The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  It was a puppy that Katerina wanted. In the apartment on Leningradsky? he had queried. Why not? Every other apartment was a kennel – at the end of the corridor the Litvaks had a puppy which seemed to be developing into a St Bernard.

  Just the same Calder looked for a puppy without elephantine potential as he pushed his way through the elbowing crowds past breeders, dealers and gypsies.

  But his thoughts weren’t entirely with puppies. It was Saturday, a week since the incident outside the car mart. According to Jessel the dentrm the Volga could have been made by a flying stone.

  ‘And the gunshot?’

  ‘You said yourself there was a thunderstorm overhead.’

  ‘It sounded like a shot to me.’

  ‘How would you know? You said it coincided with a crack of thunder.’

  Calder wavered. But he had felt an impact. Had swerved. He wished he had stopped and investigated. But stop is what you don’t do when you think someone is trying to put a bullet through your brain.

  Dalby had been more scathing than Jessel. ‘If they wanted to kill you they would have brought in a pro, a marksman. The bullet hit the wing of your car. Some m … marksman.’

  ‘Perhaps he was distracted.’

  ‘KGB snipers don’t get distracted.’ They had skirted two lovers lying among the birch trees in Sokolinki Park. ‘You’re getting neurotic about death. Kreiber falls into a hole in the ice in a drunken stupor, Bertoldi jumps out of the window, Maclean dies of cancer …. You must have been disappointed when van Doorn turned up after his couple of gay days.’

  Calder hadn’t pursued it. He glanced at his watch. A week to the minute when he thought he had felt the impact. Had glimpsed death.

  He bought a puppy with a brown nose.

  The rally was held two miles from the animal market on the scimitar-shaped island south of the Kremlin formed by the Moscow River and a drainage canal dug in the eighteenth century to divert flood water.

  The idea was to meet outside the gardens in Bolotnaya Square where Pugashev, who led a peasant revolt against the Czar in 1785, was executed, and march down Ossipenko, named after a woman pilot killed in an accident in 1939. An inspired choice. Embryonic Bolshevism and feminism. Katerina’s choice.

  But Katerina had lost her zest for the movement because she knew she was being allowed to protest only if she continued to pass on information about Calder. And that was no protest at all: it was miserable compromise.

  But, she reminded herself, that was no reason to abandon feminism. Their crusade was no less worthy because of private torment. Look at those banners unfurling in the sunshine EQUALITY FOR WOMEN and WE’VE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR APRON STRINGS.

  Svetlana said: ‘Your heart doesn’t seem in it these days. Is there anything wrong, pussycat?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Katerina tied the blue silk scarf that Svetlana had given her for her birthday round her neck. The mannish looking woman who had spoken the day they razed the assembly hall was winding up. At last. The hundred or so women gazing at the fountains in the gardens shifted impatiently. They had come to march.

  ‘Are you in love with this Calder?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s twice my age. And he’s a defector.’

  ‘Weak you mean?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything of the sort,’ and was annoyed with herself for answering so hotly.

  Svetlana, a Nordic vision in saffron, smiled, cat-like.

  Then they began their march, a small rehearsal of things to come. This time they had been given permission and militia in summer uniforms walked beside them. Across the river they could see the spires and the Great Palace of the Kremlin.

  Despite everything Revolution began to stir once more in the soul of Katerina Ilyina as they marched over the drained marshes where the market gardens of Muscovy had once flourished.

  What right had men to use women?

  She smiled fiercely.

  Svetlana smiled back. ‘That’s better,’ she said.

  The march passed off without incident. Katerina was quite disappointed.

  To celebrate her birthday they drank pink champagne in Katerina’s home while the puppy sniffed its way around the living room.

  ‘To the best daughter in the world,’ Sasha cried emotionally. He flung his glass against the wall and apologised to his wife.

  Katerina’s mother shook her head sorrowfully. A true Russian, the shake implied. Incorrigible. To Calder she said: ‘This must be a very long article you are writing.’

  ‘The National Geographic is very thorough.’ Calder looked at Katerina; she looked away.

  Sasha raised his glass again. ‘To the Geographic. May your article go on for ever.’ This time he didn’t throw his glass. ‘So what do we call the dog? Kata?’

