The Russia House (29 page)

Barley considered the question but seemed to lose hold of it.

‘No?’ asked Paddy.

‘No,’ Barley said, and again unwisely shook his head.

‘So a situation that might have arisen is this,’ said Paddy. ‘Mr. J. P. Henziger of Potomac Boston, young, dynamic, pushy, is presently to be found on holiday in Europe with his wife. It’s the season. They are at this moment, let us say, at the Marski Hotel in Helsinki. Know the Marski?’

‘I’ve had a drink there,’ Barley said, as if he were ashamed of it.

‘And in this impulsive American way they have, the Henzigers have taken it into their heads to make a lightning trip to Leningrad. Over to you, I think, Cy.’

Cy unlocked his smile and obliged. He had a sharp face when it came alive and an intelligent if snappish way of talking.

‘The Henzigers take a three-day guided tour, Barley. Visas at the Finnish border, the guide, the bus, the whole nine yards. They’re straightforward people, decent. This is Russia and it’s their first time.
Glasnost
is news back home in Boston. He has money invested in you. Knowing you are in Moscow spending it, he requires you to drop everything, hurry to Leningrad, carry his bags for him and report progress. That’s normal practice, typical of a young tycoon. You see a problem? Some way it doesn’t play for you?’

Barley’s head was clearing and his vision with it.

‘No. It plays. I can make it work if you can.’

‘First thing this morning UK time, J. P. calls your London office from the Marski, gets your machine,’ Cy continued. ‘J. P. does not talk to machines. An hour from now he telexes you care of Zapadny at VAAP, copy to Craig here at the British Embassy, Moscow, requesting you to meet with him this Friday at the Hotel Evropeiskaya, alias the Europe, Leningrad, which is where his tour-group is staying. Zapadny will wriggle, maybe raise a cry of pain. But since you are spending J. P.’s cash, it’s our prediction Zapadny will have no choice but to bow to market forces. Figure?’

‘Yes,’ said Barley.

Paddy took back the story. ‘If he’s got any sense he’ll help you get your visas changed. If he sulks, Wicklow can whisk them across to OVIR and they’ll change them while he waits. You wouldn’t make too much of it to Zapadny, in our view. You wouldn’t grovel or apologise, not to Zapadny. You’d make a virtue of it. Tell him that’s how life is lived these days in the fast lane.’

‘J. P. Henziger is family,’ Cy said. ‘He’s a fine officer. So’s his wife.’

He stopped abruptly.

Like an umpire who has spotted a foul, Barley had flung out an arm and was pointing it at Paddy’s chest.

‘Hang on, you two! Hold your water. Half a mo! What use will
either
of them be, however
fine
they are, if they’re riding round Leningrad locked in a bloody tour-bus all day?’

Paddy took only a moment to recover from this unexpected onslaught. ‘You tell him, Cy,’ he said.

‘Barley, on their arrival at the Hotel Europe Thursday evening Mrs. Henziger will contract a severe dose of Leningrad tummy. J.P. will have no taste for sightseeing while his lovely lady is laid low with the runs. He’ll dig in with her at the hotel. No problem.’

Paddy set the lamp and power pack next to the map of Leningrad. Katya’s three addresses were ringed in red.

It was late afternoon before Barley telephoned her, about the time when he reckoned she would be locking away her paperclips. He had taken a nap and followed it with a couple of Scotches to bring himself up to par. But when he started talking he discovered that his voice was too high, and he had to bring it down.

‘Ah. Hullo! You got home all right,’ he said, sounding like someone he’d never met. ‘Train didn’t turn into a pumpkin or anything?’

‘Thank you, it was not a problem.’

‘Great. Well, I just rang to find out, really. Yes. Say thank you for a marvellous evening. Mmhmh. And goodbye for the time being.’

‘Thank you also. It was productive.’

‘Hoped we might have had another chance to meet, you see. Trouble is, I’ve got to go to Leningrad. Some stupid bit of business has cropped up and made me change my plans.’

A prolonged silence. ‘Then you must sit down,’ she said.

Barley wondered which of them had gone mad. ‘Why?’

‘It is our custom, when we are preparing for a long journey, first to sit down. You are sitting now?’

He could hear the happiness in her voice and it made him happy too.

‘I’m lying down, actually. Will that do?’

