All the Beggars Riding Read online

  The day passed, and he didn’t come home, and she and the other wives watched the flames in the sky and could feel the heat of them. Then six o’clock passed, the time when his shift should have ended, had he been working a regular shift, and still nothing, and some of the wives were worried now because their husbands had been gone for twenty-four hours. Word went around that the fire was worse than expected and that men from the plant had been taken to hospital. A group of wives set off for the hospital but the roads were cordoned off and the police weren’t letting anyone through. Some women begged, and others tried to bribe the policemen, and in the confusion two of them got through, Nastasya and one other. The other woman had a brother-in-law who was an orderly at the hospital and he took the women to the ward and they saw their husbands – so red and swollen their mouths and eyes had vanished in their faces. While they were there, one of the men – there were about fifteen of them, she guessed, in that room anyhow – one of them vomited a great gush of blood and died. They knew then that the men had been poisoned: by gas, people were saying, by fumes from the smoke, and the orderly was yelling at them to get out, and saying that if they wanted to help they could bring milk. Milk? Yes, milk, the men needed milk, they needed to drink as much milk as possible, and the hospital couldn’t provide it, or couldn’t provide enough. So she and the other woman left and rushed to the nearest store and bought as much milk as they could carry: but by the time they got back to the hospital the crowd of people there – mainly wives and mothers of the hospitalised workers – had doubled, and the cordon had been strengthened, there were soldiers there by now, and military vehicles, and there was no way of getting through. People were yelling and shoving and clawing one another and wailing and the containers of milk got lost, trampled and split underfoot. A soldier announced through a megaphone that the Army was airlifting the men to hospital in Moscow, where there were better facilities and more doctors, and each man would need a change of clothes and some food for the journey, strictly limited to one bag per patient, and would be allowed to see his wife or mother for five minutes when it was handed over. So all of the women rushed back to their dormitories or flats but by the time they came back with their bundle of clothes – their husband’s or son’s smartest suit and shoes, a clean shirt and necktie, because they weren’t going to have their men looked down on in the city – and their string bag with a stoppered bottle of milk, a hunk of black bread and cheese, perhaps a hip flask of spirits, whatever they could lay their hands on: they realised that the Army had tricked them and the men were gone, loaded straight from their beds onto military aircraft, the orderlies said.

  Can you even begin to imagine?

  Not all of the women were able to follow their husbands and sons to Moscow. Many of them had babies or young children, elderly parents; many of them had never left their villages, were scared. But Nastasya went, and two others, pawning their gold rings and best shoes for the airfare.

  In Moscow, it took two days of begging and bribing before they found out the name of the hospital – it was a special hospital, for radiology, on the outskirts of the city – and another day before they persuaded a receptionist to let them in. The head doctor wouldn’t let them up at first – oh, the agony, knowing that their husbands were metres away from them – but eventually she relented and said they could have twenty minutes, but they must keep two metres away at all times; no touching, and certainly no kissing.

  Nastasya laughed when she said this. How do you expect, she said, turning towards the camera for the first time, that a woman will stay two metres from her beloved and not kiss him? As for the twenty minutes: now that she had found him, her Aleksy, she wasn’t going to leave him again, ever.

  How do you find the strength to tell a story like that? How do you find the strength to live it?

  Nastasya’s voice grows harsh and proud as she tells of how she stayed near her husband. Many of the doctors and orderlies were mutinying, refusing to work the Chernobyl ward, or simply not turning up to work at all, scared of the clicking Geiger counters and the masks they were given to wear. So Nastasya and the other women took over the duties, carrying trays of food, emptying bedpans, and in this way they managed to stay close to their husbands. Each day, she said, there were more dead, and each day her Aleksander had died a little, too. If you spill boiling water or borscht or hot oil on your skin, or go too close to a normal flame, it burns from the outside in. But his body had been burned deep on the inside, a doctor explained, and as the burns came to the surface his skin peeled away in layers, first patches the size of a small coin, then saucers, and then sections the size of a plate, leaving lesions behind, raw flesh that smelled as if it was cooking. His teeth loosened and came out as he coughed or talked – he spat them in clumps of bone and gum into his hand. His hair rubbed off in handfuls as she stroked it. He was shitting blood and mucus twenty, thirty times a day, and parts of his intestines, coiled in on themselves, were coming out, too. His pupils were like a dead rabbit’s, swollen and glazed. The head doctor begged her to leave. He is no longer your husband, she said. He is a dangerous radioactive object. Go. Save yourself. It is what he would want, surely? But I couldn’t go, she says. How could I go? How could I leave him? In his brief periods of sentience, he clutched at her hand and tried to form his mouth into the shape of her name. He knew who she was, he knew she was there: how could she leave him? In the last days, he was coughing up parts of his internal organs – chunks of liver, slimy and blackened – and she had to pluck them from his mouth with her fingers. No doctors by then would go near him.

