PART TWO
* * *
1
‘YOU LOOK,’ SAID BELINDA, ‘JUST TERRIBLE. I’D SAY YOU HAVEN’T shaved for days and days and days. And you’re dirty with it. Not a bit like God’s Englishman abroad.’ She was sitting up in bed in a Soviet hospital night-gown, a woolly bed-jacket on, her black clean hair bound in a coarse blue fillet.
‘I’m growing a bit of a beard,’ explained Paul, fingering the bristles. ‘It saves trouble, you see. We’re not too well off for water where we are.’
‘And where exactly are you?’
‘Oh, it’s all right really. A bit rough, but it’s all right. Cheaper than a hotel, that’s the main thing.’
‘But where?’
‘Not far off the Kirov works. You have to get the Metro. The suburbs you could call it.’
‘Poor Paul. This has all been a bit unexpected, hasn’t it?’
‘I’m all right. It seems funny to be called Paul again. I’ve got quite used to being called Pavel. This last week seems like ages and ages.’ He took her forearm, egg-smooth, egg-warm, and squeezed it. ‘Poor darling,’ he said. ‘I’ve missed you.’ He thought about that and added, ‘When I’ve had time to, that is. I’ve been busy one way and another. It’s been more difficult than I expected, you know, selling these damned things. You’ve got to be very careful.’ He swivelled his head instinctively to look, with narrowed eyes, at the other patients of the ward. They were all somnolent or surveying, straight in front of them, vast Russian wastes. ‘And what,’ he asked, ‘are they doing to you exactly? And when are they going to let you out?’
‘Oh.’ Belinda let the vowel drop and shrugged her shoulders vaguely. ‘Drugs and things. Tests and so on. And Sonya talks to me a lot.’
‘Sonya?’
‘Dr Lazurkina. She’s been wonderful.’
‘I see,’ said Paul warily. ‘Wonderful, is she? A great one for talking, I’ll say that. And what precisely does she talk to you about?’ He frowned jealously. Belinda smiled. She said:
‘Happiness. The meaning of happiness. The need to belong somewhere. My childhood. Her childhood.’
‘But,’ said Paul, ‘what in the name of God is supposed to be wrong with you? Talking about happiness doesn’t seem to be much of a sort of treatment. That rash seems to have gone.’ He spoke with increasing heat, crescendo poco a poco. ‘I should imagine you’re able to walk now, too. When are they letting you out? I had to go and see about an extension of our stay here. It took a long time. What the hell’s going on?’
‘That was nothing much, apparently,’ said Belinda. ‘It was just something to do with mixing barbiturates with wood alcohol or something. Have you ever heard of that before? I hadn’t, either. It seems we’ve been drinking a lot of wood alcohol. No, all that’s all right. I’m ill in a deeper way, she says.’
‘It sounds to me,’ cut in Paul brusquely, ‘like a bit of brain-washing. They’re trying to get at you because you’re an American.’
‘Is that what it is?’ said Belinda languidly. ‘It sounds rather nice.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ scowled Paul. ‘Indoctrination. Are they trying to get you to say that Western democracy’s no good and that it’s made you unhappy and there’s a fundamental contradiction in it and all that jazz?’ Belinda said:
‘Where did you pick up that expression?’ Then, ‘“Wash the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul.” That comes in Murder in the Cathedral, doesn’t it? I always liked the idea of getting absolutely clean. Mr Eliot, too. My father met Mr Eliot at least twice.’
‘I don’t seem to be getting through to you,’ sighed Paul. ‘It must be the drugs.’
‘From your boy-friend, I suppose. That’s where you’ve got that expression from. Are you happy with your boy-friend?’
Paul blushed. ‘Alex,’ he said, ‘is not my boy-friend. Not in the sense you mean.’
‘How do you know what sense I mean?’
‘I’m going to see Dr Lazurkina,’ said Paul. ‘She’s been putting ideas into your head, hasn’t she?’ He made as if to get up right away from his visitor’s chair, but the gesture was half-hearted and he knew it. And Belinda said:
‘She’s not here today. And I won’t have you running to her raging and complaining. She’s helping a great deal. Sonya’s a wonderful doctor.’
