The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “And the truth is?”

  “He is MI6.”

  §38

  Leningrad

  A return ticket to Leningrad arrived at the hotel. A travel permit. A covering letter from Koritsev with half a dozen official-looking rubber stamps. And with them a note from Matsekpolyev.

  “I trust you are ready. GGM.”

  He had hoped for a view, for a chance to see something of the country outside Moscow, the lie of the land between the new capital and the old, but for each leg of the journey Koritsev had booked him on the night sleeper. It was already dark when he boarded the train at the Leningradsky Station, but then who could stare out of the window for eight hours? It was a schoolboy fantasy of perpetual trainspotting, but he knew from having tried that at Tamworth junction as a boy that you got bored in less than twenty minutes and looked for something else to do. Perhaps night was best, perhaps sleep was best, perhaps he’d been booked on the night train just to ensure he saw nothing?

  The conductor showed him to a compartment, as narrow as an outside privy and containing two bunks. For the first time it occurred to him that he would have to share and when his roommate came in only seconds later he found himself facing a six-foot-two army captain in uniform.

  He muttered a greeting that could have been in any language, slung his bag on the lower bunk and so deprived Masefield of any say in the matter.

  “Good evening,” Masefield said, feeling he should play the polite, innocent foreigner and hoping that this would be the last exchange between them.

  It was.

  The soldier kicked off his boots, hung up his jacket and was in bed in less than a minute. He seemed to have no interest in Masefield, and Masefield was almost reassured by this. And when the man flicked out the light, leaving Masefield to undress and climb into the top bunk by the firefly glow of a five-watt emergency light, he was wholly reassured. It was just a coincidence. Nothing more. The man had not been sent to watch him.

  All the same he could not sleep. Far too many reasons to be apprehensive. Not least that he was about to present a university paper for the first time in his life. Sooner or later the magic of steel wheels on steel rails, the perfect rhythm of clickety-clack at a modest and regular fifty miles per hour, would cast its spell upon him. Meanwhile he might do what he did best. Worry.

  §39

  The conductor nudged him awake. Horizontal winter sunlight was slicing into the compartment, and Masefield was confused and bleary. The soldier had gone. Not a trace. Masefield wondered if he had imagined him. If he wasn’t trapped in an old pre-war Hitchcock film where people simply vanished from trains leaving only a packet of Harriman’s tea to tell the tale.

  Another nudge, a moustachioed, halitotic face thrust closer to his own.

  “Мы приехали в Ленинград, товарищ. Или вы думаете, что вы будете спать весь день?”

  We’re in Leningrad, comrade. Or did you think you could sleep all day?

  §40

  “Don’t feel you have to keep it simple. They’re a dozy bunch, but a bright bunch. Give it them too easy and they can get lazy.”

  Simplicity bothered him. Matsekpolyev’s assumption that he was bright enough to do this at all bothered him. And Matsekpolyev read his mind.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Our translator will take her pace from you. When you feel you’ve said enough . . . perhaps two or three sentences, pause and she’ll nip in sharpish.”

  “Sharpish.” Matsekpolyev loved his English affectations. Any second now he’s pronounce the entire nerve-racking situation “tickety-boo.”

  He’d risen, he hoped, to the challenge. Stepped up from the poor metals he knew best to transition metals, and the oddity of combinant inner shell valence electrons and the role of this unique sub-atomic feature in magnetism. Nothing as exotic as indium, all as ordinary, as basic as iron . . . the most common element in the planet, pipped at the post for the title of Most Common Metal on the Planet only by aluminium . . . but who ever beat a sword or a ploughshare out of aluminium?

  Masefield looked out at the serried ranks of students, stacked to the gods, a hundred and fifty or more, and heard himself introduced as “the distinguished English scholar.” He wasn’t and no amount of flattery would make it so. But he had sought a life of deception, a life in which he was anyone but plain old Geoffrey Masefield from Derby. And he began to warm to the occasion. He would tell no lies, he would bluff no stuff . . . he was the lie, his presence was the bluff, his entire identity but for his name was the lie. He hoped he wasn’t smiling too much as the applause died down and Matsekpolyev ushered him to the lectern. He was the lie; the subject was real.

