The Russia House (40 page)

No stamp, Barley noticed. No postmark. Just ‘Katya’ in Cyrillic, in what looked like Goethe’s handwriting, but who could tell? He felt a sudden sense of warning in his head and shoulders, like a poison, or an allergy coming on.

‘What’s he been recovering from?’ he asked.

‘Was he nervous when you met him in Leningrad?’

‘We both were. It was the weather,’ Barley replied, still waiting for an answer. He was feeling slightly drunk as well. Must be something he had eaten.

‘It was because he was ill. Quite soon after your meeting he had a bad collapse and it was so sudden and severe that even his colleagues did not know where he had disappeared to. They had the worst suspicions. A trusted friend told me they feared he might be dead.’

‘I didn’t know he had any trusted friends except you.’

‘He has appointed me his representative to you. He naturally has other friends for other things.’ She drew out the letter but did not give it to him.

‘That’s not quite what you told me before,’ he said feebly, while he continued to battle with his multiplying symptoms of mistrust.

She was unmoved by his objection. ‘Why should one tell everything at a first encounter? One has to protect oneself. It is normal.’

‘I suppose it is,’ he agreed.

Anna had finished her self-portrait and needed immediate recognition. It showed her picking flowers on a rooftop.

‘Superb!’ Barley cried. ‘Tell her I’ll hang it above my fireplace, I know just the spot. There’s a picture of Anthea skiing on one side, and Hal sailing on the other. Anna goes in the middle.’

‘She asks how old is Hal?’ Katya said.

He really had to think. He had first to remember Hal’s birth year, then the year it was now, then laboriously subtract the one from the other while he fought off the singing in his ears.

‘Ah well now, Hal’s twenty-four. But I’m afraid he’s made a rather foolish marriage.’

Anna was disappointed. She stared reproachfully at them as Katya resumed their conversation.

‘As soon as I heard he had disappeared I tried to contact him by all the usual means but I was not successful. I was extremely distressed.’ She passed him the letter at last, her eyes alight with pleasure and relief. As he took it from her, his hand closed distractedly over hers and she let it. ‘Then eight days ago, a week ago yesterday which was Saturday, just two days after you telephoned from London, Igor telephoned me at my house. “I have some medicine for you. Let us have a coffee and I will give it to you.” Medicine is our code for a letter. He meant a letter from Yakov. I was amazed and very happy. It is even years since Yakov has sent me a letter. And such a letter!’

‘Who’s Igor?’ Barley said, speaking rather loudly in order to defeat the uproar inside his head.

There were five pages of it, written on good unobtainable white writing paper, in an orderly, regular script. Barley had not imagined Goethe capable of such a conventional-looking document. She took back her hand, but gently.

‘Igor is a friend of Yakov from Leningrad. They studied together.’

‘Great. What does he do now?’

She was annoyed by his question and impatient to have his good reaction to the letter, even if he could only judge it by appearance. ‘He is a scientist of some kind with one of the ministries. What does it matter how Igor is employed? Do you wish me to translate it to you or not?’

‘What’s his other name?’

She told him, and in the midst of his confusion he was exalted by her abrasiveness. We should have had years, he thought, not hours. We should have pulled each other’s hair when we were kids. We should have done everything we never did, before it was too late. He held the letter for her and she knelt herself carelessly behind him on the grass, steadying herself with one hand on his shoulder, while with the other she pointed past him at the lines as she translated. He could feel her breasts brushing against his back. He could feel his world steady itself inside him, as the monstrosity of his first suspicions made way for a more analytical frame of mind.

‘Here is the address, just a box number, that is normal,’ she said, her fingertip on the top right corner. ‘He is in a special hospital, perhaps in a special town. He wrote the letter in bed – you see how well he writes when he is sober? – he gave it to a friend who was on his way to Moscow. The friend gave it to Igor. It is normal. “My darling Katya” – that is not exactly how he begins, it is a different endearment, never mind. “I have been struck down with some variety of hepatitis but illness is very instructive and I am alive.” That is so typical of him, to draw at once the moral lesson.’ She was pointing again. ‘This word makes the hepatitis worse. It is “irritated”.’

‘Aggravated,’ Barley said quite calmly.

The hand on his shoulder gave him a reproving squeeze. ‘What does it matter what is the right word? You want me to fetch a dictionary? “I have had a high temperature and much fantasy –” ’

‘Hallucination,’ Barley said.

