‘Indeed, no, Wes.’
At this moment, Georgio returned with the drinks, bowed theatrically to Bill and departed.
Bill sipped his Scotch. Wes left his untouched. When Bill put his glass down, he spread both of his hands on the table. Something that Wes had not noticed before: Bill was missing the nail of each middle finger. Noticing Wes’s glance, Bill said, ‘Gestapo. 1943 in Vichy. I was rescued by the Maquis. Wes, Beth is in prison. The poet and maker of political statements betrayed her. Under torture, one assumes.’
Wes bowed his head with his hands over his face. ‘Jesus God,’ he said.
‘She’s in remand. Held in Butyrka prison for eight months. She will face a tribunal in prison, be found guilty and, according to our information, be given a two-year sentence, down from six in recognition of her former status as a friend of the Soviet people.’
‘I should never have taken those poems. What was in my head?’
‘Wes my friend, what was in your head was love, apparently. Wisdom, no. Simple common sense, no. Despite all you’ve learnt about the Soviet state, you still don’t comprehend what you’re facing. Wes, they draw the line precisely nowhere. Butyrka prison is hellish.’ Bill sat back in his booth and crossed his arms. ‘Beth had two further years to endure before she could return to Australia. Two years as a heroine of the Soviet Union. She would have survived. But two years as an enemy of the Soviet people in Butyrka prison, living on starvation rations, subject to terrible abuse, no, she will not survive, Wes. A skinny little thing like her. I am sorry. I’ve been to see the head of your security, asking if Australia could intervene. He has not the slightest interest. The Russians could hang her in front of the Kremlin without him being in the least exercised.’
Wes wanted to know if Beth could receive visitors and was told that she could in theory, after she was found guilty next week, by joining a line of around two hundred people outside the prison gates, all waiting to see husbands, sometimes wives, sons and daughters and friends inside. The guards allowed three people through each day for a sixty-second visit. ‘We can get you a visa for Russia for a price. We are close to a greedy little fellow in the Soviet Embassy in London, extremely shrewd, who could get a visa for the czar, should he come back to life. We provide him with money and pretty young women, tickets to Ascot. As a known friend of Beth, you are regarded with suspicion. Nevertheless, for five hundred US dollars in cash he can get you to Moscow, where you can join the line of two hundred. Unavailingly. Then, of course, you have to find the airfare. The air-fare is dramatically lower as of a month ago, more competition, an endorsement of capitalism.’
Wes allowed his gaze to wander the frieze of dolphins and mermaids. Then he drank his Scotch in one swallow. ‘If I find the money, can you arrange the visa?’
‘Really, Wes? Two hundred people? Some have been coming to the prison gates for a year.’ He shook his head. ‘Yes, I can arrange the visa, if you provide your passport. I’ll be in Melbourne for another fortnight. Get your passport to me, and five hundred dollars. Leave it at police headquarters in Russell Street, addressed to Bill Jones. I’ll speak to the police commissioner. By the time I get the visa settled, it will be early February. You can fly to Moscow on the tenth. I’m going to give you an address in Oxford Circus in London. You fly to London on your Australian passport. When your flight reaches London, come to the address. The passport and visa will be at the front desk.’
Wes went directly by taxi to see Di Porter at the printing works in Collingwood. He met her in her office and told her the story—Beth in prison, unlikely to survive. She pushed her hands into her massy dark hair and groaned. ‘She’s determined to die a martyr, isn’t she? In Australia, she martyrs herself to the party. In Russia, she finds a way to martyr herself to freedom of speech. Of course she wants justice, but would a little sense hurt?’
Wes told her he had to get to Moscow to see her, if it was possible. He needed one thousand pounds. The other half of what he needed he would get John Li to advance him on the building project at Chinese Town. Di wrote him a cheque for cash drawn against the company’s account and said if it wasn’t enough, she would find more. ‘You have only a slim chance of seeing her?’
‘Yes, slim, but I have to try.’
‘Wes, I resigned from the party after the Hungarian invasion. I talked Beth into becoming a communist. Now I’ve abandoned them.’
John Li lived in one of only three houses still standing in Chinese Town after the spur fire. Wes called on him on the Thursday. John wished to know the whole story before offering the money Wes was asking for as an advance on the project. And he heard it.
