I FAILED TO NOTICE the gentleman on the first three occasions when he appeared at the library, but on the fourth, Miss Simpson, who was much taken with him, pulled me aside with an exhilarated expression on her face.
‘He’s here again,’ she whispered, clutching me by the arm and looking out into the body of the library, before turning back to me eagerly; I had never seen her quite so animated before. She had the feverish excitement of a child on Christmas morning.
‘Who’s here again?’ I asked.
‘Him,’ she said, as if we had been engaged in a conversation about the fellow already and I was being deliberately obtuse by not acknowledging it. ‘Mr Tweed, as I call him. You’ve noticed him, haven’t you?’
I stared at her and wondered whether she was going mad; the war, after all, was playing havoc with everyone’s mind. The constant bombings, the threat of bombings, the aftermath of bombings… it was enough to drive even the most rational soul towards lunacy. ‘Miss Simpson,’ I said, ‘I have no idea what it is you’re talking about. There’s someone here who you’ve seen before, is that it? A troublemaker of some sort? I don’t understand.’
She grabbed me, dragging me away from the desk where I had been working, and a moment later we were hidden behind a shelf of books, staring at a man who was sitting at one of the reading tables, his attentions entirely engaged upon a large reference book. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him, other than the fact that he was dressed in an expensive tweed suit, hence Miss Simpson’s name for him. I suppose he was a rather handsome fellow too, with dark hair swept and lacquered away from his forehead. His tan suggested that he was either not English or had spent a lot of time abroad. Of course, the most unusual thing of all was that a man of his age – he was in his late twenties – was in the library at the British Museum at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. He should, after all, have been in the army.
‘Well, what about him?’ I asked, irritated by my young colleague’s enthusiasm. ‘What has he done?’
‘He’s been in every day this week,’ she said, nodding her head ferociously. ‘Haven’t you noticed him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t make it a habit to notice young gentlemen who choose to use the library.’
‘I think he must be sweet on me,’ she said, giggling and looking back at him again with an appreciative smile. ‘How do I look, Mr Jachmenev? Is my lippy all right? It’s been months since I even had any and then this morning I found an old tube at the back of my dresser and thought That’s for luck, so I put it on to cheer myself up. What about my hair? I have a brush in my bag. What do you think, should I give it a quick run-through?’
I stared at her and felt my sense of irritation growing. It wasn’t that I was immune to the frivolity that some of the younger people engaged in from time to time; after all, in recent years daily life had become both more difficult and frightening for all of us. The last thing I wanted was to deny anyone a moment of fun on the rare occasions when one could be found. But there was a limit to how much jollity I could endure. It was, to put it plainly, annoying.
‘You look fine,’ I said, stepping away from her in an attempt to return to my work. ‘And you’d look even better if you got on with your job and stopped wasting time with such silliness. Don’t you have anything to be getting on with?’
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘But come on, Mr Jachmenev, there’s precious few men in London as it is and just take a look at him, he’s gorgeous! If he’s coming in here every day to see me, well, I’m not going to say no to him, am I? Perhaps he’s just too shy to talk. There’s an easy way around that, of course.’
‘Miss Simpson, please, can’t you—?’
But it was too late. She picked up a book from the shelf and began walking towards him. Despite my better instincts, I found myself watching out of a morbid desire to see what might happen next; there was always a certain voyeuristic thrill to be had from Miss Simpson’s behaviour and, on occasion, I indulged in it. She swaggered across the floor, her hips swaying left and right with all the confidence of a film star, and when she reached him, she dropped the book purposefully to the ground, its hard covers crashing on the marble flooring with an enormous booming sound that echoed around the chamber, causing me to roll my eyes in my head. As she reached over to pick it up, she offered anyone who was near by a very clear view of both her posterior and the top of her stockings. It was almost indecent, but she was a pretty girl and it would have taken a stronger man than I to look away.
Mr Tweed reached for the book and I saw her laugh and say something to him, her fingers caressing the shoulder of his jacket for a moment, but he shrugged her off quickly and muttered a terse reply before replacing the dropped volume in her hands. Another question followed; this time he simply turned the front cover of his own book to display the title and she leaned over to look at it, offering him a clear view of her ample bosom. He seemed unmoved by the spectacle, however, and averted his eyes in a most gentleman-like fashion. From where I was standing, I could see that he been engaged in a study of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and I wondered whether he was an academic or a professor of some sort. Perhaps he had an illness that prevented him from enlisting. There were any number of reasons why he might have been there.
