A Game of Soldiers. Stephen Miller

and headed away from him before he could get started on selling himself.

      In the corner Dmitri Khulchaev was shouting at the man from New Art, a young writer with bright blond curls he’d waxed down in ringlets all around his forehead in a style that he must have thought was attractive. The atmosphere in the club was intense, as if the performance had just been a fuse for the party to come afterwards.

      She was alive now after the drinks. Thrilled by the performance, but relieved that it was over, she floated through the crowd, smiling at all the audience who’d stayed behind, embracing all her new friends. She had no old ones, not any more. She saw the Professor across the room, drunk and laughing himself into a coughing fit, and on impulse she went over and kissed him.

      ‘You!’ he nearly coughed in her face. ‘You are very…very…You!’ And then quickly she kissed him again and laughed, bouncing away before she gave him a heart attack.

      Khulchaev caught her by the arm, pressed himself right up against her, held a bottle of champagne to her lips and made her drink until she nearly choked. And then he was kissing her – a quick hard insertion of his tongue – and gone almost as quickly. And she stood there, reeling in the smoky room.

      At some point she realized that she was drunk, really drunk. Too drunk, and she developed a plan, a very detailed plan to make her way to the back door and into the alley and vomit somewhere where no one could see her. It was a good plan, and she began to put it into motion. Putting one foot in front of the other and heading for the back.

      Then she found herself on her hands and knees in the alley, coughing and wiping her face on her sleeve, slipping as she struggled to her feet, bracing herself against the masonry wall while she caught her breath. There was a hissing sound as Tika, the cat, ran beneath her feet and she looked wildly around and nearly fell into the wet mud.

      It was cool out in the alley and the air was refreshing, penetrating her bones, and driving the poison out. She would never drink again, never, never, never, she told herself, and she tried to feel her way along towards the door.

      She didn’t see the man at first, and then she stopped, because she thought he was urinating and she’d surprised him, but he held the door for her and she recognized him as the same man as before. The one who’d bought her the drink, the one with the sad eyes.

      The torrent of noise crashed out of the doorway, the roar of artists arguing and debating minutiae that no one would ever understand. There was a screamed announcement about the next performance, some wild idea Khulchaev had cooked up – a mock trial of all the oppressors; for the enslavement of artists and smothering of new ideas, for the strangulation of imagination and the censorship of newspapers, the necrophilia of history, the vampirism of peasant culture…A trial against the Crime of Blindness. With each item in the indictment they were screaming, laughing, cheering.

      The man with the sad eyes was still holding the door open for her, why? Waiting for her to make up her mind? Pretending to be a gentleman? She let her eyes slide over to him. His face seemed to float lazily in front of her. She tried to focus.

      ‘I saw you before,’ he said quietly.

      ‘Oh? That’s right…’ Like all the rest, she thought. Did he expect her to thank him for the cheap drink that had started the whole thing off? She leaned against the frame of the doorway and tried to make her feet work.

      ‘No, I’ve seen you, before tonight, I mean…’ His voice had a tone of urgency; soon he’d be whining about his wife not understanding him. Maybe he had been a customer back in her old life, someone who’d paid his money and fallen in love. Another fool. Trying to get away, she managed to take one step into the corridor. Inside they were all singing now, one of the songs in the show…

      So what! It doesn’t matter,

       So what! I just don’t care, So what…

      On and on, people stamping the time on the floor.

      She wanted to go back and find Dmitri, maybe he’d be nice for a change, maybe he was tired of laughing at her. They were all waiting to see who she was going to start sleeping with. They’d even applauded when he kissed her and left her spinning around there on the dance floor. So, maybe it looked like it was going to be Dmitri. So what…So, maybe that was how he said ‘I love you’, by insulting her all the time.

      The man was explaining that he had never really seen anything like the theatre they’d produced this evening, it was different, he said. Unusual. He needed to talk to her, to have a conversation. Now was not the time, but perhaps in the morning?

      She laughed, spun around in the alley looking for escape. But the only other person in the alley was him – smiling his droopy smile, helping her back down the corridor where she could rejoin the party, if that’s what she wanted? Or perhaps she would enjoy some coffee right now?

      …the consequence, the consequence,

       …the consequence of Nothing!

      Oh, yes, join the party. And she let herself sing with the others the last phrases of the Professor’s anthem, raising her fist into the air at the end for the three cheers. She threw her head back with the last triumphant chorus, and found herself looking up, following the upraised arms and staring up at the patterns pressed into the metal ceiling…

      And all of a sudden it was as if she, Vera Aliyeva, was the only person who could see, really see. It had come to her all in a haze, dreamily, but truly she could see the future, see it all speeded up, see Izov’s old building crumbling, the Komet beginning to collapse all around them. She saw it in sudden images as if she were running through a gallery of hideous paintings – the collapse of the world spreading out, like a ripple in a still lake, wider, wider, wider.

      Perhaps the vision was the result of a curse. Perhaps they had mocked the ancient Aztec gods during tonight’s performance, and in revenge been issued an apocalyptic challenge. Perhaps a great wave was about to smash down upon them and drive them into oblivion; the Komet, her, Dmitri, the whole city, everything…Everything.

      Oh, how far she’d come in this, the final chapter of her life on Earth! She stood in the corridor hanging on to the sad man’s arm as the world disintegrated around them.

      

      She woke late in the morning, the thunder of carriages rumbling along the embankment nudging her out of sleep. She was in a soft, wide bed…the heavy coverings. Ah, yes…She remembered.

      She wrenched herself upright and swung herself to the edge of the mattress for a moment, got up and shuffled out of the bedroom – everything heavily furnished in an oriental motif, with Persian rugs hung from the walls, a lot of plants that needed watering. Yes…yes…what was his name?

      His place was on the second floor and the parquet was warm from the heat of the flats below. Everything was dusty, she could feel the little pieces of dirt under her feet. Everything needed to be cleaned. The apartment looked like it needed a good shaking out.

      She discovered him in the kitchen. There was a little balcony there and he was dressed, sitting in the doorway smoking and reading a copy of Gazette.

      ‘If you want tea, it’s on the stove,’ he said without looking up.

      ‘Yes, good,’ she said, making her voice flat. She groped for the glasses and poured herself a tall glass of tea as quietly as she could.

      ‘When you’re dressed and awake I need to talk to you.’

      ‘Um…I have a real katzenjammer…’ She put her hand up to her forehead.

      ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ he said and turned a page of the paper. She took the tea and walked back out into his front rooms without answering.

      She didn’t think he’d touched her during the night. Maybe he was too drunk, maybe he was scared, maybe he wanted to make love to someone who was awake. She found his writing desk and, tucked under a stack of mail, the solitary portrait of the woman. The wife, he’d admitted.