Presumably the name ‘Gloria’ that should have completed the sentence, but Ben’s face was already turned towards the view of the sea. For fear of spoiling the inspired moment, Joe followed the direction of the other’s gaze, saw gulls reeling and spinning whitely against blue sky and suddenly blurted out:
‘You can’t translate it!’
Ben shook himself out of a momentary reverie and nodded in reluctant agreement:
‘You’re right. We can never really believe that our finest poet can be properly translated into another language. We are so jealous of our language. It has spiritual majesty, you know. We feel protective about it. What are we without our Russian language? But you English, you never mind! English is a vagabond, easygoing language, to be used by anyone for any purpose. I want you to use it, my friend, as best you can.’
‘You’ve got more material, have you?’
‘Yes, yes, much more material. First, though, we drink again!’
The two small glasses were replenished and a jar of gherkins appeared. They then exchanged steady, long looks, raised the full glasses without spilling a drop, wished each other good health and drank. Joe’s eyes filled with tears at this second glass of vodka, but he concealed the fact by glancing away quickly. Ben remained bolt upright. He even raised his hand in a way that suggested he was on the point of giving a blessing.
‘You are a good translator.’ He intoned the remark loudly, as if addressing a congregation. ‘You translated the first letter. Tell me about it.’
‘Well, you know it was all about birds. What’s so important about birds?’
‘It does not matter.’ The problem was impatiently dismissed with a curt wave. ‘They were contacts, that’s all.’
Joe queried this.
‘Contacts!’ It was spoken querulously. ‘They do not matter! They were to be invisible!’
Joe presumed it was better not to ask what this meant. He received an evidently preoccupied look. After pressing his lips together firmly several times, Ben seemed to want to distract attention by picking a gherkin out of the jar and waving it lightly as he spoke. ‘They were to be like translators. Who bothers about the person who translated the holy text? The translator is invisible. He just recreates, that’s all.’
‘Yes, but…’
‘He is like me. I have become invisible, you know. I like to walk about and not be noticed. I like to rush to shores of empty waves and into the woods. To be completely free, you know! Yesterday I was in London looking for you. Each day I like to walk about this place, the golf course – a private golf course! Think about it! How rich she is! Or I go to your English places by the sea, the towns, and always invisible, just translating it all to myself, like an invisible translator. But a translator always knows one thing better than another, doesn’t he?’
‘You mean he knows one language better than another?’
‘Of course! Like I know my Russian better than my English. But I like my Russian not to be seen, invisible, when I am English. I want to be vagabond, easygoing, like English, when I am English. You understand me?’
‘A translator is never completely neutral,’ Joe objected.
‘Maybe that is true. And of course he does it for money.’ Again the finger wagged to and fro commandingly. ‘I knew someone would want to pay you, so don’t tell me about the money or who pays you or what you think you owe me.’ He leaned forward and once again looked straight at Joe, his eyes narrowed as if he were peering at him through the lens of a microscope. ‘You owe me nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ Then he began shaking his head slowly from side to side. ‘Because I owe you, that is the truth! It is all about you, the material I have for you! All about you!’
For the first time Joe noticed a slight clouding of the clear eyes. He felt a mixture of sadness and bewilderment. What the hell was Ben talking about?
‘What do you mean – me? Just let me have the material and I’ll…’
‘You will have it! You will have it! But once you start, you must do the translation quickly. Day and night you must work, day and night.’ Ben’s eyes were still fixed on Joe’s face, but his voice was no longer loud. It was scarcely above a whisper, urgent and insistent. ‘They are letters, very personal, intimate letters and diary entries. One letter is long, another not so long. The bulk is about twelve, fifteen pages – typewritten text, that is to say, not like that first letter. I copied that for you. The last piece is not easy, I admit, but an honest confession. So I will wish you success and God’s speed!’
‘If the stuff you want me to translate is anything like that first piece, will it be worth it? It was called a “yellow” – what’s that mean?’
