We are Scythians

My wife has told me to get a move on with this book, so I've set myself the deadline of April 28th 2011 to finish it by.

Chapter 23
The brownstone facade of the Historical Museum stretched almost symmetrically along two quiet, sunny backstreets behind Lenin Avenue. Zhenya approached from the direction of the market, having picked up some dried fish to go with her beer that evening. (It was going to be another slow, awkward night at her mother's, she feared, avoiding conflicts, or any possible breakthroughs in communication, in front of a TV cop show—but at least there were only a few days now before she could go home to Britain, thank God.) At the back of her throat a maddening tickle, which she had carried about with her since she'd arrived in town, made her splutter at intervals fitfully, though it was still nice along there, away from the noise of the market. The building itself must once have seemed quite grand in its provincial setting, and may even have been the townhouse of a prosperous factory owner before the revolution, she thought. Now, its pallid-green, mock-Doric plaster columns, which were squeezed in on either side of the corner entrance-way, reminded the visitor of nothing so much as Miss Havisham's ancient wedding cake, as if something important had been irretrievably lost.
It was Independence Day and a small group of cadets from the military academy were milling around the museum’s entrance, eating ice-creams, somehow too timidly. Despite the weather, which was already stifling at that early hour, they were making the most of the holiday atmosphere on what was probably one of the last bursts of summer. They were dressed in dark jackets and white, creasy trousers, like dishevelled naval officers from the nineteenth century.
Zhenya wondered why she'd chosen the place for a visit. She'd never been that interested in the past—not that past, anyway—and she was not a tourist. She was beginning to think she might have picked the wrong day for such an excursion. But she was there now. It gave her a chance to spend more time away from the house—and, you never knew, she might even enjoy it. Along the bottom right-hand wall of the museum, an array of bulbous stone figures, the totemic remains of a previous steppe culture, were rotting away in the sun; three tall, imperious poplars, swaying every now and then only at their heights, lined the pavement in front of them. At the foot of the short flight of steps up to the double front-doors the young woman noticed a worn-out metal boot-scraper, so that the image of a horseman in a white peasant smock, dismounting his steed after a swift ride over the steppe, flared briefly across her consciousness. Then the horseman scraped the mud from his high riding boots before entering the townhouse for a sumptuous dinner at a long, polished table, and Zhenya followed him in.

Maternity Ward No. 6

I got stuck on that last chapter: I think it started in the wrong place. In the meantime, here's a short one.

Chapter 21

Lodged in the doorway between the corridor and her ward, Vita looked the agitated stranger up and down.
“My wife,” he said, “how is she?”
He was a short, slightly-built man with greying, unruly hair, aged between 40 and 45. In the dim hallway of Maternity Clinic No. 6, against walls of pale mint-green, Vita could make out the signs of controlled strain on his patchily stubbled face. He had the grin, she thought, of an ingratiating wolf.
With one arm behind her, one on the handle of the ward’s swing-doors, it was as if she thought he might try to force his way in past her. It had been a busy afternoon and she'd been run off her feet (though, because of staff shortages, she’d be on duty for a couple more hours yet), and had only meant to dash out for a drink from the canteen, when the visitor, who was waiting for news on the condition of his pregnant wife, had pounced on her before she'd emerged fully from the ward entrance. A strong whiff of freshly smoked tobacco suffused the fabric of his dark-blue suit. He had on a denim-blue shirt and a grey tie, which he had roughly loosened.
“Look, I’ve been here for two, no, more than three hours, and no one will tell me a thing.” His pale, apprehensive face loomed out of the semi-darkness disconcertingly like an unattached balloon. “Is she alright?" he said. "I came as soon as I heard. You see, she's never been very strong.” Then he tapped nervously on the glass cover of his watch, which looked expensive. “How is she?" he added after a pause. "Can I go in?”
“No visitors at this stage,” replied the nurse, confident in the authority of her white staff coat. “It is not permitted.”
At this, the visitor hopped awkwardly, as if he suddenly felt prickly all over—as if the walls of the hospital had trapped him in a role he was unused to, draining him of his strength. He seemed to wobble between attack and retreat. Finally, the visitor managed to master himself—calculating, perhaps, that a friendly approach on this occasion might be more fruitful. As he prepared for this change of tack, the little man tugged at the woollen lapels of the jacket draped over his shoulders against the chill of the dark corridor, where not even the famous late summer heat of the Black Sea Steppe could penetrate.
“It’s just that she’s not very strong,” he repeated, with greater reticence than before. “With our last child, she was in a lot of pain. The doctor said they were lucky to survive—though both did, thank God.” As he blessed himself, he coughed violently into the clenched fist of his free hand.
“You must let us do our job,” said Vita. “Look, she’ll be fine. We’re just waiting until the contractions become more regular.”
The man nodded, unable to speak through his coughing fit. He pulled a hanky from his inside jacket pocket and phlegmed into it vehemently. For as long as he had been there, he had eaten nothing, drank nothing, and the sly self-assurance of his face, which seemed to have become etched in it, had taken on a waxen translucence. He popped out onto a stairwell to smoke a panatella, blowing the smoke out of a window hatch in a glass wall that looked out over a Spartan car park two stories below, where, on the pavement approach, under the shade of some ailing poplars, motionless invalids in wheelchairs had been parked up, out of the way. On a wall above a notice board beside him, an old cardboard sign read, “Children are the future of the State.” He shuddered, imagining the children of Beslan running through the flames of the burning school-building, mown down in the crossfire (the incident had happened almost a year before). Then he thought about his own children—two boys and a girl, all below the age of eight. Perhaps he would call work. Flicking open a mobile, he was soon back in a world he knew, berating an unfortunate subordinate on the other end.

Up in the air

Chapter 14
Kiev, late summer 2005

The smell of unburnt petrol fumes filled the grimy-white BMW. In the back seat, feeling queasy, Zhenya was on the verge of sharing the observation that she could hardly have guessed, when she’d phoned for a cab that morning, that they were willing to throw in a fairground ride as well.
“Mind if I smoke?” said the driver as they juddered over some tramlines. He reached confidently for a carton of cigarettes in the front pocket of his checkered shirt, anticipating no objection.

“But the car,” spluttered Zhenya, genuinely afraid, “won’t it explode?”