  ‘It’s a boy,’ Calder said.

  ‘Then we shall call it Nicki,’ Sasha announced for no apparent reason. He began to sing.

  On the way to Leonid Agursky’s concert Calder and Katerina saw a couple of gutter drunks being tossed into a van bound for a sobering-up station. Only yesterday Izvestia had been pontificating about alcoholism and absenteeism. It had also contained an item about two drunken teenagers who had knifed each other in Gorky Park.

  Inside the concert hall on the Lenin Hills Calder felt old again. All around him in the dusky, light-spangled atmosphere he could see Youth.

  Katerina held his arm; she must have sensed that he had grown old again. She said: ‘You’re looking very smart tonight, Robert.’

  Not young! He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt striped in red and blue and a pair of flared slacks from long ago. She wore Levi jeans and a pink blouse. He could see her nipples through the cotton.

  Agursky was good, no doubt about it. Apparently Katerina had met him on a bus; she had attended another concert and he had invited her to this one and told her to bring a friend. He was Ukrainian and he sang folk songs in a voice that yearned for his land. He also sang pop – the songs of David Tukhamov, the Jewish composer who wrote Farewell Moscow for the 1980 Olympics, and old Beatles’ numbers. He also recited Yev-tushenko. Calder felt Katerina’s hand tighten on his arm; he suspected she was a little in love with Agursky.

  The applause was prolonged and wild. After three encores the spotlight and strobes were dashed and Calder and Katerina went to the dressing room.

  Agursky was drowning in sweat. ‘Happy Birthday,’ he said to Katerina and gave her a bottle of Chanel. ‘From Paris. I had it with me the day we met.’

  She kissed him on the cheek. ‘What were you of all people doing on a bus?’

  He grinned. ‘There weren’t any taxis.’

  There was warmth and strength in his high-cheekboned face, Calder thought. When Katerina introduced them Agursky said: ‘I shall be going to New York in the winter. Perhaps we can meet? I shall be very lost there.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Calder said. ‘Not you.’

  ‘But we can meet?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Calder said.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mean that about seeing him in New York,’ Katerina said later over dinner in the Praga Restaurant on Arbat Street.

  ‘It would be kind of tricky, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve never told me about leaving America. About your wife, son ….’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘Some of it. Yes, I know some of it. But not the inner truth: the way you felt.’

  Later in his apartment he told her. Starting with the letter he received from his brother, Dean, in Vietnam.

  ‘It was full of spent passion. Passion for his country, for the great crusade, for a future floodlit with promise. A passion that had become a haemorrhage in a distant country. By the time I received the letter he was dead.’

  There were tears in Calder’s eyes. She sat beside him on the sofa.

  ‘Not that any of this is any excuse: I’m just telling you how it was. When Dean went to war a friend called Gary kind of moved in. He’d always been around, I guess, but when
a void suddenly appeared there he was. Dear old Gary. But could he talk, could he ever talk. If he’d been a Kremlin PRO the whole world could be Communist today. Golden words, shining words, persuasive words. He was at Harvard, I was a kid waiting in the wings, easy meat. I often wonder why he bothered. Perhaps he was rehearsing his speeches for the day he made it. Then he sold out. To everything that had outraged us. To the Pentagon, would you believe.’

  ‘And you?’

  The cries of children prolonging dusk in the public gardens reached them through the half-open window. The apartment smelled of evening and carnations.

  ‘I met another persuasive tongue. A lonely man in a sandwich parlour called Elsie’s. He could talk, too. But he was more practical. He made sense out of everything. No dreams. He talked about Dean’s death, the pointless deaths of thousands of other kids. I was caught on the rebound, I guess. And he talked about equality. Not the old generalisation, a classless society, all that stuff. No, he talked about practical equality. Ways of achieving it. If secrets could be traded – arms, policies, subversive intentions – with or without the knowledge of the world’s leaders then a balance of power could be established. Most of all,’ Calder said, ‘he talked about blowing the identities of clandestine agents in the seats of power. Blow those on both sides and the teeth of aggression would be pulled.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘Let’s not run ahead.’

