‘The Paraffin Man’
Ed Jane Weir, Iota Fiction, Templar Poetry, 2009, Derbyshire 2009, ISBN 978-1-906285999
By Natalya Lowndes
At seventeen , Denys went into paraffin, retail, at Weedon’s ironmongery in a long-demolished arcade off Holland Park Avenue, London,W.2. His accomplishments - Physics, Geography, English, French, German and Russian ( his had been a gently fellow-travelling school) - soon took second place to the totting-up of his commission on the paraffin sales. The dingy bedsit over the shop became Denys’s first real home.
A pudgy seventeen-year-old schoolboy, he had stolen a car so as not to lose face, drove too fast in the dark and crashed .Everything followed: his first conviction upheld; Grandma refused to pay the next term’s fees; he could leave school and find a job, forget about university. Even the scar in the palm of his left hand they called Denys’s half-stigmata ( he never went the whole hog) came from that idiotic accident.
But Grandma had done him a favour because he discovered he liked selling. He loved taking the cash, counting out, banking the till, all the physical gratifications of commerce. And the smell of the product seeped into every fold of his blanket.
At night he would creep down the twisty bannisterless stairs and stand in the passage between shop and back office, inhaling mixed odours of paraffin, PVC, linseed oil, turps and soda. That smell he later sniffed up like ether at tinpot aerodromes he used to wait for hours at when shifting hither and thither for twenty years beyond the Iron Curtain; that sweet vapid smell of jet-fuel, kerosene, my first love, oh kerosene.
Weedon specialised in hardware, but you could get almost anything there from tin-tacks to cat-litter. The old man loved the tribes of Holland Park cats that streamed into the back yard. Every afternoon Denys fed them off a roasting-dish full of lights that Weedon bought once a week out of the petty cash. Each morning Denys’s first job was to set out on the pavement the folding step-ladders, plastic dustbins, brooms and tartan shopping bags on wheels. There he could linger and take in the richness of five-star exhaust fumes from the expensive cars crawling down the Avenue.
“You don’t eat, boy,” Weedon used to say. “You’re stunting your growth. A bloody addict, that’s what you are.”
Before Weedon, the cats and the Holland Park paraffin emporium, Denys’s first ambitions had lain in the world of words. He might have been a writer or an actor, but the way they please was too much like hard work for him. And he had to live. So he took up selling and discovered he liked it.
Literature nevertheless accelerated Denys’s downfall. By the time Weedon died and the Stores were demolished to make room for the new route off the Westway, Denys was thoroughly besotted by things he had never seen except in print and his mind’s eye : cake shops on the Nevsky and where did Princess Betsy actually live; what was the number of the Astoria room where the poet Esenin killed himself; could he walk the platform at Bologoye where Anna Karenina and Vronsky met in the night, was it still there ?
Only Denys could have metamorphosed the attic above Weedon’s Stores into a Dostoyevskien garret. Even at school he had been driven by the same obsession, running up the Red Flag on the school flagstaff, telephoning the Kremlin from the staff-room phone.
He had built a spiritual nest for himself amidst the squalor of Weedon’s Stores and now he wanted to take wing to his place of migration where he had a sense of the place so exact that when he first went there nothing jarred his foreknowledge.
In Russia his business partner, Vassilii Levitine, used to introduce him as an English dealer in paraffin who had abandoned his homeland for the sake of Tolstoy and Lermontov, and fallen in love with the natives.
“It happens,” Vassilii would explain. “Especially to the English. Why the English, you don’t know, I don’t know.”
Vassilii preferred Americans because, as he used to say, Americans always keep their heads. How many Americans want to be Red Indians?
Vassilii’s jeering always set Denys back because his love was only one sort of love, a public love for a non- western style of life.
It was the Western- bank- of- the- Volga style of life for him. There was an English tradition which Denys knew from books: Richard Burton, T.E.Lawrence, Wilfrid Thesiger. In some down-at-heel way he must have shared their empathetic talent for taking on an alien identity.
Arabia people could understand. Desert privation was clean and uncomplicated but Russia was infinitely savager. Denys should have been an explorer or a general rather than the uncommitted ducker and diver he became. His trouble was that he could never come clean, even as a crook. The aura of criminality that clung to Lawrence of Arabia was reduced in the case of Denys to mere fuzz at the edges. If it came to serious action he’d cut and run, but not before selling the camels and tent.
