‘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?’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Ashburner crossly. ‘I’m not a womaniser.’
There wasn’t time to take it all in. The curator was obviously in a hurry; she ran her visitors round the room and out through the door as if the building had caught fire behind them. The smaller room contained more photographs, more reports and articles, this time from Bolshevik newspapers. In a corner stood a statue of Lenin with a marble cap on his head.
‘You must know,’ informed the curator, ‘that Stalin was revolting from 1898 onwards. At the age of nineteen he became one of the founders of the Tiflis branch of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.’
‘Are there any paintings we can look at?’ enquired Bernard grimly. Answering himself, he cried out uncontrollably, ‘Any paintings? What a bloody daft idea. What would a load of artists be doing looking at paintings?’ He limped ferociously across the room and out of the door and could be heard pattering down the stairs in his plimsolls.
Ashburner followed a few moments later. He was worried lest Bernard had gone overboard and was now running amok in the town, possibly brawling with the inebriated sailors. Peering over the banisters he saw him standing in the hall below with the Mayor and the man in the mucky overalls. For a fraction of a second he imagined he heard Bernard speaking in Russian. Clattering down the stairs, he called out, ‘Everything all right?’
‘Hunky dory,’ said Bernard. ‘I was just telling these blokes here that Zo-Zo’s Dad was a boozer.’
18
They had lunch at the People’s Palace in the main street. Many strangers drank to their health, to the loved ones they had left behind and to their safe return to Moscow. Bernard went so far as to raise his glass to Stalin. It went down very well. According to the Mayor, Stalin was returning to favour among the younger generation. The young were becoming increasingly romantic about the past and puritanical about the present.
‘I know what you mean,’ cried Bernard, and he launched into a rambling speech that dealt with falling standards in architecture, and the lack of corner shops and the absence of friendly policemen.
Assessing his condition, Olga Fiodorovna gradually stopped translating his remarks. She told Enid and Ashburner to eat up their food. ‘The cooking ladies have gone to a lot of trouble,’ she scolded. ‘You will offend them.’ Relentlessly she heaped meat and chips and bread stuffed with cabbage leaves on to their plates.
Enid wore a shoulder bag slung from her neck like a bus conductress. The bag was deep and contained nothing but an unposted letter to her mother and a comb. When no one was looking she shovelled the remainder of her food, and Ashburner’s, into this convenient receptacle.
‘Knock down the bloody buildings,’ Bernard was shouting. ‘And you wipe away the past.’ He waved his knife in the air, indicating the cracked ceiling above them, the cobwebbed cornices, the stained and peeling walls. ‘Only thin
k,’ he said. ‘Perhaps in this very room Uncle Joe paced the floor, spoke, put his fingerprints on the door handle.’
‘This building is five years old,’ commented Olga Fiodorovna.
It didn’t matter to Bernard. ‘One day,’ he said, sitting down and leaning confidentially towards Ashburner, ‘one day they’ll invent a machine to pick up all the conversations left wandering about with nowhere to go.’ He stared at a crack in the ceiling as though he saw lost words clustered like flies.
Before they rose from the table Enid complained that she felt cold. Gallantly Mr Karlovitch lent her his coat. When they went outside into the street Ashburner was astonished at the prominence of her stomach. Someone took a photograph of the group, posed against the door of the People’s Palace. Enid was in the centre, her swollen handbag hidden beneath Mr Karlovitch’s coat. ‘Mother Enid,’ cried the Mayor, kissing her farewell on both cheeks.
They left Gori at six o’clock. The sky had turned green and it was raining heavily. Even Olga Fiodorovna fell asleep. Only Ashburner and the driver remained awake. Ashburner wished he had shone a little more at the luncheon. Perhaps nobody would remember that he had ever been there. Certainly he had never raised his voice. He remembered Nina’s last words to him, spoken outside the lift in the Peking Hotel. ‘I’m not promising,’ she had said, ‘but I may come to your room.’ When I’m dead, he thought, and Bernard’s machine has been invented, no one will know what she meant.
