Читать книгу The Judas Code - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 10
ОглавлениеJuly 11, 1938. A wondrous Sunday in Moscow with memories of winter past and prospects of winter to come melted by the sun. The golden cupolas of the Kremlin floated in a cloudless sky, crowds queued for kvas and icecream and in Gorky Park the air smelled of carnations.
In a forest behind a river beach thirty miles outside the city a blond young man who would one day be asked to take part in the most awesome conspiracy of modern times was courting a black-haired beauty named Anna Petrovna.
If anyone had hinted about his future role to Viktor Golovin he would have dismissed them as a madman. And abruptly at that because it was his nineteenth birthday and he hoped to celebrate it by making love for the first time in his life.
It was a daunting prospect. In the first place he feared his inexperience might be ridiculed; in the second, being a serious young man – his solemn demeanour made the laughter that occasionally transfigured his features into an explosion – he believed that the act of love should involve more than casual pleasure. It should, he reasoned, be a seal of permanency. But did he truly desire permanency with Anna Petrovna? And if he didn’t wasn’t he betraying his beliefs?
Standing under a silver birch where coins of light shifted restlessly on the thin grass he bent and kissed her on the lips and gazed into her eyes, seeking answers. She stared boldly back and gave none. He slipped his arm round her waist and they walked deeper into the forest.
The trouble was that although he loved her there were aspects of her character that angered him. Not only was she supremely self-confident, as any girl desired by half the male students at Moscow University was entitled to be, but she was politically assertive, and dangerously so. She believed that Joseph Stalin had made a travesty of Marxist-Leninism and she wasn’t afraid to say so. But surely love should transcend such considerations.
He glanced down at her; she was small but voluptuously shaped with full breasts that he had caressed for the first time two nights ago, and there was a trace of the gypsy in her, an impression heightened today by her red skirt and white blouse. She was three months older than him and unquestionably far more experienced.
She smiled at him and said: ‘You’re looking very serious, Viktor Golovin. Let’s sit down for a while and I’ll see if I can make you smile.’
She tickled his lips with a blade of grass as he lay back, hands behind his head, and tried not to smile. He could feel the warmth of her body and see the swell of her breasts.
Finally he grinned.
‘That smile,’ she said, ‘is your key.’
‘To what?’
‘To anything you want.’
She unbuttoned his white, open-neck shirt ‘to let the fresh air get to you’, and he wondered if her previous words were an invitation and whether he should accept in view of his misgivings about her character, but when she kissed him … such a knowing kiss … and when he felt the pressure of her thighs on his and heard her sigh his principles fled.
He lost his virginity with surprising ease. None of the fumbling and misdirected endeavour that he had feared. And, at the time, such was his need that it didn’t occur to him that his accomplishment owed not a little to her expertise.
She helped him with his clothes. She lay back, skirt hitched to her hips, legs spread, breasts free. She touched him, stroked him, guided him. And when he was inside her, marvelling that at last it had happened, wondering at the oiled ease of it all, she regulated their movements. ‘Gently … stop a moment … harder, faster … now, now …’
For a while they didn’t speak. Then, when he had taken a bottle of Narzan mineral water from his knapsack and they were sipping it from cardboard cups, she said: ‘It was the first time for you, wasn’t it?’
As though it implied retarded development. But he had refused to conform with the sexual boasting of the students obsessed with masculinity. If they were to be believed they coupled every night, fuelled on lethal quantities of vodka. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was. Should I be ashamed?’
‘Ashamed? Why should you be ashamed? You’re young.’
So was she and for a moment the obvious question about her experience hovered between them; but he knew the answer and then, in her way, she answered it: ‘At our age a girl is much older than a boy.’ She stroked his hair. ‘You’re very attractive, Viktor, you’re not … not so obvious as the others.’
‘You mean I’m insignificant?’
‘Far from it. You’re tall and you’re slim and your eyes always seem to be searching for the truth. I think you’re going to have terrible trouble with your conscience in the future.’
He grinned at her. ‘I didn’t just now.’
‘It’s a pity that politically you’re such a conformist.’
Here we go, he thought and said: ‘What’s so wrong with that? I’m only conforming to communism, the beliefs that have rescued our country from tyranny.’
‘Rescued it? Twenty years ago perhaps. But now we’ve got a tyranny far worse than anything the Tsars ever dreamed up.’
‘Watch that tongue of yours, Anna, or it will lead you to Siberia.’
Triumphantly she exclaimed: ‘You see, you’re proving my point. What sort of a country is it when you can’t say what you believe?’
‘A better country than Germany,’ Viktor said quickly, annoyed with himself for having given her ammunition. ‘At least it’s not a crime here for a Jew to observe the Sabbath.’
‘Anyone with a weak argument always resorts to comparisons.’ She stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘You must have heard about the purges …’
Of course he’d heard the stories. But he didn’t believe them. Iconoclasm was a permanent resident of student society. He preferred to believe the evidence around him that Lenin, and now Stalin, had helped Mother Russia to rise from her knees and given her self-respect. Not that he believed that the Revolution had been quite as heroic as the historians would have you believe – that was for children and none the worse because of it; but he did believe in equality. He knew older people who had once lived on potato skins, black bread and tea.
