Red Square
Page 40
On the other side of the lorry, the wide Red Presnya embankment road curved between the river and the White House. It was a relatively new building, a four-storey marble box, with two wings that seemed to float lightly in the glow of thousands of people carrying candles. Arkady's group squeezed single file between buses and bulldozers that had been set up as a barricade.
Along the way, he heard every rumour. The Kremlin was ringed by tanks ready to move down Kalinin Prospect to the White House. Riot troops were stationed outside the Bolshoi. The Committee was bringing gas canisters by barge to the embankment. Commandos had found tunnels to the White House. A helicopter assault would land on the roof. KGB agents inside the building would machine-gun the defenders at a secret signal. It would be like China or Rumania, but worse.
People hovered over small warming fires of rubbish, and around votive candles stuck in makeshift altars of wax. These were people who in all their lives had gone to no public demonstration that hadn't been organized and herded. Yet their feet had brought them here.
There weren't that many ways to reach the White House because the bridge over the river was barricaded at both ends. Arkady spotted Max among people arriving from Kalinin Prospect. From a distance he didn't look much the worse for their encounter. He nestled one hand in his jacket pocket but moved with an assurance that parted the crowd.
At a corner of the White House a tank that had come to its defence was festooned with flowers. The soldiers on board were boys with the hollowed eyes of determination and fear. The turrets swung towards Kalinin Prospect, where Arkady heard the drumming of automatic fire.
Students played guitars and sang the kind of sappy songs about birches and snow that usually drove Arkady insane. Around another fire, rockers took sustenance from a heavy metal tape. Ancient veterans linked their arms and puffed up the ribbons on their chests. A battalion of street cleaners, women in black coats and scarves, stood like a row of witnesses.
Arkady manoeuvred to keep Max in sight since he seemed to know better which way to go. He skirted a barricade being assembled from construction timbers, mattresses, iron fences and benches. Its builders were men with attaché cases and women with shopping bags who had come directly from offices or bakeries to the battle line. A girl in a raincoat scaled the makeshift palisade to tie a Russian tricolour to the highest plank. Polina looked down from her vantage point without seeing Arkady in the crowd below. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair free, as if she were riding the crest of a wave. Her friend from the airport climbed after her, more carefully, as the sound of weapons fire resumed.
Max moved towards the White House steps. As Arkady tried to catch up, he saw there was a defence plan of sorts. Within the barricades, women had established themselves as an outer ring that soldiers would have to break through first. Then came shock troops of unarmed citizens, a mass that water cannon or armour would have to dislodge. Behind them, younger and stronger men were organized in divisions of about a hundred. At the bottom of the White House steps Afghan veterans stood in groups of ten. Above them was an inner cordon of men wearing dark ski masks over their faces and shouldering weapons. At the top of the steps flashbulbs popped around microphone booms and still and video cameras.
'You?' A heavy-set militiaman grabbed Arkady's arm.
'I'm sorry.' Arkady didn't recognize him.
'You almost ran me over last week. You caught me taking money.'
'Yes.' Arkady remembered; it had been after the funeral.
'See, I'm not just someone who stands in the street and takes bribes.'
'No, you're not. Who's in the ski masks?'
'A mix – private guards, volunteers.' The officer's concern, however, was Arkady. He gave his full name, insisted that Arkady repeat it and shook his hand. 'You never know another man until a night like tonight. This is the drunkest I've ever been and I haven't touched a drop.'
Everywhere was a common look of astonishment, as if they had all ventured individually to drop their lifelong masks and show their faces. Middle-aged teachers, muscular lorry drivers, wretched apparatchiks and feckless students wandered with expressions of recognition, as in I know you. And among all these Russians, not a bottle. Not a one.
Afghan veterans with red bandannas around their arms patrolled the perimeter. Many still wore their fatigues and desert caps; some held radios, others carried sacks of Molotov cocktails. Everyone had said how they'd gone to Afghanistan, become drug addicts and lost the war. These were the ones who had lost their friends in the dust of Khost and Kandahar, fought on the long retreat on the Salang Highway, and avoided the anonymous ride home in zinc-lined coffins. They seemed very competent tonight.
