White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  Chapter 10

  A few days later, Ronald Gartland Simmonds, my delegation chief, collared me as we left the trade ministry. He had never forgiven my Bulgarian gopak and squinted reprovingly down his beaky nose at my frequent absences and my casual attitude. “Ah, Churchill, I’ve an amusing little chore for you—a church parade.”

  “Sorry, I’m not a practicing Christian,” I came back.

  “All the better.” Simmonds’ angular, beanpole figure bent double to fix his galoshes, and just as I wondered if a limb might not snap off with the cold, he creaked upright and smoothed those pin-striped trousers that so impressed Soviet trade commissars. “The dear comrades want to prove how free religious worship is, and since Easter’s the sole occasion when the churches really function, they want one of us to savor an Orthodox Easter service.” Simmonds’ voice developed a razor edge. “Trot along, dear boy, to the little church by the university. And behave yourself. One wrong response, religious or otherwise, and you‘ll be on the first plane out.”

  Our official Chaika scattered boulevard traffic like a fire-engine. Comrade Boris Andreyevich Bleloff was my spiritual guide. Pink, piggy features and as much hair as a crash helmet. He got us there early, just after ten, and we parked by the ski-ramp on the falaise overlooking the Moscow River. Just in front of Trinity Church, we had a spectacular view of Moscow. Snow shrouded everything, shot through with white, blue and yellow city lights. Over the Kremlin, burning red, were the giant stars Stalin had stuck on the fortress towers; around them, the cathedral domes scintillated in floodlighting like gigantic iced buns; further north, the Ostankino TV tower light made a scarlet bruise level with the pole star.

  Hundreds of people streamed from the escalator at Lenin Hills metro station, and buses—all making for the green-roofed church. “They are mostly old people,” Bleloff commented.

  “Ah, how old were they in 1917, during the revolution?” I asked, sardonically, and Bleloff glared at me.

  Loudspeakers were relaying the service to the crowds outside when we took our places near the altar in the pecked congregation. Quite a spectacle. Around the icons and saints, rings of candles flamed; even from outside, candles were being handed on to be lit before a favorite saint or before the huge crucifix over the altar. Priests moved through the church, chanting blessings, swinging censers. Along the back wall, a table bent under offerings of food and dishes waiting to be blessed.

  Easter cakes like kulich and pashka, Easter eggs dyed red or painted with Christian symbols, bread, meat dishes, cheese.

  On the stroke of midnight, the priests headed a procession which slowly emptied the church. Candles held aloft, they made the symbolic search for Christ’s body, going three times round the church.

  At the main door, a priest stopped. His powerful voice called, “The Christ is risen…the Christ is risen.” His call was echoed by a thousand voices.

  That priest’s voice halted me. He stood, twitching his censer, spraying smoke which enveloped his richly brocaded and jeweled cassock, calling, “The Christ is risen…the Christ is risen.” Candlelight moved, fluidly, over his face. The face I had last seen in that disused church on Moscow outskirts.

  It was Kolya.

  Without alerting Bleloff, I moved nearer the priest. No, I wasn’t mistaken, and I was sure he recognized me, for his eyes flickered a warning. Fortunately, we didn’t follow the crowd back into the church. Bleloff muttered that we had seen the best of the ceremony and led me back to the Chaika.

  In my room at the Rossiya, I poured myself a whisky and gazed at the deserted Red Square and the mausoleum. Larissa had said I was the only person to meet Kolya. And he had helped to hide the Lenin dummies. She had brought a priest into the conspiracy for a very good reason—apart from his hatred of Lenin, the anti-Christ. I had often wondered what would happen to the figure in that mausoleum if we got our hands on it. Someone had to smuggle him out of the country, or at least ensure it was safe from the KGB. Who had better opportunities to dispose of bodies, whether mummies or dummies or just dead, than a priest?

  As I opened the ventilation fortochka before turning in, I began to have a glimmering of how Larissa intended to steal that body—and what she meant to do with those wax models I had brought.

