The Russia House

CHAPTER 8

In the situation room in the basement of the Russia House the atmosphere was of a tense and permanent night air-raid. Ned sat at his command desk before a bank of telephones. Sometimes one winked and he spoke into it in terse monosyllables. Two female assistants softly put round the telegrams and cleared the out-trays. Two illuminated post-office clocks, one London time, one Moscow time, shone like twin moons from the end wall. In Moscow it was midnight. In London nine. Ned scarcely looked up as his head janitor unlocked the door to me.

It was the earliest I had been able to get away. I had spent the morning at the Treasury solicitors' and the afternoon with the lawyers from Cheltenham. Supper was helping to entertain a delegation of espiocrats from Sweden before they were packed off to the obligatory musical.

Walter and Bob were bowed over a Moscow street map. Brock was on the internal telephone to the cypher room. Ned was immersed in what seemed to be a lengthy inventory. He waved me to a chair and shoved a batch of incoming signals at me, scribbled messages from the front.

0954 hrs Barley has successfully telephoned Katya at October. They have made an appointment for 2015 at the Odessa tonight. More.

1320 hrs irregulars have followed Katya to number 14 so-and-so street. She posted a letter at what appears to be an empty house. Photographs to follow soonest by bag. More.

2018 hrs Katya has arrived at the Odessa Hotel. Barley and Katya are talking in the canteen. Wicklow and one irregular observing. More.

2105 hrs Katya departs Odessa. Summary of conversation to follow. Tapes to follow soonest by bag. More.

2200 hrs interim. Katya has promised to telephone Barley tonight. More.

2250 hrs Katya followed to the so-and-so hospital. Wicklow and one irregular covering. More.

2325 hrs Katya receives phone call on disused hospital telephone. Speaks three minutes twenty seconds. More.

And now suddenly, no more.

Spying is normality taken to extremes. Spying is waiting.

'Is Clive Without India receiving tonight?' Ned asked, as if my presence had reminded him of something.

I replied that Clive would be in his suite all evening. He had been locked up in the American Embassy all day, and he had told me he proposed to be on call.

I had a car so we drove to Head Office together.

'Have you seen this bloody document?', Ned asked me, tapping the folder on his lap.

'Which bloody document is that?'

'The Bluebird distribution list. Bluebird readers and their satraps.'

I was cautiously non-committal. Ned's bad temper in mid-operation was legendary. The light on the door of Clive's office was green, meaning come in if you dare. The brass plate said 'Deputy' in lettering to outshine the Royal Mint.

'What the devil's happened to the need-to-know, Clive?' Ned asked him, waving the distribution list as soon as we were in the presence. 'We give Langley one batch of highly sensitive, unsourced material and overnight they've recruited more cooks than broth. I mean what is this? Hollywood? We've got a live joe out there. We've got a defector in place we've never met.'

Clive toured the gold carpet. He had a habit when he was arguing with Ned of turning his whole body at once, like a playing-card. He did so now.

'So you think the Bluebird readership list too long?' he enquired in the tone of one taking evidence.

'Yes, and so should you. And so should Russell Sheriton. Who the devil are the Pentagon Scientific Liaison Board? What's the White House Academic Advisory Team when it's at home?'

'YOU would prefer me to take a high line and insist Bluebird be confined to their Inter Agency Committee? Principals only, no staff, no aides? Is that what you are telling me?'

'If you think you can get the toothpaste back in the tube, yes.'

Clive affected to consider this on its merits. But I knew, and so did Ned, that Clive considered nothing on its merits. He considered who was in favour of something and who was against it. Then he considered who was the better ally.

'Firstly, not a single one of those elevated gentlemen I have mentioned is capable of making head or tail of the Bluebird material without expert guidance,' Clive resumed in his bloodless voice. 'Either we let them flounder in ignorance or we admit their appendages and accept the price. The same goes for their Defense Intelligence team, their Navy, Army, Air Force and White House evaluators.'

'Is this Russell Sheriton speaking or you?' Ned demanded.

'How can We tell them not to call in their scientific panels when we offer them immensely complex material in the same breath?' Clive persisted, neatly letting Ned's question pass him by. 'If Bluebird's genuine, they're going to need all the help they can get.'

'If', Ned echoed, flaring. 'If he's genuine. My God, Clive, you're worse than they are. There are two hundred and forty people on that list and every one of them has a wife, a mistress and fifteen best friends.'

'And secondly', Clive went on, when we had forgotten there had been a firstly, 'it's not our intelligence to dispose of. It's Langley's.' He had swung on me before Ned could get in his reply. 'Palfrey. Confirm. Under our sharing treaty with the Americans, is it not the case that we give Langley first rights on all strategic material?'

'In strategic matters our dependence on Langley is total,' I conceded. 'They give us what they want us to know. In return we are obliged to give them whatever we find out. It isn't often much but that's the deal.'

Clive listened carefully to this and approved it. His coldness had an unaccustomed ferocity and I wondered why. If he had possessed a conscience, I would have said it was uneasy. What had he been doing at the Embassy all day? What had he given away to whom for what?

