Zhukov wasn’t sure how he would like it, and if it would solve anything. ‘For what reason?’
Zuvorin gave a shrug which meant, for no particular reason other than to disrupt your surveillance. ‘I should like first-hand reports of the forthcoming meeting of the Security Council of the United Nations. I am not altogether satisfied with the speed with which information reaches me from New York. Also,’ he added, humour briefly combating the scars of fatigue, ‘I find the Tass communiqués a little turgid. May I take it that you would be willing to go? Certain formalities will have to be completed first.’
‘I didn’t know there was going to be a meeting of the Security Council,’ Zhukov said.
‘A slip of the tongue. But, take my word for it, there will be one.’
‘Very well,’ Zhukov agreed. ‘It will be an enlightening experience.’
‘Without a doubt,’ the ambassador said. ‘And perhaps it might be a good idea not to discuss your mission too freely.’
It was while he was packing that Vladimir Zhukov heard that 600,000 Soviet troops had invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia.
17
PRAGUE was seized in an advance operation in which military aircraft supported by MiG fighters were used. Almost immediately K.G.B. units were installed.
Dubcek was reported to have said, ‘How could they do this to me? I have served the cause of the Soviet Union and Communism all my life.’
Premier Cernik was reported to have cried, ‘Treason! Betrayal!’
Crowds roamed the streets of Prague, Bratislava and Košice shouting insults at the invaders and scrawling Nazi swastikas on their tanks.
In Prague barricades were thrown up around the radio station and free broadcasts continued until 11 a.m. on the day of the invasion; then secret broadcasts began as the Czechs switched frequencies.
Stones and garbage were hurled at the Russians, Molotov cocktails were thrown at their tanks. A munition truck was blown up.
Demonstrators pranced in front of a line of Soviet tanks carrying banners ‘Russian murderers go home.’ Numbers of the cars used by the K.G.B. were circulated, a general strike was called.
Three young men distributing leaflets were killed.
All this Natasha Zhukova, trained from the nursery to accept the brotherly intent of all Soviet action, watched on the television at Black Walnut Point.
Black Walnut Point lies two hours’ drive from Washington on an island called Tilghman in Chesapeake Bay. Visitors are confronted by a notice ‘Private Property, No Trespassing.’
Not that there is anything formidable or particularly secretive about The Russian Camp, as locals call it. It occupies thirty-five acres and is inhabited in the salty steamy summer by forty or so Russian children aged between five to twelve—older kids having been returned to the Soviet Union away from the contamination of the West.
The Russians have another such residence at Glen Cove on Long Island for the use of its United Nations staff. It is an ominous forty-nine-roomed Tudor mansion which looks as if it might be haunted by the deported ghost of Beria. Since the Russians bought it some twenty years ago it has been the subject of tax disputes, the Russians claiming tax exemption because it is a full-time residence of a foreign government, the Glen Cove city taxmen claiming dues because they reckon it is only used as a retreat. But the taxmen have never been allowed to inspect this Kremlin in their midst.
Black Walnut Point is a joyous place by comparison. It contains an old white frame house with fine sea views. Children dance in its grounds and there is a flag-raising ceremony in which Old Glory and the Hammer and Sickle fly together. There are 8 a.m. gymnastics, a swimming coach who also acts as chauffeur, movies, television and Tom Sawyer hunks of water melon to be eaten with meals.
On these hot seaside days a green M.G. was often to be seen parked nearby on the shore.
Natasha Zhukova thankfully accepted her removal from Washington, regarding Black Walnut Point as her private retreat for deliberation and re-assessment.
She helped organize activities for the kids, swam faster than the chauffeur and got herself a tan. She was embraced with sweaty fervour by a wide-framed Ukrainian on the staff, deflecting him with an easy tolerance of desire which he found disconcerting.
In the evenings, when she wasn’t abroad in the green M.G., she watched television—reconnecting the wires which had been disconnected by the staff during these difficult days of anti-Soviet feeling.