  Anastas fixed our next rendezvous at a school speed-skating competition in Gorki Park. “Can you get five days off from the end of the month?” he whispered when we had found a hole in the crowd of Muscovite parents.

  I thought for a moment. “The government offices shut down for several days this side and the other side of May Day, so our delegation isn’t working anyway.”

  Anastas gave me curt instructions where to meet Vanya and Raya on the following Friday then vanished towards the metro serving the park. As I followed him half an hour later, I realized that Larissa, who had sent him, must have known that Moscow would be turned outside-in over that weekend and for days beforehand because of the May Day celebrations, that government offices would be closed and a good many streets roped off. I remembered, all those months ago, Larissa telling me there were two days, or two occasions in the year, when we could steal Lenin. Of course, November 7, the anniversary of the Revolution, and May Day, the biggest day in the Communist calendar. But how was she going to pull it off when everybody of any note was packed into Red Square on that day?

  Chapter 11

  After work on Friday evening, I took the metro to Botanichesky Sad station then doubled back to the cosmonaut monument outside the exhibition park where Vanya and Raya were waiting in a hired Zhiguli. Vanya ducked along several side boulevards to make sure no-one was tailing us before emerging on Route Nine. “You been to Lev’s dacha?” Raya asked.

  “I didn’t know he had one.”

  “Designed and built by himself, every stick of it,” Vanya put in.

  Near the disused church, we turned off the main road and felt our way slowly along snowbound country roads. Half an hour of this, and Vanya backed the small saloon off the road into a birch copse where we hid it. “From here we walk,” he said, adding the car would be a giveaway outside the dacha. We trudged half a mile through deep snow before sighting the log house in the birch forest. Vanya went to a gable window and rapped several times. Larissa opened the front door and shut it quickly behind us before turning up the butane lamp in the hall and helping Raya off with her heavy clothing. We piled our coats, scarves and heavy boots against the wall and entered the living-room which was heated only by a small butane stove.

  Shapirov, the architect, had designed a square structure from pine and spruce logs, sitting this on four feet of brickwork. A big living-room occupied most of the ground floor with a bathroom and kitchen giving off the hall; a wooden stair led to the two attic rooms. Shapirov had made tables, chair and even the beds of massive pinewood. Larissa lit us into the attic and our sleeping quarters.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “You’ll be here for three days.”

  Vanya checked the attic shutters to make sure no lights were showing. We could not light a fire, which would have thawed the roof snow and created smoke to betray our presence; we had to keep the burners low for the same reason. Raya and Larissa disappeared into the kitchen to prepare the meal while we settled in.

  An hour later, the others arrived. Shapirov kissed Larissa too fervently for my liking as he handed over several bottles of Georgian wine. When we had installed Anastas and Kolya in the attic, the priest came to thank me for my discretion at Easter.

  Assembled in the living-room, I expected the inevitable bottles of vodka and brandy and quickfire toasts all round. “We’ve all sworn off liquor until the job’s done,” Vanya explained.

  Larissa had arrived several hours before us to air the dacha and organize the small kitchen. At eight o’clock, we sat down at the massive table to a beet borscht spiked with sour cream and a Kiev chicken spurting molten butter. True, the Georgian wine rasped a bit on the palate and the vegetables had wilted somewhat on the train or plane from
the southern regions; but within an hour nothing remained of the three chickens, the mountain of chips and salad, the blue Ukraine cheeses, the baclavas and pastries from one of Moscow’s better bakeries when we smoked and waited for the two samovars to heat water for tea and coffee.

  Anastas made Turkish coffee for himself, Kolya and Shapirov while Raya made the others lemon tea. From his knapsack, Shapirov produced Cuban cigars that he handed round the men. By tacit understanding, we small-talked through the meal, avoiding even the mention of Lenin, waiting for a cue from Larissa who, we noticed, had rigged a bed sheet against the blank wall of the living-room.

  Larissa and Raya cleared part of the table, disappearing into the kitchen with plates and cutlery. Talk stopped and the silence of the forest insulated by snow fell around us. Suddenly, the single lamp on the small table went out, leaving us in darkness. Two dark silhouettes slipped between us to place something on the table. Two torches beamed abrupt light on the two heads that lay on a straw bed before us. A gasp of astonishment went round the table at the coup de theatre revealing the Lenin heads which Shapirov, Anastas and Vanya were seeing for the first time.

