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Jessel stood up. ‘It’s your bed.’ He picked up his coat and Persian lamb hat from the sofa. ‘Laura will be surprised to see me home so early.’ Jessel was very proud of his happy marriage and tried to keep his home in one of the complexes reserved for foreigners as American as possible. Calder found his visits disconcerting, their purpose questionable; he tolerated them because Jessel kept him informed about Ruth and Harry. In the past he had tried to contact Ruth but his letters had been returned unopened and her telephone number was no longer listed. ‘I’ll be in touch. Any messages?’
‘None.’ There wasn’t any point: he was his family’s shame. He hoped Ruth had put antiseptic on Harry’s knee.
Jessel let himself out of the apartment, closing the door softly behind him. Calder waited until he heard the clatter of the elevator gates, then went into the bedroom.
The phone shrilled as he was lowering his head gently onto the pillow. When he picked up the receiver he heard breathing.
‘Hallo.’
The breathing was slow and measured.
‘Who’s that?’
Click.
He stared at the receiver for a moment before replacing it.
He laid his head on the pillow; above him the moulded ceiling spun like a dying top. He closed his eyes. He was playing chess with Stalin and he was losing. When Stalin called: ‘Check,’ he leaned across the board and pulled his shaggy moustache. It came off in his hand.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_3ff4f4e7-3a59-5f88-8c99-a83480567774)
The next to die was a fat Italian named Bertoldi.
He died, paradoxically, at a time of hope – the thaw. Moscow rang to the music of water. Dripping from dwindling icicles, plunging down drainpipes, frothing in the gutters. Listen carefully and you could hear the accompaniment – wet snow falling thickly from rooftops and, in green-blushing parks, tentative bird-song. On the river this April day the ice was on the move and in the streets Muscovites straightened up from winter. A time of hope. But not for Alfredo Bertoldi.
Since he had come to Moscow five years ago, blown, it was said, as financier for the Red Brigade, unsuspected for years because you expected Red Brigadiers to be young and fierce and Bertoldi was neither of these things, he had mourned. For pasta. For girls on the Via Veneto who wore nothing but fur coats and high heels. For Neapolitan songs. For God, Italian style.
Hopeless lamentations when, because you were a gangster rather than a fugitive keeper of secrets however cob-webbed, you were housed in a cramped studio in the foreigners’ complex on Kutuzovsky Prospect, named after the field-marshal who sent packing another intruder, Napoleon.
Despite the lack of pasta Bertoldi perversely grew fatter on Chicken Kiev spurting with butter and black bread and assorti ice-cream which he bought even in minus 20 degrees. But it wasn’t the healthy, baritone fatness of an Italian enjoying his sustinence: it was the bloated corpulence of the compulsive eater, the worrier.
His departure from this life of regret was spectacular. A few tenants were strolling in the courtyard of the barrack-block apartment blocks where foreigners – diplomats and journalists mostly – were housed together in the interests of surveillance. It was 10.35 am. The sun had already melted the temporary skating rink, tyres hissed excitingly on Kutuzovsky, even the two militiamen posted at the gates to check visitors were smiling.
Suddenly the windows of an apartment on the fifth floor were flung open with such force that the glass shattered. And there stood Bertoldi in a scarlet dressing gown. Later some witnesses were to testify, unofficially and without any degree of certainty, that they had observed movements behind the obese Italian; others were equally convinced that Bertoldi had stood alone.
What was undisputed was the manner of his fall. He seemed to float supported by the scarlet wings of his dressing gown. There was, it was asserted, a monstrous grace about his exit. His scream lasted from the window to the ground.
Such was his bulk that when he hit the concrete he spread. Within fifteen minutes the mess was cleaned up by militia and taken away in an ambulance.
A note was found in his cramped apartment. It was written on a picture postcard of his native Turin beside the remains of his last supper.
