I moved very slowly out of unconsciousness—not into consciousness, but into delirium. My hand was as large as a football and throbbed with a pain that extended to the shoulder blade. All was dark except for a tiny glimmer of red light. Was it a tiny light close to a gigantic light far away? I tried to move, but the pain from my hand was overwhelming. I lapsed into unconsciousness. Many times I moved from one state to the other until I mustered the strength to cling to the twilight zone without slipping back into darkness.
Upon me rested heavy cold weights and under me was a smooth, curved surface like the bottom of a gargantuan test-tube. I ran my good hand across the surface. The weights moved, tumbling over me like a cold sack of potatoes, and I eased my head round them in order to breathe. Near to my face a human hand was moving. The hand was attached to an arm and the arm belonged to one of the weights. The hand moved slowly nearer to the
edge of a blanket that was over us. It moved slowly and almost imperceptibly, its finger and thumb poised greedily, ready to grip the frayed edge. It was a bath I was in. The hand continued to move. A large stained bath-tub. The hand moved faster, passed the blanket-edge and stopped, bobbing gently in space like a mascot hanging from a carmirror. It was a dead hand, waving a tiny, posthumous good-bye. Two dead bodies were heaped upon me. I wondered if this was the pipeline to hell. I moved slowly letting the two dead men slide under me. One was the bald-headed man and the other was his son.
I climbed over the dead bodies and looked around the washroom; my eyes had grown used to the dim red emergency lights by now. Cisterns were belching and gurgling near by and a tap on the wall dripped into a bucket with a deep musical note. There were three washbasins fixed to the far wall; over the centre one was a pocket mirror one corner of which had broken and swung away on the screw to live a life of its own. There was a sudden noise of a toilet flushing. The door of a WC opened and a soldier emerged, buckling his belt. He stared and came slowly towards me. He had trouble fixing his belt-buckle but his eyes did not leave mine. As he neared me his steps became more deliberate until he was in slow motion. I was stretched full-length upon the bodies, my battered hand resting on the rim of the tub. The soldier looked at my swollen hand and then back at my
face. His skin was dark and his eyes bright and moist. An Armenian perhaps. He held his trouser-front with one hand and with the other he reached forward to prod me.
Had he prodded any other part of my anatomy I would not have yelled. My hand was lacerated, deformed, and bulbous with pus. I screamed. The soldier leaped away, crossing himself and gibbering; some ancient prayer, perhaps, or a magic sign. His back thudded against the wall and he scraped along it towards the door, still giddy with fear. As he got to the door he snatched his eyes away and blundered through the doorway. His unbuckled trousers slid and tripped him headlong into the corridor outside. I heard him scramble to his feet and his metal-tipped boots took him down the stone corridor at better than the track record.
Very slowly I took my weight on the good hand and slid my feet over the rim of the tub. I had aches in muscles I never knew I owned. From a standing position the bathroom was even colder and smellier than it had looked before. I went across to the dripping tap and held my swollen hand under the cold running water. I splashed more over my face. It looks therapeutic in movies but it made me feel worse than ever. My hand hurt just as much and now I was shivering with cold. I tried to turn the tap off but it still dripped. I staggered across to the washbasins. I looked in the mirror. I don’t know what I expected to see, but as
always when you have a tooth out or get kicked half to death the change in appearance is nowhere like commensurate with the pain. I touched my swollen lips and my ears and had a roll-call of my limbs, but apart from my hand, an incipient black eye and a few abrasions there wasn’t much evidence of my encounter with Russian free enterprise and Soviet cavalry.
I was ill. I was in pain. I was frightened. Upon all there was the overwhelming pall of failure. I stared at myself and wondered what I was doing there. I didn’t identify with the tired, frightened failure that stared back at me from the mirror. I wondered if Harvey had arranged the whole thing, betrayed me to Stok. Perhaps Signe had told him that we had made love. That was the sort of thing she would delight in saying, but would Harvey believe her? Yes he would. Or perhaps London had betrayed me. It had been done before, it would be done again. Who was responsible? I wanted to know. If this was how it was going to end I wanted to know. The responsibility for failure rests upon the one who fails. I failed. I shivered and reached for the hot taps but changed my mind. The basin was spattered with bright, fresh blood. A dirty hand-towel had blood on it. Splashes of it had hit the wall behind the basin and there were three oval blots of it on the floor. It was bright and shiny, very fresh and not at all like tomato ketchup.
