The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  “He’s nowhere. He doesn’t exist. He’s gone. I was in his way.”

  “Well, he hadn’t gone at Christmas time, had he? Not if you were together with him. Was he Austrian, Cyril?”

  Frewin was lifeless. He was dead with his eyes open. I had hit him once too often.

  “All right, then, he’s French,” I suggested more loudly, trying to jerk him from his introspection. “Was he a Frenchie, Cyril, your chum? . . . They wouldn’t mind about a Frenchie, even if they don’t like them. Come on, Cyril, how about a Yank then? They can’t object to a Yank!” No answer. “Not Irish, was he? I hope not, for your sake!”

  I did the laughing for him, but nothing stirred him from his melancholy. Still at the window, he had crooked his thumb and was boring the knuckle joint into his forehead, as if trying to make a bullet hole. Had he whispered something?

  “I didn’t catch you, Cyril?

  “He’s above all that.”

  “Above nationality?”

  “He’s above it.”

  “You mean he’s a diplomat.”

  “He didn’t come to Salzburg, can’t you bloody listen?” He swung round at me and began screaming “You’re bloody spastic, you know that? Never mind the answers, you can’t even ask right! No wonder the country’s in a mess! Where’s your savvy gone? Where’s your human understanding, for a change?”

  I stood up again. Slowly. Keep him watching me. Give my back another rub. I wandered down the room. I shook my head as if to say this simply would not do.

  “I’m trying to help you, Cyril. If you went to Salzburg and stayed there, that’s one scenario. If you went on somewhere else—well, that’s quite another. If your chum is Italian, say. And if you pretended to go to Salzburg but went—oh, I don’t know—to Rome, say, or Milan, even Venice—well, that’s another. I can’t do it all for you. It’s not fair and they wouldn’t thank me if I did.”

  He was wide-eyed. He was transferring his madness to me, appointing himself the sane one. I refilled my pipe, giving it my entire attention while I went on talking.

  “You’re a hard man to please, Cyril”—tamping the tobacco with my forefinger—“you’re a tease, if you want to know. ‘Don’t touch me here, take your hand away from there, you can do this but only once.’ I mean, what am I allowed to talk about?”

  I struck the match and held it to the bowl, and as I did so I saw that he had transferred his knuckles to his eyes in order not to be in the room. But I pretended not to notice. “All right, we’ll forget Salzburg. If Salzburg is hurtful, put Salzburg aside and let’s go back to your Iron Curtains. Yes? Agreed?”

  His hands slipped slowly from his face. No answer, but no outright rejection either. I went on talking. He wanted me to. I could sense his reliance on my words as a bridge between the real world and the inner hell where he was living. He wanted me to do the talking for both of us. I felt I had to make his confession for him, which was why I decided to play my most perilous card.

  “So suppose, for argument’s sake, Cyril, we were to add the name of Sergei Modrian to this list and call it a day,” I suggested carelessly, almost covering over my words in my efforts to sound unthreatening. “Just to be on the safe side,” I added cheerfully. “What do you say?” His head was still hanging downward, his face cut off from me. Chatting cheerfully, I expanded on my latest helpful proposal for HQ. “‘All right,’ we say to them, ‘so take your wretched Mr. Modrian. Don’t play around with us any more, we’ll come clean. Have him and go home. Ned and Cyril have got work to do.’”

  He was dangling, smiling like a hanged man. In the profound silence that had settled over the neighbourhood, I had the sensation of hearing my words resounding from the roof tops. But Frewin seemed barely to have heard them.

  “Modrian’s the one they want you to own up to, Cyril,” I continued reasonably. “They told me. If you say yes to Modrian—and if I write him down, which I’m doing, and you allow me to, and I notice you’re not stopping me, are you?—nobody can accuse either one of us of being less than frank with them. ‘Yes, I am a chum of Sergei Modrian and screw the lot of you’—how’s that? ‘And I went with him to wherever we went, and we did this, we did that, we agreed to do certain other things, and we had a lovely time, or we didn’t. And anyway, what’s all the glasnost for, if I’m still being forbidden to associate with an extremely civilised Russian?’ . . . How’s that? Never mind the gaps for the moment, we can fill all those in later. Then, the way I see it, they can pack up the file for another year and we can all get on with our weekend.”

