Russian Hide-and-Seek

by Kingsley Amis

  There were none.

  ‘Then that’s all. I’d like to thank each one of you for being fool enough to play your part in the only interesting thing that’s happened tome in eleven years. Not only interesting in itself, but the means of a much-desired promotion. I’ve been told unofficially that I’m to have Oxford. You people can imagine what a thrill that is for me. There are still colleges there, you know. The buildings, that is. Very cultured. You won’t start blabbing that everywhere you go, will you? Thank you for your attendance. Dismiss.’

  Now Vanag made a sign to the guards that sent them hurrying forward, but Theodore had time to raise his hand to him in a gesture of appeal. He nodded and beckoned to the nearest guard. Thumps and cries were heard as the audience were helped on their way out of the lecture-theatre.

  Theodore found himself separated from the other prisoners. The guard Vanag had spoken to, squat but powerful, with sallow Mongolian looks, gripped him by the upper arm and bundled him to the landing. The man pulled him about as they went so that he constantly staggered and stumbled, giving the appearance of resistance while offering none. In the same way he was thrown into and out of the lift, although in both cases he was quite willing to do what was required of him. When he started to say so he was slapped hard and expertly across the face, twice, backhand and forehand. He ought to have learned better by now, his third day in custody. Well, sooner or later he would learn, there was no possible doubt of that. The object must be never to let him forget for a single moment that he was in captivity. He would learn that too.

  On the lower floor he was dragged and pushed along a wide corridor and flung into a room opening off it, so violently that he almost fell. It was a small room, not only furnished sparsely but containing a remarkable paucity of objects: nothing on the walls, no cupboards, no files, no papers, just an open note-pad and pen on the desk at which Vanag sat facing him. The only other things on the desk were an intercom, a telephone with switches and a glass that had contained fruit-juice – lemonade, Theodore remembered. Also present was a fair-haired man of about thirty in civilian clothes, sitting behind a bare scrubbed table at right angles to the desk. He said nothing and made no move throughout the interview that followed, and Theodore never had any idea what he was there for.

  When neither of the other two spoke, he said, ‘May I sit down?’

  Vanag looked at him. His manner had lost some of the affability it had held during his address upstairs. ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘Well, what do you want?’

  ‘Nina Petrovsky,’ said Theodore, settling himself on a wooden folding chair. ‘Where is she, do you know? She doesn’t seem to be in any of the cells here.’

  ‘Of course I know where she is; I know where everybody is. She’s in hospital, but she won’t be there for long. Just a little concussion. Nothing serious.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She resisted arrest.’

  ‘But what could she do’? She’s only a girl.’

  ‘Perhaps no more than verbally.’

  ‘May I see her?’

  ‘No you may not,’ said Vanag sternly.’ Do you think I have men to spare for frivolous errands like that’? There’s still a lot of work to get through.’

  ‘Will I see her again?’

  ‘It’s possible; it’s also unlikely. You may be moved out at any moment. Is there anything else?’

  ‘How was her brother killed?’

  ‘Shot by one of his own men as he was about to shoot his father.’

  ‘Oh.’ Theodore reflected. ‘How did the man happen to be there so conveniently? It doesn’t matter – what about your man? Where was he at the time? Or-’

  The other gave a convulsive nod. ‘You have a point,’ he said. ‘Our man was snoring on his bed and the show woke him up. He only had three of the servants under his orders and he wasn’t expecting anything to happen till the next day but one. Like everybody else, I’m only as good as whoever they send me.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘No. There are some rules I never break.’

  ‘Whoever he was, how’s that episode going to look in your report?’

  ‘Very different from how it happened.’

  Theodore gave a sort of laugh. There was hardly any amusement in it, but it affected Vanag. The look he now sent Theodore was not friendly, but it was not contemptuous or irritated either; it acknowledged the intimacy brought them by having taken part in the same operation, even though on opposite sides. He spoke a single word into the intercom on his desk and seemed to relax a little.

  ‘If there ever was a fool,’ he said, ‘it was the late Alexander Petrovsky, whom you recruited with such headlong alacrity. Only a fool of prodigious dimensions would pursue an affair with the Korotchenko woman. A vicious child and a destructive child too, that one. She has her uses, though, as you must agree.’

  ‘I still don’t understand that. Surely she wasn’t under orders when she threw herself at Alexander.’

  ‘No, no, she was following her own inclinations, as always. Some days afterwards, they led her to tell her husband about her latest adventure. No doubt he had displeased her in some way. And then again perhaps he hadn’t.’

  ‘But she… but he might have…

  ‘Your wonderment proclaims your ruinous ignorance of the world and of human character. Young Petrovsky’s evident failure even to consider the possibility that she might betray him in that way proclaims something even more crass. As he was in an unimprovable position to have known, that was exactly the sort of thing she likes doing. Well, one of the sorts of thing.’

  ‘He guessed that in the end. When it was too late.’

  ‘Quite so. Actually Korotchenko had heard about her and your friend Alexander already, so she only thought she was betraying him.’

  ‘Who told Korotchenko?’

