Comrade Charlie

13

Natalia had been away on the Australian visit when Eduard became eligible for leave, which therefore had to be postponed, so it had been almost six months since they were last together. Natalia was relieved that another overseas trip had not intruded to make this visit impossible. And pleased at how quickly permission had been granted for her to take leave herself, a Friday and a Monday, giving them a long weekend together.

Natalia tried hard to make everything right for her son’s homecoming. She planned a Saturday-night outing and shopped widely at the concessionary stores, where she hesitated uncertainly at the alcohol counter. Natalia hardly drank but believed, although she was not sure, there was a half bottle of vodka somewhere in the Mytninskaya apartment. Eduard was nineteen, living in an all-male, military environment, she reminded herself: a man, which had been a strangely abrupt realization when he’d been home for the last time. He’d expect her to have something in: consider it odd if she hadn’t. Still hesitant Natalia bought whisky, vodka and some imported Danish beers. As an afterthought she added four bottles of French wine, two white and two red. In a final touch Natalia displayed flowers in the hallway and the living room: she knew Eduard wouldn’t appreciate them – probably wouldn’t be aware of them – but Natalia thought flowers in a home were welcoming so it was really a gesture for her own benefit.

His letter had guessed at his reaching Moscow some time in the afternoon but she knew the risk of delay was too great for her to start preparing the homecoming meal in advance of his arrival. Natalia wandered about the flat, touching and moving things that didn’t need to be touched and spent time in Eduard’s bedroom, tidying things already tidied. Why – or of what – was she nervous? Natalia couldn’t decide. Just that she was nervous, which was ridiculous. What on earth was there to be nervous of, receiving home a soldier-son whom she had not seen for half a year? Nothing. Ridiculous, she told herself again.

It was gone seven when Eduard telephoned and she was glad she had not started to prepare because he still had to go through some leave formalities at the military post at the Kursk station. An hour, Eduard guessed: an hour and a half at the outside. It was more than two hours from the time of the call before he got there.

Natalia was unaccountably disoriented by Eduard’s entrance into her home. He appeared to be bigger, filling more space and making everything correspondingly smaller. The army boots looked huge and the uniform was rough when he held her to him and kissed her, quickly as if he were embarrassed by the gesture. There was a smell to his clothing, a stale, unclean impression mingled with the odour of his own body. There was another, more obvious smell on his breath and Natalia wondered if it really had taken more than two hours for him to get through the railway station formalities.

The hallway greetings over, he stumped directly into his room with his bag and topcoat but reappeared immediately, looking around as if he hadn’t seen the apartment before.

‘It’s good to see you, Eduard.’

‘Good to be back.’

‘I’m cooking beef: I’m afraid it might be a little overdone.’

‘I’m starving!’

‘Would you like a bath first? There’s time.’

Eduard frowned but started a smile at the same time, as if he suspected her of making a joke. ‘Bath! What for?’

Natalia raised and lowered her shoulders. ‘I thought you might have felt like one after all the travelling.’

‘No,’ he said positively. He looked inquiringly around the apartment again as if looking for something.

‘I got some drink in. Beer: vodka and whisky, too.’

Eduard allowed the grin to register. ‘Bloody good!’ he said.

Natalia couldn’t remember his swearing even minimally in front of her before. He appeared unaware of having done so. She said: ‘It’s all in the kitchen. Why don’t you get it yourself?’

‘You want anything?’

‘No thank you.’ Natalia became aware that she had remained standing since his entry. While he was out of the room she sat down on one of the two easy chairs: he’d trodden something black, like oil, across the room and into his bedroom.

Eduard returned with a glass of vodka in one hand and a beer in the other. He gestured with the beer can from which he was drinking direct and said: ‘Imported beer and beef in the oven! Still all the privileges! You should try the beer we get at the camps: just like horse pi…’ He stopped just in time, but remained smiling. ‘Absolutely filthy,’ he finished.

‘What’s it like there?’ There hadn’t been any reports of nationalistic protests between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis for a long time, but she wished his officer-cadet field course had not been somewhere so active.

‘Boring,’ said Eduard at once. ‘I don’t know why we don’t make our minds up: either shoot the idiots when they riot or stand back and let them kill each other. Perfect solution, one way or the other.’ He slumped in the opposing chair and thrust both legs out towards her. The boots really did look huge: she couldn’t see whatever had caused the marks he’d trodden through the apartment.

‘How about your grades?’

‘I’ll graduate easily,’ said Eduard.

