‘No, no,’ he would say impatiently, when I told him about the shoebox again. ‘That’s not what I mean. The shoebox is what you were meant to know about. But what weren’t you meant to know about?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘There was a case in the paper. Some people who owned a house with a large garden sold off part of the land for development. When the builders uprooted a pear tree they found the bones of a newborn baby under it. In the end, the story was that a mother and daughter had lived together. An old woman and a middle-aged woman. But the daughter had become pregnant, God knows how or by whom. She was thirty-eight, but her mother kept her in the house for months and took the baby the night it was born, smothered it and buried it under the pear tree. Then she pretended it had never existed.’
‘What did the daughter do?’
‘She went along with it, it seems. But what if she hadn’t? What if she’d suspected her mother might harm the child, and she’d dragged herself off her bed immediately after the child was born, and put the child in an old shoebox, and crept out of the house to leave it in the backyard of an Italian restaurant, so that it would survive?’
‘That’s not what happened,’ I said. His words rasped me. Story was all I had and I wasn’t having anyone else retelling it. Not even Joe, not then.
‘You’re right,’ said Joe. He rose to get another beer. ‘It’s not what happened, but sometimes the real story doesn’t tell you the truth. If I were telling your story – or mine –’ He bent down to look inside the fridge, and his voice was muffled. ‘If I were telling your story, I’d tell it from an angle. You wouldn’t necessarily know at the outset that it was your story at all. The facts wouldn’t seem to fit at first.
‘“Where’s my shoebox?” you’d ask. “There isn’t any shoebox in this story so it can’t be mine.”’
I laughed. Joe spun round, waving a bottle of beer. His face glowed with excitement. ‘But then you’d read on, Rebecca. You’d start to recognize things. You would know where you were, because the pattern inside the story fitted the shapes inside your life.’
‘But think how well you’d have to know someone, to do that.’
‘Do you think I don’t know you well enough?’
We were silent, looking at each other, until Joe glanced down at the beer in his hand.
‘Do I want this?’ he asked.
‘Yes, you do. Pass me one, Joe.’
He bent down again to rummage in the back of the fridge.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said quietly, but he heard me, turned, and looked up at me with an expression on his face I hadn’t seen before.
‘You do what, Rebecca?’
‘Believe you know me well enough,’ I said.
A few months earlier Joe had showed a colleague a draft of the chapter which described the midnight conversation between Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva. It was chaotic, his colleague said. It leapt about and had no objectivity. It read like a novel, not the work of a historian.
Joe wasn’t too bothered. He was building his ballroom of the past, where there’d been empty air before. The floor of his ballroom was waxen and silken. Joe’s mind hummed. Of course the dancers would come. How could they bear not to?
6
A Jump Five Floors Up
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
I’ve never liked to think too much about breathing. It’s safer not to imagine the labour of it, life-long. If you know too much detail, you might not be able to go on. At school they taught us the wonders of what our bodies were doing as if they were especially rich and powerful engines which we had been given by our parents. We sat and observed them from the bright-lit chamber of our brain. We were never truly implicated in what our kidneys did, or our hearts. At the same time, in another lesson, Byron told us that the heart must pause to breathe. I believe that he was right.
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright…
It was Mr Damiano who got me to learn that poem. He told me that I should learn poems by heart and then I would always carry them with me. There would be many, many times when I would think I had nothing, and then discover that I still had the poems.
Byron was right about the heart. Whether he was right about the soul I don’t know, but I like the way he puts it. The soul grows strong and fierce and it needs to be let out. The body effaces itself, as the cervix effaces itself at birth.
Adam came bounding up the narrow stairs to our flat. I turned and saw the close, fierce pelt of his red curls. I looked away quickly and flipped the chicken pieces over in the seasoned flour.
‘You must be Rebecca,’ said Adam.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I must.’
He had red hair but dark brown eyes. It seemed to me that his face was deeply lined, but then he was thirty-eight and I was twenty-six. His face was scored and I wanted to read what was written there.
‘What are you cooking?’ he asked, drawing up a chair and sitting down at the table opposite me.
‘Chicken stew. It’s for later.’
‘It looks good.’
I stared at the naked chicken pieces. Their flour coating hadn’t done much for them yet. I knew they would soon turn gold in the hissing oil, but it was better for guests not to see the pallid, uncooked meat. The pieces which I hadn’t yet rolled in flour lay in their bowl. They looked blue and babyish in their translucency.
‘It’ll be ready at eight,’ I said. ‘But maybe you don’t want to wait that long.’
‘I’m happy to wait,’ said Adam.
Joe poured wine for us, and I peeled shallots while the two of them sank into talk. It was getting dark outside the windows, and there was the city far below, the slope of it falling away from the tall thin terrace where we perched five floors up. I looked out and saw car headlights moving over the dual carriageway. An ambulance went by with its blue light flashing. The siren reached us and I wondered if Adam would turn to it, but he didn’t. The sky had turned lilac, from the mixture of orange street light and rain-sodden dusk. It was a beautiful colour and I thought about how natural things are not always the most beautiful.
