The Untouchable (17 page)

In Moscow there were few architectural magnificences to distract one’s attention from the people passing by in those impossibly wide, sleet-grey streets. The weather was unseasonably cold, with a wind in which one could feel already the glass-sharp edge of winter. We had been warned of shortages, and although the worst of the famines in the countryside were over by then, even the most enthusiastic among our party found it hard, in contemplating those hunched crowds, not to recognise the marks of deprivation and dull fear. Yes, Miss V., I can be honest: Stalin’s Russia was a horrible place. But we understood that what was happening here was only a start, you see. The temporal factor is what you must always keep in mind if you wish to understand us and our politics. The present we could forgive for the sake of the future. And then, it was a matter of choosing; as we trooped past the glorious monuments of Peter’s northern Venice, or tossed in our lumpy beds in the Moscova Nova, or stared in a bored stupor through the grimy windows of a rattling railway carriage at mile after mile of empty fields on the way south to Kiev, we could hear in our mind’s ear, off to the west, faintly but with unignorable distinctness, the stamp and rattle of drilling armies. Hitler or Stalin: could life be simpler?

And there was art. Here, I told myself, here, for the first time
since the Italian Renaissance, art had become a public medium, available to all, a lamp to illumine even the humblest of lives. By art, I need not tell you, I meant the art of the past: socialist-realism I passed over in tactful silence. (An aphorism:
Kitsch is to art as physics is to mathematics
—
its technology.)
But can you imagine my excitement at the possibilities that seemed to open before me in Russia? Art liberated for the populace—Poussin for the Proletariat! Here was being built a society which would apply to its own workings the rules of order and harmony by which art operates; a society in which the artist would no longer be dilettante or romantic rebel, pariah or parasite; a society whose art would be more deeply rooted in ordinary life than any since medieval times. What a prospect, for a sensibility as hungry for certainties as mine was!

I recall a discussion on the topic that I had with Boy on the last night before we docked in Leningrad. I say discussion, but really it was one of Boy’s lectures, for he was drunk and in hectoring mood as he expounded what he grandly called his Theory of the Decline of Art under Bourgeois Values, which I had heard many times before, and which anyway I think was largely filched from a refugee Czech professor of aesthetics whom he had hired to give a talk on the BBC but whose accent was so impenetrable the talk could not be broadcast. It was hardly original, consisting mainly of sweeping generalisations on the glory of the Renaissance and the humanistic self-delusions of the Enlightenment, and all boiled down in the end to the thesis that in our time only the totalitarian state could legitimately assume the role of patron of the arts. I believed it, of course—I still do, surprising as it may seem—but that night, stimulated, I suppose, by Hollands gin and the needle-sharp northern air, I thought it a lot of fatuous twaddle, and said so. Really, I was not prepared to be lectured to by the likes of Boy Bannister, especially on art. He stopped, and glared at me. He had taken on that bulbous, froggy look—thick lips thicker than ever, eyes bulging and slightly crossed—that the combination of drink and polemics always produced in him. He was sitting cross-legged on the end of my bunk in shirt-sleeves, his braces loosed and his flies half unbuttoned; his big feet were bare and crusted with dirt.

“Trespassing on your territory, am I?” he said, all scowl and slur. “Touchy old Vic.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s the trouble,” I said.

As so often when he was stood up to, he chose not to fight. The bloodshot scowl slackened and slid.

“America,” he said after a while, nodding ponderously to himself. “America is the real bloody enemy. Art, culture, all that: nothing. America will sweep it all away, into the trash-can. You’ll see.”

An enormous whey-faced moon—which, I noticed, bore a striking resemblance to his own large pale head and swollen visage—was swinging gently in the porthole at his shoulder. The wind had abated and the night was calm, with the mildest of breezes. The sky at midnight was still light at the edges. I have always been susceptible to the romance of shipboard.

“What about the Germans?” I said. “You don’t think they are a threat?”

“Oh, the Germans,” he growled, with a drunkenly mountainous shrug. “We’ll have to fight them, of course. First they’ll beat us, then the Americans will beat them, and that’ll be that. We’ll be just another Yank state.”

“That’s what Querell thinks, too.”

He batted the air with a big soiled hand.

“Querell—pah.”

The ship’s hooter blared; we were approaching landfall.

“And there’s Russia, of course,” I said.

