The Russia House (18 page)

‘– Assam, Darjeeling and Orange Pekoe. What on earth’s a pekoe? Sounds more like an exotic bird to me.’

‘I don’t know. I suspect it will be a plant.’

‘I suspect you’ll be right at that. Anyway the question is, how can I give them to you? Can I bring them to you somewhere? Or can you drop in at the hotel and could we have a quick drink and a formal presentation?’

She was learning to appreciate his long-windedness. He was giving her time to steady herself. She pushed her fingers through her hair, discovering to her surprise that it was tidy.

‘You have not told me which hotel you are staying at,’ she objected severely.

Nasayan’s head jerked round to her in disapproval.

‘Well, neither I did now. How ridiculous of me. I’m at the Odessa, know the Odessa? Just up the road from the old bath house? I’ve become quite fond of it. Always ask for it, don’t always get it. My daytimes are rather taken up with meetings – always the way when one’s over on a flying visit – but evenings are relatively free at the moment, if that’s any good to you. I mean how about tonight – no time like the present – would tonight be any good for you?’

Nasayan was lighting one of his filthy cigarettes, though the whole office knew she hated smoking. Having lit it, he hoisted it in the air and sucked from it with his woman’s lips. She grimaced at him but he ignored her.

‘That is actually quite convenient,’ Katya said in her most military manner. ‘Tonight I have to attend an official reception in your district. It is for an important delegation from Hungary,’ she added, not sure whom she was meaning to impress. ‘We have been looking forward to it for many weeks.’

‘Great. Marvellous. Suggest a time. Six? Eight? What suits you best?’

‘The reception is at six o’clock. I shall come at perhaps eight-fifteen.’

‘Perhaps-eight-fifteen it is. You got the name, did you? Scott Blair. Scott like the Antarctic, Blair like a trumpet. I’m tall and seedy, about two hundred years old, with spectacles I can’t see through. But Niki tells me you’re the Soviet answer to the Venus de Milo so I expect I’ll recognise you anyway.’

‘That is most ridiculous!’ she exclaimed, laughing despite herself.

‘I’ll be hanging around the lobby looking out for you, but why don’t I give you my room telephone number just in case. Got a pencil?’

As she rang off the contrary passions that had been gathering in her burst their banks and she turned on Nasayan with flashing eyes.

‘Grigory Tigranovich. Whatever your position here, you have no right to haunt my room like this, inspect my correspondence and listen to my telephone conversations. Here is your book. If you have something to say to me, say it later.’

Then she scooped up a sheaf of translator’s manuscript on the achievements of Cuban agricultural cooperatives and with cold hands began leafing through the pages, pretending to count them. A full hour passed before she telephoned Nasayan.

‘You must forgive my anger,’ she said. ‘A close friend of mine died at the weekend. I was not myself.’

By lunchtime she had changed her plans. Morozov could wait for his tickets, the shopkeeper for his bars of fancy soap, Olga Stanislavsky for her cloth. She walked, she took a bus, not a cab. She walked again, crossing one courtyard after another until she found the down-at-heel blockhouse she was looking for and the alley that ran beside it. ‘This is how you get hold of me when you need me,’ he had said. ‘The janitor is a friend of mine. He will not even know who made the sign.’

You have to believe in what you are doing, she reminded herself.

I do. I absolutely do.

She had the picture postcard in her hand, a Rembrandt from the Hermitage in Leningrad. ‘Love to you all,’ her message read, signed ‘Alina’, and a heart.

She had found the street. She was standing in it. It was the street of her bad dream. She pressed the bell, three rings, then shoved the card under the door.

A perfect Moscow morning, alight and beckoning, the air alpine, a day to forgive all sins. The telephone call behind him, Barley stepped out of his hotel and, standing on the warm pavement, loosened his wrists and shoulders and rolled his head round his collar while he turned his mind outward and let the city drown his fears with its conflicting smells and voices. The stink of Russian petrol, tobacco, cheap scent and river water – hullo! Two more days here I shan’t know I’m smelling you. The sporadic cavalry charges of the commuter cars – hullo! The belching brown lorries thundering through the potholes in pursuit. The eerie emptiness between. The limousines with their blackened windows, the unmarked buildings splitting before their time – are you a block of offices, a barracks or a school? The dough-faced boys smoking in the doorways, waiting. The chauffeurs, reading newspapers in their parked cars, waiting. The unspeaking group of solemn men in hats, staring at a closed door, waiting.

