The Man Who Was Saturday

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.

Katerina shut the drawer. She spoke into the receiver, giving the number of the Institute. ‘Katerina Ilyina speaking.’

‘My name’s Spandarian,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s about time we met.’

Although his fingernails were polished, although his hair was carefully waved and his moustache was a topiarist’s dream, although his brown eyes were soulful and his brilliantine smelled of spices, Spandarian was a gangster. Katerina sensed this instantly. He was also a born interrogator, bandit brain and veneer, the hot/cold of the third degree.

He spoke melodiously but with a strong Georgian accent, fashioning flowers from some of his phrases. ‘So, Katerina Ilyina, you want to save Soviet women. Has it ever occurred to you that they don’t want to be saved? That, like Mother Russia herself, they merely want to endure?’ He lit a yellow cigarette packed with black tobacco and blew acrid smoke across his desk.

‘That’s what the Russian male would like to think, Comrade Spandarian.’ Her defiance pleased her: although few had seen him, the ruthlessness of the shadowy mentor of the Twilight Brigade was common knowledge.

‘The Russian male? I am not a Russian, Katerina Ilyina, I am a Georgian. In Tbilisi we know how to treat women. We flatter them, court them, love them. But they know their place just the same and they are happy.’

Katerina had been to the Georgian capital once. And what Spandarian said was true. Up to a point. Women were treated extravagantly. But they were chattels just the same. Georgia would be a challenge. But first Mother Russia.

Spandarian said: ‘Russian men are pigs.’

Katerina regarded him with astonishment, then found herself saying defensively: ‘Some of the younger ones are learning; they are more considerate.’ The young man on the bus, for instance.

‘You are a true Slav, Katerina Ilyina. Already you are confounding yourself. If the young men are improving what is the point of your Cause?’

‘Only some of them, the sons of the privileged.’ Privileged! What was she saying? ‘As for the rest … goats. And as for the Cause – equality, that’s what it’s all about. Just like Communism,’ she heard herself saying. ‘How many women are there in the Politburo, Comrade Spandarian?’

He didn’t answer. Instead he picked up a light blue folder, finger and thumb feeling one corner as though he were rubbing an insect to death. He recited from it:

‘Unlawfully convening a meeting; incitement to violence; incitement to treason; hooligan behaviour; indecency in a public place; arson. That lot,’ Spandarian said mildly, ‘could put you away for the rest of your life. Or put you in front of a firing squad. Dissidents have been shot for less.’

Reeling, she queried ‘Indecency in public?’

Spandarian extracted a typewritten sheet of paper from the folder and read the exchanges with the woman in the red shawl. ‘Goloshes,’ he said. ‘Really!’

‘I can’t help what harridans in the audience say.’

‘Your friend Svetlana Rozonova wasn’t exactly reticent.’

‘You wouldn’t ….’

‘We might.’

Spandarian stood up, walked to the window and stared in the direction of the Kremlin. ‘Strange, isn’t it, that the fount of Communism should look more like the ultimate altar of religion. All those cathedrals and churches …. The contradictions of revolution. Especially on Easter Sunday.’

Hot/cold. Her courage was trickling away. ‘What do you want, Comrade Spandarian?’

The angular woman from the outer office brought them tea and biscuits. When she had gone Spandarian sat down and said in between sips of tea: ‘You’re a very patriotic girl, Katerina Ilyina.’ She wondered about Spandarian’s brand of patriotism. ‘The spirit that won the Great Patriotic War.’

Katerina nibbled a biscuit; it tasted of aniseed; she sipped lemon-sharp tea to disperse the flavour.

Spandarian went on: ‘You are very fortunate – you are in a position to help your country.’ He dunked his biscuit in his tea and bit off the soggy tip.

Warily, Katerina asked him how.

He finished his tea and biscuit, dabbed the corners of his mouth with a red silk handkerchief and told her.

She had struck up a friendship with an American defector, Robert Calder. Nothing wrong with that. In fact the friendship must have been arranged in heaven – ‘or whatever Arcadia awaits a good Communist’ – because that was what provided the opportunity for Katerina to be of service to the Soviet Union.

