One Good Turn

thumbs-to-toes like birds ready for roasting. And those were the innocent ones, the ones who sank. Martin had never understood that-you would think that innocence would be an airy substance that would make you float, that evil would be heavy, sinking you to the bottom to the slimy, stinking mud.

Now, on the site of the witch burnings, there was an expensive restaurant where the cream of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie dined. That was what the world was like, things improved but they didn’t get better.

Martin’s neck ached, and his limbs felt as if they’d been tied up in knots all night, as if he himself had been trussed. He was in the bed, but he had no recollection of lying down next to Paul Bradley. No recollection of removing his spectacles or his shoes. He was relieved that he was still fully dressed. The smell of frying bacon penetrated the room and made him feel sick. He peered at the digital clock on the radio next to the bed-twelve o’clock, he couldn’t believe he’d slept so long. Of Paul Bradley there was no sign-no holdall, no jacket, nothing-the man might never have existed. He remembered the gun, and his heart gave a little flip. He had spent the night in a hotel room (in the same bed!) with a complete stranger and a gun. An assassin.

He unfolded his body cautiously and lowered his legs to the floor. A spasm in his lower back stopped him, and he had to wait for it to pass before he could stand up and wobble on jelly legs to the bathroom. The inside of his mouth felt like cardboard and his head seemed enormous, too heavy for the stalk of his neck. He felt as if he’d been given an anaesthetic, and for one paranoid mo-ment his heartbeat spiked as he wondered if Paul Bradley had been part of some complex scam to harvest organs off innocent by-standers. Or carbon-monoxide poisoning? The beginning of the famous summer “flu” or the end of an Irn-Bru hangover?

He slaked an outrageous thirst with chemical-tasting water from the tap and checked himself in the bathroom mirror, but he couldn’t find any visible operation scars. Rohypnol? Date rape? (Surely he would know?) Something had happened to him, but he had no idea what. Had he been given some mind-altering drug that was making him mad? But why would anyone want to do that? Unless it was the gods who were going to destroy him next. They had bided their time, it was more than a year since Russia, since the incident.

The last day, their guide, Mariya, had let them loose in a market somewhere behind Nevsky Prospekt, where there was stall after stall displaying tourist wares-nesting Russian dolls, lacquered boxes, painted eggs, Communist memorabilia, and fur hats deco-rated with Red Army badges. But mostly there were dolls, thou-sands of dolls, legions upon legions of matryoshka, not just the ones you could see but also the ones you couldn’t-dolls within dolls, endlessly replicating and diminishing, like an infinite series of mirrors. Martin imagined writing a story, a Borges-like construction where each story contained the kernel of the next and so on. Not Nina Riley, obviously-linear narratives were as much as she could cope with-but rather something with intellectual cachet (something good).

Martin had never given matryoshka much thought before, but here in St. Petersburg their ranks seemed omnipresent and un-avoidable. His fellow travelers on the tour, overnight connoisseurs of Russian folk art, chatted all the time about which kind they were going to buy to take home. They speculated about how much doll they were going to get for their ruble, and the general feeling was that the Russians were out to rip them off but that they would do everything they could to rip the Russians off in return. “They’ve embraced capitalism,” one man said, “so they can take the bloody consequences.” Martin couldn’t tell if “bloody” was being used as an expletive or merely a descriptive. Martin had noticed before on these kinds of trips that they tended to gener-ate a good deal of xenophobia, so that even when experiencing and enjoying the Wonders of Prague or the Beauties of Bordeaux, the tourists regarded the inhabitants of those places as hostile mis-creants, the tourists being little Britishers fighting a permanent rearguard action.

The shop in the foyer of their cockroach-infested hotel-hot, brightly lit, its walls mirrored with glass-sold dolls with inflated price tags attached. No one ever bought anything in the shop, and Martin spent an evening hour in there, browsing beneath the disappointed eye of the woman in charge (“Just looking,” he mur-mured apologetically), studying, evaluating, and comparing dolls in readiness for the reality of a raw retail transaction out on the streets of St. Petersburg. There were big ones and small ones, tall ones and squat ones, but the features always seemed to be the same, little pouty rosebud mouths and big blue eyes, with eyelids fixed open in a permanent stare of sex-doll horror.

