Winter Garden (17 page)

She studied Ashburner for a moment and said she didn’t think it was necessary.

‘It could be the beginnings of pneumonia,’ Bernard warned.

‘These days,’ Olga Fiodorovna said, ‘doctors are useless. He will either refer him to a hospital or hand him a prescription. It will save time if we go straight to the pharmacy. I know the people in charge.’

Though taking no part in the discussion on his health, Ashburner was listening. In the circumstances he thought the interpreter’s attitude strange. Nina hadn’t even been running a temperature and they hadn’t thought twice about rushing her off in the middle of the night to a sanatorium.

‘In my father’s time,’ reminisced Mr Karlovitch, ‘there was an old man of the village. He cured everything from ingrowing toenails to tumours.’

‘I remember breaking my leg on a bloody railway line,’ said Bernard. ‘The doctor set it and put it in plaster. But that was the past, wasn’t it?’

‘In the past,’ said Enid, ‘one always went to the doctor. Never to the hospital.’

This constant reference to the past bewildered Ashburner. Squinting down at the blurred town he had the curious notion he hadn’t got one.

The President sent a car for them after breakfast. They were going to Gori to visit the house in which Stalin had been born. The President himself was busy but he would join them in the evening. First they must take Ashburner to the pharmacy.

Ashburner and Olga Fiodorovna disembarked on to the road in front of a blue distempered house. On the flat roof a goat stood tethered to the chimney. Olga Fiodorovna led the way through a dark and empty shop into a storeroom at the back. The door, propped open, looked out on to a yard in which hens stalked between petrol drums. Nobody was about.

‘I had a most interesting talk with your friend in the night,’ said Olga Fiodorovna.

‘My friend?’ he said, startled.

‘The President’s woman,’ said Olga. ‘She is very clever, I think.’

‘I thought she was awfully nice,’ said Ashburner. He noticed that a quantity of straw quivered on the dusty floor. Overhead the goat dragged its rope across the asbestos roof. He couldn’t help wondering whether he had been brought to a vet, either by mistake or design.

‘She was interested to know your opinion of her, Mr Douglas.’

‘Really,’ he said. He was pleased.

‘I told her you thought her clothing old-fashioned and her make-up too strong,’ said Olga Fiodorovna.

Just then a brown hen ran in from the yard, followed by a quartet of matronly women in white coats. Olga spoke to them. Ashburner imagined that she implied he was malingering, because they looked at him without sympathy and brusquely pushed him down into a sitting position on an upturned packing case. Olga ordered him to remove his tie and unbutton his shirt. She joined in the examination of his ears and tongue. Trodden on, the hen flew squawking on to a shelf. If I am asked to take anything else off, Ashburner thought, I’ll pretend I don’t understand. He couldn’t help comparing unfavourably this assault of farmyard women with that of a lady dentist last year, who, called in as a locum while the regular man was away, had tilted him backwards in the chair and expored the moist lining of his open, lascivious mouth with fingers fragrant with the scent of sandalwood.

After a noisy consultation Olga informed him there was nothing wrong apart from a mild inflammation of the throat. He was handed a cup of water and three differently coloured capsules. Obediently he swallowed the pills and put a further supply, neatly packaged in blue paper, into the pocket of his coat. He had hardly taken a few paces through the shop when he was afflicted with a curious sensation of weightlessness. Foolishly smiling, he floated through the door. The road swirled beneath him, striped with sunshine, dappled with leaves. He had to be hauled down like a flag to fit inside the car. He fell instantly asleep with his head on Enid’s shoulder.

Presently he awoke and found himself alone with Bernard in a parked car in a village square. Outside stood Olga Fiodorovna, arm in arm with Mr Karlovitch, looking up at a war memorial. At a distance a little child in a black dress crouched on the cobblestones, staring at the car. There was no sign of Enid or the driver.

‘All right then, mate?’ asked Bernard.

‘Fine,’ said Ashburner. He did feel well, though less affable now that he had come down to earth. ‘Is this it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Bernard. ‘Enid wanted to pee.’

‘Aren’t you going to stretch your legs?’ said Ashburner.

‘There’s nothing here that interests me,’ said Bernard.

