The Russia House Read online

  ‘Control?’ Walter the ultimate hawk shouted at him indignantly. ‘Can you honestly not distinguish between control and disarmament, you ninny? Defuse world crisis, did I hear? What Guardian bilge is that? Our leaders adore crisis. Our leaders feast on crisis. Our leaders spend their lives quartering the globe in search of crisis to revive their flagging libidos!’

  And Barley, far from taking offence, would crane forward in his chair, groan and clap and bay for more. He would challenge Walter, leap to his feet and pound the room shouting ‘But – hang on, damn you – but!’ He had the memory, he had the aptitude, as Walter had predicted. And his scientific virginity yielded at the first assault, when Walter delivered his introductory lecture on the balance of terror, which he had contrived to turn into an inventory of all the follies of mankind.

  ‘There’s no way out,’ he announced with satisfaction, ‘and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won’t go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there’s no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we’re human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.’

  ‘So who’ll save us, Walt?’ Barley asked. ‘You and Nedsky?’

  ‘Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt,’ Walter retorted. ‘No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.’

  ‘Otherwise no hope?’

  ‘Not for man alone,’ said Walter contentedly, who more than once had seriously considered taking Holy Orders rather than the Service’s.

  ‘So what’s Goethe trying to achieve?’ Barley asked another time, with a hint of exasperation.

  ‘Oh, save the world, I’m sure. We’d all like to do that.’

  ‘How save it? What’s his message?’

  ‘That’s for you to find out, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s he told us so far? Why can’t I know?’

  ‘My dear boy, don’t be so childish,’ Walter exclaimed petulantly, but Ned stepped quickly in.

  ‘You know all you need to know,’ he said with a calming authority. ‘You’re the messenger. It’s what you’re equipped to be, it’s what he wants you to be. He’s told us that a lot of things on the Soviet side don’t work. He’s painted a picture of failure at every level – inaccuracy, incompetence, mismanagement and, on top of that, falsified test results sent to Moscow. Perhaps it’s true, perhaps he’s made it up. Perhaps somebody made it up for him. It’s a beguiling enough story as it stands.’

  ‘Do we think it’s true?’ Barley persisted stubbornly.

  ‘You can’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because under interrogation everybody talks. There are no heroes any more. You talk, I talk, Walter talks, Goethe talks, she talks. So if we tell you what we know about them, we risk compromising our capacity to spy on them. Do we know a particular secret about them? If the answer is no, then they know we lack the software, or the device, or the formula, or the super-secret ground station to find it out. But if the answer is yes, they’ll take evasive action to make sure we can’t go on watching and hearing them by that method.’

  Barley and I played chess.

  ‘Do you reckon marriage only works from a distance then?’ he asked me, resuming our earlier conversation as if we had never abandoned it.

  ‘I’m quite sure love does,’ I replied with an exaggerated shudder, and quickly moved the subject to less intimate paths.

  For his last evening, Miss Coad prepared a salmon trout and polished the silver plate. Bob was commanded, and produced a rare malt whisky and two bottles of Sancerre. But our festivities caught Barley in the same introspective mood, until Walter’s spirited Final Sermon rescued him from the doldrums.

  ‘The issue is why,’ Walter trilled suddenly, his cranky voice flying all over the room, while he helped himself to my glass of Sancerre. ‘That’s what we’re after. Not the substance, but the motive. Why? If we trust the motive, we trust the man. Then we trust his material. In the beginning was not the word, not the deed, not the silly serpent. In the beginning was why? Why did she pluck the apple? Was she bored? Was she inquisitive? Was she paid? Did Adam put her up to it? If not, who did? The Devil is every girl’s cover story. Ignore him. Was she fronting for somebody? It’s not enough to say, “Because the apple is there.” That may do for Everest. It may even do for Paradise. But it won’t do for Goethe and it won’t do for us and it certainly won’t do for our gallant American allies, will it, Bobby?’

