The Russia House (40 page)

‘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.

And now, for yet more immense rewards, this particular Long Distance Gunner had agreed to ‘lend’ his truck to a ‘Western dealer’ here in the very heart of Moscow. And this same dealer, who was one of Cy’s own army of
toptuny
, lent it to Cy, who in turn stuffed inside it all kinds of ingeniously portable surveillance and audio equipment, which was then swept away again before the truck was returned through intermediaries to its legal driver.

Nothing of the sort had ever happened before. Our own mobile safe room, in Moscow!

Ned alone found the whole idea unsettling. The Long Distance Gunners worked in pairs, as Ned knew better than anyone. By KGB edict, these pairs were deliberately incompatible, and in many cases each man had a responsibility to report upon the other. But when Ned asked if he could read the operational file, it was denied him under the very laws of security he himself held dear.

But the most impressive piece of Langley’s new armoury had still to be unveiled, and once again Ned had not been able to hold out against it. From now onwards, sound tapes in Moscow would be encrypted into random codes and transmitted in digital pulses in one-thousandth of the time that the tapes would take to run if you were listening to them in your drawing room. Yet when the pulses were restored to sound by the receiving station, the Langley wizards insisted, you could never tell the tapes had had such a rough time.

The word WAIT was forming in pretty pyramids. Spying is waiting.

The word SOUND replaced it. Spying is listening.

Ned and Sheriton put on their headsets as Clive and I slipped into the spare seats behind them and put on ours.

Katya sat pensively on her bed staring at the telephone, not wanting it to ring again.

Why do you give your name when none of us give names? she asked him in her mind.

Why do you give mine?

Is that Katya? How are you? This is Igor speaking. Just to tell you I have heard nothing more from him, okay?

Then why do you ring me to tell me nothing?

The usual time, okay? The usual place. No problem. Just like before.

Why do you repeat what needs no repetition, after I have already told you I will be at the hospital at the agreed time?

By then he’ll know what his position is, he’ll know which plane he can catch, everything. Then you don’t have to worry, okay? How about your publisher? Did he show up all right?

‘Igor, I do not know which publisher you are referring to.’

And she rang off before he could say more.

I am being ungrateful, she told herself. When people are ill it is normal that old friends should rally. And if they promote themselves overnight from casual acquaintance to old friend, and take centre stage when for years they have hardly spoken to you, it is still a sign of loyalty and there is nothing sinister about it, even if only six months ago Yakov declared Igor to be unredeemable – ‘Igor has continued along the path I left behind,’ he had remarked after a chance meeting in the street. ‘Igor asks too many questions.’