There was a brief gap in cover from his window to the trees and if they were waiting for him he wouldn’t last a second. However he knew his house was not a defence but a trap; he had to get out, to make his stand. But the few open yards from his sill to the woods seemed as wide as a prairie.
He would take his chance. If this was the moment he was to follow Gia, he prayed it would be with a well-aimed bullet and not the knife and their amusement. He could use a bullet on himself. He would go down whatever path fate had beaten out for him.
He quietly opened his window, poked the gun out to give himself some sort of sightless cover and clambered and fell and was across the gap with an agility and speed that surprised him. Facing death was taking years off him. He was in the wood, climbing as quietly as he could, keeping the breath from his aching chest under control, watching for movement between trees, stopping to listen, moving from trunk to trunk, a geriatric veteran of a thousand TV westerns.
Could he kill a man? He had no idea, but suspected he would betray himself with that moment’s hesitation. He will fall like an actor. Think of it that way. You are in a scene. Play it to the hilt. Point and shoot. Bang! You’re dead – a kid’s game. He could feel no hatred for them, nor did he feel fear, only a strange, exhilarating nervousness. Remember what they did to Gia; remember what those last minutes of his life must have been like. But it had no effect; his body was in an altered state impervious to everything.
He found a gap on the wooded slope that gave him a view of his house and the man by the Mercedes. Breath wanted to burst from him; he fought to regulate its exits and intakes and sat against a tree and waited, both guns pointed downhill at the ready. His pulse was beating so hard the guns in his hands twitched with each heartbeat. My God he thought; would the guns have a kick? Do you aim low or has the bullet left the gun by the time it kicks?
His bedroom window was wide open. They would see it and perhaps that would attract them. Or they would deduce exactly what he had done and break silently into the woods for him. If they went for the window was he too far away for an effective shot? Irakli had said fifty metres for the Gyurza, but he was well out of the Makarov’s range. He tucked the Makarov into his belt and clasped the Gyurza with both hands, resting them on his knees for support, pushing his back against the tree trunk for purchase for the kick. He wasn’t sure this was an ideal combat position.
Nothing happened; there was no movement in the woods, no one approached the window, or the house. Small noises interrupted the calm, but he was able to distinguish the difference in noise a human would make to the wood’s natural inhabitants. He had a perfect view of the kitchen door and a clear view through some foliage of his bedroom window. The man at the Mercedes seemed uninterested in anything that might be happening around Max’s house. He smoked and stared out at the sea, watched some kids play way to his left in the distance then exhaled a long geyser of smoke, flicked his cigarette onto the beach in a fast, twisting arc, got into the car and drove off.
It hit him like a wave. He began to shake violently. His chest seemed ready to rip out of him. Heart attack, I’m dying of a heart attack. I’m dying of fear. Stupidity. His panic slowly coalesced into relief, then foolishness, then shame, not just for this ridiculous armed sortie into the woods, but for an inchoate mass of everything. The kids playing at the water’s edge were watched by an old man under a tree with two loaded pistols in his hands, one of them containing armour piercing bullets. For a businessman, or a taxi driver stopping for a moment’s peace. The episode rushed him towards tears. Even Gia’s death, with all its shattering emotions, had not brought tears; he had stopped up tears for so long that he seemed to have dehydrated his humanity.
The kids’ voices came to him in high snaps of sound. Birds landed in trees, took off, the Mercedes disappeared over the top of the hill leading out of the village. Life was untouched by his crisis. The Slav eyes didn’t need to kill him; the fear would finish him off in a moment like this or when an incomprehensible sound wakes him at night. Alexei had the answer; all he lacked was the price. He would persist with Masha that very day, while the nerves were rattling round the old bones. He had to make her see how much danger he was in. He could repay her – or at least part of it – once the further instalments for the translation came in. “Make it business. Simply a business transaction” he muttered to his trembling gun.
He drew up a financial plan and gathered letters from the publisher itemising his fee for the translations and when the instalments on each book would be paid. He rang her and set off for the coffee under Shota’s old Magnolia.
She seemed softer, reflective. He felt hopeful. They joked a little with Gia’s niece Shorena when she brought the coffee. Then it landed.
“I’m thinking of basing myself in Paris,” was the first thing she said, “I can’t take this place any more. Or this country. Time to move on.”
A few words above the beach and part of a lifetime draws to a close. So many things want to be said but he sits, nodding and saying nothing. Perhaps there is some natural progression in this he thinks, that everything in my life has been stripped away for a reason: my old world with its beliefs and principles, Gia, now Masha, that even the visit of my daughter has some part in a sequence of fate that is separating me from everything.
The herd is moving on and he is the old one left behind for the predator. He looks out at the raft to which he can no longer swim. Perhaps he should make one long, last attempt. That might be the way to go. The financial plan stays in his pocket.
“Georgia will be empty without you. So, I’ve lost two in such a short time. I suppose that’s often how it happens.”
He sees her eyes following the kids on the beach.
“I spoke to Lucy.”
Nothing but a sigh is left for Max.
“They’re getting married again. A fresh start.”
