Russian Hide-and-Seek

by Kingsley Amis

  13

  The original (or perhaps just the former) picture of the male parts on the Korotchenkos’ fence had been blotted out with some dark paint or stain and another, executed with rather more dash, laid on top. As he approached the house on foot, having left Polly at the stables on the Northampton road, Alexander wondered whether there were not dozens, even hundreds of such drawings sited there one under the other, the work of successive afternoon-visitors regularly blotted out at the husband’s decree or the wife’s whim, yet in a sense still there. Alexander half-remembered a Latour-Ordzhonikidze aphorism according to which each of our lovers adds something to us which no subsequent experience can efface. He wondered what Mrs Korotchenko was going to turn out to have added to him.

  No new information on this point was immediately available. As on his previous visit, the door was not shut, his ring at the bell went unanswered. Inside, he moved a few paces along the tiled floor in the passage, looked through the glass door to his right and saw nobody, looked to his left and saw somebody, the same somebody as had been leaning against a wall before. This time she was sitting at a dining-table instead but of course was naked again or (her brief appearance at the fortune-telling hardly seemed to count) still. He hurried into the room and stood before her, aware after brief but quite intense experience that to seize her was no good till she had indicated exactly how she wanted to be seized. In a voice like that of one about to fall into a coma she told him to sit down, indicating a chair placed side-on to the table, on which, he saw as he complied, there stood a plate bearing a cracker spread with pink paste, a small glass of what was probably vodka, a packet of Fribourg and Treyer’s Virginia No. 1 cigarettes and a gold metamatch. Even for cigarettes, these he knew were expensive, over £20,000 for twenty, or a full day’s wage for a skilled worker. It was no wonder that people rarely- His thoughts shifted (not to anything in particular, just away) when, necessary preliminaries completed, she lowered herself wheezing and whinnying astride him. At the point when, given another few seconds, his thoughts would have begun to reassemble, starting off with some sort of recognition of the fact that so far all seemed strangely straightforward, she reached to her side, picked up the cracker and proceeded to cram it into his mouth. No gourmet had ever concentrated harder on the act of eating than Alexander now; though the flow of his saliva was feeble he got it all down in the end, even contriving to notice that the paste was fish, probably salmon. The vodka followed, every drop, with her holding the glass to his lips and hanging on to the back of his head with the other hand. By some miracle, or series of them, he succeeded in not coughing. Then she opened the packet and took out a cigarette, an operation that cost her some time and trouble. This was nothing, however, to the problem of getting the thing lit. She conveyed it to his mouth quite readily, pushing the heel of her hand against his cheek and turning her wrist till her fingers brought the tip within his reach; the real teaser came when she set about bringing fire to the other end. She made a platform against her bosom with her two hands, but it was only firm relative to herself; their mutual position was still very much that of two people on the deck of a small craft in a short sea. He would have accepted a brief interval at rest, but he could tell that that would not have suited the lady’s sense of style. Finally she pressed her forearm against his shoulder-blade and brought it up to a point where by turning his head at right angles he could get to the flame of the metamatch. Even now, not content with merely letting him puff away, she rested her hand on his jaw and took the cigarette into and out of his mouth. Three times he drew in smoke, not daring to inhale; the fourth time, guessing what was required of him, he pulled her hand aside and blew a jet into her face. At once her eyes shut tight, her mouth opened further and she gave that cry of hers. In it he heard clearly, so clearly that he wondered for a moment how he could ever have missed it, the accent of loathing, of shame, of grief at having done what she had done but, after successfully carrying out the equivalent of a breakneck gallop down a mountainside with stirrups up, he was too pleased with himself to bother about things like that.

