The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Svetlana said: ‘What you mean is you don’t agree with freedom of speech.’

  The woman tut-tutted. ‘Come now, let’s be realistic: this is the Soviet Union not outer space. We can’t allow public protest can we? That’s a phenomenon in the West.’

  Svetlana buttoned up her wolfskin with exasperated precision. ‘Without protest we shall achieve nothing.’

  ‘But, my dear, a lot has been achieved without your assistance. You have no idea, when I was a girl ….’ Perhaps, Katerina thought, she had lost her man in the Great Patriotic War when twenty million souls had perished. ‘The point is that your goals must be achieved with subtlety. Nothing wrong with feminine wiles, is there?’

  Katerina said: ‘Do you really believe that we are better off than we were?’

  ‘You must know that. Your life-style for instance. Clothes, entertainment, your relations with young men …. Why in my day we would have been shot for less.’

  ‘Then why,’ Katerina demanded, ‘can’t we speak our minds in public if we have such liberty? Why do the police have to be called in?’ She could still smell onions on her fingers.

  ‘I am merely advising you, nothing more. Just as an elder of your family might warn you.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘A maiden aunt?’ She touched Katerina’s arm. ‘I do hope you’ll take my advice, my dear.’ Apparently Svetlana was beyond redemption. ‘If not ….’

  She didn’t finish the sentence. They all smelled smoke at the same time.

  The fire was behind the stove. A tongue of flame snaked out from behind it, licked the stripped pine wall, fell back and returned to gain a hold. Resin crackled and spat.

  The ‘maiden aunt’ took command. ‘Quick, the sand buckets.’

  But the buckets were empty.

  The flames leaped onto another wall. Smoke rolled towards the platform.

  ‘You,’ to Katerina, ‘call the fire brigade. You,’ to Svetlana, ‘get water from the rest-rooms.’ Grabbing a twig broom she jumped from the platform and advanced on the flames.

  Katerina ran into the street. There, thank God, was a telephone kiosk. But when she reached it she discovered it had been vandalised. She ran around an apartment block, found another, dialled 01, fire emergency.

  By the time she got back to the hall it was a bonfire. A crowd had collected and Svetlana and the ‘maiden aunt’ stood among them, snow melting at their feet. Sparks and ash spiralled into the grey sky. As the roof caved in the crowd sighed.

  ‘Happy Women’s Day,’ Svetlana said to Katerina.

  ‘So, what did you make of the maiden aunt?’ Katerina asked as they made their way to Vernadskogo metro station.

  They had answered questions from a fresh detachment of militia, signed statements and finally been allowed to leave the smouldering wreckage.

  Svetlana said: ‘She showed us the yellow card.’ Her pilot was a soccer fanatic, Moscow Torpedo. ‘Beware the red card next time. That means we’ll be sent off,’ she explained in case Katerina didn’t share her new wisdom. ‘Be warned, Kata.’

  ‘But why wasn’t she tougher with us? Why aren’t we locked up? After all we’ll be held responsible for burning the place down.’

  Svetlana, hair escaping from her red and white woollen hat, glanced at her wristwatch and lengthened her stride, long thighs pushing at the wolfskin; she was hours late for a date with the pilot. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Let’s count our blessings.’

  They passed a snow-patched playground in front of a new pink apartment block. Children were playing at war, Soviets against Germans. The Soviets were winning again.

  ‘What do you think will happen now?’ Katerina asked.

  ‘God knows. But take care, pussycat, take to your lair for a while.’

  ‘I can’t, it would deny everything the Movement stands for.’

  ‘Then get ready to spread the good word in a labour camp. Or outside the Soviet Union.’

  Katerina thrust her hands into the pockets of her old grey coat, even shabbier than usual beside the wolfskin. ‘You forget things have changed since Tatyana Mamonova and the other two were expelled. There are letters about the plight of women every day in the newspapers.’

  ‘Whining letters, vetted letters. We’re inciting revolution. The Russians have had one of those and they don’t want another. If the Kremlin thinks we really pose a threat we’ll be hustled into exile and there won’t be a whisper about it in the media.’

  ‘But there would be in the West.’