It was not surprising that Miss Simpson was taking such an interest in him. A few years before, there would have been any number of young men passing through the library or the museum on any given day, but life had changed considerably since the outbreak of the war and the presence of an eligible young man at one of our reading tables, when so many of his number had been led away from the cities as if by a military Pied Piper, was certainly worthy of note. Our lives were governed by rationing, curfews, and the sound of the air-raid sirens every night. Walking along the streets, one was confronted by groups of two or three girls together, all nurses now, stepping quickly between makeshift hospitals and their digs, their faces pale, their eyes dark and hollow from lack of sleep and exposure to the broken, ripped-asunder bodies of their countrymen. Their white skirts were often flecked with scarlet but they seemed not to notice any more, or not to care.
For two years I had been expecting the library to be closed indefinitely, but it was one of those symbols of British life about which Mr Churchill maintained a stubborn defiance, and so we remained open to the public, often as a sanctuary for adjutants from the War Office, who sat in quiet corners of the reading room, consulting maps and reference books in an effort to impress their superiors with historically proven strategies for victory. We operated with a much smaller staff than before, although Mr Trevors was still with us, of course, for he was too old to enlist. Miss Simpson had come to us at the outbreak of hostilities; the daughter of some well-connected businessman, she had been given this position on account of the fact that she ‘couldn’t bear the sight of blood’. There were a couple of other assistants, none of whom were of fighting age, and then there was me. The Russian fellow. The émigré. The man who had lived in London for almost twenty years and was suddenly distrusted by almost everyone for one simple reason.
My voice.
‘Well, he plays his cards close to his chest, that’s for sure,’ said Miss Simpson, returning to the desk where I was standing once again, having grown bored of observing her flirtation.
‘Does he indeed,’ I remarked, attempting to sound uninterested.
‘All I did was ask him his name,’ she continued, ignoring my tone, ‘and he said wasn’t that very forward of me and I said, Well I call you Mr Tweed on account of the fact that you wear that gorgeous tweed suit every day. Present from your wife, was it, I asked him, or your girlfriend? I’m afraid that would be telling, he says to me then, all airs and graces, and I said I hoped he didn’t think I was being inquisitive, only it’s not so often we get the likes of him in here of an afternoon. The likes of me? he asks then. What do you mean by that? Well, I didn’t mean any offence, I told him, only he seemed like a superior sort of chap, that was all, someone with good conversation, perhaps, and for what it was worth I was free myself later this evening and—’
‘Miss Simpson, please!’ I snapped, closing my eyes and rubbing my thumbs against my temples in irritation, for she was giving me a headache with her incessant prattle. ‘This is a library. A place of erudition and learning. And you are here to work. It is not a forum for gossip or flirtation or silly chatter. If it’s at all possible, could you kindly reserve your—’
‘Well, pardon me and no mistake,’ she snapped, standing tall with her hands on her hips as if I had just offered her the worst type of insult. ‘Hark at you, Mr Jachmenev. Anyone would think I was after giving State secrets away to the Gerries, the way you carry on.’
‘I’m sorry if I was abrupt,’ I said with a sigh. ‘But really, this is too much. There are two trolleys of books over there that have been waiting to be cleared since early morning. There are books left on tables that haven’t been returned to their shelves. Is it really asking that much for you simply to do your job?’
She glared at me for a moment longer and pursed her lips, sticking her tongue into the corner of her mouth before shaking her head and turning around, marching away with as much dignity and outrage as she could muster. I watched her for a moment and felt slightly guilty. I liked Miss Simpson, she meant no harm to anyone and was, for the most part, pleasant company. But I shuddered at the idea of Arina ever turning into a young woman like that.
‘She’s quite a piece,’ said a quiet voice a few moments later and I looked up to see him, Mr Tweed, standing in front of me. I glanced down to take his book, but he wasn’t holding any. ‘A bit of a handful, I would imagine.’
‘Her heart’s in the right place,’ I replied, feeling enough solidarity of the workplace to avoid criticizing her to a stranger. ‘I suppose most of the young people have precious little to entertain themselves with these days. However, I do apologize if she was bothering you, sir,’ I added. ‘She’s an excitable thing, that’s all. I think she’s flattered by your interest in her, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘My interest in her?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise.
‘The fact that you’ve been coming in every day to see her.’
‘That’s not why I’ve been coming in,’ he said in a tone which made me look at him afresh. He had a curious air about him, one that implied that he was not perhaps the academic I had taken him for.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Is there something I can—’
‘It’s not her I’ve been coming in to see, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said.
I stared at him and felt my blood run cold. The first thing I tried to decipher was whether or not he had an accent. Whether he was an émigré, too. Whether he was one of us.
‘How do you know my name?’ I asked calmly.
