Face Me When You Walk Away

by Brian Freemantle

  She suddenly brightened. ‘Oh. I saw the ballet. It was fantastic.’

  ‘The Bolshoi? How did you get tickets?’

  ‘A friend of yours suddenly rang, the night I got back. Said he had heard you were away and had thought of me. Apparently he got the tickets for someone who had let him down.’

  Slowly Josef replaced his glass on a side-table. A feeling near to nausea gripped him.

  ‘What friend?’ he asked.

  Pamela picked up the jotting pad from beside the lounge telephone.

  ‘Devgeny,’ she read, looking up and smiling. ‘Uli Devgeny. Wasn’t that kind of him?’

  ‘Very,’ agreed Josef. What the hell did that mean?

  ‘He said he’d like to talk to you when you returned. I promised you’d telephone and thank him.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll speak to him,’ said Josef, absently. ‘I’ll certainly speak to him.’

  That night they both got drunk. Josef did it knowingly, welcoming the feeling of irresponsibility like a schoolboy playing truant for the first time. He was secure in his locked apartment. No one could take advantage of him. There could be no record of any indiscretion, no memorandum to be produced months later at an inquiry. He lived constantly aware of himself, Josef thought. Every action was assessed for its effect, every word considered for its implication, like a chess master thinking perpetually five moves ahead of an opponent. Suddenly there was the need to relax. Or collapse. But even as he tried to rationalize the decision, he recognized the element of desperation. He was giving up, just a little. He did need to unwind. And it was safe. He needed sleep, too, and alcohol might help. But there had been other, safe occasions when he could have relaxed with a bottle. And the pills in his briefcase could provide rest, of sorts. Above everything else, Josef Bultova knew himself. And so he accepted the fear and its motivation. Now he was seeking oblivion, like the flotsam of fifteen years ago who had traded with him to brew their strange narcotic concoction and upon whom he had lived, like a parasite on a series of dying animals. By recognizing Pamela, Devgeny had made it quite clear he intended destroying Josef completely, moving not only against him, but against the only other person for whom he knew Josef had the slightest feeling. There was too much unknown opposition, he thought. Pamela was Josef’s weakness and Devgeny knew it. Love, thought Josef, before alcohol flooded his reasoning, had little place in his life. It made him vulnerable.

  Pamela got drunk because she was frightened, too. She had left Nikolai’s bed in the middle of the night, long before the servants had awakened, and remained tense all day for a knowing look from whomever had had to change the bed or an expectant, over-familiar move from the writer. But the servants remained as taciturn as ever and Nikolai hadn’t approached her again. She had rehearsed her belated, positive rejection but his attitude had changed that day. Incredibly, he seemed almost respectful, pulling back into his shell of reserve, speaking few words at mealtimes and spending hours walking alone in the grounds. The experiment, Pamela had realized, was over. The knowledge doubled her humiliation, worse even than if they had made love again.

  And her fear went beyond Josef discovering her stupidity. Constantly since it had happened, she had recalled Nikolai’s boast. If he were as important as he had maintained, he had an advantage over Josef, as well as her.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, suddenly. ‘How important is Nikolai to you?’

  More in reflection than answer, he said, ‘Vitally important. To both of us.’

  He opened the second bottle of wine and she leaned forward anxiously for her glass to be filled. Drunkenness failed to extinguish the predominant fear in both of them, but it achieved one thing, the importance of which neither realized at the time. The wine, coupled with the need she felt to compensate, swamped her apprehension of sex with Josef. And it dulled his initial realization, so that he accepted what developed without the surprise that might have raised the lowered barriers. And they made love.

  Even drunk Josef was the consummate, accomplished lover she had accused him of being during her apology at the dacha. He was tender where Nikolai had been gauche, forceful where the other man had been clumsy. She and Nikolai had been two youngsters staring into a darkened room where they believed hidden something neither had seen before. Josef shone the light on more beauty than she had ever expected to see.

  She came ahead of him, wildly, and then again with him, matching his climax. She kissed him, frenzied and imploring, not wanting to stop. But at what, for them, was the most important moment, Josef was exhausted, tired and drunk, wanting only for her to cease the demands. He forced himself to embrace her and hold her, gently, until she quietened.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said, both disappointed and relieved. Then, much later, she said gratefully, ‘We’re properly man and wife.’

