The Russia House

by John le Carré

  And still his penetrating gaze would not relinquish her or the letter.

  ‘He is lonely,’ she replied protectively. ‘He is missing me so he exaggerates. It is normal. Barley, I think you are being a little bit –’

  Either she could not find the word, or on second thoughts she decided against using it, so Barley supplied it for her. ‘Jealous,’ he said.

  And he managed what he knew she was waiting for. He smiled. He composed a good, sincere smile of disinterested friendship and squeezed her hand and clambered to his feet. ‘He sounds fantastic,’ he said. ‘I’m very happy for him. For his recovery.’

  And he meant it. Every word. He could hear the true note of conviction in his voice as his eye moved quickly to the parked red car on the other side of the birch grove.

  Then to the common delight Barley hurls himself upon the business of becoming a weekend father, a rôle for which his torn life has amply prepared him. Sergey wants him to try his hand at fishing. Anna wants to know why he hasn’t brought his swim suit. Matvey has gone to sleep, smiling from the whisky and his memories. Katya stands in the water in her shorts. She looks more beautiful to him than ever before, and more remote. Even collecting rocks to build a dam, she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

  Yet nobody ever worked harder on a dam than Barley that afternoon, nobody had a clearer vision of how the waters should be held at bay. He rolls up his stupid grey flannel trousers and soaks himself to the crotch. He heaves sticks and stones till he is half dead, while Anna sits astride his shoulders directing operations. He pleases Sergey with his businesslike approach, and Katya with his romantic flourish. A white car has replaced the red one. A couple sit in it with the doors open, eating whatever they are eating, and at Barley’s suggestion the children stand on the hilltop and wave to them, but the couple in the white car don’t wave back.

  Evening falls and a tang of autumn fires drifts through the dying birch leaves. Moscow is made of wood again, and burning. As they load the car, a pair of wild geese fly over them and they are the last two geese in the world.

  On the journey back to the hotel, Anna sleeps on Barley’s lap while Matvey chatters and Sergey frowns at the pages of Squirrel Nutkin as if they are the Party Manifesto.

  ‘When do you speak to him again?’ Barley asks.

  ‘It is arranged,’ she says enigmatically.

  ‘Did Igor arrange it?’

  ‘Igor arranges nothing. Igor is the messenger.’

  ‘The new messenger,’ he corrects her.

  ‘Igor is an old acquaintance and a new messenger. Why not?’

  She glances at him and reads his intention. ‘You cannot come to the hospital, Barley. It is not safe for you.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a holiday for you either,’ he replies.

  She knows, he thought. She knows but does not know she knows. She has the symptoms, a part of her has made the diagnosis. But the rest of her refuses to admit there’s anything amiss.

  The Anglo-American situation room was no longer a shabby basement in Victoria but the radiant penthouse of a smart new baby skyscraper off Grosvenor Square. It styled itself the Inter-Allied Conciliation Group and was guarded by shifts of conciliatory American Marines in military plainclothes. An air of thrilled purpose pervaded it as the expanded team of trim young men and women flitted between clean desks, answered winking telephones, spoke to Langley on secure lines, passed papers, typed at silent keyboards or lounged in attitudes of eager relaxation before the rows of television monitors that had replaced the twin clocks of the old Russia House.

  It was a deck on two levels, and Ned and Sheriton were seated side by side on the closed bridge, while below them on the other side of the sound-proofed glass their unequal crews went about their duties. Brock and Emma had one wall, Bob, Johnny and their cohorts the other wall and centre aisle. But all were travelling in the same direction. All wore the same obediently purposeful expressions, faced the same banks of screens that rolled and flickered like stock exchange quotations as the automatic decodes came in.

  ‘Truck’s safely back in dock,’ said Sheriton as the screens abruptly cleared and flashed the codeword BLACKJACK.

  The truck itself was a miracle of penetration.

