A Kiss By The Clowns
a novel
by
Anthony Steyning
Subtitle:
[And the world sang]
L I L I M A R L E N E
Copyright P.A. van Westrenen 2012
Cover by Martine Yanow
Smashwords Edition
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
Other books by the author:
The Applicant (hardcover) 2004
Budapest my Love (hardcover) 2005
http://www.anthonysteyning.com
P A R T I
(LONDON)
Danushka spotted Joey at the Queen's Larder that first night Gordon and Kathleen took the Russian refugee girl out on the town. Sorely missing open life he and Kathleen only recently returning to England, having spent these last years in or around the desert at Suez and Cairo where besides colonial hotels, coffee-houses were the only accessible drinking spots and rather on the quiet side. Even so, this isn’t an ode to public houses but how a Russian girl stole her first, slow, hesitant glance at Joey that night, an anonymous, insolently grinning American serviceman, drinking a bitter brand of beer he didn’t care for. That first glance leading to her wide-eyed fascination with him even though she didn’t understand why she was so struck by this pock-marked military man. Or was it the certain resemblance he bore to a brother she had left behind? But then again neither could she fathom that her subsequent encounter with the soldier only one of millions between the inheritors of those blighted post-war years, many with lasting consequences on several continents.
Gordon and Kathleen first crossing paths with Danushka, this was her turn unexpectedly crossing paths with Joey. He had come to visit her at home today, carried along by the human tide, the new times. He had just arrived on the sparsely lit landing, in front of Gordon and Kathleen's exotic rosewood door, Danushka their new adoptive daughter, come to them from Sweden, where she ended up after fleeing the Soviet Union, the Frozen Union, following a gruesome, solitary, arctic escape. Lucky Strike and the climbing of three stairways causing Joey to be slightly out of breath, having gone up quickly, soundlessly he thought, cat-like even, two steps at a time. But Danushka divining he was on his way up all the same, possessing an extraordinary sense of hearing, developed while growing up outside Grinyovo, a village in northern Russia, a place still wild and primitive, where the frozen earth hardly holds odours, but where she learnt to detect the scent of a snow-hare, hiding three dozen feet away. She opened the door before Joey had a chance to knock, doing this as silently as the brash, grinning, gum-chewing American who excited her so unbelievably, thought he had walked up.
“Hi! How are yah!" he drawled, it sounding more like a statement than a common question, but Danushka couldn’t tell the difference, too overwhelmed by his impromptu afternoon visit, and also her English still very poor, by stroke of exquisite luck catching his face a second time, at the Strand Ballroom the previous night. It’s the dance hall below the Lyceum Theatre, where Gordon and Kathleen took her this time. It was Kathleen suggesting they go there for the benefit of the lonely, stateless girl. So she could meet people her own age, and despite Gordon’s complaints, fearing he'd feel out of place, and precisely the way it turned out. For these halls are even more vulgar than he had expected, and nothing like the graceful dances he and Kathleen had been invited to in Cairo, later on, in Alexandria. Here, shop-assistants, cheeks and eyes plastered with cheap make-up, laughed noisily and drank like men, servicemen and young workers somehow having managed to stay out of the armed forces, and constantly on the prowl. Kathleen soon noticing how many of the quick, new couples disappeared after only one dance, returning with blushed cheeks and shiny eyes from somewhere behind a curtain, probably an emergency exit and some convenient stairwell. Not entirely approving of this, even though she had done her thing not so many years ago, and one look at the wonder on Danushka's face making it all worthwhile. The Russian girl enthralled and beguiled by the music, the loud clothes and all the open smiles. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced, soon hesitantly tapping her small foot to the beat of this music, so exiting, so new. Until the moment her heart stopped dead cold, cutting off her breath, her spine straightening, forcing Kathleen to take note and follow the girl's sudden fixed glance. Danushka instinctively grabbing Gordon's arm after recognising Joey in the crowd, the same soldier she had first noticed at that pub, a couple of months earlier.
Kathleen had raised her glass, for only another woman knows what it feels like to encounter an anonymous man, a man she could fall in love with, for what could only have been a breath-taking second time. As for Gordon, he had looked at the mob round him and seeing nothing or no one out of the ordinary, innocently asked what the sudden fuss was all about. But Kathleen couldn’t tell him, not then, not until later, at this point only kicking him under the table, in an effort to shut his innocent mouth.
Joey had stood on the Strand Ballroom's mezzanine balcony, quite inadvertently looking down at them. A spinning mirror-ball on which spotlights were trained hanging from the ceiling, reflecting dozens of illuminated moving dots on the faces of the people below. To him appearing as if the look they cast, and particularly Danushka's somewhat anxious stare, switched off and on, and on and off… an older woman waving, signalling he should come down. Surprising him, because he wasn’t certain he knew these people at all. His first reaction to ignore them, but then curiosity getting the better of him and deciding to make his way through the crowd, down the broad and winding staircase, wondering what the hell this was all about.
Danushka had been praying to catch another glimpse of the man subconsciously reminding her of Vladimir, the brother she couldn’t be without. Once asking both Gordon and Kathleen to pass by the Queen's Larder with her again, the pub of her new English night, without quite able to put into words why she wanted to go back there. The place she had seen Joey that one time and only very briefly, unable to forget his defiant smile, rough cheeks, and that black hair of his, cut like a brush so intriguing her. She even remembered her fright when it looked as if that very same soldier got into a fight with another man, a man with long, blond hair and a flat nose. It turning out to be a minor scuffle nobody paid attention to, the blond bloke running out, the soldier, her soldier, fortunately hanging round a while longer and even though they never spoke. Only asking Gordon what kind of uniform he wore and it turning out he was a Yank, a word she wasn’t familiar with, a word they hadn’t taught her yet at language class.
