December

by James Steel

  Sergey had the capacity to dream great dreams, but the flipside of this was that he was prone to moments of black doubt, when the grand scale of his ideas seemed to crush him.

  He was really just a small-town boy from Voronezh, a decaying industrial town, smack bang in the middle of the steppe. As a child he had a phenomenally high IQ and was very sensitive. He had watched everything intently, noticed things quickly and made connections unprompted. His mother felt unnerved by how closely he watched her when he was a baby, how fast he put two and two together.

  He used to watch his father playing chess with mates from the steel mill in the kitchen of their tiny workers’ flat. Once, as a two year old, he had been given jumbled up chess pieces in a box to play with whilst his mother peeled some potatoes. When she turned round she found that he had set all the pieces out accurately on the board and had begun moving them correctly: pawns forward and back, knights two forward, one to the side, and bishops diagonally. She stared at him, disconcerted. He had looked up, smiled at her sweetly and carried on as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  At primary school he ate up the curriculum. His teachers were very pleased with him, but then aged eight he became very frustrated; he would look at his classmates sitting quietly, looking around with vacant and content expressions or stumbling to learn things that he took in at a glance, and he would be suddenly filled with anger against them. They seemed such hateful dullards to him.

  ‘Do you even think? Is there anything going on in your heads?’ he would shout at them in his mind.

  He fell into sudden rages and would rush at quiet, slow boys in his class and attack them for no reason, beating and kicking them. He was suspended from the nursery section of School 17 several times that year until he had had enough wallopings from his teachers and his father to know better.

  After that he gave up trying to solve the problem of life and took to flippancy as a way of displacing the boredom and frustration in his head. He became the class clown, winding his teachers up, coasting through school, underachieving and driving his parents mad. But underneath his easy wit and idiotic banter, he felt the pressure of existence keenly; subconsciously he questioned why he existed and found no answers.

  The lack of a solution distressed him. As a boy he would jump onto the slow-moving flatbed trains grinding through the points outside his family’s concrete apartment block on the edge of town, and let himself be carried out onto the steppe. Then he would jump off and walk miles out into the endless, flat grassland, forgetting about how and when to get home and sleeping out under the stars.

  He watched the sunset over the steppe, a painting of vast colours being shifted across the heavens by an unseen hand. The shades heaved and convulsed: yellow to orange to pink to red to purple to black.

  The whole scene was watched by the earth in utter silence; it lay flat and quiescent, overawed by the majesty of the spectacle unfolding above it. And he too lay on his back on the warm summer earth, spreading out his arms and drawing breath up from the land under him, startled by the beauty of being alive.

  To him, this landscape came together with the Russian character to form the Russian soul. It became for him the embodiment of great strength and yet, at the same time, great tenderness.

  In reading Life and Fate—Vasily Grossman’s epic of the Russian nation centred around the battle of Stalingrad—he experienced a moment of revelation: ‘The earth was vast, even the great forests had both a beginning and an end, but the earth just stretched on for ever. And grief was something equally vast, equally eternal.’

  He realised that the never-ending nature of the terrain was the same as the vastness of life, and this created both a sense of great freedom because it existed, but also of a great corresponding sadness because life will end and it will all be gone. He struggled to reconcile the tension between these forces.

  He wondered at the wisdom that he could learn from observing natural phenomena: the flight of birds, the slow graceful gestures of trees and the stately progress of clouds across the sky. He felt that all these things were words in the conversation that nature was having with him in his life.

  However, with such passionate experiences came the pain of unrequited love. He might love life but it did not feel the need to explain itself to him. He waited patiently, as a child waits on a parent to tell him how things work.

  But all he got was silence.

  He would go out onto the steppe and stare up angrily at the sky, but it just looked back at him with a gaze as empty and content as that of a Buddha and resolutely refused to answer his questions.

  Sergey felt this absence of communication as a physical force, pressing in on his skull. It was the same as when he swam down deep in the local swimming pool, where the silence was heavy, and he could look up and see the surface shimmering a long way above his head.

  He could feel the water pressing in on him from all sides; the walls of his head bulging in under it. He knew then that he had to swim desperately to the surface far above him to escape the pain. But the faster he swam the faster he ran out of breath and so the more desperately he kicked out. The feeling culminated in a fear of inactivity and created a terrified energy within him.

  From his early teens onwards, this found an outlet in two ways. Literature was his first love. He discovered that other great human minds had confronted and wrestled with the same issues that he did and had left traces of their battles behind them. So he hunted meaning in literature furiously, frantically ripping through books like a starving man looking for food between the pages, all the while marvelling at the power of writing to gather and pin meaning onto a piece of paper. When he came across insights he shivered and thought to himself: This is black bread—black bread for my soul.

  Books piled up in his room, all with significant passages underlined, pages folded and with thoughts that had spun off from the writing scribbled in the margins and on the blank pages at the back.

  The second outlet for his skills was on his mother’s market stall. She was a chelnoki, a market trader, who allowed people to survive both the incompetencies of the Soviet system and then the anarchy of its collapse in the 1990s. From her Sergey learned how to lie, to cheat and to bribe the police and other authorities that variously sought to regulate and profit from their activities. He started out by selling underwear off the back of a lorry, then graduated to buying second-hand Mercedes in West Germany, driving them back home through long days and nights, and then selling them on for a huge mark-up.