‘For the fifth time,’ exaggerated Paul, ‘when are they going to let you out of here? There’s a shop to be run, remember, back in good old capitalist decadent England. And the money won’t last for ever.’
‘If,’ Belinda said, ‘it’s dear Sandra and her goddamn widow’s dower you’re worried about——’
‘I know all about that. I know all about you and Sandra. But it’s Robert I’m concerned about. I’ve got to do my duty to poor Robert. I’ve got to take back a good thousand quid in memory of poor dead Robert. I won’t be able to do it if we stay here much longer.’
‘Oh,’ said Belinda, ‘if you take it nice and quiet and easy … You don’t have to spend much money, do you? Living out in the slums of Leningrad or wherever you are. And I’m not costing you anything. They look after me here very well.’
‘But,’ Paul said with force, ‘don’t you want to get out of here and back home again? Do you like being stuck here in a Soviet hospital?’
‘It’s nice to be able to lie back and dream a bit,’ said Belinda dreamily, pushing herself languidly back down into the bed. ‘I lie here and dream about the past, you know, and then Sonya comes and talks to me and asks me questions. It’s a bit of a rest. Soon, she says, I’ll be able to get up and go for little walks. She’ll go with me and show me things.’
‘There’s one little walk you can take,’ said Paul viciously, ‘and you can take it with me. That’s a walk back to the ship.’ Silly: that ship had long gone; nobody could call that a little walk. ‘What I mean is,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have a word with your precious Dr Lazurkina about getting you out of here. Tomorrow,’ he said. Then he saw he had to be realistic. ‘Or the next day. I’ll get these dresses off my hands somehow and I’ll book on the next available boat.’
‘All right,’ said Belinda levelly. ‘That’s fine. Nobody’s complaining, then. No hurry at all, is there? Just leave me here till you’ve finished doing what you came here to do. I’m having a nice little rest. Do you know, I’m reading all sorts of books I never read before. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Three Men in a Boat. They have them all here. In English.’
‘But it’s not right,’ said Paul. ‘Can’t you see that? It’s just not right at all.’ A farmer’s wife of a sister came to the bed, red, jolly, affectionate, with a glass of tea in which seemed to float segments of apple. She smiled on Belinda and hugged her, saying:
‘Krasiva Anglichanka.’
Belinda smiled up her thanks. ‘Did you understand that?’ said Paul. ‘Did you get what she said?’
‘She said I was a beautiful Englishwoman,’ said Belinda. ‘That, I should think, is about half right. I’m learning a few words,’ she said complacently. The sister, though still jolly, made briskish chicken-shooing gestures at Paul. ‘It would seem,’ Belinda said, ‘that visiting-time is over. It was nice of you to come and see me, dear. You must come again.’
‘Tomorrow. I’ll be along tomorrow.’
‘Kiss Momma, then.’ She kiss-pouted. Paul, scowling, kissed. Then, taking up his brown-paper parcel from the locker-top—one drilon dress, his day’s wares—he said:
‘Do you want anything?’ A few days before, still forbidden to see her, he had left a Spenserian bag of needments at the hospital office. ‘I’m afraid I’ve run out of English cigarettes.’
‘You mean American,’ said Belinda. ‘There’s no such thing as English. I don’t,’ she said, ‘seem to have the urge to smoke these days. I’ve lost the old craving. And, you know, I feel better for it.’
‘I don’t like that,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t like it one little bit.’ He juggled his parcel clumsily from hand to hand. ‘It’s not qui
te so easy as I’d expected,’ he said, ‘selling these things retail. I’m lucky if I manage one a day. I’ve let two go on tick and I can’t quite remember who the people are.’
‘Poor Paulovich,’ said Belinda rather indifferently. She drank off her glass under the sister’s smiling eye.
‘People are always willing to buy, you see, but they never have any ready cash. They seem to spend it all on drink.’
A thinner sister came rattling along with syringes, cheerful though and humming something simple.
‘Alex,’ said Paul, frowning at this, ‘keeps promising to put me in touch with people. But I’m still waiting,’ he complained. ‘This is a terrible place for putting things off.’
‘All life is putting things off,’ said Belinda sententiously. Paul thought he heard a faint distant chopping of a cherry tree, but it was the sister breaking open an ampoule. She plunged a syringe in, then frowned at Paul. ‘Ah,’ said Belinda, ‘this is my dreamland stuff. You must go now, you know.’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Paul.
