I kept my mouth shut. When I could eventually see a gynaecologist he took one look and said that he hoped I never planned to have children. He was a stubbly man who smelt of vodka, so I didn’t believe him. There was some iron cow of a counsellor there, who said it was an old bourgeois conceit that dictated the only role in life for women was to provide for capitalists to exploit, but I told her I didn’t need her advice and I walked out. A year later, I read about my lover’s heart attack in Pravda.
I tell Rudi that I take the pill, because he made it known pretty early on that he thought condoms were only fit for animals. Who knows what can happen in Switzerland? The air is clean there, and the water pure. Maybe Swiss gynaecologists can do things that Russian ones can’t. A little girl, half-Rudi, half-me, running around in the wildflowers. Ah, she’ll be beautiful. And then there’ll be a younger brother, and Rudi can teach him how to hunt in the mountains while I teach our little Kitten how to cook. We’re going to learn how to make bird’s nest soup, which Jerome says they eat in China.
Head Curator Rogorshev seems to have been avoiding me today, even though tonight’s the night of our regular liaison. Fine by me. The Delacroix will be our last picture — Rudi promised. Rudi says he’s beginning to tie up loose business ends. He says he can’t do it overnight, and of course I understand. Rudi explained the situation to Gregorski, and tolerated no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’, so Gregorski had no choice but to bow down. If necessary, Rudi said, I can go on ahead and stay in the best hotel in Switzerland for a few weeks until he can join me. That would be nice. I could surprise him by buying the chalet first and having it ready for when he’s sold his assets for the best possible price. As well as his pizza place — and, of course, the modelling agency that I work in when I’m not doing the Hermitage — he runs a taxi company, a construction company, an import–export business, has a share in a gym and is a sleeping partner for a group of nightclubs, where he handles security and insurance and such things. Rudi’s a friend of the President. The President said that Rudi is one of the new breed of Russians who are navigating the New Russia through the choppy waters of the new century.
My gallery is empty again. I stroll over to the window. Giant gulls are shouldering the wind. The weather will soon be changing for the worse. I admire my reflection in the glass. It’s true, what Rudi said last night, after we’d made love for the third time: as I age, I get younger. It’s not an everyday beauty I have, out of a powder compact or shampoo bottle. It’s more molecular than that. Wide, luscious lips, and a neck with curves that my admiral compared to a swan’s. After dallying with platinum hair, I returned to my native auburn, the bronze of tribal jewellery. I got my looks from my mother, though Christ knows she gave me nothing else. My talents as an actress and dancer I must have inherited from some illustrious, forgotten, ancestor. My eyes, deep sea green, I inherited from my father, who, in his day, was a famous movie director, now deceased. He never acknowledged me publicly. I choose not to let his name be known. I respect his wishes. Anyway, my eyes. Rudi says he could dive into them and never resurface. Did you know, I entered the Leningrad Academy of Arts as an actress? Doubtless — if I’d chosen to — I could have gone all the way to the top. My Politburo lover discovered me there, in the early stage of my career, and we entered the wider stage of society life together. We used to dance the tango. I can still dance, but Rudi prefers discos. I find them a bit common. Full of sluts and tarts who are only interested in men for their power and money. The Swiss have more class. In Switzerland, Rudi will beg me to teach him.
Jerome can’t bear the sight of his own reflection, he once confessed after drinking a bottle of cheap sherry, and he’s never owned a mirror. I asked him why. He told me that whenever he looks into one he sees a man inside it, and thinks, ‘Who in God’s name are you?’
The serpent is still there, coiled snug round the warty tree—
Christ above!
My dream’s just come back to me.
I was hiding in a tunnel. There was something evil down there, somewhere. Two people ran past, both slitty-eyed, a man and a woman. The man wanted to save the woman from the evil. He had grabbed her arm and they were running, faster than gas in air currents. I followed them, because the man seemed to know the way out, but then I lost track. I found myself on a bare hill with a sky smeared with oil paint and comets and chimes. I realised I was looking at the foot of the cross. There were the dice that the Romans had been using to divide Jesus’ clothes. As I looked, the cross started sinking. There was the nail, hammered clean through Jesus’ feet. His thighs, creamy and bloodless as alabaster. The loincloth, the wound in His side, the arms outstretched and the hands hammered in, and there staring straight back at me was the grinning face of the devil, and in that moment I knew that Christianity had been one horrible, sick, two-thousand-year-old joke.
Gutbucket Barbara Petrovich came to take my place while I went for a tea-break. As usual, she said not a word. Pious and holier-than-thou, just like my mother on her deathbed. I walked down my marbled hallways. A shuffler with a guidebook garbled at me in a foreign language, but I ignored it. Past my dragons of jade and blood-red stone, through my domed chambers of gold leaf, under my Olympian gods, there’s Mercury, living by his wits, down long rooms of blue sashes and silver braid and mother-of-pearl inlaid tables and velvet slippers, and down sooty back stairs and anterooms and into the murky staff canteen, where Tatyana was stirring chocolate powder into warm milk, all alone.
‘Hello, Tatyana! You’ve been exiled here too?’
‘I take my break whenever I choose. Chocolate? Forget your waistline for today. Put some sugar into your blood.’
‘Ah, go on then. What the hell.’ I sat down, felt too hot, stood up and the legs of my chair shrieked against the tiles. I opened the windows through the iron bars, but it didn’t make much difference. Outside and inside were the same. There was a tank in the square outside, and lots of people moving very slowly. The outer edges of a whirlpool.
‘You seem a little agitated today, Margarita,’ ventured Tatyana.
I longed to tell her about Switzerland. I longed to tell her everything, and I almost did. ‘Really? I’ve been thinking about taking a little holiday, as a matter of fact... Maybe abroad... I don’t know where...’
Tatyana lit me a cigarette. Her fingers were beautiful.
We listened to the drone of a distant boiler, and the slosh of a cleaner’s mop in the corridor outside. I wondered if Tatyana was a pianist, with fingers like that.
‘It’s strange and it makes me sad,’ I thought aloud, ‘that a place carries on without you after you’ve left.’
Tatyana nodded. ‘It’s the world slapping you in the face and saying, “Look, honeybunch, I get along without you very well.” The sea does the same thing, but nobody lives there. It hurts more if it’s a place where you’ve grown up, or worked, or fallen in love.’
Tatyana’s chocolate sweetened my tongue to its roots. ‘Sometimes I imagine that I’ll walk out into the corridor and bump into an eighteenth-century Count of Archangel.’
Tatyana laughed. ‘And what does the Count of Archangel want with Margarita Latunsky?’
‘Well, it depends. Sometimes he wants me to show him the way to the Empress’s chambers for a tryst. Sometimes he wants to paint me in oils, and hang me in his gallery. Other times he wants to drag me back to his four-poster bed, to ravish me so utterly that I can’t walk for three days.’