Russian Hide-and-Seek

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Yes. Well, rather a lot. Some of them revolted me.’

  ‘Merciful God.’

  He drew out a document and unfolded it. What he saw made him jump to his feet without having consciously intended to, something that could have been said of very few other bodily actions of his since early childhood.

  ‘Christ in heaven!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Where’s the telephone?’

  ‘In the hall. What’s the matter?’

  He hurried out to the instrument, which apart from being of inferior manufacture was virtually identical with the one in use here half a century before. As he spoke into it Mrs Korotchenko watched him with mounting anxiety and annoyance. After a very short conversation he slammed the handset back into its cradle and turned towards the front door. She barred his way.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I have to leave. Something very urgent has come up.’

  ‘I knew you were in the resistance.’

  ‘Nonsense. Now, if you…

  ‘What about my punishment?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’ll have to be deferred till next time.’ She threw a punch that would have knocked him out if her weight had been properly behind it. As it was he staggered back and crashed into the table where the telephone stood, dislodging a mug of the anthropomorphous sort he had noticed in the dining-room on his last visit; it broke in two on the tiles. When he came back at her she was waiting for him with her guard up. Swearing afresh, he feinted with his fists and rammed his knee into the pit of her stomach; she bent double and started noisily trying to breathe; he stepped past her, turned and, his eyes gone distant, fetched her a kick in her bare arse that brought her head against the frame of one of the glass doors hard enough to daze her and laid her sprawling on the chequered floor. Her child appeared from the drawing-room in good time to see this and be reduced once more to what might have been helpless laughter. Alexander banged the front door behind him.

  He set off at a fast trot for the Northampton road and the stables where Polly was. What had Latour-Ordzhonikidze had to say about situations of the kind just concluded?

  Save that brought by death, there is no true grief in love. All partings of lovers are willed by both, and that will was present in the very impulse that drew them together.

  Something like that.

  19

  His office had said that Theodore would be in a pub in George Row near the former county hall, now of course the seat of the civil administration. Although the street was only a couple of hundred metres long, Alexander had trouble finding the place. At last he registered the fact that two men were in process of changing its sign; from having been the Marshal Grechko it was that moment becoming the Jolly Englishman, an imaginative stroke, a bold stroke, a stroke that had not been cleared with authority in all its forms. Loud singing was coming from within. It was ragged and some of it was out of tune, but it sounded unnatural, forced, like low-life, rather drunken singing in a movie of sixty years and more earlier. At least it might have sounded so to an Englishman of that time, jolly or not. Certainly it meant nothing at all to Alexander.

  ‘Get on well, for I must leave you,

  Do not let this parting grieve you,

  And remember that the best of friends must part, must part.

  Good-bye, good-bye, kind friends, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,

  I can no longer stay and sigh, stay and sigh,

  I’ll hang my harp…’

  He threw Polly’s reins to a middle-aged labourer who had perhaps paused to listen to this and strode into what had been the public bar.

  Through a cloud of tobacco-smoke (the Festival made its own rules) he had a brief impression of men in check shirts and neck-scarves with pewter tankards in their hands sitting on hard chairs round an upright piano. Theodore, who was at the keyboard, gave a startled look and came over to Alexander as soon as the chorus ended.

  ‘What’s the-’

  ‘Shut up. Let’s go.’

  After a longer look Theodore called to a young man standing by the piano, ‘Take over, Henry. Go on to the end, then start again at the beginning. Don’t forget the cheers and the clapping. I’ll probably be back before you’ve finished.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Ivanov. What about the dirty stories?’

  ‘We can run through those in the morning.’

  Outside, Theodore said, ‘You and I were meeting anyway in less than an hour.’

  ‘This won’t wait,’ said Alexander. ‘Keep walking.’

  ‘What about your horse? Is that your horse?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten her. Here.’