  ‘So? Far less harmful than a forest-fire of protest in the Soviet Union.’

  Katerina knew she was right and the knowledge saddened her. She was a patriot, didn’t they understand that? Of course they did, the final deterrent. The Motherland, don’t betray her. That’s why we put up with so much: it was something foreigners, confusing Country and Party, would never understand.

  A man passed carrying a bunch of tulips, holding them like a baby to protect them from the breeze.

  ‘But,’ Katerina protested, ‘we’re doing this for Russia, for her women ….’

  She remembered the old joke. Four men sitting in a bar nipping vodka. ‘Where are your women?’ asks a Western journalist. ‘The working classes aren’t allowed in here,’ replies one of the tipplers.

  Things were changing, it was true. Five hundred of the toughest job categories had been designated Men Only and unmarried mothers were getting more money per child. But equality? It was light years away.

  As they approached the metro station Katerina said anxiously to her friend: ‘But surely you aren’t thinking of quitting?’ It was unthinkable.

  ‘Why not? We won’t get anywhere.’

  ‘Not you!’

  Svetlana turned and faced Katerina. ‘Well, not until they do something about those goloshes.’

  Laughing, they slid five-kopek pieces into the slot in the turnstile and ran down the warm throat of the metro station.

  Katerina had worked at the weekend updating the files on the defectors so she had a free day. In view of events that morning she thought it might be her last free day for a long time.

  On the way home she broke her journey to pick up some Caspian caviar that Lev Koslov, her boss, had promised to supply for the party that evening.

  Koslov was a past master at obtaining defitsitny goods. The only drawback was that he expected rewards – a pinch here, a fumble there. So far she had eluded his inquisitive fingers but a two-kilo tin of glistening black pearls, as rare these days as swallows in winter, that would take some evasion. At least he wouldn’t be able to come to the party: today being what it was he would have to dance attendance on his wife.

  When she entered the tiny office she shared with Sonya Ivanovna the first thing she noticed on her desk was a vase of mimosa, a cloud of powdery yellow blossom that smelled of almonds. Koslov making his play! Under the vase was an envelope.

  Katerina slit it with a paper-knife. The note inside said: ‘Enjoy your day.’ It was signed Robert Calder.

  Katerina leaned back in her chair and stared at an avuncular Lenin on the wall. Since she had seen Calder at Kreiber’s funeral she had wondered about him.

  Like the rest of her flock at the Institute he was a traitor and therefore contemptible. But Calder displayed qualities a cut above the rest of the turncoats. A sense of humour for one thing; she smiled as she remembered him stuffing the sugared redcurrants into his mouth, like a guilty schoolboy. And there was strength in his face that hadn’t quite gone out to grass.

  Why had a man like Calder deserted his country?

  It bothered her.

  It also bothered her that she had come to work in this futile place. She had only been here for a month but already it depressed her. The legion of lost souls sifting foreign journals for insights into their country’s policies. Eyewash. The KGB grabbed shifts in policies before the policy-makers shifted them.

  So why had she applied for the job? Come clean, Katerina Ilyina, blat, the influence that accompanies position. Bottom-of-the-scale blat, pe
rhaps, but already she had a few perks – tip-offs about consignments of luxury goods in the stores, the promise of a one-roomed apartment of her own, the passbook that asserted she was someone to be reckoned with, a hint that one day she might be allowed to travel abroad.

  With her gift for languages, English, French and German, she had romped through the academic interviews. What occasionally bothered her was the way she had weathered all the other interrogations. Why hadn’t her involvement with the feminist movement damned her? Could they possibly understand that her belief in the rights of women was not a contradiction of patriotism? She doubted it.

  The knock on the door startled her. It was probably Sonya returning from one of her furtive perusals of Western magazines, eyes shining behind her spectacles at the discovery of some new and wonderful decadence. Presumably she had knocked in case Koslov was seeking his rewards.

  Katerina called out: ‘Come in,’ and Calder walked in.

  He seemed to fill the room.

  He said: ‘I wanted to make sure you got the flowers.’