Ben’s expression was a picture of innocence. He spread out his hands. ‘Very poor, cheap paper of course. The paper turned yellow.’
‘No yellow submarine, then?’
‘What yellow submarine?’
‘Nothing to do with John Lennon?’
‘Nothing at all! Not Lennon, but…’
‘And do I get beaten up again and branded? It’s bloody dangerous, you know, translating stuff for you! I’ll have to be paid bloody well!’
Joe’s cry from the heart may have sounded impertinent as well as justifiably annoyed, but it had such an effect of shock that Ben’s expression changed instantly. He seemed not to understand at first. His head tilted at an angle so that he observed Joe with only one eye, he played for a moment with his empty glass. Then he lifted his chin:
‘In the name of all the saints, what do you mean? Who beat you up? Who branded you?’
Joe took off his watch, peeled off the plaster and displayed the mark on his wrist. Ben held the inside of the wrist towards him, studied it carefully, drew in his breath sharply and then raised his eyes with a gentle nod of the head.
‘Who did this?’
Joe told him.
‘You did what?’
‘I kicked one of them down the stairs.’
‘That was good. But that is all you know?’
‘My laptop was taken. It reached Scythian Gold.’ He mentioned the name Goncharov.
‘Oleg Fiordorovich!’ Ben made an elaborate sign of the cross, flourishing his hand from one shoulder to the other. ‘So he knows! He knows!’ He looked horror-stricken. With slightly quivering lips he peered anxiously out of the window again. Apparently he saw no one. ‘But I think he will need me,’ he added. ‘He will come for me.’ Then he turned back and put his hands up to his face in a kind of childish acknowledgement of fear. ‘So now the Old Believers are certain. They know the letter exists. And they have branded you!’
‘Which means?’
‘Zhulik!’ Ben’s head wagged from side to side in imitation of a peasant woman’s anguish as he chanted out the Russian world for ‘cheat’. ‘Zhulik, zhulik, zhulik! Cheat, cheat, cheat! You are branded, my poor Joseph! You will have it all your life! They will never leave you alone! Never!’
Joe replaced the Band-Aid and slipped his watch back on. ‘Ben, that’s not going to scare me. What scares me is my ignorance. I don’t know why.’
‘But I know!’ The claim was impish and rather surprising. It would have seemed merely a little teasing had not Ben pulled out a drawer in the table, taken out a brown plastic container, unscrewed the lid and revealed a small vodka glass marked with the legend Scythian Gold. He pushed it across to Joe. ‘Ninety percent right. Or pretty much.’
‘Please, Ben, no more riddles! What’s the point of this?’
‘Last time we met. In one of those so-called private rooms. I had to get saliva from you. Your DNA.’
‘My DNA! What the hell for?’
‘For proof. I wanted to prove you are who you are.’
‘So who am I? What’s the proof?’
‘You are Joseph Richter. The son or grandson or great-grandson of Mr Richter.’
‘It’s a relief to know that!’ Joe raised his eyebrows in mock gratitude. ‘I could have told you that much without the need for DNA. So I ask again: Why
? Why did you want proof?’
It seemed that Ben was about to answer, his mouth open, the expression of his eyes one of gravity mixed with fondness, but suddenly he stopped, shook his head, looked away as he had done before and ran a hand quickly round his chin. ‘No, I can’t! You will find out from the material. I will give it you.’
At this point Joe had a brainwave. ‘Look,’ he cried, ‘if you can’t tell me about it, tell me who these people are?’
He pulled out from his breast pocket the old photograph he had found in the ‘bank box’. Ben took one look at it and sprang to his feet.
‘Oh, my God!’ He stood with his back to Joe staring out of the window towards the sea. He was emphatic. ‘I am not a Christian believer, but I tell you this. We know about the Christian God only through what the Son of God has told us. Am I right?’
