by Peter Corris
"Christ, man, that's damned unhealthy. I can find . . ."
"No," Carl said.
"And why not?"
Carl found it hard to explain; he spoke of the bloodshed and the cruelty he'd seen—the dead children and raped, bleeding women begging to be shot. Armstrong listened stoically. "We've all been through that. You can't let it twist you. Life goes on."
"I agree, my life goes on. I want to do something useful with it. I don't want to be burdened with a wife and children."
"Who's talking about a wife an' bairns? In the long run of course, but I'm on about the question of a man's needs now."
"I tried that. I didn't much like it."
Armstrong stirred the few dying coals back into life. He used drink and women to blot out the horrors of his own war, but he had the imagination to see that other men might use other ways and was curious about what they might be. "You've never spoken of your mother and father," he said quietly.
"They died within days of each other."
"Were they happy together?"
"Yes."
"Don't you want that for yourself?"
The room was lit by an oil lamp set on a table in the far corner; Armstrong couldn't see Carl's features clearly by its dim glow. He saw a well-shaped head set on a strong neck, a red beard growing thickly, pale skin. Slowly, the face hardened and turned as if made resolute by the force of the realisation that had come to Carl at that moment. "He destroyed her," he said.
Carl continued to work as a translator and interpreter for another two years. Nothing changed in his life. He worked long hours and was preoccupied by the work. For relaxation he read, almost exclusively in Russian, books on economics and political philosophy. From time to time the imaginative, sensitive side of his nature rebelled and he went on binges of novel reading—Dickens and Zola, highly approved of by the Soviet authorities, and more erratic choices such as Thomas Hardy and George Sand. By chance he acquired a battered copy of Scott's Redgauntlet, the romantic story of the last flickering of the Jacobite cause, in English. He read it and wept and did not know why.
In the summer of 1925 Carl was summoned into the presence of Pasha Chuchin, whom he knew to be a senior official of the security service. Chuchin was a fat man, tightly buttoned into his grey uniform with its red collar tabs. He was clean-shaven as was the recent fashion in the higher ranks of the bureaucracy. Chuchin eyed red-bearded, drably dressed Carl Bystryi with distaste.
"An investigation has been carried out, Comrade Bystryi," Chuchin said softly. "A thorough investigation."
Carl stood nervously in front of the big polished desk. He made the decision to test the water. "May I sit down, comrade?"
Chuchin inspected the notes in front of him, decided, and nodded. He made no protest when Carl packed his pipe and lit it. "Did you know, comrade, that your mother's mother was a Jewess?"
"No. That's interesting."
"If you think so. It is of interest to Comrade Trotsky apparently."
Carl smoked and said nothing. The room was a vast Tsarist chamber in the administrative block on Kaunin Prospekt. It had been stripped of its trappings, was too big for its current use and was, consequently, cold and impersonal.
"It has been decided, comrade, to offer you Soviet citizenship."
Carl felt his breathing constrict and he fought to puff casually on his pipe. "That is a great honour, comrade," he said.
"It is." Chuchin prodded his notes with a sharpened pencil as if he wished to push them off the desk into the wastepaper basket. "Further, if you accept that honour, an important service for the state awaits you."
19
The job for which the newly accredited citizen, Comrade Bystryi, had been selected was nothing less than the secretaryship of one of the major committees whose operations would spearhead the first of the Soviet Union's Five Year Plans. Carl's apprehension that he was an unwitting part of a Trotskyite clique, in which Jewishness was a factor, was quickly dispelled. He followed the events that succeeded Lenin's death in 1924 in Pravda, but not otherwise. Trotsky left the country in 1927 and Stalin assumed control. Carl took no interest in politics, avoided discussions that could lead to complicity in any political manoeuvring. Comrade Bystryi studied and worked.
