Читать книгу The Man Who Was Saturday - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 9
ОглавлениеMarch 8th. Women’s Day in the Soviet Union.
From the ice wastes of the north to the deserts of the south, from mid-Europe across eight time zones to the Pacific, women reigned in the country comprising one sixth of the world’s land masses.
In fretwork villages becalmed in Siberia, in the splendid dachas of the privileged outside Moscow, men made love with unaccustomed tenderness, dressed the children, cooked dinner, washed the dishes and bought carnations at ten roubles a blossom.
Beaming, Mother Russia loosened her stays and relaxed. Until the following day when the men became goats again. Or so the feminists asserted.
On a platform in a wooden hall that smelled of resin and carbolic to the south-west of Moscow near the Olympic Village on Michurinsky Prospect, the girl from Personnel was poised to make just such an assertion. As it was her first speech, apprehension fluttered inside her like a trapped bird.
While the introductory speaker, mannish and indignant, barked hatred of all men, Katerina Ilyina nervously smoothed her blue woollen dress, fashionable but not provocative in case it upset the clucking hens in the audience.
Svetlana Rozonova, sitting on the chair beside her, patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll slay them.’
Contemplating the forty women listening impassively to the speaker, Katerina thought that was extremely unlikely. If, like Svetlana, you were leggily tall with wild blonde hair and didn’t give a damn what people thought about you then, yes, you could slay them.
Katerina shifted on her rickety chair. It creaked so loudly that the speaker turned and glared. The trapped bird beat its wings with renewed agitation.
It was daunting enough making a first speech but when you knew that three women had already been expelled from the Soviet Union for promoting the same cause …. Like her they had been loyal to their country, like her all they had wanted to do was improve the lot of its women. Their expulsion had been wicked and it had sharpened the protest within her.
From her vantage point in the hall in which a stove was burning incandescently in one corner, Katerina surveyed her small band of rebellious womanhood. The turn-out was disappointing but what did you expect with an icy breeze still at large? Come the thaw and the women of Moscow would unfurl their banners of feminism.
The women were mostly young but there were one or two of the older generation among them padded with valenki boots and heavy coats, scarves folded on their laps.
Svetlana, wearing a wolfskin coat bought in Vladivostok by an Aeroflot pilot – when you were employed by Intourist as a courier you had such luck, not when you worked with foreign defectors – nudged her. ‘That one over there who looks like a maiden aunt. KGB – bet you five roubles.’
The maiden aunt, pepper-and-salt hair combed into a bun, was writing busily in a blue notebook. ‘No bet,’ Katerina whispered. Through a window she could see the fur hat and bulky shoulders of a militiaman. Ten policemen to control forty women. What did they expect, an armed uprising?
The speaker sat down. Katerina stood up. The bird’s wings beat inside her. ‘Good luck,’ from Svetlana. The faces had become a blur, stationary white moths.
When she opened her mouth the bird flew out. Her voice rang and words bore little resemblance to the ones she had rehearsed. She astonished herself. This Katerina Ilyina was a stranger. She crumbled her notes into a ball and dropped it on the floor.
‘Today is Women’s Day and today your man will be kind and charming. Perhaps he has already prepared the breakfast, bought you a carnation …. How very considerate of him. Perhaps even now he is making the beds, queuing at the gastronom ….’ She paused with the cunning of a seasoned orator. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he did just one of those things for the other 364 days of the year?’
Some women smiled at such an improbable vision. That was the trouble: too many women were indulgent; their plight was a radio and TV joke alongside absenteeism from work and graft.
Katerina hurried on. ‘They say we enjoy equality with men. They being men. All right, there is equality during the day when you and your husbands are both at work. But what about those long evenings after work. Is there equality then? Well, is there?’
A few heads shook.
‘While you scrub and sew and cook they enrich their minds in front of the television and refuel the inner man with firewater. What sort of equality is that? How can they talk about emancipation when fifty-one per cent of the work force are women? When eighty-three per cent of all doctors and health workers are women? When seventy-four per cent of all teachers are women?’
‘And what are you?’ a tough-looking woman wearing a red shawl demanded.
‘An adviser,’ Katerina retorted. My first heckler, she thought. ‘A seeker of women’s rights. Your rights,’ pointing at the woman. She felt quite capable of handling her. ‘Sad, isn’t it, that Soviet women are still cowed, yes cowed, by the fear of pregnancy. Not because you don’t want children,’ hastily, ‘because every woman wants children, but because you can’t afford them. Granted a mother is given twelve months off work after she’s had a baby. But if she wants to continue giving the child the care it needs she loses her job. And what does the State do about that? It provides facilities for abortion, that’s what. Only the other day I read about a woman in Kiev who had fifteen ….’
The woman with pepper-and-salt hair scribbled furiously.