‘They say he’s quite mad you know.’ She began to walk back towards the beach.
‘Who’s mad?’ picking up his knapsack and following her.
‘Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known as Stalin.’
‘They also say that genius is akin to madness.’
‘A psychopath.’
‘One of those words created to disguise our ignorance of the human condition.’
How pompous we students can be, he reflected.
Through the birch trees he could see a glint of water and, faintly, he could hear the babble from the beach and the tattoo of ping-pong balls on the tables beside the sand.
‘I wonder,’ Anna said, ‘just what it would take to convince you.’ She kicked a heap of old brown leaves and her red skirt swirled. ‘Blood?’
‘Why do you talk treason all the time? Why can’t you enjoy the benefits the system has brought us?’
‘It has certainly brought you benefits, Viktor Golovin.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
But he knew. For an orphan he had enjoyed a protected upbringing; and for no apparent reason his foster parents seemed to have rather more than their share of communal benefits. An apartment near the University on the crest of the Lenin Hills, a small dacha in the village of Peredelkino where the writers lived. Not bad for a librarian and his wife.
‘Your privileges are your cross.’
Would she always be like this after making love? ‘I’ve been lucky, I admit.’
‘It must be difficult to hold forth about equality when you’ve had such luck.’
‘Luck! Everyone has a share of it. The trick is knowing what to do with it when you get it.’
‘Nonsense. Not everyone has luck. It isn’t lucky to be an army officer these days.’
‘Ah, the purges again.’
‘Purges, a euphemism. Massacres is a better word.’
They emerged from the green depths of the forest into bright light. Beyond the table-tennis players and the fretted-wood restaurant where you could buy beer, kvas and fizzy cherryade, pies and cold meats, the beach was packed with Muscovites unfolding in the sun. They shed their clothes, they shed the moods of winter. Flesh burned bright pink but no one seemed to care. Rounding a curve in the river came a white steamboat nosing aside the calm water.
The doubts that had reached Viktor in the forest dissolved. Ordinary people wouldn’t have been able to enjoy themselves like this before 1917. Possessively, Viktor, lover and philosopher, took Anna’s arm.
‘But do you?’ She must have been talking while he savoured the fruits of socialism. Impatiently, she said: ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’
‘I don’t want to hear anything more about purges.’
She pulled her arm away. ‘Of course you don’t. You don’t want anything to interfere with your beautiful, cossetted life. Least of all truth.’
‘I don’t believe it is the truth.’ Her attitude nettled him. ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’
They sat at a scrubbed wooden table and drank beer from fluted brown bottles. Around them families ate picnic lunches and guzzled; in one corner a plump mother was feeding a baby at the breast.
‘I was asking,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t listening, that is, whether you would like to see proof of what I’ve been saying.’
‘If it will please you.’
‘Please me!’ She leaned fiercely across the table. ‘It certainly won’t please me. But it will give me a certain satisfaction to see that smug expression wiped off your face.’
‘Not so long ago my eyes were always searching for the truth …’
‘In everything except politics.’
‘What you’re alleging is more than political.’
‘I can’t understand how you’re so blind. Everyone knows that Stalin is killing off all his enemies, real and imagined. They say the army is powerless now because he’s murdered all the generals.’
Some of the men and women sharing the long table were looking curiously at them. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Viktor whispered, covering her hand with his to soften the words, knowing that any moment now she would accuse him of cowardice.
‘I will for your sake,’ which was the same thing. ‘We don’t want you thrown into Lubyanka, do we?’
A man with a walrus moustache who was peeling an orange pointed his knife at them and said: ‘Cell 28. I spent three years there. Give my love to the rats.’
Viktor said: ‘You see, everyone can hear you even when you lower your voice.’ He felt faintly ashamed of his caution; but really there was no need to: if she had been speaking the truth then, yes, he would have sided with her.
‘Am I to speak in whispers all my life?’
He thought: Yes, if I’m to share my life with you. But the possibility was becoming less attractive by the minute; he seemed to have expended a lot of ideals with his sexual passion.
The man with the walrus moustache bit into his orange and, with juice dribbling down his chin, sat listening. The woman in the corner transferred the baby to her other plump breast.
Viktor said: ‘There are a lot of informers about. Even I admit that.’
‘I suppose you think they’re a necessary evil.’
He thought about it and said: ‘Frankly, yes I do,’ waiting for her voice to rise another octave.
Instead she spoke softly. ‘I meant what I said, Viktor. I will show you the proof of what I say. Or rather I will arrange for you to see it.’
The man with the walrus moustache frowned and edged closer, evidently believing that he had qualified to take part in the conversation.
Viktor tilted the bottle, drained it and wiped the froth from his lips. ‘Make the arrangements,’ he said.
‘What arrangements?’ asked the man with the walrus moustache. He spat out an orange pip. ‘I remember there was one rat who got quite tame. I called him Boris.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
Without speaking, they made their way along the dusty path beside the river. The bushes to their right were the changing quarters and from behind them came shrieks and giggles, the smack of a hand on bare flesh.
As they neared the bus terminal she said: ‘You know Nikolai Vasilyev?’
‘Your private tutor? I know of him. Isn’t he supposed to be a great admirer of Trotsky?’
