Red Square

by Martin Cruz Smith

  In a chapel next to the coffins, a priest taught a boy how to bow by pushing down his head, then led him through the Orthodox manner of crossing himself, with three fingers, not two. Arkady found himself forced by the sheer press of bodies into the 'devil's corner', where confessions were heard. A priest in a wheelchair looked up expectantly, his long beard as white as rays of the moon. Arkady felt an interloper because his disbelief was not an institutional attitude, but the fury of a son who had deliberately and in a rage left his father's camp. Yet his father had not been a believer; for all the good it had done her, it was his mother who had secretly slipped like a bird into the few churches open in Stalin's Moscow. Kopecks dropped. Wax dripped. Collection plates circulated around the faithful as the glorious music unfolded, descant climbing over descant, appealing to the Almighty: Hear us and watch over us. No, Arkady thought, better to beg that He was deaf and blind. The voices pleaded, And be merciful, be merciful, be merciful. At least mercy was the last thing the general ever wanted.

  Arkady looped around the horse track to

  Gorky Street

  , stuck the blue light on the car roof, leaned on his horn and raced down the middle lane while traffic officers, like so many semaphores in oilskins and batons, cleared the way ahead. The rain had started again, marching in gusts up the street, raising umbrellas with flower patterns on the pavement. He wasn't going anywhere in particular. It was the sound of water tearing under the wheels, the blur of a windscreen without wipers, the gondola flow of running lights, and the melting of shop windows that he pursued. At the Intourist Hotel, prostitutes fluttered for cover like pigeons.

  Without braking, Arkady swung into Marx Prospect. Rain turned the wide square into a lake that taxis surged through like motorboats. Move fast enough and you could move through time, he thought. Gorky Street, for example, had been given back its old title of Tverskaya, Marx Prospect was being renamed Mokhovaya, and Kalinin, just ahead, was once again New Arbat. He imagined Stalin's ghost wandering the city in confusion, lost, looking into windows, frightening babes. Or, worse, seeing the old names and not being confused at all.

  Through the rain Arkady saw that a traffic officer had stopped a taxi in the middle of the square. Lorries blocked him on the right; to his left were oncoming cars. He hit his brake pedal and fought the squirming wheels as the faces of the officer and the taxi driver gaped in the lights. The Zhiguli skidded up to their trouser legs.

  Arkady jumped out. The officer wore a plastic cover on his cap. A licence was in one hand and a blue five-ruble note in the other. The taxi driver had a narrow face with eyebrows frightened to his hairline. Both looked as if they had been struck by lightning and were waiting for the thunder's clap.

  The militiaman stared at the car bumper, miraculously stopped. 'You almost killed us.' He waved the ruble note, which was damp and limp. 'Excellent, it's a bribe. A lousy five rubles. You can take me off and shoot me, you don't need to run me down. Fifteen years and I make two hundred and fifty rubles a month. You think my family can live on that? I have two bullets in me and they gave me a traffic light, as if that made up for it. Now you want to kill me over a bribe? I don't care. I no longer care.'

  'You're not hurt?' Arkady asked the taxi driver.

  'No problem.' The man snatched his license back and dove into his car.

  'You, too?' Arkady asked the officer; he wanted to be sure.

  'Yes, fuck, who cares? Still on duty, comrade.' The officer saluted. He became braver when Arkady turned his back. 'As if you never saw a little extra. The higher you go, the more you get. At the top, it's a golden trough.'

  Arkady sat in the Zhiguli and lit a Belomor. He was soaked – soaked and probably crazy. As he put the car in gear he noticed that the officer had stopped all traffic for him.

  He drove more carefully along the river. The major question was whether he should pull over to put the windscreen wipers on. Was it worth getting even more wet just so he could see? Was he a good enough driver for it to make a difference?