He’d always found easy anything academic, always the perfect student, remembered Natalia. Like Igor had always had a quick and receptive mind. The recollection of the husband who had deserted them surprised Natalia: she couldn’t think of the last time he’d come to mind. At once she decided it was not surprising at all. There had always been a strong facial resemblance between father and son, even in unconscious mannerisms like the way each flicked back the straying, coal-black hair and smiled crookedly, one mouth edge up, the other down, but Natalia was caught now by how much stronger the similarities seemed to her. Imagination, she dismissed. How could any of Igor’s behaviour or attitudes have washed off on a son he’d abandoned when the child was three? She said: ‘How much longer will you be attached to an active field unit?’

The boy shrugged, making a noise as he drank from the can. ‘You know what the army’s like. They don’t have any idea where their ass is most of the time.’

There was no apology for the expression, which Natalia did not really understand. ‘You don’t know?’

‘Shouldn’t be more than another two or three months but there’s no way of telling.’

Eduard helped himself to another vodka before she served the meal, for which he opened one of the bottles of red wine and for which he sat down without washing his hands. The boy ate bent low over the table, head close to his food, practically spooning it into his mouth in a hand-circling, conveyor-belt fashion. He finished long before her and helped himself to a further complete plateful. He gulped at the wine with food still in his mouth, swallowing and chewing at the same time. Natalia forced the conversation throughout, telling him as much as she felt able about her new job and explaining the overseas travel and how different it was from anything to which she’d been accustomed before. Eduard grunted acknowledgement sounds from time to time but she didn’t get the impression he was listening fully to what she said.

Eduard allowed her to clear away without offering to help, settling with his legs outstretched once more, another glass of vodka resting upon his stomach between cupped hands. He’d undone his tunic and shirt collar and Natalia thought he looked very scruffy, a conscripted soldier instead of a would-be officer.

‘There’s some laundry,’ he announced.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’

‘Some of it is pretty disgusting. There’s been a lot of moving about. Not much time to change.’

‘That’s all right,’ accepted Natalia. ‘You seem to be drinking a lot.’ He’d had the majority of the wine, too.

Eduard examined the vodka glass as if he were surprised to find it in his hand. ‘You should see the officers’ mess at the weekend!’ he said with bombastic teenage bravado. ‘I can drink the rest of them unconscious: actually done it!’

The ability to drink more than anyone else, and never suffer a hangover, had been one of Igor’s boasts, thought Natalia, isolating other similarity. She said: ‘You’re not in an officers’ mess now.’

Eduard grimaced, not appearing to regard it as the rebuke she intended. ‘Good life, the military,’ he said. ‘I’m enjoying it.’

Another thing Igor had often said. It had taken her a long time to realize it was because of the freedom it gave him, to whore and impress women at air shows and exhibitions by flying faster or lower than anyone else. She guessed her ex-husband would have by now gained a substantive promotion in the Air Force. Igor would like that, insignias of rank on a fine uniform, medals and ribbons arrayed in lines. She wished it were not proving so easy to think of the man today. She reckoned the last time she had consistently done so was when she’d been with Charlie, here in Moscow, the reflections then those of persistent comparison, good against bad. Which, she supposed, was what they were again. She still wished it weren’t so. She said: ‘I’ve managed to get tickets for Saturday for the State Circus! It’s a new season: quite a lot of fresh acts.’

Eduard stared at her with that frowning, about-tolaugh expression again. ‘The circus!’

‘It’s hardly children’s entertainment!’

Belatedly he realized her disappointment. ‘It’s just…well, I wish you’d mentioned it before.’

‘I didn’t think of it until about a week ago, when it was too late to write. And I wasn’t sure I could get tickets anyway. They’re not easy to come by, you know!’

‘I made plans, that’s all.’

‘Plans!’ exclaimed Natalia, genuinely upset at the flippancy with which he was discarding her proposed treat.

‘With some of the other cadet-officers I came up from Baku with.’

‘For Saturday night?’

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s our first time off base for months.’

‘I understand.’

‘One of them says he knows some good places here where we can enjoy ourselves. Have a few drinks…a few laughs.’

And more, thought Natalia. The unchanged pattern: drink, whore, boast, exaggerate. ‘I said I understood.’

‘I knew you would.’