‘I have not heard of it. You are supposed to sit on your luggage or a bench, sigh a little and then cross yourself. But I expect that lying down will have the same effect.’

‘It does.’

‘Will you come back to Moscow from Leningrad?’

‘Well not on this trip. I think we’ll fly straight back to school.’

‘School?’

‘England. Stupid expression of mine.’

‘What does it denote?’

‘Obligations. Immaturity. Ignorance. The usual English vices.’

‘You have many obligations?’

‘Suitcases of ‘em. But I’m learning to sort them out. I actually said no yesterday and astonished everybody.’

‘Why do you have to say no? Why not say yes? Perhaps they would be even more astonished.’

‘Yes, well that was the trouble with last night, wasn’t it? I never got round to talking about myself. We talked about you, the great poets down the ages, Mr. Gorbachev, publishing. But we left out the main topic. Me. I’ll have to make a special trip just to come and bore you.’

‘I am sure you will not bore me.’

‘Is there anything I can bring you?’

‘Please?’

‘Next time I come. Any special wishes? An electric toothbrush? Paper curlers? More Jane Austen?’

A long delicious pause.

‘I wish you a good journey, Barley,’ she said.

The last lunch with Zapadny was a wake without a corpse. They sat fourteen, all men, the only guests in the enormous upstairs restaurant of an unfinished new hotel. Waiters brought food and vanished to the distant outskirts. Zapadny had to send scouts to find them. There was no drink and precious little conversation unless Barley and Zapadny contrived it between them. There was canned music of the ’fifties. There was a lot of hammering.

‘But we have arranged a great party for you, Barley,’ Zapadny protested. ‘Vassily is bringing his drums, Victor will lend you his saxophone, a friend of mine who makes his own moonshine has promised us six bottles, there will be some mad painters and writers. It has all the makings of a most disreputable evening and you have the weekend to recover. Tell your American Potomac bastard to go to hell. We do not like you so serious.’

‘Our tycoons are your bureaucrats, Alik. We ignore them at our peril. So do you.’

Zapadny’s smile was neither warm nor forgiving. ‘We even thought you might have lost your heart a little to one of our celebrated Moscow beauties. Can’t the delicious Katya persuade you to stay?’

‘Who’s Katya?’ Barley heard himself reply while he was still wondering why the ceiling hadn’t fallen in.

A buzz of eager amusement rose from around the table.

‘This is Moscow, Barley,’ Zapadny reminded him, very pleased with himself. ‘Nothing happens without something happening. The intelligentsia is small, we are all broke and local telephone calls are free. You cannot dine with Katya Orlova in an intimate and rather crazy restaurant without at least fifteen of us being advised of it next morning.’

‘It was strictly business,’ Barley said.

‘Then why didn’t you take Mr. Wicklow along with you?’

‘He’s much too young,’ said Barley, and scored another peal of Russian merriment.

The night sleeper to Leningrad leaves Moscow at a few minutes before midnight, traditionally so that Russia’s numberless bureaucrats may claim a second day’s subsistence for the journey. The compartment had four berths, and Wicklow and Barley had the lower pair until a heavyweight blond lady insisted Barley exchange places with her. The fourth berth was occupied by a quiet man of apparent means who spoke elegant English and carried an air of private grief about him. First he wore a lawyer’s dark suit, then he wore wildly striped pyjamas that would have graced a clown, but his mood did not brighten with his costume. There was more business when the blond lady refused to take off even her hat until the three men had removed themselves to the corridor. Harmony was restored when she called them back and, clad in a pink tracksuit with pompoms on the shoulders, fed them homemade pastries in gratitude for their gallantry. And when Barley produced whisky she was so impressed she made them eat her sausage too, insisting they drink the health of Mrs. Thatcher more than once.

‘Where do you come from?’ the sad man asked Barley across the divide as they settled for the night.

‘London,’ said Barley.

‘London in England. Not from the moon, not from the stars, but London in England,’ the sad man confirmed and, unlike Barley, soon appeared to fall asleep. But a couple of hours later as they pulled into a station, he resumed their conversation. ‘Do you know where we are now?’ he asked without bothering to establish whether Barley was awake.

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘If Anna Karenina were travelling with us tonight and had her wits about her, this would be the place where she would abandon the unsatisfactory Vronsky.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Barley quite mystified. His whisky was gone but the sad man had Georgian brandy.

