The UnAmericans Read online

  “Normally I would drink wine, but it dehydrates me.”

  Still they ignored him.

  “And Georgian wine is piss.”

  They went inside, and the tourists followed.

  Now the brooding started. There was a library of disappointments that required redress but the infidelity of Masha and Gia smouldered at the heart of everything. She was an artist whose paintings were sold by the old Georgian émigré community in Paris. Max had been partly responsible in setting her on the road to artistic success; she had been his woman for decades, protected by his position, plucked from mental hospital, tolerated and loved, with a few excursions to other bedrooms – nothing serious, and as for Masha, she outstripped any sexual run of his, sprint, middle or long distance. The ones he married annoyed her because he never married her. But the wives meant nothing to him, they were married for … well, there must have been reasons. Except his first wife of course, certainly there were reasons for her, but he had to bale out of that one, he had to. No doubt, if the circumstances had been different, it would have ended the same way as the others. Whenever he thought of young Peg, his American wife, he felt uneasy and in drink this expanded into something so painful, it required more anaesthetic. Young Peg, of course, would now be old Peg, just a few years short of his own decrepit state.

  The other partner in this conspiracy of ingratitude was Gia, a dyslexic, warped by a family feeding on rage and despair. Max and Masha provided sanctuary from Gia’s brutal family and Max watched him become a prototype for the child Masha wanted and he didn’t. When Gia revealed a talent for carpentry, it was he and Masha who had him apprenticed and when he started producing astonishing furniture they set him up and Masha sorted the export of his work to fashionable Parisian stores. He had, Max supposed, brought a sensation of parenting to him, albeit of an avuncular kind, but as the boy grew he developed a second talent that made him popular with the lady tourists and finally with Masha herself. Everyone knew about this triangular arrangement, everyone talked about it except its three members. Ignoring the little complication, they hung together; adult orphans keeping a breath on a fading cinder of thin, herd love. But the ember was dying; the old male was now in the way. Max, the former star, was being sidelined.

  He stood aggressively, “Judas!”

  “Shut up!” shouted Shota from the bar.

  Masha drained Gia. The Moscow Beach girls were currently draining him too; anyone sunshine side of vomit ugly drained him. But Gia refilled and emptied with the ease of a flush toilet. Masha had emptied many others in her time too. Max’s head roared with the sound of flushing toilets.

  Past fantasy now: third bottle, only the odd bewildering thought penetrating the thickness. He was refused a fourth bottle. The customary splutter of indignation ended with the drunkard’s pout and the angry stagger, the swaying bow over one of the jaywalking tables, the bump off a vine post, and the list into darkness.

  He encountered the two Moscow girls as he dipped and rose vaguely towards home. Their faces were half seen masks of disgust, giving as wide a berth as the road allowed, but the uncontrollable, drunken lurch threatened face-first intimacy with the mighty bosoms. “Say something,” the dating agency in his head counselled. Involuntary dance steps teetered him within the tall one’s domain, and a beautiful face burned contempt down from the night sky at his slurring apologies. For the first time he noticed the astonishing beauty that transcended her gutter origins; the flower from the dung heap hidden from sight behind her friend’s vulcanised pheromone triggers. Then all was caught in a swift totter as he fell over and everything disappeared.

  Early 1964

  I do nothing. It’s a kind of epic indolence in me often misinterpreted as a death wish. Fear springs some men into action, but sends me to sleep and my inactivity becomes a crisis. I go from invaluable to liability in double time.

  Kennedy is assassinated and Oswald’s shots ricochet around the world. In my cups, I present inappropriate theses about the bed mating Cubans and Mafiosi as the shadows on the knoll and dismiss the misfit in the Book Depository. Peter gives me the flea in the ear about that and my lack of action on defection. Tomas died of heart failure before Kennedy threw himself in front of the cornering bullet, and was nothing anyway; all those threats were Hispanic piss and wind, so zip it with the wild allegations and look to your responsibilities and danger.

  Things are complicated. I have been an expectant father for some time, a cause for celebration that I have never mentioned. Peg was bewildered at my request to keep it from her brother as long as possible, but held out for a few months. As soon as Henry knew champagne corks popped all over the office, and everyone, including Peter – consummate actor that he was – grinned and gave me the expectant father jokes and advice.

  It was not deliberate. The pregnancy sent me into a tailspin of panic and rage at Peg, all smiles and momsy, collecting magazines with crib and baby clothes ranges, happy as she was entitled to be. I did wonder if it might throw my investigators off track; surely anyone under suspicion wouldn’t start a family unless he were innocent?

  Away from the office celebrations, Peter accuses me of irresponsibility to the point of cruelty. Why hadn’t I told him? What was I hoping for by concealing it? What was I hoping for by making her pregnant? Now there would be two to be abandoned. I have no answers; I tell him it wasn’t intended, even Peg didn’t want to get pregnant I say, but it makes no difference, this is a terrible situation.

  I know he’s worried. My vulnerability is his vulnerability and I suspect he is making arrangements for his own defection, just in case. He has a huge family he won’t want to leave and I know he blames me for putting him in that position.