  §41

  Back in Matsekpolyev’s office, the professor was relaxed and expansive.

  “Particularly neat account of Coulomb’s law, I thought.”

  “They can look that up in any textbook printed in the last hundred and fifty years.”

  “Possibly, but your version has the virtue of being succinct.”

  At this rate the flattery might work. He might even begin to believe in himself.

  “And of course, they tend to purity. Theorists all. Won’t dirty hands or minds with the commercial value of any of this. You gave them a timely reminder that few of them will stay pure; they’ll most of them end up in industry just like you. You drew some interesting illustrations from your work in industry. Impressive. It’ll be less of a shock when they’re ordered to report to some godforsaken place like Chelyabinsk.”

  Dare or forfeit?

  “I asked Koritsev to let me visit Chelyabinsk.”

  “Chelyabinsk? Did Koritsev laugh out loud?”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t tell you this back in England, but Chelya­binsk is a closed area. Has been for a couple of years. You can’t go there, and for that matter neither can I. But I gathered in Moscow that it was a heavy-duty processing plant you were after. I said I could help and I will. Something much nearer home. Sillamäe, in Estonia. A couple of hours from here by car as opposed to the thirty-six hours you’d spend on a train getting to Chelyabinsk if in some moment of folly Koritsev ever gave you permission. Sillamäe’s a much better choice. They’re just getting started on the refining of transitions and post-transitions in Sillamäe. Niobium, tantalum and, lucky you, indium. We’re driving over tomorrow. You’ll enjoy it. State-of-the-art equipment. I doubt anything you’ve seen in the West will compare.”

  “Not secret, then?”

  “Everything in the Soviet Union is a secret, and if it impresses our sense of secrecy upon you its official name is Factory Number 7, Enterprise P.O.B. P-6685, a phrase I would hate to have to utter drunk . . . but there are secrets and secrets. If this were a secret secret . . . well, would I be offering if it were?”

  Yes, thought Masefield, you bloody well would.

  §42

  Masefield had read that trains crossing between Finland and the USSR were sealed at the border, so that no nosy parker with his eyes glued to the window could see a damn thing until the train entered Leningrad. Huge metal shutters closed off the windows, and the carriages looked less like public transport than armoured trains left over from the war. It posed a question. What was there to see? And if the answer to that was what Masefield was seeing from the car window as Matsekpolyev drove him at reckless speed across the Pskov Oblast, then it was ­nothing—trees and frozen lakes and snow and bugger all from Leningrad all the way to the lost frontier with Estonia. But, as his host had told him, everything in Russia was a secret. They didn’t even want anyone counting the pine trees.

  He could have nodded off. The knowledge that he was a spy and that an important part of a spy’s job might be spying would not have kept him awake. He didn’t feel much like counting pine trees. What did keep him awake wa
s the seemingly endless, if engaging, prattle of Matsekpolyev.

  He learnt more than he needed to about the man’s tastes and ­interests—a fondness for Boccaccio and Chaucer that left him feeling ignorant as he’d read neither, a passion for Shostakovich that he could not share and, far from last, an appreciation of the symphonies of Edward Elgar. At least he’d heard both of those—a couple of nights at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester ten years ago. Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé.

  Yet—it was flattering that Matsekpolyev thought of him, and treated him, as an intellectual equal. Flattering and embarrassing. He wanted to be the man Matsekpolyev took him to be. He wanted the cultural leap from the backstreets of Derby where magazines were called books and books were non-existent, where music was the Billy Cotton Band Show and Sir John Barbirolli, if known at all, was referred to as Rubber Brolly. He knew he’d crawled out of the gutter. He’d scarcely been aware that until now his nose had only just popped up above the kerbstone.

  “What do you make of this bloke Kerouac?”