All she had to do was observe Calder. Report on his moods, his thinking – party-line or otherwise – his habits. Encourage him to talk about the past – and the future.

Touch his soul.

‘No!’

Spandarian lit another of his terrible cigarettes. ‘When I was talking about the penalties involved in that disastrous affair on Women’s Day I omitted one. You would be expelled from the Soviet Union. I would see to that.’ The words rolled from his mouth in smoke.

So this was patriotism. Her beliefs shrank, tarnished.

Spandarian explained. ‘To serve one’s country one has to carry out acts that are sometimes distasteful. It’s unfortunate but when you’re dealing with unscrupulous enemies there isn’t any alternative. Always remember that these acts are a means to an end – the survival of the Soviet Union.’

‘No!’

‘And is what I’m asking so distasteful? I can assure you that at the head offices of State Security in Dzerzhinsky Square and on the Outer Ring, they would be far more unpleasant. My duties are more … delicate. Perhaps that’s why I am permitted such pleasant offices away from harsh realities.’

No. But this time she didn’t speak.

‘And don’t forget Svetlana Rozonova,’ he said.

Bastard.

‘I’m not asking you to betray anyone. Just to keep a defector under observation.’

‘Why is he so important?’

‘That needn’t concern you.’

She thought: So that’s why I’ve been allowed to stay active in the women’s movement and keep my job. Blackmail.

She felt soiled.

‘Will you do it?’ he asked.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. Give me time to think of a way out.

‘Think well, Katerina Ilyina.’ Stroking his moustache, he stood up and bowed. For the time being it was over.

From 25th October Street she walked into Krasnaya Ploschad, Beautiful Square in old Russian, better known as Red Square. To her left the windows of GUM and, farther away, the barley-sugar baubles of St Basil’s; in front of her the Kremlin walls and the red-granite block of Lenin’s Mausoleum where, in a glass sarcophagus, the father of the Revolution lay in peace. What would he have thought of the choice facing her?

She walked past the queue waiting on the cobblestones to pay homage to the embalmed spirit of Bolshevism and past the main entrance to the Kremlin, the Redeemer’s Gate.

She was arrested three days later.

A bald man and a woman with a pale face slit by bright lipstick, both in plainclothes, called at the apartment on Leningradsky and took her in a black Volga to the women’s section of the prison at 38, Petrovka.

They were courteous but uncommunicative. Katerina conducted herself with dignity but she wanted to weep.

The cell was painted dark green. It contained two bunks, one above the other, a scrubbed deal table and two chairs, a washbasin, a slice of red soap and a galvanised bucket.

The door shut with jarring finality.

She sat on the bed. Concentrate on the logic of it, she thought, otherwise you’ll break. Humiliation. Question: why? Three days ago I was useful to them; suddenly I’m disposable, garbage.

A shiny cockroach as big as a thumb made a run across the wall opposite her.

She wondered if she would be expelled from the Soviet Union.

A key turned in the lock and Svetlana was pushed through the door.

She held out her arms and they embraced. Katerina felt courage pass between them.

Svetlana said: ‘Let’s call room service and have a drink.’ She wore an emerald two-piece, a leftover from the reign of the pilot, and looked stunning. ‘Are you looking forward to life in New York?’

‘You think they’ll throw us out?’

‘We had one yellow card. This is the red.’ She sat beside Katerina and put her arm round her.

From the corridor they heard scuffling. A woman with a Ukranian accent shouting: ‘Get in there, you fucked-out old iron.’ A cell door slammed.

‘One of the girls,’ Svetlana remarked. ‘Railway station material by the sound of it. We’re in good company Katerina Ilyina.’

The key turned in the lock. Katerina smelled spicy brilliantine. Spandarian came in carrying a document headed MINISTRY OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS.

He handed it to Katerina. ‘Your expulsion order,’ he said.

‘But you said ….’

‘That was three days ago, this is now.’

Svetlana stood up, a little taller than Spandarian. ‘And mine?’

‘Yours? Who said anything about you being kicked out?’

Katerina froze. To be expelled without Svetlana, that was worse than a death sentence.

Svetlana said: ‘Listen you Georgian prick, if Katerina goes I go.’

