Two Cousins of Azov

‘I did not read it.’ Gor did not want to discuss the letter, shoved into his mailbox down in the foyer. How had it been delivered? Not by the postal service, that was clear enough. Someone had got in through the locked front door, delivered their message, and left. The dusty pot plants and the shiny brown floor tiles could tell him nothing. Baba Burnikova, nodding behind the desk, could also tell him nothing, apart from that a hand-delivered letter could not have come without her knowing. The empty courtyard, glistening with last night’s rain and a thousand snail trails, could tell him nothing. He had opened the letter there in the foyer, leaning against the solid mass of the radiator, warming the backs of his thighs as he read. His name and flat number had been written in a childish hand, no doubt to disguise the writer. Inside it contained six words in an ugly scrawl.

‘You didn’t read it? But it could have given us clues, Gor! It might have been a spirit letter!’

‘Too late, I’m afraid. It has gone down the chute.’

‘Oh dear!’

‘This is no criminal investigation, Sveta. It’s just some no-good hooliganism.’

‘Well, you were upset, no doubt. My news is good though – I have telephoned my contact.’

‘What contact?’

‘The psychic lady. Remember, I told you about her on Tuesday?’

Gor closed his eyes and swallowed before he spoke.

‘And?’

‘She can do it a week today.’

‘Ah.’

‘Is that too long? I’m afraid she is all booked up until then. Something to do with Greco-Roman wrestling at the Elderly Club. I couldn’t really tell: she can be a little vague on the telephone.’

‘No, no, that is very good. Next Friday it is. I do hope you haven’t gone to a lot of trouble on my account, Sveta, I’m really not—’

‘No trouble! I want to help. And Madame Zoya can certainly help us divine what, exactly, is going on here. She has a marvellous gift.’

‘Quite.’

There was a pause.

‘You sound low. Like you need cheering up.’

‘I am quite cheery.’

He grimaced into the mirror by the telephone table, baring his teeth in an attempt at a smile. It looked more like a snarl. He could almost scare himself with those eyes and teeth.

‘Come to the theatre with us!’ Sveta’s voice bounced off his eardrum. For a moment he was speechless.

‘Wh … what?’

‘I just … well … you seem sad, Gor, and lonely, and well, Albina is in a dance show, with lots of girls and boys from school, and she asked specifically if you could come, and I thought, well, why not? It will be fun! And there’s a craft show going on in the foyer at the same time. And pensioners get in for free.’ Her voice crumbled to quiet as she reached the end of the sentence. A long pause followed.

‘Hello?’ whispered Sveta.

‘That is kind of you, Sveta, to think of me.’

‘It’s the least I can do, after giving you such a scare with that nasty sandwich. You’ll come?’

‘Very well: I shall be pleased to escort you both to the show. What day, and at what time?’

‘Ah, hurrah! Albina will be so pleased! It is actually tonight, at seven thirty p.m., at the Palace of Youth.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes!’

‘At the Palace of Youth?’

‘You know where it is? Just past the circus, and then the bus station, but before you get to the brick factory. It’s opposite Bookshop No. 3.’

‘No. 3? Where they sell stationery and records?’

‘That’s the one.’ Sveta took a breath. ‘You’re not busy, no?’

Gor looked at the cats, the piles of music, his lunch tray still lying beside his armchair.

‘No, I’m not busy. But I can’t promise to be good company.’

‘Your presence is company enough! We shall not burden you with conversation if it’s not welcome, dear Gor! Albina will be so pleased. She is not so confident in dance, and it will be nice for her to have the extra support!’

Gor nodded and said his goodbyes and, looking up in the hallway mirror, noticed the vague shadow of a smile playing across his face. The calendar on the wall behind him winked. The smile faded, his face became set, and he stalked off to the bedroom, avoiding gambolling kittens as best he could, to select a clean shirt for the evening.

He didn’t feel like driving, so took a trolleybus as far as the centre of town, and then walked.

