The Red House

by Derek Lambert

  He nodded appreciatively. ‘Do you know something, Mrs Massingham?’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Zhukov?’

  ‘You are a very competent person. You know how to give a man strength when he most needs it. In that respect you are the complete …’ He searched for the right word.

  ‘The complete bitch?’

  ‘Far from it.’ He put down his glass on a passing tray.

  ‘Vladimir,’ she said, ‘would you like to dance?’

  ‘I would be charmed,’ said Vladimir Zhukov, soldier, diplomat, agent provocateur, spy, perfect gentleman.

  Wallace Walden, accompanied by his patient wife, Sophie, looked around him with contempt. He disliked career diplomats and opportunist politicians because he believed that all their conniving was directed towards personal rather than patriotic ends: this he had long ago decided, was the cardinal difference between himself and the other Washington players.

  The dinner jacket made his body look very squat and powerful. He was drinking Scotch-on-the-rocks and smoking a thick cigar—from Tampa not Havana, he explained. He jerked the cigar towards a group of laughing men in their thirties accompanied by healthy shiny-haired girls with Florida tans carefully maintained. ‘Someone important’s made a joke,’ he said. ‘A dirty one, most likely.’ He dismissed them with his cigar. ‘Court sycophants.’

  Henry Massingham from the British Embassy said, ‘Don’t be too hard on them, Wallace. After all it is election year.’

  ‘They make me sick,’ Walden said.

  ‘I don’t see why. It’s all part of democracy, merely human nature applied to politics. No better, no worse than business or commerce or sport. Out of it all emerges one of the best governmental systems in the world.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Walden conceded. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.’ Or you, he thought, squashing out his cigar in the Waterford glass ashtray.

  Massingham’s business was political assessment. An elegant and professional eavesdropper. Almost a caricature of the British diplomat because he had discovered that American ridicule of the typical Englishman disguises considerable reverence. At first he had been self-conscious about his deep and decent voice; then he had found that his American companions (and antagonists) were just as self-conscious about their accents in his presence; so he ladled it on with the result that he was often complimented by Washington women on his divine diction. Massingham also worked on the accompaniments to his accent: suits of striped and slightly crumpled elegance, regimental tie askew, wavy hair a little too long. When he overheard a White House aide describe him as ‘that limey pansy’ he managed to interpret the insult as an inverted compliment.

  Henry Massingham had also established a reputation for erudition and artistic appreciation and it was rumoured that he wrote poetry. ‘A real culture vulture,’ the Americans said, unaware of his rather mediocre degree at Trinity College, Dublin. Which was one of the reasons that Henry Massingham, in his late forties and beginning to accept that he would never become an ambassador, or even a minister, adored the Washington scene: unlike his own kind they hadn’t unmasked him.

  Walden took another cigar from a leather case and said, ‘Henry, I wonder if you and I could have a little talk. And you Jack—’ to Godwin.

  They were sitting at a table within sight of the ballroom. Massingham looked inquiringly at Walden’s wife. But, attuned to implied orders, Mrs Walden was already snapping her evening bag, stubbing out her half-finished cigarette. ‘I must go and have a chat with Maggie Hardin,’ she said. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me.’

  Massingham stood up and bowed.

  After she had gone Massingham said, ‘You’re a very lucky man, Walden.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Your wife. A wonderful woman.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Walden said impatiently, ‘she’s great. Massingham we’ve got a favour to ask you.’

  ‘How very intriguing.’

  Shit, thought Walden, any minute now he’s going to call me my dear fellow. He glanced around. No one seemed to be listening but just in case … ‘Let’s walk down the passage.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘I’ll be frank, Massingham. We’ve got to get closer to the Soviets in Washington and you can help us.’

  ‘I’m very flattered. But how on earth can I help American intelligence?’

  ‘By making friends with a Russian.’

  ‘Just any Russian?’

  ‘One in particular. Vladimir Zhukov. He’s new here. He’s taking Tardovsky’s place. You didn’t hear about the Tardovsky affair?’ Walden probed without much hope because, after all, Massingham was in the same business.

  ‘Yes, I heard. In a toilet in some clipjoint on 14th Street, wasn’t it?’

