I'd probably have done a decent job, he thought. I take this one out in my car and I advise him when to go for the ball. But I know that I can walk out on his mother and him any time I like, without losing any sleep over it. The truth is he's not my own son and he never will be, and his mother will probably never be my wife.
After the match he waited for the boy to shower and change. When they got in the car he noticed a cheap gold ring glittering on Robin's finger. It didn't go with his jeans at all. Eva must have got it for him. That was her business, their business. He never asked about more than he absolutely needed to know.
Eva lived on the seventh floor of a tower block. The flat had one large room and two smaller ones. Her former husband lived in the larger of these. He was a quiet, affable person, who worked as a fitter and was away from home most of the time on construction jobs. He could probably have found himself a new flat but didn't appear to be looking for one. With this arrangement, he was at least close to his son, and perhaps he wanted to stay close to his former wife as well.
She never told him why her marriage was over. He assumed it was because her husband did not seem prosperous or important enough. Pavel was a better bet in her eyes; prosperity, like importance, is all too relative. Eva had sought him out herself. Two years ago she had seen a film he'd made on divorce and its impact on children, and she had written to him about it. She was in a similar situation and wanted to see him and ask his advice.
The film was a documentary he'd directed and appeared in. The problem it dealt with had haunted him ever since his own childhood, and he was pleased that the film had spoken to someone. He wrote back, giving his home address. Several days later she rang his doorbell. It was evening. She introduced herself and asked hesitantly if she was disturbing him or his wife. She was wearing a short bluish-purple skirt, a reddish-purple sweater, high dark purple leather boots and an ultramarine ribbon in her dyed-red hair. Large green jasper earrings were swinging from her ears. He assured her that she wasn't disturbing him, that he
wasn't married and that his mother was away. She was clearly pleased to hear this. She walked in without an invitation, her hips swaying and her bracelets clinking with every step. She sat down on a chair facing him, her skirt riding up as she crossed her legs. She looked at him eagerly. He asked what he could do for her. He had done a lot for her already, she said, just by making the film and letting her see him. Without boring him with the banal details, she was living with a man she couldn't respect. She'd married him because she was pregnant; there was no love between them. She had a bizarre way of speaking, hesitating in the middle of sentences, sometimes not completing them. Her face was plain, but there was something bold and inviting in her every movement and glance. When she finished telling her story, she fell silent and seemed to be waiting for him to embrace her. When he didn't, she stood up, walked over to him and said, 'I want you to make love to me.'
When Pavel let himself into Eva's flat, Argus bounded out to meet him, planted his huge paws on his chest and licked his face. Only then did Eva appear, freshly made-up as always, her mouth painted, her eye-shadow replenished, strawberry-blonde hair combed high. She could have gone directly in front of a camera. He had to bend over slightly to kiss her on the mouth. She smiled at him. She did everything she could to bind him to her. She tried to be pleasant, to tolerate his eccentricities, his occasional disappearances, his silences. She even went with him sometimes to visit his mother, always remembering to take flowers, though his mother forgot about her the minute she left. She did his laundry for him, cooked for him, made love to him and listened to what he said. If he was silent for too long, she would complain that he hardly ever spoke to her.
What did they talk about?
About life, of course.
What was life?
Life was a heap of things, an enormous accumulation of old clothes, tubes, creams, mincing-machines, coffee-mills. It was also masses of wires, lamps, mirrors, cameras, cassettes, scissors and water-cannons.
He took his sweater off and went into the living-room.
The television in the corner was on as usual, but nobody was watching. The sound was turned down, and for a while he watched a silent singer swinging her arms to the rhythm, while behind her waves beat against a rock and a gull hovered overhead. Lacklustre, empty images, but who had any good ideas any more? Who had a point of view? Who was doing decent work? He was, or at least he could still inject the most heavy-handed material with life, and one day, when they let him show what he could really do. .
'Guess what we're having for supper,' said the boy, coming up to him.
He shook his head.
'Fried chicken. Your favourite.'
'I eat everything.'
'Except potato dumplings.'
'Potato dumplings I can do without. They don't fit down my throat.' He made a face as though he were gagging.
The boy laughed. 'Dad likes them.' Then he stopped. 'He was here yesterday,' he said, somewhat embarrassed. 'He bought me these jeans.'
'And the ring?'
'Yeah. Do you like it?'
'Let me see it.' He took the ring from the boy. 'I've never worn rings,' he said, avoiding the question. The ring had a hallmark and might have been a family heirloom. The boy's paternal grandfather had once owned a factory. The factory had been nationalized, but the state had apparently let the family keep their jewellery. Perhaps it was the jewellery that had first attracted Eva to her husband. But either there wasn't enough to go around, or it wasn't enough to compensate for the impoverished heir's other shortcomings.
Pavel had inherited nothing. When they caught him, he was wearing a threadbare duffle-coat with twenty marks in his pocket and some maps in a knapsack: a map of Germany, one of Belgium and a forty-year-old map of Mexico. It was all he could get. What do you need a map of Mexico for around here? I wanted to trade it for a local map. They struck him in the face and told him to stop lying. Still, he held out for several days. They told him there was no point in denying anything, because Peter had
already confessed. It seemed likely. Lying went against Peter's nature. In fact, Peter hadn't talked until they'd told him Pavel had confessed. The two of them had fallen for the oldest trick in the book, but they were still young, stupid and inexperienced.
Sometimes, when he thought back over this botched period in his life, he thought that the worst thing about it was not the locked doors, nor the guards shouting at them, nor the fact that there was never enough to eat and what little they had was often stolen from them: it was that everything was saturated with lies. Meanness, rottenness, baseness lay concealed behind every word, every allusion, every promise, every smile. Only later did he come to understand that his time in prison was the best preparation he could have had for the life awaiting him outside. Everyone had to get used to it, and he at least had had a crash course.
The boy left the room. When Eva opened a cupboard to take out the tablecloth, he saw several colourful sweaters in Cellophane wrapping on a shelf. 'What are those?'
'They brought these to the shop yesterday, so I kept some back. They'll certainly sell well. Shetland wool.' She took one of them off the shelf and unwrapped it.
'I know. You've got your own private customers.'
'I have more customers than goods.'
'One day you'll have your own shop and then you won't have to drag these things home.'
'You think so?' She smiled happily as though he'd told her he loved her. She longed for a shop of her own, but the truth was she couldn't possibly imagine it. Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like.