Death and the Penguin (9 page)

“I’ve got a dacha,” he said. “One of an MVD group. There’s a public phone, a fireplace and a TV, and food in the cellar … Why not celebrate New Year there?”

“But where were you planning to celebrate it?” Viktor asked cautiously.

Sergey shrugged. “Nowhere,” he said. “You know the extent of my intimate circle.”

“And your mother?”

“Won’t have anything to do with New Year. Doesn’t like festive occasions. When would you like to go?”

“The sooner the better. Today?”

Sergey looked out of the window. It was getting dark.

“Right, but I must pop home first as I haven’t got the keys with me.” He rose from the table. “Back in an hour. You get your things together.”

After seeing him out, Viktor looked into the living room.

“Sonya,” he said, squatting down in front of her, “we’re going away.”

“When do we come back?”

“In a few days.”

“What if Grandfather Frost comes and we’re not here?”

“He’s got keys,” said Viktor. “He’ll leave his presents under the tree.”

“Will there be a tree where we’re going?”

Viktor shook his head.

“Then I shan’t go,” she declared firmly.

He sighed a deep sigh.

“Listen,” he said sternly. “When Daddy comes back, I shall tell him how naughty you’ve been.”

“And I shall tell him you don’t read to me, or buy me ice-creams,” vowed Sonya.

Finding the reproach justified, Viktor fell silent.

“OK,” he said after a while. “You’re absolutely right. But
we’re expected. We can take our tree with us, if you like.”

“Is Misha coming?”

“Of course.”

“OK.”

Together they removed the decorations and toys from the tree, and wrapped them in paper.

“We’ll take the presents, too,” Sonya insisted, and obediently Viktor put them into a shopping bag.

“Wait,” she said, suddenly stopping. “What if Grandfather Frost comes and there’s no tree, where will he put his presents?”

He was at a loss. No sensible answer suggested itself. He felt infinitely weary.

“Perhaps we should paint a fir tree on the wall to tell him where,” said Sonya, pondering the matter aloud. “Got any green paint?”

“No,” said Viktor. “I know what – we’ll leave a note in the kitchen saying put them on the table.”

Sonya thought.

“
Under
is better.”

“Why?”

“So nobody sees.”

That settled, Viktor wrote the note. Sonya read it syllable by syllable, and gave it back with a nod of approval.

Down below a car hooted. Viktor looked out, and in the late afternoon gloom, was just able to make out the familiar
Zaporozhets
.

First he carried down the tree, trussed in washing-line, together with a shopping bag of toys and presents, and a carrier bag of food from the freezer; then he and Sonya went down, he with Misha in his arms.

“I’ve brought a couple more blankets,” said Sergey in the car. “Until the place heats up, it’ll be cold.”

Misha and Sonya sat at the back, Viktor in front. Misha edged closer to Sonya when the engine started, as if scared by the noise. Seeing them in the mirror snuggled up together, Viktor nudged Sergey and pointed. Adjusting the mirror to this amusing rear-seat idyll, Sergey gave a weary smile and accelerated away.

At the entrance to the dacha plots was a hut from which two men in camouflaged combat gear emerged, walked around the
Zaporozhets
, and took a good look inside. Sergey wound down the window.

“Dacha 7.”

“Carry on,” said one of the guards.

They stopped outside a little brick-built house with a steeply angled roof. Sergey got out. Looking into the back before following, Viktor saw that Sonya was asleep.

“Just a mo while I unset the trap,” said Sergey.

“What trap?”

“Anti-burglar.”

Stooping, and with a creaking of boards, he shifted something in front of the door.

“All’s well,” he beckoned. “We can enter.”

Opening the door to a glassed-in veranda, Sergey switched on the light, throwing a yellow pool onto the snow in front of
the house and the car. Sonya woke, rubbed her eyes, and turned to Misha, around whom she had had her arm for the whole of the journey. Sensing she was awake, he turned towards her and they looked hard at one another.

In no time they were all sitting in a cold room before a dead hearth, with a single bulb dispensing light and an illusion of warmth from the ceiling.

Sergey brought wood, built it into a wigwam in the hearth, and inserted a lighted newspaper.

The flames took hold, and slowly began to radiate heat.