  Clouds drifted in his way as the road dipped south by the swimming pool where the Church of the Saviour used to stand, and he found himself forced to drive on to the pavement and stop. It was stupid. Stalin had torn down the church. How many Muscovites actually remembered the Church of the Saviour? Yet that was how they identified the pool. Once Arkady got out to put the wipers on, he lost interest in the task. The car looked like a jar draped with wet leaves on the outside and airless as a grave within. He needed a walk.

  Was he in an emotional state? He supposed so. Wasn't everybody, all the time? Had anybody ever, awake or asleep, experienced a totally non -emotional state? To his right, a clump of trees sank into steam flowing from the pool. He climbed down and then up through the trees using branches as handrails until he came to a real handrail of metal, cold and sweaty to the touch, and pulled himself on to an apron of concrete.

  He walked around the locked and shuttered changing rooms until he came to the edge of the water. Vapour rose not in wisps but as white and dense as smoke off the surface of the water. This was the largest swimming pool in Moscow, a perfect factory for the fog that wrapped around him and made his eyes smart from chlorine. He knelt. The water was heated, warmer than he had expected. Although he had assumed the pool was closed, the lamps were on, sodium halos hanging in the mist. He heard the slap of water against the sides, and then not words but perhaps someone humming. He wasn't sure of the direction, but he thought he heard feet strolling around the pool's perimeter. Whoever it was hummed not so much tunelessly as idly and in snatches, in the manner of someone who believes himself or herself totally alone. Arkady guessed from the lightness of the step and voice that it was a woman, probably an attendant or a lifeguard who felt herself at home.

  Fog was a great confuser. On a trawler, Arkady remembered a veteran seaman who had listened to a distant foghorn for an hour before discovering that the sound came from an open bottle ten metres away. 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo' – that's what she was humming. A classic. Unless no one was there, because suddenly she was silent. Waiting for her to start again, he tried to light a cigarette but the match was doused instantly and the cigarette crumpled into wet paper and tobacco. How hard was it raining? He heard her from a new direction, straight ahead and higher, nearly level with the lamps. Her voice faded, paused, and he heard the flexing of a diving board. There was a flash of white dropping through the steam and the swallowed splash of a clean entry.

  Arkady resisted the temptation to clap for what was, he thought, an unusual dive at every stage: finding the ladder, climbing the rungs by feel, walking out on to the high board and keeping her balance while locating the board's end with her toes, finally pushing down against the strength of the board and flying off into... nothing. He expected to hear her surface; he imagined she would be an expert swimmer, the sort who did laps with languid, tireless strokes. But there was no sound besides the steady drumming of rain on the pool and the irregular, barely audible rush of traffic from the embankment road.

  'Hello,' Arkady called. He stood and walked along the side. 'Hello.'

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  The other customers in the 'Dream Bar' of the Kazan Railway Station carried suitcases, duffel bags, cardboard boxes and plastic bags, so Arkady didn't feel out of place with Jaak's radio. Julya's mother was a stocky peasant dressed in discards sent her over the years by a chic, long-legged daughter: rabbit-fur coat, denim skirt and lacy hose. She consumed sausages and beer while Arkady ordered tea. Jaak was half an hour late.

  'Julya won't meet her own mother's train. She won't even send Jaak, oh, no. She sends a stranger.' She studied Arkady. His jacket smelled like wet washing and sagged around the gun in his pocket. 'You don't look Swedish to me.'

  'You've got a good eye.'

  'She needs my permission to go, you know. That's the only reason I'm here. But the princess is too good to come to the train herself. And now we have to wait?'

  'Let me get you anothe
r sausage.'

  'Big spender.'

  They waited another thirty minutes before he took her outside to the taxi queue. Clouds smothered the spire lights of the two other railway stations across

  Komsomol Square

  . Taxis slowed as they approached the queue, perused the prospects and drove on.

  'A tram might be faster,' Arkady said.

  'Julya told me in an emergency to use this.' As she waved a pack of Rothmans, a private car skidded to a stop. She hopped in the front and rolled down the window to say, 'I'm warning you, I'm not going back home in any rabbit-fur coat. I may not go home at all.'

  Arkady returned to the Dream Bar. Still no Jaak. He was never this late.

