Honey for the Bears Page 14

  She still lay quiet, tears (he had provoked Russian tears: he was really part of the country now) drying under her closed eyes. What image could he lash out of its hole to lash this completely fagged impulse back to something like life? He was astonished at some of the pictures that were drily dealt, like the cards of the Tarot pack—compositions quite as bizarre as the Moon Dripping Blood or the Lightning-struck Tower, though executed in the flesh-tints of cheap Italian religious statuary. Then he heard strange and oddly attractive bell-music—that piece by Opiskin—and smelt wet RAF ground-capes, so he knew it was time to dismount, very quickly. Rolling off, he said, ‘Sorry, I can’t.’

  ‘Chto?’ Her eyes opened very wide.

  ‘Vinovat,’ he translated. ‘Ya nye mogu.’ He was standing by the bed now, looking down regretfully. With eyes and mouth equally open she gave him a long astonished stare. Then she snorted and began to laugh, her breasts blancmanging away lazily. The whole episode, far from annoying her, seemed to put her in a good humour.

  She got up from the bed, still laughing, and said, ‘Muzchini.’ That meant ‘men’.

  Paul frowned, then wondered. Why that plural? She towelled her head very vigorously, humming. Was it because Alex was as incompetent as he was? He had not yet found out what Alex was really like; there hadn’t been time, somehow. But, lying on his cane chair while Alex and Anna occupied the bed, he had not yet heard anything which sounded like cheerful frotting, the old springs zithering away. He shook his head, taking a Djebel out of the crushed pack, humbly offering one to her. She took it gaily and smoked it, still stripped, while she rubbed away at her scalp with the greyish towel.

  Then she dressed her upper half and said brightly to Paul, ‘Chai?’ Paul nodded gratefully; he would like nothing better than a nice glass of chai. Well, there it was: it didn’t matter how you established contact so long as you established it.

  Alex came home, excited. He was dressed in his working-clothes—jeans and heavy sports coat—and he carried a bag of food for the evening meal. It was always the same in this week of summer weather: open sandwiches of blood sausage, smoked salmon and ham, a couple of bottles of the very good local citronade. He also carried something flat and square wrapped in newspaper. ‘Big deal, dad,’ he said, waving this latter. ‘Jazz, genuine jazz, the real thing. Off of one of the tourists,’ he explained. ‘Tonight we’re having a ball, dig. Boris has this portable record-player and he’s bringing it along. A bit of real jazz, dad.’

  ‘Why,’ said Paul, examining the clammy sandwiches, ‘can’t we have something cooked sometime? Borshch or something.’

  ‘We’d have to light the stove, dad,’ said Alex. ‘And we don’t do that till the fall.’ He seemed to notice Anna for the first time and made a kind of kissing noise at her. ‘Jazz,’ he said, beaming. ‘Did you get any cash today, dad?’

  ‘Thirty,’ said Paul honestly. He took out the rouble-notes and laid them on the bed.

  ‘Good good good,’ said Alex. ‘Khorosho. We can buy a few bottles round the corner, dad. Make a real night of it.’

  ‘How about the rent?’ asked Paul.

  ‘That can wait, dig,’ said Alex. ‘Nobody will suffer if it waits. The State is the landlord and we, dig, are the State. The State,’ he said, ‘can wait.’ He made a little jazz-riff out of that and clicked his fingers on the off-beat all round the room, swaying his hips (‘The State can wait’) in rhythm. They were lithe slim hips.

  3

  THERE WERE TWO TROMBONISTS ON THE FOURTH TRACK OF side one, an Indianapolis negro named J. J. Johnson, and a Dane called Kai Winding, and Vladimir claimed to be able to tell which was which. He went further. He said it was possible, on tone alone, to tell a negro jazzman from a white one. This was contested. Vladimir, whom Paul liked because he spoke courteous slow Russian and, so that Paul should completely understand his weightier utterances on jazz, very fair French, grew heated and inadvertently spilt some cheap sticky vodka on to Boris’s portable record-player. That caused further heat and some loud threats. Paul’s head ached and his lower gum felt painful. This trombone duet had already been played eight times.