  And when we all burst out laughing he squeezed his eyes shut and raised his voice still higher.

  ‘Or take the ravishing Katya! Why does Goethe pick on her? Why does he put her life at risk? And why does she let him? We don’t know. But we must. We must know everything we can about her because in our profession the couriers are the message. If Goethe is genuine, the girl’s head is on the block. That’s a given. If he’s not, what does that make her? Did she invent the stuff herself? Is she really in touch with him? Is she in touch with someone different and if so who?’ He thrust a strengthless forefinger at Barley’s face. ‘Then there’s you, sir. Does Goethe think you’re a spy or doesn’t he? Did other people tell him you were a spy? Be a hamster. Store every nugget you can get. God bless you and all who sail in you.’

  I discreetly filled another glass and we drank. And I remember how in the deep quiet we distinctly heard the chimes of Big Ben floating up the river from Westminster.

  It was not till early next morning when Barley’s departure was only hours off that we granted him a limited sight of the documents he had so stridently demanded in Lisbon – Goethe’s notebooks, re-created in facsimile by Langley under draconian conditions of secrecy, down to the thick Russian board backs and line-block drawings of jolly Soviet schoolkids on the covers.

  Silently accepting them in both hands, Barley became pure publisher while the rest of us watched the transformation. He opened the first notebook, peered at the gutter, felt the weight and flipped to the back, seeming to work out how long it would take him to read it. He reached for the second, sliced it open at a random page, and seeing tightly-written lines pulled a face that as good as complained that the script was single-spaced and handwritten.

  Then he ranged across all three notebooks at once, puzzling his way from illustration to text and text to literary effusion, while he kept his head stiffly backwards and to one side, as if determined to reserve his judgment.

  But I noticed how, when he raised his eyes, they had lost their sense of place, and appeared to be fixed on some far mountain of his own.

  A routine search of Barley’s Hampstead flat conducted by Ned and Brock after his departure revealed no hard clues to his state of mind. An old notebook in which he was accustomed to make his jottings was found in the litter of his desk. The last entries looked recent, the most apt was probably a couplet he had culled from the later work of Stevie Smith.

  ‘I am not so afraid of the dark night

  As the friends I do not know.’

  Ned conscientiously entered it on the file but refused to make anything of it. Name him a joe who didn’t get butterflies in his stomach on the eve of his first run.

  And on the back of an old bill tossed into the wastepaper basket Brock came on a quotation which he eventually traced to Roethke, and which for his own dark reasons he only mentioned weeks later.

  ‘I learn by going where I have to go.’

  6

  Katya woke sharply and, as she afterwards persuaded herself, with an immediate awareness that today was the day. She was an emancipated Soviet woman but superstition died hard in her.

  ‘It was meant,’ she told herself l
ater.

  Through the threadbare curtains a white sun was appearing over the cement parade grounds of her north Moscow suburb. All round her the brick apartment blocks, decked with washing, rose like tattered pink giants into an empty sky.

  It’s Monday, she thought. I’m in my own bed. I’m free of the street after all. She was thinking of her dream.

  Having woken she lay still a moment, patrolling her secret world and trying to shake her mind free of its bad thoughts. And when this didn’t work she sprang from her bed and impulsively, as she did most things, ducked with practised deftness between the hanging clothes and crumbling bathroom fittings and showered herself.

  She was a beautiful woman as Landau had observed. Her tall body was full but not plump, with a fine neat waist and strong legs. Her black hair was luxuriant and, when she was in a mood to neglect it, rampant. Her face was puckish but intelligent and seemed to animate everything around her. Whether clothed or naked she could make no gesture that did not have its grace.

  When she had showered, she turned the taps as hard as they would go, then finished them off with a wallop of the wooden mallet that said, ‘Take that!’ Humming to herself, she picked up the little mirror and strode back to her bedroom to dress. The street again: where was it? In Leningrad or Moscow? The shower had not washed her dream away.

