Russian Hide-and-Seek

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Alexander. ‘You mentioned the four of us as having taken part in this affray.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well… my revolver hasn’t been fired, sir. The investigators-’

  ‘Fire it. Anything else? So. Even stupid troops conduct themselves better when told something of the reasons for their orders. The amended version of these improper events, then, is likely to bring you less displeasure from authority than the tale I heard earlier, but be advised that that in itself interests me not at all. If my officers were seen to be at such a low level of training, morale and esprit de corps as to risk their lives habitually in a fatuous prank, or to think that a thing like that is too ordinary to be worth mentioning,’ – here Major Yakir stared grimly at Alexander – ‘I should rightly be charged with unfitness to be their leader. This I naturally mean to avoid. Good night, gentlemen. I hope by all the saints I never have to command you in war.’

  15

  ‘Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! St Matthew, chapter three, verse two.

  ‘I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son; St Luke, chapter fifteen, verses eighteen and nineteen.

  ‘Enter not into judgement with thy servant, 0 Lord; for in thy sight shall no man living be justified; Psalm 143, the second verse.

  These words had not been heard for considerably more than the fifty years since the Pacification, neither where they had just been spoken nor in most other places of significance. It was of course unknown to Commissioner Mets or to any of his advisers that about the middle of the previous century various amended forms of prayer, supposedly more accessible to the congregation of the day and certainly disencumbered by hard words like ‘ye’ and ‘unto’ and ‘thee’, had begun to be used in English churches. The choice between one or other of these and the 1662 text had therefore fallen to the Rev. Simon Glover. He had scarcely hesitated. His best-loved uncle, an archdeacon of honoured memory, had never countenanced the smallest deviation from the old style, on the argument that any slight gain in literal intelligibility would be much more than offset by a loss in the power to win and enhance faith or even (as it must often be) merely to engage attention. Such an argument had gained force over the years. Glover knew too that he could bring to the wording he had learned in childhood a naturalness and warmth impossible to attach to the brisk, cheeky assertions and admonitions of the modern paraphrases. And, not very clearly, he felt he was offering the Commissioner a kind of defiance in spirit by going against what he would undoubtedly have preferred if he had known it was there to prefer.

  The church showed no trace of the confusion Alexander had found when he strayed into it those weeks previously. The pews were up, the choir-stalls were up, the pulpit was up – not only up, but with the appearance of haying been up for an indefinite time. The renovators’ orders had been to produce something as indistinguishable as could be from the interior to be seen in the photograph given them as their guide, and they had accordingly attacked the pine boards with chisels, drills, hammers, adzes, had stained them, rubbed ash and tea-dregs into them, stained them again; relays of men in cleated boots had run up and down the pulpit stairs. Above, missing or damaged panes of the Victorian stained glass had been replaced by window glass (of indifferent quality) overlaid with semi-transparent emulsions. Great care had been taken, on the whole rather successfully, to duplicate the tints and shades of the surviving parts, but if those craftsmen of old could have seen the reconstructions of the non-surviving parts, all supposedly conceived in a spirit of scrupulous adherence to the pictorial and devotional values of their period, they might have been very much surprised. The organ, on the other hand, having been left more or less undamaged except by rot and rust, closely approximated to its former self, in appearance at least, though erratic wiring behind the pistons had produced some sudden loud noises when soft ones had been expected and vice versa, together with unintended moments of complete silence, in the opening voluntary. Still, it led the choir safely enough into the first hymn.

  ‘He who would valiant be

  ‘Gainst all disaster,

  Let him in constancy

  Follow the Master.’

  The choir, trained by Russian masters, stiffened with Russian singers, performed well, keeping the voices balanced, giving full value to every note, holding the tempo at the end of each verse. Scattered among the congregation some old voices began to join in, most of them with the air, one at least with the bass part, powerfully and accurately rendered. Bit by bit others picked up the melody. To Joseph Wright, standing near the back with Kitty at his side, it seemed something he had always known, a part of his childhood, even though he could never have heard it in public after the age of three. The tune he understood, felt thoroughly at home with; the words were a different matter, set out in full as they were on the replicated sheet before him.

  ‘Who so [sic] beset him round

  With dismal stories?

  But they themselves confound…

  Why was it thought interesting that the kind of man who would be brave however disastrous the situation became would also be proof against mere discouragement and dismal stories? And why was the question of the identity of the dismal-story-tellers raised only to be instantly dropped? And the line about the people cursing (confounding) themselves was… but the main drift was clear. Brave men were being encouraged to make a pilgrimage, to travel to some spot where a saint was said to have been executed or a miracle performed, the pilgrimage being under the direction of a priest or parson known as the Master. Such pilgrims were evidently subjected to verbal abuse and disheartening accounts of conditions on the journey. Well…

  ‘Then fancies flee away!

  I’ll fear not what men say,

  I’ll labour night and day

  To be a pilgrim.’

