The rest of the Chinese began screaming, their voices like the cries of frightened birds on the wing. One of them struck the Russian with his book of thoughts. The militia waited uneasily for instructions.
The Russian gestured helplessly and tried to help the fallen Chinese to his feet. The Chinese spat at him and turned over on his stomach.
Randall said: ‘It looks as if you might have a story.’
‘Don’t fret yourself,’ said Hellier. ‘We’ve already got one. I just hope to Christ the pictures are all right. If they are we can’t miss. Chinese felled by Russian outside the American Embassy. Great stuff.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Randall said. ‘Doesn’t responsibility enter into it anywhere? As far as I could see he was knocked down accidentally.’
‘Sure responsibility enters into it. We’ll say in the story and caption that it looked like an accident.’ He made rapid notes in his book. ‘You Goddam diplomats. We report facts. If that picture and caption appears on the front page of every newspaper in the States tomorrow you’ll say it was exaggerated. What crap. It happened and there it is—I hope—on film. It’s a fact, Luke Randall. It happened. It would only be distortion if it were suppressed.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Randall said. ‘Anyway I don’t give a damn. It certainly doesn’t do the United States any harm for reports of Chinese brawling with Russians to be published. It merely occurred to me that photographing the truth is sometimes a half truth, or maybe even a quarter one.’
A snarling Chinese with a ragged haircut and uneven teeth butted the young Russian ineffectually in the stomach. The Russian shook his head sadly and made the Russian gesture of contempt or disbelief—a single castanet movement of the hand.
The militia in their undistinguished blue uniforms flexed their muscles.
The fallen Chinese remained on the pavement posing for pictures while the Chinese photographer snapped away from all angles. Finally the Russian who had caused it all lost his patience. He stretched out a hard-worked hand, snatched a 35 millimetre camera from the photographer’s hand and dropped it on the ground. It shattered and metal ruptured with a single leaden sound. The photographer bounced up and down with rage and the victim of the imagined aggression, sensing that he had lost the limelight, stood up brushing the dust from his blue tunic.
‘This is it,’ Randall said. ‘Flashpoint. We’re about to have an international incident or sweet nothing.’
‘Balls,’ said Hellier. ‘We’ve had an international incident already. The picture’s on the wire by now.’
‘Do you really think the Soviets are going to let you wire a picture like that?’
‘Your trouble,’ Hellier said, ‘is that you know too much about our business. Anyway the story’s in New York by now.’
‘Provided your guys across the street made it to the phone.’
‘They made it.’ Hellier said, doubt quivering in his voice.
A group of Chinese moved towards the young Russian. He smiled, spread his hands to the crowd as if to say, ‘What the hell’ and clenched his fists.
At this point the militia moved in. The Russian was bundled away down the street and a cordon of militia encircled the advancing Chinese. The Chinese struck out but their knuckles were puny weapons against bunched militia muscle and inflexible orders.
A few Russians in the crowd jeered. A few red books waved. But the incident was over.
‘What sort of story does that leave you?’ Randall asked. ‘About the best you can hope for is a strong note of protest.’
‘From whom?’
‘From the Chinese, of course. Protesting at Soviet interference in a peaceful demonstration against the dirty war being waged by the American bandits.’
‘It might have been just a punch-up to you,’ Hellier said. ‘But it’s bread and butter to us.’
‘A very responsible attitude.’
‘Screw you,’ Hellier said. ‘We report what happened. We don’t interpret it the way you Goddam diplomats do. Now let me through—I’ve got to get back to the office to write a considered piece.’
‘Ciao,’ Randall said.
‘And —— you, too,’ said Hellier.
As the Chinese wandered disconsolately away one of them lobbed half a brick in the direction of the embassy. It curled over the water carts and hit the representative of the New China News Agency in the small of the back.
‘That was a bit of an anti-climax,’ said Elaine Marchmont as she bit into a hamburger in the canteen.