  Her bedroom was very small, the smallest of the three rooms that made up her tiny apartment, an alcove with a cupboard and a bed. But Katya was accustomed to these confinements and her swift movements as she brushed out her hair, twisted it and pinned it for the office, had a sensual if haphazard elegance. Indeed the apartment might have been a lot smaller had not Katya been entitled to an extra twenty metres for her work. Uncle Matvey was worth another nine; the twins and her own resourcefulness accounted for the rest. She had no quarrel with the apartment.

  Maybe the street was in Kiev, she thought, recalling a recent visit there. No. The Kiev streets are wide but mine was narrow.

  While she dressed, the block began to wake up and Katya gratefully counted off the rituals of the normal world. First through the adjoining wall came the Goglidzes’ alarm clock sounding six-thirty, followed by their crazy borzoi howling to be let out. The poor Goglidzes, I must take them a gift, she thought. Last month Natasha had lost her mother and on Friday Otar’s father had been rushed to hospital with a brain tumour. I’ll give them some honey, she thought – and in the same instant found herself smiling a wry greeting to a former lover, a refusenik painter who against all the odds of Nature had contrived to keep a swarm of illegal bees on a rooftop behind the Arbat. He had treated her disgracefully, her friends assured her. But Katya always defended him in her mind. He was an artist, after all, perhaps a genius. He was a beautiful lover and between his rages he had made her laugh. Above all, she had loved him for achieving the impossible.

  After the Goglidzes came the grizzling of the Volkhovs’ baby daughter cutting her first teeth and a moment later through the floorboards the beat of their new Japanese stereo thumping out the latest American rock. How on earth could they afford such things, Katya wondered in another leap of empathy – Elizabeth always pregnant and Sasha on a hundred and sixty a month? After the Volkhovs came the unsmiling Karpovs, nothing but Radio Moscow for them. A week ago, the Karpovs’ balcony had fallen down, killing a policeman and a dog. The wits in the block had wanted to get up a collection for the dog.

  She became Katya the provider. On Mondays there was a chance of fresh chickens and vegetables brought privately from the country over the weekend. Her friend Tanya had a cousin who functioned informally as a dealer for smallholders. Phone Tanya.

  Thinking this, she also thought about the concert tickets. She had taken her decision. As soon as she got to the office she would collect the two tickets for the Philharmonic which the editor Barzin had promised her as amends for his drunken advances at the May Day party. She had never even noticed his advances, but Barzin was always torturing himself about something, and who was she to stand in the way of his guilt – particularly if it took the form of concert tickets?

  At lunchtime after shopping she would trade the tickets with the porter Morozov who had pledged her twenty-four bars of imported soap wrapped in decorative paper. With the fancy soap she would buy the bolt of green check cloth of pure wool that the manager of the clothing shop was keeping locked in his storeroom for her. Katya resolutely refused to wonder why. This afternoon after the Hungarian reception she would hand the cloth to Olga Stanislavsky who, in return for favours to be negotiated, would make two cowboy shirts on the East German sewing machine she had recently traded for her ancient family Singer, one for each twin in time for their birthday. And there might even be enough cloth left over to squeeze them both a private check-up from the dentist.

  So goodbye concert. It was done.

  The telephone was in the living room where her Uncle Matvey slept, a precious red one from Poland. Volodya had smuggled it from his factory and had the goodness not to take it with him when he made his final exit. Tiptoeing past the sleeping Matvey – and vouchsafing him a tender glance along the way, for Matvey had been her father’s favourite brother – she carried the phone across the corridor on its long flex, set it on her bed and began dialling before she had decided whom to talk to first.

  For twenty minutes she rang round her friends, trading gossip mostly about where things might be had, but some of it more intimate. Twice when she put the phone down, somebody rang her. The newest Czech film director was at Zoya’s last night. Alexandra said he was devastating and today she would take her life in her hands and ring him up, but what could she use for a pretext? Katya racked her brains and came up with a suggestion. Three avant-garde sculptors, till now banned, were to hold their own exhibition at the Railway Workers’ Union. Why not invite him to accompany her to the exhibition? Alexandra was delighted. Katya always had the best ideas.

