by Hugh McLeave
I still had the problem of getting those dummies into Moscow without arousing either suspicion from the Russians or my own delegation. We should soon be returning to Moscow to discuss equipment the Russians wanted to buy as computer software and monitoring instruments for their nuclear installations. I could have gutted a high-speed printer and hidden the cases in that. Or even used the diplomatic bag. But I was scared something would go wrong if I let those effigies out of my sight. I decided, whatever the risk, they would go with me.
Three weekends later, I flew back to Paris to collect the Lenin dummies. If anything, I thought Jean-Christian Melville had improved on the figures he had made for the Musée Grévin. When I followed him into the upstairs studio of his atelier, I had a sort of double-take. Two Lenin heads sat, side by side, on a shelf, though not like the museum copies. It seemed to me those faces might have been stolen from the inside of that glass sarcophagus in the Red Square mausoleum. Same with the hands, down to the reddish-gold hair on the finger phalanxes and the bent, right-hand index finger.
Obeying my instructions, the French sculptor had left out the eyes, replacing them with molded eyepieces and closing the wax lids and reddish eyelashes over them. As they would be in death. For a ‘live’ model he would have had to order special glass eyes, blown expertly and tinted exactly like Lenin’s eyes. Only the lips (that other highly-expressive feature of any portrait) did not have a dead set; Melville had imprinted something like a serene smile on them, and this I had noticed in the pictures we had taken.
These two replicas were the Lenin mummy down to the reddish moustache and beard with its scattering of golden, graying and white hairs which an artist like Melville had actually chosen from someone with red hair that had gone white. As he explained, the ‘messieurs poil de carotte’ turned a particular type of gray and white. Apart from the cheeks, he had tinted the wax that ivory yellow everyone saw in Lenin; in any case, he said the wax he had used—four parts of bleached beeswax to one of vegetable tallow—would turn a dusky yellow on its own. However, he demonstrated there and then how to touch up the wax with watercolor to whatever complexion I wanted.
Two bodies into which the heads, arms, legs and hands fitted, lay on a table; they were lifelike, each bone and muscle perfectly sculpted. “But they’re not wax,” I remarked.
“No, they’re glass-reinforced plastic.” Melville prodded one of the suitcases I had brought for the models with his foot. “Carry a wax dummy in those and you’ll wind up with a pile of candle wax.”
In case of such accidents, he showed me how to melt wax in a water-jacket at a temperature of about sixty degrees and make good small defects; I watched as he attached the head and limbs to the plastic body. He produced two boxes, insulated with vinyl rubber in which he placed the heads and hands, arranging them as tenderly as live things with his rough, clay-covered fingers. Both boxes fitted into the deep suitcases with just enough room for the plastic bodies beside them.
I had toyed with the notion of consigning one of the cases to my mother’s cottage on the edge of Richmond Park at Ham Common; since her death, recently, I had kept the place on, renting it in the summer to pay for the rates and repairs. But what if the case went astray, or got knocked about on the railway? I decided I had to risk things and fly with them and see them through London Airport myself. When I had paid Melville and thanked him, I took a cab to Roissy Airport and managed to get on an afternoon flight to London.
At the other end, as I waited in the customs hall for the cases, tried to appear nonchalant; but my collar felt too tight and my mouth too dry. Did the customs boost the heat in these places to make the nervous and the guilty sweat? Perhaps my insouciance triggered their interest, or the way I rushed over to the carousel on spotting my two suitcases.
“Open them,” the customs officer ordered. In my panic, the gold braid on his tunic nearly blinded me. My fingers were trembling up to the armpits. I raised the lid of the first case. His eye fastened on the closed boxes, then on the plastic torso. “What’s that?”
“It’s only a dummy.”
Seizing it, he turned it round then upside-down, auscultating it by drumming his fingers on the chest; he gawped down the empty neck to verify nothing was hidden inside. “Now the other case,” he grunted. He went through the same performance, but this time opened the insulated boxes as well. He stared, incredulously, at the Lenin heads, then at the hands. Back he went to study my passport which listed me as a civil servant.