  The proffered sheet of paper bore the faint diagonal red lines required by law on any replicated matter, which would otherwise have been indistinguishable from an original. It ran, in part,

  FROM THE OFFICE OF THE HEAD OF OPERATIONS

  88TH CHIEF SECURITY DIRECTORATE

  TOWN HALL, DYCHURCH LANE, NORTHAMPTON,

  ENGLAND

  AGENTS IN FIELD IN ORDER OF SENIORITY AS AT

  1 SEPTEMBER 2035

  1 Col-Gen V. S. Alksnis (‘Michael Mets’)

  2 Brig Ch. I. Kluyev (‘Aram Sevadjian’)

  3 Lt-Col Y. N. Tchernyavin…

  That was enough for Theodore for the moment. He had stopped dead on catching sight of the first name, or rather the first supposed pseudonym; a small bespectacled man carrying a tattered parcel had barged into him, apologised lavishly and not been noticed doing either. Alexander saw that clouds had moved over the sun in the short time since he entered the Jolly Englishman. The streets were littered and grimy; every few metres there was a broken paving-stone or a pot-hole filled with rubble that had strayed over the road-surface. People were hurrying home mostly as single individuals, heads down, silent, looking neither to right nor to left. Everything was normal, in fact.

  ‘Come on,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to walk the streets, keeping with the crowds. It’s probably the least suicidally dangerous place. I take it Mets is our leader?’

  ‘I don’t know for certain; I strongly suspect so. Nina and I talked to him for a second in your garden the night we were engaged. I thought he was drunk and Nina thought he was frightened.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be frightened if you had an important job under Vanag?’

  ‘Naturally I would,’ said Alexander a little irritably, skirting a pile of empty tins and shoddily-lettered cardboard containers outside a soft-drinks shop, ‘but I’d be even more frightened if Vanag was after me. Look, Sevadjian gave me the job of getting that list himself.’

  ‘He had no alternative. It was a decision of the committee.’

  ‘Did he support it? Was there a vote? And don’t forget he had an alternative – killing me before I was within a kilometre of the list.’

  Theodore had slowed in his walk and was further studying the document in question. ‘Well, things aren’t as bad as they might have been,’ he said as he refolded it.

  ‘How’?’

  ‘You and Nina and Elizabeth don’t appear.’

  ‘Better not tell Nina you checked that.’

  ‘Aram a brigadier in Intelligence… It must be a trick.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  They turned right into Abington Street and began to move past the ruins of the great shopping-centre, not the result of any concerted effort, just vandalism and the passage of time. Here the passers-by moved slowly for the most part: housewives facing a long walk home, idly chattering groups of schoolchildren, strolling whores. A black Jaguar carrying some high official, perhaps from out of town, perhaps from London, weaved its way among the horse-traffic. After a few metres Alexander put his hand on Theodore’s shoulder and halted.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ he said. ‘I know what to do.’

  ‘I wish I did,’ said Theodore, turning. ‘It doesn’t seem to me to make much difference
whether it’s a trick or not. Either way we’re hopelessly exposed.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I’ve had longer to think about this than you have. It does make a difference, perhaps a big difference. If that list is genuine, we are well and truly done for. If it’s a fake, aimed at setting some of us against others, it need mean no more than that they’ve correctly identified a number of our leaders. They may still know everything, of course, but there may be things, quite important things, they don’t know. For instance, although they know about me…

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, Theodore. They get word a chap’s trying to get hold of a list of their agents, never mind the reason he gives. What would you have thought’? Or at least gone along with to be on the safe side’?’

  ‘Then she…’

  ‘Yes. She believed it, I’m sure. She’d believe anything. No, that’s not quite right. The little bit of wiring that enables you to decide what to believe and what not to believe somehow got left out of her. Together with numerous and extensive other bits.’

  ‘Well, maybe. But it still can’t have been a plot from the start. You and I had hardly spoken by the time she made her dive at you.