  My Russian contact Yura says I’m not consciously cruel, simply careless enough to let cruelty in through my legs each time I open the door.

  Ironically, they arrange a going over point in an alley behind the baby store where Peg and I bought the pram and a bundle of things. That was the rendezvous, the beginning of the trip that would end in some dacha behind the Iron Curtain writing love poems to my abandoned wife that could never be sent. I was in the habit of calling in on the way home from work, so it wouldn’t arouse suspicion. It had a neon stork carrying a baby in a sling that switched from pink for girls to blue for boys and traded under the name ‘The Happy Stork’. Yura suggested it, so I knew they were watching me too: both sides watching, maybe watching each other watch.

  But I was trapped by my own inertia. The concept of free choice is a delusion; it only exists as a therapist’s bait to keep you booking more sessions and signing the cheques. We are powerless over ourselves. I called off two pick-up days with feeble excuses that children could have seen through, and I knew the panic bells were now ringing all the way to the Kremlin. The star boy was losing his nerve and there is no one more dangerous than an operative who has lost the plot.

  It’s night in the Washington bar where we drink. I shoot back too many martinis and ignoring the discomfort of buddies in the company of someone they know to be under investigation, launch into my lecture about the Cuban/mafia connection to Dallas. Peter comes in, sees I am drunk and doubting the Official Version. He makes a gun with his hand, aims, ‘fires’ and immediately turns his back. It is the presentation of his back that collapses every last redoubt of resistance. The choice is clear: it’s the bright red star above the Kremlin or Peg in widow’s weeds.

  September 1998

  Max sensed death sniffing him out. As they left the village, the clutter of houses and the bay receding in the wing mirror reflected back as the last glimpse of a place where so much of his life played out its farces and tragedies. Everything seemed to be ending: Masha was receding with the houses; the century was drawing to its close; the ideas to which he had dedicated his life were buried and millions danced on their graves.

  The village was preferable to Tbilisi, which h
ad become derelict and dangerous in recent years, but the difficulty with Masha was best dealt with by distance. As the van whined up the hill road she and the village would soon be out of sight – out of sight, out of mind, as with much of Max’s life.

  Gia’s van slowly filled with the smell of perfume. The lingering presence of the Moscow girls who had decorated the beach and Gia’s bed deepened Max’s nausea. He knew Gia would have crept out before they woke. Goodbyes scared him and threatened to open up secrets that he could not define. When little Gia was sent in to make his final farewell to his dying mother, she made him wait for an hour by her bed before turning her martyr’s face to him and saying “Just go away”. She made sure it was the last thing he heard from her, and Max supposed that moment from a bitch who took her sadism right to the grave was the reason why Gia could only deal with women one way. In the bedroom he was a master. Beyond the bedroom he was a mouse. His sexual hunger always ended in flight. But there was no flight from Masha. She had him netted, and Max watched the pained sufferance of the slave quietly set in his face.

  “Past their sell by date?”

  “What?”

  “The Moscow bints.”

  “Don’t get on the moral.. You know..”

  “High ground?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s something worrying about Russian women with money. ”

  “Lots of people in Moscow have money now..”

  “They have drugs?”

  “No.”

  Gia’s denials betrayed exactly what he was at pains to hide. Max could visualise it: the inelegant image of the huge bosoms rising and sinking under sleeping arms like trapped buoys would be the one Gia woke to when the drugs wore off. Their epic proportions that no doubt had him vibrating like a tuning fork the previous night, would repel him in the morning. As for the tall dark beauty who seemed to have energy for nothing but contempt, what would she provide? Sex was probably multi-tasked and practised while smoking and reading a magazine.

  “Gia, are you driving into these potholes deliberately? You trying to punish me?”

  “No.”

  “I can get drunk once in a while. It does no harm.”

  “Sometimes Max you are two metres of bullshit.”

  “Gia I can’t stand this self righteousness.”

  “Give it a rest, Max. You’re still pissed.”

  Max turned his mouth to the air slipping past. They were on the crest of the hill now. The village was behind them and slipping out of sight. Below them the sea sat to the horizon like grey glass, broken by tiny flickers of foam.

  Twice a year Gia delivers his furniture and Masha’s paintings to Tbilisi for their journey to the galleries and shops of Paris. Max does the export and EU paperwork and they oversee the precious cargo being loaded into the trans-continental lorries for their long haul across Turkey, the Bosphorus, Bulgaria, and the long roads to France. Gia has no idea where the countries his furniture will cross are; Max points them out on the map but it means nothing. Gia can’t imagine it, a complication of his dyslexia Max supposes, an inability to conceptualise space and direction.

  But Gia waits for these days like a child anticipating a birthday, and in the van rattling over the long and broken road Max knows he’s raining on Gia’s parade. “You shouldn’t have got drunk last night. You could have waited,” he mumbles to himself.

  An unavoidable hole in the road flew Max’s brain against his skull and produced a loud bang somewhere in the back of the van.

  “Shit!”

  Gia stopped and got out to check and Max took the opportunity to hover his dry old member over the roadside weeds while the precious cargo in the van was inspected and re-roped. The sun was tapping on layers of cloud over the Russian side of the sea.

