‘Knows it all, he does. Say that for him.’
‘Yeshcho odna butuilka,’ Paul ordered carefully.
‘Englishman he is, here, see, but speaks the lingo like a native.’
‘You mustn’t call them that. They’re not natives. They’re more like you and I.’
Impassively, another bottle of cognac was uncorked. Paul felt somehow that it should have been sharply cracked open at the neck. Still, no glasses. Blood and cognac, each other’s blood.
‘Za vashe zdorovye.’
‘Za vashe zdorovye.’
‘Look,’ said a breathy man with a squashed square face, ‘if this is to be done on a proper basis they ought to cover the same course. There’s one getting more down than the other—you can see that if you look close.’
‘Glasses, then.’
‘A bottle each.’
‘“If any man be taken upon committing of theft, he is imprisoned, and often beaten, but not hanged for the first offence, as the manner is with us: and this they call the law of mercy. He that offendeth the second time hath his nose cut off, and is burnt in the forehead with a hot iron. The third time he is hanged.’”
‘Za vashe zdorovye.’
‘Za vashe zdorovye.’
‘Right,’ said the breathy man. ‘Here’s two glasses. And I’ll do the measuring out.’
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘no no no. You don’t quite understand. I’m trying to get him drunk, you see. For a special reason. A very special reason. A matter of life and death.’
‘He looks all right to me,’ said the man with rosette and rattle. ‘You look to be the one that’s showing the signs.’
‘Right,’ said Paul. ‘You’re all sportsmen here. You bet him a quid he can’t down the rest of the bottle in one go.’
‘Now that,’ said the cancerous man, ‘is an imposition. That’s taking unfair advantage of a man.’
‘Za vashe zdorovye,’ went Yegor Ilyich, his face ardent.
‘No,’ said Paul. ‘You’re on your own now.’
‘Giving best to a bloody Russky,’ said a man who smelt faintly of old frying oil. ‘Where’s your bulldog breed?’
‘All right,’ said the fattish man with well-greased pale hair. ‘I’ll give him five bob if he can do it.’
‘Oh, five from me, certainly,’ said the Tudor Voyages young man, ‘for the pleasure of seeing him go down.’
‘That’s vindictive, that is. And you supposed to be educated. Sheer ignorance, that is.’
‘I hate the lot of them,’ said the young man. ‘I’m glad I went. It’s confirmed everything.’
‘Ten bob from me,’ said Paul. ‘Right,’ he told Yegor Ilyich. ‘You drink all that bottle off. One pound, see? One lovely quid.’ He waved the note in front of Yegor Ilyich’s nose.
‘Ponimaiu,’ said Yegor Ilyich. ‘Understand.’ He took the cognac-bottle by its neck and said to the entire company, ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’
‘I,’ said Paul, ‘was made to do that, but it was with a bottle of vodka and it was hanging out of the window by one ankle.’
‘Let’s have him hanging out of a porthole, then,’ suggested Tudor Voyages.
‘Vindictive.’
Yegor Ilyich drank. His larynx worked away, the level of the bottle went steadily down, the bottle itself rose slowly through an arc whose centre was the fat thirsty clinging lips, from near-horizontal to true vertical. Yegor Ilyich’s eyes remained closed, as though against a bright sun—a gardener swigging cold tea.
‘By God, he’s done it.’
‘“Now what might be made of these men if they were trained and broken to order and knowledge of civil wars?’” murmured the young lecturer out of Richard Chancellor’s report. For Yegor Ilyich did not collapse with drooped mouth and upturned eyes; instead he performed an entre-chat or two and boxed his audience so that, part-fearful and wholly intrigued, they became the periphery of an ad hoc cabaret-floor. Then Yegor Ilyich bowed his legs, thrust out his belly, pouted, frowned, and waddled about in his not very good impression of Comrade Khrushchev. After that he became Khrushchev-with-little-girls. ‘All right,’ said somebody primly. ‘There’s still some ladies drinking over there.’ Then Yegor Ilyich did a fair Nijinsky leap over to the flight of five wide shallow stairs that led down into the bar, poised on one leg and shot an Eros-shaft from the top step, blew coarse kisses, shouted ‘Zhok!’ while pointing a finger at Paul, laughed loudly, then marched out trimly.
‘Oh God,’ said Paul to himself.
