Archangel

by Robert Harris

  He listens most intently. ‘Comrade Stalin believes the soul of Russia lies in the ice and solitude of the far north. When Comrade Stalin was in exile – this was before the Revolution, in Kureika, within the Arctic Circle – it was his happiest time. It was here Comrade Stalin learned how to hunt and fish. That swine Trotsky maintained that Comrade Stalin used only traps. A filthy lie! Comrade Stalin set traps, yes, but he also set lines in the ice holes, and such was his success in the detection of fish that the local people credited him with supernatural powers. In one day, Comrade Stalin travelled forty-five versts on skis and killed twelve brace of partridge with twenty-four shots. Could Trotsky claim as much?’

  I wish I could remember all he said. Perhaps this should be my destiny: to record his words for History?

  By the time I leave him to return to my bed, it is light.

  8.7.51 The same performance as last time. Valechka at my door at 3 a.m.: he has cut himself, he wants me. But when I get there, I can see no wound. He laughs at my face – his joke! – and tells me to bind his hand in any case. He strokes my cheek, then pinches it. ‘You see, fearless Anna Safanova, how you make a prisoner of me?!’

  He is in a different room from the last time. On the walls are pictures of children, torn from magazines. Children playing in a cherry orchard. A boy on skis. A girl drinking goat’s milk from a horn. Many pictures. He notices me staring at them and this prompts him to talk frankly of his own children. One son dead. One a drunkard. His daughter married twice, the first time to a Jew: he never even allowed him in to the house! What has Comrade Stalin done to deserve this? Other men produce normal children. Was it bad blood or bad upbringing? Was there something wrong with the mothers? (He thinks so, to judge from their families, who have been a constant plague to him.) Or was it impossible for the children of Comrade Stalin ever to develop normally, given his high position in the State and Party? Here is the age-old conflict, older even than the struggle between the classes.

  He asks if I have heard of Comrade Trofim Lysenko’s 1948 speech to the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences? I say that I have. My answer pleases him.

  ‘But Comrade Stalin wrote this speech! It was Comrade Stalin’s insight, after a lifetime of study and struggle, that acquired characteristics are inheritable. Though naturally these discoveries must be put into the mouths of others, just as it is for others to turn the principle into a practical science.’

  ‘Remember Comrade Stalin’s historic words to Gorky: “It is the task of the proletarian state to produce engineers of human souls.’”

  ‘Are you a good Bolshevik, Anna Safanova?’

  I swear to him that I am.

  ‘Will you prove it? Will you dance for Comrade Stalin?’

  There is a gramophone in the corner of the room. He goes to it. I –

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘AND THAT’S HOW it ends?’ said O’Brian. His voice was heavy with disappointment. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘See for yourself.’ Kelso turned the book round and showed it to the other two. ‘The next twenty pages have been removed. And here – look – you can see the way it’s been done. The torn edges attached to the spine are all different lengths.’

  ‘What’s so significant about that?’

  ‘It means they weren’t torn out all at once, but one by one. Methodically.’ Kelso resumed his examination. ‘There are some pages left at the back, about fifty, but they’ve not been written on. They’ve been drawn on – doodled on, I should say – in red pencil. The same image again and again, d’you see?’

  ‘What are they?’ O’Brian moved in closer with the camera running. ‘They look like wolves.’

  ‘They are wolves. The heads of wolves. Stalin often drew wolves in the margins of official documents when he was thinking.’

  ‘Jesus. So it’s genuine, you think?’

  ‘Until it’s been forensically tested, I’m not prepared to say. I’m sorry. Not officially.’

  ‘Unofficially, then – not for attribution until later – what d’you think?’

  ‘Oh, it’s genuine,’ said Kelso, without hesitation. ‘I’d stake my life on it.’

  O’Brian switched the camera off.

  *

  THEY had left the lock-up by this time and were sitting in the Moscow bureau of the Satellite News System which occupied the top floor of a ten-storey office block just south of the Olympic Stadium. A glass partition separated O’Brian’s room from the main production office, where a secretary sat listlessly before a computer screen. Next to her, a mute television, tuned to SNS, was showing clips of the previous night’s baseball games. Through a skylight Kelso could see a big satellite dish, raised like an offertory plate to the bulging Moscow clouds.