  It was the first time he had told the whole story. It was a haemorrhage.

  He poured them both brandy.

  ‘Ruth. She was beautiful. Straight. If you told a lie it hung between you and shrivelled. We met when I was at Harvard studying law and got married too soon.’

  Reddish hair skipping in the salt breeze.

  ‘Also from one of the first families of Boston. Then I graduated and through my father got this incredible job in Washington. If you can’t beat them join them. And become an in-fighter. Can you imagine, a Harvard graduate, subverted by a Soviet agent – because that’s what the bastard was – suddenly attached to the team of lawyers advising the Secretary of State? With access to classified material! What a chance to implement everything that lonely young man had said in between bites of king-sized sandwiches.’

  He saw doubt in her eyes. He tried to wipe it out.

  ‘That wasn’t the whole of it. Revenge? Sure, that was there. Wounded ego? Maybe. The sense of clandestine importance that fuels every spy? No doubt about it.’

  Katerina nodded, acknowledging human frailty. ‘And did you supply the Soviet Union with a lot of information?’

  ‘Nothing world-shattering. I was blown too soon. By my wife. I tried to keep up the pretence but with Ruth it was hopeless. One day I told her. I tried to make her understand, pleaded with her. She woke Harry and took him to her parents’ house as though I were contaminated. Then she went to the FBI. I was tipped off and got out of the States just in time. That was five years ago and I haven’t seen Ruth since. Or Harry ….’

  Today was Saturday and Harry would be on a sailboat with his instructor. Other boys would be sailing with their fathers. What had Harry been told? That his father was a traitor? What did he tell the other boys? That was what terrified Calder: that his son had to carry his disgrace. The story had never broken publicly but on Beacon Hill they would know.

  ‘I’ve lost you,’ Katerina said.

  ‘I was on a boat.’

  ‘Come back into harbour.’

  He stood up and walked to the window. Although it was dark the day’s heat was still rising from the ground. Galaxies of stars looked down.

  Katerina said: ‘I don’t understand why you’re a privileged defector. This apartment, a dacha in the country, a director at the Institute …. If you didn’t pass on any important secrets why are you so important?’

  But he couldn’t tell her. From the moment you were suborned you were wedded to deceit.

  She was standing behind him. He turned and kissed her.

  She lay naked on the bed and he slid into her so easily. They moved together and he knew that this had been sealed long ago with a smile on a cold winter day. Pausing, he looked into her eyes and saw that the challenge in them had been replaced by need. Momentarily it scared him, that nakedness of the mind: he felt as if he were looking into a holy place. They moved as one again, oiled and urgent, possessing, sharing, deeper, her hands clawing his back, breasts pushing at his chest, the need swelling …. He came first, then she cried out. They slept a little. Then she made him hard again and climbed upon him and sank upon him and this time the need had been replaced by pure and wonderful lust. When Calder next awoke it was a chiming, sunlit Sunday morning. She stirred beside him and whispered his name. Then she whimpered. And as she surfaced from sleep he saw a shadow of fear cross her face. Then she saw him and smiled and held out her arms and gathered him to her.

  CHAPTER 12

  The mushroom-hunters, led enthusiastically by Mrs Lundkvist, met in a birch forest twelve miles south-west of Moscow the following Saturday.

  Calder brought Katerina. Dalby was there. Even Jessel who occasionally rubbed shoulders with treachery in the line of duty.

  ‘Beware the Death Cap,’ said Mrs Lundkvist gaily as, ferreting in the dead leaves with a walking stick, she led her gribniki through sun-slatted glades.

  Beside Calder and Katerina walked an English defector named Fellows who always carried with him a Bryant and Mays matchbox containing a specimen of his native soil. ‘I may never stand on it again,’ he frequently confided, ‘but at least I’ll die close to it.’

  He was in his late seventies with wasted features and a tick in one eye. He had crossed the Great Divide in 1939, served in the Red Army in the Siege of Leningrad and been packed off to a labour camp for five years for his pains. He wore what appeared to be an Old Etonian tie but was in fact Thames Harriers, and he followed cricket as best he could on BBC World Service. He was always keen to make friends but no one took to him: he was the ghost of the future.

