‘I should watch your words,’ Keres said. ‘Nosov’s nose is nothing to do with drinking. It was a disease in his childhood.’
‘And so was my arsehole.’
‘And as for me, what better person is there to do this work?’
The trained mind of the first militiaman was beginning to operate. ‘What happens to all the bottles, by the way?’ he asked.
Keres frowned. ‘What bottles?’
‘The bottles the drunks bring in in their boots and pockets half full of vodka. Who drinks that and who sells the bottles?’
‘They don’t always have them,’ Keres said. ‘We thought you sold them.’
‘Watch your step,’ said the militiaman, ‘or you’ll end up in Lubyanka.’
Harry was sobering up a little without the assistance of the station staff. He felt sick and there was a bunched fist of pain in his stomach. ‘I demand to be taken home,’ he said. ‘I demand my rights as a citizen.’
‘Shut your face,’ said the first militiaman.
Harry turned to Keres. ‘You’re in charge here,’ he said. ‘You can see I’m sober. Discharge me and I’ll find my own way home.’
Keres said: ‘It’s against the regulations.’
‘I’ll pay the fine.’
‘You’ll pay that anyway. I’m sorry but you’ve got to stay the night here. It’s for your own good. Ivan here will look after you.’
‘This is a bloody disgrace,’ Harry said. ‘It wouldn’t happen in Britain.’
‘Perhaps they approve of drunkenness in Britain,’ Keres said.
‘They can hold their liquor—not like you bloody Russians.’
‘And you can hold your liquor, can you?’
Harry belched loudly and painfully. ‘I could drink you under the table,’ he said.
Keres said: ‘I doubt that. See to him, Ivan.’
The bald assistant put down the bread and raw onion he was eating. ‘Strip,’ he said.
‘Balls to you,’ said Harry.
Ivan removed his clothes as easily as if he were undressing a schoolboy. Then he dragged him to the shower, pausing on the way to bite his onion.
‘It’s easier if you don’t resist,’ Keres said. ‘Ivan sometimes loses his temper. Especially if you happen to kick him in the crutch.’
Harry shuddered as the water poured over him. ‘I’ll get you sacked for this,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got contacts. You see if I haven’t.’ His head was snapped back and the water sluiced over his face and into his mouth.
‘Puny little bastard, isn’t he,’ the first militiaman said. ‘Look at all those scars on his back. Wonder where he got those.’
Ivan put Harry’s clothes in a locker numbered three and threw Harry on to bed number three.
‘Are you going to behave yourself or do we have to strap you down?’ Keres asked.
‘I want to go home,’ Harry said. But he lay quietly on the bed, shivering violently, thin and sharp and beaten. They threw a soiled blanket over him.
On one side of him a jovial drunk who had been ordered not to sing aloud hummed ballads to himself. He was a regular client and was allowed to keep his guitar under his bed. He was a Georgian with curly black hair and a moustache; he looked like a bandit who would enjoy carousing or killing with equal appetite.
On the other side an alcoholic twitched in dribbling sleep. He awoke intermittently and whimpered with fear, knees drawn up to his stomach, palsied hands protecting his face. His mouth was stained with tobacco tar and his face was as starved as a jockey’s.
Harry brooded on the ignominy of it. He with the biggest stomach and bladder capacity in the beer hall carted off to a sobering-up station. When he closed his eyes the darkness heaved around him. He dozed and heard the call of ships in the Pool of London and went hop-picking as a child with his mother. He was awoken by Nosov’s voice in the adjoining room.
The cold encountered between the entrance to the chapel and the station had not improved the appearance of Nosov’s nose which was mauve and polished.
‘They’ll have to move us out soon,’ he told Keres. ‘You can’t run our business in a monastery. We’ll become the laughing stock of Moscow. I just tripped over a cross lying outside. Left there deliberately I shouldn’t wonder. How can we be expected to make a contribution to the celebrations of the anniversary of the glorious Revolution in a monastery?’