  She stops talking for a long moment.

  When he died, she says, they wouldn’t give me his body. They said it had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin, in a place far from anywhere anyone might ever go.

  Will you find out? she says, turning straight towards the camera and interviewer. Will you find out where they have buried my husband, so I can lie beside him?

  I have three different types of cancer, she says, but the cancers are not going to get me until I have found Aleksander Alexeivich.

  At this point the off-camera interviewer asks her something, in a murmur.

  And she turns again, straight to the camera, and says in broken, heavily accented English: Why I do it? If you need to ask this, then you are stupid, you are foolish old woman, and I would not trade my life and health for yours, even now. Why I do it? Because I love him, is why. Because is what love is.

  I didn’t see the end of it. Five minutes or so of summary, I imagine there must have been, to take it up to the end of the hour. I fumbled for the remote control and managed to switch it off, the screen closing over Nastasya’s pale, twisted, transfigured face, and I sat there, trembling. Trembling is the right word: ripples of it were racing through and over my whole body. Something I hadn’t known had been thickening in me up to that moment, until Nastasya and her Aleksander dragged it to the surface. It was the realisation that if my mother had watched Nastasya talking of her sweetheart, she would have understood. She would have had a level of pity or compassion or understanding or whatever the word might be that surpassed the gruesome, car-crash compulsion of the story. Because she loved my father. She would have done what Nastasya did, for him. In fact, in a way, what she did was exactly that. I suddenly remembered her saying, and it was as clearly as if she was right beside me, speaking the words again now, I would do it all again, I wouldn’t trade anything, not even the outcome, not even if I knew the outcome right from the start. She’d said it after the funeral, when we were doorstepped, and it had been printed in the trashier papers, large, in capital letters. And I realised how much there was that I didn’t understand, that I’d never asked, and never could ask now. Our mother rarely talked about our father: she kept him all shut up inside of her, as if in talking of him she’d disperse him, or leak her store of him away. Towards the end I tried to ask her, but she wouldn’t answer; when she did talk, it was loose and rambling, and made little or no sense. I’d gone through
her things after she died, and even the shoeboxed scraps of memento she had – the odd photo or bus ticket, cinema stub or hospital wristband, cassette tape or electricity bill, old airline tickets from the days when you had actual tickets, postcards, perforated strips of negatives, a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees (she’d asked for that, in hospital, and we hadn’t been able to find it, and only found it afterwards) – none of them meant anything, none of them told me anything about her, or about him. A lot of them, I couldn’t work out if she’d kept out of sentiment or in a slow drift of accumulation, never getting round to throwing them away.

  I have the boxes here, Clarks and Dolcis and one Russell & Bromley, stacked up beside the sofa, because I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, either.

  It’s almost unbearable, the feeling that you’ve never really known someone, after all, and that now your chance to know them is gone.

  So that’s what this is. On Tuesday 29th March 2011, I am beginning my attempt to tell my story, and set the past to rights and to rest, and to understand.