As a rule Danushka doesn't like uniforms, nobody where she came from could be expected to, but this was different. Soldiers here looked kind and knew how to joke. And so it was that this first indelible impression, the soldier's first fleeting imprint on her mind, grew into something of an obsession. Getting to the point that when Gordon and Kathleen took her to another venue, the Palladium, the couple trying to get her to laugh at the comics Flanagan & Allen, she would secretly look round to see if she could spot Joey, whose name she didn’t know yet, or else during a Chelsea football match, where Gordon loved to relax, having been away from sporting events like these for more than a decade, afterwards dropping by the Queen's Larder at Danushka's request, always to see if she could catch a glimpse of her American.
Later, finding out about the pub stops, Kathleen assuming the Russian girl merely loved the atmosphere there. She didn’t always join the two of them and had no idea the requests were of a more romantic nature, the girl obviously not knowing a soul in London and Kathleen, normally an astute observer in matters of the heart, missing all the signals this time. Until suddenly, last night at that ballroom, when it all came together, for all of them, except for Gordon of course. Danushka having spent most of the day buying vegetable preserves and clothes with Kathleen's leftover ration coupons, even then thinking about the soldier, carrying her well-wrapped and packaged purchases to the Red Cross, for shipment to her mother and her brother Vladimir, in Russia. Enclosing a simple but warm and pleading letter, in which she naively begged to be reunited with them, speaking at length of Kathleen and of Gordon, of preparing to go see Marx's grave, or his favourite chair in the British Museum’s round Reading Room, a stone's throw away from where she stayed. Short lines about King and Queen, about newspapers, the radio and all the other new things in her life included in a care-package that was unlikely to reach its destination, but with nobody able to convince her of this, not even Kathleen, whose good counsel on any other subject matter she otherwise blindly accepted. During the last several months Danushka studying English four hours each day, at the Polytechnic, an institute she could walk to alone, on new shoes with high square heels and ankle straps that made her look taller than she was and on which she was still only learning how to walk. She had begun speaking simple phrases which more often than not wouldn't have an article or sometimes even miss a verb, as in Russian apparently.
"Danushka! Man you know?" Gordon had teased her, imitating her, at last figuring out the source of her fascination. With Kathleen, smiling radiantly, grabbing the girl's small hand, a young American musician, Benny Carter, leading the band. The reason Joey had come here, to listen to the music and maybe steal a dance.
In the end Kathleen rather enjoying the entire soirée, also because she had met her husband Gordon in the same building, upstairs, at the theatre, before the war, during different times, a nurse still then, her close friend, Evelyn, who had also worked in Palestine and later moved to New York, often accompanying her. But through the terrible intervening war years they had lost touch, Kathleen's letters to her returned, undelivered, unopened, making her wonder if Evelyn was still alive, still trotting the occasional fox, boogying the old woogie, or jittering the odd bug, always giggling at would-be seducers dragging her to some dance floor. Unless these suitors happened to be ugly, or rude and arrogant, I only do Gregorian mambos Evelyn telling them, turning these unfortunates away as fast as she could. Kathleen doubting now that Gordon was aware of any of this, deciding not to bring these memories up. It was, after all, Danushka's night.
“Come on, Gordon! Let's take Danushka to a dance!"
“I like pubs, Darling! Not dance halls! Now surely you know that..!"
But our boy nonetheless starting to get ready, only because he was a kind old sod.
"Oh dear, not that dreadful hat again?" Kathleen complaining, and somewhat of habit sometimes. “Darling, hats make you look so… so… humourless! Like the men on the Kremlin balcony we see in the Times, reviewing those frightening parades. Or those silly American gangsters, in the movies! Am I right, Danushka? Say yes!"
But Danushka did not, could not, understand Kathleen's comparisons and complaint.
“I need to wear a hat, darling! It's quite miserable out there!"
“But aren't we taking a cab?"
“Cab or no cab, it's that dampness! I can't adjust to it... It feels as if the Thames flows straight through my veins!"
“Very well, then! Have it your way! Wear a hat! I only wanted everyone to see that lovely, old face of yours!"
“Good God! I think the desert's got to her! Danushka, did you hear that?"
* * * * * * *
Kathleen and Gordon an emancipated couple who had been working for His Majesty from Gaza to Aden and from Amman to Aleppo, ending up with the Suez Canal Company where Gordon was placed to keep an eye on the books and on the French. The Sumners having worked very hard and being most conscientious which hadn’t stopped them from partying in India or carousing from Tangier to Piraeus on a slow boat, off the coast of Tunisia or France. On leave during those happenings, too much in love to worry about anything, but that was before the war and had lasted only until they were forced to view the world with different eyes. The moment they concluded that their mission lay in London now, where all their civilization was being blown to pieces, it seemed. Where Kathleen could care for the wounded under the sort of chaotic conditions to which she had become accustomed, during her years between Nile and Euphrates. Gordon to make himself useful because of the peerless, compassionate and collected leader that he is, at any rate, that is what they felt after it became loud and clear what that rot Hitler was up to. But not making it back to England in time, the new war preventing anyone from crossing Mediterranean military fronts, one of these extending itself into North Africa, less than a hundred miles from where they used to work.
But after that great human folly was over, making it home at last, annoyed, disappointed and frustrated, they wished making amends even though this wasn’t required of them. It was why they were so immensely pleased when his Majesty called on them again, through the Home Office and because they were fluent not only in French but spoke a mouthful of Arabic and Russian as well. This time asked to take charge of a wispy Russian refugee, barely a woman, apparently lost. Gracefully accepting that responsibility and after Danushka, shy and insecure, arrived at their home, starting her informal but certain Western education right off. By taking her to the National and to the tattered Tate, but also by taking her for obvious reasons to see Boris, the Russian expatriate grandmaster, co-owner of the Mandrake chess club in a basement on Mead, a street the free French took great delight in mispronouncing as La Rue Merde, he a good friend of Gordon, himself chess obsessed.
