Mourning Ruby

Author:Helen Dunmore [Dunmore, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 0425200191
Publisher: BERKLEY PUB
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

21

The Moscow Veteran

And to get to him – to his very heart –

without papers I entered the Kremlin…

The man sat or perhaps was propped – he had no legs – on a flat wooden trolley. One arm was whole and perfect, the other ended below the elbow. He wore military uniform and his eyes were a startling pale blue. Linen blue. In his good hand he held a cup for money.

Automatically, Joe shelled a few coins into the cup. The man’s eyes caught him and he stopped. Suddenly it seemed wrong, brutal almost, to drop the coins in the cup and walk on as he had done dozens and dozens of times before. He knew what the man’s story would be. There was nothing to say, no advice to offer. He would be a veteran of the war in Afghanistan with a veteran’s pension which was now worth close to nothing. There was no money for a wheelchair. He had his wooden trolley. He had nothing to gain from talking to Joe. And yet…

An old woman hobbled past and dropped a few kopeks into the cup. Her pension, too, would be worth almost nothing. But these old women never passed the veterans without giving a coin. And they would always speak to them. ‘There you are, son, God will bless you. God will reward you.’

There was no stopping these old women from talking about God now. They packed the churches, and young men and women packed them too, carefully following rituals relearned after decades of disuse. The young women covered their hair, the young men bared their heads.

The old woman made the sign of the cross and fumbled in her worn-out purse for the last coin. She had everything God needed in order to exist, Joe thought. Poverty and innocence and goodness and lack of hope for anything on earth. What she and all the other old women had always believed had turned out to be true. Earth was a vale of suffering, fitfully illuminated by acts of kindness such as a stallholder tipping an extra chicken foot into the scale. But this almost never happened and could not be counted on. Only God, suffering, united himself with your sufferings…

‘Take this, son, God will reward you.’

‘Have a drink,’ said Joe, and dropped in more money, rouble notes this time, enough for a bottle of vodka. The man raised his eyes and scanned the face that Joe knew would always bear an expression that marked him as not from these parts.

‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

‘No. English. But I live here in Moscow.’

The man’s blue eyes held Joe’s.

‘Why?’

‘I’m a writer. I do my research here. I’m writing a book about Stalin.’

‘About Iosif Vissarionovich?’

‘That’s it.’

‘There’s a real man for you. If we’d had him in charge I wouldn’t be sitting here.’

‘No.’

‘We didn’t lose wars in Iosif Vissarionovich’s time. Plus, you never saw a soldier begging in the streets. Write that in your book.’

The blue eyes went wan. He was tired, in pain.

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