The Russia House

by John le Carré

  ‘She’s potty,’ he pronounced into the blackness below him. ‘Certifiably, totally barmy. She wasn’t even there.’

  Nobody asked, who’s she? or where’s there? Even Clive knew the value of a good silence.

  ‘K short for Katya, short for Yekaterina, I take it,’ piped Walter after a further wait. ‘The patronymic is Borisovna.’ He was wearing a crooked bow tie, yellow, with a brown-and-orange motif.

  ‘Don’t know a K, don’t know a Katya, don’t know a Yekaterina,’ Barley said. ‘Borisovna ditto. Never screwed one, never flirted with one, never proposed to one, never even married one. Never met one, far as I remember. Yes, I did.’

  They waited, I waited; and we would have waited all night and there would not have been the creak of a chair or the clearing of a throat while Barley ransacked his memory for a Katya.

  ‘Old cow in Aurora,’ Barley resumed. ‘Tried to flog me some art prints of Russian painters. I didn’t bite. Aunts would have blown their corks.’

  ‘Aurora?’ Clive asked, not knowing whether it was a city or a State agency.

  ‘Publishers.’

  ‘Do you remember her other name?’

  Barley shook his head, his face still out of sight. ‘Beard,’ he said. ‘Katya of the beard. Ninety in the shade.’

  Bob’s rich voice had a stereophonic quality, and a knack of changing things simply by its reach. ‘Want to read it aloud, Barley?’ he called with the homeliness of an old scouting buddy. ‘Maybe reading it aloud will freshen up your memory. Want to try, Barley?’

  Barley, Barley, everyone his friend except Clive, who never once, to my memory, called him anything but Blair.

  ‘Yes, do that, will you. Read it aloud,’ said Clive, making an order of it, and Barley to my surprise seemed to think it a good idea. Sitting himself up with one jointless movement of his back, he arranged his torso in such a way that both the letter and his face were in the light. Frowning as before, he started reading aloud in a tone of studied mystification.

  ‘My beloved Barley.’ He tilted the letter and began again. ‘My beloved Barley, Do you remember a promise you made to me one night in Peredelkino as we lay on the verandah of our friends’ dacha and recited to each other the poetry of a great Russian mystic who loved England? You swore to me that you would always prefer humanity to nations and that when the day came you would act like a decent human being.’

  He had stopped again.

  ‘Is none of that true?’ said Clive.

  ‘I told you. I never met the hag!’

  There was a force in Barley’s denial that was not there before. He was shoving back something that was threatening him.

  ‘So now I am asking you to redeem your promise, though not in the way we might have imagined that night when we agreed to become lovers. Total balls,’ he muttered. ‘Silly cow’s got it all mixed up. I ask you to show this book to English people who think as we do. Publish it for me, using the arguments you expressed with so much fire. Show it to your scientists and artists and intelligentsia and tell them it is the first stone of a great avalanche and they must throw the next stone for themselves. Tell them that with the new openness we can move together to destroy the destruction and castrate the monster we have created. Ask them which is more dangerous to mankind: to conform like a slave or resist like a man? Act like a decent human being, Barley. I love Herzen’s England and you. Your loving K. Who the hell is she? She’s off her tree. They both are.’

  Leaving the letter on the table, Barley wandered off into the dark end of the room, softly cursing, hammering his right fist downward on to the air. ‘Hell’s the woman up to?’ he protested. ‘She’s taken two completely different stories and twisted them together. Anyway, where’s the book?’ He had remembered us and was facing us again.

  ‘The book is safe,’ said Clive, with a sideways glance at me.

  ‘Where is it, please? It’s mine.’

  ‘We rather thought it was her friend’s,’ said Clive.

  ‘I’ve been charged with it. You saw what he wrote. I’m his publisher. It’s mine. You’ve no right to it.’

  He had landed with both feet in the very ground we wished him not to enter. But Clive was quick to distract him.

  ‘He?’ Clive repeated. ‘You mean Katya’s a man? Why do you say he? You really are confusing us, you know. You’re a confusing person, I suppose.’

