The Russia House (46 page)

For further assurance regarding her safety Barley despatches Wicklow to take a passing look at her in the Socialist pavilion. ‘She’s fine,’ Wicklow reports with a smile, humouring Barley’s nervousness. ‘She’s steady as she goes.’

‘Thanks,’ says Barley. ‘Jolly nice of you, old boy.’

The second time, again at Barley’s bidding, Henziger himself goes. Perhaps Barley is saving himself for the evening. Or perhaps he does not trust his own emotions. But she is still there, still alive, still breathing, and she has changed into her party frock.

Yet all the while, even driving back early to town in order to be ahead of his guests, Barley continues to muster his private army of alterable and unalterable facts with a clarity that the most trained and compromised lawyer would be proud of.

16

‘Gyorgy! Marvellous! Fantastic! Where’s Varenka?’

‘Barley, my friend, for Christ’s sake save us! We don’t like the twentieth century any better than you English. Let’s run away from it together! We leave tonight, okay? You buy the tickets?’

‘Yuri. My God, is this your new wife? Leave him. He’s a monster.’

‘Barley! Listen! Everything is fine! We have no more problems! In the old days we had to assume that everything was a mess! Now we can look in our newspapers and confirm it!’

‘Misha! How’s the work going? Super!’

‘It’s war, for Christ’s sake, Barley, open war. First we got to hang the old guard, then we got to fight another Stalingrad!’

‘Leo! Great to see you! How’s Sonya?’

‘Barley, pay attention to me! Communism is not a threat! It’s a parasite industry that lives off the mistakes of all you stupid assholes in the West!’

The reception was in the mirrored upstairs room of an elderly mid-town hotel. Plainclothes guards stood outside on the pavement. More hovered in the hall and on the staircase and at the entrance to the room.

Potomac & Blair had invited a hundred people. Eight had accepted, nobody had refused, and so far a hundred and fifty had arrived. But until Katya was among them Barley preferred the spaces near the door.

A flock of Western girls swept in, escorted by the usual dubious official interpreters, all men. A portly philosopher who played the clarinet arrived with his newest boyfriend.

‘Aleksandr! Fantastic! Marvellous!’

A lonely Siberian called Andrey, already drunk, needed to speak to Barley on a matter of vital urgency. ‘One-party Socialism is a disaster, Barley. It has broken our hearts. Keep your British variety. You will publish my new novel?’

‘Well I don’t know about that, Andrey,’ Barley replied cautiously, glancing towards the door. ‘Our Russian editor admires it but he doesn’t see an English market. We’re thinking about it.’

‘You know why I came tonight?’ Andrey asked.

‘Tell me.’

Another jolly group arrived, but still with no Katya among them.

‘In order to wear my fine clothes for you. We Russians know each other’s tricks too well. We need your Western mirror. You come here, you depart again with our best images reflected in you and we feel noble. If you have published my first novel, it is only logical that you publish my second.’

‘Not if the first one didn’t make any money, it isn’t, Andrey,’ said Barley with rare firmness, and to his relief saw Wicklow slipping towards them across the room.

‘You have heard that Anatoly died in prison of a hunger strike in December? After two years of this Great New Russia we are enjoying?’ Andrey continued, taking another enormous pull of whisky, supplied courtesy of the American Embassy in support of a more sober Russia.

‘Of course we heard about him,’ Wicklow cut in soothingly. ‘It was disgusting.’

‘So why don’t you publish my novel?’

Leaving Wicklow to cope, Barley spread his arms and hastened beaming to the door. The superb Natalie of the All-Union State Library of Foreign Literature had arrived, a wise beauty of sixty. They fell into an adoring embrace.

‘So whom shall we discuss tonight, Barley? James Joyce or Adrian Mole? Why are you looking so intelligent, suddenly? It is because you have become a capitalist.’

A stampede flung half the company to the further end of the room and caused the guards to peer through the doorway in alarm. The roar of conversation dipped and recovered. The buffet had been unveiled.

But still no Katya.