The heckler in the red shawl shouted: ‘Tell her old man to buy some goloshes.’
A few women smirked at the reference to sheaths spurned by most men because the latex was so thick that it spoiled pleasure. For the first time Katerina faltered. Smut she hadn’t anticipated. Then she decided to invoke it. She was amazed at her adaptability.
She said resonantly: ‘In a truly liberated society there won’t be any place for remarks like that. Sex isn’t dirty, you know. Smut is merely a by-product of suppression.’
There, that should put paid to the potato-faced heckler. If she wasn’t interested in the movement why had she come? A paid trouble-maker?
Svetlana clapped her hands. ‘Hear, hear!’
Face screwed up with fury, the heckler rose to her feet and pointed a stubby finger at Svetlana. ‘I bet she’s fitted a few goloshes in her time.’
Svetlana had this effect on some women. Innocently she reminded them of girlhood dreams never fulfilled. Once she had worn a mini-skirt in the Arbat and women had leaped from doorways bunching their fists.
This time no one smiled and that might have been the end of it if Svetlana had allowed the heckler to get away with it; but that wasn’t Svetlana’s style. ‘What can she know about sex?’ she asked Katerina in a penetrating whisper. ‘Except on a very dark night.’
The heckler planted her hands on her hips. ‘Night,’ she proclaimed, ‘is for the modest, daytime for the shameless. There are some,’ glaring at Svetlana, ‘who don’t care whether they see the sun or the stars when they’re lying on their back.’
From the other side of the hall came a voice: ‘Sit down you with the face like a boot.’
Svetlana was rising to her feet but Katerina restrained her; sometimes she was wiser than her friend. What I need, she thought, is a rallying cry. She flattened her hands against her audience. ‘By arguing among ourselves we are playing into the hands of the male chauvinists.’
Chauvinistas pigs in the West. But Katerina didn’t feel that way about them: she liked men’s company. It was injustice that angered her.
The heckler, now under attack from her neighbours, finally sat down and Katerina moved triumphantly onto divorce – its alarming popularity – and the plight of the housewife with children abandoned by a husband for a rival down the assembly line.
She had intended to finish as she had started with an ironic reference to Women’s Day. Instead she heard herself saying: ‘The Revolution was supposed to have given women equality. It failed. Now another Revolution is under way. Women of the Soviet Union arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’
Desultory clapping. Well, there was surely nothing wrong with adapting Marx. Or was there? At that moment the militia moved in, three of them in long grey coats, from a door behind the platform.
Hands on the pistols at their hips, they stood beside the speakers menacing the audience.
Tossing her blonde hair, Svetlana said: ‘Hallo boys, and what can we do for you?’ while Katerina shouted: ‘Go on, shoot us.’
A fourth militiaman materialised, a tired-looking officer who needed a shave. He addressed the meeting. ‘Leave quietly by the door over there,’ pointing at the exit by the stove, ‘and you won’t come to any harm.’
Svetlana blew him a kiss.
Katerina, still raging, turned to the audience. ‘Take no notice of him: it’s Women’s Day.’
The officer nodded to a militiaman with a Tartar face and pock-marked skin. He clapped one hand over Katerina’s mouth and trapped her flailing arms with the other. Svetlana hit him on the head with her handbag before she, too, was pinioned.
More militiamen came onto the stage and Katerina thought: ‘This is monstrous, the way foreigners see us. ‘She bit one of the Tartar’s fingers. He swore but didn’t release his grip; oddly there was something gentle about his strength.
Two militiamen jumped from the stage, jackboots exploding puffs of dust on the floorboards. The women backed away knocking over chairs.
The officer shouted: ‘Take it easy, don’t panic. No action will be taken against you.’
Katerina continued to struggle but the Tartar’s arms were steel bands. The hand clamped to her mouth smelled of onions; perhaps he had been preparing a Women’s Day supper before being called out to put down a riotous assembly of female hooligans. Beside her Svetlana was vigorously kicking her captor, young with fat cheeks, with the heels of her magnificent boots.
The militiamen on the floor advanced steadily but placidly on the women. Regaining some of their dignity, they turned and made an orderly exit.
As the door opened the breeze brushed sparks from the glowing stove.
When the women had all gone – all, that was, except for the scribe with the pepper-and-salt hair – Katerina and Svetlana were released.
‘Well done, comrade,’ Svetlana said to the officer. ‘A great job, terrorising a handful of women. Guns against handbags. They’ll make you a Hero of the Soviet Union for this.’
The officer regarded her impassively.
While the Tartar sucked his bleeding finger, Katerina, fight gone out of her, said: ‘So what are the charges?’
They had several to choose from, the officer told her in his tired voice. Creating a breach of the peace, holding an assembly without permission, inciting violence. And how about hooligan behaviour for good measure? But he made no move to arrest them.
