Document Z

by Andrew Croome

  She had expected the ambassador to sit and hear her out. He stayed standing. She declared quickly that she had witnesses. People in direct contact with the time and the place and the personalities around which the incident revolved.

  ‘Evdokia Alexeyevna,’ Generalov interrupted, ‘your insolence towards my wife is not our concern today.’ He gestured that she sit. ‘True,’ he said, ‘you are an expert at splitting the collective. Causing divisions. Encouraging dissension. You are loud-mouthed, which some might dismiss as merely an unfortunate element of your character, not realising the cold and calculated scheming it truly is.’ She moved to protest but he silenced her with his finger. ‘It is apparent, now,’ he continued, ‘that your outbursts are not innocent but deliberate and contrived. They are the plottings of a sinister miscreant. Part of a subversive agenda to which you,’—he turned slightly—‘and your husband hold.’

  She looked to Volodya whose arms were hugged to his chest.

  Generalov went on. ‘Many have wondered about anti-social behaviours in this outpost, failures to fit with the collective, antagonisms exhibited. Always these have been believed to be conflicts of personality or some such benign thing, vacant of political content. But suddenly we find ourselves enlightened. We charge that they are part of a campaign. A crusade to ruin the good working order of this station, to disrupt and dislocate our functioning parts. An action of sabotage. It has its political motivations: a Beria faction. That is right. A cancer in this very embassy, seeking to usurp the power of the Foreign Ministry and to establish an order headed by the MVD.’

  Kovaliev’s head bobbed, his eyes pinned to Karasev’s notes.

  ‘We must name the perpetrators,’ Generalov declared. ‘We will out them and hope they die of shame. The Petrovs— Comrades Vladimir Mikhailovich and Evdokia Alexeyevna, who are far from comrades at all. We say they are saboteurs. Husband and wife; organisers of a Beria group; conspirators with the aim of elevating the MVD to a position above myself as the ruling authority of this outpost.’

  ‘Ambassador—’

  ‘From the outset they have attempted to destabilise us, pursuing the reactionary aims of their treacherous former head!’

  ‘You are wrong,’ Evdokia half-shouted. ‘That is slander. Groundless! Beria must answer for his crimes! It is nothing to do with us.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Generalov. ‘It is everything! Who here will speak?’

  Kovaliev jumped to the call. He rose from his chair, half-stuttering as if the words had jammed. ‘I . . . Ah . . . It is true! Your mission has been to degrade us, to disparage Stalin, may he rest in peace. We have witnessed your theatrics and orchestrations, your derelictions and their subversive intent. These have been your outward behaviours, trying to bend the collective to your will. But who knows what has happened in secret; what influences you have peddled behind the scenes? Shall we ask? Will you furnish the truth? You are a danger. You have made intrigues against the proper lines of control. Ambassador Lifanov understood your deleterious effect. He may not have known your motivations, but now your treachery, long suspected, is exposed.’

  Volodya was sitting in his chair, arms crossed. Evdokia waited for him to interject as Kovaliev sprinted on.

  ‘Beria loyalists,’ the attaché shouted. ‘Loyalists to the core!’

  ‘These are lies, Nikolai Grigorievich!’ she said. ‘You are fabricating at such speed you can hardly keep pace with yourself.’

  Suddenly, Kharkovetz, the press attaché, was on his feet. His mouth was dry and it clicked as he spoke. ‘I agree with this process.’

  ‘What process?’ she asked.

  He ignored her, addressing the ambassador. ‘If these two are a Beria faction, they must be heartlessly unmasked.’

  ‘Who else?’ said Generalov. ‘Who supports this charge? Vislykh?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the secretary. ‘If they are guilty, I support it.’

  ‘But we are not guilty,’ said Evdokia. ‘The charge is convenient and absurd.’

  ‘It is serious,’ said Kovaliev, still stammering.

  ‘Oh, desperately.’

  The ambassador called on Kislitsyn. The MVD man leaned back in his chair and gave no reply. Still Volodya was silent. His eyes were on Karasev, whatever it was he was writing down.