In the rear-view mirror, she saw the driver pull a down-in-the-mouth expression of disappointed resignation, and he hunched his shoulders as if to say “suit yourself”. Since then, he’d been zipping in and out of the lanes of heavy traffic on the long, straight road to Borispil, swerving ever more wildly, ever more recklessly from side to side, coming up short behind a convoy of slow-moving Kamaz trucks, or belting down the wrong side of the road, slipping back into lane just ahead of an oncoming school bus, so that the young woman's hangover, which she'd acquired during an evening spent on a stool at the bar of the Ukraine Hotel, was rocking about in her head like a bag of stones. Then, just before the airport, without saying a word, he'd pulled in to a siding next to a row of silver poplars and Zhenya had tensed up, ready for the worst. But the hollow-faced driver just hopped out of the car and removed the magnetic taxi light from the car roof, got back in and restarted the engine.

Humdrum

Chapter 24

Osip Galkin trudged solemnly along the tarmac path back through the YunKom estate, tired now, but heading home. Twilight as it fell was almost granular, like soot, but at least the heat seemed to be lifting at last. On the corner, a feisty young mongrel was yapping at flies and passers-by, its head held stiffly, proudly, and behind the dustbins, from some withered bushes that rustled with the bright sound of tinsel, the inevitable crickets were scratching a weary tune. Coming towards him on the path, a tiny old woman, taking quick, short, bird-like steps, and wearing white pop socks on her sandalled feet, carried in each hand a galvanised-iron bucket of cold potatoes, which she’d probably been hawking down at the railway station. She was grimacing under the strain.

Vita hadn’t been pleased to see him: one of the women on her ward was having a difficult delivery and she would have to work late. She’d thanked him absent-mindedly for the chocolates and flowers, but would he mind taking them with him, and she would see him later at home? It occurred to Galkin that his wife might be having an affair. Who with? At the hospital, there must be plenty of opportunities. Osip's monobrow lifted at this novel possibility; what bothered him most was how little it worried him. What did he think of her, after all this time? They’d been teenage sweethearts and, apart from a brief and ill-advised marriage to a law student at the institute in Kharkov, they’d been together ever since—almost 20 years! Of course, he had no wish to see her harmed, and more often than not now he stayed silent when she said something he thought overbearing or crass. There was still a certain sentimental tenderness, but in truth he found her a bit vulgar, grasping, lacking in philosophical perspective, too swamped in life’s minutia to be able to develop an overview of it.
Alongside the tarmac strip, some telephone cables sagged mournfully between two wonky posts and a crooked birch leaned forward as if into a stiff wind. He looked behind him at the path spiralling up the hill he’d just climbed, continuing to harangue himself bitterly over of the day’s failures. Of course, he'd have shot Kulyeba, if Kulyeba had turned up—he had to believe that. It wasn't as if he didn't have the evidence of his guilt. But Osip couldn't even plan that properly. Time was running out and he was going in circles. What use was he? He felt transparent, light-headed, nauseous. There was a sensation, low in his belly and not fully articulated, that he was walking back through his own life, but could not recognise anything. He looked ahead again, but could not go on. Quite calmly, he considered the possibility that he was going mad—but what were the giveaway signs? How was he supposed to tell?
Osip frowned with the effort of thinking. What good was he? He recalled the look on Mila’s face once as she'd opened a box of perfume he’d bought her—crafty and bright-eyed, full of real delight and feigned surprise (she had a great sense of entitlement). At her flat, he liked to sit on the shabby sofa and watch her through the shimmering rainbow curtain over the doorway as she stood out of the balcony, puffing away happily on her long, slim cigarettes. This soppiness made him wince. The worst was he'd had no-one to talk to about her since her death, not even Arkady. Yet what was the use dredging up the past? He had long regretted confessing the affair to Vita—and not just because of the tears and tantrums, which he thought he understood. It was unseemly to foist yourself on others.

In the hallway of his flat, only the sour smell of burnt cooking fat, tinged with cabbage and gas, was waiting to greet him. Heavier than the air around it, his being sank. He stooped to switch on a low floor lamp under a row of coat hooks—it was quite dark now—but the lamp’s sphere of illumination was unable to penetrate very far into the gloom. As he hung it up on a wall peg, he felt as worn out as his bomber jacket—as if he were hanging himself up there, his own flayed hide. Really, what was the point of him? He forced off first one boot then the other, but without loosening the laces enough, side-footing them in the vague direction of the passage wall. Wiggling his toes into a pair of black slip-ons, the coolness of the slippers' lining through his socks gave him some momentary low-level relief.
In the kitchen, which was small and cramped, a saucepan of cabbage soup was laid out on the cooker and a wicker basket of bread on the folding table over by the window. There was a tea towel laid over the basket to keep the bread fresh. Trying the dials of the radio, a blast of raucous folk music assailed him, and he switched it straight off. From a biscuit tin on top of a cupboard by the cooker, he fished out a small package. Then he opened the door onto the balcony, which was little more than an oversized window box with a railing, and squeezed out onto the narrow platform, freeing from the light blue “Prima” carton a single cigarette.
Vita was sure to find out. A childish fear surged through him. He closed the door to, defiantly, the blaze of the struck match absolving him temporarily.
Behind the metals plant, the sun was melting away and the structures of the gas-storage tanks were the huge helmets of medieval knights in silhouette. How nice it was out there, above it all. Between his fingers, he let the cigarette consume itself. He couldn't understand why he'd stayed with his wife. He couldn’t fathom why he’d split with Mila. She wasn't everyone's idea of a beauty—she seemed always to smirk out of the side of a crooked mouth, and she wore an old black beret everywhere. But with her, it had always been easy: they’d just play cards, listen to music, chat about this and that, have a drink or two (she liked white beer and sweet Russian champagne). Also, she loved to dance and didn’t care at all if he wore his shoes indoors. But it was too late. He’d chosen the easy path: this cowardice not only sickened him, it baffled him, as he couldn’t quite work out how or when it had happened. For an easy life, he’d left important things unsaid. Or he'd tried to say them, but they'd come out sounding reflexive, insincere. One god-awful night towards the end, they'd been walking along a miserably rainy street in Donetsk, when she’d said without a lead up, “But I love you,” and he had mumbled to the pavement: “I love you, too”. Now, he could no longer tell if the memory was real. And his life had been no easier. He and Vita had so little in common. It was a strain simply to find new ways of avoiding her. He suspected that, at bottom, he might have stayed with her just to avoid an awkward scene. He looked down at the decrepit playground, which was deserted. In the distance, a great white smog-cloud had formed over the steel plant in the shape of an anvil, as if there had been an enormous explosion. Why was it so bloody difficult to get what you want?
From the direction of the steelworks came the clatter of numerous invisible machines, and a low unexplained rumble, like rubble, filled his ears. He peered up at the cosmos, but there was so little there he recognised: the Great Bear and the Little Bear, which looked more than anything like a couple of household saucepans, and the Milky Way, a stain on a tablecloth. Humdrum, monotonous, unspeakably dull. How tedious life was, how tedious it was to live—a bind, and irritation, the irritating buzz of an insect that you are not quick enough to swat, or even see. A humdrum buzz in the eardrum. Mundane as the clatter of domestic pots and pans. In the distance, Osip heard a discordant train whistle, like two bum notes on a harmonica fighting it out to make it to the top, struggling for air.

