When I was a child my mother, “ said Kim, lowering his head, “ would often lock me up in my room. When she had a rendezvous…In the cupboard even. She would punish me. I even went to sleep in there once… So that now I suffer from chronic claustrophobia…

“ And Russia, for you, is one large cupboard, a cage…” baring his teeth, his father finished for him. His hands had come back to life, began to play their little game; now they were drumming on the cover of the book.

“As for journalism, engaged or not,” Kim placed his glass carefully on the table, I don’t have any intention of turning it, my photography that is, into another, new, cupboard. What difference does it make what you do for a living! In Katmandu…One sixth of the globe, that’s fine but there’s another five-sixths…”

“Your other five-sixths is shit,” quietly but distinctly the elder Shuisky said, rising.

His lips began to chew away at some phrase or other but he managed to control himself, opened the album, shut it with a thud, got up from his chair, and went to the bookshelf. Returning, stooping and looking, suddenly, flabby he spread out his arms and then slapped his side but, again, said nothing.

The maid, opened the door, just slightly, that led from the dining room, well lit by its crystal chandelier, and gave a nod of her head. You could see the corner of a table, a floral tablecloth, a glint of silverware, a bottle of French wine and a hunting scene of some sort hanging on the wall.

“Let’s eat, “ the old man said, picking a pill up from out of his tobacco case. “ It isn’t every day…”

But he didn’t finish his sentence and he started towards the door, dragging his heels.

“Rita,” Kim heard, “ Dim the lights.”

The dining room began to slowly darken.

***********

Just after twelve, summoning the lift for Kim, scattering ash from a Monte-Cristo onto the hallway carpet, he said:

“Don’t take any notice of Kolomyets. He’s a moth who’s fond of naphthalene. He’ll end up on guard duty outside some foreign embassy…”

He paused. The lift rose, clanking as it passed the various floors.

“Think it over and let me know” The smoke of his cigar had washed out the upper part of his face.

“ I feel guilty about Sonia, “ he was suddenly speaking in a quite different voice “ It’s too late now. There was a time you can guess how…”

Kim was looking at his father without as yet being aware that he was speaking about his mother. Nobody had called her Sonia.

His father lowered his head, inhaled noisily and emitted a cloud of smoke. When he raised his head his eyes had an interrogative glint. Kim turned away.

Shuisky the elder shrugged, turned, and walked towards his open door.

“There’s no need to hate us, “ he said with his back turned. He gently but firmly closed the door.

***********

It was raining. Lorries were thundering along Kotelnicheskaya Embankment. The green light of a taxi could be seen approaching in the distance. Everything he knew about his father, from Glukhov’s book, from conversations with well-informed friends, had the feeling about it of trash literature, amazingly trashy literature, unadorned kitsch. But everything that went on around him was trash literature; freakish, incredible kitsch.

And his father was one of its principal, unseen, authors.

In the taxi, sitting on the back seat immersed in a tango that was splashing in waves through the punctured partition from a hoarse car radio, contemplating dry-eyed the damp city, he asked himself aloud.

“Don’t hate us? Why “us.”

“Are you talking to me?” The taxi driver turned a highway robber’s mug shot towards him.

************

The room had been tidied up and had a holiday air. He wasn’t taking a thing with him. The negatives had been in Germany long since. The box of books he had been permitted to take out with him he had dispatched by snail mail to Boris’ Paris address. He hadn’t tried making any phone calls, knowing from past experience how funereal they could be. Garrick, “four-eyes,” was living in Boston. Stas was in London. The Sal’nikovs were somewhere in Israel, on a kibbutz. The lovely and loving girls from the School of Languages and their less well educated sisters who had touted for business in the city center had all gone – off to their Amsterdams and Barcelonas. Even that most home-loving and laziest of people, Zhenia Holtz, who had never ventured further than the local VD clinic was now living in unimaginable, discombobulating Rio!

He sat up all night in his armchair, his feet up on the radiator; listening to the dry rustling of the leaves of the old poplar, breathing in the cooled scents of the city summer; looking over at the window of the house opposite. Behind those same old curtains everything was in darkness but in the old man’s window- he had died at the end of February- a faint light burned and something flickered to and fro.

“The old sod,” Kim thought. “ He emigrated further than all the rest of them, but he seems to like to visit his old haunt from time to time. Those angel guards must be a bit slack sometimes.”

Towards morning he slipped into brief transparent sleep and, in that state, to the accompaniment of the click clack of wheels, he hung from the running board of a local train, sensing the dull stares of adults upon his back, fearing to turn around, afraid of seeing in their midst a smiling tweed-attired, old man… He guessed at the blurred, speckled flickering of pines, the low dachas, the neatly cut woodland clearings, the flashes of sunlight, the do-re-mi of fences and, letting go, he again flew to meet the gritty asphalt sky which, with mechanical indifference, revolving time and again, tried its darndest to kill, flatten squash…

At thirty-two years of age Kim Shuisky jumped at full speed from the flagship of modernity. The Soviet Union, belching smoke from its carmine, starred funnels, to the accompanying lower-register uterine screams of her sirens, steamed on, full ahead, into its blindingly bright, inevitable future.

**********

PART III

The passage from life to life across the narrow isthmus between two non-communicating vessels, one’s arrival in a new, yet somehow familiar from birth, world is really very like the convalescence from a long illness – one to be measured in years. The only thing that the radiant fortunate being involved does not, as yet, know is that to the end of his days he will be at the mercy of the recidivists of that other power…

Kim came to in Paris. Lutz had brought him there from Vienna to Boris’ comfortable two-roomed apartment on the top floor of a building desiccated with age which stood awry but firm of footing on the corner of a small street by the church dedicated to Sainte Eustache. Boris who was living out his third year of French vocables and Camembert was down in the South, in Le Lavandou, at Yvonne, his ex’s, playing tennis, finishing off a book.

Lutz Schafuss helped Kim out with his papers, opened an account for him with the Credit Lyonnais and transferred a fairly large sum of money into that account. He took Kim to the Pré Catalan, to Paris Match and to the Crazy Horse Saloon. At three in the morning, after the Crazy Horse, they parted company. Diplomatically but firmly Lutz tried to teach Kim what he already knew: Up until now Kim had been a photographer from “the other side,” from Russia, a man from the front line, an uncoverer of the unseen. But now he had become just like everybody else. A mere photographer one of thousands and thousands of other paparazzi with bad backs: snappers of portraits, ads, events and louche postcards.

“Now,” said Lutz, holding open the door of his Volvo, “ you’ve got to prove yourself as a photographer over here, find yourself a theme. Nothing to with Sovietdom. You’ve got a signature, a style of your own. Like all of you Easterners you have one huge advantage. Your color film is shit, so you’re great at black and white. You use it as if it were color. My advice to you is - don’t change to color.”

Lutz, “ Your Lucifer,” as Boris called him, was right. The past was in black and white or, rather, gray - like asphalt or emery paper. And, after Russia, Paris was intolerably colored. But looking carefully at the frontages in the Marais district, the quais, the roofs, the gardens and the squares – miniscule in comparison with Moscow’s - the boulevards and inner courtyards, trying to fathom out what hadn’t yet been done, what else could be mined from this city with a Leica, Kim, as winter neared, came to realize that Paris, in fact, was bathed in just two colors or, more precisely, just two tones, blue-gray and rose-lilac - and that everything that could be done already had been.

The city had been taken apart, dismantled, cut up into a million snaps, panoramic views, middle distance shots, close-ups. Every piece of ornamentation, every cornice, every door handle and every sewer grating had been photographed at least three times: once by a pro and twice by an amateur. In the Beaubourg he stumbled across a big color album, Lutetia – A Bird’s Eye-view. The photos had obviously been taken by someone in the employ of the Ministry of Defense: neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street; chimneys, tiles, balconies, terraces… an ocher, almost Roman in tone, a dirty-gray, the color of the city’s pigeons, the glint of hidden luxuriant greenery in yards invisible from the street. The catacombs had been photographed too – passageways, niches, steps, mould, graffiti, furtive shadows…

Even the air of the city, stagnant, blebby, scribbled with a box of child’s crayons, adhered, like a fly to flypaper, to the ektochrome. You could feel it on the shiny Siba paper. It stuck to your hands like pollen.

***********

The Paris Metro is a paradise for people who love jumping off moving vehicles. The very first time though, hurrying to a newspaper office for a meeting with the spitting image of Jack Nicholson – Jean-Pierre de Cazanove- Kim was standing by the car door, listening to the hissing of the freed-up pneumatic safeguard system. He gently slid the doors apart but he didn’t jump but fell out onto the platform of the George V station with all the swagger of a suburban hooligan. Two German girls with long hair, eyes glued to their pocketsize maps of the subway system, shied away from him; an elderly lady in a raspberry colored coat carrying a pug of the same shade in her arms opened wide her raspberry colored lips in approbation…

In Paris there used to be four kinds of trains; the ultra-modern, tricolor colored which sped across the city and rushed at a gallop into the surrounding commuter belt; the blue-black MF 77 - Chatillon – St. Denis- with their clumsy, hard to open doors; the yellow ocher trains without any special insignia which were native to the east-west routes; finally the marvelous Spragues, of post-war vintage jolting, unbalanced, with doors willing to open up at the least breath of air, a click, a touch… Alas these were a rare, fading breed. Vanishing…

The Moscow suburban trains have little in common with those of the Paris Metro. Kim’s latest caltapultic technique was honed to perfection during his Paris winter. First of all he had to secure and maintain a position by the door. Kim would, in the rush hour, squeeze himself last into the carriage. If some tardy passenger came flying in after him and leaned up against the door the trip was ruined: at the very first opportunity Kim would transfer to another carriage in search of a free door. The science of the off-leap now incorporated, in addition to its purely sportive aspects, various technical factors. The highest class of achievement was to leap out at maximum speed near to an exit or an up-escalator. The pneumatic safeguard system on the Sprague trains was almost always defective and Kim would leap out like a bullet; disappearing down a passageway before the driver could begin to brake.

The doors of the trains on line number one and the tricolor trains of the RER had to be listened to with the ear of a doctor osculating a patient. Everything depended on the driver’s mood. If he had had a reprimand from the boss, or a tiff with his wife over his rabbit in mustard sauce, the outlook was bad. But if he wasn’t nodding off or irritable, if he felt like getting his leg over and was in a hurry to get back to his native Montreuil to see his wife Bernadette, who was putting on a bit of weigh, then he would release the door locking mechanism the moment he spotted the foremost tip of the platform, the heads of the waiting passengers turned in his direction. And, in that case, you could hear, under the muffled beat of the wheels, the sweet sound of escaping air and Kim, both hands on the door handle was like a grenade whose pin had been released… The doors would fly apart with a gentle thud, the passengers would unglue themselves from their newspapers and Kim, pushing off, would fly towards the platform. Tourists would shy away with their usual solicitude for their cameras dangling round their necks, schoolkids would gasp in openmouthed rapture, swarthy guys with moustaches would suddenly look downcast and any Lolitas about would smile.

The most advanced form of aerobatics was the Rush Hour Leap when, Tokyo-like, a solid wall of swaying human flesh would occupy the platform. Grasping the handle and hanging on the outside of the open door Kim would pick out a far-off gap in the blurry faces and, wedging himself into it, changing leg position in full flight and slaloming so as to avoid even brushing up against other people’s clothes he would make it through to the second or third tier.

Once, at the station with the unpronounceable name of Denfort-Rochereau he almost broke something when a vigilant driver, waking from the hypnosis induced by the op-art of oncoming tracks, spotted on the monitor screen flanking him a strange flickering movement at the door of the second car and, as a result, pressed down hard on the button to operate the door failsafe mechanism. Kim, already halfway out of the car, almost in the air, in flight, was caught by the doors clanging to. Taking evasive action he snatched at the outer door handle, slippery with grease, and managed to dislocate his wrist so badly that a few days later he was forced to agree his curly haired woman doctor’s advice when she was filling a syringe with a solution of hydrocortisone: “You’d better forget about that heavy Leica with its motor for a week or two, you won’t be capable of even handling a fork. This is the only thing I can reasonably do in your case.” And with that Dr. Watier plunged the hypodermic, which shed but a single tear, into the heart of the problem.

Another time, in evening dress, in a black cashmere cloak borrowed from Boris - his gloves and hat as well - he made a bold leap onto the platform of the Opera station five minutes before the curtain was due to rise on Lucia di Lammermoor. He had completely forgotten about his brand new narrow fitting shoes from Arnis and he slid silently fifteen to twenty feet on his back, with the cloak over his head, his ticket to the stalls gripped in his black gloved hand, to the badly synchronized applause of a completely fortuitous audience.

He had a few rivals in Paris. He pretty quickly spotted a pale guy with prominent cheekbones who would leap out sometimes at Réamur, sometimes at St. Michel. The guy was gangly and sleepy looking but, technically, couldn’t be faulted. And then one day, at Trocadéro he experienced a jealousy so explosive it left him soaking with sweat. This rosy-cheeked American adolescent leapt out of a train while it was still going – on roller skates! The son of a bitch spun round once like a ballet dancer and then rolled off, his long chicken-like legs protected by kneepads; towards the stairs leading to the fountains, the esplanade, towards life at another speed, in completely different dimensions…

A friend of Boris’, a shrink, a bona fide priest of the cult of Sigmund F. told Kim once that his whole obsession with jumping, catapulting, represented a chronic, highly charged with energy, desire to distinguish himself from the mass, to escape the grasp of the collective - that idiotic family which was certainly not his - to slip away at full speed, to throw himself out of this life, liberate himself from all those indifferent but persistent gazes that he felt continually directed at his back.

“ Take care of your knees and ankles,” said the heirophant “in a crowd you’re on your own, and you will always be thrust, pushed out of it. You differ from the others in that you are indissoluble. You can be spotted a mile off. The past will always be pounding over you with its wheels.”

The crowd! Kim smiled. He knew its voracity, its insatiability. He knew with what unwillingness it opened up to outsiders. How unwillingly it let you go. He recalled how gladly it swallows up those who stand and stare and how it presses and surges around those who don’t fit in, those strangers to it, those who won’t dissolve…

But who, in this day and age, believes in shrinks?

Boris had written somewhere that people who had spent their childhood in Moscow were at least half a lifetime behind and that they when moved in a European crowd they used techniques of basketball players, their feints; a feigned move towards a hurrying passer-by who would step aside, a half step to the side and a step into a chance doorway. The movements of a Trojan horse.

“When you see pedestrian traffic held up in a pedestrian underpass or in a narrow street,” Boris wrote, “ you can be sure the hold up is caused by a self-satisfied and blindly happy family group who are holding hands – papamamasondaughterdog. Their microsystem is self-enclosed, blind and potentially aggressive. They need territory for their happiness; they want recognition and privileges. However, other loving groups drunk on their temporary immortality are also blocking progress. Another sort of barrier is that formed by old people and invalids. People go round them like trees growing where they shouldn’t. But the French generally don’t know how to walk. They weave their way from the basket chair on the terrace of one café to another basket chair an another café terrace, from one love affair to another, from one revolution to the next. Even on demonstrations, they drag their feet. Even in discotheques! But don’t tell them that! You are liable in that case to awaken in them a dangerous playfulness… Not for long however…”

********

The fact that in New York, as in Moscow, it was the train driver who opened the doors seemed in his first months there to be a hint at hidden parallels. New York was, in general, wonderfully like Moscow. I t was difficult to explain though. The granite facades? The width of the streets? Or the fact that in the phone book you could find practically any family name out of your past life?

As it turned out, after almost four years of life in Paris, in the rotten core of the Big Apple he took a dislike to the subway. If the truth be told, from time to time, twice a month, not more often, he would find himself in a crippled, half-dead car with a jammed, paralyzed door which let in the whipped and tattered rags of a truly cosmic horror. Kim would stand half out the door waiting for his station, then would leap jauntily onto the platform to the ululations and whistles of the black gangs.

************

One morning it was just his luck to get such a car. Kim was on the West Side, on 47^th Street, the center of the diamond trade, in an Hassidic shop where for thirty bucks you could buy a couple of two twenty-watt Morris flash bulbs. Pros would call these bulbs “the Hebrew slaves”; alone they were dead, but in circuit they would sync with the main flash, exploding into cold blue light.

Zavad, sexual maniac that he was, had an obsession about simultaneous orgasms and was always dreaming of finding a “Morris woman.”

At the corner of 43^rd and 9^th Avenue a fat man with a peppery face, wearing a silver colored overcoat had sold him three joints, one of which he had smoked standing in a little niche between trashcans and the wire netting around a playground watching some husky types – three blacks and one white – playing basketball. He got high in no time. According to the dealer the grass was Jamaican and then, he was still flying from the night before. He and Dez had got back at four in the morning from Kovatch’s where, up on the roof, the champagne had flowed like water and everyone had been smoking and snorting to their heart’s content. Kovatch had sold an old wrinkled guy from Palm Springs a twenty square foot panel of almost empty space – white on white – for a sum as astronomical as the Milky Way! And he was as generous as a Pasha.

**********

In the underground passage there was the roar of pneumatic drills and a thick solid wall of gray dust hung in the air. A black lad with a skateboard under his arms was sneezing and shaking his head. Immediately after each sneeze he would open his huge red mouth in a grin, as if he were asking forgiveness. The car was crumpled and dented, like a can of baked beans that had been knocked around a bit too much to be worth the full asking price. The really hot weather hadn’t set in yet but the walls and ceiling were covered with mould – the breath and the sweat of yesterday’s passengers.

One half of the broken door was jammed open. The lad with the skateboard, grasping its handle, was carefully thrusting his head out into the darkness, trying to spot any hairy phosphorescent monsters or the corpses of the old men dead in the night and stripped of everything of any use. Trains from the opposite direction passed with a savage roar, rising and falling, and there was the flashing of the lights of the B trains - the expresses that ran on parallel tracks.

Kim stood before they reached 42^nd Street. Pushing his backpack further across his spine and winking to the black lad, he shoved his head out the door. There was a smell of stale air: every molecule of oxygen came pre-packed in a film of grease. The platform advanced out of the black hole of the tunnel, grew wider, spattering a turbid light. Kim checked to see that his bag was free of the door and, an ingrained habit of his, rose on tiptoe several times to flex his ankles, and then leapt nonchalantly out.

He had grown unused to sudden movement; he was so out of practice, that he found himself being hurled to the side, towards a tiled column. A bearded Behemoth in denim overalls that were coming apart at the seams snorted heavily whilst gulping down a sandwich. To Kim it seemed that he had managed a very elegant return to the vertical. He let out a deep sigh and went limping off towards the exit. As he hobbled along he sang, in recitatif: "vodka, grass, chemical heaven go get fucked… son of a bitch… grass, vodka, snow… fucking bastard…old goat. Snow on the slopes of the sixty-first floor, music by Cole Porter, words by Kim Shuisky…

Nobody on the platform - except for a married couple who to all appearances hailed from another world, from the Old World - stared with horror at his unwashed locks, his filthy army surplus trousers and boots: nobody blinked an eyelid or gave him a second glance. The New York crowd is the best-trained crowd in the world. If Spiderman were to fall at your feet from the roof of the Chrysler Building you’d step over him and carry on your way. If an armless Puerto Rican, using a shoelace gripped in his teeth and a dirty toe, fired a colt pistol under your nose you’d still carry on walking, just taking that extra effort to step over the corpse of the fat man who stopped the bullet… A beautiful young woman, a grocery basket in her hand, turns the corner of the street where her mother brought her into the world twenty-one years since and you don’t turn, you don’t move a muscle or if you do it’s because you’re a hick, a cowboy, from out of town, a Johnny Appleseed – you’re no New Yorker!

“Are you?” He asked aloud. Of late Kim had been talking to himself quite a lot, like a huge number of the people who live in this city – the Manhattan crowds, the people on the square, the people on the crossing were almost always mouthing something

They were chewing over their solitude.

***********

On the street - aperture 16, exposure 500 - the sun was punching him everywhere; like a boxer just before the knockout he felt a succession of blows to his head. His legs were still shaky. Bells rang in his head now and then. He made up his mind not to go to Broadway to see Lloyd who’d promised him three hundred a month and he turned west, homeward. On the way he called in at the liquor store and bought three bottles of beer. Dez was sure to be still in bed.

Just in front of his building the aperture was 22, the sun was melting the stonework. The doorman in the lobby was digging into the dismantled innards of a ventilator and merely waved his free hand at him by way of greeting. The elevator smelt of chemical Spring. He opened his door with a turn of the key and a slight push of the knee. Dez was sitting amidst a pile of cushions, a tray of coffee on her closed knees. At twenty-three, at almost twenty-three, she still looked like a seventeen year old lycéene. Boris called her the “Nutcracker.” With her big mouth, long thighs, the forever tousled light brown hair, the rings under her eyes, her honey-golden Long Island tan which gives a rounded appearance to her boyish shoulders…

He put the beer in the icebox, charged the toaster with a round of slightly rubbery bread and then, divesting himself of his shirt on the way, went over to Dez. A wet coffee kiss. He placed two joints wrapped in foil on the small table and jumping first on one leg then the other freed himself of his trousers. Dez, spilling coffee, moved over to make space for him. The toaster discharged and there was a smell of burning. Leaning over Dez - his Dez, his little girl, his hela, his monster, his Mama Dez, his salope, his only, his fate, his goddess, his life - put the tray on the floor and he slipped, dived, into her embraces which he left three hours later; disappearing, dissolving; breathing her, feeling her still lazy, still not completely awake lips on his neck, on his shoulders, on his arms, on the back of his head, down his spine, between his legs ; breathing her scent, childlike, warm, steamy, penetrating her deeper and deeper; more and more enflamed, more and more happy. But, four hours later, when the sun - quitting the bed, the carpet and tray, the piles of clothing, the coffee table upon which her blue suede shoes lay - had moved over towards the kitchen and lit up the long bar with its dirty dishes, the yawning maw of a radio cassette player: the passage of four hours swift, fleeting, happy, full, last hours - she was dead.

Dez was dead.

*************

In the old fashioned mirror bought last winter at the flea market an August sky was reflected: huge, wide open, its clouds turbulent as an unmade bed,

At a quarter past ten a church bell rang out. On the deserted street, siren wailing in despair, a police van rushed by.

A tall naked man, thin and sinewy with short-cropped hair, a neat military moustache and a thick hairy chest stood squinting at a cut on his neck. A ray of sunlight burned hot on the blue blade of a cutthroat razor. Reflected in the greenish water of the mirror were the blood-red geraniums outside the window, the dark cluster of his sex and a portion of the table with its clutter of scattered papers, cassettes, cuttings from newspapers and photos - all centered around a coffee cup.

Boris slowly wiped the razor. In the mirror a striped towel appeared and disappeared. A contorted animal-like face bared a set of powerful looking teeth. Boris vacated the mirror.

The stereo was belching forth Sibelius. Boris, already clothed in a snow-white Oxford shirt and black knee-length socks, was standing in front of the mirror, drinking cold coffee. The city again covered by a light veil of heat trembled like a mirage. Boris, from time to time, as if he were coming down with the flu, felt feverish and shivery. Then he called New York, but there was no answer. The Manhattan night had swallowed the waters of the Hudson. La dame qui pique was expecting him at any moment. Tatiana hadn’t even asked why he needed the money.

It was Kim who had brought them together. Tatiana was a distant relative of his, on his mother’s side. After Kim had moved to New York the old woman had devoted all her energies to Boris. She had invited him to countless cocktail parties. She had looked for a wife for him. She had got him acquainted with the right people. She had pushed books his ways; books whose existence he had never even suspected and which once read turned your life around, by a half a degree, a quarter...

Once she had summoned him late in the evening. In a half darkened salon she was sitting on a leather pouf before a pile of things heaped up on the floor. There were silk monogrammed shirts, ties suitable for a museum exhibit, jackets of the finest suede, suits of a semi-military appearance one glance at which summoned up to the mind’s eye snakes, oppressive heat, hyenas, lions…

“Count Uvalov,” said Tatiana, inhaling deeply through a silver ringed ivory cigarette holder, “has, as your generation would say, got the big chill. Poor Kostya! He wasn’t even seventy… The rose Bentleys and his other goods, movable and immovable, have been divided up between those children of his. The Count, my friend, was a real dandy and I think that some of these things will suit you… You’re the same size, though Kostya was as thin as a Chinese ballerina… here you are, perhaps the shoulders…”

She handed Kim a wonderful Sulka smoking jacket, a half dozen monogrammed shirts, two suits, a Cashmere blazer, an English overcoat and he happily took a broad-brimmed Italian hat the color of oak leaves in October.

Tatiana wouldn’t take no for an answer. Into a trunk made of supple leather she threw a tangled heap of ties then added some pairs of braces, some pocket-handkerchiefs. She displayed a couple of pairs of cufflinks in the palm of her hand, shoved them under his nose - and all of this at such a frantic tempo as if the slightest pause would prove fatal, might give Boris time to say,

“I really don’t need anything….”

“ Kostya took his own life…” She informed him finally. “ I hope you are not superstitious? He was so afraid of death that he preferred to meet it on his own terms. He and Garrik were together at Cambridge… He came to bid me farewell. He was quiet and collected, as if he were going on a diplomatic mission to Riyadh or somewhere…”

So Boris arrived home sweating - with the huge trunk and hat aslant, as if he had just this minute returned from Australia, New Zealand or Borneo… He felt unsteady on his feet, as if he was suffering from jetlag after the flight. The next day he took the moustached Polish tramp who panhandled near the Metro station and slept on the steps of St. Eustache home with him. The Pole dragged the Count’s trunk off so fast that Boris didn’t even have time to get the cigarette the Pole had wanted to cadge from him out of its packet.

