The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  He was disappointed. ‘We have enough,’ Petrov told him and the bargemaster returned to his coal without knowing that Petrov had once filled barges with gold.

  In the morning Petrov’s wife brought Calder omul steaks and tea and black bread as rich as cake. ‘I think,’ said Petrov, sitting beside the bed in a room overlooking the now-placid lake, ‘that you’d better tell us all about it.’

  When he had finished, Petrov, wearing a white bathrobe and looking uncommonly urbane for a member of a fishing community, said: ‘We’ll help you, of course, but it’s going to be tricky. The militia have already searched the village and they’ll be back.’ He toyed with a gold St Christopher medallion hanging from his neck. ‘Do you realise they’re probably searching every village, every town, in Siberia. Unless ….’

  Calder, unshaven and wracked with spasms of shivering, said: ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless they got the name of the village from Katerina. And the name of Petrov ….’ He lit a cigarette; he looked, Calder thought, like a certain Russian film star who had always seemed just a little too suave for Soviet movies. ‘So it might be even trickier than I thought.’ St Christopher flashed in the reflected light from the lake. ‘So what are we going to do, Raisa?’ he asked his wife who was replenishing Calder’s cup from a samovar.

  ‘You know perfectly well,’ said his wife. She was wearing a red silk robe embroidered with Chinese dragons. Her blue-black hair hung in night-dishevelled tresses and beneath the silk her body moved sinuously with the dragons. She smelted faintly of lemons.

  ‘I suppose I do. You see,’ he said to Calder, ‘I used to be on the run. I worked in the gold-fields in the north and I used to transport the rock south to Irkutsk for crushing and milling.’

  ‘You don’t look like a trucker,’ Calder said.

  ‘He was a thief,’ Raisa said fondly.

  ‘I believe you have a word in America: scam. Well believe me there are scams here that would make the Mafia die of shame.’

  ‘What was yours?’ Calder asked.

  ‘I had my own refinery. You know, Siberia’s so vast you can get away with things like that. It was supposed to process ferrous rock. And it did, millions of tons of it. But it also processed gold-bearing rock creamed from the trucks. A little cyanide, a little zinc dust and we had gold to refine in the furnaces.’

  Raisa poured steaming tea into Calder’s cup – he couldn’t eat the food. As she bent down he saw her small satin-smooth breasts. Straightening up she said: ‘By the time Yury was in maximum production so many high-ups were involved in Irkutsk that no one could touch him.’

  ‘Goldmail,’ Yury said in English. ‘Much more grand than blackmail. But in the end,’ reverting to Russian, ‘we had to do a deal because rumours of apparatchik weighted with gold were reaching Moscow. So I agreed to abandon my scam and the authorities in Irkutsk agreed to forget the whole thing. And here I am, living off my golden opportunities.’ St Christopher winked at Calder. ‘But you’re probably wondering what all this has got to do with you ….’

  ‘In the old days,’ Raisa explained, ‘Yury was always anticipating getting caught. So he bought this place – we lived in Bratsk in those days – and he built a secret room in it.’

  Calder raised himself on one elbow. ‘How secret?’

  ‘Secret enough to hide most of my gold in it,’ Yury told him.

  ‘Katerina’s a wise girl.’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’ Raisa asked.

  Thinking: ‘I don’t look much like an object for love,’ Calder said: ‘Yes, we love each other.’

  ‘And you’re going back to America?’

  ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘Will she go with you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Calder said.

  ‘She’s a beautiful girl. Not just her looks, ‘Raisa shrugged and the dragons shrugged with her. ‘But I suppose she knows what she’s doing. If any of us do when we love a man.’ She stretched out and touched the arm of her robber-baron husband.

  ‘I knew her mother years ago,’ Yury half-explained. ‘Before she met Sasha. Ah, that Sasha. What a voice. What a man. When things got really tough in Moscow Kata came to stay with me. When she was a little girl, that is. Then I met Raisa.’ He shared a smile with her. ‘Then Sasha came on the scene and Kata didn’t come here anymore. There wasn’t any need for it, I suppose.’

  ‘Whatever Kata says,’ Raisa said, ‘is all right by us.’