Blind justice

Chapter 11
Tram No.40 clattered slowly along Partisan Street. Outside the Palace of Justice, a life-sized cut-out of Femida, dispassionate goddess of law, was propped up against a wall like an advertising board. Heavily made-up, she had brass scales in one hand and a broad sword in the other, her eyes blindfolded.
There'd been news about Vazgen. A contact in records had traced his girlfriend to a block of flats on Karl Liebknecht Street, just over the railway track, so perhaps he was still in town. Osip had asked for a squad car to pick him up in, but Bobrovski had refused. The girlfriend, it turned out, had worked in Mila’s salon, though Osip couldn't remember whether he'd seen her there or not.
Arkady was to meet him at the Italian cemetery, and they'd take his car from there—it was safer to arrive together, in case Vazgen put up a fight. The investigator scanned the courtyard beside the tram stop for his promised back-up team, but there was no one about. He decided to carry on to the terminus anyway.
In the municipal park, the grass was sparse and wizened, the ground baked hard by a brazen sun. Maybe the captain was right: this wasn’t his job. What had got into him? Osip loosened his tie and wiped the sweat from his hairline, and his jaws clamped together involuntarily, pulsing the muscles in his cheek. Winding around the terminus, which was looped like a lasso, the tram came to a stop and its doors squeaked open. In the shadows of a narrow side alley, between a breeze-block shelter and the huge, pale-green cinema, Arkady was puffing a cigarette, shifting his weight from one foot to another. The cinema, themed like a roman temple, now mostly showed soft-porn, shoddy horrors, Bollywood imports. Someone had graffitied glasses and an imperial beard to the face of a girl in a mini-skirt looking saucily back over her shoulder out of a tatty poster on the wall, a few wisps of pubic hair along the knickerline. Emerging into sunlight, Arkasha shielded his eyes. The two men stopped on the patchy tarmac and bear-hugged. Since the incident at his flat three days before, Arkasha’s appearance was transformed, his face re-energised, again uncannily youthful, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
"And your people, where are they?" asked Arkady.
"Just us, I’m afraid," said Osip. “Where’s your car?”
"No car," said Arkady, giggling nervously. From an inside jacket pocket, the sleeves of which he’d rolled up to the elbows because of the heat, Arkasha pulled out a hefty steel spanner and said: “I brought this, though.”
By the time they reached the footbridge over the bunched tangle of railway tracks up to a coking plant, Arkady had again withdrawn into the privacy of a cigarette. In silence they ascended the wooden stairs, and Osip considered briefly what it was like to be Shapiro, forever making unpalatable compromises with men like Kulyeba, whose gift was simply that they lacked the capacity to be ashamed; scurrying this way and that through the cracks in life’s skirting boards, past traps, like a rat. Kulyeba had “eased” Shapiro out of the steel plant after he’d fronted it for him as a favour, and at some personal risk. He’d probably made some money, though, and at least he’d survived. Others hadn’t been so lucky (two metals traders who’d tried to set up on their own had been shot). Yet Arkady retained a likeable lightness, almost an innocence, that was hard to define.


Down on the track, through the bridge’s iron safety grills, Galkin could see a gang of railway workers, berry brown and stripped to the waist, resetting short sections of rail in the blistering heat. Involuntarily, he rubbed the prominent scar on the right side of his forehead where a suspect has once caught him with a broken bottle.
On the opposite platform, the two men trudged towards a gravel path that ran parallel to a pockmarked road, back in the direction they'd come from, their earlier buoyant spirits now seeming to evaporate through the pores of their skin. What were they doing there? And what the hell were they going to do when they arrived at Vazgen’s hotel? He imagined taking Vazgen by surprise in a body tackle, a sharp twinge of anxiety assailed the officer: he'd like to avoid violence, if he could, but perhaps it wasn't possible.

The girlfriend’s apartment block was at the far end of Karl Liebknecht Street. A short distance from the entrance, the two men came to a halt. Osip looked the tall building up and down, as if to assess the size of the task ahead. The building was 12 stories high and ultra-slim, like the component on a circuit-board. On its roof, ringed by a simple balustrade, was what looked like some large-scale communications equipment. By the dusty steps’ entrance, emaciated birch trees stood guard, stooping like so many bony Don Quixotes, lances raised. Osip's consciousness quivered, itching for a smoke, and Arkady shifted from foot to foot. Absorption in the task ahead deadened an awareness of the surrounding urban noise.
“Wait by the double doors,” said the investigator. “If you hear shooting, make yourself scarce. But if he runs out, see if you can’t trip him up.”


