The Russia House Read online

  ‘If you respect Pasternak so much, why don’t you come and meet some friends of mine?’ the little chap suggested. ‘We are writers here. We have a dacha. We would be honoured to talk to distinguished British publishers.’

  Oliphant had only to hear the first half of this speech to develop a severe case of the bends, said Barley. Jumbo knew all about accepting invitations from strange Russians. He was an expert on it. He knew how they ensnared you, drugged you, compromised you with disgraceful photographs and obliged you to resign your directorships and give up your chances of a knighthood. He was also in the middle of an ambitious joint publishing deal through VAAP and the last thing he needed was to be found in the company of undesirables. Oliphant boomed all this to Barley in a theatrical whisper that assumed the little stranger was deaf.

  ‘Anyway,’ Oliphant ended triumphantly, ‘it’s raining. What are we going to do about the car?’

  Oliphant looked at his watch. The girl Magda looked at the ground. The bloke Emery looked at the girl Magda and thought there could be worse things to do on a Sunday afternoon in Moscow. But Barley, as he told it, took another look at the stranger and decided to like what he saw. He had no designs on the girl or on a knighthood. He had already decided he would rather be photographed in the raw with any number of Russian tarts than fully dressed on the arm of Jumbo Oliphant. So he waved them all off in Jumbo’s car, and threw in his lot with the stranger.

  ‘Nezhdanov,’ Barley declared abruptly to the silent room, interrupting his own flow. ‘I’ve remembered the chap’s name. Nezhdanov. Playwright. Ran one of these studio theatres, couldn’t put on his own plays.’

  Walter spoke, his soaring voice shattering the momentary lull. ‘My dear boy, Vitaly Nezhdanov is a latterday hero. He has three one-acters opening in Moscow just five weeks from now, and everyone has the most exotic hopes for them. Not that he’s a blind bit of good, but we’re not allowed to say that because he’s a dissident. Or was.’

  For the first time since I had set eyes on him, Barley’s face took on a sublimely happy aspect, and at once I had the feeling that this was the real man, whom the clouds till now had hidden. ‘Oh, now that’s really great,’ he said with the simple pleasure of someone able to enjoy another man’s success. ‘Fantastic. That’s just what Vitaly needed. Thanks for telling me,’ he said, looking a fraction of his age.

  Then once again his face darkened over and he began drinking his whisky in little nips. ‘Well, there we all were,’ he murmured vaguely. ‘More the merrier. Meet my cousin. Have a sausage roll.’ But his eyes, I noticed, like his words, had acquired a remote quality, as if he were already looking forward to an ordeal.

  I glanced along the table. Bob smiling. Bob would smile on his deathbed, but with an old scout’s sincerity. Clive in profile, his face keen as an axe and about as profound. Walter never at rest. Walter with his clever head thrown back, twisting a hank of hair around his spongy forefinger while he smirked at the ornate ceiling, writhed and sweated. And Ned, the leader – capable, resourceful Ned – Ned the linguist and the warrior, the doer and the planner – sitting as he had sat from the beginning, to attention, waiting for the order to advance. Some people, I reflected, watching him, are cursed with too much loyalty, for a day could come when there was nothing left for them to serve.

  Big, rambling house, Barley was reciting in the telegraphese he had resorted to. Edwardian clapboard, fretted verandahs, overgrown garden, birch forest. Rotting benches, charcoal fire, smell of a cricket ground on a rainy day, ivy. About thirty people, mostly men, sitting and standing around in the garden, cooking, drinking, ignoring the bad weather just like the English. Lousy old cars parked along the roadside, just like English cars used to be before Thatcher’s pigs in clover took over the ship. Good faces, fluent voices, arty nomenclatura. Enter Nezhdanov leading Barley. No heads turn.

  ‘Hostess was a poet,’ Barley said. ‘Tamara something. Dikey lady, white hair, jolly. Husband editor of one of the science magazines. Nezhdanov was his brother-in-law. Everyone was someone’s brother-in-law. The lit. scene has clout over there. If you’ve got a voice and they let you use it, you’ve got a public.’

