Single & Single

by John le Carré

  At Tbilisi you are likely to arrive in a scalding hurricane that causes the wings to rock and flings grit and smut at you as you dash for the cover of the terminal. Otherwise, there are no formalities, unless you count half the worthy men of the city in their best suits, and a shiny albino fixer called Temur, who, like everyone in Georgia, is Tinatin’s cousin, nephew, godchild or the son of her closest friend at school. Coffee and brandy and a pyramid of food await you in the VIP lounge, toasts are drunk and redrunk before you can proceed. A convoy of black Zils, motorcycle outriders and a chase truck with special troops in black uniforms then spirits you at hectic speed without benefit of safety belts westward over a giddy mountain range toward the promised land of Mingrelia, whose inhabitants had the wit to make their womenfolk pregnant ahead of the invader and can therefore boast the purest blood in Georgia, a claim Yevgeny happily repeats as the Zil careers over snake roads and zigzags between stray dogs, sheep, piebald pigs with triangular wooden collars, pack mules, oncoming lorries and enormous potholes. All this in a mood of childlike euphoria enhanced by frequent drafts of wine and Oliver’s duty-free malt whisky, but also by the knowledge that, after months of maneuvering, the three specific proposals will be signed, paid for and delivered anytime within the next few days. And is this not Yevgeny’s personal protectorate, the home of his youth? Does not every landmark on the perilous road to Bethlehem call for the region’s perfections to be highlighted, shared and marveled at by Yevgeny’s wife, Tinatin, and his brother Mikhail at the wheel, and above all by Oliver himself, the sacred guest to whom everything is new?

  Behind them in another car ride two of Yevgeny’s daughters, and one of them is Zoya, and Paul is sitting on her lap, and Zoya has her hands linked round him and her cheek against his cheek as their car bumps and swings and follows. And even with the back of his head, Oliver knows that her melancholia is for him alone; he should not have come, he should have left this work, he is pretending everything and therefore he is nothing. But her all-seeing eye cannot mar his pleasure in Yevgeny’s joyous alchemy. Russia never deserved Georgia, Yevgeny insists, speaking partly his own brand of English and partly through Hoban, who crouches spikily between Oliver and Tinatin on the backseat: every time Christian Georgia sought Russia’s protection from the Muslim hordes, Russia stole her wealth and dropped her in the mire . . .

  But this homily is interrupted by another as Yevgeny must point out the hilltop forts, and the road to Gori, which boasts the accursed hovel where Joseph Stalin made his entry to the world, and the cathedral that, to believe Yevgeny, is as old as Christ himself, where Georgia’s earliest kings were crowned. They pass houses with fretted balconies tottering at the edge of a great gorge, and an iron scaffold like a bell tower that marks a rich boy’s grave. This rich boy was an alcoholic, Yevgeny recounts earnestly through Hoban, embarking on some kind of morality tale. When the rich boy’s mother came to remonstrate with him, the boy blew out his brains in front of her with a revolver, and Yevgeny’s own fingers are at his temple to show how. The father, a businessman, was so stricken with grief that he had the boy’s body interred in a four-ton vat of honey so that he would never decompose.

  “Honey?” Oliver repeats incredulously.

  “For preserving corpses, honey is pretty fucking good,” Hoban replies dryly. “Ask Zoya, she’s a chemist. Maybe she’ll preserve your corpse for you.” They drive in silence till the scaffold disappears. Hoban makes a call on his portable telephone. It is of a different breed, Oliver observes, to the type he favors in Moscow or London. It is attached by a coil to a witch’s black box. One drop of blood and it can decipher all your secrets. Three buttons and he is already murmuring. The convoy stops at a solitary petrol station to refuel. In a makeshift cage next to the reeking toilet a brown bear examines the company without favor. “Mikhail Ivanovich says it’s important to know which side bear sleeps,” Hoban translates with patent derision, lifting his mouth from the telephone but without switching it off. “If bear sleeps on left side, you eat the right side. Left side of bear will be too hard to eat. If bear jerks off with left paw, you eat right paw. You want to eat some bear?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You should have written to her. She went crazy waiting for you to come back.” Hoban returns to his telephone conversation. The sun beats onto the road’s surface, making puddles of tar. The car fills with the scents of pine forest. They pass an old house set in a coppice of chestnut trees. The door stands open. “Door closed, the husband’s home,” Hoban intones, translating Yevgeny again. “Door open, he’s out at work so you can go in and fuck the wife.” They climb, and the plains to either side flatten below them. White-capped mountains glisten under an infinite sky. Ahead of them, half-drowning in its own haze, lies the Black Sea. A wayside chapel marks a precarious bend in the road. Lowering his window, Mikhail tosses a handful of coins into the lap of an old man seated on the step. “Guy’s a fucking millionaire,” Hoban says wistfully. Yevgeny calls a halt at a willow tree with tags of colored ribbon tied to its old branches. It is a dream tree, Hoban explains, once more interpreting for Yevgeny: “Only good wishes may be attached to it. Dirty wishes rebound on the one who wishes them. You have dirty wishes?”

