The doctor was in a good mood. There was small talk, men’s talk. They discussed Sydney’s left wing, their pitiful reaction to events. Unimaginative, the way they mimicked the Soviet line. Petrov asked after the boxes in the corner.
‘Lady Poynter is returning,’ Bialoguski grumbled. ‘That, or news of my sacking from the orchestra finally reached London. I’m to vacate by the end of the month.’
The Russian joked that Bialoguski should move to the safe house. If certain communists found out how he’d helped him, the doctor might need the protection.
‘That’s right,’ said Bialoguski. ‘That’s right.’
Suddenly, and, Petrov thought, quite awkwardly, both the Security men excused themselves, Howley muttering something about checking the cars. They left quickly, their drinks unfinished. Carter caught the doctor’s eye and looked instructively at his watch.
Petrov turned to Bialoguski. The doctor looked at him, fetched a whisky bottle, poured them both a glass.
‘They’ve gone because I need a word,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. Let me preface this by saying it is my certain belief that you know what is coming. I wonder, in fact, if it really needs declaring at all.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s been my desire, of course, to confide in you for a long time. That has not been possible, but you understand how it works.’
‘What is this?’
‘I must tell you, Vladimir, that I am an agent of the Security organisation. It is my belief that you have known this for some time.’
Blank.
‘I have been a paid agent for many years,’ the doctor continued. ‘Since before we met—an important point, I think. Once we became friends, of course, I stopped the rest of my work to concentrate on helping you to remain in Australia. I don’t think our friendship should suffer as a result of what I’m telling you. I believe you were aware of who I was; however, the situation dictated that our circumstances remained unspoken. Of course, it was not my job to encourage you. Only to be there if you made your choice. I don’t think any of this is news. Nothing that would surprise you. I’m sure you knew or heavily suspected. It would have been no good putting questions or making accusations. What purpose could have been served? So we kept the fact outside ourselves, you and I, a secret that stayed in the background. I believe there were many things your suspicions caused you to hide from me. There should be no need of that now. Please understand also that Security and I were never the same thing. Out of friendship for you, I kept things from them. The women, for example, the escapades with girls—entirely our own affair. Never reported. What would have been the point? Do you understand? That was private and it will remain so, between you and me. The things that brought us together were unfortunate. We should remind ourselves that you were MVD and that officially I was not aware of that also. But now it is all in the open. Yes? And I hope our friendship will grow stronger now that all this secrecy is gone.’
The doctor finished his whisky. ‘You are very quiet, Vladimir,’ he said.
Bastards.
He drank some whisky and looked past Bialoguski to the kitchen, at nothing. He felt beaten, like a player who, outmatched in the final moment, looks for a rule that has been broken only to find, gallingly, that none has.
He reached forward, performing the only act that seemed to make sense, which was to shake the doctor’s hand. To his mind, Bialoguski’s blow couldn’t have been better delivered, softened by those palatable fibs supposed to allow his friend, Vladimir, to save face. Silently, the Russian finished his whisky and poured another, returning the bottle to the doctor’s side of the coffee table but not refilling his glass. ‘Of course we are friends,’ he said. And that was all.
The Security men returned. As they sat, the doctor told Howley to advise Colonel Spry that he and their prize asset remained friends, true roles out in the open. Howley nodded in a diminished way, lighting a cigarette. They sat quietly until Leo Carter brought up the topic of the federal election, which was locked up, he said, at forty-nine points apiece. They discussed it for a time. Bialoguski joked that perhaps Vladimir ought be issued with a vote. Big laughs. Nervous laughs. They were trying to bring him back, draw him in again, resurrect his ability to trust.
There was a section of road on the return trip that hugged the coastline, bringing the cars to the black edge of the sea. It wasn’t a long stretch, climbing slightly uphill for perhaps only a hundred metres. There was a point, however, where the road curved, bracing against the cliff that stood over its dark height. Here, when road conditions were right, travellers could feel the land beneath them dissolving.
