The Russia House (25 page)

‘When the reception ended I asked my father for three roubles to go to the Café Sever to eat ice-cream with my companions. There were several daughters of academics at the reception, some were my school comrades. We made a group and I invited Yakov to join us. On the way I asked him where he lived and he told me: in the street of Professor Popov. He asked me, “Who was Popov?” I laughed. Everyone knows who Popov is, I said. Popov was the great Russian inventor of radio who transmitted a signal even before Marconi, I told him. Yakov was not so sure. “Perhaps Popov never existed,” he replied. “Perhaps the Party invented him in order to satisfy our Russian obsession with being the first to invent everything.” From this I knew that he was still struggling with doubts about what they would do concerning Czechoslovakia.’

Feeling anything but wise, Barley gave a wise nod.

‘I asked him whether his apartment was a communal or a separate one. He said it was a room which he shared with an old acquaintance from the Litmo who was working in a special night laboratory, so they seldom met. I said, “Then show me where you live. I wish to know that you are comfortable.” He was my first lover,’ she said simply. ‘He was extremely delicate, as I had expected him to be, but also passionate.’

‘Bravo,’ said Barley so softly that perhaps she didn’t hear.

‘I stayed with him three hours and took the last metro home. My father was waiting up for me and I talked to him like a stranger visiting his house. I did not sleep. Next day I heard the news in English on the BBC. The tanks had gone into Prague. My father, who had predicted this, was in despair. But I was not concerned for my father. Instead of going to school I went back to look for Yakov. His room-mate told me I would find him at the Saigon, which was the informal name of a cafeteria on the Nevsky Prospekt, a place for poets and drug-pedlars and speculators, not professors’ daughters. He was drinking coffee but he was drunk. He had been drinking vodka since he heard the news. “Your father is right,” he said. “The system will always win. We talk freedom but we are oppressors.” Three months later he had returned to Novosibirsk. He was bitter with himself but he still went. “It is a choice between dying of obscurity or dying of compromise,” he said. “Since that is a choice between death and death, we may as well choose the more comfortable alternative.” ’

‘Where did that leave you?’ Barley asked.

‘I was ashamed of him. I told him that he was my ideal and that he had disappointed me. I had been reading the novels of Stendhal, so I addressed him like a great French heroine. Nevertheless I believed that he had taken an immoral decision. He had talked one thing and done the opposite. In the Soviet Union, I told him, too many people do this. I told him I would never speak to him again until he had corrected his immoral choice. I reminded him of E. M. Forster, whom we both admired. I told him that he must connect. That his thoughts and actions must be one. Naturally I soon relented and for a while we resumed our relationship, but it was no longer romantic and when he took up his new work he corresponded without warmth. I was ashamed for him. Perhaps also for myself.’

‘And so you married Volodya,’ Barley said.

‘That is correct.’

‘And you kept Yakov going on the side?’ he suggested, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

She was blushing and scowling at once. ‘For a while, it is true, Yakov and I maintained a clandestine relationship. Not often, but sometimes. He said we were a novel that had not been finished. Each of us was looking to the other to complete his destiny. He was correct, but I had not realised the strength of his influence over me or of mine over him. I thought that if we met more we might become free of each other. When I realised this was not the case I ceased to see him. I loved him but I refused to see him. Also I was pregnant from Volodya.’

‘When did you get together again?’

‘After the last Moscow book fair. You were his catalyst. He had been on vacation and drinking very heavily. He had written many internal papers and registered many official complaints. None of them had made any impression on the system, though I think he had succeeded in annoying the authorities. Now you had spoken into his heart. You had put his thoughts into words at a crucial moment in his life, and you had related words to actions, which Yakov does not find easy. The next day, he telephoned me at my office, using a pretext. He had borrowed the apartment of a friend. My relationship with Volodya was by then disintegrating, although we were still living together because Volodya had to wait for an apartment. While we sat in the room of Yakov’s friend, he spoke very much about you. You had made everything come clear for him. That was his phrase to me. “The Englishman has given me the solution. From now on, there is only action, there is only sacrifice,” he said. “Words are the curse of our Russian society. They are a substitute for deeds.” Yakov knew that I had contact with Western publishers, so he told me to look for your name among our lists of foreign visitors. He set to work at once to prepare a manuscript. I should give it to you. He was drinking a great deal. I was scared for him. “How can you write if you are drunk?” He replied that he drank to survive.’