  “None.”

  “Personally I have dirty wishes all the time. Specially at night and first thing in the morning. Yevgeny Ivanovich was born in Senaki,” Hoban resumes while Yevgeny shouts and points a thick arm into the valley. “Mikhail Ivanovich was also born in the city which the Soviets renamed Senaki. ‘Our father was commandant of military base at Senaki. We had house in military town outside Senaki. This house was very good house. My father was good man. All Mingrelians loved my father. My father was happy here.’” Yevgeny’s voice lifts and his arm swings toward the coastline. “‘I was at kids’ school in Batumi. I was at marine school in Batumi. My wife was born in Batumi.’ You want any more of this shit?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “‘Before Leningrad I was at university in Odessa. I study ships, building, marine. My spirit is on the waters of the Black Sea. It is in the mountains of Mingrelia. I shall die in this place.’ You want me to leave my door open so you can fuck my wife?”

  “No.”

  Another halt. Mikhail and Yevgeny get out of the car purposefully, and make their way across the road. On an impulse Oliver goes after them. At the roadside lank men driving donkeys laden with oranges and cabbages pause to watch. Ragged gypsy children lean on sticks and stare as the brothers, trailed by Oliver, pass between them and ascend a narrow black stairway overgrown with weed. The brothers have reached a black-paved grotto. The stairway is of marble. A black marble handrail runs beside it. Set into the wall stands a statue of a bandaged Red Army officer heroically urging his troops into battle. In a misty glass case, cut into the rock, is the foxed and faded photograph of a young Russian soldier in a peaked cap. Mikhail and Yevgeny are standing shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed, hands folded in prayer. In ragged order, they take a step back and cross themselves several times.

  “Our father,” Yevgeny explains gruffly.

  They return to the Zil. Mikhail negotiates a hairpin bend and comes face-to-face with a military checkpoint. Lowering his window but not stopping, he hammers his left shoulder with his right hand, indicating high rank, but the sentries refuse to be impressed. With an oath Mikhail pulls up while Temur the fixer leaps out of the car behind them and kisses one of the men, who hugs and kisses him in return. The convoy may continue. They reach the summit. A lush land opens before them.

  “He says we got another hour from here,” Hoban translates. “On horse, he says, it would take two days. That’s where he belongs. In the fucking horse age.”

  A valley field, sentries, a helicopter with its fins rotating, a mountain wall. Yevgeny, Hoban, Tinatin, Mikhail and Oliver ride in the first helicopter with a case of vodka and a painting of a sad old lady in white lace collars that has traveled with them all the way from Moscow, shedding chunks of gesso frame. The h
elicopter climbs a waterfall, follows a pony track, scales the mountain wall and dips between white peaks to lower itself into a green valley made in the shape of a cross. A hamlet nestles in each limb, an old stone monastery stands at the center amid vineyards, barns, grazing cattle, forests and a lake. The party clumsily dismounts, Oliver after them. Hillsmen and children advance on them and Oliver is amused to notice that the children do indeed have brown hair. The helicopter lifts off, taking the din of its engines with it as it drops below the crest. Oliver smells pine and honey and hears the stirring of grass and the trickle of stream water. A skinned sheep hangs from a tree. Wood smoke billows from a pit. Rich handwoven carpets of pink and crimson lie in the grass. Drinking horns and wine gourds are stacked on a table. Villagers crowd round. Yevgeny and Tinatin embrace them. Hoban sits on a rock, the telephone to his ear and the black box at his feet, embracing no one. The helicopter returns with Zoya and Paul and two more daughters and their husbands, and again departs. Mikhail and a bearded giant, armed with hunting guns, stride off into the forest. Oliver drifts with the group toward a wooden one-story farmhouse at the center of a sloping paddock. Inside, it is at first pitch dark. Gradually he sees a brick fireplace, a metal stove. He smells camphor, lavender and garlic. The bedrooms have bare floors and garish icons in battered frames: the hallowed Jesus as a baby, being nursed at his mother’s covered breast, Jesus nailed to the cross but stretched there so gaily that he is already flying up to heaven, Jesus arrived safely home, sitting at the right hand of his Father.