He would need to go over everything. The last three years were suddenly a fresh and opaque concern. Too early, he supposed, for evaluations. It was time for considered thought and the replaying of events in his mind. Hard to believe. He’d always been a popular man in Moscow; fair with the privileges he’d had; respected as a man and for his work. Friends he’d had then—men who put his interests on equal footing with their own. Pronin, one of his clerks. Unbelievably slender, as if horribly underfed. Fishing partners for years, boating on the River Moskva, venturing to discuss many things, even politics and systems of rule. Pronin was an amateur technologist, a scientist of a type. He admired Petrov’s Omega, jesting cash amounts and material inducements to buy it. In Sweden, Petrov bought him one, a newer and more stylish model with a date and day function built in. When he returned to Moscow, Pronin wasn’t there to receive it—he had been promoted to head of cypher for the ekrano-plan project on the Caspian Sea: huge aircraft prototyped to fly mind-boggling distances over water at an altitude of one metre or less. Petrov sent the watch in the mail—an ambitious idea at best—and it was robbed in transit. Pronin wrote, saying, never mind. They never saw each other again. Strange when friends vanish from your life and you do not give them a second thought.
Leo Carter killed the engine and turned towards him.
‘Now that your wife is here,’ he said quietly, ‘the director thought we should tell you. The girls. No one has any reason to dredge that up. It’s a secret between us. Does that suit? Only the case officers saw the details. We’re not paying it any mind, and you can be trusting. There’ll be none of it that sees the light.’
She was sleeping crossways on the bed, the solid expanse of her back facing upwards, her sides expanding with each breath. The room was only halfway dark, with the curtains open and the twin windows fed by streetlight. He stripped down to his underwear and sat across from her in a bedside chair.
In the far corner was the safe. A black, short-legged structure with an antique appearance, holding a shade under five thousand pounds.
He was thinking that he had never been cut out for this. At one stage he’d thought he was, but obviously he’d never been. These other men—the likes of Kislitsyn, the doctor, the Australians—they were an alien breed in comparison, a peculiar subset of humanity he had thought he could mix with, but—judging by where he now found himself, in this room—he could not. Embarrassing. He had been the world’s worst spy: a dupe and a traitor. His only solace was that he hadn’t asked for it. They had given it to him, the mantle, insisted that he take it on. Well, they regretted that now. So did he. He wondered what part of this room he should put down to his incompetence rather than Lifanov’s and Generalov’s greed? What was it a question of? He didn’t know.
He looked down at her body and was thankful she was there. For a moment he regretted everything. Every part of what had been done. The room was a sorrow; not of his own making, but of a cohesion of personalities and forces, and who could pick one event or decision as the cause? Strange to be these people in this room. Odd to be doubled in the news papers and on the radio and to be those people and these at the same time.
No special thing to feel this way about history. He had never been a collector of mementos or keepsakes—something in the impulse struck him as politically unsound. His mat
erial connections were a suitcase of clothes, a comb, a toothbrush, some spectacles, the pair of shoes he’d just removed, a key. Sum total. He saw this as a good thing. Not to be weighted by the past. He had no need of reminders to know the wretchedness at the heart of things.
Desolate views. He looked from the window, the streetlights’ electrical glow more stark and less inviting in some spots than in others. There was a jetty or some other fixed object by the water, putting an arc of yellow light onto the sea, picking out whitecaps, barely.
He wanted to vanish now. Escape and use his ransom to buy somewhere to live a life. Go alone. Find an isolated place to reside without ever being found. Such a big country. So many places just like that. Queensland, maybe. Tasmania. Buy a small farm, blocked by sea frontage or a river, some wily route by which to flee should anyone from Special Tasks manage to track him down.
Not possible, of course. He was coming to realise how deeply imprisoned he was by the freedom that he’d bought.