If Black Walnut Point was intended to redeem her from the corrupt freedoms of Washington, D.C., then it had the opposite effect. For one thing, the camp had its own childlike freedoms which accentuated memories of oppression barely realized at the time. The two flags fluttering contempt of adult intransigence; the saline draughts from the Atlantic breathing liberty. And the television recording nightly the suppression of green endeavour in Czechoslovakia.
Natasha was there in the streets of Prague with the students. You couldn’t help it: youth was a crusade, youth was the future.
Whoever decided to send me to America, she thought, switching on the box of truth, dispatched me at the wrong time. All those young energies were being directed nicely into the Cause; the industrious, commendable, self-righteous cause. Now they had been diverted.
But I am not a traitor, she assured herself, watching the end of a situation domestic comedy which she found childish. I believe in equality, in Socialism, which is not as dreary as they would have you believe in the West.
Building camps in the woods outside Moscow and kissing a timid boy beneath dripping lilac. Reciting Pushkin and Lermentov, and reading Marganita Aliger and Andrei Voznesensky. Feeling his timid, searching hands. (She could smell the mauve scent dripping from the sponges of blossom.)
Meeting artists in a park, taking a boat ride with one and feeling your first burn of vodka which you swore you would never touch again. Folk songs and guitars and copies of jazz records cut by decadent (always decadent) artists of vice-ridden capitals. Listening to Rostropovich and Shostakovich and feigning appreciation because the tickets had cost your companion a lot of roubles.
But always directed. Although you didn’t pause to consider this. There was no time: you spent the pulse of youth wherever it was channelled. Painting a picture (conformist), plucking a flower, enjoying sex, building a town.
I am immoral, she thought. Already the lessons of my childhood are forgotten: the Fascist beast who did service for the wicked witch has fled. Fickle? Perhaps. If only her instructors hadn’t tried so hard …
If only she hadn’t seen the American homes with their unfenced lawns from which a power-mower could go churning unleashed across the land to the sea …
[Although, it must be said, these nebulous sentiments were privately expressed by Natasha Zhukova without any thought that she might stay in America. So they had about them an element of a child’s jubilation at his first visit to the seaside. And none of the guilt of a parent who leaves his children.]
The faces of Wenceslas Square appeared on the screen. Grinning, winking, thrusting victory fingers into the camera lens with puny triumph.
Natasha Zhukova, child of the Soviet Union, triumphed with them. The voice of rebellion whatever the cause. Only one cause—the voice of youth. (Even if many of the demonstrators were well over twenty-five.)
She glanced at her wristwatch, a present from Charlie, and a modicum of adult doubt disturbed the cause. She loved him, but she felt she hadn’t really met him yet.
She switched off the television, unplugged the wire and made her way through the scented, insect-flying dusk to take a dinghy to meet her lover.
But Charlie Hardin wasn’t himself this evening. He drove erratically, crashed his gears a couple of times and talked disjointedly like a man with a hangover listening to himself.
‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter?’
His face was tanned, the V between his shirt collar peeling slightly. She pulled a little parchment away—like stripping a paper birch. The
muscles of his strong forearms were taut from his grip on the racy wooden wheel; his hair looked damp with a glister of sweat on his brow which she wanted to wipe away with one finger.
A dark sandbank of cloud moved on the horizon and the sun glowed, deep and final, a molten hump behind the flickering stems of pine trees. There was woodsmoke in the air, and a bat scything the descending night.
‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘please be careful where you drive. You know I mustn’t go outside the limit.’
‘You’re outside the limit at Black Walnut Point anyway.’
‘I know—but that’s permitted.’ There was a quality to his voice that frightened her.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.’
‘Charlie—have you been drinking?’
He glanced at her in surprise. ‘No, ma’am. I don’t drink too much. A little pot now and then, maybe … I’m joking, of course.’
With a sickening certainty she knew that he was going to leave her. Knew it. ‘What’s the matter, Charlie?’
‘A lot of things.’