They had been driving for two hours through flat countryside, the rain continuously falling, when the car began to slow down. Ahead of them waited a sinister black limousine. Suddenly a man jumped out into the road and ran towards them.
‘Good Lord,’ cried Ashburner, ‘It’s what’s-his-name.’
He shook Olga Fiodorovna, who woke and poked her head irritably out of the window. Seeing the President of the Tblisi Artists’ Union standing out there in the rain, she smiled. After a brief exchange he ran back to the limousine and drove off. The car reversed and followed, driving along a winding lane between potato fields.
‘We are going to a special monastery in the mountains,’ explained Olga Fiodorovna. ‘Mr Burns will be pleased.’
It took some time to reach the mountains and still longer to find the exact route to the monastery. It was growing dark. They climbed steeply, swaying over pot-holes and throwing up cascades of muddy water which dashed against the windows of the car. The driver swore often.
Bernard woke groaning. He thought he was in an aeroplane, caught in air turbulence. ‘This isn’t doing my hip any good,’ he complained, lighting himself a cigarette. Had Olga Fiodorovna protested he would have throttled her.
They arrived eventually in a gloomy village surrounded by pine trees. The driver sounded his horn and an old man came blinking into the headlamps of the car. Instructed by the President, he tottered off into the trees and presently returned with a lumpy boy who was wearing oil-skins and carrying a bunch of keys. The cars could go no further. Everyone was told to get out. Ashburner was relieved to see that the President was accompanied by three members of his committee and hadn’t brought the Amazon women. Olga Fiodorovna stayed in the car. She had seen it all before.
They toiled up a steep slope, the boy bounding ahead, leaping over boulders and jangling his keys.
‘Do you need a hand?’ asked Ashburner, concerned that Bernard might stumble and fall.
‘Get off,’ said Bernard, head bent against the driving rain. His trousers were soaked through. ‘It had better be good,’ he added in a threatening tone, as though it was Ashburner who had devised such a perilous outing.
When they reached the top of the slope it was too dark to see the monastery. All they could discern was a blackened shape towering against the stormy sky. They heard the boy unlock the door and then scuffling sounds and a little echoing yelp of pain.
‘He is looking for the lights,’ said Mr Karlovitch. ‘Many tourists come here. It is an attraction.’
‘I think I can see a bit of battlement,’ cried Ashburner, and he moved a few paces to his left.
‘Do not stray, Mr Douglas,’ cautioned Mr Karlovitch. ‘We are standing on a cliff above a ravine.’
It appeared there was something wrong with the electricity supply; the President and his retinue stumbled after the boy.
‘I’m cold, Vladimir,’ whimpered Enid, as though about to recite an epic poem.
Mr Karlovitch guided his drenched visitors to the door. ‘Do not worry,’ he comforted them; ‘there are no steps’, and tripping over a length of cable he struck his head on a stone. Shouting blasphemously, the President and his men roamed the sooty darkness until, striking matches and lighters, they feebly illuminated a small circle of floor strewn with building materials.
‘Perhaps there’s a candle,’ said Bernard, and he began to strike his own matches and gradually lit his way to some stone steps. He sat down and took out another cigarette.
‘We are in a place founded in the eleventh century,’ Mr Karlovitch said. ‘Before that it was also here, but the Arabs destroyed it. However, stones remain from the fourth century and are still in peak condition.’ His face, glimpsed briefly in the flare of a match, was ashen; a trickle of blood ran down his left cheek.
Ashburner stood with his back to a crumbling wall, his arms stretched out on either side to anchor himself. The blackness under which he was crushed was interfering with his sense of balance. He felt as though he was swaying on a windowsill at the top of the Empire State building. I’m perfectly all right, he told himself. I am among friends. But in fact he was beginning to experience that same catatonic state of helplessness which had seized him on the bridge at Leningrad. For an instant he saw the white sleeve of the President’s mackintosh raised above the head of the mountain boy who was kneeling on the floor, recklessly fiddling with electric wires.