'It is a common misapprehension of this Service,' Clive continued, talking straight at Ned now, 'that we and the Americans are in the same boat. We're not. Not when it comes to strategy. We haven't a defence analyst in the country who is capable of holding a candle to his American counterpart on matters of strategy. Where strategy is concerned, we are a tiny, ignorant British coracle and they are the Queen Elizabeth. It is not our place to tell them how to run their ship.'

We were still marvelling at the vigour of this declaration when Clive's hot line began ringing and he went for it greedily, for he always loved answering his hot line in front of his subordinates. He was unlucky. It was Brock calling for Ned.

Katya had just phoned Barley at the Odessa and they had agreed a meeting for tomorrow evening, said Brock. Moscow station required Ned's urgent approval of their operational proposals for the encounter. Ned left at once.

'What are you brewing with the Americans?' I asked Clive, but he didn't bother with me.

All next day I spent talking to my Swedes. In the Russia House, life was scarcely more enlivening. Spying is waiting. Around four I slipped back to my room and telephoned Hannah. Sometimes I do that. By four she is back from the Cancer Institute where she works part time, and her husband never comes home before seven. She told me how her day had gone. I scarcely listened. I gave her some story about my son, Alan, who was in deep water with a nurse up in Birmingham, a nice enough girl but really not Alan's class.

'I may ring you later,' she said.

Sometimes she said that, but she never rang.

Barley walked at Katya's side and he could hear her footsteps like a tighter echo of his own. The flaking mansions of Dickensian Moscow were bathed in stale twilight. The first courtyard was gloomy, the second dark. Cats stared at them from the rubbish. Two long-haired boys who might have been students were playing tennis across a row of packing cases. A third leaned against the wall. A door stood ahead of them, daubed with graffiti and a red crescent moon. 'Watch for the red marks,' Wicklow had advised. She was pale and he wondered if he was pale too, because it would be a living miracle if he wasn't. Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad. And Barley Blair, he'll never be either. He grabbed the doorhandle and yanked it. She kept her distance. She was wearing a headscarf and a raincoat. The handle turned but the door wouldn't budge. He shoved it with both hands then shoved harder. The tennis players yelled at him in Russian. He stopped dead, feeling fire on his back.

'They say you should please kick it,' Katya said, and to his amazement he saw that she was smiling.

'If you can smile now,' he said, 'how do you look when you're happy?'

But he must have said it to himself because she didn't answer. He kicked it and it gave, the grit beneath it screaming. The boys laughed and went back to their game. He stepped into the black and she followed him. He pressed a switch but no light came. The door slammed shut behind them and when he groped for the handle he couldn't find it. They stood in deep darkness, smelling cats and onions and cooking oil and listening to bits of music and argument from other people's lives. He struck a match. Three steps appeared, then half a bicycle ,then the entrance to a filthy lift. Then his fingers burned. You go to the fourth floor, Wicklow had said. Watch for the red marks. How the devil do I watch for red marks in the dark? God answered him with a pale light from the floor above.

'Where are we, please?' she asked politely.

'It's a friend of mine,' he said. 'A painter.'

He pulled back the lift door, then the grille. He said 'Please' but she was already past him, standing in the lift and looking upward, willing it to rise.

'He's away for a few days. It's just somewhere to talk,' he said.

He noticed her eyelashes again, the moisture in her eyes. He wanted to console her but she wasn't sad enough.

'He's a painter,' he said again, as if that legitimised a friend.

'Official?'

'No. I don't think so. I don't know.'

Why hadn't Wicklow told him which kind of bloody painter the man was supposed to be?

He was about to press the button when a small girl in tortoise shell spectacles hopped in after them hugging a plastic bear. She called a greeting and Katya's face lit up as she greeted her in return. The lift juddered upwards, the buttons popping like cap pistols at each floor. At the third the child politely said goodbye, and Barley and Katya said goodbye in unison. At the fourth the lift bumped to a halt as if it had hit the ceiling and perhaps it had. He shoved her ashore and leapt after her. A passage opened before them, filled with the stench of baby, perhaps a lot of babies. At the end of it, on what seemed to be a blank wall, a red arrow directed them left. They came on a narrow wooden staircase leading upwards. On the bottom step Wicklow crouched like a leprechaun reading a weighty book by the aid of a mechanic's light. He did not lift his head as they climbed past him but Barley saw Katya stare at him all the same.

'What's the matter? Seen a ghost?' he asked her.

Could she hear him? Could he hear himself? Had he spoken? They were in along attic. Chinks of sky pierced the tiles, bats' mess smeared the rafters. A path of scaffolders' boards had been laid over the joists. Barley took her hand. Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body.

He advanced cautiously, smelling turpentine and linseed and hearing the tapping of an unexpected wind. He squeezed between a pair of iron cisterns and saw a life-sized paper sea-gull in full flight strung from a beam, turning on its thread. He pulled her after him. Beyond it, fixed to a shower-rail, hung a striped curtain. If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.' He swept the curtain aside and entered a painter's studio, once more drawing her after him. At its centre stood an easel and a model's upholstered box. An aged chesterfield rested on its stuffing. It's a one-time facility, Wicklow had said. So am I, Wickers, so am 1. A homemade skylight was cut into the slope of the roof. A red mark was daubed on its frame. Russians don't trust walls, Wicklow had explained, she'll talk better in the open air.