Misha, who had tucked himself away in a far corner, suddenly livened up and came and stood in front of the fire.

“Uncle Vik,” yawned Sonya, “when are we going to see to the tree?”

“Tomorrow morning,” said Viktor.

The small room contained a settee and an armchair facing the fire, and against the left-hand wall, a bed.

They put Sonya on the settee close to the fire with the two blankets over her, and she soon fell asleep, leaving Viktor, Sergey and Misha to keep vigil by the blazing hearth. Sergey added more wood. Apart from the occasional hiss of moisture issuing from the logs, there wasn’t a sound.

Viktor perched on the edge of the settee, Sergey sat in the armchair, and Misha, not taught by nature how to sit, stood.

“I’m off to work tomorrow,” said Sergey. “I’ll get champagne and some meat afterwards and come back.”

Viktor nodded.

“It’s so quiet here,” he said dreamily. “A silence to sit and write in.”

“No one’s stopping you,” Sergey said amiably.

“Life is,” said Viktor, after a silence.

“It is you who’s made it complicated … Let’s have a smoke on the veranda.”

Viktor went, though he didn’t smoke. After the slightly warmed air of the living room, the veranda was like a refrigerator, but invigorating.

Sergey exhaled a stream of smoke towards the low ceiling. “Look,” he said, “if you’re in that sort of a mess, why drag a small girl around with you?”

“Her father seems to be in the same boat. I’ve no idea where he is. So what can I do?”

Sergey shrugged. “Ah, we’re not alone,” he said a minute later, looking out of the window.

Two windows were shining bright in the darkness.

“Like some cherry brandy?” Sergey asked suddenly.

“Rather!”

“They went through to the tiny ice-cold kitchen, where there was just a stand with an electric hotplate and a small table with two stools. Sergey raised a rectangle of wooden floor and thrust a torch at Viktor.

“Light me down,” he told him, and Viktor obeyed.

Lowering himself into the cellar, Sergey passed up two old champagne bottles corked with babies’ dummies, then climbed back up.

They sat straight down in the kitchen, filled cut-glass tumblers with cherry brandy, and drank in leisurely fashion, listening to the silence. Sergey went to put more wood on the fire.

“Is she asleep?” Viktor asked when he returned.

“Yes.”

“And Misha?

“Keeping an eye on the fire,” Sergey grinned. “Well, shall we drink to the New Year?”

With a sigh Viktor grasped his glass. That, too, was cold.

“As a butcher friend of mine was wont to say,” continued Sergey, “
Let’s drink to not being worse off. We have known better days
.”

Next morning Sergey left for Kiev, and Viktor filled a bucket from the water pipe running overground through the plots. After putting the kettle on the electric hotplate, he looked into the living room. The fire had burnt itself out in the night, but warmth and a scent of pine remained. Sonya was asleep and smiling. Misha stood brooding over the heap of black ash in the hearth.

Viktor slapped his thigh, and as Misha turned, half opened the door and beckoned.

“Come,” he whispered.

With a backward look at the dead hearth, Misha came waddling.

“Hungry? Of course you are. Come on, let’s go out.”

From the shopping bag he took a couple of plaice, which he laid on the top step.

“Tuck in!”

Misha came out onto the step, and swivelled his head left and right, taking in his surroundings. Descending to the snow, he marched around in a circle and headed towards the trees, but coming up against the water pipe, turned back, his tracks not unlike those of crooked skis, describing irregular geometric
figures on the clean page of snow. Returning, he edged round the steps, and treating the topmost as a table, addressed himself to the fish.

Well pleased at such a display of animation, Viktor proceeded to the kitchen and made tea. He looked into the living room. Sonya was still sleeping and he didn’t want to wake her.

He sat with his cup of tea at the kitchen table. On the window ledge beside him stood the two bottles of cherry brandy, one half empty, the other full. Romantic thoughts stirred in the silence, touching again on unwritten novels and the past. He suddenly had the sensation of being abroad, out of reach of yesterday’s existence. This abroad was a place of tranquillity, a Switzerland of the soul blanketed in snows of peace, permeated with a dread of causing disturbance; where no bird sang or called, as if out of no desire to.

