The Human Factor (35 page)

The most valuable object in the apartment seemed to be the telephone. It was covered with dust and disconnected, but all the same it had a symbolic value. One day, perhaps soon, it could be put to use. He would speak through it to Sarah – to hear her voice meant everything to him, whatever comedy they would have to play for the listeners, and there certainly would be listeners. To hear her would make the long wait bearable. Once he broached the matter to Ivan. He had noticed Ivan preferred to talk out of doors even on the coldest day, and as it was Ivan's job to show him around the city he took an opportunity outside the great GUM department store (a place where he felt almost at home because it reminded him of photographs he had seen of the Crystal Palace). He asked, ‘Is it possible, do you think, to have my telephone connected?' They had gone to GUM to find Castle a fur-lined overcoat – the temperature was twenty-three degrees.

‘I'll ask,' Ivan said, ‘but for the moment I suppose they want to keep you under wrappers.'

‘Is that a long process?'

‘It was in the case of Bellamy, but you're not such an important case. We can't get much publicity out of you.'

‘Who's Bellamy?'

‘You must remember Bellamy. A most important man in your British Council. In West Berlin. That was always a cover, wasn't it, like the Peace Corps?'

Castle didn't bother to deny it – it was none of his business.

‘Oh yes, I think I remember now.' It had happened at the time of his greatest anxiety, while he waited for news of Sarah in Lourenço Marques, and he couldn't recall the details of Bellamy's defection. Why did one defect from the British Council and what value or harm would such a defection have to anyone? He asked, ‘Is he still alive?' It all seemed such a long time ago.

‘Why not?'

‘What does he do?'

‘He lives on our gratitude.' Ivan added, ‘As you do. Oh, we invented a job for him. He advises our publications division. He has a
dacha
in the country. It's a better life than he would have had at home with a pension. I suppose they will do the same for you.'

‘Reading books in a
dacha
in the country?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are there many of us –I mean living like that on your gratitude?'

‘I know at least six. There was Cruickshank and Bates – you'll remember them – they were from your service. You'll run into them I expect in the Aragvi, our Georgian restaurant – they say the wine's good there – I can't afford it – and you will see them at the Bolshoi, when they take the wrappers off.'

They passed the Lenin Library – ‘You'll find them there too.' He added with venom, ‘Reading the English papers.'

Ivan had found him a large stout middle-aged woman as a daily who would also help him to learn a little Russian. She gave a Russian name to everything in the flat, pointing a blunt finger at everything in turn, and she was very fussy about pronunciation. Although she was several years younger than Castle she treated him as though he were a child, with an admonitory sternness which slowly melted into a sort of maternal affection as he became more house-trained. When Ivan was otherwise occupied she would enlarge the scope of her lessons, taking him with her in search of food at the Central Market and down into the Metro. (She wrote figures on a scrap of paper to explain the prices and the fares.) After a while she began to show him photographs of her family – her husband a young man in uniform, taken somewhere in a public park with a cardboard outline of the Kremlin behind his head. He wore his uniform in an untidy way (you could see he wasn't used to it), and he smiled at the camera with a look of great tenderness – perhaps she had been standing behind the photographer. He had been killed, she conveyed to him, at Stalingrad. In return he produced for her a snapshot of Sarah and Sam which he hadn't confessed to Mr Halliday that he had secreted in his shoe. She showed surprise that they were black, and for a little while afterwards her manner to him seemed more distant – she was not so much shocked as lost, he had broken her sense of order. In that she resembled his mother. After a few days all was well again, but during those few he felt an exile inside his exile and his longing for Sarah was intensified.

He had been in Moscow now for two weeks, and he had bought with the money Ivan had given him a few extras for the flat. He had even found school editions in English of Shakespeare's plays, two novels of Dickens,
Oliver Twist
and
Hard Times, Tom Jones
and
Robinson Crusoe
. The snow was ankle deep in the side streets and he had less and less inclination to go sightseeing with Ivan or even on an educational tour with Anna – she was called Anna. In the evening he would warm some soup and sit huddled near the radiator, with the dusty disconnected telephone at his elbow, and read
Robinson Crusoe
. Sometimes he could hear Crusoe speaking, as though on a tape recorder, with his own voice: ‘I drew up the state of my affairs in writing; not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few heirs, as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my mind.'

Crusoe divided the comforts and miseries of his situation into Good and Evil and under the heading Evil he wrote: ‘I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me.' Under the opposing Good he counted ‘so many necessary things' which he had obtained from the wreck ‘as will either supply my wants, or enable me to supply myself even as long as I live.' Well, he had the green wicker armchair, the gravy-stained table, the uncomfortable sofa, and the radiator which warmed him now. They would have been sufficient if Sarah had been there – she was used to far worse conditions and he remembered some of the grim rooms in which they had been forced to meet and make love in dubious hotels without a colour bar in the poorer quarters of Johannesburg. He remembered one room in particular without furniture of any kind where they had been happy enough on the floor. Next day when Ivan made his snide references to ‘gratitude' he broke furiously out: ‘You call this gratitude.'

‘Not so many people who live alone possess a kitchen and shower all to themselves . . . and two rooms.'

‘I'm not complaining of that. But they promised me I wouldn't be alone. They promised me that my wife and child would follow.'

The intensity of his anger disquieted Ivan. Ivan said, ‘It takes time.'

‘I don't even have any work. I'm a man on the dole. Is that your bloody socialism?'

‘Quiet, quiet,' Ivan said. ‘Wait awhile. When they take the wrappers off . . .'

Castle nearly struck Ivan and he saw that Ivan knew it. Ivan mumbled something and backed away down the cement stairs.

2

Was it perhaps a microphone that conveyed this scene to a higher authority or had Ivan reported it? Castle would never know, but all the same his anger had worked the trick. It had swept away the wrappers, swept away, as he realized later, even Ivan. Just as when Ivan was removed from London because they must have decided he had the wrong temperament to be the right control for Castle, so now he put in only one more appearance – a rather subdued appearance – and then disappeared for ever. Perhaps they had a pool of controls, just as in London there had been a pool of secretaries, and Ivan had sunk back into the pool. No one in this sort of service was ever likely to be sacked, for fear of revelations.

Ivan made his swan song as an interpreter in a building not far from the Lubianka prison, which he had pointed proudly out to Castle on one of their walks. Castle asked him that morning where they were going and he answered evasively, ‘They have decided on your work.'

The room where they waited was lined with books in ugly economy bindings. Castle read the names of Stalin, Lenin, Marx in Russian script – it pleased him to think he was beginning to make out the script. There was a big desk with a luxurious leather blotting pad and a nineteenth-century bronze of a man on horseback too large and heavy to use as a paper-weight – it could only be there for decorative purposes. From a doorway behind the desk emerged a stout elderly man with a shock of grey hair and an old-fashioned moustache yellowed by cigarette smoke. He was followed by a young man dressed very correctly who carried a file. He was like an acolyte attending a priest of his faith, and in spite of the heavy moustache there
was
something priestly about the old man, about his kindly smile and the hand he extended like a blessing. A lot of conversation – questions and answers – went on among the three of them, and then Ivan took the floor as translator. He said, ‘The comrade wants you to know how highly your work has been appreciated. He wants you to understand that the very importance of your work has presented us with problems which had to be solved at a high level. That is why you have been kept apart during these two weeks. The comrade is anxious that you should not think it was through any lack of trust. It was hoped that your presence here would only become known to the Western Press at the right moment.'

Castle said, ‘They must know I am here by now. Where else would I be?' Ivan translated and the old man replied, and the young acolyte smiled at the reply with his eyes cast down.

‘The comrade says, “Knowing is not the same as publishing.” The Press can only publish when you are officially here. The censorship would see to that. A press conference is going to be arranged very soon and then we will let you know what you should say to the journalists. Perhaps we will rehearse it all a little first.'

‘Tell the comrade,' Castle said, ‘that I want to earn my keep here.'

‘The comrade says you have earned it many times over already.'

‘In that case I expect him to keep the promise they made me in London.'

‘What was that?'

‘I was told my wife and son would follow me here. Tell him, Ivan, that I'm damned lonely. Tell him I want the use of my telephone. I want to telephone my wife, that's all, not the British Embassy or a journalist. If the wrappers are off, then let me speak to her.'

The translation took a lot of time. A translation, he knew, always turned out longer than the original text, but this was inordinately longer. Even the acolyte seemed to be adding more than a sentence or two. The important comrade hardly bothered to speak – he continued to look as benign as a bishop.

Ivan turned back to Castle at last. He had a sour expression which the others couldn't see. He said, ‘They are very anxious to have your co-operation in the publishing section which deals with Africa.' He nodded in the direction of the acolyte who permitted himself an encouraging smile which might have been a plaster cast of his superior's. ‘The comrade says he would like you to act as their chief adviser on African literature. He says there are a great number of African novelists and they would like to choose the most valuable for translation, and of course the best of the novelists (selected by you) would be invited to pay us a visit by the Writer's Union. This is a very important position and they are happy to offer it to you.'

The old man made a gesture with his hand towards the bookshelves as though he were inviting Stalin, Lenin and Marx – yes, and there was Engels too – to welcome the novelists whom he would pick for them.

Castle said, ‘They haven't answered me. I want my wife and son here with me. They promised that. Boris promised it.'

Ivan said, ‘I do not want to translate what you are saying. All that business concerns quite a different department. It would be a big mistake to confuse matters. They are offering you . . .'

‘Tell him I won't discuss anything until I've spoken to my wife.'

Ivan shrugged his shoulders and spoke. This time the translation was no longer than the text – an abrupt angry sentence. It was the commentary by the old comrade which took up all the space, like the footnotes of an over-edited book. To show the finality of his decision Castle turned away and looked out of the window into a narrow ditch of a street between walls of concrete of which he couldn't see the top through the snow which poured down into the ditch as though from some huge inexhaustible bucket up above. This was not the snow he remembered from childhood and associated with snowballs and fairy stories and games with toboggans. This was a merciless, interminable, annihilating snow, a snow in which one could expect the world to end.

Ivan said angrily, ‘We will go away now.'

‘What do they say?'

‘I do not understand the way they are treating you. I know from London the sort of rubbish you sent us. Come away.' The old comrade held out a courteous hand: the young one looked a bit perturbed. Outside the silence of the snow-drowned street was so extreme that Castle hesitated to break it. The two of them walked rapidly like secret enemies who are seeking the right spot to settle their differences in a final fashion. At last, when he could bear the uncertainty no longer, Castle said, ‘Well, what was the result of all that talk?'

Ivan said, ‘They told me that I was handling you wrongly. Just the same as they told me when they brought me back from London. “More psychology is needed, comrade, more psychology.” I would be much better off if I was a traitor like you.' Luck brought them a taxi and in it he leaped into a wounded silence. (Castle had already noticed that one never talked in a taxi.) In the doorway of the apartment block Ivan gave grudgingly the information Castle demanded.

‘Oh, the job will wait for you. You have nothing to fear. The comrade is very sympathetic. He will speak to others about your telephone and your wife. He begs you – begs, that was the word he used himself – to be patient a little longer. You will have news, he says, very soon. He understands – understands, mark you – your anxiety.
I
do not understand a thing. My psychology is obviously bad.'