The Red House

by Derek Lambert

  Zhukov said it wasn’t, enjoying the transient authority of unexpected attack. He was, after all, a second secretary.

  ‘Then what are you thinking?’

  ‘Just remembering that in the shops in Gorky Street you can see nothing in the windows.’

  ‘You are commenting unfavourably on the commerce of the Soviet Union?’

  ‘On the contrary, Comrade Grigorenko. I’m surprised that you should interpret a remark so prematurely and so incorrectly.’ He gestured towards a windowful of lingerie threaded with tinsel. ‘If you judge a woman by her jewellery you may find a whore.’

  ‘Just so, comrade.’ Grigorenko made notes in his mind. ‘You speak very well—but of course that’s your job.’

  ‘Surely yours as well, comrade.’

  Valentina’s elbow nudged his ribs, warning.

  Brodsky said, ‘Perhaps Zhukov’s words are as empty as those shops in Gorky street.’

  Zhukov said, ‘But the shops aren’t empty. Only the windows.’

  ‘You will make a very good diplomat,’ Grigorenko observed. ‘You’re smart with words.’

  ‘I am a good diplomat.’

  ‘Forty-four? Second Secretary? Perhaps your capabilities have been underestimated.’ The doggy face regarded Zhukov with total seriousness; in the bruise-coloured pouch under one eye there was an incipient growth.

  If I were a man, Zhukov thought, I’d reply, ‘But you’re only a third secretary.’ But you had to be smart with not saying words as well as saying them.

  The city was slowly on the move, the snow like the fuzz the morning after too much Stolichnaya.

  A Buick fanning wings of slush hove past bearing the legend ‘Save Soviet Jewry.’

  From what? Ah, diplomacy …

  A street sign said Tow Away Zone. Another said Snow Emergency Street. They turned into East 67th Street. No. 136—The Mission of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the United Nations. And those of Ukraine and Byelorussia. And, across the road, down the street from the red-brick 19th police precinct clubhouse a synagogue.

  2

  BUT the spirit of good will and New Year’s resolution hadn’t penetrated the pale and clinical building at 136.

  In the foyer Zhukov’s body turned clammy in the artificial heat. A woman with greying hair forced into a bun, and a lackey in a miserable suit and thin tie regarded him suspiciously. A plastic Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden beamed in the corner in spite of it all.

  ‘We shall stay here until they open Washington Airport,’ Grigorenko said. ‘You would perhaps like to get some sleep?’

  ‘I’d like to have a look at New York while I’m here,’ Zhukov said.

  ‘It would be better if you got some sleep.’

  ‘I should like to see New York. It might be my only chance.’

  Valentina sided with Grigorenko. ‘I’m very tired, Vladimir.’

  You couldn’t make a scene within minutes of arrival; nor could you relinquish all authority to a couple of third secretaries protected by the ghost of Beria. ‘Perhaps later,’ Zhukov said.

  Outside they heard scuffling. Russian oaths involving mothers. A voice with a Uzbek accent screaming ‘Samarsky!’

  The door sprang open. A blast of cold air followed by a young man held by two squat captors. They pinioned him easily, his feet just touching the ground. His hair was black and curly, badly cut; his skin dark, his body slight and struggling.

  Grigorenko strode across to them and growled as softly as he could, showing the squatter of the two an identification card.

  Grigorenko spoke to the young man.

  ‘Go and fuck yourself,’ screamed the young man. His dark face was frenzied with fear—a man being carried to the hangman’s noose.

  Grigorenko nodded slowly, as if abrupt movement might dislocate the big head from his neck. ‘Put him down.’ The hunters released their quarry. ‘You haven’t made a very good start on the New Year,’ he observed.

  ‘Shit on you,’ said the prisoner.

  Grigorenko stepped forward kicking hard and down the shin, crunching on the instep, bringing his knee up into the crotch as the man gasped forward, finally rabbit-punching the side of the neck with the blade of his hand.

  The young man, doubled over in pain, was carried away.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Grigorenko said, ‘he will be on the plane to Moscow.’

  ‘And what was that all about?’ Zhukov asked.

  ‘It’s nothing for you to worry about,’ Grigorenko replied.