  “‘The quality of pissing is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven.’” And the gentle rain caressed a few weeds, then paused, then started again, then paused, then didn’t start again, then did.

  Patches of the sea and coast were still mixing light and mist into low sprays of incandescence. Gia was drawn towards the cliff’s edge to contemplate the day smoothing away the remnants of night. He was a dyslexic who could barely read a thing, a condition that condemned him as a child to the fist fights and rage of the pack outsider, but Max knew that behind this was a strange, battered poetry, a sensitivity that plugged him into mystery, almost like an animal, a Dao quality of knowing something the rest didn’t get. The balancing cost was word blindness and hopelessness with women. He was a tortured soul but not on an operatic scale. His was a life of everyday difficulties exaggerated because of his handicap, the type who would always find life difficult, and when he wasn’t arguing or being driven close to insanity by him, Max loved him for that.

  “What’s that word for you know, poems or music about dawn?”

  “Aubade.”

  “Yeah. All that peace. You could be an alien, just landed, and you wouldn’t know there were people.”

  “Nice thought.”

  “The bit just between night and day. The world’s changed. People have died, people have been born.”

  “I hate it.”

  “How can you hate that peace? Before the shit starts.”

  “It’s death’s light. I wake, and I know.”

  “You know what?”

  The vomit rose up like lava and was over the wild flower before the brain transmitted the previous evening’s vodka was on its way back.

  “Jesus!” said Gia and watched till the vomit production ran dry. Max seemed as shocked as Gia at this sudden flight from his stomach and took his jitters off to a little rock to calm down. Light as a rag, a canvas wrap of bones and skin, glowing with illness high above the ocean, he seemed as skeletal and warped as the surrounding trees that a century of winds had deformed.

  “Jesus, Max. Why do you do this to yourself? What kind of a manly thing is this? Getting helpless drunk?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You remind me of my old man. Drinking and spewing. Have you any idea how bad it makes me feel?”

  “Not as bad as me.”

  “I nearly didn’t bring you this morning. I was so disgusted with you.”

  “Who would deal with your EU paperwork?”

  “That’s the only reason I brought you.”

  “Well, we must be grateful for small mercies.”

  “Your door was open all night. The room was full of mist. Wet everywhere. Inside the piano. How can you do that? Musical instruments… They’re the masterpieces of carpentry.”

  “I threw up in it once. It survived.”

  “Your room stank like a lavatory. You pissed the bed again.”

  Max let out a death rattle sigh and the arteries on his temples channelled pain into his brains.

  “We can’t hang about.”

  “A minute.”

  Gia pouted and waited, then the shifting light and the first seabirds moving across the pewter sea caught him again. Max spoke with the energy of a man running out of time.

  “You know those books I gave you? With the photos. Gaudi, Art Deco, Japanese minimalism, you know, for your ideas.”

  “I have my own ideas.”

  “I know, but there’s nothing wrong with plagiarism. It’s the privilege of the gifted and the only recourse of the mediocre. These books have beautiful photographs, but why not go there and see the real thing? Stand under Guadi’s spires tickling the old Barcelona dusk. You’ve got the money. Most people here haven’t got an arse in their pants. Go to Japan and feel what its like to sit at a tea ceremony in a Shinto temple or wherever they have tea ceremonies in Japan.” Max felt a foreign body in his mouth and spat it at the wild flower. Gia turned back to the sea birds in disgust. “You get wound up about being dys
lexic, poor me, everyone else can read. So what? Idiots can read. Idiots write. How many of them have a real gift? Like you? Though you wouldn’t think it, the amount of whining you get through in a day.

  “You can pick up some scrap of wood and hand back civilisation. Jesus Gia, how many people can do that? A chunk of that old tree over there, that twisted, old, knackered thing, transformed into a… I don’t know.. A beautiful chair that will sit in a Parisian home for generations. That people will get fond of – ‘Oh I love that old chair, don’t you? So get off it will you?.”

  “Get off what? The chair?”

  “Not the chair! You! Poor me. The ‘poor mes’. ‘Think of how upset I get when you have a drink!’” Max spat again into the long grasses soaking his legs. “Trees are pregnant with your furniture. You’re a fucking midwife. A forest is just a big family to you.” He aimed another gob of murky phlegm at a clump of wild flower.

  Gia grimaced, “D’you save that stuff up?”

  “Money really does grow on trees for you. Well, spend some. See the world. Everything stays little in a place like this. Yes, the littleness of life.” He looked at the palm of his hand as if he were reading it, “I’ve always had a dread of the littleness of life.”

  “Look where it got you. Honking up on a hillside.”

  “Thank you. As I was saying before your astute observation, get out of here. Before you shrink away.”

  “You’ve shrunk into a bottle.”

  “We’re talking about you. What have you got here? Your loving family? Who only stopped beating you when you got rich?”

  “They’re family. You don’t know about that.”

  “You really are pissed off with me.” Max hauled himself unsteadily to his feet.

  “You’re not going to throw up in the van?”

  “Oh, get off the pity pot.”