  Of course! The pilgrimage was frowned on by the authorities, perhaps actually forbidden, but the doughty Christian would make good his right to go on it just the same, undeterred by the fear that reports of this might reach their ears. So the poem was not so much about a literal pilgrim as about the duty of following one’s convictions, which, Wright supposed, made it a religious poem even though it nowhere referred to God. Admirable as its theme certainly was, if it was at all typical of what his parents’ generation had sung in church some of the early Russian measures had at any rate not been reasonless.

  What had others in the congregation made of the hymn? They had clearly enjoyed the singing as such, producing, along with the choir in unison, a quite impressive body of sound in the last verse. Their expressions as they settled back in their seats were comfortable, pleased, expectant of further sober enjoyment. He could see no hint of triumph at a freedom restored or a gesture of defiance, however small, however permissible, offered the oppressor. Jim Hough, Frank Simpson and their families, the rest of them and their families, looked to Wright very much as their forbears might have looked when at evensong, in one sense peculiarly so, for the dark suits the men wore, the bowler hats and gloves they carried, the women’s long dresses and wide-brimmed hats, had been carefully copied from another photograph, one taken almost a century before, in 1937, of a crowd of people leaving this church after a service. The clothes had been mass-produced by local labour from cheap sub-materials and in some cases were already starting to come apart.

  ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.

  There was a prolonged rumbling and rustling as, one after the other, members of the congregation caught on to the idea of kneeling. Glover spoke alone from the chancel.

  ‘The Lord be with you.’

  ‘And with thy spirit,’ responded those of his hearers who could read.

  ‘Lord, have mercy upon us.’

  ‘Christ, have mercy upon us.’

&n
bsp; ‘Lord, have mercy upon us.

  To Kitty Wright, what then followed was relatively familiar, a piece of old church ritual in which people gave particulars of what they expected God to do for them every day. What had been said earlier interested her more: the list that began with the Holy Ghost. That was the third Christian god, about whom even less seemed to be known than about God the Father; a sinister figure, even scaring if taken seriously, but she remembered reading somewhere that a great point of religions had been their scaring parts. The holy Catholic Church puzzled her for no reason she could have named, so she went on to the communion of saints. Communion of course had been another old church ritual, with which saints had no doubt had something to do. The final three items were plain enough in a sense, though the inclusion of the resurrection of the body was another mystery, given that it could actually be seen to be impossible in a way that the forgiveness of sins, for instance, could not. But the whole catalogue was very odd – remote and fanciful. It made sense to believe in keeping oneself to oneself, in divorce for unhappy couples, in a hot-water-bottle on cold nights; to do so might be of use in each case; that could be argued about. But what difference could it make to think the Holy Ghost advisable, to be in favour of the life everlasting? How had they come to recommend things like that? And yet men and women had died for the right to say they thought well of them. Incomprehensible; though it should be said that these days no one died for anything.

  A girl who Kitty rather thought was Glover’s granddaughter went and led him to the foot of the pulpit stairs and put his hand on the rail. Slowly but without a false step he completed the ascent and faced the congregation. The nave was full of flowers: yellow, bronze and orange chrysanthemums, white and pink dahlias, gladioluses of all those colours. Glover could not see them as such; he saw vague variegated patches, but he had been told of their presence often enough. What he had not been told (because there was nobody to tell him) was that by the standards of another time the blooms were puny and undergrown, not diseased, just uncared-for. If he had known this he would still have been glad they were there. The church was almost completely silent, but he was necessarily unaware of that too. He tried to pitch his voice at the level established as satisfactory at the run-through the previous evening; one could not be expected to carry that sort of thing in the mind after fifty years.

  ‘We are the children of God; the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, the eighth chapter, the sixteenth verse. As some of you will know, what you are about to hear is called a sermon, that is to say an address, a talk about religion, about God and ourselves. It won’t be a long talk. Please listen carefully, because what I have to tell you is very important and very interesting.’

  Already Glover was into his stride, speaking confidently and clearly; training, habit, whatever it was had told after all. He had dictated the whole thing to his granddaughter, who had read it back to him sentence by sentence till he had it by heart. Not once was he to make even the smallest slip.

  ‘St Paul never met Our Lord Jesus Christ, but he knew a great deal about him, and about God the Father too, probably more than anybody else has ever done, and he handed on what he knew in as straightforward a way as he could. He was a very direct man. He meant what he said. So, when he said, “We are the children of God,” he wasn’t using the phrase in the vague sentimental way in which people used to talk about children of light or children of love. No, St Paul was speaking precisely. We - by which he meant the whole human race as long as it lasts, including all of us here this afternoon - we were created by God, put in this world by God. We are the children of somebody who is not a human being, somebody who is infinitely more powerful than any human being can ever be, and also infinitely more loving, that is, his love is without limit and without end. We are the children of our parents too, and we all know how loving they can be, but we also know that their love is not without limit, and quite right too: limitless parental love would be unreasonable. God is not only infinitely loving but also infinitely wise, and again we all know from our ordinary experience, some of us as parents ourselves, how necessary it is that love should be accompanied by wisdom.’