  I suppose I’d better begin at the beginning. Perhaps I should have done that all along. Ignored this documentary, and its effect on things. Or summarised it more briefly. For one thing, it’s gruesome using real people’s lives, real people’s deaths, to try and explain something of mine, I know. The scales of suffering are incomparable. All I can say is that even though I can’t quite articulate why exactly it’s important, I just know it is, crucially so. In my defence, I have tried not to linger, or to be gratuitous. If you ever watch it for yourself, you will see that: you will see that it is hundreds of times more terrible and more harrowing in the flesh than in my words. But I am trying to be truthful – there’s no point in doing any of this if I’m not truthful – and telling the truth, somehow getting to the truth, or towards it, is the only thing that seems to matter. For my life was a whole tissue of deception and lies.

  The beginning, as you will see, was in many ways the ending of everything, too.

  The memoirs of Lara Moorhouse

  Fuengirola

  We went on holiday only once as a family. July 1985, Fuengirola, on the Costa del Sol in Spain. I turned twelve that summer – in fact, I had my twelfth birthday while we were there. It was the moment everything began to fall apart.

  Alfie – who would have been seven and a half – and I were of course wildly excited about the trip from the moment our father first announced it to us. For days afterwards, we talked of nothing else. I remember one afternoon in particular, jumping around the living room listing the firsts. It was our first time on an aeroplane, our first time out of England – except it actually wasn’t, I suddenly pointed out, with all the self-righteous pedantry of an older sister. Belfast, technically, was in a different country than England. A different island, anyhow, and a place you had either to fly or get the ferry to definitely counted as ‘out of England’. And I’d been there, and Alfie hadn’t, and so although it was his first time out of England, it was my second.

  Our mother must have overheard our squabbles because next thing I knew I was being yanked up by the arm – we’d been on our bellies on the brown and orange living-room rug, consulting a map of the world as I proved to Alfie I was right – and she had me by the shoulders, gripping them so tightly it hurt, and shaking me a little. Her face was inches from mine as she shouted, and I could see the places where her brown lipstick bled into the tiny gullies and wrinkles around her lips.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ she was shouting. I didn’t: I was too shocked and surprised to take in what was happening. My mother was small, and slight, and self-contained. I struggle to remember more than a handful of occasions when she raised her voice at us and I don’t think she hit either of us even once. She was named after Jane Eyre in her mother’s favourite novel, and the family joke – she told this to me, once, in an unguarded moment, and I never forgot it – was that she was as quiet and plain and shy as her namesake. This behaviour – wrenching at my arm, physically hurting me, yelling right in my face – was so completely out of character that I froze, went numb. I was as nonplussed, I think, as I was scared. I could not for the life of me work out what was wrong: what I could possibly have done.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ I managed. An ugly mauve bloom had spread up my mother’s neck and into her cheeks and I could see it crawling through her temples and into her scalp. She suddenly loosened her grip – her hands went limp and fell by her sides – and I took a step back. We stared at each other for a moment and then, without taking her eyes from me, she said, ‘Go to your bedroom, Alfie.’

  He turned and scuttled from the room.

  ‘You must never,’ she said, ‘and I mean never – do you hear me? – repeat again that you’ve been to Ireland. Not to Alfie, not to anyone. Not even to me, and certainly not to Daddy. Do you hear me, Lara?’

  I said I did.

  ‘You promise me?’ she went on.

  ‘I promise,’ I said, and I think I was very probably on the brink of tears by now because she reached for my hand, gently this time, and sat us both down on the sofa.

  ‘I’m sorry, petal,’ she said. ‘I scared you, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to. I just – didn’t think you remembered, that’s all.’

  She was stroking my hand, pulling and massaging at the fingers, as she sometimes did, and I wished she’d let go of it.

  ‘Why is it’ – I tried to frame the question in a way that wouldn’t make her explode again – ‘why does it – I mean . . .’ I trailed off.

  ‘When you’re a little bit older,’ she said, and even counting everything that happened afterwards, it’s the saddest I’ve ever seen her, ever. ‘When you and Alfie are both a bit older, then you’ll understand.’

  It was she who looked old, suddenly. In less than the time it took her to say those words, she had aged centuries, millennia, and I felt a gulf between us, an abyss, that could never be bridged. A child should never see the depths of its parent’s sorrow. You can never forget it, once you’ve seen something like that: it is irrevocable.

