The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Page 13

‘It’s for you.’

  He returned to their quarters and picked up the receiver. After being passed through a succession of intermediaries of varying rudeness, he was connected with Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The past is the past, Gorbachev says. The Central Committee has considered your case and you are free to come back to Moscow. Your old apartment is waiting for you, you will be immediately readmitted to the Academy of Sciences, everything is clear for you to take up your rightful place as a responsible citizen in the new Russia of the perestroika.

  The words ‘responsible citizen’ got Sakharov’s goat. His idea of a responsible citizen, he informed Gorbachev – I imagine with some heat, although Sakharov as so often is smiling – was somebody who obeyed the law of his country. In this one closed city alone, he said, there were inmates walking around who had never even been near a law court, and some barely knew why they were here at all.

  ‘I sent you letters to this effect, and received not a murmur of a reply.’

  ‘We’ve got your letters,’ Gorbachev replied soothingly. ‘The Central Committee is considering them. Come back to Moscow. The past is over. Help with the reconstruction.’

  By now the wind seems really to have got into Sakharov’s nostrils, because he is reeling off to Gorbachev a list of the Central Committee’s other derelictions, past and present, that he has written to him about, also to no effect. But somewhere in midstream, he says, he caught Bonner’s eye. And he realized that if he went on like this much longer, Gorbachev was going to tell him: ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel, Comrade, you can stay where you are.’

  So Sakharov rang off. Like that. Without even a ‘Goodbye, Mikhail Sergeyevich.’

  And then it occurred to him – the mischievous smile broad now, and even Bonner is giving way to an impish twinkle:

  ‘And then it occurred to me,’ he repeats in bemusement, ‘that in my first telephone conversation for six years, I had managed to hang up on the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.’

  It is a couple of days later. I am billed to address an assembly of students at Moscow State University. On the podium we have John Roberts, my intrepid British guide and interpreter; Volodya, my Russian guide, supplied by PEN or the Union of Writers, I was never sure which; and a wan professor who has introduced me to the audience, rather disobligingly in my opinion, as a product of the new glasnost. My impression is that he feels glasnost would be a lot better without me. Now, without enthusiasm, he is inviting questions from the audience.

  The first questions come in Russian, but the wan professor filters them so patently that the students, already restive, decide to yell their questions in English instead. We do writers I admire, and writers I don’t. We do the spy as a product of the Cold War. We debate – saucily – the morality or otherwise of reporting on your colleagues. By now the wan professor has heard enough. He will take one last question. A woman student’s arm is up. Yes, you.

  Woman student: Sir. Please. Mr le Carré. What do you think of Marx and Lenin, please?

  Howls of laughter.

  Self: I love them both.

  It doesn’t strike me as my best line, but the audience treats it with prolonged applause and shouts of merriment. The wan professor calls it a day and I am quickly commandeered by the students and ushered down a staircase to some kind of common room, where they interrogate me intently about a novel of mine that I know for certain has been banned here for the last twenty-five years. Where on earth have they managed to read it? I ask.

  ‘In our private book club, of course,’ a woman student retorts proudly in fractured Jane Austen English, pointing to a cumbersome computer screen. ‘Our team has typed out text of your book from illicit copy given us by one of your countrymen. We have read this book together at night-time many times. We have read many forbidden books in this manner.’

  ‘And if you’re caught?’ I ask.

  They laugh.

  Paying a farewell visit to Volodya, my ever helpful Russian guide, and his wife Irena in their tiny apartment, I play Santa Claus, although it’s nowhere close to Christmas. They are a couple of gifted university graduates, living on the breadline. They have two smart little girls. For Volodya, I have brought Scotch whisky, ballpoint pens, a silk tie and other unobtainable treasures I picked up at the duty-free in Heathrow; for Irena, bars of English soap, toothpaste, tights, headscarves, whatever my wife advised. And for their two little girls, chocolate and tartan skirts. Their gratitude embarrasses me. I don’t want to be this person. And they don’t want to be those people.

