Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [126]
They walked at the same pace, ten meters apart, down a dark avenue of firs. Where the path narrowed to a strip that threaded a stand of birches, she slowed, then stopped and leaned against the white, papery column of a birch for him to catch up.
They walked on together in silence. Arkady felt like a man who had approached a deer. The single wrong word, he thought, and she would bolt for good. When she glanced at him he didn’t dare try to hold her eyes or read them. At least they were walking side by side. In itself, that was a victory.
He was sorry that he looked so bad. His shoes were flecked with grass, his clothes damp and molded to his back. His body was too thin, and probably his eyes had the glower of the chronically starved.
They came to the edge of a lake. The water was black and still. Irina looked down at their reflections, at the man and woman looking up from the water, and said, “That’s the saddest thing I ever saw.”
“Me?” Arkady asked.
“Us.”
Birds collected. The park was rich in them: velvet-headed mallards, wood ducks, wigeons and teal appeared out of the mist, breaking the surface of the water into spoons of light. Shearwaters flew as acrobatically as signatures, geese dropped like sacks.
They sat on a bench.
She said, “There are people who come here every day to feed the birds. They bring pretzels the size of wheels.”
It was cool enough for their breath to condense.
“I sympathize with these birds,” she said. “The difference is that you never came. I will never forgive you.”
“I can tell.”
“And now that you’re here, I feel like a refugee all over again. I don’t like that feeling.”
“No one does.”
“But I’ve been in the West for years. I’ve earned the right to be here. Arkady, go home. Leave me alone.”
“No. I won’t go.”
He half-expected her to rise and leave the bench. He would follow her; what else could he do? She stayed. She let him light another cigarette for her. “A bad habit,” she said. “Like you.”
Despair saturated the air. Cold penetrated his thin jacket. He heard his heart echo across the water. A walking collection of bad habits was what he was. Ignorance, insubordination, lack of exercise, dull razors.
So many birds arrived, some dropping wholesale in flocks, others wheeling individually out of the mist, that Arkady was put in mind of the factory ship he had spent part of his exile on, and how gulls had mobbed the air above the stern for the overflow and refuse from the nets. He remembered standing in the breeze above the stern ramp fieldstripping a cigarette and a gull snatching the paper from the air and carrying it away as its prize. “Find the Russian duck,” he said.
“Where?”
“The one with dirty feathers and a crooked bill smoking a cigarette.”
“There is no such thing.”
“But you looked, I saw you. Imagine when Russian ducks really do hear about this lake, a lake with pretzels, they’ll come here by the millions.”
“The swans too?”
A line of swans glided imperiously through the ducks. When a mallard resisted, the lead swan stretched out its long and creamy neck, opened its bright, yellow bill and snorted like a pig.
“Russian. He’s already infiltrated,” Arkady said.
Irina sat back to study him. “You do look terrible.”
“I can’t say the same for you.”
She bent the light her way. Mist sat on her hair like jewels. “I heard you were doing so well in Moscow,” she said.
“Who did you hear that from?”
She hesitated. “You’re not what I expected. You’re what I remembered.”
They walked slowly. Arkady was aware that she walked a critical millimeter closer and that