  ‘It’s good to see you young people taking part in group activities,’ Fellows said.

  Flattered, Calder lied, ‘You’re looking pretty sprightly yourself.’

  ‘I lived in Suffolk. We used to gather mushrooms from the fields in the morning.’ His faded eyes gazed across Europe. ‘The fields used to be covered with dew. It sparkled like diamonds in the sunlight.’

  Katerina said: ‘Why did you defect, Gaspadeen Fellows? You seem to love England.’

  He focused his eyes on her. ‘I forget,’ he said.

  Dalby joined them. ‘I wonder who will be the first to stop for refreshment.’

  ‘Bennett,’ Calder guessed.

  Bennett, an Australian journalist, was the heaviest drinker among them. He was middle-aged with booze-bright cheeks and a small grey moustache stuck to his lip like a postage stamp. He and Fellows wrote to each other to make sure their letter-boxes weren’t perpetually empty; other defectors had catalogues sent to themselves. Bennett was already nipping from a worn silver hip-flask.

  The gribniki began to spread out, younger members pushing ahead in search of exciting fungi.

  Mrs Lundkvist cried out: ‘We’ll remuster in two hours by the cars. At 1200 hours. Synchronise your watches.’ She peered at her wristwatch. ‘Don’t eat any fruitbodies until you’ve checked them with me. And don’t get up to any wickedness.’ Laughing, she winked at Calder and Katerina; as she laughed her grey-blonde hair tied in a pony-tail bounced on her shoulders like the tail of a dog.

  Dalby said: ‘Do you two want to be alone?’

  Calder shook his head. He liked people to see Katerina and himself together. And he liked to share people with her. Since they had first made love there was a sheen of satisfaction about her.

  Accompanied by Dalby and Jessel they plunged deeper into the silver woods leaving Fellows behind in Suffolk. Heat was collecting under the fragile foliage. Calder took off his tweed jacket and hung it over his arm. He touched Katerina’s neck above her
white blouse. She smiled at his touch.

  It was Katerina who made the first sighting. Three red-capped toadstools with white gills and stems straight from a nursery picture book. ‘Careful,’ Calder cautioned, consulting a photo-copy of Mrs Lundkvist’s do’s and don’ts.

  ‘Fly agaric,’ Dalby told them. ‘Once known as Soma, the symbol of immortality. Siberians used to get stoned on them before they discovered vodka.’

  Jessel said: ‘Let’s hope Bennett doesn’t know that.’

  ‘But there’s nothing wrong with these,’ Dalby said pointing with his stick at a clutch of mushrooms with brown velvet caps. ‘B-brown birch boletus. They feed reindeer on them in the north. Fine for humans provided the maggots haven’t got there first.’ He picked one. ‘No, these are okay,’ plucking the others and putting them in his basket.

  ‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about mushrooms,’ Jessel said.

  ‘Of course. Russians love their mushrooms. I’m a Russian.’ He folded a smile towards Katerina. With his longish grey hair and his basket Dalby looked almost matronly.

  The birch trees thickened into sturdier deciduous trees. Calder found a growth of yellow fungi. They looked like seaweed with fronds upright in still water. ‘Chanterelle,’ Dalby said. ‘Marvellous cooked with butter. But, of course, it’s too early in the season for the best fruitbodies.’

  They passed Russians foraging in the woods. In the late summer some of them would devote a whole weekend to the hunt and store their harvest and their memories throughout the winter.

  Katerina was about to pick a mushroom with an olive umbrella-head growing under an oak tree when Dalby shouted: ‘Don’t touch.’ When she had recovered he said: ‘Amanita phalloides, better known as the Death Cap. Deadly. Responsible for most fungi deaths.’ He kicked the mushroom. They could smell its honeyed breath.

  They walked out of the wood into a field where mushrooms grew in enchanted circles. ‘Horse mushrooms,’ Dalby said. ‘Delicious,’ and began to gather them. Calder and Katerina filled their baskets; the chocolate-coloured gills smelled of aniseed.

  They left the basket in a shady corner of the field for a while and explored an almost deserted village built around a water-pump; then they headed back to the cars.