Black Out (45 page)

Dieter was different in his different world. He chatted in a lowkey manner. The tendency to make a thesis of everything seemed to have been brushed off on the doorstep. He had a talent for small talk. He was constantly affectionate towards his wife. He covered her hand with his frequently. Pressing it rather than holding it. An habitual gesture – a reassuring conjugality. Cosima had passed the entire war in Berlin. She had seen the world turned upside down, dissolved into dust and all but blown away. Troy watched the nuances in their gestures as he listened to this tale of hell. He had seen nothing like it, he thought, since the death of Ethel Bonham. Even though the constant touching, and the way Cosima would gently biff his shoulder with her head like a young cat, was remote from the spare intimacy of the Bonhams, the image – the metaphor – stood. They fitted each other like gloves. It was startlingly natural. It had beauty, containment, safety, peace and pleasure. It occurred to him that this was a way of life he had rejected, or that had somehow passed him by, and at thirty-three was unlikely in the extreme to be offered him. And he didn’t miss it one jot.

Midnight struck. What church bells remained in church belfries rang out. Troy felt he should be going. Felt he should leave them to an intimacy that was fascinating to watch, but in which he had no place.

‘Let me call you a cab,’ said Dieter.

‘I’d rather walk,’ said Troy.

‘It’s two miles!’

‘All the better,’ said Troy. ‘I need the air.’

He thanked Dieter for all he had done and set off along the empty streets back to the Kurfürstendamm. He wondered if the not unpleasant feeling that spread softly within him was relief and
freedom from the impossible pursuit – or just Hock and Armagnac. It’s over, he told himself. It’s over.

It was, Troy thought, remarkable how far he had strayed. His frustration with Dieter had given place to something approaching gratitude that he had stood firm and honest at a point when Troy was ready to break any rule, bend any law. It was snowing gently, flakes the size of half-crowns billowing down around him, a white night magic in the small hours of Christmas Day. All the world was white. Somewhere in the gathering snow behind him he heard a squelch – a wet footstep – and turned to look, then all the world was green. Green of a rather pleasing shade, the old Victorian green of a good billiard table. His father had had one in just this shade.

Troy lay in a fitful half sleep on the long, peeling white verandah of his father’s Hertfordshire house. He had no idea why he was there. It seemed years since he had lain like this, yet he was unmistakably conscious that he was in some stage of the slow convalescence from one of the many childhood illnesses that had dogged him throughout those years. He was warmly wrapped, almost to the neck, cushioned and propped against the head of an old oak and iron porter’s trolley, like a piece of baggage awaiting collection. The sun shone in the west. Down the garden, off towards the end of a lawn that covered more than an acre he could see the large stooping figure of his paternal grandfather, Rodyon Rodyonovich. Well into his seventies, still the Slavophile, a simple-life disciple and friend of the late Count Tolstoy, he was dressed in the manner of a Russian peasant and swung the heavy scythe against the long grass of the unkempt lawn in the fond pretence that it was good Russian wheat.

Troy’s father had bought this house in the late summer of 1910, for no other reason than that the long, south-facing verandah struck him as being faintly like home. Laughingly, he called the crumbling
Georgian pile his dacha. When one of the natives shrewdly observed that there was no higher ground between this small village in the English Home Counties and the mountains of the Urals, his father’s attachment to the place became complete. ‘There is nothing,’ he would say, biting back near hysterics, ‘there is nothing between me and Moscow!’

In the November of the same year Tolstoy had died a peasant’s death in a railway hut at Astapovo, attended only by his family, his followers, the Bishop of Tula and the world’s press. Rodyon Rodyonovich knew it was time to leave. Only the old man’s world status had kept the secret police at bay. Without him there was no future in Russia for a Tolstoyan. Before Christmas he was in Hertfordshire, where he lived out the rest of his life, dressing in the coarse linen costume of the peasant, refusing to learn a word of English, writing long letters to
The Times
(which his daughter-in-law had to translate on his behalf), preoccupying his grandchildren with tales of the old country and the peaceful revolution, and quaffing vast quantities of claret.

The old man had dropped his scythe and lumbered closer. His huge hands rested on the verandah railing – Troy could count the hairs on the backs of his fingers – and he leaned his bear-like face down towards his grandson.

