The Restoration Game (6 page)

“What's that got to do with it? You might as well blame French restaurants for Ho Chi Minh because he once cooked in one.”

“I would, if recipes he'd learned there had poisoned a million people!”

Jeez, what an asshole, Amanda thought. And at first glance he'd seemed a friendly guy, as well as good-looking.

“How much do you know about structuralism, anyway?” she asked.

“Just some stuff I've read.”

“Well, if you read more, maybe you'd see some other intellectual roots of Pol Pot.”

“Such as?”

“Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao…”

“Oh, that,” said Ross. “Nah. Might be to blame for a lot, like what's going on in Afghanistan, but Year Zero is something else. Anyway…”

He waved his pipe about. Smiled. “Forget it.”

“OK,” said Amanda.

“Something else I wanted to say,” Ross said, sounding a bit conciliatory.

“And what's that?”

“You still haven't answered my first question,” Ross said. “What were you doing rummaging through our post?”

He put the pipe in his mouth and lit it with a match, his narrowed eyes fixed on Amanda through the smoke. The smoke was fragrant.

“All right,” said Amanda. She passed the sheets of paper to him. He scanned them quickly, then flipped back to the first page.

“‘Annual shareholders’ report of the Ural Caucasian Mineral Company,’” he read out. “Not a lot happening, because…” He flicked to the final sheet. “‘All assets of the Ural Caucasian Mineral company were nationalised by the revolutionary government of Soviet Russia in November 1918. However, the Company continues to press its case for full compensation or return of its property.' Hah hah hah! The capitalists never give up, do they?”

Amanda thought it an odd remark, but gave him a tight smile.

“No,” she said coldly. “They don't.”

Ross folded the sheets away into the brown envelope. “The funny thing is,” he went on, “I never opened that old envelope because of my respect for private property. Same for the rest of us in the flat. Still, I can't say I'm sorry you didn't have the same scruples.”

Amanda found herself liking his grin, though his teeth were more stained and uneven than she'd ever seen on anyone middle-class back home. In the US you saw such teeth in the mouths of people who, well, smoked corncob pipes.

“Actually,” Amanda said, “I do have a right to open that envelope.”

“How d'you work that out?”

“Look who the envelope's addressed to,” Amanda said.

“‘Miss E. Montford,’” Ross read out. “How's that connected to Amanda, uh, Stone?”

“It's a long story,” she said.

Ross took a swig of his beer and a puff of his pipe. He gestured towards the sofa.

“Have a seat,” he said.

Amanda sat in the corner of the sofa, her Coke on the armrest. Ross sat down in the middle, leaning forward and looking sideways at her. His hairy forearms stuck out from the denim jacket's grubby, upturned cuffs; his longfingered hands played with the pipe, the envelope, and the can.

“Tell me the story,” he said.

“Miss E. Montford,” said Amanda, “is my grandmother, Eugenie. She's still alive. She was born in, uh, 1915, so she's a spry sixty-four. Her parents, Lord and Lady Montford, owned this house. I looked it up in the
Edinburgh A to Z
, and came by this evening just to have a look at it and to see if…well, if there was anything here connected with us. Heard the party in full swing, knocked on the door, some guy nods and lets me in, and I happened to see that stack of old unopened mail and looked through it on the off-chance and…here I am!”

Ross looked disbelieving.

“You're descended from a family that owned this house?”

“Oh, yes,” said Amanda. “Along with, oh, a Highland shooting estate, several other Edinburgh properties, and a bundle of shares in the Ural Caucasian Mineral Company. These shares became just about worthless after the Russian Revolution. That left the Montfords not quite ruined. However, they still have the town rents and the Highland estate. In the twenties deerhunting becomes popular with American businessmen, right? So the Montfords make friends, cultivate some contacts in NYC, start to do quite well speculating on the New York stock market, and then—”

Ross laughed again. “They lost everything else in the Wall Street Crash?”

“Yup,” said Amanda. “So young Eugenie has to leave her expensive private school and put some bread on the table. She goes to London and—thanks to Lord Montford's contacts—gets a secretarial job in what's left of the Ural Caucasian Mineral Company. From what my grandma told me, this worked out of a poky little office in Clerkenwell. It was still in business, but it had been reduced to an import-export agency for mining equipment, pretty much. But the old directors, real shabby-genteel types, were still hoping to get its Russian-Empire property back. Partly by intriguing with various shady White Russians who promise them the downfall of the Bolsheviks and a glorious restoration any year now, and partly through the courts. At the same time, with the other hand so to speak, they're trying to do deals with the Soviet State Mining Trust.”

