The Russia House

by John le Carré

  ‘I was in Moscow,’ I said, fighting hard to find the flow to our conversation. ‘I went to the places. Saw the people. Used my own name.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked with the same courtliness. ‘Your name. What is it?’

  ‘Palfrey,’ I said, leaving out the de.

  He smiled as if in sympathy, or recognition.

  ‘The Service sent me over there to look for you. Unofficially but officially, as it were. Ask the Russians about you. Tidy things up. We thought it was time we found out what had happened to you. See if we could help.’

  And make sure they were observing the rules, I might have added. That nobody in Moscow was going to rock the boat. No silly leaks or publicity stunts.

  ‘I told you what happened to me,’ he said.

  ‘You mean in your letters to Wicklow and Henziger and people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, naturally we knew the letters had been written under duress, if you wrote them at all. Look at poor Goethe’s letter.’

  ‘Balls,’ he said. ‘I wrote them of my own free will.’

  I edged a little nearer to my message. And to the briefcase at my side.

  ‘As far as we’re concerned, you acted very honourably,’ I said, drawing out a file and opening it on my lap. ‘Everybody talks under duress and you were no exception. We’re grateful for what you did for us and aware of the cost to you. Professionally and personally. We’re concerned that you should have your full measure of compensation. On terms, naturally. The sum could be large.’

  Where had he learned to watch me like that? To withhold himself so steadily? To impart tension to others, when he seemed impervious to it himself?

  I read him the terms, which were somewhat like Landau’s in reverse. To stay out of the United Kingdom and only to enter with our prior consent. Full and final settlement of all claims, his silence in perpetuity expressed ex abundanti cautela in half a dozen different ways. And a lot of money to sign here, provided – always and only provided – he kept his mouth shut.

  He didn’t sign, though. He was already bored. He waved my important pen away.

  ‘What did you do with Walt, by the way? I brought a hat for him. Kind of tea-cosy in tiger stripes. Can’t find the damn thing.’

  ‘If you send it to me, I’ll see he gets it,’ I said.

  He caught my tone and smiled at me sadly. ‘Poor old Walt. They’ve given him the push, eh?’

  ‘We peak early in our trade,’ I said, but I couldn’t look him in the eye so I changed the subject. ‘I suppose you heard that your aunts have sold out to Lupus Books.’

  He laughed – not his old wild laughter, it was true, but a free man’s laugh, all the same. ‘Jumbo! The old devil! Conned the Sacred Cow! Trust him!’

  But he was at ease with the idea. He seemed to take genuine pleasure in the rightness of it. I am scared, as we all are in my trade, of people of good instinct. But I was able to share vicariously in his repose. He seemed to have developed universal tolerance.

  She’ll come, he told me as he gazed out at the harbour. They promised that one day she would come.

  Not at once, and in their time, not in Barley’s. But she would come, he had no doubt. Maybe this year, maybe next, he said. But something inside the mountainous bureaucratic Russian belly would heave and give birth to a mouse of compassion. He had no doubt of it. It would be gradual but it would happen. They had promised him.

  ‘They don’t break their promises,’ he assured me, and in the face of such trust it would have been churlish in me to contradict him. But something else was preventing me from voicing my customary scepticism. It was Hannah again. I felt she was begging me to let him live with his humanity, even if I had destroyed hers. ‘You think people never change because you don’t,’ she had once said to me. ‘You only feel safe when you’re disenchanted.’

  I suggested I take him out for food but he seemed not to hear. He was standing at the long window, staring at the harbour lights while I stared at his back. The same pose that he struck when we had first interviewed him here in Lisbon. The same arm holding out his glass. The same pose as on the island when Ned told him he had won. But straighter. Was he talking to me again? I realised he was. He was watching their ship arrive from Leningrad, he said. He was watching her hurry down the gangway to him with her children at her side. He was sitting with Uncle Matvey under the shade tree in the park below his window, where he had sat with Ned and Walter in the days before his manhood. He was listening to Katya’s rendering of Matvey’s heroic tales of endurance. He was believing in all the hopes that I had buried with me when I chose the safe bastion of infinite distrust in preference to the dangerous path of love.