  Our own truck! In Moscow! Us! In English it would have been a lorry but here it was a truck in deference to the American proprietorship. An enormous separate operation lay behind its acquisition and deployment. It was a Kamaz, dirty grey and very big, one of a fleet of trucks belonging to SOVTRANSAVTO, hence the acronym daubed in Roman letters across its filthy flank. It had been recruited, together with its driver, by the Agency’s enormous Munich station during one of the truck’s many forays to West Germany to collect luxury commodities for Moscow’s privileged few with access to a special distribution store. Everything from Western shoes to Western tampons to spare parts for Western cars had been shuttled back and forth inside the truck’s bowels. As to the driver, he was one of the Long Distance Gunners, as these luckless creatures are known in the Soviet Union – State employees, miserably underpaid, with neither medical nor accident insurance to protect them against misfortune in the West, who even in deepest winter huddle stoically in the lee of their great charges, munching sausage before sharing another night’s sleep in their comfortless cabins – but making for themselves, in Russia nevertheless, vast fortunes out of their opportunities in the West.

  And now, for yet more immense rewards, this particular Long Distance Gunner had agreed to ‘lend’ his truck to a ‘Western dealer’ here in the very heart of Moscow. And this same dealer, who was one of Cy’s own army of toptuny, lent it to Cy, who in turn stuffed inside it all kinds of ingeniously portable surveillance and audio equipment, which was then swept away again before the truck was returned through intermediaries to its legal driver.

  Nothing of the sort had ever happened before. Our own mobile safe room, in Moscow!

  Ned alone found the whole idea unsettling. The Long Distance Gunners worked in pairs, as Ned knew better than anyone. By KGB edict, these pairs were deliberately incompatible, and in many cases each man had a responsibility to report upon the other. But when Ned asked if he could read the operational file, it was denied him under the very laws of security he himself held dear.

  But the most impressive piece of Langley’s new armoury had still to be unveiled, and once again Ned had not been able to hold out against it. From now onwards, sound tapes in Moscow would be encrypted into random codes and transmitted in digital pulses in one-thousandth of the time that the tapes would take to run if you were listening to them in your drawing room. Yet when the pulses were restored to sound by the receiving station, the Langley wizards insisted, you could never tell the tapes had had such a rough time.

  The word WAIT was forming in pretty pyramids. Spying is waiting.

  The word SOUND replaced it. Spying is listening.

  Ned and Sheriton put on their headsets as Clive and I slipped into the spare seats behind them and put on ours.

  Katya sat pensively on her bed staring at the telephone, not wanting it to ring again.

  Why do you give your name when none of us give names? she asked him in her mind.

  Why do you give mine?

  Is that Katya? How are you? This is Igor speaking. Just to tell you I have heard nothing more from him, okay?

  Then why do you ring me to tell me nothing?

  The usual time, okay? The usual place. No problem. Just like before.

  Why do you repeat what needs no repetition, after I have already told you I will be at the hospital at the agreed time?

  By then he’ll know what his position is, he’ll know which plane he can catch, everything. Then you don’t have to worry, okay? How about your publisher? Did he show up all right?

  ‘Igor, I do not know which publisher you are referring to.’

  And she rang off before he could say more.

  I am being ungrateful, she told herself. When people are ill it is normal that old frie
nds should rally. And if they promote themselves overnight from casual acquaintance to old friend, and take centre stage when for years they have hardly spoken to you, it is still a sign of loyalty and there is nothing sinister about it, even if only six months ago Yakov declared Igor to be unredeemable – ‘Igor has continued along the path I left behind,’ he had remarked after a chance meeting in the street. ‘Igor asks too many questions.’

  Yet here was Igor acting as Yakov’s closest friend and putting himself out for him in risky and invaluable ways. ‘If you have a letter for Yakov, you have only to give it to me. I have established an excellent line of communication to the sanatorium. I know somebody who makes the journey almost every week,’ he had told her at their last meeting.

  ‘The sanatorium?’ she had cried excitedly. ‘Then where is he? Where is it located?’