‘Today under the
perestroika
it is all much easier,’ Natalie was saying through her irresistible smile. ‘Foreign travel is no problem. For example to Bulgaria. All we have to do is describe to our bureaucrats what kind of person we think we are. Naturally the Bulgarians need to know this before we arrive. They must be warned what to expect. Are we an intelligent person, medium intelligent or normal intelligent? The Bulgarians need to prepare themselves, perhaps even train themselves a little. Are we calm or excitable, plain-minded or full of imagination? When we have answered these simple questions and a thousand more of the same sort, we may proceed to the more important issues, such as the address and full names of our maternal grandmother, the date of her death and the number of her death certificate and, if they are feeling like it, perhaps also the name of the doctor who signed it. So you may see that our bureaucrats are doing everything possible to introduce the new, relaxed regulations quickly, and send us all abroad on holiday with our children. Barley, whom are you staring round for? Have I lost my looks or are you bored with me already?’

‘So what did you tell them?’ Barley asked with a laugh, and willed himself to keep his eyes on her.

‘Oh, I said I was very intelligent, I was a calm, amusing person and the Bulgarians would be delighted with my company. The bureaucrats are testing our determination, that is all. They hope that if we have to satisfy so many different departments we shall lose courage and decide to stay at home. But it is getting better. Everything is getting a little better. Maybe you don’t believe it, but the
perestroika
is not being run for foreigners. It is run for us.’

‘How is your dog, Barley?’ a man’s gloomy voice murmured at Barley’s side. It was Arkady, unofficial sculptor, with his beautiful unofficial girlfriend.

‘I haven’t got a dog, Arkady. Why do you ask?’

‘Because from this moment it has become safer to discuss one’s dog than one’s fellow human beings, I would say.’

Barley turned his head to follow Arkady’s gaze and saw Alik Zapadny standing on the far side of the room in earnest conversation with Katya.

‘We Muscovites are talking too dangerously these days,’ Arkady continued, his eyes still fixed upon Zapadny. ‘We are becoming careless in our excitement. The informers will have a good harvest this autumn, even if nobody else does. Ask him. He is at the peak of his profession, I would say.’

‘Alik, you old devil, what are you pestering this poor girl about?’ Barley demanded as he embraced Katya first and then Zapadny. ‘I could see her blushing from across the room. You want to watch him, Katya. His English is almost as good as yours, and he talks it a lot faster. How are you?’

‘Oh thank you,’ she said softly. ‘I am
very
well.’

She was wearing the dress she had worn at their meeting at the Odessa. She was withdrawn but in command of herself. Her face had the battered eagerness of bereavement. Dan Zeppelin and Mary Lou stood with them.

‘We were having rather an interesting discussion on human rights, as a matter of fact, Barley,’ Zapadny explained, waving his glass in a circular gesture round the company as if he were taking a collection. ‘Weren’t we, Mr. Zeppelin? We are always so grateful when Westerners preach to us about how to behave towards our criminals, you see! But then what is the difference, I am asking myself, between a country that locks a few extra people in prison, and a country that leaves its gangsters at large? I think I have just found a negotiating point here for our Soviet leaders, actually. Tomorrow morning we shall announce to the so-called Helsinki Watch Committee that we can have nothing further to do with them until they have put the American Mafia behind bars. How would that be, Mr. Zeppelin? We let ours out, you put yours inside. It’s a fair deal, I would say.’

‘You want the polite answer or the real one?’ Dan snapped over Mary Lou’s shoulder.

Another polyglot group of guests swept past, followed after a theatrical pause by none other than the great Sir Peter Oliphant himself, surrounded by a retinue of Russian and English bag-carriers. The noise grew, the room filled. Three sickly-looking British correspondents inspected the depleted buffet and departed. Somebody opened the piano and began playing a Ukrainian song. A woman sang well and others joined her.

‘No, Barley, I do not know what terrifies you,’ Katya was replying, to Barley’s surprise, so he must have asked her. ‘I am sure you are very brave, like all English.’

In the heat of the room and the swirl of the occasion, his own excitement had turned suddenly against him. He felt drunk but not from alcohol for he had been nursing one tired Scotch all evening.

