The Untouchable

by John Banville

  Talk. Tedium. Jaw-ache from ceaseless smiling. Standing tensely beside me, my interpreter has begun to sweat as she struggles with the definite article, manfully stacking up sentences like so many big unhandy boxes. Her rapid-fire interventions are as much a hindrance as a help to understanding: I cannot rid myself of the sense of being dogged by an impossibly rude companion for whose behaviour I should be apologising to the people struggling to get a word in edgeways as she gabbles on. I am rescued from her briefly by a shambling giant of a man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who clamps a big square hairy paw on my wrist and leads me into a corner, where, glancing behind him first over one shoulder and then the other, he reaches into an inside pocket—dear God, what is he going to produce?—and brings out a worn, fat leather wallet from which he lifts reverently a set of dog-eared photographs of what I take to be his wife and a grown-up son and shows them to me and waits in silence, panting softly with emotion, while I admire them. The woman wears a print dress and half turns her face away from the camera in shyness; the crop-haired young man, arms folded across his chest as if he were strapped in a straitjacket, glares into the lens, stern and vigilant, a son of the Revolution.

  “Very nice,” I say helplessly, nodding like a doll. “Are they here tonight, your family?”

  He shakes his head, gulping back a sob.

  “Lost,” he says thickly, stabbing a meaty finger at the figure of the son. “Gone.”

  I do not think I want to know what he means.

  Then Heidegger appears silently at my shoulder again—very soft-footed, is Heidegger—and the snaps are hastily put away, and I am led off to the other side of the room, where a door that I had taken for a part of the panelling opens, and here is another ill-lit corridor, and suddenly my heart is in my mouth as I realise with incontrovertible certainty that it is Him I am about to meet. But I am wrong. At the end of the corridor is an office, or study— big desk with green-shaded lamp, shelves of books no one has ever read, a ticker-tape machine, inactive but tense with potential, on a stand in the corner—the kind of room that in films the important man slips away to, leaving his sleek wife to entertain the guests while he makes a vital telephone call, standing silk-suited, sombre and cigaretted in the light from a half-open doorway (yes, I used to go to the pictures a lot, when they were still in black-and-white; my Patrick was a great enthusiast, and even subscribed to a magazine called, if I remember correctly, Picturegoer, which I sometimes furtively flicked through). I think the room is empty until there steps forward from the shadows another plumpish, balding little man, who might be Heidegger’s older brother. He is dressed in one of those square, shiny suits that Soviet officials seem to have specially made for them, and wears spectacles, which, remembering them, he whips off quickly and slips into his jacket pocket, as if they are a shameful sign of weakness and decadence. He must be a man of some consequence, for I can feel Heidegger trembling faintly beside me in reigned-in excitement, like a steeplechaser waiting for the off. Once again there is no introduction, and Comrade Pinstripe does not offer to shake hands, but smiles the kind of rapidly nodding, excessively enthusiastic smile that tells me he does not speak English. Then he delivers himself, in a rolling, rapid voice, of a lengthy and, I guess, elaborately embellished address. I notice again how Russians, when they speak, seem not only drunk but at the same time look as if they are juggling a hot potato in their mouths. This is true also of working people in the part of Ireland where I was brought up; for a mad moment I wonder if I might mention this—to me interesting— correspondence, perhaps offering it as evidence of an essential class solidarity stretching from the glens of Antrim to the slopes of the Urals. Ending his peroration with a sort of trilled verbal flourish, Pinstripe makes a stiff little bow and steps one pace backwards, smugly, like a star pupil at a school speech-day. There follows an awful silence. My stomach pings and rumbles, Heidegger’s shoes creak. Pinstripe, with eyebrows lifted, is smiling and nodding again, with some impatience. I realise with a start that he is awaiting a reply.

