Fin acknowledged the boy in the chair, leaning now on its back legs against the wall. The boy glowered as though he’d been taught that foreigners were trouble. Darcy had never seen Fin so drawn, the dye faded from her eyebrows, the pale translucence of her skin seemed almost ashen. She took a quick sip of the silty dregs of Darcy’s drink then, registering his bruised face in the wavering light, she winced.
What did they do to you?
They took me from the Hotel Ukraine, he said. His voice sounded strange even to himself, without its usual lilt. He didn’t mention the call to his mother. They held me in Lubyanka, he said. He dabbed a paper napkin in his water and unveiled the burn, pressed the napkin on his neck.
Who did that? she asked. She leaned in close, not the way his mother would strain to see sores as if there was nothing, but concerned, as if distressed by what she’d wrought.
Darcy examined the round stamp of blood on the napkin. The Turkish Consul-General, he said. He heard her short, almost imperceptible breath and raised his eyes. What colour had been left was blanched from Fin’s cheeks, her concern focused suddenly inward. What was his name? she asked.
Consul Tugrul, said Darcy.
A small fridge nearby jump-started and Darcy jolted. A new sound hummed to accompany the one that sang in his head, but Fin didn’t react.
What did you tell them? she asked.
It’s what they told me, said Darcy. He held her gaze with a mix of dashed hopes and welling fury. You brought me into this, he said, knowingly. He reached and grabbed her sleeve and the cook appeared in the kitchen doorway. Fin turned and shook her head at him like she could handle it.
You must be important, said Darcy.
If the KGB is cooperating with Turkey, she said, you can’t go with me. There’s too much at stake. Where’s Aurelio?
He’s in trouble, said Darcy. I have to come with you. It’s not just that they want Jobik. The general’s a madman. In the night he tried to rape me. He said he wanted to fuck me in pieces. I saw what happens to the likes of me in the gulag. Darcy gripped her narrow wrist tightly, the other hand pulling her sleeve. I’m not going back there, he said.
No, said Fin. He could see the struggle in her eyes, but she was shaking her head. I can’t take you if Tugrul’s with them. The KGB has never cooperated with the Turks.
It’s not about that. They’ll kill me. Darcy was begging now, talking so fast he could feel himself spit. I wasn’t followed here, I promise, Fin, I wasn’t. I ran from the apartment through the dark to Pyatnitskaya, there was no car behind me, no footsteps. I caught a taxi at a light, got out halfway down Solyanka, then I walked, backtracked, waited in the dark near the church, no one followed me up the alley.
They’re the KGB, she said, it’s not hide-and-seek… I have to go back—alone.
To Jobik? asked Darcy. He clasped her hands over his plate of food. Fin, look at me, look at my face. I’m your brother. If you don’t help me, they’ll kill me. You brought me here. He fell silent, his teeth clenched, as the woman with the pendant appeared with Fin’s unordered food, a plate of herring and bliny, tomatoes and cheese. The woman retreated and the boy watched on from the corner like he was born reading lips, Darcy continued under his breath. They told me you drove Jobik to the Turkish consulate in Melbourne. Again he imagined the Corvair parked under elms alongside the Botanic Gardens. You borrowed my car. My mother’s car.
Fin stared down at her food, poured water from the carafe, then she looked Darcy in the eye for the first time. They killed more than a million, she said. She spoke with a purpose that seemed heightened; it almost didn’t sound like her.
That was 1915, said Darcy.
It has to be recognised.
Darcy knew it wasn’t that. He felt something deep from their past, an anger that shook in his gut and pitted against the sadness in his chest—she’d been intoxicated by Jobik from the beginning, out of her depth in a way Darcy understood. A force of nature that had given her this acute, anxious radiance, the sheen of her great secret, and sex that was probably as violent as the terror she’d seen and concealed in her veins all these years.
He’s a killer, said Darcy.
Fin nodded. I love him, she said, unapologetically, as if that would explain it. And in a way it did. She pulled restively at the edge of a bliny, her fingers seemed smaller with no nail polish. Like Merran loved our father, she said.
What? asked Darcy. He hated the way she called her mother Merran, as if she was some friend from high school. He watched Fin pocketing bread from the small wicker basket, thinking.
Did you know that when she slept with him, your mother was in hospital, losing that baby?
Darcy cradled his neck as it throbbed again suddenly. He knew his mother had lost a three-day-old baby, but what did this have to do with anything now? Her name was Tilda, he said, the baby’s name was Tilda. That’s all his mother had said. Why are you telling me this?
You always want to know the truth, said Fin, so here it is. My mother flew out from Santa Barbara to be there for yours. That’s what she meant to do. But she ended up in the Frankston Hospital parking lot in the back of your father’s kombi, fucking him. That’s how I was conceived.
You call that love? said Darcy. He couldn’t believe he knew none of this, and he saw the vengeance in Fin’s verdant eyes as she told it, as if misguided conceptions produced difficult lives, but Darcy just thought of his own mother—the cruelty of it took him slightly sideways. He pushed his fingertips in under his eyes. The burring in his ears and the balalaika woman from the other room, malinka, malinka moia! It felt like a kind of madness.
This is what happens in our family, Fin whispered matter-offactly. You got the Mormon, and it fucked you up. Not the gay thing itself, but the way you do it. I got Jobik when I was only fourteen and then I got pregnant and he took me away. And then he got radical but I was in love. She broke off a piece of wax and played with it in the candle flame, moulded it. Maybe it’s a thing that runs in us like a kind of greed, she said. Like a gene. She reached for a chunk of cheese from Darcy’s plate. Eat, she said. You look like a heroin addict.
Darcy looked down at a forkful of the floury potato, thought of himself on the verge of having sex with her in the apartment only days ago, a thing that had brewed between them. He looked over at the wan determination in the green of Fin’s eyes, her lids red with fatigue. I don’t want to be like that, he said.
Like what? she asked bitterly.
Like you, he said.