That whole summer long the Pole stood barefoot, by the supermarket entrance on Rue Berger, garbed in a filthy smoking jacket. A silk shirt that was turning black hung unbuttoned over his chest. Nobody called him the Pole anymore. He had a new name now – Ginzbar.

The hat, though, stayed. It covered the battered head of a stone cherub whose swollen little belly, flayed knees and chicken wings blotchy with graveyard mould, adorned the space between the bedroom windows. The cherub stood atop a fragment of column of unknown provenance and its celestial myopia was concealed by the cracked lenses of a pair of shades.

***********

Tatiana lived in the 14^th arrondissement in an annex buried amidst tamarisk and honeysuckle. Her two-storied dwelling - acquired by her father in the Twenties - protected by its ten foot high wall, atop of which something evergreen and always prickly clambered, was like a precious ring dropped and lost in a dark dusty corner hedged around as it was by shabby towering multi-storied boxes.

Hundreds of windows stared avidly down at the lushly flowering garden, at the bright red awnings, the just as blood-red parasols which hid three quarters of a green table and the mercury pool of a silver tray upon which, with the aid of a good pair of binoculars, could be descried a crystal goblet, burning green like a ruby, and a sparrow pecking caviar from a half-eaten sandwich. An astonished Vaska, a huge coal-black cat, was gazing alertly out from the cover of sharp-leafed irises.

Bees weaved through he air and somewhere inside, quietly, like a tap left running, Satie gurgled. The net that was strung between the wall and the roof would have been invisible if not for the leaves and the torn remnants of an ad caught up in it.

Boris glimpsed the familiar scene through a chink in the gate as he pressed the buzzer.

“It’s open,” shouted a voice.

Tatiana was sitting on the porch steps. She was always dressed as if Bakst himself had chosen for her those crushed silk slacks, the Turkish shawl, the ankle-length boots in Moroccan leather. Her tan was always the same, winter or summer alike - the tone of polished wood. She was smiling, showing off her snow-white teeth.

“ They’re all mine, thank God!” she would always say.

In May they had celebrated her eightieth birthday.

“A glass of vodka?” she asked.

“ That’s fine by me…” Boris began

Her vodka was wonderful; variegated in color, made with raspberries, blackcurrant, herbs, walnuts... It was always iced, globular like mercury, exploding in the mouth like a dum-dum bullet…

“Um, no, perhaps not, thank you…” he finally mumbled; though he took the glass and threw its contents back with a shake of his head.

The old woman had been grumbling at him recently about his “maladie russe.” She herself drank as sparingly as a bird, beginning the day with a glass of lemon and vodka and finishing up in bed at three in the morning with a helping of extra-strength, home-distilled. If you were to follow the trail of glasses abandoned here and there - in the garden, the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen, or the little peasant-style room on the mezzanine floor which smelled of hay and dry wood where she did her work - you could see just how she spent her twenty waking hours. She slept little and at seven o’clock her silent Senegalese servant, who had perfected the technique over long years in her service of soft-pedaling his movements, was already at work in the kitchen; cleaning the silver goblets, the ashtrays the crystal glasses greasy with lipstick.

She had been brought over from St. Petersburg when she was still a little girl and only once - during the Kremlin reign of the balding clown with the red birthmark - had she returned to Russia : for a few hours only. The taxi driver, having driven her down Nevsky Prospect spent a long time showing her the embankments and canals then, crossing over to Vasilevsky island took her further on, over the bridges to Ostrova. There she asked him to stop, near a semi-derelict dacha, while she had a long smoke, gazing at a bordeaux-colored sign which bore an insane abbreviation, made up of consonants only. The driver ended up with a pile of money, masses of ten ruble notes – she wouldn’t be needing them.

On the way back casting a last glance at the tender blue palaces, at the porcelain-fragile cathedrals, the golden spire burning bright above the fortress, she said:

“ And why on earth do you have a city like this….”

And falling back in her seat, closing her eyes she ordered “ To the airport!”

In Paris, that very evening, like an invalid surrounded by her friends, she threw up her arms and repeated;

“ It’s like an aquarium, they’ve let the water out of… An old cracked aquarium…”

Before the war she had been acclaimed the best of the woman big game hunters. She had known Africa better than her husband’s hereditary estate in Yorkshire. “Her Garrik” sailed under the Union Jack and she slept under mosquito nets, a triple barreled Sauer at her feet. When a wife and husband sleep separated by thousands of miles their marriage is often long lasting. They were divorced after the war and immediately after the divorce went into the first London hotel they chanced upon and spent the happiest, maddest hours of their life together.

Garrik died shortly afterwards and friends remarked on the folly of their divorce: right up until his last fatal voyage - when a mine, like a package sent special delivery by Satan himself, found its addressee and sent up a celebratory whoosh of joy along with a several tons of warm Mediterranean water- they had been living as man and wife.

The remarks were met by grimaces on Tatiana’s part. Divorced or widowed, what’s the difference? “ A divorced widow” was what she called herself. As for money, that interested her even less; she was no roulette player and could not envisage any other fateful means of disposing of her several millions. Her father had, long before the revolution, invested his money in, firstly, oil and cobalt and, later, in real estate. Tatiana had a Swiss passport and, from time to time- with no particular pleasure, just to satisfy the authorities- she would set off for a breath of mountain air. “My exile,” she called it.

********

“Tell me,” Tatiana ordered, slowly scanning the windows of the block which overhung her garden through a pair of binoculars, “ what’s he been up to over there? Has he assassinated the President? Contracted AIDS?”

“He didn’t explain exactly.”

Boris followed Tatiana’s eyes. Up on a seventh floor balcony a red-faced ox of a man, bald and paunchy, was standing, dressed in family-size shorts, sipping beer from a can

“During the night, my netting catches five or six cans of beer and sometimes, alas, even an empty bottle of some other filthy concoction.” It was the householder speaking now, baring her teeth. “ My fingers are itching… That idiot up there is a sitting duck… We’ve all become too soft. That’s Humanism for you!”

“ As far as I can make it out he needs the money to buy a plane ticket to Paris.” Boris poured himself another small shot. Thanks to an empty stomach the alcohol was starting to kick in.

“I’ll toast you a sandwich,” said Tatiana, rising to her feet as lightly as a young girl and passing him the binoculars. The ox was in his thirties perhaps. He had blue washed-out eyes and a tattoo on his left arm - an eagle grasping in its talons a pin-up with parted legs. Behind the billowing tulle curtains was an unmade bed with someone’s oversize feet sticking out of the bedclothes.

He stayed for lunch. Tatiana rang up the Chinese restaurant on the corner and ordered half a dozen items. The owner in person, a robust and smiling Vietnamese, rushed over with the order in just fifteen minutes and stayed to unpack the goodies. He sipped a glass of Zubrovka, told them some story no one could make head or tail of and vanished carrying off in his embrace a dull-colored pot-bellied vase made of bubbly glass. Tatiana was always giving presents to both friends and strangers; engravings, tea-pots, small carpets, books, place mats, bunches of flowers from her garden, cigarette cases that had belonged to Garrik, jars of jam. She would disappear into the cellar and return with a cobwebbed bottle of Chateau-Lynch or a tiny glass container with a black slimy truffle inside – like the brain of a dissected animal. Leaving her house empty-handed was virtually impossible.

They drank their coffee on the second floor in a library that smelled of old leather and the honeysuckle that rambled up the wall outside.

“ And how are things with you, my dear?” Tatiana asked, while closing the shutters and pulling the heavy curtains across with a violent jangling of the rings that held them in place. With taciturn ferocity a wave of heat beat against the closed shutters and streaks of gold splashed through the chinks… A bee lazily sawed through the air and dropped onto a plate of cherries.

“ Is your motorcyclist, your antidote to Sandra still effective? No side effects? Does she still seem so sphinx-like or has the time for such Grand Illusions passed? Have you heard from Sandra?”

“ A colloquium on milch cows, Lausanne… Illusions? There never were any special…Typical Soviet masochism. The worse it gets, the better. And if life -God forbid! - should suddenly become gay, pleasant and superficial … the police sirens start to sound straight away… I swear to you on oath that sometimes I wake up and I have this feeling: something’s wrong! Why this sense of impending danger? Of menace? And then I realize - it’s all because I feel so wonderfully well…”

“Perhaps it’s time, my dear, you thought about getting married?”

“ To Julie? Blondes on motorbikes are not really suitable for a long-term marital sentence with no hope of parole.

They don’t have a head for the really high places. The past, which you’re trying so hard to ditch, is like a lodestone for them. It’s what drew them to you in the first place. For them what they can’t understand about you is precisely what they find exotic. You can deprive them of material things just as long as you give something they can’t really fathom… And all the time you, like an idiot, are wanting to be just like everybody else… To be sincere, I’ve never felt at ease with Sandra. Either allegro passionato or sweet Fanny Adams. But, generally, as soon as I feel sure of myself, vraiment bien; which, as you know, is fairly rare (Tatiana smiled) I get a panic attack.”

“ You wouldn’t be the first. I noticed something about your generation a long time since: you find it a lot easier to live life topsy-turvy. It was the much same in England after the war. Once they were demobbed the soldiers became nervous wrecks, simply because all that fear and danger had disappeared. The external pressures had evaporated. They got the bends and that was why so many of them went on one long bender and began to live, as the saying goes, at the bottle’s bottom…”

Tatiana slipped into the next room. The cat, which had been dozing in a chair, jumped up straight from her sleep to follow her. Boris finished his coffee and lay back on the cushions of the divan. He wanted to go to sleep and to wake up in some far-off village by the sea, in a little bay with green water, steep cliffs and burnt steppe… Cicadas and absinthe; tarantulas; and an enormous sky, clearing its throat with distant thunder… Nostalgia is an optical illusion; it isn’t the geography that gets to us, it isn’t the flowering capers, the wild sage or the asphodels in the mountains. It’s our own youth, strolling in that country of the mind, hands in its pockets…

The cat entered, its tail up, and behind her, Tatiana.

“Seven thousand?”

His voice was hardly able to pierce the roar of the far-off tide’s withdrawal. Over there the storms were sunny and gay, there were ruffled mountains of yellow-green waves through which a troubled but insistent sun shone… Boris stood up feeling the salt spray on his face, and took the proffered money.

“If you young people have nothing better to do… When is he coming over? “

“ In theory he should be here tomorrow evening.”

“You know what… call me. And come for lunch on Saturday.”

He kissed her on her cheeks - soft and moist with cream - and ran downstairs, making a fleeting appearance in the huge wall length mirror in the hall, crossed the garden, causing panic amongst a flock of sparrows, and went out into the street. It was a quarter past two. The American Express offices closed at six.

“Six or seven?”

*********

By the way out at Vavin metro station a skinny gypsy woman, barefoot, was breastfeeding a bundle of varicolored rags. The hand she held out was the same color as the sidewalk. Boris fumbled in his pants pocket and went on by. A bee overtook him by the entrance to Select. A waiter, hunkered down, his soaking shirt sticking to his back, was brushing bits of broken glass into a dustpan. By the counter a semi-darkness held sway, the ventilators were thrumming and there was a smell of toast.

“Eh!” he heard from behind him, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

Boris turned reluctantly. As he had feared! That bastard sonofabitch Boris Zorin! Correspondent for the hammer and sickle in the French capital. They had lived on the same landing. He had been a big wheel in the Komsomol. In those days he had been a good-looking sportsman, specializing in screwing virgins and the high jump. A graduate stool pigeon as pure as crystal. A true comrade: if you turned your back you could be sure he’d spit in your drink!

“Just listen! It’s urgent! Is there anyplace we can talk? I spent all day yesterday scouring the place for you. I was told you’d either be at Select or la Closerie. Why the hell are you unlisted!”

“ It’s preferable to being blacklisted….”

Boris drank some beer from the tankard he had in front of him. Should he send him packing with the text in plain language? Comrade Zorin, go fuck yourself!

“The same for me!” His ex-compatriot shouted at the waiter.

“Boris, listen! Straight from the horse’s mouth. A bit of news that’s worth ten thousand bucks! What are you looking at me like that for? You have my word! You don’t believe me? A scoop!”

“ I’ve got to get to the office,” Boris said, frowning. “I’m already an hour late.” He rapidly downed his beer and scarcely hiding his annoyance, turned to go.

“ Hold on, shitkicker! I’m serious. You scratch my back… I don’t need any of the green stuff.”

“ Your change” a voice boomed from behind him.

“ And what is it you want, Comrade?” Boris took his change and thrust it in his pocket,

“ I just need a contact. I’ll explain it to you.”

“ Sticks like a leech” thought Boris, horrified. “ He’s going to want to come with me.”

“ I don’t know…Tomorrow? Come tomorrow… I’ll be around. Either here or over the road.”

Not noticing the proffered hand, screwing up his eyes and hunting for his sunglasses, he hopped out into the street, out into the taciturn deluge of sunshine.

The gypsy woman was still standing there at the guardrail by the metro station. He gave her five francs and turned to the left, onto the Rue Brea.

***********

During those days of August, inundated with molten gold, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Luco, with its openwork roof of thickly clustering treetops, was a virtually submarine kingdom. The black trunks of the centuries old chestnut trees, moss covered, tangled in ivy, merged with the trembling, burning blue. The jade-dark foliage let through rare diffuse and, in that darkness, hot burning rays of sunlight. But where the line of trees was broken by the turn of an avenue, a bed of wilting irises, a deluge of sunlight swept into the gap with the thunderous pedal note of a photonic rocket.

Within the dense shade, strolling, wandering amid the dusty columns of sunlight, were spinsters of seventy, visitors from out of town soaked in sweat, hunters of nymphets, out-of-work spies, policemen who had just stepped out of an operetta, American tourists armed with that essential bottle of warm overpriced wine and - returned to a state of Nature, following the precepts of Jean-Jacques himself - those who had been unemployed so long they could have graduated in it.

From time to time a group of Japanese, cameras dangling, would glide noiselessly down an avenue or a pair of soaked joggers would run past; the man scrawny and rather too pale for the time of year (an academic’s goatee beard, gloomy face, tee-shirt violet with sweat); the woman, a weak, flabby face, breasts jouncing to the rhythm of her feet, bright green cycle shorts almost indecently cutting into her swelling flesh, her hair curly, darkening with sweat, gluing itself to her neck … .

There are sleepy, neat old men dreaming the day away under the linden trees while, next to the sandpit full of half-naked little brats, are the fabulous looking babysitters who are finding it so very difficult to parler française. Then, behind the back of Blanche of Castille a young samurai, his face frozen into stony nobility, has flown over the balustrade - higher than the rather dim looking marble lion - beaten the dappled air with his heels and landed with the grace of a puma, and while doing so has chopped himself up into a good hundred semi-transparent fanned still-images…

Beneath a basketball net some huge black guys are trying to separate some lathered players who have gotten into a fight – Putain! Someone shouts, - motherfucker, kill him! ... Ferme la, espèce de ass-hole, someone else answers back. The motley crowd sitting under the café’s parasols watches the brawl with a glazed look.

For Boris Luco is the only place he feels truly at home: it’s the place where he knows everybody, and everybody knows him. When he’s asked his nationality he answers, “I’m from Luxembourg –the Luxembourg Gardens…”

The bright red disk of a Frisbee, flying higher than the tops of the chestnut trees, swings back in a gentle curve towards the expectant hand of a sunburnt guy dressed in torn denim shorts.

“Hi, Bernard!” Boris calls to him. “I thought you were off sailing….”

“No, I’m on welfare right now. I’ll be off again come October. You know I just have to think about waves and everything begins to look wavy, like a TV screen when there’s no signal…”

Bernard wiped a damp hand on his shorts and proffered it to Boris.

“We’re playing the krauts on Sunday. Are you coming?”

Boris took his jacket off, undid his tie. A young girl was asleep on a bench in the thickest of the shade, her head resting on her backpack. Her light brown hair cascaded down and her blouse had slipped away to reveal a shoulder, a breast. A green Michelin Guide to France was lying on the ground. Stéphane and Jean-Luc seated in chairs nearby were smoking and exchanging remarks.

“Good-looking?” asked Stéphan. “Swedish, judging by the guide.”

“ You reckon she’s free?” Boris joined in the game.

“ Till this evening, no later. Let her have her sleep now.” And Jean-Luc smiled his shy wide smile.

A thick cloud of reddish dust fell about them: in the avenue behind them a file of long-maned ponies was passing. Along with the dust the hot wind carried the acrid smell of urine and sun oil; a nauseating combination.

“How can you sit here” Boris coughed, “in this khamsin?”

Stéphane, throwing his head back, blow smoke out of his nose and straightened his sunglasses. On the Swedish girl’s shoulder, its wings folded back, a ladybird was crawling.

“But we can’t leave that girl on her own…” he said.

On Court Number four some newcomer was playing Etienne. A beefy guy, fast on his feet; American, judging by his style. On Number Three a couple of lads were stubbornly messing up every move they made and were shouting and cursing each other out, using very grownup words. On Number Two Alfredo was giving a lesson to a novice – as usual she was tubby. On Number One David and Roger, soaked in sweat, were drinking water.

Having greeted everybody Boris found a vacant chair and dragged it over to the netting around the courts. Jan was smoking a short and pungent Partagas; Luc and Alain, heads together, were deep in a Breitling catalog; Rémi was rolling a bandage around his knee; some unknown foxy chick was giggling away on Antoine’s knee; Olaf and Fabrice, as wet as if they had just taken a shower, were sitting with eyes closed, looking blissful.

“I’ll let you have the second service…” Jan was saying.

“And in the meanwhile they’ll have pillaged half the country! A voice resounded from behind.

“And right behind Jean-Pierre this broad was sitting, thirty-five, legs apart….”

“That’s what you say! For my first Saint-Georges studio I paid nine hundred francs!”

“… on the chair and pulled her skirts up. And under her skirt, all things being equal, she didn’t have…”

“Apart from her beaver fur! Olaf giggled.

“And there wasn’t even much of that,” continued Jan.

“And now?” rasped the invisible voice. “ For that broom closet with no bathroom and walls as thin as cardboard…When my neighbor sneezes my books fall off the shelf. I can even hear him when he plucks his nostrils!”

“Of course I made a mess of the second service. 15-30. I go to serve to the left. I raise the racket.”

“Four thousand two hundred a month!”

“And I don’t even manage to serve! His sweetie pie is looking at me with eyes like the barrel of a machine gun about to fire. And she pretends she didn’t even see me.”

“ No, but you remember, don’t you? You could have dinner for two for sixty francs, including wine and coffee.”

“OK! The ball is next to the net and I say to Jean-Pierre: pass me a ball, the one I’ve got is dead, fucked. And he turns around, goes to the net and doesn’t see a thing, the prick.”

“ I’m tell you what. Those Greens. Their fight against pollution. The biggest cause of pollution isn’t exhaust fumes…”

“So he returns the ball to me. And he starts prancing around like Agassi, waiting for me to mess up again.”

“It’s not nitrates.”

And, then, a second before I serve, it clicks with him. I see his head move as if some force or other is pulling him and he turns around…”

“And it isn’t contaminated water…”

“ And then he goes back to his original position – his face stiffens, his mouth begins to twitch and he hammers his racket on the ground as if he’s banging in nails.”

“ The biggest pollution’s of the mind. Politics and advertising.”

“ I win the game and he suggests we change sides.”

“They take us for imbeciles! They think we’re to swallow all that crap ad infinitum… washed down with cheap plonk...”

“ Though he’d refused to play facing the sun. In short, it was a helluva match…”

“And that bitch, who was she?” somebody asked.

“Hey, Ivan, what changes did you make in that Pampers’ ad?”

“That bitch? She just sat there, airing her fanny until Guillaume turned up.”

Jan yawned and blew out a cloud of smoke.

“How can you smoke that shit?” asked Alain.

“He’s not smoking it, he’s just putting on the dog! You don’t inhale. Do you? asked Olaf.

“ Only phonies inhale cigar smoke, “ Jan remarked and spat, sotto voce.

“Ivan!”

“Let him be, he’s having a nap….”

“So, he dragged her off?”

“Um…He doesn’t give a damn what sharpener he sticks his pencil in.” Antoine’s voice boomed out.

“ Boris substituted Frenchwomen for the ad’s diapers: even when wet, they’re dry!”

“Pencil-sharpener, her? Jan finally extinguished his cigar. “She could grind rocket heads!”

“You’re all just a bunch of filthy-minded swine,” the skirt intervened gleefully. “You’ve only got one thought in your heads!”

“ And you know who’s behind this fuckin’ epidemic?”

“AIDS?”

“Mam’selle Véro! “ Fabrice interrupted, opening one eye. “You’ve come four times at least rubbing yourself on this clumsy idiot’s knees and he’ll have to have a new zip in his jeans... Playing the hypocrite in this heat!”

“I’m going to tell you and I’m being absolutely 100 per cent sincere now: this whole AIDS story is an invention of the condom manufacturers. Can you imagine the sort of dough they’re raking in right now?”

**********

The American was clearly a lot stronger than Etienne. In reply to his cannoning serves Etienne either sent the ball into the net or out. His right was dreadful but Etienne was capable of returning at least as good as he got. However, the Yank’s power was awesome. He would hunker down low under the ball and then when he struck he would spiral like a corkscrew and raising himself, arms spread-eagled, would practically throw himself after the ball. And right up until the very last millisecond it wouldn’t be apparent whether his stroke would be straight along the line or take the diagonal.

Boris felt his eyelids growing heavy. He blinked a few times, yawned and closed his eyes. Even with his sunglasses on purple spots floated across the insides of his eyelids.

Children shouting… tricycles…ringing…Ding! …Dong!… Deng Xiaoping …A Chinese bicycle…the sound of balls being struck… dully…Velvet, heavy damp velvet… like the curtain in a theater…the court with its coarse grainy surface…burning through Nike soles…a band…In the bandstand, in deep shade. A waltz and hot gusts of air. Someone’s newspaper suddenly deciding to take off. Not Strauss. But something familiar.

For a while he cut his way out - it was just like drowning in hot syrup – he slept. Jan and Alain went off to play. Fabrice too. Antoine was hanging suspended to his girl’s lips. On her slender sunburnt neck red spots began to appear. Puma-girl! Stephane and Jean-Luc were escorting a smiling Swedish girl towards the exit. Boris shook his head, trying to chase away sleep. Go to the changing rooms, get under a cold shower? Nothing to get dry with. He took off his glasses, clenched his eyes shut and, feeling a tear start to roll down his nose, opened them again: the elephant-eared catalpa leaves, the fleecy clouds sailing aslant across the unbearable blue; a Dali. Larry, hanging above the net having played a smash…

Larry: out on the court three hundred and sixty five days a year. A bag that held five racquets; a gray, close-cropped head of hair; prominent cheekbones; a bony frame wrapped in braids of muscle. Larry wearing himself out on the court morning and evening, in rain and in snow, in sorrow and in health, for richer for poorer. Amen. Only death will part him from the thrum of the strings of his Konnex. They’ll take him to the cemetery straight from the court. The fireman’s band from la rue de Sèvres will play Benny Golson’s March, Europe Numéro–1. On the block of marble there will be the laconic inscription -

LARRY SCHWARTZ

HE PLAYED TENNIS

Instead of the dates of his birth and his death they’ll inscribe those of his first match, his last smash…His friends won’t bring flowers, but old tennis balls, balding and flabby.

“That’s the way Larry Schwarz would have wanted it”

“Hey!” Someone was calling him from behind.

Boris turned: Pierre and Luc were getting their bags together.

“Want to come with us to Deauville? Rémi’s bought his father’s Range Rover. We’ll have a dip and then drop in at the Casino?

“I have to be at the paper,” Boris freed himself from his chair with a sigh – “ not everybody can chill out: somebody has to build Capitalism…”

“If you change your mind, come along” Pierre slapped him on the back, as friendly as ever. “We’ll be at Saint-Sulpice at seven. Le Café de la Mairie.”

***********

Kim inherited the Perry Street loft from François Wong of AFP. Their paths had first crossed in Peshawar; they had subsequently met up at embassy briefings in Beirut and, once, bumped into each other at three in the morning in a half-empty disco in Larnaca, Cyprus when François, having turned freelance and as thin as a rake, was chasing after a Congressman’s daughter who was head in heels in love with a blonde guy who answered to the name Kozlov.

Thirty years old, Kozlov - according to the papers he worked either for Soviet military intelligence or the KGB - was no Apollo in looks with muscles as taut as hawsers. The following morning Boris was able to observe him to his heart’s content through the zoom lens of Wong’s camera. The red 007 was lounging on a striped chaise-longue by a pool and had a flabby belly, not that much hair left, an almost womanly chest and really impressive, piercing blue eyes…

In New York, after a show at Robert Miller’s gallery, Wong went up in the world. Kim even earned some money thanks to him, making portraits of stars who had not yet risen in the local firmament and when François moved to a comfortable duplex at the corner of Lex and 64^th which belonged to a Filipino model who earned enough to buy a half a Porsche a day, Kim moved into his vacated loft.

It wasn’t really a loft but a big sixties-style New York garret with a sky light, a minuscule terrace, a fireplace, windows that looked out on to the port and the wall opposite which was part whitewashed and part, a whim of the architect, exposed brickwork. Wong left behind a thicket, a veritable jungle of flowers and a kitsch bath on casters which was wheeled out of its cubby hole when required. The icebox stood between the windows and the range was hidden in a corner behind the highly polished bar.

Thanks to a small ad placed in the Village Voice Kim managed to buy a secondhand futon and two leather armchairs; the table, seating six, belonged to the landlord, his books had come from Paris by boat, a month after his own arrival, the portrait of Desiree painted by Fazzi the lilac-colored Moscow roofs, by his childhood friend Sasha Rubinin, were perched above the fireplace: everywhere else was encumbered with tripods, rolls of scenery paper, bags, boxes, lamps, screens, speakers, the fax, the stereo and a gravity system - the “ironing board” as Boris called it - a sort of windmill with ankle straps upon which you could either keep turning or remain dangling upside down ; it was the only useful remedy for all the ills that afflict the professional photographer – scoliosis lumbago, back pain – it loosened up your spine, lessened any pain and was good for your back.