The work became his passion. The task of transforming a mediaeval economy into a modern one was monumental, requiring thousands of decisions, thousands of meetings, thousands of tons of paper and, as it eventuated, millions of lives. Carl's single-minded capacity for work, his ability to read and absorb lengthy and complex reports quickly and advise on appropriate strategies, made him a key figure in the devising and execution of the Five Year Plan. Trotsky's vision of a rapidly transformed agricultural sector feeding a modernized, urban-based economy had a natural appeal to Carl. As a child in England and an adolescent in Australia, Carl had had very little exposure to the joys of the countryside. As a soldier he had seen deserts, hillsides and forests enough and had found them all dangerous. Rivers had to be crossed under fire, valleys were possible traps, grassy plains concealed landmines. Carl worshipped cities.
"Think of it, Jock," he said to Armstrong one night as they ate dinner in a Moscow cafe. "We make an industrial revolution, as complete as the political one, and without the horrors that happened in Europe."
"Aye," Armstrong said. He had recently married and was feeling secure and comfortable. He had put on weight and had come to value his friendship with Carl all the more because his status as a senior bureaucrat admitted him to cafes like this. "If it can be done."
"You're sceptical?" Carl pushed away his plate and took a sip of wine. He had never become very interested in food or alcohol; the long rationing of both in Russia had never bothered him; tobacco was his vice but he resisted lighting his pipe until Armstrong had finished eating.
"I am." Armstrong was a minor functionary now, a railways administrator. He found the work dull but enjoyed the opportunities to deal in black market goods—furs, jewellery, brandy, cigarettes and medicines—that were transported around the country by train.
Carl packed his pipe. He kept his voice low by habit. "You've lost faith in socialism?"
Armstrong laughed, he chewed vigorously and swallowed. He wiped his face before emptying the last of the wine into his glass. Carl had put his hand over his own half-full glass. "Not a bit of it. Look at us, eating caviar in style. Clean tablecloth and we have this to drink." He tapped the bottle. "Rumanian. It's horse's piss, but that's better than cow's piss."
Carl sighed and lit his pipe. "I'm talking about a new world and you're talking about wine." He felt in his pocket for matches. He never had any; most of the members of the various committees on which he sat were smokers, and matches were quickly expended. Armstrong passed him a petrol lighter.
"How old are you, Carl?" Armstrong accepted the return of the lighter and lit his own pipe.
"Thirty-one."
"You look forty. Natasha has a sister, twenty-five. Tits out to here."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Sometimes I work at home until three a.m. I have four hours' sleep with two nightmares, get up and go to work in an office. I come home at eight, eat some bread and cheese and start work. What would Natasha's sister think of that?"
"You wouldn't do it if you had her."
"Exactly. And if I were you, comrade, I wouldn't produce my French cigarette lighter with such a flourish. You didn't buy that in GUM."
In the summer of 1936, on 26 August shortly before his fortieth birthday, Carl Bystryi awoke in his apartment near Moscow University. The move to this district, not premature or the result of any string-pulling or queue-jumping, had pleased him. The apartment was old but well built, with high ceilings and a skylight in the small room that served as a laundry and kitchen. Carl had a refrigerator, a gramophone and radio, modern furniture and a view of an ancient seat of learning. He cherished an ambition to teach in the university one day, and to that end he had taken up two new projects in addition to his
heavy administrative workload—he met regularly with a group of students from the university to discuss foreign literature, and he was translating Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads into Russian. The university authorities had approved his informal classes and the State Publishing House was supporting his translation.
Carl looked out cheerfully at a clear blue sky, unusual for Moscow, but which could herald a spell of bright weather. He left his bed, put on a dressing gown and prepared coffee—another privilege attaching to his status. Life is good, he thought as he sipped the coffee. With the Second Five Year Plan well under way, the modernization of Russia was being accomplished according to schedule. The peasants had resisted the collectivization and many had been dispossessed. This Carl knew, but he regarded it as a regrettable necessity. If pressed he would have declared that many had died, but that most had been relocated or re-educated, and were now productive members of the Soviet state. Moscow-based, he had seen nothing of the butchery in the Ukraine; he was totally ignorant of the mass graves of Georgia. He knew that the cities were being fed and that more than eighty per cent of Russian industry was operated with plants less than ten years old. He believed that Russia was on a course to outstrip the rest of the world economically, as it had politically, and he was proud to have played his part. And there was much still to be done.