‘Are you awake?’ he asked in Russian. He looked off somewhere over Troy’s right shoulder. ‘I don’t think he’s awake yet.’

Troy struggled to open his eyes and realised he was blindfolded. There was the distant sound of dripping water and the smell of mould and decay.

‘Take it off,’ said a woman’s voice in Russian.

Troy blinked into the light of an unshaded overhead bulb. There was a small woman, two men flanked her like colossal bookends. They were in a cellar.

‘Wassamatterbaby? Light too bright for you? My boys hit you too hard?’

Troy looked at the two men. Large, dark and anonymous in their heavy black overcoats. Broad, brutal Slav faces. The one very much like the other.

‘Do we need them?’ he asked.

She waved the two men towards the door. It thudded behind
them, and in a swift upward movement Troy seized Tosca by the throat.

‘I thought you were dead!’

‘Take it easy, baby,’ she gasped.

His grip tightened.

‘I thought you were dead!’

He had her back against the brick wall. Anger gave him a strength he did not feel.

‘I thought you were dead! There was blood all over the place!’

‘Let me go and I’ll tell you!’

Troy eased his grip. He felt his legs would buckle under him, but he stood looking down into the clear brown eyes.

‘I thought you’d spot it.’

‘Spot what?’

‘You know. It’s an old trick. I felt sure you’d get the message. Oh, Come on, baby. We talked about the goddam book the first time we met. Remember?
Huck Finn? ’

‘The blood group matched yours. I had it checked against your army medical record. I really thought you were dead. Huck Finn used pig’s blood!’

‘Oh come on. Where in hell d’you think I’d get a live pig three blocks from Trafalgar Square? Besides it took less than a pint. You splash it around enough and it can look like a real mess.’

‘A set-up?’

‘Sure. What else?’

‘An NKVD set-up?’

‘We got a new name for it now. New initials too.’

‘And I suppose we’re in the East now?’

‘Well – I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.’

Spent seed did not send Troy tumbling into a vulnerable, satiated sleep. Tosca slept. Troy felt he would never sleep again. Understanding so little, nettled into a stinging alertness. The back of his
head throbbed. He wrapped his shirt around him and stumbled into the sliver of light that came from the crack between the shutters. The light hit the cracked linoleum floor, a rough shard beneath his feet. How often had he shuffled around her bedroom, in and out of the light, working out the pieces she had put in front of him, so seemingly casual, teasing him like a child with the jumbled mess of a jigsaw puzzle.

As ever her eyes flicked open. Not even a flutter of the eyelids to drag herself from sleep. She woke instantly, totally, hard-eyed and staring.

‘Oh God, Troy. Do you never sleep?’

‘I was waiting.’

‘Waiting for what for Chrissake?’

‘For you to tell me what a fool I’ve been.’

‘OK. You’ve been a fool. The complete horse’s ass. Now come back to bed.’

‘How long did you string me out? Feeding me titbits. From the start?’

‘You don’t want to go into that. Really you don’t.’

‘You played me for a fool. I think I deserve an explanation.’

‘Oh my. Have you turned into a pompous asshole or what?’

He had drifted too close to the bed. A powerful hand snatched him back. Her left foot shot out, biffed him lightly in the belly and pinned him to a sitting position. Her grip on his arm was fierce. She squirmed upright, looking straight into his eyes.

‘You want it? You’ll get it. Could be a long story. I have to go back a few years.’

‘I’ve got the patience of Job,’ Troy said quietly.

‘No, Troy, I don’t think you have. You have the fucked-up selfmartyrdom of one of those boring Christian saints.’

It was the most complex notion Troy had heard pass her lips.