  ‘As soon as my leg mends,’ Calder told them, ‘I’ll be on my way.’ He lay back on the pillow again and, as he moved so the blankets moved, and a faint smell of putresence reached him.

  Raisa pulled the blanket from his legs. ‘Oh God,’ she exclaimed. Calder, craning his neck, stared at his leg. The blood oozing from the bottom of the cast was streaked yellow.

  Yury whistled softly. ‘We’ll have to get a doctor.’

  ‘Then I’m finished.’

  ‘In Siberia?’ Petrov shook his head vigorously. ‘We don’t hand brodyagi back to Moscow that easily.’

  ‘I hope,’ Calder said, managing a smile, ‘that you aren’t going to tell me that in Siberia only bears steal.’

  ‘Only bears and truckers.’

  Petrov stood up. He crossed the room and pressed the base of a light-fitting fashioned like a dripping candle. A panel of wood opened on the other side of the room. A rich metallic gleam came from within.

  The bars of gold were stacked beneath an aperture in the wall – fitted with a wooden shutter if the hunt for the occupant of the room grew near – that overlooked Baikal.

  Calder, lying on an iron bed, stared at them as the doctor from Nizhneangarsk thirty miles away across the lake cut through the plaster cast. He continued to stare as the doctor exclaimed: ‘Mother of God, who treated this?’

  ‘A medic at Angarsk,’ said Calder thinking how strange it was that God was invoked so often in a country ruled by atheists.

  ‘A butcher,’ the doctor, scrubbed and studious, said, ‘not a medic. We’ll pump you full of antibiotics and clean the wound and give you some painkillers.’

  He covered the wound with lint, patted Calder on the shoulder and, ducking and beckoning to Petrov, returned to the living room.

  Calder stared through the aperture. A fishing boat was becalmed on the blue and white sky reflected on the smooth water. I shall get to know this lake, Calder thought. Already it was his guardian. To the right, on a hard-rutted lane leading to the grey beach, he could see a man pouring vodka, makeshift anti-freeze, into the radiator of an old Moskvich.

  The doctor, smelling of carbolic, returned and began to clean the wound. As he worked he talked. ‘Don’t tell me who you are, how you got here, I don’t want to know … The Petrovs, wonderful people …. If they’d known you were coming they would have had bread and salt waiting for you …. You can trust them as you would your own hands ….’ He stared at his own; the fingers were blunt and strong. ‘And from Baikal you’ll get strength, we all do …. Superstitious? Perhaps … nothing wrong with a little respect for your elders …. They say the Old Man is twenty-five million years old, the oldest lake in the world …. My God, plucking a sliver of bone from the wound with a pair of tweezers, ‘what a mess.’ He sprinkled powder on the wound and dressed it loosely; then he strapped a metal splint to Calder’s leg. He gave Calder some tablets, shot antibiotic into his buttock and was gone.

  By midday Calder felt better. The pain had shrunk to an ache, like muscle fatigue after exertion, and his brain had cleared. He even felt hungry.

  Raisa brought him borsch and black bread and sat beside the bed while he drank the purple soup floating with islands of cream.

  ‘How is Katerina?’ she asked. ‘Still fighting for us poor underprivileged women?’

  Calder couldn’t imagine anyone less underprivileged than Raisa dressed now in a red track suit, polished hair coiled. ‘As long as they allow her to fight,’ he told her.

  ‘The women will win,’ she said. ‘One day they’
ll win; it’s part of evolution.’ She spoke Russian with what Calder decided was a Han Chinese accent, rippling her r’s prettily into l’s. ‘Katerina is merely a catalyst of change. Some people are born like that; without them we would still be in the Stone Age.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Calder said, spooning borsch, ‘with all this gold,’ pointing the spoon at the ingots, ‘why do you live here?’

  ‘Many reasons. We’ve come under Baikal’s thrall for one. For another Yury can carry on his love affair here. You see I have a rival – gold. Yury is trying to manufacture his mistress.’

  ‘Crazy?’ Yury, in black, grey hair healthy against his tan, came into the secret room; he reminded Calder of a fashionable New York psychiatrist. ‘You think it’s crazy?’ as though everyone else did. ‘Not so. It can be done. You didn’t know that?’

  Calder shook his head wondering if Petrov was crazy. Raisa left the room to get more food; Yury took her place and began to lecture.

