Two Cousins of Azov

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Andrea Bennett 2017

Cover design & illustration Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Buildings © Shutterstock.com

Andrea Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008159573

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008159566

Version: 2017-05-10

Dedication

For Mum and Dad

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Disappearing Egg

A Mothy Mouthful

Tolya Talks

A Study in Bisection

A Shiver in the Trees

The Palace of Youth

Sveta’s Acrobat

Open Flame

Dill and Doughnuts

You Can’t Pickle Love

The Princess

Colours and Crayons

My Name Is Sveta

Zoya Asks the Spirits

Suspicion

The Ideas Incubator

Super Rush

Between Pink Sheets

The Kindly Orderly

A Subdued Troika

Vim and Vigour

Ice-Cream

Moonlight

Muddy Goings on

A Splash of Zelenka

Albina Gives Chase

Funny Pills

Visiting Time

A Windswept Place

A Disappearing Girl

The Broken Adonis

Cuckoo!

A Long Journey

Pryaniki for Tea

Special Measures

Not Dead

The Big Show

A New Year Glimmers

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Andrea Bennett

About the Publisher

The Disappearing Egg

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

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—’

‘Oh no! You must not bring the magical cabinet into the apartment! No, no, that would be too much! The noise and excitement! We must just rehearse, as if we had it with us. No equipment, thank you.’

‘Make believe, Sveta? I am not convinced. Maybe we need to have a talk.’ He raised his eyebrows. Still Sveta stood in the doorway, stepping uneasily from one swollen, slippered foot to the other, not inviting him in. The warm smell of the apartment rolled into his nostrils: furniture polish and something edible – gravy, perhaps.

He cleared his throat. ‘May I?’

‘Oh, of course, of course, come in, how silly of me!’ She stood away from the door and flicked the light switch. A blowsy ceiling lamp trickled pinkish light along the narrow hallway. ‘Please, take off your shoes! Here we are, some slippers – for men!’ Sveta, her face beaming in a way that made Gor uncomfortable, handed him a pair of navy suede slippers with grubby woollen insides. He had the impression they had been waiting a long time for a suitable pair of feet, although they were not particularly dusty, and gave no home to spiders. There was something about them that reminded him of the pleasure boats down on the river: abandoned.

She bade him sit on the bench by the telephone table to remove his shoes, and stood over him as he did so. She repeatedly glanced down the corridor to a room at the end, where a door lay ajar. He guessed the daughter must be occupying that wing, and must be suffering: her mama was clearly anxious. Perhaps he should have brought melon.

As he pulled on the second slipper he heard a flapping, followed by a whistle of wings through the air. He raised his head as an avian screech rang out, followed by what sounded like a series of muffled oaths, deep within the apartment. Sveta giggled, her fist pressed into her mouth, pushing down on her small, receding chin. She turned to him.

‘That’s Kopek, our parakeet. Albina loves him, and she’s teaching him to talk. I think Albina has a special relationship with animals – an affinity, I think it’s called,’ she confided with an air of pride.

Gor raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. The bird had sounded as if it were in pain. The screeches continued, becoming louder and more insistent, and then interspersed with a series of thuds that made the light fittings rattle. Gor and Sveta looked at each other. The latter dropped her smile, sighed and pursed her lips.

‘Just one moment,’ she said, raising a lone index finger into his face before hurrying down the corridor and through the open door at the end, pulling it closed behind her.

‘Be my guest,’ he murmured to himself.

He turned to the bookcase as he waited, perusing the familiar titles and shaking his head occasionally. Scratchy sibilants hissed from the door at the far end of the hall, followed by a storm of shushing. He hunched his shoulders into his ears as the unfortunate bird continued squawking. He dropped the book in his hand – The Mother, by Maxim Gorky – and leapt inches into the air when the mysterious door clattered open and a shrieking girl-cum-devil came dashing into the corridor. A round, pink face framed rolling marble eyes under ropes of hair, fixed into pigtails by two enormous shaggy pom-poms, which flew fiercely about her. She was laughing. Or crying. He wasn’t sure. She was definitely running – towards him.

The shrieking noise the girl was making morphed into an extended ‘ahhhh!’ of terror as her foot caught in the edge of the runner and she started to tumble. In that moment, as she sought to regain her balance, she reminded Gor of a bear cub in a hunter’s trap: her half-grown body out of her control, its constituent parts flailing around her haunches, the fore-paws and hind-paws huge and silly, but also full of menace. It was in the last moment before impact that Gor noticed she was carrying a small, brightly coloured bird in her right hand, its beak stretched in a soundless, endless squawk of terror. He raised his hands.

He heard the impact before he felt it. The air whistled from his lungs as he dropped backwards onto the bookcase, the girl felling him like a tree in the forest. For a moment he was in blackness as a mass of hair, smelling of gravy, furniture polish and pom-poms, claimed his face. He was aware of pain in his back and a tightness in his chest. There followed a second of absolute quiet, and then a roar as if a shell had struck the apartment. The girl began heaving sobs, coughing and spluttering as she fought to right herself, all the time not letting go of the small, still bird in her hand.

‘Kopeka! My Kopek-chik! He’s deeeeaaaaadddd!’ The words erupted from her.

‘Oh, malysh, shush now, collect yourself, and let’s have a look at you.’ Sveta huddled over her daughter, trying to heave her up from the tangle of rug and bookcase and Gor, yanking ineffectually at her arm. ‘I’ve told you not to run in the house, haven’t I?’

‘He’s deeeaaaaadddd! You made me kill him!’

‘No no, I can see his eyes are gleaming – look! He’s just stunned. Let’s get you up and check on our poor guest. Are you injured?’

‘I hate you!’

‘Now, now baby-kins! Mummy didn’t mean to make you fall over.’