  Walden said yes it was.

  Massingham asked how Walden thought he was going to make friends with this Russian. A newcomer at that. Hardly any of their people—except the Ambassador, the Minister Counsellor, a counsellor or two and a few spies—were allowed to mix with the degenerates of Washington. ‘I’m told they even have to ask permission to go to the cinema. What do you want me to do? Play footsie with him in Loew’s Palace?’

  ‘I understand he’s something of an egghead. Like yourself, Henry.’

  Massingham nervously poked a handkerchief up the sleeve of his dinner-jacket. ‘It’s very daring of them to let an intellectual out of Moscow.’

  ‘I guess they must be pretty sure of him. But he’s all we’ve got. It shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange a chance meeting. He speaks fluent English and they might get him to help the cultural attaché’s staff. He might even come around and see some of our Soviet and East European Exchange guys on the fourth floor. And if not I’m pretty sure he’ll go to the National Gallery of Art and other places like that. Godwin’s boys will keep an eye on him and call you when he moves.’

  ‘And then what am I supposed to do?’ Massingham asked. ‘Solicit him in front of some suggestive sculpture?’

  Godwin who looked as if he’d obtained forced entry into his tuxedo said, ‘I understood you were pretty experienced in operations like this, Mr Massingham.’

  Walden said, ‘Sure he is. Come on Henry, don’t bullshit us. You know how to play the game as well as anyone. When it comes to screwing someone in these kind of stakes, you limeys have the edge on the world.’

  ‘It’s very decent of you to say so, Walden. But why me?’

  ‘Like I said, you and Zhukov have the same interests. You write poetry, don’t you?’

  ‘The occasional stanza when the mood takes me. Nothing for publication, though.’

  You’re damn right they’re not for publication, Walden thought. Difficult to publish the non-existent. ‘Also,’ he went on, ‘you have the great advantage in this instance of not being American. Any overture we made would be doomed—especially after Tardovsky. They use other embassies for this kind of manoeuvre and we’ll do the same. It’s a long shot at the moment. But think it over while we see what we can dig up on Zhukov.’

  Massingham shrugged elegantly. ‘I shall have to consult, of course.’

  Walden blew out a jet of smoke. ‘Is that really necessary, Henry?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Massingham snapped.

  ‘For Chris’ sake don’t get insulted, Henry, I was only querying the wisdom of sharing this thing with too many people.’ He gazed speculatively at Massingham’s handsome, has-been features. ‘By the way, Henry, what was that degree you got in Dublin? You never did tell me.’

  ‘Very well,’ Massingham said in his melodious and resigned voice, ‘I’ll see what I can do for you without consulting anyone.’

  Back at their table Walden looked around for his wife. Scanning the dancers, he snapped his fingers and pointed again with his cigar. ‘Jack,’ he said to Godwin, ‘do you see what I see?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There, dancing with Helen Massingham.’

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Godwin said. Walden took Massingham’
s arm. ‘Do you see that guy dancing with your wife?’

  Massingham nodded. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘That’s Vladimir Zhukov,’ Walden said.

  On the other side of the room the confrontation between Kalmykov and the Czech was becoming vicious. Kalmykov’s face was flushed and he had spilled vodka down his jacket. And the Czech had lost his discipline. Willowy, with hairless cheeks and surprisingly powerful fists, he was shouting at the Russian. ‘The dictatorship will soon be over. Dubcek and Cernik are our leaders. To hell with the Kremlin.’ He gulped at his whisky. ‘You’ll see. Soon it will happen.’

  ‘Hooligan,’ Kalmykov shouted. ‘Son of a bitch. You will come to heel just like the traitors in Hungary did.’

  The Czech, searching for the choicest Russian invective, suggested a relationship between Kalmykov and his mother.

  The sophisticated and the cultivated guests edged closer.

  Kalmykov tossed his vodka into the Czech’s face, the Czech swung. Zhukov intercepted his fist and put a lock on the arm. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘Remember where you are.’

  The Czech struggled a little but Zhukov was too strong for him. He relaxed, breath sobbing.