It said: I can’t stand this fucking life anymore.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_07afc22b-b190-58b0-a11d-e0183d5c26bc)
Katerina always remembered Easter that year: it changed her life.
In the afternoon of the Saturday she went with Svetlana to a meeting of the feminist movement near the pink massif of Soviet Radio and Television on Piatnitskaya Street.
The purpose of the meeting was to establish some sort of order in the crusade. And to an extent it succeeded largely due, Katerina believed, to the call of spring. The lime trees were tipped salad green, kvas vans were in the streets, cotton dresses were beginning to blossom. ‘Anything is possible,’ the breeze whispered.
In a small assembly hall – ‘Stone, this time,’ Svetlana had insisted, ‘in case of arson’ – a committee was elected, a chairman appointed. Katerina was given a place on the committee with a responsibility to teenagers; Svetlana was charged with ‘spreading the word across the length and breadth of the nation.’
‘Just because I was going out with an Aeroflot pilot, ‘Svetlana said later when they were drinking lemon tea in a steely-bright cafeteria. ‘Ah, well, it’s only one sixth of the world’s land surface – it shouldn’t take long.’
‘It’s because you work for Intourist,’ Katerina corrected her. ‘Was going out?’
‘He was too keen that one,’ Svetlana said.
Keen for what? Svetlana had never been sexually reticent. All she demanded was respect. And that, if you boiled it down, was all the movement wanted.
Beside them a crumpled-looking man was reading Pravda, starting at the bottom of a page where brevities of interest lurked and losing interest when he reached the exhortations to greater productivity and recriminations about absenteeism. The coffee machine behind the stainless steel counter hissed like a steam engine.
‘He wanted to get married,’ Svetlana explained when the hissing subsided. ‘Can you imagine? Marrying a Russian is bad enough but a pilot … girls in Leningrad, Kiev and Archangel and the faithful wife waiting in Moscow to stir his borsch while he kicks off his shoes in front of the television. No thanks. Besides he was a goat.’
By which, Katerina assumed, she meant he was a selfish lover. The old school. The younger generation were more considerate, some of them.
‘So who’s taken his place?’ Katerina asked.
‘An architect. Lots of blat. Special pass for the third floor of GUM, dollars for the Beryozka shops, a Volga, hi-fi, video. He tells me he’s got a dacha in the country too.’
‘Obviously a very good Communist,’ Katerina remarked.
The crumpled-looking man looked up from his newspaper and smiled.
‘And he’s not bad-looking,’ Svetlana said. She sipped her tea. ‘Not exactly good-looking.’ The coffee machine hissed. ‘But architecturally sound.’
‘Does he know you’re a defender of women’s rights?’
‘No, he wouldn’t like that at all,’ Svetlana said decisively. She searched in the pockets of her coat for cigarettes; to Katerina the coat looked suspiciously like part of an Aeroflot stewardess’s uniform. ‘And you, what have you been up to pussycat?’
Katerina wanted to tell her that Calder was taking her to midnight mass but she checked herself. The crumpled-looking man looked benign enough but you could never tell. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘The Institute’s boring as ever. It reminds me of a literary treadmill. No one ever gets anywhere, they just keep turning pages.’
The crumpled-looking man folded his newspaper. He said: ‘Enjoy yourselves while you’re still young,’ and was gone.
Pushing at her blonde, untamed hair with her fingers, Svetlana leaned conspiratorially across the table. ‘So tell me, kotik, what have you really been up to? Consorting with decadent foreigners?’
When Katerina told her Svetlana was uncharacteristically solemn. ‘Take care. It’s always struck me as odd that we weren’t prosecuted over that fire.’
‘I don’t see the connection,’ Katerina said.
‘Nor do I, but I suspect one.’ Svetlana sipped her tea. ‘Perhaps I’ve been reading too many spy novels. Too many videos …. Why not give the American a miss?’
