The Man in the Shed (23 page)

He saw me look towards the door.

‘There’s no one else I can turn to,’ he said.

But could I help him? That’s what I was wondering.

It is winter in Russia. The oak tree outside the window has long since shed its leaves. At night when the air temperature sits on freezing, Neil’s wife and the doctor huddle by the wood burner.

Over in the Wairarapa it was the planting season, and there were plenty of days when Neil would look up from the row he was planting to find his wife’s smile closed around this other world from which he was excluded, a place where bells ring from horses’ necks, and sledges whistle through the snow.

The bathings—this routine of theirs—have become more regular than Neil would wish for, the doctor’s childish game masking a more serious intent. Neil was amazed his wife couldn’t see through it. Such as the doctor asking for the hilltops to rise so he can slide his soapy hands beneath the full
weight of her breasts. Or when he says, ‘Please. Show me your steppe,’ and she obediently raises her flat white belly above a layer of foam for the doctor’s hands to wander and explore. To distract attention from his prying he hums popular Russian folksongs.

Each morning the doctor intercepts his servants with the breakfast trolley—‘Ah, what have we here?’—treating it as through it was a chance encounter, no more, and proceeds to Judith’s room. He is always delighted to see her. He sets about arranging her pillows. ‘How is my little bird today?’ Today he has a gift for her, a nightgown. Tomorrow it will be honey, or a jar of marmalade.

Twice now Judith has attempted to discuss with the doctor the attack on the Jewish neighbourhood. Both times he placed a finger to his lips. Once he popped a spoonful of yoghurt in Judith’s mouth. The second time he scraped a smear of honey from her cheek then held his finger a few inches above her mouth until she came up to taste it. ‘There. There. My baby golubchik.’ And he made the cussacking sound of a dove.

And there was more. Last night, said Neil, a name bubbled from his wife’s lips. Mikhail.

I had to admit the very sound of the name was discouraging. Mikhail—the word opens the mouth. It makes space for and leaves behind a certain yearning.

Neil must have detected in my expression some lingering doubt, for now he produced a chequebook and laid it on the table between us.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you have your expenses to consider.’

Think of the sun staring at the earth, of it frowning through the clouds, alternating with periods of concentrated effort, day after day willing the seed to burst from the unseen world into the open. And you get an idea of how Judith’s Russia was able to flourish and take over the life she led with Neil in the Wairarapa.

The imagination can turn into a blunt instrument without something to react against. The imagination loves to be pandered to, loves attention. I began my work for Neil by reading around the subject. I read Russian folktales, I studied maps, I thumbed through the country’s history in order to dream up stories to enable Neil to burrow through to Mikhail’s neighbourhood. We met once or twice a week and, for want of a better description, I came to think of these occasions as Neil’s lessons.

I planted stories in his imagination, I scoured the town for Russian landscapes, I dreamt up people. Early in the piece I drew him over to my window to point out ‘my Russian neighbour’ and Neil gazed back at Trisha Blake weeding her garden.

‘There’s your Russian, Neil. In case you’ve never seen one before.’

Neil shook his head, willing the little he knew of Russia to take seed in dear old Trish. ‘Yes. Interesting,’ he said. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t know but for that thick neck, and, oh, yes, the headscarf sort of gives her away, doesn’t it?’

Point number one: the imagination is non-discriminating when it comes to old prejudices and lies.

‘Masha Venyukova. That’s her name,’ I said.

Point number two: in stories we trust. We ask no questions. In stories we glimpse other possibilities. I began to load Trish with character, background, history. I sweated it to begin with, and sketched Masha Venyukova as I went. What writer has to put up with a reader looking over their shoulder as they advance the story? Back then I was not the practised adlibber I’ve since become. Several times I had to excuse myself to go to the toilet or out to the kitchen for another glass of water, to give me a moment to invent away from Neil’s trusting eyes.

Russian lessons. That’s what they were. Neil even took notes and I brought out my maps to locate Odessa on the Black Sea. He stood at the window while he listened to me, holding back the curtain and looking down at the crouched figure of Masha Venyukova.