Randall said: ‘It’s difficult to believe that they’re the greatest menace to world peace since Nazi Germany. Little men with delicate fists and red books of quotations. But that’s what it’s all about at the moment. They let off another atomic bomb last night in case you hadn’t heard.’
‘I heard that,’ said King sawing away at a steak.
‘Did you?’ said Randall who knew that he lied. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘The same place as you, I expect,’ King said.
‘I got it from Tass,’ Randall said. He had just read the tapes and there was not a word about the exploded bomb on them.
‘I guess that’s where I saw it,’ said King.
Randall was pleased that he had caught King out and that King probably knew it. ‘It’s difficult to look at those little men out there shouting and gesticulating and to believe what power they wield,’ he said.
‘It certainly is,’ King said. He finished his steak and set about the drama of smoking a cigarette.
Randall wondered about the reference to his son’s operation in the letter from his wife. He had considered cabling her; but she would have told him if it had been anything serious. Just the same any operation could be serious. He thought of the scalpel parting white, delicate skin. He thought of the trust—or was it just acceptance?—on a child’s face. He knew he should be there when the operation took place and he knew he would not be.
He thought of Michele and saw his son’s face sweating with pain. He tried to repel the visions but they refused to retreat. He tried to convince himself that sincere love could equal parental responsibility; but the equation remained unequal.
He decided to write to his wife that afternoon and find out about the operation.
He patted Elaine Marchmont on the hand. ‘Come on, baby,’ he said. ‘The Sino-Russo-Americano war is over for the day. There’s work to be done.’
In the morning Randall went to Red Square for the May Day parade. It was as he had forecast—the same massive rockets nosing across the cobblestones, the same tanks, the same armoured cars; the same impressive and ordinary men on the top of the mausoleum; the same speech—or very nearly; the same walk-out by the Chinese petulantly pushing their way through the spectators; the same goose-stepping soldiers, sailors, airmen and border guards led by generals built like Hermann Goering. Nothing went wrong: nothing ever did. It was exciting and frightening, this splendid military boast in the sunshine.
Randall found Richard Mortimer standing beside the British Minister in the diplomatic stand. ‘How do you like your first Red Square special?’ he asked.
‘It’s tremendous,’ Mortimer said.
‘It’s that all right. The old hands will tell you it palls a bit after your second or third. But it doesn’t really. In any case there’s always the possibility of one of the generals having a heart attack. They shouldn’t make them goose-step.’
The Minister said: ‘It would kill me.’
‘It reminds you just where you are, doesn’t it,’ Mortimer said. ‘You tend to forget living the sort of life we do that you’re in the capital of the greatest military power in the world.’
‘The second greatest military power,’ Randall said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Mortimer,’ said the Minister, ‘I sometimes wonder if you’ll ever make a diplomat.’ He smiled to show that he was joking; he was in a relaxed mood since the departure of the Foreign Secretary.
On the square actors and da
ncers fought the Revolution again in front of the Kremlin leaders, and athletes from all over the Soviet Union danced and pranced and boxed and fenced. The sun polished the golden Kremlin domes and young faces sweated with exertion and eagerness to please.
After the sportsmen came the cavalcade of citizens, comrades, Komsomols, party secretaries and ancient revolutionaries, the embodiment of everything that mattered, or was thought to matter, in the Soviet Union; a pilgrimage of loyalty to the quick and dead leaders of a way of life to which there was but one alternative in the contemporary world. Sombre-clothed, red-flagged, the procession rambled on, a thread drawn from an inexhaustible ball of grey string.
The Kremlin leaders smiled and chattered and waved, as ordinary as their earnest subjects, as powerful as the rockets that had preceded the procession.
Randall said: ‘There goes the answer to anyone in the West who reckons that there might be another revolution in the Soviet Union.’
‘But it’s not all spontaneous, is it?’ Mortimer asked.
‘It doesn’t matter a damn whether it’s spontaneous or not,’ Randall said. ‘They’ve all had their fare paid here if that’s what you mean. They may even have been ordered to come. But that’s not the point. The point is they wanted to come. Look, you can see it on their faces.’