  She’d left off rubbing at my hand, and even though only a moment ago I’d been willing her to stop, I couldn’t bear it now that she had. I nudged her hand with mine and when she didn’t respond I picked up her right hand with my left and clumsily worked the fingers for her.

  ‘It’s OK, Mummy,’ I said, using the childish name I’d lately stopped using. ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to explain. You never have to explain anything.’ I meant it, too: I meant it with every desperate, straining atom of my heart. So long as she was all right again, and we could pretend it hadn’t happened – I was furiously, silently bargaining with her, with myself – I wouldn’t ever ask her, would never do anything that might again bring that haunted, beyond-wretched look into her eyes. I nuzzled my head against her, into the space between her neck and shoulder. I kissed behind her ears again and again with the soft little kisses we used to call ‘fairy kisses’ and I promised her that I would never mention Ireland again and I’d forget, I would, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, that we’d ever been there.

  It was raining in London on the day we set off for Fuengirola. Rather than dampening our spirits – and it was a heavy rainstorm, soaking our feet in their stiff new sandals and spattering with liquid London pavement the new spaghetti-strapped white dress that I’d insisted on wearing – the weather made us even more gleeful. The incident with my mother would have been around Easter time, I think, and by the time summer came I must have been genuinely excited again. There would have been more than two months for the anticipation to build: two busy months in which there were passports to apply for, swimming costumes and sundresses and sandals to buy, different suntan lotions and cool-smelling aftersuns to study in the chemist’s. Besides, even if it wasn’t my first time ‘out of England’ it was still my first proper holiday, and first time flying, and our first holiday as a family longer than a weekend in Brighton or the Suffolk coast. I remember repeating to myself, like a ma
ntra, We’re all going on a summer holiday, and even now I have to flip the radio station or leave the room if that wretched song comes on. So when the day finally arrived Alfie and I capered and squealed down the street, tugging and bumping our new suitcases, revelling in the looks of annoyance from passers-by. The prospect of being on the beach in the Costa del Sol by that very afternoon was made even sweeter by the fact that we should have been in school: it was a Monday, I seem to remember, and there was at least a week before we broke up for the holidays. I don’t know how our mother had managed to persuade the head teacher to let us miss the end of term, and I remember my class teacher, fat old Mrs Ingle, wasn’t pleased about it at all.

  I’ve been staring at those last sentences for almost ten minutes now, seized, riddled with doubts. Was I really content to be missing the end of the school year? It was my last year of primary school, after all, and although the majority of my classmates, myself included, were going on to the same local secondary school, a significant number weren’t, and so the last days were to be filled with goodbye parties culminating in a grand prize-giving and ‘graduation’ ceremony complete with playlets that we’d written and been rehearsing ourselves. The force with which those memories come back to me, almost thirty years later, suggests that deep down, I must have felt that I was missing out – or at the very least, that I wasn’t as carelessly happy as it might have seemed. Perhaps my hysteria and general capering, unlike Alfie’s, was part of an act: a show for my mother, who ever since the Ireland incident had been strained, nervous, somehow not-quite-right. Or perhaps it was me who was different: even if I was oblivious when it happened, I wasn’t afterwards. I’d begun, against my will, to notice things that I hadn’t noticed before, begun to watch my mother – and my father, but especially my mother – carefully, when I thought she wouldn’t know, tracking her moods and expressions and nuances of her speech. Perhaps it was myself I was trying to fool, not her. How to know? A handful of pages in, and already it seems that it’s going to be impossible to get inside the past, to really be true to it. We can only see it from the outside, squinting back at it, and it changes utterly depending on the mood and circumstances and point from which we happen to be regarding it. There is no one meaning, no correct or tidy interpretation, only a maybe-this, a what-if-that. I didn’t know this before. I look back at what I have written so far and it is a halting, juddering hotchpotch of perhaps, but, perhaps. I will try to be bolder. If it weren’t for the fact that the events of this story would seem impossible, too lurid to be true, I might try to write it as fiction. You have none of these hideous doubts in fiction: you are completely in control of your characters. There’s none of the doubt or hedging that comes from trying to be real and true. But as I’ve said already, there are too many lies already in my story.