  O’Brian said, ‘And how long is it going to take us to get this stuff tested?’

  ‘A couple of weeks, perhaps,’ said Kelso. ‘A month.’

  ‘No way,’ said O’Brian. ‘No way can we wait that long.’

  ‘Well, think about it. First of all this material technically belongs to the Russian government. Or Stalin’s heirs. Or someone. Anyway, it isn’t ours – Zinaida’s, I mean.’

  Zinaida was standing at the window, staring out through a gap she had made with her fingers in the slatted blinds. At the mention of her name she glanced briefly in Kelso’s direction. She had barely said a word in the last hour – not when they were still in the garage, not even on their cautious drive across Moscow, following O’Brian.

  ‘So it isn’t safe to keep it here,’ continued Kelso. ‘We’ve got to get it out of the country. That’s the first priority. God knows who’s after it now. Just being in the same room is bloody dangerous as far as I’m concerned. The tests themselves – well, we can have those done anywhere. I know some people in Oxford who can check the ink and paper. There are document examiners in Germany, Switzerland –’

  O’Brian didn’t seem to be listening. He had his feet up on his desk, his long body lolling back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. ‘You know what we’ve really got to do?’ he mused. ‘We’ve got to find the girl.’

  Kelso stared at him for a moment. ‘Find the girl? What are you talking about? There isn’t going to be a girl. The girl’s going to be dead.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that. She’d only be – what? – sixty-something?’

  ‘She’d be sixty-six. But that’s hardly the point. It’s not old age she’ll have died of. Who d’you think she was getting mixed up with here? Prince Charming? She won’t have lived happily ever after.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we still need to find out what happened to her. What happened to her folks. Human interest. That’s the story.’

  The wall behind O’Brian’s head was plastered with photographs: O’Brian with Yasser Arafat, O’Brian with Gerry Adams, O’Brian in a flak jacket next to a mass grave in the Balkans somewhere and another of him, in protective gear, stepping through a minefield with the Princess of Wales. O’Brian in a tuxedo, collecting an award – for the sheer genius of simply being O’Brian, perhaps? Citations for O’Brian. Reviews of O’Brian. A herogram from the Chief Executive of SNS, praising O’Brian for his ‘relentless dedication to triumphing over our competitors’. For the first time, and far too late, Kelso began to get a measure of the man’s ambition.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kelso very deliberately, so there was no room for misunderstanding, ‘nothing is to be made public until this material is out of the country and has been forensically verified. Do you hear me? That’s what we agreed.’

  O’Brian clicked his fingers. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. But in the meantime we should find out what happened to the girl. We’ve got to do that anyway. If we go on air with the notebook before we find out what happened to Anna, someone else’ll come along and get the best part of the story.’ He lifted his feet off the desk and spun around in his chair to a set of bookshelves beside his desk. ‘Now where the hell is Archangel, anyway?’

  IT happened with a kind of ine
xorable logic so that later, when Kelso had the time to review his actions, he still could never identify a precise moment when he could have stopped it, when he could have diverted events on to a different course –

  ‘“Archangel,”’ said O’Brian, reading aloud from a guidebook. ‘“Northern Russian port city. Population: four hundred thousand. Situated on the River Dvina, thirty miles upstream from the White Sea. Principal industries: timber, shipbuilding and fishing. From the end of October until the beginning of April, Archangel is snowbound.” Shit. What’s the date?’

  ‘October the twenty-ninth.’

  O’Brian picked up the telephone and jabbed out a number. From his position on the sofa Kelso watched through the thick glass wall as the secretary reached silently for the receiver.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said O’Brian, ‘do me a favour will you? Get on to the System’s weather centre in Florida and get the latest weather prediction for Archangel.’ He spelt it out for her. ‘That’s it. Quick as you can.’

  Kelso closed his eyes.