On a personal level, he felt his life to be expanding dramatically after years of stasis. Work on the massive Child collection had revealed to him his ignorance of Russian dialects, of Ukrainian and the Turkic tongues spoken in the south. He felt that he had to capture at least the flavour of these to do justice to the ballads, and he had resolved to travel when he could be spared from his endless committees and reports.
And there was Vitalia.
Vitalia was the illegitimate daughter of Rachel Kylenko, a dancer and musician. She had been born in Odessa in the Ukraine and had been protected, with her mother, by Colonel Udanov when the city was taken by the Red Army in 192O. Later, Rachel joked that Udanov, the only man who had ever treated her well, was her only lover at the time who could not possibly have been the father of her child. She claimed to have slept with twenty men in the month in which Vitalia was conceived. In that month Udanov, who had operated as an undercover agent in the city for almost a year, was not in Odessa.
It made no difference to Udanov, who distinguished himself in the fighting around Odessa, was rapidly promoted to general, and from 1925 kept Rachel and her daughter in comfort in a small flat in Minsk. Here Rachel, starved for attention and artistic outlet, drank herself to death in seven years after the move from Odessa. Udanov, a solid family man whose one passion and aberration Rachel had been, arranged for Vitalia to be fostered by a discreet family of displaced Ukrainians in Moscow. Her outstanding scholastic record earned her a place at Moscow University without Udanov's intervention, although he had been instrumental in arranging a scholarship for her.
Vitalia was a member of the second instruction group in foreign literature Carl took at the university. He would never forget the first words he heard from her: "How can you tell a Scotsman and an Englishman apart, professor?"
He looked at the strongly built, dark-haired young woman who sat with the others in the university courtyard. Carl had been promised a tutorial room 'when available'. For now, the weather encouraged learning al fresco. "By their accents primarily," Carl said. "You," he looked down at his typed class list, "Vitalia Kylenka, are from Minsk."
The girl's smile lit up her dark, sombre features and made her beautiful. She shook her head. "From Odessa."
"Originally perhaps, but lately from Minsk."
The other students watched the exchange doubtfully; they were accustomed to vast distances being daily maintained between their teachers and themselves. "And you, comrade professor, are you an American?"
"No," Carl said. "And I am not a professor either."
They had gone on from there, with bantering and teasing that they had learned to repress in class because it embarrassed the other students and interfered with instruction. They had met for coffee and cake outside the university. For the first meeting, hesitantly arranged after a class, Carl trimmed his beard and moustache, had his hair cut and wore a new shirt. Vitalia brushed her hair until it shone dark red in the sun. She chose her prettiest blouse and wore a light patterned jacket over it that matched her full skirt. She wore a pair of ankle-strap shoes that hurt her feet.
They met at an outdoor cafe on a street that bordered Gorky Park. They talked for four hours and drank six cups of coffee each. Carl smoked one pipe and made himself late for an important committee meeting. As he talked and listened, new unfamiliar feelings warred inside him. He noticed the swell of her breasts under her blouse and the smooth brown skin of her throat. At another time, in another country, Carl might have been embarrassed by the mutilation of his left hand, but not in Russia in 1936. Men with missing eyes and limbs, with terrible scars and prosthetic devices substituting for shattered bones and flesh were a common sight. Carl's disfigurements were minor. He was glad that he had a full head of thick hair, although he regretted that it was streaked with grey. His stomach was flat, that was good; his eyes were surrounded with lines and wrinkles—bad.
"You have seen the world outside?" Vitalia had said.
"Yes." Carl forced himself not to stare at her full red lips, the dark wisps that grew on the nape of her neck below the point where her hair had been gathered and swept up.
"Tell me about it." Vitalia's lips were parted and her eyes shone with something like the fanatical light Carl had seen in some of the planners and executors he had dealt with for the past decade. He knew he should be cautious—these were the signs of unrest and dissent—but he could not help plunging forward to tell her what she wanted to hear. He wanted to say what he had felt to be the truth until then, that there were good people in the world but that the world itself was rotten. He could not say it; old images swam up before his eyes and the words formed without his bidding.