  Kovaliev rambled on with another indictment, footnoting various incidents, incitements to unrest.

  ‘This is not a hearing,’ said Evdokia. ‘This is an ambush. We are not followers of Beria. We are respected Party members with long careers.’

  Generalov laughed. ‘Evdokia Alexeyevna, we know your record, the black stains on your Party history.’

  ‘The Party knows who I am and is comfortable, Ambassador. I think there are men in this room with questionable histories who should be the last to throw stones.’

  Kovaliev went to protest but she cut him off. ‘This charge is a falsity,’ she said. ‘Let us dismiss it and end this meeting.’

  ‘If the Petrovs won’t admit their betrayals, we must test them by formalising the charge,’ said Kharkovetz.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kislitsyn, putting the pencil behind his ear. ‘This is all hearsay. If the ambassador believes it, let him command the charge and afford a proper prosecution and defence. If he believes it.’

  Generalov glared at his second secretary.

  Kovaliev lifted a book of protocol from his bag. ‘There are rules,’ he said. ‘Without Moscow’s permission, no process can be made. As secretary, I can take an agreement to petition them. If the Petrovs won’t admit the charge, this is the only way we can begin.’

  ‘Now you are being ridiculous,’ Evdokia said. ‘You know Moscow will grant you no such thing.’

  ‘We must follow the regulations. I am secretary. This is what the regulations state.’

  Generalov called on Prudnikov, who was sitting quietly at the end of the table. ‘Petr, what is your opinion of all this?’

  The cypher clerk looked fearful. He muttered about the regulations, taking refuge in them, saying there should be a strict observance of the rules.

  ‘Alright,’ said Generalov. ‘Kovaliev will petition Moscow. He will collect signatures from those who support the charge.’

  ‘We will include a protest that what is alleged is nonsense,’ Evdokia said.

  ‘You cannot protest a petition,’ Kovaliev told her.

  ‘We will protest it.’

  ‘The rules are plain. You may protest at a later stage.’

  Evdokia went to speak once more, but Kovaliev and Gener-alov stood, declaring the meeting closed. Karasev packed his minutes into a satchel, which Kovaliev took.

  ‘You must write to Moscow,’ said Kislitsyn, when everyone had gone.

  ‘All this writing,’ said Volodya.

  ‘The facts may make no difference, but then again they might.’

  ‘He’s thought hard about this, the prick.’

  ‘Two pricks. Scheming.’

  ‘Is this the kind of thing that makes it them or us?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘We are completely untenable. How is Doosia supposed to work?’

  ‘Shoulder to the wheel. Follow the rules.’

  ‘Six feet from bedlam.’

  They looked to her. She wasn’t talking. She pulled the strings on the nearest curtain, struck by nausea in the sudden bright light.

  Anna Kislitsyna broke away. Their walks and shopping excursions stopped, Evdokia’s telephone calls went unreturned. Evdokia understood, or thought she did. Theirs was an ordinary friendship and what was an ordinary friendship when you had a family to protect? It was an intellectual understanding and it didn’t help the hurt. If they saw one another at the embassy, Anna gave her a distant smile and nothing more.

  Masha wasn’t afraid. They ate their lunch together at the end of the orchard in the shadow of the hedge or out of it. An hour in the afternoon sun; the smell of citrus and the cigarettes they smoked.

  Others sniped. Karaseva spat i
nto the garden if their paths crossed. Someone made pig noises under her office window then disappeared. Someone wrote ‘whore’ on the roster by her name. When she left a room, she stood outside the doorway, quietly hovering, listening for laughter or any comments made.

  Volodya stayed a week in Sydney. She wanted to know what they were going to do about this, the situation. He rang her once and wouldn’t discuss it.

  Ethel Rosenberg was executed. President Eisenhower rejected her last-minute letter requesting clemency. She made no statement before dying. There were riots in Rome and Paris.

  Generalov demanded to be told what was wrong when Evdokia rang in sick. ‘Fever,’ she said. ‘I won’t bring it to the embassy.’

  She stayed in the house for two days, the curtains drawn, sleeping with the lights on, not bothering to watch the street.