‘OK. OK. Picture this, you complete pain in the ass. 1905 – my dad, like your dad, gives up on the revolution. He gets out of Russia. He thinks it’s never going to happen. So he sails for New York. Settles on the Lower East Side, where the wops and the Jews live, a dozen or so to a room. There he meets my sweet little Italian momma, only seventeen years old when he marries her in 1910 – in 1911 I come along. Born an American, raised an American.
Then
it
happens. The revolution does come, and the old man can’t wait to get back – he’s itching for it, but he can’t get there. Everybody in Europe’s fighting everybody else. It’s 1919 before he can get a passage to St Petersburg. All three of us make the crossing. I puked every day for two weeks. But the old man is happy – he dumps us in a crummy apartment in Moscow, flourishes his party card and suddenly he’s gone – we don’t see the bastard for nearly two years. He fights for Mother Russia, the reddest soldier in the Red Army – by the end of the war they’re pinning medals on him so fast they have to use a fuckin’ stapler. So, he comes home, one eye gone, three fingers missing and a chestful of ribbons. He looks like Halloween. I guess I’m eleven or twelve. My Russian’s fluent – which is just as well, on account of all my mom can do is struggle with her mishmash of English and Italian and scream that she wants to go home. We don’t. We’re here for good he tells her. And just to show her he uses privilege and gets her a classy apartment and enrolls me in the youth wing of the party. And every night she cries herself to sleep.’

Troy’s mouth opened to speak and Tosca’s hand flashed out at the intake of breath, her fingertips resting on his lips.

‘Whatever it is, keep it. Just shuttup. You wanted it all. So shuttup or I stop.

‘Now. It’s 1924. Lenin’s been dead about three months. Trotsky’s losing out. May Day parade’s over. The goons are climbing down off their podium and some lunatic cries “Long Live Holy Mother Russia” and points a gun at Trotsky. So what does my father do? The stupid bastard bursts out of the crowd and throws himself in front of Trotsky and takes a full magazine right in the chest. Well, of course, he gets a hero’s funeral. We already knew he was a hero, but to tell the truth this really doesn’t count for much with my mother. All she can think of is that they’re burying him in three different places – ’cos one eye’s in Siberia somewhere, and the three fingers are in the Ukraine. The day after his funeral she asks to leave – like a kid in a school she hates she says “Can I go home now?” ’Cos she’s had the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Well, you’d expect they’d say no. And they go on saying no – until ’31 when I’m told to present myself at Party Headquarters. They’ve cooked up a lulu of a scheme. Am I a loyal party member? Of
course I am, I say. After all to say no is to ask for a one-way ticket to the salt mines. Even at twenty I know that. How did I see the future of Europe? I stumble through that one. It’s kind of a biggie. I seem to recall something about the inevitable collapse of the evil British Imperialists as the irresistible workers’ movement wells up in the rainy little islands. Cut the crap, says the head brasshat, in so many words. The Brits are out of it. Let ’em drink tea. What about the Germans? Like I said I was a shrewd twenty-year-old. It’s Hitler I said. He’s your problem. A year or two, maybe five and the little corporal could be chancellor of the paper republic. That was the right answer. Jackpot. Hole-in-one. How would I like to go back to the States? they ask. For a second or two this throws me – one minute we’re discussing Germany. Now it’s America. But I get the message. Momma can go home, but I have to go with her and I have to go as an agent of the Soviet Union.

‘I said it was a lulu, didn’t I? They fix us up a phoney past to explain the twelve years in Russia – we’ve been picking lemons in the hills above Naples or some place like that. And as we’re both American citizens we’ve no trouble getting back in. I enlist. Do my basic training in Virginia, and go to serve Uncle Sam, but really I’m serving Uncle Joe, ’cos what worries the Russians is that when the war comes – and they’d no doubts that it would – America will stay neutral, that they’ll let Europe go under and Russia with it. So – they need people on the inside. I guess I was one of a dozen, maybe more, working my way up, working my way closer. I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen, I didn’t have a clue what I believed.

‘Then, a few months after basic training I was posted to a desk job in Washington. It was April or May of ’32. That spring thousands and thousands of poor people, First-War vets most of ’em, marched on Washington, camped around the edge in a colossal shanty town. All they asked was a bonus payment – something they were owed anyway for doing their bit in the war. Do you know what the home of the brave and the land of the free did to its poor? They bulldozed their shacks and shanties, and MacArthur, Ike and that lunatic George Patton turned the cavalry loose on those walking bags of bones. I was there. I saw that. Troy, if I didn’t
believe in what I was doing before, I sure as hell did after. Life, liberty and the pursuit of hogwash.’

‘And what do you believe now?’

‘What? What? What in hell gives you the right to ask me what I believe?’

Tosca leapt from the bed, banging heavily on the floor. Her fists pounded each shutter in turn, sending them crashing into the window. She turned to face him, red with rage, her arms in the air, her breasts shaking with the weight of anger.