He waited in a chilly hallway which had walls the colour of eggshell as the narrow lift descended with the sound of nails scraping down a blackboard; at ground level, its dented metal doors opened stiffly. On the eighth floor, Galkin stepped out into a dim corridor. On the concrete floor ahead of him was a dead rat, lying on its side, peacefully, as if in sleep, two paws tucked up sweetly under its jaws. Shivering in disgust, but stepped over it carefully, as if not wishing to wake it. Osip thought about Femida, with her scales held out before her, boldly—but at least she was armed. When he knocked on a red door, twice, it was open. Down a fusty hallway a stoop-shouldered, stocky young man in his 20s was sitting on the side of a bed, motionless, puffy-eyed. He had jug ears and a skinhead, and his red paisley shirt was unbuttoned, half-tucked into his belted black jeans. A lit cigarette was jutting cockily from the side of his mouth. Behind him on the unmade bed could just be made out the figure of a half-naked girl stretched out, comatose.
“The militia have the place surrounded,” said Galkin theatrically, raising his voice. “You'd better come quietly.”
But the young man didn't stir. Perhaps he was weighing up his options. Perhaps one of the gnarled threads of smoke curling up from his dangling fag had stung him in the eye at the critical moment, inhibiting his ability to respond. Supposing that he was just stoned, however, the officer advanced down the hall, which smelled of tooth-decay or of sweet bad breath, where his attempt to handcuff the suspect met little resistance.
Back out on the towerblock steps, Arkady inserted the spanner back in an inside jacket pocket irritably: having gone to the trouble of psyching himself up, he seemed put out to learn that it was all over without much fuss.
“Thanks for your help,” said Galkin, "I can take it from here". Then he prodded the suspect back in the direction of the little wooden bridge and the tram.
"Want to meet up later for a drink at the Alligator Club?” said Arkady. Galkin said he'd be there in a couple of hours.
The tram back across town was full of Saturday shoppers heading for the busy central market. The conductress, as he paid their fares, gave Galkin and his charge a look half-suspicious, half-puzzled, but she kept stum. Galkin stared out of the window at the forest of tall chimneys of the steel plant, densely packed, each spouting a wind-sock of black smoke. Vita probably wasn't up yet. On the kitchen table at home, he’d left her a gift-wrapped package of the crimson shoes she'd wanted and a note wishing her all the best on her 35th.

The Alligator Club

Chapter 12

The Alligator Club was tucked away to the side of a double-helix stairway that wound up through the multiple floors of the Palace of Culture. When Galkin arrived at the bar, two little girls in blue leotards and pink leggings were standing on tiptoes ahead of him; bunking off a gymnastics class, they were buying with their attendance money a tasty snack of crisps, coconut sweets, fizzy drinks.
Shapiro was sitting at the other end of the bar, peering out of a large window into Lenin Square. He was nibbling on a few thin shreds of dried calamari laid out on a saucer and was most of the way through a beer.
As the children counted out their precious coins, Osip waited his turn. When the girls left, skipping, pleased with their haul, he ordered a couple of bottles of Obolon Light lager from behind a half-sized, glass-doored fridge.
“Arkasha,” said Osip, approaching his associate along a short central aisle. Placing the cool, perspiring bottles down on the tabletop, he pulled up a chair and sat down. “How’s things?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain,” said Shapiro, grinning. “Small victories!" he said, raising his glass half-heartedly.
“Sorry I’m a late,” said Galkin, “there was some paperwork.”
“No problem, no problem,” said Arkady. “To life,” he said, and they clinked together the fresh bottles of beer. Behind them, on a TV mounted against a yellow wall above the stencilled outline of a blue palm tree, a sports broadcaster was reading the football scores. Wild-eyed, Arkady leaned on his elbows over the table, took a few swift sips as he squirmed uneasily in his chair. “Enjoy yourself while you can,” he said, “you can’t take it with you when you go.” Then he offered the investigator a cigarette from a depleted carton.
“Not for me,” said the officer.
“Can't tempt you, then? Good for you. Never look back, that’s my motto. But with me, if you live, you live. O, and, by the way, how’s the wife?”

Both men’s spouses were fine. Vita Ivanova, Osip’s second wife, was fine—still at the hospital, working long hours. They seemed to cross paths less and less, now that the boys were growing up. And Katya Ramizovna, Arkady’s third wife, was fine—still running the second-hand clothes shop he'd bought her, and which she liked to call a “boutique”. But for some reason the doctor had put her back on tranquilisers.
Osip weighed up his companion for a moment. What age was he? He guessed that he was in his mid-30s. He had on what must once have been a good grey woollen suit, but it was too loose about the shoulders, as if he was wasting away inside it. When he smiled, which was often, faint wrinkles appeared in concentric half-circles on his cheeks, at the corners of his mouth, surrounding everything he said in multiple brackets, asides within asides.

Clutching their beers the two men peered out into the square, which was bright as a desert, each finding one of those rare, separate moments of serenity, or perhaps its was just easeful oblivion, non-consciousness. At the other end of the room the stocky barman, slouched on a stool, was flipping a matchbox over and over on the wooden bar top. “I wish he’d stop that,” said Shapiro, “it’s getting tiresome.” Along Heroes’ Alley, the outlines of youthful soldiers’ faces lined the path on a series of small terracotta tablets, above their dates, and there were intermittent sprigs of wilting daffodils dug into the flowerbeds. In the metallic basin of the desiccated fountain, a pigeon hopped, hot-toed, over the scorching tin.