A whole country that knew his face. How long could a man like that hide? He could picture the brute emerging from the everyday haze, a stranger at first like any stranger, a well-dressed insurance seller or a tradesman in overalls, approaching to the sound of cicadas, the same smells in the air, everything regular, nothing amiss—which, he supposed, it wouldn’t be—knocking at the door, looking for sales, asking for work, regular, regular. The only plan you could have was to bargain for the pistol and not the pick.
The unfortunate thing about the future is that it cannot be taken back.
He opened the window slightly and Evdokia stirred. He looked down, hoping she would not wake. The bedsheets were white, like hospital clothes, dim in the darkness. He stood and held his breath. He didn’t want his wife to become a conscious presence in the room, discomforted by the idea of her seeing him.
Did Gouzenko have a family? Had he taken them with him or left them behind? If they met each other in South America or Africa, two defectors on safe and neutral ground, would friendship be possible? Would they remind each other, awfully, of what their choices had done?
Tamara looked as he imagined Evdokia might have at fifteen. Curls and a movement of body that was athletic and self-assured. He’d taught her in one afternoon how to ride the bicycle her sister brought her from Sweden. They had gone to a square of grass in a park and she had ridden, just clear of his hands, in circles. That was the only time he could think of when they had ever been alone together. Otherwise, he only saw her with Evdokia, the two sisters, Moscow cosmopolitans making the best of their advantages, pretending to be Americans, not quite convincing when they were discussing merit systems in the Komsomol and which play to see of Brecht’s.
Was he responsible for that young girl? Weren’t there a billion small events that had added up to get them here? Why blame him when any link would do?
He took a pillow from the bed and slept the whole night in the chair.
23
Yes, she was a Soviet intelligence worker, a captain in the MVD. Yes, she had run agents in the field. Yes, she knew something of the espionage situation in Australia. No, she was not aware of the types of document that Volodya had brought out.
Michael Howley’s face was mild, a young man’s face, pleasant, helpful. They were in the lounge room drinking tea with the translator, Saburov.
Howley asked what she knew about radio equipment. What type of transmitters did the Soviet embassy use?
‘Are you able to get news of my family?’ she said.
He drank from his teacup and looked at her blankly.
‘You must have agents in Moscow,’ she said. ‘Can’t you send a man to check?’
‘What is the address?’ he asked.
She gave it in English and in Russian. That and the building’s telephone number, E-1-31-36. He said the matter would be considered. Whatever help that could be given, it would be done.
Saburov stared at his fingernails.
‘We never transmit by radio,’ she explained. ‘There was an old one, broken. Everything travels by the cable.’
That afternoon she went to the beach. Volodya was anxious about the idea but she did it anyway to spite him. Elizabeth brought several bathing suits for her to try and she decided on a black one with the best fit. There was a good beach in front of the safe house but they didn’t risk it. Instead, they drove forty minutes up the coast to a small cove, which was deserted when they arrived. Leo Carter erected an enormous umbrella on the sand. He looked thin and wiry in swimming trunks. The three of them stood in the surf. The water, washy, darkly toned, came up and to their knees.
She felt guilty and ashamed. Unreal. As if she were living a sudden second life, parallel to her own. They ate bits of ham and cheese in the shade. Carter went to sit in the car, leaving her and Elizabeth to chat.
Only they didn’t chat. They simply sat there, staring at the sea.
They returned at dusk. Volodya was playing chess with Gilmour at a table in the lounge room. Upstairs, on the bedside table, her carry bag was open. It was one of her few certain possessions and she was sure she had zipped it closed.
She went downstairs. ‘What is this?’ she demanded.
Volodya and Gilmour looked up, the Security man appearing suddenly afraid.
‘Why is my bag open?’ she said. ‘Who has been in here when I left it closed?’
Volodya moved a chess piece. ‘I opened your bag,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘We were searching for your air ticket.’
‘Why?’