Why did it always draw me? he wondered, contemplating his life in the past tense, which had recently become his habit. Why did I keep coming back here? He was feeling high and bright, he couldn’t help it. He was not used to fear.

Because of their making do, he decided. Because they can rough it better than we can. Because of their love of anarchy and their terror of chaos, and the tension in between.

Because God always found excuses not to come here.

Because of their universal ignorance, and the brilliance that bursts through it. Because of their sense of humour, as good as ours and better.

Because they are the last great frontier in an over-discovered world. Because they try so hard to be like us and start from so far back.

Because of the huge heart beating inside the huge shambles. Because the shambles is my own.

I shall come at perhaps-eight-fifteen, she had said. What had he heard in her voice? Guardedness? Guarding whom? Herself? Him? Me? In our profession, the couriers are the message.

Look outwards, Barley told himself. Outwards is the only place to be.

From the metro a group of teenage girls in cotton frocks and boys in denim jackets trotted purposefully to work or instruction, their glum expressions switching to laughter at a word. Spotting the foreigner they studied him with cool glances – his rounded, pop-eye spectacles, his shabby handmade shoes, his old imperialist suit. In Moscow, if nowhere else, Barley Blair observed the bourgeois proprieties of dress.

Joining the stream he let it carry him, not caring which way he went. By contrast with his determinedly contented mood the early food queues had a restless and unsettled look. The grim-suited labour heroes and war veterans, their breastplates of medals jingling in the sunlight as they waded through the crowds, had an air of being late for wherever they were marching. Even their sloth seemed to have an air of protest. In the new climate, doing nothing was itself an act of opposition. Because by doing nothing we change nothing. And by changing nothing we hang on to what we understand, even if it is the bars of our own gaol.

I shall come at perhaps-eight-fifteen.

Reaching the wide river Barley again dawdled. On the far bank the fairytale domes of the Kremlin lifted into a cloudless heaven. A Jerusalem with its tongue pulled out, he thought. So many towers, scarcely a bell. So many churches, barely a spoken prayer.

Hearing a voice close beside him he swung round too sharply and discovered an old couple in their best clothes asking him the way to somewhere. But Barley of the perfect memory had few words of Russian. It was a music he had listened to often, without summoning the nerve to penetrate its mysteries.

He laughed and made an apologetic face. ‘Don’t speak it, old boy. I’m an imperialist hyena. English!’

The old man grasped his wrist in friendship.

In every foreign city he had ever been, strangers asked him the way to places he didn’t know in languages he didn’t understand. Only in Moscow did they bless him for his ignorance.

He retraced his steps, pausing at unswept windows, pretending to examine what they offered. Painted wooden dolls. Who for? Dusty tins of fruit, or were they fish? Battered packets hanging from red string, contents a mystery, perhaps pekoes. Jars of pickled medical samples, lit by ten-watt bulbs. He was approaching his hotel again. A drunk-eyed peasant woman pushed a bunch of dying tulips at him, wrapped in newspaper.

‘Awfully kind of you,’ he cried and, rummaging through his pockets, found among the junk a rouble note.

A green Lada was parked outside the hotel entrance, the radiator smashed. A hand-inked card in the windscreen said VAAP. The driver was leaning over the bonnet detaching the wiper blades as a precaution against theft.

‘Scott Blair?’ Barley asked him. ‘You looking for me?’ The driver paid him not the slightest attention but continued with his work. ‘Blair?’ said Barley. ‘Scott?’

‘Those for me, dear?’ Wicklow enquired, coming up behind him. ‘You’re fine,’ he added quietly. ‘Clean as a whistle.’

Wicklow will watch your back for you, Ned had said. Wicklow, if anybody, will know whether you’re being followed. Wicklow and who else? Barley wondered. Last night, as soon as they had checked in to the hotel, Wicklow had vanished until after midnight, and as Barley had put himself to bed he had seen him from his window, standing in the street talking to two young men in jeans.

They got into the car. Barley tossed the tulips on to the back ledge. Wicklow sat in the front seat chatting cheerily to the driver in his perfect Russian. The driver let out a great bellow of laughter. Wicklow laughed too.

‘Want to share it?’ Barley asked.

Wicklow was already doing so. ‘I asked him whether he’d like to drive the Queen when she came here on her state visit. There’s a saying here. If you steal, steal a million. If you screw, screw a queen.’