  I had been expecting the outburst sooner. I had sensed already that Barley’s submissiveness was a truce and not a victory, and that each time Clive reined him in he brought him nearer to revolt. So that when Barley sauntered up to the table, leaned across it and slackly raised his hands, palms forward, from his sides, in what might well have been a docile gesture of helplessness, I did not necessarily expect him to offer Clive a sweetly reasoned answer to his question. But not even I had reckoned with the scale of the detonation.

  ‘You have no damned right!’ Barley bellowed straight into Clive’s face, smashing his palms on to the table so hard that my papers bounced up and down in front of me. Brock came rushing from the hall. Ned had to order him back. ‘That’s my manuscript. Sent to me by my author. For my consideration in my good time. You have no right to steal it, read it or keep it. So give me the book and go home to your squalid island.’ He flung out an arm at Bob. ‘And take your Boston Brahmin with you.’

  ‘Our island,’ Clive reminded him. ‘The book, as you call it, is not a book at all and neither you nor we have any right to it,’ he continued frigidly and untruthfully. ‘I’m not interested in your precious publishing ethics. Nobody here is. All we know is, the manuscript in question contains military secrets about the Soviet Union that, assuming they are true, are vital to the defence of the West. To which hemisphere you also belong – I take it, thankfully. What would you do in our place? Ignore it? Throw it into the sea? Or try to find out how it came to be addressed to a derelict British publisher?’

  ‘He wants it published! By me! Not hidden in your vaults!’

  ‘Quite,’ said Clive with another glance at me.

  ‘The manuscript has been officially impounded and classified as top secret,’ I said. ‘It’s subject to the same restrictions as this meeting. But even more so.’ My old law tutor would have turned in his grave – not, I am afraid, for the first time. But it’s always wonderful what a lawyer can achieve when nobody knows the law.

  One minute and fourteen seconds was how long the silence lasted on the tape. Ned timed it with his stopwatch when he got back to the Russia House. He had been waiting for it, even relishing it, but he still began to fear that he had hit one of those maddening faults that always seem to happen with recorders at the crucial moment. But when he listened harder he caught the grumble of a distant car and a scrap of girl’s laughter carrying to the window, because Barley by then had thrown the curtains open and was staring down into the square. For one minute and fourteen seconds, then, we watched Barley’s strangely articulate back silhouetted against the Lisbon night. Then comes a most frightful crash like the shattering of several window panes at once, followed by an oil gush, and you would suppose that Barley had staged his long-delayed breakout, taking the ornamental Portuguese wall plates and curly flower vases with him. But the truth is, the whole rumpus is only the sound of Barley discovering the drinks table and dumping three cubes of ice into a crystal tumbler and pouring a decent measure of Scotch over them, all within a couple of inches’ range of a microphone that Brock with his characteristic over-production had concealed in one of the richly carved compartments.

  4

  He had made a base camp at his own end of the room on a stiff school chair as far away from us as he could get. He perched on it sideways to us, stooped over his whisky glass, which he held in both hands, peering into it like a great thinker or at least a lonely one. He spoke not to us but to himself, emphatically and scathingly, not stirring except to take a sip from his glass or duck his head in affirmation of some private and usually abstracted point of narrative. He spoke in the
mixture of pedantry and disbelief that people use to reconstruct a disastrous episode, such as a death or a traffic accident. So I was here and you were there and the other chap came from over there.

  ‘It was last Moscow book fair. The Sunday. Not the Sunday before, the Sunday after,’ he said.

  ‘September,’ Ned suggested, at which Barley rolled his head around and muttered ‘Thanks,’ as if genuinely grateful to be prodded. Then he wrinkled his nose and fussed his spectacles and began again.

  ‘We were knackered,’ he said. ‘Most of the exhibitors had got out on the Friday. It was only a bunch of us who hung around. Those who had contracts to tidy up, or no particular reason to get back in a hurry.’

  He was a compelling man and he had centre stage. It was difficult not to attach to him a little, stuck out there on his own. It was difficult not to think, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ And the more so since none of us knew where he was going.