In the 1970s and 80s Russian intellectuals got the West inside out and failed to realise that the West was full of people who wanted the East. It was the only place Denys called “home” for nearly thirty years. He had found his refuge in places where things of the spirit counted for nothing, officially. What a chance that gave him! With his actor’s verve he could pastiche spirituality, pass it off like it was a gift from his deepest nature.
When he talked about their own literature his customers treated him like one of the Apostles. He was taking people in. Ah, the thrill!
Lermontov’s Pechorin was his hero, a slightly down-market Hero of Our Own Times. The perfect salesman, Pechorin, he used to say : the compulsive traveller who boasts of having no heart, but who is at heart all heart. Just like Denys,
Eventually he ended up more Russian than Pushkin, especially after he studied the art of selling.
Or perhaps it was the act of selling. The money was a side-issue. After selling he loved literature, but selling always came first.
The key to selling, Denys enjoyed explaining, was that you never pretended. You always meant what you said while you were saying it; you avoided lies, if possible, and treated each potential customer as your friend, your confidant, even your lover - until the deal was struck. And never forget - every deal was unique.
Denys lectured his customers on New Year’s Eve, 1984, in a little yellow kitchen in Tablecloth Street, shortly after returning to Moscow from Warsaw. He was in particularly good form, entertaining a group of formidable Russian academics who owed Vassilii money. A captive audience one might have said, but they were genuinely moved.
“How about that?” Denys whispered to Vassilii. “Bucked them up no end.”
He was invaluable to Vassilii in those days, the charmer of the partnership, the user-friendly component of the scam. He recounted his adventures as an up-market pedlar, caravanning through Eastern Europe, travelling in swatches, leather dog leads, denims, Scotch and soap. He made it sound easy.
Vassilii knew the truth, he was there and felt everyone watching them officially and unofficially, and he was the one on 25 mg. of Tamazepam per diem , terrified that some malcontented Pole or Hungarian would shop him. In retrospect he needn’t have lost a moment’s sleep.
Denys’s gift was to appear small-scale, operating in dribs and drabs and therefore harmless. No-one took him seriously, unlike Vassilii who really was small- scale but threw his weight around like some Balkan godfather. They’d given up the scrap metal business in favour of non-durables, the little luxuries everyone could afford for a wedding, a birthday, that kind of thing. East of the Berlin Wall people were very family-minded. Customers sought them out, made the initial approaches. Denys flirted with them like a shy boy having his first grown-up love affair, was late for assignations, fumbled, was nervous. All until the money changed hands.
“Ya liubliu,” he would call out, amidst shrieks of laughter. “Liubliu vsye.” I love you, all of you. It was true. Denys was a barker, a pitcher, he loved the customers. His was a heart of gold, worn on his sleeve for all to see.
That evening Denys put on his Tolstoy shirt, an unbleached linen smock which Kuryakina, the Linguistics’ Professor’s wife had sewed for him on a foot-treadle Singer. Denys could never resist anything Slav. Never mind that he couldn’t quite get the knack of correctly tucking his black trousers into his knee-high soldier’s boots, or had to pull in his belly, he looked a picture with the material bunching at the waist when he threw out his chest, and the long cuffs making his hands look transparently pale, fragile and very clean.
That night he was theirs, vulnerably, heart-rendingly, innocently theirs. They loved him.
That night he held them all. The world was fresh and beautiful. On that side of the Wall nobody had to be persuaded they needed Denys. They knew the moment they saw him trundling in Vassilii’s stock. They stood there, his cultivated burghers, dumb with covetousness. That night he could never have hurt anyone, never have been even a threat .
As the years passed, the tensions and the greed ate away at Denys’s natural kindliness and, like the Berlin Wall itself, his little nugget of integrity, his single-minded cherishing of his art of selling came crashing down, burying the new under the ruin of the old.
Denys never realised that innocence was to be utterly compromised when the Wall, that had so long protected him, would pass away on one night, in jamboree. Nobody could have grieved more keenly than he grieved. His life and livelihood disappeared with it, fragment by fragment. With its destruction a sort of Pharoah’s curse fell on him. How would he extricate himself from under the rubble, how should he live?