‘Odessa? That’s where she’s from?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Odessa is where the circus business regularly took her. She was a procurer of circus acts.’

Neil mouthed a silent ‘Ah’. Then he asked, ‘She told you all this?’

‘We’re great mates. But listen,’ I said. ‘This is what I wanted to tell you. This is what she told me.’

On one of her trips to Odessa she gets word of a very special exhibit down in the port. From the top of Potyomkin Steps she can see the white rust-bucket which had ferried the Turk
and his wares across the sea. It is a hot day and she toys with stopping at a cafe but, as she is already late, she continues to drop down the steps, past the sailors’ bars and the tired, unpainted entranceways of the prostitutes’ quarters. She hurries across the busy port road, through the gates, and finds the Turk’s ship. She takes off her shoes and climbs the gangway. At the stern, a small crowd of her circus colleagues has gathered. But she is already late—the auction is underway.

In fact, when the Turk announces he will introduce his wife, she thinks it must already be over. But as is his practice, the Turk has left the best for last. He disappears briefly and returns with what appears to be a mannequin in a black dress and black stockings.

Masha thinks the woman must have died recently—leukaemia, possibly, or TB—and that the impresario, under mounting financial pressure after a recent flop with his Russian-speaking ponies, has taken his wife to a taxidermist who has removed the brain and intestines and filled the body with an aromatic resin.

‘So she bought the Turk’s wife?’ asked Neil.

‘No, she did not. Her bid wasn’t successful.’ Though, god knows, she was deeply sorry to have missed out, as procurers of circus acts received appalling pay.

Now, with the auction over, the Turk kisses his wife goodbye. Masha sees him afterwards standing at the ship’s rail, a bald man with a sad, down-turned moustache, a hand raised in farewell to his wife of thirty years, as another, a fellow from a Romanian circus, carries the corpse wrapped
in brown paper past the wharf authorities.

By now it is late afternoon, still very warm. Rather than return to the hotel, Masha wanders Odessa’s leafy streets. She keeps to the shaded side and walks beneath the French balconies, from which old men in white singlets lean over the black fretwork, pruning with scissors, dropping cigarette ash onto the flagstones below. After forty minutes of dragging her heels, she decides to cross the tramlines and stroll beneath the trees of Shevchenko Park.

It is there that she happens to look up and see a man catch a sparrow in his hand. One moment the sparrow is flying with its head down, in search of crumbs; the next, the man’s hand snatches it from the air. As quick as that. It bobs above his fingertips and all the young women come running to see and stroke the sparrow’s head. But, once they surround the man, they realise he is not holding a sparrow but the head of his penis.

‘No,’ said Neil. ‘No. Christ.’

‘Exactly. See, it was a clever illusion.’

Now, for the benefit of those watching at a distance the man makes to release the sparrow. He opens his hand to the air, fluttering his fingertips, then walks off with one of the admiring women.

Neil was still stuck on the idea of the man whipping his cock out in Shevchencko Park, with women running towards him clutching their bags of bird feed.

The point I was trying to make is this: there were any number of strategies by which Neil might enter Judith’s
Russian neighbourhood, including sleight of hand, illusion. Now I came to my recommendation. Neil would have to impose himself on the landscape available and take possession of it.

Listen to what happens next in Shevchenko Park. Masha removes her shoes from her blistered heels. She happens to be sitting near a number of young men lined up at a kvass truck, clutching jars and pails. In another direction, through the trees at the edge of a small lake, she can make out a number of photographers in leather jackets circling a bride and groom. Eventually they depart for a distant caravan selling beer and vodka.

The couple soon follows. Masha says they couldn’t bear to walk for more than a dozen paces without the bride coming to a halt and turning to her new husband with the words ‘Kiss me.’

So they kiss and part, kiss and part, like butterflies. Masha watches them all the way back to the caravan where they melt into the crowd.

Only then does she discover an artist has set up his easel next to her. The man must have slipped in and made his preparations while she was absorbed by the bride and groom. The artist glances up, smiles and returns to his canvas.