It was Dez who had called the loft a garret when she had first arrived in New York. She wanted to use the American names for everything. Taxis became cabs, concierges – doormen, gardens- parks, idiots- schmucks. She gladly rechristened her world and was carried away by the fact that the laundries were run by Chinese, the fruiterers the veggie and grocery stores by Koreans, the cabs by Russians, by the fact that there were policeman who rode horses, that the entrances of buildings were adorned with marquises, that there were water-towers up on the roofs, that the city’s concrete was daubed red as if with carmine lipstick, that the sunsets were monumental – like in the mountains- and that the atmosphere was so impregnated with electricity that you could get a bulb to light up just by holding it in your hand.

She had grown up in a city where the streets weren’t a grid of parallel lines, where the building were like a varied crowd of people who had been petrified on the hoof. Dez from the Luxembourg Gardens, Desiree from la rue Vavin who a mere eight years back had still been playing hopscotch on the pavements of the Champs Elysee redrew the lines of her life on the grand American checkerboard pattern and forgetting the chestnuts and rhododendrons fell in love with that naked New York tree with the huge silky leaves, with the city magnolias that flamed amid the bare brick…

They had lived together for nearly four years: two in Paris and two in New York.

And now laughing and dancing Dez who would fall into fits of melancholia as if her internal sun had been obscured by a passing cloud, Dez who, oh so passionately wanted to be better than everyone else, Dez who could mange to stick a pan even if there was nothing but water in it, Dez whose pullovers shrank three sizes with their first wash and had to be given away to the doorman’s grand-daughter, Dez who could, of a sudden turn, into a vile traitress, a malicious, spoilt, obdurate she-devilet in an unprecedentedly clean and clinging dress with her hair impeccably coiffured but with her mouth slimed with a deliberately crude lipsticking, Dez so sleepy of a morning, forever stretching herself, hounded by fragments of dreams, Dez whose skin would suffer intermittences of hot and cold, with her bird cries when she made love, with her cat screams when she was angry, with her laddish movements when she danced alone or was making like a karateka, Dez, his Dez – sa tendresse, sa douleur – his all, his everything was lying concealed in a plastic, zip-fastened sack and being carted off by two burly cops, one white, one black, who were cursing and swearing as they bent under the weight even though she was lighter than a feather - about a hundred pounds, a hundred pounds at the most.

Or is death a transition to another category of weightfulness.

************

The lieutenant tormented him for forty minutes or so with idiotic questions. Who had installed the flashguns? Had any of the lamps ever fallen over before? Why had he chosen to shoot Miss Leroux in the bath? Had he notified the next of kin?…

When Kim said that Miss Leroux’s father worked at the U.N the lieutenant stopped making notes and gazed attentively at him. He was, maybe, twenty-seven, his rosy face was badly shaved because of the pimples, his eyes were a turbid blue and his adam’s apple protruded from the collar of his open shirt.

Kim signed each sheet, vaguely nodded his head in response to the injunction not to leave town and shutting the door behind the departing police got a bottle of whiskey from out of the wall cupboard and phoned Paris. Boris just didn’t seem to understand, kept on yawning, but he did promise to send the money.

An hour, maybe a couple of hours, he remained sitting in the worn old leather armchair, the phone in one hand the bottle of White Horse in the other. Despite the heat the large pool of water on the floor showed no sign of drying. The fan wasn’t on, the lights were off, the ice in the fridge cracked dully, starting to melt.

Finally he set the phone down on the floor, got up, stepped over the towel that was swollen with water, kicked the stand that lay across his path and went out, his feet crunching fragments of broken glass, onto the terrace. Was it because the heat hadn’t let up or was it because instead of air there was there this taut void, anyway, he had this feeling of being grabbed by the throat - fingers of steel closed around his neck, something cracked behind his ears, he opened his mouth wide trying to breathe: but couldn’t.

He leaned back against the wall with a sensation of weakness in legs that had suddenly grown alien to him as they buckled beneath him. He shook his head but he couldn’t get any air and sank down on his haunches, feeling the sweat gathering between his shoulder blades, on his forehead, running down his spine, burning his eyes. He threw his head back hit it painfully hard against the wall and started to breathe again; as if suddenly emerging from the dark waters of the other world, gulping down big tense ovals of air and shivering; his whole body shivering.

Time staccatoed forward. Quarter of an hour. A minute. Then God knows how long. His arm with his watch upon it hung down, as if dead. Slowly, as through a fog, it came to him that he was crying, rocking to and fro on his haunches, shaken by dry sobbing. Like a shaman out in the taiga a stranger’s thoughts were moving through him.

After a while he fell silent and sat quietly with the feeling that something had wedged up inside him as if a rib had broken and had become embedded in soft flesh. A great sundering dullness filled his body. Nothing mattered or made any difference. Inconsequent. Finally, in his right hand he found the still glugging bottle of whiskey and throwing his head back towards the strawberry-black New York sky he sloppily drank it all down - in just a few gulps.

Somewhere below, in the city’s depths, sirens bansheed; from the pier there flew up, whistling and spitting, a lilac-colored rocket; in the darkness an invisible window pulsed to the sound of Brahms. He moved back to the room, stripped, put Dez’ silk bedragoned kimono on, tightened its cord around his waist and threw himself on the bed. The bed linen was all crumpled, the pillow smelled of her hair. He embraced it, pressed his face to it. His torpor vanished She must be here somewhere. Above him. In the room. In this lightless air. He turned over onto his back. A person couldn’t just vanish like that. Like a thing. Like a couch you’d thrown out. There just had to a few molecules of her left, didn’t there?

But she wasn’t there. The room was empty, the burning air was empty. He knew with certainty that now he would no longer be able to embrace her, no longer be able to run his hand down the length of her slender spine, feel her breath on his face, lick the tears from her cheeks, squeeze her breasts in his hands, come in response to her coming… He sat up, with the pillow still in his arms, and moved his knees up towards his stomach. His body ached all over, as if he been given a good working over by a gang of street punks. The room seemed to him to be like a movie that had jammed in the projector and was about to burst into flames. Dense blue cumbered darkness. He was on his own. Somewhere, from out of a corner, like a locomotive on a screen something moved towards him, formless, alien, not to be appeased. A panic terror took hold of him.

“Dez!” he called idiotically, soundlessly, in a dry whisper, “Dez…”

The buzzer screeched and at the same moment the lights came on and the radio began its clamor. The doorman opened the door with his master key and was now standing on the threshold rocking back and forth on his elephantine legs. The lips of his flabby mouth moved. The sound followed later:-

“ No need to worry I fixed it … He looked on with the sympathy, the pity of a simple soul; his eyes were telegraphing: this life is a pile of shit, yeah? Fuck it man… lowest grade shit…”

“You were such a marvelous couple…” at the were he stumbled…

“Want me to get you a little something? My wife has a bottle of Russian schnapps hidden somewhere…”

“Oh, thanks a lot Greg,” he said. “ Thanks for everything. I’m OK….”

************

He slept until eleven, shaved without cutting himself, went out to the Italian place for lunch, eat two platefuls of ravioli and artichokes, drank a bottle of Valpolicella and ordered coffee.

He had quite literally forgotten that Dez was dead. The only thing unusual thing about the condition he was in was a general feeling of lumpishness. Somebody could have hit him over the head with a frying pan and he would hardly have noticed it. Somebody could have stuck pins under his fingernails, he would have glumly waited, as one does, for the gabby manicurist to finish cutting and polishing.

Stefano pushed the trolley over with the dolci. Kim pointed a finger at an almond pastry. Amaretto! As ever, near curtain call, fat and smiling, Mama Francesca came over to see him. She was carrying her ritual bottle of grappa.

“How is she, my little girl?” she asked. “Dazzy?” She added in English, “Still dancing?”

No, signora..” Kim said, wiping his mouth with a claret-colored paper napkin and holding out his glass. “She isn’t dancing anymore, dear signora!…

He looked out the window: someone’s greasy back flitted by, clothed in a white jacket, from a stopping taxi there clambered a shaky old man leaning on a stick.

“She’s flying…Volare…”

The clock showed it was four ‘o clock

Returning home, absolutely calm, as if he were about to order some tickets for a Carnegie concert, he rang Pierre Leroux’s office number. M Leroux wasn’t in. The secretary gave him Leroux’s fax number and with his Flowmaster marker pen he wrote Lieutenant Hubbard’s phone number on a sheet of paper.. He thought it over and added – URGENT. And further down the page- Sorry… He immediately tore off the part of the sheet that contained the sorry and left the docile fax machine to deal with his message.

“You always wanted her back” he thought, maliciously. “ Well, now she’s all yours. For always.”

He had never been able to hit it off with Leroux. Dez had once told him something that had upset him for months afterwards and he had made an earnest vow to bump off the worthy M. Leroux at the earliest opportunity.

“It was just after my mother died, “ Desiree had explained to him. “Irene wanted to go to the police about it.”

“And, of course, it was you who stopped her from doing it!” Kim raged.

**************

He gave Greg his keys and having scrawled Boris’ number on a scrap of card said that he would be back in a week. In a week, in a month, in a decade, OK?. Time no longer existed. Perhaps the gewgaw’s winding mechanism wasn’t quite fucked just yet but it was surely pretty badly jammed.

Greg clapped him on the shoulder and looked him guardedly in the eye.

“No problem! Try to take it easy…”

Kim looked out at the street through the entrance door window: the outside world. staccato, chronically spasmodic – pedestrians walked by, a dog cocked its leg against he wheel of a motorbike, the elbow and broom of a black man in overalls made furtive appearances.

Francois Wong took him to the airport. He was sitting in his car waiting for him, studying some test plates(?). Kim sat down beside him, took a cigarette from his packet. The lighter clicked.

“Your filter’s on fire” said Francois

Kim let out a curse and tore off the smoldering filter.

“Hey, aren’t you taking anything with you?” Francois was surprised.

And that was the truth of the matter; Kim was leaving just as he was – in jeans and a crumpled shirt. His money in his belt, his passport in his shirt pocket.

“ They won’t stop you boarding. But things’ll get sticky later. Especially at Roissy…”

He had to go back, get his keys from Greg… He threw things into a lightweight sports bag – a change of underwear, shaving tackle, a sweater. From his bedside table he took the plastic bottle of Bromazepan and threw a jacket across his shoulders. The bottle of whiskey was empty. “ I’ll get some at the duty-free” he thought. Dragging the rucksack with his Hasselblat in it from out under the bed he kicked back a dusty shoe that emerged with it and making his way out kicked an armchair that blocked his way. Once out in the corridor again he re-locked his door.

The Toyota’s motor was quietly bubbling away. They cast off.

“We’ll just call in at my place,” Francois suggested, “ for a half hour. I’ve got to pick up the rest of the photos.”

The Toyota dived into the gap between a red Sony delivery wagon and a Volkswagen beetle painted all over with flowers.

“Why are you so gloomy?”

Francois was in complete ignorance. At first Kim had wanted to tell him. But he’d reconsidered. Why should he?

At Francois’ they drank a bottle of over-chilled champagne.

“I knew a family who lived not far from St. Paul-de-Vence who weren’t too badly off at all,” said Kim. “They had one fridge which they kept stocked up with Crystal the whole year round. But in my opinion warm Italian sparkling wine is preferable. Il se casse dans le frigo, ce vin des putes et des rois!” (It spoils in the fridge this wine of kings and whores)

“Tell that to Maligai” chuckled Francois. “ She can’t tell champagne from Schweppes…”

Deep in the apartment’s depths Brahms was playing: the very same Second Concerto that had been playing the night before. For a moment he stopped breathing; missing a beat, his heart tore off in an irregular tattoo.

Francois lent him the money, as usual, without any questions. And no matter how much he insisted against it Kim left him the Hassel and two lenses in hock.

“They’re a surety, OK?” he said.

Maligai emerged from the bedroom, phone in hand, wearing a kimono identical -except that this was emerald green and not purple and the dragons were gold - to the one that just a few short hours ago Kim had been strolling around the loft in: the one he had slept in towards morning. Kissing her on the cheeks – she carried on taking rapidly into the phone- Kim was relieved that neither she nor her kimono were heavily scented with Mlle X, the perfume that came from a certain small boutique on the Avenue Raspail.

It was around five in the evening. Sparks of electricity tore through the stagnant air. Late in the day the sky had clouded over and all visible space had been inundated by an opaque light which trembled, like the light above the sub-arctic wastes of Kuokalla. With indifference Kim watched as through that turbid flickering paleness he saw how the towers of the city, their spires, their secret gardens on the sixty-eighth floor, grew and thrust up at the lowering heavens, how the shapes of the water cisterns, the arcs of the bridges, vanished into swirling space…a world gone bananas. Lunatic brick and concrete… Diagonally, like a fat fly, a helicopter slides by, tormenting the ears; disappearing only to reappear once again.

For a long long time, as in a dream, they cross over a bridge. The wheels dully thrum across the steel plates. Somewhere up in front, behind a diversion sign a worker in an orange helmet is smoking, turning his back to the slow ceaseless stream of traffic. A second man is leaning over his cavorting pneumatic drill. Pan-Am. Flight 118 is departing at !9.30.

Old man Marx got it wrong – non-existence defines consciousness…

God Bless America! There’s no queue, no passport control at the airport. On his way through he buys a liter bottle of Oban in the duty free. The Boeing 747 was packed to overflowing, he was shown to a seat in First Class on the upper deck.

A tanned steward in an impeccable gray suit brings round champagne. Kim says he doesn’t want any and the steward, wiggling ass like Claudia Fischer on Saint-’s catwalk, returns with a big bottle of cognac. Smelling as sweet as the month of May in the meadows outside Grasse, a rosy cheeked elderly woman in equally rosy silks makes herself comfortable in the next seat.

“Monsieur…”

“Bonsoir Madame!

Emerging from behind a thick curtain a graying and going to fat pilot makes his way down the gangway. A blue clad stewardess leads an awkward young girl of about twelve to a front row seat – she looks a lot like the young Audrey Hepburn. Across the girl’s chest there hangs a board with her details. Import-export – child post! The plane begins to roll towards takeoff.

With his cognac in his hand Kim leans over the porthole. In the distance beyond the airfield concrete, beyond the burnt and garbage-strewn grass and the radio masts the inky tentacles of the approaching storm are moving in fast. He feels hot, suffocating. He straightens himself up and turns on his ventilator. An icy draught lazily caresses the top of his head. He puts his headphones on; on Channel Three, as if there are no other records left in this world, the same allegro appassionato is just coming up to the boil; boils over like a Hokusai wave and evaporates finally into the andante¨- pure glucose.

He tore the phones from his head and wiped his brow with a crumpled handkerchief. Night was coming on again. He shook his head. There was a pain in his stomach, his stomach was contracting and slowly, like mercury in a thermometer, growing in strength, there crept the horror of yesterday’s events. It slowly flared up as if he were burning up inside. His chest tightened abominably, abjectly. And the world started to go out, like a corridor light.

In this new half-light, with some lateral sense, not that of sight, he noted that the light streaming through the porthole was filled with darkness. The light’s content was darkness. Loudly, staccato, above the noise of the engines, his heart beat in his ears.

Then they brought the papers round. He took one at hazard. His hand was shaking, a wide wedge of pain continued to bore into his right side.

Gorby was sunbathing at Fors. There was a strong smell of printer’s ink. The steward, sitting in a vacant seat, was absentmindedly twanging at the safety belt. Forests were burning in the South of France. Was Freud a phallocrat? The ranks of claret colored seats reared up, the Boeing abruptly began to climb.

His arm was heavy, wooden. He drew a hand across his brow, swallowed. The flesh of his face seemed sort of frozen. The seat next to him was empty. The old lady had slipped off to another vacant seat on the right-hand side. The Boeing, trembling, continued its oblique ascent, the whole force of its engines battling with the earth’s magnetic pull. Mass multiplied by force. If there is no force get rid of the mass. Ice was sliding down the nape of his neck as if it were the North Pole. The muscles of his neck were tensed. In its sliding course the ice was changing: into 99% sweat, 1-% ocular fluid.

Out the porthole the sky was a limpid lilac blue. On this tender satiny backdrop a few big stars pulsated. The asbestos skin of the ocean was cut with deep wrinkles. A wood-chip of a petrol tanker lay athwart a long foaming breaker. The breeze from the ventilator was now a taut forceful stream of air.

His sweat evaporated and Kim experienced a pleasant shivering sensation. Smiling, he gestured at the steward with his empty bottle and the latter bowed his head in reply.

“Tout de suite, Monsieur…”

New York was far off. Already far off.

Above the city, like a ragged blanket, the storm was creeping in. A flash of lightning and, for the space of a few seconds, the skyscraper towers seemed to grow bigger. The asphalt looked like coagulated caviar. A pack of yellow cabs was tearing down 5^th Avenue.

Near the Plaza the dapple-gray horses covered in their red caparisons were getting a soaking. The chauffeur of a Jaguar turning into Park Avenue from 57^th Street was saying, directing his words to the back of his vehicle without turning his head:

“Yes, Madame, it’s as if we were in a submarine, Madame, a yellow… My elder brother was a fan of the Beatles, I played the violin until I was fourteen…”

On the subway steps a crowd of people were waiting for the rain to go off. All for one and everyone for themselves… Every five minutes the Subway regurgitated twenty to thirty newcomers. Through the wet, rain-bespattered window of a luncheonette a gray-haired youth stared. His jaws moved. He was chewing a sandwich, watching as a crushed billboard poster twitched beneath the wheels of a bus. And somewhere, down there, in the labyrinth of Manhattan streets, in one of those concrete boxes, in a basement, or rather in the retractable steel drawer of a big freezer, lay Dez. Dead titty with tacky hair and two beers and a dry Martini in her veins. Her face was elongated and flattened, like in a Bacon painting.

Paris: seven hours and one minute flying time.

Non-being continued to determine consciousness.

**********

In a dark corner of his memory that forgotten day, cross-hatched with February rain, continued to molder. Only when they had had their first quarrel and she had gone for ten whole days to the mountains with her sister did that day, that turbid, typically Parisian lilacy-gray day rise to the surface, like a mud-filled bubble, and burst, splattering his vision.

He was waiting for Boris in a bistro on the corner of the Rue Vavin and Notre-Dames-des-Champs. It was noisy, smoke-filled, humid, smelling of perfume, disinfectant and dog. The waiter, having just brought him his third cup of coffee, was standing counting out his change. At the table opposite a young woman was sitting looking at him, eyes wide-open and smiling. At first he felt embarrassed then, noticing the Labrador in harness under the table, realized she was blind.

She could have been twenty-five, at the most twenty-six. She was drinking lemon tea and it was the way she felt for her cup, the way she stirred the sugar, the way she moved the ashtray. There was a touching fragility, a horrifying trustfulness. Her fingers were never more than a few fractions of an inch out. She wasn’t wearing rouge or eyeliner but her mouth, a little too rapacious, a little too glossy, bore a few traces of lipstick. Suddenly Kim realized he could keep on staring at this young woman’s rosy face, brimming over with health and curiosity, with absolute impunity. He was filled with a strange feeling of intense intimacy. He sensed that she knew that she was being watched…

With a movement that had grown habitual he felt for the Leica in his bag. He got it out and hesitated. No question of using a flash. The camera was loaded with ektochrome – 400. If he pushed it to 3200 the photo would be as grainy as a Seurat portrait…

He reprogrammed the camera for greater sensitivity and measured the light against her gray raincoat. He switched to manual - the dog stirred under the table – and took a shot. A Leica motor is the quietest in the world and the bustle of the café easily drowned any clicking. But the blind woman turned her head to one side, listening. The warm light of a lamp poured over her face. Her fulsome lips were clearly wanting to pose some question. Kim hastily altered his shutter speed, took aim at her eyebrows and clicked his camera, once, twice – someone came into frame, barred…

He turned at random towards the windows and re-aimed his camera. The light meter fell to !/235 at 8 seconds

The street gleamed – a lustrous black – water splurged up from under the buses’ wheels and only the legs and umbrellas of the passersby were visible.

It was an old ploy - make out you’re photographing something else nearby. As a street photographer you needed insolence; robbing strangers of their faces demanded the legerdemain, the actorly skills of a pickpocket.

He put the camera down and, noting with the corner of his eye that Boris was shaking himself down in the doorway, he glanced at the neighboring table. A sweet-faced schoolgirl, cigarette in mouth was stroking the dog whose head lay on her knees with one hand whilst with the other she was stretching out for the teapot.

“One expresso, one cordial and two halves!” the waiter shouted to the barman before disappearing, tray held aloft, through the swinging doors to the miniscule kitchen.

Boris felt somberly gay and was drinking his brandy while scratching his cheek with the back of his hand. He had just shaved off his beard and upon his face there had surfaced skin that was smooth pale and boyish - like the trace of a mask.

“One time, in Moscow,” while he was speaking he kept rotating his head from side to side, “ I shaved off my beard and when I got home instead of using my key I rang the bell. My mother came to the door, looked at me and said, ‘Boris isn’t here… He’ll be back later…’ Can you imagine it? For three years she’s been nagging at me to shave it off and when I do…”

“C’est quelle langue, s’il vous plait?” someone behind him asked. Both sisters were looking at them, smiling.

“C’est une langue bizarre.” Boris said very happily. Semi-extinct, semi-wooden Une langue de boule ou simplement: la langue de boulaie.”

“Ya nim noshko ponimai yu,” said the big-mouthed youngster whilst the elder dropped a spoonful of sugar wide of her cup.

PART IY

Kim was in Djerba at the end of April. The Tunisian sun, like a top of the range spotlight, assiduously burned down upon them. Happy, a thirty-year-old Yankee-noodle, dressed in long motley-colored shorts, his head wrapped in a bandanna, set up the tripods, schlepped the heavy trunks of equipment and make-up and played at making enormous sun-sparks with the round reflector shield. Emily, the aging make-up girl, a thirty-year-old brunette the color of a ripe plum, was constantly on the move between the loungers and the pool with armfuls of fresh towels. The three models, two Germans and an American, splashing about in the apple-green water of the pool had, after a few days, so raised the hormonal level of the hotel’s male inhabitants that the manager noticed a doubling of the bar receipts. The natives admired the beauties from afar: there was an invisible line dividing the beach from the rest of the world, beyond which peddlers and camels were not allowed to stray.

The fashion agency was paying fabulous amounts of money, the season had only just begun – broom and bay were in flower, night fell abruptly at eight as if the celestial trip-switch had short-circuited. And it was as black as an exposed negative. The local wine was rather like that of Armenia and was rather heavy like Amelia the makeup girl whose fantasy knew no frontiers, demanded no visa…

You could lie about on the beach till five o’clock. Barbecued Northern flesh smoked in the shade of parasols. The Italians raised such a din that you would have thought each and every one of them had a loudspeaker fitted in their throat. A skinny kid in wet trunks that clung to his body suggested a ride. A pile of old divan cushions was lying around on the scorching hot sand: a camel that answered to the name Kurt Waldheim and a she-camel called Brigitte Bardot.

Fat, with folds of cascading flesh, glistening with cream, looking at the world through high-priced St-Laurent glasses sexagenarian frauleins made their way across the rosy sand dunes accompanied by fourteen year old gigolos. Three boys to each merry matron. Thirty Deutschmarks – what, nowadays, can you get for that in Europe?

Slowly, defying the heat, in a light blue - look long enough and it seemed almost black - sky, a para-glider rose, drawing in its wake a silver thread, dragging behind it a launch, bobbing up and down as it cut through the waves. Four legs dangled from the straps.

An elderly Arab in the white uniform of the hotel - straight as a ramrod, thin as a rake- with a face of stone upon which, below the strip of gray, brush-like, whiskers was incised a disdainful smile served cool drinks to the sunbathers. A black Labrador had an orange Frisbee clenched in its teeth.

The world was divided into blacks and whites, into those who had already had their fill of sleeping, relaxing and burning and those who nervously surveyed the beach, not knowing where to throw down their chicken–white carcasses, their skeletal forms. Here were the sun tan fanatics, as well oiled as Neapolitan marrows, not wanting to know a thing about filter creams as well as mind you, those obsessive combatants of ultra-violet rays who, every half hour, would rub their 100% screen or Factor 22 into their skin.

By degrees their bluish skins darkened, became charred and so they would become insolent, begin to make to make a ruckus in the evening, forget their diet and order up lobster. Then there would be the new-comers, squinting in the light, going out on to the balcony, gazing for a long time at the rippling green dazzle of the sea, then going down to the pool, hiding themselves beneath parasols and inquiring whether the water was warm. A week later and they would be astride Waldheim; flying through the air, under the wings of the Deltaplane, diving from the pier; kicking up a row on the beach until dawn.

After five they could start shooting. Thirty-five bathing costumes; as many hats, sunglasses, watches, necklaces. Kim, through the viewfinder of his Polaroid, caught the athletic Betty at the moment when a solicitous Amelia was rubbing her back and shoulders with the usual ration of cream - simultaneously concealing the traces of her sharp little claws. Of the three models the most well known was Krista. Her high cheekbones, the hollows of her cheeks, the raven’s wings of her short hair, her not dark but light blue deep penetrating eyes, her lips, her teeth, and even her particularly apple-red skin were never off the covers of the magazines.