In 1990 he was getting 30 roubles to the US dollar. At the Central Market in Moscow tomatoes retailed at 15 - 20 roubles a kilo. At the Northern there were roses for 7 - 15 roubles a stem and potatoes at 4 - 8 roubles. Some people bargained, others fought with one another. The stallholders couldn’t have cared less.
He started to go round the markets, pricing. By 1991 he and Vassilii were still quite flush but asleep to their own frailty. It was the last time. Even then there was the feeling they was under superintendance. Not by anyone, but by something that irked them by its presence while they were delving in amongst the foodstuffs, suddenly incapable of bargaining with the stolid weatherbeaten matrons presiding over their barrels and boxes. Russia Awakens From Her Sleep ran the headline their last day together at the Rizhski market, and Denys felt that he too was awakened but by something malign which would strike in a flash, some horrible steppe-goblin that bit out at him from a crate of oranges.
Russia Awakens from Her Sleep. Denys woke from his. He had nothing left to sell, his market was disappearing, customers decamping to the west
Where should he go?To Poland where he was wanted on currency charges? To England where he had moved so far outside the system he knew nobody ?
He had no stock, none that anyone could possibly want to buy. But Vassilii knew there was one last sale to negotiate .
He introduced Denys to Magda Polotzkova. She was an actress. “Quite famous in her way,” he said. “But rather extreme.”
She made Denys laugh. He had no idea how much of a comedienne she was in the theatre , but off-stage she was a scream, a woman of endless tales with a vast but distant family, strung out between Budapest and the Dnieper. Her beautiful eyes glowed with energy, their cobalt irises reflecting the turbulence of her moods, sparked off by absurd postures of grandeur which were undermined by her broken nails, narrow neck and limited, shabby wardrobe.
Whenever they took an evening drink together Vassilii would end up by spluttering into his wine: “ What a preposterous girl, a romancière.”
The French word struck Denys as so self-consciously inaccurate that for a moment he went cold. Why couldn’t he say liar? Vassilii repeated Magda’s tales about herself as if Denys had not been present when she told them – the gift of diamonds from the head of a Japanese delegation; orchids from a teak dealer from Singapore; the student who shot himself for love of her. How frail she was. Her heart attacks. The short time she might have to live.
“Preposterous,” Vassilii had repeated softly, not looking at Denys. “A preposterous girl.”
And so she was, this Magda Polozkova, principal female understudy at the Little Comic Theatre , her eye set on a British passport and, incidentally, a British husband. One day she came round to Tablecloth street without Vassilii and cooked up some peasant mess in Denys’s last copper saucepan.
Not that Magda had been near a peasant or a village for twenty years, although Denys could trace the Hunnish peasant origins in her stockiness, broad full mouth and flattened- out cheekbones.
After the meal they walked hand in hand, admiring the tulips in the Aleksandrovskii garden.
Oh, the agony of choice, thought Denys, put it off, put it off!
Magda made fun of him, believing everything he said, agreeing with him, and adoring the ridiculous in him. But she would go too far and in the end, he knew she would, unless he agreed to do what she wanted. He should have known how it would end.
When finally Vassilii disappeared with the remainder of their stock and the cash Magda had given him for the introduction to Denys, she paid again, a fortune to get Denys a room. Strictly business terms for business girls. She was robbed. And the longer he stayed the more she had to pay the enforcer who squeezed her for the rent. Denys could not contribute, not even a pair of net curtains or a rug. So the whole burden of his existence fell on her.
Now he found himself spoiled by a clever woman who could earn.. Sometimes Denys wondered if at heart he was really a Socialist, one of the primitive variety - like an Early Christian; someone who did not squabble over belongings but held everything in common, grudgelessly, in anticipation of the final cataclysm.
Meanwhile, a Socialist woman ensured his survival: she might have to share him if someone with a larger breadbasket hove to, but he couldn’t be owned. He used to wonder why communists attached so little importance to sex. Now, in 1991, when the real politics were changing day by day, it wasn’t who’s whose any more.
Every week or so he went on book-buying sprees. He couldn’t read modern fiction - too much imagination, he said, facts were the thing - Memoirs, Reminiscences, Autobiography. He ended up with a crate of volumes which had to be shipped back to England after he and Magda were finally married at the British Embassy.