The exit door banged shut tossing dust and woodshavings against the stove.
The scribe mounted the platform and showed the officer a red ID card. He nodded and departed with his men.
‘After all, it is Women’s Day,’ she said, smiling at Katerina and Svetlana. ‘And now may I see your papers, please?’ She smelled of lavender water.
They showed her their blue work passbooks and internal passports containing their propiskas, their residential permits. The woman studied them cursorily, as though confirming what she already knew.
‘And now,’ Svetlana said, ‘may we examine your identification?’
‘If you wish.’ The woman dug in her handbag again. The red ID was militia, not KGB; that was something. ‘You know, my dear,’ she said to Katerina as she replaced the ID, ‘I agree with everything you say but not with the way you say it.’
Svetlana said: ‘What you mean is you don’t agree with freedom of speech.’
The woman tut-tutted. ‘Come now, let’s be realistic: this is the Soviet Union not outer space. We can’t allow public protest can we? That’s a phenomenon in the West.’
Svetlana buttoned up her wolfskin with exasperated precision. ‘Without protest we shall achieve nothing.’
‘But, my dear, a lot has been achieved without your assistance. You have no idea, when I was a girl ….’ Perhaps, Katerina thought, she had lost her man in the Great Patriotic War when twenty million souls had perished. ‘The point is that your goals must be achieved with subtlety. Nothing wrong with feminine wiles, is there?’
Katerina said: ‘Do you really believe that we are better off than we were?’
‘You must know that. Your life-style for instance. Clothes, entertainment, your relations with young men …. Why in my day we would have been shot for less.’
‘Then why,’ Katerina demanded, ‘can’t we speak our minds in public if we have such liberty? Why do the police have to be called in?’ She could still smell onions on her fingers.
‘I am merely advising you, nothing more. Just as an elder of your family might warn you.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘A maiden aunt?’ She touched Katerina’s arm. ‘I do hope you’ll take my advice, my dear.’ Apparently Svetlana was beyond redemption. ‘If not ….’
She didn’t finish the sentence. They all smelled smoke at the same time.
The fire was behind the stove. A tongue of flame snaked out from behind it, licked the stripped pine wall, fell back and returned to gain a hold. Resin crackled and spat.
The ‘maiden aunt’ took command. ‘Quick, the sand buckets.’
But the buckets were empty.
The flames leaped onto another wall. Smoke rolled towards the platform.
‘You,’ to Katerina, ‘call the fire brigade. You,’ to Svetlana, ‘get water from the rest-rooms.’ Grabbing a twig broom she jumped from the platform and advanced on the flames.
Katerina ran into the street. There, thank God, was a telephone kiosk. But when she reached it she discovered it had been vandalised. She ran around an apartment block, found another, dialled 01, fire emergency.
By the time she got back to the hall it was a bonfire. A crowd had collected and Svetlana and the ‘maiden aunt’ stood among them, snow melting at their feet. Sparks and ash spiralled into the grey sky. As the roof caved in the crowd sighed.
‘Happy Women’s Day,’ Svetlana said to Katerina.
‘So, what did you make of the maiden aunt?’ Katerina asked as they made their way to Vernadskogo metro station.
They had answered questions from a fresh detachment of militia, signed statements and finally been allowed to leave the smouldering wreckage.
Svetlana said: ‘She showed us the yellow card.’ Her pilot was a soccer fanatic, Moscow Torpedo. ‘Beware the red card next time. That means we’ll be sent off,’ she explained in case Katerina didn’t share her new wisdom. ‘Be warned, Kata.’
‘But why wasn’t she tougher with us? Why aren’t we locked up? After all we’ll be held responsible for burning the place down.’
Svetlana, hair escaping from her red and white woollen hat, glanced at her wristwatch and lengthened her stride, long thighs pushing at the wolfskin; she was hours late for a date with the pilot. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Let’s count our blessings.’
They passed a snow-patched playground in front of a new pink apartment block. Children were playing at war, Soviets against Germans. The Soviets were winning again.
‘What do you think will happen now?’ Katerina asked.
‘God knows. But take care, pussycat, take to your lair for a while.’
‘I can’t, it would deny everything the Movement stands for.’
‘Then get ready to spread the good word in a labour camp. Or outside the Soviet Union.’
Katerina thrust her hands into the pockets of her old grey coat, even shabbier than usual beside the wolfskin. ‘You forget things have changed since Tatyana Mamonova and the other two were expelled. There are letters about the plight of women every day in the newspapers.’
‘Whining letters, vetted letters. We’re inciting revolution. The Russians have had one of those and they don’t want another. If the Kremlin thinks we really pose a threat we’ll be hustled into exile and there won’t be a whisper about it in the media.’
‘But there would be in the West.’
‘So? Far less harmful than a forest-fire of protest in the Soviet Union.’