Irma had a German passport: her father was Brazilian, her mother a Swiss who, the second time around, had married a German. Irma was difficult to capture on film, less sportive than Betty or Krista she was fabulously feminine and possessed qualities which film just couldn’t capture – a magnificently chesty voice, a fantastic sense of humor and a degree in Economics. At one time Kim had been mad about her. But after a spring weekend together in Saint-Malo his ardor had cooled once and for all. They remained friends or, rather, they finally became friends. Lately, wherever Irma was working, there was this Hungarian millionaire assiduously trailing after her. He was as fat as a pasha, as shy as a young girl : Istvan Balfasz he was called. He had told her that, sooner or later, she would consent to be his wife…

With a glass of the appalling local beer and a packet of black and white Polaroid try-outs Kim was sitting on a trestle-bed under the mobile shade of a fan-like palm when, behind him, someone’s voice said, “ Vy imaitye vremya?

He glanced round. The girl from the café on the Rue Vavin was lying on a bright red Coca-Cola inscribed towel and smiling a huge but timid smile. Behind her, on a stool at the bar, looking for matches, was her sister.

“ The world is a small place,” Kim mumbled “ On holiday?”

“Something like that,” answered the girl, sitting down. “ You’re a photographer?”

“Something like that,” Kim mimicked.

They burst into laughter. She held out her hand.

“Desireé.”

“Kim.”

“ You don’t need an assistant, do you? I’ve always dreamt of becoming a photographer. I even went on a course in Aix. Last year…” from her straw beach bag she had extracted a battered old Rolleiflex and now she was standing in front of him holding out her treasure to him. Apart from the sunglasses and the modern-day equivalent of the fig leaf she hadn’t a thing on.

Thin, powerfully built, with wide boyish shoulders, small but muscular breasts (as Tatiana would have said, “Just the right size to fit in the palms of your hands”) big gray eyes, prominent cheekbones and a shock of wet, dark red hair she could have been a model herself. Perhaps her mouth was a little too big - a nutcracker. And, of course, for a top model she was a couple of inches on the short side. But at her age she was still growing…

Krista, made up and groomed, came over. The shoulder straps of her lilacy-silver swimsuit were, possibly, a little too long. Amelia went in search of her sewing box. Happy, the lone cowboy, dragged himself over. He had been taking colored tabs of some sort or other and now and again his red inflamed eyes would start to look like the view through a kaleidoscope. Happy measured the light on Lina’s peachy cheeks, winked at Desireé and said hoarsely: “Haven’t we met somewhere before? I’ve a thing about remembering faces. Antibes? Cannes?”

“I can’t stand the Riviera,” said Desireé. “Those rich old men and their girls…”

Somewhere a loudspeaker coughed into life and a woman’s voice announced: -

“Will Mr. Tuulikki Koskenini come to the phone, please. There is a call…”

The wind carried off with it the Finnish name’s complex articulations and the blonde leader of the scorched redskins, screwing up his eyes and pulling a baseball cap the color of squashed strawberries onto his boyish head, strode out of the bar’s mottled shade.

They only managed to take shots of three of the swimsuits. By six in the evening the first clouds began to appear, the sky started to be covered with the dusty veil of a sandstorm heading over from the mainland. Two hats were blown off towards the camels, a window slammed and, sending half the swimming pools’ contents flying upwards as he belly-flopped into it, a finally awakened Istvan Balfasz made his entrance. He had returned at dawn in two taxis: he traveled in one, in the other there was ensconced a whole orchestra of local musicians, wearily bashing out something that was vaguely reminiscent of a czardas.

That evening the whole company was sitting in the restaurant. Beyond the huge bay windows the night sea raged. In the pitch-black wind-pitted darkness there was a long drawn out moaning and on the yellow sand of the beach, lit from beneath, bubbling foam ran in, melted away and then was heard the dull rumble of a fresh onslaught of waves. A musician sitting next to the doors holding his oud in a vertical position was playing what, to European ears, sounded like an endless, inside out chord.

Everyone, except the rosy colossus Otto, Betty’s new boyfriend, were drinking icy Muscadet. The taciturn Otto applied himself to his beer. The table was littered with the carcasses and claws of lobsters and rather resembled this was Happy’s observation, an auto wrecking yard. Istvan Balfasz appeared at the very end of the meal, thrust a napkin into the neck of his blindingly white shirt, shining phosphorescent in the semi-darkness, and ordered a bottle of Sidi-Saad and a couscous royal.

After dessert, which nobody actually touched, Kim went up to the two sisters who were sitting by the window. They were both wearing identical summer dresses with plunging necklines. Irene, the elder, was a singing teacher and in the evenings used to play piano in a tiny jazz club near the Gare de Lyons. Kim learnt that previously the family had owned a house on the island, but after their mother’s death – he hadn’t been able to get any details - their father who had obtained a post with the UN, sold the house and was now having another built in Florida.

Returning to his seat he just caught the tail end of a story and automatically laughed with everyone else, then yawned and asked for the bill. Leaning close to his ear and staring off to one side the maitre d’ informed him that M. Balfasz had once again paid for everything … Kim shrugged his shoulder and, catching the Hungarian’s eyes, pushed his palms together and plunged into a false bow of gratitude. Then he yawned into his napkin again and felt Amelia’s hand touch his knee. He closed his eyes, searching his memory for a terribly amusing anecdote so as to be able to contribute his mite to the collective hilarity. At that precise moment everyone stood up and pushed away their chairs.

Otto caught up with him in the corridor. Embarrassed and not sure of the appropriate words in French the colossus wanted to know if Kim knew where he might be able to lay his hands on some condoms.

“Try a plastic bag!” Kim wanted to say but, instead, he told him to go to the Hungarian who always traveled with a good dozen suitcases and trunks, a stereo, a satellite phone, a supply of sweet Tokai as well as an emergency first-aid and pharmaceuticals chest - the contents of which would have been the salvation of the ailing population of some small African country

He went out to take a stroll before going to bed. There was one dim solitary lamp, its spherical glass cover grimy with sodden dust, scarcely shedding sufficient light to illuminate the slippery paving stones and the water of the pool covered with a film of sand. On the beach some drunk threw himself into the crashing waves and had to be dragged out. The southern edge of the darkness was torn and ragged and now and again there was the dim glimmer of maybe a star, maybe the navigation light of a small boat.

**********

He went back to his room. Amelia was splashing water around in the bathroom. He undressed and lay limply down on the dry sheets that rustled like tinfoil. He took hold of a dog-eared paperback edition of Canetti’s autobiography and didn’t even manage to open it before he fell asleep; just as he had done as a child or during his army service - literally catapulting himself into sleep.

He woke early: it wasn’t even seven. The french windows onto the terrace were wide open and taut waves of sunlight noiselessly and lazily reverberated on the walls, rippled in dry splashes on the ceiling. Somewhere at the boundaries of hearing glass tinkled, there was a creaking of wheels from a trolley in the corridor, muffled laughter, the discreet sound of music- from the local radio station - like a tape being played backwards.

A headless Amelia bore a resemblance to a landscape just before a battle - steep hills and gently sloping valleys, a small garden covered in bristling shrubbery; a ruby crucifix at the end of a chain had slipped down her back, the sheets twisted awry in her sleep. Her head lay hidden beneath a pillow. He had to be satisfied with what remained.

***********

A few days before they were due to go Istvan Balfasz organized an excursion by jeep to the mainland. The leading vehicle was driven by Happy, the second by Otto. Kim didn’t go and in the evening he invited the sisters to dine out at Abu Havas’ place.

The restaurant was half-empty and, praise be to Allah, in semi-darkness. The tables were lit by candlelight, the waiters slipping between them like shadows. An arctic blast issued from the cooling system vents and there were pleasant vibrations from the inevitable oud. A local crowd were getting merry at a big round table not far from them: men of middle years with large moustaches, endowed with a solid supply of reserve fat. Their faces were gloomy. The macho mask/ face of southern climes is more closely akin to what you would expect to see in a funeral parlor rather than the circus. Irene, smiling as usual, was sitting facing the Tunisians and managed to attract their attention

Absentmindedly Kim listened to her stories about childhood vacations on the island, about their servant Fatima with her gift of second sight whose predictions for the future were delivered in the same bored way some tiresome people tell you stories from their past. Fatima knew the sisters’ mother would die but merely hinted at her illness as if not wanting to hurt her mistress’ feelings.

She vaguely linked her predictions with a “ far distant road”, with a new life in a far off land “at the other side of the world.”

Just as on that rainy February day in Paris, Kim found himself intrigued by the possibility of staring with impunity at Irene’s face; knowing that she knew it and sensing her trusting openness. Her face, fuller and more feminine than her sister’s was seen as if through a soft focus filter. Desireé was, as yet, an underage girl; almost a child – all sharp angles and abrupt movements. Irene’s blindness gave her careful gestures even greater delicacy and roundedness. Her senses of hearing, and of touch were her lifelines: her nakedness, her open sensibility to the external world her only weapons.

There came a moment when Kim, picturing her body, powerful and sunburnt and her hands, caressing and endowed with sight, felt himself immersed in a warm wave. Again he had this sense, as he had when he had taken the photos of her on the sly in that café, that she was reading his thoughts. Her face trembled slightly, her lips moved - as if she were on the point of saying something.

Desireé too moved her head, just slightly, and he realized that she also was capable of reading his thoughts - at least when they had to do with her sister.

“I’ve got your photos…” he said, getting embarrassed. “The ones I took then, in the café in Paris. If you’re interested, I’ll send them…”

I t was, obviously, a slip…

What would a blind woman want with a photograph of herself…Pinhead! Fortunately, at that point, the waiter brought in the melon dressed with mint, a bottle of Mahon and hot loaves of flat bread wrapped in napkins.

Kim drank a lot: three whiskeys at the bar, a large glass of vodka to keep the sisters company and the Mahon, refreshing but heavy. He didn’t even know what to talk about with the sisters and for that reason he talked unimaginable rubbish, about the atomic city in Siberia, ducks blinded by radiation, Petersburg’s white nights, its empty squares a la Magritte and then, without any transitional link, about Boris’ attempts at punning and wordplay Russian-style en langue francaise.

“ His latest pearl, I don’t know really whether any Frenchman has ever given birth to such a chef d’ouevre, but this is it, “Elle a pleure comme la Madelaine de Proust”

Desireé giggled but it was clear from her face that she didn’t understand. She was generally sparing with her speech and would listen distractedly, tuned to some wavelength known only to herself. Her hair gathered in a chignon, her high cheekbones, her slender neck – she followed her sister as if she were her mother or her nurse. Having scarcely touched her melon she was smoking again, her free hand picking at the dimly glinting pearl on her tanned neck.

Midnight approaching they moved on, in a dilapidated taxi, to their hotel. Passing the barrier of bored bouncers on the stairs they made their way up to the disco. And only there, in the multicolored semi-dark, amongst the fast revolving lights and pulsating sounds did Desiree liven up. There wasn’t much of a crowd and she danced on her own. Sort of. From the first step Kim knew that she had done some ballet; her body knew the language of classical dance as well as the contemporary jargon.

Irene, half-reclining on the plush cushions of a semi-circular couch, was sipping something bloody from a highball glass. Her fulsome bosom was stretched tight by the bodice of her dress. Reaching out for an ashtray Kim found himself close to that warm valley trimmed with the lace of her décolleté. Slowly, as if in a dream, he gently pushed his lips down upon the damp flesh, running them from side to side… Irene did not start, did not shy away but, up above his head the ice in her glass tinkled and beads of cold sweat gathered on her neck Irene exuded a sharp scent of tuberose.

She said nothing. He said nothing. She had stopped smiling and was now looking off to the side. Her delicate little ear had turned purple. Her face, neck, breast, one bare shoulder had become covered in tiny beads of sweat. Desireé came back and pulled her sister by the arm. Kim took the highball from her hand and put it down on the table.

Irene danced practically without moving from the spot. She broke up the mad rhythm of a Copa to match her own co-efficient. Desireé, sheltering her sister from the dancers who approached, guarded her every step. Once again a smile appeared on Irene’s face but now it got on Kim’s nerves. He turned, trying to catch the eye of a waiter and someone’s shrill voice spat out of the semi-dark “Laisse-moi!. Fais pas chier…” He found himself asking , as he done often recently, ‘Where am I? What am I doing here, in the midst of these fourteen-year-old Tunisian gigolos, these old frumps from Dusseldorf, these disposable Swedes, these managerial flunkeys from Paris…”

“And where would you like to be?” he asked himself

The music changed to a slow; it swung as sweet as a cherry. The violins undulated in high rounded waves and the alto sax decorated the background spray with something familiar. It was called, he seemed to remember, Winter Moon.

Finally the waiter appeared, a sullen type whose face had an unhealthy coloring. His blazer smelt of deodorant – artificial flowers. Kim ordered a demi of champagne. Desireé came up and tugged him by the arm. He danced with her with prudence but she, like a boxer going into a clinch, quickly pressed herself up against him and he felt her hands around his neck and her cheeks against his. For a while they marked time on the spot and Art Pepper unwound and unwound the gigantic spiral of his melancholy. Then Irene appeared in his arms and the prickling of her tits and the soft presence of her thigh gave him a funny feeling in his loins.

Through the corner of his eye he noticed Desireé making off towards the heavily curtained door that led to the washrooms and, continuing to just noticeably move his body to the music, he kissed Irene on her half-open, just slightly, taut mouth. She came to a halt and he felt the sweet curve of her belly, her finger fanning through the hair on the nape of his neck.

“Dancing is like sleeping standing up,” she said. “ Honestly, today I’ve broken all the records for banality.”

“Do you really sleep so badly?”

“Not at all”

“Then you really mean something else…”

At that very moment Saturday Night Fever began to boom out and Kim, taking Irene’s hand like a schoolgirl’s led her back to the table.

A half hour later Desireé, having turned down an offer of champagne and drinking glass after glass of water, said in Kim’s ear: “In my opinion it’s time my sister went to bed. She usually goes early.” And after a pause she added, a little interrogatively, in Russian, “Yei Pozdno”

And only then, turning to Irene, did Kim realize that she was quietly and hopelessly drunk

Her glass was immediately confiscated and she was towed off to her room on the second floor. Kim helped to lay her on the bed and, while Desireé undressed her, he went out onto the balcony. A full moon lit up the beach and a smooth, as if frozen, sea. Towel in hand Desireé came out to him.

“Fancy a dip before turning in”

They descended the dimly lit stairs and, passing the reception desk with its snoozing night attendant, went out to the pool. A whole gang of cats spurted off, helter-skelter. At the edge Desireé, without glancing round, threw her towel down on the sand and entered the water.

Her naked body, bathed in moonlight, was not as boyish as by day. She swam torpedo-like, a bright silver wake in tow. Kim sat down on the sand. He felt slightly sick. Slowly he undid the laces of his canvas boots, took his pants off, unbuttoned his shirt. Now just in his bathing trunks he shivered. Hopping on one leg he pulled them off too. He waded through the shallows in the warm fresh water. His every movement set the water alight. One step equaled one explosion. You could see a long way off, to the very furthest building visible in the east, to the necklace of lights shining in the west.

He plunged into the dark sand-weighted murk then dived upwards, snorted and turned over on to his back. A star fell, scratching briefly across his eyes. The moon, half hidden by a muddy-colored bank of cloud was huge and warm, like the breast of an old wet-nurse. He turned once more in the water and, slowly throwing out his arms, swam in a lazy crawl, feeling his body livening up, awakening, sobering, as it moved against the waves.

The torpedo raced by, on its way back. He changed course to follow her but catching up with her was impossible. His swimming was shamefully bad. He hadn’t got the stamina, his old terror was present in solution in the water along with the salt. In Tuchino, at the age of eight a speeding police boat had brushed, like a demon, against him and he had only just managed to save himself from its propeller. That day he had swallowed a lot of green water and even more fear.

From a long way off he saw Desireé get out of the water, throw the towel over her shoulder and, bending her head, wring the water out of her hair. He wanted to get out a few feet to her left but then, realizing the stupidity of that, went straight back to his things.

He stood there, naked, shaking himself down as she came up to him.

“ My towel’s almost dry,” she said, holding it out to him.

He rubbed himself down slowly, pulled on his pants, raked up his things. Holding hands like children they walked along the moonlit beach towards the hotel. Somewhere in the distance a motorcycle engine cracked into life. The waves gently lapped.

“What I miss here,” said Desiree “ are the cicadas.”

He gave her a sidelong glance. Lowering her head she smiled as if she knew something that he couldn’t even guess at.

“ That pretty brunette, is she your wife?” She finally asked.

“Oh. No! A friend. I was married once but that happy event only lasted six months. The divorce was a merrier affair than the wedding.”

“Mais elle a pleuré comme la madelaine de Proust…”

“Nothing of the sort! Girls often get married just to get away from their parents. That was what it was in her case.”

The hotel was deep in sleep. In the wide corridor window the marine landscape phosphoresced, like a hyperrealist painting. At her door he released her hand.

“Goodnight, Mademoiselle,” he said softly.

“Goodnight, Monsieur, “ she said, smiling and they kissed Paris-fashion.

“Dormez-bien…”

The pillow smelt of Amelia, the sheets rustled like tinfoil and there was a dry prickling of sand he hadn’t managed to shake off. He coughed, jerking his leg, remembering how Desireé had looked at him while he was rubbing himself down. Something pleasant and long forgotten began to wrap itself around him, he turned onto his belly, dug into the pillow then, without a transition, he saw the wooden frame of a country well. The emerald moss edging the beam, the shadow of his raggedy head swaying to and fro on the outward moving mirrored circles of greasy slate black water.

The following day, during the siesta lull, two Land Rovers covered in rust colored dust rolled up to the hotel’s entry. Sluggish and sour looking the long-legged beauties and the tanned cowboys dispersed to their rooms. They hadn’t got as far as Carthage; all of them, with the exception of Balfasz, were sick- victims of the infamous local dysentery, le djerbianne, .which took a variety of forms:

That evening, in the plane, they occupied the unnumbered seats closest to the toilets. Balfasz handed each of the divas returning from the toilet a fresh dose of Imodium. Otto refused to take any medicine. A thinning Happy chewed caraway seeds, drowning them in vodka. His tan had faded and he was unusually pale. Through half-shut eyes he gazed through the porthole at the wide fiery sunset and sucked at his cheeks, looking evil.

Paris slowly neared. France slipped past jerkily, as if someone were pulling it southward – pulling from her a bright-colored patchwork blanket.

**************

Kim spent June in Venice. The previous winter he had been the recipient of a month’s stipend, something in the nature of a prize, from the Irma Rubenfeld Foundation. He had lived in a comfortable two-roomed apartment not far from the Campo San-Polo. The studio had been on the top floor and through the round, ship’s porthole windows facing southeast there lapped not the green water of the canals but a burning sea of slates.

He had never been in Venice in the summer, in season, but that first time the hordes of tourists, the noise, the atmosphere of the bazaar, of the fair, didn’t get on his nerves. He knew the winter Venice - virtually deserted. He remembered the piazza under the snow and the diagonal file, as if they were somewhere in the Gobi Desert, of the inevitable Japanese tourists muffled up as for war. He remembered the Guidecca under wet floods of sleet and thick fog on the island of San Francisco del Deserto - fog in which someone, huge and invisible, was gargling his throat, however, once you were behind the monastery wall, surrounded by the crashing fall, the squelching noise of the water you could no longer hear it. In his memory remained the imprint of the icy, milky-blue Christmas nights on the rivi, the swirling, gross-grained lilacy light of the lanterns on the bridges, the burn of the icy wind on the deck of a vaporetto, the taste of a thick ciocolata con pana in the tiny tavola calda next to the Fenice

And all his photos were also wintry; blue, like Chinese porcelain, gray like a damp flannel, with warm spots of rust - reflections on a ceiling of a fire in the hearth, of lampshades behind window curtains - the stern lights of fruit and vegetable barges moored to the walls of canals as narrow as the sleeves of an old overcoat:- barges trading in the shaggy darkness, selling apples, potatoes, cauliflower, onions and strings of garlic…

At no other time, in no other place, even in the Siberian taiga, had he felt as frozen as he did in Venice in January. Standing on the bridge of the night vaporetto, sliding -a phantom past other phantoms- unsteadily along the poorly lit walls of the Dogana, he grew more and more frenzied as he tried, with numbed fingers, to unscrew the top of his grappa-filled silver hip flask. The wind from the lagoon carved huge tears from his eyes, the blasted top finally surrendered and the raspberry flavored heat, not warming him, slowly flowed down his gullet, and remained, refusing to mingle with his blood, lying on his stomach - like a molten puddle of tin.

The Leica froze, its motor fell silent, and he had to put the batteries under his sweater, in the breast pocket of his shirt. The tripod bit his fingers; as for the lens, you just had to breathe in its direction and it would steam up, the tears welling in his eyes refusing to flow down his cheeks, getting stuck in his lashes preventing his sighting through the viewfinder. He doubled, then trebled the sensitivity of the film, counting more upon the depth of field than upon his own sight

And yet, La Serenissima in winter was miraculously beautiful on those ektochrome slides. The ragged walls of the palaces melted like dull red gold in the orange-black darkness. The silhouettes of an old hunchbacked couple strolling along the riva by the Arsenal in wreaths of interior-lit fog could have been taken from Il Purgatorio.

The lacquer of the gondolas on bright days was violet. The young salesgirl in the waisted purple silk dress, her image multiplied by the countless mirrors in the glassy thickets of a glazier’s, sat unselfconsciously, a half eaten apple in her raised hand. The oblique snow barely perceptibly crosshatched the photo. The marble steps and porticoes of churches penetrated by an arctic chill were rough and white - like the brow of a corpse. And yet, and yet, it was all porous and pointillistic, like a painting from the century’s early years – forcing the development of the film here gave you these gross grained results.

*********

And now, in June, he recognized and didn’t recognize his Venice. She was like an abandoned lover, living with another man - exaggeratedly gay, deliberately open, defiantly and dubiously happy.

The city was a cat capital and everywhere he could he took shots of them - behind the wall of D’Annunzio’s house - in the cul-de-sac of the Rio Pisani – in the gondolas by the pier, where there must have been over a hundred of them - at the foot of Gobbo on the Rialto - on Stravinsky’s grave - on the nearby gravestone of Ezra Pound.

They reminded him of the gangs of thugs who infest the outer reaches of Moscow. There was no sign amongst them of any of the progeny of Nini, so beloved of Verdi and Prince Paul Metternich: - snow-white Nini who used to live at a coffee shop opposite the Frari Church. Nowadays they’re all a dirty-gray: ragged and provokingly independent. They warm themselves on the roof tiles, sleep in other people’s gardens, glare out from under the blue tarpaulin covered seats of gondolas. They’re dragging a rat over the paving stones of a church or pressing themselves into the mossy stones of some steps, thrusting out their claws squeamishly fishing for something in the greasy emeraldly flashing fresh water of the canals.

Once, at dusk, by the Cavalli Bridge, he happened, 500-mm zoom in hand, upon a huge jawed rusty red disheveled tomcat that, glancing round from time to time was devouring a heap of spaghetti in tomato sauce. The spaghetti was piled up neatly on a carefully laid out copy of Il Corriere della Sera. On one of the slides he developed, the creature was staring evilly at the lens, long threads of spaghetti dangling down from its jaws.

The city was a cat capital, inhabited by stone lions. He tried doing a series of tailed and winged creatures but gave it up. So he never learned how to photograph rounded, only flat, stone. And only one lion was caught on film – the bald one by the Arsenal gates. Taken from below on a windy day with spurts of sunny downpours, the lion was sailing with lordly disdain amongst wreathing clouds, beneath the cupolas of the multicolored umbrellas of Belgian tourists.

The light in that summer Venice incited both passion and horror in him. The sun filled the city as a whirling flux of water fills a blue enamel basin. The city was flooded to the very rooftops by airy, mobile light. And that light - reflected in the water of the canals and lagoons in thousands, in tens of thousands, of windows, of shop fronts, portholes, mirrors, sunglasses, and wristwatches -vibrated and trembled.

Mobile rainbows pulsated here and there, long blue swirls of light lacerated the daytime obscurity of narrow alleys. The window glass of small shops blazed with gay fire. The sun’s reflections skipped and jumped helter-skelter on the paving stones of the piazzas.

He was now experimenting with overexposing his film, almost risking complete whiteout in his attempts at obtaining pale pastel tones, barely delineated contours. No panoramas - the least possible amount of clouds, sky or open space. And if there were clouds, if there was sky, then it would be reflection in a window or on the lacquered side of a police patrol boat.

He took shots of doors, blinds, window cornices, stone balustrades, bridges worn by centuries of contact, Goldoni’s shoes on the Piazza S. Bartolomeo, seagulls and their worn perches by the pier of the Scalzi church, the nephritic water, squelching like the kisses of a drowned man behind the columns of the Ca’ d’Oro. The heaps, inky-silver, of anchovies laid out on the stalls of the fish market like old chain mail suits in a museum, the endless steps, stairs, moss, mould… Before his departure he spent a couple of days on the low slung bridges taking pictures of passing vaporetti. The passengers did not turn away nor freeze, as they would have done in Paris; but raised their heads; the women smiling, the men assuming a frown.

On one slide he later found Marguerite Duras, or her double – dark eyed, tall, a roller neck sweater, a raspberry colored scarf which had “crawled” onto the face of the person next to her. On another were a pair of lovers – a rosy-blue, bare-armed and golden haired Juliet aged thirteen and a shiny-black muscular Iago pressing her down upon the mattress.

Someone had carelessly collated the pages of their Shakespeare.

************

He returned to Paris by the night train. For two days everything was astonishingly nice, warm, homely. Then, like dregs at the bottom of a coffee cup, irritation surfaced.

The enchantment of his first years in Paris had long since vanished - it was always pleasant returning to the city but it was living now on the scanty dividend of past fame. There might well be dozens of concerts and openings, hundreds of shows and exhibitions but nothing was happening. Some sort of co-efficient was lacking, some kind of chemical combination had been lost. It was a city suited to careerists, self-seekers, young wolves with fine white teeth prepared to drink the blood of any group; a city of functionaries straight from the pages of Gogol who just happened to speak French; of nouveaux-riches: of cocktail party pseuds - schemers of every color of the rainbow.