  From this he went on to buying companies. He understood accounts instinctively and loved the challenge of ripping through a balance sheet, diagnosing faults and then taking on the cold-blooded risks necessary to win in the bare-knuckle capitalism of the Yeltsin era. From humble beginnings his business empire gradually expanded from automotive parts, to mines, to food preparation, and then into more glamorous sectors like media.

  However, at times of inner crisis, like now, he had to turn back to literature to steady himself. He needed books as his touchstone.

  He pulled the greatest book ever written out of the Louis Vuitton briefcase at his feet: Life and Fate. His battered copy had been heavily annotated.

  He turned to the section where Sokolov and Madyarov were arguing about the true nature of what freedom meant in Russia. Sokolov was in full flood: ‘Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history—the banner of a true, human, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man.’

  The bearer of the banner of the dignity of the Russian man! That was what he was! That was what Russkaya dusha was all about!

  He could see himself with a grand banner unfurled over his head expressing his love for the people of Russia. The great image stuck in his head, revivifying him.

  He sat in his luxurious executive jet with the book in front of him, holding it and staring out of the window, lost in renewed dreams of glory as he swept on to meet
President Krymov.

  Chapter Nine

  Sergey was ushered quietly into Krymov’s office in the Kremlin.

  Even though it was Saturday evening, the President was still hard at work. Being unable to let go was all part of his instability.

  He followed the classic dictator-kitsch style of having a huge office with his desk set at the far end of it to intimidate anyone who had to take the long walk towards him.

  Although, to be fair, this desk did have history. His particular office lay on the top floor of the Senate House, a triangular building around a central courtyard, along the eastern wall of the Kremlin, with Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square just over the great outer wall to the east of it.

  It had been the office of the Russian head of state since 1918 so the other occupants had included Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernyenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev.

  Now Krymov sat at his huge desk with a green-shaded lamp illuminating the wall of paperwork that he liked to hide behind. It was ten o’clock at night and he was hunched over the desk, pen in one hand, signing documents. He looked up and glowered at Sergey like an angry pig.

  Sergey walked nonchalantly across the deep pile carpet towards him, wearing his crumpled suit and tie, his hair askew and his diamond earring glinting in the low lights.

  Krymov wagged his finger at him threateningly.

  ‘Shaposhnikov, what’s this I hear about you meeting up with a man called Devereux in London?’

  Sergey froze halfway across the carpet.

  ‘You said he was a geologist you were flying out to Krasnokamensk but Gorsky has checked him out and tells me he is a well-known British mercenary. What’s going on?’ he barked. ‘If you don’t want to smell, then don’t touch shit!’

  Behind him stood Major Batyuk, the head of Echelon 25, Krymov’s élite bodyguard unit. A tall, balding man with a hardened face, wearing a tight-fitting uniform, he had had his right ear sliced off years ago in a fight and the angry little stump of red cartilage stuck out of the side of his head, giving him a weird, lopsided look.

  The major clenched his fists at his side, knowing that this was going to be another of those sessions when some poor subordinate was dragged into the office and shredded. Krymov would probe them to start off with; they would then be terrified, which encouraged him to bully them more so the whole thing would end with the President in a screaming fit and Batyuk having to beat someone senseless and then drag their battered body out of the office. He looked at Sergey now, waiting for him to sweat and start pleading for his life.

  Sergey swaggered forward right up to the desk, looking straight at Krymov.

  ‘I’ve hired him to go hunting elephants, comrade.’

  Krymov sat up and frowned. ‘Hunting elephants? What shit are you coming out with now, Shaposhnikov?’ he shouted, unsure whether to be angry or confused.

  ‘Yes, Devereux’s worked in Africa a lot. He’s an expert tracker to help me track down the Russian elephant.’

  ‘What? The Russian elephant! Shaposhnikov, you’re a head-fucker!’

  ‘Ah! Comrade President, you know me.’ Sergey waved a hand.

  The overly familiar tone made Major Batyuk grind his teeth.

  ‘Yes, you know, the Russian elephant. It has a trunk and two ears. Yes, like this, you see, it has one ear on one side of its head,’ Sergey paused and pulled out the lining of his left-hand trouser pocket, ‘and one ear on the other side of its head.’ He pulled out the lining of his right-hand trouser pocket. ‘And then it has a trunk. Yes, a trunk, like this.’ Sergey paused again.

  Krymov stared at him, not comprehending what was happening.

  Sergey then unzipped his trousers.

  Major Batyuk could not believe it. He knew that Shaposhnikov was a joker, but to come out with this in the face of an accusation of treason by the President was too much. He was going to have to shoot this guy here and now.

  Sergey pulled his shirt tail out through his fly and started waving it around and laughing manically.

  Krymov gave a weird sound, halfway between a scream and a wheeze. His face went bright red and he creased up, bent over his desk and banged it with his fist.

