by Hugh McLeave
“They can’t give us twenty years for stealing a couple of flags and entering Lenin’s crypt out of hours.”
“You’re innocent, Alan. That’s what I like about you.”
“Is that what made you pick me?”
She poured the brandy dregs into our tea glasses as though deliberating whether to tell, even when we had no longer any reason to keep secrets. Finally, she smiled at me. “I watched you for months—at the trade fair in Moscow well over a year ago. I knew you were going to Sofia, so I cancelled my summer holiday and swapped with someone to take over the Bulgarian stall. We needed somebody who flew in and out of the country, a foreigner, and I…well, I liked the look of you. And you were a Churchill. I did follow you into the Dimitrov Museum that day.”
“Was my gopak as bad as they claim?”
“Worse.” She laughed. “Much worse.”
For a moment we sat silent, the firelight washing over us both; now that the room had warmed through, I had taken off my anorak and Larissa her cardigan; she had also slipped off her fur-lined boots and curled her feet beneath her on the mattress; the fluid, red glow struck highlights from her tawny hair. I suppose it was the moment to ask her the question that had niggled at me for months.
“Larissa, why didn’t you sleep with me?”
“And if I had, you would have thought I was a whore, a slut. Like Shapirov and even Raya.”
“Was that the only reason?”
She stared into the flames, cupping her tea-glass in both hands and drinking from it like a child. “No,” she said, finally. “I was scared, unsure of myself. I knew if I gave in and slept with you, I might fall in love with you.”
“And people in love are not to be trusted with secrets or anything else, is that it?” She looked at me, sadly, hearing the echo of those words she had flung at me what seemed years ago in that sleazy Bulgarian hotel.
“It was a pretentious thing to say.” She threw her cigarette into the fire. “But it was true for me. I really thought I might weaken and forsake the attempt to free Sasha and the others. And if I gave in to you and myself, you might have got tired of me quickly and pulled out.”
“You didn’t know me very well.”
“No, I misjudged a lot of people and things.”
“But you realized how I felt about you.”
“More than you could ever imagine,” Larissa said so softly her voice almost lost itself in the hissing of the fire. “If you want to strangle me, Alan, and bury me here I would not blame you.”
“Larissa, you know I love you and you’ve known it from the moment I choked on that vodka in the Sobranye Hotel. Why else would I have let you talk me into joining you and the other five in a lunatic project that never had any chance of succeeding.”
“You thought that—and yet you stayed with us.”
“I’ve told you why.”
She had moved nearer me and put out a hand to fondle the back of my neck. Her hand felt cold, despite the warmth in the big room. Pulling back my shirt cuff, she glanced at my watch. “After two-thirty,” she murmured. “How many hours do we have?”
“That depends how clever they are and how useful our friend, their nark, has been.”
“Maybe three hours, and maybe six.” For several minutes, she lay staring into the fire, its light eddying over her face as though reflecting the vacillation of her mind. “It’s not much time,” she whispered.
“If you think like that, you’re already in their gulag.”
“I meant it’s not much time to get to know each other.”
“We’ll have all the time we need when they issue all of you with exit visas. I started to outline what we would do in the West. Perhaps I exaggerated a bit, though in my more sentimental moments I did imagine inducting Larissa into her new life. When we had done London, Oxford, Cambridge, Scotland, I would show her Paris, the Cote d’Azur, Rome, Madrid, all those places she had dreamed of visiting and never could. Larissa reached out a hand and put a finger on my mouth to stop me.
“You’re a romantic, Alan,” she said.” You really don’t know anything about me.”
It was true. In the ten months since meeting Larissa in Sofia, I had spent no more than perhaps two weeks in her company, the rest of the time fretting between our dates, and longing for her. But that was the bargain, the way she wanted it. “All right,” I said, “tell me about yourself’.”
She seemed to want to do just that, I don’t know why. Perhaps she wished to justify her action, perhaps she had a guilty conscience about embroiling me in her scheme without being completely frank; perhaps she felt somebody who loved her should know her story before she disappeared to Perm or Kolyma or Vorkuta or one of the hundred other gulags beyond the Urals, or died. I suppose every one has a compulsion to write his or her name somewhere, be it merely on a tombstone, to plant the name in somebody’s mind. This is what Larissa seemed to be doing by reciting her childhood in the middle of complete silence in that forest.
In a curious way, it reminded me of those letters Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, wrote from her dacha not so far away from where we lay.
Chapter 16
Her story emerged simply, low-voiced. She came from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, born there ten years after the war. Her father and mother were both party members; he ran a shoe factory in the town while she worked as a librarian in the children’s section of the Lenin Library and taught English at night-school. Which accounted for Larissa’s command of that language. She was a couple of years younger than her brother, Sasha, and followed him to Kiev University; he was studying medicine and she took languages and Marxist history.