“What do you expect?” Boris said. “Cities live and die just the same as people. Paris breathed its last gasp, suffocated in the howl of sirens and the songs of Brel, some time very shortly after May ’68. The barricades on the Boul’ Mich’ and the burning Citroens on the Rue des Ecoles were a final attempt at stopping the rot, cocking a snoot at the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We got here too late. We should get out… It’s too comfortable living here, but it’s an average quality dream; not deep enough or happy enough for you to be able to forget the rest of the world is out there…”

He was right. But the very fact of return was always holiday-like. That’s also true, however, of played out married couples. The first two to three days after a separation are filled with joy then, through the none too solid novelty, would surface the old familiar boredom, the even more familiar irritation. Life, once more dragged on to no purpose - empty.

It was great when the city landscape was really shitty. When the city street had every appearance of being an insult set in stone and the city square seemed like one colossal hardened ball of spit, he didn’t have to go get his suitcase ready: - all he needed to do was call up the emergency services and beg them to take him to the airport instead of to the hospital.

But Paris was repulsively beautiful.

**********

Kim forgot all about Leroux’s sister but one evening, playing tennis in the Luxembourg Gardens, through the corner of his eye he saw Desiree pushing her bike by the handlebars. She was wearing something light and airy, her hair falling onto her bare tanned shoulders and down her back. The next day he went to the café on the Rue Vavin and sat on the terrace until evening.

He went back again the following day, had lunch, drank coffee and hung around until about five o’ clock in the evening. The day after that he didn’t go but, on Thursday, he went armed with Newsweek, Libe, and a volume of Cavafy’s poems. He got edgy, drinking too much coffee and chatting with the waiter, who had already gotten used to seeing him, about politics, the weaker sex and Japanese tourists.

On Friday he went back to the tennis courts in the Luxembourg. It was hot, the wind sent mini tornadoes of rust colored dust whirling around and there was a tang of flowering lime, of the courts heated asphalt and of pony piss. The ponies lazily shambled through the avenue past the tennis courts carrying their cargo of exited/frightened kids.

He lost to Ted, a big, ruddy Australian who was as hard-hitting and as fierce as they come - the worst kind of opponent. He had just returned the ball with the butt-end of his racquet pour la remasser and was near the wire netting wiping the sweat from his forehead with his arm when he suddenly sensed he was being watched. He raised his eyes: making herself comfortable with two seats, half lying in one, placing her feet on the other , in a slight, scarcely visible dress, Desiree was sitting eating a black cherry sherbet. He picked up a second ball, put it in the pocket of his shorts wiping his wet palm on the brown nap. His racquet described a knot pattern in the air. Out. Commencing a second knot, throwing himself maliciously at the ball, feeling the impact of his hefty stroke in his wrist, he knew what would be the result before it actually happened. Net. Looking for words he turned round as if bothered by something not quite definable. He felt his hair sticking to his forehead as he tried to fully develop the image he had on his retina. Then he had it - he realized: it wasn’t her.

One of the balls was completely gone, he knocked it into a corner where there a pile of dead leaves and catalpa pods. Grasping the net with both hands he gave her a long stare. Her mouth smeared with sherbet, her tiny breasts visible beneath the transparent dress, a look as sweet and melting as the sherbet which was staining the sand with its almost black drops.

“What are you doing later? He asked, a bit out of breath.

“If only I knew…”she answered, fluttering her eyelids. “And you…?”

“If only I knew…” he gave a twisted smile. “What’s your name?”

“Kitry,” she said thrusting out a thick pimply tongue and licking the drops of black cherry sherbet.

“ Make up you mind! What sort of balls are you playing!” Ted shouted from somewhere behind him.

***********

That same week he had supper with some friends in the Rue des Quatre –Vents. Climbing the stairs – the light had gone out but was on again now – he heard a laugh, a dog’s yelp and --on the first floor landing - came face to face with Desireé. A tall guy in a white tuxedo with the sleeves rolled up and tattered jeans was holding out a lighter to a sweet-looking round-faced girl while Desireé was taking the lead off a Labrador whose muzzle was raised towards her.

“Good God!” she exclaimed. “Surprise! Surprise! Just the place to meet the famous photographer.”

“Hello.” He kissed the proffered cheek, then the other; pulled her towards him. “We Russians do it three times.”

“That’s right. You told me, teriraza. Meet Jerome…Céline… Do you want a drink? This is Irene’s place, her lair.”

Her lair was a cozy three-roomed apartment. Somewhat retro - heavy shutters, worn carpets, the family crystal, tall old dressers. In the living room there was a Yamaha keyboard and shelves and shelves of CDs.

Irene still had that heavy scent of tuberose about her. She had sweaty palms and a silly bow in her hair…

He drank a glass of chilled Chardonnay, refused a second and left, taking with him a piece of paper with Desiree’s phone number on it.

On the way home he was tormented by one question –“Jerome?”

She had said that she would be busy until the Tuesday. It was five days till Tuesday. My God, how he hated waiting. But he hadn’t felt the torment of waiting so badly for such a long time now! This was a nightmare. He was bothered, bewildered and yet, bewitchingly happy.

It was so strange! He had forgotten about this biological rapture, this joy without reason that was warming him up right now long since. Internally he was undergoing some sort of chemical reaction. Something was hissing and bubbling. He was grinning like an idiot, talking nonsense whilst, at the same time noticing that the external world looked rather better than before. The green of the leaves looked even brighter, the geraniums by the window even more blood red, the blue sky now outshone the Mediterranean firmament.

His energy increased threefold. He managed to do in one day what previously had required a week. And he didn’t understand why.

Why her? Why, suddenly, this teenage girl? What had she got? And why, suddenly, as if something somewhere was cutting-out, shorting, emitting hissing lilac sparks…Where had that primary charge…discharge… come from ?

Mentally he understood that she was his contrary in everything, his contraindicant. She needed parties, discos, seaside trips, ski resorts, the exotic, the unusual, she needed to expend excesses of adrenaline, she needed speed, a BMW sports model, rain beating in her face…

He suddenly remembered. He grew gloomy.

“Why,” – he reprimanded himself - “are you thinking of her as if she were yours? And what if she just doesn’t get the hots for you? If you’re too old for her? What if she’s in love, prefers men with red hair and, when it comes down to it, is in love with some fat Argentine fortuneteller with a moustache?

His nights were sleepless. Every evening, every night, all of those five nights, he imagined her first with one guy then with another. His imagination screened a cheap skin flick. Desireé! Momentarily he thought it would be better if he went away. To the South, to Amsterdam, Greece. Call her up in October. November, perhaps.” I’m here, not far away, in a café. Are you coming over for a drink? I’ve got an hour before my plane leaves.”

***********

She lived not on the Rue Vavin but on the Rue Notre-Dame-des Champs, near the Boulevard Raspail. Under the overheated roof of her spacious studio everything gave the impression she was living in a house in the country : the wood-beamed ceiling, the bright-colored summery curtains blowing everywhere in the breeze, baskets of lavender, garlands of forget-me-nots, a very old dresser in light-colored wood, a table in the same and bookshelves as well. The bed was unmade and on the floor next to the tray. with its cup of undrunk coffee where a bee swam twitching, lay a magazine open at a picture of Irma astride Waldheim: a coal black swimming suit, tres fermé, a white turban and a heavy Tunisian ear-ring to which had adhered a tiny mercurial sun.

Kim lay on the floor. On the soft nap of the carpet. The only clothing hr had left on was one white pump(?) on his left foot. Dez, standing between the windows was busy drinking water from a liter plastic bottle. Classic backlighting, a slight silhouette, smoldering gold contours-as fluid as nitrogen- a luminescent aura. Everything had happened very quickly and wordlessly just as he had wanted it to. Just, as he now knew, she had wanted. First, surrender to one’s desires. What next? Who knows?

The telephone rang. She crossed to the table, picked up the receiver.

“I’ll call you back,” she said, turning away. “You are at home ?.”

Hanging up without looking at him she went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of peaches. Taking a bathrobe from a chair she threw it on the floor next to Kim and sat down , pulling her legs up under her.

The peaches were bittersweet, the juice ran down his chin, his neck and she leant over him, licking at the steady flow

He pulled her to him, her skin was still damp, her hair crackled; for a few seconds she looked at him with a serious expression then, as if consenting , she sighed, surrendered and, lowering herself down, pushing herself against him, fitted her body to his – from ankles to neck.

An hour later with wet hair, with streams of perspiration on her gleaming skin, she was giggling idiotically , lying on her back, sipping cold Sauterne, remembering the beach, Djerba, dinner at Abu Havas’ and their nocturnal swim.

Nearer to evening, but on the following day, they went off to eat. Steam was rising from the asphalt. All day there had been short downpours of sunny rain, but they knew nothing about that: they had gone to sleep at about ten in the morning and slept the whole day through. Now it was all just like after being ill; the melancholy of gratitude the weakness of convalescence…the whole world seemed to have cracked, peeled; it was sloughing its old skin…

By the gate to the park they took a taxi and, ten minutes later, they were sitting by the window on the second floor of a minuscule restaurant in the Passage Vero-Dodat Bernard,. the owner, brought the menu over to them; starting to thicken around the waist and lose his hair he was pure high camp.

“And where is Napoleon?” asked Kim.

Bernard, without answering, went off to the kitchen. His partner, Jean-Claude, a six foot plus Corsican in a long apron, a chef’s hat on his head appeared in the kitchen doorway. Having said hello, he moved a chair up to their table and carefully sat himself down,

“Don’t ask him about Napo,” he said to Kim. “ He was chasing a cat on the Buttes Chaumont, fell down a precipice and broke his neck… Bernard hasn’t been himself since.”

“When did it happen?” Kim, bending down, retrieved a napkin that had slipped onto the floor.

“ A month ago. I would advise you to have the veal with white mushrooms,” said Jean-Claude, standing up and concealing his huge hands behind his back.

Desiree nodded her agreement.

“What are you drinking?”

“Pomerol?” asked Kim

“Chateau-Lafitte? 78? The price is a little steep but, if you’re celebrating some anniversary… you won’t regret it…”

“That’s us.” Kim smiled and looked at his watch. “ It’s our anniversary right now…We’ve known each other just over twenty-four hours.”

Under the table Dez kneed him..

“Oh!” Jean-Claude was overwhelmed. “Twenty-four hours is sometimes more important than twenty-four years! I’ll just run down to the cellar!”

“Shouldn’t I have said anything?” asked Kim.

Instead of answering she laid her hand on his wrist. Through the window you could see the grimy glass arch of the passage and the dark unwashed windows opposite.

“Napoleon, Napo was an extremely long fat, old dachshund.” Kim raised her hand to his lips. “He would lie about under the tables and only get up when somebody was served a plate of filleted duck with honey and figs. It was the only thing he would beg for from the guests.

He tenderly kissed her hand. He sensed her estrangement.

“You’re feeling unhappy ?” He looked her in the eyes. She lowered her head.

“I’m still asleep…” Dez smiled.

Something was troubling her.

A merry band of young Germans were climbing the stairs.

Jean-Claude brought the wine and two huge degustation glasses over.

“Belle robe!” said Kim. The wine was a golden terracotta color..

“Give it time to breathe!” advised Jean-Claude and, seizing the menu, he went over to the Germans.

“My father’s three years older than you,” Dez finally said. “He’s forty-seven….”

“And that alarms you?”

Kim carefully filled her glass a quarter full.

“No. But you’re like him. Physically.”

“That disturbs you?”

“I hate him…”

“ What did your mother die of?” he asked, changing the subject as he handed her some bread.

“At first she had bouts of manic-depression. When she began to buy three pairs of shoes a day, a ton of makeup, armfuls of underwear and two suits a week, we all knew that she had entered, as she would say, ‘ the dark phase of mental derangement. She had to be dragged away from a metro train… Once when we waiting for a train at Concorde she grabbed at the sleeve of my blouse so tightly she ripped it… She was afraid she was going to throw herself under the wheels…She used to lock her bedroom window at night - she was convinced she would throw herself out of it in her sleep. She couldn’t cross a bridge; she would turn pale, get covered in sweat… It was horrible to watch. Fortunately her “depressions” only lasted two to three weeks and didn’t come back too often…”

“With the change of the season?”

“Spring and autumn. Yes. But, in general, she followed her own rhythm. As for the rest she was like all the rest…”

“And?”

“She was with father in Avoriaz, skiing . He’s a very good skier, has even competed…Do you know Avoriaz?”

“ I spent a week there once. In ’81… I think…”

“Do you remember the cliff up which the funicular from Morzine runs? There’s a precipice…”

“A five hundred foot drop?”

She fell silent. He noticed she was looking pale through her tan.

The drop is protected by some wire netting. There’s a children’s run, some moguls… That day some guy had taken a delta plane down the cliff and a gap had been made in the fencing. There were a lot of people. They were all watching how he was catching the air in his wings, getting ready to glide down. He was already soaring over the valley and all eyes were looking in his direction when mother did exactly the same thing. She pushed off and went down on her skis to the drop. And she flew as well but she without any wings…”

Kim didn’t know what to say.

“ Father was up in the mountains. He was always the last to descend; it would already have been dark, so he only learned about it all that evening. And we at home were phoned a day later... His voice was so normal, even, tame. I couldn’t believe it. Not what he was saying but that it was him on the phone…”

She fell silent.

“ Forgive me” she said. It’s not the best time for such memories.”

“It’s my fault,” he said. “ I was the one who asked.”

“You’ve never wanted to go back to Russia?”

Now she changed the subject. “You’re probably always being asked about that…”

“In my dreams. Many times. I find myself there automatically, about twice a week. No visa required.”

“And in real life?”

“You remember, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river’. Time is the river. The country I knew no longer exists; it has flowed away.”

There was something infinitely melancholy about their feelings. Some kind of premature separation, farewell. Over-expenditure of adrenaline? Altitude sickness?

“How’s Irene?”

“She’s in Antibes for the festival. Her God is playing – Horace Silver.”

You’re not into jazz?”

“Yes…but I prefer classical music. I ought to tell you something…”

He laid his fork down.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Already?” he said it automatically and regretted it as soon as he said it.

“Sorry. Your boy friend?”

“ I don’t know,” she said. “Possibly, Happy…”

“Happy? Happy!” Kim felt as if his eyes were about to pop out of their sockets, his face was distorted, as if he had just been drinking from a glass of vinegar.

“We were seeing each other here, in Paris. Before he flew off, that is. But I’m not certain.”

Kim’s hands were trembling. He felt hot.

“That junkie!”

He’s nicer than you think…”

“So that’s why, when I asked you about the pill you said it didn’t matter?”

She didn’t answer.

Through the sudden wave of jealousy it slowly began to dawn on Kim that he had no legitimate hold on her. That she was as free as he was. That she could get up and go at any moment. Out of the restaurant. Out of his life. That the only thing they could do was to agree together about their mutual freedom…

“Perhaps it’s none of my business but what are you intending to do?” he said, in an artificially natural tone.

“Of course it’s idiotic, but I would have liked it” Dez said, her eyes still lowered, “ to have been your business.”

“Oh, Dez!” he said, knocking over the glass, pulling up the table cloth, looking for the salt and drawing it towards him across the table, feeling hate and tenderness mingling…”Dez…”

“Your sleeves are swimming in sauce,” she giggled - crying one minute, laughing the next…

************

“You know,” she said to him a bit - quite a bit - later. They were standing in a wintry deserted square in front of the Cathedral of St. Stephan in the capital city of chocolate cream cakes and waltzes. “ Never in your life have you once said, ‘I love you!’ The first time you used the word was when we quarreled, when we broke up… Then you said, “ Je ne t’aime plus!’ And I was happy! Later, however, you said ‘I loved you. Now, I don’t anymore.’ That’s why I felt better. I knew everything was starting over…”

He was looking at the snow-covered paving stones of the square. From the very doors of the cathedral to the deserted fiacre stand everything was covered with broken shards of glass, champagne bottles and cheap glasses. It was New Year. Drink up and smash it!

“I would have liked to have had a drink of mulled wine” he said, exposing his face to the snow - long whirling white threads extending high into the dark skies. There wasn’t a soul in the streets. “Somewhere not far from here there’s a club in a cellar; dark shabby walls, old posters and music that’s just as ancient. The kind you love.” He took her by the hand.

“Wait!” She stopped him. “Kiss me”

Her face was burning under that snowy torrent. Her lips were burning too, and her breasts, beneath the fur of her wide-open coat. Snow was melting on their cheeks, on their brows; they felt its sweet tickling flood on their lips, their necks, down their collars.

“Let’s go!” She said finally, gasping for breath. “I want to get drunk. I’m happy today. You know, there have been so many times I’ve been happy with you. And it’s different every time. But when you torment me, when I torment us, my unhappiness is always the same…”

“You haven’t, by any chance, read any late Tolstoi, have you? He chuckled and embracing, they headed off towards where a dark alley gaped beneath a yet fiercer fall of huge warm snowflakes.

**********

The passengers were sleeping. Only one of them, a blue photoluminescence on his face, was awake, busy with his laptop. The engines throbbed evenly and almost inaudibly. From time to time the Boeing shook and the engines grow louder: a steward would appear in the aisle, would disappear, then return with a bottle of mineral water and lean over some gray head or other.

“Je ne t’aime plus…”

The ektochrome of their paradise did not fade right away.

There are some strangely apt songs; their simple words are seemingly full of secret meanings while their melody acts directly on your arterial pressure, on the amount of hemoglobin in your blood. No one knows why, or rather how - but those songs make you feel happy and sad at one and the same time. You can hear the whisper of leaves in gardens at night in them, the crunch of gravel on a path leading, perhaps, down to the sea; possibly there’s a muffled laugh, the gentle slam of a car door, the labored rhythm of someone’s breathing…

Seemingly such songs take shape spontaneously, there’s nothing strained, calculated, contrived about them. Most probably words and music are already there inside, pre-existent, and the author simply finds the song like some guy down on his luck who finds a heavy gold ring in the damp grass of an ancient park, after the rain.

And both the park and the asbestos gray mansion, four-square at the end of the straight as a line avenue planted with pyramidal poplars, had been rented for the weekend by a well-known rock group who are setting off, come morning, for either Japan or Down Under…

Their life together in those first two years was just like one of those songs. Parisian bucolic left bank, free and easy, iridescent pearls on the thread of life, all in E flat, at once happy and sad.

In the morning, if they had spent the night at his place, in the Rue Tournefort, they would be awoken by the concierge’s canary. On cold sunny days a rusty metallic screech would surface in its trills. In summer, however, it would rave as though someone had speeded it up from 33 and a third to 78 rpm. The baker’s was just round the corner on the Rue Mouffetard and while the electric coffee machine was savagely hissing Kim would just have time to go fetch their croissants. They would drink their coffee in bed, someone’s radio would howl away out in the courtyard, to the accompaniment of the banging of a brush, a neighbor’s drill biting maniacally into something friable… Mouth open and gaping at the wall Dez would try to recall her dreams.

“A Chinaman” she finally said. “Remember the owner of the little cafe on the Rue Mont St-Germaine? I saw him in a mirror. In a big old mirror. I was somewhere behind him. He was very earnestly cutting a papaya into pieces with a cutthroat razor. What was that about? And you couldn’t see me in the mirror!”

If they woke up at her place on Notre-Dames-des-Champs he would, every time, get this feeling that he was waking up somewhere in the country. A heavy country-style wooden beamed ceiling strengthened with braces of steel, white walls hung with pictures in wooden frames, her curtains the color of ripe peaches, decorated with large flowers…

Amongst the pictures she had taken from her mother’s bedroom, were a tender blue watercolor with a forest of white ship’s masts in a small seaport, the blood red bricks of the houses of a little Moroccan town hiding behind the walls of its encompassing fortress and a woman’s portrait done in pencil.

In a large, full-length mirror, with a peeling, gilded frame was reflected a corner of a heavy walnut dresser and an armchair in the same wood. Above a chair upholstered in light blue velvet hung a garland of desiccated tea roses. And the furniture, the pans, all those heavy teacups, plates and saucers were family heirlooms from Autun, from Orange, from grandmothers or from aunts, from one of those provincial fairy godmothers that Des had so many countless multitudes of.

Thus, when he woke up at her place, it seemed to him that, if he were to look out of the window, he would see, to his left, thickets of broom and low heather-covered hills whilst, directly in front of him, would be squat stocky pines behind which the golden dazzle of the sea would be visible.

But, instead of the breakers of the sea, from the Boulevard came the sound of the traffic’s surf while, directly in front of him, like a transfer adhering to the window, was the dense fog which had crept up from the frozen streets overnight.

Lying in bed, just about able to unglue his eyelids, he observed how she, dressed in a short rose-colored bathrobe wanders round the room. She yawns and, of a sudden, by the mirror, freezes, looks at herself as at a stranger, contorts the reflected face and then begins to get the table ready; drops a spoon, then a napkin, disappears behind the glazed bathroom door, returns naked, a towel on her head, sits down on the foot of the bed, yawns again, guiltily smiles and, finally surrendering, throws herself down beside him.

Their love in the morning bore no resemblance at all to their love at night. If it was on his territory it prickled with bread crumbs, if on hers it took place to the accompaniment of the slow hissing of the coffee maker as the water inexorably evaporated.

He would work ten days, at most two weeks a month. There wasn’t a lot of studio work; basically he worked on newspaper assignments but when he did need a studio, he would pay the hippie-like Fraulein Arendt for her one hundred meters of white-washed walls and a fridge full of Heineken in a cul-de-sac by the Alesia metro. Rita Arendt had spent most of her life in Africa, published a dozen books and never photographed any Whites.

Dez would come back from Sciences-Po, where she had been persuaded to enroll by her father, at about five. Sometimes Kim would wait for her in a small café on Grenelle and they would walk home through St. Sulpice, stopping a couple of times en route: to drink a cup of coffee, to buy un macaroon de chocolat chez Mulot or two sprigs of Casablanca lilac from the florists on the Boulevard Raspail. Three times a week she went to dancing school. Twice a week to the pool. He would play tennis, sometimes with Boris, more often with a Brazilian friend whose game was one or two notches up on his and who would never give Kim more than three games.

The greater part of his time was taken up with newspaper and agency work. He would call in at Jean-Claude’s on the Champs-Elysee, find out who was doing what, wax anecdotive, suggest a few lines he might pursue, agree to dinner on Wednesday. One floor up, in an identical office to Jean Claude’s, wrapped in wreaths of tobacco smoke - as always half reclining in a large armchair - would be the once beautiful Marie-Helene. In her case it would be she who would tell the stories and suggest lines of work. She would light one cigarette from the butt of another, scatter her ash on the plastic envelopes of slides, send her secretary off to make coffee, toss the very latest copy of Vanity Fair into the corner, get a fresh cigarette from the packet and, suddenly, pick up the phone and reserve a table at Fouquet’s.

“Shall we go get a bite to eat?”

From the Champs-Elysee to Lauriston, from agency to magazine – then to the paper. You had to keep your nose close to the wind, get hold of cheap film, haunt the sales, keep an eye out for celebs, phone home ten times a day to check the answering machine.

There was little work; a lot of papers had folded, publishers disappeared: his world had suddenly changed from being dependable - safely horizontal- to being on a slope where everything was going off to one side, downwards, to the devil…

And yet there was work, his books were reprinted, his old pictures still brought in the royalties and he had no reason to really complain. The editors in this burg, though, were conservative: if you were a war correspondent you had to stay a war correspondent and wear khaki: if you took pictures of beauties in bathing costumes you had no right taking black and white shots of the Rio favelas. And if you exhibited a series of portraits of Russian dancers in a gallery near the Beaubourg everything would go pear-shaped when they saw your Paris Match piece on crack smokers in Chicago.

************

When and how does a gracious young fair Titania transform herself into a miserable old Zentippe? Perhaps not into an old hag but certainly into an obstinate, bulletproof lamebrain; absent-minded and hysterical. He had turned away for a moment and when he turned back again the old Dez had gone. There was this malicious bare-toothed vixen.

“Je ne t’aime plus…”

Or wasn’t it like that?

************

They were on their way back to Paris from La Baule. The carriage of the high-speed train was half-empty. She was looking distractedly out the window. The sunset ran thick with blood, like in a butcher’s shop. Bare gardens – it was late February when this happened – were knee-deep in fog that looked like floodwater. A castle flashed by, the empty eye-sockets of its meutrieres. A windmill. Whining, a train passed widdershins… He was reading something but couldn’t concentrate. Finally he realized what was stopping him. It was to do with her; with Desiree.

He gave her a sidelong glance and was horrified. It was another woman. A stranger. With pursed lips. An absent look. At least five years older.

“Have you lost your mind?” he said to himself “It’s her, your Desiree! You made love to her barely two hours ago!”

It occurred to him now that their farewell lovemaking in the hotel had been somewhat lackadaisical. He had put down her lack of participation, her subdued submissiveness, to lack of sleep (a storm had been raging all night) but now it suddenly came to him that lately she had been less approachable, evasively-cool: alluding to a pain in the small of her back, a possible infection…

“You know yourself, nowadays the water in swimming pools is a veritable reservoir of biological weaponry…”

Dez! He felt uneasy.

He took her hand. Her hand was warm, tender. She turned towards him; moving up close, she rubbed her cheek against his.

“Oh! You’re all thorny. Unshaved. A Mexican cactus….”

What raving nonsense! Her sweet wide-mouthed smile, her warm unfocussed glance. Girl/woman. Hooliganess. Laughing jackass. Nit-picker, prankster, cry-baby, sleepy-head, sweet-tooth… His Dez. What had got into his head?