  But it was as if Igor had not yet thought of the answer to this question, for he had scowled and looked uncomfortable and pleaded State secrecy. Us, State secrecy, when we are flaunting the State’s secrets!

  I am being unfair to him, she thought. I am starting to see deception everywhere. In Igor, even in Barley.

  Barley. She frowned. He had no business to criticise Yakov’s declaration of affection. Who does he think he is, this Westerner with his attaching manners and cynical suspicions? Coming so close so quickly, playing God to Matvey and my children?

  I shall never trust a man who was brought up without dogma, she told herself severely.

  I can love a believer, I can love a heretic, but I cannot love an Englishman.

  She switched on her little radio and ran through the shortwave bands, having first put in the earpiece so as not to disturb the twins. But as she listened to the different voices clamouring for her soul – Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Voice of Israel, Voice of God knew whom, each one so cosy, so superior, so compelling – an angry confusion came over her. I’m a Russian! she wanted to shout back at them. Even in tragedy, I dream of a better world than yours!

  But what tragedy?

  The phone was ringing. She grabbed the receiver. But it was only Nasayan, an altered man these days, checking on tomorrow’s plans.

  ‘Listen, I am confirming privately that you really wish to be at the October stand tomorrow. Only we must begin early, you see. If you have to get your kids to school or something of that sort, I can easily instruct Yelizavyeta Alexeyevna to come instead of you. It is no hardship. You have only to tell me.’

  ‘You are very kind, Grigory Tigranovich, and I appreciate your call. But having spent most of last week helping to put up the exhibits, I should naturally like to be present at the official opening. Matvey can manage very well to see the children off to school.’

  Thoughtfully, she put the receiver back on its cradle. Nasayan, my God – why do we address each other like characters on the stage? Who do we think is listening to us who requires such rounded sentences? If I can talk to an English stranger as if he is my lover, why can’t I talk normally to an Armenian who is my colleague?

  He rang, and she knew at once that she had been waiting all this while for his call, because she was already smiling. Unlike Igor, he did not say his name or hers.

  ‘Elope with me,’ he said.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Horses are saddled, food for three days.’

  ‘But are you also sober enough to elope?’

  ‘Amazingly, I am.’ A pause. ‘It’s not for want of trying but nothing happened. Must be old age.’

  He sounded sober too. Sober and close.

  ‘But what about the book fair? Are you going to desert it as you deserted the audio fair?’

  ‘To hell with the book fair. We’ve got to do it before or never. Afterwards we’ll be too tired. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I am furious with you. You have completely bewitched my family, and now they ask only when you will come back with more tobacco and crayons.’

  Another pause. He was not usually so thoughtful when he was joking.

  ‘That’s what I do. I bewitch people, then the moment they’re under my spell I cease to feel anything for them.’

  ‘But that’s terrible!’ she cried, deeply shocked. ‘Barley, what are you telling me?’

  ‘Just repeating the wisdom of an early wife, that’s all. She said I had impulses but no feelings and I shouldn’t wear a duffle coat in London. Anyone tells you something like that, you believe it for the rest of your life. I’ve never worn a duffle coat since.’

  ‘Barley, that woman – Barley, that was a totally cruel and irresponsible thing for her to say. I am sorry but she is completely wrong. She was provoked, I am sure. But she is wrong.’

  ‘She is, is she? So what do I feel? Enlighten me.’

  She broke out laughing, realising she had walked straight into his trap.

  ‘Barley, you are a very, very bad man. I shall have nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Because I don’t feel anything?’

  ‘For one thing, you feel protection for people. We all noticed that today, and we were grateful.’

  ‘More.’

  ‘For another, you feel a sense of honour, I would say. You are decadent, naturally, because you are a Westerner. That is normal. But you are redeemed because you feel honour.’

  ‘Are there any pies left over?’

  ‘You mean you feel hunger too?’

  ‘I want to come and eat them.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘That is completely impossible! We are all in bed already and it’s nearly midnight.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Barley, this is too ridiculous. We are about to begin the book fair, both of us have a dozen invitations.’