The skylight opened, to the consternation of a colony of doves and sparrows. He nodded her through first, noticing the easy flow of her long body as she stooped. He clambered after her, barking his spine and saying 'Damn' exactly as he knew he would. They were standing between two gables in a leaded valley only wide enough for their feet. The pulse of traffic rose from streets they couldn't see. She was facing him and close. Let's live up here, he thought. Your eyes, me, the sky. He was rubbing his back, screwing up his eyes against the pain.

'You are hurt?'

'Just a fractured spine.'

'Who is that man on the stairs?' she said.

'He works for me. He's my editor. He's keeping a lookout while we talk.'

'He was at the hospital last night.'

'What hospital?'

'Last night after seeing you, I was obliged to visit a certain hospital.'

'Are you ill? Why did you go to hospital?' Barley asked, no longer rubbing his back.

'It is not important. He was there. He appeared to have a broken arm.'

'He can't have been there,' Barley said, not believing himself. 'He was with me the whole evening after you left. We had a discussion about Russian books.'

He saw the suspicion slowly leave her eyes. 'I am tired. You must excuse me.'

'Let me tell you what I've worked out, then you can tell me it's no good. We talk, then I take you out to dinner. If the People's custodians were listening to our call last night they'll expect that anyway. The studio belongs to a painter friend of mine, a jazz nut like me. I never told you his name because I couldn't remember it and perhaps I never knew it. I thought we could bring him a drink and look at his pictures but he didn't appear. We went on to dinner, talked literature and world peace. Despite my reputation I did not make a pass at you. I was too much in awe of your beauty. How's that?'

'It is convenient.'

Dropping into a crouch, he produced ahalf bottle of Scotch and unscrewed the cap. 'Do you drink this stuff?'

'No.'

'Me neither.' He hoped she would settle beside him but she remained standing. He poured a tot into the cap and set the bottle at his feet.

'What's his name?' he said. 'The author's. Goethe. Who is he?'

'It is not important.'

'What's his unit? Firm? Postbox number? Ministry? Laboratory? Where's he working? We haven't time to fool around.'

'I don't know.'

'Where's he stationed? You won't tell me that either, will you?'

'In many places. It depends where he is working.'

'How did you meet him?'

'I don't know. I don't know what I may tell you.'

'What did he tell you to tell me?'

She faltered, as if he had caught her out. She frowned. 'Whatever is necessary. I should trust you. He wasgenerous. It is his nature.'

'So what's holding you up?' Nothing. 'Why do you think I'm here?' Nothing. 'Do you think I enjoy playing cops-and-robbers in Moscow?'

'I don't know.'

'Why did you send me the book if you don't trust me?'

'It was for him that I sent it. I did not select you. He did,' she replied moodily.

'Where is he now? At the hospital? How do you speak to him? He looked up at her, waiting for her answer. 'Why don't you just start talking and see how it goes?' he suggested. 'Who he is, who you are. What he does for a living.'

'I don't know.'

'Who was in the woodshed at three a.m. on the night of the crime.' More nothing. 'Tell me why you've dragged me into this. You started this. I didn't. Katya? It's me. I'm Barley Blair. I do jokes, I do bird noises, I drink. I'm a friend.'

He loved her grave silences while she stared at him. He loved her listening with her eyes and the sense of recovered companionship each time she spoke.

'There has been no crime,' she said. 'He is my friend. His name and occupation are unimportant.'

Barley took a sip while he thought about this. 'So is this what you usually do for friends? Smuggle their illicit manuscripts to the West for them?' She thinks with her eyes as well, he thought. 'Did he happen to mention to you what his manuscript was about?'

'Naturally. He would not endanger me without my consent.'

He caught the protectiveness in her voice and resented it. 'What did he tell you was in it?' he asked.

'The manuscript describes my country's involvement in the preparation of anti-humanitarian weapons of mass destruction over many years. It paints a portrait of corruption and incompetence in all fields of the defence-industrial complex. Also of criminal mismanagement and ethical shortcomings.'

'That's quite a mouthful. Do you know any details beyond that?'

'I am not acquainted with military matters.'

'So he's a soldier.'

'No.'

'So what is he?'

Silence.

'But you approve of that? Passing that stuff out to the West?'

'He is not passing it to the West or to any bloc. He respects the British but that is not important. His gesture will ensure true openness among scientists of all nations. It will help to destroy the arms race.' She had still to come to him. She was speaking flatly as if she had learned her lines by heart. 'He believes there is no time left. We must destroy the abuse of science and the political systems responsible for it. When he speaks philosophy, he speaks English,' she added.

And you listen, he thought. With your eyes. In English. While you wonder whether you can trust me.

'Is he a scientist?' he asked.

'Yes. He is a scientist.'

'I hate them all. What branch? Is he a physicist?'

'Perhaps. I don't know.'

'His information comes from across the board. Accuracy, aimpoints, command and control, rocket motors. Is he one man? Who gives him the material? How does he know so much?'

'I don't know. He is one man. That is obvious. I do not have so many friends. He is not a group. Perhaps he also supervises the work of others. I don't know.'