  Piecing together now the encounters crammed into those two short weeks in the Russia of 1987, I am moved again by the pity of it, by the striving and endurance of so-called ordinary people who weren’t ordinary at all; and by the humiliations they were forced to share, whether standing in line for life’s essentials, servicing their own bodies and those of their children, or guarding their tongues against a fatal slip. Strolling in Red Square with an elderly lady of letters in the aftermath of Mathias Rust’s unscripted arrival, I took a snapshot of the sentries guarding Lenin’s tomb, only to see her face turn white as she hissed at me to put my camera out of sight.

  What the collective Russian psyche most fears is chaos; what it most dreams of is stability; and what it dreads is the unknowable future. And who wouldn’t, in a nation that gave twenty million of its souls to Stalin’s executioners and another thirty million to Hitler’s? Was life after communism really going to be better for them than the one they had now? True, the artists and intellectuals, when they felt sure of you, or bold enough, spoke glowingly of the freedoms that would soon – touch wood – be theirs. But between the lines they had their reservations. What status would they have in whatever new society beckoned? If they had Party privileges, what was going to replace them? If they were Party-approved writers, who was going to approve them in a free market? And if they were currently out of favour, would the next system restore them?

  In 1993, I returned to Russia in the hope of finding out.

  18

  The Wild East: Moscow 1993

  The Berlin Wall is down. Mikhail Gorbachev, after a rollercoaster ride that saw him one minute under house arrest in the Crimea and the next restored to power in the Kremlin, has been supplanted by his long-time enemy Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Communist Party is suspended, its Moscow headquarters closed. Leningrad is once more St Petersburg, Stalingrad is Volgograd. Organized crime has gone viral. Justice is nowhere. Unpaid soldiers returned from the ill-starred Soviet campaign in Afghanistan roam the country and are everywhere for hire. Civil society does not exist, and Yeltsin is unwilling or unable to impose it. All this I knew before I left for Moscow in the summer of 1993. So what possessed me to take my twenty-year-old undergraduate son along with me, I’ll never know. But come along he did, and happily, and we muddled through without a mishap or a cross word.

  The purpose of our journey was clear to me, or so I tell myself now. I wanted to get a taste of the new order. Were the new crime bosses the old ones in new clothes? Was the KGB really being disbanded by Yeltsin, or had it been, as so often in the past, merely reconstituted under another name? In Hamburg, our starting-out point, I solemnly set about stocking up with the same essential supplies that I had taken to the Russia of 1987: give-away soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, Cadbury’s chocolate biscuits, Scotch whisky, German toys. Yet already at Sheremetyevo airport, where we passed through on the nod, there was an air of garish materialism. Perhaps the most improbable to my unready eye: for a deposit of fifty dollars you could rent a cellphone from the kiosk at the exit.

  As to our hotel: forget the Minsk. This was a glittering, marbled palace with wide, curling staircases, chandeliers big enough to light an opera house and a bevy of smart, conspicuously unattached girls dawdling in the lobby. Our bedrooms reeked of fresh paint, air purifier and plumbing. One glance at the shop fronts a
s we drove through the city had said it all: gone was the fabled state-run shopping emporium GUM, and in its place, Estée Lauder.

  This time my Russian publisher does not embrace me. He does not joyously whisk a bottle of vodka from his desk drawer and toss the cap into the wastepaper basket. First he eyes me through the peephole in his steel door, unfastens a battery of locks, shuffles me through and fastens them again. In a low voice he apologizes for being the only one in the office to greet me. Since the insurance company came, he says, his staff won’t come in.

  Insurance company?

  Men in suits with briefcases. Selling insurance against fire, theft and flooding, mostly fire. The neighbourhood is very high-risk following a spate of arson attacks. So the premiums have to be high too, which is only natural. A fire could break out any time. Better sign up straight away, and here’s a pen. Because otherwise certain people they know will firebomb the place, then what will happen to all those old files and manuscripts we see lying about?

  And the police, I ask?

  Advise you to pay up and shut up. They’re part of the racket.

  So will you pay?