  Brodsky, who’d been watching with his inhaler held up one nostril, said, ‘Just another drunk, probably. They will insist on drinking Scotch when they’re used to vodka.’

  ‘That man wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘It affects different people in different ways.’

  ‘And now,’ Grigorenko announced, ‘it’s time for bed.’

  He was, Zhukov thought, very avuncular. As avuncular as Stalin.

  Only Grandfather Frost who had once been on the receiving end of denunciation—a puppet of the priests, no less!—saw any humour in the situation.

  He allotted himself two hours’ sleep and lay down on one of the two single beds in the small bedroom. A bowl of fruit and a picture of Lenin dominated the decor.

  He listened to his rapid vodka heartbeat and told himself to calm down about everything. About the priorities shifting around in his mind. About the tests of loyalty ahead.

  Although I am a good citizen, Vladimir Zhukov assured himself. A good Party member. I believe in our crusade. His trained brain recited, unsolicited: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ The last lecture in Moscow surfaced. ‘We know that an accelerating, unmanageable national debt will effect civil collapse and open the floodgates of Socialism.’ The lecturer’s fanatic face peered closer. ‘This is now happening in the United States of America. It is up to you …’

  They had observed him over the past five years and he had passed their surveillance. Not for them to penetrate the secret sensibilities that are a man’s soul. The coil of poetry unsprung. Not for them to glimpse the doubts on which true strength is founded.

  He lapsed into an excited doze, limbs twitching, eyelids quivering. Yellow cabs vanishing down narrowing vistas of skyscrapers, Manhattan a mirage behind a veil of snow. When he awoke he was confused about reality: he had dreamed so often about this arrival in a celluloid city projected on his private grey screen.

  He climbed out of bed carefully, still in his underwear. It was exactly two hours: such damned precision. His wife slept serenely. Through a slit in the curtain he looked down on the synagogue, on the blue cap of a guardian cop.

  In the bathroom down the corridor he shaved, drawing blood from his tired skin. He pressed his eyelids and his eyes ached back at him. He massaged a little pomade into his sleek hair and watched the wires of silver fade. He returned to the bedroom.

  Valentina said, ‘Where are you going, Vladimir?’

  ‘I thought I’d take a stroll. I can’t sleep.’

  ‘You mean you’ve stopped yourself from sleeping.’ She knew him so well.

  ‘I may never see New York again.’

  ‘They don’t want you to go out alone, Vladimir. You know that. Why defy them on our first morning in America?’

  ‘I’m not their slave, Valentina.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish—remember how you’ve worked for this day.’ She sat up in bed, hair loose, the brown aureoles of her nipples visible through white cotton; in her waking moments she was more feminine than she cared to be.

  ‘A servant, maybe. But, I repeat, not a slave. I must assert some authority now before it’s too late.’

  ‘Come and lie down with me.’ She stretched out warm arms.

  Vladimir Zhukov silently apologized to his wife for rejecting her comforts and put on his new dark-grey suit with the wide trouser bottoms which Western fashion was beginning to acknowledge. Except that with his trousers the width extended to the thigh.

&nb
sp; Valentina said, ‘If you insist, then I shall come with you.’

  But he wanted to see it by himself. Gary Cooper walking lone and tall down Fifth Avenue. Compromise—the dress-sword of the diplomat. ‘I’ll meet you later and we’ll have lunch together.’

  ‘Meet me? Where? We don’t know anywhere in New York.’

  He reacted swiftly. ‘At the top of the Empire State Building.’ He laughed aloud for the first time since the aircraft touched down at Kennedy Airport.

  He felt as if he had been released from prison and was vaguely ashamed of his exhilaration. But a lot of conformity lies ahead, comrade.

  It was midday. The snow had stopped and the sky above the rooftops of Lexington Avenue was polished blue. A few jewels still sparkled on the edge of the sidewalk but in the gutters the slush was ankle-deep. They had a lot to learn about street cleaning, he decided proudly.

  The Gallery Drug Store, Marboro Books. Sixty, 59, 58 … 53, 52. He enjoyed the drugstores. ‘Meet you in the drugstore, buddy.’ Sulky-faced girls with bobbed hair wise-cracking with chunky athletes with greased or chopped hair (Hollywood 1935–50). But it needed courage to enter one. They would call him mister and ask where he came from.