'Is he high up? A big boss? Is he working here in Moscow? Is he a headquarters man? What is he?'

She shook her head at each question. 'He does not work in Moscow. Otherwise I have not asked him and he does not tell tne.'

'Does he test things?'

'I don't know. He goes to many places. All over the Soviet Union. Sometimes he has been in the sun, sometimes he has been very cold. sometimes both. I don't know.'

'Has he ever mentioned his unit?'

'No.'

'Box numbers? The names of his bosses? The name of a colleague or subordinate?'

'He is not interested to tell me such things.'

And he believed her. While he was with her, he would believe that north was south and babies grew on jacaranda trees.

She was watching him, waiting for his next question.

'Does he understand the consequences of publishing this stuff?' he asked.

'To himself, I mean? Does he know what he's playing with?'

'He says that there are times when our actions must come first and we must consider consequences only when they occur.' She seemed to expect him to say something but he was learning to slow down. 'If we see one goal clearly we may advance one step. If we contemplate all goals at once we shall not advance at all.'

'How about you? Has he thought about the consequences to you at all if any of this comes to light?'

'He is reconciled.'

'Are you?'

'Naturally. It was my decision also. Why else would I support him?'

'And the children?' he asked.

'It is for them and for their generation,' she said with a resolution bordering on anger.

'What about the consequences to Mother Russia?'

'We regard the destruction of Russia as preferable to the destruction of all mankind. The greatest burden is the past. For all nations, not only Russia. We regard ourselves as the executioners of the past. He says that if we cannot execute our past, how shall we construct our future? We shall not build a new world until we have got rid of the mentalities of the old. In order to express truth we must also be prepared to be the apostles of negation. He quotes Turgenev. A nihilist is a person who does not take anything for granted, however much that principle is revered.'

'And you?'

'I am not a nihilist. I am a humanist. If it is given to us to play a part for the future, we must play it.'

He was.searching her voice for a hint of doubt. He found none. She was tone perfect.

'How long's he been talking like this? Always? Or is it only recent?'

'He has always been idealistic. That is his nature. He has always been extremely critical in a constructive sense. There was a time when he was able to convince himself that the weapons of annihilation were so terrible they would have the effect of abolishing war. He believed they would produce an alteration in the mind of the military establishments. He was persuaded by the paradox that the greatest weapons contained within them the greatest capacity for peace. He was in this regard an enthusiast of American strategic opinions.'

She was starting towards him. He could feel it in her, the stirring of a need. She was waking and approaching him. Under the Moscow sky, she was shedding her mistrust after too much loneliness and deprival.

'So what changed him?'

'He has experienced for many years the incompetence and arrogance of our military and bureaucratic organisations. He has seen how it drags on the feet of progress. That is his expression. He is inspired by the perestroika and by the prospect of world peace. But he is not Utopian, he is not passive. He knows that nothing will come of its own accord. He knows that our people are deluded and lack collective power. The new revolution must be imposed from above. By intellectuals. By artists. By administrators. By scientists. He wishes to make his own irreversible contribution in accordance with the exhortations of our leadership. He quotes a Russian saying: "If the ice is thin, one must walk fast." He says we have lived too long in an era we no longer need. Progress can only be achieved when the era is finished.'

'And you agree?'

'Yes, and so do you!' Heat, now. Fire in her eyes. An English too perfect, learned in the cloister, from permitted classics of the past. 'He says that he heard you criticise your own country in similar terms!'

'Does he have any small thoughts?' Barley asked. 'I mean, does he like the movies? What car does he drive?'

She had turned away from him and he had the side view of her face cut against the empty sky. He took another nip of Scotch.

'You said he might be a physicist,' he reminded her.

'He was trained as a physicist. I believe he has also qualified in aspects of engineering. In the field in which he works, I believe that the distinctions are not always closely observed.'

'Where was he trained?'

'Already at school he was regarded as a prodigy. At fourteen he won a Mathematics Olympiad. His success was printed in the Leningrad newspapers. He went to the Litmo, afterwards to post-graduate studies at the University. He is extremely brilliant.'

'When I was at school those were the people I hated,' said Barley, but to his alarm she scowled.

'But you did not hate Goethe. You inspired him. He often quotes his friend Scott Blair. "If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries." Did you really say this?'

'What's a Litmo?' said Barley.

'Litmo is the Leningrad Institute for Mechanical and Optical Science. From university he was sent to Novosibirsk to study at the scientific city of Akademgorodok. He made candidate of sciences, doctor of sciences. He made everything.'

He wanted to press her about the everything, but he was scared of rushing her so he let her speak about herself instead. 'So how did you get mixed up with him?'

'When I was a child.'

'How old was the child?'

He felt her reticence collect again and then dissolve as if she had to remind herself she was in safe company or in company so unsafe that to be further compromised made little difference.

'I was a great intellectual of sixteen,' she said, with a grave smile.

'How old was the prodigy?'

'Thirty.'

'What year are we talking about?'

'1968. He was still an idealist for peace. He said they would never send in the tanks. "The Czechs are our friends," he said. "They are like the Serbs and the Bulgarians. If it were Warsaw, perhaps they would send in the tanks. But against our Czechs, never, never."'