  “Ah,” I say stumblingly, “yes, well, ah.” Then pause. “I am—” My voice is too high-pitched; I adjust it to a rumbling baritone. “I am extremely proud and honoured to be here, in this historic place, seat of so many of our hopes. Of the hopes of so many of us.” I am doing quite well; I begin to relax. “The Kremlin-”

  Here Heidegger silences me by putting a hand on my arm and giving it a not unfriendly but definitely admonitory squeeze. He says something in Russian, at which Pinstripe looks a little piqued, though he goes to the desk and from a drawer takes out a vodka bottle and three tiny glasses, which he lines up on the desktop and with tremulous care fills them to the brim. I venture a cautious sip and wince as the cold, silvery fire slithers down my oesophagus. The two Russians, however, give a sort of shout and in unison knock back their shots with a quick toss of the head, their neck tendons cracking. On the third round Heidegger turns to me and with a roguish smile cries out, “King George Six!” and I choke on my drink and have to have my back slapped. Then the audience is at an end. The vodka bottle is put away, along with the glasses, unwashed, and Pinstripe bows to me once more and retreats backwards out of the lamplight as if on castors, and Heidegger takes my arm again and steers me to the door, walking along quickly very close up against me, his yeasty breath caressing my cheek. The great hall is empty under its menacingly icy chandelier; not a trace of the party remains, save for a sweetish after-smell of champagne. Heidegger looks gratified, whether at the success of the occasion or the thoroughness with which it has been brought to a close, I do not know. We walk back along the damp-smelling corridor to the front door. He tells me, in an excited, feathery whisper, of a visit he once paid to Manchester. “Such a beautiful, beautiful city. The Corn Exchange! The Free Trade Hall! Magnificent!” Leathercoat is waiting for us at the door, slouched in his long coat and still holding his hat. Heidegger, his thoughts already elsewhere, shakes my hand, smiles, bows, and—surely I am mistaken?—clicks his heels, and propels me out into the glimmering night, where my single star, my talisman, has paled into a myriad of its fellows.

  The return trip was a far jollier affair than the voyage out. It did not start auspiciously: we were flown to Leningrad by military transport, and then went on by train to Helsinki. Finland smelled offish and fir trees. I felt wretched. We joined an English cruise ship which had been visiting the Baltic ports. On board we found a few acquaintances from London, including the Lydon sisters, scatterbrained as ever and with that faint aura of debauchery that I always suspected they had not really earned. There was a jazz band on board, and in the evenings after dinner we danced in the cocktail lounge, and Sylvia Lydon put her cool hand in mine and pressed the sharp little points of her breasts against my shirt-front, and for a night or two it seemed something might come of it, but nothing did. By day the pair of Cambridge dons, who despite deep academic differences—something to do with Hegel’s concept of the Absolute—had stuck exclusively to each other’s company throughout the trip, paced the deck in all weathers with their pipes and mufflers, while Boy sat in the bar propositioning the waiters, and arguing politics with young Lord Belvoir, whose strongest impression of Russia had been a distinct sense of the shadow of the guillotine, with a consequent falling-off in his enthusiasm for the cause. This placed Boy in a quandary; normally he would have countered any sign of apostasy with a storm of argument and exhortation, but since on Felix Hartmann’s advice he was himself supposed to be displaying signs of disenchantment with the Soviet system he had to perform an elaborate game of verbal hide-and-seek, and the strain was showing.

  “What the hell is Bannister playing at?” Archie Fletcher wanted to know, his little pink face pinched with outrage.

  “It’s the shock,” I said. “You know what they say: you should never wake a sleepwalker.”

  “What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Archie had always disliked me.

  “The dream has ended for him. He has seen the future and it doesn’t
work. Don’t you feel that, too?”

  “No, I damn well don’t.”

  “Well,” with a show of weary regret, “I do.”

  Archie gave me an apoplectic stare and strode off. Boy, sweating in desperation, winked at me miserably over young Belvoir’s shoulder.