Barley took another nip of whisky. ‘Did you tell Volodya about Yakov?’

‘No.’

‘Did Volodya find out?’

‘No.’

‘So who does know?’

It seemed she had been asking herself the same question, for she replied with great promptness.

‘Yakov tells his friends nothing. This I know. If I am the one who borrows the apartment, I say only that it is for a private matter. In Russia we have secrecy and we have loneliness, but we have no word for privacy.’

‘What about your girlfriends? Not a hint to them?’

‘We are not angels. If I ask them for certain favours, they make certain assumptions. Sometimes it is I who provide the favours. That is all.’

‘And nobody helped Yakov compile his manuscript?’

‘No.’

‘None of his drinking friends?’

‘No.’

‘How can you be certain?’

‘Because I am certain that in his thoughts he is completely alone.’

‘Are you happy with him?’

‘Please?’

‘Do you like him – as well as love him? Does he make you laugh?’

‘I believe that Yakov is a great and vulnerable man who cannot survive without me. To be a perfectionist is to be a child. It is also to be impractical. I believe that without me he would break.’

‘Do you think he’s broken now?’

‘Yakov would say, which one is sane? The one who plans the extermination of mankind, or the one who takes steps to prevent it?’

‘How about the one who does both?’

She didn’t reply. He was provoking her and she knew it. He was jealous, wanting to erode the edges of her faith.

‘Is he married?’ he asked.

An angry look swept across her face. ‘I do not believe he is married but it is not important.’

‘Has he got kids?’

‘These are ridiculous questions.’

‘It’s a pretty ridiculous situation.’

‘He says that human beings are the only creatures to make victims of their children. He is determined to provide no victims.’

Except yours, Barley thought: but he managed not to say it.

‘So, you followed his career with interest,’ he suggested roughly, returning to the question of Goethe’s access.

‘From a distance, and without detail.’

‘And all that time you didn’t know what work he did? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘What I knew, I deduced only from our discussions of ethical problems. “How much of mankind should we exterminate in order to preserve mankind? How can we talk of a struggle for peace when we plan only terrible wars? How can we speak of selective targets when we have not the accuracy to hit them?” When we discuss these matters, I am naturally aware of his involvement. When he tells me that the greatest danger to mankind is not the reality of Soviet power but the illusion of it, I do not question him. I encourage him. I urge him to be consistent and if necessary brave. But I do not question him.’

‘Rogov? He never mentioned a Rogov? Professor Arkady Rogov?’

‘I told you. He does not discuss his colleagues.’

‘Who said Rogov was a colleague?’

‘I assumed this from your questions,’ she retorted hotly and yet again he believed her.

‘How do you communicate with him?’ he asked, recovering his gentler tone.

‘It is not important. When a certain friend of his receives a certain message, he informs Yakov and Yakov telephones me.’

‘Does the certain friend know who the certain message is from?’

‘He has no reason. He knows it is a woman. That is all.’

‘Is Yakov afraid?’

‘Since he talks so much about courage, I assume he is afraid. He quotes Nietzsche. “The ultimate goodness is not to be afraid.” He quotes Pasternak. “The root of beauty – ” ’

‘Are you?’

She stared away from him. In the houses across the street, home lights were appearing in the windows.

‘I must think not of my children but of
all
children,’ she said, and he noticed two tears lying neglected on her cheeks. He took another pull of whisky and hummed a few bars of Basie. When he looked again, the tears had gone.

‘He talks about the great lie,’ she said, as if she had just remembered.