‘He believes Stalin cheated him. He also believes that one day Stalin will murder him.’
‘Another of your psychopaths by the sound of it.’
‘He’s a very fine man,’ Anna said and from the tone of her voice Viktor guessed that he was, or had been, her lover.
‘Does he teach you Trotsky’s theories?’
‘Sometimes when our sociology lesson is finished he talks about what he believes in. The dreams that peasants dreamed before Stalin made nightmares out of them.’
Exasperated, Viktor punched the palm of one hand with his fist and said: ‘This proof. Tell me about it.’
‘Nikolai’s best friend is an army officer, a captain. The captain’s father was a general.’
‘Was?’
‘He was executed by a firing squad along with thirty other officers. His crime – he questioned the disposition of Soviet troops on the eastern borders. He was proved right when the troops clashed with the Japanese at Manchukuo ten days ago. But the fact that he was right merely made his crime worse.’
‘Perhaps he was executed for treason. Or treasonable talk,’ Viktor said.
Anna ignored him. ‘Nikolai knows where the executions take place. And he will know through his friend when the next one will be. For all I know they take place every day,’ she added.
‘In the imagination of Nikolai Vasilyev and his friend.’
‘There’s only one answer: you must see for yourself. If you have the stomach for it.’
Then he couldn’t refuse.
*
In the red and white coach packed with Muscovites radiating heat from their sun-burn Viktor considered Anna’s jibes about his privileged upbringing. In fact it had bothered him long before she had mentioned it.
He had been born in 1920 when the Red Army was still fighting its enemies in the civil war that followed the Revolution. There were many orphans in those days but not many who had the good fortune to be farmed out almost immediately to a respectable but childless young couple.
Viktor stood up to give his seat to a pregnant woman who had pushed her way through the strap-hanging passengers. The bus bounced as the hard tyres passed over pot-holes in the roads, but at least the crush of bodies stopped you from falling.
From what he had subsequently gathered the Golovins had become remarkably self-sufficient in the dangerous, disordered streets of Moscow. They had found a small house in a relatively tranquil suburb; his father had been given a job at the library where he helped Bolshevik authors re-write history; his mother had devoted herself to the upbringing of little Viktor.
In photographs he looked an uncommonly smug child, scrubbed, combed, smiling complacently at the cameraman. It was a paradox that such self-assurance should have led to the self-doubts he was experiencing now.
It wasn’t until he was sixteen that his father had told him that he was adopted. And it was only then that he began to question the uneventful security of his life.
To the inevitable question: ‘Who were my parents?’ his father, bearded and patient, replied, ‘We don’t know. There were thousands of children without parents in those days. You see it wasn’t just the men who were killed in the Revolution and the fighting after it: women fought side by side with them.’
‘But how did you find me?’ Viktor asked.
‘We didn’t find you. You were allocated to us. We knew by this time that my wife, your mother … foster mother? … no, let’s always call her your mother … we knew that she couldn’t have a child so we went to an orphanage. You had been taken there by an old woman who left without giving any details about your background. Perhaps she didn’t know them; perhaps she was your babushka; we shall never know.’ His father put his hand on Viktor’s shoulder. ‘But we do know that we were very lucky.’ A pause. ‘And I think you were very lucky too.’
But it wasn’t the mystery of his birth that bothered Viktor because it was true, a baby could easily have lost its identity in those chaotic days when a new creed was being spawned. What bothered him was the cloistered life that he and his parents lived; questioned on this subject his father had no real answers.
‘We’re decent, upright citizens,’ he said in his calm voice. ‘Your mother keeps a good home.’ Which was true; in her early forties when Viktor was sixteen, she was a fair-haired, handsome woman who cooked well and was obsessively house-proud. ‘And I work hard,’ which Viktor later discovered wasn’t quite so true because his father had taken to nipping vodka behind the bookshelves in the library off Pushkin Square. ‘So why shouldn’t we have our security? We’ve earned it.’
When he was seventeen Viktor pointed out that the apartment on the Lenin Hills, to which they had just moved, and the dacha were hardly commensurate with a librarian’s income. And it was then that he first heard about his father’s biography of Tolstoy. ‘I was given a considerable advance by my publishers,’ he confided.
‘Enough to support two homes?’
‘They have high hopes of my project.’
Viktor’s doubts were assuaged until he discovered that the great work consisted of an exercise book half filled with jumbled notes and a letter from the State-controlled publishers saying that they would consider the manuscript on its merits when it was delivered. Which, judging by the scope of Tolstoy’s life and the paucity of his father’s notes, wouldn’t be this century.
The bus swung round a corner and the standing passengers swayed together, laughing, still drunk with the sun. Viktor loved them all; but he wasn’t one of them – his parents had seen to that.
At school he had subtly been kept apart from other children. Even now at university where he was studying languages – English, German and Polish (he could have taken a couple more because foreign tongues gave up their secrets to him without a struggle) – his privileged circumstances created suspicion.
Through the grimy windows of the coach he could see blue and pink wooden cottages tucked away among birch and pines; then the first scattered outposts of Moscow, new apartment blocks climbing on the shoulders of old houses.