Then someone thrust a lighter into Ashburner’s hand. Making a tremendous effort he flicked the flint, and as the spark caught the petrol and the small flame leapt he saw Nina, her face and shoulders not a yard from him, her eyes looking at him with such an expression of entreaty and desperation that he let fall the lighter. At the same moment the electricity came on; he found he was facing Enid who also looked at him, her mouth open in shock. ‘Nina was here,’ he said. He sank downwards until he sat on the floor with his legs stretched out.
Enid believed him. She wanted to run and tell Bernard, but she thought Ashburner might think she was trying to cash in on his own personal, supernatural revelation. She squatted down in front of him, the skirt of her pink frock tight over her splayed knees. ‘What did she want?’ she asked, and felt immediately foolish. Already she didn’t believe him.
‘Nothing,’ Ashburner said. ‘It’s too late. Someone hit her over the head at that studio by the lake. I’ve always known it. Petrov knew it too. So did his wife. They put a rug down because the floor was stained.’
Enid was alarmed. She nodded sympathetically and taking her time stood up and sauntered across to Bernard who was sitting on the altar steps. ‘It’s got something, this place,’ he said, staring at a vast and ruined arch which vaulted into the shadows.
‘Douglas ought to be taken back to the hotel,’ said Enid. ‘He’s gone really peculiar now. He thinks Nina’s been murdered.’
‘I know,’ said Bernard.
‘Where is Nina?’ asked Enid.
‘She’s probably back in London,’ Bernard said. ‘She got cold feet, didn’t she? She never could follow anything through.’
‘He’s wracked,’ whispered Enid, looking at Ashburner. ‘Wracked.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Bernard. ‘The poor sod’s in love. He thinks that when she walks the world holds up its head.’
They both fell silent, a bit put out, and stole glances at the fortunate Ashburner sat slumped against the wall, blessed with visions, tormented by demons. Neither of them could think how Ashburner had stumbled on the art of loving; love depended on the ability to like oneself and required
an understanding of eternal regret.
‘He didn’t seem the type,’ said Enid, at last. Remembering his ineptness on the midnight express when she had mistaken him for Mr Karlovitch, she wondered if the fault lay in herself.
19
They flew back to Moscow late the next day and had a restrained farewell dinner in the restaurant of the Peking Hotel. Enid presented both Olga Fiodorovna and Mr Karlovitch with numerous pairs of nylon stockings. Ashburner had purchased the extra large size by mistake. ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not much good at shopping.’
Olga Fiodorovna said they wouldn’t be wasted; perhaps she would post them on to his lady friend in Tblisi. When the band struck up she danced with Bernard.
‘I really like you,’ he said. ‘As soon as I get home, I’ll write you a letter.’
‘But of course,’ she replied, without rancour, and, smiling, foxtrotted beneath the Chinese lanterns.
In the lobby, before he went upstairs, she told Ashburner that Mrs St Clair would join them after breakfast and travel to the airport in the official car.
‘How nice,’ he said, and stepped into the lift.
Packing his suitcase the following morning, Ashburner remembered the shirt loaned to him by Boris’s friend Tatiana. It was simply not on to take it home with him, torn or otherwise. He took out the paper bag Tatiana had given him and removing his own shirt replaced it with the borrowed one. He threw the bag carelessly on to a chair. After locking his suitcase he looked round for his fishing rod. It was missing. He had last seen it at the airport at Tblisi. Bernard had insisted on carrying it. He had turned on the steps of the aircraft and held it aloft in a final salute to the President and his committee.
Ashburner was about to leave the room – he had tucked the paper bag under his arm thinking he would hand it over to Olga Fiodorovna – when he noticed a scrap of paper lying on the floor. It had obviously fallen from the folds of his shirt. He picked it up and read the words ‘Dzerzhinsky Square’, followed by the number 827. It was simply an address, nothing more. It was in Nina’s handwriting.
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