The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  The shadow was waiting when he emerged after a good twenty ­minutes—standing on the next corner, cigarette in hand.

  Brown had said, “Look at him as little as possible. You simply don’t know he’s there.”

  Masefield turned the opposite way, another two streets on and he found himself at the end of another queue. More women clutching baskets, old men with oilskin bags, all queuing for fruit and veg at one of half a dozen makeshift stalls. Was this the black market—черный рынок?

  A uniformed militia man walked by, an exchange of nods with the men behind the stalls and Masefield knew that this really was the black market, out in the open, all kept safe by a backhander, a nod and a wink.

  He queued again, and by the time he reached the front, the day had waned, and he found himself looking at an array of apples, carrots, turnips, and potatoes of far higher quality and far higher prices than the shop had asked.

  “Ну вы что, черт возьми, будете весь день там стоить?”

  Are you going to stand there all fucking day? He bought another ­apple—just the one—as vividly red and green as a traffic light, paid three times what he had paid in the grocers, and succeeded in annoying the proprietor and most of the others in the queue, one woman heaving him aside with a well-rounded hip and a mutter of

  “Дурак!”

  Arsehole.

  It was an oddly pleasing encounter. Hip to hip. She was dressed in “grey,” the only splash of colour being a frayed red headscarf, but he and “real” Russia had finally connected, albeit only via the backside of a monotone fat woman—“dumpy as a sack of spuds”—but she loomed up in 3-D and swore at him in Cyrillic stereo. He was prepared to bet that Arthur Proffitt had never been called a дурак.

  And when he emerged from the mob clutching his one red apple, looking like Snow White about to take the poison, his shadow had gone. He walked back to the corner, peered both ways. Gone, just as Proffitt had told him—vanished with the sunset.

  §29

  Masefield had always been drawn to junk shops. You learnt as much about the culture of a country from its junk shops as its supermarkets. Moscow had no supermarkets. A couple of streets away from the clutter of vegetable stalls he found such a shop. A window full of samovars, a doorway half-blocked with shovels and pickaxes, and a greasy glass counter housing cameras and wristwatches.

  The price he paid for listening was greater than the price he paid for the camera.

  The man in the junk shop spoke English badly but seemed determined to try, and, it being simply impossible for Masefield to usurp the situation and conduct the transaction in Russian, to pretend and to tolerate English that was compound-fractured rather than broken was the only option. To speak Russian would blow his cover in a single sentence—the second he got past “спасибо” and “до свидания.”

  Masefield pointed to a Zenit S under the glass counter. A 35mm, single lens reflex camera in a shiny black leather case. It looked brand new, the oddity on a shelf mostly stacked with broken Poljot and Pobeda watches missing hands or lenses. He knew a little about cameras—he had been given a Box Brownie for his twelfth birthday, and throughout his undistinguished war had travelled everywhere with a folding Kodak 620—but he’d never owned a 35mm. Many of his few friends had 35 mils, picked up on foreign jaunts. His boss at New Caledonian had a Leica with which he took colour “slides” rather than “snapshots” and would ruin any meal at his house with a postprandial slideshow of mind-numbing boredom. Skiing in Switzerland, summer breaks in Tenerife . . . snow and sand, sand and snow. For a middle-class Englishman of means it was almost obligatory when taking a foreign holiday to come back with a new camera, a fake Rolex, and a deep curiosity about “when olive oil/aubergines/garlic/anything-else-both-exotic-and-obscure might catch on in this country.”

  “Is verr good,” said the proprietor, handing the camera to Masefield.

  Yes. He knew that. It probably was good. It wasn’t a Leica, unlike the Zorki it looked nothing like a Leica, but it was OK. And he didn’t doubt he knew more than its owner. Focal plane shutter, one thirtieth of a second to one five-hundredth. Sand and snow didn’t move much, but with a fast film at one five-hundredth of a second you could catch anything on the hoof.

  Masefield did the arithmetic in his head. The man wanted six roubles for the Zenit. At current rates of exchange about £2 10s 6d. Cheap at twice the price, plain, unflashy, the perfect tourist’s camera (after all he was a tourist, wasn’t he?), the very model anonymous Mr. Brown had suggested to him back in London—but a little further along the counter was a cardboard box full of camera parts . . . lenses, light meters, bodies . . . and sticking edge up was the end of a small, aluminium, rectangular camera, about three inches long—so small it would fit neatly across the palm of his hand.

  Masefield pointed at the box.

  “May I?” he asked.

  The man stared blankly back at him, perhaps the conditional was a confusion.

  “Avec votre permission . . . ?”

  It worked. The man nodded and gestured an open hand towards the box of parts.

  Masefield rummaged, pretended to look at half a dozen bits, and as he did so set the tiny camera on the counter.