‘Tell me, Charlie.’ My Charlie.
‘I guess maybe we should find a place to park.’
‘And make love?’ Because she didn’t believe that any man could make love immediately before he abandoned a girl.
Charlie didn’t reply. But the muscles on his forearms twitched as he took it out on the steering wheel.
A few miles later he said, ‘I suppose you’ll be going back to Russia soon.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘We haven’t talked much about the future, have we?’
No, Natasha said, they hadn’t. She wanted nothing of the future: just the existing moment.
‘What do you want, Natasha?’
She thought: I want you. The dry warmth of your body beside me. In waking moments. In suffering and in anger. Because you are the one, and there can only ever be one even though you may find substitutes and some forgetfulness. Those who had never loved would diagnose infatuation. But Natasha Zhukova knew that, even in the throes of infatuation, a part of you was able to identify it as such: you knew it would end with an unsolicited moment of perception—a laugh at cruelty, insensitivity behind handsome sensual features. But there were other weaknesses which you nursed: that was love.
She said, ‘To be with you.’
He drove faster, speedometer quivering at ninety.
‘We haven’t made it easy for ourselves, Natasha.’
‘What do you mean, Charlie?’
‘We didn’t make it easy for ourselves by meeting.’
‘You mean you wish we hadn’t?’
‘No, baby. Nothing like that.’
‘Baby,’ she repeated. ‘I like that.’ Just a glimpse of the sun now, animated by the speeding, telegraph-pole pines. And, diving beneath the fast road, a stream combed with boulders. Soon he will tell me, she thought.
‘If I drove north to Baltimore,’ he said, ‘we would come to Friendship Airport. If I continued south we would come to Petersburg. How’s that for homeliness.’
‘You will be going to Russia soon, Charlie. Perhaps we shall go together.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. And she could feel the lie.
‘Where are we going, Charlie?’
‘Anywhere.’
Carefully she said, ‘That wasn’t just chance—that meeting in the bookstore, was it, Charlie?’
‘There are some things I have to tell you. I never thought I would have to. And I know that I shouldn’t tell you now. Whatever I do I’m betraying someone. I guess, to put it at its lowest, that it’s a question of priorities. Although,’ he said to himself, ‘they’ve given me a sort of escape-hatch.’ The car slowed to eighty then advanced again to ninety.
Natasha said, ‘Please, Charlie. We shouldn’t go any further. I will get into trouble and my parents will suffer.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve got American licence plates. No one would think to stop us.’
They passed a couple of motels, swimming pools adjoining the road, illuminated arrows, chefs and old dixie gentlemen soliciting.
‘Shit,’ said Charlie Hardin.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The law.’
The headlight of the pursuing patrol car flashed angrily in the driving mirror. Hardin pulled to the side of the highway beside a motel.
The cop was big and sour and conscientious. ‘These limey cars sure travel,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at them.’
Hardin said, ‘I’m sorry, officer. I wasn’t thinking—and this little lady has to get home or else she will be in big trouble.’
A second cop hovered menacingly in the background.
‘Buddy,’ said the first cop, ‘you’re in big trouble right now. You were doing a sporty ninety miles an hour just now.’
He walked around the M.G. kicking the tyres like a prospective buyer. ‘These kind of cars were made to break the law. Myself, I like a nice comfy limousine.’
‘I guess they sometimes break the law too.’
‘I guess you think speeding’s some sort of sport, fella.’
Vehemently Hardin said he thought no such thing.
‘Speeding ain’t no joke. Not if you’ve seen the smashes I’ve seen. The kids crippled for life. I figure every driver like you should be shown a few smashes. They might slow you down a little. We had one today—a young couple in an American sports car thinking they were at Indianapolis or Daytona or some place. Full of life, I guess, just out of the woods after a session most like. Now dead as Dodos. Took a left hand turn relying on their acceleration. But the truck coming the other way was accelerating too. Just went over them like crushing a beetle.’ He took out a pad. ‘The guy I feel real sorry for is the truck driver.’