‘What the hell!’ Joe cried.
‘If there were no Son of God, would there be a God?’
Joe waved his hand. The other shook his head:
‘Oh, dismiss it if you like! You are lucky. You’ve never had to believe. From the age of five I’ve had to believe. Our religion was communism and the God of that kingdom ruled my life. That is why all the believers will want to know whether what I am giving you tells more of the promised land, about the forgiveness of sins in the name of communism, about the resurrection of the body in the name of science and progress, about the fulfilment of humanity’s destiny in the name of historical and dialectical materialism. And if it is no holy writ, if it seems too human and ordinary, people won’t want to believe it. They’ll want to suppress it, because God can never be ordinary, human and fallible. So it is dangerous. Very dangerous.’
‘How dangerous?’
There was a slight glisten of sweat on Ben’s broad face. He avoided Joe’s eyes at first after the question was asked and instead gazed out at the wind-ruffled grass, the sprinkling of leaves swept up in the glassy afternoon, torn from the trees like droplets from a high jetting fountain. Beyond them was the crazed blue porcelain of the sea. Although the noise of the wind was loud, everything in the outside world seemed to have the extraordinary calm of an aquarium far removed from the intensity of Ben’s emotions.
‘Has the history of the Christian church been free of blood? Has any religion ever been bloodless? Dangerous enough. The Son of God lived and is now risen from the dead, to speak to us about the Father! They seek him. We all seek him. But only very few will find. And the clue is not here, not in Russia, not on this continent. It is in somewhere they used to call The New World. But buried! They say it is buried! Buried very deep!’
Whether because all this was being said in Russian, or because there was a noticeable thickening in Ben’s speech, much of it made very little sense. It seemed he had gone temporarily out of his mind.
‘And beware,’ Ben went on, ‘beware the so-called seekers after truth! But they are wise men, very wise men! Look at this!’ He stretched up and took off a shelf a small photograph album. He laid it out in front of Joe. The open page showed an enlarged photograph of an occasion some three or four months previously when Joe and another man had been snapped standing on the steps of the RGD building. One of the figures had been carefully cut out. It was, Joe recognised, his own figure that had been cut out and no doubt used to help Gloria Billington identify him. He remembered the occasion, though he could not remember exactly who the man standing beside him was. ‘He is the one! He is the one!’ And Ben pointed at the man. ‘That professor, he is a seeker after truth! He is a believer. But he cannot believe what I know!’
Joe saw what he thought was the name Reid written under the photograph, but before he could ask who it was Ben snapped the album shut. This struck him as so paranoid that he felt like giggling.
‘He may want to steal it, you see!’ was the cry of explanation. ‘I am sure he will want everything! Especially this!’ Ben picked up the photo from the ‘bank box’ and studied it carefully. ‘He will want this because…’ he sat down opposite Joe once again ‘… because this will be another kind of proof. And very, very precious.’
‘But who are they?’ Joe insisted. He explained where he had found it.
‘Your relatives,’ was the calm reply. ‘Probably your great-grandparents, if you found it in that box. A lot of other photographs, you say. Well, you must show him, that wise professor, you must show him! But until then it must be secret.’
His friend’s concern for secrecy had always been so obsessive it seemed irrational and childish. Now it verged on the comic.
‘Why, Ben, why?’
Ben’s lips twisted into a sneer. ‘He will be jealous, that’s all. Only the great professor can know all there is to know about God. I think he is jealous that I have found so much.’ Then he was suddenly smiling again as he refilled his glass. ‘Forget about him. We must drink a toast. We must hope you tell no one about the material I have for you or about me or about coming here or about where you got it from. I trust you as a friend, Joseph, to do all these things.’
‘I will, Ben. I promise.’
‘So we drink a toast. To secrecy and speed!’
‘To secrecy and speed!’