Long strides brought him quickly from the central crossroads to the wide boulevard named after Mayakovsky, where milk-bars and furniture shops turned wide, hungry eyes on trudging shoppers and workers. He averted his gaze from the windows and the price tags. He hurried on, away from town, heading past the circus, which shone like paste jewellery half-way up the hill. Round, almost majestic, its curved concrete walls were bathed in jagged, multi-coloured reflections thrown by the glass of its windows. It looked like a space-age Colosseum with a giant Frisbee for a roof. Gor took in its curves and its permanence as he hurried on. He had heard that, years before, circuses had been travelling affairs, housed in huge tents borne by troupes of gypsies from town to town. They entertained the masses, taking stories and characters from place to place, fertilising minds and more with ideas and characters picked up and scattered across the continent from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk. For generations, travelling circuses had roamed like this, tossing ideas like seeds on the wind. But Stalin didn’t like it. The travelling circus meant danger. He ordered permanent circuses to take their place in all major towns, staffed by troupes trained in state circus schools. So circuses were tamed: tethered in one place, telling one, state story, and doing one show … the one that Stalin liked. They were cleansed of magic and mystery, and made safe for the masses. No more tents and ideas blowing in the wind; no more transience. The circus was castrated, to become a harmless eunuch, no danger to anyone.

Gor had no love of the circus. He could not abide a white-faced clown or a leering, drug-addled lion. It was all fake, all manufactured, with a predictability that bored him rigid.

He snorted as he passed the queue snaking out of the door. He shook his head and tutted, but despite himself, remembered a night more than twenty years before, when he’d been there, to this very building, and laughed. How he’d laughed. Not at the miserable animals and their antics, nor at the lackey clowns, but at his own daughter as she sat beside him, her face a delight as each act had unfolded. Such a young life: such a happy child. He had loved the circus that night, because she had loved it; little Olga. A smiling face in the queue caught his eye and he glowered, turning away sharply. He huddled his shoulders further into his coat, and quickened his steps. The circus was rot.

He came to a halt outside what he surmised was the Palace of Youth. It was not a place he had been before. Great columns rose from the crumbling wash of the pavement to hold a canopy of dark grey concrete above windows that shone with a fizzing orange glow on Azov’s youth. An abundance of small girls with buns and huge pom-poms flocked in and out of the lights in front of the building, their anxious mamas in tow, blocking the doorway and holding up the traffic as they alighted from buses and communal taxis. They were a myriad fluff-encrusted fledgling birds, shrieking and dashing, peppering words with pi-pi-pi noises as they came and went through the warped double-doors. Gor stood very still, towering above the faeries and their mothers, silent, grey, dark. He held his arms stiffly by his sides and every so often made a little hopping movement to one side or the other, attempting to avoid a collision. Still they flocked, an occasional mama looking up at him with startled concern as she steered her charge away from his shins and elbows. They seethed and rolled around him, a throng of girls in pink and white, chattering like sea-gulls. Gor’s brow began to sweat.

‘Gor! Coo-eee! There you are!’ Sveta came breaking through the crowd like a steam tug, dragging an unwilling and extraordinarily gangly Albina in her wake. The girl bumped off every available surface, tangling limbs with her ballet-dancing colleagues, the tiny speckled waifs crumpling to the floor as Albina bobbed past in her grubby moon-boots, walrus grey. Her hair was piled into an elaborate bun, much like a nest. Gor smiled to the ladies and held out his hands in greeting. They drew together in the sea of fluff.

‘Good evening, Sveta. Good evening, Albina. I am glad to see you! But whatever is the matter?’

‘I don’t want to do it! Don’t make me! Please!’

Together they ploughed through the dancers, heading for the clogged doors. They pushed their way through with elbows held high and struck out for the cloakroom.

‘But I’ve come specially to see you, Albina,’ said Gor with some concern, as they took off their coats and handed them to the stout woman behind the counter. ‘I am sure you will be … spectacular.’ His goatee twitched as he attempted a kindly smile.

‘But I hate it, and I don’t feel well.’ She gripped her stomach under her bright blue jumper.

‘Now, now, petuchka, we’ve had all this at home. Gor has come here specially to see you dance, so don’t disappoint him. No one is going to laugh at you. I promise!’