She laughed. ‘A crazy night. Friends … ’
‘Ah.’ From Anna Antonovna he had already learned that the only friends in the apartment that night had been Ponomarenko and this girl; it had been the first of their friendly nights.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we are both good friends of Alexei.’
‘Ah, Alyosha, that crazy boy … Thank you.’ He had given her a cherry brandy, and noted her approval of his good manners. A lady’s drink; although he had also heard from Anna Antonovna that this girl had no trouble with a vodka.
In no time they were chatting easily, and he saw that his startling head in no way fazed her. Quite the reverse; she seemed fascinated by it and was coming on fast.
‘Your Russian — so beautiful,’ she softly told him.
‘Thank you.’ Her own was far from high class, and he was fracturing his in the manner he had adopted here from the start. But he saw the remark as less a tribute to beautiful Russian than as a hint that ethnicity was no problem here. At the drop of a hat this girl could be tumbling in the Finnish bed. But the blatancy of it puzzled him. It also alerted him. Did she know that Ponomarenko would be absent a long time? And if so, how?
‘So what do you hear,’ he asked, handing her a third shot of cherry brandy, ‘from our friend?’
‘Alyosha? … What, another drink? I shouldn’t. But I also get lonely sometimes … Oh, Alyosha doesn’t write. Too busy with those Georgian girls, I expect.’
‘After you? Water after wine? Of course not.’
‘Liar,’ she said delightedly, and showed him more leg. ‘I’m sure you’re just as bad. Didn’t you go for those gorgeous Batumi girls?’
‘In Batumi I just relax.’
‘And have parties? He loved parties. I’ll bet you had parties.’
‘Parties, yes. There were parties.’
‘Loved them. And now he’ll miss one here. He’d be back if he knew that! Oh yes, like a shot. Pavel Grigorovich’s.’
‘Pavel Grigorovich?’
‘Bukarovsky. His sixtieth. Everybody’s going. You didn’t know?’
‘Oh. Yes,’ he said. And now he saw. Everybody wasn’t going. The mayor was going, and the top brass of Tchersky and Green Cape were going. Many of Bukarovsky’s drivers were also going. But supermarket assistants weren’t going.
‘He’d be showing me off there, all right. He loved to see me dressed up. I mean, what I’ve got on now isn’t anything. I’ve got some lovely clothes — and nowhere to go in them.’
‘I’m sure you look lovely in anything. Isn’t that cherry brandy a little sweet for you?’
‘It is a little sweet, yes.’
‘Try a sip of vodka.’
‘Oh, no. I must be going.’
‘From mine,’ he said, and displaced the panda to sit beside her and give her a sip; which the girl refused so playfully that she managed to spill it down her dress front. He helped her mop up with a handkerchief.
‘Quite dry now?’
‘I think so.’
‘It didn’t go down further?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
He tried further, without the handkerchief, and left his hand there.
‘Naughty Kolya,’ she said, looking at him.
‘Naughty Lydia.’
He kissed her and received a mouthful of cherry tongue. ‘We’re only human, aren’t we?’ she said in his ear.
She said it again, next door, some time later, when he had begun to doubt it. The girl was a tiger. Presently she propped herself on an elbow and gazed down at him. ‘You know I haven’t been with a man since Alyosha. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said honestly. A minimum of four months’ energy had gone into her activities, and he didn’t think much could have gone spare.
Later, lying more comfortably, she said reflectively, ‘Yes … that will certainly be a party, all right.’
‘Would you like to go to it?’
‘Who could I go with?’
‘Why not me?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if Alyosha would like that.’ Her eyelashes flickered at the ceiling. ‘I haven’t thought of it really,’ she said.
26
Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky, the road manager of the Tchersky Transport Company, had been given his job by Leonid Shevelyev, the founding father of the company and the man credited with opening up north-east Siberia. Shevelyev, arrested in 1947 for ‘unsound political beliefs’ had served his time in a local labour camp, and Bukarovsky had served time in the same camp. Most of the senior staff of the company had done time in the camps.
The camps of the Kolyma, strung out all along the river, had been the most infamous in the Soviet Union; and yet when they were closed in the 1950s many of the inmates had chosen to remain in the area. Their reasons were simple. The land of restraint had suddenly become the land of the free — freer at least than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. It had fewer police, fewer party officials, fewer bureaucrats. It also of course had fewer amenities.
But even that changed; for after the great gold and diamond finds of the 1960s, it suddenly had more amenities than elsewhere. It had more food, more housing, more pay. And by another reversal, what had once been the worst had become the best. By common consent Tchersky had been the worst. Under its former name of Nizhniye Kresty it had been a byword for horror even in the days of the Tsars: the remotest outpost of the Russian empire, the least accessible, a final hell for the most desperate prisoners. Now, as capital of the Kolymsky region, it had become the centre of all good things.
Pavel Grigorovich Bukarovsky in his own life had witnessed these changes, and on his sixtieth birthday, forty years after arriving in the Arctic, he planned to celebrate them. Although he lived and worked at Green Cape, he had to celebrate at Tchersky, which had the largest premises: Barbara’s.
Barbara’s was a labyrinth of rooms running one into another; it had been converted from a double row of log houses. Deloused, debugged, completely sanitised, it all the same still retained the atmosphere of another Siberia and was the most popular venue in all the Kolymsky region. With the assistance of the mayor, who served as head of the planning committee, walls had been removed and temporary plinths inserted to open up the area — for the largest party Tchersky had ever seen.
Several hundred people were already there when Porter arrived with the girl, and Lydia Yakovlevna was both excited and nervous.
‘Oh God, it’s huge. Oh God, everybody’s here! How do I. look?’
She looked like an overdressed tart, but was not out of the ordinary. And not everybody was here. The winter roads were now laid and hundreds of the drivers were away. But the upper echelons of the two towns were here and their women were here, and all of them were in their best and overdressed. Stiletto boots were everywhere, and ornate hairdos and plunging necklines and eyeshadow and makeup.
There were thirty tables for ten clustered round a space left open for dancing, and guests were now packed tight in this space, greeting each other and taking early refreshment from laden trays pushed through the throng. Music was playing — accordions, balalaikas, brass — and people had to shout to be heard. The girl was soon flushed and dewed, her mascara smudging. ‘Oh God, it’s wonderful, it’s marvellous. Everybody’s here! Just look at the tables!’
The tables were indeed a sight: a mass of crisp napery and sparkling silverware, of glass, flowers, fruit piled high. And bottles, battalions of bottles.
‘Kolya!’ The limping Kama chief, Yura, was shouting in his ear. ‘You’re at my table! And your lovely lady, eh? You’re with me! Wonderful, very good! Never had one of you before.’