The Russia House (11 page)

Then the readings began. Little chap read poetry. Big girl read prose. Then a filthy little aeroplane flew so low overhead you couldn’t hear a thing. Then it flew back the other way. Then back the same way.

‘Wang, wang!’ Barley yelled, his long wrist whipping back and forth through the air. ‘Wee-ah, wee-ah,’ he whined through his nose in disgust.

But the plane couldn’t damp the enthusiasm of the crowd any more than the rain could. Someone began singing, the punters took up the refrain and it became a knees-up. Finally the plane pushed off, presumably because it was low on fuel. But that wasn’t what you felt, said Barley. Not a bit. You felt the singing had shot the little swine out of the sky.

The singing grew stronger and deeper and more mystical. Barley knew three words of Russian, and the others none. Didn’t stop them joining in. Didn’t stop the girl Magda from crying her eyes out. Or Jumbo Oliphant from swearing to God, through lumps in his throat, as they walked away down the hill that he was going to publish every word Pasternak had written, not just the film but the other stuff, so help me, and subsidise it out of his very own personal pocket as soon as he got back to his damask castle in the docklands.

‘Jumbo has these hot flushes of enthusiasm,’ Barley explained with a disarming grin, returning to his audience, but principally to Ned. ‘Sometimes they don’t die down for minutes on end.’ Then he paused and frowned again and pulled off his strange round spectacles that seemed to be more an infliction than a help, and peered at everybody in turn as if to remind himself of his situation.

They were still walking down the hill, he said, and still having a good cry when this same little Russian chap came darting up to them holding his cigarette to one side of his face like a candle, asking in English whether they were Americans.

Once again Clive was ahead of all of us. His head slowly lifted. There was a knife-edge to his managerial drawl. ‘Same? What same little Russian chap? We haven’t had one.’

Unpleasantly reminded of Clive’s presence, Barley screwed up his face in a renewal of distaste. ‘He was the reader, for goodness’ sake,’ he said. ‘Chap who’d read Pasternak’s poetry at the graveside. He asked if we were American. I said no, thank God, British.’

And I noticed, as I supposed we all did, that it was Barley himself, not Oliphant or Emery or the girl Magda, who had become the appointed spokesman of their group.

Barley had fallen into direct dialogue. He had the mynah bird’s ear. He had a Russian accent for the little chap and a Scottish woof-woof voice for Oliphant. The mimicry slipped out of him as if he were unaware of it.

‘You are writers?’ the little chap asked, in Barley’s voice for him.

‘No, alas. Just publishers,’ said Barley, in his own.

‘English publishers?’

‘Here for the Moscow book fair. I run a corner shop called Abercrombie & Blair and this is the Chairman Himself of Lupus Books. Very rich bloke. Be a knight one day. Gold card and bar. Right, Jumbo?’

Oliphant protested that Barley was saying
far
too much. But the little chap wanted more.

‘May I ask then what were you doing at Pasternak’s grave?’ said the little chap.

‘Chance visit,’ Oliphant said, barging in again. ‘Total chance. We saw a crowd, we came up to see what was going on. Pure chance. Let’s go.’

But Barley had no intention of going. He was annoyed by Oliphant’s manners, he said, and he wasn’t going to stand by while a fat Scottish millionaire gave the brush-off to an undernourished Russian stranger.

‘We’re doing what everyone else here’s doing,’ Barley replied. ‘We’re paying our respects to a great writer. We liked your reading too. Very moving. Great stuff. Ace.’

‘You respect Boris Pasternak?’ the little chap asked.

Oliphant again, the great civil rights activist, rendered by a gruff voice and a twisted jaw. ‘We have no position on the matter of Boris Pasternak or any other Soviet writer,’ he said. ‘We’re here as guests. Solely as guests. We have no opinions on internal Soviet affairs.’

‘We think he’s marvellous,’ Barley said. ‘World class. A star.’

‘But why?’ asked the little chap, provoking the conflict.

Barley needed no urging. Never mind he wasn’t totally convinced that Pasternak was the genius he was cracked up to be, he said. Never mind that, as a matter of fact, he thought Pasternak quite seriously overpraised. That was publisher’s opinion, whereas this was war.

‘We respect his talent and his art,’ Barley replied. ‘We respect his humanity. We respect his family and his culture. And tenthly or whatever it is, we respect his capacity to reach the hearts of the Russian people despite the fact that he had the daylights hounded out of him by a bunch of bureau-rats who are very probably the same little beasts who sent us that aeroplane.’

‘Can you quote him?’ the little chap asked.

Barley had that kind of memory, he explained to us awkwardly. ‘I gave him the first lines of “Nobel Prize”. I thought it was appropriate after that foul aeroplane.’

‘Give it to us now, please, will you?’ said Clive as if everything had to be checked.

Barley mumbled, and it crossed my mind that he might actually be a very shy man.

‘Like a beast in the pen I’m cut off
From my friends, freedom, the sun
But the hunters are gaining ground
I’ve nowhere else to run.’

The little chap was frowning at the lighted end of his cigarette while he listened to this, said Barley, and for a moment he really did wonder whether they had walked into a provocation, as Oliphant feared.

‘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.