  She cooked soup and reheated soup and fed some soup to Jack. The dog tongued the bowl across the floor, upended it and licked the spilled liquid from the lino.

  The hum of the Powerhouse was one of those distant things— could she really hear it or was she listening to the wind?

  She was sacked, finally, which was something she had seen coming. The ambassador called her to his desk and closed the door.

  ‘Evdokia Alexeyevna,’ he said. ‘I am terminating your work as my assistant. You are dismissed as accountant. You will make sure your records are in order and hand them to me. Vislykha will take the role.’

  ‘You don’t have the authority,’ she protested. ‘Moscow assigned me the position. I follow the regulations and the rules.’

  He looked at her in silence. He told her she would bring him the records in an hour.

  She cleared the photographs from her desk. She left the whittled pencils and the notes and sums she’d scribbled. She wanted Vislykha to realise her intrusion, to know that the space she was inhabiting was not a vacant, nullified place. You are profiting from a casualty, the desk said.

  She went upstairs to tell Kislitsyn what had happened. The door of his office was locked. She hovered for a time before collecting the MVD channel from Prudnikov. She asked whether Kovaliev’s petition had received a reply. ‘Not yet,’ said the clerk, though she wondered whether he would tell her, whether things were now so lost that he had chosen the ambassador’s camp.

  She took the MVD cables to Volodya’s room. Easy to lose herself decyphering, running like an automaton, vanishing her conscious parts. Subtract this column from this. Substitute the codewords. The messages uncovered felt as though they were spoken in a godly voice. The way the words were housed inside themselves, secretly bound up in reassortments unbreakable to anyone else.

  Moscow Centre wanted Kislitsyn to track down a military man named David Morris, an undercover communist and a tank researcher once on the general staff in Melbourne. They wanted the current address and living circumstances of a lawyer named Finnard, graduate of Sydney University, interested in questions of Marxist philosophy. They sought information on one Fitzhardinge, a librarian at the National Library and a consultant to parliament whom they thought might provide useful advice.

  She felt reassured by this humdrum noise. The mundane rattle of intelligence work, pedestrian and routine questing of the unremarkable kind. Disarmed, she was midway through the last instruction before she realised what her decrypting had made. It was an order to Volodya: Return to Moscow. Brief us here, directly, on the progress you and your detachment have achieved.

  She felt ill.

  They wanted him on a plane via London and Zurich at the earliest. Unthinking, she picked up the phone on the desk and asked for a trunk call. The Buckingham Hotel told her that a Mr Petrov wasn’t registered. Were they sure? She described her husband physically: not short but short-looking, not fat but somewhat round. ‘Glasses,’ said the clerk. He knew of the chap referred to but he was certainly not booked in.

  She tried Bialoguski. The doctor answered the phone out of breath, and was elusive about her husband’s whereabouts, telling her that if he saw Vladimir anywhere he’d tell him to call.

  Ivan Golovanov was below the window, pushing the mow-ing contraption and swearing. Evdokia went home in the mid-afternoon. The phone was ringing as she walked in. It was Volodya.

  ‘I’ve been sacked,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Generalov has dismissed me as his assistant and the embassy accountant.’

  She told her husband about the Moscow cable, avoiding the word ‘recalled’. ‘ “Come to Moscow as fast as possible”— instructions to that effect.’

  ‘He can’t sack you! Who does this man think he is?’

  ‘He is at ease, as he tells me. He looks like a man who is safe.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘What about Moscow?’

  ‘Is Kislitsyn there? What does he say?’

  ‘Everything is falling apart.’

  Silence.

  ‘My eyes are deteriorating,’ he said. ‘Quite suddenly. I am having medical attention and the doctor says it is not a sensible thing for me to fly.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We’ll cable this opinion.’

  ‘A delaying tactic.’

  ‘Moscow won’t send a man blind.’

  She listened to him breathe. ‘What would we be stalling for?’

  ‘Oh, anything. Something. Let’s not be fatalistic.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve done some good work up here, Doosia. We can smooth things over with the Centre. Get them behind our cause.’