Everything was going so well until the day Sasha and two other students got into trouble with the police. During a university end-of-term party, they borrowed a car belonging to a hard-line professor, crashed it in the snow and abandoned it. Of course, the local KGB branch got to hear about it and blackmailed the three students, asking them to collaborate by informing on fellow-students. Both Sasha’s friends finally ceded, but not him. Even though the KGB threatened to bring a case against him and ruin him and her parents with the publicity. In a sense, it was the turning-point in his life and the family’s. If the KGB didn’t bring the case, they had him sent down from university and all he could find to do was building-site work. “They turned him into a rebel,” Larissa murmured.
“And your parents?”
Her father lost his job and they had to rely on what little her mother earned, teaching. Larissa explained that each winter they went from Kiev to the Crimea for two weeks’ holiday. Two years after the trouble with the KGB they were traveling in an Ilyushin 14 when it crashed into a fogbound hill several miles from Simferopol airport in the Crimea. They died instantly. It was then Larissa moved to Moscow, putting distance between herself and her past, and got the job with Gosizdat. A year later, she managed to bring Sasha there to work.
“The KGB didn’t object about him moving?”
“The KGB claims it is never wrong, but they had somehow and somewhere lost Sasha’s file.”
Sasha had kept out of mischief for several years, but then he joined the Helsinki Group to monitor human rights concessions and cultural and information exchanges with the West; it was then he met Raya’s brother, Stalnov, Arakelyan, Chernov and others. They never knew how the KGB infiltrated their group and gathered all the material they were distributing like samizdat books, pamphlets and circulars; or how they knew about the demonstration where they were arrested long before it took place.
“It’s a wonder they allowed you to keep your job,” I commented.
“It was only because my department head spoke up for me and persuaded them to forget their idea of dismissing me and exiling me from Moscow.”
After the trial, she had completely lost contact with Sasha. Outside the courthouse, she had made the acquaintance of Raya, who introduced her to Vanya, her boyfriend. One of Sasha’s group gave them the names of Shapirov and Kolya as persons they cou
ld trust. Between them, they had decided to bring off a big coup to secure release of the four men and Shapirov’s friends.
“Who had the idea of stealing Lenin?”
“That was Kolya. I think he had the notion that if Lenin disappeared from the mausoleum, that fact alone might turn Russia back on the path she had never really left, the one leading to Bethlehem and Jerusalem.”
For long minutes, we remained silent, Larissa no doubt thinking like me of that body swinging from the rafter and now lying, cold, beneath the outhouse. In this world, at any rate, Kolya only existed for people like us who had known him. Larissa had ended her story. She turned to me, “You had some plan, Alan. What was that?”
“Not much of a plan. Just to keep them guessing, I suppose.”
“But they must have all the answers.”
“Nobody has all the answers.”
It was on the point of my tongue to tell Larissa that she did not know the full story. But she might have told me nothing had I confessed that I had spent long days sieving through Pravda and Izvestia and several other Soviet newspapers in the British Library, looking for accounts of the Bukov trial. That yielded little. But the Amnesty International headquarters helped with information about Aleksandr Bukov, culled from accounts smuggled out by prisoners and sympathizers. Their stories did not square with what she had told me, or parts of the letter she had allowed me to read. Larissa might have assumed I did not trust her, which was not true. We were both on the same side and had the same feelings, the same motives,
I rose to add some more logs to the fire. When I turned, I saw she was pulling her sweater over her head. She wore no bra and didn’t need one, for her breasts thrust out, full and firm. She stood up to unfasten her skirt and let that drop over her hips, then peeled off her stockings so that she had nothing on but a pair of silk panties.
I had often envisaged what Larissa would look like naked; but as she stood there, half-profiled, with the fluid firelight playing over her body, I realized nothing I had imagined would have done her justice. I halted, rapt in contemplation of her body, thinking I had never seen anything so lovely. She drew her silk pants off, over her legs. I let my eye travel slowly from her chin curve over the contours of her breasts and the fluent hollow of her belly and along her thighs. My desire for her leapt like the firelight over her body.
Her face turned to watch me, and since I made no move, she said, anxiously, “Alan, I want you to make love to me.” She extended her hand and when I grasped it, her fingers felt feverish, hot and I could sense the pulse in their tips.
My own heart was knocking against my chest and pulsing in my throat. But having waited so long and dreamed so much about this moment, I did not intend to spoil it by rushing. Larissa, too, had the same idea. She lifted her face to be kissed, opening her lips to accept my tongue and playing with it.
I let my fingers run through her tawny hair, reveling in its silken touch. I broke away from her lips to kiss her on the shoulders, on the points of her breasts, now swelling hard. While I covered her soft flesh with kisses, Larissa unbuttoned my cardigan then my shirt, running her fingernails over my chest and stomach, sending small shocks through me. With no other woman had I ever felt the sort of sexual current that passed between Larissa and myself. When we were both naked and our bodies had molded to each other, it built up to such an intense charge that I had to pull away before it surged over me, engulfing me. Larissa understood. She drew me down to lie beside her on the makeshift bed, and waited a while before beginning again to fondle me with her hands and cover me with kisses.