He nodded, slowly, solemnly.

“Well, it’s the only hope, old chap, isn’t it?” I should remark that from the start of the voyage Boy and I had found ourselves somewhat estranged. I believe Boy had been annoyed to discover that I was to accompany him on this momentous visit. He had thought he had been the only one of our circle to be chosen. He glanced at me now, sullen and suspicious, from under his brows. “Don’t you think it’s the only hope?”

“Of course.”

We were silent for a time, nursing our tooth-glasses of gin, then Boy in a tone that was too casual said:

“Have you a contact in Moscow?”

“No,” I answered, immediately on the alert. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged again.

“Oh, I just wondered if Hartmann had given you a name, or something. You know: a contact. Nothing like that?”

“No.”

“Hmm.”

He brooded glumly. Boy adored the trappings of the secret world, the code names and letter-drops and the rest. Brought up on Buchan and Henty, he saw his life in the lurid terms of an old-fashioned thriller and himself dashing through the preposterous plot heedless of all perils. In this fantasy he was always the hero, of course, never the villain in the pay of a foreign power.

He need not have felt cast down. No sooner had we arrived in the capital—tank-grey sky, great sloping spaces spectrally peopled with ugly, disproportionate statuary, and always that constant, icy wind cutting into one’s face like a flung handful of ground glass—than he disappeared for an afternoon, and turned up at dinnertime looking insufferably pleased with himself. When I asked where he had been he only grinned and tapped a finger along the side of his nose, and peered in happy horror at his plate and said loudly:

“Good Christ, is this to eat, or has it been eaten already?”

My turn came to be singled out. It was on our last night in Moscow. I was walking back to the hotel, having been at the Kremlin Palace for most of the day. As always after a long time spent among pictures (or an hour in bed with a boy), I felt lightheaded and tottery, and at first did not register the motor car chugging along beside me at walking speed. (Really, that is the kind of thing they did; I suspect they got it from Hollywood movies, of which they were depressingly fond.) Then, with the car still moving, the door opened and a tall, thin young man in a tightly belted, ankle-length black leather overcoat stepped nimbly on to the pavement and approached me rapidly at a sort of stiff-armed march, his heels coming down so violently on the pavement it seemed they must strike sparks from the stone. He wore a soft hat and black leather gloves. He had a narrow, hard
face, but his eyes were large and soft and amber-coloured, and made me think, incongruously, of my stepmother’s warm, wistful gaze. A hot qualm of fear was spreading slowly upwards from the base of my spine. He addressed me in a harsh growl— all Russians sounded like drunks to me—and I began flusteredly to protest that I did not understand the language, but then realised that he was speaking in English, or an approximation of it. Would I please to come with him. He had car. He indicated car, which had come to a stop and, the engine still going, stood shuddering like a hot horse.

“This is my hotel,” I said, in a loud, foolish voice. “I am staying here.” I pointed to the marble entryway, where the doorman, a blue-chinned heavy in a dirty brown uniform, stood looking on with knowing amusement. I do not know what sort of sanctuary I thought I was claiming. “My passport is in my room,” I said; it sounded as if I were reading from a phrase-book. “I can fetch it if you wish.”

The man in the leather coat laughed. Now, I must say something about this laugh, which was peculiar to Soviet officialdom, and especially prevalent among the security establishment. It varied from Leathercoat’s brief, bitten-off snicker to the melodeon wheeze of the ones at the top, but essentially it was the same wherever one heard it. It was not the mirthless snarl of the Gestapo man, nor the fat chuckle of a Chinese torturer. There was real, if bleak, amusement in it, almost, one might say, a kind of attenuated delight; Here’s another one, it seemed to say, another poor dolt who thinks he has some weight in the world. The chief ingredient of this laugh, however, was a sort of bored weariness. The one who laughed had seen everything, every form of bluster and bombast, every failed attempt at cajoling and ingratiation; had seen it, and then had seen the abasements, the tears, had heard the cries for mercy and the heels clattering backwards over the flagstones and the cell doors banging shut. I exaggerate. I mean, I am exaggerating my perspicacity. It is only with hindsight that I am able to dismantle this laugh into its component parts.