“Sounds like a fun place to work,” said Ross.

Amanda couldn't be sure he wasn't being sarcastic.

“Yeah, well, at least it was work. In the Great Depression that was something. But the real funny thing is that in her later teens Eugenie became something of a wild child—and a radical.”

“An aristo pinko,” Ross chuckled.

Amanda nodded. “And an adventuress. She even got a pilot's licence—don't ask me how she could afford flying lessons. I guess she was still in Society, as they call it, and…Well. Anyway, she became curious about the Great Experiment—you know, the Five Year Plan and all that?”

“I know about the Five Year Plan and all that,” said Ross, straight-faced.

“OK,” said Amanda. “So…around about 1934, I think it was, this slip of a girl, all of nineteen years old, wangles a place on a commercial delegation to Russia. By now she actually speaks Russian, so that gives her an advantage, I guess. She's with some retired overseer from the company who reckons he can use his expert knowledge of its old workings to flog the Mining Trust hoists.”

“Hoists?”

Amanda made a winding motion with her hand. “You know, hoists.”

“Got it.”

At this point a guy holding a vodka bottle loomed in front of her. He was short, dark-haired, stocky. He wore a leather jacket over a T-shirt. He stared straight at Amanda. She recognised him as the guy who'd let her into the flat.

“Y'aw righ' for drink?” he asked, swaying but keeping his gaze locked onto her eyes, giving her the impression he was less drunk than he sounded.

“Sorry?”

“He's asking if you're all right for a drink,” Ross translated.

“I'm fine,” said Amanda, holding up her Coke can.

“S'fine, I'll see you aw right,” said the guy, and, before she could stop him, he tipped a hefty slug of vodka from the bottle into the can. Then he transferred his attention to Ross.

“Y'aw right Ross?”

“I'm fine, Cairds.”

Cairds swayed back to his full height, looked at Amanda, looked back at Ross, tapped the side of his nose with his finger, and winked.

“Aye, I c'n see that.”

Cairds lurched back into the living room.

“Sorry about that,” said Ross. “He's an old mate.”

“It's OK,” said Amanda. She sipped the now-fortified drink, and spluttered. “More or less.”

“Well,” said Ross. “As you were saying…the trade mission, yeah?”

“Oh, yes. Well. This delegation was pretty small beer. The big boys got contracts in the Urals. Despite its name, all that the Ural Caucasian Mineral Company could manage were some visits to mines in the Caucasus. The company had owned a copper mine in a real out-of-the-way place, a little autonomous region called Krassnia. Between Russia and Georgia, and squeezed in somewhere between Ossetia and Abkhazia, if those names mean anything.”

Ross shook his head. “Nah. Can't say they do.”

“These two places are hard enough to find on the map, let alone Krassnia. Anyway…While she was there she met this forty-year-old guy whom she fell head over heels for. His name was Avram Arbatov. He was a business manager for the mines in Krassnia, but he'd had quite a past—he saw his father's estate burned by rebellious peasants in the 1905 revolution, grew up to be a radical student with an interest in peasant life, joined the Bolsheviks during the First World War. In the Red Army in the Civil War, rose through the ranks, and after the war returned to civilian life, became a professor—of ethnology and philology, I think it was—at Moscow University. He started a major study of Krassnian folklore, and just before he completed it, in 1927—”

“Let me guess,” said Ross. “He was expelled from the Party and lost his job because he wouldn't denounce…the founder of the Red Army.”

Amanda raised her eyebrows.

“Spot on,” she said. “That's how he ended up back in Krassnia—I think he was exiled to somewhere in Kazakhstan at first. Now the collectivisation famine was horrendous there, but like a lot of these kind of guys he saw this as all the more reason for the Party to hang together, you know? In ‘32 or so he recanted and was readmitted. But he had to start from the bottom, as some kind of clerk in the Mining Trust, and he was only allowed to move to Krassnia, not anywhere near the centres of power. Being a very smart guy, he soon worked his way up to a responsible post, and managed at the same time to complete the work he'd been doing at Moscow University. In fact he even got it published, in 1934.
Life and Legends of the Krassnar.
He gave a copy to Eugenie. He said it was the most precious thing he could give her.”