  But it was like a return to one’s youth; or rather it was like experiencing a sample of the youth Paul had missed because of the war—student youth with drinking and arguing going on till all hours. After the war it had seemed too late to think of applying for a university scholarship; well, here was an extra-curricular finger of the life he’d wanted, and he had had to come to the Soviet Union to find it. What he would have liked was for the students to wear caps with shiny peaks and tassels and to smoke big pipes. He would also have liked some nice youthful discussions on religion and the Meaning of Life; but the only dialectic these youngsters wanted was the dialectic of jazz.

  The needle pricked at an earlier track and Vladimir said, ‘Blackhawk, San Francisco. Miles Davis, Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb.’ He knew it all, by God: he stayed up late, tuning in to obscure radio stations; he haunted the foreign ships looking for jazz records; he had a map of New Orleans, he said, in his bedroom. He now explained to Paul that Miles Davis was a great trumpet-player and that the ugliness of his tone was deliberate—a subtly cultivated aspect of his art. He was delighted with this American LP: it was an anthology of great jazz.

  Paul looked round benevolently from the bed where he was sitting. Alex, Anna, Vladimir, Sergei, Boris, Feodor, Pavel—he, too, was Pavel—Dyadya Pavel or Uncle Paul, because of his age. Next to him was a young man he had not previously met, but he was called sometimes Pierre and sometimes Petruchka and he wore steel-rimmed glasses like Army respirator spectacles: he seemed vaguely familiar, but Paul could not quite place him. Alex and Anna sat together on the floor, his arm absently around her, and occasionally it seemed that Anna sneered up at Paul, her brief friendly tea-making mood quite gone. Paul’s head raged; he found that swigs of cognac from the bottle helped a little. There was, in fact, more than one bottle; his thirty roubles seemed to have gone quite a long way.

  ‘Kid Thomas,’ said Vladimir, ‘i yevo Algiers Stompers. Cet Algiers,’ he explained, ‘est un faubourg de Nouveau Orleans.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Paul. The fact was, not the music. All the music sounded alike to him. Now, a few of the songs of the nineteen-thirties—‘These Foolish Things’, ‘Two Sleepy People’, ‘Sweet and Lovely’—would, in his boozy mood, be far more acceptable. He said so to Alex and Alex gave a long, rather contemptuous, speech in Russian about what he’d said.

  Young Pavel made a comment and this got back to Paul as: ‘You like give your age away, dad. Square, that’s what it is.’ Paul had taught Alex that use of ‘square’. ‘Or, if you like,’ went on Alex, ‘it’s bourgeois. Real capitalist stuff and the opium of the people.’

  ‘And how about this?’ said Paul loudly. ‘Isn’t this opium, too?’

  It was not opium, he was told indignantly. This was proletarian, this was: music of an enslaved race.

  ‘Enslaved race my bottom,’ said Paul rudely. ‘A lot of dead-beat gin-guzzling reefer-puffing layabouts.’ That took some translating. ‘And commercial like everything else,’ Paul added. He was a bit disappointed in these young Russians; he had expected them to be rebels. But, of course, in a sense they were rebelling, like all the young people of the world; the trouble was that the language of rebellion was also, in the USSR, the language of the Establishment. Paul said loudly, ‘Look at your own glorious tradition of Russian art—Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky and Borodin and Opiskin. What about those, eh? Aren’t they a lot better than this tripe?’

  He shouldn’t have mentoned Opiskin; he realized that too late: Opiskin was a dirty word. Alex said, ‘What do you know about Opiskin, dad? Opiskin’s not talked about much nowadays, dig. They reckon that Opiskin went over to the enemy.’

  ‘What enemy?’ said Paul. ‘What does anybody here really know about Opiskin? What, for that matter,’ he said, warming, over a noisy shipwreck chorus on the record-player, ‘does anybody
here really get a chance to know? You’re only allowed to know what the State wants you to know. The sources of information are polluted. A lot of muzzled bears,’ he added, for some reason. A bear—something to do with someone dancing with a bear. He turned to Pierre or Petruchka, puzzling. Meanwhile a lot of noise was going on, provoked mainly by his words. Then he got it. He said, ‘Tolstoy. War and Peace.’ Pierre looked bewildered: he knew no English. ‘Voina i Mir,’ Paul translated.

