The Russia House (31 page)

They were heading for a picnic place with chairs and tables cut from logs. They sat side by side and Barley spread his map. They bent over it, pretending to examine it together. Goethe was still measuring Barley’s words, matching them against his purposes.

‘There is only
now
,’ he explained finally, his voice not above a murmur. ‘There is no other dimension but
now
. In the past we have done everything badly for the sake of the future. Now we must do everything right for the sake of the present. To lose time is to lose everything. Our Russian history does not give us second chances. When we leap across an abyss, she does not give us the opportunity for a second step. And when we fail she gives us what we deserve: another Stalin, another Brezhnev, another purge, another ice age of terrified monotony. If the present momentum continues, I shall have been in the vanguard. If it stops or goes back, I shall be another statistic of our post-Revolutionary history.’

‘So will Katya,’ Barley said.

Goethe’s finger, unable to stay still, was travelling across the map. He glanced round him, then continued. ‘We are in Leningrad, Barley, the cradle of our great Revolution. Nobody triumphs here without sacrifice. You said we needed an experiment in human nature. Why are you so shocked when I put your words into practice?’

‘You got me wrong that day. I’m not the man you took me for. I’m the original useless mouth. You just met me when the wind was in the right direction.’

With a frightening control Goethe opened his hands and spread them palms downward on the map. ‘You do not need to remind me that man is not equal to his rhetoric,’ he said. ‘Our new people talk about openness, disarmament, peace. So let them have their openness. And their disarmament. And their peace. Let us call their bluff and give them what they ask. And make sure that this time they cannot put the clock back.’ He was standing, no longer able to bear the confinement of the table.

Barley stood beside him. ‘Goethe, for God’s sake. Take it easy.’

‘To the devil with easy! It is easy that kills!’ He began striding again. ‘We do not break the curse of secrecy by passing our secrets from hand to hand like thieves! I have lived a great lie! And you tell me to keep it secret! How did the lie survive? By secrecy. How did our great vision crumble to this dreadful mess? By secrecy. How do you keep your own people ignorant of the insanity of your war plans? By secrecy. By keeping out the light. Show my work to your spies if that’s what you must do. But publish me as well. That is what you promised and I shall believe your promise. I have dropped a notebook containing further chapters into your carrier bag. No doubt it answers many of the questions the idiots wish to put to me.’

The breeze of the river washed over Barley’s heated face as they strode along. Glancing at Goethe’s glistening features, he fancied he glimpsed traces of the hurt innocence that seemed to be the source of his outrage.

‘I shall wish a book jacket that is only letters,’ he announced. ‘No drawing, please, no sensational design. You heard me?’

‘We haven’t even got a title,’ Barley objected.

‘You will please use my own name as the author. No evasions, no pseudonyms. To use a pseudonym is to invent another secret.’

‘I don’t even
know
your name.’

‘They will know it. After what Katya told you, and with the new chapters, they will have no problem. Keep correct accounts. Every six months, please send the money to a deserving cause. Nobody shall say I did this for my own profit.’

Through the approaching trees the strains of martial music vied with the clatter of invisible trams.

‘Goethe,’ said Barley.

‘What is the matter? Are you afraid?’

‘Come to England. They’ll smuggle you out. They’re smart. Then you can tell the world everything you want. We’ll rent the Albert Hall for you. Put you on television, radio – you name it. And when it’s over, they’ll give you a passport and money and you can live happily ever after in Australia.’

They had stopped again. Had Goethe heard? Had he understood? Still nothing stirred behind his unblinking stare. His eyes were fixed on Barley as if he were a distant spot upon a vast horizon.

‘I am not a defector, Barley. I am a Russian, and my future is here, even if it is a short one. Will you publish me or not? I need to know.’

Buying time, Barley delved into his jacket pocket and pulled out Cy’s worn paperback. ‘I’m to give you this,’ he said. ‘A memento of our meeting. Their questions are bound into the text, together with an address in Finland you can write to and a phone number in Moscow with instructions on what to say when you call. If you’ll do business with them direct, they’ve got all sorts of clever toys they can give you to make communication easier.’ He placed it in Goethe’s open hand and it remained there.

‘Will you publish me? Yes or no.’