She had turned her whole back to him. She was too many women at once. She had her back to him and was talking to the sky, yet she was drawing him into her life and appointing him her confidant.

It was August in Leningrad, she said, she was sixteen and studying French and German in her last year at school. She was a star pupil and a'peace-dreamer and a revolutionary of the most romantic kind. She was on the brink of womanhood and thought herself mature. She was speaking of herself with irony. She had read Erich Fromm and Ortega y Gasset and Kafka and seen Dr. Strangelove. She regarded Sakharov as right in his thinking but wrong in his method. She was concerned about the Russian Jews but shared her father's view that they had brought their troubles on themselves. Her father was Professor of Humanities at the University, and her school was for sons and daughters of the Leningrad nomenclatura. It was August 1968 but Katya and her friends were still able to live in political hope. Barley tried to remember whether he had ever lived in political hope and decided it was unlikely. She was talking as if nothing would ever stop her talking again. He wished he could hold her hand again as he had held it on the stairs. He wished he could hold any part of her, but best of all her face, and kiss her instead of listening to her love story.

'We believed that East and West were drawing closer together,' she said. 'When the American students demonstrated against Vietnam, we were proud of them and regarded them as our comrades. When the students of Paris rioted, we wished we could be beside them at the barricades, wearing their nice French clothes.'

She turned and smiled at him again over her shoulder. A horned moon had appeared above the stars at her left side and Barley had some vague literary memory that it boded bad luck. A flock of gulls had settled on a roof across the street. I'll never leave you, he thought.

'There was a man in our courtyard who had been absent for nine years,' she was saying. 'One morning he was back, pretending he had never been away. My father invited him to dinner and played him music all evening. I had never consciously met anyone who had been freshly persecuted so I naturally hoped that he would talk of the horrors of the camps. But all he wished to do was listen to Shostakovich. I did not understand in those days that some suffering cannot be described. From Czechoslovakia we heard of extraordinary reforms. We believed that these reforms would soon come to the Soviet Union and that we would have hard currency and be free to travel.'

'Where was your mother?'

'Dead.'

'How did she die?'

'Of tuberculosis. She was already ill when I was born. On 20th August there was a closed showing of a Godard film at the Club of Scientists.' Her voice had become strict against herself. 'The invitations were for two persons. My father, after making enquiries about the moral content of the film, was reluctant to take me but I insisted. In the end he decided I should accompany him for the sake of my French studies. Do you know the Club of Scientists in Leningrad?'

'I can't say I do,' he said, leaning back. 'Have you seen A bout de souffle?'

'I starred in it,' he said, and she broke out laughing while he sipped his Scotch.

'Then you will remember that it is a very tense film. Yes?'

'Yes.'

'It was the most powerful film I had ever seen. Everyone was greatly impressed by it, but for me it was a thunderbolt. The Club of Scientists is on the embankment of the river Neva. It is full of old glory, with marble staircases and very low sofas which are difficult to sit on in a tightskirt.' She was sideways to him again, her head forward. 'There is a beautiful winter-garden and a room like a mosque with heavy curtains and rich carpets. My father loved me very much but he was concerned for me and he was strict. When the film was over we moved to a dining room with wood panels. It was beautiful. We sat at long tables and that was where I met Yakov. My father introduced us. "Here is a new genius from the world of physics," he said. My father had the fault of sometimes being sarcastic with young men. Also Yakov was beautiful. I had heard something about him but nobody had told me how vulnerable he was, more like an artist than a scientist. I asked him what he was doing and he replied that he had returned to Leningrad to recover his innocence. I laughed and for a girl of sixteen produced an impressive response. I said I found it strange that a scientist of all people should be seeking innocence. He explained that in Akademgorodok he had shown too much brilliance in certain fields and had made himself too attractive to the military. It appears that in matters of physics the distinction between peaceful and military research is often very small. Now they were offering him everything privileges, money to make his researches - but he was still refusing them because he wished to preserve his energies for peaceful means. This made them angry because they customarily recruit the cream of our scientists and do not expect refusal. So he had returned to his old university in order to recover his innocence. He proposed initially to study theoretical physics and was looking for influential people to support him, but they were reluctant because of his attitude. He had no permit to reside in Leningrad. He spoke very freely, as our scientists may. Also he was full of enthusiasm for the Gorodok. He spoke of the foreigners who in those days passed through, the brilliant young Americans from Stanford and MIT, also the English. He described the painters who were forbidden in Moscow but permitted to exhibit in the Gorodok. The seminars, the intensity of life, the free exchanges of ideas and, as I was sure, of love. "In what other country but Russia would Richter and Rostropovich come and play their music specially for the scientists, Okudzhava sing and Voznesensky read his poems! This is the world that We scientists must build for others!" He made jokes and I laughed like a mature woman. He was very witty in those days but also vulnerable, as he is today. There is a part of him that refuses to grow up. It is the artist in him, but it is the perfectionist also. Already in those days he was an outspoken critic of the incompetence of the authorities. He said there were so many eggs and sausages in the Gorodok supermarket that the shoppers poured out by bus from Novosibirsk and emptied the shelves by ten in the morning. Why could not the eggs make the journey instead of the people? This would be much better! Nobody collected the rubbish, he said, and the electricity kept cutting off. Sometimes the rubbish was knee-deep in the streets. And they call it a scientific Paradise! I made another precocious comment. "That's the trouble with Paradise, - I said. "There is nobody to collect the rubbish." Everyone was very amused. I was a success. He described the old guard trying to come to grips with the ideas of the new men and going away shaking their heads like peasants who have seen a tractor for the first time. Never mind, he said. Progress will prevail. He said that the armoured train of the Revolution which Stalin had derailed was at last in motion again and the next stop would be Mars. That was when my father interrupted with one of his cynical opinions. He was finding Yakov too vociferous. "But, Yakov Yefremovich," he said, "was not Mars the god of war?" Immediately Yakov became reflective. I had not imagined a man could change so quickly, one minute bold, the next so lonely and distressed. I blamed my father. I was furious with him. Yakov tried to recover but my father had thrown him into despair. Did Yakov talk to you about his father?'