  I never did discover the identity of Heidegger or his big brother. Boy was no help. I had assumed that he, too, on his missing afternoon, had been accosted by Leathercoat and taken to meet them, but he denied it (“Oh no, old man,” he said with a smirk, “I’m sure the ones I talked to were much higher up.”). Year after year I scanned the newspaper photographs of Politburo members on their balcony at the May Day parades, but in vain. Certain gaps along the rows of squat heads and daintily waving hands gave me pause: had Pinstripe stood there, before he was airbrushed out? I even took the opportunity, after the war, of attending one or two stiflingly boring receptions, at the Foreign Office or the Palace, for visiting Soviet delegations, in the hope of spotting a familiar pate, balder now, or a grizzled toothbrush moustache. It was no good. Those two had disappeared, as if they had been conjured into existence solely to officiate at my ceremonial induction into the arcanum, and afterwards had been disposed of, silently and efficiently. I quizzed Felix Hartmann about them, but he only shrugged; Felix was already feeling the breath of the airbrush on his own face. Whenever I thought of that mysterious pair, in the years when I was active as an agent, I experienced a faint tremor of apprehension, like the flat smack caused in the air by an unheard, distant explosion.

  I was secretly as glad as Lord Belvoir to be leaving Russia behind, though I grieved to think that I would never again see the Poussins at the Hermitage or the Cézannes at the Pushkin— or, indeed, that anonymous icon, at once poignant and stoical, darkly aglow in the depths of a tiny church I had hidden in for half an hour when I had managed to give our Intourist guide the slip one breezy sunlit morning at a crossroads in the midst of vast, barren cornfields somewhere south of Moscow. The little white ship that we took out of Helsinki, with its jazzy glitter and tinkling glasses and the Lydon girls’ hard, bright, careless laughter, was an antechamber to a world that in my heart I knew I would never want to give up. Russia, I realised, was finished; what seemed like a beginning was really an end, as a wake can look like a party. Oh, probably, I told myself, the Revolution would succeed, would be made to succeed—I recalled Leather-coat’s grim little laugh—but all the same, the country was doomed. It had suffered too much history. In the ship’s lounge one evening I stopped to look idly at a framed map of Europe on the wall and thought the Soviet Union looked like nothing so much as a big old dying dog with its head hanging, peering westward, all rheum and slobber, barking its last barks. Boy would have been scandalised, but when I thought of Russia I knew that, unlike him, I did not have to feign disenchantment. You will laugh, Miss Vandeleur (if you do laugh, for I have never heard you do so), but what I discovered, as we ploughed our way through the Baltic’s increasingly wintry waves, was that I was— as was Boy, indeed; as we all were—nothing less than an old-fashioned patriot.

  6

  I arrived back from Russia into a smoky English autumn and went straight to Cambridge. The weather on the fens was gloomy and wet; fine rain fell over the town like drifts of silver webbing. My white-walled rooms wore a pursed, disapproving aspect, seeming to hunch a cold shoulder against me, as if they knew where I had been and what I had been up to. I had always liked this time of year, with its sense of quickening expectation, so much more manageable than spring’s false alarms, but now the prospect of winter was suddenly dispiriting. I had finished my long essay on the Poussin drawings at Windsor and could not disguise from myself the fact that it was a poor, dry thing. I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship—if decision is the word—was the result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision. What I mean to say is, did the pursuit of accuracy and what I call the right knowledge of things quench the fires of passion in me? The fires of passion: there sounds the voice of a spoiled romantic.

  I suppose that is what I meant when, at the outset, Miss Vandeleur asked me why I became a spy and I answered, before I had given myself time to think, that it was essentially a frivolous impulse: a flight from ennui and a search for diversion. The life of action, heedless, mind-numbing action, that is what I had always hankered after. Yet I had not succeeded in defining what, for me, might constitute action, until Felix Hartmann turned up and solved the question for me.

  “Think of it,” he said smoothly, “as another form of academic work. You are trained in research; well, research for us.”