  In front of them Kalmykov sneered. ‘Thank you comrade. But I did not need your help.’ And to the Czech he said, ‘See what happens to you when you get impertinent. That is what will happen to your country and your foolhardy leaders.’

  Zhukov took Kalmykov’s arm. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘it’s time to go.’ Ironic, he thought, that he was supposed to be in Kalmykov’s charge.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’

  Old military authority returned to Zhukov. ‘Don’t argue—just come with me.’

  Kalmykov glanced around, noticed the audience. He became sulky. ‘You can’t order me around.’

  ‘Come,’ Zhukov said. ‘As it is you’ll have a lot to answer for in the morning.’ He took Kalmykov’s arm.

  Fear quivered in Kalmykov’s voice. Zhukov was glad that, in the secret hierarchy of authority, seniority was never clearly defined.

  Kalmykov nodded uncertainly. ‘But I did right, didn’t I—putting that treacherous pig in his place?’

  ‘Others will judge you,’ Zhukov said ominously, not completely sober himself. ‘Now we must go.’

  They threaded their way through the delighted crowd while in the background Peter Duchin glided into ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Dr Zhivago.

  7

  AFTER the Germans had been beaten Vladimir Zhukov retired sick to Alma-Ata. He was twenty-one: a veteran. But the Siege of Leningrad had sucked at the juices of his youth: his body needed more than rotten potatoes, horse and dog-meat and mouldy bread.

  He was born a Muscovite but his father, a trusted officer in the Party, was posted to Kazakhstan to guide the peasants whose loyalties sometimes became confused. After all, until the glorious victory of the Bolsheviks, they had been nomads traversing the steppes and salt-marshes, sleeping in their felt tents.

  Vladimir suffered from long debilitating fevers that were never confidently diagnosed. ‘Malnutrition, his very soul has been poisoned by the Nazi atrocities—let him rest and he will recover,’ said the doctors, always elaborately sympathetic towards a Zhukov ailment because Zhukov senior was now a secretary and respected Party elder.

  So Vladimir rested all summer in his parents’ home, his body skeletal, the poetry that had been numbed by warfare released by fever—pollinated by the distant bee-buzzing of tractors, the flaky whispering of poplar and silver birch, the scent of apple blossom and rose.

  And, as his body gained strength, so did his stunted idealism. He heard vaguely of purges and prison camps and presumed that all victims were guilty. His God was still the heavily moustached little marshal from Georgia who had chased the invading Nazis from the land.

  He read with pride of the collective farming that was making the wilderness blossom; heard the music of collective toil purring across the wheatfields. And he saw factories and apartment blocks piling up in the city, acetylene sparks spilling like soft words into the night.

  He read most of the permitted foreign authors, giving precedence to the French because they were more abundant—Hugo, Balzac, de Maupassant, Zola. And Dickens (present-day England still much the same, he understood), Kipling, Shakespeare, Hardy; Shelley, Burns and Byron. Mark Twain and Dreiser from America.

  But despite the languor of the southern summer, when Vladimir Zhukov wrote verse on coarse grainy paper, his words were about war.

  In the late summer he took to wandering into the city, once called Verny, drinking tea at one of the chaikhanas and watching young workers taking time off from the assembly lines to play. Komsomols and Young Pioneers, they all seemed very gay and sun-burned this summer of salvation as they paraded, Turk, Mongol and occasional Chinese, benath the karagachs.

  Zhukov also loved the market because it seemed to him to be the gaudy southern symbol of communal effort—‘production and distribution for the benefit of all, instead of profits for a few.’ For the benefit of all a dozen races, pigments, minorities—even a few Chinese ancients with mandarin moustaches—cheerfully sold spices, stubby brooms, kebab, fruit, elixirs for hiccups and bad breath.

  The Fascist enemy had been decimated (with the help of the Americans and British) and now only poetic industry with sunny, carousing rewards lay ahead.

  It came as something of a shock to Vladimir Zhukov, then, to realize that a new enemy—or rather a very old one—had replaced the Nazis: the entire Capitalist West.

  And, as the fever receded, it came as an unpleasant surprise to him to discover that not everyone revelled in the workers’ paradise that shone from the pages of Pravda and Izvestia.