‘Miss Hardy was communist, now she is against the communists?’
‘In a fashion, John.’
‘The communists want to kill her?’
‘She’s not under sentence of death. But the prison she is in is so brutal that she will quite possibly die.’
‘Okay. Communists, I hate. Bastards. But I will help your friend, Wesley. She has seen the mistake she made in becoming a communist. You are a Christian, Wesley, not a communist. I have been to your meetings, Quaker meetings, Society of Friends. As you know, Wesley, all my family is Christian. I went to Scotch College. Communists, I disdain.’
Chapter 25
WES HAD never seen snow. He saw it now, before the gates of Butyrka prison. It settled on his overcoat shoulders and on his hair. He wasn’t wearing a hat. He did as the many, many others in the line of hopeful visitors did, and stamped his feet and hugged himself. The fortress-like prison with its single tower was a long way off. Guards shuffled rather than marched up and down the line, too bored to look menacing. The ordeal was too great for some of the older people in the line. They collapsed and ramshackle ambulances carted them away, four at a time. The ambulances only departed when they had the full complement of four patients.
The majority of those in the long line were fairly aged, but there were some in their twenties, thirties. Young or old, they didn’t converse, but stood stoically gazing straight ahead. A toilet was located by the wall halfway along the line. The protocol was that if anyone had to leave the line to use the toilet, that man or woman would be allowed to rejoin the line at the point of leaving it. Wes used the toilet—it was filthy—and was welcomed back into the line. The aged lady behind him tapped him on the shoulder in the first hour of waiting. ‘English?’ she enquired. Wes said: ‘Australian.’ He heard this interesting information passed along the line, forward of him, behind him. A little later, the old lady tapped him on the shoulder again and offered him a hunk of bread, which he accepted. He stupidly hadn’t thought to bring anything for himself to eat. The bread was delicious.
Standing still for hours at a stretch, the mind soon exhausts anything original that might crop up. For periods of a half-hour, he would pray for Beth, attempting to convey telepathically that he was near. But then he would find himself puzzling over the type of tree that stood by the prison’s wall. An elm? No. Unless it was a species of elm he’d never seen before. A type of oak? It was difficult to tell without foliage. But this was not what he was here for, to distinguish between different sorts of trees, and he would return to prayer, unable to stop himself imagining that Beth might at that very moment being tortured.
No miasma of hopelessness had settled over those waiting. It looked to Wes as if everyone in the line somehow expected to see their relatives and friends one fine day and would wait even if it took ten years. Their loyalty—yes, he saw that he shared it with the Russians around him. He would wait however long it took to see Beth. The woman in front of him, aged, short and frail, turned to him and smiled and patted his cheek. She said something in Russian, perhaps encouraging, and he put his arms around her and hugged her.
But now the snow was being driven by a bitter wind, and some of those in the line had to retreat to the shelter of the wall. The guards abandoned their patrols and sought their hut, a chimney on top releasing black smoke. One of them called something loud
ly in Russian, waving his arms in a ‘go home, get the hell out of here’ motion. Few withdrew. Wes, like all those who remained, doubled himself over and shuddered in the blizzard. It was now the middle of the afternoon and the sky was darkening. The guard came out of the hut again, shouting even louder. He fired two shots into the air and the line of people became a mob, hurrying to the gates. Wes was one of the last to retreat, together with a tall, thin woman of about fifty or more. She said in distinct English, ‘Come with me.’ He allowed her to lead him into the blizzard along a street that he happened to know was called Novoslobodskaya Street. The woman was wearing a thick red knitted cap, which she held onto her head with both hands. She signalled to him to follow her off the main street into a network of much narrower streets and alleys lined with apartments dowdy and long in need of repair. She unlocked a door and ushered him in.
It was dark inside; a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling of the foyer wasn’t working. Inside the small apartment, though, a surprise. Once she turned on the light switch, brightness and warmth; maybe a hundred-watt bulb overhead and heat was given off from a coal stove.
‘My neighbour comes in and adds coals to the stove while I’m out during the day. The light bulb, I stole. My name is Anna—Anna Rothstein.’ She held out her hand to Wes, who shook it after removing his leather gloves.
