Hardin confessed that he didn’t know either, stubbing out his cigarettes in the turf. Explaining how he’d never dreamed he would fall in love.
She talked, too, but the words were formalities—exhaled, like cigarette smoke, without thought. Like asking people how they are when you don’t care.
The true Charlie Hardin. She thought: I expected weakness but not deceit. In the climax of love, even. Inside her. Still plotting. Disbelief and disgust shouted dumbly inside her.
She thought: So I was the poor little peasant girl. Naïve and quaint in my unfashionable clothes. Easy prey for a plausible Russian-speaking seducer. She saw herself in her awkward clothes munching a hotdog and came as near to crying as she would that night.
Hardin lit another cigarette, smoke melting in the darkness. Natasha Zhukova lay on her back and gazed beyond the stars until motives became grotesque and meaningless. And youth was suicide.
Vaguely she heard Charlie delving deeper into explanation. She explored infinity; looked down and saw the ball of the earth fuzzed with cloud. She saw beaches with shining waves. The snow-covered taiga waxed with loneliness, listening upon itself. Mountains riding high above clouds. Icebergs and pyramids.
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Of course I’m listening, Charlie.’ With the tranquillity of icing fever.
‘You know I love you.’
‘I know that, Charlie.’
The silhouette of his head drooped. ‘If only everything I said didn’t sound so empty … But I have come clean, haven’t I? I couldn’t keep up the lie.’
‘Are you telling the whole truth now, Charlie?’ she asked dreamily.
‘Sure I’m telling the truth.’
‘You suggested just now that we stay here together. That we get married. That would make me a defector, wouldn’t it?’
‘In a way it would, I suppose.’
‘Never to go back to Russia again.’
‘Never, I guess.’
The smell of lilac and timid searching hands. The golden apples of Alma-Ata. The vodka on a student’s breath. A guitar and a red scarf around your neck. Or a power mower that churned a free swathe through the grasslands of America.
She raised herself on one elbow and said, ‘It seems to me that perhaps you were given two alternatives. One to enlist me as a spy, sneaking secrets from my own father and mother. Or, if that failed, to persuade me to defect. Am I right?’
‘None of it matters. I love you and want to marry you.’
‘Am I right? For God’s sake try and be honest for once.’
‘Okay, so you’re right. I’m not doing very well, am I?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Yours must have been a very difficult position, Charlie. After a while dishonesty must come quite naturally.’
‘Maybe. But I’m trying to do something about it.’ He drew on his cigarette and his face was illumined, all except his eyes which remained hollows.
‘Are you? I don’t think so. You knew me well enough to presume that I would never spy on my own parents. Or anyone from my own country for that matter. In any case quaint peasant girls aren’t clever enough for that sort of thing.’ She paused, annoyed by the self-pity. ‘So you decided to do the next best thing—you decided to persuade me to defect.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So maybe they did want me to enlist you as a spy. And maybe I did realize it wouldn’t work. But I don’t have to marry you to persuade you to defect, do I? And that’s what I want to do. I want to marry you and have you live with me here in the States and for us to have kids. Is there anything so wrong with that?’
At least he hadn’t tried to make love to her before the confession, she thought. Or maybe he would have if that policeman hadn’t spoiled it for him. No—he had said there were some things to talk about. And he was the one, the only one: only substitutes ahead.
The moon climbed a little, losing its yellow glow. And its light found a chink of silver in the closed ranks of trees. ‘Look, Charlie,’ she said. ‘A lake.’
‘So?’
But she was on her feet escaping; brambles scratching her small skirt, twigs fingering her face. She could smell pine and mud. The lake was small—a pond if you wished to humiliate it.
‘Hey,’ Charlie shouted. ‘Look out or you’ll sprain your ankle.’
She took off her shoes. Muddy sand beneath her feet. She experimented with it, picking up footfuls with her toes.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘wait for me,’ catching up with her.
The water was as calm as the deep sky. It needed to be broken. A shark-fin knifing it was what it really wanted.