  I succeeded in persuading him to come to dinner, and as a kindness he let me pay. But I could buy nothing else from him, he signed nothing, he accepted nothing, he wanted nothing, he conceded nothing, he owed nothing and he wished the living lot of us, without anger, to the Devil.

  But he had a splendid quiet. He wasn’t strident. He was considerate of my feelings, even if he was too courteous to enquire what they were. I had never told him about Hannah, and I knew I never could, because the new Barley would have no patience with my unaltered state.

  For the rest, he seemed concerned to make me a gift of his story, so that I would have something to take home to my masters. He brought me back to his flat and insisted I have a nightcap, and that nothing was my fault.

  And he talked. For me. For him. Talked and talked. He told me the story as I have tried to tell it to you here, from his side as well as ours. He went on talking till it was light, and when I left at five in the morning, he was wondering whether he might as well finish that bit of wall before turning in. There was a lot to get ready, he explained. Carpets. Curtains. Bookshelves.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, Harry,’ he assured me as he showed me off the premises. ‘Tell them that.’

  Spying is waiting.

  The author and publisher acknowledge use of the following copyright material:

  Lines from ‘Nobel Prize’ from Selected Poems by Boris Pasternak, translated by John Stallworthy and Peter France, copyright © Peter France, 1983, (Allen Lane, 1983); lines from ‘Dirge’ from Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems, (Allen Lane, 1975); a line from Theodore Roethke’s Collected Poems, (Faber, 1985); quote by May Sarton, Journal of Solitude, (Women’s Press, 1985).

  Afterword

  I visited Russia for the first time in my life in 1987, drawn by Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic declaration of a perestroika, or reconstruction, of the Soviet Empire. I did not know, few did, that he had also issued the most momentous, and disastrous, secret edict of his career, which sanctioned the privatisation of the Soviet Communist Party and opened the door to the free-for-all scramble for State assets that turned post-Communist Russia into a criminalised society. All I knew – by instinct, by hearsay, by what I had read in the papers – was that the Communist knight was slowly dying inside his armour.

  In 1987 the West was still undecided how to interpret Gorbachev’s signals. Or certainly it suited us to pretend we were. Though British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had recently paid an historic visit to Moscow, and publicly assured the world and President Ronald Reagan that Gorbachev was ‘a man one could do business with’, the CIA, blind as so often to what was obvious to the merest observer on the street, was still warning its customers that the perestroika was a cunning Bolshevik trap. Meanwhile, among America’s Western allies, a timid game of ‘first across’ was unfolding as Germany, France and Britain, dreaming of vast untapped consumer markets – yet fearing they might burn their fingers – vied for favour and contracts with the New Russia.

  As to myself, I was as sick of the Cold War as the rest of the real world, as impatient to see its end, and convinced it could not be long delayed. How on earth, I reasoned, can you hold together a huge and disparate police state in the face of the new communications technology? How run a closed society in the face of the ubiquitous fax ma
chine? How deploy a huge, traditionally lugubrious state bureaucracy, and at the same time compete successfully in a global free-market economy? And how, while you are doing all this, sustain a credible response to America’s ever-growing nuclear arsenal? Ronald Reagan’s sabre-rattling was having its effect. Talk of Star Wars, deliberately hyped by the American administration, was threatening yet another generation of astronomically costly, useless weaponry, exactly as it is today. So for how much longer can the Soviet Union’s beleaguered command economy afford to stay at the strategic poker table – being raised, matching, matching and being raised?