With a clear conscience

Chapter 26

Day of Knowledge, Southern Cemetery.
Hauling himself up with difficulty over a high cemetery wall, Galkin dropped to the ground on the other side unsteadily, glanced left and right, then set off at a bulky trot across the unkempt Jewish plots. Puffing and wheezing as he neared the back wall of a primitive outhouse, above the entrances of which on either side, he noticed, were daubed crudely the letters for male and for female in thick red paint. For a few moments he leaned his heaving frame against the decrepit brick structure to catch his breath.
Composure regained, Galkin peeked out around the building's right-hand side. Through a ringed array of bunched-up silver birches, which helped to conceal his position, he was able to watch the funeral proceedings at a safe distance. Between the figures at the front of a band of dark-clad mourners, the tussled grey hair of Valentin Kulyeba could just about be seen like a stormy cloudscape. When some late-comers in heavy grey overcoats arrived, they shook hands discreetly with some of those at the back of the group, bear-hugged, laughed at some inaudible remark. The tubby priest seemed to be eking out the ceremony, prolonging his stint at the centre of the drama. After a while, one or two of the attendees sat down nearby at a wooden table and chairs fixed next to a mottled-pink marble headstone, sharing a drink from a chrome and leather flask.
For Chrissakes, was he ever going to get a shot at Kulyeba? The thought crossed Osip's mind that it might not happen, a surge of panic rising inside him momentarily, though after a while his concentration wandered, so that he found himself brushing the smudges of dirt on his pleated trousers with his fingertips, considering…. He poked at a small, neat rip in the fabric around the knee, which he must have got rolling in over the graveyard wall (it was set along the top with worn-down broken glass). The torn flap in the sea-green garment that rose on the hole in his trouser leg reminded him of a small pyramid casting its shadow, and by the time he checked back on the funeral gathering, Kulyeba was gone. "Oh, Christ!" the officer gasped. Had he let him get away again? What should he do? He found himself pulled in several directions at once.
He crept back along the rear wall of the toilet block. On the side path leading to the main exit, behind a clump of dense sedge thicket, a dark shape moved—he was in time to see Kulyeba pass through the cemetery’s huge cast-iron gates. A stillness infused Osip’s consciousness, underpinned with an unexpectedly firm sense of determination. It was as if he had changed his relation to physical space: his path was not just clear, but inevitable, almost, and he felt full of energy, a ball poised at the top of an arc, ready to roll. Everything was happening in slow motion, the details sharp and vivid.
One half of the gate was turned in towards him. Through the distorted perspective of its widely space bars, he could see Kulyeba come to a halt no more than two hundred metres in front of him, pull out a mobile phone to take a call. Osip advanced, trying to carry himself lightly, all the time keeping to his left, close to the cemetery wall, so as to make his approach out of the line of sight. At the gate post, he peeked around: Kulyeba was pacing back and forth slowly along the narrow dirt pathway outside the graveyard, one hand flattened to his ear to listen more intently, gesticulating with the same hand agitatedly every now and then as he spoke.
Just then, pacing back, Kulyeba tripped, his shoes' smooth leather soles losing their grip on a loose rock or stone, so that the mobile slipped from his hand like a bar of soap, spinning in a descending curve through the air until it bounced down into an open manhole between him and the adjacent building site. Kulyeba's face reddened, and the veins in his forehead rose. His arms jerked in angry, staccato movements and a frothing stream of obscenities flooded over his lips. Behind gritted teeth, he restrained a gurgling howl of rage.
Osip stood rigid, held his breath, as Kulyeba with his back turned got down on all fours, stiffly, and crawled towards the drain; stretching his legs out behind him, knees bent, he balanced on the tips of his toes, hands placed either side of the opening, as if preparing for a sprint start. Then he lent forward and peered timidly inside.
A new plan came to Osip: he'd sneak up from behind, grab Kulyeba by the ankles and tip him in. Much less noise to attract attention. Also, with Kulyeba distracted, he'd have the element of surprise. If necessary, he could finish him off with a couple of caps, firing the gun inside the cavity to muffle the percussive sound of the shots. All these lines of reasoning went on simultaneously, in a flash.
He reached for the gun in his jacket, but it was stuck. Curling his left hand around inside his jacket to hold the ad hoc holster, he gave a good tug on the gun's grip, but by the time he’d managed to withdraw the weapon, this time resolved to use it, Kulyeba had again disappeared.
Galkin scanned a monotonous horizon. It took a second or two to realise what had happened: in front of him, a pair of well-made leather shoes were poking out of the ground, flailing: Kulyeba must have lost his balance and tumbled in, head first, so that the sides of the drain bound his arms tightly around him.
Without thinking, Galkin moved reflexively to aid the stricken man. But then, halfway, he stopped in his tracks. What was he doing? His thoughts swirled, adapted, curled themselves around him. Looking around furtively, he began to withdraw towards the cemetery gates. It wasn't as if he had pushed him in, so it couldn't be said he was to blame. The same thing would have happened even if he hadn't been there. Was he a killer? Not at heart, he knew. But did he really intend to save Kulyeba now, after tracking him for so long? Of course, he'd have shot him if it had come down to it, he reasoned: he wasn't a coward. But now that he didn't have to, couldn't he wash his hands of the matter? Continue to walk tall in front of his wife and his colleagues, his conscience clear?
The tan shoes flapped for a while in the sullen air weakly, as Kulyeba's lungs gave out. There were no cars or passers-by, and Maltsev's mourners had vanished, presumably for a well-oiled wake; even the gang of workers who were doing up the bungalow opposite seemed to have knocked off for a tea break. The officer pulled out a sky-blue Prima packet, but then thought better of it, wheeling about to creep back through the iron gate, back past the crumbling outhouse, across the Jewish plots, as if by retracing his steps he thought he was erasing them, removing any evidence of his having been there, and he hopped back up and over the cemetery wall, feeling horrified and relieved.

My house is on the outskirts

Chapter 27

At Klava’s. Miners’ Day, two years later.
Headlights lit up in binocular shape the planks of a dilapidated fence, a mid-section of lamppost, the small green hump of a rusty telephone relay box, as the car turned into a dirt path off Red Dawn Road. The car tyres scrunched over gravel stealthily. It must have been getting on for 11 o’clock.
Vita had been out for the evening, catching up with an old friend who was over from England to visit her mother, who now lived in a big house on the edge of Utansk, all alone. In fact, Galkin's wife had been fretting about the meeting ever since she’d taken the call a few days before, because the friend had been her great school rival—especially for the attention of boys. Her clothes, as she pawed through them, looked so tatty, so provincial. What was she going to wear? She’d fended off the friend’s suggestion that they meet up at Vita’s: although since Osip's promotion they'd moved into a bigger flat on Lenin Avenue, it was still being done up—a seemingly unending process—and was covered with musty canvas tarpaulins, cluttered up with step-ladders, buckets, brushes, stacked bags of plaster by the entrance door. Projecting onto the visitor her own sense of her belittlement, she feared eliciting the pity for those who have stayed behind. She found herself checking her appearance more carefully in the hallway mirror, noting especially the lines that splayed out from the corners of her eyes when she grinned (she admonished herself not to do this), the appearance of one or two unruly grey hairs. But at least she'd had children—unlike her former rival. She was very proud of her two boys. Neither was it a small achievement that she was now in charge of the antenatal ward. At one of the town's new boutiques, she picked up a pair of jeans the colour of pink grapefruit, a high-necked crimpelene top in peach, had her hair re-hennaed.

The mother's house was on the far edge of the town, just before the wilderness took over. It had been a long time since they’d all met there, as they’d used to quite often in the days just after college, before they’d gone their separate ways. Soon after, Osip and Vita had got married.