The car was a big black ugly high-built thing, shaped like one of those loaves that in my childhood were called turnovers, with
a domed roof and a long, dented snout. The driver, who seemed hardly more than a boy, did not turn to look at me, but loosed the brake a second before I was seated, so that I was thrown back on the upholstery, my head hobbling and heart crouched in fright in a corner of its cage, as we shot off along the wide avenue at a lumbering but reckless speed. Leathercoat took off his hat and held it primly on his lap. His short fair hair was damp with sweat, so that the pink scalp showed through, and was moulded by the crown of the hat into a pointed shape which was almost endearing. A bit of dried shaving soap, speckled with straw-coloured stubble, was lodged under his left earlobe. Buildings rose up in the windscreen, vast, blank-faced and, to my eyes, increasingly menacing, and then collapsed silently behind us.

“Where are you taking me?” I said.

I might not have spoken. Leathercoat was sitting bolt upright, watching the passing scene with lively interest, as if he, and not I, were the visitor. I leaned back on the seat—the upholstery smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke and something that seemed to be piss—and folded my arms. A curious calm had overtaken me. I seemed to be floating a foot above myself, supported somehow by the onward movement of the car, like a bird suspended on an air thermal. I wish I could believe this was a sign of moral bravery, but the most it seemed to be was indifference. Or is indifference another name for bravery? At last we pulled off the street and crossed a cobbled square, the tyres burbling and squeaking, and I saw the onion domes gleaming in the steel-grey twilight and realised with a start, and an unexpected, apprehensive thrill, that I was being brought back to the Kremlin.

Though not to the art gallery. We drew to a lurching stop in a crooked courtyard and, while the boy driver—who may well have been a little old man—continued sitting with the back of his head firmly turned to me, Leathercoat jumped out and hurried around to my side at a canted run and wrenched open the door before I could find the handle myself. I stepped out calmly, feeling a bit like an elderly and no longer grand lady arriving by taxi at Ascot. Immediately, as if the touch of my foot on the cobbles had operated a hidden spring, a great high set of double doors in front of me was thrown open and I found myself
blinking in an expressionist wedge of somehow glutinous electric light. I hesitated, and turned my head, I don’t know why— perhaps in a last wild search for a means of escape—and glanced upwards, past the high, dark-windowed walls of the surrounding buildings, that seemed to lean inwards at their tops, and saw the sky, delicate, pale and depthless, where a solitary crystalline star, like a star on a Christmas card, like the star of Bethlehem itself, stood with its stiletto point poised on an onion dome, and in that moment I realised with a sharp, precise shock that I was about to step out of one life and into another. Then a richly accented voice said warmly, “Professor Maskell, please!” and I turned to find a short, dapper, balding man in an ill-fitting, tightly buttoned three-piece suit approaching me from the doorway with both stubby little hands outstretched. He was a dead ringer for the older Martin Heidegger, with a smudge of moustache and a sinisterly avuncular smile and little black eyes shiny as marbles. Never taking those eyes off mine, he fumbled for my hand and pressed it fervently between both of his. “Welcome, comrade, welcome,” he said breathily, “welcome to the Kremlin!” And I was ushered inside, and felt a tingling sensation in the middle of my back, as if that star had dropped out of the sky and stabbed me between the shoulder blades.

Mouldy corridors, ill lit, with someone standing in every other doorway—sag-suited officials, clerks in drooping cardigans, secretary-looking middle-aged women—all smiling the same worrying smile as Heidegger, and nodding mute greetings and encouragement, as if I had won a prize and was on my way to be presented with it (I had something of the same experience years later, when I was escorted through the Palace to kneel before Mrs. W. and her sword). Heidegger walked at my side, gripping my arm above the elbow and murmuring rapidly in my ear. Although his English was faultless—another mark of the sinister—his accent was so thick I could not properly understand what he was saying, and in my agitation and apprehensiveness was hardly listening, anyway. We arrived at another pair of tall double doors—I was, I realised, nervously humming a snatch of Mussorgsky in my head—and Leathercoat, who had been loping nonchalantly behind us with his hat in his hand,
stepped forward quickly and, like a harem guard, shoulders and head down and both arms thrust out stiffly, pushed the doors open on a vast, high-ceilinged, brown-painted room hung with an enormous chandelier that was a kind of monstrous, multiple parody of the star I had seen outside in the square. Dwarf people, or so they seemed, stood about the parquet floor, uneasily nursing empty glasses; at our appearance they all turned and for a moment seemed on the point of breaking into applause.