‘Your name I know. Wesley. Take off your coat and scarf.’
‘How did you know my name?’
Once Anna had removed her heavy grey overcoat, she revealed a slim figure, almost too slim for health. But she was beautiful, and would once have been much more beautiful.
‘I have been going to the prison for two years, hoping to see my son Andre. I became friendly with one of the guards. He knows the story of the Australian girl. He was at her first two interrogations. He pronounced your name ‘Visli’, which I assumed was Wesley. She speaks excellent Russian, I was told.’
The walls of the apartment were entirely covered in arresting paintings, each canvas filled with tiny human figures, naked, hairless, male and female, exquisitely drawn, some bending, some kneeling, some upright hugging themselves as if against the cold. On each canvas maybe one hundred figures were painted, all in flesh tones. The expressions on the visible faces were bleak, demoralised. The setting was identifiably Red Square.
Anna said: ‘My son’s pictures. Those we could save. He’s in prison for painting decadent art, far from socialist realism. He would have simply been banned from any further exhibitions, but at his hearing he made some shocking comments about Soviet society and politics and was locked up for five years. He’s unrepentant. I go each day to see him, but no success. Will I make us some tea?’
When they were sitting in a pair of threadbare armchairs with large cups of tea, she continued. ‘I wanted you to come here to tell you something you won’t discover by yourself,’ she said. ‘You will have noticed that the guards now and again take people out of the line and lead them to the top of the queue? Good. Those people have paid the guards. One hundred US dollars. Most of the people cannot afford the bribe. They sell everything without raising enough. I have one hundred US dollars. I could bribe the guards. But Andre would refuse to see me because he would know I bribed the guards. I wait out of love and loyalty. Knowing all the time that Andre is being abused. He has a terrible temper. What I have to accept is that they might very well hang him. Each week a KGB squad comes to the prison and beats the prisoners. Not the murderers, not the thieves, not the rapists. Just the anti-Soviets, like your girlfriend, like my son. You, Wesley, I could arrange to see your girlfriend. That is why I brought you here.’
The tea was rich and strong, no milk. Wes now noticed something odd: Anna’s eyes were purple. Not a deep blue but a distinct purple. She was smoking a cigarette, powerful. She’d asked Wes if he’d like one but he’d declined. He smoked every now and then, but the packet Anna had offered him, with a portrait of Lenin on it, didn’t seem appealing.
‘I have a problem with offering the guards money,’ said Wes. ‘I have the money, but most of those people don’t. It seems unfair.’
Anna asked quietly: ‘Do you think all the other people think it is unfair?’
‘I think they would, yes.’
‘They do not.’
‘No?’
‘No. They think good luck to anyone who can find the money. Russia is not a place where we think of “fair” and “unfair”. That is too innocent. You have enough to bribe the guard, Yevgeny, bless your good fortune. They have all seen you in the snow. They were impressed. Wesley, right and wrong is in your head. In your heart is Elizabeth. You may not see her alive again.’
Her purple gaze was gentle and piercing at the one time. She stubbed out her cigarette in a large, overflowing porcelain ashtray shaped like a dove with its wings raised.
She said she was a poet, who published under the name of Anna Rosen. ‘There was already an Anna Rosenberg, a regime stooge, and I didn’t want to be confused with her. She writes what amounts to hymns in praise of Comrade Stalin and the courageous Soviet people. She’s very pretty, I think she probably slept with Comrade Stalin. But if I awoke one morning and found myself writing like her, I’d kill myself.’
‘What do you write?’
The tea, as if it weren’t strong enough already, had been fortified with brandy.
Anna stood and went to a tall set of bookshelves. On the middle shelf she pointed out a row of volumes. ‘These are mine. And I did not sleep with Comrade Stalin to have them published.’
She handed him a volume in English with the title Selected Poems of Anna Rosen. ‘Read some, while I prepare us some borscht. You have tried borscht. Of course! At the Russian border they make you eat a litre of borscht. If you can’t, they throw you out.’
He read: a conversation between Anna and John Keats on the subject of his odes, very elegant, and more intimate, more bawdy than anything Keats had suggested in his odes. The fourth one was about Catherine the Great; how she had brought a robust peasant sensibility to the Russian throne.