  It was a Minox Riga, the perfect spy’s camera (and he was a spy, wasn’t he?), cartridge-loading, and with an attached chain neatly measured off in fractions of a metre so that you had no need to guess at distance. He wondered how the man had come by it. It was Latvian made, World War II, and he supposed many of them had been made, lost, sold . . . but he also supposed that they were impossible to buy in any legitimate shop. What, after all, would any tourist want with a camera uniquely designed to photograph documents?

  There was a gamble here. If the chap on the other side of the counter knew as much about the Minox as he did about the Zenit, then his knowledge might extend as far as “verr good” and no further. Doubtless everything in this palace of junk, from the broken car jack he’d almost tripped over to the pile of pre-war Bakelite radios heaped in the corner, was “verr good.” In a country that had next to nothing, you threw nothing away. It didn’t mean he knew what he had. Even the fact that it was in a box of camera parts told him nothing. The man might just have bought the job lot and not bothered to examine any of them. He might think it an attachment to something larger rather than a camera in itself.

  Masefield pushed a lens that might just fit the Zenit, a light meter in a tatty brown leather case and the Minox towards the owner. He glanced down, no more than that, and asked for another six roubles. Done.

  He slung the Zenit over his shoulder, looking like a tourist, and with the Minox nestling in his coat pocket, felt like a spy. It was as a potent a symbol as there could be—as powerful as a gun in the unarticulated glossary of his newfound trade. He patted the pocket, smiled, and remembered his enemies fondly.

  §30

  Up in his room Masefield lay back on his rather lumpy bed. It was as good a room as any hotel he’d ever been in, and he’d been in plenty. It was warmer than most, but that was typical of what he thought of as the “snow” countries. So bloody cold outside they had learnt to heat the inside properly, whereas the English seemed content to shiver and turned off every last vestige of indoor heat between May and October. It was a clean room, smelled faintly of beeswax. He wondered where best to hide the Minox, and wondered more whether he needed to hide the Minox. The hint of beeswax reminded him—daily cleaners, the old babushkas he passed in the corridors. He swung his legs off the bed, knelt down. Put his nose to the parquet, breathed in the scent of fresh wax and looked under the bed. Not a speck of dust. No hiding place free from granny’s dusters. He decided the camera was best kept in his pocket along with his spare specs and his fountain pen. If the KGB turned over his room, well . . . it wasn’t there . . . and in the unlikely event he was searched, well . . . he was
hardly trying to conceal it was he?

  He wasn’t the only one to buy a camera.

  The trade missionaries were all gathered at a table in the Muromets bar. Proffitt was well into fake Russian brandy; mellow and near silent, the French were talking rapidly in low voices to each other and the Dutchman and the Belgian seemed to be Glendinning’s captive audience.

  On the table between them sat a Zorki, quite possibly the one Masefield had declined to buy earlier in the day.

  “Got this in GUM. Absolutely cracking price.”

  Hellemans, the Belgian, hefted it in his hand, turned it around and looked at the lens and the gadget on the top.

  “Looks like a Leica, feels like a Leica,” he said. “But what is this?”

  “Dunno, o’man. Russki behind the counter couldn’t explain it to me in English. So I thought sod it and bought it anyway.”

  “May I?” Masefield asked.

  Hellemans passed the camera to him.

  “It’s a rangefinder. If you change lenses, you then rotate the rangefinder, thus, to match the focal length of lens, that way you’re seeing more or less what the camera’s seeing.”

  Glendinning did not roll his eyes up to the ceiling in boredom, but might just as well have done.

  “If you say so, o’man. A camera’s a camera to me. I’ll probably give it to one of my kids and let them figure it out. Did you buy anything? I thought I saw you in GUM. Looking for a bargain too, were you? God, what the buggers will do for hard currency. One Regent Street shop, a Liberty, or a Fenwick for the party apparatchiks and Woolworth’s for the rest of ’em. All hypocrisy isn’t it. Some animals are more equal than others, eh?”

  Masefield reached into his jacket pocket. He’d meant to show them this, was never quite sure when, but the word “hypocrisy” cued him like a drum roll.

  He set the shrivelling, brown apple next to the fake Leica.

  “That’s what I bought,” he said.

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “I had to buy something, as I’d queued, but really I wanted to be in the queue, to queue for something. Didn’t really matter what.”

  “You need a drink, someone get Masefield a glass.”

  “Queuing is a fundamental Russian experience. It goes with being cold, wearing leaky shoes, and drinking water that tastes foul. And, however bad you think the food is in a hotel like this . . . this is what a Russian queues up to buy and to eat.”

  “Have you gone completely bloody loopy? Fundamental bloody Russian experience?”

  “Yes. Something like that. I felt it got me closer to understanding Russians.”