Ashburner left the car and called out to Mr Karlovitch and the interpreter. The child ran headlong across the square and into a doorway. Olga Fiodorovna turned and stared at Ashburner as if she didn’t know who he was; he had the dark thought that she hadn’t expected to see him on his feet. Reaching her and respectfully bowing his head in the shadow of the war memorial, he asked in a low voice if there wasn’t some little café they could pop into for a morning drink of coffee. ‘It is morning, isn’t it?’ he enquired, not sure how long he had slept.

Mr Karlovitch said certainly it was morning but it was a little early for drinking, even for him. They would drink themselves under the table at Gori.

Appalled at such a prospect, Ashburner sauntered away and came to a little path bordered with wild raspberries that led to an ancient church glimpsed through eucalyptus trees. As he walked he whistled, not wishing to embarrass Enid should she be squatting in the bushes. He didn’t look up; he was thinking of yesterday and wondering if his liver hadn’t been permanently damaged. The President had taken them to a dusty plateau on a hillside to the south of Tblisi. Honoured guests at a Fair, they had stumbled from tent to tent, from enclosure to encampment. Forced to sit on upturned buckets in front of fiercely glowing wood fires, various friends of the President had pressed them to sample the young wine and the old. Whether under canvas or the blue sky, a goggling populace had observed their every move, separated from the inner sanctum by barricades. At some point a cookery demonstration had taken place. Men with daggers in their belts stood over vats of semolina and alternatively whipped and stirred the glutinous mess with paddles. A boy, stripped to the waist, worked the bellows against the fire. They had all broken down, weeping from the smoke. The crowd, lips bursting open like plums, swayed against the barricades and split their sides with laughter. Bernard was photographed amid a wedding party from Tashkent. Placed incongruously between the groom, who wore white, and a fat girl in a navy blue anorak, he smirked uncertainly into the camera. Behind him stood a row of octogenarian giants in astrakhan caps, mouths inlaid with teeth of solid gold. As the shutter clicked, the golden, flash-bulb smiles exploded in the sunlight.

In all that wine-consuming day, bloated with semolina pudding, garlanded with pink carnations and laden with gifts, grapes, honey sticks, handkerchieves from Samarkand, no one mentioned Nina. Not once. When they returned to Moscow, thought Ashburner, she would always be about to arrive, or have just left.

Turning a bend in the path he saw Enid, standing on tiptoe at a wire fence, peeping in a furtive manner at something beyond. At his approach she looked over her shoulder and gestured for him to keep quiet. He stood stock still on the path.

‘What’s up?’ he whispered.

She beckoned him and he stared through the netting at a vegetable garden filled with runner beans in flower.

‘It’s Rasputin,’ she said. ‘I’ve just seen Rasputin.’ Behind a wall of green leaves a man moved slowly up and down, snipping with secateurs. ‘Look at his beard,’ she hissed. ‘Look at his eyes.’ But dazzled by the sunshine Ashburner saw nothing save a figure in a long black coat.

In the car, Enid described what she had seen. She was full of it. ‘There were several men at one time,’ she cried, ‘planting things. One of them threw a dead sheep over the wall. A man and a dog were passing and the dog sniffed at the sheep and Rasputin threw a stone at the dog to make it leave off.

‘What sort of a dog?’ asked Olga Fiodorovna. Ashburner noticed that Mr Karlovitch was looking at her in the driving mirror. He was frowning.

‘Just a dog,’ said Enid. ‘The man had a long beard, didn’t he?’ She appealed to Ashburner.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t see anything like that,’ he confessed. ‘But then I’m not very observant, and of course I’ve been recently drugged.’ He hadn’t meant to sound quite so censorious.

‘Such eyes,’ exclaimed Enid. ‘Like Indian ink. And hair right down to his shoulders.’

‘Monks,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Georgia is full of monasteries.’

Bernard was staggered. He had thought religion stamped out and all the priests sent packing to Siberia. He could have kicked himself for having remained in the car and missed those hippie monks.

‘This is not Moscow,’ said Mr Karlovitch. ‘Nobody cares. The churches are empty.’

‘They’re giving away the ikons to every Tom, Dick and Harry,’ remarked Ashburner, remembering his conversation with Tatiana’s husband in the forest.

