The Russia House (12 page)

‘Mr. Wonderful, that was me. Star of stage and screen. Western, courteous and specious. That’s why I go there, isn’t it? Sovs are the only people daft enough to listen to my bullshit.’ His forelock dipped towards his glass again. ‘It’s the way it happens there. You go for a walk in the countryside and end up arguing with a bunch of drunk poets about freedom versus responsibility. You take a leak in some filthy public loo, somebody leans over from the next stall and asks you whether there’s life after death. Because you’re a Westerner. So you know. And you tell them. And they remember. Nothing goes away.’

He seemed to be in danger of ceasing to talk at all.

‘Why don’t you just tell us what happened and leave the reproaches to us?’ Clive suggested, somehow implying that the reproaches were above Barley’s station.

‘I shone. That’s what happened. A glib mind had a field day. Forget it.’

But forgetting was the last thing anybody intended, as Bob’s cheerful smile showed. ‘Barley, I think you are being too hard on yourself. Nobody should blame themselves for being entertaining, for Pete’s sake. All you did was sing for your supper, by the sounds of it.’

‘What did you talk about?’ said Clive, undeflected by Bob’s goodheartedness.

Barley shrugged. ‘How to rebuild the Russian Empire between lunch and teatime. Peace, progress and
glasnost
by the bottleful. Instant disarmament without the option.’

‘Are these subjects you frequently enlarge upon?’

‘When I’m in Russia, yes they are,’ Barley retorted, provoked again by Clive’s tone, but never for long.

‘May we know what you said?’

But Barley was not telling his story to Clive. He was telling it to himself and to the room and whoever was in it, to his fellow passengers, point for point, an inventory of his folly. ‘Disarmament was not a military matter and not a political one, I said. It was a matter of human will. We had to decide whether we wanted peace or war and prepare for it. Because what we prepared for was going to be what we got.’ He broke off. ‘It was top-of-my-head stuff,’ he explained, again selecting Ned. ‘Warmed-up arguments I’d read around the place.’

As if he felt more explanation was required, he started again. ‘It so happened I was an expert that week. I’d thought the firm might commission a quick book. Some tout at the book fair wanted me to take UK rights in a book on
glasnost
and the crisis of peace. Essays by past and present hawks, reappraisals of strategy. Could real peace break out after all? They’d signed up some of the old American warhorses from the ’sixties and shown how a lot of them had turned full circle since they left office.’

He was apologising and I wondered why. What was he preparing us for? Why did he feel he should lessen the shock in advance? Bob, who was no kind of fool, for all his candour, must have been asking himself the same question.

‘Sounds a fine enough idea to me, Barley.
I
can see money in that. Might even take a piece of it myself,’ he added with a locker-room chuckle.

‘So you had the patter,’ Clive said in his barbed undertone. ‘And you regurgitated it. Is that what you’re telling us? I’m sure it isn’t easy to reconstruct one’s alcoholic flights of fancy but we’d be grateful if you’d do your best.’

What had Clive studied, I wondered, if he ever had? Where? Who bore him, sired him? Where did the Service find these dead suburban souls with all their values, or lack of them, perfectly in place?

Yet Barley remained compliant in the face of this renewed onslaught. ‘I said I believed in Gorbachev,’ he said equably, giving himself a sip of water. ‘They mightn’t, I did. I said the West’s job was to find the other half of him, and the East’s was to recognise the importance of the half they had. I said that if the Americans had ever bothered as much about disarmament as they had about putting some fool on the moon or pink stripes into toothpaste, we’d have had disarmament long ago. I said the West’s great sin was to believe we could bankrupt the Soviet system by raising the bidding on the arms race, because that way we were gambling with the fate of mankind. I said that by shaking our sabres the West had given the Soviet leaders the excuse to keep their gates locked and run a garrison state.’

Walter let out a whinnying laugh and cupped his gappy teeth with his hairless hand. ‘Oh my Lord! So
we’re
to blame for Russia’s ills. Oh, I think that’s
marvellously
rich! You don’t think that by any chance they did it to themselves, for instance? Locked themselves up inside their own paranoia? No, he doesn’t. I can see.’