At the very beginning Boris merely interpreted between the Sumners and Danushka whenever communication between them had ground to a halt. Boris had lived in London for many years and from him and during their subsequent walks, Danushka hearing about the heroics of Wanda Landowska, the Polish harpsichord player, performing at Underground stations throughout the Blitz' fieriest nights in an effort to soothe people's nerves. It was a story of courage, of conquered fear, greatly touching the young refugee’s heart.
Boris also teasing Danushka in Russian about the great treatise on which he was supposed to be working, entitled Capitalism, Communism and Sodomy, phenomenally parallel concepts he said, but she was too young to laugh, preferring to look at the new faces, the new streets where Churchill's booming voice still rang from old wireless sets and innocent, open windows. Watching thousands upon thousands of people, when in that other life of hers she had been with only three other people, then two, then one, then none... now not getting enough of it.
Despite Kathleen's efforts to dress her more decently, Danushka unwittingly contributing to the new émigré look with her ill-fitting, ill-matching, even grotesque clothes ---the bungled haircut and the pre-historic walking shoes she had brought with her all the way from Russia. Quizzing Boris innocently about the pervasive pomp, the continuous ceremony she saw going on all round her ---the changing of the Guards, the flying Union Jacks, all those drawings of a dog called Bull, the wigs on sombre, black-robed men. Serious again, he would explain that all these symbols were born of deep respect for the people by the people, and the basis of England's legendary resilience.
"Turning their own country into a prison doesn’t make sense to them... But Danushka, you still haven't told me anything about yourself, “Boris said during one of their Soho strolls. But how could she begin to tell him what had happened to her, what she had been through, why she was here, her love for Vladimir, Volodya, and the mission, his mission that she was on, the weeks of lifting her knees up high and over deep and heavy snow in order to progress, crossing that interminable, frozen night? About their last minutes together, the morning her brother had taken her to the edge of that silent shrouded forest with which she was so well acquainted. The spot where Vladimir had stopped their three steaming, harnessed horses beside those grey, frigid thickets she knew so well because it was the exact same place her father had also taken her, years earlier, when she was still small. To walk and to play the last summer that he was still alive, surprising her at the time because he had never taken her anywhere, so naturally loving him for it, only much later to understand that he must have sensed a darkness in his future and those small outings his final embrace.
`If they stop you, say as little as possible. You got lost travelling around the region, trading handicraft for food. That's all. You know it's illegal, everything always is. But now that we've beaten the Nazis, they're not going to be as tough as they used to!'
Danushka's brother, Vladimir, had spoken softly, urgently, vapour dancing from his mouth, perhaps more to reassure himself, adding: ‘Naw, they won't punish you. They'll scold you, try scaring you, but in the end they'll send you home! And anyway, you're just a girl!'
He should have realized the utter stupidity of that last, short phrase, the contradiction it contained. Like weak mortar making the entire edifice of his weeks of pleading and reasoning with Danushka come crashing down. For this terrible, this solitary, Homeric journey, this flight on foot to the West she was about to embark upon that morning, shouldn’t it have been his? But not picking him up on it, too stunned, listening but not hearing him, barely nodding while he fidgeted with the small knitted bag that he strapped round her fragile frame. Filled with well-wrapped tempera-coloured Kargopol Polkan watchdogs and Sirin-bird clay figurines, her alibi should she get caught. Danushka too dazed by the cold, but probably even more by her deep sense of disbelief, the surreal business of leaving her brother and reluctant lover and the only life she had ever known. There, just outside Grinyovo, in the Karelia region, a long way southwest of Arkhangelsk, a city, according to Vladimir, named after an archangel having got lost one day and crashed. For no sane angel, Volodya had muttered, would otherwise come to stay in modern Russia, the Russia that was sometimes besieged from the outside, but just as surely from within. But then, he said, more and more angels were trying to descend. Some like hungry, lonely vultures, only perching, tired of flying, and of lying, jealous of the living, despite all their troubles, for could it be that eternity is even colder than anything down here? And was it the gaze of those very imaginary angels, which had made Vladimir send her looking for warmth in the west?
“Danushka, what are you thinking?" Boris asked. “You haven't spoken a word in nearly half an hour!"
“Don’t you want to know how I got here, Boris?"
“How you got here, my little Danushka is your secret. It's the one thing we exiles never ask each other. It brings bad luck! But do talk about yourself, if it makes you feel better!"
“My nostrils, my eyebrows were frozen… for weeks." Danushka spoke, following Boris' advice. She sounded like she was reciting a story that she had read, and re-read. "It was at least forty below the day I left. My brother limped nervously round the troika on the loud, crunching snow. You see, his right foot had been nearly severed, bloodied, infected, cut to the bone, after one day accidentally stepping into a bear-trap. But that was another year, and summer, and he a boy without shoes. I was too small to help him then. It was a terrible accident, but at least it kept him home, with me, with my mother, when other men, all men, were sent to fight at Stalingrad. He fixed my snow-shoes and said ‘Here's a map. I drew it while you were asleep. It's the best I can come up with since the bastards took away our books'!"
Danushka had spoken softly, monotonously, the words now flowing forth. She was unable to stop, the months of pent up anguish had taken their toll. Her Russian phrases were heavy, composed during weeks of unspeakable solitude. Heavy and ponderous like every damned step through that hateful snow. Boris just let her speak, and speak, and then, putting his arm round her, softly asked:
“Do you still love your brother?"
“Why not? What are you asking me? If I hate him? Because he sent me here? Away from him?"
“He could have come with you..!"
“Volodya, that's his nick name, can't walk! Didn't I just explain that to you?" Danushka's voice had contained affection but now contained no small amount of quiet rage.
“You could have refused. You could have stayed!"
