Old Flames (17 page)

The lobby of the
Sunday Post
was full of grumbling hacks complaining yet again of the absurd vanity of Lawrence calling a press conference. The other newspapers might
have sent their trainees and their hasbeens, but they would not ignore Lawrence, and the chance of another row. There was at least an inch or two of column space in reporting the antics of the
competition. They cliqued unto themselves, talking shop, but then so did the other faction present.

London was a city of exiles. Here and there, statistical probability implied, there might just be the odd refugee from the fall of the Second Empire. Some nonagenarian brought across the Channel
in childhood. The Empress Eugénie herself had lived on in Chislehurst on the southern edge of London into the 1920s. But Russians fleeing their revolution, London had had aplenty in its time
and, it seemed, every living London Russian exile Troy had ever met or even heard of, including several he had thought long dead, was there. They were not a pleasant bunch. The last scions of
displaced and dying lines, the final bearers of ancient and occasionally bogus titles, the last believers unwilling to recognise the course history had taken, not-so-old men who still thought the
storming of the Winter Palace might be undone, that Ekaterinburg might not have happened after all. As a rule, he avoided them.

The USSR was the fine line of the century. Its most heated topic, from the old guard of diehard monarchists to the fellow-travellers of the thirties. Though both were thin on the ground these
days, there was still a peculiar species of egghead who could bore for Britain on the subject of the Soviet Union at the drop of a hat. It was the most attacked, the most defended, and the most
mythic country on earth, that about which we knew least and talked most. People turned out for Russia.

‘If this lot are meant to be indicative of the tone or content of this hullaballoo,’ Troy said, ‘I’m leaving now. It’s beginning to look like a freak show. I take
it Lawrence has dug up some new scandal on the USSR? And the gathering of the clans is meant to celebrate the cocking up of another Five Year Plan or something equally silly?’

‘Bear with me,’ said his brother. ‘There’s more to it than a handful of old fools and clapped-out hacks.’

At the back of the room Troy caught sight of one of the few people he would still listen to on the matter of the Soviet Union. Seated on a foldaway chair, Homburg far back on his head, eyes
closed as though snatching a nap mid-morning, was his Uncle Nikolai, Troy’s father’s younger brother. The last of the Troitsky brothers, and the only one to accompany Troy’s
father to England. He looked old to Troy, though he could not say with any certainty how old he was.

The old man’s consistent opposition to all Russian regimes, from Nicholas II to Lenin and Stalin, to Khrushchev and Bulganin, had enabled him to keep intact his wartime role as British
Intelligence’s man on ships and planes and bombs and rockets, right into the peace, and right past his retirement, despite his obvious Anarchist leanings. He received a
‘clearance’ that was in all probability denied to Troy, a serving copper, and to Rod, a former Government minister and, if the Tories blew the election in 1960, most certainly the next
Foreign Secretary. Nikolai had given up his chair in Applied Physics at Imperial College, but hung onto his office and a fellowship, hung onto his advisory role. Nobody knew more about ships and
planes and bombs and rockets; his mind was an attic cluttered with the dust of these horrors. A mind that was much like his father’s—Troy’s grandfather’s—tending to
dust off the attic at unexpected moments and wheel out something arcane, to interrupt a conversation with a diversionary tack—the wooden horse of physics, the abandoned rag doll of pre-Soviet
history. His grandfather would suddenly burst with nostalgia and reminiscence, bringing meals and conversations to a juddering halt. Even Troy’s father, Alexei Rodyonovich, that garrulous
piss artist, could be silenced by unanswerable interjections from the elder generation, a Slavic rumble from deep in the enveloping beard and tunic. Nikolai was more focused, arcane it might be, or
amusing, or important, or deadly accurate. He had the unsparing knack of putting lives to rights in a sentence or two without even recourse to ‘you know what your trouble is?’ Troy
added it silently to many things the old man threw at them, and he was pretty sure Rod did the same.

Troy felt Rod nudge him. Lawrence had appeared in front of the lectern and was waving for silence with a piece of paper, Chamberlain-style.