  In his arbitrary memory, Barley now split the occasion into three parts. Lunch, which began around two-thirty when the rain stopped. Night, which followed immediately upon lunch. And what he called ‘the last bit’, which was when whatever happened had happened, and which so far as any of us could ever fathom occurred in the blurred hours between about two and four when Barley, to use his own words, was drifting painlessly between nirvana and a near terminal hangover.

  Until lunch came along, Barley had pottered from group to group, he said – first with Nezhdanov then alone, having a shmooze with whoever felt like talking to him.

  ‘Shmooze?’ Clive repeated suspiciously, as if he had learned of a new vice.

  Bob hastened to interpret. ‘A chat, Clive,’ he explained in his friendly way. ‘A chat and a drink. Nothing sinister.’

  But when lunch was called, said Barley, they sat themselves at a trestle table with Barley up one end and Nezhdanov the other and bottles of Georgian white between them, and everyone talking their best English about whether truth was truth if it was not convenient to the great proletarian so-called Revolution, and whether we should revert to the spiritual values of our ancestors and whether the perestroika was having any positive effect on the lives of the common people, and how if you really wanted to know what was wrong with the Soviet Union the best way to find out was to try sending a refrigerator from Novosibirsk to Leningrad.

  To my secret irritation, Clive again cut in. Like a man bored by irrelevances he wanted names. Barley slapped his forehead with his palm, his hostility to Clive forgotten. Names, Clive, God. One chap a professor at Moscow State but I never caught his name, you see. Another chap in chemical procurement, that was Nezhdanov’s half-brother, they called him the Apothecary. Somebody in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Gregor, but I didn’t get round to finding out what his name was, let alone his angle.

  ‘Any women at the table?’ Ned asked.

  ‘Two, but no Katya,’ said Barley, and Ned like myself was visibly impressed by the pace of his perception.

  ‘But there was someone else, wasn’t there?’ Ned suggested.

  Barley leaned himself slowly backwards to drink. Then forward again as he planted the glass between his knees and stooped over it, nose down, inhaling its wisdom.

  ‘Sure, sure, sure, there was someone else,’ he agreed. ‘There always is, isn’t there?’ he added enigmatically. ‘Not Katya. Someone else.’

  His voice had changed. From what to what I couldn’t fathom. A shorter ring. A hint of regret or remorse. I waited as we all did. I think we all sensed even then that something extraordinary was appearing on the horizon.

  ‘Thin bearded chap,’ Barley went on, staring into the gloom as if he were making him out at last. ‘Tall. Dark suit, black tie. Hollow face. Must be why he grew a beard. Sleeves too short. Black hair. Drunk.’

  ‘Did he have a name?’ asked Ned.

  Barley was still staring at the half-dark, describing what none of us could see.

  ‘Goethe,’ he said at last. ‘Like the poet. They called him Goethe. Meet our distinguished writer, Goethe. Could have been fifty, could have been eighteen. Thin as a boy. These dabs of colour on his cheeks, very high up. Beard.’

  Which, as Ned remarked later, when he was playing over the tape to the team, was operationally speaking the moment when the Bluebird spread his wings. It is not marked by any awesome silence or the intake of breath around the table. Instead Barley chose this moment to be assailed by a sneezing fit, his first of many in our experience of him. It began as a series of single rounds, then accelerated to a grand salvo. Then it slowly petered out again while he beat his face with his handkerchief and cursed between convulsions.

  ‘Bloody kennel cough,’ he explained apologetically.

  ‘I was brilliant,’ Barley resumed. ‘Couldn’t put a
hoof wrong.’

  He had refilled his glass, this time with water. He was sipping from it in slow rhythmic movements like one of those plastic drinking birds that used to bob up and down between the miniatures on every gloomy English bar in the days before television sets replaced them.

  ‘Mr. Wonderful, that was me. Star of stage and screen. Western, courteous and specious. That’s why I go there, isn’t it? Sovs are the only people daft enough to listen to my bullshit.’ His forelock dipped towards his glass again. ‘It’s the way it happens there. You go for a walk in the countryside and end up arguing with a bunch of drunk poets about freedom versus responsibility. You take a leak in some filthy public loo, somebody leans over from the next stall and asks you whether there’s life after death. Because you’re a Westerner. So you know. And you tell them. And they remember. Nothing goes away.’