‘What great lie?’

‘Everything is part of the same great lie, down to the smallest spare part of the least significant weapon. Even the results that are sent to Moscow are subject to the great lie.’

‘Results? What results? Results of what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of testing?’

She seemed to have forgotten her denial. ‘I believe, of testing. I believe he is saying that the results of testing are deliberately distorted in order to satisfy the orders of the generals and the official production requirements of the bureaucrats. Perhaps it is he personally who distorts them. He is very complicated. Sometimes he talks about his many privileges of which he has become ashamed.’

The shopping list, Walter had called it. With a deadened sense of duty, Barley crossed off the last items. ‘Has he mentioned particular projects?’

‘No.’

‘Has he mentioned being involved in command systems? How the field commander is controlled?’

‘No.’

‘Has he ever told you what steps are taken to prevent mistaken launches?’

‘No.’

‘Has he ever suggested he might be engaged in data processing?’

She was tired. ‘No.’

‘Does he get promoted now and then? Medals? Big parties as he moves up the ladder?’

‘He does not speak of promotion except that it is all corrupt. I told you already that maybe he has been too loud in his criticisms of the system. I do not know.’

She had withdrawn from him. Her face was out of sight behind the curtain of her hair.

‘You will do best to ask him all further questions for yourself,’ she said, in the tone of someone packing up to leave. ‘He wishes you to meet him in Leningrad on Friday. He is attending an important conference at one of the military scientific institutions.’

First the sky swayed, then Barley became aware of the evening chill. It had closed over him like an icy cloud, though the sky was dark and clear and the new moon, when it finally kept still, shed a warming glow.

‘He has proposed three places and three times,’ she continued in the same flat tone. ‘You will please keep each appointment until he is successful. He will keep one of them if he can. He sends you his greetings and his thanks. He loves you.’

She dictated three addresses and watched him while he wrote them in his diary, using his apology for a code. Then she waited while he had a sneezing fit, watching him as he heaved and cursed his Maker.

They dined like exhausted lovers in a cellar with an old grey dog and a gypsy who sang blues to a guitar. Who owned the place, who allowed it to exist or why, were mysteries Barley had never troubled to solve. All he knew was that in some previous incarnation, at some forgotten book fair, he had arrived here drunk with a group of crazy Polish publishers and played ‘Bless This House’ on someone’s saxophone.

They talked stiffly, and as they talked the gap between them widened until it seemed to Barley to engulf the totality of his insignificance. He gazed at her and felt that he had nothing to offer her that she did not have tenfold. In the ordinary way, he would have made a passionate declaration of love to her. A lunge into absolutes would have been essential to his need to break the tension of a new relationship. But in Katya’s presence he could find no absolutes to put opposite her own. He saw his life as a series of useless resurrections, one failure supplanted by another. He was appalled to think that he belonged to a society that existed only in materialism and gave so little thought to its great themes. But he could tell her none of this. To tell her anything was to assail the image that she had of him, and he had nothing to offer in its place.

They discussed books and he watched her slipping away from him. Her face became distracted, her voice prosaic. He went after her, he sang and danced, but she had gone. She was making the same flat statements he had been listening to all day long while he had been waiting to meet her. In a minute, he thought, I’ll be telling her about Potomac Boston and explaining how the river and the city are not joined. And God help him, he was, doing just that.

It was not till eleven o’clock, when the management put the lights out and he walked her down the lifeless street to the metro station, that it dawned on him against all sane reckoning that he might have made an impression upon her that in some modest way compared with the impression she had made on him. She had taken his arm. Her fingers lay along the inside of his forearm and she had fallen into a wide stride in order to keep pace with him. The white mouth of the elevator shafts stood open to receive her. The chandeliers twinkled above them like inverted Christmas trees as he took her in the formal Russian embrace: left cheek, right cheek, left cheek and goodnight.

‘Mr. Blair, sir! Thought I spotted you! Quite a coincidence! Come aboard, we’ll run you home!’