‘Bar finish now,’ said the barman with bitter scorn. There was a rush for one last one. Paul remembered young Opiskin’s need and bought a bottle of vodka.
‘I should have thought you’d have had enough for one night like,’ said the rosette-and-rattle man.
‘Oh, the night hasn’t really started yet,’ groaned Paul. He left the fighting-for-one-last-one and, hugging the vodka like a child, found his way back to the Khrushchev suite past grinning Khrushchev pictures. There was more than grinning, though; there was the wide-nosed cunning triumphant look of one who delivers a good knock-down argument in the form of a peasant proverb: sharpest knives cut the keenest; rain may fall when the sky darkens; a slice of roast goose is better than a stinking fish-flake.
Young Opiskin was snoring, transfixed on his back with his hands joined like an effigy of a knight in a church. Paul shook him roughly awake and said, ‘Vot tam vodka.’ Then he went into the sitting-room, sank into a cold leather club chair, lighted a cigarette, and waited. He had a little book of Russian verse in his raincoat pocket, a book he had not really had the opportunity to open since coming to Russia. He turned to the poems of Sergey Esenin, the young man who had been married to Isadora Duncan for a year and, after taking to drink and a kind of madness, had written a farewell poem in his own blood and then hanged himself. That had been, as far as Paul knew, in the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad. He now, to the faint accompaniment of a glugging vodka-bottle in the bedroom, read the poem:
‘Goodbye, my friend—no word, no clasp of hand.
Do not grieve, do not in sorrow screw
Your brow. In this life it is nothing new to die,
And to live, of course, itself is nothing new.’
There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ called Paul. An officer with a young, moustached, knowing face—but knowing after the Western style—came in. He wore two rings on each arm. The uniform was good serge, well-tailored, London perhaps being a suburb of the Alexander Radishchev.
‘Mr Gussey?’
‘That will do.’
‘We do not appear to have your passport in the office.’
‘It’s in my pocket. I’m looking after it on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.’
‘Pardon?’ It was a thin, genteel English accent, as though learnt in some school of the LCC.
Paul tapped his inner pocket, smiling. He was not going to let that passport go.
‘If I could see it—for the number, for our records.’
Paul took it out, held it up. The young officer frowned at the two photographs. He said:
‘Perhaps it would be possible to see Mrs Gussey for a moment.’ It was a pity about that Russian G. Paul said:
‘I’m afraid she’s sleeping at the moment.’ A vodka belch from the bedroom gave that the lie. ‘If,’ said Paul, ‘Tovarishch Yegor Ilyich has been telling you stories, they’re all untrue. The man’s drunk.’
‘There are many names I do not know,’ said the officer. ‘There have been transfers from other ships of the Baltic Line. I am only doing my duty.’
‘Why do you want to see my wife?’
‘There is some rumour that she is really a man. It is very difficult. I was asked to see that everything is all right.’
‘Everything’s fine.’
The young man looked embarrassed. ‘I was ordered to satisfy myself that everything is in order.’
‘And aren’t you satisfied?’
A rasping cough came from the bedroom.
&nb
sp; ‘I think,’ said the young officer carefully, ‘I shall come back here in ten minutes and then I shall take both you and Mrs Gussey to the Captain. Believe me, it is for everybody’s good,’ he added anxiously.
12
‘HE WAS RIGHT,’ SAID THE CAPTAIN. ‘HE PERFORMED HIS duty. It is not for you to talk about treachery.’
‘I gave him money,’ said Paul. ‘I bought him drink. What did this business matter to him, anyway?’
‘You cannot be speaking the truth,’ said the Captain. ‘Members of the ship’s company do not take bribes. They are not able to be corrupted. And they regard it as their duty to report what seems suspicious. The State must be protected. This ship is part of the State.’
‘Ah, God,’ growled Paul. Now that he and young Opiskin were seated in the Captain’s cabin—a model of cleanliness and order, clinically lighted, with rows of Russian books on navigation and maritime law—he could see more clearly the forces they were up against. Young Opiskin, though, apparently saw nothing. He had dressed carefully in drilon and Cuban heels, had lipsticked and powdered over the sprouting stubble of the night, and minced giggling along with his protector behind the two-ringed officer. Now he sat, plastic handbag on very visible knees, leering at the Captain. Paul rather liked the look of the Captain: a youngish man, perhaps younger than himself, grown neatly grey, his features sharp and earnest, smoking a papiros with a grace that would have better suited a better type of cigarette. Paul saw the Captain’s point of view; he felt mean, venal and dirty. But he made dead Robert’s image lurch up, the death-mask of a great composer. He said, after his growl:
‘You must see all this from another angle. In the West perhaps our minds work too simply, but we regard freedom of movement as a basic human right. Water finds its own level. If you deny that right to your citizens, then you must expect craft, guile, subterfuge.’