  She touched the saffron blossoms. ‘I got them, thank you, they’re beautiful. But ….’ She had only spoken to Calder twice since the funeral.

  ‘I’m glad you like them.’

  ‘I love all flowers. Muscovites are like that – they see too few of them. Soon we’ll see snow flowers.’

  ‘Snow flowers?’

  ‘In the winter people fall and die from exposure. The snow covers them and they are lost until the thaw. When the snow melts they’re found perfectly preserved …. Is anything the matter Comrade Calder?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ Calder smoothed the frown from his forehead with his fingertips. ‘I think I prefer mimosa. I suppose it comes from Georgia.’

  ‘Probably. Somewhere in the south, anyway. Have you seen much of the Soviet Union, Comrade Calder?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ His smile tightened.

  She skated over that one. ‘Do you feel you’ve been accepted?’

  ‘People have been very kind.’

  What sort of an answer was that?

  ‘Why don’t you come to a party this evening?’ she said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Spandarian was a Georgian and therefore a schemer and on the afternoon of Women’s Day he was scheming busily in his office on 25th October Street.

  On his desk were eight buff dossiers, dog-eared and stained from frequent perusals, and one eggshell blue folder, relatively unscathed.

  Thoughtfully, stroking his luxuriant moustache and pulling on a yellow, tube-tipped cigarette, he picked up the dossiers in turn and scanned the latest computer print-outs inside them.

  He didn’t touch the blue folder.

  A knock on the door and his secretary, Yelena, cheeks as bright as a wooden doll’s, came in carrying a glass of lemon tea brewed in an electric samovar in the outer office. Spandarian slugged it with Armenian brandy.

  He gestured out of the window at the grey sky drooping over Red Square. ‘A typical Moscow day.’ He sipped his fortified tea.

  ‘Spring is just around the corner,’ she said brightly. ‘March the eighteenth, Maslennitsa.’

  Madame, he thought, you delude yourself. There was no way winter in Moscow would be locked away that early; in any case Maslennitsa was a country festival. But all Muscovites were the same: they couldn’t accept the slightest criticism of their capital city.

  That was because they were Russians and still believed that the Russian republic was the Soviet Union. Didn’t they ever pause to consider the other fourteen republics? The hundred or so ethnic groups speaking different languages? Moldavians, Uzbeks, Armenians, Georgians …. Didn’t they ever cast their eyes to the sun-drenched south, peer down the Golden Road to Samarkand?

  But soon they would have to face reality. Admittedly Russians accounted for more than half the 260 million or so inhabitants of the Soviet Union but the combined populations of the other republics were overhauling them, particularly with virile Georgians multiplying like rabbits. Then the Slavs in the Kremlin would have to tread warily.

  ‘You’re looking very smart today, ‘he told Yelena. He couldn’t quite muster ‘attractive’ even though it was Women’s Day. But he had bought her half a dozen pink carnations flown in from Tbilisi – at a knockdown price because he was Georgian.

  ‘Thank you, Comrade Spandarian,’ bright cheeks bunching. She was severely built and the rouge gave her a clownish air.

  Spandarian finished his tea and dismissed her. ‘Adlobt.’ He spoke Georgian whenever he could. ‘That will be all.’

  When she had gone he lit another yellow cigarette and stared through the window at the clustered cupolas and spires of the Kremlin. The Politburo was meeting there tomorrow; thirteen strong and not a Georgian among them. It was enough to make Stalin turn in his grave. Nine Russians, two Ukrainians – the Russians had to pay lip service to the fifty million restless souls in the south-west – and a couple of minority republics.

  But with the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as Party Leader, the old order was changing. Out with the aged roosters, in with the young hawks. And who better placed to lead them one day than an up-and-coming Georgian KGB department chief?

  Spandarian, head of the department responsible, within the Second Chief Directorate, for the defectors in Moscow, smiled crookedly at the gilded baubles across the square.

  He closed his eyes and the baubles became a bunch of purple grapes freshly washed and glistening in a bowl in the restaurant at the top of the funicular climbing Holy Mountain in Tbilisi. He was eating lobio, beans in walnut sauce – his mouth watered – and drinking red Khvanchkara, the wine that Stalin, the most wily Georgian of them all, drank. Beneath him sprawled the city, cobblestone streets teeming with gangsters and girls with beckoning eyes, cafés filled with conspirators, perfumed air rustling with money and intrigue.