  I was not welcome. Vladimir Karpov, the ruling baron of the KGB-controlled Soviet Union of Writers, was there to embrace me at Sheremetyevo airport; a photographer from Izvestia was also conveniently on hand, though Karpov was at pains to insist that their presence was a coincidence. Otherwise, it was abundantly clear that in the places where it mattered I was still definitely not welcome. It had taken the good offices of our British Ambassador to persuade the Soviet authorities to grant me a visa. According to my reluctant hosts, it had taken the personal intercession of Raisa Gorbachev to see it through. All my previous applications for a visa had met with stony silence. For a quarter of a century, off and on, the Soviet press – notably, the Literary Gazette – had demonised me for ‘elevating the spy to the status of hero in the Cold War’. The writers were referring, I assumed, to Western spies rather than their own, since the likes of Kim Philby had already had postage stamps printed in their honour, Moscow streets and Soviet tankers named after them, and received medals – often posthumously – that formally described them as heroes, even if, in a fit of State paranoia, they had been shot or betrayed by their own side.

  But when I had pointed this out to my Soviet critics – alas through the dubious pages of Encounter magazine, which turned out later to be a CIA front – I had only drawn down more abuse on my head. And this was the more peculiar because, so far as I had been able to establish in advance of my present visit, only two of my novels had been published in the Soviet Union: A Murder of Quality which described a murder in a ‘bourgeois’ British public school, and A Small Town in Germany which predicated a resurgence of nationalism in ‘fascist’ West Germany, or thus the ponderous introductions explaining the dialectical significance of these novels to the Soviet reader. But the Literary Gazette’s assault on me was all about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold which the Soviet censors had firmly sat on, arguing – as one Soviet reviewer put it – that I might have made the right perceptions about the Cold War, but I had reached the wrong conclusions. So why review it? I had reasoned aloud in my response in Encounter. Why trash a book for the benefit of people who weren’t allowed to read it?

  And I asked the question again, when to my secret bemusement I found myself sitting in the editorial offices of the self-same journal, facing some of the very writers and editors who had reviled me in the sixties and seventies. Their reply only added to my bewilderment. I should not be so naive, they said, as if to a child who has yet to learn the ropes. The attacks had been a compliment to my writing. They validated me as a subject for coded dialogue between members of the Soviet intelligentsia, all of whom, in one language or another, would have had ‘privileged access’ to my work.

  Well, they could have fooled me.

  It is an odd experience, living in a hotel room that is searched whenever you leave it. Having my luggage ‘lost’ at the airport, and waiting two days for it to reappear – well, that came as no great shock to me. Nor did it surprise me to be kept waiting three-quarters of an hour at the airport immigration desk while my visa and passport were conspicuously ‘verified’ by a po-faced KGB frontier guard murmuring into a telephone. Why do you look older than the photograph in your passport? he asks me through an interpreter. Because I have been disappointed in love, I reply. No smile. Nothing behind the brown eyes, not a flicker round the buttoned-down mouth. The electrical barrier opens. I may pass.

  Being followed in the street and watched over in cafés and bars didn’t bother me either. In Hamburg and Berlin, where I had visited sympathisers of the Baader-Meinhof gang in the course of my researches for The Little Drummer Girl, I had grown familiar with the phenomenon of deliberately identifiable surveillance. In Moscow, in no time at all, I became tacitly attached to the two stoic, rather plump gentlemen from Central Casting whose job was to stay sober enough to report my movements: a task they clearly found difficult, for one night, having observed me from across the room while I enjoyed a liquid dinner with a bunch of Western journalists at Moscow’s first ‘cooperative’ restaurant, they followed my brother Rupert instead of me, and only woke to their mistake, slapstick-style, as they reached his apartment.

  But the searching of my room got on my nerves. It was repetitive and inexpert, I assumed by design. First, the ‘lost’ suitcases reappeared unannounced beside my bed, with my suits rolled into a ball and my shirts and underclothes looking like offerings to the Salvation Army. I set them out as best I could, suits to the rickety wardrobe, shirts to the rickety chest of drawers, only to find them ostentatiously repositioned the same night. The contents of my briefcase and the papers on my writing table proved equally restless. Each day, they changed places, changed order, turned themselves upside down. As a warning? As a sour joke from old opponents? To this day I have no idea. But as I came to terms with the persistent intrusion, I discovered I was grateful for this unconscious contribution to the novel I was putting together in my mind. It was precisely what I wanted for my secret sharer and hero, Barley Blair, whose life I was trying to lead. I’m in their sights, I thought. As Barley is. I am learning to live with the sensation that somebody is watching over me day and night, and bit by bit I am becoming a little dependent on it. I am learning to be a citizen of Moscow.