Keres shrugged. ‘I think you’re making too much of it,’ he said. ‘It’s only being restored as a museum after all.’
Nosov moved Ivan’s bread and onion from his desk. ‘That’s even better,’ he said. ‘A sobering-up station in a museum. That will really get us a good reputation. People wandering in and thinking we’re part of the museum. We’ll have to put our drunks in glass cases. No, we’ve got to get new premises. We cannot allow ourselves to be humiliated any longer.’
‘I think you are too sensitive,’ Keres said.
Nosov thumbed through the papers on his desk. ‘How many have we got in now?’
‘Four. One more was brought in while you were resting. He isn’t causing any trouble.’
‘Four. There was a time when all the beds would have been occupied and we’d have had a couple on the floor besides.’
‘When the winter sets in we’ll be full again. They’ll have their old excuse—drinking to keep the cold out.’
Nosov wandered into the next room. Harry, who had decided that he was completely sober, sat up and said: ‘I demand to be sent home.’
Nosov appeared startled. He shook his head. ‘This is all I need,’ he said. And added: ‘Keres, please leave the room.’
Five minutes later Harry Waterman was dressed. Keres looked at him in amazement. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.
‘I’m going home,’ Harry said.
Nosov said: ‘This man is discharging himself.’
‘But he can’t,’ Keres said. ‘It’s against the regulations. And what about the fine?’
‘I’ll pay the fine,’ Harry said. ‘If that’s all that’s bothering you.’ He turned to Nosov. ‘And now may I go home?’
Nosov pointed to the door. ‘Clear out,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of taxis outside.’
The blue mosaic eyes of Christ watched icily as Harry picked his way past snow-felted heaps of crosses and eroded sculptures.
‘Why did you let him go?’ Keres demanded.
Nosov sighed. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘may I ask a favour?’
‘There’s no harm in asking.’
‘We’ve been good friends. Good colleagues devoted to the cause. Doing our small bit for the furtherance of the aims of the State. May I plead with you never to mention this to anyone again?’
‘But why did you let him go?’
‘He happens to be married to my daughter,’ Nosov said. ‘This very night my wife is sleeping at his flat.’ He tugged at his nose as if he were trying to remove it.
‘What a disgrace,’ said Harry’s mother-in-law. ‘What a terrible disgrace.’
‘It can’t be all that bloody disgraceful,’ Harry said. ‘After all it’s your husband’s work.’
‘To think that my daughter’s husband should be taken to a sobering-up station.’
‘Your husband’s sobering-up station.’
‘Good kind man that he is,’ said Nosov’s wife who frequently told her husband that he was the most evil and cruel man in the Soviet Union. ‘Letting you go like that.’
Harry’s wife Marsha said: ‘I was worried about you, Harry. I thought perhaps you’d been hurt in a fight. You do provoke people so.’
‘I don’t get hurt,’ Harry said. ‘It’s the others who get hurt. And as for your husband …’ he rounded on his mother-in-law ‘… the only reason he let me go was because he knew he’d be the laughing stock sobering up his own son-in-law. That and the fact that he was scared stiff of what you’d say.’
‘I would have been all for keeping you in,’ she said. ‘Best place for you if you ask me.’
His mother-in-law was planted in front of the dead television set to which she seemed to address her remarks. She was eating small biscuits as hard as nuts from a box on the table beside her. She was grossly fat, Harry thought. Like most Russian women. A sexless lump of peasant stock.
‘What’s for dinner?’ Harry asked.
‘Strogonoff,’ said his wife. ‘I’m sorry, Harry, but it’s a bit dried up. You’re so late, you see.’
Harry was again reminded of the injustice of life. ‘Strogonoff,’ he said. ‘It’s always bloody Strogonoff. Can’t you cook anything else?’
‘I thought it was your favourite, Harry. You always said it was.’
‘Well it isn’t,’ Harry said. ‘Get me something else.’
‘Give him nothing,’ said his mother-in-law to the television set.