  Mrs Korotchenko detached from her palm and let fall to the floor what was left of the cigarette, crushed in her grip a minute earlier. When she had briefly held his hands to her breasts, she got up and adopted what could not have been a very comfortable position on the table, stretched out on her back with legs dangling and toes brushing the floor. Alexander attempted no conversation; he knew that to her he was no longer there, had indeed only been in existence for a few minutes in the last couple of weeks. Well, after no very long time he would be reborn. Meanwhile there was only one thing to do; the chair had a satisfactory high back; within seconds he was asleep. He dreamed he was riding Mrs Korotchenko in a ceremonial procession through the streets of Northampton; almost documentary realism, he was to reflect when he called this to mind later. After an unmeasurable time somebody said something to him.

  ‘What’?’ he said, waking.

  ‘Have you thought of a plan yet’?’ She was sitting on the edge of the table, absently swinging her legs.

  ‘Plan? What sort of plan?’

  ‘You know, you said you’d think of a plan to make my husband look a fool.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Well, as a matter of fact I have.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, the idea is for you to get hold of a list of the people who are secretly working for the Directorate, a complete list if possible, and then I’ll write them all letters saying I’m on to them and Deputy-Director Korotchenko doesn’t keep a proper watch on his office. Or his tongue.

  After apparent thought she said, ‘That might do a bit more than make him look a fool.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it might. Do you mind?’

  ‘No. No, of course not. They might send him home. The very thing. I can’t stand this country.’

  ‘Really? What about that list? Is it possible?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be difficult. No problem, in fact. There’s a man in Korotchenko’s office who wants to do things to me, but I haven’t let him because I don’t like him, but now I could easily tell him I’ll let him do them to me once each after he’s brought me the list. I shouldn’t mind. It’d be worth it. I’ll probably need a few days.’

  ‘What are these things he wants to do to you?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts of things.’

  ‘Er… Sonia, it can’t really be all sorts of things, can it? Astronomical things and gastronomical things and…’

  ‘Oh, all right. Things like fucking me and so forth.’

  ‘Things like-’

  ‘But why should I’? I’ve told you what I could do to get the list, but I didn’t say I would. Why should I? You tell me why I should.’

  ‘Very well. Listen to me. Your behaviour so far has been bad enough in all conscience, not only in deceiving your husband, in committing adultery, and with a much younger man at that, but in these evil perversions that, your appetite for normal healthy sex glutted and jaded, you positively insist on!’ Resonance was in his voice and dignity and authority, or approximations to them, in his manner. He lifted a forefinger. ‘Just try to imagine how your husband would feel if he could have seen you a few moments ago, sitting across a soldier in his uniform and jogging up and down like a drunken gypsy! You’re revolting!’

  He had hardly begun his tirade before she was fidgeting and catching her breath, her features turning coarse and brutal with glee. When he lowered his voice to a deeper pitch of gravity and his manner became grimmer yet, she made a bleating noise and settled herself clumsily at his feet.

  ‘But all that, even that,’ he was saying, ‘pales into insignificance beside your proposal to submit to the most ignominious indignities in order to be able to deal a deadly blow to your husband’s pride and honour! Your foulest cravings are innocence itself in comparison! But justice will be done, and you will receive fitting punishment!’

  Mrs Korotchenko had taken off one of his boots and was in the act of taking off the ot
her; they were really high shoes, finely but stoutly made by Lobb of St James’s, called boots because the name had never been changed in regulations. Now she halted her movements and gave him an eager glance.

  ‘You mean I can put these back on?’ she asked indistinctly.

  ‘No, Sonia, I can’t punish you for something you haven’t yet done. When you’ve brought me the list it’ll be a different matter, I promise you. This afternoon I’m just going to correct you for your vicious sexual behaviour.’

  She gave a submissive nod, finished taking off the second boot and, with a longing look at them, put the pair aside. Moving on hands and knees, she went to a corner of the large Wilton rug that covered most of the floor of the room and threw it back, uncovering a surface of bare boards scattered with dust, fluff and a few dead insects. Here she lay down on her back, her limbs spread. It was Alexander’s part to trample on her mildly for a few minutes, as he had learned to do last time. Then as now he had resisted her desire that he should carry out this exercise with his boots on. He had very little objection to causing her physical pain, since she so clearly had none herself to suffering it, but it would not do to cause her any kind of actual physical injury or leave an obvious mark on her. As before, too, he tried ridiculously to make himself weigh less as he put his feet down, cursing silently at the boredom of it, trying to find it funny and not succeeding at all.