  ‘You can make gold from platinum. It’s been done. But obviously it’s very expensive, more expensive than natural gold and therefore pointless. But if you can make gold from platinum why not other metals?’

  ‘The alchemists didn’t succeed.’

  ‘They didn’t succeed with platinum either. Today we have harnessed science to help us. In my laboratory I have lasers ….’

  ‘But surely if you manage to manufacture gold you’re debasing your mistress. Making a whore out of her.’

  Yury shook his head. ‘I only want to learn the secret. I won’t make a big production of it.’

  ‘Won’t other people?’

  ‘Maybe they already have: it doesn’t matter: the formula will be kept secret by the gold barons. They don’t want to kill the golden goose …. As a matter of fact, ‘pointing vaguely north, ‘there’s enough ore-producing rock in Siberia to make the world’s gold as cheap as tin. To bankrupt the Bank of England and Fort Knox. Come to that there are enough gem-stones there to make shoe-shops of every jeweller’s on Fifth Avenue. But, of course, the Russians aren’t stupid: they’ve no intention of ruining their own market. Unless one day ….’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Raisa returned with a plate of stewed bilberries sprinkled with powder. Calder pointed to the powder and asked what it was.

  ‘Gin-seng, the herb of youth ….’

  ‘And virility,’ Yury said, smiling man-to-man. We old men with young women.

  ‘It grows in the taiga. Where the shaggy tigers roam – or so they say.’

  ‘So,’ Yury said, ‘you eat gin-seng in Siberia and go to Georgia and live to be a hundred and fifty.’

  When Calder slept he dreamed golden dreams of youth and love.

  For a while it seemed as though the fracture and wound would heal.

  And while bone and flesh were knitting Calder, walking with crutches, leg in plaster except round the wound, lurched round the house watching winter assemble its forces round the last pocket of resistance, Baikal.

  He saw the first blizzards attack the distant mountains leaving them imperiously white – but the sky was so blue and the sun so bright that they only menaced in the evenings. He saw the dawn tissues of ice on the fringes of the lake and he saw them melted by banks of fog advancing across the water. When the ice grew thicker overnight the ground trembled and dispersed it.

  ‘They say,’ Petrov confided proudly, ‘that if we had another earthquake like the one a hundred years ago the Old Man would wipe out Irkutsk.’

  Since the cold had pushed its way into the village Yury had exalted. Sitting at the living room table, examining a ten-tola gold ingot, he said: ‘Siberia means Sleeping Land, you know, but it only sleeps in the summer. In the winter it comes to life.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘The snow and ice talk and out come the skis and the sky is full of eagles ….’

  ‘And you freeze to death,’ Calder said fingering the beginnings of a beard.

  ‘Not here. It’s warm here. Thirty degrees – below, that is – nothing more. But in the north, Yakut, that’s the real Siberia. Seventy degrees sometimes and permafrost as hard as concrete. That’s cold,’ Yury said with relish. He reached for a bottle bearing a red label. ‘Here, let’s drink to winter.’ He poured two shots of crystal-clear liquid. ‘Spirt. Grain alcohol, 192 proof. Makes vodka taste like mother’s milk.’ He tossed the spirit down his throat as the KGB Border Guard cavalry arrived at the other end of the village.

  The horsemen, green piping on their grey uniforms, had been brought by train from the eastern border with China. They were the élite and they rode arrogantly on their fine chestnut horses, AK 47 assault rifles strapped beside their saddles, pistol holsters unbuttoned.

  While a dozen of them dismounted and began their search, heels of their leather boots crisp on the wood-log streets, the others blocked all exits, even the beach. The horses’ breath smoked on the frosted air; from time to time a cavalryman would lean forward and pat the sleek neck of his mount.

  The streets emptied. Dogs, the door-knockers of Siberia, barked. Far out on Baikal a school of seals played boisterously.

  One by one the dismounted horsemen searched the fretwork cottages. They were bored but they treated the occupants courteously. They didn’t hold out any hope of finding anyone, their attitude implied, but orders were orders even if they did come from Moscow. They didn’t even bother to consult the KGB informant in the village: in Siberian villages informants were a joke.