‘But I do,’ said Belinda. Her upper arm was gently bared and then swabbed. ‘I like it fine,’ she said, with mock nasality.
Paul was rather glad to get out. On his way to the main entrance he had a look at himself in a fine old blue mirror, Tsarist loot, on the wall. Dirty open-necked shirt, no jacket because of the return of the heat, sloppy unpressed sports trousers, brown shoes unpolished, hair ill-combed and in need of a trim, the beard slow in coming. Putting on dark glasses, he grinned at himself and said, ‘Tovarishch.’ The teeth were all right, the false four plugged in today with a very tasteless kind of chewing-gum given to Alexei by an American tourist. Pavel Ivanovich Gussey, dealer in illicitly imported drilon dresses. He slouched out into the sunlight, appraising with a vendor’s eye the few comrades who walked in Ploshchad Mira. But the streets were no good; the best place seemed to be a little champagne-and-cognac dive called the Kukolka, a pretty name. There he had sold two dresses, though he had not yet received the money for them. Today he would be firm: no cash, no goods. Twenty roubles seemed a reasonable price to ask but, in his present financial state, he would be willing to go down to Mizinchikov’s fifteen. Walking towards Ulitsa Plekhanova, he counted his pocket’s meagre contents: two roubles, forty-five kopeks. His traveller’s cheques had all been cashed: hotel bill, lavish drunken lunch for Zverkov and Karamzin (they had been there, waiting; oh, thoroughly predictable), loan to needy Alexei Prutkov, back rent of Alexei Prutkov’s flat, food, drink, cigarettes: money didn’t go very far, especially not in this gay city. He smiled in the sun, remembering that lunch with Zverkov and Karamzin, their affection growing with the vodka, the loud toasts to Anglo-Soviet friendship, the final sentimental tears of farewell and vigorous hand-pumping. ‘Only connect,’ someone had once said; connection was the thing, whether through bed, bottle, grand inquisitorial session. And supposing now he were to meet Zverkov and Karamzin again? They would not, he thought, recognize him, a tramp, bearded. Besides, Leningrad was a very big city. Besides, even if they did meet, what wrong was he doing, having—through sad circumstances all open to the checking of the suspicious—been obliged to delay his departure? What they must not find out, of course, was where he was now staying. It was up to bloody Alex to help him get rid of those dresses. Any day now, he kept saying. There was somebody, he said, very definitely interested.
Paul came to the Kukolka and entered, his heart thumping away with fear and excitement; the holiday, he was sure, must be doing him good. The Kukolka was neither attractive nor clean, despite the delightful name which meant ‘Dolly’, but it breathed a sort of vigour of drinking. There were, apparently, no pure drink-shops in Leningrad; the fiction that drinking was ancillary to eating was maintained everywhere, but in the Kukolka it was a comic fiction: food was minimal—the bread brown stone, the fish scaly rags in old oil. It was a place of specialist drinking: sweet champagne to chase the rawest of native cognacs: those only. Paul entered as a pedlar, whining, ‘Platye, platye—ochin dye-shyovuiy.’ That was meant to mean: ‘A dress, a dress—very cheap.’ It was not a place—with such open and hearty drinking going on—in which to make a furtive approach. As he exhibited the dress, or rather a cognac-gold tongue of it lolling out of the parcel, he looked around for his debtors. A man with a known face and two statutory bottles nodded cheerily. Paul approached with ‘Dobriy dyen, tovarishch,’ working out a polite and grammatical request in his mind. (‘Are you, comrade, now perhaps in a position to …’) Russian grammar was terrible.
‘There’s no point in you speaking Russky to me, mate,’ said the man, ‘though it’s a fine language and a worker’s language.’ Paul frowned, taking in now the clothes too smart (though not in themselves very smart) for Soviet tailoring, the thinnish East London tones. ‘Unless, of course, you’re playing some very deep game in which you’re supposed to be pretending to be a Russian.’ And Madox, companion to the strange bisexual doctor of the voyage, winked. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Strangers in a strange land, mate, but both workers, as I take it, and hence entitled to sit here drinking champagne in a worker’s country. So perhaps not so strange.’ He whistled to the sullen whitish-aproned glass-washing curate, shaping with his fore-fingers the image of another glass. ‘Pretty,’ he said, ‘the way they’ve got the walls done up.’ He showed Paul a prominent larynx as he looked up at the crudely painted, flatly gambolling dolls in an open-square fresco near the ceiling. ‘There’s some nice little places in St Petersburg.’