  ‘I did. It’s important that a Deputy-Director of Security should be informed when his wife has relations with a counter-revolutionary. Yes, the after-dinner conversation at the mess.

  ‘That fellow with the birthmark,’ said Theodore bitterly. ‘But I looked carefully and found nothing.’

  ‘Having done which, you felt altogether safe from eavesdroppers, safer than if you hadn’t looked, and of course, you didn’t look further. Our man’s conduct was slightly creditable.’ Vanag made a note on his pad.

  ‘Did you record our outdoor conversation? Or was that impossible?’

  ‘We have the capability of recording any conversation anywhere, but even after all these years outdoor technique is still rather complicated and calls for a skilled operator. We’re chronically short of them and so we tend to keep them for gathering material of some importance.’

  ‘Weren’t you rather taking a chance? We might have been planning to steal the projectiles the very next day.’

  Vanag smiled broadly. ‘You can’t ever have thought seriously about that, as indeed about anything else. If you had, you’d have realised that it was out of the question for soldiers to be able to get their hands on real projectiles whenever they felt like it. Do you think a man in my position would trust Field Security? They’re soldiers too. What your mate would have been shooting at me were dummies painted like the genuine article.’

  ‘But there must be real ones somewhere.’

  ‘Assuredly there are, and where do you imagine they’d be? The same place as the real TK gas. When real projectiles are needed for a practice, we dole them out, and we account for every one. Just like the KGB in days gone by. But you wouldn’t know about them. That’s one of the things that’s so depressing about all you people. Because you don’t know how to live in the present, you haven’t the slightest interest in the past. You and I had a very brief argument once, about what happened when we Russians came here, about the Pacification. I remember you said that organised English resistance ceased on the third day of fighting and thereafter there were isolated pockets of resistance. Perfectly true, and perfectly misleading. And you are one of the great number of misled, of
those willing or more than willing to be misled.

  ‘Pockets of resistance. Wherever our soldiers went they ran into one of those, especially in the country, though they came across plenty in the towns too. There was a particularly capacious pocket in the village of Henshaw, not far from here, where naughty Alexander used to do some of his courting. The English slaughtered a company and a half of our boys and severely mangled the relieving force with captured weapons before they were themselves destroyed. Only a few of their troops were involved. Most of them were villagers, including women and adolescents. They refused to surrender even when the buildings they had occupied were set on fire. They went on shooting through the smoke. They weren’t hitting much by then. Our side had to hush all that up as hard as it could. It would have done terrible damage to morale. Some things couldn’t be hushed up.’

  ‘The English must have suffered appallingly.’

  ‘Yes, very appallingly indeed. It had been said earlier that they had gone soft. If they had, I’d be interested to know what they were like before. They went on after they’d lost – Henshaw was after that – after they knew they were beaten. In the name of God, why? Well, that’s one thing we can safely say we’ll never know. And it went on. There was a victory parade through the streets of Liverpool, one of a series that turned out to be called for, and a middle-aged woman took a carving-knife out of her handbag and put it through the heart of the man marching on my father’s right. She was dead in a second, but so was he. Perhaps it was something to do with their queen being killed. It was an accident, but nobody ever came across one of them who believed it. She was supposed to be a shadowy feudal relic. Those who’d said that, or were said to have said that, underwent corrective training that proved fatal in most cases.’

  There was a pause. The fair-haired man looked interestedly out of the window. Theodore scratched his armpit, waited a moment and said,

  ‘Could I please have a drink?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Vanag, but without asperity this time. ‘Nor a cigarette. What and where do you think you are’? And isn’t it rather early for a drink? So, anyway. There had been disorders here, runaway inflation, mass unemployment, strikes, strike-breaking, rioting, then much fiercer rioting when a leftist faction seized power. It was our country’s chance to take what she had always wanted most, more than Germany, far more than the Balkans, more even than America. And she took it, after serious difficulty at first, after being on the point of having to withdraw entirely in order to regroup.’

  ‘What did the Americans do?’

  At that, Vanag gave one of his merriest and longest laughs.

  It died away finally in affectionate chuckles and little snorts of amusement. Then his demeanour changed again. He stared grimly at Theodore. After another pause he said,

  ‘All that was new to you. But if you’d really wanted to, you could have found it out. Found out a little about the nation you were supposed to be ready to kill and die for.’

  ‘You didn’t exactly make it easy for me or anyone else to find it out.’

  ‘How true, Markov; we didn’t exactly make it easy. In fact I’ll go further: we made and make it difficult in the extreme. But that’s all. Nobody can bury the truth so deep that it can never be found, and I ought to know. The most that can be done is to persuade people there’s no point in looking for it. People who are willing to be persuaded. The versatile Alexander also thought he was interested in the English. And in a way he really was – at least he fucked quite a few of them, which is more than you ever did. He had some acquaintance with that ancient clergyman, Glover, who conducted the pointless and profitless church ceremony in your Festival. You are an extraordinary lot. Well, Glover among others would have been quite a useful source of knowledge about the Pacification and events before and since if you’d ever wanted one. And I’m sure Alexander would have put you on to him if you’d ever told him you wanted one. But you didn’t, so you didn’t. That’s the trouble with ignorance, it defends itself to the death against knowledge. Behind it lies absence of curiosity, and behind that – absence of any reason to know. Intelligence is no help to those in your situation. A man can’t behave intelligently when he doesn’t understand anything.