“And you? Why didn't you stay, Boris? What are you doing here, in London? Things aren't that simple, are they? I left, because of Volodya, because he begged me to, on his knees. My mother never leaving her bed since my father disappeared. She had nothing to do with it. Caring more for herself than for us, her grief selfish and mean, it wasn’t for her that I would stay, or leave!"
“But if he loved you, how could he..?"
“Volodya loves me, but he loves Russia even more. That's why he sent me. To see where it all went wrong, how we all went wrong. Yes, I didn't care, only wanting to be with him. But I couldn't disappoint him, it was too important. Even though, out there, on that tundra, sometimes zigzagging like the track of some train gone mad, all those weeks, and until the day I fainted and woke up in that Swedish country church, I was very, very angry with him..!"
“How long did it take you? Did you know the terrain? Did the Sumi Lapps help?"
“I don't remember. And didn't you just tell me not to speak about that part. I think I want to go back to Kathleen!"
She missed Volodya, his stubbly beard against her face, his pounding chest, his sweet embrace. Oh, it was she who had first pressed her breasts into the hollow of his stomach, she who had taken his warm, rough hand and thrust it between her thighs when she was barely fourteen. He had laughed and admonished her, drawing away at first. But she couldn’t help it. She was like the animals she had lived with all her life. She knew them well. She had often been told to lie beside them when they were ill, in the small barn at the far end of their kholkoze. And sometimes she needed Volodya to touch her, as if she too were unwell.
Then, once, it had happened. During one long polar night he finally let her have her way, for the first time allowing her to sit on top of him. Moving silently, gently, until electric bolts ripped through her loins and she had sobbed with happiness. But this she told no one, not even her new friend Kathleen. Not because she had done anything wrong, but because speaking about Volodya in this way was like sharing him with someone, and that she could never, ever contemplate.
Their love had lasted until last year, when she turned seventeen. When Vladimir had first begun to talk about the future, about freedom when all she wanted was him, his nearness, to prepare him his bath, his food, Mother always sick in bed.
‘We'll have to get you out of this rotten icebox, Danushka! Away from Stalin, the interminable night, none of this is very healthy for you. We're living like animals, look what's happening to us!’ and then, horribly, Vladimir had begun to shy away from her. As if he couldn’t bear to be with her any longer. And this hurt her more than anyone could possibly understand.
“She must have crossed a part of Finland, or a piece of northern Norway, to get to Sweden....!" Boris thought. He was enormously impressed with this unassuming, giant of a small girl. He turned a corner, wondering about the quickest way back to Gordon's flat. He respected his tiny compatriot's wish to be alone. But then Danushka spoke again, as if she felt a need to sum it all up.
"Volodya wants me to describe to him where Marx worked, un-harassed, here in London, and maybe go to Switzerland one day to a city called Zurich, where railway cars go straight up mountains and into the sky, to see why Vladimir Ilyich could work, read and write there, yet nobody is allowed to read at home."
Whereupon Boris quietly put his huge arm round Danushka's shoulder and told her one more thing.
“Well, I don't know about your brother sending you here, but he's right about one thing, Danushka!" he said. “The big dream is and was a good one for Russia. An inevitable dream, because before things were always very, very bad. Yes, there had to be a revolution. But where it all went wrong was when we allowed Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, butchers all of them, to fail us! You see, my sweet, dreams only work, provided next morning you wake up! If not, all you do is end up in a coma. And that's not living, is it? C'mon, I'll walk you home!"
* * * * * * *
“Piss off!" tall, blond, wavy-haired, flat-nosed, but not unhandsome Tommy had mumbled under his breath, jumping to his feet, off the barstool on which he had been sitting, drinking a half-pint of Bitter. He had just witnessed what he thought was an American serviceman make a move on a pretty blond bird, who in a distant way reminded him of his mother. She was obviously a lot younger and also a lot shorter. Her parents sitting next to her, didn’t resemble her. Tommy was furious. He was pretty sure it was the Yank, the same bloke with whom he had a bit of a run-in at the Queen's Larder one night, a few months back. And perhaps the pretty girl who that evening had also been present.
Tommy, like a good number of young Englishmen, had a thing against all those foreigners reigning in London right after the war, and seemingly grabbing or snatching away all the girls. He had just left the stale air of the moist walls and old clothes in his flat; his grandmother sitting near the window, gazing down dreamily into the narrow street below. She waved at him and smiled as he had walked away towards the tube, coming to this dance and having some fun for once.
Earlier that day Tommy had come home after his workout at Nigel's Gym, dumping his old army bag full of sweaty clothes on the floor. The room was small, stifling, less than a few hundred feet square. The table against the wall crowded with dirty plates and teacups, in the corner his unmade bed, on the short side for him. He had been shocked at the old woman's appearance, looking more neglected than ever, haggard, with him trying to cheer her up.
“Watcha cock! How's yourself?” he enquired tenderly in pure Cockney.
She nodded. She was glad he was back, but had not been feeling well of late. And it hadn’t helped catching her grandson going into her purse, stealing a handful of change. It wasn’t as much for the money as the matter of her last and only hope betraying her just like her husband and only daughter had done to her. And then that grinding, that dreary poverty, always the scraping by, every hour of every day... Her bones ached, she cried a lot, and did poorly not to show it.
Tommy felt badly about having disappointed her. It was true he had been a bit short for half a pack of Navy Cuts cigarettes and gone into her wallet. But he had done so dozens of times and always put the money back. Later, after earning a bit of cash doing deliveries for the green-grocer down the road and without ever bothering to tell her. He’s no thief, or if he is, she never his victim. He loves her, respects her, they have a bond. The one his mother reinforced by not showing up at home anymore, preferring to run round with one bloody foreign soldier or sailor after another. Probably dreaming of a new life in New Zealand or Rhodesia, but getting dumped once a month. Either way, dropped, engaged or married, doing the two of them, him, Tommy, and his grandmother, absolutely no good
"Are you still angry wif'me then?" he grinned, while washing up over a small wooden tub in the corner that represented the kitchen, and before going out to the West End, to the Strand Ballroom, later that evening.