  ‘Shaposhnikov!’ he wheezed. ‘I embrace you!’ Tears of laughter streamed down his face. ‘Russian elephant!’ He staggered round the desk and embraced Sergey, both of them laughing hysterically now. ‘Russian elephant!’

  Krymov got hold of Sergey’s shirt tail and pulled him around the office. ‘Off to the circus!’ he shouted, making trumpeting noises.

  They pranced around Stalin’s office until they collapsed on a pair of chairs to one side.

  ‘Shaposhnikov, you make me laugh!’ Krymov eventually wheezed. He looked with loathing at the pile of work on his desk. ‘This job does my head in, I tell you. But you make me laugh. Come on! Batyuk, get the car! Fuck work! Let’s go and drink vodka!’

  The heavily armoured black Zil limousine swept west along Kutuzovskiy Prospekt. Using the central lane in the road reserved for government vehicles they were able to maintain a steady eighty miles an hour despite the snowy conditions.

  The two Russian tricolours fluttered on its bonnet, another Zil followed behind with the nuclear launch codes and two large Ural military vehicles travelled in front and behind, loaded with Major Batyuk and two squads of heavily armed Echelon 25 troops.

  In the back of the Zil, Sergey and Krymov sat facing each other, reclining in the black leather seats with their feet stretched out in front of them. They bantered and picked at a plate of pickled fish, mushrooms, salamis and other delicacies, occasionally breaking off to toast each other with shots of vodka when a good idea came to mind.

  Krymov held up a pickled mushroom. ‘That’s the problem with the West, you know. Whenever I go there I can never get a good pickled mushroom.’

  Sergey looked at him blankly. It wasn’t one of the main issues he faced in London. He nodded sagely, though. ‘Yes, that is the legacy of capitalism. You see,’ he pointed a finger knowingly at the President, ‘under capitalism, man exploits man.’ He paused and they both nodded wisely. ‘But under communism,’ Sergey continued, ‘it was the other way round.’

  Krymov continued nodding and looked out of the tinted window. He then glanced back at Sergey, who was grinning at him. Krymov wheezed with laughter and slapped his leg. ‘The other way round! Ah! Shaposhnikov!’

  They continued eating, drinking and bantering and the MKAD, Moscow’s main ring road, shot past unnoticed behind the black tinted glass.

  After a while Sergey shouted, ‘Here’s to those British fuckers, to keep ’em warm tonight!’

  ‘Yes! Fuck ’em! Do ’em good to get the cold up ’em!’

  Soon they were heading down the long drive of Novo-Ogaryovo, the country estate that Krymov had taken over from Putin.

  The President’s official residence was an imposing nineteenth-century classical house set amidst snow-covered pine woods. Ice and gravel crunched as the convoy drew up outside the colonnaded porch. Golden light shone from carefully polished lanterns, and soldiers and uniformed servants stood at attention lining the steps up to the grand front door.

  The convoy swept up and Krymov’s limousine parked neatly in front of the steps. The Echelon 25 troops debussed and took up positions around the convoy to cover the President’s movement up the steps.

  There was a long pause as they all waited in the cold. After two minutes nothing had happened and eyes darted to and fro across the lines of attendants. Had something happened to His Excellency? Major Batyuk walked up to the Zil, anxiously trying to see in through the tinted glass.

  The door burst open and Krymov fell out of the limo, laughing. Guards darted forward anxiously and then backed off. He rolled over in the snow and lay on his back shouting: ‘The British are a bunch of pussies! Bunch of pussies!’

  Sergey staggered out of the car, tripped over Krymov’s outstretched foot and fell face down next to him. He shouted in anger and thrashed
around trying to get the snow off his face.

  Krymov hooted with laughter. He crawled over to him on his hands and knees and then staggered to his feet and helped Sergey up.

  ‘Come on, comrade! You see, this is what living in Britain does to you! You can’t take your vodka!’

  Servants came forward to help but Krymov waved them away angrily and continued supporting Sergey on his shoulder up the steps.

  Once inside they lurched down a series of long corridors to the banya complex overlooking the gardens at the back of the house. Saunas are to Russian male culture what the pub is in Britain: a place for men to be together and talk in private. Krymov’s major-domo hurried along nervously behind them, fearing his boss’s unpredictability in these sessions.

  The President entered the changing room first, clapped his hands and ordered more vodka and food before stripping off his overcoat and suit and dumping them on the floor. The major-domo scurried about picking them up.

  Sergey followed his example until both were stark naked facing each other. Krymov’s body sagged with age: the bags under his eyes, and his flabby male breasts. His stomach hung down over his crotch and his skinny legs stuck out under the mass. Sergey was also rotund but slightly better built; his hair looked particularly dishevelled and ridiculous after his fall in the snow. The only thing he was wearing now was his diamond earring.

  Krymov ignored the servant, thrust his chest out and looked Sergey straight in the eye. A moment of understanding passed between them before Krymov flung open the sauna door and they both strode into its swirling steam.

  Krymov’s sweating face leered up close to Sergey’s.

  Sergey could see that the pores in the President’s vodka-raddled skin had opened up like moon craters. He was out of breath and his eyes were crinkled up with pleasure.