  ‘Smooth things over. Delay things. What do you think is going to change?’

  ‘It is a good country this, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The Oriental Hotel.’

  ‘Are you coming home?’

  ‘I’ll go to the doctor.’

  ‘Go to the doctor and then come home.’

  ‘Yes. Okay. Alright.’

  ‘I’ll continue going to work,’ she said. ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Alright. It will be alright. This is a good country, isn’t it?’

  ‘Come home. Be careful.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Alright.’

  12

  Bialoguski rang the Sydney Morning Herald from a phone box on Victoria Road, asking to speak to any journalist with a special interest in world or national affairs. They put him through to a man named Clean. He listened closely to the man’s voice, trying to make a political assessment.

  ‘Listen,’ Bialoguski said. ‘Are you a man of the left or the right?’

  ‘What’s that matter?’

  ‘Answer.’

  ‘Left, right—I’m too bloody busy.’

  ‘Left or right?’

  ‘Let me refer you. We’ve got both kinds of bastard here.’

  ‘Look, I need a journalist who’s not a communist.’

  ‘If there’s one thing I’m not.’

  ‘Alright.’

  He told him he was a Security agent, recently retired. He wanted to write an exposé based on his penetrations. He wanted to forensically describe the activities of the New South Wales communist front, its various organisations, the Peace Movement. There were respectable doctors and lawyers and scientists sinking in the shit of Marxist philosophy. People having their pockets cut open and their cash funnelled in unsavoury directions. He had documentary evidence. Hard facts. Names. He would write these articles anonymously and he would be paid. If they needed proof of his Security connections, he could provide the names of men who would vouch for him. The best idea, he thought, would be to pen the articles under a pseudonym, something suitably heroic and metaphysical: T.J. Shawl or K.K. Ghost. The articles could be used as the basis of news stories, but the articles themselves had to be the magazine type with illustrations and a hard, black edge. There were further options. A series of articles on the Soviet embassy. He had a direct connection to revelations about the activities of Soviet diplomats and embassy personnel.

  ‘Who am I speaking with
?’ asked Clean.

  ‘For the moment I’m just a man calling from a phone box.’

  He mentioned the name Petrov; the names Pakhomov, Vislykh, Generalov. Said there were underhand goings-on he could expose. Front-page news.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Clean. ‘How can we meet?’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ said Bialoguski. ‘For the moment I am simply interested in your interest.’ He disconnected.

  Arriving at Cliveden, it was a shock to find Petrov on the doorstep. The Russian looked drunk and sulky, mostly wretched. The weather was much too warm for an overcoat, but Vladimir’s hugged his body all the same.

  ‘I need to see Beckett,’ he said.

  Bialoguski felt his dark mood. They went upstairs. He poured them drinks and they sat.

  ‘Bastards,’ Petrov spat.

  ‘What’s wrong, Vladimir?’

  The man jerked a newspaper from his pocket and thrust it under Bialoguski’s nose. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

  It was an article. Life in Russia. The day-to-day starvation of the masses; the overbearing fear of the purge.

  ‘Lies?’ suggested the doctor.

  ‘No,’ said Petrov. ‘It’s all true. Except really it’s twice as bad!’

  Bialoguski looked at him carefully.

  ‘Come on, Doctor,’ the Russian went on. ‘I think you know. You are clever enough to realise we are suffering terribly. Maybe you believe in dialectical materialism, but about the ruthless conditions in the Soviet Union you are smart enough to know.’

  ‘What is this, Vladimir?’

  The man pointed to Malenkov’s bulbous, dual-chinned face. ‘This man and his clique, they live like the czars. It is as plain as day. Their cars and their food and their houses. But you go to Russia and say something against them, they’ll cut your head off.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘They will. Just see what they will do to this bastard Beria! And how many people did Beria kill?’

  ‘You’re drunk, Vladimir.’

  ‘The Russian people are ruled at bayonet point.’

  ‘A Soviet diplomat saying this.’

  ‘It’s true, Doctor. Power-thirsty bastards at the helm and anyone who stands up gets shot. That is the Russian way.’