  We were in The Fox in Roundleigh. He had motored up from London in the afternoon and picked me up at my rooms. I had not invited him in, from a combination of shyness and distrust— distrust of myself, that is. The little world with which I had surrounded myself—my books, my prints, my Bonington, my Death of Seneca—was a delicate construct, and I feared it might not bear without injury the weight of Felix’s scrutiny. His car was an unexpectedly fancy model, low and sleek with spoked wheels and worryingly eager-looking globe headlights, over the chrome cheeks of which, as we approached, our curved reflections slid, rippling amid a speckle of raindrops. The back seat was piled with mink coats, the polished fur agleam and sinister; they looked like a large dead soft brown bloodless beast thrown there, a yak, or yeti, or whatever it is called. Hartmann saw me looking at them, and sighed sepulchrally and said, “Business.” The bucket seat clasped me in a muscular embrace. There was a warm, womanly afterbreath of perfume; Hartmann’s love life was as covert as his spying. He drove through the rain-smeared streets at a sustained forty—that was terrifically fast in those days—skidding on the cobbles, and almost ran down one of my graduate students who was crossing the road outside Peterhouse. Beyond the town the fields were retreating into a sodden twilight. Suddenly, as I looked out at the rain and the crepuscular bundles of shadow falling away on either side of our steadily strengthening, burrowing headlights, a wave of homesickness rose up and drenched me in an extravagant wash of sorrow that lasted for a second and then dispersed as quickly as it had gathered. When, next morning, a telegram arrived to tell me that my father had suffered his first heart attack the previous day, I wondered with a shiver if somehow it was an intuition of his distress that I had felt, if it was at the same moment that he was being stricken that, out on the wet road, the thought of Ireland and home had come to me unbidden and my heart, too, in its own way, had suffered a minor seizure. (What an incorrigible solipsist I am!)

  Hartmann that day was in a strange mood, a sort of slow-burning, troubled euphoria—lately, with so much talk of drugs, I have wondered if he may have been an addict—and was avid for details of my pilgrimage to Russia. I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I could tell I was disappointing him. As I spoke, he grew increasingly restless, fiddling with the gearstick and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. We came to a crossroads and he pulled the car to a lurching stop and got out and stamped into the middle of the road and stood looking in all directions, as if in desperate search of an escape route, with his fists in his overcoat pockets and his lips moving, billowed about by dark-silver wraiths of rain. Because of his bad leg he leaned at a slight angle, so that he seemed to be canted sideways against a strong wind. I waited with misgiving, not knowing quite what to do. When he came back he sat for a long moment staring through the windscreen, suddenly haggard and hollow-seeming. A tracery of raindrops fine as lace was delicately draped across the shoulders of his coat. I could smell the wetted wool. He began to speak in a gabbling way about the risks he was taking, the pressures he was under, stopping abruptly every so often and sighing angrily and staring out at the rain. This was not at all like him.

  “I can trust no one,” he muttered. “No one.”

  “I don’t think you need fear any of us,”
I said mildly, “Boy or Alastair, Leo—me.”

  He went on looking out at the deepening dark as if he had not heard me, then stirred.

  “What? No, no, I don’t mean you. I mean”—he gestured— “over there.” I thought of Leathercoat and his faceless driver, and recalled, with a not quite explicable shudder, the speck of shaving soap under Leathercoat’s earlobe. Hartmann gave a brief laugh that sounded like a cough. “Perhaps I should defect,” he said, “what do you think?” It did not seem entirely a joke.

  We drove on then to Roundleigh and parked in the village square. It was fully dark by now, and the lamps under the trees stood glowing whitely in the fine rain, like big, streaming seed-heads. The Fox in those days—I wonder if it is still there?—was a tall, teetering, crooked place, with a public bar and a chophouse, and rooms upstairs where travelling salesmen and illicit couples sometimes stayed. The ceilings, stained by centuries of tobacco smoke, were a wonderfully delicate, honeysuckle shade of yellowy-brown. There were fish mounted in glass cases on the wall, and a stuffed fox cub under a bell jar. Hartmann, I could see, found it all irresistibly charming; he had a weakness for English kitsch—they all had. The publican, Noakes, was a big brute with meaty arms and broad side-whiskers and a brow furrowed like a badly ploughed field; he made me think of a pugilist from Regency times, one of those bruisers who might have gone a few rounds with Lord Byron. He had a fierce, ferrety little wife who nagged him in public, and whom, so it was said, he beat in private. We used the place for years, right up to the war, for meetings and letter drops and even once in a while for conferences with embassy people or visiting agents, but each time we gathered there Noakes behaved as if he had never laid eyes on us before. I suspect, from the sardonic way in which he surveyed us from behind his row of beer-pulls, that he thought we were what the papers would have called a homosexual ring; a case, to some extent, of misplaced prescience.