  “Why?”

  I affected not to understand.

  “Why can they pack up the file then?” he demanded, as suspicions crowded in on him. “When they’ve been who they are? They’re not going to turn round and say ‘What’s the point?’ Nobody does. Not when they’ve been one thing. They stay who they are. They don’t become other people. They can’t.”

  “Come off it, Cyril.” He had sunk into his own thoughts and was becoming hard to reach “Cyril!”

  “What then? What’s up? Don’t shout.”

  “So what’s wrong with being Russian these days? HQ would be far more worried if Sergei was a Frenchie! I only suggested Frenchie as a trap. I regret that now, I apologise. But a Russian these days— for heaven’s sake, we’re not just talking friendly nations, we’re talking partners! You know HQ. They’re always behind the times. So’s Gorst. Our job’s to set the trend. Are you hearing me, Cyril?”

  And that was where, for a moment, I thought I had lost the whole game—lost his complicity, lost his dependence, lost the willing suspension of his disbelief. He wandered past me like a sleep-walker. He stood himself at his bay window again, here he remained contemplating his half-dug pool and all the other halfbuilt dreams of his life, which he must have known by now would never be completed.

  Then, to my relief, he started talking. Not about what he had done. Not about who he had done it with. But why.

  “You don’t know what it means, do you, to be locked up all day with a bunch of morons?”

  I thought at first he was complaining of his future, till I realised he was talking about the Tank.

  “Listening to their filthy jokes all day, choking on their fags and their BO? Not you, you’re privileged, however humble you make yourself out. Day after day of it, sniggers about tits and knickers and periods and little bits on the side? ‘Come on, Saint, tell us a naughty joke for a change! You’re a deep one, I’ll bet, Saint! What are you into—gym slips? Bit of the rough? What’s the Saint’s little fancy of a Saturday night?’” His energy had returned to him in full force, and with it, to my astonishment, an unexpected gift for mimicry. He was mincing at me, playing the music-hall queen, a ghastly soft grin twisting his hairless face. “‘Heard the one about the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, Saint? The excitement was in tents. Get you!’ You wouldn’t know about that, would you? ‘Do you pull it now and then, Saint? Give it a little jerk occasionally, just to make sure it’s there? You’ll go blind, you know. It’ll drop off. I’ll bet you’ve got a big one, haven’t you? A real donkey knock, all the way down your leg and tucked into your garter.’ . . . You’ve never had that, have you, all day long, in the office, in the canteen? You’re a gentleman. Know what they gave me April Fool’s Day? A top secret incoming from Paris, Frewin’s eyes only, decypher yourself, manual, ha ha. Flash priority, get the joke? I didn’t. So I go into the cubicle and get out the books, don’t I? And I decypher it, don’t I? Manual. Everyone’s got his head down. Nobody laughing or spoiling it. I do the first six groups and it’s filth, some filthy joke all about a French letter. Gorst had done it. He’d had the boys at the Paris Embassy send it specially as a joke. ‘Steady on, Saint, keep your hair on, give us a smile. It was only a joke, Saint, can’t you take a joke?’ That’s what Personnel said too, when I complained. Horseplay, they said. Pranks are good for morale. Think of it as a compliment, they said, show a little sporting instinct. If I hadn’t had my music I’d
have killed myself long ago. I considered it, I don’t mind telling you. Trouble was, I wouldn’t see their faces when the found out what they’d done.”

  A traitor needs two things, Smiley had once remarked bitterly to me at the time of Haydon’s betrayal of the Circus: somebody to hate, and somebody to love. Frewin had told me whom he hated. Now he began to talk about whom he loved.

  “I’d been all over the world that night—Puerto Rico, Cape Verde, Jo’burg—and there wasn’t anything that took my fancy. I like the amateurs best, as a rule, the hacks. They’ve got more wit, which is what I like, I told you. I didn’t even know it was morning. I’ve got these thick curtains up there, three hundred quids’ worth, interlined. It’s meat and drink to me after the Tank, the quiet is.”

