Two Cousins of Azov

Albina Gives Chase (#litres_trial_promo)

Funny Pills (#litres_trial_promo)

Visiting Time (#litres_trial_promo)

A Windswept Place (#litres_trial_promo)

A Disappearing Girl (#litres_trial_promo)

The Broken Adonis (#litres_trial_promo)

Cuckoo! (#litres_trial_promo)

A Long Journey (#litres_trial_promo)

Pryaniki for Tea (#litres_trial_promo)

Special Measures (#litres_trial_promo)

Not Dead (#litres_trial_promo)

The Big Show (#litres_trial_promo)

A New Year Glimmers (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Andrea Bennett (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

The Disappearing Egg (#ue0435510-83e1-5197-9377-fc03b7299c17)

A fortnight after the rabbit incident, Gor was standing at the table in his kitchen waiting for water to boil for his lunchtime egg, and scratching his head with a thoroughly chewed pencil. The crossword before him lay unresolved, the fluffy white cat at his feet virtually ignored. The egg nestled, still cold, in his palm. He was distracted, gazing out of the window with unseeing eyes, the gloominess of his inner thoughts reflected in their murky depths. A dog howled. A crow cawed. He shuddered, brows drawing tight. Perhaps he should fetch his jerkin?

This was it: autumn was moving in all around him – its bags unpacked, its toothbrush already in the glass above the basin. The daylight that splashed across his thin canvas slippers held an unhealthy pallor. He sniffed: the essence of the rain-washed ground was percolating the walls. A chill would not do. He was letting himself go. The pencil dropped to the table and he strode from the room. He would unearth his autumn slippers a few weeks earlier than usual, and gain a drop of solace from mildly cosy toes.

Gor did not mind autumn so much. He was not sentimental about the seasons, and neither missed them nor anticipated their return. Each dawn came later, and the days seemed worn out, fading to dusk before the birds had finished singing. This put a strain on his light-bulb supply, but it rarely strained his nerves. Autumn was a quick and mucky deal, transforming summer’s dust to cold dirt within a matter of weeks. The alchemy hinged on a drop of three degrees and some extra millimetres of rain. But it was just the cycle of life. It was good to be rid of summer’s heat, Gor muttered to himself. The humidity had been stifling, especially at night.

Sometimes, tossing and turning in the fug of summer’s stillness, he had the strangest feeling, as if he were in the wrong place, and were the wrong kind of creature. It was a different sense, not hearing or taste or smell, but a physical memory, printed in his bones. He almost felt he had wings; could feel them unfurling from his back, the effortless rise and fall as he swooped above the earth. He sensed he should be someone else. It made his stomach contract, like a long-forgotten promise: yes, I will be good; yes, I will be true. It made him yearn to nest somewhere high and stony, bone-dry.

Perhaps it was his Armenian roots finally tugging him back to the landscapes of his forefathers. The southern Russian town of Azov, his current domicile, was not his natural habitat, after all. It sweated or shivered on windy, salt-marsh flats where the mighty River Don emptied into the shallow Azov Sea. From the top of the ancient ramparts, you could see the water glisten and heave in the distance under a fierce sky, while Azov steamed under a cloud of midges. And Armenia itself had nothing to do with the sea, sitting noble and remote, glorious and resplendent in separateness, its barricades the mountains that rose up on each side, while its sinuous back arched to heaven, veined with dusty roads that twisted into the very sky.

He sat in the hall, rummaged in the shoe box and eventually tugged on the autumn slippers, their leather outers shiny with age, the inners enveloping his soles in the softest lamb’s wool.

Maybe one day he would return to the land of his ancestors, well, one half of them, and sit on an Armenian mountain. He would mark out the spot with his graphite eye where a tree would be planted in a pebble-strewn valley. On a stretch of flat earth by that tree, he would fashion an Armenian house, with high brown walls and elegant arched windows. He would grow vines and till that difficult soil to bring about a richness of fruits, juicing the earth.

But then again, maybe not. He had visited the country only once, in his youth, to meet strange, distant relatives and see what he was missing. He had enjoyed the trip, as far as he recalled, but had never made the journey back despite his intentions. Life had got serious, and his priorities had changed. Take his career at the bank, for instance. It had flourished quickly, weaving roots that would keep him firmly embedded in the local soil. And now, many of those he had met would no longer be walking souls: they were probably buried under the trees in the valley, resting in that dry, sandy earth. For him, time was getting late to be building a house and learning a new language.