  “What Moscow forbids, Mingrelians love,” says Hoban for Yevgeny, and yawns. “You bet,” he adds.

  A cat presents itself and is made a fuss of. The old sad lady in crumbling gesso must have her place above the fire. Children are standing in the doorway waiting to see what wonders Tinatin has brought from the city. In the village, someone is playing music. In the kitchen, someone is singing, and it is Zoya.

  “Do you agree she sings like a goat?” Hoban inquires.

  “No,” says Oliver.

  “Then you are in love with her,” Hoban confirms with satisfaction.

  The feast lasts two days but it is not till the end of the first that Oliver discovers he is attending a high-level business conference of the valley’s elders. He learns many other things first. That when shooting bear you do best to shoot them in the eye, because on the rest of their bodies they wear a bulletproof armor of dried mud. That it is customary when feasting to pour wine onto the earth to nourish the spirits of our ancestors. That Mingrelian wines come from many different grapes, with names like Koloshi, Paneshi, Chodi and Kamuri. That to drink a toast in beer is to swear a curse on the person toasted. That Mingrelia’s ancestors are none other than the fabled Argonauts, who under Jason’s generalship built themselves a great fortress not twenty kilometers from here to house the Golden Fleece. And from a wild-eyed priest who seems never to have heard of the Russian Revolution he learns that to cross himself he must first join two fingers and his thumb—or was it only the thumb and fourth finger, his magician’s fingers were too clumsy to be sure—and point them upward to indicate the Holy Trinity, then touch the brow and afterward the right and left sides of the belly, so that he doesn’t see the devil’s cross as he looks down.

  “Alternatively, you can shove clover up your ass,” Hoban advises sotto voce and repeats the joke in Russian for the edification of his telephone partner.

  The business conference, which Oliver attends, turns out to be a consequence of Yevgeny’s great dream, and the great dream is to unite the four villages of the cruciform in a single wine-growing cooperative that, by pooling land, labor and resources, and redirecting watercourses, and employing the techniques of countries such as Spain, will produce the finest wine, not just in Mingrelia, not just in Georgia, but in the entire world.

  “It will cost many millions,” Hoban reports laconically, translating. “Maybe billions. Nobody has smallest fucking idea. ‘We must build roads. We must build dams. We must buy machinery and make depot in the valley.’ Who will pay for this shit?” The answer, it transpires, is Mikhail and Yevgeny Ivanovich Orlov. Yevgeny has already flown in viniculturists from Bordeaux, Rioja and the Napa Valley. With one voice they have declared the vines superb. His spies have recorded temperatures and rainfall, measured the angles of hillsides, taken soil samples and pollen counts. Irrigators, road builders, shippers and importers have testified to the surefire feasibility of the plan. Yevgeny will find the money, he tells the villagers, they can rest assured. “He’ll give the assholes every ruble we ever make,” Hoban confirms.

  Dusk is falling fast. A furious blood red sky proclaims itself behind the mountaintops and dies. In the trees lanterns are lit, music plays, the skinned sheep is turning on the fire. Men start singing, others make a ring and clap, a troupe of girls performs a dance. Outside the circle the elders talk among themselves, though Oliver can no longer hear them, and Hoban has given up translating. A dispute breaks out. An old man shakes his rifle at another. Eyes are on Yevgeny, who makes a joke, earns a scattered laugh and takes a step closer to his listeners. He opens his arms. He rebukes, then he promises. To judge by the applause, the promise must be substantial. The elders are appeased, Hoban leans against a cedar tree, growing larger with the dark while he murmurs lovingly into his witch’s telephone.

  In the House of Single the tension is audible. The primly clothed typists tread gingerly. The Trading Room, barometer of morale, is buzzing with rumor. Tiger has gone out there for the big one! It’s boom or bust for Single’s! Tiger is poised for the kill of the century.

  “And Yevgeny in good heart, you say? Excellent,” says Tiger briskly, at one of the haphazard debriefings that follow Oliver’s sorties to the Wild East.