‘The embassy can gain a refund on the Sydney to Zurich section. The BOAC agent in Canberra needs to see the unused document returned.’
Gilmour was staring. She narrowed on Volodya. ‘I thought you had quit the embassy,’ she said. ‘But still you do their bidding.’
‘Don’t be snide.’
‘Don’t tell me what to be. Don’t go poking through my things!’
‘Hundreds of pounds, the price of that ticket. I am just preventing them from making further accusations.’
‘That you are a thief.’
‘Yes.’
‘The ticket was not there.’
‘No.’
‘Ironically, you are a thief.’
He said nothing.
‘Hotel receipts,’ she said. ‘Not paying the duty on all that liquor.’
Her husband’s face screwed up. He asked her how the beach was. He asked in a mocking tone, designed to bring things into focus and to hurt.
‘You,’ she said. The nearest object was a porcelain ashtray. She threw it across the room. It hit his shoulder high, surprising him more than anything, falling to the floor with a dull thud. Reacting dumbly, his hand came forward and knocked the chess pieces.
Gilmour stood up.
She gave him a painful look and rushed from the room.
Grief and the amplifications of night. She stood at the back of the house, facing the hill, a massing blackness. The night was cloudless. The stars were the Canberra stars, the southern stars that Masha thought patternless and rogue. Carefully, she climbed the stairs to the rooftop balcony. Houses below her to the sea. The balcony’s railing at her waist. Underneath was the front garden and, with a little effort, the longer drop over the garden wall.
She wondered about her father’s cancer. Where it was in his body. How it felt to carry that inside. What about treatment? Would the state provide for his care now?
She guessed that the money she had in Moscow had by now been seized or frozen. Section 1.3 of the USSR Statute of Political Crimes. Funny to have betrayed your childhood, your whole life, the lens by which you viewed the world. She was a Marxist. She believed in the revolution. Capitalism was vulgar, an apocalyptic depravity. How would she make her way here? What was she going to do?
Tell the Australians everything, she supposed. Offer them all she knew about secrets in the Soviet Union, the names, the methods and structures, the missions, the countries, the handlers, the chiefs of se
ctions, the ideals and the cruelties of approach. Tell herself it was a doublecrossing of no choice. Because the Australians had got to her cleverly, it being their job.
Yet how long could that last? A year to remember and recount? Moscow, Stockholm, Japan. The story of her past life. Afterwards, what? Who did she know on this earth but Volodya? And once she’d had the time to reflect on these last few years, would she claim to know even him?
She heard something shift behind her. A face in the darkness; one of the policemen at the foot of the balcony steps. They looked at one another for a moment. His name was Grandelis. They had spoken only once. She thought he might say something but instead he lit a cigarette, a spark of flame and a fiery red circle. Then he turned and vanished with a slow walk, going back to guarding and to listening.
She heard the sound of an accelerating car somewhere in the distance.
Her heart, somehow, was thundering.
She remembered the items she had left for shipping. Would the embassy give her these if she asked? Just as likely, they had already incinerated them, or perhaps sent them to an investigations office somewhere in central Moscow, the subject of a forthcoming paper: ‘Items of Suspicion When Detecting Potential Traitors’.
Now we are passing through the curtain, she thought. Maybe you expected your life to unravel, but might you better have prepared for the threads to disappear?
It was a physical feeling. Empty.
She went slinking to the back door and into the kitchen and to the brandy cupboard, poured a midnight glass, the liquid brash and fuming, aftertaste like blood. Grandelis still smoking somewhere, the coarse bitterness of the tobacco a deadening of the air, a starvation. Darkness in the hallway and under Volodya’s door.
Standing without reason, holding the glass.
The next morning, she took her time getting up. Nine, and she was just out of bed. Howley and Volodya were already in session in the lounge room. Elizabeth had seemingly been waiting for Evdokia to rise and they ate breakfast together, marmalade on toast.
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