  Bookshops, delicatessens, restaurants … the luxury seemed cosy and refined in this particular avenue. East Side, West Side. Which was which? Grand Central Station, Central Park, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the Waldorf Astoria, Harlem, Greenwich Village—that was all he knew.

  He found courage and bought two newspapers from the front stall of a drugstore. The New York Times and the Daily News.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ the girl sighed, yawning and chewing and talking simultaneously.

  He tucked the papers under his arm like a baton wondering if he could be mistaken for an American. He looked behind to see if he was being followed. It didn’t look it but you could never tell.

  What strikes me most? he asked himself, seeking first impressions for the album. It had to be the shops with their abundance of consumer goods: this he had been warned about—the products of exploitation, late participation in wars, geographical advantages, twenty million Soviets killed conquering the Hun. But the briefings hadn’t fully prepared him for the profusion, the multiplicity, the permutations of plenty. (How many variations of salad dressing could there be? How many odours of deodorant? and who wanted to smell of lemons or Tahitian lime anyway?) In Moscow he had queued for a ballpoint pen with a sputnik that slid up and down the stem.

  And again, the cars—the automobiles. New Yorkers paraded in their cars. Vladimir Zhukov, crunching down Lexington Avenue with the enemy all about, lusted guiltily for a big tin fish with automatic drive and power-assisted windows. He was startled by the number of female drivers—girls with long, straight hair, smartly coiffured old ladies steering their vehicles like tank commanders. What happens to the babushkas? Do they have them put to sleep? or let them drive their tanks over the cliffs like lemmings?

  He reached 42nd and turned right past Grand Central, remembering faintly from another life the stations of Moscow—cathedrals, fortresses, terminals of turreted grandeur where immigrant peasants wandered like bewildered insects.

  He looked at the street numbers and knew with his mathematical certainty that he could never be really lost; just the same at that moment he was, gloriously and excitingly. Like a child trying to get lost and fearing the chilly second-thoughts of dusk.

  Courage, comrade. He said to the cop frowning at the unplumbed depths of slush on a street corner, ‘Excuse me, please, can you tell me the way to the Empire State Building.’ His words froze and hung between the two of them.

  The patrolman who had long sideburns and a squashed face said, ‘How’s that?’

  Zhukov expelled the rush of words again, hating the sense of inferiority that accompanied them. Put this cop in Red Square and see how he managed.

  ‘Where you from, fella?’

  ‘Moscow.’

  Enlightenment shifted the crumpled features around and Zhukov realized that it was a friendly face.

  ‘No kidding. One of those emigré guys, huh? And you don’t know where the Empire State is? How’s about that.’

  Zhukov waited.

  The patrolman said, ‘Two blocks down. Turn left down Fifth. You sure as hell can’t miss it. I guess that’s the one building you can’t miss.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Zhukov crossed the slush, wishing he didn’t look so conspicuous. Even though no one seemed to pay him much heed.

  ‘Okay, pal,’ said the patrolman. ‘Any time. Any time at all. Have a good day.’

  The City Library. (Four million volumes.) Negroes, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Germans, Puerto Ricans (he presumed), hippies, producers in camel-hair coats, soldiers to be sacrificed in Vietnam, women in furs and boots as arrogant and vapid (he was sure) as fashion models, businessmen with slim black attaché cases—one there munching a hot-dog. All intent on something on this white melting day.

  One thing he did not do: he did not walk along staring up at the narrow sky because that was the hallmark of the green horn. Which I am not, he thought. I am a representative of the greatest power on earth. It’s just that I’m a stranger. At which point he discovered that his head was tilting upwards like a peasant seeing his first aeroplane.

  So there it was—a colossus of playbricks beneath him. Massive and vulnerable. You could crunch them, swipe them aside with one bear paw.

  On the 102nd floor observatory, nicely placed at 1,050 feet, Vladimir Zhukov surveyed the enemy camp with awe and got annoyed about the awe.

  He gazed south-west where the vanguard of the buildings gathered for approaching tourists. With the Statue of Liberty on sentry duty. He moved and sighted north towards what he thought was the Bronx, beyond a phalanx of skyscrapers. Difficult to believe that in one section of one storey of one of those obelisks, a business, an existence, a saga, could exist without awareness above or below.