  He seemed to be in danger of ceasing to talk at all.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell us what happened and leave the reproaches to us?’ Clive suggested, somehow implying that the reproaches were above Barley’s station.

  ‘I shone. That’s what happened. A glib mind had a field day. Forget it.’

  But forgetting was the last thing anybody intended, as Bob’s cheerful smile showed. ‘Barley, I think you are being too hard on yourself. Nobody should blame themselves for being entertaining, for Pete’s sake. All you did was sing for your supper, by the sounds of it.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’ said Clive, undeflected by Bob’s goodheartedness.

  Barley shrugged. ‘How to rebuild the Russian Empire between lunch and teatime. Peace, progress and glasnost by the bottleful. Instant disarmament without the option.’

  ‘Are these subjects you frequently enlarge upon?’

  ‘When I’m in Russia, yes they are,’ Barley retorted, provoked again by Clive’s tone, but never for long.

  ‘May we know what you said?’

  But Barley was not telling his story to Clive. He was telling it to himself and to the room and whoever was in it, to his fellow passengers, point for point, an inventory of his folly. ‘Disarmament was not a military matter and not a political one, I said. It was a matter of human will. We had to decide whether we wanted peace or war and prepare for it. Because what we prepared for was going to be what we got.’ He broke off. ‘It was top-of-my-head stuff,’ he explained, again selecting Ned. ‘Warmed-up arguments I’d read around the place.’

  As if he felt more explanation was required, he started again. ‘It so happened I was an expert that week. I’d thought the firm might commission a quick book. Some tout at the book fair wanted me to take UK rights in a book on glasnost and the crisis of peace. Essays by past and present hawks, reappraisals of strategy. Could real peace break out after all? They’d signed up some of the old American warhorses from the ’sixties and shown how a lot of them had turned full circle since they left office.’

  He was apologising and I wondered why. What was he preparing us for? Why did he feel he should lessen the shock in advance? Bob, who was no kind of fool, for all his candour, must have been asking himself the same question.

  ‘Sounds a fine enough idea to me, Barley. I can see money in that. Might even take a piece of it myself,’ he added with a locker-room chuckle.

  ‘So you had the patter,’ Clive said in his barbed undertone. ‘And you regurgitated it. Is that what you’re telling us? I’m sure it isn’t easy to reconstruct one’s alcoholic flights of fancy but we’d be grateful if you’d do your best.’

  What had Clive studied, I wondered, if he ever had? Where? Who bore him, sired him? Where did the Service find these dead suburban souls with all their values, or lack of them, perfectly in place?

  Yet Barley remained compliant in the face of this renewed onslaught. ‘I said I believed in Gorbachev,’ he said equably, giving himself a sip of water. ‘They mightn’t, I did. I said the West’s job was to find the other half of him, and the East’s was to recognise the importance of the half they had. I said that if the Americans had ever bothered as much about disarmament as they had about putting some fool on the moon or pink stripes into toothpaste, we’d have had disarmament long ago. I said the West’s great sin was to believe we could bankrupt the Soviet system by raising the bidding on the arms race, because that way we were gambling with the fate of mankind. I said that by shaking our sabres the West had given the Soviet leaders the excuse to keep their gates locked and run a garrison state.’

  Walter let out a whinnying laugh and cupped his gappy teeth with his hairless hand. ‘Oh my Lord! So we’re to blame for Russia’s ills. Oh, I think that’s marvellously rich! You don’t think that by any chance they did it to themselves, for instance? Locked themselves up inside their own paranoia? No, he doesn’t. I can see.’

  Undeterred, Barley resumed his confession. ‘Somebody asked me, didn’t I think nuclear weapons had kept the peace for forty years? I said that was Jesuitical bollocks. Might as well say gunpowder had kept the peace between Waterloo and Sarajevo. Anyway, I said, what’s peace? The bomb didn’t stop Korea and it didn’t stop Vietnam. It didn’t stop anyone from pinching Czecho or blockading Berlin or building the Berlin Wall or going into Afghanistan. If that’s peace, let’s try it without the bomb. I said what was needed was not experiments in space but experiments in human nature. The superpowers should police the world together. I was flying.’