Pride expanded inside him. So much achieved during his lifetime! What scared him was the gathering threat to the achievement. War. Fermented in the east by Japan and in the west by Germany. Viktor, orphan of war, was a preacher of peace. Russia had most certainly had her fill of war, but would the belligerents of the world let her rest?
By the time he and Anna alighted from the bus and made their way towards her lodgings in the Arbat her mood had changed. She seemed to regret what she had proposed.
‘Of course you don’t have to go,’ she said and, when he protested, she insisted: ‘No, I mean it. You’re entitled to your opinions. I was being possessive.’
‘No, I must go,’ confident that in any case there would be nothing to see.
It was early evening and heat trapped in the narrow streets of leaning houses engulfed them. In the distance they could hear the rumbling of a summer storm.
She slipped on the cobblestones and he held her and she leaned against him.
She said: ‘There’s no one in the house. Would you like to come in and I’ll make some tea?’ and he said he would, but he wasn’t thinking about tea and his double standards surprised him; an hour ago they had been snapping at each other like wayward husband and nagging wife.
She slid the key into the door of the tenement owned by a baker and his wife. The stairs creaked beneath their feet, splintering the silence.
Her room was a revelation. He had expected garish touches, photographs of film stars, vivid posters from Georgia, beads and powder scattered on the dressing-table. But it was a shy, chaste place and he wondered if he had misjudged her. On the mantelpiece above the iron fireplace stood a photograph of her parents, and the only beads on the dressing table were those strung on a rosary … So even she had to admit that you were still free in Russia to worship whatever god you chose.
She lit a gas-ring in the corner of the room, put a blackened kettle on it and sliced a lemon. ‘What are we doing this evening?’ she asked.
‘Whatever you like.’ He was fascinated by the change in her.
‘You know something? You’re the first man who’s ever been up here.’
He believed her.
‘I always kept it reserved for … for someone special.’
‘I’m honoured,’ he said inadequately.
‘How do you like your tea?’
‘Hot and strong,’ he told her.
‘I wish I had a samovar. Perhaps one day. But I have a little caviar.’
She poured the tea in two porcelain cups and spread caviar on fingers of black bread.
As he sipped his tea, sharp with lemon, he said softly: ‘You know you really should take care. Your talk, it’s too bold. It will get you into trouble.’
‘So, who would care?’ She was estranged from her parents; he didn’t know why.
‘I would care.’
‘But we must be free, Viktor.’
‘Aren’t we?’
She shook her head sadly. ‘Let’s not start that again.’ She popped a finger of bread loaded with glistening black roe into her mouth.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. After I’ve been to this place that Professor Nikolai Vasilyev babbles about I’ll prove to you that this is a free country.’
‘You really believe it, don’t you?’
‘We’ll each try to prove our points.’
‘And yet by warning me to watch my tongue you disprove yours … But enough of that. Here, have some more tea.’ She poured a scalding stream into his cup. ‘How about going to the Tchaikovsky?’
Her suggestion was hardly inventive: they went there most evenings since they had paired off together. It was a student café, strident with debate and none too clean; but the beer was cheap and the company stimulating.
‘Why not?’
‘Do you mind looking the other way while I change?’
He stared through the window thinking how strange it was that a girl who only that afternoon had lain half naked beneath him in the forest should suddenly be overcome by modesty.
Suddenly thunder cracked overhead. The first blobs of rain hit the window and slid down in rivulets. Behind him he heard the rustle of clothing.
Another crack of thunder and he turned and she was naked and he reached for her
*
The summons came ten days later.
His father took the call in the living room.
‘It’s that girl,’ he said, exuding displeasure, and handed the receiver to Viktor.
‘Do you still want to go through with it?’ Anna asked.
‘Of course. Where shall I meet you?’ He wanted to stop her from committing any indiscretion on the phone. But why should I worry?
‘Nikolai says—’
‘Forget about Nikolai,’ he broke in. ‘Just tell me where to meet you.’
‘At the Tchaikovsky in half an hour. But Viktor—’
‘I’ll be there.’ He hung up.
He glanced at his watch. Six pm.
‘That girl,’ his father said, stroking his grey-streaked beard. ‘Anna, isn’t it?’
‘How did you know her name?’
‘I’ve heard you talk about her.’
Viktor who didn’t remember ever discussing her said: ‘Well, what about her?’
‘I’ve heard,’ his father said, ‘that she’s a bit of a firebrand.’ His voice didn’t carry authority; but it was a voice that wasn’t used to being contradicted.
‘Really? Who told you that?’
‘We get a lot of people from the university in the library.’
‘And they thought fit to discuss your son’s friends with you? Your adopted son,’ he added because he was angry.
‘Just one of your friends. They seemed to think that she wasn’t desirable company.’
‘What were they implying? That she was a whore?’
‘Viktor!’ exclaimed his mother who had just entered the room, clean and bright from a good dusting that morning.
‘I’m sorry, mama, I didn’t know you were there.’
‘What sort of excuse is that? I won’t have that sort of language in my house.’ With one finger she dabbed at a trace of pollen that had fallen from a vase of roses on the table.
Viktor turned to his father. ‘Why did they think she was undesirable, whoever they are?’
‘Apparently she has an ungovernable tongue.’ He had a way of emphasing long words as though he had just invented them.
