by Hugh McLeave
Agarov resumed his contemplation, then pointed his cigarette holder at me. “If I can convince my superiors, they will certain exact one condition—that you never ever return to the Soviet Union.”
“I shall give you that undertaking, and if you want a witness, my immediate superior, Mr. Ronald Gartland Simmonds will gladly endorse my promise.”
If all this sounds very formal, that is how it happened. Agarov left the embassy before the staff came on duty. Ten hours later, in mid-afternoon, he returned to inform us that visas were being prepared for the eleven people on my list and they would be flown out, at their own expense, to whichever destination they chose.
With Agarov, the embassy counselor and Frazer as witnesses, I rang my solicitor who did not sound as bewildered as I had imagined, and stayed his hand for a week.
As we accompanied Agarov to his Zil outside the embassy, he stopped and turned to me. “If you wish to see Miss Fotyeva, it can be arranged,” he said, then added, “Outside Lubyanka, of course.” I wondered if it were a trap to lure me beyond the embassy, arrest me and start the horror sequence again; but somehow, I didn’t think so. Agarov was probably either playing on my sympathies to hold me to my word, or sending me away with the best impression of people like himself! Or perhaps atoning for using her to trap me on the spying charge.
“Has Miss Fotyeva asked to see me?” Agarov shook his head, and I said, “If she does, then I’ll think about it.”
Epilogue
For a moment or two, I glanced at the worshipping faces intent on that tiny, black-clad figure with angular features, reddish hair and beard and that Tartar cast to his closed eyes. On previous visits, I had sensed the religious awe in that incense-laden vault, but did not have time to notice how ritualistic, how theatrical the whole ceremony was. A hundred pairs of hypnotized eyes gazed at Lenin as though at some icon while the guards stared back at the crowd. “Keep moving hands out of your pockets,” a guard whispered hoarsely as we scuffed along the back wall by Lenin’s feet, then towards the exit. “Er sieht wie Wachs aus,” hissed the blonde German woman to her husband. “No talking,” a guard snapped at her, beckoning her onwards.
But she was right. Lenin did look waxy. His hands and face, all there was of him on show under that fluorescence, appeared dark-yellow, jaundiced—though at ten feet it was difficult to tell if this were a mummy or a waxwork dummy. Yet, despite my own doubts, despite everything I have learned about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, every time I have gazed at that parchment face and those tiny hands lying on that black silk cloth, I get the sort of feeling pilgrims must have before the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, or at Fatima. I know that face like my own, with its cropped ginger hair and the flare of its side nostrils, the outsize cranium; I could describe exactly how the right index finger is crooked; in fact, I don’t suppose Professor Boris Zbarsky or Professor Ferdinand Hochstetter, the doctors who embalmed Lenin, knew some of the details as well as I did. Shuffling round, I wondered what that curious, Eurasian head would have thought had it been aware of the trick we played on him.
Nothing seemed to have changed from the first time I had seen Lenin. Same guards. Same anonymous crowd. Yet nothing was the same for me, since Larissa could not share it with me. We had shared so much and even though she had never loved me as much as I loved her, nobody had ever loved me like her. Nobody.
“Move along, chelovek,” the senior guard whispered in my ear. But gently, perhaps mistaking my faraway expression for adoration of the Communist Christ.
After rounding the coffin, we inched down some steps, up some more and out the back door leading to the path along the Kremlin Wall, lined with spruce trees. There, the queue scattered though guards still marshaled us and urged us forward. Several people loitered to peer over the iron railing at the graves of Stalin and other revolutionary figures buried beside the crenellated wall.
My mind was still back there, in the crypt. Wondering exactly what that was lying under the glass cage. Had she been here, Larissa might have enlightened me. Or maybe she finished up having to guess, and she was the one who thought up the whole crazy scheme.
At the end of the Kremlin Wall, Jock Frazer was waiting as he said he would when he had eaten in the embassy.
“Well, what’s he like today, Vladimir Ilyich?”
“Like the one in the suitcase Agarov collected this morning, only a little bit more the worse for wear,” I said with a grin. “But honestly, Jock, who would know?”