  “You really do need a drink. Listen o’man. There’s only one thing to understand about Russians, Russia, the whole bloody Soviet system. Hypocrites. Every last damn one of them. Why you couldn’t just hand over a few quid and buy yourself a fake Leica like everyone else I just do not know. They don’t want your understanding; all they want is hard cash. They’re just like everyone else, it’s the ackers that matter . . . they just dress it up in a cloak of principle that doesn’t mean shit to a dog. Plonk your average Russki down in a council house in some new town in the home counties . . . I dunno . . . Stevenage or Harlow, some oik hellhole or another . . . and in a couple of years he’ll be voting Tory just like the English working bloke does. Because the most fundamental thing on God’s earth can be summed up in a single phrase: “they’ve never had it so good” . . . and my do they know it. Put a few quid in a man’s pocket and he’ll forget Communism, Socialism, the bloody trades unions . . . all that left-wing claptrap. I say again, hypocrites. Every last damn one of them.”

  And with that, Glendinning picked up the apple, Masefield’s little bit of Russia, and lobbed it neatly into a waste bin on the far side of the room. Masefield had never been very good at cricket, or tennis or any other game involving a small ball, but could admire the skill. He looked around to see if Tanya Dmitrievna had heard Glendinning’s rant. But she was nowhere to be seen.

  Masefield thought of asking Glendinning if the working bloke in Harlow or Stevenage, be he Russki or English oik, would be permitted to join the golf club, but it seemed like a red rag to an already insufferable bull.

  Instead he went up to his room, ate the good red apple and set the last manky brown apple on the dresser between the Zenit and the Minox. Stared at his “souvenirs.”

  It occurred to him to see if he could strip down the Minox. It came apart easily enough. To his surprise the innards seemed to be brass, which explained its inordinate weight, and to his further surprise, there was an unexposed fifty-shot cartridge inside. That would be . . . no that might be . . . might possibly be . . . handy.

  §31

  Andrei Semyonovich collected him the next morning in a tatty Mosk­vich, which he drove himself. Of Black Mac there was no sign. Masefield assumed that one at a time was enough and that Andrei Semyonovich now played the same role.

  He said very little on the journey. Masefield wondered if he, or any interpreter, had been instructed not to engage in conversation but merely to translate and answer questions. He asked how far they were going, and Andrei Semyonovich replied, “Not far. Not out of Moscow. To Preobrazhenskaya Ploshchad in the northern suburbs.”

  “And what’s there?”

  “The refinery you asked to see.”

  When the car pulled up in a wide suburban thoroughfare, Masefield looked around for anything resembling a refinery. There was none. Row upon row of thirties flats, six and seven storeys high, and in the middle, just as tall, a faded Orthodox church. It might once have been as beautiful as any in the city centre, pointed domes tapering as finely as a Christmas tree ornament, in powdery shades of weathered copper. Walls that might once have been a creamy magnolia could now be best described as dirt-coloured, streaked with black and stained with rust like dragon’s tears.

  To one side of a doorway, which had been savagely and carelessly widened to take huge steel doors, with no regard for the curve of the arch, was a rotting wooden sign that still bore the inscription

  Святая Церковь Преображения.

  Holy Church of the Transfiguration.

  And on the doors themselves a stencilled line:

  MЧM.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You mean this is it?”

  “Yes. MЧM. Московские Чистые Металлы. Moscow Pure Metals.”

  Masefield was not at all sure he had heard Andrei Semyonovich right, but the man led off with a terse, “Please, you follow now.”

  Inside, the church had been stripped of everything. In between walls of fading gilt—scarred and scratched Madonnas in the plasterwork—stood steel-smelting furnaces, and above the furnaces a glowing head of Christ transfigured as though the gigantic sunburst halo was powered by the furnaces themselves. He had stepped into a world where mediaeval onion domes and heavenly spires melded with the earthly remnants of a Stalin-era industrial five-year plan. None of this looked or felt right.

  A man bearing a striking resemblance to Peter Sellers playing union leader Fred Kite in the comedy I’m All Right Jack greeted him like a long-lost cousin.

  “An English visitor. Our first since 1935. We are so proud, so pleased.”

  Masefield was handed a pair of overalls, whisked around the factory with a commentary from Andrei Semyonovich that was ninety per cent inaudible in the clash of steel and the roar of gas furnaces. It reminded him of open days at the Midland Railway Loco Works in Derby. There was, he thought, beauty in heavy industry—only an idiot would be blind to it—he had thought so the first time he had seen a Jubilee Class locomotive plucked up like a child’s toy and hauled over his head. But what did all this heat and noise have to do with indium or any other post-transition metal? Indium melted at scarcely more than the boiling point o
f water—you could cook it up in a saucepan on the hob like scrambled eggs—in its solid state, at room temperature, you could slice it like a slab of butter.

  It occurred to Masefield that in his conversation with Koritsev he had referred to indium as a “poor” metal, a common, and, he had thought, easier term to translate than “post-transition” metal. “Poor” and “pure,” phonetically close in English, were perhaps even closer to the Russian ear and Andrei Semyonovich had heard not “poor” but “pure” and hence translated poor not as низший, nizshy, but as чистый, chisty. If the bugger spoke more clearly Masefield would have spotted this the day before. He hadn’t. Hence a not uninteresting but otherwise wasted morning observing the smelting of gold and silver—“pure” metals in that they were “precious” metals.