Anna called him to the table for the borscht.
He said the poems were very good, and she said they were actually better in English than in Russian. ‘I translated them myself. My mother was English, and my sensibility is more English than Russian. My mother came to Moscow during the revolution. She was a communist. And she stayed. She met my father here, who came from Odessa. They fell in love. They were happy. All the communists were happy, for a time. You know the Wordsworth lines, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, to be young was very heaven”? No? No matter. That was what it was like for them. I know because I was there, with my mother. I was fifteen.’
‘She didn’t think it would be dangerous for you? A revolution?’
‘Eat your borscht, Wesley. You must eat borscht hot. And eat the bread with it. When you finish you will be a Russian. No, she didn’t think it would be dangerous. She was a romantic. In any case, she couldn’t leave me behind—my father had abandoned her years before. My aunt was ill and my uncle was an alcoholic. She didn’t think she would return. At first we lived in luxury. We found a huge room in the palace with a kitchen attached to it. We ate off silver plates. In the kitchen, a huge amount of food. Then the looters came and cleaned everything out and we had to move to an apartment not far from here, on the park. Still attractive. We found money in drawers, gold coins from the czar’s anniversary. But then the Whites counterattacked and my mother’s friend was drafted into the Red Army, sent to Ukraine. And we starved. He never came back. We survived on the charity of the People’s Committee and lived in the basement of an old church with forty or fifty other families. The reds were always fighting among themselves. Factions. I saw people shot every day. My mother was about to be shot because she had stolen the people’s food from the palace years before, then at the last minute a new faction stormed in and shot those who were about to shoot my mother. They put my mother and me to work sewing buttons on uniforms in a factory that h
ad once made soap. I was twenty-two. We had both lost our love of communism. The whole thing was a terrible mess. We never knew who was in charge. Then I met Maxim, a beautiful boy and I became pregnant. He was in charge of exterminating rats in our district. The rats carried plague, and he caught it and died in eight days.’ Anna’s voice faltered. ‘But at least he saw Andre. At least he saw our beautiful Andre.’ She turned her face away. Her eyes were wet.
‘And now,’ she said drying her eyes with a small handkerchief from her sleeve, ‘my beautiful son is going to die for painting pictures, and your beloved is going to die for writing poems. Wesley, what a country!’
The next day was as cold as the previous one. The snowflakes were larger, but the wind as powerful. Wes stood in the line with Anna. She shouted at him when she wanted to be heard, and he shouted back. At least he was wearing a woollen cap today, a red one like Anna’s. She showed him how to wear it, pulled down to his neck so that it covered his ears. At ten in the morning, when she caught sight of Yevgeny, the guard she knew, she took the hundred dollars from Wes, stuffed the money into one of the coarse-grained grey envelopes used in Russia and took it to the guards’ hut. When she returned, she shouted to him: ‘He doesn’t know when!’ An elderly woman from a few places ahead left the line to put her arms around him, and kissed his cheeks three times. She shouted something in Russian that went on for a minute or more. Anna said: ‘She is telling you that you came all the way from Australia to see your wife. She says you are a good man. May you and your wife be together again.’ Wes asked her to thank the woman, who nodded and went back to her place in the line. Other women came to him and patted his shoulder.
He wasn’t selected to see Beth that day. He stayed until the guards turned away all those waiting. Fifteen people collapsed and Wes himself almost froze to death. Anna rubbed his back to keep him upright. ‘You don’t want to go to hospital,’ she said. ‘Hospital is worse than this.’ When they left the prison, Anna took him to a restaurant at the end of her street. ‘The name means the People’s Kitchen.’ Inside, it was warm and noisy and on the walls portraits hung of famous Russian writers, world famous, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, also a number that Wes didn’t know. But in the midst of those he did not know was one he knew very well: it was Anna, some years younger, with longer, darker hair and a slightly sardonic expression. Her lips were parted and the purple of her eyes gave her an erotic charm. ‘Yes, it’s me. Andre painted it. On the right side of me is Osip Mandelstam, and on the other side, Nikolay Gumilyov. You have heard of them?’
The Bride of Almond Tree Page 17