‘For many weeks now, we have all of us been hearing rumours, emanating from the Soviet Union, concerning a secret speech made at the Twentieth Party Congress by Nikita Khrushchev. Details
of this speech have been speculated upon since February, and I think I speak for Fleet Street when I say that it is now widely believed that Khrushchev used this secret session to denounce Stalin.
I can tell you now that this is true.’

Somewhere in the ranks of the cognoscenti a raspberry was blown, and a second voice said simply ‘Big deal’. This was hardly news.

‘I can tell you,’ Lawrence went on, ‘because I have obtained a copy of the speech.’

No one sneered. The press ranks exploded with cries of ‘How?’, ‘Where from?’

Lawrence carried on regardless. He had their attention now. They’d all been upstaged and they knew it.

‘From, shall I say, sources overseas.’

Lawrence had a simple code. Russia itself would be ‘unnamed sources’, a contrived British leak would be ‘friendly sources’, and the US was always ‘sources
overseas’. So, Lawrence had a nark in the State Department? This should not surprise the hacks. What was surprising was that this should be Khrushchev’s way of leaking the truth. Who
did
he
have in the State Department? It was a neat trick—it had in-built deniability. Khrushchev could leak it and deny it at the same time. Lawrence’s sense of theatrical timing
gave the hacks a minute or two of hubbub before he closed in for the kill.

‘The full text will be published in the
Post
this Sunday. All 26,000 words of it. In the meantime I can tell you something of the atrocities denounced by Khrushchev. There are some
truly shocking revelations. I think we have known for some long time now that history is unlikely to offer a larger rollcall of the dead. Khrushchev does not deal in figures. Indeed I doubt that we
or he will ever know the full carnage of the Yezhovshchina, but he deals in methods and principles—the methods of Stalin’s madness and the principles of his paranoia.’

Lawrence rattled on. Troy looked at Rod. His face said, ‘I told you so,’ and his lips formed the words seconds after Troy had read them in his eyes.

‘Told me what?’

‘It’s a hoot. It’s a coup.’

‘No it’s not.’

‘How so? It means Khrushchev was serious about peaceful coexistence. Or are you going to insult me in your habitual fashion and tell me that “he’s just another
politician”?’

‘Worse, Rod. He’s an actor.’

‘Eh?’

‘I saw a wee bit more of the man than you did, and take it from me, he’s Grimaldi and Alec Guinness rolled into one.’

Lawrence was almost through with his press-tease, saying nothing and something at the same time, and he ended by quoting Khrushchev’s own words.

“Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”And if you want any more, you’ll have to buy the
Post.
Thank you,
gentlemen.’

Lawrence stepped down to half-hearted applause, beaming with pleasure. He had pulled off a coup, stuck one to the rest of Fleet Street
en masse
and he knew it. Every editor on the street
would have killed for that speech. Most of them would run it in full just as Lawrence was doing, revelling in the showmanship, knowing full well that not one reader in fifty would get halfway
through it. Troy made a mental note to buy the
News of the World
instead. Comrade K could not compete with tits and bums and wayward vicars, the rightful, the traditional subjects of the
English Sunday papers, as British as the fish and chips they would be wrapping by next Tuesday.

From behind them Troy heard a sigh that seemed to bear the weight of history on its breath, an infinite weariness, the like of which Troy had not heard since the days of his grandfather. It
could only be Nikolai. They both turned at the same time. Rod and Troy looked at their uncle, his head resting on the wall, the brow of his Homburg pointing skyward, his eyes looking up to the
heaven in which he surely did not believe.

‘Nikolai,’ Rod said, softly, with caution. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I am fine, my boy,’ he said without looking at either of them. ‘It is you and yours I fear for, not myself. Stalin is dead—long live Stalin.’

‘Eh?’ said Rod for the both of them. It struck Troy as the most logical response he could make.

‘Do you know why Khrushchev will not enumerate the Soviet Book of the Dead? Do you know why he will not add up the millions upon millions? Do you know what this man did in the first years
after the war?’

The question did not seem to either of them to require an answer.