Barley lowered his window and tapped out a tune on the sill. Life was a romp till perhaps-eight-fifteen.

‘Barley! Welcome to Barbary, my dear chap. For God’s sake, man, don’t shake hands with me across the threshold, we have enough troubles as it is! You look positively healthy,’ Alik Zapadny complained in alarm when they had time to examine each other. ‘Why have you no hangover, may I ask? Are you in love, Barley? Are you divorced again? What have you been up to that you require to confess to me?’

Zapadny’s drawn face examined him with desperate intelligence, the shadows of confinement stamped for ever in his hollowed cheeks. When Barley had first known him, Zapadny had been a dubious translator in disgrace working under other names. Now he was a dubious hero of the Reconstruction, dressed in a larger man’s white collar and black suit.

‘I’ve heard the Voice, Alik,’ Barley explained, with a rush of the old fondness as he slipped him a bunch of back-numbers of
The Times
wrapped in brown paper. ‘In bed with a good book every night at ten. Meet Len Wicklow, our Russian specialist. Knows more about you than you do, don’t we, Leonard Carl?’

‘Well, thank God somebody does!’ Zapadny protested, careful not to acknowledge the gift. ‘We are becoming so unsure of ourselves these days, now that our great Russian mystery is being held up to public view. How much do you know about your new boss, by the way, Mr. Wicklow? Have you heard, for instance, how he undertook the re-education of the Soviet Union single-handed? Oh yes. He had a charming vision of a hundred million under-educated Soviet workers longing to improve themselves in their leisure. He was going to sell them a great range of titles about how to teach themselves Greek and trigonometry and basic housekeeping. We had to explain to him that the Soviet man-in-the-street regards himself as finite and in his leisure hours he is drunk. Do you know what we bought from him instead to keep him happy? A golf book! You would not imagine how many of our worthy citizens are fascinated by your capitalist golf.’ And in haste, still a dangerous joke – ‘Not that we have any capitalists
here
. Oh my God, no.’

They sat ten strong at a yellow table under an icon of Lenin made in wood veneers. Zapadny was the speaker, the others were listeners and smokers. Not one of them, so far as Barley knew, was competent to sign a contract or approve a deal.

‘Now Barley, what is this total nonsense you are putting about that you have come here in order to buy Soviet books, please?’ Zapadny demanded by way of opening courtesies, lifting his hooped eyebrows and placing the tips of his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes. ‘You British
never
buy our books. You make us buy yours instead. Besides, you are broke, or so our friends from London tell us. A. & B. are living off God’s good air and Scotch whisky, they say. Personally I consider that an excellent diet. But why have you come? I think you only wanted an excuse to visit us again.’

Time was passing. The yellow table floated in the sunbeams. A pall of cigarette smoke floated over it. Black-and-white images of Katya in photographic form came and went in Barley’s mind. The Devil is every girl’s cover story. They drank tea out of pretty Leningrad cups. Zapadny was delivering his standard caveat against trying to make deals directly with Soviet publishers, selecting Wicklow as his audience: the day-and-night war between VAAP and the rest of the world was evidently raging well. Two pale men wandered in to listen and wandered out again. Wicklow was earning favour by handing round blue Gauloises.

‘We’ve had an injection of capital, Alik,’ Barley heard himself explaining from a long way off. ‘Times have changed. Russia’s top of the pops these days. I’ve only got to tell the money boys I’m building up a Russian list and they come rushing after me as fast as their short fat legs will carry them.’

‘But, Barley, these
boys
, as you call them, can grow into
men
very quickly,’ Zapadny, the great sophisticate, warned to a fresh burst of docile laughter. ‘Particularly when they are wishing to be repaid, I would say.’

‘It’s the way I described it in my telex, Alik. Maybe you haven’t had time to read it,’ said Barley, showing a little muscle. ‘If things work out as we plan, A. & B. will be launching a brand-new imprint devoted entirely to things Russian within the year. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, juveniles, the sciences. We’ve got a new line in popular medicine, all paperback. The subjects travel, so do the reputations of the authors. We’d like real Soviet doctors and scientists to contribute. We don’t want sheep farming in Outer Mongolia or fish farming in the Arctic Circle but if you have sensible subjects you want to suggest we’re here to listen and buy. We’ll announce our list at the next Moscow book fair and if things go well we’ll bring out our first six titles next spring.’