In 1996, I was sent to Ukraine for 3 months to work on a European project to retrain Ukrainian army officers. I had to travel around the country and I soon noticed that from Kiev to Odessa, from Odessa to Kharkov, from Kharkov to Lviv, there was always a man with red hair behind me. My “minder” – an ex-special services officer called Gennady – told me not to worry and merely noted that the man following us was “not one of ours.” However, the phone in my Kiev flat was tapped and one morning an impossibly beautiful woman turned up at my front door informing me, in faultless English, that she had been sent to look after me. There were many peculiar Brits around, too. These included a man working for the military school of languages and an ex-solicitor alcoholic whose untimely death I happened to witness. It was his death and the story told to me afterwards by the “military man” that inspired me to write this short story.
Most of the story is true.
All of it was cathartic.
I left the story alone for one year. At first, I wanted to polish it up. It was full of mediocre writing, too many adjectives and too many adverbs. But what it lacked with regard to style, it did have something powerful in its rawness and it represented my writing skill in 1996. So, I decided not to touch it at that time, and I will not touch it now. The story is entitled, “Hotel Kiev.”
It was not fair really. Rob’s story represented many years of suffering and yet it was but three minutes in the telling. Rob knew the value of a casual acquaintance, so he chose my last evening in Kiev to tell me his tale. That story and that evening come like a dream to me now - though in dreams perhaps, both Rob and I are in Kiev forever. But we are there alone because, for those who stayed behind, we have gone: gone, like a never-to-be-recalled song.
I was sitting in the grand dining-room of Hotel Kiev. Through the window-panes I watched dusk lapping round the hotel while a grey polar wind pressed against the outside walls. This old Soviet glass contained impurities so that everything outside was unclear, deformed or twisted. Even the moon seemed to shimmer under a layer of frost, and thrusting buildings, heavy with importance, seemed to be marooned in glaciated streets. Along those streets, the trees were upturned witches’ brooms and they flickered like an old film when touched by the breeze.
Inside the hotel, I was wrapped in faded red velvet. The other diners were Western people selling their products and Ukrainian ladies selling their bodies. Lounge suits and expensive women named Olga, honoured and revered by the squeal of mobile phones and insistent waiters who scurried and danced to the strains of a gypsy violin. The violinist stood on a rostrum and he bent and twisted as he played. His beard was skin-tight and the eyes were so black that they seemed permanently set in shadow. I felt him watching us as he turned and returned to his dark world inside. When he stopped playing his gypsy melodies, he held the violin like a machine pistol.
Rob then appeared in the doorway. He glanced nervously around the dining-room and, seeing me, he rose on to his toes and bounced across the room towards my table. A small man in a brown leather coat, Rob had arrived at that period in life when he knew he was fixed and permanent and would develop no more. Although he was involved with the Military School of Languages, nobody was sure who employed Rob and he frequently seemed anxious and often spun around as if someone were standing behind him. To me he was untouchable. Surrounded in a vacuum, he was a cocoon of eternal loneliness. He draped his coat over the chair back and glanced behind him while the chair groaned as he dropped on to it. Rob crossed his legs and twisted them together like pipe cleaners. Sitting sideways to me, he turned from the waist as if he were wringing a rag dry. There were tears in his eyes and, placing his elbows on the table, he raised hands to each side of his mouth, directing his words only at me.
"I just had to tell you before you go," he whispered.
To our left, a mobile phone purred. To the right, two Olgas giggled. The mobile appeared from a hip holster and, as its owner extended the antenna, the two Olgas giggled appreciatively. One of them orchestrated her efforts with suggestive movements of buttock and thigh. Long nails protruded like red French loaves. Her companion stood up and, balancing precariously on high silver heels, she leaned sideways. Glancing at the extended antenna from beneath her eyelids she slid a chair across the floor. I had never seen a chair slide sexily before. Rob's eyes gleamed like those of a drunk.
"John died in my flat...as you know...," he said.
I saw the mobile drop into a hip holster. Its owner leaned over his plate and shovelled peas into his mouth with a knife. And the violinist played, watching from his shadows, and the foreigners huddled as if threatened by the intense cold outside.
"The autopsy showed that he had no liver,” Rob said. “But you're not surprised..."