She squeezed his hand and again turned away towards the window. It was growing dark. Across a ploughed field a pickup crawled towards a farm - feeling its way with headlight antennae. A station flashed by with its trio of dull-orange balls of light. A bridge. A village flashed by: its contours cut out of black paper - roofs, cornices. A small church.

He again looked at her. And again he didn’t recognize her. She was biting her nether lip, her eyes, directed at the window; blind, unseeing. Her warm palm lay in his hand: like a dead bird growing cold.

In April he had had two reporting assignments. Pakistan. A four-day break. Nicaragua. He got back scarcely half alive. A bowel infection, plus lumbago. The left shoulder as well. Intercostal neuralgia. Down there too. The full Monty. Rivaling Boris! He couldn’t drink; it put his stomach in a twist. Up until then he had been flying on pure whiskey. A Boeing flew on aviation fuel; he did it on Scotch. In Pakistan he had managed to get hold of some really righteous grass - one puff and you were away. The pain was eased, cushioned… He lay up for a few days. Took the antibiotics, some kind of powder. The infection passed but his appetite took a long break.

He went to see a celebrated bonesetter. Old Mr. Pain-in-the Side stuck a finger in his ear, twisted it, and then pressed down. Making Kim lie on his motorized couch he started kneading and rolling him like so much dough for Sunday’s lasagna…it all ended with vigorous hugs and a half-nelson. Crack… His head was whirling but his neck could now rotate as well as the forged steel cock on top of the local town hall. As for the three-inch knife blade that had been jammed between his shoulder blades for the past week, he had pulled it out, polished it and put it away somewhere. The osteopath didn’t take checks. Kim ponied up four hundred, thanked him. In the doorway, shaking him by the hand, Mr. Pain-in-the-Side said:-

“Laisse-vous aller! You’re too tense! Concrete!” He pressed just below the nape of his neck “ Of course, with double scoliosis, there’s always a risk. It’s not a vertebral column you’ve got. It’s a snake, a letter S! It’s got nothing to do with trunks and cases…Forget.... It’s all about tension. Il faut se laisser aller! Are you listening to me? You should let go! Then it’ll all go! Vanish!”

But Kim just couldn’t translate what he said- into either English or French. What did he mean? Relax? No. Laisses aller… It wasn’t a theme he could improvise on: externally or internally. Bodily or linguistically. He knew it had to do with the past. The tension. The jitters. As one old friend in Moscow, an aficionado of the art of unarmed combat Russian-style, had said:-

“Let your lower jaw hang loose! Relax!”

Apparently the molecules in a Russian body, apart from the usual lines of communication, posses some other sort of link somehow…Fatally forward-looking. Progressively atom…

When he had recovered and stopped being delirious and it was delirium - not inflammation of the mucus membrane caused by the usual saprophytes - (delirium, caused by not wanting to think about what he had seen on the roads around Peshawar, in the mountain villages of Nicaragua). When he did come to his senses, after those two jinxed assignments, he realized that something had happened to Dez. Happened conclusively. She was no longer splitting herself in two. She wasn’t falling into a black hole. Now she was openly hostile. Sarcastic. She would disappear without a word. She would walk around unkempt, forever chewing on something… She was snapping…

But no, judging by the tampon in the wastepaper bin, she wasn’t pregnant… But she would begin cursing and swearing about diddlysquat. Something absolutely absurd. About the fact that he couldn’t stand Georges Perec, Claude Lelouch or the Rolling Stones. Once he said something pretty unpleasant about hospital porters. She tore into him. He was wrong, he simply despised ordinary people.

“Rubbish!” was his retort.

He had spent half a lifetime amongst ordinary people. Had worked hard and long with them in a country supposedly governed by ordinary people…

“You’re a cynic.” She parried. “For some reason or other those proles get on your nerves, don’t they?”

“Because they belong to the exclusive caste of proletarians who have the privilege of holding people to ransom, of grabbing them round the throat…They make their entrance just when you’re standing ankle-deep in shit and don’t how know the hell you’re going to unblock some idiotic lavatory pan. Right at that moment you’re willing to pay whatever it takes, just as long as it gets fixed. The same goes for all the other professions that have anything to do with all life’s little catastrophes – the electricians, the locksmiths, the glaziers. They all demand several times more than is reasonable and we pay up because we’re in a panic, because we want to get out of the mess we’re in, the nightmare…I’ll pay them, ok, but I don’t have to like them!”

“You’re a misanthropist, a snob and a cynic!” That was her sentence of judgment. Then it was carried into effect. No sex. At such times she literally froze and instead of radiating her usual warmth there was something scary, malicious …

***********

Already that winter he had realized that she was jealous; though he gave her no reason to be. Yes, he did work with professional beauties. For photos like that you needed sea and sun, exotic scenery. There was Madagascar, the Philippines, and the West Coast of Africa, Mauritius – at the very least Morocco. When he got back, instead of the usual Desiree there would be a wild vixen ready to bite at the slightest excuse. However, at that time, she would be back to her normal self within three or four days.

A few times he tried taking her with him on the shoots. But that was even worse. She was emphatically on her own. She didn’t come to lunch. She would lie about in bed for days on end with a headache. She would fall downstairs or manage to go down with some local fever or other. She tried with all her powers to be miserable, tried to get him to herself again; attempting to steal him away from his harem of mannequins.

He exploded. It was just so stupid, so idiotically simple-minded… She agreed with him. (“Tu penses que je suis si bete?”) bit her lips, wept in silence, blew her nose on a hotel towel.

They went through periods of stormy truce and two days later it would start all over again: her eyes avoiding his, 37.7, a sleeping potion taken at one in the afternoon with a glass of champagne or, alternatively, the disappearances that started off as strolls and ended up full scale search and rescue missions in the jeep, in the company of hypocritically zealous local cops, obviously stoned out of their heads…

He couldn’t take shots of her. She knew that. The world of fashion has its strict conventions. Of course, Liz Molly was celestially beautiful. Her beauty drove you insane, frightened you, but you felt no desire for her. You could watch Elizabeth Macbee for hours on end. Natasha Coeur Le Roi was capable of changing the life of any man who came within a foot of her.

Any one of those women needed to be laid siege to, like a city, a country.

But he lived a life free of temptation. He had his Dez and, at first, he experienced, at least so it seemed to him, an unaccustomed constancy of feeling. “It’s my time of life,” he thought sometimes. “Diminishing testosterone – another ten years and along with the morning coffee there’ll come a shiver of alarm, a shudder of terror…”

“Paranoia and a state of obsession.” Boris said persuasively. “Our only wealth, slyly smuggled through Russian customs…” And he added, as if it were news to anyone, “ It’s easy being honest with others… The hardest thing is being the same with oneself.”

He tried to make it appear that nothing was happening, that everything had always been that way. It seemed to him that a huge cloud had obscured the sun and he just needed to wait five minutes and the sky would once again be the color of his dreams. But the five minutes had passed. Five weeks had passed. Their paradise, with all its furnishings, had gone straight to perdition. The worst thing of all was that his studio in the Rue Tournefort was flooded out– a neighbor’s pipes had burst- and he was now living at her place.

The happy song in E flat had ended. Some awful march blared. It wasn’t a military march or a funeral march, not even a fireman’s march, but the march of the hospital porters, of the garbage men, the stray cat catcher’s…

Sometimes it seemed as if the nightmare were about to end. He would find her neat and kempt, taciturn but smiling. They would walk out together to have supper at some nearby restaurant. They would eat in silence, frightened of spooking their unsubstantial world with words. Then, equally silent, they would return home and silently make love to one another in the midst of lacerated sheets and scattered pillows.

Even her habitual moans, the bird cries she was never able to hold back, were constricted by that same aphonia. They would fall asleep in each other’s arms but, in the night, thirsty and looking for a glass of water, he would notice that she was not asleep and, in the morning, at the very first spoken sentence she would let fly and everything would begin all over again.

The repairs to his studio were finished. He moved back into his place and, almost simultaneously, Dez again became Dez; literally as if she had returned from a trip somewhere: as if, in her absence, the Doppelganger Agency had sent over a listless substitute, a capricious, malicious woman who, having ploughed the her acting school entrance exam, was earning a little money doing casual work.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Dez said sometime in May. “ Something got into me. I don’t even know what to call it…”

She had a series of tests done. To her and even more so to him it seemed that the nightmare was hormonal in origin. But the results of the tests were normal and the doctor just advised her to stop taking the pill.

**********

Then that strange summer began … It poured with rain. Paris got soaking wet. In the hallway it smelt of mould and disinfectant. Dez left Sciences-Po without taking the exams. She was sick of the politicking, of “the planetary dictatorship of sixty year old cretins” and of the “universal Machiavellianism” as she called it.

From then on it was Colin Wilson who held her interest; crystals, the X factor, Professor Suzuki, dervishes, the secret schools of the Sufi. She would blather on about the Templars, read the Tarot and talk about magnetism, dream of going to California and of meeting Casteneda.

She started going to a different dancing school: the body should find its own language. Right now that language was African dance. She started to fill out. Once again he would find her with a packet of biscuits in her hand, with a bar of chocolate. She was eating mechanically, without looking at what she was doing taking one biscuit after another from the packet, breaking off square after square. Then she went off to Toulouse, on a course; two weeks. He took advantage of her absence to fly to LA - an assignment on “Health Freaks” for Lui.

That was in June. At the beginning of September he was standing by the photo mag stand at the newsagents on the corner of Guy Lussac and the Boul’ Mich. Some dirty old man, enflamed eyes behind thick lenses, was leafing through a third- rate skin mag, trying to conceal what he was looking at.

Kim glanced over the man’s shoulders (the usual rosy meat) and thumbed through a few pages of a photo magazine. He shivered and felt his face suddenly freeze over as the world suddenly jerked and went awry. A bumblebee seemed to be buzzing in his ears as he reached up to the top shelf for a copy of Kama

He couldn’t recall how he paid for the magazine or how he crossed the Boul’ Mich’ against the lights (the newsagent stood on the other side of the road with Kim’s change, shouting something at him). He couldn’t remember how he found himself in the Luxembourg Gardens, on a vacant bench, in the dense shade of the trees. He quickly leafed through the magazine. He didn’t find it. All he came across were idiotic explanations about creams for enlarging your erection, about Chinese concoctions which when taken by a centenarian paralytic made him capable of bringing joy to an entire female volleyball team. Finally, there flashed before his eyes the title of a photo-reportage - Suburban Scamp. Then, overleaf, opening her legs wide over a two page spread, badly made up, with an expression of alarm and a tortured smile on her face was Desiree, her beaver freshly shaved.

A fat pigeon, waggling along, was looking for something under the bench. Not very far off the blue uniforms of a military band were getting off of a bus. A blonde hooked-nosed girl was watching, open-mouthed, as a lemon butterfly alighted on the dark trunk of a chestnut tree. The wings of the little lemon were fluttering.

He opened the magazine again. On the smaller photos, taken with an everyday fifty mill lens Desiree, bent over like a treble clef was splashing about under a shower, crawling down the silk sheets of a badly made bed – a hotel bed obviously - and, down on all fours, barking up at the lens directed at her.

He recalled the unexpectedly shaved beaver, its Turkish carpet silkiness, her embarrassment and her not quite intelligible explanation.

“At the Hammam on the Rue des Rosiers some terrorists let loose a pack of mutant pubic lice who lap up Lorexane like it’s grade A coke…”

A week later, her tender embraces were as prickly as those of a roadside burr…

“Je ne t’aime plus!”

Stupor, horror. A longing to wake up.

Her explanation was short. Yes, she did have it done malice aforethought. No, she hadn’t needed the five thousand. Yes, she had slept with the photographer. His son too. And some other guy into the bargain. That was the most interesting bit. But not that... Though… Once… After a disco. He had been away… She had gone to a hotel… Some boy. What’s the difference? A Dane or Swede. He’d fucked her like a goat. She hadn’t been able to sit down or…What did it matter? What did anything matter? She was free. He was free too We’re not married, are we?

He tried not to believe her. He didn’t succeed. He knew what this was; the suicide of love by triviality. Bang! Right between the eyes. I did love you. I loved you too. Clenched teeth, blanched lips. Here’s your pullover. Here’s your raincoat. Mail? Don’t worry the concierge will forward it.

No, who does she think she is?

“For the love of God, just don’t hit me!”

“Me?”

“You!”

“Are there so few pretty girls in Paris?”

“Um, and carefree guys?”

“Garce! Little idiot! So what’s up with you, not enough orgasms for you, is that it?”

He knew where she was coming from. She wanted to be the young shop girl all the guys fall headlong in love with. She wanted adventure, thrills, dates, freedom. She didn’t want, she secretly detested, this new constancy of relations and feelings. But that was precisely what he had warned her about at the beginning, that June, that August, when she had said he should come and live at her place.

At the time she had been convinced that her sole desire was to be with him.

And he also knew that she was punishing herself for something, trying with all her strength to be unhappy. Because of Irene?

***********

He gathered his things together. She threw him his keys. He knew that a week hence she would be howling like an Irish salmon at the moon, caterwauling like an oyster, yowling like a carp out of water. He knew that she would be buying biscuits, almond tarts, eclairs, bars of bitter (70% proof) chocolate, puff flake pastries layered with whipped cream, or simply big cartons of ice cream they sold by the kilo. She would eat them standing up in the kitchen by the fridge, eyes shut tight ; first of all she would use a spoon, then just her fingers. And she would have it smeared all over her face, along with the mascara and the tears… He knew that she would collapse onto the bed at six in the evening just as she was, dressed in a sweater, striped tights and big basketball shoes, so that she would wake up after midnight with a bad head, just like after the Tunisian red…

He knew that he would have to catch her near the house and gather her up in his arms like a sparrow. She would twitch for a moment or two and then soften and then start to let the moisture flow from her eyes, from her nose, emitting sobs and glugging sounds. From then on it would be easier and simpler. She would sniff , search for a Kleenex, be absolutely ashamed of herself, like a child and the malice, all five atmospheres of it, would evaporate.

The main thing after that would be not to mention anything about it, to forget it, wipe it out with a big white eraser.

But he couldn’t. And that’s how New York got started…

**********

It was past midnight. Beyond the double glazed porthole flowed and swirled a desert filled with silvery light. Some star or other - no, more probably a planet - was dropping below the horizon. It was getting cold. He rose shivering and got a light blanket out of the luggage rack above his head. Sitting down again he splashed some liquor from his own bottle into the whiskey glass, swallowed a Bromezepam and closed his eyes. Behind his trembling lids a turbid nothing slowly swam past from north-east to south-west, from eleven in the morning till five in the evening. Through his left temple and downward to his right clavicle plunged a rusty pin. The old piece of iron slowly turned. If he had wanted to he could have gone and been sick.

He swallowed a poisonous burning belch, shook his head, banged it against the window and cursed. If he took a Maalox the heartburn would go and maybe the nausea as well. But the Maalox would neutralize the Bromazepam. And without the Bromazepam he wouldn’t last out. Without advanced capitalist chemistry his mind would start fermenting and, what’s more, the noxious dough would pile on the pressure to his brain box and start oozing out through his ears and his eyes. Pourriture…

Without any Zepamabrom the Boeing would have flown backwards, tail to the fore, until it sliced into the stony feculence of New York.

**********

She got his address through the photo agency. It was the second or third day of January. A hangover of epidemic proportions. In the fast thickening dusk big warm snowflakes were falling. When the doorbell rang he was hanging head down on his “ ironing board”.. He didn’t have any time to equalize the tension in his posture when he went from being in a horizontal to a vertical world. The changeover was too abrupt and so, when he opened the door, he took her to be a part of his vertigo.

She was dressed in an ankle-length light overcoat, made for Parisian winters. Over her head she had the woolen shawl he had bought her in Beirut and on top of that she was wearing an enormous fox-fur hat. Her hands were in her pockets. Her pale face was wet with snow and he knew right away she was afraid he would think she had been crying.

“Are you going to let me in? “ she asked, coming in.

He didn’t know what to say and mechanically scratched the back of his head with his fingers.

“I’m at my father’s” Desiree said, unwinding the shawl. “ On Riverside Drive. He’s taken Irene to the airport. We spent Christmas with him. How are you? Have I called at the wrong time? You are alone?”

He was alone. He was alone with Vicki, Anna, Kitty and Mary-Lou. His aloneness was solid, dependable, almost triumphal. What did she want from him? He was so happily, peacefully, hanging head over heels… Adepts of the Order of Bat/Men, of ultrasound and mosquito pilau don’t have the right to meet wind-blown young Frenchwomen. They should hang upside down at least three hours a day…

What the devil brought you here?!

They sat for a long time in the dark. It was easier like that. She smoked, tapping her ash into an empty Marlboro packet. Paris, it seemed, had not changed.

“And La Place des Vosges is still square ?” he asked.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking” she said finally. “I haven’t come to beg forgiveness. I…”

“ Oh, please, don’t. It really isn’t worth it!”

“Wait…! I ought, anyway, to say this. When we were together there was this moment when I got the feeling life was sort of coming to an end. It was if you had locked me up in our relationship, as if it were a closet. Do you understand? I don’t know if you can understand… It was as if your love had me under lock and key… I started to panic. I didn’t want to lose you for anything… Wound you, even less. Then you came back from that trip…From Afghanistan. Pakistan. And you were a complete stranger. For quite some time. Two or three weeks. I don’t remember. And you were drinking more than usual… And you didn’t want to tell me a thing…You smoked grass. Without me. It was all, suddenly, without me. All that you told me was that something had happened over there...I didn’t know what, but I understood. I sensed that I had to wait it out.”

Hey, listen! If you’re getting material together for your memoirs.”

“ Don’t be a cynic. You’re twice my age. It’s too easy. Have you got anything to drink?”

He opened a bottle of Valpolicella and poured. She drank it down quickly; the way children do after they’ve been running around outside. She poured her second glass herself, took a sip; almost invisible in the dark she smiled guiltily.

“That story about my father. I know that was what was behind my looking for a refuge with you. I was unfair to you. I felt guilty. I wanted, by any means possible, to get rid of that feeling of guilt. All this has no significance now…You’re not saying a thing. But I’m going to be a proper little egotist. Even if none of this means a thing to you, I have to say it all out loud. Out loud. To you. Even if that is unpleasant for you.”

And that guy, the photographer, Jean-Francois - I’d like to get to get a hold of his regalia and use a pair of garden secateurs on it. To the root. Right now. At the time I wanted it all to be as bad as it possibly could and as filthy, as primitive… And it was like that. He makes his living doing that. He makes use of that gang of his to get his claws into schoolgirls, idiots, pretentious dreamers… He promises to make them stars. Of course, I know all that. He’s in TV now. Casting. More choice. Power over more…Over those cretins. In short I got what I wanted. I destroyed what there was between us. And I was happy with that for a very long time. A few months. But inside I felt really awful…”

He didn’t know how to stop her without being too head on, point blank

“We’ve already been over all this, haven’t we?” he said “I’ve absolutely no interest in hearing it all over again from the beginning.”

“Kim, you know yourself that you’re wrong. We haven’t been over it all at all. We’ve been over my whoring around, my jealousy, your godly sublimity…”

He stood up, took the newspaper from the table; something plopped to the floor. He crumpled a few pages, knelt down by the hearth, feeling the soot on his fingers, shoved the paper under an unconsumed log and adding some chips of wood struck a match.

That was better. Complete darkness is too good a screen for three-D nightmares.

She carried on talking for a long while yet. More or less repeating herself. Returning again and again to the same thing; the cul-de-sac, the self-enclosure of their relationship, the way he changed after Peshawar, her father, her desire to destroy it all. It was one long plaint. Crying over spilt love.

“I’ll call you a taxi,” he said with a sinking heart, knowing he had only to take a half a step and she would be sobbing in his arms.

“OK” Her voice was calm and tender. “ That was all I wanted to say to you.”

The taxi took ten minutes to get there. He went down with her and stood in the doorway. She slipped right by the cab, but didn’t fall. The cab door slammed and, as soon as it had gone a few yards, the dense wet snow simply crossed it out.

He did manage, however, to get out of his seat and make his way to the toilet. What he saw in the mirror was almost laughable. The kind of mask Kabuki actors wear. His mask had solidified and had a hard bush of whiskers growing through it.

Two fingers down the throat. A tickling that made him throw up. He went into contortions, started to twitch all over, but all he managed to do was to spit out some rose colored stuff. The plane shook and his forehead gently bumped into his own reflection. There was a ringing in his ears, the hand he held on the door handle shook just slightly.

“Remember,” he said to himself. “ something that guarantees you throw up…first love, your army boots, my country right or wrong. There are so many useful things you can do with two fingers. Make the victory sign, conquer chronic virginity, poke someone’s eyes out… He rinsed his fingers, leant over and began to drink the luke-warm water. At the third or fourth mouthful he finally got there. It gushed up seemingly endlessly – through his nose too. The second and the third waves of nausea were shallower. He blew his nose, wiped his face; splashed some eau-de-cologne out of a large flask over his hands and rubbed it in, over his neck too. Things eased off.

He made his way back through the sleeping passengers and annexed the seat next to his own, once he’d raised the armrests, and settled himself down in a half-reclining position. He managed to sleep for a while. Then he slowly resurfaced. He realized he would have to compensate for the Bromazepam he had sicked up. He took a quarter of one and drank a mouthful of Oban. Felt in his pocket for some chewing gum. That way it would act even much more quickly.

**********

In Peshawar his bag containing his Sony short wave scanner and four packs of ektochrome had been stolen. In Peshawar he had come down with some sort of stomach bug and been unable to eat a thing. In Peshawar he had bowed out of his photographic career.

He had been on his way back from the city outskirts, from a refugee camp. Rose-colored dust was trembling in the light of the setting sun. There was a smell of bonfires, of freshly baked naan bread and of gasoline. From a nearby barracks three people emerged; two bearded and well proportioned, the other a squat adolescent. They were escorting a prisoner. The latter was middle-aged, had a jowly face and a strangely feminine pelvis. His head was hanging down and it shook from side to side. Kim couldn’t figure out what nationality he might be. Seeing someone with a photo case and two cameras slung around his neck all three turned in his direction.

“American?” asked one.

“French.” Kim answered.

“You have cigarettes? American cigarettes?”

He got out a packet of Kent and made free with them. One of the bearded guys, a weird grimace on his face, took a cigarette for the prisoner lighted it and stuck it between the man’s teeth.

Then the two older men got into a wreck of a Chevrolet and drove off.

The teenager, prodding the prisoner with his “sawn-off” Kalashnikov led the prisoner off towards a copse of dusty willows. Kim followed behind. A tamarisk bloomed dryly at the edge of the drop where the stony area of flat ground ended. There was a twenty-foot fall beyond that. Down below there were broken bottles, all kinds of trash, a rusty bicycle wheel. When the boy, slowly raising the barrel of his gun stepped back he seemed just a step away from Kim. One shove and he would fly to the bottom, perhaps break a leg or twist his neck. It was Kim’s choice to make but he automatically raised his Leica to his right eye.

Aperture 5, 6; exposure 250. He changed the aperture to 4 and doubled the exposure to 500. He knew any movement would be less smeary.

The killing was rather like a dance. The fat man with the feminine pelvis started to turn to the teenager, the latter took another half step back. The cartridges skipped on the bricks. The body of the executed man, as if he had thought it over and had decided to beg for mercy, first bent at the waist then went over backwards. He sat down, started to jerk and fell back – the smoking cigarette in his clenched teeth…

***********

When you look at the world through the viewfinder of a camera, reality is distanced; transformed into a fiction where time is abnegated. That is precisely why space is so easily stylized, transformed into a landscape, a still life and people, both the living and the dead turned into portrait studies.

Kim, for many months afterwards felt the physical sensation – on the backs of his hands, in his arms and shoulders - of that failure to move. He had been ready to push the teenager forward, over the precipice. But instead he had pressed the starting button of his camera’s motor. There had been four shots. The 28-mill lens took in all of the flat stony area. With the squat wild olive tree, the peaceful puff pastry evening sky, the brick wall, the barrel of the AKM and the squatting fat man.

On the slide the fat man was smiling.

**********

For he while he snoozed. He awoke at the touch of an old man who, passing by on his way to the can, brushed a hand across Kim’s nape. Kim lay down again, his head by the window now and began, once more, to slip off to sleep. Modern chemistry is a wonderful thing! He knew that something monstrous, irremediable, had happened to his life and that it was, moreover, pour toujours, for ever. But eight 25-ml tablets of Bromazepam held the nightmare at a safe distance.

**********

Lutz Schaffhaus had set up a huge international photo exhibition at the Beaubourg . Half a floor. Sponsored by Kodak.

Kim got an invitation –together with a plane ticket – to give a talk there. He spent a month in Paris and when he returned to New York it was with Dez.

The past had been anesthetized if not forgotten. He couldn’t do without her, she couldn’t do without him. Happiness is in fact always terribly banal. The words of the old song sounded dreadful but the melody, the thematic development were much improved.

Desiree was once more a young fresh-faced prankster, an inveterate tennis player, an inimitable and affecting Maman Dazzy, shameless concubine and diligent housewife. Now she wanted to do everything for him herself, share everything with him. She still didn’t know how to cook but their attic apartment became cozier. Now she could, when she wanted to, win a set against him. She would patiently correct his mistakes in French. He improved his swimming. But they were drinking more than they had done the year before. They would score weed and, when they had the funds, cocaine. Colin Wilson and Castaneda were both forgotten now but she continued to carry a big piece of citrine crystal in her pocket. Golden-lemon colored in daylight, a bloody orange at night it warded off the evil eye, negative energy and attacks of bulimia.