‘She’s got spirit if that’s what you mean.’
‘Misdirected by all accounts. I really think, Viktor, that you should give her up.’
‘There must be some nice girls in your class,’ his mother said.
What would they say, Viktor wondered, if they knew that he had celebrated his release from celibacy by making love to her twice in one day? Twice! He almost felt like telling them; but that wouldn’t be fair, they had been good to him in their way.
His father said: ‘Wasn’t there some gossip about her and her private tutor?’
‘Was there? I didn’t know.’
‘Your father’s only telling you for your own good,’ his mother said.
Viktor wondered if his father had been fortified by a few nips of vodka. ‘And I’m grateful,’ he said stiffly, ‘but I’m nineteen years old and capable of making my own judgements.’
His father drummed his fingers on a bookcase crammed with esoteric volumes discarded by the library. ‘You’re going to see her now?’
‘You were listening to my conversation, you know perfectly well I am.’ He consulted his watch again. ‘And I’m late.’
His father’s fingers returned to his beard but the combing movements were quicker. ‘You realise you are displeasing your mother and me. Do you think we deserve that?’
Addressing his mother, Viktor said: ‘Look, you’ve been wonderful to me. If it wasn’t for you I might be living in a hovel, working on an assembly line; I might even be dead. I’ve never been disobedient before. But I’m a man now. And I have the right to choose my friends. After all, it is a free country. Isn’t it?’ turning to his father.
His father said: ‘I’ve warned you.’
‘And your warning has been considered and dismissed.’ Viktor kissed his mother on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry but there it is: your little boy has grown up. And now I must rush.’
He took a tramcar to the centre of the city. It was another fine day, cumulus cloud piled high on the horizon. Two more months and the jaws of winter would begin to close. But Viktor didn’t mind the long bitter months. Perhaps his parents had been Siberians. That would account for his blue eyes.
He walked briskly through the Arbat, past sleeping dogs and a group of children wearing scarlet scarves and red stars on their shirts and old people in black becalmed in the past on the pavements.
She was waiting for him at a table by an open window. A breeze breathed through the window stirring her black hair. She wore a yellow dress with jade beads at her neck. She was smoking a cardboard-tipped cigarette with nervous little puffs.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’
‘We haven’t time. Come, we can’t talk here.’ Outside she said: ‘You have to promise me, Viktor, that whatever you see you won’t tell a soul. You won’t say where you’ve been and you won’t say who with. Do you promise?’
‘Of course, it was understood anyway. Where am I going anyway?’
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘To a place of execution.’
Apprehension was germinating inside him: she seemed so confident. ‘How do we get there?’ he asked. ‘Wherever there is.’
She took his arm, propelling him along the pavements until they arrived at Theatre Square. There they caught a No 18 tram to the Kaluzhskaya Zastava and thence a No 7 to the Sparrow Hills.
‘And now?’ He looked at her questioningly, apprehensively. An old grey limousine answered his question. Anna pulled open the rear door and pushed him in. The car moved off, leaving her behind.
The driver had cropped brown hair and his accent was Ukrainian. ‘I have one request,’ he said, ‘and it’s up to you whether or not you obey it. But I’d be grateful if you didn’t take too much notice of where we’re going.’
‘You seem to take it all rather lightly,’ Viktor said, ‘if we’re going to see what Anna claims we’re going to see.’
‘Is there any other way? In any case Anna says, through Nikolai Vasilyev, that you don’t believe there are any restrictions in the Soviet Union. If that is so why should I bother too much about what you see?’
‘But you do bother …’
The shoulders in front of him, clothed in blue serge despite the heat, shrugged. ‘It’s immaterial. If you go telling tales then we’ll kill you.’
The driver handed Viktor a flask. ‘A little firewater, perhaps, to prepare you for what lies ahead?’
Viktor took the flask. He had only drunk vodka once and had considered himself quite sober until he had walked into the fresh air, whereupon he had collapsed. He took a sip and handed the flask back to the crop-haired enigma in front of him.
The vodka felt like molten metal in his stomach.
From the crown of the Sparrow Hills, he could see the valley of the Moskva River, fields of vegetables, Tikhvinski Church, the Novo-Dyevitchi Convent and to the right, on the wooded slopes of the river, the Merchants’ Poor House. It all looked very peaceful in the evening haze.
The Ukrainian took a rambling route as though trying to confuse anyone following. In the outlying suburbs where the Tartars had once lived men were coming home from work to wives and children standing at the doors of houses surrounded by wooden fences threaded with dog roses. The homecomings had an ordered rhythm to them that soothed Viktor’s doubts. The proposition that he was being taken to a mass execution became ludicrous. And yet … Why had Anna gone to such elaborate lengths? What possible motive could the Ukrainian have for taking him on this confusing journey? Perhaps some bizarre mime would be staged; perhaps they would claim they had missed the killing and show him some bloodstains. Well, they would have to do better than that.
‘Another nip?’ The Ukrainian handed back the flask, silver with a family crest engraved on it. Viktor took another sip; if the Ukrainian was trying to get him drunk he had another think coming. But the liquor did embolden him to ask: ‘What sort of farce is this that we’re acting?’