‘It is Mr Jachmenev, isn’t it? Mr Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev?’
I swallowed. ‘What do you want?’
‘Me?’ He sounded a little surprised, but then shook his head and looked away for a moment before leaning in closer. ‘I don’t want anything. It’s not me who wants your help. Who needs your help.’
‘Then who?’ I asked, but he said nothing, just smiled at me, the type of smile that – had she not been finally engaged upon her work in a separate part of the reading room – might have been the undoing of Miss Simpson.
The lightning war over London had been going on for months and had accelerated to the point where I thought it might drive us all mad. Every night we waited in terror for the wail of the air-raid sirens to begin – the anticipation was almost worse than the fact of them, for nobody could feel safe in the kinetic silence until they finally and inevitably began to sound – and when they did, Zoya, Arina and I would run towards the deep-level shelter at Chancery Lane, the two long parallel tunnels of safety which quickly filled with residents of nearby streets, to find a place to call our own.
There were only eight such shelters in the city, far too few for the number of people who needed to find refuge there, and they were dark, unpleasant places, stinking, noisy, fetid underground passages that, ironically, made us feel even less safe than we had in our own homes. Despite the strict rules regarding which shelter each enclave was supposed to go towards, people started to arrive at the stations in the early evening from the more distant areas of London, waiting outside in order to secure their own position, and there was often an unseemly rush to get through the doors when they opened. Unlike the popular legend which has built up over time, stoked by the flames of patriotism and the tranquillity of safe recollection, I can recall no cheerful moments in those shelters, few nights when there was any type of solidarity on display between us poor mice, driven underground by the overhead bombing. We rarely talked, we didn’t laugh, we never sang songs. Instead, we gathered in small family groups, trembling, anxious, tempers fraying, occasional outbursts of violence pricking the fretful atmosphere. There was a constant terrifying sensation that at any moment the roof might collapse above our heads and bury us all in rubble-topped graves beneath the streets of the demolished city.
By the middle of 1941, the bombing had started to grow a little less frequent than six months previously, but one never knew the night, or the time of night, when the sirens might go off, a situation which left us in a constant state of exhaustion. Although everyone hated the sound of the bombs exploding, tearing down our neighbours’ homes, creating deep chasms in the streets and killing those poor souls who failed to make it to the shelters on time, Zoya found them particularly agonizing. Any notion of firepower or slaughter was enough to send her spirits desperately low.
‘How long can this go on?’ she asked me one night as we sat in Chancery Lane, counting the minutes until we could emerge safely from our tomb to examine the damage of the previous night’s bombing. Arina was asleep, half tucked inside my overcoat, seven years old by now, a child who thought the war was simply a normal part of life, for she could scarcely remember a time before it had been central to her world.
‘It’s hard to say,’ I replied, wanting to offer her some notion of hope but unwilling to create false optimism. ‘Not much longer, I think.’
‘But haven’t you heard anything? Has no one spoken to you and told you when we might—?’
‘Zoya,’ I said quickly, interrupting her and looking around to ensure that no one was listening, but it was too noisy for anything she said to be overheard. ‘We cannot talk of that here.’
‘But I can’t take it any longer,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Every night it’s the same thing. Every day I worry about whether we will survive to see another morning. You have friends now, Georgy. You are important to them. If you could only ask them—’
‘Zoya, be silent,’ I hissed, my eyes narrowing as I glanced around quickly. ‘I’ve told you. I know nothing. I can ask no one. Please… I know how difficult it is, but we cannot talk about these things. Not here.’
Arina shifted in my arms and looked up at me sleepily, her eyes half open, her mouth working slowly as her tongue flickered across her lips, her expression changing to ensure that both of us, mother and father, were still here to protect her. Zoya reached forward and kissed her forehead, smoothing the palm of her hand across her hair until the child returned to sleep.
‘Do you ever think we came to the wrong place, Georgy?’ she asked me, her voice quiet and resigned now. ‘We could have gone anywhere when we left Paris.’
‘But it’s everywhere, my love,’ I replied quietly. ‘The whole world is caught up in this. There was nowhere we could have escaped it.’
My mind drifted back frequently to Russia during those long nights in the shelter. I tried to imagine St Petersburg or Kashin as they might exist after twenty years away from them and could not help but wonder how they were surviving the war, how their people were coping with this torture. I never thought of St Petersburg as Leningrad, of course, even though the newspapers referred to it as the Bolsheviks’ city. I had never become accustomed to Petrograd either, the name the Tsar had inflicted on it during the Great War, when he feared that its original title was too Teutonic for a great Russian city, particularly when we were engaged in a war of boundaries with his German cousin. I tried to imagine this man Stalin, about whom I read so frequently, and whose face I distrusted. I had never met him, of course, but had heard his name discussed in the palace during the last year – along with those of Lenin and Trotsky – and it seemed curious that he had been the one to survive and rule. The reign of the Romanovs had come to an end in an outpouring of repugnance at the autocracy of the Tsars, but it seemed to me that this new Soviet leadership differed from the old Russian empire in little but name.