Marsha said: ‘There’s nothing else to eat. I made the Strogonoff especially for you. You’ve got to eat more now the cold weather’s coming.’
‘I suppose that means the borsch season’s starting,’ Harry said. ‘Bowls and bowls of bloody borsch.’
‘I’ll make other soups. You know you like the way I do them.’
Harry massaged his shrunken belly, wishing his fingers could reach the pain inside. ‘You know what I’d like?’ he said. ‘I’d like baked beans on toast. That’s what I’d like. And a great mug of decent tea. And a slab of Cheddar cheese to follow.’
Marsha said: ‘There’s a little bit of cheese and sausage left. I could cut them up with some salad.’
‘You don’t know what real sausages are like,’ Harry said. ‘Not real sausages.’ He undid his belt. ‘Anyway I’ll have a bit of cooked cheese.’
He sank back in his chair and examined the flat. It smelled of food and soap and the cologne he used to drown all odours. A bowl of plastic flowers stood on the table; in one corner of the room was a brass simova which was never used. Through a crack in the patched curtains he could see the snow on the window-sill. On the old cabinet, its surface fingered with black cigarette burns, stood a half-full bottle of Haig which he kept for Western visitors. But only the newcomers to Moscow came these days; they came once, said how much they had enjoyed themselves, and never came again.
He ate the cheese, cooked Georgian style, with exaggerated effort. ‘It’s like bloody chewing gum,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we get some decent cheese?’
His wife returned to the kitchen. He knew she was crying and he felt a little ashamed of himself for upsetting her. He followed her, uncertain whether to placate her or to continue the persecution. She was washing dishes. The tears slid down her cheeks and fell in the water.
‘Can I help you?’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘Are you going to sulk all night?’
‘I’m not sulking.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I was a bit narked. It’s that old bitch in there.’
‘She’s my mother. Why can’t you be a bit nicer to her?’
The anger that rose and fell like a yo-yo these days bounced back. He had apologised and the gesture had been ignored. ‘I’ll do for her one of these days,’ he said.
‘Oh Harry,’ she said. ‘Oh Harry.’
‘Are you sorry you married me? A bloody Englishman?’
She put the dishes away. ‘It’s time to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get up in the morning.’
They turned down the sofa and made up the camp bed in the kitchen for Marsha’s mother.
After they had been in bed for half an hour Harry decided to make it up with his wife. He turned to her but she was asleep. Her tranquillity, her ability to sleep immediately after a crisis and her regular breathing fortified the poison in his mind. In the morning, he decided, he would ask some of his Western friends about the possibility of returning to Britain. After all he was British by birth.
CHAPTER THREE
The first few days of Richard Mortimer’s Russian experience surged swiftly past, time unheeded, appreciation at night dulled by cocktail and dinner parties. Everything was somehow as he had expected it, except the melting of the snow by day and the autumn fogs that blurred the afternoons and thickened the nights.
The embassy was as he would have expected it had he thought about it. Dignified and self-effacing outside; rich and brooding inside. Militiamen saluting and noting his new face at the gates and Kensington trees, just waiting there, with barks flaking and last leaves falling.
Across the river from the embassy stood the Kremlin. Stalin’s Kremlin in his mind. Mulled red walls embracing spires and domes, theatres, residences, halls, cathedrals. Stalin and the Kremlin: the names fused into an awesome entity. And here he was gazing upon it, working opposite it; he Richard Mortimer late of Dulwich, Cambridge and the Foreign Office. ‘I am here,’ he thought. ‘In Moscow. Beside the Kremlin.’
Inside the embassy the walls were made of dark carved wood. The building had been owned by a sugar baron in the days of splendour and poverty before such barons had fled or been put to the sword and all their sugar distributed among the people. On his first day there he saw a middle-aged man in grey walking down the broad stairs with his hands behind his back. The man looked at him without interest and vanished down the corridor, bright shoes treading lightly on the carpet.