‘He’s a Soviet citizen. I’m not doing anything wrong. Merely showing him the real Moscow. He bothers me,’ Katerina added. ‘He’s not weak like the others. Just ….’
‘… misguided?’
‘Maybe.’
‘So you’re trying to prove to him what a great place the Soviet Union is? Are you angling for my job?’
‘No chance,’ Katerina said. ‘I’m stuck with the Brigade.’ She finished her tea, slid the oblong of hard sugar into her bag. ‘Come on, let’s get a breath of spring.’
But by eleven that night the air was chilled again. When Calder picked her up on Leningradsky he was wearing a top-coat and fur hat. Katerina’s face was framed in sable, a second-hand gift from Svetlana’s discarded pilot.
He drove to Bolshaya Ordinka Street, a discreet thoroughfare with a roll-call of churches, small houses and lime trees. She took him to a small pink and gold church. A crowd was packed around it and through the open doors they could smell Easter.
Spandarian’s phone rang at ten minutes past midnight.
The girl beneath him swore.
Rolling clear, he picked up the receiver and asked brusquely: ‘Well, are they there?’
‘Affirmative, Comrade Spandarian.’
‘Stay with them.’
Spandarian returned to the girl, the Estonian to the entrance to the church pausing on his way to lock the battered cream Volga.
Easter was mostly age. Burning candles smelling of the past and priests with grey beards and worshippers as fragile as autumn. But there was youth there, too, peering in from the godless outside and wondering.
Calder and Katerina eased their way through the militia-ringed throng to the back of the church where, with the rest of the congregation standing in a nave bereft of pews, they were entombed in candlelight, cocooned in the chanting of priests and choirs.
Time was the pendulum swings of censers, the diminishing of tallow-spitting candles lighting icons. The senses melted. The congregation was as one. Glowing, golden adoration filled this small House of God.
Feeling her warmth through her shabby coat, Calder wondered if Katerina, great-grandchild of a Revolution that had invented its own religion, acknowledged the Resurrection of Christ. He wondered if he did.
As the priests walked three times round the outside of the church, searching for the body of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre, Calder saw wistful young faces in the crowd.
Walking back to the car, Katerina said: ‘It’s strange but that ceremony was more Russian than anything the Party has invented,’ and Calder thought how ironic it would be if, innocently, he was becoming the instrument of her doubt.
Immediately she recanted. ‘To think that there are more than thirty million churchgoers in the Soviet Union. There aren’t as many accredited members of the Communist Party. Did you know that?’
He did. He also knew that the Party tolerated the Church because it was the ancient heartbeat of Mother Russia. A heartbeat, they hoped, that would soon falter and allow the young to worship at the altars of Marx and Lenin without Christian distractions. Unfortunately for the Party religion was said to be undergoing a revival.
One binge, one night of homage. What next? Sitting behind the wheel of the Zhiguli, Calder grinned into the night and didn’t think about Alfredo Bertoldi at all. He drove back to Leningradsky with a flourish.
After the second phone call Spandarian lay, hands behind his head, staring at the reflections of himself and the dozing girl on the mirror on the ceiling. He decided he would make his move tomorrow, Easter Sunday.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_2805568d-85cf-5e1e-8182-0714515e81bc)
Resentfully, Katerina caught a bus to the Institute: it just wasn’t the Sunday morning to squander in that futile place. Budding plants had pushed through the wet soil overnight. River breezes fanned the late-sleeping streets. A tentative sun was finding the city’s fragile graces.
Still, she only had to spend a couple of hours there preparing and allocating periodicals for the Monday return-to-work in the absence of the Study Supervisor who was recovering from a prolonged encounter with a crate of Ukrainian pepper vodka.
And then? It was a day for the first visit to the river beaches at Serebriani Bor or an excursion into the forest to see if mushrooms had begun to sprout among the damp remains of winter or a trip to one of the villages outside Moscow. But for that you really needed a car.
Calder had a car.