  The surveillance never let up but it had a sweet finale. A couple of nights before I left Moscow I drank an awful lot of vodka with the excellent Arkady Vaksberg, a Russian investigative journalist and lawyer who had somehow fashioned for himself the rôle of tolerated in-house critic of corruption in the Soviet Union. Leaving Arkady reposing on his sofa, I stepped out of his house in the small hours of the morning, for once without my redoubtable British interpreter and guide, John Roberts. I realised that I was on the edge of town with no idea which way to walk. Standing in a tree-lined boulevard, I looked in vain for the glow of a city centre. But in those days Moscow didn’t glow. Turn left? Turn right? Go straight ahead? Or wake up Arkady and have another drink? I was still deliberating when to my relief I spotted my faithful watchers, crouched buttock to buttock on a bench, looking as bleary as I felt. I walked uncertainly over to them, addressing them first in English, then German, then French, for I have no word of Russian. All in vain. I resorted to sign language. ‘I am very drunk,’ I explained – waving a wobbly finger round my face – ‘and you are very tired’ – making a pillow of my hands and closing my eyes – ‘why don’t we all walk together to the Hotel Minsk?’

  So we walked, all four of us, myself, my watchers, and my secret companion Barley Blair, who was even worse for wear than I was. On the steps of the Minsk I shook hands with my good shepherds and wished them long life and happiness. Regretfully, they declined my offer of a nightcap in my room. Perhaps they knew that our conversation would be listened to by their masters, and they would be accused of drinking with the enemy.

  Fragments, all vivid. Extraordinary times, extraordinary people, extraordinary revelations, all brand new. You only get two shots to write with authority about a country, as every journalist knows. The first is when you arrive there from the moon, and each impression hits you like an express train. The second is thirty years on when, just possibly, if you’ve been very diligent and very lucky, you know the place from the inside. Obliged to content myself with the first, I sat up half of every night recording my precious memories in a notebook while they were oven-fresh: the reek of Russian petrol that you cease to notice on the third day, the drab procession
of anonymous grey buildings – are you a hospital, a ministry, a hotel? – the prison-like hostility of the breakfast queue in the hotel canteen, the crappy, rusting ironmongery of Communist insignia at every second street corner, recalling the first-floor Madonnas that overlook Italian street crossings.

  I remember the first conference with my hosts round a long, honey-coloured table in the Writers’ Union, where we discussed the agenda for my visit. They were something, these so-called Soviet writers. They were like old sergeant majors gone to seed. None was under fifty except my designated Soviet guide, who was to double up with my interpreter. Most were over sixty. One was introduced to me as a famous poet – but only, I discovered later, on the evidence of one slender volume of verse written twenty years ago and, according to the whisperers, by someone quite different who was no longer with us. Whom do you wish to meet? my hosts asked me, down the table. Their smiles were more alarming than their scowls. What places do you wish to visit? – as if they expected me to say, ‘your leading rocketry experts’ or ‘your secret scientific cities’. Somebody facetiously suggested I might care to spend my time with dissidents. No, thank you, I replied, not your dissidents, not your refuseniks, not your banned writers and painters. It is you yourselves whom I would best like to know. I would like to hear how you feel about the impending changes in the Soviet Union, and how you propose to position yourselves in the reconstruction. But they would rather have introduced me to all the dissidents in the world than enter into that debate.

  God was still a taboo subject in 1987. But in the Russian Orthodox capital of Zagorsk I watched elderly babushkas on their knees, fervently kissing the glass lids of caskets containing the relics of the saints. In an archimandrite’s office that was as bare as a hospital and as frightening, I listened without interruption to a convoluted dissertation on how God wrought his miracles through the agency of the State.