My God! How simple it all was and how idiotically beautiful! He realized that when he was vulnerable to horror and grief Dez was his shield. And in exactly the same way she needed him to defend herself from her fears and to ensure her energy wasn’t dissipated aimlessly. Solon’s descendant was right; each human being is the separated half of another and it is their entrails, the point of separation, where they are most vulnerable, open to every misfortune. To acquire strength and fortitude weakness has to combine with weakness, unite, add together that vulnerability, those scars, once again form a single entity, like the two halves of a walnut.… Sex is Man’s weak side but only when directed towards the outside world. It is a source of strength when he unites with his other half, when they, he and she, become a single entity.

Of course now Kim was just waiting for Destiny to deal him an underhand blow, a stab in the back- I panic when everything is going well. But having spent the summer in France – Grasse’s incandescent alleys, Avignon’s burning rooftops, the bucolic silence of a fishing village on the Golf of Morbihan – when their New York fall set in with its asphalt and its openness to the sky, their life began to settle down, to finally take on form. Vogue gave him an assignment and Dez decided to open a small gallery. Her father gave her the money without going into any details. “ He’s paying me off, he knows why” she said. Then winter came, the first opening, and more and more news of incredible events in Russia. Kim left for Berlin on an assignment. From there he went on to Prague. But he didn’t want to go to Russia though approaches were made; temping, unexpected.

A year passed. At a certain point he realized that he had let himself go a little too much, gone soft, like a piece of bread dropped in a puddle. He had put on weight, his reflexes had slowed. Snow, grass, vodka on the rocks in chilled glasses, to the accompaniment of balyk (sturgeon dried and salted) - at Brighton Beach they smoked anything: hams, fish, cheese, bonnes mamans, old shoes… He was short of breath and Dez was making fun of him but once, in bed, he almost died on her. The doc took his blood pressure and looked grave. The upper reading was 210.

He refused to go to hospital, even for just three days rest. What’s more, he didn’t have a medical card. For a while he was on a diet - no salt, no animal fat- and shed about sixteen pounds. He began to run three days a week, then five, but he didn’t make the grade as an athlete. On the sly he again began to smoke draw again, to roll General Grant into a tube and snort. When they had the green stuff that was - and Dez was bringing it home by the bagful ….

Then there was a hole. A beautiful black hole with jagged edges. No work. Zero. Dez threw away what money they had left on a small Braque, an oil. The Braque turned out to be a bad break. It had just one thing wrong with it – it was a fake.

Wong advised a return to Paris. Kim was a known quantity there and, at least they had their own place… Kim could find a job on a paper, with Jean-Claude for example; he had offered more than once…

But the rules of the game had changed. Now, if he wanted to be sent on an assignment he’d have to be willing to go back to his old stomping-ground, Moscow, Peter, Astrakhan , no matter where, as long as it was in the old Eastern bloc.

“You’ll need a make-over,” Marie-Helene told him when he rang her.

Lutz said much the same thing:

“I’m sorry but your reputation went down with the Wall. Not just yours, of course. But now you’re archive material. If you were to do one or two reports from Russia, you could be…resurrected. If not, well, you know… But, in my opinion, if an old rebel like you, whose pictures were seen in print the whole world over, were now to do a portrait of Gorby, then the chances of success would be pretty…solid.”

Lutz just loved those pauses when he spoke.

“Silence,” he would affirm, “ the gaps between the words, pack a bigger punch than a quote from Goethe …”

Dez used to say that it was just that he was a little slow.

“And an awful drag.” She would add.

**********

Kim was sitting, wrapped up in his blanket staring out the porthole. The night was growing light. The Boeing with a velocity of forty miles to the minute was speeding into daybreak. A steward passed down the aisle, shaking his head, making an effort not to yawn. He turned back, hung over Kim.

“Sir, would you like some tea? Coffee? It’s an hour till breakfast.”

Kim asked for a very large coffee. No milk.

If he didn’t move, if he didn’t stir, everything would be bearable… “I’m OK”, he said to himself and grimaced even as he said it. The lie reverberated like a pain throbbing in his temples. The back of his head had once more transformed into a North Pole, a skullcap of ice.

Of course it all had to do with her, with Mother Russia…For how many years, molecule by molecule, had he been expunging the past from his memory. The cassette of the past spooled from right to left, from left to right. The erase head, overheated, was working full out A fat lot of use!

It was forever popping up at some street corner or other, the past. Like that old biddy with her purse in her hand in Jaffa, the spitting image of Auntie Frossia from the Bureau for the Disabled.

Or, somewhere in New Jersey, on a rainy day in fall, on some access road overgrown with three foot high nettles - phantom image of childhood happiness. “March on the rails, shit! On the rails, shit! On the rails…” And even in the valley of the Loire, once the customary royal chateau was out of sight, the landscape was just so like central Russia.

When space is transformed into time, into past time, it’s difficult to shake it off. There’s too much of it, that past. It’s insanely concentrated. A whole country, a whole world has been crammed into that past. It has the mass of an ultra-heavy metal, the density of the interior of Aladdin’s lamp. With it there inside you it’s just not possible to retain your own center of gravity.. Its weight wins out in every instance, in every variant. A past like that holds on to you, doesn’t let go.

The present becomes unreal then, an irisated film, a surface illusion. To really get a grip on the present and stay there becomes an impossibility.

Hence all the melancholy, bitterness and, sometimes, the heart-rending hysteria of a young diaspora. The children of emigrants, not loaded down with memory, live in the Here and Now but the parents who conceived them. in the visa office or almost, try to clear a path for themselves in the Here and Now, without success, without hope, unaware of their doom. They need to get out of there so they get out. Geography, they’re au fait with that. But, at the same time they’re still over there, in that happy drunkard sixth of the earth. And they’re clueless- over there isn’t over here, over here isn’t over there. Schizophrenia. Life between two worlds, in no-man’s land, between two watchtowers; a wall of barbed wire to the left and a conveyor belt armed with razor blades (that’s progress!) to the right.

Go on, try and get out of there…

But, two years ago, the erase-head started to take away one layer after another. The past started slowly losing its grip on him. Life started to take on volume, became three-dimensional and if you could see through it that was only at the joints. The phantoms, of course still made their visitations; would burst in without warning at three in the morning through the walls of worn-out brick; erupt amongst the crowd on Saint-Germain, especially when it was getting dark, in the blue hour, entre chien et loup: but at least it was less and less frequent an occurrence.

At curtain fall of the epoch’s most iron curtain he was almost free of the past. At least that’s what, in all honesty, he believed.

And now everything that had been erased, wiped out, vanished; all that false reality through which, as he had grown up, he had cleared a passage for himself, for his real life, was trying to make a comeback… The Anti-world obtained right of entry into reality. People from his former life, alive and noisy, began to appear. He dined out with them, drank with them, asked after mutual acquaintances, showed them round Paris or Manhattan, accompanied them, loaded down with packages, round La Samarataine or Bloomingdale’s and felt the conversation slipping away, missing the point: everything seemed beside the point, pointless, out of wack…

Some people simply bought plane tickets and three days later were back from Moscow, their eyes popping out of their heads.

“You just can’t imagine…”

But that was just it; he could imagine it. But to return physically to something that one fine day had ceased to exist for him…he couldn’t. But Russia’s huge carcass, was creeping up on him - out of a radiant past into a gray day after tomorrow. For several decades to come she would be living somewhere in a no-man’s land.

**********

The steward bought the coffee – completely European, thank God! The passengers began to come to life. A half hour later someone was coughing, someone was loudly asking the steward how many hours his watch should be wound forward; the young Audrey Hepburn was on all fours in the aisle searching for something. Columns of cigarette smoke reached him only to dissolve and the silky old woman whose face had grown twisted overnight, opened her handbag to fill her mouth with colored tablets.

**********

He couldn’t call to mind the exact moment when everything had started to shrink and go awry and he had started down the road signposted To the Devil- fifteen miles. Or at what moment Chris had first appeared.

Father German, mother Filipino, grandfather Polish, grandmother a Princess Samostrugoff…or something along those lines. Twenty-seven, handsome, but too off the wall, too handsome. He was certainly no fool though he smelled of foolishness.

Chris was getting together a magazine that would span the Atlantic, Paris- New York. He may have had the money but the chicks were not exactly scrambling for his clover. At first Kim had thought that this brown-haired man with blue eyes was a typical queer. But then, observing the way he danced around Dez, he realized that this queer would put his own mother in the family way without batting a sphincter… Before the first Chris paid an advance and bought an old, but unpublished photo-interview of Kim’s with Nureyev. To general astonishment the first issue did appear. And to even greater surprise by its third issue it had begun to pay its way. The mock-up was craftily done: a Paris cut using American material; European elegance combined with New World pizzazz.

But issue number four didn’t make it and Chris vanished – direction unknown. He surfaced as summer neared, somewhat slimmer, crumpled looking despite the tan. But he was just as impudently polite, stormily optimistic, a man with N-R-G, just like that famous orange…

Now he was the stateside representative for a consortium of Scandinavian magazines of a rosy pink dermatological tendency. But- may they never see Valhalla’s lofty halls if they lie - they had nothing to do with hard core porn. They were after producing a series of issues aimed at stimulating the hormonal system, on rather thin inexpensive paper, with a plethora of exquisite photos of wonderfully developed young nymphets romping with some young devils lightly roasted by the breath of the southern sun. Chris supplied the Vikings with articles written by West- Coast Gurus about amino acids that were capable of transforming folds of fatty flesh into firm muscle, essays about the extraction of the sap of a rare variety of Central American dandelion that stopped people from getting herpes and, through agencies in Los Angeles and San Diego, he sent over the ocean tons of slides of an extraordinarily naked …

It was this Chris, grandson Of Princess Samostrugoff and son (of a bitch that was for sure) of a Bavarian brewer, who proposed, at the end of July, to publish a series of photos of Dez, naked, for the consumerist eyeballing of the male population of the Nordic lands.

Right then money wasn't just tight: it wasn't even expected to put a hint of a nose through their door before September. The loft rent had to be paid, the phone and something was required to eke out an existence until September when, in theory, Dez would get some money – part of her mother's savings, held back by the French authorities for boring reasons of government pillage- tax at double the normal rate.

Delirium condensed to nightmare at that precise moment.

On the one hand Kim was afraid that there would emerge, as from a mirror, that old vicious Dez, caustic tongued, sluttish - off for a course in Toulouse that never existed. On the other hand, you would have had to have been an idiot not to realize that Chris- who wasn't paying out himself, out of his own pocket, and for whom producing a new cover girl was but a moment's work - very much wanted to see Dez a poil.

Of course. Kim's fear that Dez would, for the sake of a bit of spare change, find a photographer and pose for him nude, in the gynecological chair position, was unjustified. She wasn't simply on his side but, from here on in,. an integral part of his being. There was no possibility of doubt on that score. But the odious phantom of non-love had begun to haunt the loft on Perry Street in the twilight. Chris did not want all the visceral details. But his mags did not carry any photos by well-known photographers and he wanted Shuisky. Shuisky and his fiancée. In Dez's case the shitbag confirmed a need for lightweight unagressive nudity, something on the lines of a «petite Parissienne in New York»

“A la Hamilton, right? A liquid rainbow flowing over her shoulders…”

“I couldn't give a toss how many Danes see me in their wankerzine.” Dez said.

“Aha,” thought Kim, “And what about those Frenchmen who made themselves sore looking at your pussy putting its tongue out in Kama ? “

Crafty Chris had paid in advance.

“I know you think of me as a goddess, my darling jealous boy,” Dez assured him.

“ You are like a goddess, my Hudson nymphet,” he responded in the same vein. “ So, you’ll give it a whirl, ok… Bathtub, foam, your hill country…and everything in black and white. That’s how we’ll string Uncle Chris along. I’ll need to buy a couple of slaves…”

“Slaves? For your harem?”

“Two Morris flashes…”

They were standing in the foyer of a fleapit on Lexington, waiting for a downpour to pass. Streams of warm water were falling: straight as a plumb line, as if it were a miniature waterfall financed by the Mayor’s office or some eccentric philanthropist.

“We’ve the same back home,” he said to her. “ Made of sunshine, though.”

The heat was awful.

**********

After two cups of coffee he fell asleep and was probably, judging from the looks he got from the rosy-cheeked old woman after he woke up, snoring. His head still felt a bit sore but he didn’t feel sick anymore. He got his bag and foraged in the side pocket, grinning as he felt the pack of Korean ginseng. They were packed just like condoms He asked for some boiling water and the steward came back with a thermos flask. He emptied three of the little packets into a glass and gave the contents a stir. He waited for the familiar surge of energy - the ginseng always acted on him like that without fail – but instead he fell asleep again and only woke up to find himself at Roissy.

“Sir,” the steward shook him gently, “your custom declaration.”

“Thank you,” Kim squinted, trying to breathe to the side. “I don’t need to. I’ve a French passport…”

In the airport bar he drank a coffee and cognac. In the taxi the radio was playing some Arab music – “Allah Akhbar!” he said to himself – “Parigi!”

He almost felt happy. He wanted to move, to swim, run, take a bath, crash out and sleep for three days, change his underwear, sit with Boris in some miniscule restaurant, sit there till closing time and do all of it at once in any old order. He recalled Dez’s pet phrase from her Sufi period and it was as if a switch had clicked somewhere. It became hot and stifling. He felt his shirt sticking to his back. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. The dirty gray outskirts of the city danced before his eyes.

Freedom was absence of choice.

**********

Boris wasn’t at home. He went into a corner caff on Montorgueil and phoned his office. The answering machine. He left his bag with the concierge and went down into the Metro. Zavad was probably sitting somewhere in one of the bistros on the Boulevard Montparnasse or in the Petit Suisse by the park. He decided he’d get out at the Luxembourg station, have a look in at the Suisse and if he wasn’t there, go straight across the Park to Vavannes and start with the Coupole.

He was standing on the platform, benumbed, when from out of a tunnel rolled a real live Sprague, yellow and peeling.

This was surely the last of the breed. The whole train was shaking and there was a grinding noise - its brakes were sound enough, probably, to provide the soundtrack for a horror film. Kim turned the handle and opened the doors, let a fat woman with a striped Tati bag pass in front of him, and then entered and sat down. The car was almost half-empty.

At Notre Dame a noisy group of Italian teenage sightseers piled in. The train moved off, the car shaking and screeching, the door handles jolting; somewhere there was a ringing, like dacha telephone bell. Heavily, as if he were moving underwater, Kim stood and approached the doors. The platform had to be on the left. This was an opportunity not to be missed. Slowly he moved the door opening mechanism, his pressure imperceptible: the doors were ready to fly open without the least resistance.

In the grimy glass he observed the young Italians, their chubby healthy faces. The girls were handing round an open can of Coca-Cola. The guys were talking amongst themselves, throwing guarded glances at a long legged mini-skirted black woman

who was sitting on a jump seat.

Kim stretched on his toes, warming up his ankles. Habit. So as not to strain a ligament, so as not to catch a foot in the door. Suddenly, once more, warmth surged up his spine in a wave and his eyes darkened. In his ears, as if someone had upped the volume, the old train’s wheels beat a tattoo. Through the bloody dots circling in front of his eyes he saw his naked leg, the one that had tripped over the Morris flash wire, and the tripod – awry - making its swift descent into the bath and, smiling in the soap foam, Dez and then the short blue flash, just as if someone had fired a replica pistol in front of his eyes… Tatters of darkness.

He shook his head. The platform neared. He felt the Italians’ curious glances on his back. With one quick jerk he had the doors open. They moved easily and quickly aside and, as usual, he stepped off into nothingness.

A few yards before the platform at Luxembourg station begins there is a fairly big, dirt-choked recess, lit up by a skewed neon tube. The tramps who wile away their time at the station often hide their liter bottles of wine there, along with plastic packets of food. It was the recess that Kim had mistaken for the start of the platform. He was thrown up against the filthy wall with its triple layer of thick black cabling and bounced back under the deafening beating wheels of the train.

By the time the brakes had sang out their sharps and then descended whole octaves in pitch, four Italian teenagers had been cut down. Two of them were clinging to the handgrips, somehow managing to keep their footing, another went rolling down the aisle on their back and another, having sustained a facial injury had collapsed onto the lap of a Mauritanian woman who was cursing her head off.

**********

PART V

Luc dropped Boris off by the Closerie des Lilas. Remi was asleep on the back seat of the Range Rover. It was around about nine: sunny and deserted. August: asters… So he hadn’t managed to get to the American Express the day before. Instead he had been whisked off to Deauville by Luc, Pierre and Remi.

Luc, thick-set - and contrary to what you would suppose, shy - was a freelance computer technician, forever setting up, buying and selling printers scanners and modems. He expressed himself in a kind of DOS-speak.

“After a glass of vodka I feel four megs richer…”

As for Pierre - a gentle soul - apart from the fact that he played an excellent game of tennis and that you could score grass at his place - he was an unknown quantity. Pierre, an eternal smile on his face, was handsome and, at times, dangerous. Like a flick-knife it was best not to open him.

Remi… Remi had bought a picture gallery and turned it into a warehouse full of abandoned bric-a-brac, which he subsequently converted into a bistro, a travel agency and florists’. Remi was on the lookout for a chateau in Brittany, which he was intending to transform into a five-star hotel with a sports club and chic restaurant. But the chateau had, in the end, been bought by a Japanese golf club. Remi intended to put on a play he’d written himself… Remi was a dreamer – with money…

They had themselves a very enjoyable dip while the European sun set- he had had to buy a swim suit – five hundred, a first bite into Tatiana’s bundle - and they had dined at an inordinately expensive bar by the casino and then gone off to play the tables. There were a lot of people, all of them beach people, scented, tanned. Men with gold chains hung around their ox necks, Cartier watches on their muscular wrists while the women had three-roomed apartments hanging from each ear lobe and a country residence on each ring finger… There were characters too who seemed to have been edited out of some black and white film… Thus, under the bell jar of the glass fronted bar, separated from the tables by a row of columns, a dimmer-jacketed Cary Grant was getting sozzled in the grand manner whilst, in the vestibule, a young and charming mad woman was strolling around in fluttery, lily-colored, silk.

Boris was gambling for the second time in his life. He didn’t have any sort of system. He put a hundred on red. Zero came up.

“You’re in jail,” said Remi, “They’ve locked you in.”

Then red came up and Boris recouped his hundred. For a while he observed the players, then he decided that if black came up three times in a row he would put two hundred on red. He placed his bet and won, doubled his stake of four hundred and won again.

Pierre had come without any proof of identity and they wouldn’t let him into the casino. He had said that they should forget about him – he would get back on his own. Luc had gone off with some plump girl on the beach who looked like an inflatable mattress. Remi yawned and staked hundred after hundred on twenty-six. It must be great to have a safe the size of the Arc de Triomphe instead of a father… Just after midnight Boris split his capital in two. Besides Tatiana’s money that he had won back he had his own wad – three and a half thousand. By about two in the morning he had just a few hundred left. He recouped a thousand and, bad tempered and weary, left the table. In his head the croupier’s voice was pealing out his declaration; “Vignt-six, noire, paire et passe…” It sounded muffled, as if it were under water.

Luc came back minus the girl but with a joint and for a long while they sat down by the shore, drinking old Armagnac from a flask, smoking and watching the waves as they ran onto the sand. In the sky, between the stars, a stream of fire flickered: identical to the one that flared just above the horizon, on the sea.

“Just think,” said Luc. “ I was in the same class as she was. She was a dozy unattractive little piss-artist but, in math, in physics, in German she beat everyone. How old were we? Must be ten years since we saw one another. She got married to a guy with a chain of sewing shops and she moved here… The guy chucked her for some Pole and shoved off to Krakow to open some shops there. Now she’s working in the casino restaurant, waiting for news of her divorce. She’s got a two year old boy at home… she used to wear glasses and be thin now she wears contact lenses and she’s two hundred meg minimum. She’s spread out. It’s all as humdrum as a pile of shit. Life – that’s what it’s called.”

“ Isn’t it time to crash out?” Remi melancholically inquired. “I need to be in full form tomorrow.”

“She’s coming straight back,” said Luc. “She’s got a couple of friends here, local girls. Let’s give it another half-hour at least…”

The tubby broad was called Clothilde. One of her girl friends had already gone to bed for the night but the other one, Rosa, was the sort who would go only when she absolutely forced to. They went over to Rosa’s place. She lived on the ground floor of a comfy little Norman house and they all sat up till four. At first they drank chilled white wine, then coffee. Rosa came on hard with Remi; unbuttoned his shirt, ran her hands over his chest. Remi yawned, rolled his eyes and laughed it off half-heartedly. But, finally, he was carried off to the mezzanine and when he reappeared both his clothes and hair were in disorder and there was a lascivious grin on his lips…

“Shall we go?” He cheerfully asked.

They all gave Clothilde a goodnight kiss - Rosa didn’t come down - and went outside, into the street. A fresh morning breeze had blown up. The sea was growling angrily. Somewhere music was still being churned out.

In the car, looking for a cassette and then not being able to push it into its slot in the machine, Remi complained

“ A cock teaser! A one hundred per cent cock-teaser. She said she was into the second week of a course of antibiotics. I swear I’ve never in my life had such a hard on! Perhaps in Corsica when a bee stung me right under my prick…

Despite the early hour the AutoRoute was crowded with heavy lorries and, near Paris, they even got stuck in a bit of a traffic jam.

***********

In the deserted brasserie Boris sat down by the window and ordered a large coffee with milk, a ham sandwich and a couple of croissants with honey. He was as hungry as a horse.

Later on he went out to buy a paper and when he returned the garcon, bringing his second milky coffee told him that some foreigner had been asking after him.

He had just finished looking at his Libe when someone sat down on the seat beside him.

“Are you trailing me?” Boris, displeased, asked.

Zorin was smoothly shaved, pale. His Lacoste polo neck showed off his prominent tits. He smelt of a mixture of cheap eau-de-cologne and deodorant.

“Ok, Andre,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“Either Sunday or Monday there’ll be a coup in Moscow.”

The terror was plainly visible on Zorin’s face.

“Your sources?”

“The very top.”

“You’ve got proof?”

Zorin placed a photocopy of a fax on the table in front of him.

“Well, you know, anyone can send…”

“Have you read it through?” Zorin quietly asked.

Boris read to the end, took a croissant and dunked it in his coffee.

“What do you want for this?”

“You’ve got contacts in OFPRA.”

“Possibly. Do you think I’m in the pay of the DST?”

“No, but I do know you’ve got a good connection in OFPRA. In the Russian section. We had this tidbit about you some time ago. You helped Yefimov. You got Rukhin in and he didn’t have to queue.”

“But you know yourself there are no defectors anymore.”

“With what’s going to go down tomorrow it’ll be starting…”

Zorin took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled in his pocket for a lighter.

The waiter brought him his half and gave him a light. Zorin puffed at his cigarette and shook his head.

“I haven’t really asked for very much.”

“That’s true, “ said Boris, rising. “ Sit here, I’ll give the paper a call…”

He went to the washroom and to the accompaniment of running water considered the pros and cons. The chief was still away on vacation and his stand-in, that old fox Dubin, was sure to say no.

So, the best thing to do was not to talk to them but with the head of the foreign section, Seldman.

“Who can’t stand you,” said Boris to himself, pulling the chain.

Seldman wasn’t there and Dubin asked him straight off for his source.

“ A colleague on the other side,” Boris answered.

“How much does he want, this colleague of yours?” A chain smoker, Dubin was exhaling so loudly that Boris thought smoke was going to appear through the earpiece.

“Five.”

“Does the letter name names?”

“Yes, and that includes Marshall Yazov.”

“I’m trying not to think about it. I need to know whose obit I should be preparing to write. For all of them or just for Gorby…”

“All right… if this friend of yours is prepared to sign something, get it and bring it over. If not… we’ll insert a three-liner about rumors that…”

“I’ll need the money today,” Boris said. “In cash.”

“If he gives us his name – he’ll get it today.”

********

In the restaurant a vacuum cleaner howled wearisomely, in the brasserie there were a few more people. Two middle-aged Americans struggling with their French were ordering breakfast.

“OK, Andy,” he said as he sat down. “This is perhaps your finest hour. If you give us your signature, I’ll send you over to OFPRA.” Boris took out a pen and notebook. “Sofia Ivanovna Shumilova, the general’s daughter works at OFPRA.”

Zorin’s fingers drummed on the table. The waiter brought over and placed on the table in front of them another half, deftly removing the empty glass. Zorin was drinking Adelscott.

“If you were to ask for asylum today,” asked Boris, “what difference would it make to you?”

“Okay!” said Zorin with a pitiful smile. He got a second piece of paper out of his attaché case. “Everything is in my name on this. Should I sign?”

He signed boldly and Boris tendered him a beer coaster with Shumilova’s phone number on it.

“Ring her before lunch. Tell her you got the number from me and get over there right away. You’ve got your papers on you?”

They both fell silent. Then Zorin speeded up. He finished his drink in one gulp and threw his cigarettes into his attaché case.

“Perhaps we should make the call together?” Boris asked.

“To OFPRA?”

“Oh no, to the Kremlin. To Gorby. We’ll warn him…”

“He’s in the Crimea,” Zorin said. “ And I doubt if he’s got a line… getting through, that is, would…”

“Oh! Yes?” Boris looked out the window, a black guy in green overalls was sweeping the pavement with a plastic broom. “ I read that. He’s in Yalta…”

“Foros.” Zorin stood.

“The healthy peasant type” Boris thought, examining the athletic figure of this traitor to the Motherland. “He could be put to use, carrying heavy water…”

“I’m off” said his old classmate.

“Good luck.” Boris threw at his retreating back.

********

The Prince of Smolensk and the Moscova stood there disarmed – Marshall Ney’s sword had been removed for restoration.

Boris was about to turn towards the Boulevard de l’Observatoire but changed his mind and letting a screeching ambulance with its escort of police cars heading for the Cochin Hospital go by, he set off towards the Port-Royal Metro station. It was closed.