Eduard slept late, snoring loudly. His bedroom was redolent of him when Natalia crept in to collect up the laundry and she wondered how long the windows would have to be left open to air the place after he’d gone. The washing was filthy, a lot personally stained, and she doubted her son always emerged the victor in the drinking contests, as he claimed. If Eduard could handle his drink intake one way he did not appear to be able to do so in another. She pressed him to bathe when he finally arose and he said he supposed he should, though there was little enthusiasm. He had his first drink before noon, although only a beer. Eduard kept prowling around the apartment and Natalia guessed he was bored or felt restricted or both. She suggested an ice-hockey game that afternoon and he said OK without much interest although when they got to the stadium his demeanour changed. He yelled and shouted and swore uncaringly, although not obscenely, and when it ended said he’d enjoyed himself.

Afterwards Eduard said there didn’t seem any point in his returning to Mytninskaya and then having to come out again so soon, so why didn’t they have a drink to fill in the time before he had to meet friends. Because it was convenient they used the bar in the Berlin Hotel, on Zhdanova. Eduard ordered vodka with a beer chaser again, telling his mother to get more than one purchase ticket to save time when they wanted refills.

‘There’s no real reason for me to go back to the apartment, either,’ said Natalia when they were seated. ‘I might as well go on to the show straight from here.’

‘Show?’ queried Eduard blankly.

‘The circus,’ reminded Natalia sadly. ‘It would be silly to waste both tickets.’

‘Right!’ agreed Eduard, with surprising eagerness. ‘You’ll have fun.’

Natalia moved to make the obvious reply but then stopped, saying nothing. Eduard took the tickets which lay between them and returned with more vodka and beer. ‘You didn’t want another juice, did you?’

‘No,’ said Natalia.

‘I didn’t think you would. That’s why I got the beer, instead.’

‘That’s fine.’ Natalia had no real interest in going to the circus on Vernadskovo by herself, but the alternative was to go home by herself which wasn’t really an alternative at all. She realized that quite apart from wanting to see Eduard again she had been looking forward to some brief hours of simple companionship.

‘So you won’t need the car?’ demanded Eduard, smiling.

‘What?’ she said, confused by the question.

‘The car. You won’t really need it if you’re going to the circus, will you?’

‘I’ve got to get home, afterwards.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Eduard, waiting expectantly.

‘Why?’ she asked in weary resignation.

‘I just thought…well…’ shrugged Eduard. ‘I mean it might have been useful if I could have borrowed it…’ He smiled, a little-boy-misunderstood expression. ‘Silly idea.’

‘I suppose I could always get a taxi.’

‘Sure you wouldn’t mind?’ said Eduard, eager again and too impatient to bother with the charade of protesting that it would cause his mother too much inconvenience.

‘I’d be upset if it were damaged.’

‘You can trust me.’

It had never before occurred to Natalia to doubt that she could but she did now and was disturbed by the ease with which the uncertainty came to her. She recalled her reflection in the concessionary store: Eduard was a man living in a rough, even brutal, all-male environment of an army camp. She should be more understanding of how difficult it must be for him to make in minutes, at the snap of his fingers, the transition from one existence to another. She was letting her emotions become jumbled and convoluted, fashioning images where none existed. Natalia handed over the car keys and then, reminded, said: ‘What about a key to get back into the flat?’

‘You haven’t a spare?’

‘Not with me. I’ll wait up.’

‘I might be late,’ said Eduard in quick warning.

‘If it gets too late I’ll go to bed and you can wake me up with the bell when you get home.’

‘Sure you don’t mind?’

There was a lot she was being asked not to mind tonight, thought Natalia. ‘No,’ she said.

The State Circus was spectacular, some of the acts so good that Natalia genuinely forgot the disappointment of not having Eduard with her. During an interval a woman on the far side of the empty place said how could people be so selfish as not to bother to use a seat that was so difficult to get, and Natalia said she couldn’t imagine.

She stayed up at Mytninskaya until almost one o’clock in the morning and guessed she managed to remain awake for nearly an hour after she got into bed. She jerked awake in the morning, aware at once of not having let Eduard in. His bed had not been slept in although it was possible to detect a trace of his having occupied it the previous day: unthinkingly Natalia opened a window.

She sat tensed at the kitchen table, hands held tightly before her, unsure what immediately to do. The emergency services, she supposed. But in what order? She’d use her KGB rank and position to get the proper response: she’d never experienced it herself but the civilian militia were legendary for uncaring disregard. So who first, police or hospital services? Hospital services, she decided. There were other things that could have happened to him, beyond a traffic accident. He could have become involved in a fight or got so drunk he’d fallen down and hurt himself. Be in a sobering-up station, in fact. She wasn’t sure but she didn’t think such places, necessary to get fall-down drunks off the Moscow streets to prevent their freezing to death in the winter, were administered by either the police or medical authorities. Definitely try hospitals first.