Spandarian hit her across the face with the back of his hand but before she could throw herself at him an immense wardress invaded the cell and pinioned her arms.

‘If you don’t behave yourself,’ Spandarian said mildly, ‘we’ll have to lock you up with the old whore next door.’ He bowed to Katerina. ‘Read this document and digest it. If there’s anything you don’t understand I’ll be happy to explain. As we cross the border,’ he added. He lit one of his yellow cigarettes. ‘And now the contents of your handbag. A formality, you understand.’

He picked up Katerina’s handbag and pillaged it. Compact, lipstick, crumpled one-, three- and five-rouble notes, a few kopeks, tissues, punished wallet, ballpoint pen. A nondescript mess.

Spandarian opened the wallet. Flipped through the plastic-sheathed ID cards hinged inside. A couple of ten-rouble notes, photograph of her mother and step-father at a camping site at Adler on the Caucasion coast road, a few visiting cards and a couple of invitations. Spandarian examined one of these. Frowning, he asked: ‘Where did you get this?’ He was surprised, and that with Spandarian was a small victory.

Realising that it was the card the young man on the bus had given her and realising that Spandarian was impressed, she said: ‘From its owner, of course.’ She wished she had read the card.

‘I wasn’t aware you knew him.’ Him. Who? Spandarian was patently furious that the name hadn’t featured in the blue folder. Someone would fry! ‘Have you known him long?’

‘Since childhood.’ They would boil!

Spandarian timed his revenge nicely. ‘By the way, your mother and father – apologies, step-father – are quite comfortable in their jail.’ He slid the invitation back into the wallet.

‘You bastard. What have they done wrong?’

‘Let’s think. Harboured a known hooligan?. How about that?’ He gave a stage bow and walked out of the cell.

When he had gone Katerina allowed herself to cry. ‘A good man … my mother, always hardship … What right?’

Svetlana sat beside her again. ‘Never mind, pussycat. They won’t come to any harm. It’s us they’re gunning for.’

Me, Katerina thought. ‘I never dreamed they would expel me without you.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there too. ‘And curiously: ‘Who was that invitation from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Kata, I’m not a Georgian bandit.’

‘Honestly.’ Katerina extracted the card from her wallet. ‘My God!’

‘Hand it over.’ When she did Svetlana whistled. ‘How did you get to know him?’

Katerina retrieved the card. It was an invitation to a pop concert. A personal one with the star’s name embossed on the bottom right-hand corner. Leonid Agursky. Pop idol, sex symbol …. And I met him on a bus!

Spandarian returned the following day. Picking up the expulsion order, he said: ‘You have read and understood it?’

‘I realise I’m being expelled for preaching Leninism.’

‘Ah, the rights of women. A worthy cause, Katerina Ilyina.’ He stroked his moustache downwards and outwards. ‘But you do understand the document?’

‘I’m not an imbecile.’

‘Good, good.’ He was pensive for a moment; Georgian spice reached Katerina strongly. ‘By the way you will be pleased to know that your mother and step-father have been released from jail. After all, why hold them? I’m sure you’re not going to be a hooligan any more.’

He tore up the expulsion order.

Striding past Petrovka’s shops in the direction of Sverdlov Square metro station, Svetlana said: ‘So it’s a different game from football. Two yellow cards and we’re still on the pitch.’

‘My parents … the son of a bitch.’

‘We were being given the treatment,’ Svetlana said. ‘The expulsion order – a phoney.’

Judas counselled Katerina. Would it really harm Calder if I processed what he told me and passed on innocuous trivia?

‘What I want you to concentrate on,’ Spandarian told her later in his office, ‘is Calder’s state of mind, what he plans to do with the rest of his life. Any secrets he’s kept to himself ….’

Why, she wondered, was Calder so important? She hoped she never found out.

CHAPTER 8

In summer mushrooms proliferate in the green and silver countryside outside Moscow as urgently as that short season itself. And armies of gribniki, mushroom-hunters, leave their sweating city in search of Little Foxes, Shaggy Parasols, Caesar’s Mushrooms, Horns of Plenty …. The fungi are eaten raw, cooked, pickled or salted; they are also measured with a fisherman’s elastic rule and toasted exuberantly – brown vodka for the milk mushroom, pellucid and ice-cold firewater for a russala. The pastime is pursued exhaustively because there has to be a little exquisite suffering in most experiences; photographs of mammoth fungi are printed in the Press; doctors in hospital casualty departments stand by with stomach-pumps for the first imprudent gribniki.