  Finally, not quite as soberly as when they arrived, Siberian hospitality being what it is, they reached the Petrov dacha. There, because it was so grand, they stopped and conferred. Then, with the slightly aggressive swagger of a horseman without his horse, the officer in charge knocked loudly on the front door, and dispatched two of his men to the rear.

  Petrov was on his second glass of spirt when the officer hammered on the door.

  ‘Quick,’ he said to Calder. ‘Only the police knock like that. Once. Then they knock the door down.’

  Picking up his crutches, Calder lurched towards the secret door. But one of the padded rests wasn’t fitted snugly under his armpit. As he negotiated the step he lost one crutch. For a moment he stood like a stork in water. Then he fell sideways.

  Behind him the panel closed. Darkness except for a bright shaft of light from the aperture in the wall. Imprisoned dust sparkled in the beam.

  His leg was agony. Remote from him. Someone else’s agony. He dragged the agony towards the aperture. It was heavy. A concrete encumbrance.

  Supporting himself on his good leg, he pulled himself up to the aperture. He saw a uniform. Green piping. He shut the wood slats across the opening.

  Then he slid to the floor.

  The officer was young with close-cropped hair and a small, fierce moustache. He was very correct and held his cap under his arm.

  He said: ‘With your permission, comrade, we want to search the house.’

  ‘Permission? Since when did you need permission?’ Petrov poured himself another spirt. ‘Will you take a nip to keep out the cold?’

  The young officer stared at him without expression. ‘I don’t drink on duty.’ Behind him two cavalrymen swayed slightly.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Petrov drank the spirt; he should have been eating something to soak it up. ‘What are you looking for, brodyagi?

  ‘That needn’t concern you.’

  ‘You’re very correct, young man. What did you do when the Chinese showed their bare asses across the Amur?’

  ‘I wasn’t there; I was too young. And now if you’ll excuse me ….’ He nodded crisply to the two cavalrymen. When they had gone clumsily about their business he asked: ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘My wife is in Nizhneangarsk stocking up for winter.’ He remembered the second glass on the table. ‘She likes to take a shot before boarding the ferry.’

  ‘The ferry left half an hour ago,’ the officer said. He picked up the glass. ‘Doesn’t she wear lipstick?’

  ‘She doesn’t have to. A natural beauty f
rom Mongolia. Not like city women. Are you from Moscow, comrade?’

  ‘Leningrad. Tell me, how do you manage to look so prosperous in a village like this?’

  ‘Furs,’ Petrov said promptly. ‘Barguzin sable. The finest in the world.’

  ‘Everything in Siberia seems to be the best, the biggest, the oldest.’

  ‘We cannot lie,’ Petrov said.

  After a while the two cavalrymen returned and reported that there was no one else in the dacha.

  The officer took a silver case from the pocket of his tunic and, with neat movements, took out a cigarette and lit it.

  Crossing long, leather-booted legs, he regarded Petrov speculatively. ‘Irkutsk and Baikal,’ he said removing a flake of black tobacco from his bottom lips. ‘They’ve always had, shall we say, a golden reputation ….’

  ‘Historically? They taught you well in Leningrad. Many a governor has been hypnotised by gold. Governor Gagarian, wasn’t it, who was hanged for ‘unheard-of theft’? His horses were shod with gold ….’

  ‘The associations are much later than that. In the Civil War. When the Bolsheviks captured Admiral Kolchak and shot him. That was when we recaptured our gold from the Czechs who were supporting the Whites. Twenty-nine truckloads of gold, I believe. According to rumours some of it’s still at the bottom of Baikal ….’

  Petrov poured himself another shot of spirt. ‘Really? I hadn’t heard that. But I wouldn’t argue with the pride of the Chief Border Guards Directorate.’ He really should have eaten something with the grain alcohol.

  ‘Well, we must be on our way.’ The officer stood up and Petrov rose from his seat a little unsteadily. ‘You dress very well,’ the officer observed.

  ‘Really?’ surprised. ‘That’s very kind ….’

  ‘But you should see your tailor about the jacket – it really doesn’t fit too well.’ The officer leaned forward and lifted the ten-tola bar of gold from the inside pocket of Petrov’s jacket. ‘Meanwhile you’d better come with us.’