They both raised their glasses, touched them together and drank the vodka back at a gulp. The taste was warming this time, not fiery. Joe felt it like a sudden affirmation. The latent fear that he might be getting in too deep, as Jenny had warned, no longer mattered. He and Ben looked smilingly at each other with a sort of bleary amiability bordering on love.
‘But please, Joseph, my friend,’ Ben said, nodding as he spoke, ‘no phones, no contact with me. Just secrecy and speed. Please.’ He reinforced his demand by seizing Joe’s hand and giving it a squeeze.
A buzzing sound came from near the door. In the instant Ben was on his feet, the revolver in his hand. A small red light flashed busily above the small screen showing the area of fairway. Joe could see at once the miniaturised images of Gloria Billington and Dolly coming across the grassy slope, their hair blown about and their coats flapping in the wind. Dolly ran ahead and Ben, hiding the revolver quickly, opened the door to her.
‘Hello, Dolly! Hello, meelaya, meelaya Dollee!’
She rushed in, followed by Gloria. The transformation in Ben at that moment was dramatic. For all his supposed fear of the sinister anonymous enemies surrounding him, he had the look of someone quite confident of himself and his place in the world. As his eyes, wrapped in their wrinkled smile lines, looked at Dolly’s fresh, delighted face, it was obvious that he had no happier role to play in life than that of her surrogate father. Save, perhaps, for the other role that revealed itself when he exchanged a cautious, tentative look with Gloria Billington and the air between them seemed literally filled with rapture. Joe could hardly fail to intercept the look. His smile showed them as much.
‘Well,’ said Gloria, ‘there’s a train to catch.’
Ben opened his jersey-clad arms and hugged his friend.
‘Remember – secrecy! No contact! And quick, very quick. Please!’
‘Of course I will.’
‘Maybe two days? Yes?’
Joe knew he could not prevaricate, but it helped him that Gloria intervened very neatly with a reminder that there was less than an hour to go before the next fast train left for Waterloo.
8
She said little during the drive to the station. When she did speak, the subject was unexpectedly personal and confidential and he found himself a little resentful of the need to be her confidant.
‘He told you my father died two months ago, I expect.’ The words were addressed direct to the windscreen rather than to him. ‘I never imagined there’d be so much fuss. You see, it happened quite soon after I’d split from Eric, that’s my ex. It was wonderful having someone to turn to, you know what I mean. I’ve come to rely on him. But he talked so much about you, you know. You’d met at that Russian office in London and become close friends, that’s what he said. So I wanted to meet you. That’s why I insisted
on catching that early train this morning and going up to Waterloo with Dolly.’ She paused. ‘You were the person who made him into Ben, weren’t you?’
‘No, he made himself into Ben.’
‘He told me you’d helped.’
‘Like Frankenstein, I merely put the parts together.’
‘Well, he likes to be what you put together. And I like what you did.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But he may turn out to be a monster, you know.’
She laughed. ‘Not if I have anything to do with it, he won’t!’
The absence of Dolly, who had been left in Ben’s charge, meant she had the opportunity to speak frankly – about the divorce, that is, about how Ben had become a real second father to the little girl, about how reclusive their life was, but not a word about what Ben really meant to her, let alone what she might mean to him. Similarly, Joe did not mention Jenny’s fears, nor the promised material, which would no doubt reach him as mysteriously and secretly as the first letter.
‘Your father was a wealthy man,’ he inquired rather tentatively. ‘Ben said as much.’
‘Electronics,’ she answered before any direct question was asked.
‘What sort of electronics?’
‘Before Bill Gates. And he did what Ben has been trying to do. He disappeared. He came here, you see. It’s where he met my mother. He disappeared into England.’ This was said cryptically enough straight towards the windscreen and he was about to ask more when she suddenly curtailed further conversation. ‘He had a lot of money, and if you’ve got a lot of money, there’s always a penalty. Unless you make sure people don’t know, they’ll pester you to death.’
Mr Frankenstein Page 10