Hellier wandered up scribbling in his notebook. ‘Same old crap,’ he said.
‘But you’ve got a story, I presume,’ Randall said.
‘Oh sure, I’ve got a story. The Chinese walk-out.’
‘As you so rightly put it,’ Randall said, ‘the same old crap. Can’t you get a bit of majesty into it?’
Hellier pointed at the shuffling procession. ‘What majesty?’ he said.
‘Remind me to buy you a new pair of spectacles for your birthday,’ Randall said. ‘Anyway I’m shoving off.’
‘I shouldn’t go,’ Hellier said. ‘There’s a lot more majesty to come yet. About two Goddam hours of it.’
Randall pushed his way through the crowds, through the balloons and sprays of red and pink paper flowers, to his Chevrolet parked by the Lenin Library. He picked up Michele at her apartment and headed up Kutuzovsky towards beach and forest.
On either side of them Moscow relaxed in holiday languor. The tall buildings bled with red bunting, a breeze invisible elsewhere rippled big red flags, everywhere Lenin, very nearly benign in the dozing sunlight, watched over it all from balcony and hoarding.
A factory had recently turned out miles of rainbow-striped cotton material. Every other woman in Moscow seemed to be wearing a frock hooped with its bright colours.
They queued in the frocks, armpits already dark with sweat, for Kvas or beer from the little wagons, like miniature petrol tankers, parked at street corners. Then off they went with full jugs for their thirsty men at home while other men with open-necked shirts and V’s of sun-reddened skin on their chests drank from the cracked mugs provided, and drank again, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands, slapping their bellies, pushing their flat caps on to the backs of their heads.
‘Fancy a glass of Kvas?’ Randall asked.
‘I’ve never drunk it,’ Michele said. ‘What is it like?’
‘It’s great,’ Randall said. ‘Try some.’ He parked the car, which was immediately surrounded by wondering children, and took her to a wagon.
‘Drink up,’ he said.
She looked at the foggy glass tankard which the woman attendant handed her. ‘Are you sure it’s good?’
‘Nectar,’ Randall said.
She took a mouthful and grimaced. ‘It is horrible,’ she said.
Randall grinned. ‘But it’s an experience. It’s made from fermented black bread I believe. Personally I’ve given it up.’
She gave it to a small boy who had noticed her reaction. ‘How can they drink it?’ she said.
‘Analyse most drinks by the mouthful and they’re pretty awful. Even Scotch.’
‘I had not noticed that you disliked it.’
They drove past muddy ponds filled with bathers in the embryonic suburbs. Past grim cyclists and straggling hikers. They were passed by diplomatic Mercedes, angry Volgas and small motorcycles.
Villages bloomed lazily in the sunlight, mauve lilac lolling in front of wooden cottages framed with cherry blossom. The dozing cottages looked home-made, leaning and subsiding, with their fretwork cornices and casually-boarded walls. Each village had its Kvas van, its pump and its militiaman as somnolent in the heat as the pump.
Beside the road, when it turned into the forest, stood statues of brown bears and deer, and summer-cleaned cars abandoned by families picnicking in spotlights of sunshine among the pale trees.
They crossed the river fringed with bathers as thick as reeds and coasted through the dacha country where the rich spent sylvan holidays. A sharp turn to the left and they were at the diplomatic beach at Uspenskoye where only foreigners bathed as if they would contaminate or be contaminated elsewhere. The segregation on the small stretch of sand was unique: the world with one country—the Soviet Union—excluded. Bolivians, Japanese, Danes, Americans, Britons: this was the Beach of Babel. A playground of doubtful privilege, inferior to many other Moscow beaches with their placid waters and plump belles, but frequented because the diplomats liked to stick together.
Randall parked the car on the grass behind the beach. ‘Why in God’s name we had to come here I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The one day we can get away from diplomats and we follow them all the way out to their private beach.’
‘Because I have not been here before,’ Michele said. ‘And in any case I think it looks nice.’ She looked doubtfully at the crowded sands beside the dark water.