  Josef lay beside her long after she had drifted into a contented, drunken sleep. His head ached, badly. After two hours, he took methalaquone. And then, desperately, more. His headache worsened. Sleep still would not come. He turned towards her and in the shadowy light of the bedroom made out her face, turned towards him, fur-like through a skein of hair. She was smiling, very slightly. Love, he thought, for the second time that night, was an inconvenience. An inconvenience he was uncertain whether he could afford.

  7

  Predictably, Uli Devgeny refused to see him the following morning. The secretary, a pebble-spectacled, never-smiling young man with late-clearing acne, cited pressure of work and previously arranged meetings. Josef reacted immediately and with equal predictability, leaving Devgeny’s Kremlin office with the curt instruction that the Minister should telephone to discuss a mutually convenient appointment. Fighting cocks, thought the secretary, unimpressed as the plump Russian hurried out. Bloody fools, both of them. In the end, probably neither would win.

  Josef decided to go to the dacha to see Nikolai, so that he could justifiably reject Devgeny’s first suggestion for a meeting. The negotiator was permitted to keep a Mercedes in Moscow and he drove with the sun-roof fully retracted, unsuccessfully trying to blow away the previous night’s drunkenness. He was unused to hangovers and felt awful. The night had been completely sleepless, culminating at dawn with a violent spasm of vomiting that had left him aching and sore. His eyes were red-veined and puffed from insomnia and his chin stained from bad shaving. A band of pain kept tightening around his head. There had been rumours, he remembered, that tourniquet headbands had been used for torture in some sections of the camp. He wondered if it had been true. Medev had insisted it was.

  Pamela, in complete contrast, had been almost light-headed in her gaiety, disregarding an admitted headache and chattering without direction, like a bird suddenly freed from captivity, giggling at him, imagining the legacy from drink was the only reason for his moroseness.

  The consummation of their marriage had lifted from her an enormous uncertainty. A person of frequently ill-considered impulses from which, once committed, pride prevented retreat, she had been deeply worried. She believed her decision to turn away from the carefully ordered life of a wealthy M.P.’s daughter in London had been one of the few to which she had devoted the consideration it justified. Russia, from the moment she had stepped ashore in Leningrad, had enthralled her. But no matter how sincere her feelings, for a single girl – particularly the daughter of a Tory Member of Parliament – to quit London for Moscow was a ridiculous hypothesis which even she, in her haphazard way, did not consider. And then she had met Josef at a British embassy reception. She had heard of him, of course. Everyone at the function had and she had been intrigued finally meeting someone about whom she had read so much. She had first thought him an unprepossessing, fat little man with glasses, immaculately dressed to disguise his shortness, but by the time the evening had ended, she was enraptured by him, her interest far exceeding the aphrodisiac of power. She had had a week remaining of her tour and he had seen her every day. She had been flattered by his attention and impressed at his easy access to everything in what she
accepted with the myopia of the irrationally committed was a largely closed society. Gradually, beginning with the first and strengthening with the two subsequent visits she made within the year, the idea developed of how she could adopt a life she felt preferable to her own. The opposition from her family had been enormous and sustained. And the publicity in the West, particularly as her name was linked to that of Josef Bultova, had been terrifying. Buy she was determined she was in love, had withstood the publicity and laughed at the Victorianism of her father’s final gesture in publicly disowning her. But although she would have argued otherwise, it was impossible for Pamela’s life to exist on unsound foundations. While she had been contemptuous of her English background and the way of life it represented, she had needed its reassurance. Having spurned it, she needed a replacement. Marriage to Josef would provide that, she knew, but it had to be a proper marriage, a complete one. What had belatedly happened the previous night had made it so, she felt. Her buoyancy was even unaffected by what had occurred between her and Nikolai, which seemed to lessen in importance.

  Nikolai saw Josef’s car arrive and came running from the house like a schoolboy welcoming his father to the boarding school on speech day.

  ‘Josef, my friend.’

  ‘How have you been, Nikolai?’

  ‘Miserable without you.’