  Kazan Station was 'the Gateway to the East'. The information hall had walls of flipping destination cards under a brick, mosque-like dome. A bronze Lenin, striding, right hand raised, looked strangely like Gandhi. A Tadzhik girl wore a brilliant scarf over braided hair and a dull raincoat over loose, multicoloured trousers. Gold earrings played at her neck. All the porters were Tartars. Arkady recognized Kazan mafia in black leather jackets making the rounds of their prostitutes, pasty-faced Russian girls in jeans. A shop in the corner dubbed music on cassettes. As an inducement it played the Lambada. Arkady felt like a fool carting the radio around. He had gone to his flat and stared at it for an hour before forcing himself to return it to its rightful owner, as if it were the only one in Moscow that could receive Radio Liberty. He would get one of his own.

  On the outdoor platforms, Army patrols searched for deserters. In the cab of a locomotive Arkady saw two engineers, a man and a woman. He was seated at the controls, a muscular man stripped to the waist; she wore a pullover and coveralls. He couldn't see their faces but he could imagine a life on the tracks, the whole country passing by the window, eating and sleeping behind the momentum of a diesel engine.

  Arkady returned to the Dream Bar, crossing a waiting room so crowded and still that it could have been a madhouse or a prison. Row after row of faces were raised towards a silent, rolling image of folk dancers on a television screen. Militia prodded sleeping drunks. Whole Uzbek families bedded on huge pillow-like sacks that contained all their earthly possessions. By the bar, two Uzbek boys in knitted caps played a Treasure Box. For five kopecks they manipulated a grip that controlled a robot hand within a glass case. The bottom of the case was covered with sand, and strewn on this miniature beach were prizes that could be, with luck, picked up and dropped to the winner in a sliding tray. A tube of toothpaste the size of a cigarette, a toothbrush with a single row of bristles, a razor blade, a stick of gum, a piece of soap. Each in turn slid out of the grasp of the hand. When he looked more closely, he could see that the prizes had been in the case for years. The yellow bristles, the curling wrappers, the veins in the soap were not so much treasure as trash occasionally sorted, never removed. But the boys played enthusiastically, undeterred, since the idea wasn't the getting as much as the grasping.

  After an hour and a half, Arkady gave up. Jaak wasn't coming.

  The Lenin's Path Collective Farm was north of the city on the

  Leningrad Highway

  . Women bundled in scarves against the rain held up bouquets and buckets of potatoes to cars and lorries passing by.

  Where Arkady left the motorway, the road turned immediately to a dirt lane that rose and fell through a village of dark cabins with painted eaves, newer houses of breeze blocks, and gardens of tomato poles and sunflowers. Black-.and-.white cows wandered on the road and through the yards. At the end of the village the road split into two tracks. He chose the one that was more deeply rutted.

  The country around Moscow was flat potato fields. Picking was still done bent over, by hand. Students and soldiers were ordered out for the harvest, straggling behind peasants who tirelessly filled sacks; at any time, scavengers could always glean a few potatoes from a field. But he saw no one at all, only mist, turned earth and a glow in the distance. He followed the road to a burning pile of cardboard boxes, burlap and corn husks. It was a dirty country habit to mix trash with brown coal for incineration. Not usually in the evening, though, and not in the rain. Around the fire were livestock pens, lorries and tractors, water and petrol tanks, barn, garage, shed. Collectives were smaller farms where workers shared according to the time they put in. Someone should be on watch, but no one answered his horn.

  Arkady got out and before he was aware of it stepped into water that overflowed the yard from an open pit. The sharp odour of lime overlaid ambient barnyard smells. In the pit, rubbish, slops and animal bones stripped of skin floated in a stew that was pocked by rain. The fire was half as tall again as he was. It blazed in some sections and smouldered in others, individual flames blossoming around newspapers, gnawing on spoiled potatoes. A can rolled from the top of the pyre to the bottom, next to two neatly placed man's shoes. Arkady picked one up and as quickly dropped it. The shoe was hot, literally steaming.