  ‘No, we all underestimated her, including Sevadjian. It was just a sort of joke on her part. She was stirring things up by telling her husband what she and I were up to and then doing just as he said. Holy Christ, I’d punish her now if I had the chance. Anyway: this is all assuming the list is a fake. If it’s genuine they don’t know about me through her…

  The two parted momentarily to allow plenty of room for an unshaven, ragged man with a bottle who was coming towards them in a series of arcs. When they were side by side again, Alexander, who seemed to Theodore almost to be enjoying himself, went on as before, ‘… but they still know about me because they know about everybody. And either way, alas, they know about you too. But one thing they don’t necessarily know – if the list is a fake – is when we’

  He stopped in the middle of the pavement and stared at Theodore with what anyone might have said was real consternation. Theodore made a puffing noise.

  ‘No more shocks, for heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could stand another.’

  ‘That silly bugger of a CO of mine.’ Alexander got moving again. ‘He summoned me this afternoon and gave me a rather cryptic warning. A good half of my mind was on Mrs K, and so I assumed he was warning me off her – not bad advice when you come down to it – and was being cryptic because the subject embarrassed him. But then he said something I didn’t really take in till just now. When I said, quite falsely as you understand, that of course I’d do as he suggested and drop her – no, not drop H YE R, drop the enterprise or the involvement or something – he said he was glad I was getting out in time. Before what happened? Now with Mrs K, after you’ve decided to follow her up, which admittedly might be thought a bad move and also irrevocable in a sense, you just get more of the same, well no, not the same, but roughly similar. It would only be not in time, too late, if I ran away with her, something of that order, which needless to say I never contemplated. Or if her plan for our next meeting included me cutting her head off, which wouldn’t surprise me totally, but I don’t see how Colonel Tabidze could have heard about that. And then -yes! Afterwards we chatted with his wife for a couple of minutes, and he said he and I had had a good talk, and she had no idea what it had been about. Now you’ve only met them a couple of times, haven’t you’? but can you imagine him warning me off Mrs K without his wife not only being a party to it but probably drilling him in what to say? He was being cryptic because he was leaking a deadly secret at great risk to himself, the old idiot. And the secret isn’t that they know about me, though I think it does rather prove that, don’t you? No, Theodore, the secret is that they know when. They know about Sunday.’

  They had made their way back to the Jolly Englishman, from which came voices raised as before in professionally-simulated amateurish song. Theodore fancied he also heard a faint roll of thunder. He looked a little distractedly at a passing boy and girl, then at Alexander again. What made the fellow so cheerful, so obviously in good form in these unencouraging circumstances? Was this what was meant by being at one’s best in a crisis? How could he know? – he had never been in a crisis before. He said in a helpless sort of way,

  ‘What are we to do? Give up?’

  After a small hesitation, Alexander said violently, ‘No, we can’t do that now. My advice to you is to take that list to the most senior member of the organisation whose name isn’t on it. I’m certain as I can be that it’s a fake, but we daren’t take the risk of letting anyone see it who’s on it, like Sevadjian. Now from the way Tabidze was talking, they’ve decided to wait for us to move, to reveal and incriminate ourselves. The only thing to do is seize the initiative by moving when they’re not expecting it. Added to which they may change their minds and pull us in at any moment.’ He glanced at the dial on his wrist. ‘I’m advancing zero fifty-two hours. I’ll see you at the rendezvous at seven o’clock.’

  Theodore literally gasped. ‘You’re mad. How could I warn people in the time? And ours isn’t the only revolution, you know. Even if we-’

  ‘You’d better get a move on, hadn’t you?’

  ‘But this is… What chance do you think you’ve got?’

  ‘About none. But I must try it. Any other way we have no chance at all.’

  ‘Assuming all your deductions are correct. At least wait till we’ve consulted somebody.’

  ‘I’ve decided.’ Alexander’s manner had changed to a heavy obstinacy. ‘This is the only thing to do.’