  Bloke—he would say bloke, wouldn’t he?

  Bloke or not, Masefield had never read Kerouac, but that was not the issue.

  “Grigory Grigoryevich, how on earth do you get hold of books by Jack Kerouac? Foreign trips? A bit of smuggling?”

  “Mostly from visitors like yourself. I don’t make foreign trips. I stick within the territory of the Warsaw Pact.”

  “Why?”

  “In case they don’t let me back in. Why do you think Pasternak would not collect his Nobel Prize?”

  “They wouldn’t do that to him?”

  “They most certainly would have. He never wanted the damn prize in the first place, told me himself it should have gone to Moravia, but he knew that collecting it in person would be the last straw. A bit like getting excommunicated by the Pope. He’d be stuck in the West for the rest of his life . . . not that he lived much longer anyway, but that’s by the by.”

  “But in the West he would have been . . . fêted.”

  “I’m sure he would . . . but it’s scant reward for losing your country. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Masefield—I may not be an apparatchik, but I am every inch a Russian. And in case you thought otherwise, I am a party member. So . . . I study Western culture, I enjoy Western culture but I’ve no wish to live it. Could you leave England? Could you lose England?”

  He could, but it seemed unwise to say so.

  §43

  Piotr Ilyich Putkin, technical director of the Sillamäe plant, was nothing like Fred Kite. As different to look at from the manager of Moscow Pure Metals as was possible. Tall and gangly—like Matsekpolyev himself. Well dressed in a three-piece suit—like Matsekpolyev himself. But their managerial practices were identical and Masefield began to think he could go nowhere in the Soviet Union without the top coming off the vodka bottle.

  First there was the toast to the distinguished visitor. One shot knocked back. Then there was the toast to Comrade Professor. Second shot. Then Matsekpolyev returned the compliment and they all hoisted a third glass to Comrade Technical Director and only when all three were sufficiently tiddly did they set off on the tour.

  Matsekpolyev was right. He had seen nothing like it. One of the advantages, perhaps the only advantage, of being blown to buggery by the Red Army, of being kicked back and forth between the Third Reich and the USSR for five years, was that you had little choice but to rebuild and in so doing modernise. He’s never seen so much stainless steel. It was like being inside an Italian espresso machine.

  He was about to ask what such-and-such a vast shiny chunk of metal did, when Piotr Ilyich announced that it was time for another toast and he was whisked back to the office to knock back more vodka and drink the health of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who Piotr Ilyich hoped would visit the Soviet Union very soon.

  Back in the factory, Masefield asked if it was all right to take photographs. Piotr Ilyich must have noticed the Zenit hanging from his shoulder in its tatty leather case. All the same he hesitated. Then Matsekpolyev put one arm around his shoulders and said, “What have you got to hide?” and Piotr Ilyich replied, “Everything.” Then they both doubled up with laughter and through the laughter Matsekpolyev translated for Masefield—and Masefield, cautious of his cover, refrained from laughing until he’d finished.

  Matsekpolyev positioned himself in front of a bank of dials and switches, and beckoned Piotr Ilyich to stand next to him.

  “Smile,” he said, and they both did.

  And it dawned on Masefield that Matsekpolyev had chosen the shot deliberately and the fact that he and Piotr Ilyich were the grinning foreground was as nothing to the technology visible in the background.

  Half a dozen more staged shots followed. Piotr Ilyich seemed never to tire of smiling. Nor did he tire of drinking.

  Another adjournment to the office and a toast to “our esteemed leader, Comrade Khrushchev.”Would sobriety fall upon them only when they ran out of people to toast?

  After an hour or more, Masefield had used up an entire roll of film, thirty-six shots entirely staged by Matsekpolyev. He asked if there was a dark or dimly lit place where he might change rolls. Piotr Ilyich showed him to his private lavatory, next to his office, and when Masefield emerged he found it was his turn to propose the toast.

  He could think of no one.

  Bulganin? Yesterday’s man. They’d just laugh.