Although I thought of them infrequently, I wondered how my sisters were coping with the war, whether they were even still alive to endure it. Asya would be in her mid-forties by now, Liska and Talya in their forties. They were certainly old enough to have sons – my nephews, who might be fighting on the Russian fronts, laying down their lives on European battlefields. I had often longed for a son and it hurt me to think that I would never know any of these boys, that they would never sit and share their experiences with their uncle, but this was the price I had paid for my actions in 1918: banishment from my family, eternal exile from my homeland. It was entirely possible that none of them were even alive any more, that they had grown old childless or had been murdered during the Revolution. Who knew what retaliation might have been visited upon them in Kashin, if news of my actions had reached that small, hopeless village.
Three bombings in particular had a great effect on my family. The first was the partial bombing of the British Museum, a place I considered a home of sorts. The library was left mostly intact, but parts of the main building were destroyed and subsequently closed down until they could be repaired again, at some unknown date in the future, and it grieved me to see such a magnificent building brought to this.
The second was the destruction of the Holborn Empire, the cinema that Zoya and I had frequented on many occasions before the outbreak of the war, the place I associated almost entirely with my Greta Garbo obsession and the night that my wife and I had spent two hours lost in images and memories of our homeland during Anna Karenina.
The third was the most devastating of all. Our neighbour, Rachel Anderson, who had lived in the flat next to ours for six years and had been a friend and confidante to Zoya and a grandmother of sorts to Arina, was killed in a house in Brixton, where she had been visiting a friend, when they had failed to get to an air-raid shelter in time. Her body was not discovered for more than a week and in the meantime her absence had already left us fearing the worst. Her loss caused each of us great suffering, but most particularly Arina, who had seen Rachel every day of her life, and who had never known what it was to grieve before.
Unlike her parents, who knew only too well.
First, there were a series of letters, none of which contained any information that could possibly be considered important, but I translated them anyway, and looked for hidden meanings among the idioms. They were dated from over a year before and included details of troop activities which would have been long over by the time I sat down to render the Russian alphabet into English; most of the men whose movements had been directed by these letters were dead already. I worked carefully, reading each note from start to finish in order to get a clear sense of their meaning before deciding how to decipher them. I wrote in a neat, clear script on white vellum paper which was provided for me by the War Office, using a black fountain pen of excellent quality which had been laid on the table before I arrived, and when I was finished, at almost the precise moment that I laid the pen down, the door opened and he stepped inside.
‘The mirror,’ I said, nodding in the direction of the glass which ran the length of one wall. ‘You were watching me through it, I suppose?’
‘Yes, Mr Jachmenev,’ he replied with a smile. ‘We like to observe. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘If I minded, I wouldn’t be here, Mr Jones,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if you made a great secret of it, anyway. I could hear you talking in there. It’s really not very secure. I hope you don’t use it for more important people than I.’
He nodded and gave me an apologetic shrug before taking a seat in the corner of the room and reading my pages carefully. He was wearing a different suit from the one he had worn in the library on the day he first introduced himself to me, but it was of equally good quality and I couldn’t help but wonder how he was able to purchase it at a time when rationing was so strict. Mr Tweed, Miss Simpson had called him on that first afternoon. Mr Jones, he had introduced himself as a little later, offering no first name, a most unusual overture which implied that this was no more his real name than Miss Simpson’s more fanciful offering. Not that it mattered. Whoever he was made no difference to me. After all, he wasn’t the first person in my life who was pretending to be someone they were not.
‘Your suit,’ I said, watching him as he scanned my sentences, his expression changing from time to time as he drifted between approval and surprise.
‘My suit?’ he asked, looking up.
‘Yes. I was just admiring it.’
He stared at me and the corners of his mouth turned up a little, as if he was unsure how to take the remark. ‘Thank you,’ he said, a note of suspicion in his tone.
‘I wonder how such a suit is available to a young man. In these difficult times, I mean,’ I added.
‘I have a private income,’ he replied immediately, the speed of his response suggesting to me that he didn’t care to discuss it. ‘These are very good,’ he continued, stepping over to sit at the table beside me. ‘Very good indeed. You’ve avoided the mistakes that most of our translators make.’