She took off her blouse and skirt.
Hardin said, ‘For Chris’sake, Natasha, this isn’t the time or place to go swimming. There might be weed in there.’
‘There’s no weed,’ she said calmly, knowing that she made him feel stuffy; not a very heroic figure at that moment.
First the night air bathed her body. And she smoothed her breasts, intuitively not coquettishly. It was a pagan night now, prancing with fauns, intoned with heathen rites.
Then she ran to the water which was almost tepid, as if it had been distilled from the heavy air. And struck out with her masculine crawl, feeling the fish-tail of hair trailing behind her.
He followed, stripped down to his underpants. More heroic now, although still trailing the maiden.
When he was ten yards away from her she dived. Why she didn’t know. Feeling fear as the moonlight receded, a phosphorescent ceiling above her. Seeking the serpents of dishonesty, the worms of untruth. A slipperiness touched her legs and she screamed a bubble of water that made a capsule of her fear floating to the shining surface.
Down till I touch the bottom. Wanting to breathe lungfuls of dark fishy water and fighting the temptation. Down searching with one leg and finding only cold caverns of immersion.
Charlie Hardin and all worldly phenomenon lost in the serpentine depths. Escape.
One foot touched slime. Prodded a few inches lower and found the bottom.
From that single toe she kicked off. An instinct, a primeval achievement achieved. And now the return. Kicking with a vacuum in her chest which her lungs laboured to fill. Shooting towards the stars. Surfacing like a dolphin.
Hardin’s arms were around her. ‘I thought you had drowned. I’ve been down there looking for you. What happened?’
Through the water she could feel his warmth and she stayed there for a moment, shrugging herself into the foetal position so that he was carrying her in the water.
‘I just dived,’ she said.
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘I don’t know. Because I wanted to.’
‘That was a helluva stupid thing to do.’ He held her tighter.
‘It was just a dive.’
She broke loose and swam to shore, watching her ripples preceding her along the surface of the dark disturbed water.
They smelled of mud and their bodies were cold. They didn’t speak for a while, watching the oncoming headlights rush at them and duck away into the night.
Natasha heard adult voices in the future. ‘You’ll get over it, my dear.’
But you never did. She had always known that there was only one and pitied the women who met him after marriage, after children.
‘Would you like some music?’ he asked.
‘I don’t mind.’
He switched on the radio at their knees. A brief outburst of pop, a commercial for malted milk and a news bulletin about the defiant Czechs.
‘That’s what it’s all about,’ Hardin said enigmatically.
‘I feel for them very much,’ Natasha said.
‘It must be very difficult for you,’ Hardin said gently. ‘They’re defying your country.’
‘So it seems.’
‘But your feelings are with the Czechs, aren’t they?’
She sensed the way it was going. ‘I admire their spirit but I’m still a Russian. I’m still a Komsomol.’
&n
bsp; ‘Would it be so unpatriotic if you decided to live in America? To marry an American? It’s not regarded by other countries as an act of treachery to marry a foreigner and to live in his land.’
‘And is that how your father and his friends would describe it? Or would they perhaps announce that I had sought political asylum? That I had defected? It seems to me, Charlie, that both our countries would say that. Although my people would qualify it by saying I was mentally unstable. And,’ she added, ‘I believe you know that, Charlie. And I’m sure that the people you’re working for don’t want a quiet marriage with the Hardins living happily ever after. That isn’t what they’ve asked you to accomplish, is it, Charlie?’
Hardin said it wasn’t.
They were nearing The Russian Camp.
Hardin said, ‘Is there any hope?’
The dark sharky waters of the pool closed in. ‘You can’t take a girl out and ask her to defect just like that.’ The flippancy unfelt.
‘I asked if there was any hope.’
‘Could you not have been honest from the beginning?’
He shook his head.
‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘And you’re not coming to Russia?’
He shook his head.
‘Couldn’t you have told me that day at the airport?’
‘I wanted to,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it must have been very difficult for you.’