There were also dolls in the shape of cats, dogs, frogs, there were American presidents and Soviet leaders, there were five-doll sets and fifty-doll sets, there were cosmonauts and clowns, there were crudely made dolls and ones that had been exquisitely painted by real artists. By the time he left the hotel shop, Martin felt dizzy, his eyes swimming with endless reflections of dolls’ faces, and when he went to his narrow, uncomfortable bed, he dreamed he was being watched by a giant Masonic eye in the sky that turned into the eye painted at the bottom of his grandmother’s chamber pot, with its prurient inscription, WHAT I SEE I’LL NEVER TELL. He woke up in a sweat, he hadn’t thought about his grandmother-let alone her chamber pot-in years. She had been born in a Victorian century and had never really left it, her working-class Fountainbridge ten-ement a dark and gloomy space draped with chenille and musty velvet. She died a very long time ago, and Martin was surprised that he remembered anything about her at all.

“Going to take one of those dolls home for my little grand-niece,” the dying grocer said as they surveyed the rows of stalls. It was beginning to snow again, big wet flakes of early snow that melted on contact with tarmac and skin. It had snowed the day before, and now the streets were grim with gray slush. The air was hostile with a damp kind of cold, and the grocer decided to buy a fur hat with earflaps, haggling with the stallholder over the price. Martin wondered what the point of bargaining was when you were so near to death. He was beginning to wonder if the grocer really was dying or if he had simply made the claim in order to get attention.

Martin managed to give him the slip while he was entrenched in the negotiations over his hat. The man was ruining the Magic of Russia for Martin, that very morning he had trailed on Martin’s heels through the Hermitage, complaining all the way about the excesses of the decor (but surely that was the point) and imag-ining what “god-awful pig swill” they would be served up for supper. Even the Rembrandts didn’t shut him up. “Miserable old bugger, wasn’t he?” he said, contemplating a self-portrait of the artist. Martin knew it could be only a temporary respite, no doubt the minute he had his new hat on his head, the grocer would ferret him out from among the souvenir stalls and spend the rest of the afternoon complaining about being taken to the cleaners by the hat seller, a scrawny man who looked as if he were going to beat the grocer in the race to scramble through the door to the next world.

Martin intended to buy a set of dolls for his mother, he knew they would sit, dusted but neglected, on a shelf among her other cheap knickknacks, the porcelain “figurines,” the dolls in national costume, the little cross-stitched pictures. She took no pleasure in anything he bought her, but if he didn’t buy her something she would complain that he never thought about her (her logic was indefatigable). If someone had given Martin a piece of rock wrapped in paper, he would have been grateful because they had gone to the trouble of finding the rock and wrapping it in the paper, just for him.

He would buy her something ordinary, he decided, because she deserved nothing better than ordinary-a little peasant set, aprons and head scarves, he was holding one in his hand, feeling its smoothness, its fertility-symbol shape, thinking about his mother, when the girl at the stall said, “Is very nice.”

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t think it was nice at all. He tried not to look at the girl because she was so pretty. She was wearing finger-less woolen gloves and a scarf wrapped around her blond hair. She came out from behind the stall and started picking up different dolls, opening them up, cracking them like eggs, setting them out. “This one beautiful, this one also. Here this doll special, very good artist. Scenes from Pushkin, Pushkin famous Russian writer. You know him?” It was such a soft sell that it would have seemed discourteous to resist, and in the end, after perhaps more contemplation than either the task or the dolls merited, he bought an expensive fifteen-doll set. They were attractive things, their fat-bellied stomachs painted with “winter scenes” from Pushkin. Works of art, really, too good for his mother, and he decided he would keep them for himself.

“Very beautiful,” he said to the girl.

“No dollars?” she queried sadly when he handed over his fist-fuls of rubles.

She was wearing ankle boots with a high heel and an old-fashioned, serviceable kind of coat. All the girls in St. Petersburg wore high-heeled boots, picking their way dexterously through the icy slush while Martin found himself slipping and sliding like a slapstick comedian.

“You want coffee?” she asked unexpectedly, confounding him with the question. He thought she was going to produce a flask from somewhere, but she shouted something harsh at the man selling old Red Army insignia at the next stall, and he shouted something equally harsh back, and then she picked up her hand-bag and set off, swinging her bag and beckoning to Martin as if he were a child.