Adam got up and went to stand by the window, with his back to us. I could watch the shape of his body without him seeing. His outline was strong against the lilac that was changing minute by minute into a more ordinary darkness.
‘It’s starting to rain,’ said Adam. ‘The windows in the next room are wide open. Is it part of your flat?’
‘It’s Joe’s room,’ I said. ‘He always leaves them open. He wakes up and finds rain in a pool on the floor.’
I fried the chicken in oil, added stock and wine and the vegetables. The pan spat and a plume of savoury steam went up to the low ceiling. It was Joe who’d taught me to cook. I only knew about beans on toast, pizza and toasted sandwiches before I met him.
Joe had watched me eat my usual food without comment, for the first few weeks. He never criticized it, but he brought me into the pleasure world step by step. He’d taught himself everything and then he taught me. I’d been living with half nothing, believing I was lucky if I had a cheese roll for lunch and the hot water didn’t run out before I had my bath. Joe taught me to go into shops I’d walked past automatically all my life. I went inside and bought wine and flowers and books and music.
One day, to make Joe smile, I wrote out the menus which my adoptive mother fed to us on a two-weekly rotation. I remembered every meal by heart.
Week One, Monday: Corned beef, tinned peas and tinned new potatoes. Strawberry Angel Delight.
Each morning we measured out our cornflakes with an off-white melamine cup. To drink there was hot Ribena, or hot Bovril, or good fresh water from the tap.
The glory of my adoptive mo
ther’s housekeeping was that she was never hostage to the seasons. They filled the boot of their Mazda with tins and packets once a month. She was particular about where the tins came from. Corned beef from Argentina was no good even if it was on special offer. To buy Heinz baked beans was to spend money for the sake of spending money. Only fools bought instant mashed potato, which had no food value compared to the tinned variety.
She taught me that potatoes were waxen and slippery and came ready-peeled, carrots grew in cubes and corned beef had to be warmed under the hot tap to loosen its coat of fat so that it would glop out of the tin. At Christmas we had a Plumrose Ham from a bigger tin. The strip of metal that wound onto the key-opener was so long that it sometimes broke under the tension, slashing a thumb.
Day by day, Joe undid my good housekeeping. I got soil on my fingers, and I sliced up meat which bled. I learned to check the eyes of fish before I bought them, to see if they were full and bright, and then not to look into them again. We picked shot out of pheasants, and I learned that hares, like horses, have saddles.
We were in the middle of all this life when Adam came.
‘I’ll put on some music,’ said Joe. He had installed a sound system throughout the flat. There were speakers in the kitchen, his room, my room, the big square landing which was big enough for a sofa where Joe would lie late at night, punch-drunk with work, while Blind Willie Johnson sang ‘I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole’.
Joe should have gone out of the kitchen door, across the landing and into his room. But he passed behind me, brushing against my body so that I turned. Adam moved aside as Joe pushed open both kitchen windows, pressed his hands down on the sill, and vaulted into the gully outside. The parapet was maybe eighteen inches high. It ran the length of the terrace, and a low wall divided the gully outside the kitchen from the gully outside Joe’s room.
Joe sprang into the gully. He balanced himself, and turned to face left. There he was, printed on my eyes against the darkness. He rose up, outlined against the lights of the city that dropped away beneath us. If he made a mistake the next surface he would hit was a stone terrace, five floors down.
He stepped back two or three paces. I did not know what he was doing, but then I saw he needed to take a run so he could jump the low wall that divided the gullies. He ran past and I heard his breathing and then the thud as he did it, he jumped over the wall and landed outside his bedroom window. I wasn’t afraid to move now. I ran to the kitchen window and watched him as he put both his hands on the sill of his own room, vaulted it, and disappeared inside.
When he’d gone the whole risk of it hit me. The back of my knees stung with fear. The gully was shining wet, and so was the surface of the low wall. The parapet was too low to save a child, and Joe had been drinking as we sat in the kitchen. If he had caught his foot on the wall nothing would have held him. I heard again his heavy breath and the thud of his feet as he ran and took the low wall in the dark and rain, five floors up.
A gust of wind blew rain over me and I shut the window as ‘Crossroad Blues’ flooded the room. I thought of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads, and wondered if it was true that anyone could do that. Well, Robert Johnson had found out soon enough if the devil was real or not. He was my age when he died. To me no music was worth any part of you belonging to anyone else.
‘Do you go out on that parapet?’ Adam asked me.
‘In the summer sometimes. I sunbathe on the wall.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ he said, and it sounded like the closest thing anyone had ever said to me.
Adam sat opposite me at the kitchen table and ate my chicken stew. Joe sat at our side, quietly drinking and slipping layer after layer of skin off the shallots until there was nothing left but a heap of pearly cores.
Adam wrote a letter to Joe late that night, after he’d gone home, and delivered it by hand the next morning. He wrote that he would not come to the flat again. He didn’t know the nature of the relationship between Joe and me but he did not want to damage something he could not repair.
Joe showed me the letter. His eyes were puffy with hangover. ‘He thinks I’m your father. Or your lover.’
