The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (15 page)

I had slept, despite myself, and when I was shaken awake, my hand went instantly to my pocket, feeling for the gun, imagining guards, soldiers, retribution. Instead a bright-eyed man with an almost spherical face and a grin that twitched the ends of his tiny ears with its enthusiasm stood over me. “You wanted to go to Pietrok-112, comrade? I’ll take you!”

His price was extortionate; his means of transport an ex-
Wehrmacht
staff car. It takes a great deal to surprise me, but I stared at this thing in astonishment. The metal around the doors and fender was rusted to a crinkled orange, the seats a tangled mess of springs and stuffing, re-upholstered with the remnants of old blankets, but the Nazi emblem was still clearly visible on the front and sides, and as I gaped the young man beamed with pride and exclaimed, “My father killed two colonels and a major, and didn’t even damage the paintwork while doing it!” He stood by the car, illustrating the momentous deed. “Bham! Bham, bham! Soft-nosed revolver bullets, that’s what it took. Three shots, three corpses. My dad was blown up by a tank in Poland, but he left us the car. You want a ride?”

As vehicles went, it wasn’t the most discreet I could imagine, but it was operational and heading where I needed to go.

“Thank you,” I mumbled. “It’ll be something new.”

On the journey to Pietrok-112 I sat in silence, huddled against the tearing wind, and considered my next move. I had come this far, as much for curiosity as any coherent plan of what I’d do when I got there. It was clear that the authorities would be on the alert for me, and I had neither the equipment for a discreet entry nor, I suspected, the luck left in me to deceive my way inside. The question was therefore increasingly becoming, was I prepared to die for my answer? Death in some form seemed likely, considering my circumstances, and I’d far rather a quick and easy death than a prolonged bout of questioning in the Lubyanka. It felt like an insufferable waste of time to die so young in this life, with all the tedium it entailed, and I was absolutely determined that I would not die prior to acquiring as much information as I could about Vitali Karpenko and Pietrok-112. A suicide mission then? Was that what this was going to become? I was prepared to go through with it as long as the information acquired appeared to outweigh the boredom death induced. I considered my situation and knew that emotionally I was already committed, even if intellectually the rationale was flimsy. It was an adventure, a dangerous, reckless, unwise adventure, and I had had so few of these in my time.

If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where that horse went to die. A chain fence circled a low mess of cabins and rectangular concrete slabs, windowless, nameless, soulless. The road ran straight to a gate, where a sign proclaimed,
PIETROK
-112–
PASSES MUST BE SHOWN
. Two guards in militia uniform were huddled in a small white shed by the gate, listening to the radio. One of them scurried out as we approached, hailing us to stop. He seemed to recognise my driver, giving him a warm pat on the shoulder, but as he approached me, his expression hardened. His fingers tightened on the rifle strap slung across his back, and there was more than just routine caution in his voice as he barked, “Comrade! Your papers!”

Having embarked on a suicide mission, I decided to follow it through with aplomb. I got out of the car, marched straight up to the soldier and replied, “That’s comrade Captain, and you are?”

He stood to attention, looking as surprised as I was that this reaction, drilled into him during his training, had become such a physical instinct. The trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come. “Where’s your commander?” I added. “He is expecting me.”

“Yes, comrade Captain,” he barked out, “but I need to see your papers, comrade Captain.”

“I am Mikhail Kamin, internal security.”

“I need to see your pa—”

“No, you don’t,” I replied softly. “You need to see the papers of farmers delivering grain, of commissars carrying last week’s mail, of petty officers who went on the piss last night. You need to see the papers of people who don’t have the big picture. What you do not need to see, my son,” translating the full meaning of “my son” from cockney gangster into Soviet paranoia is not as simple a linguistic adaptation as you might expect, “are the papers of a man who isn’t here. Because I’m not fucking here. Because if I was fucking here, you’d have one hell of a fucking problem, you see?”

The boy was almost shaking with the two conflicting terrors inside him–terror of the known retribution which would strike for disobedience of his superiors, terror of the unknown which would come from disobedience of me. I decided to sway the matter for him.

“I’m glad you’re doing your duty, son,” I added, resisting the urge to clasp him by the shoulder with a too-hard grip, “but your duty is, if you don’t mind me saying so, so far beneath the big picture right now that even thinking about it is giving me a squint. So why don’t you walk me to your commander like a good soldier and keep an eye on me, and I won’t have to stand around here freezing my fucking balls off in this fucking waste of a fucking place while the shit hits the fan. What do you say, lad?”

Translating the connotations of “lad”, as deployed in its most patronising form by red-faced landowners of an uncertain social class, was if anything an even more engaging linguistic challenge than “my son”. Sometimes, brute will is the way to deal with a problem, particularly when that problem has been trained from birth to respect the bullies who run the state. The guard knew that there was a security alert–of course he did, his voice as much as any other circumstance had told me as much–and was it therefore such a surprise that someone from the internal security services had turned up at his door to speak to the commander? Certainly no foreign agent would ask as much. Perhaps it wasn’t so implausible. Perhaps thinking was above his grade.