  Maybe. He’ll see. He won’t give up without a fight. He used to know influential people. But they’re not influential any more.

  I ask a former KGB friend how I can meet a top mafia chief. He calls me back. Be at the so-and-so nightclub at 1.00 on Thursday morning, and Dima will receive you. Your son? Bring him along, he’ll be welcome, and if he’s got a girl, bring her too. It’s Dima’s nightclub. He owns it. Nice customers, good music. Very safe. Our indispensable bodyguard is Pusya, the all-Abkhazia wrestling champion and adviser on all matters relating to his people’s struggle for liberation. He is as squat and broad as the Michelin Man, a polymath, linguist, scholar and paradoxically the most peaceable fellow you are likely to meet. He is also by way of being a national celebrity, which is a kind of protection in itself.

  Fit young men with submachine guns line the way to the nightclub entrance. While Pusya looks on benignly, they frisk us. Benches of scarlet plush surround a circular dance floor. Couples dance sedately to sixties music. Mr Dima will be with you shortly, the manager informs Pusya as he ushers us to a banquette. Driving us here in his car, Pusya has already provided us with an example of his powers of peaceful intervention. The street is blocked. A small car and a large car are intertwined. The drivers are about to come to blows. An eager crowd is taking sides. Pusya opens his door and strolls over to the belligerents, I assume with the intention of separating or quelling them. Instead he takes hold of the smaller car by its rear bumper, disentangles it from the larger car and, to the raucous applause of the crowd, delicately parks it at the side of the road.

  We drink our soft drinks. Mr Dima may be late, the manager warns us. Mr Dima may have business to attend to, business being the new Russian catchword for impenetrable transactions. Sounds of circumstance in the corridor alert us to a royal arrival. The music swells in greeting, then stops dead. First to enter are two fit young men with close-cropped hair and tight, blue-black Italian suits. Spetsnaz, Pusya tells me in a murmur. For Moscow’s new rich, former Special Forces soldiers are the bodyguard of choice. With bird-like jerks of the head, the two men case the room by sections. Spotting Pusya, they hold the stare. Pusya smiles benignly in return. They take a step backwards, one to each side of the entrance. A pause, then enter – as if by popular demand – Kojak of the New York Police Department, alias Dima, followed by a retinue of pretty girls and more young men.

  If you have seen the Kojak television series the comparison is ridiculously apt, right down to the Ray-Ban shades: shiny bald head, very big shoulders, rolling walk, single-breasted suit, arms lifted ape-style from the sides. A bulbous, clean-shaven face, frozen in a half-sneer. Kojak is a big hit in the new Russia just now. Is Dima deliberately styling himself after him? He wouldn’t be the first crime boss to think he’s the star of his own movie.

  The front row of the stalls is evidently the family pew. Dima sits himself at the centre. His people sidle in beside him. To his right, an extremely pretty girl in jewels; to his left, an expressionless, pock-faced man: think consigliere. The nightclub manager brings a tray of soft drinks. Dima abjures alcohol, says Pusya, who abjures it himself.

  ‘Mr Dima will speak to you now, please.’

  Pusya sits tight. With my Russian interpreter I pick my way across the dance floor. Dima extends a hand; I shake it, and it’s as soft as my own. I kneel down in front of him on the dance floor. My interpreter kneels beside me. It’s hardly the best of postures, but there’s no space for us to do anything else. Dima and his people are peering at us over the balustrade. I have been warned that Dima has no language but Russian. I have no Russian.

  ‘Mr Dima says, what do you want?’ my interpreter bellows into my right ear. The music is so loud that I haven’t heard Dima speak, but my interpreter has, which is what matters, and his mouth is four inches from my right ear. Our kneeling position seems to call for a moment of bravado, so I say I would like the music turned down, and would Dima be kind enough to remove his dark glasses because it’s difficult to have a conversation with a pair of blacked-out eyes? Dima orders the music down, then testily removes his dark glasses, leaving his eyes naked and pig-like. He is still waiting to know what I want. Come to think of it, so am I.