‘Which are?’
‘Translating every word and every phrase exactly as they appear on the page. Ignoring the differences in idiom from language to language. In fact you haven’t translated them at all, have you? You’ve told me what every letter says. There’s a keen difference.’
‘I’m glad you appreciate it,’ I said. ‘But perhaps I can ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘Your Russian is obviously as good as mine is.’
‘Actually, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said with a smile, ‘it’s better.’
I stared at him, amused by his arrogance, for he was a good fifteen years younger than me and sported an accent which implied that he had been schooled at Eton or Harrow or one of the other exclusive schools which made young gentlemen out of the sons of wealthy fathers. ‘You’re from Russia?’ I asked in a disbelieving tone. ‘You sound so… English.’
‘That’s because I am English. I’ve only been to Russia a few times. Moscow. Leningrad, of course. Stalingrad.’
‘St Petersburg,’ I said quickly, correcting him. ‘And Tsaritsyn.’
‘If you prefer. I’ve been as far west as the Central Siberian Plateau. As far south as Irkutsk. But that was purely for pleasure. Once I was even in Yekaterinburg.’
I had been looking back down at the letters as he spoke, enjoying the sight of Russian characters again, but at that word, at that most terrible of words, my head snapped up and I stared at him, examining his face for anything that might betray his own secrets.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I was sent there.’
‘Why Yekaterinburg?’
‘I was sent there.’
I looked at him and felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety coursing through my veins. I couldn’t remember when I had last encountered someone so entirely in control of their emotions; a young man who never perspired, never lost his temper and never said anything which he was not absolutely sure that he wanted to say.
‘You have only visited Russia,’ I said finally, for it seemed as if he was not going to speak again until I did.
‘That’s correct.’
‘You’ve never lived there?’
‘No.’
‘But you believe your Russian is better than mine?’
‘Yes.’
I couldn’t help but laugh a little at the absolute certainty in his tone. ‘Might I ask why?’
‘Because it’s my job to have better Russian than you,’ he said.
‘Your job?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is your job exactly, Mr Jones?’
‘To have better Russian than you.’
I sighed and looked away. The conversation was utterly pointless, of course it was. He wasn’t going to tell me anything that he didn’t want to. It would be simpler if I just waited for him to talk instead. He would say the same things, regardless.
‘But having said that,’ he added, lifting the letters once again and scattering them across the table, ‘your Russian is excellent. I commend you. I mean it’s not as if you’ve had anyone to practise it on these last twenty years, is it?’
‘Haven’t I?’
‘Your wife, of course,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But you don’t speak Russian at home. And you never speak it around your daughter.’
‘How do you know what I speak at home?’ I asked, feeling my temper begin to rise a little now; I hated the fact that he seemed to know so much about me. I had spent twenty years trying to protect my family’s privacy and now this boy was sitting next to me telling me things that he should never have known. I wanted to know how had he discovered them. I wanted to know what else he knew about me.
‘Am I wrong?’ he asked, sensing my annoyance perhaps and softening his tone.
‘You know that you’re not.’
‘And why is that, Mr Jachmenev? Why don’t you speak your own language around Arina? Don’t you want her to know her heritage?’
‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘You seem to know everything else about me.’
Now it was his turn to smile. We sat there for what felt like a very long time but he said nothing in reply, simply shook his head and nodded.
‘Really very good,’ he repeated, tapping his index finger on the bundle of letters. ‘I knew I’d found the right man. But I think next time we might offer you something a little bit more challenging, don’t you?’
The experience of being Russian in London between 1939 and 1945 was not an easy one. There were many evenings when Zoya recounted stories to me of how, purchasing food in a grocer’s or butcher’s shop where she had been a customer for years, she was stared at with mistrust the moment her request betrayed her accent; of how the portions of rationed meat passed across the counter were always slightly smaller than those handed to the English women in front and behind her in the line. Of how the bottle of milk was always closer to its use-by date, the bread always a little more stale. Whatever friendliness and sense of belonging we had built up with our neighbours over more than twenty years among them, however much we thought we had assimilated ourselves into their country, seemed to dissipate almost overnight. It didn’t matter to them that we were not German. We were not English, that was all that counted. We spoke differently, so we must be agents of the enemy, dispersed into the heart of their capital in order to discover their secrets, betray their families, murder their children. All around us was the stink of suspicion.