I had so sublimated my love for Larissa over the months, that as her mouth started to explore mine, then my body we seemed to move into another dimension. Dissociated from the purely physical act. Dissociated from the crude dacha with its rough walls and ceiling, its primitive furniture, its rumpled blankets and mattress, all held together by the fire glow. Dissociated, too, from time and the threat hanging over both of us. I had an almost mystical, floating sensation and I am sure Larissa was experiencing it, too,
For she could not have been pretending. In the love act, there are things that happen between men and women that cannot be simulated; they are more like an act of worship. That was how I felt about us both.
When Larissa drew me into her and our bodies finally locked and our ecstasy reached it climax, the passion seemed to burst from me like some dam too-long pent-up while from Larissa, it echoed in a long, hoarse cry.
For a long while we lay in each other’s arms staring at the fire flickering over the dacha ceiling. Within half an hour, Larissa had dropped off to sleep. I was wondering if I could do the same and risk being wakened by a KGB battering-ram piercing the front door when the trials and the fatigue of the last two days crowded in on me and I fell asleep.
I opened my eyes to find myself shivering in the darkness. My watch hands read five o’clock, the fire had burned out and the room had filled with a damp chill. Larissa still slept, her head pillowed in her tawny hair and on my shoulder. Without disturbing her, I wriggled out of bed and went to the kitchen to light the butane stove and brew some coffee. Dawn light was filtering through chinks in the shutters when I carried the coffee, tinned milk and biscuits through to the living-room.
“Why haven’t they come for us?” Larissa asked when I shook her awake and handed her a mug of coffee. I shrugged, though I had my own ideas. They would beat everything they could about me and my part in the plot out of Vanya or Anastas, whichever one had not collaborated. We dunked the hard biscuits in the sweetened coffee and ate them, wrapped in blankets against the cold. I lit the fire while Larissa washed in the kitchen and dressed.
“What do we do if they don’t come for us by tonight?” she asked.
“We make love, sleep, make love again…”
She cut me short. “But seriously.”
“Maybe they’ve no intention of arresting us,” I said. “After all, we didn’t intend to keep the flags we took and we only got a few pictures of the crypt.”
“The KGB doesn’t have to prove you did anything at all to lock you away for life.”
“Well, let them worry about that. We have another day together.” To pretend I was unworried, I went and opened the shutters. “Look, the sun’s coming up and we’re going to have a splendid day.”
Outside, the thaw had reached the track and the clearings in the birch forest; it looked like a color photograph taking shape and substance in the developing tank as the snow melted, leaving white patches here and there on the green earth and beneath the trees. I noticed things I would have been blind to on other occasions: how the sun struck a million light points from the drips on the branches and dappled the ground; how burgeoning shoots were appearing through their snow blanket; how green and gold moss on the ash trees was breaking surface and the brown rungs ascended the silver birches like a ladder.
“What are you staring at, Alan?”
“Just the way things are coming to life again.”
Altogether, it was a magic day for me. We wrapped up and walked for miles through the forest, hand in hand, forgetting that these might be our last moments together; near the deserted church, we came across an isba (cabin) where a peasant woman made us soup, bread and cheese and a samovar of tea then refused to accept the rubles I proffered and her reminiscent glances at us told me why.
We returned through a fiery, yellow sunset to check the car still sat where we had hidden it. Larissa started the engine then looked at me, askance. “Where do we go?”
I thumbed towards the dacha. “We have tins of stew, ham, beans, biscuits and coffee,” I said. “And we’re just getting to know each other.”
“But tomorrow…”
“I’ll even tell you about tomorrow,” I replied.
Though I had no intention of revealing anything much to her. Had I done so, she would never have consented to go back to the dacha, but would probably have started running.
Chapter 17
Two KGB men
picked me up on the circle line and followed me round to Sverdlov Square metro station; two more dropped into my tracks as I emerged from the escalator. But now I had broken cover and had no reason to try to shake off all these men in dark gabardine coats and soft-brimmed hats who were tailing me. I only hoped nobody had spotted Larissa; she had driven me round the Moscow outskirts and dropped me at Kursk station in mid-morning.
At my insistence we had split up, each of us to seek a hiding-place until the air cleared. Had Larissa known what was in my mind, she’d have stuck with me, thinking I’d gone mad. Now, on legs that grew more and more wobbly and watery, I ambled through the Bolshoi gardens past the colonnaded facade of the great theatre towards Dzerzhinsky Square and the most sinister building inside or outside the Soviet Union.
From the square, it had the appearance of an office block, painted in that pale mustard hue that blended with snow or the surrounding buildings; in fact, before the Revolution, it had been the affluent headquarters of the Russia insurance company, although another more modern building had recently been grafted on to it. I had often passed it during the day when it betrayed nothing, and at night when lights flickered on and off as though the faceless staff within were handling a giant computer connected to every prison and gulag in Mother Russia, manipulating, moving, erasing persons like marionettes or chess pawns.
Just watching Muscovites walking by the place hinted at how baleful its reputation was. Nobody broke stride, nobody glanced at it though it sat among the best hotels, restaurants and shops in the city; many people averted their gaze, superstitiously, as if they might be smitten; those older citizens, especially women, who knew its history seemed to be muttering sotto voce Hail Mary; but even younger people and those with the air of fully-paid-up Party members didn’t seem to want to know the place.