  ‘We got drunk on Saturday night and on the Sunday we all drove out to Peredelkino in Jumbo’s car.’ Once again he seemed to have to remind himself that he had an audience. ‘Peredelkino is the Soviet writers’ village,’ he said as if none of us had heard of it. ‘They get dachas there for as long as they behave themselves. Writers’ Union runs it on a members-only basis – who gets a dacha, who writes best in prison, who doesn’t write at all.’

  ‘Who’s Jumbo?’ said Ned – a rare interjection.

  ‘Jumbo Oliphant. Peter Oliphant. Chairman of Lupus Books. Closet Scottish Fascist. Black belt Freemason. Thinks he’s got a special wavelength to the Sovs. Gold card.’ Remembering Bob, he tilted his head at him. ‘Not American Express, I’m afraid. A Moscow book fair gold card, dished out by the Russian organisers, saying what a big boy he is. Free car, free translator, free hotel, free caviar. Jumbo was born with a gold card in his mouth.’

  Bob grinned too broadly in order to show the joke was taken in good part. Yet he was a large-hearted man and Barley had spotted this. Barley, it occurred to me, was one of those people from whom good natures cannot hide, just as he could not disguise his own accessibility.

  ‘So off we all went,’ Barley resumed, returning to his reverie. ‘Oliphant from Lupus, Emery from the Bodley Head. And some girl from Penguin, can’t remember her name. Yes, I can. Magda. How the hell could I forget a Magda? And Blair from A & B.’

  Riding like nabobs in Jumbo’s stupid limo, said Barley, tossing out short sentences like old clothes from his memory box. Ordinary car not good enough for our Jumbo, had to be a damn great Chaika with curtains in the bedroom, no brakes and a gorilla with bad breath for a driver. The plan was to take a look at Pasternak’s dacha which rumour had it was about to be declared a museum, though another rumour insisted that the bastards were about to pull it down. Maybe his grave as well. Jumbo Oliphant didn’t know who Pasternak was at first but Magda murmured ‘Zhivago’ and Jumbo had seen the film, said Barley. There was no earthly hurry, all they wanted was a bit of a walk and a peck of country air. But Jumbo’s driver used the special lane reserved for official roadhogs in Chaikas, so they did the journey in about ten seconds flat instead of an hour, parked in a puddle and schlepped up to the cemetery still trembling with gratitude from the drive.

  ‘Cemetery on a hillside among a lot of trees. Driver stays in the car. Raining. Not much, but he’s worried about his awful suit.’ He paused in contemplation of the driver. ‘Mad ape,’ he muttered.

  But I had the feeling Barley was railing at himself and not the driver. I seemed to hear a whole self-accusing chorus in Barley, and I wondered whether the others were hearing it as well. He had people inside himself who really drove him mad.

  Point was, Barley explained, that as luck would have it they had hit a day when the liberated masses were out in force. In the past, he said, whenever he’d been there, the place had been deserted. Just the fenced-in tombs and the creepy trees. But on that September Sunday with the unfamiliar smells of freedom in the air, there were about two hundred fans crammed round the grave and more by the time they left, all shapes and sizes. Grave was knee-deep in flowers, Barley said. Offerings pouring in all the time. People passing bouquets over the heads to get them on the heap.

  Then the readings began. Little chap read poetry. Big girl read prose. Then a filthy little aeroplane flew so low overhead you couldn’t hear a thing. Then it flew back the other way. Then back the same way.

  ‘Wang, wang!’ Barley yelled, his long wrist whipping back and forth through the air. ‘Wee-ah, wee-ah,’ he whined through his nose in disgust.

  But the plane couldn’t damp the enthusiasm of the crowd any more than the rain could. Someone began singing, the punters took up the refrain and it became a knees-up. Finally the plane pushed off, presumably because it was low on fuel. But that wasn’t what you felt, said Barley. Not a bit. You felt the singing had shot the little swine out of the sky.

  The singing grew stronger and deeper and more mystical. Barley knew three words of Russian, and the others none. Didn’t stop them joining in. Didn’t stop the girl Magda from crying her eyes out. Or Jumbo Oliphant from swearing to God, through lumps in his throat, as they walked away down the hill that he was going to publish every word Pasternak had written, not just the film but the other stuff, so help me, and subsidise it out of his very own personal pocket as soon as he got back to his damask castle in the docklands.