I tried to be sick in the toilet, but even that I failed to do. I sat down. I shivered. Psycho-shock, I told myself, a way to soften you up for interrogation. Psycho-shock, having you regain consciousness piled under corpses, don’t succumb; but I continued to shiver. In the corridor there were orders given and monosyllabic assents. Colonel Stok swung the door open with a crash. He was shirtless, a great hairy muscular figure with bad scarring on his upper arms. He was dabbing at his face with a large wad of cotton wool. ‘I always do it,’ he said. ‘I cut myself when I am shaving. Sometimes I think I will go back to using my father’s razor.’ Stok leaned towards the mirror and bared his teeth at his reflection. ‘I still have some of my own teeth,’ he said. He prodded his teeth. ‘I have a good man—a good dentist—these state dentists are no good. It’s better to have a private dentist.’ Blobs of blood had reappeared on his chin. ‘They take an interest in you, private dentists.’
Stok seemed to be speaking only to his own scrubby reflection in the pockmarked mirror, so I said nothing. He tore small pieces of cotton wool off the wad and stuck them to his face with blood, while singing ‘The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows’ in a scratchy basso. When he was satisfied with the blood-staunching, Stok turned round to me.
‘So you did not heed my advice.’
I said nothing, and Stok walked across and looked down upon me.
‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie, O what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa’ sae hasty, Wi’ bickering brattle.’
Stok quoted it with an excellent Highland accent, ‘Robert Burns,’ pronounced Stok, ‘“To a Mouse”.’
I still didn’t say anything, but I had my eyes open and I looked at Stok calmly.
‘Are you not going to speak?’ said Stok mockingly. I said,
‘Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face, Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race.
Robert Burns, “To a Haggis”.’
Stok joined in the last three words as I said them, and then he laughed so loud that I thought he would shake some of the cracked tiles off the wall. ‘“To a Haggis”,’ he said again, the tears of delight welled in his eyes. He was still laughing and saying ‘To a Haggis’ when the guard came to take me downstairs and lock me up.
Stok’s temporary office was at the end of a long corridor lined with dusty panes of glass that almost permitted you to see beyond them into the honeycomb of bureaucracy. One door had ‘Health Bureau’ stuck on to its glass panel in raised letters. Parts of some letters had been chipped away, but a careful paint job had cured them. Inside the office
there were midget desks and a huge plans chest and a poster about putting fires out and another that showed two wooden-faced men and artificial respiration. Beyond this opened a small glass-sided cubicle from which a senior clerk could watch for frivolity among the underlings. Stok was sitting there speaking to a telephone that looked like a prop from
The Young Mister Edison.
My clothes had been dried and rough-ironed. They had that smell of coarse soap that is as endemic to Russia as the smell of Gauloises and garlic to Paris. I sat in a small easy chair, the stiff clothes seeking out the bruises and abrasions of the night, my hand throbbing with pain.
Stok replaced his phone. His uniform was clean and pressed and his buttons were shiny. Behind him through the thin curtains the sky was beginning to grow dark. I must have been unconscious a long time. The guards saluted. Stok pulled a small chair close, and rested his big shiny jackbooted feet upon it, then he lit a cigar and threw a cigar and matches to me. The two guards watched this with surprise.
Stok said ‘Spasibo,’ to the guards, and they said ‘Tovarich Polkovnik Stok’ to him and withdrew.
‘Smoke it,’ said Stok. ‘Don’t smell it.’
‘If it’s just the same to you,’ I said, ‘I’ll do both.’
‘Cuban. Excellent,’ said Stok.
Then we spent five minutes blowing cigar smoke at each other, until Stok said, ‘Lenin didn’t smoke, hated flowers, never had a soft chair in his
office, had only the simplest food, liked reading Turgenev and always had his watch fifteen minutes slow. I am not like that. I like all things that grow from the soil. The first thing I demand when I move into a new office is one soft chair for myself and another for my visitors. I like rich bourgeois food on the rare occasions that I have it. I don’t much like Turgenev—I think the death of Bazarov in
Fathers and Sons
is unconvincing and unfair to the reader—and I always have my watch fifteen minutes fast. As for smoking, there are nights when it’s been friend, fire and food to me. Many such nights.’