"I rode on an elephant in Ceylon," he said. "I was frightened. It was so high and it swayed, but the view was wonderful. We bought bananas and threw them into the elephant's mouth."
"How wonderful," Vitalia said. "Who is 'we'?"
"My brother and I." Carl felt his eyes growing moist at the memory of Edward. He had not thought of him for more than fifteen years, almost the lifetime of the girl sitting across from him. He shook his head, trying to clear away the thoughts and emotions, but they would not go. "I haven't talked of these things, ever."
"I understand." Vitalia had her own memories—of the photographs of the White Russian officers her mother kept hidden in the Minsk apartment, of the men who arrived late after General Udanov had left and whom Rachel turned away scornfully because she would rather drink than take risks for love.
"Do you?" Carl felt an overwhelming need to talk. He spoke mainly of the sea—of the passage through Suez, of the blue waters of Sydney Harbour and the Dardanelles, the grey blustery English Channel. Vitalia knew only Odessa, Minsk, Leningrad and Moscow, but Carl hung on her words. They did not touch at the first meeting or the second. The third time they walked beside the river and crossed bridges they had crossed often before, but never feeling like this. They found the city beautiful. On the fourth meeting Carl kissed her. He had not touched a woman since he had fumbled and failed with his last whore more than twenty years before. He felt his body tingle with a new life, and years and months and weeks and days fell from him like grains of sand spilling in an hourglass.
"I love you," Carl said.
Vitalia kissed him hard. "I am eighteen in two weeks," she said. "We can be married."
Carl finished his coffee. He was too happy to eat and he wanted to remain slim. He looked around the sitting room carefully to make sure no papers were in evidence. He took a towel and went out of the flat to the bathroom he shared with two others. This was a great luxury; three single men could roster for a bathroom so that no one ever had to wait, wh
ich was what Carl and his fellow residents had done. He bathed and shaved. Back in his flat he packed his briefcase and selected some of the Child material he would work on in the library that night.
A firm knock on the door startled him. Sometimes a car was sent for him when he had to conduct a meeting in a remote part of the city. Sometimes there were packages and messages. But he was expecting nothing like that today.
"Who?" Carl said.
"Security, Comrade Bystryi. Open please."
Carl felt a shiver run through him and his hands shook as he unbolted the door. Three men stood on the landing; they wore the grey and red uniforms of the security police. Pistols in hard leather holsters sat high on their hips. The senior officer, with gold badges on the lapels of his coat, stepped forward, forcing Carl to retreat into the room.
"What?" he said.
"You are under arrest," the officer said.
"A mistake," Carl stammered, "I am . . ."
"I know who you are." The officer omitted the word 'comrade' and Carl felt the omission like ice water being dashed into his face. "You are Carl Bystryi, and you are being placed under arrest for anti-revolutionary activities and subversion."
20
The man who limped through the gates of Kazan station into Komsomol Square on 1 August 1955 would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had known him twenty years before. He had shrunk in size, barely five feet six inches now, and was painfully thin. His hair was still thick, but it was white, and his features were pinched and sunken. His skin was grey and he coughed harshly with every few steps. The coughing brought some colour to his cheeks but racked his body and made his limp seem more pronounced. He carried a cardboard suitcase in one gloved hand and the other hand was clenched tight around a piece of paper.
Carl Bystryi wore an overcoat, gloves, a scarf and a hat, although it was a mild day in the Russian capital. He had been cold so long that he felt it would be impossible ever again to be too warm. He looked at the hurrying, normally busy people in the square without interest. At the sight of an MVD militiaman, striding along in his smart uniform, he shrank back against the wall. People stared at him curiously, noting the bloodless lips and the awkward, shuffling gait. They knew him for what he was—a person who had been brought to justice in the People's State, punished and set free. No one wanted to speak to him, but Carl stopped the first man walking slowly enough for him to clutch his sleeve. He showed him the paper.