‘The word is
gallutsinatsiya
–’ she began furiously.

‘Okay, let’s stick with that.’

‘ “– but now I am recovered and in two days I shall go to a convalescent unit for a week by the sea.” He does not say which sea, why should he? “I shall be able to do everything except drink vodka, but that is a bureaucratic limitation which as a good scientist I shall quickly ignore.” Is that not typical also? That after hepatitis he thinks immediately of vodka?’

‘Absolutely,’ Barley agreed, smiling in order to please her – and perhaps to reassure himself.

The lines were dead straight as if written on a ruled page. There was not a single crossing out.

‘ “If only all Russians could have hospitals like this, what a healthy nation we would soon become.” He is always the idealist, even when he is ill. “The nurses are so beautiful and the doctors are young and handsome, it is more a house of love here than a house of sickness.” He says this to make me jealous. But do you know something? It is most unusual that he comments on anybody happy. Yakov is a tragedian. He is even a sceptic. I think they have cured his bad moods as well. “Yesterday I took exercise for the first time but I soon felt exhausted like a child. Afterwards I lay on the balcony and got quite a suntan before sleeping like an angel with nothing on my conscience except how badly I have treated you, always exploiting you.” Now he writes love talk, I shall not translate it.’

‘Does he always do that?’

She laughed. ‘I told you. It is not even normal that he writes to me, and it is many months, I would say years, since he spoke of our love, which is now entirely spiritual. I think the illness has made him a little sentimental, so we shall forgive him.’ She turned the page in his hand, and again their hands met, but Barley’s was as cold as winter and he was secretly surprised that she did not comment on it. ‘Now we come to Mr. Barley. You. He is extremely cautious. He does not mention you by name. At least the illness has not affected his discretion. “Please tell our good friend that I shall try my best to see him during his visit, provided that my recovery continues. He should bring his materials and I shall try to do the same. I have to deliver a lecture in Saratov that week” – Igor says that is the military academy, Yakov always gives a lecture there in September, so many things one learns when somebody is ill – “and I shall come to Moscow as soon as possible from there. If you speak to him before I do, please tell him the following. Tell him to bring all further questions because after this I do not wish to answer any more questions for the grey men. Tell him his list should be final and exhaustive.” ’

Barley listened in silence to Goethe’s further instructions which were as emphatic as they had been in Leningrad. And as he listened, the black clouds of his disbelief swept together to make a secret dread inside him, and his nausea returned.

A sample page of translation, but in print, please, print is so much more revealing, she was saying on Goethe’s behalf.

I wish for an introduction by Professor Killian of Stockholm, please approach him as soon as possible, she was reading.

Have you had further reactions from your intelligentsia? Kindly advise me.

Publishing dates. Goethe had heard that autumn was the best market, but must one really wait a whole year? she asked, for her lover.

The title again. How about
The Biggest Lie in the World
? The blurb, please let me see a draft. And please send an early copy to Dr. Dagmar Somebody at Stanford and Professor Herman Somebody-else at MIT …

Barley painstakingly wrote all this down in his notebook on a page he headed BOOK FAIR.

‘What’s in the rest of the letter?’ he asked.

She was returning it to its envelope. ‘I told you. It is love talk. He is at peace with himself and he wishes to resume a full relationship.’

‘With you.’

A pause while her eyes considered him. ‘Barley, I think you are being a little childish.’

‘Lovers then?’ Barley insisted. ‘Live happily ever after. Is that it?’

‘In the past he was scared of the responsibility. Now he is not. That is what he writes and naturally it is out of the question. What has been has been. It cannot be restored.’

‘Then why does he write it?’ said Barley stubbornly.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you believe him?’

She was about to be seriously angry with him when she caught something in his expression that was not envy and not hostility but an intense, almost frightening concern for her safety.

‘Why should he spin you the talk just because he’s ill? He doesn’t usually fool around with people’s emotions, does he? He prides himself on speaking the truth.’

And still his penetrating gaze would not relinquish her or the letter.

‘He is lonely,’ she replied protectively. ‘He is missing me so he exaggerates. It is normal. Barley, I think you are being a little bit –’

Either she could not find the word, or on second thoughts she decided against using it, so Barley supplied it for her. ‘Jealous,’ he said.