“Sounds typically Californian.”
“They’ve invited me.”
Max wonders how long he will have to pay the price for that blunder in a basement corridor one day in Tbilisi. He is tempted to lose himself in Moscow for a while.
“You should go, Max.”
“I’d be arrested.”
She smiled at him. “You’ve always got an excuse.”
Something had flown out of him and he didn’t care what she said any more.
“Did you know she’s an alcoholic?”
“Lucy?”
“Apples don’t fall far from the tree.”
“I am not responsible for my daughter’s social habits.”
The word shocked him; it always shocked him when it was used about him, usually in his opinion by some puritan desperate to put him in his place. Americans, however, seem to regard it as a character asset, as if they had been led to a state of grace simply because they’d stopped vomiting on their shoes.
“They turn everything into a new religious sect: holy drinkers who have found the Way. The world has too many idiots who have found the Way. The Way should be banned.”
“You found it, didn’t you?” she riposted languidly and with a lazy look that told him that whatever she once had for him had emptied itself from her. She rises, says nothing, leaves some coins for the coffee, goes home and he is left thinking of her grotesque Mother and Child and how deliberately and brilliantly repulsive it is. The holy pair, cratered with marine crustaceans matted into the paint are physically composed of death and decay. Christ clings in terror to his despairing mother and they look up as if they are the damned, not the serene pair pedalled by the church and her tame artists. He knows she modelled them on photographs of the starving in the Ukraine under Stalin’s programme of depopulation. But there is some other quality in the picture that wails at him from the mental asylums she was locked in, and sets him thinking about the brutal side of the quest for grace.
The
kids are still on the beach, running pell-mell to the water with their buckets as if the sea will leave if they don’t hurry. Kids need tension in their games. Life or death. The little girl is always several metres behind. She holds her hand over her bucket and comes back up the beach in a fast waddle. Her bikini knickers have flounces. It’ll take them all afternoon to fill the trench.
Next morning Max was once again pondering the thuja tree and the dark Circassian walnut, wondering whose lives before his had been lived out in this little house to the sea’s eternal counterpoint. On the veranda with his fruit he watched the beach umbrellas, spades and buckets slowly emerge in the dawn. The village had changed for him overnight. He had good companions like Shota there, people he was fond of but the real connections were gone or going. If he sold up what did he face? Increasing difficulties climbing the stairs to his apartment in Tbilisi? Would he be safer there? Possibly. Would he miss this place? No doubt.
In mid-morning, the beach heated to a wonderful descant of the kids’ trebles and the waves’ baritone, and Max digressed from the translation to write a letter to Lucy, explaining that, although he could understand her curiosity, and accepting that he had no rights over any correspondence with Masha, he felt it was improper and unhelpful to everyone. He redrafted the letter twice then tore it up and returned to the translation. An hour later he wrote another letter and posted it.
When Shota heard what he had written he told Max he was offering up his throat, and predictably, Max regretted mailing it.
Dear Lucy,
Masha tells me you are marrying again. The institution of marriage must agree with you if you are to celebrate it twice. I tried it three times. If you and your husband are proposing a second honeymoon, may I suggest you have it here, by the Black Sea? I will pay your air flights. Accommodation may be Spartan by American standards, but it is pleasant, warm and, as yet, relatively unspoiled. Just a wild idea – if you were to consider having this second marriage over here, I dare say we could arrange something with a Georgian flavour. Despite the parlous state of things, people here are gracious and they love a good wedding.
I appreciate that you may find this offer offensive. Whatever, I wish you and your new husband well.
Best wishes, Max.
Russia – 1960s
When an agent defects, the possibility of his being a ‘double’ has to be ruled out. So when I arrived in Russia in the early Sixties, I was squirrelled away and underwent what is politely known as debriefing, a process not necessarily conducted with courtesy and warmth for the new guest. One of my interrogators was particularly brilliant and quickly took me to a point where I didn’t know if I were coming or going, a state where even an agent trained in resisting interrogation would find it impossible to hide anything. This state was induced with wit, charm and, when needed, a scalpel-like threat. At times I wondered if I might end up in some gulag or be despatched with a bullet in an anonymous yard.
I shall call this man Alexei – it’s not his real name. He is small, is now old and with a bad hip, but was then wearyingly energetic, blessed with glittering film star good looks, and, it was said, despite having a very beautiful wife, possessed the sexual appetite of an alpha baboon. He was chief puppeteer in the various wooded retreats and windswept places I found myself in for clearance and re-education, and delighted in leading me a merry dance.
One night he decided to take me for a walk, a suggestion that made me instantly wary. Was I going to be despatched in the woods with a sniper’s rifle, the way of Sydney Reilly and, no doubt, many other agents who had outlived their usefulness? I was very unsure of my position and suffered from the recurrent idea that I needed to confess to something and get the whole torture over and done with, although I actually had nothing to confess. I was legitimate, on their side, but at times, under the incessant questioning and switches in technique, it was difficult to keep a grasp of this.