  ‘As for Crime and Punishment,’ Feodor said, ‘it was a crime to write it and it is a punishment to read it.’ He then shut up; Paul looked at him, open-mouthed: he had not realized that Feodor knew any English.

  Alex was translating a pronouncement of Sergei’s. ‘Western decadence, dig,’ he said. ‘This is the point, dad—that everybody knows what they need to know. And in the West you still haven’t put a man into orbit. So what does it all mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Paul, feeling desperate. ‘I don’t know what anything means. But,’ he added, ‘don’t start telling me about Western decadence. We’re not dead yet, not by a long chalk. In Europe, I mean. In Great Britain, that is. As for America, that’s just the same as Russia. You’re no different. America and Russia would make a very nice marriage.’ Saying that, he felt sudden goose-pimples starting. Nobody seemed to be listening to what he was saying; the record-player still blared and thudded. He heard Anna give a loud merry laugh; she seemed to have been whispering something in Alex’s ear. Paul reddened. He shouted, ‘Don’t give me any more of that guff about Western decadence.’ Something about a bottle of rum and an open window brought a sudden gust of vertigo. He said to Pierre, ‘That’s what you’re supposed to do. To get on that window-sill there and drink off a whole bottle of rum.’ Pierre shook his head good-humouredly, not understanding one word. ‘There you are,’ cried Paul. ‘If you’re looking for decadence, here it is. He could do it in War and Peace, but he can’t do it now.’

  ‘Dad, dad,’ said Alex, ‘we don’t want trouble and we don’t want arguments, dig. All we want is to just hear this jazz.’

  ‘But there isn’t any rum,’ said Paul. ‘I see that. I apologize,’ he said, bowing gravely to Pierre. Pierre bowed back. ‘No rum,’ said Paul. ‘So it can’t be done.’

  ‘Dyadya Pavel,’ said Boris kindly, ‘zamolchi.’ Johnny St Cyr’s Hot Five was at it, very hot.

  ‘I will not zamolchi,’ said Paul. ‘I have as much right to speak as anybody else. More right, really, because I am the eldest here. There’s no rum,’ Paul said, ‘but there’s vodka. It could be done as well with vodka as with rum.’

  ‘Listen, dad,’ said Alex. ‘Tolstoy was a long time ago, dig, and things have changed since then. It was a wilder sort of life they lived then, dig.’

  ‘Less decadent,’ said Paul.

  ‘Just as you like, dad.’ He hugged Anna to himself with one hand and took a fair draught of cognac with the other. Anna smiled. Johnny St Cyr’s Hot Five played a very rough coda; the needle hissed; it was the end of the side.

  Sergei said something in Russian; Alex shook his head and said, ‘Nyet.’ They all looked at Paul, shyly, grinning a little.

  ‘What’s that about?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Never mind what it’s about, dad,’ said Alex. ‘You’re not doing it, that’s what. We’re having no War and Peace in this flat.’

  ‘Would you mind just explai——’

  ‘Never mind. Peace but no war is what I should have said, dig. Because war is what there’d be if you fell, dad, Jackie Kennedy blowing the whistle and letting the Bomb drop.’ Alex mushroomed his left arm into the air and made guttural noises significant of a cracking civilization. ‘An international incident, that’s what there’d be.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Paul. His headache was clearing nicely. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give a free drilon dress to anyone who’s got guts enough to sit on the window-sill there with his legs outside the window and drink a bottle of vodka straight off. I can’t say fairer than that.’ But Alex shook his head and would not translate. To Vladimir Paul said, ‘Fe donnerai une robe de drilon à celui qui …’ He couldn’t get any further; his French was not all that good. And now Pierre was putting his arm firmly round him and pulling him up from the bed, smiling. There were cheers. Alex said:

  ‘I’m not having it, dig, I’m really not …’ He tried to get up from the floor, but Boris and Feodor came over, grinning, and sat on him. They were hefty young men. Alex, now flat down, spoke breathless and angry Russian. Anna giggled; it was Anna who picked up a vodka-bottle nearly three-quarters full and proffered it to Paul. Paul said:

  ‘All right, khorosho—we old ones can show you youngsters a few tricks still.’ It was a large sash-window, contrived by the State builders probably less to give light than to save bricks. Paul pushed up the lower sash and looked out and down. It had been, as he remembered, the third storey in War and Peace; this floor was much much higher. The warm Leningrad summer night, with dawn not far off, was as much below as above. He gazed down into a wide well of shadows, coigns, lights. He felt giddy and sick. He just could not, after all, do it; he was, damn it, a middle-aged man.