“There’s a man come by! 'is name is Wea'erby or something!"
“Wha’s 'e want then?"
“‘e said 'e saw you fight the o'er night. Says you could be somebo'y. May even 'ave a job for you...!"
Sometime earlier Tommy had concluded that if he were ever to get out of this rut, this depressing life, someone would have to do something very easy for him, something he apparently had been incapable of doing for himself. And that was to force him right up, against and over a huge wall. Without the possibility of retreat, cornered like a rat, forced to fight back and get killed or to take one desperate leap over that wall, to freedom and more. He dried his face and put on clean clothes. He combed his unfashionably long, blond hair, powerfully stroking it back with a nearly toothless comb.
“Well, aren't you 'appy!" he said. “Come, I'll take you down to the Jack for a pig, I made a few bob today, you can tell me all about the bloke!"
He would bring her back home in an hour then go out, he decided. Up till then Tommy was figuring boxing his only way out, his only ticket to another life, but terrific self-doubts paralysing him. He didn’t have a great deal of self-respect, a stigma that came with the neighbourhood, their private lives, stuck in the East End, turf of the Dockers, while not being one of them. Sure he had tried to work in the port. But it was a father and son thing to get in and he didn’t have one of those, of course. That is why it bothered him the old girl seemed to be giving up, she, the only person who had always encouraged him, pushing him to finish school, feeding him, dressing him, even getting him those small jobs at the chemist and the greengrocer while he was growing up, then sending him off to Nigel's...Where she wanted him to become tough, a fighter, no longer the pale, poor, insignificant lad who would be everyone's doormat. So that one day he could drive a lorry or join the Navy, or...
Tommy not figuring out for sure what it was that bothered her tonight. It couldn’t just be the incident with the spare change. Perhaps it was the recent war, the bombings, the memories, or simply her arthritis. But here she was, very down indeed. And he wondered what he could do for her. Steal, fight, claw? Yes, but not on his own. Better fight in the service of someone much stronger than him, someone as yet unknown. Who would corner him but ultimately offer a new horizon for the two of them, 'im and 'er, presently easing his grandmother down the stairs, the ‘apples’, across the slow road which took forever because of her stiff legs, poor shoes and the cobbles uneven and wet. As always, it had been raining miserably.
"C'mon, then. It’ll cheer you op!" he insisted with a smile, always in Cockney, thinking of a ‘loop’ and a quick ‘Tommy’ for ‘er.
A man his grandmother's own age, well-dressed for the area, looking up as they walked in. He was carefully eating fish that had just been served. Tommy had never seen the man there before, he wore a plaid jacket with leather patches at the elbows, a shirt and tie to match, and he also sported a moustache which curled at the tips. He would better fit at some country inn, but perhaps he had some insane craving for the Pearly Queen and her ensemble, performing ‘ere later.
Tommy had just sat down with his grandmother and let his eyes run round the house to see if anyone he knew was there, when upon their resettling on her face he saw something that gave him a pleasant jolt. For what struck him was how suddenly and unexpectedly happy his grandmother looked, from one moment to the other her entire demeanour changed, colour back to her cheeks, back a little straighter, tidying her grey hair in the back of her neck ---smiling at the elderly gentleman who smiled back at her.
And suddenly it was the happiest night either one of them had in a long time. It was miraculous. Tommy tried to have a conversation with her but she hardly paid attention to him. He had tried helping her eat as he so often did, by holding her deformed arthritic hand or by helping her glass to her lips, but tonight she wouldn’t have any of it. Gently pushing him away, others who knew them, looking their way and sensing what was going on, smiling away. But Tommy didn’t care. He hadn’t seen her like this for ages and enjoyed the moment as much as she and they did. Until his mind drifted back to the mysterious afternoon caller, Weatherby, who was to return in the morning, having left word: where he came from, what he had to offer, what he looked like, if he was sincere…
* * * * * * *
“Ello, there! Like to dance?" Tommy, said, in one move pulling Danushka out of her seat and onto the floor. It all occurred so suddenly, she didn’t know what was happening. Her mind fixed on Joey, that unknown soldier just having joined their table, a man appearing to be so affable but deep in his heart carrying a lurching, slow-burning sense of refusal. Affability often only manoeuvring, the taking of initiative, the controlling of conversation, of keeping intruders at bay and what Joey was good at talking fast and talking hard, what streets had taught him in the USA. But here now Danushka finding herself standing on a half-empty floor, the music just starting and another man, a man come from nowhere, putting his arm round her waist. Gordon and Kathleen waving at her, encouraging, shrugging their shoulders, flailing their arms a bit, signalling to make the best of it and Joey raising his eyebrow just a tad, not knowing who the ‘dude’ looking like a boxer taking the girl away was, though there was something vaguely familiar about him.
"Come on! Come on! What's the matter! Dance! Dance! Dance!" Now it was Tommy's turn to feel awkward, because the small, pretty girl on the high heels had suddenly sunk her face into her hands. For the first time since she was fourteen sobbing out loud, though this time not for happiness and in the middle of that dance floor, in front of a seated, mostly noisy crowd.
“It’s all right, it's all right!" Kathleen coming to the rescue, apologizing to the calm but annoyed young Englishman. "It's not her fault! She's a Russian refugee! I suspect she's never danced before. Please let me take her back to our table, and do join us for a drink!"