“If you don’t, nobody does.”
Frazer had spent two weeks acting as go-between to ensure the safe passage of the eleven people on the release list and had shuttled back and forth between the embassy, Lubyanka and Moscow Airport seeing everyone off.
Now, it was my turn. I fell into step with him as we crossed Red Square. Early afternoon sunlight was gilding the Kremlin domes and ricocheting off the garish bulbs of Saint Basil’s. I wondered if I were seeing all this for the last time, and I couldn’t resist an over-the-shoulder glance at the Kremlin fortress, the history museum, GUM, then the mausoleum fed by that endless stream of faithful, its squat shape burnished in the late May sun.
Frazer was following my glance. He caught my arm. “Alan, I never did get round to asking how you did it, but we’re all amazed that you made a hard nut like Agarov play your game.”
I shrugged. I had never divulged my fight with Agarov and how I had tortured him. And I never would.
I suppose I felt guilty, for I had discovered that a two-edged weapon like torture affects the torturer as much as the victim.
“Agarov had too much to lose, personally and professionally,” I said, simply.
Outside the Rossiya, we got into his car and he pointed it along Gorki Street and out the Leningrad Road to the airport. When he had cleared the town and its traffic, he said he had heard from Raya, who had decided to try her luck in London with her brother. Anastas was on the way to Australia where they had found him a job with a shipping firm. Both Shapirov parents and the two hi-jackers had arrived in Israel. Two of the gulag men had gone to the United States.
“She got away all right this morning,” Frazer said, too casually.
“Which flight?”
“British Airways to London. She’s going to spend a week there then go on to her chosen destination—Lagos in Nigeria.”
I knew what she’d want to see during her week in London. My mind went back to that night in the dacha when we had talked dusha dushe (heart-to-heart). She had said then she would have chosen somewhere like Africa where Sasha could take up medicine again.
“What’s he like?” I kept my voice and tone even.
Frazer pulled his eye off the road to glance at me. He lit himself a rare cigarette, passed it to me then lit another for himself.
“Nothing like you,” he said. “He’s small and weedy and wears specs.”
“Don’t forget he’s been eighteen months in a gulag in the coldest bit of Siberia.”
“I don’t—but looking at him still made me wonder why she did it.”
And Jock Frazer knew only a tenth of what she had done for Sasha Bukov.
He knew nothing about her relations with Shapirov.
Nothing about the risks she had run every day of being arrested.
Nothing about the sacrifices and the self-denial.
“She did it because that’s the sort of woman she is,” I said.
“You might bump into her in London.”
“I won’t be there.”
Frazer flicked his half-smoked cigarette out the window. “You’re both crazy,” he said. For several minutes he had to drive in silence since the small car filled with the din of a big jet gunning its motors on the end of the runway then taking off just above us.
As we turned into the airport compound, he mentioned that Larissa had studied every face in the airport lounge, expecting to find me that morning before she went to board her plane. “Why didn’t’ t you turn up?”
“I never like seeing people off.�
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“You know, she caught hold of me just before the flight was called. She whispered in my ear, ‘Tell Alan to forgive me, and to give us time.”’
Frazer looked at me. “What did she mean by that?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied.
But I did know. For what seemed to her an eternity, Larissa had been obsessed with one thing, releasing Bukov from his gulag. To that end, she had subordinated everything, including her own personal thoughts and feelings. She was possessed by that one idea. I know, for I had the same symptoms.
Yet, in the end after days of torture and the threat of a lifetime in the camps, she had still retracted all those lies Agarov had forced out of her and persuaded her to sign. She had made that sacrifice which proved not only courage and loyalty, but something else. Love.
For at that moment, everything seemed lost for her.
But Larissa was right. We both needed to put time and distance between ourselves and everything connected with the risks and pain and horrors of the Lenin plot. However, as I had my passport checked and passed the green-capped KGB border police in the immigration building and humped my bag into the neutral territory of the duty-free lounge to wait for my plane, I felt that somehow I was taking a long stride towards her.
END