Whenever I stopped to read one of the propaganda posters that were liberally scattered around the walls of the city – CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES; YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’S LISTENING; BE LIKE DAD, KEEP MUM – I understood why people stopped their conversations whenever they heard me speak and why they turned to look at me, their eyes opening wide as if I was a threat to their well-being. I began to hate speaking in shops or cafés, preferring to point to whatever I wanted and hoping that I could be served without the need for conversation. And when we were not avoiding the bombs in the air-raid shelters, Zoya and I spent every evening at home together, where we could talk freely without having to endure the intimidating stares of strangers.
Towards the end of 1941, I found myself walking home one evening with my spirits particularly low after a long and difficult day. The wife, daughter and mother-in-law of my employer, Mr Trevors, had been killed the night before, when Mrs Trevors’ family home had been struck by a single bomb, dropped by a Luftwaffe aeroplane which had veered wildly off course. It was the worst luck imaginable – theirs was the only house in the street which was in any way damaged – and Mr Trevors had been distraught because of the tragedy. He’d wandered into the library in the late afternoon without any of us noticing and a short time later, I heard loud cries coming from his office. When I went inside, the poor man was seated behind his desk with an expression of utter devastation on his face, which changed to tears and howling when I attempted to comfort him. Miss Simpson followed me in a few minutes later and surprised me by taking full charge of the situation, finding whisky from I knew not where to settle his trembling, before taking him home and offering what little friendship he would allow at such a terrible moment.
Still unsettled by these events, I did something entirely out of character as I made my way home, stepping into a public house in desperate need of alcohol. The place was two-thirds full, mostly older men who were beyond the age of enlisting, women of all ages, and a few soldiers in uniform, home on leave. I barely gave any of them a second glance and walked directly to the bar, leaning up against it, glad for what little support it offered.
‘A pint of ale, please,’ I said to the barman, who was unfamiliar to me, despite the fact that this was as close to a local pub as Zoya and I had, but then we had rarely set foot in there.
‘What was that?’ he asked, his tone confrontational as he narrowed his eyes and looked at me with barely disguised contempt. It was difficult not to be aware of his thick arms as he wore the sleeves of his shirt rolled up towards the biceps, the suggestion of a tattoo peeping out from beneath the cuffs.
‘I said I’d like a pint of ale,’ I repeated, and this time he stared at me for ten, perhaps twenty seconds, as if he was considering whether or not to throw me out into the street, before finally nodding and walking slowly towards one of the pumps, where he poured a long draught into a glass, heavy with foam, and set it on the counter before me.
‘Isn’t that a bitter?’ I asked, knowing full well that it would be better if I simply left the bar and went home. Zoya usually kept a few bottles of rationed ale hidden in a cupboard somewhere for emergency moments such as this.
‘One pint of bitter,’ said the barman, holding his hand out. ‘As requested. That’ll be sixpence, if you please.’
Now it was my turn to hesitate. I looked at the glass, the beads of perspiration clinging invitingly to the side, and decided that this was not the moment to protest. The hum of conversation around the room had already lessened, as if the other patrons were hoping that I might do something, anything, that would provoke a fight.
‘Fine,’ I said, reaching into my pocket and placing the exact change on the counter. ‘And thank you.’ I took my drink and sat down at an empty table, picking up a newspaper that a previous customer had left behind and scanning the headlines.
It was mostly war stories, of course. A series of quotes from a speech that Mr Churchill had given the afternoon before in Birmingham. Another that Mr Attlee had offered in support of the government. Short articles about bombings and the names of some of the people who had been killed, their ages and occupations, although nothing as yet about Mr Trevors’ family; I wondered for a moment whether they would figure in the reports the following day or whether there were too many people killed to list them all. It was probably bad for public morale, anyway, to list the names of the dead every day. I was about to start reading a piece relating to a sporting event that barely interested me when I noticed two men walking down from the other end of the bar and sitting at the table next to mine. I glanced up – their drinks were half finished and I suspected they had been there for some time – but turned immediately back to my newspaper, unwilling to engage in conversation.
‘Evening,’ said one of the men, nodding at me, a fellow of about my own age with a pale complexion and rotten teeth.
‘Good evening,’ I replied, in a tone that I hoped would discourage further dialogue.
‘Heard you at the bar, ordering your drink,’ he said. ‘Not from round here, are you?’
I looked up at him and sighed, wondering whether it would be in my best interests to simply stand up and leave, but decided not to allow myself to be intimidated by them.
‘Actually, I am,’ I replied. ‘I live only a few streets away.’
‘You might live only a few streets away,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘but you’re not from here, are you?’
I stared at him and then towards his companion, who was a little younger, and rather simple looking, and nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I am,’ I replied calmly. ‘I’ve lived here for nearly twenty years.’
‘But you must be my age if you’re a day,’ said the man. ‘Where were you for the twenty years before that, eh?’