  Squaring his shoulders, he moved off. Uncertain, fearful, exasperated too, Theodore could still not forbear from calling ‘Good luck’ after him. He turned at once and came back and the two young men embraced warmly.

  ‘You’re a good pal, old boy,’ said Alexander.

  ‘And the same to you with knobs on.’

  20

  The land was darkening under a sky that, though covered with a yellowish haze, still seemed bright. The buildings, the trees and bushes were drained of colour, differing only in their tones of what was no longer green, grey or brown; a patch of vague shadow surrounded each of them. Little tremors, too brief and shifting to be called breezes, stirred in the air and made the parched leaves rustle, but it was still intolerably hot and humid. At the horizon the thunder muttered and rolled, like an artillery barrage in a kind of war nobody remembered or would have taken the least interest in. For fractions of a second at a time, pale flashes showed there. So much vapour hung in the atmosphere that human voices out of doors sounded hollow, as if contained by more solid barriers. A sweetish, sickly odour drifted about, derived from hot grass bruised by the feet of men and animals, fallen flower-petals and some spice used in cooking, at one moment teasingly elusive, at the next almost too strong to bear. Minute seeds, singly or in clusters of four or five, floated to and fro, swinging abruptly aside as the currents caught them.

  To Trooper Lomov, walking briskly up the gentle slope towards the main house in the park where his regiment was quartered, it all had an unreal quality, though it would not have occurred to him to describe it in any such way. The rough material of his collar, damp with sweat, chafed at his skin and the horses’ harness jingled and creaked. All five of them were shaking their heads and lashing their tails against the small brightly-coloured insects that darted about them. Lomov’s pack-horse whinnied sharply at no perceptible stimulus and he reached across and stroked the animal’s forehead. Nobody spoke.

  The party reached a level space about the size of a tennis-court near the corner of the house. Here, in some degree hidden from view by a rough line of straggling laurels, they halted. Lomov stayed with the horses while the other two went into the house by a side entrance.

  With Corporal Lyubimov at his side, Alexander reached the hall, the basement door and the sentry and Security NCO, the latter a dumpy Muscovite with stupid, calculating brown eyes. Good, tho
ught Alexander, watching the man’s parade of conscientiousness in checking the photograph on the proffered identity-card against its owner’s appearance, with which he was perfectly familiar. Miming satisfaction for all he was worth, he waited for the next move, the handing-over of some document of authorisation. When this failed to follow, his expression became first puzzled, then worried. Alexander waited ten seconds, then said briskly but pleasantly,

  ‘Open up, please.’

  Now the sergeant’s expression was one of acute discomfort. ‘Sir, with the most profound respect, your honour, my standing instructions are not to let anyone past that door who hasn’t produced-’

  ‘My mission takes priority over that regulation,’ said Alexander as before. ‘Temporary removal of stores for the purpose of emergency training. In a real emergency there would almost certainly be no written orders. I had mine directly from the commanding officer, by word of mouth. Now.’

  The sergeant had been slowly and wretchedly shaking his head. ‘I just daren’t risk it, your grace,’ he said hoarsely.

  Alexander was prepared for this. He stared grimly at the man with his eyes dilated; he had practised this many a time in front of a mirror and knew it made him look alarming, even a little mad. Without averting his gaze he picked up the handset of the intercom on the table between them and stabbed his finger in the direction of the row of call-buttons. Then he waited.

  ‘Valentine, it’s Alexander. Is the Colonel still there?’ He looked fixedly at the ceiling fifteen metres above them while he listened, or appeared to listen. After half a minute he spoke a single word of thanks, hung up, glanced at his wrist-dial and stared at the sergeant again, this time with the corners of his mouth slightly down-turned. Another pause followed. At last he said, in a heavy, dismal tone, ‘Two hours. They think,’ and slowly put his hands on his hips. ‘What do you suppose will happen to you then?’