  A different smile had come up on him, a small boy’s smile on his birthday.

  “‘Good morning to you, Boris, my friend,’ says Olga. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ Then she says it in Russian and Boris replies that he’s feeling a bit low. He’s often low, Boris is. He’s prone to Slav depressions. Olga takes care of him, mind. She’ll have a joke, but it’s never cruelly meant. They have a fight now and then too—well, it’s only natural, seeing they do everything together. But they always make it up in the same programme. They don’t bear a grudge from day to day. Olga couldn’t do that, to be frank. It’s out with it and that’s it, with Olga. Then they’ll have a laugh together. That’s how they are. Constructive. Friendly. Clean spoken. Musical too, naturally—well, they would be, being Russian. I wasn’t that keen on Tchaikovsky till I heard them discussing him. But afterwards I came round to him straight away. Boris has got quite advanced tastes in music actually. Olga—well, she’s a bit easy to please. Still, they’re only actors, I suppose, reading their lines.

  But you forget that when you’re listening to them, trying to learn the language. You believe in them.”

  And you send your written work in, he was saying.

  For free correction and advice, he was saying.

  You don’t even have to write to Moscow after the first time. They’ve got this box number in Luxembourg.

  He had fallen quiet but not dangerously so. Nevertheless I was becoming scared that his trance might end too soon. I took myself out of his line of sight, and stood in a corner of the room behind him.

  “What address did you give them, Cyril?”

  “This one, of course. What else have I got to give them, then? A country house in Shropshire? A villa in Capri?”

  “Did you give them your own name, too?”

  “Of course I didn’t. Well, Cyril, yes. I mean anyone can be Cyril.”

  “Good man,” I said approvingly. “Cyril who?”

  “Nemo,” he announced proudly. “Mr. C. Nemo. ‘Nemo’ is Latin for ‘nobody,’ in case you didn’t know.”

  Mr. C. Nemo. Like Mr. A. Patriot, perhaps.

  “Did you put your occupation?”

  “Not my real one. You’re being stupid again.”

  “So what did you put?”

  “Musician.”

  “Did they ask for your age?”

  “Of course they did. They had to. They had to know you were eligible, in case you won the prize. They can’t give prizes to minors, can they? No one can.”

  “And status—married or single—you told them that too?”

  “I had to put my status, didn’t I, with the prize being available to couples! They can’t give a prize to one person and leave his wife out, it wouldn’t be gracious.”

  “What work did you send in—the first time round, for instance—do you remember?”

  He decided to take further exception to my stupidity.

  “Thickhead. What do you think I sent them? Bloody logarithms? You write in, you get the forms, you enrol, you get the Luxembourg box number, you get the book, you’re one of them. After that you do what Boris and Olga tell you to do in the programme, don’t you? ‘Complete the exercise on page 9. Answer the questions on page 12.’ Haven’t you been to school then?”

  “And you were good. HQ says you’ve got a mind like an encyclopaedia when you use it. They told me.” I was beginning to learn how much he relished flattery.

  “I was more than good, as a matter of fact, thank you, HQ. If you wish to know, I was in the nature of being their top pupil. Certain notes were sent to me by certain tutors, and some of them had a highly congratulatory tone,” he added, with the wild grin that came over him when he was praised. “It gave me quite a filip, if you wish to know, walking into the Tank of a Monday morning with one of their little notes in my pocket and not saying anything. I thought, I could tell some of you a tale if I wanted. I didn’t, though. I preferred my privacy. I preferred my friendships. I wasn’t going to have those animals making filthy comments about Olga and Boris, thank you.”

  “And you wrote back to these tutors?”

  “Only as Nemo.”

  “But you didn’t fool with them otherwise?” I asked, trying to fathom what restraints, if any, were in his mind as he embarked on this first illicit love affair. “I mean, if they asked you a plain question, you’d give them a plain answer. You weren’t coy.”

  “I was not coy! I had no cause to be! I took great care to be courteous, the same as my tutors were. They were high professors, some of them, academicians. I was grateful and I was diligent. That was the least they deserved, considering there was no fee and it was voluntary and in the interests of human understanding.”