“Please come with me, comrade Captain!”

He even saluted as he let me into the compound.

I once spent time working in a settlement in Israel which reminded me somewhat of Pietrok-112. I was going through a pastoral phase, having spent a good hundred and twenty years indulging in wine, women and song. Ironically enough, it was Akinleye, the queen of a good time, who inspired me to move to the Promised Land, where I would, so my reasoning went, rediscover man’s purer nature through hard work and agrarian toil. She, who had derided my ambition to kill Richard Lisle, was living at the time in Hong Kong. The year was 1971. I was fifty-two years old and wondering whether heroin addiction was such a bad way to go.

“Don’t you see how lucky you are?” she asked, lying on a recliner beneath the stars as the needles were prepared by her silent-footed maid. “You can do things to your body that no one else would dare. You can die of happiness and come back to die again!”

“Are they clean?” I asked, observing the needles carefully on their small silver tray.

“Jesus, Harry, what does it matter? Yes, they’re clean. I get them straight off this guy Hong, a triad boy.”

“How’d you meet a triad boy?”

She shrugged. “They run all the good-time houses in this place. You got money and a sense of fun in this town, you meet people, you know? Here.” She slipped off the recliner and, giggling a little at her own good nature, rolled up my sleeve for me. As I get older, the veins on my arm become bluer, or perhaps the skin whiter, and she chuckled to see the blood bulge in the crook of my arm as she pulled the tourniquet tight. The concern in my face must have showed as she picked up the first needle of amber fluid, because she grinned and slapped my skin playfully. “Harry! You’re not going to tell me that you’ve never done this before?”

“By the time I had the cash and the time,” I replied firmly, “I’d also had several lifetimes of exposure to the notion that it was a bad thing.”

“You mustn’t let yourself be influenced by what the linears say,” she chided. “We’re not like them.”

She was good with a needle–I hardly felt it go in.

Euphoria is, I believe, the term they use to describe the sensation, and upon experience I found it to be an entirely useless definition, as it relies on comparatives that are not apt to the situation. A happiness beyond compare, a contentment beyond understanding, a bliss, a travelling, a freeing of the mind from the flesh–these are all, in their ways, an appropriate description of the process, but they mean nothing, for no recollection can re-create them and no substitute mimic them. So, having known what euphoria is, it remains precisely that–a word with longing attached, but no meaning when actually experiencing the thing. My arms and legs were heavy, my mouth was dry, and I did not care, for my mouth was not mine. I knew that I was still and time was moving, and wondered how it had taken me so long to comprehend that this was the nature of time itself, and wished I had a notebook to hand so I could jot down these thoughts–these profound, beautiful thoughts I had never thought before, which would, I felt certain, revolutionise the way mankind worked. I watched Akinleye inject herself, and inject the maid, who lay with her head in Akinleye’s lap, a dutiful kitten as the drug did its work,
and I wanted to explain to them that I’d had the most extraordinary idea about the nature of reality, seen the most incredible truth, if only I could make others understand it!

Opiates suppress sexual desire, but I knew that Akinleye kissed me. We were not young lovers any more, but then it didn’t matter, for our love was a thing which, like euphoria, could not be explained to those who did not experience it. I knew that the maid was dancing, and so Akinleye and I danced too, and then the maid danced down the length of the deck, whirling and spinning, until she reached the prow of the ship. We followed, my legs too heavy to move by themselves, so I dragged myself along the floor with my arms, face down on my belly, craning my neck to see Akinleye put her lips to the maid’s neck and whisper the secrets of the universe into her ears. Then the maid laughed some more, stood up on the railing that ran round the edge of the ship, spread her arms wide and let her own weight take her down, face first into the water.

Her corpse washed up two days later on the beach.

The coroner’s ruling was suicide.

She was buried in an unmarked grave, no family to mourn her. Akinleye had left the port without telling me her servant’s name. Three hours after the coffin was covered, I went to Israel, signing on as a worker in a settlement beneath the turbulent ranges of the Golan Heights. I was not Jewish and had no political affection for the state, but a farmer had offered me the chance to pick oranges for him over the summer, and I had nowhere better to go. For seven months I woke at dawn and worked with a basket on my back, ate flat bread at supper and read no words, watched no TV, heard no radio and spoke to no one beyond the settlement walls. I was housed with thirteen other workers in a wooden shack of low bunk beds, and when I failed to do a satisfactory job accepted the chiding of the farmer like a little boy. The family whispered that I was mentally damaged in some way, unable to understand why this white-haired Englishman would have travelled to the sun-drenched hills of a foreign land to crawl in dust and dirt for his days. Sometimes the boys from the local villages would come
and stare, and none of us went outside the settlement alone for fear of being attacked by the families whose land the settlement had taken. In time, none of us left the settlement at all, but hid behind the high white-stone walls from a hostile society only a bullet away from retribution.