“That’s Lenin, isn’t it?” he said.
“Both of them…yes.”
“May I ask what are you doing with two dummies of Lenin, importing the same into the United Kingdom?”
“Is there a law against it?” He kept his eyes fastened on me, waiting for his answer. “It’s a hobby of mine,” I said, “I sculpt in wax and other materials, and he’s an eminent man.”
He didn’t believe a word of this stuttered explanation, but chalked both cases and turned to the next victim.
I walked away, lugging my cases on legs so watery I didn’t think I would make it to the taxi rank.
Chapter 7
As the TU 154 banked and groped downwards into Sheremetyevo Airport, I wondered how the pilot could possibly distinguish between the blizzard and the white wilderness beneath. We were literally tunneling through snow which thudded against the portholes, isolating us and even muffling the whining jets. An eye-searing glare filled the plane. Everybody seemed tense. My own apprehension brought on a sudden bout of Gulag Syndrome, that trapped, claustrophobic feeling foreigners get in Russia.
Our return to Moscow had been delayed until late March because the Russians had several times postponed the trade discussions. Simmonds had told us to take clothing for a couple of months which meant long, bargaining sessions, but fortunately for me a lot of hanging around, heel-kicking.
From the VIP lounge where we waited for the embassy cars, I watched our luggage trolley crossing the customs hall. Since our mission had diplomatic cover, the customs would not bother us. But my heart began to hammer when I noticed a brace of those retrievers the Russians used for detecting drugs and explosives snuffling around the trolley near my two cases. Could it be the plastic Melville had wrapped round the dummies?
A customs officer stopped the trolley. I held my breath. I had my story ready. Those Lenin heads were for a friend, a fervent admirer of the great revolutionary. As the customs man directed the trolley towards the inspection bays, another trolley crossed the shed. A voice yelled, “No brakes,” and the second trolley crashed into ours scattering the cases and Simmonds’ heavy trunk.
Simmonds bounded out of the lounge like a terrier to pounce on the Russians and berate them for their clumsiness, even threatening to lodge an official complaint. Without a word, the Russians loaded the trolley and the customs man waved it through. Only then did I see the driver of the second trolley.
It was Vanya. I didn’t know where to look. I had water in my spine.
There was still the problem of hiding the statues. I couldn’t leave them in my room at the Rossiya, for the KGB carried out routine checks on everybody’s baggage. I solved the problem by asking my friend, Jock Frazer, the embassy security man, for a locker and shoving them in that.
Two days after my arrival, Vanya contacted me. We were meeting in Larissa’ s flat the following evening. I could hardly wait. I had not seen Larissa for three long months. I arrived early. She drew me inside and kissed me. “Alan, I’ve missed you,” she whispered. I handed her my presents—musky French perfume, silk stockings, chocolates. She didn’t even open them.
“Did you get them made?” I nodded, telling her how then she grilled me like some inquisitor about Paris, Melville and the contretemps at the customs. “I told Vanya to look out for you,” she said. She lit a cigarette, dragging on it deeply. Her violet eyes became troubled. “Where are they now—not in the Rossiya?”
I told her they were in a locker in the British Embassy, and held up the key to pr
ove it. For a moment, she forgot her own rules and threw her arms round me, hugging me then holding my face in both hands and looking at me with admiration. Seizing my chance, I grabbed her and pressed her tight against me. I kissed her and felt her mouth yielding and the points of her breasts harden against my chest.
Suddenly, she wrenched herself away, as though she couldn’t trust herself. “What if the wax melts?” she cried.
I reassured her, then put a question of my own. “Larissa, what exactly do you mean to do with two wax dummies of Lenin?”
“I’ll tell you that when the time comes.”
“So, you still don’t trust me.”
She took both my hands in hers and stood on tiptoe to kiss me on the lips. “Alan, would I have asked you to get those wax figures if I didn’t trust you. After all, you’re a Churchill.”