The Ukrainian laughed, massaging the bristles on his scalp. There were a couple of incipient creases on his neck; he wasn’t so young. ‘A tragedy,’ he said, ‘not a farce. Grand Guignol.’
‘You don’t seem to be taking it too tragically.’
‘That way lies madness.’
‘And how do you know about these … alleged executions?’
‘Because, my dear Viktor, I have become a desk-bound soldier, a military clerk, after being wounded in a skirmish with the Japanese. But a clerk with a difference. I was considered bright enough to be enrolled in military intelligence known to one and all as the GRU. Do you know how the GRU came into existence?’
‘It seems irrelevant.’
‘But then you wouldn’t know, would you, because it was born of defeat and defeats don’t have any place in our history books.’ He swung the old car round a bend in a dirt road, sending up a cloud of dust. ‘In 1920 the Poles invaded the Soviet Union and stormed through my country. The Ukraine, that is,’ he explained. ‘They were thrown out eventually; then Lenin made a mistake.’ He turned his head and grinned. ‘Heresy, Viktor Golovin? But a mistake it certainly was. His intelligence, the Cheka Registry Department, got it all wrong and told him the Poles were ripe for revolution. As ripe as green apples as it turned out. The Red Army attacked Poland and got torn to ribbons for their pains. As a result the GRU was formed and a certain Yan Karlovich Berzin was put in charge.’
Viktor said: ‘What’s all this got to do with executions?’
‘The GRU is in charge of military purges, even though we’re only a branch of the Secret Police, the NKVD. The NKVD itself didn’t do too badly in the purging business under a gentleman named Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda. But apparently he didn’t purge quite diligently enough and he was shot in Lubyanka Prison. Now they have a fellow named Nikolai Yezhov in charge. He’s doing a good job – seeing off about thirty a day, they estimate – but it’s only a question of time before they cart him off to Lubyanka.’
‘I don’t believe any of this,’ Viktor said.
‘Where have you been, comrade? In solitary confinement?’
‘I’ve heard the rumours, of course.’
‘You should listen to rumours. They’re the alleyways in the maze surrounding the truth.’
‘If what you say is true – and I don’t for one second believe it is’ – Or did he? – ‘then why are you honouring me with a visit?’
‘Because I’m in love with Anna Petrovna. So is my friend Nikolai Vasilyev. So, I believe, are you. Wouldn’t you do anything she asked?’
Viktor thought about it, then said firmly: ‘No.’
‘Ah, but you are young. Perhaps you are the sort of young man she needs. Someone who will stand up to her.’
The Ukrainian’s words surprised Viktor: he seemed to be the sort of man who would stand up to anyone.
The Ukrainian went on: ‘But I assure you that what I’m doing is not entirely selfless. You see I think you’ll be so horrified, so disgusted, that you’ll do something rash – and leave Anna to me. And Nikolai Vasilyev —’ He circumvented a cow that had wandered into the road. ‘There is another reason,’ he said abruptly, his tone flinty. ‘You see I’ve heard all about you from Nikolai. You’re something of a hothouse plant, aren’t you? And in my book naïvety, feigned or otherwise, is as much to blame for tyranny as greed or corruption or any of the other usual culprits.’
Viktor shivered; but he knew he still had to attack. ‘By your own admission you play your part in this blood-letting. Are you proud of that, comrade?’
‘I have saved more than I have sentenced to death. It’s all I can do.’
‘So you select the victims?’
‘I don’t intend to be cross-examined.’ His voice was suddenly weary.
‘Not a very proud achievement, to condemn men to death and come to terms with yourself by saving a few souls.’
‘Then you believe me?’
Too late, Viktor realised that he had been manoeuvred into accepting the Ukrainian’s claims. ‘And what if I tell the authorities that you took me to this place of execution?’
‘Then you, too, would be executed. Comrade Stalin doesn’t like to have people in the know around too long. Yan Berzin’s days are numbered. So are my own. So, you see, I don’t really care what you do or say.’
He pulled into a track leading to a farmyard and parked the car in a stable. ‘And now, my patriotic young friend, we walk.’
The Ukrainian was shorter than Viktor had imagined him to be. He wore a brown tweed jacket and grey trousers and an open-neck grey shirt making Viktor self-conscious about the alpaca jacket that had looked so smart in the shop in the Alexander Arcade.
He also walked with an unnatural stiffness and when he saw Viktor staring at him he said: ‘The bullet hit me in the spine. I wear a steel corset. Ridiculous, isn’t it? But perhaps it will stop another bullet one day. Except that in Lubyanka they pump them into the back of your head.’ They turned into the dirt road and headed east. ‘You’re not a very curious young man, are you? I suppose it’s part of your upbringing. But you haven’t even asked me my name. It’s Gogol, like the author. Mikhail Gogol.’
Bats fluttered in the calm air, swallows skimmed the road ahead of them. In the fields peasants were scything lush green grass. A bearded muzhik wearing brown carpet slippers wandered past, eyes vacant.
‘I’d better tell you where we’re going and what we’re going to do,’ Mikhail Gogol told Viktor. ‘We’re on the outskirts of a village that was once called Tzaritzuino-Datchnoye. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘Not a thing,’ replied Viktor, with the terrible certainty growing upon him that it soon would.