Katerina knew she was right and the knowledge saddened her. She was a patriot, didn’t they understand that? Of course they did, the final deterrent. The Motherland, don’t betray her. That’s why we put up with so much: it was something foreigners, confusing Country and Party, would never understand.
A man passed carrying a bunch of tulips, holding them like a baby to protect them from the breeze.
‘But,’ Katerina protested, ‘we’re doing this for Russia, for her women ….’
She remembered the old joke. Four men sitting in a bar nipping vodka. ‘Where are your women?’ asks a Western journalist. ‘The working classes aren’t allowed in here,’ replies one of the tipplers.
Things were changing, it was true. Five hundred of the toughest job categories had been designated Men Only and unmarried mothers were getting more money per child. But equality? It was light years away.
As they approached the metro station Katerina said anxiously to her friend: ‘But surely you aren’t thinking of quitting?’ It was unthinkable.
‘Why not? We won’t get anywhere.’
‘Not you!’
Svetlana turned and faced Katerina. ‘Well, not until they do something about those goloshes.’
Laughing, they slid five-kopek pieces into the slot in the turnstile and ran down the warm throat of the metro station.
Katerina had worked at the weekend updating the files on the defectors so she had a free day. In view of events that morning she thought it might be her last free day for a long time.
On the way home she broke her journey to pick up some Caspian caviar that Lev Koslov, her boss, had promised to supply for the party that evening.
Koslov was a past master at obtaining defitsitny goods. The only drawback was that he expected rewards – a pinch here, a fumble there. So far she had eluded his inquisitive fingers but a two-kilo tin of glistening black pearls, as rare these days as swallows in winter, that would take some evasion. At least he wouldn’t be able to come to the party: today being what it was he would have to dance attendance on his wife.
When she entered the tiny office she shared with Sonya Ivanovna the first thing she noticed on her desk was a vase of mimosa, a cloud of powdery yellow blossom that smelled of almonds. Koslov making his play! Under the vase was an envelope.
Katerina slit it with a paper-knife. The note inside said: ‘Enjoy your day.’ It was signed Robert Calder.
Katerina leaned back in her chair and stared at an avuncular Lenin on the wall. Since she had seen Calder at Kreiber’s funeral she had wondered about him.
Like the rest of her flock at the Institute he was a traitor and therefore contemptible. But Calder displayed qualities a cut above the rest of the turncoats. A sense of humour for one thing; she smiled as she remembered him stuffing the sugared redcurrants into his mouth, like a guilty schoolboy. And there was strength in his face that hadn’t quite gone out to grass.
Why had a man like Calder deserted his country?
It bothered her.
It also bothered her that she had come to work in this futile place. She had only been here for a month but already it depressed her. The legion of lost souls sifting foreign journals for insights into their country’s policies. Eyewash. The KGB grabbed shifts in policies before the policy-makers shifted them.
So why had she applied for the job? Come clean, Katerina Ilyina, blat, the influence that accompanies position. Bottom-of-the-scale blat, perhaps, but already she had a few perks – tip-offs about consignments of luxury goods in the stores, the promise of a one-roomed apartment of her own, the passbook that asserted she was someone to be reckoned with, a hint that one day she might be allowed to travel abroad.
With her gift for languages, English, French and German, she had romped through the academic interviews. What occasionally bothered her was the way she had weathered all the other interrogations. Why hadn’t her involvement with the feminist movement damned her? Could they possibly understand that her belief in the rights of women was not a contradiction of patriotism? She doubted it.
The knock on the door startled her. It was probably Sonya returning from one of her furtive perusals of Western magazines, eyes shining behind her spectacles at the discovery of some new and wonderful decadence. Presumably she had knocked in case Koslov was seeking his rewards.
Katerina called out: ‘Come in,’ and Calder walked in.
He seemed to fill the room.
He said: ‘I wanted to make sure you got the flowers.’
She touched the saffron blossoms. ‘I got them, thank you, they’re beautiful. But ….’ She had only spoken to Calder twice since the funeral.
‘I’m glad you like them.’
‘I love all flowers. Muscovites are like that – they see too few of them. Soon we’ll see snow flowers.’
‘Snow flowers?’
‘In the winter people fall and die from exposure. The snow covers them and they are lost until the thaw. When the snow melts they’re found perfectly preserved …. Is anything the matter Comrade Calder?’
‘No, nothing.’ Calder smoothed the frown from his forehead with his fingertips. ‘I think I prefer mimosa. I suppose it comes from Georgia.’
‘Probably. Somewhere in the south, anyway. Have you seen much of the Soviet Union, Comrade Calder?’
‘Don’t you know?’ His smile tightened.
She skated over that one. ‘Do you feel you’ve been accepted?’
‘People have been very kind.’
What sort of an answer was that?
‘Why don’t you come to a party this evening?’ she said.