Larissa thought all Churchills not only epitomized anti-Communism but were all endowed with courage and genius. Hadn’ t Winston Churchill put that tyrant, Stalin, in his place during World War II? And his son, Randolph, had even sent a call-girl back to the KGB with a note, saying she wasn’t pretty enough to induce him to walk into their sex-trap. She laughed at that one.
She brought us two glasses of strong tea, spiking it with brandy and adding half a lemon. She opened her presents, sniffing the perfume and running those strong, blunt fingers over the silk stockings. But absently, as though something was troubling her. She put the presents down. “We must get those cases out quickly…Vanya will hire a truck and we must hide them properly…When can you do it…tomorrow?”
“Why the hurry?”
“I have a plan, and my brother is sick. If we don’t hurry, he’ll die.”
“Have you heard from him?”
Her eyes moistened and for a moment she said nothing before rising and disappearing into the small bedroom where I heard her moving bits of furniture. When she returned, she had something looking like a thick toothpick; with a fingernail, she lifted an edge and I realized she was unrolling a square fragment of paper about the size of a postcard. She handled it like old parchment, smoothing it. She put it on the table under a lamp, handing me a small but powerful magnifying lens. “Sasha’s last letter,” she said. “Hurry and read it before Vanva and the others arrive.”
Hardly a millimeter of space remained uncovered on both sides of that flimsy paper; into it, the writer had compressed several thousand words in microscopic, Cyrillic script. “It was smuggled out by one of the Civil engineers working on the town they’re building,” Larissa explained. “You won’t find my name, or Sasha’s.”
“It must have taken him days to write that.”
“He did it without his glasses. They took them away.” She ground out her cigarette stub. “Know how he does it—by making a pin-prick in a piece of paper and using that as a lens. Go ahead and read it.”
After such a long time, I can’t remember half of what I read in that strange letter with its minute script squirming beneath the magnifying-glass. To anyone not knowing the writer, it was almost impenetrably cryptic so that no-one could trace him or the other people mentioned. Yet, Sasha Bukov had identified himself in a hundred ways with a personal code. Because of the way he had put the message together, word by word, he had excised everything unnecessary—adjectives, articles, prepositions, conjunctions—finishing with a sort of telegraphese.
Judging by the changes of pen and pencil, he must have toiled for weeks over that square of paper. Sasha didn’t dwell too much on the hardships of that primitive camp where the temperature descended to minus 60 Centigrade on some January and February nights. He sacrificed some space by mentioning prisoners he had encountered in various camps (so that their names would appear in samizdat accounts to give parents and friends news about them) I recall one name, Dr Semion Gluzman, a young psychiatrist who bravely rebelled against the internment and drugging of dissidents like General Piotr Grigorenko, defender of the exiled Tartars, and was given a long, hard-labor sentence in the camps. I have to paraphrase and substitute English slang and acronyms for what I remember Sasha saying:
I spent week in dock with frostbite in feet and fingers cos no gloves and issue boots NBG. That and rotten rations—skilly, maggoty stew, weevil bread. S… one of Odessa students in back-to-Lenin rebellion found black beetle promenading over rotten cabbage. No heart to kill it knowing effort it had made to survive here. They’ve nothing to learn from Hitler, Himmler and SS. Glad father mother no longer alive to weep for years devoted to Party.
I lifted my eye from the tiny script. ‘I didn’t know your parents were Party members.”
“Party members?” Larissa had a faraway look in her eyes, then nodded. “Yes, our father was a Party man for thirty years. It wounded him deeply when Sasha wouldn’t follow him through the Komsomol into the Party.”
“Was this in Moscow?”
“No, in the Ukraine.” Larissa made no move to elaborate, and I went back to reading. Sasha described life in what they called a hospital unit, merely another barrack-room with two medical orderlies and a woman as a nurse. No doctor. After a week, he was sent back to work feeding the concrete mixer making the deep foundations in the permafrost for the tower blocks they were building. They toiled from the darkness before dawn until well after sunset in that frozen region of short days.