‘Well, the village was given by Peter the Great to Prince Kantemir of Moldavia. In 1774 Catherine the Second – Catherine the Great – bought it back for Russia. She started to build a huge dacha here but abandoned it. There’s a theatre – also unfinished – next to it and there are lakes, lawns, gazebos … but all overgrown. In fact the place is a jungle,’ Gogol said.
‘Why the history lesson?’
‘You must know your background. One day, perhaps, you’ll write about it.’
‘I might,’ Viktor said. ‘But it will be fiction.’
‘Touché.’
Gogol stopped for a moment, holding his back as though it pained him. He thumped the base of his spine with his fist. ‘I can’t walk very far these days. Would you believe that I was once an athlete? Hundred metres sprint champion at the military academy in Kiev?’
‘Why are we going to a decayed dacha?’ Viktor asked.
‘To witness a massacre, of course. I forgot to tell you why Catherine abandoned the place. It was because it reminded her of a coffin.’
*
From behind his cover Viktor could just see the dacha over the top of the ivy-covered wall surrounding it. And it did resemble a coffin. A long, low building surmounted with spires that looked like funeral candles.
He was crouching behind a clump of dusty-leaved laurel bushes. Facing him, across a stony path, a massive wooden door, studded with iron spikes, opened into the wall; set into it was a smaller door; both were guarded by a grey-uniformed sentry who every ten minutes marched along the length of the wall, first to the right and then, re-passing the door, to the left. According to Gogol, who had brought Viktor through the undergrowth to the rear entrance, the smaller door was unlocked and only needed a push to open it. Clearly the sentry, a shabby-looking fellow with pock-marked features, didn’t expect intruders because he marched dispiritedly, staring at the ground; and no official visitors either because he had taken off his cap and was smoking a cigarette. Locals, said Gogol, had been warned not to come anywhere near the mansion and only a select few (GRU, for instance) knew that it was used for executions.
‘Make your move when he’s halfway to the right-hand extremity of the wall,’ Gogol had instructed Viktor, before making his way to the front entrance of the mansion where, apparently, he was expected. ‘Then make your way through the shrubbery to the theatre. At the back you’ll find a potting shed, wait for me there. If you get caught then I’ve never heard of you. I admit,’ he added, ‘that I do still have some faint instincts for self-survival.’
The sentry took a deep drag on his yellow cigarette, pinched out the tip and slipped the remainder into the pocket of his jacket. Then, carrying his rifle as though it were a cannon, he started out to the right of the door.
Viktor tensed himself. Twigs cracked beneath his feet. Dust from the laurel leaves made him want to sneeze.
Halfway across the path he slipped, righted himself and made it to the door. The sentry, a hundred yards away, didn’t look around. Viktor reached out one hand and pushed the smaller door. But it didn’t move. Perhaps Gogol had locked it from inside. Perhaps he wants me dead with a bullet from the sentry’s rifle in my back – or an NKVD bullet in the back of my head in Lubyanka.
The sentry was turning. Viktor pushed again. The door swung open with a creak. He was inside, closing the door, peering round, sprinting for a privet hedge enclosing a shrubbery. He crouched behind a rhododendron. In front of him a spider on a web suspended between dead blooms was devouring a fly; through the web he saw a man wearing a brown smock pushing a handcart. A gardener – reassuring; gardening and bloodshed were contradictions. Then it occurred to him that the garden was so overgrown that gardeners were superfluous; he thought of gardeners exterminating insects and wondered if this one had turned his hand to humans.
He was through the shrubbery and halfway across a stretch of knee-high grass strung with brambles when a shot rang out, freezing him. The explosion stayed with him for a moment like a splash of ink; then it was erased and he was away again.
Was that what he had been brought to hear? he wondered, kneeling behind a lichen-covered wall surrounding a stagnant pool. A single shot and then, perhaps, a glimpse of a body, or what looked like a body, being removed under a blanket? He almost smiled.
Through a crack in the wall he could see the pool; a stone cherub with a ruined face smiled crookedly at him; a fish with a white, diseased body surfaced briefly before returning to the moss-green depths with a flick of its tail. Viktor crawled to the end of the wall; keeping low, he ran to a thicket of holly bushes. Above him loomed the walls of the dacha, the coffin.
On one side lay the half-finished theatre where Catherine the Great had once planned to watch the cream of Russian thespians. It looked a dull place from the outside, dead-eyed and brooding, but then theatres often did. Beside it stood the potting shed, ferns growing from its windows.
Inside the shed Viktor waited. Outside, the shadows were lengthening. The swallows and bats had vanished but somewhere in the tangled undergrowth a bird sang.
Gogol said: ‘Follow me,’ his voice reaching Viktor through the ferns. Viktor joined him outside.
‘Right,’ Gogol whispered. ‘Through that gap,’ pointing at a gap in the wall of the theatre intended for a door. Gogol got there first; inside the doorway he paused, grinding his fist into the base of his spine. ‘Now you’ve got to be careful,’ he said. ‘Just round the corner you’ll see a passage, just like the corridors behind the auditorium at the Bolshoi. Take the first door on the right. You’ll find yourself in a box. If you stand in the shadows at the back you can’t be seen from below. But you’ll have one of the best seats for the show.’ He grinned fiercely. ‘Wait there afterwards for me,’ and was gone.