And he managed what he knew she was waiting for. He smiled. He composed a good, sincere smile of disinterested friendship and squeezed her hand and clambered to his feet. ‘He sounds fantastic,’ he said. ‘I’m very happy for him. For his recovery.’

And he meant it. Every word. He could hear the true note of conviction in his voice as his eye moved quickly to the parked red car on the other side of the birch grove.

Then to the common delight Barley hurls himself upon the business of becoming a weekend father, a rôle for which his torn life has amply prepared him. Sergey wants him to try his hand at fishing. Anna wants to know why he hasn’t brought his swim suit. Matvey has gone to sleep, smiling from the whisky and his memories. Katya stands in the water in her shorts. She looks more beautiful to him than ever before, and more remote. Even collecting rocks to build a dam, she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

Yet nobody ever worked harder on a dam than Barley that afternoon, nobody had a clearer vision of how the waters should be held at bay. He rolls up his stupid grey flannel trousers and soaks himself to the crotch. He heaves sticks and stones till he is half dead, while Anna sits astride his shoulders directing operations. He pleases Sergey with his businesslike approach, and Katya with his romantic flourish. A white car has replaced the red one. A couple sit in it with the doors open, eating whatever they are eating, and at Barley’s suggestion the children stand on the hilltop and wave to them, but the couple in the white car don’t wave back.

Evening falls and a tang of autumn fires drifts through the dying birch leaves. Moscow is made of wood again, and burning. As they load the car, a pair of wild geese fly over them and they are the last two geese in the world.

On the journey back to the hotel, Anna sleeps on Barley’s lap while Matvey chatters and Sergey frowns at the pages of
Squirrel Nutkin
as if they are the Party Manifesto.

‘When do you speak to him again?’ Barley asks.

‘It is arranged,’ she says enigmatically.

‘Did Igor arrange it?’

‘Igor arranges nothing. Igor is the messenger.’

‘The new messenger,’ he corrects her.

‘Igor is an old acquaintance and a new messenger. Why not?’

She glances at him and reads his intention. ‘You cannot come to the hospital, Barley. It is not safe for you.’

‘It’s not exactly a holiday for you either,’ he replies.

She knows, he thought. She knows but does not know she knows. She has the symptoms, a part of her has made the diagnosis. But the rest of her refuses to admit there’s anything amiss.

The Anglo-American situation room was no longer a shabby basement in Victoria but the radiant penthouse of a smart new baby skyscraper off Grosvenor Square. It styled itself the Inter-Allied Conciliation Group and was guarded by shifts of conciliatory American Marines in military plainclothes. An air of thrilled purpose pervaded it as the expanded team of trim young men and women flitted between clean desks, answered winking telephones, spoke to Langley on secure lines, passed papers, typed at silent keyboards or lounged in attitudes of eager relaxation before the rows of television monitors that had replaced the twin clocks of the old Russia House.

It was a deck on two levels, and Ned and Sheriton were seated side by side on the closed bridge, while below them on the other side of the sound-proofed glass their unequal crews went about their duties. Brock and Emma had one wall, Bob, Johnny and their cohorts the other wall and centre aisle. But all were travelling in the same direction. All wore the same obediently purposeful expressions, faced the same banks of screens that rolled and flickered like stock exchange quotations as the automatic decodes came in.

‘Truck’s safely back in dock,’ said Sheriton as the screens abruptly cleared and flashed the codeword BLACKJACK.

The truck itself was a miracle of penetration.

Our own truck! In Moscow! Us! In English it would have been a lorry but here it was a truck in deference to the American proprietorship. An enormous separate operation lay behind its acquisition and deployment. It was a Kamaz, dirty grey and very big, one of a fleet of trucks belonging to SOVTRANSAVTO, hence the acronym daubed in Roman letters across its filthy flank. It had been recruited, together with its driver, by the Agency’s enormous Munich station during one of the truck’s many forays to West Germany to collect luxury commodities for Moscow’s privileged few with access to a special distribution store. Everything from Western shoes to Western tampons to spare parts for Western cars had been shuttled back and forth inside the truck’s bowels. As to the driver, he was one of the Long Distance Gunners, as these luckless creatures are known in the Soviet Union – State employees, miserably underpaid, with neither medical nor accident insurance to protect them against misfortune in the West, who even in deepest winter huddle stoically in the lee of their great charges, munching sausage before sharing another night’s sleep in their comfortless cabins – but making for themselves, in Russia nevertheless, vast fortunes out of their opportunities in the West.