Because of being in the KGB Natalia possessed that rarest of Moscow commodities, a telephone directory, and was actually looking up the numbers when the doorbell shrilled.

She ran to the door, hesitating for the briefest second to compose herself before opening it, expecting some official conveyor of bad news. Eduard stood with one hand outstretched against the frame, as if he needed its support. His uniform and shirt collar were undone again, sagging, and his face was red and bloated and his eyes red-veined.

‘Didn’t wake you up after all,’ he avoided.

Eduard was still drunk Natalia decided: if not drunk then very close to it. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Decided not to disturb you. Slept in the car,’ he said, grinning, making the lie obvious.

Were mothers supposed to hope quite so quickly that their sons didn’t become infected by the whores they slept with? She said: ‘You look dreadful. Come in and clean yourself up.’

‘Little sleep first,’ insisted Eduard, giving the lopsided smile of his father. He stayed grinning. ‘Not very comfortable, sleeping in a car.’

It was past noon when he emerged from his bedroom, and once more Natalia had to insist upon his bathing. She tried to keep any distaste from showing in her voice when she asked if he’d enjoyed himself the previous night and pretended to believe the haphazard account of what he’d done. Throughout the rest of the day there were long silences between them, neither with anything left to say, and on the Monday, their last day together, Natalia took him out into Moscow again, trying to use up the time with constant activity in restaurants and bars and among the stalls in the GUM store.

Eduard had to leave very early on the Tuesday morning and Natalia got up to see him off. He said he had had a wonderful leave and Natalia said she had enjoyed it too. He wasn’t sure when he would get his next furlough but he would let her know and Natalia said that would be fine and that she hoped the new job wouldn’t clash with it, taking her out of the country. Eduard said he hoped that too. The farewell kiss was as clumsy and embarrassed as the greeting gesture had been. Each was relieved at the parting.

Natalia stripped the bed and washed the blankets as well as the sheets and opened all the bedroom windows to their fullest extent. As an afterthought she put both sets of flowers in the room, although they did not seem particularly scented. Afterwards, still with time to spare before having to get to the First Chief Directorate building, she sat at the same kitchen table and with the same tenseness in which she’d been held imagining Eduard lying injured or dead somewhere on the Sunday morning. It had been an appalling weekend: ugly and disgusting and awful. She didn’t believe Eduard’s behaviour had been the difficulty of adjusting from one environment to another. She believed he found it easy – easier than to conform any other way – to be brutal and coarse, like his father had been brutal and coarse. And in the end she’d come to hate his father.

Blackstone had been waiting when Losev arrived, getting quickly into the car but saying nothing as they drove to the seafront where Losev stopped intentionally in a car park from which it was possible to see the island, a distant grey outline beyond the dull sea.

‘Well!’ said Losev. ‘You’ve had time to think.’

‘It won’t work,’ insisted Blackstone. ‘I told you, I’ve been refused on the project.’

The ambitious Losev hadn’t told Moscow of the problem. ‘Re-apply,’ he insisted. He was determined to get Blackstone operational.

‘There’s no point,’ shrugged Blackstone. ‘They’ve got all they want.’

‘It’s worth a try,’ persisted Losev.

Blackstone shrugged again, without replying. He was trapped whichever way he looked: and he considered he’d looked at every possible escape. He desperately wanted to continue receiving the money and felt no reluctance in getting it this way, although he knew precisely who this man calling himself Mr Stranger really was. What right did the company have to expect any loyalty, after the way they’d treated him! Served them right!

Losev said: ‘I think you’re being too easily beaten. You’re an employee there, even if you’re not part of the project. You can move around, can’t you?’

‘Not easily, in the restricted areas.’

‘Have you tried?’

‘I don’t need to. I know.’

‘Five hundred, every time you get me something,’ bargained the balding KGB man. ‘A bonus, for anything particularly good. Doesn’t that appeal to you, five hundred pounds a week at least?’

‘You know it does.’

‘So do as I say.’

‘How will I contact you?’ capitulated Blackstone.

‘I’ll give you a phone number,’ said Losev. ‘It will always be manned.’ He smiled across the car, offering an envelope. ‘And didn’t I tell you I was a friend?’

Blackstone looked at the envelope without taking it. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t want you to worry, about anything,’ said the Russian. ‘It’s your first bonus, a sign of my good faith. Five hundred pounds for doing nothing.’

Blackstone took it eagerly. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.

‘I knew you would,’ said Losev.