If there had once been a stage it was no longer there; nor were there any seats; just a rubble-strewn arena cleared at one end in front of a wall that would have been the back of the stage. Half a dozen civilians strolled restlessly about, smoking; leaning against another wall opposite Viktor’s box stood a collection of old M 1891 rifles and two green boxes of ammunition.
So it was going to happen. His belly lurched and with it everything he believed in. No, it wasn’t going to happen; this was bizarre play-acting, a charade. Why the ammunition, Viktor? And what are those stains, so black and regular on the floor?
He returned to his schoolroom where, as a treat, they had screened flickering newsreels of the Revolution. There was Lenin, fierce and yet avuncular, accepting the adulation of his triumphant rebels. He opened a history book and the first page was a red flag that reminded him of a field of poppies rippled by a breeze. There was the new order, there was justice.
The men below selected rifles. More civilians, all in shirtsleeves, entered the arena and picked up the rest of the guns. Crisply, they loaded them. Outside, he heard a vehicle, a lorry by the sound of it, draw up.
Viktor bit deep into the flesh inside his lower lip and tasted blood.
From behind the wall he heard shouts. Hands clenched, body taut, he waited the entrance from the wings. Shouldn’t there have been an orchestra? A conductor in white tie and tails?
In came the players. Middle-aged mostly. All men. All wearing military trousers, all in shirt-sleeves. They walked erect but there was a strange docility about them. They were obviously officers. Did those trained to command accept commands just as readily?
Desperately Viktor wanted to leave his vantage point. To return to the sanctuary of his adolescence, to the toy soldiers of his nursery.
The officers were blindfolded and lined up against the wall, hands behind their heads, elbows touching. Thirty of them, Stalin’s daily ration. I don’t believe it. His skull filled with ice, his legs bent and he had to steady himself with one hand against the wall of the box.
The firing squad lined up opposite the blindfolded men raised their rifles. Some of the condemned crossed themselves.
Now surely they would be granted their last wishes. That always happened. In books, in films …
They slumped. Blood appeared at their breasts. And it seemed to Viktor that he heard the explosions from the rifles after the impact of the bullets.
The abruptness of the transition from life to death astonished him; he could barely comprehend it. A second volley of shots made the bodies jump as they slid to the ground.
Two of the executioners propped their rifles against the wall, drew pistols and walked along the line of bodies shooting out any vestiges of life.
Then the gardener made his entrance pushing his handcart. But Viktor, unconscious on the floor of the box, didn’t see them load the bodies into it.
*
He waited the following evening at the Café Tchaikovsky for three hours. From seven in the evening, the hour at which they usually met, until ten.
But she didn’t come and some inexplicable perversity – nothing had rational explanations any more – stopped him from calling at her lodgings. Perhaps the whole episode had been an act of cruelty on her part for which she had found some anarchic justification; perhaps, like Gogol, she had merely wanted to knock him off his smug perch. Perhaps even now she was naked in the arms of Nikolai Vasilyev. Or Gogol.
She hadn’t attended her class that day but she had sent a note explaining that she had to visit a sick relative at Kuntsevo. Well, she had a grandmother in Kuntsevo (Stalin also had a house there), but that was only seven miles away so she could have been back by seven, eight at the latest, especially when she knew what he had been through.
Later, he decided that he had done so little about finding her because he was still in a state of shock. He believed nothing any more, least of all the earnest babble of the students in the Tchaikovsky.
When she didn’t appear in class the following day he telephoned Nikolai Vasilyev and then, when he didn’t get any reply, went round to Anna’s lodgings in the lunchtime break. Her landlady, an old crone with features as sharp as a claw, told him that Anna had packed her belongings two nights before – the night of the massacre – paid a week’s rent and disappeared.
Viktor didn’t believe her. He threatened her, offered money, but fear and the bribe she had received (the new Viktor Golovin knew she had been bribed) had efficiently silenced her.
He called at Nikolai Vasilyev’s house in the north of the city. But he, too, had disappeared; the woman who answered the door was in her thirties, blonde, pretty and distraught, possibly Vasilyev’s mistress. She didn’t know what had happened; he had been missing for two days. But she had an address for Gogol.
Gogol lived in an apartment near the Alexander Brest Railway Station. Viktor rang the bell but its chime had a lost quality to it. Neighbours told him that they had seen Gogol leave with four men in civilian clothes. Leave? Well, escorted would be a better description, said one old man. ‘But don’t say I said so,’ he added, pocketing Viktor’s rouble.
When Viktor continued to pursue his inquiries his father took him aside and said: ‘Best leave it alone, Viktor. What’s done is done. You can’t bring them back …’
Them? Again Viktor wondered about his father’s source of information.
But what astonished him most as, with suicidal intent, he asked his questions, was the lack of reprisals. What he was suggesting to those he cross-examined was tantamount to treason. And yet he remained untouched. Privileged.
When he had finally ascertained beyond all reasonable doubt that Anna, Vasilyev and Gogol had been purged, Viktor took the only step left to him.
He, too, disappeared.
