Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 17

Jim was a communist. Everyone at the Journal was a communist. But Jim would never agree with the other communists, which seemed to make him immensely popular among them. People would come round and get sidetracked into spending long, hero-worshipping hours by his desk while he was unbelievably rude about them to their faces. Among these people were a group called the Chartists whom Eric Gordon, the editor, expected every Friday for a serious discussion involving the whole office. Eric was a communist too and had travelled to China as a journalist in the 1960s to help out with the Cultural Revolution. When he had objected to what he was seeing, the authorities had put him and his wife and child under house arrest. For five years. In a room that measured ten feet by twelve. And he was still a communist.

On Fridays when the big hitters rolled up, everyone was expected to contribute. Jim, whose hair seen closer up now seemed the colour of curry powder, would dazzle the room while Eric listened through the frosted glass to his protégé, too knowledgeable and wise to condescend to mere pyrotechnics. These were terribly detailed, recondite conversations as abstruse as the discussions on scripture during which I had been equally silent throughout my childhood. There was still the vexed issue of the Twentieth Party Congress. There was serious present business to do with Central America. There was the question of getting Stalin's twenty million victims down to something more manageable, like twelve million. There was always 1917 and Trotsky. While Jim waltzed through the upper echelons of theory and practice, I kept my head down and watched his elegant freckled fingers draw their merciless distinctions. Only once did I ever score a success, when the subject had moved to the First World War.

‘I don't know, but John Reed always seemed right to me,’ I said. ‘The First World War was about prophets.’

Jim, who was not to know that I was only aware of this because I was a fan of Reds, flashed me a vulpine grin which sent me floating up Parkway that evening eight feet off the ground. I had won a smile from a man who knew how to repair the flaws in dialectical materialism.