The beach lay beside a thin, hurried backwater of the fat river around the corner. The water was brackish and its bed slimy; some foreigners insisted that the Russians had chosen the site because it was down-stream from a sewer. But the British Embassy doctor had acquitted the water. Behind the beach and the parked cars shimmering with heat, a wooded cliff rose to the dacha country above.
The diplomats and correspondents staked out the beach according to their nationalities. A few square yards of Miami, a fragment of Ostia, a soupçon of Cannes and a great winkle-patch of Southend. But the staff of the British Embassy, security guards and communications clerks and their wives, dominated the beach with their transistors, battling children, baggy shorts and bodies grilled rare by the sun. Their dominance stemmed from their apparent unawareness that there was anyone else on the beach: their interest was confined to their sandwiches, their warm beer and their children urinating intently and proudly in the bushes.
Randall and Michèle lay on a patch of scorching sand between Cannes and Ostend and as far away from Miami as possible.
Randall undressed reluctantly, conscious of his thickening paunch. Michèle wore a black bikini; she looked soft and delicate in the burning sunshine; her breasts were paler than the rest of her body still faintly tanned by the sun of summers past and he wanted to kiss them. A group of Italian men with flat bellies and oiled muscles looked at her approvingly.
Randall and Michele smeared each other with sun-tan lotion, finger-tips lingering and kneading. The heat, her caressing hands, the feel of her warm body beside him acted like an aphrodisiac on Randall. He rolled over on to his stomach and made a minute examination of a handful of sand.
‘You haven’t done my back,’ Michele said. ‘Why have you stopped?’
‘It’s too indelicate to explain,’ Randall said.
She lay down beside him. ‘Mmmmm,’ she said. ‘Me too. Shall we stop in the forest on the way back?’
The erotic prospect remained with him all the time they were on the beach.
Soon Miami expanded and joined them. A second secretary from agriculture wearing Bermuda shorts who placed himself strategically so that he could see as much as possible of Michele’s breasts, his wife who had no breasts at all and a visiting magazine photographer who snapped away at anything that moved a
s compulsively as Hellier made notes.
‘Luke, you’ve never introduced me to this gorgeous girl,’ said the second secretary. His wife followed his gaze towards Michele’s breasts; her lips tightened.
Randall introduced the second secretary and felt sorry for the wife. She reminded him of a married Elaine Marchmont. He guessed she had trouble with her husband. He smiled at her and said: ‘That’s a pretty costume you’re wearing, Mary.’
She smiled gratefully. ‘You’re very kind, Luke Randall,’ she said.
He wanted to tell her that some of the most warm and passionate women he had met had been flat-chested—even if it wasn’t completely true.
The cameraman photographed them all, then photographed the lithe Italians and the angular Dutchmen on the other side.
Sweat gathered and trickled down shoulders and chests. ‘Let’s go for a swim,’ said Randall. He pulled Michele to her feet and they ran down the hot sand, through the paddling children into the cool water.
Together they swam through the fast, dark water, where only yesterday a little girl had nearly drowned, to the crumbling sandy bank on the other side of the creek, and gazed back at the representatives of a dozen nations sprawling on the small beach.
Randall tried to control his heaving chest without success. Michele stroked the hair there, black and strong and flecked with grey and said: ‘You’re out of condition.’
‘I’m an old man,’ he said.
‘Not you,’ she said. ‘No, not you.’
Her hair was licked back by the water. She looked very young, almost boyish. He held her cold hand. The sky was infinite blue; white butterflies danced among the weeds growing in the sand. The wooded slope on the other side of the water was clouded in patches with white cumulus clouds of wild cherry.
She lay on her back and gazed into the sky. Randall surveyed her youth and saw her as she had described herself to him living as a child in a big happy house on the outskirts of Paris; a girl with three brothers and a tomboy herself. Her father had been an unambitious civil servant content with his wife, her cooking, his four healthy children and his Calvados.
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