  The whole yard glowed. The tractors were ancient models with rusty harrow discs, but both lorries were new, one the lorry from which Jaak had bought his radio. Tractor attachments – reapers, balers, ploughs – were laid out along the shed; morning glories had grown around them, twined around tines, their petals folded for the night. Nothing stirred in the pens; there were no piggish grunts, no nervous clacking of a goatbell.

  The garage was open. There were no working switches but the light of the fire was sufficient for Arkady to see a white four-door Moskvitch with Moscow plates squeezed between oil cans and a tyre vice. The car doors were locked.

  The barn was cement, with empty stalls on one side. The other side was a slaughterhouse. A coat hung on a wall. It took a while for Arkady to see it was a pig on a hook. The pig was upside down and it droned not with bees but with flies. Below it was a pail covered in cheesecloth black with crusted blood. Beside it was a long tallow paddle for stirring fat. The floor was cement, with blood grooves leading to a central drain. Against one end were butchering blocks, meat grinders and tallow pots as big as kettle drums on hooks standing before a hearth. On the blocks were perfume vials labelled 'Black Bear Bile – Highest Quality', with a label in Chinese on the other side. There were also vials labelled 'Deer Musk' and 'Powdered Horn'; the latter bottles claimed both Sumatran origin and the rejuvenating powers of rhino horn.

  The shed's double doors stood ajar, bent where a crowbar had forced the lock. Arkady swung them wide to the light of the fire. Unpacked VCRs, CD players, personal computers, hard disks and video games were stacked to the ceiling. Tracksuits and safari wear hung on racks, and a Japanese copier stood on slabs of Italian marble – all in all, a scene like a customs depot, except it was in the middle of a potato field. The Lenin's Path Collective hadn't worked as a real farm for years, he realized. On the floor was a prayer rug; on a card table were dominoes and a newspaper. The paper's headline was in Arabic script, but the masthead was half in Russian and said Grozny Pravda.

  Arkady went outside to the fire. It was uneven, blazing through woodshavings here, creeping through damp hay there. Paint rags burned in their own aura of colours. He pulled out a burning hoe shaft, poked in the flames and found nothing but charred brand names, Nike falling over Sony crashing on to Luvs, threatening to collapse over him.

  As he stepped back, he noticed that the reflections of the fire betrayed a narrow track of footsteps leading between the slaughterhouse and the shed to a meadow of tall wild grass that obscured two berms, low earthen walls serving no apparent purpose. At the end of one, cement steps went down to a steel hatch with a wheel lock that wore a bar and heavy padlock.

  The second berm had a similar hatch without a bar. Arkady opened it and stepped inside, crouching because he felt how tight the space was. His lighter produced a weak glow, enough for him to see that he had stumbled into an Army war bunker. Command bunkers – capsules of buried, reinforced concrete like this – had been built all around Moscow, then mothballed when the nuclear holocaust didn't arrive. Elaborat
e venting and radiation monitors surrounded the hatch. On a long communications desk were a dozen phones; two of them he recognized from his own service as radio-frequency phones, artifacts of the past. There was even a high-speed Iskra system, phone and code modem intact. He lifted a receiver and got an earful of static, but was astonished that the line was alive at all.

  He returned to the yard. There was too much water to make out individual tyre treads. He walked the periphery without finding any other tracks except to the road, and he had come that way. It struck him that since the lorry and tractor tyres weren't smeared with lime, the overflow was recent. There was no flooding anywhere else.

  In the reflection of the fire the overflow was molten gold, though Arkady knew that in daylight it would look like watered milk. He guessed the pit was about five metres square. He sank the hoe; the pit was at least two metres deep. An object bobbed to the surface that resembled a cross-section of sausage; it rolled to show the circular jowls, cone ears and snout of a pig, a face made smooth and hairless by corrosive lime, then rolled and sank again. Feathers and hair lay pasted on the scum. A stench deeper and more profound than simple rot pervaded the mist.