I don’t know which region we were in, or even which country, but after a few careful steps from the compound, we found ourselves in a broad clearing between woods. We may even have been standing on a frozen lake. It was a full moon and the low lines of fir trees were purple in the moonlight. The snow crunched under our feet and the stars were sprayed crystals. The night was like some magic, white precipitate held in a suspension of indigo. We paused and Alexei lit a cigarette. I sank into that wonderful muffled silence of snow with the cold on my cheeks and for some reason no longer felt afraid, I was just a smudge on a winter miracle. We stood wordless for a while, Alexei quietly smoking, my waiting for some statement from him, some word to disturb the harmony of this winter night. When it arrived, it was, as usual, unexpected.
“What do you feel about your wife and baby?”
I couldn’t find an answer anywhere. The night flew off and peeped back through the wrong end of a telescope. A low level tinnitus broke out in my hearing and Alexei spoke to me through my own white noise.
“She’ll be three months now. The little one.” He dragged slowly on his cigarette. “Lucy.” Another long slow drag expanded the point of ruby light at the end of his cigarette. “She’ll have changed.”
I imagined this was how a boxer felt when he’d taken a hard punch to the head, and lost the connection, leaning against the ropes not sure what was going on, what was next, what the noise was, seeing shapes and movements that he knew he once understood, but which were now meaningless.
“Do you want us to get a message to them?”
“Saying what? ‘Sorry’?”
His breath blasted the smoke round his cigarette tip. His face glowed against dark fir trees. He was watching me, reading me, filing me. The blue eyes were black and still under the Communist moon.
“There can be no weakness, Max, in any of us. You understand?”
I nodded.
“Begin forgetting.” The ruby cigarette tip vaulted into the night and died in the snow with a weak hiss.
Needless to say, once I was given the all clear, Alexei became my case officer, the one who could most easily trip me up, keep me on my toes and make my life anything but relaxed. But in all his capriciousness and tricks, I could see there was fondness for me, and he became a good friend.
In my second summer in Russia, now well clear of debriefings and interrogations but still under surveillance, Alexei took me to his home village about fifteen kilometres outside Moscow. After sturgeon in aspic and pork with beer under a hand-tinted portrait of Stalin, we left his wife Petra to his garrulous mother and disappeared into the woods.
Every insect in the wood took a liking to my face and I slapped myself till archipelagos of their tiny corpses smudged my cheeks. We found old paths and strolled through tunnels of luminous leaves, and the glades where Alexei and prepubescent village girls discovered the difference.
The thick foliage gave way to a dusty road running by a high wooden wall. Above the wall, strings of barbed wire diminished like an endless musical stave to the horizon. Sweat scattered down my sides and buttocks as we followed the razor-wire. We passed a short door in a solid gate.
“Knock, but no one will hear.”
“What’s over there?”
“Old military zone. Absolutely verboten.”
In this country with its Byzantine imagination, it is easy to feel even the wind dare not trespass. Alexei picked up the pace.
“You’re wheezing.”
“Booze in the middle of the day. And the heat.”
“There’s no point in coming to this country if you don’t drink.”
The wall gave way to a chain link fence. Alexei scuttled along, scuffing his English brogues through the grass till he found a tear in the fence and pulled it open.
“Enter.”
Resigned, I folded my jacket, threw it over, got down and striped my shirt with grass stains. Alexei slithered through without removing his jac
ket or picking up any stains. He stood, smacked the back of one hand into the other’s palm and took off through the woods.
We continued under a mixture of trees, some of which were still in flower. It was restful and beautiful, green and soft and quiet. In a wide clearing he stopped and lay down in long, shadowed grass on the edge of the trees. When he spoke his voice had an intimacy I had never heard. His seriousness sanctified the place; something beyond the briefs that constituted our official relationship was being offered.
“They say to a kid ‘don’t go in the woods’, so you go in the woods. We had our little arses whipped if they found out. They were shit scared.”
“Who?”
“The parents.” The breeze raised a chorus in the leaves. “It was thick with fruit and berries but nobody came in to pick them. Except us. Till our little guts ached.” Some old fruit memory amused him for a while. “We’d lie here and wait for the lorries. Straight past, flat out, into the military zone. From Moscow. A lone lorry would have two cars. Then we’d wait for the next bit. Sometimes we’d turn chicken and get out. It was a test – a kid’s dare. You’d be worried your mother would guess where you’d been, but you’d wait, and then you’d hear them.” He nodded at where the clearing turned into the afternoon sun and disappeared. American landscapes are huge but the Russian landscape has a quality of infinity. The clearing would run into a secret country within the country.
“Single shots. We’d count them. Twenty. Forty. Whatever. It would go on all day sometimes.” His gaze was fixed where the clearing bent from sight through the trees. I suggested we go for a look, but he shook his head. He had never dared beyond this point, and still wouldn’t. I had found the minotaur at the centre of his labyrinth, a forest clearing dripping with beauty and mythic fear. He was showing me his limit. His high office was the Ariadne thread that led him to safety, his calling to search in the fear of his victim for the reflection of the fear he discovered under these quiet trees. This wordless confession came to me obliquely. I was privileged; it was an act of love in some corkscrewed way.
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