‘But you said he was accelerating, too.’
‘Let’s not make a fight out of it,’ the cop said. ‘He was driving legal. But, sure as hell, he’ll remember that smash for the rest of his life. Now could I see your licence, please.’
Hardin showed his licence.
‘And some identification from the little lady?’
‘You don’t need that,’ Hardin snapped.
‘Now, look here, fella, you don’t tell me what I need and what I don’t need. I want to know who that little lady is. Because the way you drive you’ll mebbe get into a smash and then we’ll need the identification.’
‘Jesus,’ Hardin said. ‘You sure have a morbid turn of mind.’
The cop stuck out a hand. ‘Could I see some identification, please, ma’am.’
Natasha looked at Hardin. ‘Do I have to?’
The cop looked more interested. ‘Why, is there any reason why you shouldn’t?’
‘No reason at all, officer,’ Hardin said. ‘But please, be a good guy and forget it. She wasn’t doing the speeding and I’ll pay my fine like a good American.’
‘Sure you will. Trouble is I’m getting intrigued. Why is this lady so shy? I ain’t gonna put her in front of a grand jury. Unless she’s on the wanted list or something.’
‘She’s somebody else’s wife,’ Hardin said.
‘She sure looks young to be adulterating. And I don’t see no ring. Maybe she’s got that in her smart little plastic purse there.’ He pointed at the shoulder-bag Natasha had bought to match her mini-skirt. ‘In there with her identification papers.’
‘Look,’ Hardin said, anger lurking in his voice. ‘She doesn’t have to show you anything and you know it. You’re exceeding your rights and if you persist I’ll make it my business to see you answer for it.’
‘Well now,’ said the cop, widening the angle of his legs comfortably. ‘It’s threats, is it? I might just have to slap a few other charges on you in addition to speeding and dangerous driving.’
‘Who said anything about dangerous driving?’
‘I did. Ninety miles an hour is dangerous driving. Especially changing lanes at that speed without giving any indication.’
Natasha
put her hand on Hardin’s arm. ‘Charlie, don’t get yourself into any trouble. I’ll give him some identification.’
‘Say,’ said the cop, ‘that’s a mighty fancy accent the little lady’s got.’
Natasha dug in her purse. A report to the Soviet Ambassador, flown back to Moscow. Her parents disgraced.
‘Hold on,’ Hardin said.
‘Now wait a minute,’ said the cop, hand straying towards his gun as Hardin climbed out of the car. ‘If she identifies herself without any more trouble that’s okay by me.’
Hardin stood in front of him, lithe beside the cop’s crash-proof bulk. ‘We have to make a phone call.’
‘Now see here,’ said the cop.
‘Please. It’s important.’
Natasha waited, shivering in the warm wet air. They returned in a few minutes.
The cop said, ‘I’ll still have to charge you with speeding.’
‘Okay,’ Hardin said. ‘I’m sorry it happened.’
He let in the clutch and they swooped away, leaving the cop with his hand raised in salute.
‘Who did you phone,’ Charlie?’
‘Someone in Washington.’
‘Who, Charlie? Tell me about it.’ She paused. ‘Tell me about everything.’
‘I was going to anyway. I’d like you to believe that.’
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘You’re some sort of policeman, aren’t you, Charlie.’
He touched her knee. ‘I’ll take the next exit and tell you all about it.’
It was quite dark now with a lick of lemon moon high over the straight black trees.
It took a long time to explain on the grass behind the car beneath the slithering leaves and the assembling stars. A blanket, a cigarette, a blazer with fanciful buttons over his blue denim shirt.
Nor was the quiet wide night appropriate for shameful explanation, or even suggestions for living happily ever after. How his father had needed him to do it; how it had been his duty to his parents and his country. And hell—self-defensively—weren’t the Soviets playing exactly the same game? Who started this kind of intrigue? he wanted to know.
‘I don’t know, Charlie,’ she said. ‘Who did?’
The Red House Page 24