The car tyres scrunched stealthily along the gravelly lane. Up ahead, Osip could make out the dingy yellow lights from the windows of a few irregularly spaced little houses as he searched for a spot to park, pebbles springing up sporadically against the car’s underside with a sharp metallic clink. At the gate in the high fence, he rang the piercing electric bell and waited. After a time, he could hear multiple bolts being undone from the inside and then Klava Rustadze let him in. As he followed her down wide steps into the cool lower floor of the building, which served as a kitchen and pantry, in the gloom Osip just managed to navigate the sticky flytraps that uncurled vertically at even points from the doorjamb.
Inside, with her back to him, his wife was leaning into the wooden kitchen table, eagerly relating the details of the latest unbelievable news to Zhenya Rustadze, her old school friend. Zhenya had on a tight T-shirt and jeans, all green, and her hair was cropped—quite different from how he remembered her. But her dark-skinned, pretty face was unmistakable, almost childlike in its naivety as she patiently listened to his wife, nodding in agreement and encouragement at judicious intervals. It must have been ten years since he'd met her, though they’d always got on. Maybe he'd even had a bit of a crush on her. Sat beside her at the table was Zhenya's new English husband, bespectacled and a little overfed, bearing a weak, discomfited smile. There were drinks and snacks laid out on the table. Behind them, on the kitchen sideboard, a metal-blue keg of Baltica beer was tipped sideways in a large enamel pie dish, drowning in a pool of its own juice.
“Osip, how are you?” said Zhenya, and she cracked open a can of beer and handed it to him.
Osip nodded in silent greeting, took a slurp of the beer and pulled up a chair next to his wife—who, he now noticed, with some approval, was a little drunk. It was so rarely these days that she got a chance to let her hair down. Klava sat back in a chair a short distance from the table, as though awaiting permission to join in.
“How are you, Osip,” repeated Zhenya. “You look well.”
But before he could speak, Vita interjected: “He’s been promoted. He’s head of material investigations."
"She thought I’d be stuck on the bottom rung for good,” said the officer, with a laugh. Then Vita added: “But he’s taken up smoking again.”

“How long are you back?” asked Osip.
“A couple of weeks," replied Zhenya, "more than enough for anyone.” But she regretted the jibe even as it was leaving her mouth. They'd already been to visit her step-dad’s grave, she added quickly. In fact, they'd taken a wrong turn in the cemetery—it was so overgrown and unkempt there now—and had stumbled across rows of fresh gravestones: all those cocky young men who’d strutted about the town when she'd been a waitress, ten years before. One of them once spat in her face when she’d asked him to pay for his beer, and she'd even been out on a couple of dates with another—Arkady Shapiro, the lawyer's son. She hadn't even known that he'd died.
“A terrible business," said Klava. "Poor Arkasha. Such a funny little boy. Don’t you remember?” (She was speaking to Vita.) “Not even his wife could recognise him.”
“You knew Arkasha, didn’t you, Osip?” Vita said.
“Yes, I knew him.”
“They never found out who it was,” said Klava. "Soon after that, old Shapiro died in Israel. A stroke. (He always dressed so smartly.) The son’s death can’t have helped.” Then she brought her hands together in a mighty clap, squeezing the spirit of a mosquito out of its skin and making the jittery foreigner start.
“O, what a morbid conversation,” said Vita. “Can’t we talk about something more cheerful? Did you go into town today for the celebration? It was a lovely, bright day. All the young cadets were out in their dress uniforms.”
Klava said: “I saw Sashukian on the TV. He was giving away flats to crippled miners. It was a nice gesture.”
“The Armenian?” said Zhenya.
“He’s our new deputy,” said Vita.
“Got in on an anti-corruption ticket,” Osip added softly, almost under his breath. All of them, except Klava, burst into laughter.
Klava fumed. “At least he’s kept the mines open,” she said.
"But if he doesn't keep the mines open," said Vita, "he'll go broke."
At this, Osip took the opportunity to go outside to roll himself a cigarette.

It was a muggy night in late August. From the low wooden bench in Klava’s yard, beside a lattice screen of creepers, as he licked the gummy edge a cigarette paper he could see glowering over the back fence at the end of the long garden the silhouette of a huge slagheap on the grounds of the Utansk Metallurgical Works. Turning in the opposite direction, as if to escape its glare, he gazed up at the night sky, which was salted with the clusters of innumerable stars—the Great Pan and the Little Pan, that stubborn stain of the Milky Way—and inhaled.

The everlasting jump

This is the final chapter, or rather the epilogue, from my "lost novel".

Chapter 28
“The Scythians, as I said, take some of this hemp-seed, and, creeping under the felt coverings, throw it upon the red-hot stones; immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scyths, delighted, shout for joy.”
Herodotus, Histories.