  No, there was no one better equipped to scheme his way to the secretaryship of the Communist Party than a devious Georgian. Why in Tbilisi the name of Otari Lazishvili, Godfather of the ‘sixties who had swindled the State out of two million roubles and lived like a Rockefeller, was revered alongside Stalin’s. Recently the Kremlin had decided to purge the Georgian Mafia. Fat chance.

  Spandarian saw himself as part Stalin, part Beria – Stalin’s police chief and executioner – part Lazishvili.

  But a much more polished schemer than either Stalin or Beria. Stalin, God rest his soul, was only a cobbler’s son and when Beria wanted a woman he pulled her off the street! Spandarian, who was forty-two, belonged to an aero club and flew his own plane in Georgia, favoured sharp suits, had his wavy brown hair cut by a barber imported from Tbilisi, jogged and enjoyed modern music and read contraband Playboy magazines. The naïve sometimes asked him how he got away with it; the answer which he never supplied was simple – he had too much on his bosses and, for that matter, the granite-faced old men in the Kremlin.

  Just the same he had to succeed at the job in hand. Fail, like a five-year plan, and you were doomed whatever clout you possessed. Spandarian opened his eyes and met the gaze of the ubiquitous V.I. Lenin regarding him shrewdly from the wall of his sumptuous office. Then he picked up the fattest file on the leather-topped desk, opened it and began to read the computer summary.

  ROBERT EWART CALDER

  Born April 5, 1946, Mt. Vernon, Boston.

  Height: 1.8 metres.

  Educated: New England prep and Harvard.

  Profession: lawyer.

  Specialisation: member of legal team advising Secretary of State.

  Marital status: divorced.

  Progeny: one son, Harry, by ex-wife, Ruth.

  Recreations: baseball, sailing and chess!

  Spandarian wondered if the computer had added the exclamation mark unprompted.

  Character: determined but resolution undermined by adolescent ideals exacerbated by death of brother in Vietnam.

  First approach: second year Harvard. At Elsie’s, Mt Auburn St. (A whorehouse, Spanda
rian had surmised at first. In fact an establishment selling king-size sandwiches to students).

  Progress: finally suborned third year – Cross-Ref 8943XA, Infiltration US universities.

  Grading: B but promoted when posted Washington.

  Value: inestimable until blown.

  Spandarian speed-read the rest of the summary. Reactions to Soviet life-style, sexual inclinations, companions, ideological stability, veracity of information brought from Washington ….

  He paused, feeling the last sheet between his fingertips. What information? Value: inestimable …. What the hell did that mean? To his Georgian mind in which every highway was a maze, the lack of definition jarred.

  Ever since he had taken over the department Calder had bothered him. The apartment on Gorky Street, the dacha, the air of impregnability that he carried with him like a briefcase full of secrets …. Spandarian suspected that Calder possessed knowledge that had been denied to him and that was insufferable.

  Which was why he had mounted Grade 2 surveillance on the American. Grade 1 as from now, following Dalby’s report that he had expressed doubt about the manner of Kreiber’s death and was generally expressing disquiet.

  And today Calder had made his own contribution to that surveillance. Mimosa indeed! Spandarian picked up the eggshell blue folder and peered into the life of Katerina Ilyina.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Kremlin – kreml, fortress – is the hub of Moscow, more so than the seats of government of most capital cities. Driving into town there is no escape from it, the great avenues converging on it like the spokes of a wheel.

  Around this fabled triangle of palaces, towers and cathedrals and around the old town of Kitay-Korad lie seven squares hemmed by a belt of green boulevards which are linked in the south, beneath the Kremlin’s walls, by the River Moscow. After the boulevards, and the next layer of assorted development – Czarist baronial, Stalinist wedding-cake, 1980s’ functional – comes the Sadovaya, the Ring, the city’s broadest highway, and finally a roaring motorway that girdles Greater Moscow as the Périphérique girdles Paris.