‘You use the old name,’ smiled Paul, ‘like your …’ Perhaps this fundamental matter had better be settled first. ‘Is it,’ he asked boldly, ‘master or mistress? Both? I feel it’s one of the things one has a right to know.’
Madox shrugged, as though the question of a person’s sex were of little importance. ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘Depends what the job is.’
‘Job?’
‘I see I’ve said too much already.’ A glass was brought and Madox poured sugary froth. ‘Though I can see you’re up to something yourself that’s not quite above board, as the saying goes. Not that the Doc is doing anything wrong, far from it. Far far far from it, mate. Nothing but good the old Doc is doing, and you can take that from me as gospel.’ He frowned at Paul’s scruffiness and the parcel gaping brandy-gold cloth on the chair between them. The frown said that Paul seemed up to no good at all.
‘What does it say,’ asked Paul, ‘on your—on the Doc’s passport? About sex, I mean? And, while we’re at it, what is the Doc a doc of?’
‘You do want to know a lot of things and no mistake.’ Madox smiled and rocked the smile from left to right as though it were a cradle for Paul’s curiosity to be cosseted indulgently in. ‘Well, you could always ask the Doc personally, couldn’t you, mate? You do that thing—you ask the Doc personally. We’re here in Petersburg for a week more yet.’ He surveyed comfortably the comfortless little dive as though he proposed to pitch his tent there. ‘Only got back from Moscow last night. There’s a dump of a place for you, Moscow. Wait,’ said Madox, and he began to search his pockets. ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t—I’ve got the damn things here somewhere if I can only … I think these are the bug … Ah.’ His jacket seemed to have more than the usual allowance of pockets; it was from one somewhere near the back that he pulled out a deck of gilt-embossed cards all engrossed in old-time copperplate print. ‘After all,’ said Madox, ‘you are, in a way, one of our race.’ Paul didn’t understand that qualification. ‘More so than any of these Polish fur-buyers and engineers and the like. And the Doc took a fancy to you, I could see that. You had guts, sort of. You shouted out about old what’s-his-name that time on the boat. Old Buggerlugs—you know who I mean.’ He handed Paul a card; the card said, in the guest-space, ‘Colonel D. Y. Efimov’; the pleasure of his company, so curlicued the formal print, was requested at dinner at the Evropa Hotel at 8.30 p.m. on the …
‘But this isn’t me,’ said Paul. ‘I’m not Colonel Efimov. Opiskin is the
name you mean,’ he added. ‘On the boat, that is. Look, I don’t see how I can really …’
‘Opissoff or Efiskin,’ said Madox, ‘makes no difference. The Doc won’t know and won’t care who comes. All these names are much the same,’ he confided. The card, Paul noticed, gave no clue to the sex, name or precise academic qualifications of the Doc; the invitation was extended by something called baldly ‘ANGLERUSS’.
‘So,’ said Paul, ‘you’re something to do with Angleruss, whatever that is. Something to do, I should guess, with improving Anglo-Russian relations.’
‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth,’ said Madox obscurely. ‘It could be that, and it could be other things. But, whatever it is, it’s not the sort of thing you’re doing, mate.’ His nose rabbited at the rough parcel as he poured out more champagne and then more cognac. ‘And when you come,’ he said, ‘do try and come a bit less untidy. There’ll be women there,’ he added. ‘The Russian women are very old-fashioned in some ways. They don’t like being at posh parties with geezers who haven’t shaved. This place,’ he said, ‘seems to have got you down a bit, if I may make so bold.’
‘I’m growing a beard,’ explained Paul, scraping his chin with the flat of his hand: skurr skurr skurr.
‘A disguise, eh?’ said Madox. ‘Dark glasses and all. But I would have spotted you anywhere. It’s the walk, you know. A man can’t disguise his walk.’
‘Is that,’ said Paul, in a sudden bold inspiration, ‘why the Doc goes about in a wheelchair?’