‘Do you really care?’ I asked.
‘Do I care?’ he repeated with a laugh. ‘Of course I bloody care, mate, or I wouldn’t be asking you, would I? Do I care, he asks me,’ he added, shaking his head and looking around as if the entire bar was his audience.
‘It just seems like a rather dull question, that’s all.’
‘Listen, friend,’ said the man, more forcefully now, ‘I’m only trying to make conversation with you, that’s all. I’m just being friendly, like. That’s how we are here in England, you see. Friendly. Maybe you’re not familiar with our ways, is that how it is?’
‘Look,’ I said, putting my glass down and staring him directly in the eye, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to be left in peace. I just want to enjoy my drink and read this newspaper, that’s all.’
‘Peace?’ he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest and looking at his friend, as if he had never heard anything so extraordinary in all his life. ‘Did you hear that, Frankie? This gentleman here says he wants to be left in peace. I daresay we’d all like to be left in peace, now wouldn’t we?’
‘Aye,’ said Frankie, his head nodding up and down like a braying donkey. ‘I know I would.’
‘Only we none of us have any peace any more, do we?’ he continued. ‘What with all the trouble your lot have caused.’
‘My lot?’ I asked, frowning. ‘And what lot would that be, exactly?’
‘Well, you tell me. All I know is you’re not an Englishman. You sound half-German to me.’
Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘Do you really think that if I was German I would be sitting here, in a public house in the middle of London? Don’t you think I would have been taken away and interned a long time ago?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘They might have missed you out. You’re a crafty lot, you Germans.’
‘I’m not German,’ I said.
‘Well, that voice of yours tells me different. You didn’t grow up in Holborn, I know that much for sure.’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘So what’s all the secrecy about, then? Got something to be ashamed of, have you? Worried you might be caught?’
I looked around and hesitated before answering; there was a hum of chatter in the room, but I could tell that most ears were tuned to our conversation nevertheless.
‘I’m not worried about anything,’ I said eventually. ‘And I’d rather not continue with this discussion, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Then answer my question, that’s all I want,’ he said, his tone growing less patient with me now, more aggressive. ‘Come on then, Mister, if it’s not some big secret, then why can’t you tell me where that accent of yours comes from?’
‘Russia,’ I said. ‘I was born in Russia. Is that enough for you?’
He sat back for a moment and seemed almost impressed by this. ‘Russia,’ he repeated beneath his breath. ‘Where do we stand on the Russians then, Frankie?’
‘On their necks,’ said the younger man, leaning forward and attempting to look threatening, which was difficult for him as he had an innocent, childlike expression, rather like a newborn lamb struggling to find its feet; I got the impression that when he was not being called upon to speak he was lost in a world of his own thoughts.
‘Gentlemen, I think it’s time for me to leave,’ I said, standing up and walking away from them. They called after me that they were only being friendly, that all they wanted was to pass the time of day with me, but I ignored them and left the bar, aware that more than one set of eyes was focussed on me. I kept looking straight ahead, however, and turned on to the street which led towards my home. A few moments later, I heard footsteps behind me and my heart sunk. For twenty, thirty seconds I tried desperately not to turn around, but they were getting closer and closer. Finally, unable to stop myself, I looked back, just as the two men from the pub caught up with me.
‘Where do you think you’re going then?’ asked the older one, pushing me against the wall and holding me there, his hand pressed around my throat. ‘Going off to spill secrets to your Russian friends, are you?’
‘Let go of me,’ I hissed, breaking free of him for a moment. ‘You’ve both been drinking. You’re well advised to go back to it and leave me be.’
‘Well advised, are we?’ he asked, laughing as he looked at the younger man, before pulling his arm back and clenching his fist, ready to attack me. ‘I’ll give you well advised.’
That hand never made contact with my face. My left arm grabbed his right and, old habits, snapped it immediately as my own right fist pulled back, before sweeping forward with a low blow to the side of his jaw, sending him sprawling backwards on the pavement, uttering an oath as he clutched his broken arm, which would not yet be hurting him, but growing numb and offering the sensation of great pain to come.
‘He’s broken my arm, Frankie,’ he cried, the words dribbling down his chin like spilt beer. ‘Frankie, he’s only gone and broken my arm. Get him, Frankie. Sort him out.’
The younger man looked at me in astonishment – he had not expected such violence; nor had I – and I stared at him with a cold expression, holding his gaze for a moment before shaking my head, as if to tell him that any move on his part would be an ill-conceived idea. He swallowed nervously and I turned and walked away, maintaining a steady pace as I turned the corner, trying to ignore the sounds and threats that were following in my wake.