After what seemed like a long trip away, Igor Nastanovich was coming down through a beautiful blue morning, but slowly, as though through a mass of water, a warm blue sea, and he could sense on his descent, as the outlines of the town were approaching—the house shapes, the streets, the statues, as though zooming in on a living urban map—that one or two of his organs were packing up, and he knew, without panic or self-pity—and in fact with a touch of relief—that he would probably be gone before he hit the ground.
He’d been squatting for months now in one of the derelict apartments along Industry Street. He and a couple of acquaintances had been living off what they could lift from the market, though one of their number had recently been given a pasting in the cells down at the militia station, and so Igor had been keeping a low profile. Of course, he’d thought about returning to his mother’s, who lived only a few streets away. The argument between them seemed so stupid now. What could she have done about the baby, anyway? But, in the end, an attempt at reconciliation was beyond the sum of his strength—it would have involved an obscure defeat which he could not stomach, even if he’d been conscious of it. He hadn’t been to see her in three years, and now it would stay that way.
Slumped up against a stunted lime tree outside a padlocked mechanic’s workshop, he leaned into a pile of food wrappers, washing powder cartons, plastic beer bottles, a crumpled pink packet of New Superlims, becoming one with the rubbish around him. In the cold of the early morning, under a huge open sky, a stray mongrel had curled up silently beside him, making the most of his dissipating warmth. Thinking over his life for the little that remained of it, Igor conceived of it—yes, that was it, he was sure of it now—as a falling sensation, queasiness, a lifelong feeling of unease. Then he turned to face his fate with fortitude—and at least he wasn’t alone.
Fading in an out of consciousness, in front of him appeared the fuzzy outlines of animated human shapes across a liquid border, a window into another world, the figures coming more into focus the longer he stared, as after a knock on the head. Soldiers—he could now make them out—in great coats and puttees stood about, strapped into their round tin hats. One of them, with stooped shoulders and spindly legs, was repeating in Italian (which Igor could understand) the punch line of a joke, approaching it each time with the same circumlocutions, the same dramatic pauses. Each time, the others in the group would laugh uncontrollably, rubbing the tears from their eyes, fresh each time, as if caught in a video loop.
"So we go in there and I said to the waitress…'Get the tinnies in!' Yeah, yeah, really, that's what I said."
Past and behind them, an emaciated peasant woman crept. Agitated and jittery, she sniffed this way and that. She kept asking if anyone had seen her baby, though she was holding it in her arms. From the opposite direction, rode a cavalryman of one of the steppe’s ancient nomad tribes, wearing a brown padded jacket and a black-spotted red cape. His keen, bird-like eyes flashed erratically. He was looking about desperately for something he’d lost. Mila too walked past, and Arkady, his famous curly locks singed and on end absurdly, as after a comic electric shock, the absence of eyebrows giving him a look or permanent surprise; with his hands planted firmly behind his back and locked together, studiedly informal, as if he was preparing to launch into speech, as if the two of them were out on an invigorating holiday stroll in the municipal park. Sherbakov was hanging about there, still wearing the noose that they’d dressed him in after 1905, although the tail of the noose was turned around so it hung down his shirt like a tie. He peered about warily, as if someone might still be after him, as if he had no intention of becoming a monument. Nearest the kerb, a pair of short legs, shod in expensive foreign shoes, were sticking out of an uncovered manhole, flailing incessantly. “Why can’t I feel it? Why can’t I feel it?” the owner of the legs was saying, over and over, his voice echoing inside the manhole but still audible, and Igor, becoming accustomed to the new reality, answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “Because you no longer have a head.”
Igor was floating now, rising gradually above the town where he had lived, mostly uselessly, and died for no purpose—as if he had simply bounced off the world, leaving no impression on it—and he could see laid out below him the lucid, pulsating map of the shrinking town as he tried to follow intently the meandering journey of the fretful Scythian soldier as he led his pony to water in the nearby crystal stream.
Dismounting, the cavalryman knelt beside the little clear stream, breaking up the ice at the edges with the small dagger he kept in his belt, hacking a hole, so that his companion, his horse, might be able to nose her way, after the day's long ride, to a well-earned drink. The warrior too was thirsty, weary, so that he had to lean with a palm on the horse’s neck to steady himself as he got up, his head beginning to throb a little, become heavy.
That morning, before leaving camp on patrol—which they did almost daily now, ever since the strangers had been spotted—their troop leader had called all the soldiers into his tent, throwing a few stones into the pot over the log fire, along with a handful of the precious seeds, which, burning, produced the sweet, thick smoke that was good to inhale on a freezing day, as it helped to sustain morale. This offering for their dead leaders, they believed, would make certain that the spirits were with them, and they’d left there purified and reassured.
Now, as he stood almost motionless in front of the icy stream, drinking from a cupped hand, he stared over towards the opposite bank, out into the snowy, featureless landscape. Strange things he perceived there: a giant snake, very angry, rattling across the plain; tall stone buildings of a fortress city such as men had never seen—great power and great misery he perceived there. And all this time, though he was unaware of it, he must have been fiddling with the stag-shaped silver brooch that fastened his cloak at the neck; giving it a quick tug clumsily, the pin must have broken, and something had hit his hand, but only the dull plop of the object dropping into the stream brought him out of his reverie.
He was horrified—even petrified—because the brooch had been dear to him since he’d won it on a raid some years before. Its antlers curled freely, as in a dream where he'd once encountered the spirits of the other world wrapping around one another, as in a dance-like fight, in flight, or as in the reports of the shaman when he returned from a trance. Had he really lost the stag’s power for good?
As much as he dare without also losing his balance, the horseman dipped his ankle boot delicately into the slow-flowing water beyond the ice-edged riverbank. How deep was it there? He feared the tricks of the water spirits—who might easily pull him in—and he withdrew his boot, got back into the pony saddle, gripping tightly with his knees to hold himself in place. Slinging his cloak over his shoulder, he made for the shortest route back to camp, which was just over a small hill. On the hill’s top, he stopped for a while to consider the meaning of what had just happened, its enormity: no good could come of it, that much was certain. But what could he do? The implications of the incident scuttled away from him and off into the brush. He looked east: there was the vast emptiness of the plains. To the west, down to the pure flowing river, he could see his people, small as ants at that distance as they went about their work. How long could their happiness last? He felt woozy—as if the stag’s power were draining from him. He had a headache and began to feel afraid. He dug his heels into his mount and sped home.

One hand washes the other

This is the first chapter of a novel that I finished last Christmas (2007) but was never really happy with. I will try, at some point in the future, to rewrite it, perhaps taking a leaf out of the book of the Simsonian hamster: starting at the end and working backwards. In my mind, I called it My House is on the Outskirts, which is a Ukrainian proverb that means the equivalent of the English "see no evil".