  “Yevgeny’s terrific,” Oliver replies loyally. “And Mikhail’s right there beside him.”

  “Good, good,” says Tiger and darts away into the thickets of operational costs and stock flotations.

  A letter from Tinatin urges Oliver to make contact with yet another distant cousin, a girl named Nina this time, who teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies and is the daughter of a Mingrelian violinist now dead. Taking it as a kindly hint from Zoya’s mother to cast his impressionable eye elsewhere, Oliver dashes off a letter to the violinist’s widow and is invited round to Bayswater for tea. The widow is a retired actress in a smock, with a habit of brushing away her fringe with the back of her hand, but her daughter Nina is black haired with smoldering black eyes. Nina agrees to teach Oliver Georgian, beginning with its beautiful but daunting alphabet, though she warns him it will take him years to learn.

  “The more years the better!” Oliver cries gallantly.

  Nina is of a high-minded disposition, and her Georgian and Mingrelian ties have been strengthened by exile. She is moved by Oliver’s uncritical admiration of everything she holds dear, though of oil, scrap, blood and seventy-five-million-dollar bribes she providentially knows nothing. Oliver preserves her in her innocence. Soon she shares his bed. And if Oliver is aware that Zoya is in some devious sense the inspiration of their union, he feels no guilt—why should he? He is grateful that, by going to bed with Nina, he is able to distance himself from the predatory wife of an important business associate, whose naked body still shines provocatively at him from the upper window of the Moscow house. Under Nina’s guidance he surrounds himself with works of Georgian literature and folklore. He plays Georgian music and pastes a map of the Caucasus along one wall of his disgracefully untidy prestige flat in a tower block in Chelsea Harbour built with Single-brokered finance.

  And the Post Boy is happy. Not happy happy, for Oliver does not believe in pleasure as an attainable ideal. But active happy. Creative happy. Happy cautiously in love, if love is what he feels for Nina. Happy also in his work—as long as work is visiting Yevgeny and Mikhail and Tinatin, and provided that the insidious shadow of Hoban does not hang too near, and Zoya continues to ignore him. For where once her unhappy eyes devoured Olive
r constantly, now they refuse to acknowledge him at all. She steers clear of the kitchen when he is chopping vegetables with Tinatin. In corridors, on staircases, flitting from room to room with Paul in tow, she uses the curtains of her hair to hide her face.

  “Tell your father, in one week they will sign all documents,” says Yevgeny over Stone Age billiards, when he has satisfied himself that nobody but Hoban and Mikhail and Shalva is within hearing distance. “Tell him, when they have signed he must come to Mingrelia and shoot a bear.”

  “In that case you must come to Dorset and shoot a pheasant,” Oliver counters, and they embrace.

  There is no hand-carried mail this time. Oliver brings the two messages in his head. On the flight home he is so excited by them that he has half a mind to propose marriage to Nina. The date is August 18, 1991.

  It is two nights later and Nina is weeping in Georgian. She is weeping on the telephone, she is weeping when she arrives at Oliver’s flat, weeping as they sit like an old couple side by side on the sofa watching in horror as the new Russia trembles on the brink of anarchy, its daring leader is seized by the old guard risen from the grave, newspapers are closed, tanks flood the city and people at the highest level in the land tumble from power like ninepins, taking with them their best-laid specific proposals for scrap metal, oil and blood.

  It is summer still in Curzon Street but no birds sing. Oil, scrap and blood are as if they had never been. To acknowledge them is to acknowledge their demise. The recent history books have been tacitly rewritten, the young men and women of the Trading Room dispatched in search of other bounty. Otherwise, nothing, absolutely nothing, has occurred. No precious tens of millions of investment have turned to dust, nothing has been lavished on advance commissions, there have been no sweeteners bestowed on American intermediaries and officials, no down payments have been made on the lease of refrigerated jumbo jets. The heat, light, rent, cars, salaries, bonuses, health insurance, educational insurance, phone and entertainment bills for five prime floors of Curzon Street and their spendthrift inhabitants are not in jeopardy. And Tiger is the least affected of everyone. His tread is lighter, his walk prouder than ever before, his vision grander, his Hayward suit crisper. Oliver alone—and perhaps Gupta, who is Tiger’s Indian factotum—knows the pain that lies beneath the armor, knows how close the brittle hero is to snapping. But when Oliver in his incurable compassion chooses a moment to commiserate with his father, Tiger retaliates with a ferocity that leaves Oliver rocking with internal anger.