‘How do they get hold of you? They have to know.’

‘Tell them I can be reached through my publisher.’

‘Take Katya out of the equation. Stay with the spies and keep away from her.’

Goethe’s gaze had descended to Barley’s suit and remained there, as if the sight of it troubled him. His sad smile was like a last holiday.

‘You are wearing grey today, Barley. My father was sent to prison by grey men. He was shot by an old man who wore a grey uniform. It is the grey men who have ruined my beautiful profession. Take care or they will ruin yours too. Will you publish me or must I start again in my search for a decent human being?’

For a while Barley could not answer. His mechanisms of evasion had run out.

‘If I can get control of the material, and find a way through it to a book, I’ll publish you,’ he replied.

‘I asked you, yes or no.’

Promise him anything he asks within reason, Paddy had said. But what was reason? ‘All right,’ he replied. ‘Yes.’

Goethe handed Barley back the paperback book and Barley in a daze returned it to his pocket. They embraced and Barley smelt sweat and stale tobacco smoke and felt again the desperate strength of their farewell in Peredelkino. As abruptly as Goethe had seized him, so he now released him and with another nervous glance round him set off quickly towards the trolleybus stop. And as Barley watched him he noticed how the old couple from the outdoor café was watching his departure too, standing in the shadow of the dark blue trees.

Barley sneezed, then started sneezing seriously. Then really sneezed. He walked back into the park, his face buried in his handkerchief while he shook his shoulders and sneezed and shook again.

‘Why,
Scott!
’ J. P. Henziger exclaimed, with the over-bright enthusiasm of a busy man kept waiting, as he snatched back the door of the largest bedroom in the Hotel Europe. ‘Scott, this is a day when we discover who our friends are. Come in, please. What kept you? Say hullo to Maisie.’

He was mid-forties, muscular and prehensile, but he had the kind of ugly friendly face that Barley would normally have warmed to instantly. He wore an elephant hair round one wrist and a gold-link bracelet round the other. Half-moons of sweat blackened his denim armpits. Wicklow appeared behind him and quickly closed the door.

Twin beds, draped in olive counterpanes, commanded the centre of the room. In one of them languished Mrs. Henziger, a thirty-five-year-old kitten without her make-up, her combed-out tresses spread tragically over her freckled shoulders. A man in a black suit hovered uneasily at her side. He wore liver-coloured spectacles. A medical practitioner’s case lay open on the bed. Henziger continued vamping for the microphones.

‘Scott, I want you to meet Dr. Pete Bernstorf from the US Consulate General here in Leningrad, a fine physician. We are indebted to him. Maisie is improving fast. We are indebted to Mr. Wicklow also. Leonard fixed the hotel, the tour people, the pharmacy. How was your day?’

‘One bloody long laugh,’ Barley blurted, and for a moment the script threatened to go badly wrong.

Barley tossed the carrier bag on to the bed and with it the rejected paperback book from his jacket pocket. With shaking hands he pulled off his jacket, tore the microphone harness out of his shirt and flung it after the bag and the book. He reached behind him into his waistband and, brushing aside Wicklow’s offer of assistance, extracted the grey recording box from the small of his back and threw that on the bed as well, so that Maisie let out a stifled ‘shit’ and moved her legs quickly to one side. Marching to the washbasin, he emptied his whisky flask into a toothmug, hugging his other arm across his chest as if he had been shot. Then he drank and went on drinking, oblivious to the perfect drill unfolding round him.

Henziger, light as a cat for all his bulk, grabbed the carrier bag, picked out the notebook and shoved it at Bernstorf who spirited it into his medical case among the phials and instruments, where it mysteriously disappeared. Henziger passed him the paperback, which also vanished. Wicklow swept up the recorder and harness. They too went into the case, which Bernstorf snapped shut while he issued departing instructions to the patient: no solids for forty-eight hours, Mrs. Henziger, tea, a piece of brown bread if you must, make sure you complete the course of antibiotics whether or not you feel better. He had not finished before Henziger chimed in.

‘And Doctor, if ever you are in Boston, and you need anything, because I mean
anything
, here’s my card and here’s my promise and here’s …’

Toothmug in hand, Barley remained facing the washbasin, glowering in the mirror as the Good Samaritan’s case made its journey to the door.