It was a shabby grey morning but the flat glowed. I’d got up early, gone out for fresh bread, made coffee, bought a bunch of early narcissi. I’d lit a fire in the small iron grate in my room and the flames were as bright as petals. If you’d looked in through the window it would have been any orphan’s dream of home.
It was my dream of home. Why would I jump out of the window into the dark and the rain?
7
Fall or Fly
‘I don’t want him to come again,’ I said. Joe blinked, rubbed his eyes and said nothing. His eyelids were permanently reddened from too much reading and working at the computer screen.
‘I mean Adam,’ I said. ‘It’s better if he doesn’t come again.’
‘I knew who you meant,’ said Joe, and he took two oranges from the yellow bowl on the table. ‘I’ve been seeing someone,’ he added.
A wave of heat swept across me.
‘Who?’
Joe took a third orange from the bowl. He held two oranges in his right hand and one in his left. He tossed up the left-hand orange and began to juggle. He couldn’t look at me while he was juggling. His eyes followed the oranges as they swung into rhythm and his eye movements were like a shoal of fish darting to safety. But his hands were sure and the oranges flew swift and even.
‘She’s called Daniela. Dani.’
‘How long have you been seeing her? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I thought it was best to wait until we saw how things went. Between me and Dani.’
Faster and faster he whipped the oranges into the air from the cup of his hands. They blurred, and I stopped looking at them.
‘You’ve been practising again,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I practise when I get stuck. It clears my mind.’
No one I’d ever known used their mind as Joe did. I wondered then if he would ever wear out, but now I know that when he sat there juggling the oranges he was only at the beginning, feeling the ease with which he was coasting past what he was doing even six months earlier, beginning to sense how far acceleration might take him.
‘When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union,’ said Joe, ‘Stalin went into a state of fugue. He retreated to his dacha. He fell in on himself. No one knew why he’d gone or whether he’d come back again.’
I knew that fugue was a musical term. I thought of aeroplanes dive-bombing, and German parachutists landing like dandelion clocks all over Europe. What had that got to do with music or Stalin? Maybe he was one of those dictators who imagine they are a creator, and play clumsily on grand pianos while their cowed intimates applaud. I imagined a row of Stalins in a hall lined with mirrors, playing on the black and white keys with pudgy fingers while above him a chandelier shivered from the bombardment.
‘Did Stalin play a musical instrument?’ I asked. I never felt foolish asking Joe any question I wanted, no matter how ignorant.
‘By fugue here, I meant flight,’ said Joe.
‘You mean he ran away?’
‘The dacha was outside Moscow. So he went to the forest, which is what a north European would naturally do when he was at his wits’ end. A man from Finland or Sweden, say.
‘“How long shall I stay in the forest? – Until my heart is healed of its sickness,”’ sang Joe.
When he sang he had a dramatic projection that you never heard in his speaking voice. He stopped singing and grinned at me.
‘But Stalin wasn’t a northern European. He was a Georgian. Think about it,’ he went on, letting the oranges fall, catching them. ‘It’s June. There are birch trees growing around the dacha and it’s warm. The German army’s advancing, he ought to have known it was going to advance. He’s the leader. He’s the heir of Lenin, the father of the nation, the guardian of the revolution. And now he’s let this happen. He and Hitler go and make a
gentleman’s agreement between dictators and Hitler doesn’t keep it. Just like Stalin’s never kept an agreement in his life, unless it suits him. So there he is, outmanoeuvred by the most obvious thing in the world. Everyone’s been trying to tell him what’s going to happen, and he’s ignored them. The outcome is that he’s been fucked by the man he’d hoped to screw.’
‘Why are you so interested?’
‘Don’t you see how crucial it is? It’s a key event. Stalin went to his dacha and no one knew what to do. What would any of them have dared do? Think of how he treated the whole crew of them. Mandelstam called them a gang, a rabble.
‘Stalin used to make them dance after dinner. They had to keep drinking, because he watched them to see how many glasses they had. He wanted them drunk and incapable. If they dared, they’d ask the servants to bring them red water instead of red wine. He wanted them drunk, so that they would humiliate themselves and know that they’d humiliated themselves.
‘When they were drunk enough, they had to dance. He’d get them up on their hind legs. He made Khrushchev dance a Cossack folk dance.’
Joe’s face was lit. He leaned towards me.
‘If only we knew about all these things while they were still happening. Think how different the world would be.’
‘We wouldn’t need historians,’ I said.
‘Imagine if we’d known about the Politburo dancing like bears on chains, or John Kennedy fucking everything that had a heartbeat.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘You do.’
‘I don’t. It scares me. It seems as if there’s no pattern in anything. Just people stumbling over themselves into nowhere.’
‘Listen, Rebecca. It’s 1941. Anything could have happened. What if Stalin had stayed at the dacha? What if he’d never come back to Moscow? They’d have had to get rid of him eventually. No matter how terrified they were they’d have done it, and history would have got going again. But a different history.’
‘We’d still have won,’ I said vaguely. I didn’t know enough about the war.