‘I’ll stretch it on the inside.’
The funny thing was that the spell which made it possible to pack a whole heap of junk into a small volume had only appeared fairly recently. It had simply never occurred to a single Other that it could be done – until people started describing magical bags and suitcases in books of fantasy and fairy tales. Naturally, the path from concept to realisation was not long. But even at that time not every magician was capable of casting the ‘handbag’ – aka ‘nosebag’ – spell.
Svetlana could, of course.
‘I’ll expand your suitcase for two weeks,’ said Svetlana. ‘You never know … if you really did get delayed, there’d be shorts and shirts spraying out in the middle of the airport.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘What can I bring you from London?’
Svetlana brushed that aside.
‘Don’t you try choosing any clothes for me … London has the oldest toyshop in the world: Hamleys. Drop in there and buy something for Nadya.’
‘Clothes?’ I asked.
‘Toys.’
I harrumphed. I reckoned our daughter was pretty much indifferent to toys already. If I’d had a son, everything would have been simple enough. Buy him some radio-controlled helicopter, or some fancy kind of construction set.
‘Barbie?’ I asked, straining my imagination.
Svetlana sighed, smiled and explained. ‘Look what girls her age are buying and get that.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I said happily. ‘Still, what shall I bring you?’
There was a moment’s awkward silence, with just some dialogue in squeaky cartoon voices from the TV in the sitting room: ‘I want to know what the meaning of life is!’ – ‘Then you need Cusinatra, who gives meaning!’
‘We need a food processor for the kitchen,’ said Svetlana, laughing at something. ‘But you don’t have to drag it all the way from Great Britain. Bring what the English do best of all.’
‘A global language or an empire?’
‘Good whisky.’
‘In the first place, whisky is either Scotch or Irish, and not English. And in the second place, when did you start drinking?’
‘I’ll try it,’ said Svetlana, smiling again. ‘And you’ll have a drink with your friends. And your conscience will be clear, because you’ve brought me a present.’
Gesar was feeling so benevolent that I didn’t even have to book a taxi – Semyon called round for me at seven.
‘There’s your present for Erasmus,’ he said, waving one hand towards a tightly packed plastic bag, crudely sealed with sticky tape, that was lying on the boot of the car.
‘What’s in it?’
‘I don’t know. What kind of presents do people take from Russia? Vodka, caviar …’
‘A matryoshka doll and a balalaika,’ I said in the same tone. I opened the suitcase and stuffed the plastic bag into it. In defiance of all common sense it fitted easily into the tightly packed case.
‘Did Sveta put a “nosebag” on it?’ Semyon asked.
‘Uh-huh. She has the strange idea my trip’s going to last a whole week.’
‘I’d trust what Svetlana says,’ Semyon said seriously.
‘I do.’
Along the way, after we’d made the turn onto Leningrad Chaussee, Semyon unexpectedly asked: ‘Anton, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘How are things with you and Svetlana?’
‘In what sense?’
‘The most direct sense possible. How’s the relationship?’
‘Just fine,’ I said. ‘Best friends and comrades. Complete mutual understanding.’
‘That’s not exactly what’s required in family relationships,’ Semyon said didactically. ‘You and I are the ones who should be best friends and comrades – we fight together. But in bed and at the family table comradeship is inappropriate.’
I said nothing for a moment, then lowered the window on my side of the car, took out a cigarette and lit up. Leningrad Chaussee was already packed with cars, but Semyon was driving easily and quickly.
‘What made you suddenly bring this up?’ I asked. ‘You lousy psychotherapist …’
‘I want to help you,’ Semyon explained. ‘I’ve lived in this world for a long time, after all, and I’ve seen a lot. It was hard to make everything fit together at first, right? You and Sveta are both strong individuals, it’s hard for you to adjust to suit someone else, even if you want to. And then somehow it all came together after all. You had a daughter and everything was really good, right? But afterwards, when she grew up a bit – everything got a bit messy again. Comradely.’
‘So?’ I asked, taking a greedy drag.
‘You need shaking up a bit,’ Semyon said imperturbably. ‘For instance, you need a good row about something, the real thing, with smashed plates, or a fight. Separate for a while, get really miffed with each other. But that’s hard for you, because of your daughter … And it would be good if you were unfaithful to her. You’ve never been unfaithful to Svetlana, have you?’
‘Listen, you, sod off …’ I said, starting to get really wound up. ‘When you were a kid, didn’t your mum tell you not to poke your nose into other people’s family business?’
‘No, my mum just loved sticking her nose into other people’s squabbles,’ Semyon replied. ‘Anton, don’t go taking offence, there’s no one else who’ll tell you this. But I love you and Sveta very much. And I really want everything to be fine for you.’
‘So you advise us to have a fight or be unfaithful to each other!’
‘Well, I’m a simple soul and my methods are simple,’ Semyon chuckled. ‘You could turn to a therapist for help instead, go to sessions for a year or two, spend a bit of time on the couch, talk about life …’
‘Screw you,’ I said crudely, flicking my cigarette out of the window.
‘Anton, there’s something big brewing,’ said Semyon. ‘Trust my intuition on that. Hard times are on the way and it would be good if we can all be in good shape to meet them. With no discord in our hearts or our families …’
‘You get married then, set up a durable social unit of your own …’
‘My love was a human being. She died,’ Semyon replied simply. ‘I told you about that. And it seems like I’m the one-woman kind. Like yourself. Okay, don’t go getting upset, don’t make a big thing of it.’
‘Oh, sure, first you lay all this on me, then it’s “don’t make a big thing of it”,’ I muttered. ‘Shall I bring you something from London? Whisky …’
‘I can buy whisky here,’ Semyon said dismissively. ‘You know what, drop into Fortnum and Mason’s, that’s on Piccadilly. Buy me a jar of Yorkshire honey, I really love it and you can’t get it here.’
‘The world’s gone crazy,’ I said. ‘I asked Sveta, she told me to bring whisky. And a healthy drinking man like you wants a jar of English honey!’
‘I like tea with honey,’ Semyon said impassively. ‘And an intelligent, loving man like you should think of a present for your wife yourself, and not ask what you should bring. Even a jar of honey would do.’
CHAPTER 2
IT WAS A bad landing at Heathrow. No, there was nothing wrong with the plane, we were on schedule, we touched down on the runway gently, docked with the bridge quickly …
But a flight from somewhere in South-East Asia had arrived at Terminal Four just ahead of us – maybe from Bangladesh, maybe from Indonesia. And a hundred and fifty Russian passengers found themselves queuing up for passport control behind two hundred swarthy Asians.
Each one of them was carrying a whole heap of documents. It looked from the papers as if they were all planning to study at Oxford or Cambridge, invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in the economy or collect a multimillion-pound inheritance. Basically, the Bangladeshi-Indonesians had so many grounds for entering the country, it was immediately obvious that most of them would end up working in the restaurants or on the construction sites and farms of Britain. The officers at passport control – also, for the most part, not native Anglo-Saxons – understood this perfectly well, and they checked the documents with exacting precision. Every now and then a check ended with a passenger being led aside – for further investigation …