  The point was – he knew it in his heart – that O’Brian was right. The story was the girl. And the story couldn’t be pursued in Moscow. If the trail could be picked up anywhere, it could only be in the north, on her home territory, where it was possible there might still be some family or friends who would remember her: remember the Komsomol girl of nineteen and the dramatic summons to Moscow in the summer of 1951 –

  “‘Archangel,’” resumed O’Brian, ‘“was founded by Peter the Great and named after Archangel Michael, the Warrior-Angel. See the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, verses seven to eight: ‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,/And prevailed not.’ In the nineteen-thirties –”’

  ‘Do we really have to listen to this?’

  But O’Brian held up his finger.

  ‘“– in the nineteen-thirties, Stalin exiled two million Ukrainian kulaks into the Archangel oblast, a region of forest and tundra larger than the whole of France. After the war, this vast area was used for testing nuclear weapons. Archangel’s outport is Severodvinsk, centre of Russia’s nuclear submarine construction programme. Until the fall of communism, Archangel was a closed city, forbidden to all outside visitors.

  ‘“Traveller’s tip,”’ concluded O’Brian. ‘“When arriving at the Archangel Railway Station, always be sure to check the digital radiation meter – if it shows 15 microRads per hour or below, it’s safe.”’ He closed the book with a cheerful snap. ‘Sounds like a fun place. What d’you think? You up for this?’

  I am trapped, thought Kelso. I am a victim of historical inevitability. Comrade Stalin would have approved.

  ‘You know I’ve no money –?’

  ‘I’ll lend you money.’

  ‘No winter clothes –’

  ‘We’ve got clothes.’

  ‘No visa –’

  ‘A detail.’

  ‘A detail?’

  ‘Come on, Fluke. You’re the Stalin expert. I need you.’

  ‘Well that’s touching. And if I say no, presumably you’ll go anyway?’

  O’Brian grinned. The telephone rang. He picked it up, listened, made a few notes. When he put it down, he was frowning and Kelso entertained a brief hope of reprieve. But no.

  The weather in Archangel at 11:00 GMT that day (3 p.m. local time) was being reported as partly cloudy, minus four degrees, with light winds and snow flurries. However, a deep depression was rolling westwards from Siberia and that was promising snow heavy enough to close the city within a day or two.

  In other words, said O’Brian, they would have to hurry.

  HE fetched an atlas and opened it on his desk.

  The fastest way into Archangel, obviously, was by air, but the Aeroflot flight didn’t leave until the following morning and the airline would require Kelso to show his visa which would expire at midnight. So that was out. The train took more than twenty hours, and even O’Brian could see the risks in that – trapped on board a slow-moving sleeper for the best part of a day.

  Which left the road – specifically, the M8 – which ran nearly 700 miles, more or less direct, according to the map, swerving slightly to take in the city of Yaroslavl, then following the river plateaux of the Vaga and the Dvina, across the taiga and the tundra and the great virgin forests of northern Russia, directly into Archangel itself, where the road ended.

  Kelso said, ‘It’s not a freeway, you know. There are no motels.’

  ‘It’s nothing, man. It’ll be a breeze, I promise. What’ve we got now – let’s see – couple of hours of daylight left? That should get us well clear of Moscow. You drive, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There you go. We’ll take turns. These journeys, I tell you, they always look worse on paper. Once we’re in the groove, we’ll eat those miles. You’ll see.’ He was making a calculation on a pad. ‘I figure we could hit Archangel about nine or ten tomorrow morning.’

  ‘So we drive through the night?’

  ‘Sure. Or we can stop if you’d sooner. The thing is to quit talking and start moving. Quicker we hit the road, quicker we get there. We need to pack that book in something –’

  He came round from behind his desk and headed towards the notebook that was lying on the coffee table, next to the congealed mass of papers. But before he could reach it, Zinaida grabbed it.

  ‘This,’ she said in English, ‘mine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mine.’

  Kelso said, ‘That’s right. Her father left it for her.’

  ‘I only want to borrow it.’

  ‘Nyet!’

  O’Brian appealed to Kelso. ‘Is she crazy? Supposing we find Anna Safanova?’

