From Aberystwyth with Love

Chapter 20

Calamity returned from the samovar with two glasses of black tea. ‘We still owe the provodnitsa three gryvnia for the bowl of cabbage soup we had at breakfast,’ she said.

‘That was good soup.’

‘It sure was. Of the fifteen bowls of cabbage soup we’ve had on the ferry and this train, this provodnitsa’s was definitely the best.’

I warmed my hands round the hot tea. This morning had started quite chilly, and the carriage had still not warmed up. Last night’s soup had been in Odessa, and the five bowls before that had been on the Black Sea ferry from Istanbul.

‘I can’t believe Mooncalf would promise me as a bride like that,’ said Calamity.

‘We don’t know for sure that he did.’

‘That’s what Igor said.’

‘It might have been a misunderstanding, English isn’t his first language.’

‘Oh sure! What about the wedding dress, and the empty envelope? And . . . Monsieur Souterain.’

‘That was a terrible accident, I don’t see what that has to do with Mooncalf.’

‘We ought to report him to Llunos.’

‘He’d just say Transylvania was outside his jurisdiction.’

‘Yeah, he’d say it served us right for going there, and for leaving our travel arrangements to someone like Mooncalf.’ Calamity looked at me and brightened as the truth of that remark sank in. We both knew that was exactly what Llunos would say, and he would be right. ‘I’m sure Hughesovka will be a lot better,’ she said.

‘That’s right, even Mooncalf wouldn’t try and marry you twice.’

Calamity grinned and punched me on the arm and we both gazed out at the countryside flowing by. The gently rolling farmland of the Western Ukraine slowly gave way to the outskirts of that longed-for Eldorado, Hughesovka. Some people said it didn’t exist, it was just a far-off, remote, hopeless land of dreamers, where every home was an ice-cream castle in the air for romantics and fools. We were about to find out.

A man wearing a plain grey two-piece suit stood on the platform staring intently at everyone who stepped down. He was holding a sign saying ‘Louie and Calamity. Croeso i Hughesovka’. When he saw us, his face burst into a grin, he put the sign under his arm and rushed forward to greet us. ‘Mr Louie and Miss Calamity! I’m delighted to meet you; I’m Jones the Denouncer. You are just as Mr Mooncalf described you.’ He stopped and peered up the platform beyond our shoulders. ‘But where are the spinning wheels?’

‘They are being sent on,’ I said.

He took us through the main ticketing hall, down the steps into Ploschchad John Hughes, and across the car park to a battered Lada. The buildings in the vicinity of the station had an impressive faded grandeur. Directly across from the station was the ornate portico with winged angels of the Hughesovka Ballet. Next to that there were the golden onion domes of the church. And in the centre, where the trams pulled up to turn around, there stood a statue to the great Welsh steelman who had made it all possible. Jones the Denouncer told me the streets had originally been laid out according to the street plan of Merthyr Tydfil.

We drove down Bulvar John Hughes, the main boulevard, flanked by chestnut trees and with a central reservation of trees and grass where young lovers and old ladies in head scarves sat on benches. The avenue terminated at the steps of the Hughes Mausoleum, a large building fronted by Doric columns. There we turned into Vulitsya Kreshchatyk and again into Prospekt Bakunina by which time we had left the centre and were entering the suburbs. The buildings got smaller, the tram lines ended, and we found ourselves in a wasteland of featureless modern apartment blocks.

‘Wow! It’s just like Penparcau,’ said Calamity for whom all new experiences were a source of wonder.

‘Where is that?’ Jones the Denouncer shouted above the din of the engine.

‘It’s a housing estate in Aberystwyth.’

‘You must write it down for me, I am thirsty for all knowledge about the Motherland.’