Undeterred, Barley resumed his confession. ‘Somebody asked me, didn’t I think nuclear weapons had kept the peace for forty years? I said that was Jesuitical bollocks. Might as well say gunpowder had kept the peace between Waterloo and Sarajevo. Anyway, I said, what’s peace? The bomb didn’t stop Korea and it didn’t stop Vietnam. It didn’t stop anyone from pinching Czecho or blockading Berlin or building the Berlin Wall or going into Afghanistan. If that’s peace, let’s try it without the bomb. I said what was needed was not experiments in space but experiments in human nature. The superpowers should police the world together. I was flying.’

‘And did you
believe
any of this nonsense?’ Clive asked.

Barley didn’t seem to know. He seemed suddenly to regard himself as facile by definition, and became shamefaced. ‘Then we talked about jazz,’ he said. ‘Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young. I played some.’

‘You mean somebody had a
saxophone
?’ Bob cried in spontaneous amusement. ‘What else did they have? Bass drums? A ten-piece? Barley, I’m not believing this!’

I thought at first that Barley was walking out. He unwound himself and clambered to his feet. He peered round for the door, then headed apologetically towards it, so that Ned rose in alarm, afraid that Brock would get to him first. But Barley had halted halfway across the room where a low carved table stood. Stooping before it, he began lightly slapping his fingertips on the edge while he sang ‘pah-pah-paah, pah-pah-pah-pah,’ through his nose, to the simulated accompaniment of cymbals, wire brushes and drums.

Bob was already applauding, Walter too. So was I, and Ned was laughing. Clive alone found nothing to entertain him. Barley took a sobering pull from his glass and sat down again.

‘Then they asked me what could be done,’ he said as if he’d never left his chair.

‘Who did?’ said Clive, with that maddening note of disbelief he had.

‘One of the people at the table. What does it matter?’

‘Let’s assume everything matters,’ said Clive.

Barley was doing his Russian voice again, clogged and pressing. ‘ “All right, Barley. Given is all as you say. Who will conduct these experiments in human nature?” You will, I said. They were very surprised. Why us? I said because, when it came to radical change, the Sovs had it easier than the West. They had a small leadership and an intelligentsia with great traditional influence. In a Western democracy it was much harder to make yourself heard above the crowd. They were pleased by the paradox. So was I.’

Not even this frontal assault upon the great democratic values could ruffle Bob’s genial forbearance. ‘Well, Barley, that’s a broad-brush judgment but I guess there’s some truth in it at that.’

‘But did you suggest what should be
done
?’ Clive insisted.

‘I said there was only Utopia left. I said that what had looked like a pipe dream twenty years ago was today our only hope, whether we’re talking disarmament or ecology or plain human survival. Gorbachev understood that, the West didn’t want to. I said that Western intellectuals must find their voice. I said the West should be setting the example, not following it. It was everyone’s duty to start the avalanche.’

‘So unilateral disarmament,’ said Clive, clamping his hands together in a knot. ‘Aldermaston, here we come. Well, well. Yes.’ Except that he didn’t say ‘yes’ so much as ‘ears’ which was how he said yes when he meant no.

But Bob was impressed. ‘And all this eloquence just from reading around the subject a little?’ he said. ‘Barley, I think that’s extraordinary. Why, if I could absorb that way, I’d be a proud man.’

Perhaps
too
extraordinary, he was also suggesting, but the implications evidently passed Barley by.

‘And while you were saving us from our worst instincts, what was the man called Goethe doing?’ asked Clive.

‘Nothing. The others joined in. Goethe didn’t.’

‘But he listened? Wide-eyed, I should imagine.’

‘We were redesigning the world by then. Yalta all over again. Everyone was talking at once. Except Goethe. He didn’t eat, he didn’t talk. I kept tossing ideas at him, simply because he wasn’t joining in. All he did was grow paler and drink more. I gave him up.’

And Goethe never spoke, Barley continued in the same tone of mystified self-recrimination. All through the afternoon not a dickybird, Barley said. Goethe would listen, he’d glare into some invisible crystal ball. He’d laugh, though not by any means when there was anything much to laugh about. Or he’d get up and cut a straightish line to the drinks table to fetch himself another vodka when everyone else was drinking wine, and come back with a tumbler of the stuff, which he knocked off in a couple of swigs whenever anyone proposed a fitting toast. But Goethe, he proposed no toasts at all, said Barley. He was one of those people who exert a moral influence by their silence, he said, so that you end up wondering whether they’re dying of a secret illness or riding on some great accomplishment.