“Cunt Yank" Tommy muttered angrily under his breath. " It's all 'is bloody fault, i'n't it!". He declined Kathleen's invitation and left. After having a closer, a second look at the people round that table, Tommy was now convinced that Joey was the same soldier with whom he had a run-in at the Queen's Larder one night. Joey rubbing him the wrong way even then, cap cocked nonchalantly on a thick, dark, military crew cut, over a pockmarked face, and an irritating grin. It was the second time Joey had spoiled Tommy's evening, and this one had started off so well. That first time haring out of the Queen's Larder, making his way to the Russell Square tube station, in anger throwing a half-open fist at the red, solid cast-iron and fast dozing letter box standing in his path. A punch that was the first expression of a new dawn for him--- he wasn't going to take it anymore. And also the first manifestation of the will he would require to one day get behind the steering wheel of a green racing car. That is if he could persuade Weatherby to let him drive one, not repair one, something he would eventually be allowed to do, but as for today leaving quietly, into that night, looking for action.
For all his brawn Tommy becoming aware that it was quite pointless to end up at the wrong end of an upper-cut. For knock-outs are radical, immediate, public and humiliating. Deep down Tommy being afraid of their devastating consequence: in the ring one can't come in second or third, the pressure to win debilitating him. Still, he remembered gloating over the stiff elbow he had sunk into the Yank's ribs that time. Tommy was becoming like England itself ---tattered but scrappy once purpose got defined. Despite it all, slowly feeling more at ease.
* * * * * * *
It was Christmas in London. The months had whisked by. A Salvation Army Brass Band played psalms outside Harrods, while two woman officers, beating belled tambourines in good time, collected for the poor. Gordon threw a half-crown into the kettle and shivered in his winter coat. Kathleen was inside, shopping, but he had come out, not able to stand the hustle, the bustle, the pushing any longer.
It was a dark, late afternoon and the wind blew cold. His nose was red and his eyes watery, his fingers stiff inside his fur-lined gloves. His gout was on the move. He didn’t complain, just not used to these decidedly un-Egyptian temperatures. Port Saïd had been his last posting, administrating the Canal there, and its scorching weather for most of the year bearable only because dry at the same time. Dryer than the desert from where it emanated relentlessly, but also its dust, and blindness and cholera. And closer to the Nile, malaria, hunger and fanaticism, all inter-twined. A European only able to take so much, so that the urge to come home many faceted. One of them that the local, grovelling functionaries were so inert and corrupt as to drive any sane, honest man mad, on top of that heap, Farouk, like a fat, gluttonous, perspiring, conspiring sphinx, whose operetta army another thorn in most expatriates’ side. In the end Gordon hearing the rumblings in the desert, the other side of Alexandria, hearing Rommel, the desert rat, getting ready with his Italian footmen for Montgomery at Al Alamein. The Germans everywhere from the Levant to Libya and though here not occupiers per sé, an impediment to his and Kathleen's freedom to travel, making those last years in Egypt too painful to describe.
It’s during such times that memories begin to haunt, that childhood re-imposes, that sadness sets in, particularly when sitting dreaming on the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel, business bringing him to Cairo, crossing the ochre sands between here and Suez once more. Where Gordon suddenly remembered his younger sister getting her first menstruation, for everyone to note that she had become a woman and expecting to be treated accordingly, that is… with suitable respect. And luckier than Eve, born many years later, getting none from her parents, but Gordon couldn’t know this of course. In fact he would never meet the youthful widow, an out-of-protest stripper, sharing Tommy's life at one point.
Gordon also reminiscing about his years at Public school, those summer camping trips to France, the jumping into roped-off river, everybody naked, all the boys keeping away from the headmaster's fast hands, even digging trenches round their tents to keep the man at bay… the boys' running joke, anyway. Or the smoking of his first, swiped fag during the same outing, the prolonged nausea it caused, cramps setting in worse than if he had eaten a kilo of green plums. He smiled, wondering what ever became of the little rogues and would-be bugger, where they were all swimming now.
He had solemnly promised Kathleen they would return home as soon as all the fury ended, praying England would still be there, unchanged. In the Middle East, those last years, becoming more sensitive to the suffering round him, and particularly irritated with the appalling arrogance of his own younger colonial colleagues. Finding their airs of hegemony stupid and immoral, the invisible exploitation they carried on round the clock, out of date. There, as in India, did they not realize the world as they knew it or imagined they knew had already come to an end? That fellahin and untouchable deserved a better lot?
“Silly bastards!" he called those Empire types, each day getting more heavily into drink.
To some Gordon appeared laconic, but he was very much a man of quiet commitment, diffident but on the inside angrier than all hell. The perfect keeper of the Suez books ---honest, lawless, yet never an anarchist, only disrespecting rules he recognised had to exist, for others, never for him. A gentleman of the first order, non-confrontational, smooth and graceful as a tropical fish, new internationalist, in a small symbolic way father to his King...
“Rashwa, Sumner Effendi? Foulous? A small greasing of the palm, Sir?"
“Two loads of coal, Sumner? One for our pockets, one for the ship?"
“No thanks! Thank you all very much! And I do mean the lot of you!"
Except giving baksheesh to the forgotten, the handing out of alms, this he never refused and why they followed him to the souks, the infirm, the children, his clan, all of them, whenever he passed through.
“Sumner Effendi, Sumner Effendi....!"
“Yes, yes, all right...Here you are....God bless...!"
He now took the handkerchief Kathleen had ironed for him that morning and loudly blew his painfully throbbing nose. The colourful piece of cloth had been given to him by a distant Irish cousin. The English always manage to have their Irish cousins somehow distant, Gordon mused, thinly smiling, although he didn’t quite know how they accomplished it. Then he chuckled in the wind, for without them knowing it, he is the Irish cousin, which probably explains his creative behaviour in all those foreign lands and Kathleen probably not even remembering it, though warned by him to this effect one time, after a bottle of gin or two, one intimate, late evening. Gordon originally hailing from County Mayo, but barely remembering its green, rolling grass, his parents leaving for Durban when he was only four, then moving, moving, in search of a better life, shortly after the turn of the century but ever within the old British Empire, including stints in London, his spiritual home. A man used to open decks, to open skies, to open shirts and even a few dispersed open minds, now back to new do's and don't's, where to cross the road, where to enter a building, to pay for the telephone, the wireless, and how to address Mr. So and Mrs. So, in which mandatory corner to place one's initials, where to affix a stamp, stamps, stamps everywhere, on every corner, corners and the lining up behind each lingering queue --- modernity a bit taxing, but it didn’t matter, did it? For he was home, home at last, and home was where Kathleen got him. He the best friend she ever had, while taking his quirks, his morning testiness, the double gins, the smoking, mainly because he’s the most decent man she has known and is ever likely to meet.