  ‘I thought you preferred to be without people.’

  The writer shrugged a contradiction. ‘I need people I trust. I trust you.’

  ‘Wasn’t Pamela company?’

  ‘Of course,’ responded the writer, immediately. ‘I was sorry she decided to return to Moscow.’

  The pale, inconspicuous boy smiled up at the older man and Josef felt a surge of pity for him. He was to be used by men who disdained literature with contemptuous boorishness, jerked and paraded like a puppet suspended on elastic. And there was nothing he could do about it. Josef wondered if he would ever become aware of it. They went into a small chamber off the main hallway in which the archduke had created a gun and trophy room. Nikolai had chosen the room when they had first arrived and announced it was to be his study, the room in which he would structure a sequel to Walk Softly on a Lonely Day. An empty typewriter, dust-marked from disuse, was on the desk, paper confettied around it, a few pieces marked by isolated jotting.

  ‘Work not going well?’ probed Josef, curiously.

  Nikolai shrugged, irritated by the question. ‘It’s impossible to work here. You wouldn’t understand. You’re not an artist.’

  Josef smiled at the conceit, shaking his still aching head. The open drive hadn’t done any good. Nikolai pulled a chair from behind the desk and sat facing Josef, hands on his knees, once again the anxious schoolboy awaiting the end-of-term report.

  What happened in Stockholm?’ he asked.

  ‘It went well, I think.’

  ‘Am I going to be chosen?’

  Josef smiled at the naivety.

  ‘I don’t know that. The decision is made by an impartial committee.’

  ‘Why did you go, if it wasn’t to be told the award was mine?’

  Nikolai sat straight up in the chair, offended by Josef’s unwillingness to make a prediction. Josef sighed. Had the young man changed in three weeks? Or was his impression clouded by the stupidity of the previous night’s debauch?

  ‘Nikolai,’ he started, gently. ‘There are things you don’t understand about this award. There’s more than the Nobel nomination involved.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ rejected the writer.

  ‘I wish it were ridiculous,’ said Josef. ‘Believe me, I wish it were.’

  ‘Why did you go? I want to know.’

  Josef paused, halted by the imperiousness of Nikolai’s demand.

  ‘There were people to see … assurance to be given,’ generalized the negotiator.

  ‘But the Literary Committee know the book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And like it? They do like it, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, I believe they do.’

  ‘It is a good book, isn’t it Josef? It will become part of Soviet literature, won’t it?’

  Some things haven’t changed, thought Josef. ‘Yes,’ he recited. ‘It’s a wonderful book. And it will become recognized as such.’

  ‘When will we know?’

  ‘Soon, I hope,’ said Josef. He pressed his fingers into his forehead. Would the bloody pain never dissipate? He yawned.

  ‘Now that Pamela and 1 are back in Moscow,’ he said. ‘There doesn’t seem a great deal of point in your staying all the way out here …’

  He nodded towards the little-used desk.

  ‘… particularly as it seems to hamper your writing.’

  ‘I refuse to share an apartment with anyone,’ announced Nikolai, sharply. ‘I want a place by myself. I am one of Russia’s foremost writers. I have a right to certain privileges. I want you to make that quite clear.’

  The boy gradually becomes a man, thought Josef. Amused at the writer’s posturing, he said lightly, ‘All right. I’ll let everyone know.’

  ‘You’re laughing at me,’ erupted Nikolai, suddenly. ‘There was a sneer in your voice. I will not be laughed at.’

  Josef’s humour evaporated. ‘And I won’t be addressed like that,’ he snapped. ‘You stand a very good chance of having more honour and money bestowed upon you in the next few weeks than most men dream of in their lifetimes, certainly in Russia. You’ll be exposed for weeks, maybe months, before people just waiting for you to behave as you did a few moments ago. As long as I am with you, entrusted with seeing no disgrace comes to you or to Russia, then you won’t behave like that. And don’t you forget it, for a moment.’

  ‘Perhaps someone else should have the responsibility,’ retorted Nikolai, still defiant.

  ‘I wish there were someone else,’ said Josef, sincerely. ‘There isn’t.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Nikolai tried, unconvinced.