  After a while she ceased to squirm about and make her ambiguous noises. Guided once more by previous experience he stepped off her at this point and waited while she got rather groggily to her feet. What now? She mumbled something about two minutes and the same room upstairs and slouched out. Yawning, he went back to his chair. He noticed for the first time that there were representations of human figures wherever he looked, on plates or mugs, as parts of clocks or candlesticks, in the form of dolls, puppets, statuettes. They had been collected without regard for consistency of material, scale or period, let alone style. Their presence seemed to make it less, not more, likely that two people lived here, ate, slept, saw friends, played the music-sounder, read newspapers, watched the PP projector, gave orders to servants and were waited on by them. It was not after all impossible that Mrs Korotchenko was domiciled somewhere else altogether and kept this place entirely for use as a sexual gymnasium.

  What was the matter with her? That was no way to put it; that implied that there was one received norm of erotic behaviour from which other modes were deviations, and if the twentieth century had achieved nothing else it had finally put paid to that last and greatest citadel of bourgeois morality. At the same time it was hard to love someone who ignored endearments, who attempted no caresses, whose interests reached no further than one’s hands, feet, penis, not even mouth. Of course Latour-Ordzhonikdize had put it on record that he who had obstacles placed in his path to love deserved ten times more credit than he whose progress was unimpeded. What of it? Alexander felt he could do without credit (credit from whom, anyway?); he wanted Mrs Korotchenko to kiss him and stroke his neck and not even say she loved him, just tell him that he was a very sweet boy. He looked out of the window at the brilliant day and felt his spirits droop a little. Then he told himself not to be childish; a mature man took what came his way in the form it was offered and wasted no time fretting that it was not otherwise. The signal to move on would be that he was starting to tire of the lady’s charms, and for the moment there was no sign whatsoever of that.

  The loud screeching of a pig from the other side of the house had the effect of recalling him to his immediate situation. The two minutes must be up, perhaps twice over. He went out, up the stairs, along the passage and into the end bedroom. Here Mrs Korotchenko proved to be spread-eagled on the bed with her wrists and ankles tied to its corners and a gag, in the form of what looked like a substantial scarf, tied round her face. Within the limits open to her she was jerking about. Alexander started to unbutton his tunic. At once she shook her head fiercely and made antagonistic sounds into the gag. He too shook his head and told her it was his turn this time. As he stripped he wondered briefly and shallowly how she had got herself tied up like that. A slip-knot, he assured himself; for her second wrist she had used a slip-knot. It was some time later that he had leisure to reflect that a hand might secure another hand with a slip-knot, but would find it remarkably difficult to secure itself, especially when the binding material was not rope or string but (as he now saw) handkerchiefs or further scarves. So as not to chafe. He sat on the side of the bed and undid the gag.

  For the first time since they had met, Mrs Korotchenko laughed, a comfortable, almost happy sound. Her glance moved over his shoulder and he heard a similar laugh behind him. A girl of about twelve stood there; she was naked. He recognised her immediately without knowing who she was. Where had he seen her? In the photograph he had noticed on his previous visit to this room; a year or two younger there, but the same. And then, when she came and stood in front of him and looked him up and down, grinning, and he observed her large ill-shaped ears, he knew who she was.

  ‘Merciful God,’ he said in a low voice, and snatched up what had been the gag to cover himself.

  ‘There was no point in that,’ said Mrs Korotchenko. ‘Dasha’s seen dozens, haven’t you, darling?’

  ‘Of course I have, mummy.’

  Alexander pushed the child aside and began collecting his clothes.

  ‘What are you doing? Wouldn’t you like to be nice to Dasha?’

  ‘No thank you. I don’t think I could be.’

  Mrs Korotchenko laughed again and waited till he was almost at the door before she said, ‘Do you really want me to get that list for you?’