He sighed and returned to the kitchen, the bold figures of the wall calendar catching his eye, smirking at him as Pericles twisted at his ankles. A timid X marked that first Friday in September, when he had made his move and taken fate into his own hands. A deeper slash of an X denoted the day, two weeks later, when things had gone very wrong. Now, he stood before the calendar, tugging hard on his goatee beard and, with a frown, took the pencil to mark another X four days after that. The date of the rabbit incident. The day he met Sveta.

He shuddered, despite the lamb’s wool slippers, and realised he had been ignoring both the crossword and the egg. He could not abide a dry egg. He went to remove it from the pan and stopped short, mouth dropping open. The pan was empty, boiling away merrily to itself with no sign of an egg in it at all. But he had put the egg in there just moments ago, before going into the hall. He had heard it gently boiling away! He was sure his fingertips still felt cold where they had rested on its smooth, hard surface. He looked around, feeling stupid: where could it have gone? Pericles opened an eye and observed his master probing the oven, the cabinet, the larder, the empty biscuit jar, all the cupboards: all for nothing. There was no egg. Gor’s eyes strayed up to the light fittings and down to the floor, not searching, but wandering. He stood motionless and unsure of himself, staring into the pan of boiling water as it giggled back at him, winking.

What was going on? Things did not just disappear. There must be a logical explanation. He opened the heavy fridge door: yes, there was the egg container, and there was the space left by the egg he had removed precisely six minutes before, or a little longer, come to think of it. Tuesday’s egg was definitely gone. He slammed the fridge with more force than was necessary and shut off the gas under the pan. He didn’t care for this at all.

The last thing he could afford was the loss of a nutritious egg. To hell with it: he’d just have to have tea with a piece of buttered bread. After all, he’d survived without eggs before, and much besides, although admittedly a long time ago, back in Siberia. He was about to sit down to his meagre luncheon when the telephone changed his plans with a harsh and repeated bleeping. He hesitated, buttered bread in hand, wondering who it might be. Still it bleeped. He hurried out into the hall.

‘Good day!’ he pronounced grimly, his deep voice booming off the walls.

His bass was answered by a slightly scratchy contralto. ‘Ah, Gor! It is I … Sveta.’

‘Oh, yes.’ He winced and swallowed a sigh, relaxing minutely against the wall. ‘How may I help you?’

‘We have a rehearsal shortly at your apartment, if I am not mistaken?’ She did not pause, despite the implied question. ‘However, I have to say Albina, my daughter, you remember? Well, she is really not at all well, and I have had to keep her home from school. I cannot leave her, obviously.’ Gor’s chest heaved with inaudible relief as the idea settled into his mind that Sveta was about to cancel their rehearsal. ‘But I was wondering …’ she continued, in a more intimate tone, ‘I would hate to miss the rehearsal, when we’ve just started, so do you think you could come to my apartment, and we could do it here instead? Albina will be very well behaved. She has promised.’

Gor’s black eyebrows locked for a moment and he chewed on his cheek, surprised by Sveta’s determination, and also disappointed by it, truth be told. ‘If there is no other option, Sveta, we will have to do what we can. I can come to your apartment, if it is absolutely necessary: that is, if you think I should.’ The woman did not detect his lack of enthusiasm, and thanked him for his flexibility before ringing off with a contrived tinkle of a laugh.

He had noted her address on the first piece of paper that had come to hand; the bank statement of the Rostov Regional Magic Circle. How he wished he’d never become treasurer. He chewed on his cheek as he stalked back to the kitchen to tidy, and fret.

Today, the convoluted tricks and the cabinet of magic, once his diversion of choice, held zero appeal. He felt tired, uninspired; preoccupied, perhaps. He coveted time to himself, to play the piano and ruminate on these problems of his disappearing memory, the strangeness of life, his burgeoning conscience, and the piles of doubt surrounding him, reaching to the ceiling, sometimes crowding out the daylight.

He did not sleep. The hands that combed through his hair sometimes shook. Odd events had been occurring, and it wasn’t just the stupid egg or the hideous rabbit. An afternoon at the baby-grand might give him peace to sort through his thoughts. An afternoon with Sveta surely would not.