She was sitting across the valley from him, propped against the opposing slope of the roof tiles, her long legs stretched before her, her dress drawn tightly over her body. The sky was darkening behind her, the moon and stars were growing.

'He told me his father died of an overdose of intelligence,' Barley replied.

'He took part in a camp uprising. He was in despair. Yakov did not know of his father's death for many years. One day an old man came to Yakov's house and said he had shot Yakov's father. He had been a guard at the camp and was ordered to take part in the execution of the rebels. They were shot down in dozens by machine guns near the Vorkuta railway terminal. The guard was weeping. Yakov was only fourteen at the time but he gave the old man his forgiveness and some vodka.'

I can't do this, Barley thought. I'm not equal to these dimensions.

'What year was his father shot?' he asked. Be a hamster. It's about the only thing you're fit for.

'I think it was the spring of 1952. While Yakov remained silent, everybody at the table began to talk vehemently about Czechoslovakia,' she continued in her perfect archaeological English. 'Some said the ruling gang would send in the tanks. My father was sure of it. Some said they would be justified in doing so. My father said they would do it whether they were justified or not. The red Czars would do exactly as they pleased, he said, just as the white Czars had done. The system would win because the system always won and the system was our curse.This was my father's conviction as it later became Yakov's. But Yakov was at that time still determined to believe in the Revolution. He wished his own father's death to have been worthwhile. He listened intently to what my father had to say but then he became aggressive. "They will never send in the tanks!" he said. "The Revolution will survive!" He beat the table with his fist. You have seen his hands? Like a pianist's, so white and thin? He had been drinking. So had my father and my father also became angry. He wished to be left in peace with his pessimism. As a distinguished humanist, he did not like to be contradicted by a young scientist whom he regarded as an upstart. Perhaps also my father was jealous, because while they quarrelled, I fell completely in love with Yakov.'

Barley took another sip of Scotch.

'You don't find that shocking?' she demanded indignantly as her smile leapt back to her face. 'A girl of sixteen, for an experienced man of thirty?'

Barley wasn't feeling very quick-witted, but she seemed to need his reassurance. 'I'm speechless but on the whole I'd say they were both very lucky,' he said.

'When the reception ended I asked my father for three roubles to go to the Café Sever to eat ice-cream with my companions. There were several daughters of academics at the reception, some were my school comrades. We made a group and I invited Yakov to join us. On the way I asked him where he lived and he told me: in the street of Professor Popov. He asked me, "Who was Popov?" I laughed. Everyone knows who- Popov is, I said. Popov was the great Russian inventor of radio who transmitted a signal even before Marconi, I told him. Yakov was not so sure. "Perhaps Popov never existed," he replied. "Perhaps the Party invented him in order to satisfy our Russian obsession with being the first to invent everything." From this I knew that he was still struggling with doubts about what they would do concerning Czechoslovakia.'

Feeling anything but wise, Barley gave a wise nod.

'I asked him whether his apartment was a communal or a separate one. He said it was a room which he shared with an old acquaintance from the Litmo who was working in a special night laboratory, so they seldom met. I said, "Then show me where you live. I wish to know that you are comfortable." He was my first lover,' she said simply. 'He was extremely delicate, as I had expected him to be, but also passionate.'

'Bravo,' said Barley so softly that perhaps she didn't hear.

'I stayed with him three hours and took the last metro home. My father was waiting up for me and I talked to him like a stranger visiting his house. I did not sleep. Next day I heard the news in English on the BBC. The tanks had gone into Prague. My father, who had predicted this, was in despair. But I was not concerned for my father. Instead of going to school I went back to look for Yakov. His room-mate told me I would find him at the Saigon, which was the informal name of a cafeteria on the Nevsky Prospekt, a place for poets and drug-pedlars and speculators, not professors' daughters. He was drinking coffee but he was drunk. He had been drinking vodka since he heard the news. "Your father is right," he said. "The system will always win. We talk freedom but we are oppressors." Three months later he had returned to Novosibirsk. He was bitter with himself but he still went. "It is a choice between dying of obscurity or dying of compromise," he said. "Since that is a choice between death and death, we may as well choose the more comfortable alternative."'

'Where did that leave you?' Barley asked.