It had been years since I had been called upon to defend myself in such a way, but I had been trained well by Count Charnetsky and the movements came back to me quickly. But still, for all that, I felt a degree of shame for my actions and told Zoya nothing of the events of the evening when I returned home, talking to her instead of Mr Trevors’ tragedy and the sympathy that Miss Simpson had offered him in his time of need.
My working hours remained unaltered. I arrived at the library at eight o’clock in the morning and left at precisely six. I spent much of my time behind the main desk, entering titles in the card system, as I had always done. When the tables became particularly messy, I assisted Miss Simpson with clearing them. When there were difficult reference books which readers needed to source, I found them and delivered them into their hands as efficiently as possible.
But this was now a cover for my real responsibilities, which lay elsewhere.
If it was just an envelope which was to be delivered to me, a note would be placed in my jacket pocket as I walked to work, without my even noticing it, with a sentence scrawled on it. A phrase that meant nothing. Don’t forget we need milk, love Zoya, written in a hand which was obviously not her own.
At the library, ensuring that no one was observing me, I would take a pencil and paper and look again at the words.
D for 4. F for 6. W is 23, which equals 5. N is 14, another 5. M, 13, which sums to 4. L, 12, therefore a 3. And finally Z, 26, 8.
Don’t forget we need milk, love Zoya.
4655438
465-5438.
The book reference. Find the book, find the letter.
Read the letter.
Translate the letter.
Destroy the letter.
Deliver the meaning.
If there was more than a simple envelope, if it was a series of documents that needed to be examined, a man would pass me by as I left our flat in the morning, a different man every time, and he would bump into me and apologize, saying that he should have been looking where he was going. When this happened, I would stop to buy a newspaper and some fruit at a corner shop near the museum. As I examined the fruit, searching for the least bruised apple, I would leave my briefcase on the floor beside me. When I lifted it again, it would be slightly heavier than it was before. Then I would buy the fruit and leave.
On occasion, the telephone would ring at the museum at precisely four twenty-two in the afternoon and I would answer it.
‘Is that Mr Samuels?’ a voice would say on the other end.
‘There’s no Mr Samuels here, I’m afraid,’ I would reply, those exact words. No divergences. ‘This is the library at the British Museum. Who are you looking for?’
‘I’m so sorry,’ was the reply. ‘I think I must have the wrong number. It was the Natural History Museum I was after.’
‘That’s perfectly all right,’ I would say, hanging up, and then, when I left work later, rather than walking directly home to my wife and child, I would take a bus towards Clapham and a car would be waiting for me on the corner of Lavender Hill and Altenburg Gardens to take me to see Mr Jones.
‘A devil of a problem for you today, Mr Jachmenev,’ he might say as I arrived. ‘Think you can handle it?’
‘I can but try,’ I would reply with a smile, and he would lead me to a quiet room and lay a series of documents or photographs before me. Or perhaps he might introduce me to a roomful of stern men, none of whom would offer their names to me, but each of whom would pepper me with questions the moment I walked through the door, and I would do my best to answer them with clarity and confidence.
On one occasion, I spent an entire night reading more than three hundred pages of telegrams and letters. Having imparted everything I had understood from them to Mr Jones, he appeared surprised by my reasoning and asked me to talk him through the logic of my translation once again. I did so, he thought about it a little more, and then summoned a car. Within the hour I was standing before Mr Churchill, who sucked on a cigar as I repeated to him what I had told Mr Jones earlier. He looked entirely displeased throughout my discourse, as if the whole direction of the war was changing and it was entirely my fault.
‘And you’re sure of this, are you?’ he asked, stomping out the words at me with a heavy scowl.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Quite sure.’
‘Well, it’s very interesting,’ he replied, drumming his chubby fingers on the table before him for a few moments before standing up. ‘Very interesting and very surprising.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ I replied.
‘Well done, Mr Jones,’ he said then to my deliverer, checking his pocket-watch. ‘But I must go now. Keep up the good work, there’s a good fellow. Sound chap you have here, too. What’s his name, anyway?’
‘Jachmenev,’ I said, even though the question hadn’t been addressed to me. ‘Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev.’
He turned to stare at me, as if I had been entirely impudent to answer him when the question had been directed elsewhere, but finally he nodded and went on his way.
‘A car will take you back to Clapham,’ said Mr Jones then. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to make your own way home from there.’
And so I did. Walking back in the moonlight, tired after a long day, I was nervous that at any moment the sirens would sound and Zoya, Arina and I would be separated.
Zoya smiled at me when I came through the door and prepared breakfast, placing it before me with a large pot of tea. She never once asked me where I had been.