As he came to the doorway, humming softly to himself, a movement in the window drew his glance. He looked up automatically, expecting to see a pigeon wing, or scrappy paper in the wind. Instead, to his astonishment, he glimpsed the imprint of a face, features clouded by the steam that clung to the cold glass, but definitely a human countenance – just hanging there, peering in – four floors up. He froze, dumbfounded as the face faded into the clouds, and then dashed over to the window. The hinges scraped as he pushed the frame and craned his head out and down, raking the view. There was nothing to see: no human, no bird, nothing at all except an empty wash of sky and the pitted courtyard below. Somewhere a dog barked, and a door slammed. Leaves fell to earth from a skinny silver birch. He stood, panting into the cold, damp air, watching his steam dissipate and waiting for his breath to slow to normal. When it did, he rubbed a bony hand across the cavities of his great, dark eyes, and shut the window.

Returning to his bedroom, he stood at the mirror for a long time. Was he sick? Was he losing his grip? He looked the same as before: there was no sign of dementia or confusion in his face. But then, what did they look like?

He held out his hands: they were solid, strong, ready for work. He could stand up tall and straight. He remembered everything he had done so far that day, and he absolutely knew what day it was, what year, where he stood and what he should be doing. He grimaced at his reflection. What he should be doing, he acknowledged, was packing the car with props and going over to Sveta’s.

There was nothing to be done: he must carry on as normal. He shrugged his shoulders, and pulled on his jerkin.

A Mothy Mouthful (#ue0435510-83e1-5197-9377-fc03b7299c17)

Once Gor’s little tea-chest car had been loaded up with his basic prop requirements, the short drive out to Sveta’s presented no problems. He switched on the radio, enjoying the heavy thunk of the solid black buttons as he progressed through the stations, searching for something mellow, wordless and reassuring. He eventually fixed on Rachmaninov, the notes bubbling in his blood like oxygen as he navigated massive pot-holes and waved with a swift, jerking movement to the newspaper seller on the corner – a man whose name he did not know, but who was a staple of his day. Later he would stop and buy a paper, and exchange nods and worldly wise shakes of the head: this he knew. He passed through the main square, bustling and full of business, and saluted the traffic policeman keeping order at the crossroads. He crossed the metal bridge over the River Don and drove on towards the newer side of town, increasing his speed as the road, if not the tarmac, broadened. He eased around a couple of rights and a left, past encampments of kiosks and packs of shaggy, mud-encrusted dogs, and set about the artful business of hunting down the correct boulevard, corpus, building and flat number for Sveta.

Despite the Rachmaninov and the wide, sweeping road, his thoughts dwelt on his new assistant. He was not sure she would do. Gor had not practised as a magician for a number of years, but his previous experience was relevant: he had the right demeanour, and a fitting temperament; he could be mysterious, and instil belief. If required, he could take the audience with him on a journey that could confound and perplex. In his own estimation, he was a master, if very rusty. But this Sveta: could she ever be an effective foil? If they were laughed off the stage he would get no further bookings, and if they simply weren’t very good, well, the bookings would be unpaid. And that would be bad news. Indeed, he nodded grimly to himself, the pay was the whole point.

A cloud of steam hissed from a pipe by the roadside, and Sveta evaporated from his thoughts, replaced by recollections of the empty pan, and the steamy face. Had it been real, or a hallucination? Were his nerves really that bad? Maybe neither he nor Sveta belonged on the stage. Maybe he should forget his plan. Would he really be able to confound and perplex and command a paying audience, if he couldn’t successfully boil an egg? Did people these days even want magic? What with their pop music, private enterprise and foreign holidays … He rubbed his chin and nodded as her building came into view, allowing himself a quick ‘rum-pum-pum-pah’ along with Rachmaninov to raise his spirits.

When Sveta opened the door to Flat 8, Building 4, Corpus 6 on Turgenev Boulevard, Gor was taken aback to see that the apartment behind her was entirely in darkness. She looked dishevelled compared to previous weeks, her blonde hair puffy and tufted around her hamster-like cheeks, and her make-up smudged. They stood facing each other, him nodding good day and she seemingly frozen.

‘Good—’ Gor began and was immediately quelled with a ‘sssh!’ that rattled his bones. ‘What is it, Sveta? Is something wrong?’ he whispered, still standing in the doorway.

‘Quietly, Gor! As I told you, my little girl is sick today. She must have absolute quiet. She is … she is a highly strung girl, and suffers, you understand?’

Gor thought he did not understand, and frowned. ‘I have to get my things from the car. That will, I am sure, make a little noise, but I will be as careful—’