  On a bench in Gorky Recreation Park, fondly observing lovers’ trysts, he got talking with a factory worker munching a goat cheese sandwich and an Alma-Ata apple for his lunch; one of the twenty-eight heroes of Ivan Panfilov’s Kazakh division which helped to throw back the German tanks from the outskirts of Moscow.

  ‘Where do you work, comrade?’ the man asked. He was built like a general with pearly scars on his brown southern face.

  ‘I’m not working right now,’ Vladimir replied, feeling shame for the first time.

  ‘You are very lucky—or very privileged.’

  ‘Not privileged. I was at Leningrad and I picked up some sort of fever.’

  ‘Then I salute you,’ said the man. ‘You had it worse than us. You’re lucky to be alive, comrade. But,’ he looked at Zhukov suspiciously, ‘you don’t look very sick.’

  ‘I’m almost fit now, and I’m looking forward to starting work.’

  ‘Then you’re a fool,’ said the worker, chewing up the core of the apple.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Never work until you have to. And that will be soon enough. To work you must be given a decent incentive …’

  Vladimir was astounded. ‘Incentive? Surely we have the greatest incentives of any nation in the world?’ He was becoming angry and he had been told to avoid excitement.

  ‘It’s no incentive to see work wasted. Did you know that a million acres of grain will remain unharvested this year because the combines haven’t been repaired?’

  Zhukov said he didn’t know that. But was it surprising when a country had suffered as Russia had suffered? When factories had been making guns, and women had been doing the work of the men?

  ‘The combines could have been repaired. But the peasants have no interest in work when their spirit’s crushed by taxes. Do you know that even trees are taxed here? That many peasants have cut down their own fruit trees to avoid the tax?’

  ‘Then they’re fools,’ Vladimir Zhukov said. ‘The taxes are for the benefit of Russia and Socialism—and ultimately for the peasants’ themselves.’

  Suspicion was crystallizing in the mind of the hero with the big chest and bigger stomach. ‘May I ask, comrade, what your father does for a living?’

  Zhukov told him proudly.
>
  ‘That explains everything.’ The man stood up, closed his cardboard sandwich box and was gone, hurrying across the sunlit park which, to Vladimir Zhukov, suddenly seemed like a mirage.

  Above all he was mortified that he’d been considered naïve. He was of age, a Leningrad veteran, world traveller (well, Berlin), man of letters, patriot, potential Party stalwart. Who the hell did that peasant think he was? It was as if noble aspiration had suddenly been ridiculed as maudlin. I should report him: men who sabotage everything Lenin and now Stalin have fought for should be thrown in prison camps.

  That night he told his father about the rebel as they ate Uzbek-plov, the rice thick with mutton and carrots and raisins. His father, soft now at fifty-five with obedience and conformity, didn’t seem surprised. ‘Who was this man?’ he asked, shovelling the buttery food into his mouth, steel teeth catching the light.

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘Then there isn’t much we can do.’

  Vladimir found he was glad. After all the man was a hero. And I don’t want to punish his wife and children. No, what he wanted was reassurance, doubts dispelled. ‘Doesn’t it shock you?’ he asked.

  His father, who looked sixty-five, shrugged. His mother, silent and lost elsewhere as always, disappeared into the kitchen, unmoved by rebels or politics.

  ‘Well, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not really. There are others like him. Ungrateful dogs,’ he added without emotion.

  Are there so many, Father?’

  His father assumed his official voice. ‘There will always be capitalist lackeys who seek to further their own selfish ends.’

  ‘But this man was a worker, not a capitalist lackey.’

  ‘More shame on him then.’ Zhukov’s father wiped his mouth thoroughly with his handkerchief. ‘And now, my son, I have some things to say to you.’ He went to the varnished sideboard dominated by a photograph of Stalin tousling a child’s hair in front of an adoring crowd, among them Zhukov’s father smirking fervently. ‘Just what are these?’ He held up Vladimir’s folder of poems.

  Vladimir flushed. Now he understood why his mother had retired to the kitchen. ‘You have no right to read those.’