  ‘Supposing we do? What do you have in mind exactly? Stalin’s grey-haired old lover in a rocking chair, reading aloud for the viewers?’

  ‘Oh, funny guy. Listen: people are a whole lot more likely to talk to us if we’re carrying proof. I say that book should come with us. Why’s it hers, anyhow? It’s no more hers than mine. Or anybody else’s.’

  ‘Because that was the deal, remember?’

  ‘Deal? Seems to me it’s you two’ve got the only deal going round here.’ He slipped back into his wheedling mode. ‘Come on, Fluke, it’s not safe for her in Moscow. Where’s she gonna keep it? What if Mamantov comes after her?’

  Kelso had to concede this point. ‘Then why doesn’t she come with us?’ He turned to Zinaida, ‘Come with us to Archangel –’

  ‘With him?’ she said in Russian. ‘No way. He’ll kill us all.’

  Kelso was beginning to lose patience. ‘Then let’s postpone Archangel,’ he said irritably to O’Brian, ‘until we can get the material copied.’

  ‘But you heard the forecast. In a day or two we won’t be able to move up there. Besides, this is a story. Stories don’t keep.’ He raised his hands in disgust. ‘Shit, I can’t stand around here bitching all afternoon. Need to get some equipment together. Need supplies. Need to get going. Talk some sense into her, man, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Zinaida, after O’Brian had stamped out of the office, banging the glass door behind him. ‘I told you we couldn’t trust him.’

  Kelso sank back into the sofa. He rubbed his face with both hands. This was starting to get dangerous, he thought. Not physically – in a curious way that was still unreal to him – but professionally. It was professional danger he scented now. Because Adelman was right: these big frauds did usually follow a pattern. And part of it involved being rushed to judgement. Here he was – a trained scholar, supposedly – and what had he done? He’d read through the notebook once. Once. He hadn’t even done the most basic check to see whether the dates in the journal tallied with Stalin’s known movements in the summer of 1951. He could just imagine the reaction of his former colleagues, probably leaving Russian airspace right now. If they could see how he was handling this –

  The thought bothered
him more than he cared to admit.

  And then there was the other bundle of papers, lying on the table, mouldering and congealed. Those he hadn’t even begun to look at.

  He pulled on O’Brian’s gloves and leaned forwards. He ran his forefinger experimentally through the grey spores on the top sheet. There was writing underneath. He rubbed again and the letters NKVD appeared.

  ‘Zinaida,’ he said.

  She was sitting behind O’Brian’s desk, turning the pages of the notebook, her notebook. At the sound of her name she looked up.

  KELSO borrowed her tweezers to peel away the outer layer of paper. It came off like dead skin, flaking here and there, but cleanly enough for him to make out some of the words on the page underneath. It was a typed document, a surveillance report of some kind by the look of it, dated 24 May 1951, signed by Major I. T. Mekhlis of the NKVD.

  ‘… summary of finding to the 23rd instant … Anna Mikhailovna Safanova, born Archangel 27.2.32 … Maxim Gorky Academy … reputation (see attached). Health: good … diptheria, aged 8 yrs. 3 mths … Rubella, 10yrs. 1 mth … No family history of genetic disorder. Party work: outstanding … Pioneers … Komsomol …’

  Kelso peeled back more layers. Sometimes they came away singly, sometimes fused in twos or threes. It was painstaking work. Through the glass partition he caught occasional glimpses of O’Brian, lugging suitcases across the outer office to the elevator doors, but he was too absorbed to pay much attention. What he was reading was as full a record of a nineteen-year-old girl’s life as it was possible for a secret police force to compile. There was something almost pornographic about it. Here was an account of every childhood ailment, details of her blood group (O), the state of her teeth (excellent), her height and weight and hair-colour (light auburn), her physical aptitude (‘in gymnastics she displays a particularly high aptitude …’), mental abilities (‘overall, in the 90th percentile …’), ideological correctness (‘the firmest grasp of Marxist theory …’), interviews with her doctor, coach, teachers, Komsomol group leader, schoolfriends.