  The hunter in me again. I was calculating the moves they would have made as they played him along. I was working out how I would have played him myself, if the Circus had dreamed up anything so perfect.

  “And I suppose, as you improved, they passed you on from plain printed exercises to the more ambitious stuff—composition, essays?”

  “When it was deemed by the Board of Tutors in Moscow that I was ripe for it, yes, they moved me up to freestyle.”

  “Do you remember the subjects they set you?”

  He laughed his superior laugh. “You think I’d forget them? Five nights at each one of them with the dictionary? Two hours’ sleep if I’m lucky? Wake up, will you, Ned!”

  I gave a rueful little laugh as I wrote to his dictation.

  “‘My Life’ was the first one. I told them about the Tank, not mentioning names, of course, or the nature of our work, naturally. Nevertheless, a certain element of social comment was present, I won’t deny it. I thought the Board had a right to know, specially with the glasnost in the pipeline and everything easing up for the benefit of all mankind.”

  “What was the next one?”

  “‘My Home.’ I told them about my plans for the pond. They liked that. And my cooking. One of them was quite a major cook. After that they gave me ‘My Favourite Pastime,’ which could have been redundant but wasn’t.”

  “You described your love of music, I suppose?”

  “Wrong.”

  The rest of his answer rings in my ears today: as an accusation, as a cry of sympathy from a fellow sufferer; as a blind prayer flung into the ether by a man who, like myself, was desperate for love before it was too late.

  “I elected ‘Good Company’ as my favourite pastime, if your really wish to know,” he said as the wild smile came racing back to his cheeks. “The fact that I had not had much good company in my life hitherto did not deter me from relishing the few occasions when it had come my way.” He seemed to forget that he had spoken, for he began again, in words I might have used of Sally: “I had a feeling I had renounced something in my life which I now wished to reclaim,” he said.

  “And did they admire your advanced work too? Were they impressed by it?” I asked as I diligently wrote this down.

  He was smirking again. “Moderately, I assume. Marginally. Here and there. With reservations, naturally.”

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “Because, unlike some, they had the grace and generosity to show their appreciation. That’s why.”

  And the
y showed it, said Frewin—I scarcely needed to press him further—they showed it in the person of one Sergei Modrian, First Secretary Cultural, of the Soviet Embassy in London, in his capacity as Radio Moscow’s devoted local emissary despatched to answer Frewin’s prayer.

  Like all good angels, Modrian arrived without warning, on Frewin’s doorstep one dank November Saturday, bearing with him the gifts of his high office: one bottle of Moskovskaya vodka, one tin of Sevruga caviar, and one foully printed artbook about the Bolshoi Ballet. And one grandly typed letter appointing Mr. C. Nemo to be an Honorary Student of Moscow State University, in recognition of his unique progress in the Russian language.

  But the greatest gift of all was Modrian’s own magical person, custom-trained to provide the good company Frewin had so loudly craved in his prize-winning essay for the Board.

  We had arrived at our destination. Frewin was calm, Frewin was in triumph; Frewin, for however long, was fulfilled. His voice had broken, free of its confinements; his plain face was lit with the smile of a man who had known true love and was longing to impart his luck. If there had been anyone in the world for whom I could ever have smiled in the same way, I would have been a different man.

  “Modrian, Ned? Sergei Modrian? Oh, Ned, I mean we’re talking the total top league here. One look at him, I knew. None of your half measures here, I thought. This one’s the whole hog. We had the same sense of humour, of course, straight off. Acid. No wool across the eyes. The same interests too, right down to composers.” He attempted a more detached tone, but in vain. “It is very rare in life, in my experience, for two human beings to be naturally compatible in each and every respect—bar women, where I have to admit that Sergei’s experience far outran my own. Sergei’s attitude to women”—he was trying hard to be disapproving—“I’ll put it this way: if it had been anyone else behaving in that manner, I would have been hard put to it to approve.”

  “Did he introduce you to women, Cyril?”

  His expression switched to one of adamant rejection. “He assuredly did not, thank you. Nor would I have permitted him to. Nor would he have regarded such introductions as coming within the ambit of our relationship.”