  ‘No,’ corrected Josef, too experienced to be angered by rudeness. ‘We won’t see. We go abroad on my terms. Don’t ever imagine I’m a servant, Nikolai. Never make that mistake.’

  ‘I thought you were my friend,’ complained the writer, edging towards capitulation.

  ‘I will be,’ undertook Josef. ‘I’ll make you one of the most famous Russians in the world. But on my terms.’

  ‘You don’t understand strain,’ said Nikolai, subsiding further.

  Initially, Josef could not reply. Oh God, he thought, do I understand strain. I live with it, exist on it, like a machine running on electricity. Without strain, I’d wind down and stop. How good it might be, just for a short time, to be able to wind down and stop.

  ‘I’m not going to try to understand it,’ he said, taking up the argument again. ‘With me, there will be no tantrums of genius.’

  The telephone concluded the argument. Both men were relieved.

  ‘You’re elusive,’ rebuked Devgeny, when Josef took the receiver from the housekeeper.

  ‘It seems to be a sudden development in both our lives,’ replied Josef. Tired and ill, he felt drained by the surprising argument with Balshev. He couldn’t compete today with Devgeny. The meeting had to be avoided.

  ‘I have other duties to perform, you know,’ said the Minister. He was relaxed, his attitude rehearsed. ‘Sometimes I envy you, able to detach yourself completely and devote your undivided attention to just one project. You’re a lucky man.’

  He waited, but Josef did not respond.

  ‘We’re anxious about Stockholm,’ said Devgeny. ‘We thought of convening this evening, around seven o’clock.’

  Pamela had been excited when he had left the apartment, happy at the thought of personally preparing their first meal together.

  ‘I’m at the dacha, as you know,’ countered Josef. ‘I can’t make it tonight.’

  ‘Oh, you can, Josef,’ insisted Devgeny. ‘It’ll only take you two hours in that rather ostentatious motor-car of yours.’

  ‘After this morni
ng, I find this sudden urgency surprising,’ said Josef. It was a poor protest. ‘And it’s inconvenient. Let’s meet tomorrow.’

  ‘We can’t do that, Josef. Both Illinivitch and Korshunov have gone to great personal difficulty to attend. It wouldn’t be wise, inconveniencing them. I’m sure your wife will understand. Did she enjoy the ballet, by the way?’

  ‘Very much,’ said Josef, tightly. Devgeny couldn’t wait, thought the negotiator. ‘Thank you for providing the tickets.’

  ‘Is she settling to life in Russia?’ asked the Minister.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I see she’s retained her British passport.’

  He wants me to know he’s studied the files, thought Josef.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘No doubt she’ll get homesick, in the future.’

  ‘We haven’t discussed it.’

  ‘Of course not. But there’ll be a time when you’ll want the necessary travel documentation, won’t there?’

  ‘There could well be.’

  ‘Quite. Well, as I said, the meeting tonight starts at seven o’clock. You won’t be late, will you?’

  ‘No,’ promised Josef. ‘I won’t be late.’

  8

  Josef was angry at his helplessness to oppose Devgeny now that he was using Pamela as a lever. Nikolai was not the only one destined for the role of a puppet, he accepted, reluctantly. His confidence, Josef realized, was being eroded. Which was probably what Devgeny intended. It had to stop, immediately. Soon he would begin making stupid mistakes, errors that everyone would recognize. Then the doubts would begin to fester. And the door would be open for Devgeny’s arguments before the Central Committee.

  To attend the meeting in his present condition would be just such a misjudgment. Immediately after Devgeny’s summons, he left the dacha and a protesting Nikolai Balshev, driving hard and at times dangerously back to Moscow. He needed the apartment, and its sauna, to sweat the discomfort from him. His flurried, curt arrival interrupted Pamela in the middle of the dinner preparations. Immediately she saw his face she stopped, frightened, waiting tensely for the end to her marriage. There had to be an outburst, shouted demands for an explanation, then for a divorce. Josef was not a man to be cuckolded, she knew. He practically ignored her, cursory even in his apology for upsetting the dinner arrangements. She said nothing, withdrawing herself uncertainly into the kitchen. He went without saying goodbye, leaving her bewildered.