  Macmillan? He’d never voted for him and to drink his health seemed like hypocrisy.

  Kennedy? They’d laugh at that too. The man Khrushchev dismissed as a “boy.”

  “Come on, Geoffrey. Doesn’t have to be royalty. We’ve done the Queen. Give us one of your famous English writers.”

  “OK. Gentlemen, raise your glasses to . . . Spike Milligan.”

  And, in Russian, they wished long life upon the creator of Eccles, Bluebottle and Henry Crun.

  Halfway through roll two Matsekpolyev called it a day. They shook hands heartily and repeatedly with Piotr Ilyich and made their way back to the car.

  “Are you OK to drive?”

  “For God’s sake, Geoffrey. This is Russia. Everybody is half-cut half the time. If they cremate Khrushchev when he dies, his body will fuel a power station for a week.”

  On the way back to Leningrad Matsekpolyev played much the same game of cultural chess he had on the way out—more cabbages, more kings. But the ball was squarely in Masefield’s court.

  Feeling pissed, and pissed almost always making him feel wicked, he asked, “Have you ever read any Kingsley Amis?”

  “No.”

  “Oh you should. Uses humour to create a quintessentially Marxist critique of the English bourgeoisie.”

  “Sounds a complete bloody bore. Now, name me a writer you really like.”

  “Betjeman,” Masefield said, quite seriously. “He’s probably my favourite poet . . . ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough’ . . . If you’d ever been to Slough you’d know exactly . . .”

  §44

  In his office the next morning, Matsekpolyev threw out a question so casually it might have been possible for a moment to believe that it had not been uppermost in his mind for days.

  “Geoffrey, are you a spy?”

  He hadn’t even glanced up from the pile of papers he was working through.

  “No. Of course I’m not. I’m here to buy indium, and I will be buying indium. Why do you ask such a question?”

  “Потому что вы понимаете каждое нахуенное слово, которое я говорю.”

  Because you can understand every fucking word I say.

  Masefield wondered what his face betrayed now. Was he card-bluffing blank? Was he transparent as indium itself? At least he wasn’t twitching.

  “It’s all right, you know. I won’t be telling anyone.”

  And Grigory
Grigoryevich was smiling as he said it.

  Then he looked down at his papers, scribbled his signature on something and said, “OK, have it your own way.”

  Emboldened, Masefield said, “Grigory Grigoryevich, каким образом вы избежите наказания?”

  How do you get away with this?

  Grigory Grigoryevich did not hesitate for so much as a moment. Looked up again and launched his answer.

  “As I said, I’m a party member. A particularly privileged party member. And, of course, the USSR needs me. I realise that that may sound at odds with my fear of excommunication, but paranoia is a mathematical constant in my country . . . a strand of DNA. You imbibe it with mother’s milk.

  “They need me. Doesn’t mean they won’t let me go if they have to. But . . . I know more about transuranic elements than any man in the Soviet Union. I am the king of beta decay, the crown prince of neutron capture. OK, put me up against Robert Oppenheimer or Glenn Seaborg . . . they’d give me a run for my money . . . but they’re not here. They’re stuck behind the Iron Curtain, prisoners of the free world.”

  It was an odd thought. For nearly twenty years now, since Churchill had purloined a phrase originated by Goebbels, Masefield and every other sentient inhabitant of the West had thought of Russia as being “behind” the Iron Curtain. It was odd, a mirror shift, to think that the Iron Curtain had two sides and that to a Russian, America and England were “behind” the Iron Curtain.

  Odder still was the man he was dealing with. He began to realise that Grigory Grigoryevich Matsekpolyev might be the most unpredictable person he’d ever met.

  “Why did you take me to Sillamäe?”

  “You wanted a heavy processing plant. I obliged you.”

  “In the interests of academic freedom?”

  “If you like. There are better reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as . . . such as . . . the maintenance of the balance of power.”

  And he emphasised every single word, almost as though he’d spelled them out letter by letter.