At the Institute the Twilight Brigade went mushroom-hunting with qualified enthusiasm. Few of them had ever hankered after anything more exotic than the cultivated mushroom, on the other hand the younger recruits were keen to take part in anything characteristically Russian. It was all part of adapting, being accepted, and if long-serving members of the Brigade were sceptical about this they nevertheless accompanied the alien gribniki because there was not a lot to be said against supping a few grams of Stolichnaya in the cool of a birch forest.

In charge of mushroom-hunting was Mrs Lundkvist from Sweden. In fact she was in charge of most Russian-orientated pursuits managing through perseverance and unrelenting good humour to drum up support for her activities.

She was a once-beautiful blonde who was being remorselessly converted by the years into a matron. A decade earlier her husband had fled to Moscow bringing with him the secrets of Swedish submarine surveillance in the Baltic and his wife had followed him. The unkind asserted that if he had known this he would have stayed where he was and faced the music.

On this particular June morning Mrs Lundkvist, seated at the head of Table No. 5 during mid-morning break in the Institute canteen, was finding it difficult to sustain interest in mushrooms because another subject was vying for attention. A subject that is always discussed with animation in any expatriate society. Death.

Just as speculation about the death of Alfredo Bertoldi had begun to wane a Dutchman named van Doom had disappeared.

Mrs Lundkvist, sipping lemon tea and speaking in English because she had long ago discovered to her chagrin that Russian would never be the lingua franca of the defectors, began to list to her audience the ten articles they would have to take with them into the country.

‘Basket, waxed paper, tins, notepaper, stick ….’

Fabre, the Frenchman, said to Calder: ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’

‘How should I know? It’s not the first time he’s gone missing ….’

‘True. Once he meets the pretty boys outside the Bolshoi he seems to stick with them.’ The nodding of Fabre’s creased old face acquired an obscene air.

Dalby said: ‘He’ll be back.’ As usual he spoke with nonchalant authority. He had retired from the Institute two years ago and had stopped by for coffee on his way to the Pushkin Museum.

‘Unless he’s dead.’ The speaker was Langley, the Canadian who had been talking to Katerina at Kreiber’s funeral. A bright young hope in the RCMP he had elected to stay in Moscow when the KGB had shown him photographs of himself with two girls which they planned to show to his boss and his wife unless ….

‘Dead?’ The slanting pouches on Dalby’s face took up the question. ‘Why should he be d … dead? You younger people do tend to be terribly dramatic’

‘Well he won’t be the first this year,’ Langley said defensively. He was thirty-ish and followed Western fashions as best he could, managing with his mussed fair hair and moustache to look like a shop-worn model for a cigarette advertisement.

‘True. Natural causes, accident, suicide …. We all have to go some time you know. Even you.’

‘A whole lot of people seem to have been going-some-time recently.’

‘Coincidence, my dear fellow. Would you have preferred their deaths to have been staggered tover the year?’

‘I’ll let you know,’ Langley said, ‘when van Doorn shows his face.’

Mrs Lundkvist said loudly: ‘You must pick out mushrooms with care. Never, never experiment. Peasants will tell you’ – Calder suspected that anyone outside Stockholm was a peasant – ‘that there are ways of testing fungi to see if they are edible. Take no notice, consult the experts.’ She laughed gaily. ‘In this case me.’

‘Do you really think,’ Langley went on, ‘that Bertoldi committed suicide?’

Dalby sighed. ‘How many times have we been through this? There is no evidence to the contrary. He left a note, he was seen to jump.’

‘Fall,’ Calder said.

He was keeping his eye on the Russians coming into the canteen to see if Katerina was among them. He had been to the Maly Theatre with her the previous evening and he wanted to discuss the play – and to be near her. The Russians veered away from the corner of the canteen occupied by the defectors: that was alien territory.

‘Very well, fall. That’s what happens when you jump, I believe. Do you m … mean you still have doubts?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.