‘Stalin regarded anyone who had allowed themselves to be captured by the Germans as a traitor. He ordered returning prisoners of war to be interrogated, and an arbitrary number of them to
hanged. Guilty or innocent, he did not care; but enough should be hanged to let the people know the power of their leader. This man, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, hanged his fellow countrymen in
countless numbers. His denunciation of the monster Stalin comes ten years too late to be believed.’

In the midst of the hubbub, the room-filling buzz of ardent hacks whose hands had quickly tired of clapping, there opened up a silence which seemed to engulf the three of them.

‘There’s no such thing,’ Rod said gently. ‘It can never be too late. Khrushchev has done now what was right. Regardless of what he might have done in the past.’

Again the heaven-bound, world-weary, earth-sent sigh.

‘Regardless?’ he queried. ‘I find it impossible to disregard such things. What he did then is surely indicative of what he will do next. My country—our country, though I
know you boys haff never seen it—has become a country of programmed change. Each change is a rewriting of the history of what has gone before. Each change has meant a new set of victims, a
new herd of scapegoats to be staked out in the sun. Do you really think this will be different? Do you really think this is anything we haff not seen before? There may not be show
trials—that, after all, would seem to run against the grain of what the man is saying—but for all that do you not think that heads will roll? That purges will surely follow, that there
will once more be disposable people, that the little people will suffer? In sloughing off the guilt of a generation onto one man, Khrushchev has accepted the cult of personality even as he would
seem to reject it. But the one man is dead so the burden will fall on those who served him. Little people.’

‘Apparatchiks,’ said Troy.

‘People,’ said Nikolai.

‘Apparatchiks,’ said Troy.

‘People like you and me. Little people, caught in the tide of a history they could neither make nor unmake.’

‘Don’t ask me to care about apparatchiks,’ Troy said, ignoring the slow pressure of Rod’s foot on his. ‘There’s nothing on earth could make me
care.’

If nothing else, Troy had seized the old man’s attention. He had lowered his eyes from heaven and was looking at Troy with a deep sadness in his eyes.

‘Perhaps,’ Nikolai said slowly, ‘perhaps, they are not people like you and me. Perhaps I am wrong. What distinguishes us from them but the matter of choice? And if there was
one thing your father’s genius did for us all, to say nothing of his money, it was that he gave us choice. Me as much as the two of you. These are people who know no choice. If I were
Khrushchev’s head of KGB, I would not bank on collecting my pension, but if I’d been one of his apparatchiks, as you insist they are, under Josef Stalin, I would now fear for my life.
Believe me, heads will roll. This denunciation is but prelude to another purge. The dead will pile up in heaps uncountable yet again. This is not freedom. Your man is wrong about that. This is the
false dawn before the new nightmare. We are a long way from freedom.’

Rod seemed flabbergasted, speechless, but had stopped treading on Troy’s foot in the vain hope of shutting him up.

‘You know,’ said Troy, picking his words brutally. ‘You might as well ask me to care about the fate of the guards at Auschwitz.’

Nikolai got to his feet, shrugged off Troy’s unanswerable remark. He made his way slowly, painfully, towards the door. He stopped. The very posture, the angle of his head and body,
betrayed the action of memory at work. Then he turned and spoke, looking at them with a sad air of mourning about him, his voice scarcely audible.

‘I considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but
they had no comforter.’

The old man’s voice rose, the softness of tone vanishing in a burst of anger, hammering out the verse with a hard emphasis.

‘Wherefore I praised the
dead
which are already
dead
more than the living which are yet alive. Better is he than both they, which haff not yet been, who haff not seen the
evil work that is done under the sun.’

Nikolai walked slowly out, leaning heavily on his walking stick, and did not look back.

‘Good God,’ said Rod. ‘What was that? Lear on the blasted heath?’

‘It was the Old Testament,’ Troy replied. ‘Don’t ask me which book. Even old atheists can’t escape their upbringing.’

‘Do you think we’ve upset him?’

‘Yes—but for once I don’t care. He can’t ask us to shed a tear for the jobsworths of Russia. I couldn’t give a damn about his apparatchiks any more than I could
about all the spooks from Torquay to Timbuctoo and back again. And I cannot conceive of the force that could make me. He’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it.’