“An accident,” said the ticket woman. “ At Luxembourg.”

“An unemployed man did himself in. What else have they got to do?” muttered a fat woman in an ample floral dress, house slippers on her feet, as she made her way towards the up escalator.

He went up again to the Boul’ Mich, looking round for a taxi. There was hardly any traffic except for the tourist coaches - the sun burning on their windows. He needed at the very least to take a shower and get changed. The sky was clean and there was a smell of freshly watered asphalt, of the countryside, of drying paint. In August the whole city is repainted, touched up, the signs changed, the roofs repaired.

On the corner of Val de Grace he found a taxi – a white Mercedes, a black driver. An arctic chill reigned in the car.

“Earlier on my head was breaking up into molecules, into atoms!” said the driver, his ears moving perceptibly. “When you think about what you breathe… Pure lead, Monsieur. You could mould bullets out of this air… Now ca va. If it weren’t for all those shitheads you don’t know how to drive, Monsieur… and the pedestrians… Is there any where else in the world where they still have the sort of pedestrians we have here…? But, if you can put those little things out of your head driving in this city is like … a holiday!”

“And, you’re not cold? Boris asked. “ Because you’re, nonetheless…”

“Monsieur is thinking of my origins?” The ears moved apart. “I’ll tell you. I spent three years in Moscow. You know what the temperature’s like there in January?”

“I do.” Boris said, smiling to himself. “Sometimes it’s minus twenty-five. When I was ten it went down to thirty below.”

The taxi stopped at an intersection. The driver turning, looked at Boris.

“Vy Russky?” he asked, genuinely happy. “I studied over there. I’ve a Russian wife.”

“At Lumumba?”

“At the Medical Institute.”

The taxi moved off and the driver switched back to French. “I didn’t finish. I got fed up with being a “black ass”. When I sat down on the bus somebody just had to say it. I’ve never in my life had to fight as much as I did over there. It particularly annoyed them that I, a black man, had foreign currency and that I could buy stuff in the

special shops…”

“Your wife is a Moscovite?”

“Yes, she is. She’s over there right now. She lived here for a month and went back. ‘ I can’t,’ she said. ‘This isn’t for me.’ She’ll come over, perhaps for the New Year. If not we’ll have to get a divorce. A pity. She’s a good woman. She’s got soul and, you know, she’s not like these puny little French women. She’s got staying power… You don’t fall asleep at ten o’clock in the evening with her…”

They drove over the Pont Neuf. On the Seine, towards Sully, a barge loaded with sand was slowly making headway.

“You can go right along Rivoli. But it’s probably best to take the Samar tunnel – the Louvre exit.”

“No problem,” said the driver and finished his conversation in Russian.

“Everything’s just fine, Comrades…”

**********

In his post box there was a large envelope bearing the stamp of the Social Security. Better not open that.

“ Don’t want to ruin my day, puss…”

Boris was whispering to the stairway cat which was rubbing its flanks against the doorjamb. The concierge was out. He knocked again. Dy-ob-on. No-bo-dy

“Je sonne- personne; je resonne- repersonne!”

“Madame, I’m interested in a relative of yours, Anita -Juanita, Rosa-Maria-Carlos. Is she about to pod? That inflatable cushion under her blouse suits her so well. She’ll be fine if she just shaves those whiskers… Madame, she was given a month’s pay in advance and, really, I expected that… when it comes down to it the reception hall parquet floor is covered in a layer of dust and the windows looking out on the Grand Canal…

**********

He’d just got his key when the stair light suddenly went out. Nature has blessed us with the gift of night sight. Tanks and armored transporters – rockets on caterpillar tracks, the key wouldn’t fit and what’s more the hooligans who piss over the wheels of jeeps shall not escape our … The door opened. There was a smell of something that prompted feelings of guilt in him. What could it be? A moldy bachelor existence. Fag ends in cups of coffee. A towel, still wet, on the bathroom floor. Then the door was brusquely ripped from his hands and slapped shut with a cannon shot. Bach! Aha, Johann Sebastian.

As he moved forward so he freed himself of his jacket and his shirt, unbuckled his belt. He reached the bed. He lifted the telephone handset. The last call had been from New York. He pressed redial. A burst of plastic machine gun bullets flew towards the window; something hissed, cracked and buzzed. He waited a minute then put the receiver down. The main thing was there was now something to send. The green stuff…

He pulled his trousers down and, with difficulty, threw socks, pants, watch onto an armchair….collapsed onto the bed. The right to relax is guaranteed in the Constitution. Where has that spot come from? Coffee?

He stretched out his arm blindly towards the answering machine and pressed down.

“Are you coming over for supper?” inquired Julie.

“I’ll come…” he said quietly.

“Call…” her voice was immeasurably tender. There was a click.

“Monsieur Boulanger speaking. Darty. I’m very happy to inform you that your Phillips vacuum cleaner has been repaired. With satisfaction” – click, click- “at any time you can mmmh come and collect it.” Crack!”

“Hello. Are you in? It’s Sandra. I’m in town. If you’ve got time call in at Rostand’s on Medici. I’ll be there between seven and eight. Ciao, darling…”

Beneath slammed-shut lids his eyes began to tickle. He had a warm feeling in his groin.

“Everything’s fine and dandy. It wasn’t me Sandra was talking to but you,” he said, feeling the little rascal raise his sleepy head. Sandra! A tremor passed through his body. Squeeze into her and let it all come in a warm flow. Crying together is more … than… What? I don’t remember. My memory is full of holes, more holes than your colander.

********

He woke up at five minutes to three. His sweaty face glued to the pillow. The sky behind the billowing curtains was a liquid pearl. From the street could be heard the dull throb of African drums. He stood for a long while under a burning hot shower, then a cold one. Wiping himself down with a filthy towel he pulled his jeans up over his naked flesh and dug a pair of white tennis pumps out from under the bed. In passing he switched on the coffee machine, the radio. In Brittany, in the Gulf of Morbihan, a storm was due. In Germany the Ossies were asking the Wessies to exchange bank accounts. In Shanghai a plane belonging to a local airline had landed upside down. All the passengers were alive but in a bad way.

He pulled on a black T-shirt decorated with a blue Harley eagle and pressed redial again; waited, then rang Julie.

“I’ll be with you after nine,” he said after the squeaky beep.

Casting a glance at the filthy cups, he switched off the coffee maker, grabbed his wallet and sun glasses, opened the fridge – there was a whiff of something rancid - and got out a bottle of orange juice, unscrewed the top and screwed it back on again. Fuck you! To no one in particular. The wicked world.

Somersaulted aircraft, letters from the Income Tax and Social Security, inciting roaches to make themselves at home under coffee makers and transforming the blood of Jaffa orange into rat piss…

“Have you tried it?” someone asked. “Rat piss?”

Closing the door, he heard a short ring and his own voice on the answering machine. Then there was a click and the deep chesty voice of General Shumalov’s daughter said:-

“Boris Stepanovitch, could you possibly give me a ring at the office. It’s Sofia Ivanovna. I would be grateful if you would. Thank you.”

He slammed the door.

***********

Alain Dubier had at one time been special correspondent in Moscow, then in Peking, then in Washington. So Dubier could have been the boss by now. In stead he was the boss’s deputy. Either he hadn’t been forgiven his fiery youth or it was that millionairess wife of his. In the lobby, by the elevator, in the corridors – everywhere- were cardboard boxes; filled to the brim with documents. The editorial office was being transferred to another building at the end of September.

Dubier wasn’t in his office and Boris, seating himself in a large revolving chair, began to leaf through Newsweek. Alain, glasses on the bridge of his nose, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, entered as quietly as a fox, a very large fox. In his hand was a bunch of dispatches.

“I called Pierre in Moscow,” he said, gently lowering himself into the chair opposite. The reds of his eyes gazed wearily but attentively from above his glasses. “He says everything’s quiet. There’s been no sign of any troop movements, no increase in the usual patrols. Reuter’s correspondent…”

Boris held out his piece of paper.

“Should I translate?”

“Oh, as long as it isn’t poetry… I haven’t forgotten the great, magnificent…” He spoke with a strong accent but he didn’t make any mistakes. Reading it through Alain cleared his throat, scratched his hair.

“Want a drink?”

“Oh, no thanks.” Boris declined his offer. Alain, still reading, switched the coffee machine on with his thumb.

“Oh, coffee. Yes. I wouldn’t say no.”

Boris stood up.

“Shall I pour?”

“Hmm.” Alain was looking for a phone number on the computer screen. “ I don’t know if we can put this out. It’s too serious.”

“It’s up to you.” Boris said. “But I have already paid for it.”

“Yes, yes. I remember.” Alain pressed a key, the computer began dialing the number. “ Call in on the second floor. They’ll write you out a receipt. Have you known him long?”

“Zorin? He was a neighbor of ours. His mother used to come and borrow salt and matches from us.”

“ A small world?”

“The world isn’t that small, it’s just cramped over there…”

“ A steely Chekist?”

“One hundred per cent.”

“What do you think personally? Why do they need to do it? Put pressure on Gorby? Shake his nerves?”

“You think it’s all bluff?”

“If this is true, it could be the beginning of a disaster… No-one wants to see a period of peace and quiet come to an abrupt end.”

Boris placed a plastic cup of coffee in front of them.

“ The Cold War was actually the least dangerous of times. From now on and for a very very long time to come we’re all going to be in deep doo-doo. At any moment anything can happen…”

“That’s not the Quai D’Orsay’s line on it.”

The telephone call wasn’t being answered.

“Well you can you expect to find in Paris on the 16^th of August? It’s silly.” He pressed a key and the phone stopped ringing. “Anyway, thanks. The information’s ours. We’ll wait till tomorrow.”

“And what if, tomorrow…?” Boris wanted to say but he held back.

“Thanks for the coffee…”

Alain held out a sluggish hand. Boris once again covertly examined his face. One tired old-timer. And he drinks like a fish. Short of breath. There’s the reason for those famously pithy sentences of his. His breath won’t hold out.

On the second floor he received an envelope with his name on it then hustled off to the morgue - he needed to get hold of everything on Garreau, the whole of Garreau - but the archives had already been transferred. Out on the street he bought himself a hot chocolate crepe and with fifteen minutes to spare before closing time he flew into the semi-dark of the entrance hall of the American Express. Down below in the semi-basement - where a line of people snaked, still waiting to change their money, greenbacks for francs, for checks, for marks. He filled in a form, counted out ten five hundred-franc notes, asked for the form back and in the section marked Text scratched “Sorry be late”, signed and catapulted himself outside.

No guilt! No harm. And some profit. Happiness is a warm gun! But where’s the famous trigger?

He cut across the Place de l’Opera. It always has something of the merchant caste about it; money grubbing, Muscovite, pre-Revolutionary, but… But? Multiplied a hundred fold. He descended the Avenue, went into Brentano’s, started excavating amongst the books, bought the New York Review of Books, got to the Comedie Francaise and sat down in the small café behind the colonnade. Who was he going to eat? They brought him real okroshka, minus the kvas, and a light beer,

He ate, gazing vacantly at the tiny square with its dense barricade of tourist coaches. The sun was shining through all the gaps; in shafts, in rays and raylets.

The sun hummed in mighty columns in the vaulted bay of the Louvre, it hissed splattered and poured its warmth over the passers by in the Palais Royal. One narrow laser-like ray, coming from God knows where, slowly crawled from bottle to bottle as it closed in on the barman’s bald spot. The enflamed bottle glass remained burning a long while yet. Boris turned. Who wants to look at a burnt through skull, the steaming brains of a Parisian barman?

He remembered the magnifying glass, the treasured burning glass of his childhood, which could be used to set fire to whatever you chose. A roll of film, the bows of a pair of spectacles –even better, a comb. He watched as the blue smoking little ray burnt the letter B on the handle of a ping-pong bat. The B was hissing. He remembered how they had focused the blinding fiery spot on a pair of pants with diagonal stripes – and made a hole! And shoes as well. You just had to wait a little longer. Zoi brought the golden spot to bear on Kim’s naked shoulders on the beach and he went around with a broken nose for a week afterwards…

He left the salad unfinished, settled up and walked on past the Louvre towards the river. Crossing the Pont des Arts he passed a superannuated rocker strumming something he couldn’t quite put a name to on his played-out guitar, then a long legged Yankee sunbathing on a bench whose cap bore the inscription Living Immortals, near a man in a somber suit and tie who was looking, tight-lipped, at the Ile de la Cite through the viewfinder of a camera ( had he been to a funeral?). How was it possible in this heat…? He passed a Japanese who was at an easel painting the shady riverbank and the barges at their moorings, a man in a huge straw hat and tattered shorts panhandling for drinks money and emerged on the left bank. It was his favorite walk

A half-hour later, after casting a glance at the terrace at Rostand’s, he turned towards his office. Having turned off the alarm he uncorked the window and sat down at his desk. A 2 was pulsing on his answering machine. The first message was a repeat of the one Julie had left at the apartment, the second was the hoarse voice of Kim giving out with:-

“I’ve just flown in… I tried to find you at your office or in Montparnasse… See you…”

Good God! Boris thought. And the bread? The green stuff? Eventually though, they’ll send it back here. A waste of time, no more.

He was glad. He tried not to think about Desiree. Probably they’d had a row. Perhaps they’d been about to break up again. A pity. They were completely… for each other… The bottle of Vichy water was warm. He tipped some over himself, swallowed some. It was boiling. He took off his shirt, yawned loudly and made his way to the pigsty of a washroom. He splashed water down to his waistline, drank from the tap. Warm as well. Returned, sat himself down on the beat-up couch. “There won’t be any rain”, he thought, stretched and moved closer to the phone. What was the number of the apartment on the Champs Notre-Dame? He remembered the number but wasn’t so sure of the last digit. He rang. A young woman’s voice answered in English.

“Hello?”

He asked if it was Mademoiselle Leroux’s apartment. Yes, it was. Who was he speaking to? The leasee. Miss had taken the flat for six months. No, nobody had rung for Mlle Leroux and nobody - no, no- had called at the flat… There was a hiss of water, the telephone clicked. Miss, it was clear, was talking on a cordless phone while standing under the shower.

He decided to have a look in the New York Review of Books but couldn’t find it. He’d left it in the café. He switched his computer on and, from lack of anything better to do, began to clean up his files. He wiped off half the backup files he’d created, got into Norton and de-fragmented his hard drive. Then he shut it down. It might be a good idea to buy a modem.

As he put on his T-shirt which was soaked through with sweat he realized that spleen was oozing out of him from some deep internal fissure and he fished in the waste-paper basket for a hidden bottle of Ballantine’s and drank. The whiskey resonated in him and left a slight sensation of burning.

“Tomorrow,” he said “ a strict diet. Basta!”

**********

Sandra was sitting in the very furthest corner by a bookstand. She was on her own. He plumped himself down beside her. He made circular motions with his head.

“Are we acquainted?”. He asked

“No.” She said, kissing him on the lips. “But that’ll pass.”

“God, how beautiful you are!” There was a tickling in his throat.

“ At least you know what you’ll be losing…”

For a moment her smile vanished.

He wanted to order a shandy but when she ordered a kir he changed his mind and called the waiter back. He was brought a highball of vodka on the rocks and a bottle of tonic water.

“I can’t face being with you without a double.”

She drank her coffee.

“Night flight.” She smiled, watching his expression. “Anyway, I won’t sleep.”

“As per usual,” he said, feeling himself getting drunk.

“You know where I’m off to?” She caressed his arm.

“Moscow… “

“ Ca!”

For a minutes he wasn’t sure which language they were talking in.

“Ca, tu as mal choisi…”

“Why?” she asked.

“A surprise. A hack’s ravings… You’ll find out tomorrow…Don’t take any notice, it’s nothing, it’s a sort … of joke.” He added, noting that her eyes continued their questioning.

They fell silent. Tetso, a bag of rackets in his hand, gave them a wave as he passed by. A lapdog emerged from beneath a neighboring table and thrusting out its tongue fixed its gaze on Sandra.

She threw it a sugar lump. The sun was lower than the treetops now and, from time to time, it shone through the gaps in their branches like an arc welder that was on the blink.

“Kim’s hit town.” Boris said finally. “Perhaps he’ll put in an appearance. Everything’s up in the air with them again…”

“Listen.” Sandra took his hand, raised it and stared at his palm. “Let’s go to your office, it’s right next door, isn’t it?”

“Thirty yards away,” he answered. He knew that quiet voice of hers. Is it worth it. Everything will start over again, right from the beginning… He wiped the sweat from his brow with a napkin.

“When I’m with someone else,” she was looking to one side now, “ I think about you. Practically every time it’s you I finish up with.”

“It’s the same with me.” Boris said.

He took his numbed hand away from her. She stood up, pulled out a hundred-franc bill and shoved it under the ashtray. Already on his feet, he knocked back the vodka and tonic and, almost crushing the pooch in the process, extricated himself from the table.

Past the bookshop display window, past the minuscule gallery, past the film poster store, past the stationer’s and past the florist’s stall beside which - amidst the thickets of berberis and dahlias - a rubber hose snaked and danced on the wet asphalt, past the tarot cards, past the vitamins and herbs they walked and took a turn to the right into the entrance way that was as chilly as a church.

On his way out he had forgotten to turn on the alarm and now as he switched it off in reality he was switching it on. Realizing this at the last moment he punched in the code. He felt shivery and his body was shaking.

“Je suis malade de toi…”

Sandra, sliding her hands behind her back, undid her bra. Her skirt hung neatly on the back of a chair. Hopping on one leg she pulled off her slip. He turned to her and she abruptly drew him to her and kissing him forcefully, blindly, began undoing the belt of his jeans. Her hand slid under the jeans and he felt himself filling with strength in her hands, her breasts pressing into him. Momentarily they separated. He pulled off his T-shirt then his jeans and, almost falling onto the couch, they passionately caressed and pummeled each other, as if they were actually making sure everything was in its proper place after their separation. His hand was between her legs; he stroked her carefully, feeling her swell, open up to him.

She flowed like a torn carton of mango juice.

The couch was not the most convenient of places: somehow he found his equilibrium and entered her forcefully, feeling how the whole of her was rising to meet him. She had perfected the technique of being able to moan almost in silence by biting on an arm - not necessarily her own. He thrust himself against her, thrust into her with some ferocity.

“I can’t wait,” she whispered and, not closing her eyes, looking him straight in the eye, seeking his mouth with her own, she reached the finishing line, climaxing in diminutive spasms. He kissed her damp shoulders, her damp breasts, face…

************

It was just gone nine o’clock. Sandra emerged from the toilet, rubbing herself down with a pitifully small towel. He was sitting on the floor smoking. His body was slowly growing cold. Between his shoulder blades a rivulet of sweat was drying up.

“Don’t feel sad,” she said, pulling her skirt off the back of a chair. “Cela nous est deja arrive. Remember? On Ischia. You couldn’t get off then either.”

“C’est dans ma tete…” he said.

“ You think someone else’s is involved? Of course it’s your head. Your idiotic head.”

She started to button up her blouse.

“I’ve got a bit of time to spare, shall we walk through the park?”

He stretched out his hand and grasped the bottle of whiskey.

“I could do with a drink of beer,” he said, taking a large gulp of liquor. “A cold beer.”

“Rostand’s is open till when?” she asked.

It was just past ten. He called Julie on the phone. Her voice was caramel sweet.

“I was expecting you…”

“Listen,” he watched as Sandra used a large comb on her hair, “ Kim has arrived. He hasn’t rung, has he? I can’t think where to look for him…”

“What time will you be here?” Her voice was flat now.

“An hour?” he answered interrogatively. Sandra shook her head. “An hour. If he rings tell him I’m on my way…”

***********

They went back to Rostand’s and, standing at the bar, he quickly drank off a glass of draught beer.

Crossing the street at an angle they made their way into the park.

On that side - the Rue de Medici, Boul’ Mich’ side - the leaves of the chestnut trees were already starting to turn yellow. The sun was now very low in the sky, somewhere off by the Montparnasse Tower, and they were forced to screw up their eyes. Its rays were a thick raspberry hue, at times almost verging on green and, until they had passed the fountain and the duck pond it just wasn’t possible for them to remove their sunglasses. They sat down by the railings, having placed two of the cumbersome park chairs side by side.

“Je ne suis pas triste,” he said. “ There’s no need for you to suffer for my sake.”

She leant forward and kissed his palm. It was something she rarely did and every time she did it ants would crawl up his spine. Deep shadows were falling on every side, narrowing, stretching out towards the pond. There was a faint scent of lemon in the air, of nicotinia, of stagnant water.

“Do you think we could live together? If I were to get a divorce ?” Sandra looked to one side.

“My God! he thought. “Of course! Starting right this minute. For now and ever more!”

“Is that what you want?” he said aloud.

He got out a cigarette, broke it in two, and lit it.

“I don’t know,” he watched as, ramming soft layers of red dust, a bee crawled towards the foot of his chair, “exactly what went rotten in our relationship. I mean, with me… with Kim, perhaps…we’re twins really…do you understand? I’ve got this feeling that I was born with some vital internal organ missing or that it’s atrophied since I was a child. At least I’m not like you. Like you Westerners, I mean. We’re not like that. It’s silly but I’ve come to that conclusion after a lot of years. I don’t like that word – emigration.”

The wind swayed the branches of the trees above them, red-rose dust ascended in a cloud, lit up here and there by the rays of the low sun and whirled around like a toy tornado.

“What you’re trying to say,” she carried on looking away, “and I know you don’t like that word either, is that when you feel happy you start feeling guilty…or is it sad? Can’t you just simply be happy? Without any consequences?”

“You know, if you were to fall out of a window you could, if you wanted to, say you were flying but, in fact, you’d still be falling. You know, when I’m with you I really am happy. And yet, at the very same time, I start hearing alarm bells. Sirens. It’s as if I don’t have the right… I literally don’t how to put it… Suicide? Suicidally?”

The bee jerked, moved off and vanished.

“That’s your answer?” Sandra asked. “You don’t want to live with me because of that sound of sirens?”

Somewhere off in the direction of the basketball pitch a whistle trilled. And straightaway, from every side, from the depths of the park, from the palace, from the distant rhododendron bushes by the Medici fountain, from the direction of the colonnade and the chipped lions, came the sound of parkeepers’ whistles.

“Fermeture!” The shouts came from every direction. “Closing time. Fermeture.”

A plump silver-bearded man with a whistle in his hand drew near them. “We’re closing Mesdames et Messieurs.” He smiled at them with moist red lips. “Fermeture!”

They stood up and made for the exit. In the dense shade of the chestnut grove the very last embers of the sun were burning in the hot sand, like pools of blood.

“The gates are already closed on that side.” A park-keeper’s voice warned them from somewhere to the side. “Take the central avenue, please.”

“If you and I were to start living together tomorrow morning,” he began - astonished that the words came with such difficulty, that it was suddenly so hard to get them out - “and if, after a year or after five years, everything we have together came to an end, stopped being vibrant, dried up, then for me it would be the end of everything. Not me and you…” he led her by the hand, the way you would lead a child, “ but of everything. You understand? The end of everything, of every possibility in life. In general.”

“And you don’t want to take the risk?” she asked, squinting. Her head was empty and as she walked she seemed to be looking for something down by her feet, “Idiot …” she added, after a pause, shaking her head. “You’re simply very stupid, weak-minded, completely idiotic, an all round fool, a fool to the power of…!”

“I know,” he said “I’m more than a fool.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

She raised her head. Her eyes were glistening, her mouth smiled a strained smile. “What do you want to talk about? About when we …”

He filled his lungs with air.

“I’ve got this feeling,” he began- he had this almost physical sensation of being split in two- “that an entirely new era is about to begin. Right now it’s imperceptible. But when we, the whole bunch of us, made our way over here it was a very different time. I don’t know, if you feel that… I remember this dense fog of unbearable feeling – like a dog pining - and, somewhere in Moscow, I met up with an old flame. She had got married to a diplomat and had just got back from Europe. I asked her :-

‘What’s it like over there? In Europe?’

‘Terrific,’ she said. ‘The whole of Europe is dancing…’

What I want to say is. They stopped. It’s not because I’m past forty now. In Europe they’re not dancing anymore. That’s all finished now: the Sexual Revolution, the racing down the freeway, the acid trips, the islands in warm seas, the old farms bought for a song in Normandy, Woodstock. McCluhan, T.M., …Well, all that does, after a fashion, go on going on, it’s still got life in it, but it’s like a reflection in a mirror with no light on it. You know, take a long look at a twig of jasmine, close your eyes and it’s still there, trembling somewhere on the inside of your eyelids… Everything that’s happening now is just a reflection in a mirror with no light on it, on the inside of your eyelids…”

They were standing under some limes. She was looking at him with the old tenderness.

“Eschatological rantings,” she said as she ran the palm of her hand across his face. “And what about alien invasion? What else has got stuck between those two hemispheres of yours?”

“At random?” he asked. “We’re all like the Jews. Scattered to the four winds. Even at home. And without an Israel. Without a Promised Land.”

“Is that all?”

He drew her to him, breathed in the scent of her hair, kissed her behind her ear.

“My God! How tiresome it is being an idiot,” he said, taking her by the arm.

His steps were less assured now, different. He felt the earth swaying, swimming. Behind him the sky was silently widely turning, the Montparnasse Tower was sliding aside, the trees were laying themselves down prone. The Senate House was climbing to the zenith, the pond’s green water was gushing over its edges, greasy carp were beating on the gravel paths…

At the gates onto the Boul’ Mich’ there was a small disturbance. One couple tried to take advantage of it to get back into the park.

“It’s closed.” Said a rosy-cheeked park-keeper, barring their way. “I’m sorry. Come again tomorrow. We open at eight o’ clock.”

Paris, 1992 - 1998

*********