They arrived in Gori in mid-afternoon, too late for the reception committee who had given them up for lost and gone home. The museum was heavily padlocked. Ashburner was tremendously agitated when he understood; he hated unpunctuality and felt personally responsible for the inconvenience caused. He squirmed at the thought of the prepared speeches unspoken, the minor officials trailing forlornly homewards with hands unshaken. ‘God, how awful,’ he said to Bernard. ‘I feel dreadful for having wasted so much time at the chemist’s.’

Seeing his perturbed, perspiring face, Mr Karlovitch asked if he was unwell again.

‘Believe me, I had no idea,’ protested Ashburner incoherently. ‘If only I had known.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ said Bernard. ‘Nothing medical anyway.’ Looking out at the petrol station, the combine harvesters, the rows of ugly shops, he wondered why he had been so anxious to come.

Olga Fiodorovna went off to find somebody important who might have a key to the museum. The others left the car and strolled up and down a withered strip of grass beside the main road. On the opposite side of the street a group of sailors stood drunkenly arguing beneath a tattered tree. Ashburner was shocked at the sight, though relieved to know that the Russian navy was no different from anyone else’s. Even so, he turned round and pretended to be studying a concrete horse trough dug into the ground; he imagined that Mr Karlovitch must be feeling pretty hot under the collar. In his head, he told a gathering of impressed colleagues how in Georgia he had witnessed at first hand the undisciplined behaviour of Soviet sailors, and then he remembered he couldn’t tell anyone. He was supposed to be fishing in Scotland. He wondered if he could transpose the incident to Scapa Flow.

After half an hour Olga Fiodorovna returned with the Major, the lady curator of the Museum and a man in dirty overalls who wasn’t introduced.

‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ said Ashburner, wringing the Mayor’s hand and casting sorrowful glances at the lady curator.

Nobody else apologised. They crossed the road and walked up a dilapidated side street until they came to a stretch of open ground on which stood a statue of Karl Marx, a Greek temple on legs and a red brick building fronted with stained glass windows.

‘Flipping hell,’ said Bernard.

Stalin’s house lay under the temple. It was a mud hut arrangement, obviously reinforced by modern methods, comprising one room and a cellar. A stove pipe was sticking out of the roof. There was a rocking chair, a bed with a spotless white counterpane and a framed photograph on the wall of Stalin as a child, set between his mother and father.

Enid said he looked beautiful – a bit like Omar Sharif without the moustache. ‘Such eyes,’ she cried, and thought again of the monk in the bean garden.

Bernard was disappointed. He had expected to feel something. It was that bloody silly Greek temple that ruined everything. He started to go down into the cellar, but the curator took hold of his sleeve and restrained him. He stood in the doorway and wondered what she would do if he lay down on the bed.

‘You must know,’ said the curator, speaking in a curiously Australian accent, ‘that it was here that the young child was born to poor but honest peasants. Notice the bed, notice the floor.’

She was looking sternly at Ashburner.

‘His mother was a half-wit,’ said Bernard, nudging Ashburner in the back. ‘And his old man an alcoholic.’

‘It’s all so fascinating,’ Ashburner said. ‘Quite remarkable.’

They weren’t allowed to descend into the cellar. No explanation was given. Fuming, Bernard was led away.

‘Why can’t we?’ he muttered, pestering Olga Fiodorovna.

‘Mr Burns,’ she said reasonably, ‘what’s so marvellous about a hole in the ground?’

When they entered the museum the curator wanted it to be understood that only two rooms were open for inspection. ‘You must know,’ she told them, ‘that we are renovating the rest of the exhibition.’

‘Revamping, she means,’ Bernard said. ‘They’re wiping out any reference to anything after 1945.’

The largest of the two rooms were filled mainly with photographs and tracts. A glass case displayed Stalin’s school reports and various essays he had written as a brilliant schoolboy. Everyone except Bernard pretended to be interested in the reports and crowded round the cabinet with murmurs of awed appreciation. They must know, the lady curator drawled, that as a child Stalin had been known as Zo-Zo. Zo-Zo had written many gifted poems.

At the other end of the room Bernard was stomping up and down, looking at the photographs and snorting with contempt. ‘Where is Voroshilov?’ he suddenly shouted. ‘And Marshall Blucher and Kamenev? Where is Comrade Trotsky?’

Everyone ignored him, though Ashburner grew very red in the face.

‘What do you think of her?’ asked Olga Fiodorovna, linking arms with him and staring critically at the curator. ‘She is no good at her job, yes? You like her legs?’