‘You talk too quickly,’ said the Captain. ‘I understand English well but not fast.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘To do? To do?’ He kept his lips in the kissing position, suddenly caught sight of them in the mirror behind Paul and young Opiskin, then spread them wide as though grinning with pain. ‘First,’ said the Captain, ‘we must find out,’ and he beetled at young Opiskin, ‘who this person is.’
‘He’s a youngster of no consequence,’ said Paul. ‘He has no parents, he has no relatives. I’m taking him to some friends in Helsinki. He is handicapped, being unable to speak. He has no education.’ Ready tears were brimming in Paul’s eyes. ‘He has no work, no money. He has nothing.’
‘He has the State,’ said the Captain.
‘The State isn’t a person,’ said Paul. ‘The State has no blood or warmth in it. He needs love.’
‘He needs a passport,’ said the Captain. ‘He needs a travel permit. You have both broken the law. It is terrible. All I can do is to send you back to Leningrad.’
‘I’m a British subject,’ said Paul. ‘I have certain rights.’
‘You broke the law,’ said the Captain. ‘The Soviet law, on Soviet soil. And this ship is Soviet soil. You are still breaking the law. And I think you must be breaking the British law also. You must hand over your passport to me now.’
‘Ah, no,’ said Paul. The game wasn’t finished yet, not by a long chalk. ‘I no longer have a passport. I took the precaution of throwing my passport into the sea. You must dredge the Baltic for it.’
‘I think you are not telling the truth,’ said the Captain. ‘Well, we shall see. We shall leave it all to the police now.’
‘In Leningrad?’
‘From Leningrad. The wireless room will contact the Leningrad police now.’
‘Mentioning my name?’
‘Mentioning your name. They will pick you up in Helsinki tomorrow. It is not far to fly from Leningrad. They may be even perhaps waiting for us when we arrive.’ The Captain’s eyes shone at his wall-mirror, as though reflected there, as in trick film-making, was some draped personification of Soviet efficiency.
‘I’m prepared to co-operate,’ said Paul. ‘The officers in charge of my—er—case ought to be the ones to collect us.’
‘In charge of your—— You already have a dossier? You admit to previous crimes?’ The Captain seemed quietly pleased.
‘Comrades Zverkov and Karamzin,’ said Paul. ‘They will, I think, be pleased to see me.’
‘One of them I know,’ said the Captain. ‘There was a case of suspected contraband. Sometimes it is attempted on the ships of the State Baltic Line. Not,’ he added, ‘Soviet citizens.’
‘Naturally not.’
‘Zverkov and Karamzin, then,’ said the Captain. ‘So you know them well?’ He wrote down the names in a fair Cyrillic hand on his memo pad.
‘They knocked these four teeth out,’ said Paul modestly, showing.
‘So.’ The Captain was impressed. Then he looked with some distaste at young Opiskin. ‘Familiya?’ he asked loudly. ‘Imya?’ Young Opiskin giggled.
‘It’s no good asking his surname or his first name or anything else,’ said Paul. ‘He can’t speak. He can only make noises. Poor, poor boy. Be satisfied that you have discovered the primal fact of his maleness. Although, poor lad, he has come, as you see, to think he is female. He is not quite right in the head. Did I say he has nothing? He has less than nothing.’
‘Well, we will leave it to the police tomorrow,’ said the Captain. ‘Tonight where shall I put you to sleep? It is wrong and indecent for you to share the same bedroom. You are not, after all, husband and wife.’
‘I paid good money for Khrushchev’s suite,’ said Paul coarsely. ‘I demand a decent night’s rest.’
The Captain pressed a buzzer on his desk. ‘Second Officer Petrov will take you back to your suite then. I see no harm if the door is locked on you. Also the windows must be wound up and the handles taken away.’