  ‘I understand you’re a gangster,’ I say. ‘Is that correct?’

  I can’t know how my interpreter translates this question, but I have a suspicion that he has watered it down because Dima seems remarkably at ease with it.

  ‘Mr Dima says, in this country everyone is gangster. Everything is rotten, all businessmen are gangsters, all businesses are crime syndicates.’

  ‘Then may I enquire of Mr Dima what line of business he is actually engaged in?’

  ‘Mr Dima is engaged in import–export,’ my interpreter begs me in a don’t-go-there voice.

  But I have nowhere else to go.

  ‘Please ask him what type of import and export. Just ask him.’

  ‘It is not convenient.’

  ‘All right, then. Ask him what he’s worth. Can we say he’s worth five million dollars?’

  Reluctantly, my interpreter must have asked the question, or something like it, because Dima’s people are sniggering and Dima has responded with a contemptuous shrug. Never mind. I think I see where I’m heading now.

  ‘All right. It’s a hundred million, it’s two hundred, it’s whatever. Let’s agree that it’s pretty easy to make a lot of money in Russia just now. And if things stay as they are, we can assume that in a couple of years Dima will be a very rich man indeed. Mega-rich. Just put that to him, please. It’s a simple point.’

  And presumably my interpreter puts it to Dima, because I get a kind of smirk of agreement from the lower part of his bald face.

  ‘Has Dima got children?’ I enquire, reckless now.

  He has.

  ‘Grandchildren?’

  ‘It is immaterial.’

  Dima has replaced his Ray-Bans, as if to say the conversation is over, but for me it isn’t. I’ve blundered too far down the road to stop.

  ‘Here’s my point. In the United States, as I’m sure Dima knows, the great robber barons of olden days made their fortunes by what we may call informal methods.’

  I am pleased to detect a flicker of interest from behind the Ray-Bans.

  ‘But as the robber barons grew older and looked at their children and grandchildren, they got all idealistic and decided they needed to create a brighter, kinder world than the one they had ripped off.’

  The blacked-out eyes remain fixed on me as the interpreter conveys whatever he conveys.

  ‘So my question of Dima is this. Could he imagine, as he grows older – let’s say in ten, fifteen years from now – could Dima see a time coming when he might start building hospitals and schools and art museums? As an act
of philanthropy? I’m serious. Just ask him. As a way of giving something back to the Russian people he’s – well – robbed, actually?’

  There’s a standard joke in old movie comedies when people talk to each other through an interpreter. A question is put. It is interpreted. The person for whom it is intended listens intently, then flings his arms around and orates for two long minutes of movie time, and the interpreter, after a stage pause, says: ‘No.’ Or ‘Yes.’ Or ‘Maybe.’ Dima doesn’t fling his arms around. He speaks a measured Russian. The supporters’ club starts to giggle. The shorthaired sentries at the door giggle. But Dima goes on talking. Satisfied at last, he puts his hands together and waits for our interpreter to relay his message.

  ‘Mr David, I regret to tell you, Mr Dima says fuck off.’

  Seated under the crystal chandelier in the lobby of our glitzy Moscow hotel, a slender, shy man of thirty in a grey suit and spectacles, sips at his orange fizz while he explains the code of conduct of the thieves’ brotherhood or vory, of which he is a made member. I have been told he is one of Dima’s soldiers. Perhaps he is one of the suited men selling fire insurance to my publisher. By his careful choice of words he puts me in mind of a Foreign Office spokesman.

  ‘Have the vory changed much since the collapse of Soviet communism?’

  ‘I would say the vory have expanded. Owing to greater freedom of movement in the post-communist era, and better communications, one may say the vory have extended their influence in many countries.’

  ‘And which countries might those be, in particular?’

  It is better, he would say, to speak of towns rather than countries. Warsaw, Madrid, Berlin, Rome, London, Naples, New York are all favourable to vory activities.

  ‘And here in Russia?’

  ‘I would say that social chaos in Russia has benefited many vory activities.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Please?’