  “But they’re more real than the one in the mausoleum,” Vanya exclaimed.

  “The wax is better in Europe, like everything else,” Shapirov commented dryly.

  “Where did we get them and what are we going to do with them?” Anastas said, pointing his long cigar at the wax models.

  “Never mind where they came from,” Larissa replied. “We’re going to replace Vladimir Ilyich with one of these and a body.”

  “And the second one?” Shapirov queried.

  “A decoy—we plant it somewhere to create a diversion and give us time to get the original out of the country.”

  “How’re you going to get the real Lenin out?” Vanya asked.

  “I’ve left that to Kolya.”

  Everyone turned to the priest, but he said nothing. His church, they knew, handled dozens of funerals every month and some of the dead had requested burial in their native soil which could be at the other end of the Soviet empire, or even abroad.

  “I don’t see the point in exporting that doll they have there,” Shapirov said.

  “That doll happens to be our hostage and our bargaining counter,” Larissa came back. “Once he’s abroad, the KGB will realize they can’t get their hands on him, then we swap their mummy or dummy for the men in the gulag.”

  “What if the real body’s made of wax, too?” Raya said, illogically. “We’ll be doing them a favor leaving ours, won’t we?”

  Shapirov guffawed. “If it’s made of wax…,” he sneered. With his cigar smoke he drew a circle then deftly sent several smoke rings through this. “That’s what Lenin was and is—zero. In that mausoleum there’s nothing left of Vladimir Ilyich except a few hairs and bristles. For what it’s worth, his brain’s in some museum, but they removed and pickled that just after he died.”

  “But the embalming…” Raya began.

  “That was botched when they tried to preserve him first in honey, then in water and vinegar and hydrogen peroxide,” Shapirov sneered. So, poor old Zbarsky and his team couldn’t do much with what was left when they came to finish the job. They’d already slit him up during the post-mortem so they couldn’t use the large blood vessels to inject antiseptics like formalin. They tried pickling the body in a mixture of glycerin, formalin and potassium acetate, but Vladimir Ilyich threw that up as well. In desperation, they called in that Austrian professor—what’s-his-name, Hochstetter? That was 1929, five years too late to use his patent method of drying out the body and steeping it in paraffin oil.”

  Shapirov canted his back against the dacha wall and put his feet on the table; he was savoring the astonishment at his knowledge of Lenin’s fate after death. He made another pattern of smoke rings, one of them floating and wavering ironically above the Lenin heads like a halo. “Take it from me—he’s just a doll.”

  “But…but.” Raya was stuttering. “What are we doing all this for if, as Lev says, he’s just a dummy?”

  “I just want to see that robot they’ve fooled everybody with for so long…to get my hands on it, to spit in its face, to piss on it, to…

  Larissa cut Shapirov’s tirade short by banging on the table. “Lev, don’t be a fool,” she said. Her gaze ranged round the group, dwelling on each face in turn. “What does it matter whether the thing in that crypt is what’s left of Lenin or nothing but a dummy? If it’s the real thing, so much the better. If it’s a dummy, then it’s the last thing our Kremlin masters will want to admit. They’d look pretty sick confessing that—how many people is it?…”

  “A hundred and forty million at the last count,” I put in.

  “…in the last sixty years all those people have queued for hours to pay homage to a bit of wax and plastic.”

  “A graven image—whether it’s wax or the body of that man.” Kolya’s long, scrawny fingers drummed on the table. I could see that, like Shapirov, this man itched to get his hands on that mausoleum figure. And Larissa was going to hand Lenin over to his keeping. Surely she had reasoned that this priest might seize the opportunity to destroy the embalmed remains of Lenin, or the dummy, whichever it turned out. So far as I knew, Kolya had no relations or brother-priests in the gulag, or in any of the psychiatric hospitals where dissidents wound up, accused of insanity because they dared criticize the Soviet idea of Utopia.