‘It was a swamp before, it is a swamp today,’ the sad man said. ‘If you are studying the Russian disease, you must live in the Russian swamp.’

He was talking about Leningrad.

10

A low cottonwool sky hung over the imported palaces, making them dreary in their fancy dress. Summer music played in the parks but the summer clung behind the clouds, leaving a chalky Nordic mist to trick and tremble on the Venetian waterways. Barley walked and, as always when he was in Leningrad, he had the sensation of walking through other cities, now Prague, now Vienna, now a bit of Paris or a corner of Regent’s Park. No other city that he knew hid its shame behind so many sweet façades or asked such terrible questions with its smile. Who worshipped in these locked, unreal churches? And whose God? How many bodies had choked these graceful canals or floated frozen to the sea? Where else on earth has so much barbarism built itself such pretty monuments? Even the people in the street, so slow spoken, decorous, reserved, seemed joined to one another by their monstrous dissembling. And Barley, as he loitered and gazed like any tourist – and like any spy counted off the minutes – Barley felt himself a part of their duplicity.

He had shaken hands with an American tycoon who was not a tycoon, and commiserated with him about his sick wife who was not sick and probably not his wife.

He had instructed a subordinate who was not his subordinate to give succour in an emergency that did not exist.

He was on his way to keep a rendezvous with an author who was not an author but was seeking martyrdom in a city where martyrdom could be had free across the counter, whether or not you happened to stand in line for it.

He was scared numb and had a hangover for the fourth day running.

He was a citizen of Leningrad at last.

Finding himself in the Nevsky Prospekt he realised he was looking for the cafeteria called informally the Saigon, a place for poets, drug-pedlars and speculators, not professors’ daughters. ‘Your father is right,’ he heard her say. ‘The system will always win.’

He had his own street map, courtesy of Paddy – German, with a multi-lingual text. From Cy he had a copy of
Crime and Punishment
, a battered Penguin paperback in a translation to drive him to despair. He had put them both in a plastic carrier bag. Wicklow had insisted. Not just any bag but this bag, advertising some beastly American cigarette and recognisable at five hundred metres. Now his only mission in life was to trail Raskolnikov on his fateful journey to murder the old lady, which was why he was searching for a courtyard leading off the Griboyedev Canal. Iron gates opened to it, a spreading tree gave it shade. He wandered in it slowly, peering at his Penguin book, then guardedly at the grimy windows as if expecting the old pawnbroker’s blood to come seeping down the yellowing paintwork. Only occasionally did he allow his gaze to stray into that unfocused middle distance which is the preserve of the English upper classes, and which comprises such extraneous objects as passers-by, or those not passing by but doing nothing; or the gate that led to Plekhanova Street which only very local people knew of, said Paddy, such as scientists who in their youth had studied at the Litmo around the corner, but who, so far as Barley could see from his casual searching of the approaches, showed no sign of returning.

He was out of breath. A bubble of nausea like an air-pocket filled his lower chest. He reached the gate and opened it. He passed through an entrance hall. He climbed the short flight of steps to the street. He glanced both ways and made another show of comparing his findings while Wicklow’s hated microphone harness sawed his back. He turned round and sauntered back through the courtyard and under the spreading tree until he was once more alongside the canal. He sat on a bench and unfolded the street map. Ten minutes, Paddy had said, handing him a scratched sports-watch in place of his unreliable heirloom. Five before, five after, then abort.

‘You are lost?’ asked a pale man who looked too old to be a tout. He was wearing Italian racing-driver glasses and Nike sneakers. His Russian English had an American accent.

‘I’m always lost, old boy, thank you,’ said Barley politely. ‘It’s the way I like it.’

‘You want to sell me something? Cigarettes? Scotch? Fountain pen? You want to trade drugs or currency or something like this?’

‘Thanks, but I’m very nice as I am,’ Barley replied, relieved to hear himself speaking normally. ‘If you’d just move out of the sun a little, I’ll be even nicer.’

‘You want to meet an international group of people including girls? I can show you the real Russia nobody ever gets to see.’

‘Old boy, to be perfectly honest, I don’t believe you’d know the real Russia if it got up and bit you in the balls,’ said Barley, returning to his map. The man drifted away.