The painting is of the bride and groom standing by the lake—the same view obtained through the trees, only brought into closer focus. Masha stares at the painting until, she said, she can feel the spirit of it enter into her, and when she gazes back in the direction of the wedding guests, it is her own face
she sees on the bride. Through the trees in the distance she sees herself laughing, tossing her head back. It is her own face—the same one as in the painting—and she feels the same powerful longing that the young bride felt.

She snaps out of it only after an elderly man, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, chances by. He gives a polite cough and Masha opens her eyes to a jacket emblazoned with war medals. The Patriot politely averts his gaze as she makes the startling discovery that his hand is shoved up inside her blouse, cupping her breast. She withdraws that hand and the other plunges up her skirt.

She quite rightly kicked up a fuss. The Patriot shrugged and wandered off.

Neil proved to be an excellent student—almost too good, because Masha Venyukova’s Odessa experience had immediate effect.

By now, the Owens were sleeping apart. Neil had set himself up in the spare room next door to the master bedroom. Two nights after I told him the tales from Shevchenko Park, he woke up on his camp stretcher wondering what had interrupted his sleep, then as he lay there the feeling grew in him that Mikhail was in bed with his wife in the next room. Sure enough, when he knelt with his ear to the wall, he heard noises that spoke of his wife’s pleasure. The rustle of sheets, the
careful shift of limbs, the long sighs.

So he crept out to the hall to stand in the doorway of Judith’s room. There he remained like an interested spectator, watching his wife’s hips rise beneath the duvet. He studied her smiling eyelids and the way her lips parted, and kissed, along a thin line of moisture. And then, he said, he noticed something quite different, something new in the way Judith twisted along the keel of her spine, that bit between her teeth—the unexpected vigour of it. Mikhail, he realised. Judith had brought him back to Neil’s patch.

He left the hall, went out to the verandah and slipped around the side of the house to the bedroom window. There, he looked in and thought he saw Judith and the doctor lying across the bed. That’s when the dance of the bride and groom in Shevchenko Park came back to him.

For the first time, he truly appreciated Masha’s cleverness—to switch places with the bride. And how brilliant it would be now, were the doctor’s lovesick penis to turn into a sparrow. No sooner did the thought occur and there was a feathery movement from Judith’s loins, a flapping of wings. Both lovers stopped what they were doing and looked up, surprised, and the doctor knelt, said Neil, with his soft appendage folded in his hand.

Soon after this, Neil wanted to go to Russia. Nothing was going to stop him. I pictured Neil with his sleeves rolled up, marching through Mikhail’s neighbourhood, looking out for the doctor’s house. And I saw nothing but trouble ahead.

One afternoon we met at Wellington Railway Station for a practice run into Russia. I told Neil we had no choice but to make full use of the landscape available to us. Alert and interested as ever, he glanced about the station platforms for Russians. Point number three: the imagination is only a tool. We drive it with our will to rearrange the world to our liking. While still on the platform, I reminded Neil of the artist in Shevchenko Park and how he had borrowed Masha’s features for the bride’s. This too would be our
modus operandi
. First, though, I explained the need for his imagination to make room for the dimensions of Russia.

I told him to expect railway stations with a superior bearing. In Judith’s Russia the stations are temples, the ceilings are pitched to the height of the gods. The roofs of the major railway stations are so high that at night the stars and moon shelter under them.

We sat in a carriage that was only a quarter full. In Russia, I said, the trains heave and breathe with humanity. While our trains are like someone hurrying through a crowd to get home, their trains convey a sense of epic; they move with a hip-rolling motion, a slow gathering of speed.

For the next forty minutes, all the way to Upper Hutt, I applied a Russian paintbrush to everything passing in the carriage window. As we came into stations I singled out a Russian face, though, as you might expect, few stand comparison. In Russia, Neil could expect faces to be more raw, like meat that has suffered freezer-burn. And he could expect old carbuncular women selling plain ice-cream from portable
freezers. He liked me talking like that—‘In Russia you can expect …’ It gave him hope, prospects. I was getting into the swing of things. I pointed back at a Russian in beltless trousers looking forlornly up from the fallen-down trellis in his backyard.