I was not. John's death was stamped on my brain like a prehistoric cave painting. I saw him now as he crawled like a reptile across the tiled floor towards the stretcher. I remembered him on all fours like a whipped dog. I recalled his breathing, laboured as a man who has not quite woken from a long sleep. His eyes look up at me. He is too weak to panic but his eyes still plead with me to help him. As he rolled onto the stretcher he let out a long sigh of resignation and I see again, as if in a dream, his blood covering the floor like blackcurrant jam. Resembling the afterbirth, this was the beforedeath: dark red and sticky at birth and at death; but this was his liver that lay in pieces upon the floor.
"He must have been drinking heavily," I said.
Rob threw his arms sideways and leaned backwards as if taking applause. His chair groaned.
"He was heaving it back...must have been, for years...as you know."
I noticed that an Olga had moved. She was sitting with the phone-man and she had her back to me. I saw her head rolling with laughter and chiselled ear-rings vibrated with the movement of her head and glinted as they caught the light from the chandeliers. She laughed, our eyes met, and I turned away. Then, the lights flickered and died and, as if it had breached the hotel walls, night surged into the room. For a second there was a hush, a moment of tension before someone laughed and a candle was lit; then another and another until the upward light remodelled the familiar faces of those around me. I was suddenly surrounded by strangers. Rob's voice persisted.
"I'd been in Kuwait, as you know," he said. "Margaret, my wife - my ex-wife, stayed in England. One summer, I came home and she told me she was leaving me. She had fallen in love with another man and she wanted a divorce. And, well as you know, that other man was John."
A shadow passed behind Rob's back. Gliding like a ghost across the dining-room, the shadow moved stealthily towards the door. Dagger shapes hung from its ears.
"I struggled at first...," Rob laughed. "I even supaglued his car. But what can you do? They really loved each other."
Another shadow passed behind Rob. This one was a prowling wolf and as it passed the reception desk, I saw the face, gorged and swollen in the candle light. There was a sob from the chair opposite and I heard Rob say:
"As you know, we stayed friends...a threesome...but the lack of her became more important than the people around me..."
The table top vibrated with the movement of Rob's shaking body. He twisted himself still further so that the candle light shone in the tears which were squeezed from his eyes and which rolled down the cheeks.
"I was her friend, a ghost from her past while she sat next to John - her present and her future."
Rob swallowed.
"Just imagine how it feels to sit opposite those fragments of yourself that you gave to a woman. I was no longer her business. The future was where her dreams lay. I had no part in them and I longed to take those dreams from her."
The face opposite glowed in the artificial light and lines around the mouth danced like matchstick men.
"Then, last year I got my chance. There was a vacancy in Donetsk. John had problems as you know. Whether these problems caused the drinking or whether the drinking caused the problems who can say? But John was in trouble and just one push might drop him over the edge. Donetsk is an awful place, as you know."
Yes, I knew Donetsk. It was full of lost souls, victims of Stalin's manufactured famine and I recalled the oppression of spirit I had felt there. It was not depression exactly, nor could I call it unhappiness at least not my unhappiness. Donetsk consisted of roads whose sole purpose seemed to be to take people from their homes and to the mine and back. It was not a place for people to live. Rob intertwined his fingers and squeezed them as if he were recharging his will.
"So, I asked John if he would work there for six months. I knew he needed the money, so he came. I reckoned that in a place like Donetsk, he would need about six months to drink himself to death."
Outside, I saw the treetops blowing frantically. Like a pistol shot a window crashed open and our candle flame snapped out like a piece of stretched elastic. In the darkness I heard the words explode from Rob's lips as if he had been holding his breath.
".....took his life.....you think I took his life?"
His breathing came in gasps, deep and rasping from across a vast black abyss. Just for a moment I felt I was standing on the edge of it, and I was about to topple over when I heard Rob mutter as if from a place far away:
"Well, perhaps I did, but the bastard took mine."
His dark shape rose and loomed over the table and then with a rustle he was gone. As the electricity flickered back I saw the door swinging where Rob's troubled spirit had passed. The chair opposite was now vacant like an empty tomb.
Next day I flew to London. John, Rob and I were gone forever, the faintest traces of human memory, stirred perhaps by the strains of a gypsy melody blowing in the streets around the Hotel Kiev.
Published in The Third Half: Issue 28:1997
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