  From the floor Alex called up in a winded voice, ‘Don’t do it, dad, don’t.’

  Paul brought his head back into the room and said, ‘All right. It is, after all, just a bit …’ Then he saw Anna, her lips spread tight in a malicious smile, swaying her hips and shaking the vodka-bottle in both hands, as if it were a cocktail-mixer. She then took the bottle by its neck, turned it upside down, and, with a look of infinite malice, did a coital thrust-and-recoil in Paul’s direction with it, grinning mockingly. ‘Right, you bitch,’ said Paul. ‘Give me that bloody bottle.’

  But he didn’t like it, he didn’t at all, getting up on that window-sill—it was smooth and it sloped—with his head bent as to the guillotine, even though eager hands held him in position. Alex was in the background of the crowd, still shouting, ‘Stop, I tell you, dig. This is my apartment and I won’t have it——’

  Paul sat in terrible fear, his heels feeling for some cranny in the brickwork. The bottle was uncorked for him; the great negro throat, jazzy with lights, gaped below to drink him. Pierre rasped sharp and strong, and the supporting hands, like chocks, left him. He was on his own, launched. He raised the bottle to his lips, but his head was pushed forward by the raised lower window-sash; it could not be tilted back for the act of swigging. ‘Ya nye mogu!’ he cried, Russian coming to him clear as a bell. ‘It can’t be done!’ He tried to climb back into the room, thrusting his left leg in first. This leg was at once seized and held strongly. He then found himself squirming, head down, arms desperate, vodka glugging out of the bottle, trying to get his other leg into the room. But he couldn’t and, like a Blake Satan, was poised falling and not falling in the immense immense immense. Jeering voices of the heavenly host assailed him. And his literal host cried in distress, ‘Oh, dad, dad …’ Even in this state of nightmare inversion Paul could not bear to think of vodka streaming in the firmament, degging the bluey dew, dewy blue. He inserted the neck into his gob and went glup glup glup glup. This might well be one of the forms of death, or rather the complex Bardo experience of passing in one of its forms. Cheers rocked his left ankle; it was only by his left ankle that he was now being held. A final glup finished the bottle. He shook it neck-down to show it was empty. The cheers were louder. He sent the bottle spinning into the dark emptiness. Afar off it silvertinklesplintered. He was pulled into the room legwise, cheered, petted, patted. Even Alex had to say, ‘Well, dad, if you’re the West the West is not decadent, dig.’

  Paul’s pluck was one raw red burn. The record-player was tromboning black and white again, but this time at 78 r.p.m. so that the dark treacly tones spun mad and high and absurd like some Gothic vision of heaven, bobbed auburn nobs of blasting archangels. ‘Shakespeare,’ called Paul. ‘Sweet William.’ There was a jam-jar with a scant bunch of the flower in it, sitting on the cloth-topped soap-box by A
nna’s side of the bed. ‘For that the furtive ties pronounce auriculous,’ recited Paul, ‘and in fat andirons cross and cowslip lay—then foreshore tits wax loud in holdall brew.’ There was applause. Feodor started a sort of frog-dance. They were all old Russia after all, God bless them. ‘I suggest now,’ cried Paul, ‘that we all strip ourselves stark ballock naked.’

  4

  ‘COME ON, THEN, COME ON, COME ON, OUT OF IT.’

  It was incredible that two weak eyelids should be able to shore up all the howling light of the universe. Paul, or whoever he was, opened up a fraction to admit the whole toppling weight of it, right up to infinity’s navel; then he shelled his lanced and bitten jellies, crying out as at a gouging. That lad Bob Daring in the Boy’s Magazine SF serial, 1930 or thereabouts, had been out on the wing of the spaceship mending something or other; he had, in a second’s curiosity, opened his space-helmet in that infinite dark and felt the veritable sword of God. Paul had never believed it possible that light could be so vindictive as now. He made a wincing foetus of himself and said: