The Untouchable (21 page)

There is one final image of Iosif I want to sketch before I pack him away for good in his tissue paper alongside so many other of the best-forgotten characters with whom my life is littered. As he was leaving the pub—he had insisted we go out separately—the old man’s little dog trotted forward, coiling and uncoiling itself in that enthusiastic doggy way, as if its body, taut as a sausage, were somehow spring-loaded, and tried to rub itself against his ankle, only to be rebuffed by a deft, sideways kick from a polished toecap. The animal gave a squeal, more in sorrow than pain, and skittered away, its claws clicking on the floor tiles, and sat down again between its master’s spread feet, blinking and rapidly licking its lips in puzzlement and consternation. Iosif went out, briefly letting in sunlight that played, unspurnably, at his ankles, and the old man glanced at me from under his brows with a sort of grinning scowl, and for a moment I saw what he thought he was seeing in me: another of the petty, impatient, harsh-eyed ones, the dog-kickers, the elbowers-through, the pushers-out-of-the-way, and I wanted to say to him,
No, no, I am
not like that, I am not like him!
and then I thought,
But perhaps I am?
I catch that same look nowadays when some Cold War veteran or self-appointed patriotic guardian of Western Values recognises me in the street and metaphorically spits upon me.

Anyway. Thus began my career as a working spy. I recalled Felix Hartmann’s hope that we scions of the loftier classes would provide Moscow with a completed jigsaw-puzzle picture of the English establishment (I had not had the heart to enquire if he had ever considered the subjects the manufacturers of such puzzles choose for illustration, but I had an image of a bunkerful of crop-headed commissars gravely poring over a caramel and sugarstick-pink scene complete with cottage and roses and rippling rill and ringleted little girl with a basket of buttercups on her dimpled arm: England, our England!). Diligently I began to accept the dinner invitations that previously I would have declined with a shudder, and found myself discussing
water-colours and the price of poultry with the moustached, slightly mad-eyed wife of a Cabinet minister, or listening, befuddled with brandy and cigar smoke, while a peer of the realm with brick-red jowls and a monocle, gesturing expansively, expounded to the table on the devilishly clever methods the Jews and Freemasons had employed to infiltrate every level of government, to the point where they were now ready to seize power and murder the King. I wrote up exhaustive accounts of these occasions—discovering, by the way, an unexpected flair for narrative; some of these early reports were positively racy, if somewhat over-coloured—and passed them on to Iosif, who would scan them rapidly, frowning, and breathing loudly through his nostrils, and then stow them in an inner pocket and cast a masked glance about the bar and begin to talk with laboured blandness about the weather. Once in a while I gleaned a bit of information or gossip that elicited one of Iosif’s rare, lip-biting, nervous little smiles. What Moscow considered to be my greatest, early triumph was the long and, to me, extremely tedious conversation I had at a Trinity Feast with a Private Secretary at the War Office, a portly, sleek-headed man with a small moustache, who as he prattled on reminded me of those blithe gaffe-makers in the Bateman cartoons; as the night ground along he became increasingly, solemnly, comically drunk—his dicky kept flying up, as in a music-hall farce—and told me, in indiscreet detail, how unprepared for war our armed forces were, that the armaments industry was a joke and that the government had not the will or the means to do anything to rectify the situation. I could see that Iosif, sitting at a low table in a corner of The Hare and Hounds in Highbury, crouched intently over my report, could not decide whether he should be appalled or jubilant at the implications for Europe in general, and Russia in particular, of what he was reading. What he seemed unaware of was that every newsboy in the country already knew how scandalously ill-equipped we were for war, and how spineless the government was.

This naivety on the part of Moscow and its emissaries was a cause of deep misgiving to all of us on our side; much of what passed with them for intelligence was freely available to the
public. Didn’t they ever, I asked Felix Hartmann in exasperation, read the papers or listen to the ten o’clock news on the wireless? “What do your people do at the embassy all day, apart from issuing laughable communiqués about Russia’s industrial output and refusing entry visas to defence correspondents of the
Daily Express?
” He smiled, and shrugged, and looked at the sky and began to whistle through his teeth. We were walking by the frozen Serpentine. It was January, the air was dense with mauve-white frost-smoke, and the ducks were waddling unsteadily about on the ice, baffled and disgruntled by this inexplicable solidification of their liquid world. After two years of duty Iosif had been abruptly recalled; I can still see the sickly sheen of sweat on his already cadaverous brow the day when he told me that this was to be our final meeting. We shook hands and in the doorway—The King’s Head, Highgate—he turned back and shot me a furtive, imploring glance, silently asking me I do not know what awful, impossible question.

“Life at the embassy is somewhat … subdued, just now,” Hartmann said.

Since Iosif’s abrupt departure I had been telephoning the embassy repeatedly, but had heard nothing until today, when Hartmann had just turned up, dressed in black as usual, wearing a black hat with the brim turned low at the front. When I asked what was going on, he had only smiled and put a finger to his lips and led me into the street and towards the park. Now he stopped and looked across the iron-coloured ice, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his long overcoat.

“Moscow has gone silent,” he said. “I send my messages along the usual channels, but nothing comes back. I am like a person who has survived an accident. Or like a person waiting for an accident to happen. It is a very strange sensation.”

On the bank near us a small boy attended by a black-stockinged nurse was throwing crusts of bread to the ducks; the child laughed throatily in delight to see the birds ignominiously slipping and slithering, their wings thrashing, as they chased the wildly skidding morsels. We turned and walked on. At the other side of the lake, on Rotten Row, a group of riders was jostling
along untidily amid white bursts of horse-breath. In silence we reached the bridge, and there we stopped. Distant behind the tops of the black trees around us the shrouded forms of London loomed. Hartmann, dreamily smiling, stood with his head tilted to one side, as if listening for some small, expected sound.

“I am going back,” he said. “They have told me I must come back.”

High up in the frozen mist, above the spires and the chimney pots, I seemed to see something hover for a second, a giant figure, all silver and gold and dully ashine. I heard myself swallow.

“I say, old man,” I said, “is that wise, do you think? They tell me the climate over there is not at all congenial, these days. Quite the coldest it’s been for a long time.”

He turned away from me and glanced skyward, as if he too had sensed some hovering portent.

“Oh, it will be all right,” he said absently. “They say they want me to make a personal report, that’s all.”

I nodded. Strange, how like incipient laughter dismay can feel. We set off across the bridge.

“You could always stay here,” I said. “I mean, they can’t
make
you go, can they?”

He laughed, and linked his arm through mine.

“This is what I like about you,” he said, “all of you. Matters are so simple.” Our footsteps rang on the bridge like axe-blows. He pressed my arm against his ribs. “I
must
go,” he said. “Otherwise there is … nothing. Do you see?”

We left the bridge still arm in arm and stood on the brow of the park’s gentle rise and surveyed the city crouched before us motionless in the mist.

“I shall miss London,” Hartmann said. “Kensington Gore, the Brompton Road, Tooting Bee—is there really a place called Tooting Bee? And Beauchamp Place, which only yesterday I at last learned how to pronounce in the correct way. Such a waste, all this valuable knowledge.”

He squeezed my arm again, and glanced quickly at me side-wise, and I felt something in him falter, as if a part of an inner mechanism had suddenly, finally, run down.

“Listen,” I said, “the thing is, you mustn’t go; we won’t let you, you know.”

He only smiled, and turned and limped away, back in the direction we had come, over the bridge, under the massy black mist-draped trees, and I never saw him again.

I
tried for years to find out what had become of him. The Comrades were tight-lipped; when they drop you, you disappear between the floorboards. Tatters of rumour did drift back. Someone had seen him in the Lubyanka, in bad shape, missing an eye; another claimed he was at Moscow Centre, under surveillance but running the Lisbon desk; he was in Siberia; in Tokyo; in the Caucasus; his corpse had been spotted in the back of a car on Dzerzhinski Street. These whispers might have been coming to me from the dark side of the moon. Russia was that far away; it was always that far away. The couple of weeks I had spent there had only served to make the place more distant for me. This is a curious fact about us—I think it is curious—that the country to which we had committed ourselves was a blur in our minds, the Promised Land we would never reach, and never wanted to reach. None of us would have dreamed of going to live there voluntarily; later on, Boy, though he tried to hide it, was aghast when he came to realise that he had no choice but to defect. The opposition seemed far more familiar with the place than we were. There were people in the Department, desk men who had never been east of the Elbe, who talked as if they were in and out of the Lubyanka every day, strolling up Dzerzhinski Street—which I hardly knew how to pronounce— for a copy of
Pravda
and a packet of whatever was the most popular brand of cigarettes in Moscow in those days.

Why did he go back? He knew as well as I did what awaited him—I had read the accounts of the show trials, hunched over newspapers in solitary horror behind locked doors, my hands damp and face on fire, like an appalled adolescent devouring a manual of obstetrics. He could have made a run for it, he had the contacts, the escape routes, he could have got to Switzerland, or South America. But no; he went back. Why? I brooded on the question; I still do. I have the uneasy conviction that if I could answer it, I could answer a great many other things, too, not only about Felix Hartmann, but about myself. The blank bafflement that comes over me like a fog when I contemplate that final, fateful decision that he made is an awful indictment of a lack of something in me, something perfectly ordinary, the common fellow-feeling that others seem to come by naturally. I would try out the kind of thought experiment old Charkin, my philosophy tutor at Trinity, used to urge us to conduct, imagining myself as best I could into Felix Hartmann’s mind and then plotting a plausible course of action for myself in the same circumstances. But it was no good, I could never get farther than the moment when the choice became unavoidable, whether to face one’s fate, or cut and run. How would it feel to have come to that pass, to be required to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of a cause—and not even for the cause itself, but only to save its face, as it were, to save the phenomena, as the old cosmologists used to say? To know that one would most likely end up in a pit in a forest with a thousand other riddled corpses, and yet to go back, regardless: was that courage, or just pride, foolhardiness, quixotic stubbornness? I felt guilty now for having laughed behind my hand at his poses and pretensions. Like a suicide—which, essentially, he was—he had both earned and verified his own legend. I would lie awake at night thinking of him, a formless heap of pain and despair in the corner of a lightless cell, shivering under a filthy blanket, listening to the skitter of rats’ claws and the water pipes clanking and a young man somewhere crying for his mother. But even that I could not make real, and always it turned into melodrama, an image out of a cheap adventure yarn.

Boy laughed at me.

“You’re going soft, Victor,” he said. “Bloody man could be anywhere. They come and go like gypsies, you know that.” We
were in Perpignan, in a brasserie by the river. It was August, the last weeks before the war. Purple shadows under the plane trees, and shimmying lozenges of water-light on the grey-green undersides of their big, torpid leaves. We had motored down from Calais in Boy’s white roadster, and were already chafing under the burden of each other’s company. I found exhausting his appetite for boys and drink, and he thought me an old maid. I had decided to go on the trip because Nick was supposed to be with us, but “something had come up,” and instead he had flown to Germany again on some secret mission or other. Now Boy gave me one of his surly, smear-eyed looks. “Obviously you’re smitten, Vic. Hartmann the heart-throb. It must have been the priestly touch, the laying on of hands. In love with your father when you were a lad, were you? Gives a new meaning to the word bishopric.”

He poured himself the last of the wine and called for another bottle.

“I suppose you don’t mind at all who they shoot,” I said, “or how many.”

“Christ, Vic, you’re such a moaner.”

But he would not meet my eye. It was a bad time for the true believers such as Boy. The London embassy was practically unmanned. One case officer after another—Iosif, Felix Hartmann, half a dozen others—had been recalled and not replaced, leaving us to shift for ourselves as best we might. Lately the stuff I had been pilfering from the Department files, the kind of thing which used to send Felix Hartmann into transports—probably he was exaggerating its worth, out of old-world politeness—I now delivered through a dead-letter drop in an Irish pub in Kilburn, and could not be sure that it was getting through, or, if it was, that anyone was reading it. I do not know why I kept at it, really. If it had not been for the war I might have given up. We had to spur ourselves on, like lost explorers reminding each other of the joys of home. It was hard work. Alastair Sykes had recently published a hopeless piece of self-deluding twaddle in the
Spectator
arguing the necessity for the Moscow purges in the face of the Fascist threat; I laughed as I read it, imagining him up there in his rooms in Trinity, crouched over that antique typewriter of his, tapping away like mad with two fingers, brow furrowed
and the bristles standing up on his head and his pipe firing off showers of sparks.