  To the north-east the metallic, ostentatious thrust of the Chrysler Building with, he surmised, the pygmy-giant of the United Nations close by; but within that cubist pygmy lay the power to curb so much capitalist expansionism.

  The city, so beautifully exhibitionist, within the ice-blue perimeters of its rivers.

  ‘Sometimes snow and rain can be seen falling up.’

  ‘I know,’ Vladimir Zhukov said. ‘And the rain is sometimes red.’

  He turned without surprise and faced Mikhail Brodsky.

  The breakfast was called The Heavyweight. It consisted of a wafer of bacon, two rheumy fried eggs and three pancakes covered with maple syrup and crowned with a dollop of whipped cream. For your $1.25 you also got a small glass of orange juice, toast and coffee. It was, Zhukov thought, good value and totally disgusting He ate it with relish.

  Brodsky ordered coffee, tapping the last grains of sugar from the paper sachet with his forefinger, leaking the last drop of cream from the tiny carton, his actions the legacy of a needy youth. Although the delicate bloom on his cheeks seemed to have surmounted bread and potatoes and blinis.

  Brodsky tuned in with two bars and said, ‘I think this is more our style.’

  More than what?

  Brodsky cat-sipped at his coffee. ‘I feel at home in these places. With these people.’ He indicated the coffee shop’s occupants: a gaunt, white-haired man in a Stetson flirting grotesquely with the woman behind the counter; a starved little guy in a red checked lumber jacket continuing his life’s search for winners with a chewed fingernail; a bearded Negro in a cowboy jacket riding his chair like a horse; mother and son spooning banana splits, a salesman inside an overcoat collapsed by rain and snow.

  The statement seemed to Zhukov to be an admission of inferiority. But he let it pass. ‘How did you find me up there?’ Either the room had been bugged or Valentina had told him or he’d been followed. Any one explanation wearied him.

  ‘It was not so remarkable. Your wife was still feeling tired and suggested that I
meet you instead.’ He wiped his glasses, looking myopic and vulnerable. ‘And it’s good that we become friends because we shall be seeing a lot of each other in Washington. I think we should have a chat now before we leave. You see,’ he explained, ‘the weather has cleared and we shall be taking the shuttle this afternoon.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Washington is your destination.’ He glanced around the café with a furtiveness as natural as sleeping and breathing.

  ‘So we are going to have a frank and open talk, are we?’

  ‘I hope so, comrade. I really hope so.’ The girlish hair fell about.

  He pressed his loaded sinus with finger and thumb; nails pared and clean, hands hairless. His lashes brushed the lenses of his spectacles. He wore the same dark overcoat, the same woolly scarf that mothers made you wear, a thin grey tie.

  ‘Then tell me what happened at the Embassy this morning.’

  ‘It was all most unfortunate.’

  ‘I could see that. It is never fortunate for a man when he is kicked in the crotch and rabbit-punched. But why, Brodsky? Why?’

  ‘He was a very foolish boy.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You need not concern yourself. It was a small irritating incident and you have the great task of adapting yourself to life in this self-indulgent society in which we find ourselves. It was the foolishness of youth. A girl, too much whisky—watch the whisky, comrade. He will wake up in Moscow and be dealt with there. A small punishment, probably, plus the knowledge that he has ruined his career.’

  ‘I think he tried to defect.’

  Brodsky sighed, holding up one delicate hand as the woman came to clear the table.

  ‘More coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Please,’ they said.

  ‘Coming up.’

  She was blonde and Germanic and smiling, but she moved like an automaton, like the girl who sold him the newspapers. A symptom of being a menial in an affluent society, Zhukov supposed. She brought more coffee and they thanked her and she said, ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Did he try to defect?’ Zhukov asked.

  ‘That is a very dramatic and contemporary word. He simply decided that he would like to stay with this American girl.’ Brodsky reached for his inhaler. ‘I suppose you might as well know the full story.’ (Which meant he would be lucky to hear a half-truth.) ‘He arranged to meet an American in a café in Queens. She was going to help him disappear for a while. But we were waiting for the unfortunate Boris Ivanov in the café.’