When I collapse on bed, for few moments before falling asleep I play over times we were together long ago. Remember that hotel in S… where summer lasted nine months and you could reach out and touch hills and sea? That day we went fishing with boatmen and grilled and ate catches on beach…
“Where was S..?” I asked.
“Sukhumi, in the Crimea. The whole family went there four years running.”
Sasha went on to talk about other memories he shared with his sister, writing eloquently about the night they saw Mussorgski’s Boris Godunov in K… (Kiev) and watching Plissetskaya dance in L… (Lvov). Then I reached the part that had compelled Larissa to bend her rule of silence and show me the letter.
Last week (Larissa reckoned this to be the first week in March) they accused Lex, Aram, myself of malingering cos we caught smoking in latrines. Our food stopped for two days. When they lifted ban Lex refused to eat, we did, too. So began hunger strike. Gulag colonel came to barrack-room to harangue us about danger of death. We sent him on his way, saying we’d rather die than rot in this hole. Anyway, their morgue best, most comfortable building in whole camp. We’re tempted with food we dole out to other prisoners. Colonel asks what we want. To be treated like human beings with better food, better clothing, shorter hours, permission to write and receive letters, radio, newspapers, usual things. We might even get them.
“Who are Lex and Aram?”
“They’re our code names for Chernov, Raya’s brother, and Arakelian. Stalnov, the fourth man convicted with them, was transferred to another camp for smuggling letters out.”
I handed back the paper which Larissa rolled into its thin tube and went to hide it. “So, that’s why you’re in such a hurry,” I said when she returned.
“If he goes on with his hunger strike, he’ll die,” she said. “Do you know what they do?” With a sort of sob in her voice, Larissa went on to say, “They force-feed the gulag hunger-strikers. They push two wooden spatulas between the teeth and one guard holds the jaws open while another one pours liquid food through a tube into the stomach.” She stopped to light another cigarette and I could see the lighter flame tremble. “If they make a mistake and push their tube into the windpipe and pour their filth into the lungs, they can easily murder a man. Dozens of prisoners have died that way, and nobody has ever heard about them.”
She seemed so nervous she had to find something to do with her hands, going to straighten the curtains then pouring us more tea and cognac, not sparing the liquor. “They do even worse things,” she muttered. “Just think of it, Sasha with an ulcer and a bad lung in a place with not even a decent first-aid hut.”
I went to put my arm round her and
felt her body shaking with suppressed sobs. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You cannot understand what freedom is because you live it. You cannot understand a life with no meaning, a life spent in the camps.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll go and collect those statues on Monday evening when I get away from the conference-room.”
Chapter 8
After dark on Monday, I collected the cases and took a taxi to Mayakovsky Square. Vanya picked me up with a small truck and we ducked through dimly-lit back streets. Fresh, powdered snow squealed under our tires, that squeal meaning it was twenty below or more. Once past the cosmonaut monument and the vast exhibition of Soviet achievements, we rounded the TV tower, its huge ruby light a pinprick seventeen hundred feet above us. At the main state highway Number Nine, we again swung left and headed north-east, away from Moscow and on the Zagorsk-Yaroslavl road.
Now I could see why Vanya had borrowed a four-wheel-drive Niva with a high chassis; outside the city limits, snow was banked on both sides of the road with a deep ridge down the middle; we rattled along the twin ruts gouged on the right-hand lane, and slithered on snow that had thawed and frozen again; our headlights shimmered and spangled over the snowscape and splintered off white-rimed birch trees on either side.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Vanya shot me a quick glance. “Didn’t Larissa tell you that?”
“I didn’t ask her.”
“Then you’d better do that.”
“I’m asking you.” His attitude irritated me.
Vanya pulled a packet of Mazurka out of the glove-box, crimped the end of one, lit it and pulled so hard the glow illuminated his tight-set features. “What’s in those cases you brought back?”
“You’ll have to ask Larissa that,” I said, turning his ploy against him.