‘We’re not going to dive overboard,’ said Paul. ‘In any case, this poor boy can’t swim.’
‘Officer of the watch can send in reports,’ said the Captain. ‘My ship must be protected.’
‘You flatter us,’ said Paul, ‘me and that poor boy there. If you would be so good, Captain, perhaps you would not make your proposals too obvious. Do not, for instance, speak Russian to Second Officer Petrov when he comes in. Ensure that we’re locked up discreetly. This poor lad is, besides idiotic, much given to quick violence when he thinks his security is threatened. Let him believe that everything is going according to plan. It is better so, believe me.’
Thus young Opiskin kept to his leer and his giggles. He would do well in the West, perhaps. He had tremendous confidence in the power of money. He took off his woman’s clothes for the second time that night, put on his aunt’s night-dress in the pathetic conviction that the deception was still going well, that that session with the Captain had been purely social and that the Captain had perhaps even admired this fine figure of an Englishman’s wife. Paul now saw that perhaps Opiskin père had been, like so many great musicians (from Henry VIII to Adrian Leverkühn), syphilitic and had begotten a son whose brain was deeply mined with spirochaetes. He watched young Opiskin glog off two hearty slugs of vodka in a tooth-glass, then settle down to confident sleep. He didn’t say good night. Paul was a mere instrument, like the money.
Paul slept fitfully. It wasn’t really young Opiskin’s snores that nudged into his rest—he could accept their rhythm, like the softer one of the sea as they moved towards Finland. What made him toss and thump his pillow was his wonder (insomniacal as dexedrine) that his excitement should be so completely unmixed with apprehension. He was, he supposed, exhibiting the Englishman’s finest attribute, that of hopeless optimism. Young Opiskin snored in confidence; Paul watched in it. When he slept he dreamt of crowds cheering. As in one of those montages that form a background to a TV sports-news title, he saw cricket, football, a boat race, the high jump in heraldic quarters. The brass band tore off a red-hot march. Cheers and cheers and cheers. Belinda had neve
r really understood sport, fair play, that sort of thing.
By grey dawn, in his drowsiness, he scented landfall: firs, lakes, Tapiola—Finland sidling up to starboard. He slept. He woke again to see young Opiskin’s bed empty. His heart pounded away at him as though he were a punchbag, it a heavyweight in training. Too late, a failed mission. But in the sitting-room he found young Opiskin eating with such appetite that, to blurred morning eyes, it looked as if his entire body was involved in the act: prehensile feet reaching for the coffee-pot, arms twining out for more bread as if they had extra mouths instead of hands at the end of them. ‘Zavtrak,’ munched young Opiskin in greeting. He was dressed in very old-fashioned female underwear. ‘I know it’s breakfast,’ said Paul crossly. There was cold rice porridge, apricot jam, very fatty sausage slices, smoked salmon, black caviar, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, pumpernickel, butter. It was a breakfast for condemned men. Blinking, Paul looked out on deck. It was full summer northern morning. Green landfall, a distant prospect of conifers. There were men taking queasy exercise, recognized from the night before. Paul saw, swaying all alone, the young Russophobe lecturer, hands in sports-coat pockets, reading the sky as though the sky were a page of Hakluyt. Paul went over to the square wound-up window (‘light’ was the correct term) and knocked on it. The Tudor Voyages man recognized him, nodded. Paul mouthed urgent words. Soundproof. The young man shrugged. Behind Paul, young Opiskin munched away. ‘Wait,’ mouthed Paul. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ He picked up his little book of Russian verse, tore out the fly-leaf, found his ball-point in a jacket pocket, then wrote, small and clear, ‘The following is true. Please take action when time comes.’ Then came the thriller clichés: ‘Political asylum. Secret Police. Disguised as woman. Help.’ He took the bit of paper over to the window or light and stuck it on, inscription outward, with spit at the four corners. And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue. The young lecturer read. He believed on the first reading. He brought others, football supporters, to read: the fattish man with plastered pale hair, the man with cancer, the man who had worn a rosette and cranked a rattle. All looked ill and read very slowly. The Tudor Voyages lecturer made tearing-down gestures: somebody Russian coming. Paul crunched his plea into a ball. Young Opiskin made himself an open sandwich of sausage and caviar. Paul gulped coffee, jumping with excitement, and went to shave. Timing was everything, timing.