I smoked and nodded and watched him. The small pimples of cotton wool were still stuck to his bright new chin but his eyes were dark and old and tired.
‘Exciting friends you have,’ said Stok. ‘Gay, temperamental and devoted to private enterprise.’ He smiled.
I shrugged.
Suddenly Stok said, ‘They tried to kill you. Fifteen of them. We arrested ten, including two that died. Why did they try to kill you? Have you been meddling with someone’s girlfriend?’
‘I thought you had spent all night asking them.’
‘I have. I know why they tried to kill you. I just wondered if you did.’
‘I’ll always welcome a second opinion.’
‘Your old friend Newbegin wants you dead and out of the way.’
‘Why?’
‘You were sent to spy on Newbegin and he doesn’t like it.’
‘You don’t believe that?’
‘No interrogation I conduct ends until I get a story that I believe.’ Stok opened a brown dossier and looked at it in silence, then closed it again. ‘Trash,’ said Stok. ‘The people I arrested last night are trash.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means they are anti-social elements. Delinquents. They are not even people with political errors. Trash.’
There was a tap at the door and a young officer came in. He addressed Stok by his rank alone—usually a sign of friendship in the Soviet Army—put another limp file of papers upon the desk, and then whispered into Stok’s ear. Stok’s expression was unchanging, but I had an idea he was working hard to keep it so. Finally Stok nodded and the Guards major stood to one side of the desk.
Stok opened the file and signed the corners of eight sheets of paper. Then from the back of the file he took six more sheets of paper, perused them hurriedly and then signed those too. He spoke slowly to the papers which were still receiving his attention. ‘Ten men were taken into custody and we require…’ he turned the pages without haste ‘…thirty-five sheets of paper covered with reasons and thirty signatures from four different police authorities. I am buried under the paperwork. And do you
know,’ he leaned across the table staring at me and tapping the open file softly with his huge fingers, ‘if tomorrow I decide to release one of them, there will be over three times as much paperwork.’ Stok laughed a hoarse laugh as though the prisoners had pulled that trick upon him and he wanted to show that he didn’t mind.
‘Things are tough all over,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Stok. He drew on his cigar carefully, then waved it at the major. ‘Guards Major Nogin. GRU,’
*
Stok explained. The major looked surprised at being introduced to a prisoner, but he played along with it. ‘The major has just become the father of an eight-pound boy,’ Stok said, and then there was a lot of soft rapid Russian, which was probably Stok wising the major up on me and my department. Then Stok gave Major Nogin a cigar, and the major smiled at both of us and left the room. ‘He is a nice fellow for a GRU officer,’ said Stok.
I smiled.
Stok said, ‘Baltic Military District GRU are handling the whole thing. The District Military Council sent me over to the Area Military Commissariat as an adviser, but these young men don’t want an old man’s advice. They have handled the people that NTS
†
sent here, and they can quite well handle these new people.’ Stok gave an angry
flick of his gigantic fist. ‘We don’t send men into other countries to interfere with their internal affairs, why should you send your criminals here?’
I said, ‘What about the suppression of the Budapest rebellion?’
Stok shouted, ‘What about the Bay of Pigs? What about Suez? Tell the truth, English, the thing that sticks in your throat is that we were successful and you were not.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed wearily, ‘you are successful and we are not.’
‘Modern victories are not won by movements of armies, but by imperceptible change of molecules. Victories must be won inside the hearts of men.’
‘I prefer my victories inside their heads,’ I said.
‘Come along, English. We soldiers must not talk politics. Our job is to take the stupid and impossible fantasies of our politicians and try to make them work in terms of flesh and blood.’ Stok stood up and put his hands on the small of his back and threw his head back like a man in pain. ‘I am tired,’ he said.
‘I’m half dead,’ I told him.
He took my arm. ‘Come along then, we’ll support each other.’
‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘Of course you are, and so am I. Let’s go somewhere civilized and have a meal.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘But I must be back by nine-thirty. Tonight Moscow will inevitably take its revenge.’