  Larissa broke through my musings. “What do you think, Anastas?”

  Anastas shrugged. He had sat without uttering throughout the discussion. “If it’s a dummy, they’ll be even more anxious to get it back and keep it quiet before their trick is discovered.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “They know enough about the Russian mentality to realize that something like this might start another revolution. After all, Lenin’s a god.”

  “I’ll drink to the revolution.” Shapirov raised his wine glass and we all drank his toast. Anastas looked solemn, Kolya pensive, Vanya and Raya troubled, but Larissa had a flush on her cheeks and her eyes glinted brightly in the amber light as they tracked from one face to another, finally fixing on the Lenin heads.

  “All right,” said Shapirov, “when are we going to do it?”

  “We’re going to do it on May Day.”

  Although I’d guessed right, it still shook me; the others, too, seemed transfixed by that statement. Vanya spilled wine. Shapirov puffed out his cheeks like a trumpeter before exhaling his cigar smoke. Kolya was nervously polishing his steel-rimmed glasses on his sleeve. Only Anastas took the news in his stride.

  In Moscow over the past fortnight, we had all witnessed the preparations for the biggest show in the Communist world. Red Square was out of bound. It had been titivated and adorned with huge posters of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Andropov and these also planed on poles and on the main buildings of the capital. Thousands of troops with their military material had been rehearsing the march-past and thousands more civilian delegations had been drilling their parts, down to the slogans they would shout as they filed past the Lenin Mausoleum.

  Anastas turned to Larissa. “I think it’s crazy. There’ll be half a million people swarming around Red Square that day, and several hundred millions throughout the world watching it on the box.”

  “I’ve seen the thing once or twice myself.” Larissa tossed the remark lightly over her shoulder as she went to a deep cupboard to emerge with a projector, placing it on the table orientated towards the bed-sheet screen. She checked the batteries and film as Raya removed the two Lenin heads. “Remember,” Larissa said, “all these people will have their eyes on the show.”

  “What about the mausoleum?” Vanya protested. “It’ll be surrounded by the foreign delegations, diplomats, Party bigwigs on the stands. And the whole of the politburo will be lined up on top. I agree with Anastas, it’s crazy.”

  “Listen—that’s one of the days the mausoleum guard has a holiday, isn’t it Lev?” Shapirov nodded, and now something was clic
king behind those somber eyes; he was smiling as though he had suddenly grasped Larissa’s point.

  “We still have to worry about the hundreds of KGB and militia around that granite block and in the square,” Anastas said.

  “They’ll be busy looking after the politburo and watching the people watching the big parade in case somebody has a bomb.” As Larissa spoke, she was focusing the projector though she did not set the film running. “One thing I should have told you—we’re all here until the job starts in earnest. Walk around the woods, but not on your own, and nobody uses the two cars.”

  “So, we don’t trust each other out of sight.” Vanya tried to make this sound flippant, but his voice rang tense.

  “You all know what I mean.” Larissa conjured a papirosa from Vanya’s packet on the table. “Somebody goes into town and gets drunk and commits a minor offence and lands in the police station, the KGB leans on him and he blabs. Being cooped up here for three days is no hardship compared with the Kolyma gulag.”

  “Switch it on Reeza,” Raya suggested.

  All our attention focused on the two square meters of white cloth as the film began to run. It was no masterpiece, for these May Day shots had been taken clandestinely from various points around the vast Red Square rectangle. We also had film of the other great day in Soviet mythology: November 7, anniversary of the 1917 Revolution which swept away the Tsars and brought the Communists to power.

  Judging from the weather changes, the film had been put together over two years. It showed views from the Rossiya Hotel terrace, GUM, the history museum and from under a bulb-dome of St Basil’s cathedral. Preparations for the parades followed the same pattern, worked out by some Kremlin commissar; identical portraits appeared, dusted off and retouched, the same slogans, the same soldiers and civilians rehearsing after midnight for May Day or November 7. For the most part, Muscovites turned a blind eye and kept clear of Red Square and surrounding streets, having seen this mammoth TV spectacular too often.