When Nezhdanov led the group indoors to listen to Count Basie on the stereo, Goethe tagged obediently along. It wasn’t till late into the night, when Barley had given up all thought of him, that he finally heard Goethe speak.

Once again Ned permitted himself a rare question. ‘How did the others behave towards him?’

‘They respected him. He was their mascot. “Let’s see what Goethe thinks.” He’d raise his glass and drink to them and we’d all laugh except Goethe.’

‘The women too?’

‘Everyone. They deferred to him. Practically made way for him. The great Goethe, here he comes.’

‘And no one told you where he lived or worked?’

‘They said he was on holiday from somewhere where drinking wasn’t approved of. So it was a drinking holiday. They kept drinking to his drinking holiday. He was someone’s brother. Tamara’s, I don’t know. Maybe cousin. I didn’t catch it.’

‘Do you think they were protecting him?’ said Clive.

Barley’s pauses are like nobody else’s, I thought. He has his own tenuous hold on present things. His mind leaves the room and you wait on tenterhooks to see whether it will come back.

‘Yes,’ said Barley suddenly, sounding surprised by his own answer. ‘Yes, yes, they were protecting him. That’s right. They were his supporters’ club, of course they were.’

‘Protecting him from what?’

Another pause.

‘Maybe from having to explain himself. I didn’t think that at the time. But I think it now. Yes I do.’

‘And why should he not explain himself? Can you suggest a reason without inventing one?’ asked Clive, determined apparently to hold Barley to the angry edge.

But Barley didn’t rise. ‘I don’t invent,’ he said, and I think we all knew that was true. He was gone again. ‘He was high-powered. You felt it in him,’ he said, returning.

‘What does that mean?’

‘The eloquent silence. All you hear at a hundred miles an hour is the ticking of the brain.’

‘But no one told you, “He’s a genius,” or whatever?’

‘No one told me. No one needed to.’

Barley glanced at Ned to find him nodding his understanding. A fieldman to his fingertips, if necessarily a grounded one, Ned had a way of popping up ahead of you when you thought he was still trying to catch you up.

Bob had another question. ‘Anyone take you by the elbow and explain to you just
why
Goethe had a drinking problem, Barley?’

Barley let out an unfettered laugh. His momentary freedoms were a little frightening. ‘You don’t have to have a
reason
to drink in Russia, for Christ’s sake! Name me a single Russian worth his salt who could face the problems of his country sober!’

He dropped into silence again, grimacing into the shadows. He wrinkled up his eyes and muttered an imprecation of some kind, I assumed against himself. Then snapped out of it. ‘Woke with a jolt round midnight,’ he laughed. ‘ “Christ. Where am I?” Lying in a deck chair on a verandah with a bloody blanket over me! Thought I was in the States at first. One of those New England screened porches with panels of mosquito gauze and the garden beyond. Couldn’t think how I’d got to America so fast after a pleasant lunch in Peredelkino. Then I remembered they’d stopped talking to me and I’d got bored. Nothing personal. They were drunk and they were tired of being drunk in a foreign language. So I’d settled on the verandah with a bottle of Scotch. Somebody had thrown a blanket over me to keep the dew off. The moon must have woken me, I thought. Big full moon. Bloodshot. Then I heard this chap talking to me. Very sombre. Immaculate English. Christ, I thought, new guests at this hour. “Some things are necessary evils, Mr. Barley. Some things are more evil than necessary,” he says. He’s quoting me from lunch. Part of my worldshaking lecture on peace, I don’t know who I was quoting. Then I take a closer look around and I make out this nine-foot-tall bearded vulture hovering over me, clutching a bottle of vodka, hair flapping round his face in the breeze. Next thing I know he’s crouching beside me with his knees up round his ears, filling up his glass. “Hullo, Goethe,” I say. “Why aren’t you dead yet? Nice to see you about.” ’

Whatever had set Barley free had put him back in prison again, for his face had once more clouded over.

‘Then he gives me back another of my lunchtime pearls. “All victims are equal. None are more equal than others.”

‘I laugh. But not too much. I’m embarrassed, I suppose. Queasy. Feel I’ve been spied on. Chap sits there all through lunch, drunk, doesn’t eat, doesn’t say a word. All of a sudden ten hours later he’s quoting me like a tape recorder. It’s not comfortable.