  ‘And did you believe any of this nonsense?’ Clive asked.

  Barley didn’t seem to know. He seemed suddenly to regard himself as facile by definition, and became shamefaced. ‘Then we talked about jazz,’ he said. ‘Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young. I played some.’

  ‘You mean somebody had a saxophone?’ Bob cried in spontaneous amusement. ‘What else did they have? Bass drums? A ten-piece? Barley, I’m not believing this!’

  I thought at first that Barley was walking out. He unwound himself and clambered to his feet. He peered round for the door, then headed apologetically towards it, so that Ned rose in alarm, afraid that Brock would get to him first. But Barley had halted halfway across the room where a low carved table stood. Stooping before it, he began lightly slapping his fingertips on the edge while he sang ‘pah-pah-paah, pah-pah-pah-pah,’ through his nose, to the simulated accompaniment of cymbals, wire brushes and drums.

  Bob was already applauding, Walter too. So was I, and Ned was laughing. Clive alone found nothing to entertain him. Barley took a sobering pull from his glass and sat down again.

  ‘Then they asked me what could be done,’ he said as if he’d never left his chair.

  ‘Who did?’ said Clive, with that maddening note of disbelief he had.

  ‘One of the people at the table. What does it matter?’

  ‘Let’s assume everything matters,’ said Clive.

  Barley was doing his Russian voice again, clogged and pressing. ‘ “All right, Barley. Given is all as you say. Who will conduct these experiments in human nature?” You will, I said. They were very surprised. Why us? I said because, when it came to radical change, the Sovs had it easier than the West. They had a small leadership and an intelligentsia with great traditional influence. In a Western democracy it was much harder to make yourself heard above the crowd. They were pleased by the paradox. So was I.’

  Not even this frontal assault upon the great democratic values could ruffle Bob’s genial forbearance. ‘Well, Barley, that’s a broad-brush judgment but I guess there’s some truth in it at that.’

  ‘But did you suggest what should be done?’ Clive insisted.

  ‘I said there was only Utopia left. I said that what had looked like a pipe dream twenty years ago was today our only hope, whether we’re talking disarmament or ecology or plain human survival. Gorbachev understood that, the West didn’t want to. I said that Western intellectuals must find their voice. I said the West should be setting the example, not following it. It was everyone’s duty to start the avalanche.’

  ‘So unilateral disarmament,’ said Clive, cla
mping his hands together in a knot. ‘Aldermaston, here we come. Well, well. Yes.’ Except that he didn’t say ‘yes’ so much as ‘ears’ which was how he said yes when he meant no.

  But Bob was impressed. ‘And all this eloquence just from reading around the subject a little?’ he said. ‘Barley, I think that’s extraordinary. Why, if I could absorb that way, I’d be a proud man.’

  Perhaps too extraordinary, he was also suggesting, but the implications evidently passed Barley by.

  ‘And while you were saving us from our worst instincts, what was the man called Goethe doing?’ asked Clive.

  ‘Nothing. The others joined in. Goethe didn’t.’

  ‘But he listened? Wide-eyed, I should imagine.’

  ‘We were redesigning the world by then. Yalta all over again. Everyone was talking at once. Except Goethe. He didn’t eat, he didn’t talk. I kept tossing ideas at him, simply because he wasn’t joining in. All he did was grow paler and drink more. I gave him up.’

  And Goethe never spoke, Barley continued in the same tone of mystified self-recrimination. All through the afternoon not a dickybird, Barley said. Goethe would listen, he’d glare into some invisible crystal ball. He’d laugh, though not by any means when there was anything much to laugh about. Or he’d get up and cut a straightish line to the drinks table to fetch himself another vodka when everyone else was drinking wine, and come back with a tumbler of the stuff, which he knocked off in a couple of swigs whenever anyone proposed a fitting toast. But Goethe, he proposed no toasts at all, said Barley. He was one of those people who exert a moral influence by their silence, he said, so that you end up wondering whether they’re dying of a secret illness or riding on some great accomplishment.

  When Nezhdanov led the group indoors to listen to Count Basie on the stereo, Goethe tagged obediently along. It wasn’t till late into the night, when Barley had given up all thought of him, that he finally heard Goethe speak.