  ‘What time?’

  A beautiful silence was settling between them.

  ‘You may come at perhaps-half-past-seven.’

  ‘I may be early.’

  For a long while after that neither of them spoke. But the silence joined them more closely than words could have done. They became two heads on a single pillow, ear to ear. And when he rang off it was not his jokes and self-ironies that stayed with her but the tone of contented sincerity – she would almost say solemnity – that he had seemed unable to keep out of his voice.

  He was singing.

  Inside his head, and outside it too. In his heart and all over his body at last, Barley Blair was singing.

  He was in his big grey bedroom at the gloomy Mezh on the eve of the Moscow book fair, and he was singing ‘Bless This House’ in the recognisable manner of Mahalia Jackson while he pirouetted round the room with a glass of mineral water in his hand, glimpsing his reflection in the immense television screen that was the room’s one glory.

  Sober.

  Hot sober.

  Barley Blair.

  Alone.

  He had drunk nothing. In the safe truck for his debriefing, though he had sweated like a racehorse, nothing. Not even a glass of water while he had regaled Paddy and Cy with a sweetened, unworried version of his day.

  At the French publishers’ party at the Rossiya with Wicklow, where he had positively shone with confidence, nothing.

  At the Swedes’ party at the National with Henziger, where he had shone yet more brightly, he had grabbed a glass of Georgian shampanskoye in self-protection because Zapadny was so pointedly amazed he was not drinking. But he had contrived to leave it undrunk behind a flower vase. So still nothing.

  And at the Doubleday party at the Ukraina with Henziger again, shining like the North Star by now, he had clutched a mineral water with a bit of lemon floating in it to look like gin and tonic.

  So nothing. Not out of highmindedness. Not a reformed spirit, God forbid. He had not signed the Pledge or turned over a new leaf. It was merely that he wished nothing to mar the clear-headed, reasoned ecstasy that was collecting in him, this unfamiliar sense of being at dreadful risk and equal to it, of knowing that whatever was happening he had prepared himself for it, and that if nothin
g was happening he was ready for that too, because his preparedness was an all-round defence with a sacred absolute at its centre.

  I have joined the tiny ranks of people who know what they will do first if the ship catches fire in the middle of the night, he thought; and what they will do last, or not do at all. He knew in ordered detail what he considered worth saving and what was unimportant to him. And what was to be shoved aside, stepped over and left for dead.

  A great house-cleaning had taken place inside his mind, comprising quite humble details as well as grand themes. Because, as Barley had recently observed, it was in humble detail that grand themes wrought their havoc.

  The clarity of his view amazed him. He peered round him, took a turn or two, sang a few bars. He came back to where he was, and knew that nothing had been left out.

  Not the momentary inflection of uncertainty in her voice. Or the shadow of doubt flitting across the dark pools of her eyes.

  Or Goethe’s straight lines of handwriting instead of wild scrawls.

  Or Goethe’s cumbersome, untypical jokes about bureaucrats and vodka.

  Or Goethe’s guilty dirge about the way he had treated her, when for twenty years he had treated her however he had damn well felt like, including using her as a throwaway delivery-girl.

  Or Goethe’s callow promise to make it all up to her in the future, so long as she’ll stay in the game for the time being, when it is an article of Goethe’s faith that the future no longer interests him, that his whole obsession is with now. ‘There is only now!’

  Yet from these spindrift theories that were most likely nothing more than theories, Barley’s mind flew effortlessly to the grandest prize of his clarified perception: that in the context of Goethe’s notion of what he was achieving, Goethe was right, and that for most of his life Goethe had stood on one side of a corrupt and anachronistic equation while Barley in his ignorance had stood on the other.

  And that if Barley were ever called upon to choose, he would rather go Goethe’s path than Ned’s or anybody else’s, because his presence would be urgently required in the extreme middle ground of which he had elected himself a citizen.