One of the men at the reception desk said: ‘Your new boss.’
‘Was that the Ambassador?’
‘That was his nibs all right.’
Richard Mortimer hesitated. He wanted to what what the Ambassador was like, but he wasn’t sure how to conduct himself with the men at the desk. They treated him without deference, without familiarity. He imagined them describing him as ‘a cocky young bugger’ and flushed at the thought. ‘What’s he like?’ he asked.
‘He’s all right,’ they said.
The Ambassador summoned Richard Mortimer next day. He sat behind his desk in the corner of his tall, spacious study; languid, shrewd, peering into retirement, remembering elegant occasions on shaved lawns beside indigo seas, relishing his ability to parry the Kremlin’s matchet diplomacy with rapier subtlety that was the envy of other ambassadors. He looked curiously at Mortimer who looked as gauche as he had once been.
‘I gather you are a cricketer,’ he said.
‘I played a bit, sir. Nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘You won’t get much chance to play cricket here. Do you ski?’
‘Not terribly well. I never really got further than the nursery slopes.’
‘That’s all right. It’s mostly cross-country ski-ing here. At least you don’t break your leg. And then there’s skating. A lot of the junior staff go skating. And they play a game called broomball. Rather like hockey only it’s played with brooms.’
The Ambassador stopped talking and gazed across the dying garden. Mortimer desperately searched his mind for an adequate reply. ‘I expect I shall like that,’ he said.
‘You’ve got to have some sort of relaxation,’ said the Ambassador. ‘It’s vitally important. How’s your Russian coming along?’
‘Not too bad, thank you, sir. I can read a bit. I just need practice talking to Russians.’
‘I’m afraid you won’t get an awful lot of practice. You’ll meet a few Russians at parties and official functions. But most of them want to practise their English.’
‘I expect I’ll manage to meet a few socially,’ Mortimer said.
The Ambassador sketched a Union Jack with a slim gold pencil on his pad. ‘I think you’d better talk to Mason about that,’ he said; and diverted the trend of the conversation. ‘You’re not married, I gather.’
‘No, sir. I haven’t had any time for that sort of thing.’ Everything he said seemed to crystallise into incongruity.
‘Ever
y diplomat should marry. Not necessarily when you’re as young as you are. But certainly before you’re thirty.’
‘I expect I’ll manage that. I realise that a good wife is a tremendous asset.’ He was annoyed to hear himself saying what he thought the Ambassador would like to hear.
The happiness of the Ambassador’s marriage was a wonderful and self-evident phenomenon envied by friends and enemies. He had married young and taken his bride to a succession of steamy outposts where the character of potential ambassadors is tested and jealousies and gossip thrive as lushly as lilies, and unworn clothes become mildewed within a week. Their experiences had deepened their love which had transcended the marriage experience of the majority and become a distillation of trust and devotion. And when young diplomats and their wives lay in bed blaming Moscow for the friction in their marriages one or the other would point out that the Ambassador and his wife had jointly conquered far worse hardships.
The Ambassador said: ‘I think you have the makings of a good diplomat. But never be too obvious.’ He stood up and held out his hand. ‘Now at least we know each other’s faces. We’ll have another chat soon. Mason will look after you.’ He turned to the garden where the roses had cringed, at the touch of frost, into ragged balls like ladies’ handkerchiefs crushed in the hand.
In the lobby the men at the reception desk in their homely suits watched him as they would watch a passing car. He smiled at them and they nodded. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. They nodded again.
The embassy reminded Mortimer of his public school. Certain places such as dollar bars and Russian homes were tacitly understood to be out of bounds; games were not compulsory but if you didn’t ski, skate or play tennis in the summer you were unsociable; any individuality was synonymous with eccentricity which was noted by the security officers; the non-diplomatic staff had much the same standing as the bursar’s clerks; obscenity met with a reproof and junior diplomats were kept in their place.
Henry Mason, a first secretary in the political section, laid down the rules for Mortimer in his office.
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