“So he fell for her, too?”

“Oh, sure. He was divorced, not exactly happy, and he meets this vivacious and pretty young woman.”

“I can see how that would have an effect,” Ross said, deadpan. “What happened?”

“I don't know what happened,” said Amanda. “They were only together for a few days. The trade mission was quite a success—Eugenie and the old foreman or whatever he was managed to sell their hoists to the State Mining Trust, at least in Krassnia. And then they went home to England.”

“But here's the curious thing. A month or so after Eugenie came back, Lord and Lady Montford blew a lot of money on flying her to the States, where within like three weeks she was married in Boston to a young man called Bartholemew Finn. Grandpa Bart. Their daughter Gillian—my mother—was born seven months later, quite heavy and healthy for such a premature baby….”

Ross sat back on the sofa, sipped from his can, and gave Amanda a side-long look.

“Has your grandmother ever said—?”

“Jeez, no! We're a very respectable New England family.”

“And heirs to this”—he waved the brown envelope—”notional mining fortune! Was Eugenie the Montfords' only child?”

“No,” said Amanda. “Her two brothers were killed in action in the Second World War.”

Ross's face twitched. “Ah.” He sighed. “Quite a story. And did your grandmother ever hear anymore from…?”

“Arbatov? Well, that's where it gets real tragic. Between coming back and getting married—not after, she's very insistent on that—she wrote a few letters to him. I think she may have gotten one letter back, late in 1935. His letter was friendly but he asked her—begged her, actually—not to write to him. And then she never heard from him again. Years later, in the sixties, she found his name in the
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia.
Born 1894, joined the S-Rs 1912, got into the Bolshevik Party 1917, advanced some erroneous theses on ethnography, died 1937.”

“Meaning he was shot in the Purges and never rehabilitated,” Ross said.

Amanda took a gulp of vodka and Coke. “You're well informed,” she said.

“Not really,” said Ross. “I've just been reading.”

He tugged a thick, battered Pelican paperback from his overloaded jacket pocket and held it up.

“This,” he said.

“Oh!” said Amanda.
“The Great Terror.
Yes, it's an interesting book.”

“Aye, it's great. Kinda grim, mind. No as grim as
The Gulag Archipelago
, though.”

“I've read that too,” said Amanda.

Ross mimed a shiver. “And you might just be related to somebody who died in the Terror or in the Gulag—oh! Fuck, I've just got it. The connection with what you're studying, I mean.”

“It's kind of the other way round,” Amanda said. “It was after I got interested in folklore and indigenous people that Grandma Eugenie started telling me about this amazing guy she'd met. And she lent me her copy of Avram Arbatov's book. I took a course in Russian in high school just to be able to read it.”

“Wow,” said Ross. “I'm impressed. But, fuck, you must be wanting to find out what happened to him.”

“Oh, I do,” said Amanda. “Hence, the non-Slavic languages, right? There's just so much stuff out there, all in Russian-Soviet ethnology, studies of the minority peoples, and so on. I'm trying to get a grip on the Circassian languages—Kabardin, Cherkess, Krassnar…”

“That's the language of the Krassnians?”

“Yeah. Originally it was the name of the people, or tribe—actually the Krassnians are made up of Krassnar and a much smaller minority, the Vrai. Sort of a tribe, though I think it's what anthropologists call ‘fictive kin’—you know, not really blood related? They used to be the feudal ruling class, way back when. They had their own language—linguists have argued over whether it was a proper Romance dialect or just sort of a corrupt Latin. Arbatov included a glossary of it in the back of his book.”

“Which was he?”

“Vrai. I guess. He never said.”

Ross looked puzzled. “Are there…you know, references to his work or something? Is that what you're looking for?”

“Well, yes, I've looked for them, and it's obvious that some specialists have read his work even if they don't reference it. But that's not the main thing. Some day I'm going to
go
to Krassnia.”

“Go there?” Ross laughed. “Not much chance of that.”

“There is!” said Amanda. “There are still scholarships and exchanges and so on.”

“That's all gonna freeze up, with Afghanistan and the Cruise missiles and Reagan coming in.”