‘So, what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, Charlie.’
He parked the car and helped her out. They kissed like two old people going to bed after the clock has been wound and the cat put out.
When she opened the door of her room the Ukrainian was waiting for her. Grinning with amateurish lust.
‘Get out,’ Natasha said. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here but get out.’
He held up a fat hand. ‘You have been a bad girl,’ he said fatuously.
Her hair hung wetly over her shoulders. She looked in the mirror: her face, washed of its make-up, was a schoolgirl’s.
The Ukrainian, whose name was Dmitri Sokolov, said, ‘I have been observing you, Comrade Zhukova. You have been breaking the regulations of this establishment. You have been playing truant, shall we say. And, I believe, consorting with an American in a green sports car.’
‘So?’ Because she didn’t care.
‘So, that is very bad. If I make a report it will go very badly for you—and for your parents.’ Despite his white bulk his voice was soft and wary, as if he were accustomed to rejection.
‘Do what you like,’ Natasha said. ‘Now get out.’
He stood up, one button of his shirt pulled open by the drum of his belly. ‘Also I have observed you plugging in the television in order to watch the antics of the hooligans in Czechoslovakia. I got the impression that you admired very much what they were doing.’
‘You want to sleep with me?’
His thoughts slavered. ‘There would be no harm in it, Comrade. Just a lonely man and a beautiful girl finding escape … Perhaps’—his thoughts accelerated into perverted practice—‘perhaps you have already been making love this evening?’
‘And you would like that, Comrade?’ the schoolgirl asked.
He shrugged. Some of the hair on his chest, she noted, was grey. And there was a steel tooth among his tobacco-stained fangs.
‘Where is your wife, Comrade Sokolov?’ She was surprised by her authority.
‘She is in the Soviet Union with the children. Other members of the embassy staff find relief in some of the bars of Washington and on the beaches of Delaware, so I am told. I am stuck out here …’
‘Get out,’ she said. She picked up a pair of scissors and advanced on all human deceit. ‘If you don’t get out I’ll stick these in your belly right up to the handle. Even now I can hear the noise of the puncture.’
‘But you seemed so understanding just now …’
She jerked the scissors towards the frightened fat man’s gut, ‘Out.’
He left without dignity, throwing words over his shoulder about Russian women who preferred American lovers to Soviet manhood.
Natasha took off her damp clothes and climbed into bed. She slept in dark deep waters surfacing occasionally beside Georgi, beside Charlie Hardin, beside Dmitri Sokolov, beside a substitute husband with substitute children calling to her from a bed across the room.
18
CENTRAL Washington and its white ghettos took the heat with colonial grace. A tinkle of ice on the terrace and, over the centuries, the slap of slavish feet on polished floors. It had officer status and its humidity was perspiration not sweat.
New York was non-commissioned. And it took its heat badly—vulgarly pouring sweat. Heat bounced off the yellow cabs, cannonaded around the haunches of the high-rise office buildings and fell back exhausted in the streets.
Its airports shimmered with heat, its gasping skyscrapers stretched and nosed around for air, finding only pollution. Its bars were ice-cold, dark and dispensing pneumonia; its heavy newspapers smudged by moist thumbs. Talking taxi drivers talked less: the silent, bitter ones, hunched over bruised fenders, opened up the dictionary of their bitterness.
In Central Park, where the grass was going bald, the muggers went on to summer schedules with shorter hours. Hippies seeking repose there from the immorality of existence pulled back their wild hair with headbands and took off their battle-blouses, stripping away a lot of swagger and sometimes disclosing poor thin ribs like Venetian blinds.
The unrelieved heat trapped beneath the smog brought out noise and smell. Florists smelled like jungles, hamburgers like Sunday roasts, garbage like disease; car horns signalled the troops to charge, and the blacks around Times Square slapped and chortled like pop groups.
Street trade in Italian ices, pretzels, giant balloons and soft drinks was thriving. And, of course, hotdogs, because they would still be eating hotdogs on the day the earth dried up.