'I was ashamed of him. I told him that he was my ideal and that he had disappointed me. I had been reading the novels of Stendhal, so I addressed him like a great French heroine. Nevertheless I believed that he had taken an immoral decision. He had talked one thing and done the opposite. In the Soviet Union, I told him, too many people do this. I told him I would never speak to him again until he had corrected his immoral choice. I reminded him of E. M. Forster, whom we both admired. I told him that he must connect. That his thoughts and actions must be one. Naturally I soon relented and for a while we resumed our relationship, but it was no longer romantic and when he took up his new work he corresponded without warmth. I was ashamed for him. Perhaps also for myself.'

'And so you married Volodya,' Barley said.

'That is correct.'

'And you kept Yakov going on the side?' he suggested, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

She was blushing and scowling at once. 'For a while, it is true, Yakov and I maintained a clandestine relationship. Not often, but sometimes. He said we were a novel that had not been finished. Each of us was looking to the other to complete his destiny. He was correct, but I had not realised the strength of his influence over me or of mine over him. I thought that if we met more we might become free of each other. When I realised this was not the case I ceased to see him. I loved him but I refused to see him. Also I was pregnant from Volodya.'

'When did you get together again?'

'After the last Moscow book fair. You were his catalyst. He had been on vacation and drinking very heavily. He had written many internal papers and registered many official complaints. None of them had made any impression on the system, though I think he had succeeded in annoying the authorities. Now you had spoken into his heart. You had put his thoughts into words at a crucial moment in his life, and you had related words to actions, which Yakov does not find easy. The next day, he telephoned me at my office, using a pretext. He had borrowed the apartment of a friend. My relationship with Volodya was by then disintegrating, although we were still living together because Volodya had to wait for an apartment. While we sat in the room of Yakov's friend, he spoke very much about you. You had made everything come clear for him. That was his phrase to me. "The Englishman has given me the solution. From now on, there is only action, there is only sacrifice," he said. "Words are the curse of our Russian society. They are a substitute for deeds." Yakov knew that I had contact with Western publishers, so he told me to look for your name among our lists of foreign visitors. He set to work at once to prepare a manuscript. I should give it to you. He was drinking a great deal. I was scared for him. "How can you write if you are drunk?" He replied that he drank to survive.'

Barley took another nip of whisky. 'Did you tell Volodya about Yakov?'

'No.'

'Did Volodya find out?'

'No.'

'So who does know?'

It seemed she had been asking herself the same question, for she replied with great promptness.

'Yakov tells his friends nothing. This I know. If I am the one who borrows the apartment, I sav only that it is for a private matter. In Russia we have secrecy and we have loneliness, but we have no word for privacy.'

'What about your girlfriends? Not a hint to them?'

'We are not angels. If I ask them for certain favours, they make certain assumptions. Sometimes it is I who provide the favours. That is all.'

'And nobody helped Yakov compile his manuscript?'

'No.'

'None of his drinking friends?'

'No.'

'How can you be certain?'

'Because I am certain that in his thoughts he is completely alone.'

'Are you happy with him?'

'Please?'

'Do you like him - as well as love him? Does he make you laugh?'

'I believe that Yakov is a great and vulnerable man who cannot survive without me. To be a perfectionist is to be a child. It is also to be impractical. I believe that without me he would break.'

'Do you think he's broken now?'

'Yakov would say, which one is sane? The one who plans the extermination of mankind, or the one who takes steps to prevent it?'

'How about the one who does both?'

She didn't reply. He was provoking her and she knew it. He was jealous, wanting to erode the edges of her faith.

'Is he married?' he asked.

An angry look swept across her face. 'I do not believe he is married but it is not important.'

'Has he got kids?'

'These are ridiculous questions.'

'It's a pretty ridiculous situation.'

'He says that human beings are the only creatures to make victims of their children. He is determined to provide no victims.'

Except yours, Barley thought: but he managed not to say it.

'So, you followed his career with interest,' he suggested roughly, returning to the question of Goethe's access.

'From a distance, and without detail.'

'And all that time you didn't know what work he did? Is that what you're saying?'

'What I knew, I deduced only from our discussions of ethical problems. "How much of mankind should we exterminate in order to preserve mankind? How can we talk of a struggle for peace when we plan only terrible wars? How can we speak of selective targets when we have not the accuracy to hit them?" When we discuss these matters, I am naturally aware of his involvement. When he tells me that the greatest danger to mankind is not the reality of Soviet power but the illusion of it, I do not question him. I encourage him. I urge him to be consistent and if necessary brave. But I do not question him.'

'Rogov? He never mentioned a Rogov? Professor Arkady Rogov?'

'I told you. He does not discuss his colleagues.'

'Who said Rogov was a colleague?'

'I assumed this from Your questions,' she retorted hotly and yet again he believed her.

'How do you communicate with him?' he asked, recovering his gentler tone.

'It is not important. When a certain friend of his receives a certain message, he informs Yakov and Yakov telephones me.'

'Does the certain friend know who the certain message is from?'

'He has no reason. He knows it is a woman. That is all.'

'Is Yakov afraid?'