And still, it wasn’t so terribly long ago that she got rid of all her previous and incidental lovers, dashing nibblers of her nipples buying her dresses and bringing her momentary passion, stroking her softly in her shadowy parts. But these men always ending up treating her with the cruelty of a child, which they were, those younger lions and not worth it, she decided, not really, even though Gordon, much her senior, at night would soon and mostly snore.
This Kathleen presently walked out of Harrods, half a dozen stately black taxi-cabs standing patiently waiting in line for her. Red double-deckers tearing dangerously close round their parked fenders, one taxi-driver, spotting Gordon standing somewhat forlornly on the pavement as if unsure where to go, reckoning here was a man of distinction, probably good for a handsome tip, calling him `Guv'ner', offering to drive him where ever he wished.
“Look, Gordon! Look what I bought for Danushka! The poor dear! She has absolutely nothing to wear!"
“Yes, yes, I agree, it's a lovely jumper. But when do we go back to the flat? Do you think that American boy has left by now? Wasn't he leaving for Berlin tonight? We don't know much about him, do we! Are you quite sure Danushka’s safe with him?!"
* * * * * * *
Only a few short years after Vladimir Chernov was born, but well before Danushka saw her first light near Grinyovo…. on a different parallel, on another continent, with a different climate, with a different pace and mood, a newborn male infant was abandoned on a subway train. For the first time and already taken in his very new life for what would be one of many subsequent, dubious, even odious rides.
Wild and scrambling, the free ferocious grazing for wealth, fast and rocketing events nearly every hour of the day, racing Fords and racing minds, propelled the American herd forward but also inadvertently trample on some of its stumbling, weaker components, unnoticed and in a dust that was never seen to settle. One of these an infant, soon to be baptised Joey by a British nurse named Evelyn, who worked at the Mt. Sinai Hospital having just completed a stint in Palestine.
“Oh, my Gawd, I thought it was a snake. But, oh, Amazin' Grace, when that there brown bag moved, and after all them white folk be gone runnin’ way screaming, I saw, praise the Lawd, I saw the tiniest of li`l bitty fingers done come stickin right outta that there brown shoppin' bag, I swear!"
An eighty-four year old black woman with doleful eyes explaining what happened to the Bronx precinct policeman who had ‘done come rushin’ up the ill-lit stairs leading to the over-ground portion of the evening sub-way line, summoned there to retrieve a bag with a snake.
Chorus: Watcha say, ole woman?
Old Man: Watcha say, ole Missie?
Youth: Whatcha say, ole puss?
Old Lady: I’ll have ya’all done know, Mrs Baily’s my name!
“They done run faster than a crazed herda buffalo, them white folk did!" she added, her face turning sombre with contempt." And they'ze white fingers, you know! I don't believe how they’d be doin' bad thing like that, to one their own!"
Evelyn, the delightful, heavy-set nurse who had just been hired at the hospital's obstetrics ward, soon naming the foundling Lawrence after a countryman of hers, whose exploits in the thirst-lands of Arabia had captured her imagination and one long the subject of her lonely passion. But this darkish child, instead of on the Bronx line, might as well have been found on sandy knoll, deep in that mythical desert where Evelyn used to work before sailing to America of the canyons, some ancient and in the west, but in her opinion mainly urban, ghastly new, and more like towering forests of stone. Therefore, on second thought, given the child’s olive skin, not only naming him Lawrence but also Joseph, after a carpenter once upon a biblical time.
Needless to say the hospital's very name held tremendous appeal for nurse Evelyn, the reason she fought hard for a job there and succeeding just in time to be entrusted with the welfare of young Lawrence Joseph, tiny traveller, discoverer, bed-wetter, lover of offered wet breasts and a short time later the odd spoon of lukewarm pabulum. Only the latter provided lovingly by Evelyn, every four hours, on or off shift, not the former, as regrettably she was long dry. Authorities soon throwing inane darts at invisible charts to determine small Joey's future, callously ignoring the nurse's fervent pleas to adopt him followed by their refusal having something to do with her temporary legal status in the United States of Infinite Wisdom, being unmarried, and lacking ‘stability', though not apparently a heart...
Darts making Joey's rather prolonged stay at Mt. Sinai come to an abrupt end one day--- his natural mother declared incurably absent and so dispatched on an endless journey of foster upon foster home. Where it would soon become apparent to all who touched upon his young life that Joey was smart, healthy and the proud possessor of a will his own, one that would ultimately prevent him from fitting in with those very parents, their other children, their parakeet or garish wallpaper. And just as well, for these families received money for his care and as he would find out take him only till the Christmas shopping bills were paid, not a day more.
Joey concluding it was much less painful not to become attached to anyone, not even a dog, than to follow his natural urge for affection. He was a youngster subjected to short-term leasing, with no drop-off charges, a fully lubricated child, handy to have round, here to air-condition a summer, there to warm a long winter's night, rented out by and large at a pace of twice a year, understandably cultivating in him a sizeable aversion and a deep mistrust towards anyone married and adult.