To Vladimir Zhukov New York seemed like a bricklayer. He wasn’t sure why. Something in its baked busyness. The old brownstone work in the suburbs falling apart and being stuck together again with a few professional smears of cement; the high-rise of Manhattan climbing away from the heat—each floor a brick.
He enjoyed his return. Even New York’s corruption was red-blooded meat after the sinister white veal of Washington. You could hear pistons grinding, hearts beating. The sidewalk cafés selling bargain breakfasts were the bricklayer’s sandwiches: the cocktail restaurants the foreman’s lunch.
Walking down 42nd Street, past Tudor City, watching emergent old ladies with ballerina poodles tanning their pink tongues, Zhukov bought a newspaper black with Czechoslovakia. He looked for the Soviet explanation and found little of satisfaction except that, under treaty, they had the right to station troops there. He stuffed the paper into a wire basket on the sidewalk.
From across the broad street, wavering with water mirages, the United Nations looked cool and pure, like its charter. Its thirty-nine-storey Secretariat, modelled like a carton of playing cards (with the world’s poker hands inside), the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, the glacial motel of the General Assembly, the fountain and the herbaceous border of flags, each according to its style—defiant red, green and yellow shields of African emergence, celestial blues and whites of historic impotence, stars of bravado, crosses and stripes of wilting arrogance; every cotton anthem limp now in the city heat.
Behind this oasis of altruistic assumption—not without a few jobs for the boys—tugs plied the East River separating the U.N. from smoking acres of suburban ambition.
On the chessboard floor of the General Assembly lobby, near the model of Sputnik I, Zhukov met his resentful guide from the Soviet Mission, a stubby and hirsute linguist called Muratov, aflame with indignation over world reaction to the Soviet response to a cry for help. Muratov was an excellent linguist but, when excited, he tended to switch from one language to another.
‘We should hurry,’ Muratov sa
id in Russian. ‘The debate is about to begin.’ He looked at his watch and exclaimed in French. ‘My God any minute now we shall be late.’ And as they walked across the squares he said in English, ‘We do not quite understand what you are doing here. There have been no complaints before—from Washington or the Kremlin.’ A shade of emphasis on the last word. ‘You must be very well thought of at the Embassy.’
Zhukov said, ‘Not particularly. We are all equal there.’
‘Indeed,’ Muratov agreed hastily. (A very nervous one this, Zhukov decided.) ‘Although one or two of our comrades here seem to have been influenced by the gutter press. It is shameful, is it not?’ His face, dark and downy on the cheekbones, peered anxiously at Zhukov. ‘A very special watch is being kept on such weaklings in case …’
‘In case what?’
Muratov exclaimed in German, ‘We must go in now.’
Brazil was in the chair surrounded at the horseshoe table by the permanent Big Five—America, Britain, France, Nationalist China and Russia—and the other nine countries there for two years: Algeria, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Pakistan, Paraguay and Senegal.
Zhukov and Muratov sat at the back of the chamber facing the horseshoe and the huge confused mural, painted by a Norwegian. A very cool place for heated debate with its starry lights in the ceiling, grey carpets and careful air-conditioning. As anonymous as its delegates and visitors were nationalistic and fervent. Zhukov kept his interpretive earphones ready: Muratov pointedly spurned them.
Zhukov waited for justification but expected none as the meeting of the Security Council got under way. Or rather the Russian delegate, an avuncular man like all the best Soviet diplomats, tried to stop it getting under way. He said, ‘There is no basis for the discussion of this matter by the Security Council. The armed units of the Socialist countries, as is well known, entered the territory of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic on the basis of the request of the Government of that State … It goes without saying that the above-mentioned armed units will be immediately withdrawn from the territory of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic as soon as the existing threat to the security is eliminated … Upon the instructions of the Soviet Government I inform you, Mr President, that the Soviet Union resolutely opposes the consideration of this question in the Security Council because this would be in the interests of certain external circles, the forces of aggression.’
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