Magda coped well with England although she despised the English. “They not as cultured as I was led to believe.” The only property they could afford to rent was in Boyle’s Court, a terraced housing estate outside a provincial town in East Anglia where Magda found a post as a drama teacher in a comprehensive school.
At the end of each summer term they had just enough saved for a trip back to the old country.
The liver –and- white – cladded brick of Boyle’s court became home to a stream of Russian visitors who never stopped wanting to visit England and complained about it the whole time they were there.
Most days when Magda was at work Denys sat in Boyle’ s Court reading his Russian books and fantasising about country estates in 1912 around Pskov or the Don valley or the Caucasus. He had a soft spot for cant, understandably, since his livelihood had once come from spinning a line.
In retrospect, it seemed to Magda that any living nonentity during the Gorbachev years, who once had had a private income and retained some pretensions to soul, had posted themselves up as one of Denys’s miraculous children whose autobiographies he read every day..
It always enraged her when Denys used to smile to himself at the perfect image of Russian innocence, the humbugging, pre-Revolutionary, angelic child on his birthday at the lakeside picnic party where even Mama’s muslins and Papa’s shining boots blended in with the pastoral froth of sun and green leaf.
Nostalgia was the Russian disease, the pathology of it is so deepset that in 1917 they had taken it away with them, this travesty of youth, to Chantilly, Berlin , Biarritz, like they took diamonds sewed into the hems of their frocks. And now they were bringing it back, polished and intact.
Denys loved it, of course. It touched a chord. It took him away from Boyle’s Court.
“What chord?” Magda would say. ‘What Papa of yours ever wore a white uniform and conducted charades? What heirloom has ever been passed down to you? ’
She didn’t understand - it was a question of atmosphere.
Atmosphere? The unspoken poignancy of inevitable catastrophe, that sort of thing?
Not quite, more like, well, cricket. How did the Newbolt go? - Ten to make and the match to win - A bumping pitch and blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in.
Magda would burst out laughing. “Oh dear, poor Denys, being expelled from your English public school must have been like being harried out of paradise”. He only liked his gilded Russians when they’d flopped, a real case of self-identification.
Winter arrived early that year. Through a crack in the window which Denys kept open to relieve the heat from the overloaded boiler, the wind moaned with a high, consistent keening. Snow fell dense and fluffy against the tight flix of heaped verges and deepened, thickening the air, sweeping him up to cloudscape; horizons inextricably merged with the sky and roads were blanked out by snow. Only black figures and brake lights were visible. At night snowflakes whirled around the streetlamps and the wind monotonously keened.
It reminded him of being in Russia, this East Anglian winter. The main difference was that unlike Communist Russia where utilities had once been free, in East Anglia people had to pay for heating. Magda couldn’t afford to keep the boiler running all day while Denys read his Russian books. In the end she invested in a second- hand paraffin stove which, one afternoon, leaked and suffocated Denys with toxic fumes while he drowsed over Elizaveta Fen’s A Girl grew up in Russia.
Black suited Magda and made her look slimmer. She never wept at the crematorium, or at the wake, but she was profoundly grieved. Six nights after the funeral she dreamed she was walking down an arcade of strange shops in an unknown city. They were selling uniforms from defunct Russian military and naval units. She saw scarlet burkhas, caftans edged with braid, the ciphers of rank on gold-laced broadcloth and wonderingly read the old names : Pavlovskii Guards,
Mikhailovskii Mountain Battery, Siberian Rifle Division, Empress Marya Fyodorovna’s Own
Denys stood inside one of the shopwindows, looking out at the street.
Magda cleared her throat . “Why aren’t you dead?”.
Through the glass Denys’s voice was soft but clear: “I’m waiting for Lenin to buy the stock.”
This was too much for Magda. She almost lost her temper. How could Denys square his nostalgic fantasies with Lenin? Hadn’t Lenin had put the stopper on Denys’s proxy childhood dreams once and for all?
Denys smiled and she saw the black burns of the paraffin fumes on his hair and in the hollows beneath his grey eyes.
“You don’t understand, darling,” he said. “Lenin had the edge.” He admired Lenin as the ultimate huckster, the man who had nothing to sell except a social abstraction, which he sold on to two generations. “Seventy years without guarantee, comeback or notice of complaint. He had a good run.” Denys turned and walked away into the back of the shop towards the stockroom. “The run of a lifetime,” he called back over his shoulder. “The run of a lifetime.”