The bus, proceeding at a measured speed along the broad reaches of Leningradsky, reached Byelorussia Square. Here Leningradsky became Gorky Street where Calder lived.
The bus stopped outside the green and white stucco hulk of Byelorussia Railway Station. A young man carrying a shiny fawn suitcase climbed aboard and sat in. the seat in front of Katerina. His brown hair was stylishly barbered and he wore a new blue suit cut with a discreet elegance that few Soviet tailors could manage. As the station served the west Katerina assumed he had arrived from somewhere like Smolensk or Minsk.
He turned and smiled. ‘This time two days ago I was in Paris.’ Paris! ‘But I’m glad to be back.’ That saved him, as far as she was concerned.
‘Oh, really?’ She stared out of the window. She was wearing her new lemon costume bought defitsitny in the Arbat and she knew she looked attractive enough; the young man was probably making a pass and she didn’t object to that – the time to worry was when they didn’t – but her mind was on Calder.
The bus headed down Gorky Street. Through the arcades to the right stood a huddle of old streets. Chekhov had lived there, and so had Chaliapin. She would like to show the house to Calder.
She tried to analyse her feelings about the big American. He was a challenge. She wanted to prove to him his wisdom in coming to Russia. Or his weakness. She wasn’t sure which. Until she had met him she had been sure of her values. Now they were presenting themselves for inspection. She wished he hadn’t eaten those redcurrants at Kreiber’s funeral.
‘And where are you going to so early on a Sunday morning?’ the young man asked.
‘To work.’
‘Really?’ He considered this. His features were Slavonic but warm, peasant or intellectual, whatever way you chose to regard him. They were also vaguely familiar. ‘And what sort of work is that?’
Her work was difficult to label: it invited elaboration. ‘A waitress,’ she said. Good enough for her mother, good enough for her.
‘Where?’
‘The Centralny.’
‘Then I shall come and eat there.’
So he was making a pass. She tried to put a label to him. Paris … carried himself with unobtrusive style … accent, pure Moscow … son of some Kremlin nachalstvo? If so, why hadn’t there been a Chaika at the station to meet him?
The bus passed the arch through which Calder lived. It had occurred to her that she might glimpse him but there was no sign of him, the sidewalk outside the arch occupied by a group of tourists trooping patiently towards Red Square behind their Intourist leader.
She picked up her handbag and prepared to alight at the National Hotel corner of Manezhnaya Square.
The young man took a card from a slim wallet and handed it to her. ‘If you feel like coming along anytime ….’ She slipped the card into her wallet without looking at it. As she made her way to the exit he called after her: ‘By the way, you’ve gone past the Centralny.’
The atmosphere at the Institute closed in upon her. Furniture polish and cheap paper and the baked paintwork of the radiators. The bad breath of wasted endeavour.
Footsteps echoing, she walked past the empty, book-lined chambers to the spacious office of the Study Supervisor. Outside stood sheaves of newspapers and magazines tied with coarse string.
She began to sort them into nationalities on a trestle table in the study. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, De Telegraff, Bild, La Stampa …. As always what astonished her was not the content of the papers but their freedom to print what they pleased. Editorials actually criticising the Government. Vistas of freedom beckoned slyly through screens of newsprint.
‘But don’t close your eyes,’ she had been warned before she got the job, ‘to the decadence you will find on those pages. ‘As if she could. Corruption, child abuse, rape, racism, industrial injustice … you name it. ‘All encouraged by circulation-crazed newspapers and magazines.’
But don’t we get our fair share of most of these evils in the Soviet Union?
Treason!
The biggest pile of papers was from the United States. A skyscraper of them. Calder was in charge of that section, analysing and indexing with a team of six other American defectors.
The Study Supervisor’s phone rang. Katerina picked up the receiver, at the same time pulling out a drawer in the table. It was filled with cuttings from glossy magazines. The Study Supervisor apparently reserved the right to analyse the female anatomy of the West.