A certain Mrs Agnes Monroe the last and easily the most determined of these merchants, deciding to use her cunning lust to rid him of his acne. Seducing him only two days after the young, strong castaway had reached the age of thirteen, a boy who’d never been taught to stop and look at a chestnut tree or to admire the spotted tufts of a night-owl, weary at dawn after long hunts in a wet dark park. A boy finding out what a home-run was without having set foot in Yankee Stadium, despite growing up in and around the Bronx. Agnes Monroe herself becoming convinced at an early age that by being good she wouldn’t get too far, all the signs there, whichever turn taken. As a small girl unnoticed no matter how diligent, courteous and prompt she was., boys teasing her, girlfriends using her, parents decent but only sitting there, and sitting there, smiling. Somewhat like the parents of another, younger woman called Eve, who was growing up in North Yorkshire in England and who would have a crush on Joey, an American of native Indian extraction, accidentally meeting him in the lobby of a Paris hotel across the square from its ornate Opera.
It turning out though that Mrs Monroe had, miraculously, and given her bloodline, a more than accomplished mind. But even that would do her little good and adding insult to injury, she wasn’t particularly lovely either. No money at home to force the course, never able to buy the graces and the love other, richer girls, also ugly, could. So that when to her own astonishment a man turned up a second and then a third time at her doorstep, marrying him as fast as she could.
One owning a fruit stand, rising early, shaving poorly, but if not much else, always paying the rent in full, of this she could be sure. The times hard, America's bag burst, even banks going bust and New York a battle field, so that her choice had been nothing short of justified. He becoming her twice a week husband and only God divining what he was doing on this earth, because it soon seemed to her that he came from another planet. Out of touch, out of reach, mainly sticking it in her wrong moist end, and getting her pregnant the few times he turned her over.
“Albania in New York!" she often hissed silently in an attempt at bitter humour, referring to his swarthiness. But where then did he get the name Monroe?
Untrained, stumpy and overweight, her natural intellect by far surpassing her husband's and continuing to grow through prodigious reading, which with a small break here, a loving push there, might well have taken her in a fuller direction. But what she saw, what she experienced was endless crap, adorned, to boot, by children indifferent to her. What she needed was a lift, a laugh, some tension to off-set the unbearable boredom of her existence. Getting this when that incredible orphan walked in through her door, acquired on impulse, in a last attempt to break down the wall between herself and her family, bringing in some extra cash to boot, but where Agnes Monroe went wrong was not perhaps by seducing the orphan, but by deciding to steal him, lock, stock and barrel, by wanting to keep him all to herself.
“Joey, why don't you stay home from school this afternoon? You've worked so hard lately, and the weather’s so foul. Come, I'll write your teacher a note! What d'yah say, hey, boy?!"
They could spend some time together... He had been placed in September, it was now November, and she had grown to like him a lot... He was so big for his age, almost like a man... And a good man had to rest... be spoiled... Until five o'clock in the afternoon at least, till then no one else home... She would bake his favourite pie, of apple, buying a whole case of soda just for him… With a bit of money she had secretly put away, for him...
And thus it was that Agnes Monroe, blushing with an excitement she had never felt in her life, took revenge on her world. On her silly, smiling, peasant parents who were still alive, on her husband and in a way on all of New York. And this by soon opening her housecoat and her genital orifice wide all at once, keeping Joey home from school whenever she desired, to this end writing long reports to his principal and the Child-Welfare agency concerning his supposed frail health, spending evenings glaring at her husband and children, all the while furiously fondling Joey's new, young thighs under her kitchen table.
Joey's skin clearing up nicely that fall, but failing every one of his exams at school and after the first excitement of his strange initiation Mrs Monroe's appetite becoming progressively more obsessive, while in direct proportion his starting to decline. The lady becoming rather jealous of his every move, creating an atmosphere in the three bedroom tenement that could soon be cut with the hard, dried edge of his repeatedly stained handkerchief. Alice in Joey-land not speaking to anyone, her own children hating the boy and observant neighbours winking meaningfully behind her husband’s back, at his nearby outdoor fruit stand.
And so it came that she nabbed not only Joey's precocious manhood but a good slice of his youth as well. And when she missed two periods and explained to Joey what this meant, he knew the time had come to move on swiftly. Trapped, he could talk to no one, ask for help and unwilling to transfer to another foster family, damned if he’d go back to some foul-smelling ward, turning fourteen and to the streets all at once. But not before smashing up the Monroe house first, with a crowbar he had found in a lane, one morning, poorly clad but not yet underfed, smiling eerily.
* * * * * * *
With Kathleen, Danushka would go on excursions and visits of a different stripe, discovering London, roaming Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury and more appreciating how much Vladimir must have loved her by sending her here. Standing in the Fitzroy and brushing against tall, paint-stained artists and stringy writers, like her own Volodya understanding the depths of the totalitarian menace so well. Before finally encountering Marx at Highgate Cemetery in North London, standing pensively before his imposing granite and bronze tombstone, covered by new wreaths and surrounded by wooded walkways, wild flowers and the breath of island air she was beginning to get accustomed to. It is where she prayed for Vladimir whose warm body she missed, asking him for help and strength:
“Volodya, Volodya, I'm here. I've done everything you've asked me to, but what do I do now?!"
But then and fortunately getting distracted by some of the other headstones, each with its own story to tell, surely not necessarily sad. For this, in a certain way, could also quite easily be a happy place. And we do live or die by distractions or the lack of them. Like stones, stone angels everywhere, ivy snuggling up and round. Terraces rising and falling according to where one stood and which way one looked, covered with beds of flowers, pasture green lawns once immaculate, now neglected, leading away towards more and more neighbourhoods of the immensely peaceful dead.
“Look, the Egyptian Avenue behind that special gate! It even has obelisks. Miles of sand now, and we're all set!" Kathleen exclaimed. She laughed at the gaudy banality of it all and would have had a real soul-mate in Manolo, the Spanish stowaway, now on his way to Hoboken and Greenwich Village, where to befriend an awkward ex-serviceman, just back from Berlin, at Zanetti's Café and also the man whose feet Danushka would someday cure from a case of severe and chronic eczema, by teaching him how to bathe them gently, in his own urine…