  ‘Let me ask you one last question. Did you believe that story about handing the country over to the English when things had settled down’? You needn’t answer. Of course you never bothered your head about how, and which English, and awkward questions like that. But in fact none of it arises, you see. It would only arise if we were talking about a real counter-revolution instead of the greatest Security operation of the last fifty years. I think it’s good that you should know that, on the off-chance that you still have some pride left. Yes, Group 31 was all the brain-child of one of our men in Moscow.

  Quite straightforward: induce the disaffected elements to reveal themselves in apparent safety, arrange for them to commit crimes and then arrest them. There was a conspiracy if you like. More selective than a purge, excellent training for the organisation, double deterrent effect – if you join a subversive movement we’ll catch you and punish you, and more than that, if someone tries to persuade you to join one he’s probably a policeman. I’ll be interested to see what effect it has on the rather different operation planned for Poland, starting early next year. I shouldn’t advise you to tell your colleagues about this part, unless you happen to fancy a broken neck. Some of them aren’t as nice as you. That’s another thing that’s no help: niceness.’

  Vanag’s hands had not moved from the desk in front of him, but there was a thump at the door and the guard came in. Theodore said quickly,

  ‘I was against those killings, you know.’

  ‘I do know, and what of it? There won’t be room for fine shades like that at the kind of trial you’ll have. Niceness is no help. You poor bloody little fool.’

  He nodded to the guard, who wrenched upwards at Theodore’s arm even though he was already well on his way to a standing posture. In the corridor, lurching about as he was pulled and pushed at, he wondered dully if this was indeed the same man that had brought him to Vanag; he seemed a little taller, a little less broad. But whether or not he was the same man, he was beyond all doubt the same sort of man, the sort of man that treated all his charges with casual, inattentive brutality, that if ordered to would go much further, as far as an y one might require, not cruel, just wantonly merciless, the sort of man that had always been needed somewhere in the world since the beginning of civilisation. This representative of that sort spat carefully and copiously in Theodore’s face as they stood in the lift, and swung him into his cell with such force that he crashed against the wall and bruised his shoulder painfully.

  The cell was no more than six metres square, but with only thirty-eight people in it there was at least room for everyone to sit down. Theodore found a place near one corner, and also inevitably near the slop-pails. He had been expecting to be asked, perhaps even sympathetically asked, what had been happening to him, but nobody so much as looked up. He clasped his wrists round his knees and shifted about on the stone floor; it was hard to find a not uncomfortable position. The place was at least dry and adequately ventilated. Slowly his mind went back to the last part of his conversation with Vanag. When asked whether he had believed that it had been intended to give England back to the English, the reason for his failure to answer had not been the result of unwillingness to betray himself one way or the other; he had simply forgotten what he had believed. Now he made an effort and tried again to remember. It was no good; he had never thought about the matter much and the last time had been too long ago. Had he believed that the revolution would succeed? That was easier; he had pondered about the matter now and then and in the end decided to suspend judgement and let events take their course. Or had he just got bored, left off pondering? He was not sure.

  The long morning crept by. Every few minutes someone used one of the slop-pails, always having to step over him to reach it and sometimes kicking or hackin
g him in the leg. There was no conversation. A guard paced up and down the corridor outside, his footfalls very distinct on the flagstones. The cell was at the end of the row; Theodore could hear his regular tread receding towards the other end, turning, coming back. By estimating the length of his stride while he was in view through the bars and counting his steps, it should have been possible to calculate the length of the corridor, but that piece of information was not worth the trouble of acquiring; it had no point. How long to the midday meal? Nobody could know; all dials and watches, together with all other personal effects, had been removed by the guards before the prisoners had been taken to the cells. They were too far below ground to hear anything of the outside world.

  Further questions, thornier questions, began to come lumbering up, presenting themselves to Theodore’s reluctant attention. He conducted a slow-paced dialogue with himself.

  Was the revolution a good cause? – or rather, was I right to think it one?

  Certainly. The English had been deprived of what was theirs by right and to restore it must be good.

  What about Vanag’s point? They’d have to be trained to run the country, wouldn’t they?

  Yes. Yes, of course they would.

  And they’d have to be given responsibilities a little at a time, as they became more experienced.

  I suppose so.

  But that would have run directly counter to our declared policy of giving them full political control at a stroke.

  What of it?

  Why was I in favour of that policy?

  Wait… Because Sevadjian recommended it.

  Did I understand his arguments?

  Yes. If the handing-over was done in stages it would never be done at all.

  Why not? How does that follow?

  What’s the next question?

  Do I care about the English? Enough to risk my life for them?

  No. I joined the revolution because I wanted to fight for what I believed in.