‘Maybe there’s nothing there,’ he ventured, addressing not just Katya but a ring of unfamiliar faces. ‘Out in the woodwork. Talent.’ Everyone was waiting, Barley too. He was trying to look at all of them while his eyes saw only Katya. What had he been saying? What had they been hearing? Their faces were still turned to him but there was no light in them, not even Katya’s; there was only concern. He stumbled on. ‘We had this vision, all of us, for years, of great Russian artists waiting to be discovered.’ He faltered. ‘Well, didn’t we? Epic novels, plays? Great painters, banned, working in secrecy? Attics full of wonderful illegal stuff? Musicians the same? We talked about it. Dreamed about it. The secret continuation of the nineteenth century. “And when the thaw comes, they’ll all come out of the ice and dazzle us,” we told each other. So where the hell are they, all these geniuses? What if they froze to death in the ice? Maybe the repression worked. That’s all I’m saying.’

A spellbound silence followed before Katya came to his aid. ‘The Russian talent exists and has always existed, Barley, even in the worst times. It cannot be destroyed,’ she declared with a hint of her old strictness. ‘Perhaps it will first have to adjust itself to the new circumstances, but soon it will express itself brilliantly. I am sure that is what you wish to say.’

Henziger is making his speech. It is a masterpiece of unconscious hypocrisy. ‘May the pioneering venture of Potomac & Blair provide a modest addition to the great new era of East-West understanding!’ he declares, puffed up by his conviction. His voice lifts and with it his glass. He is the honest trader, he is every decent American with his heart in the right place. And no doubt that he is precisely what he thinks he is, for the ham actor in him lies just below the surface. ‘Let’s make each other rich!’ he cries, raising his glass still higher. ‘Let’s make each other free! Let’s trade together, and let’s talk together and let’s drink together, and let’s make the world a better place. Ladies and gentlemen – to you and to Potomac & Blair and to our mutual profit – and to the
perestroika
– good health! Amen!’

They are yelling for Barley. Spikey Morgan starts it, Yuri and Alik Zapadny take it up, all the old hands who know the game yell, ‘Barley, Barley!’ Soon the whole room is yelling for Barley, some of them without even knowing why, and for a moment none of them see him anyway. Then suddenly he is standing on the buffet table holding a borrowed saxophone and playing ‘My Funny Valentine’, which he has played at every Moscow book fair since the first, while Jack Henziger accompanies him on the piano in the unmistakable style of Fats Waller.

The guards at the door creep into the room to listen, the guards from the stairs come to the doorway and the guards from the hall come to the stairs as the first notes of Barley’s swansong gather clarity and then a splendid power.

‘We’re going to the new Indian, for Christ’s sake,’ Henziger protests as they stand on the pavement under the stodgy gaze of the
toptuny
. ‘Bring Katya with you! We’ve booked a table!’

‘Sorry, Jack. We’re bespoke. Longstanding date.’

Henziger is only putting on a show. ‘She needs welfaring,’ Barley has confided to him. ‘I’m going to take her off and give her a quiet supper somewhere.’

But Barley did not take Katya to dinner for their farewell evening, as the irregulars confirmed before they were stood down. And it was Katya, not Barley this time, who did the taking. She took him to the place known to every urban Russian boy and girl from adolescence, and it is to be found at the top of every purpose-built apartment block in every major city. There is not a Russian of Katya’s generation who does not count such places among her memories of early love. And such a place was to be found at the top of Katya’s staircase also, at the point where the last flight ends and the attics begin, though it was more sought after in winter than in summer because it included the suppurating hot-water tank and steaming black-bandaged pipes.

But first it was necessary for her to inspect Matvey and the twins and establish that they were still safe, while Barley stood on the landing and waited for her. Then she led him by the hand up several flights until the last, which was of wood. She had a key and it fitted the rusted steel door that ordered all trespassers to keep their distance. And when she had unlocked it and relocked it, she led him across the rafters to the bit of hard floor where she had prepared a makeshift bed, with a muddied view of the stars through the filthy skylight and the chugging of the pipes and the stench of drying clothes for company.

‘The letter you gave to Landau went astray,’ he said. ‘It ended up in the hands of our officials. It was the officials who sent me to you. I’m sorry about that.’

But there was no more time for either of them to be shocked by anything. He had told her little of his plan and he told her no more now. It was understood between them that she knew too much already. And besides, they had more important matters to discuss, for it was on this night also that Katya told Barley the things that afterwards constituted the rest of his knowledge of her. And she confessed her love for him in terms simple enough to sustain him through the separation they both knew lay ahead of them.