Of all his nights in Russia and, come to think of it, of all his nights anywhere in the world, this was Barley’s worst.

Henziger had heard that a cooperative restaurant had just opened in Leningrad, cooperative being the new codeword for private. Wicklow had tracked it down and reported it full, but rejection for Henziger was challenge. By dint of heavy telephoning and heavier tipping, an extra table was laid for them, three foot from the worst and noisiest gypsy opera Barley ever hoped to hear.

And there they now sat, celebrating Mrs. Henziger’s miraculous recovery. The mewing of the singers was amplified by electronic bullhorns. There was no remission between numbers.

And all round them sat the Russia that the slumbering puritan in Barley had long hated but never seen: the not-so-secret czars of capitalism, the industrial parvenus and conspicuous consumers, the Party fat-cats and racketeers, their jewelled women reeking of Western perfumes and Russian deodorant, the waiters doting on the richest tables. The singers’ frightful voices rose, the music rose to drown them, the voices rose again and Henziger’s voice rose above them all.

‘Scott, I want you to know something,’ he bellowed to Barley, leaning excitedly across the table. ‘This little country is on the move. I smell hope here, I smell change, I smell commerce. And we in Potomac are buying ourselves a piece of it. I’m proud.’ But his voice had been taken away from him by the band. ‘Proud,’ his lips repeated soundlessly to a million gypsy decibels.

And the trouble was, Henziger was a nice fellow and Maisie was a sport, which made it worse. As the agony dragged on, Barley entered the blessed state of deafness. Inside the cacophony he discovered his own safe room. From its arrow-slit windows his secret self stared into the white Leningrad night. Where have you gone, Goethe? he asked. Who stands in for her when she isn’t there? Who darns your black socks and cooks your washed-out soup for you while you drag her by the hair along your noble altruistic path to self-destruction?

Somehow without his being aware of it they must have returned to the hotel, for he woke to discover himself propped on Wicklow’s arm among the Finnish alcoholics stumbling shamefacedly round the lobby.

‘Great party,’ he told anyone who would hear him. ‘Splendid band. Thank you for coming to Leningrad.’

But as Wicklow patiently hauled him up to bed the undrunk part of Barley glanced over his shoulder, down the wide staircase. And in the darkness near the entrance, he saw Katya, seated with her legs crossed, her perhaps-bag on her lap. She was wearing a pinched black jacket. A white silk scarf was knotted under her chin, and her face was pressed towards him with that tense smile she had, sad and hopeful, open to love.

But as his gaze cleared he saw her say something saucy out of the corner of her mouth to the porter, and he realised she was just another Leningrad tart looking for a trick.

And next day, to the fanfare of the most discreet of British trumpets, our hero came home.

Ned wanted no display, no Americans and certainly no Clive, but he was determined on a gesture, so we drove to Gatwick and, having posted Brock at the Arrivals barrier with a card saying ‘Potomac’, we installed ourselves in a hospitality lounge that the Service shared uneasily with the Foreign Office amid endless argument about who had drunk the gin.

We waited, the plane was delayed. Clive phoned from Grosvenor Square to ask ‘Has he arrived, Palfrey?’ as if he half expected him to stay in Russia.

Another half-hour passed before Clive phoned again and this time Ned himself took the call. He had scarcely slammed the phone down before the door opened and Wicklow slipped in grinning like a choirboy but contriving at the same time to shoot his eyes in warning.

Seconds after him, enter Barley looking like his own surveillance photographs, except that he was white-faced. ‘Buggers cheered!’ he blurted before Brock had got the door shut. ‘That prissy captain with his Surrey vowels! I’ll kill the swine.’

While Barley stormed on, Wicklow discreetly explained the cause of his distress. Their charter flight out of Leningrad had been occupied by a delegation of young British traders whom Barley had arbitrarily branded yuppies of the vilest sort, which by the sound of them they were. Several were drunk by the time they boarded, the rest were quick to catch up. They had not been more than a few minutes in the air when the captain, who in Barley’s view was the provocateur of the incident, announced that the plane had left Soviet airspace. A roar went up while the air hostesses scampered up and down the aisle doling out champagne. Then they all broke into ‘Rule, Britannia!’