  14

  ‘ God save the Queen!’

  ‘Long live the gracious Queen!’

  ‘Hip hip hurray!’

  The sitting-room with the hanging plants, with the conservatory at its further end, resounded with cheers, laughter and general loud talk. It was getting late at one of Ensign Petrovsky’s soirées in Dr Joseph Wright’s house. The vodka had long since begun to circulate and everyone was sweating in the late-summer humidity. The fattish young officer called Leo, the one with the flabby mouth, said heavily to Wright,

  ‘I could not see -I don’t think I saw you drinking that toast, doctor.

  ‘I have an early call in the morning.’

  ‘No doubt. I meant you deliberately and formally put your glass aside. It wasn’t just that you didn’t drink – you refrained from drinking of set purpose.

  ‘All right, but please don’t let’s discuss the matter.’ When the other assumed a look of theatrical puzzlement he hurried on, ‘Because I know from experience that it’s quite impossible to explain to a Russian how we feel about that. After what happened… there’s no point.’

  Leo’s expression changed to theatrical surprise. ‘She poisoned herself. Is that so mysterious?’

  ‘Please. Please have another drink.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ said Leo, all ruffled feelings now, ‘I won’t pester you any more. I just thought the more our people understand the English the better. I was only trying to be helpful.’

  ‘Your best way of being that is to shut up. Please.’

  ‘I will. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  Left blessedly alone for a moment, Wright thrust his line of thought away from him and surveyed the main group of three Russians and four Englishmen – no women; this was a serious-drinking night, not a screwing night, and that was an end of the matter. All seven faces shone with goodwill as well as drink; any number of them might be running with tears or blood before the next round was even poured, but for the moment the balance held. The three regarded the four much as the four the three, with tolerance, shallow affection, limited trust and that faint contempt likely to persist between parties of different nationalities even when long known to each other. And such were their fixed attitudes; at other times their feelings would be less whole-hearted but not essentially different. Wright could not have spoken for the Russians
, nor did he particularly want to, but he was sure the English view of them would never change much. Peter Bailey, builder, hard-working, talkative, generous; Jim Hough, water engineer, not very bright, close with his money; Terry Hazel-wood, farm engineer, fattish, reliable, well dressed, knowledgeable about the local fauna; Frank Simpson, draughts-man, a great teller of stories, a great one for the women; all under forty. If the units of supervision were to be withdrawn (as one day they were presumably bound to be) in their lifetime, they would be sorry. For them, things worked well enough as they were. English is a language, thought Wright to himself; England is a place.

  The person primarily responsible for the festivities had so far taken very little part in them and now sat apart looking as black as thunder. Wright went over in the hope of a chance to elicit vexation. He said as bracingly as he could,

  ‘You’re not looking too pleased with life, Ensign Petrovsky.’

  ‘It’s not life, it’s myself. I did something the other day that made me very ashamed and I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.’

  ‘How annoying. Perhaps telling me about it would give some relief.’

  Wright had been looking forward to turning down an unexpressed invitation from Alexander to coax the story out of him, and was quite surprised when he shook his head decisively. ‘It probably would, but I’d have to tell you everything for it to mean much, and I can’t do that because there are confidences in it. Still, thank you for asking. Even these few words have helped a bit. But this is boring. How’s Kitty?’

  Kitty’s part in these sessions was traditionally limited to preparing sandwiches and other cold foods beforehand. By the time the guests arrived she was not only out of the way but out of the house, to spend the night with a neighbour. So went Alexander’s own decree; he could not be responsible, he said, for what his brother-officers might get up to when drunk. Wright considered this to be eyewash. The chance of even an attempted rape, given the hefty opposition it would arouse, was surely negligible. No, what the fellow wanted to do was prevent his mates from getting so much as the most distant glimpse of his girl, not to have to use up the smallest part of his drinking-time guarding her against invitations to badminton-parties. But (Wright reflected) many young men were less confident than they usually appeared. He said,