We stopped and got out at one of the tenements. The lift was broken, the common areas stank of urine. We climbed a dark, graffiti-covered stairwell to the fifteenth floor and were let into a barely furnished apartment: tattered linoleum floor, a few religious icons on the wall, a table covered with an oilcloth set with food. The table was laid with glasses and chipped, floral-patterned china. There were hard-backed chairs and no soft furnishings. There was a large group of people waiting and when we entered they cheered and ran forward to hug and embrace us. Music started up and Jones the Denouncer said, ‘Louie, you will be staying with the consumptive student one floor up and Calamnotchka will be staying with the public prosecutor’s clerk’s daughter. I will take you there in a while, but first we must celebrate.’

We ate slices of pig fat with chillis, gherkins, caviar, black bread and vodka. Jones the Denouncer introduced us to the company. Evans the Swindler, Morgan the Enemy of the People, Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat, Jones the Deviationist heretic, Edwards the Fascist Wrecker, and Lewis the Pedlar of Nationalist Opiate under the banner of Proletarian Literature; together with their wives. It was difficult to keep track of all the names.

‘So this is the Welsh Underground.’ said Calamity.

There was an awkward silence after she said this. Edwards the Fascist Wrecker explained, ‘We don’t normally talk about our . . . our nature quite as openly, but, yes, I suppose that’s as good a term as any.’

‘What do you do?’

‘We meet when and where we can, in safe houses mostly. We also print our own samizdat . . .’ He pulled out a tattered and tightly rolled-up mimeographed pamphlet. It was called Hiraeth and bore on the cover an illustration of Barry Island pleasure park. A woman dressed in a dowdy red peasant dress and a sleeveless pullover stepped forward and spoke with a certain fiery passion that indicated that she and Edwards the Fascist Wrecker were engaged or married but she tired of his slow dithering ways and regretted that he could not apply himself with more fervour to the cause.

‘Our aim is to return to the Motherland for which we all ache so terribly in our hearts. But, of course, the authorities will never allow such a thing. And so we try to gather what scraps of information we can. Your visit to us today is a great and longed-for honour. Occasionally we organise an escape. But the authorities are cruel and cunning and thwart us at every turn.’

‘What do they do?’ I asked.

Lewis the Pedlar of Nationalist Opiate under the banner of Proletarian Literature replied soulfully as if he bore the pain of all the failures in his own heart. ‘They intercept our escapers and arrest them. We don’t see them for many months. What happens to them is not clear but we believe they are taken to a special psychiatric institution where they are re-educated. The doctors at this place are without mercy. They erase entirely the memory of the re-education and implant in its place the false memory of having reached Aberystwyth and found it a great disappointment. After the treatment they are released back into life in Hughesovka but they are not the same as they were before. They avoid their old haunts, shun their old friends and contacts. After many months, quite by chance, one of us will run into one of them in the bread queue or something, and say, “Hi, Boris, what are you doing here, I thought you’d gone to Wales?” And he will refuse to answer, look away and mumble something sheepishly, some absurd story about how he travelled to Wales and decided to come back because he didn’t think it was all that good.’ The people in the room scoffed in disgust at the absurdity of the notion.

‘So far,’ said the girl in the red peasant dress, ‘not even the strongest among us has been able to withstand the brainwashing technique.’

A hubbub of conversation broke out as they discussed their oppression. Edwards the Fascist Wrecker spoke up. ‘But tell us, Louie Eeyoreovitch, you have seen how we live here, you see how we ache and groan under the yoke, and you have seen the blessed town of Aberystwyth, is it possible that a man who had sampled the delights of which we read, such as Sospan’s ice-cream kiosk and the automated fortune-teller in a glass case in the Pier amusement arcade . . .’

The mention of the mechanical gypsy drew gasps of wonder.

‘And the kiosk selling whelks freshly scraped from the rocks on the beach,’ a voice piped up. More voices added their opinions:

‘And the funicular railway that shoots up the face of Constitution Hill at giddying speed . . .’

‘And the train of mules that offer rides to sick and weary children along the seafront . . .’

‘And bingo, the working man’s chess . . .’

‘And the rocks that line the seashore, many millions of years old, which are inlaid with a strange red mineral in configurations that some say resembles lettering . . .’

‘Some people even claim it spells out the name of Aberystwyth . . .’

‘And though many scoff at this notion, yet they cannot explain whence came the letters . . .’