Chapter 1
The armed guard stood at the entrance to the steam-baths as Arkady puttered up on his motorbike-sidecar was dressed entirely in black. He seemed to have modelled his outfit on the Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, but it was as though he’d received the kit instructions over the telephone, on a poor connection, so that the effect was scruffy and ragged rather than menacing or sharp—a bit shabby, provincial, second-hand. Recognising the newcomer, the security man stepped aside to let him in. The steel door creaked on its hinges and a flake of its khaki paint helicoptered to the ground, unobserved.
Arkady’s contact with the “Donetsk Fellas” was Valentin Kulyeba, a petite Ukrainian who worked for the Russian crime clans. Arkady had dealt with him once before, “helping out” as the front man for a certain pyramid investment scheme. He hadn't exactly enjoyed the experience, but Arkady's attitude was “needs must when the devil rides”. Kulyeba was clever alright, but in the same way as a clockwork mechanism, or an elaborate statistical proof; he was a gifted minor administrator who would have been equally at home as a zealous official in a ministry of one of the totalitarian regimes of the previous century.
At the far end of the corridor Arkady Shapiro came to a heavily padded door, and a shiver of dread shot through him. Relax, relax, he told himself, and he knocked on the door and strolled into the room as breezily as he could manage. Kulyeba was sitting behind a low desk on the far side. He had a creamy white jacket draped over his shoulders, Napoleon-style. Hunched up over some paperwork, which seemed to absorb all of his attention, he looked for all the world as though he was doing the firm's accounts. On the desktop, to one side, was a black coffee steaming away in a white cup and saucer; on a large plate beside it, there was a selection of cold meats and pickles from which, from time to time, Kulyeba would pick out a morsel to munch. Under the desk, his leg shook obsessively. He seemed to breathe exclusively through a half-smoked panatella that had fizzled out some time before.
“Come through,” he said as he stood to his feet, gesturing to a low wooden chair in front of him. As he spoke, he stood up and wheezed phlegmatically into a hanky. “Come in. Come in and shut the door—stop those damned mosquitoes getting in.” Next to the refreshments on his desk there were two neat stacks of documents; a series of biros, laid out in parallel; three pads of yellow post-its, fanned out slightly; a metalworker’s rasp. Kulyeba was no more than five feet six, slim, with narrow shoulders. His movements were as staccato as his pattern of speech, conveying more irritation than anxiety—in no way compromising an implacable sense of self-belief. His dark eyes were emotionless, as if he was never fully engaged with anyone around him, looking over their shoulder for the next opportunity or risk. His hair was messy, like a sunburst in negative, and he was just starting to go grey at the temples. These elements combined to produce a crow-like impression about him, something of the scavenger.
On Arkady’s left, three of Kulyeba’s men were sitting at a round table playing cards. The youngest, jug-eared and shaven-headed, had on a long-sleeved paisley shirt in red and black. He looked the new arrival up and down, but, most likely judging him a negligible threat, went straight back to the poker game. Arkady pulled himself together and crossed over the cold stone floor. Kulyeba’s handshake was swift, limp, damp.
“We got your call,” said Valentin. “I’m only sorry we couldn’t get back to you sooner.”
“No problem, no problem,” said Arkady, bearing his uneven teeth.
“We heard that you were in trouble,” said Kulyeba, and he brought together his palms with a savage slap, surprising an unlucky insect out of existence. The three men looked up from their card game and Arkady jumped. With an index finger, Kulyeba poked at a gap in his teeth to dislodge a shred of pork. Then he got round to the real reason he had called Arkady in.
Kulyeba, it turned out, had had a bit of a bust up with Irakliy Sashukian, "the Armenian", a rival leader from their home town of Utansk, where Kulyeba still took care of metals exports for Donetsk. A convoy of Kulyeba's trucks carrying steel pipes to China had been hijacked, and he blamed Sashukian. One of Sashukian’s men had been “picked up”—but hadn’t held up “under questioning”. The dead man was Misha Karbak, Sashukian’s cousin. Kulyeba couldn’t see what the fuss was about—except it was bad for business. Of course, no one wanted a return to the “dog eat dog” of the mid-90s, no one wanted a return to the "good old days". For a moment Arkady rolled to and fro on the balls of his feet, nervily. Then he said he could help.

“And how’s the family?” asked Kulyeba, escorting his visitor back out onto the dusty street. “I trust they are well”—perhaps intending to bolster an impression of concerned cordiality, though without going so far as to wait for a reply. Vazgen, his jug-eared associate, left with them, heading out for a bite to eat with his sallow-faced girlfriend, whom Arkady thought he recognised—but from where? She had long, black, shiny hair, and the imprints of dark half-circles under her eyes, as if she hadn't slept for days. Vazgen nodded to the scruffy guard at the building's entrance and made off in the direction of a café on the corner, arm-in-arm with his paramour. Kulyeba, meanwhile, had ventured as far as the kerb. At the sight of Arkady’s motorbike-sidecar, an ancient black Dnipr K-650 parked there, Kulyeba almost choked on his own glee. “What’s this?” he spluttered. “What happened to the Fabia?” Arkady didn’t feel like explaining that he’d sold the car to pay for his father’s trip abroad. “It's a long story,” he said.
“I hope you’re not going to turn up at the Armenian’s on that thing,” said Kulyeba. “We can’t have that,” and he pulled from a calf-skin wallet a slim green wad of $100-bills. “Here,” he said, “live a little, why don’t you? Get yourself something with a little more class,” and he pressed some cash into Arkady’s hand, which seemed to extend itself of its own volition, without consulting his will.

On the two-lane highway from the city, Arkady shivered. Interrogating the afternoon’s events, he had his gaze fixed firmly on the road ahead, scanning for potholes.
Could he deliver?
Changing gear, he overtook a struggling red Zhiguli.
Would he be able to deliver what he’d promised? Of course he would, no question, no question. Hadn’t he’d always been lucky?
But the low, hypnotic growl of the bike’s engine failed to reassure him, and the sidecar rattled, unutterably empty now he’d seen his father off for the flight to Kiev. (Through the double-glass windows from the first floor of Donetsk Airport he’d watched the "internal" short-haul passenger planes taking off and unsteadily landing, and when he’d looked down, he’d caught sight of the old man shuffling along the tarmac towards the airport’s shuttle-bus, with almost no luggage. He was probably in Kiev already—perhaps in the air on the way to Tel Aviv. Had Arkady seen his father for the last time? This thought pierced him sharply.)
Tall rows of poplars sprouted from a flat horizon that seemed to posses them in inexhaustible supply, with only the odd field of wilting sunflowers or a coal-pit's spindly winding gear, turning slowly, to relieve the monotony of the scrubby steppe. A wind stream whipped over Arkady's cheeks and pushed back his unkempt, curly hair. And if a militiaman were to stop him for riding without helmet, so be it (he kept a few 100-hryvnya notes in his back pocket for bribes), because the deal with Kulyeba seemed to offer a way out of a tight spot he'd got himself into with the tax department, who were now investigating his business affairs. Feeling lighter than he had in months, he steered the bike onto a slip road: it seemed to handle more easily now. As he drove past the football stadium, the artificial lake, he felt almost wholly calm, coming to a halt steadily at a red light ahead of a crooked, narrow bridge. Just over the bridge, at the centre of a roundabout, he eyed a huge glossy poster for New Superslims, the purple waves of its silky backdrop, the stylish arrangement of the delicate cartonettes somehow seeming to welcome him home. He pictured the dinner for two he had planned for later that night with his mistress, Mila. Above him, the sky seemed blue and hopeful, and there was no cloud cover. “Whatever happens, happens,” said Arkady to himself, as if to throw any remaining anxieties off the scent, the bike wobbling a little as he pulled away.