'Since he talks so much about courage, I assume he is afraid. He quotes Nietzsche. "The ultimate goodness is not to be afraid." He quotes Pasternak. "The root of beauty".'

'Are you?'

She stared away from him. In the houses across the street, home lights were appearing in the windows.

'I must think not of my children but of all children,' she said, and he noticed two tears lying neglected on her cheeks. He took another pull of whisky and hummed a few bars of Basie. When he looked again, the tears had gone.

'He talks about the great lie,' she said, as if she had just remembered.

'What great lie?'

'Everything is part of the same great lie, down to the smallest spare part of the least significant weapon. Even the results that are sent to Moscow are subject to the great lie.'

'Results? What results? Results of what?'

'I don't know.'

'Of testing?'

She seemed to have forgotten her denial. 'I believe, of testing. I believe he is saying that the results of testing are deliberately distorted in order to satisfy the orders of the generals and the official production requirements of the bureaucrats. Perhaps it is he personally who distorts them. He is very complicated. Sometimes he talks about his many privileges of which he has become ashamed.'

The shopping list, Walter had called it. With a deadened sense of duty, Barley crossed off the last items. 'Has he mentioned particular projects?'

'No.'

'Has he mentioned being involved in command systems? How the field commander is controlled?'

'No.'

'Has he ever told you what steps are taken to prevent mistaken launches?'

'No.

'Has he ever suggested he might be engaged in data processing?'

She was tired. 'No.'

'Does he get promoted now and then? Medals? Big parties as he moves up the ladder?'

'He does not speak of promotion except that it is all corrupt. I told you already that maybe he has been too loud in his criticisms of the system. I do not know.'

She had withdrawn from him. Her face was out of sight behind the curtain of her hair.

'You will do best to ask him all further questions for yourself,' she said, in the tone of someone packing up to leave. 'He wishes you to meet him in Leningrad on Friday. He is attending an important conference at one of the military scientific institutions.'

First the sky swayed, then Barley became aware of the evening chill. It had closed over him like an icy cloud, though the sky was dark and clear and the new moon, when it finally kept still, shed a warming glow.

'He has proposed three places and three times,' she continued in the same flat tone. 'You will please keep each appointment until he is successful. He will keep one of them if he can. He sends you his greetings and his thanks. He loves you.'

She dictated three addresses and watched him while he wrote them in his diary, using his apology for a code. Then she waited while he had a sneezing fit, watching him as he heaved and cursed his Maker.

They dined like exhausted lovers in a cellar with an old grey dog and a gypsy who sang blues to a guitar. Who owned the place, who allowed it to exist or why, were mysteries Barley had never troubled to solve. All he knew was that in some previous incarnation, at some forgotten book fair, he had arrived here drunk with a group of crazy Polish publishers and played 'Bless This House' on someone's saxophone.

They talked stiffly, and as they talked the gap between them widened until it seemed to Barley to engulf the totality of his insignificance. He gazed at her and felt that he had nothing to offer her that she did not have tenfold. In the ordinary way, he would have made a passionate declaration of love to her. A lunge into absolutes would have been essential to his need to break the tension of a new relationship. But in Katya's presence he could find no absolutes to put opposite her own. He saw his life as a series of useless resurrections, one failure supplanted by another. He was appalled to think that he belonged to a society that existed only in materialism and gave so little thought to its great themes. But he could tell her none of this. To tell her anything was to assail the image that she had of him, and he had nothing to offer in its place.

They discussed books and he watched her slipping away from him. Her face became distracted, her voice prosaic. He went after her, he sang and danced, but she had gone. She was making the same flat statements he had been listening to all day long while he had been waiting to meet her. In a minute, he thought, I'll be telling her about Potomac Boston and explaining how the river and the city are not joined. And God help him, he was, doing just that.

It was not till eleven o'clock, when the management put the lights out and he walked her down the lifeless street to the metro station, that it dawned on him against all sane reckoning that he might have made an impression upon her that in some modest way compared with the impression she had made on him. She had taken his arm. Her fingers lay along the inside of his forearm and she had fallen into a wide stride in order to keep pace with him. The white mouth of the elevator shafts stood open to receive her. The chandeliers twinkled above them like inverted Christmas trees as he took her in the formal Russian embrace: left cheek, right cheek, left cheek and goodnight.

'Mr. Blair, sir! Thought I spotted you! Quite a coincidence! Come aboard, we'll run you home!'

Barley climbed in and Wicklow with his acrobat's agility spirited himself into the back seat where he set to work to dislodge the recorder from the small of Barley's back.

They drove him to the Odessa and dropped him. They had work to do. The lobby was like an airport terminal in thick fog. In every sofa and armchair, unofficial guests who had paid the going rate slumbered in the gloom. Barley peered benignly round them, wrinkling his nose. Some wore jumpsuits. Others were more formally dressed.

'Snoot, anybody?' he called, quite loud.No response. 'Anyone care for a glass of whisky at all?' he enquired, fishing his bottle, still two-thirds full, from the poacher's pocket of his raincoat. He gave himself a long pull by way of example, then passed the bottle along the line.

And that was how Wicklow found him two hours later - in the lobby, squatted companionably among a group ofgrateful night souls, enjoying a last one before turning in.