The hubbub rose again as each turned to his neighbour to discuss this latest marvel. Edwards the Fascist Wrecker hit a glass with his fork to bring the room to order, and turned to me: ‘Is it really possible that a man having seen such things would willingly return to Hughesovka?’

I scanned the eager faces waiting breathlessly for confirmation that the myth by which they lived their lives was valid. ‘No, it is not possible,’ I said. ‘Only a madman would return.’

My words whipped up the party spirit and more vodka was handed out and many toasts were drunk including one to Comrade Mooncalf. And then they asked me about our business here and I described the case of Gethsemane and the strange photo of the imaginary friend and the levitated dog. The company expressed great excitement and demanded to see the photo. I reached into my jacket pocket but inexplicably the photo was no longer there. I apologised that I was not able to show them. ‘This is really strange,’ I said. ‘I had it on the Orient Express.’

‘Someone must have stolen it,’ said Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat.

‘Honey-trap,’ said Calamity knowingly. I avoided her gaze.

Fortunately my description of the photo rang a bell in the mind of Evans the Swindler. He went to the bookcase and brought back a catalogue; it looked similar to the one Mooncalf had used to evaluate the market price for the Yuri Gagarin sock. He skimmed through to the right page and opened out the book. One page listed Yuri Gagarin socks, worth only a few pence apparently. Not the thousands of pounds Mooncalf had offered us. On the other page was a reproduction of the photo of the levitated dog which could, it said, fetch many thousands of pounds at auction. Mooncalf must have noticed it as he searched for the Yuri Gagarin sock and realised its worth. Then he feigned interest in the sock while really it was the photo he wanted. But had he arranged the honey-trap to steal it as well? It was baffling. Evans the Swindler explained the significance of the photo.

‘This image of the levitated dog is the work of a famous retoucher who worked for many years for the security apparat, in a basement across the street from the infamous Lubianka Prison. His job was to help in the re-writing of history by altering photographic evidence to fit the new version of events. This photo was his suicide note. He was given twenty-five years in a camp and died of pneumonia.’

‘But what does it mean?’ asked Calamity.

‘The dog is not really levitating, it is held in the arms of a person but the person has been removed from the picture. His orders were to retouch out the person, remove her from the historical record, which is what he did; but in an act of suicidal impudence he interpreted his directive literally and removed only the person, leaving the dog suspended seemingly in mid-air. This piece of photographic retouching became thereby an act of counter-revolutionary terror. It is impossible that he could not have been aware that in performing this act he was signing his own death warrant. It was a futile anguished cry from the heart rebelling against the compassionless inhumanity of the system. A man who was an artist and should have used his gifts to bring joy and enlightenment to the human race wasted instead the best years of his life and his rich store of talent falsifying history, turning lies to truth, giving false benediction to the tyrant.’ He paused and took a breath.