At a sound from the veranda door, he went to investigate, and came face to face with Misha, who, seeing Viktor, comically bowed his head, giving him to understand that he liked it here. Ample food and suitably cold, Viktor decided, pleased at his friend’s good spirits.

Soon after, Sonya woke, putting an end to silence and reflection. First he must give her breakfast, then get to work on the tree.

The tree took more than an hour, but finally there it stood, decked with ribbons and toys, in trampled snow and less than lofty splendour, with Misha beside it, keeping an eye on events.

Sonya walked back to see how it looked from the dacha.

“Like it?”

“Yes!” she said, delighted.

They made a tour of the little garden, then went back in. Viktor re-lit the fire, and Sonya settled down in the armchair
with a pencil and an exercise book she had found.

Towards five, when it was dark and the room was warm, suffused with the yellow light of the single ceiling bulb, Sergey returned. He dumped two shopping bags on the veranda, then parked his car behind the dacha.

“Brought you the latest,” he said, handing Viktor a bundle of newspapers. “I’ve got a couple of bottles of champagne and one of pepper vodka – in case of colds. Will that be enough?”

“Ample,” said Viktor, opening out the first of the papers.

The headlines jolted him back to reality. Skimming both articles, he tried to think. The banker’s name rang no bell. He was not
obelisk
-carded. The State Deputy – only wounded, albeit in the head – was.

“Look, old friend,” said Sergey, “I didn’t bring these to furrow your brow!”

Viktor let the papers slide to the floor by the hearth. “They’ll do for fire-lighting,” he said.

“Quite right! News you can’t read calmly, don’t read at all!” said Sergey. Then, turning to Sonya in her armchair, he asked, “And what are you up to?”

“Drawing a stove.”

“Show me.”

He studied the drawing in the exercise book, and turned to her with a puzzled expression.

“Why’s the fire black?”

“It’s not, it’s grey,” she corrected. “Because I only found one pencil.”

“Didn’t look hard enough,” said Sergey. “OK, tomorrow we’ll both look. There must be others – my niece brought some.”

They fried potatoes, made a good supper, then settled Sonya for the night.

“I shan’t sleep,” she warned. “I shall watch the fire, and if it goes out, I’ll call.”

Leaving it at that, they sat at the kitchen table and retrieved yesterday’s cut-glass tumblers from the window ledge. Sergey filled them, and dropped the empty bottle on the floor.

“One more day, and that’s it,” said Sergey. “Then back to the same old thing, except that the year will be new.”

At two in the morning they were still sitting, hotplate glowing red for warmth. Though the second bottle was empty, they felt unjustifiably sober. Only indolence kept Sergey from the second visit to the cellar that seemed highly desirable.

Suddenly an explosion set the windows rattling and made them start up in alarm.

“Shall we go and see?” Viktor asked uncertainly.

Sergey looked into the living room. Sonya was muttering in her sleep. The fire was burning low.

“Yes,” he said, returning to the kitchen. Standing on the top step they found Misha.

“Seems to be asleep,” whispered Viktor, after bending to look.

Voices broke the silence. Words couldn’t be distinguished, but the intonation was one of alarm. Snow crunched beneath the feet of people invisible in the darkness. The cones of light shed by solitary lamps at 100-metre intervals along the main avenue had merely the effect of provoking the darkness into closing in more impenetrably.

“Come on,” called Sergey, now more decisive.

“But where?”

“Not far.”

Coming to one of the footpaths that served to delimit the plots, they followed it for 100 metres or so, before stopping and listening.

“Over there!” Sergey pointed in the direction of voices made louder by the silence of the night.

As they made their way towards the voices, they saw the beam of a powerful torch moving slowly over the snow.

“Local man,” they heard a wheezy voice declare.

“That’s Grandpa Vanya, dacha caretaker,” Sergey whispered.

Advancing, they made themselves known.

“What’s up, Vanya?” Sergey enquired.

“The old story,” said the caretaker, directing the beam of his massive accumulator-powered torch at a body lying on the snow. The snow, Viktor saw, was red, and the body minus a leg and an arm. The latter, torn off at the elbow, lay some distance away, still in its padded sleeve.

Two men, one tall and wearing a tracksuit, the other slightly shorter, bearded and wearing a down jacket, were standing there saying nothing.