  ‘Jumbo has these hot flushes of enthusiasm,’ Barley explained with a disarming grin, returning to his audience, but principally to Ned. ‘Sometimes they don’t die down for minutes on end.’ Then he paused and frowned again and pulled off his strange round spectacles that seemed to be more an infliction than a help, and peered at everybody in turn as if to remind himself of his situation.

  They were still walking down the hill, he said, and still having a good cry when this same little Russian chap came darting up to them holding his cigarette to one side of his face like a candle, asking in English whether they were Americans.

  Once again Clive was ahead of all of us. His head slowly lifted. There was a knife-edge to his managerial drawl. ‘Same? What same little Russian chap? We haven’t had one.’

  Unpleasantly reminded of Clive’s presence, Barley screwed up his face in a renewal of distaste. ‘He was the reader, for goodness’ sake,’ he said. ‘Chap who’d read Pasternak’s poetry at the graveside. He asked if we were American. I said no, thank God, British.’

  And I noticed, as I supposed we all did, that it was Barley himself, not Oliphant or Emery or the girl Magda, who had become the appointed spokesman of their group.

  Barley had fallen into direct dialogue. He had the mynah bird’s ear. He had a Russian accent for the little chap and a Scottish woof-woof voice for Oliphant. The mimicry slipped out of him as if he were unaware of it.

  ‘You are writers?’ the little chap asked, in Barley’s voice for him.

  ‘No, alas. Just publishers,’ said Barley, in his own.

  ‘English publishers?’

  ‘Here for the Moscow book fair. I run a corner shop called Abercrombie & Blair and this is the Chairman Himself of Lupus Books. Very rich bloke. Be a knight one day. Gold card and bar. Right, Jumbo?’

  Oliphant protested that Barley was saying far too much. But the little chap wanted more.

  ‘May I ask then what were you doing at Pasternak’s grave?’ said the little chap.

  ‘Chance visit,’ Oliphant said, barging in again. ‘Total chance. We saw a crowd, we came up to see what was going on. Pure chance. Let’s go.’

  But Barley had no intention of going. He was annoyed by Oliphant’s manners, he said, and he wasn’t going to stand by while a fat Scottish millionaire gave the brush-off to an undernourished Russian stranger.

  ‘We’re doing what everyone else here’s doing,’ Barley replied. ‘We’re paying our respects to a great writer. We liked your reading too. Very moving. Great stuff. Ace.’

  ‘You respect Boris Pasternak?’ the little chap asked.

 
Oliphant again, the great civil rights activist, rendered by a gruff voice and a twisted jaw. ‘We have no position on the matter of Boris Pasternak or any other Soviet writer,’ he said. ‘We’re here as guests. Solely as guests. We have no opinions on internal Soviet affairs.’

  ‘We think he’s marvellous,’ Barley said. ‘World class. A star.’

  ‘But why?’ asked the little chap, provoking the conflict.

  Barley needed no urging. Never mind he wasn’t totally convinced that Pasternak was the genius he was cracked up to be, he said. Never mind that, as a matter of fact, he thought Pasternak quite seriously overpraised. That was publisher’s opinion, whereas this was war.

  ‘We respect his talent and his art,’ Barley replied. ‘We respect his humanity. We respect his family and his culture. And tenthly or whatever it is, we respect his capacity to reach the hearts of the Russian people despite the fact that he had the daylights hounded out of him by a bunch of bureau-rats who are very probably the same little beasts who sent us that aeroplane.’

  ‘Can you quote him?’ the little chap asked.

  Barley had that kind of memory, he explained to us awkwardly. ‘I gave him the first lines of “Nobel Prize”. I thought it was appropriate after that foul aeroplane.’

  ‘Give it to us now, please, will you?’ said Clive as if everything had to be checked.

  Barley mumbled, and it crossed my mind that he might actually be a very shy man.

  ‘Like a beast in the pen I’m cut off

  From my friends, freedom, the sun

  But the hunters are gaining ground

  I’ve nowhere else to run.’

  The little chap was frowning at the lighted end of his cigarette while he listened to this, said Barley, and for a moment he really did wonder whether they had walked into a provocation, as Oliphant feared.