‘What exactly is retouching?’ said Calamity

The people in the room, who had gone quiet as Evans the Swindler spoke, now turned to him with gazes that urged him to speak. He walked up to Calamity and lowered himself, bending at the knees to be nearer her level. ‘Picture the cow grazing in the field,’ he said in a bedtime-story voice. ‘The cow that goes “moo”; picture her coming to the end of her days. She is old and cannot see or hear very well any more; she has lost her teeth and cannot chew and because she cannot eat she loses weight and grows thin and feeble. Sometimes in the morning, she cannot even get up. Picture the cow that comes to the end of her days.’ Calamity was frowning and broke off the gaze of Evans and turned to me. I put on a broad happy idiot smile and nodded as if to encourage her to pay attention. Evans continued. ‘Her meat is sold to man, the entrails minced up into dog food, the horn turned into buttons that the prisoner in the lonely depths of winter sometimes boils up for food and gnaws for the ancient echo they contain of a summer meadow. And the old cow’s bones may be turned into glue, or by some exquisite alchemy may render us a gelatine so pure, much more so than the variety we find in our cakes and dainties, that it is made into a photographic emulsion containing crystals of silver halide.’ He paused and raised his arms to the heavens in adoration. ‘Now imagine the sun, the big yellow sun with a happy morning face: he sends us a photon and this little photon arrives on earth and bounces off the first thing it touches and then is refracted down the lens of a camera, and in the belly of that machine it impacts the silver halide which releases an atom of silver. This is the ink of God. Suspended in the gelatine that had once been a cow the atoms of silver preserve a record of the latent image of the world and the deeds done under the sun by men. The history of man is thus written in the incorruptible ink of light and silver. This is called photography. And though silver and gold have traditionally adorned the heads of kings, yet did the humble cow play her part too in this celestial chemistry. This is a thing of wonder! Light, that most elemental of things, the first that God made on the first day, light which fills our hearts each dawn with hope and the strength to carry on in the face of all our difficulties, light that was sent by Him to illumine our world both physically and metaphorically, this same wondrous light exposes our deeds and also records them in the spectral shadow of silver upon celluloid. Here written in light is Truth. The record of our passing, of our joys and sorrows, never to be erased or altered. And herein lies the seeds of wickedness: the tyrant takes this joyous gift and perverts it to his twisted purpose. Through photographic retouching he insults the Creator and impudently undoes His handiwork; he changes and alters, he lies, he turns despots into heroes and erases our suffering, reduces and expunges it, and fills our tears with mud. He brings injustice to birth. All this did the great retoucher understand and against this wickedness set his seal even though it would, he knew, be mortal for him.’ Evans the Swindler wiped a tear from his eye and apologised for being over-emotional. The great retoucher was, he said, his father.

‘So,’ said Calamity with the air of one patiently separating wheat from chaff, ‘there used to be a person holding the dog and the authorities airbrushed her from history, but the guy left the dog in the picture.’

Evans the Swindler agreed but looked saddened to have it all presented in such bald outline.

After lunch, Edwards the Fascist Wrecker drove us round Hughesovka. We visited Uncle Vanya’s house but it turned out to be a fire-gutted shell occupied only by vagrants. They told us no one had been living there for many years and they had not heard of Vanya. But they were very kind and, while we waited, one of them fetched an old crone who had been living in the area all her life. She told us Mrs Vanya had been murdered in 1957 by her husband. She remembered the date well because it was the same year that Laika had passed in orbit above their heads and filled all their hearts with hope for a while. The school for remote viewing which Vanya’s daughter had attended was now a paper wholesaler’s. The Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering was closed. A thick chain held the door fastened and it was clear that for many years now, the only visitors had been State spiders.

When we returned to the car, Edwards was in a state of nervous agitation. ‘I’ve received a message,’ he said. ‘Something has happened. We must get back.’ He drove as fast as the old Lada would go through the backstreets of Hughesovka and pulled up outside the apartment block. There was consternation in the apartment.

Jones the Deviationist heretic explained what had happened. ‘You’ve been denounced.’

‘Denounced?’ we both said. ‘Who by? What for?’

‘We’re not sure, but no one has seen Jones the Denouncer since this morning. Quick, there is no time, you must prepare.’

Someone handed us our suitcases. ‘There is bread inside and biscuits.’

A girl handed me my jacket: ‘I’ve sewn on cow-horn buttons. In lean times they can be eaten.’

‘Are you crazy?’ said Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat. ‘He could be killed in the camps for those buttons.’

Someone advised us to avoid becoming unwittingly staked in a card game. ‘You should try and get a job decorating,’ someone else advised. ‘You can eat wallpaper paste. And the leather of your shoes of course. Although your shoes are your most precious possession, do not discard them lightly.’

‘The winter nights in Siberia are very long. It is helpful if you can spare some of your bread ration because chewed bread can be used to make chess pieces to while away the night.’

‘And do not forget also,’ added Morgan the Enemy of the People, ‘that when someone dies you must be quick – sneak out in the middle of the night and dig them up for their underwear: for this can be exchanged for a ration of cabbage which will keep your thyroid healthy.’

We were about to thank them for their kind advice when all conversation was silenced by a banging on the door and the words, shouted out, ‘Open up, State Security.’