  Black-market beef could be bought every Thursday evening from the back of a refrigeration van on the road to Sheremetyevo, said Lyuba; ask for a Tartar named Jan, but don’t let him near you! Cuban pineapples were on sale from a shop behind Kropotkin Street, said Olga; mention Dimitri and pay double what they ask.

  Ringing off, Katya discovered she was being persecuted by the American book on disarmament that Nasayan had lent her, blue with Roman lettering. Nasayan was October’s new non-fiction editor. Nobody liked him, nobody understood how he had got the job. But it was noted that he kept the key to the one copying machine, which placed him squarely in the murkier ranks of officialdom. Her bookshelves were in the corridor, crammed from floor to ceiling and overflowing. She hunted hard. The book was a Trojan horse. She wanted it out of her house, and Nasayan with it.

  ‘Is somebody going to translate it then?’ she had asked him sternly as he padded round her office, squinting at her letters, poking through her heap of unread manuscripts. ‘Is this why you wish me to read it?’

  ‘I thought it was something that might interest you,’ he had replied. ‘You’re a mother. A liberal, whatever that means. You got on your high horse over Chernobyl and the rivers and the Armenians. If you don’t want to borrow it, don’t.’

  Discovering his wretched book jammed between Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy, she wrapped it in newspaper, stuffed it in her perhaps-bag, then hung the bag on the front doorknob because, just as she remembered everything these days, so she forgot everything.

  The doorknob that we bought together from the flea market! she thought with a surge of compassion. Volodya, my poor dear intolerable husband, reduced to nursing your historical nostalgia in a communal flat with five ill-smelling grass widowers like yourself!

  Her telephoning over, she hastily watered her plants, then went to wake the twins. They were sleeping diagonally in their single bed. Standing over them, Katya gazed at them in awe, for a moment not brave enough to touch them. Then she smiled so that they would be sure to see her smile as they woke.

  For an hour after that, she gave herself to th
em totally, which was how she planned each day. She cooked their kasha, peeled their oranges and sang daft songs with them, ending with the ‘Enthusiasts’ March’, their absolute favourite, which they growled in unison, chins on chests, like heroes of the Revolution – not knowing, though Katya knew and was repeatedly amused by it, that they were also singing the melody of a Nazi marching song. While they drank their tea she made their packed lunch, white bread for Sergey, black bread for Anna, a meat-cake inside for each of them. And after that she fastened Sergey’s button-on collar and straightened Anna’s red neckerchief and kissed them both before she brushed their hair because their school principal was a Pan-Slavist who preached that tidiness was an act of homage to the State.

  And when she had done all this, she dropped into a crouch and gathered the twins into her arms, as she had each Monday for the last four weeks.

  ‘So what do you do if Mummy doesn’t come back one evening, if she’s had to dash off to a conference or visit somebody who is ill?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘Telephone Daddy and tell him to come and stay with us,’ said Sergey, tugging himself free.

  ‘And I look after Uncle Matvey,’ said Anna.

  ‘And if Daddy is away too, what do you do then?’

  They began giggling, Sergey because the notion unsettled him and Anna because she was thrilled by the prospect of disaster.

  ‘Go to Auntie Olga’s!’ Anna cried. ‘Wind up Auntie Olga’s clockwork canary! Make it sing!’

  ‘And what is Auntie Olga’s telephone number? Can you sing that too?’

  They sang it, hooting with laughter, all three of them. The twins were still laughing as they clattered ahead of her down the stinking stairwell that served the adolescents as a love-nest and the alcoholics as a bar, and seemingly everybody except themselves as a lavatory. Stepping into the sunlight, they marched hand in hand with her across the park to school, Katya in the middle.