  Glover spoke for a few minutes about these and others of God’s qualities, avoiding with practised skill the ticklish problem posed by a divine love that apparently tolerated what could be severe affliction being experienced by the objects of that love. He hoped he was making some sense to some of his listeners, even that he had some listeners; he sensed that, deprived of the stimulus of perceiving the effect of his words, he was delivering them with less animation than he would have liked. At least no loud objection or other response was being voiced; now and then he fancied he caught movement towards the back of the church, but it was too dark there for him to be sure. He ended by saying as earnestly as he could,

  ‘A world without purpose except that of survival is a miserable place. It’s also a sinful place, but I’m not going to pursue that today. The freedom we once enjoyed is gone for good, and England will never be happy again. But there is one certain way of triumphing over whatever may be done to us, of turning our defeat not into victory but into defiance, of resisting the oppressor in a place he can never subdue, our minds and souls. It is the one way to recover our pride as a nation and our sense of purpose as men and women. And God is the way. More than at any time before, we need God, need him not as a man with holes in his clothes needs new ones, but as a man with only one leg needs a crutch, or even as a drowning man needs air. God is our father; he wants what is best for us; and he knows what is best for us. Wouldn’t most people give a lot to know the best way to live their lives, something more attractive and enlivening than just hanging on to them? What we must do is ask God. He always listens. Pray to him,’ he always answers. If you don’t believe in him, pray to him just the same; if you want to believe in him, he will help you to. Of course he will. We are his children. All of us.

  ‘We will sing the hymn “Jesu, Lover of my Soul”.’

  Although he had nothing to go on beyond surmise, and despite the assurances of Commissioner Mets that no official interest would be taken in any part of the service, Glover was quite sure that a full text of his sermon would soon reach the authorities, had probably been relayed to them already. But he found it hard to care. He had glorified God. The doubts he had had earlier, whether, there being no bishop anywhere in the land, his own service of reconsecration had proved efficacious – these quite fell away from him. In his mind he thanked the young Russian officer who had pressed him into doing what he had done today.

  After the Blessing, his granddaughter came and led him out of the church. He failed to hear the closing voluntary stop abruptly in mid-bar as the blower broke down. Nor had he any way of knowing that, of the more than two hundred people who had been present at the start, only eleven remained. Some had left in the earlier stages, but the largest exodus had been in the first few minutes of the sermon. They had made as little noise as possible and no fuss; they had too much respect for that.

  Kitty was one of the eleven who had stayed, because her father had stayed. She looked with approval and some affection at the old clergyman as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Under his dark jacket he wore a curious undivided collar-like affair without tie and what was evidently a black shirt. He was smiling. So was she; it had been a very pleasant occasion, arousing tranquil feelings in those capable of appreciating it, sadly above the heads of most.

  Joseph Wright was not smiling. He had started pestering Kitty to be ready to go to the church over an hour before the service was due to start, had driven them there in the little Russian-made Badger runabout in a style that sent horses scattering, and had sat through the opening organ voluntary at a high pitch of expectation, all this to his own surprise. He had had no idea what he had been expecting, but he knew plainly enough that it had not taken place; he had stuck it out to the end from pure obstinacy. He realised that he had begun to put a growing emotional stake on the service ever since the evening Glove
r had in effect agreed to officiate. And nothing had happened, so unequivocally and with such finality that the chance of any significant event, any change, was ruled out for ever. That was the day Wright finally despaired.

  16

  ‘What a glorious day.’

  ‘All put on specially for you, my darling. You look your loveliest in the sunlight. It brings out the colours in your hair.’

  ‘It also brings out the freckles on my skin. I suppose you’re going to say you hadn’t noticed them.’

  ‘You underrate me. To say I hadn’t noticed them would be to slight them. In fact they constitute one of your great beauties.’

  ‘Dearest Theodore, I really think you should try to be a little more selective in your flattery.’

  ‘Now you do me an injustice: I’m highly selective. Should I ever come across a piece of you I don’t find beautiful I intend to keep silent on the matter.’

  ‘You’ll have plenty to choose from.’

  Nina had spoken without thinking. When she did think, desire made her catch her breath and turn her head away. She had on the instant such a vivid sense of lying naked in Theodore’s arms that she found it hard to believe that it had never happened, that their closest physical intimacy had been a kiss, an embrace that no one living could possibly have found improper, or rather a fairly crowded series of embraces. Hearing of this from her, Alexander had shown or feigned surprise and indirectly (but clearly) intimated that it could be nothing but the result of deficient erotic drive, especially on Theodore’s part. As if he had read her thoughts the latter got hastily to his feet at that moment and strolled up the ornamental steps to the small summer-house, containing a likewise small sarcophagus, near which they had been sitting. On every side were assorted saplings and the stumps of cedars, oaks and pines.