I worked until the day the farmer’s wife sat down beside me and said,

“I think you need to let it go.”

She was a large woman, a black wig on her head, a black apron around her belly.

“This thing you carry inside you,” she said at last. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know where you got it. But Harry,” and her hand slipped round the inside of my thigh as she spoke, “the past is the past. You are alive today. That is all that matters. You must remember, because it is who you are, but as it is who you are, you must never, ever regret. To regret your past is to regret your soul.”

Her hand wandered up my leg. I caught it by the wrist before it could finish its journey and laid it carefully down in her lap. She sighed, turning her head slightly away, her shoulders to the side. “It was only a second,” she explained. “For a second my hand touched yours, but that second is gone, and cannot be seen, heard or felt ever again. This second is gone too, the moment in which I spoke by your side. It is dead. Let it die.”

So saying, she stood up briskly, patted down her apron, the skirt around her buttocks and back, and went back to work.

I left in the night, leaving not a sign behind.

Fifteen years earlier, and a few centuries later, and Pietrok-112 reminded me of that farm in Israel. Silence in the night, long, low sheds of bunks for its workers, a fence to cut it off from the rest of the world–a hostile, frightening world of darkness and things that rattled in the night. Where the Golan Heights had stood above us as a monument to the god of another tribe, in Pietrok-112 the mountains were of unmarked concrete, temples to a new, rational deity of atoms and numbers.

I walked at the self-important speed of all managers visiting an insubordinate. There were more guards on duty by the first gate into that concrete canyon, which extended as far down into the earth as it did up. They looked at me with suspicion, but the deference of my escort gave me a certain credibility, and they asked no more.

Corridors of concrete beneath white strip lights; signs gave no more indication of which way to go than B1 or G2. Notices on the wall advised that radiation badges must be worn at all times, but it was no nuclear testing site. A poster showing the triad of scientist, soldier and happy industrial worker leading the way across golden fields, the sun glowing at their backs, reminded all
passers-by of the bigger picture. Civilians were plentiful, mixed in among the guards. Lab coats were out, heavy quilted jackets were in, but the place was no industrial warehouse. Heavy shutters isolated the more sensitive areas, or access to them, with giant warnings proclaiming,
NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS
.

The commander’s office was a small raised room overlooking a delivery platform that led to the outside world. A black and white picture on the desk showed a man holding a very large machine gun, strings of bullets slung across his shoulders like a gangster’s fashion prize. The radio was playing greatest communist hits of the 1940s, songs with refrains such as “We march through our brother’s blood, raise our children to the sun” or “In the motherland we work for our loved ones and our comrades” and other poetic statements of intent. The commander himself was a man who’d been compressed to thinness–a protruding nose and squashed face sat on a matchstick frame that could only have been achieved through some horrific medical accident. His brown eyes flashed up from a bank of telephones as we entered, and at the sight of me he barked, “What is this?”

Having begun boldly, I decided to continue so, and reaching into my pocket for my papers, making a show of having a hard time finding them, I barked, “Mikhail Kamin, comrade, state security. My office rang.”

“Never heard of you.”

“Then you should get a better secretary,” I barked, “because I’ve been travelling for eight fucking hours to get here and I’m damned if I’m going to waste another second on some bloody memo. Have you received the latest description?”

The commander’s eyes flashed from me to the private. This was a man paid to think, a man who really should not have permitted anyone to talk to him with less than suitable rifle-point deference. I could see his mind heading in a direction I didn’t want it to go, so slammed my fist hard on to the tabletop to drag it back and snapped, “For Christ’s sake, man, do you think the mole is going to sit around waiting for you to sort the paperwork out? We need to move now before he receives the warning.”

Tyranny can do marvellous things for a person’s independent will. The commander’s eyes flashed to sudden, focused attention. “A mole? I’ve heard nothing of this. Who are you again?”

I rolled my eyes with a little too much drama, turned to the private and barked, “You–out!”

He obeyed with the shuffle of a man not quite sure where his loyalty lies, mind going one way, legs taking him the other. I waited for the door to close, leaned forward on the table, looked the commander deep in the eye and said, “Get on the phone, and get me Karpenko.”

Hesitation resolved itself into action.

“I don’t know you,” he repeated firmly. “You come in here, making these accusations…”

I pulled the gun from my pocket. The Mikhail Kamin papers came too, unprofessionally tangled up in the depths of my coat, but as they tumbled on to the table they only mildly undermined the emphasis of the moment. “Vitali Karpenko,” I repeated softly. “Get on the phone and bring him here.”

Heroism fought with pragmatism.

To my relief, pragmatism won. I really had no idea what I was going to do if it hadn’t.