Max's hair and one ear looked singed and he had changed jackets, but he seemed remarkably untouched after having one arm on fire at the collective. He stopped by worshippers huddled around a priest who was blessing crucifixes at the base of the White House steps, then turned and saw Arkady.
A loud-hailer announced, 'Attack is imminent. We are observing a blackout. Extinguish all lights. Those with gas masks, prepare to put them on. Those without should tie wet cloths over their noses and mouths.'
Candles disappeared. In the sudden dark there was a stir of thousands of people slipping on goggles and tying scarves and handkerchiefs over their faces. Undeterred, the priest pronounced blessings through a gas mask. Max had slipped away.
The loud-hailer appealed, 'Please, reporters, do not use your flashes!' But someone stepped out of the White House door and the response at the top of the steps was an explosion of flashbulbs and spotlights. Arkady saw Irina among the reporters and Max climbing towards her.
The embankment was blacked out, but the scene at its centre was an illuminated theatrical production. The steps spilled over with lights and journalists trading shouts in Italian, English, Japanese and German. There were no official press passes for the coup, but reporters were professionals used to mayhem and Russians were accustomed to disorder.
Max was stopped halfway up by two men in ski masks. Half an eyebrow was gone and his neck had a raw sheen, yet he seemed unruffled and in control. Cameramen rushed up and down the steps on either side. He enlisted the guards in conversation, employing a confidence that commanded any situation, an ability to flow around any obstacle.
'... you can help me,' Arkady heard him say as he caught up. 'I was on my way here to join my colleagues from Radio Liberty when my car was deliberately run off the road. In the explosion one man was killed and I sustained injuries.' He turned and pointed to Arkady. 'There is the driver of the other car. He followed me.'
The guards had cut eye holes in woollen ski caps that were a contrast to their satiny suits. One was hulking and the other small but they both had sawn-off rifles that they held casually in Arkady's direction. He didn't even have his father's gun, and by now he was so exposed he couldn't retreat.
'He's not from the press. Ask for his identification,' Arkady said.
Max took hold of the situation like the director of a film. It looked like a stage set: wet marble steps, vying spotlights, the fairy lights of tracers in the clouds. 'My identification burned in the car. It doesn't matter because a dozen reporters here will vouch for me. Anyway, I think I recognize this character. His name is Renko, one of Prosecutor Rodionov's gang. Ask him for identification.'
Dark eyes stared through the masks. Arkady had to admit that Max had defined the moment neatly; here his identification could condemn him.
'He's lying,' Arkady said.
'Is his car a wreck? Is my friend dead?' In the clamour of the steps, Max's whisper was all the more effective. 'Renko is a dangerous man. Ask him whether he killed someone or not? See, he can't deny it.'
'Who was your friend?' the smaller guard asked through his mask. Though he had no face to go by, Arkady thought he had heard the voice before. The guard could have been militia, like the traffic officer at the bottom of the steps, or a private bodyguard.
'Borya Gubenko, a businessman,' Max said.
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br /> 'The Borya Gubenko?' The guard seemed to know the name. 'He was a close friend?'
Max answered quickly, 'Not close, but Borya sacrificed himself to get me here and the fact is that Renko brutally killed him and tried to do the same to me. Here we are, surrounded by the cameras of the world. The world is watching these steps tonight and you can't afford to let a reactionary agent like Renko near anybody. The main thing is to get him out of sight. If you should trip and accidentally shoot him in the back, it would be no loss to the world.'
'I don't do anything accidentally,' the guard assured him.
Max began to sidestep to continue his climb. 'As I said, I have colleagues here.'
'I know you do.' The guard lifted off his mask. It was Beno, Makhmud's grandson. His face was almost as dark as his mask, but it was lit by a smile. 'That's why we came, in case you tried to join them.'
The larger guard pulled Max back by the tail of his jacket.
Beno said, 'We were looking for Borya too, but if Renko took care of him then we can concentrate on you. We'll start by asking about four cousins of mine who died at your apartment in Berlin.'
'Renko, what is he talking about?' Max asked.
'Then we'll talk about Makhmud and Ali. We'll make a night of it,' Beno said.
'Arkady' Max appealed.
'But since it's going to get dangerous here in about an hour,' Beno said,' we'll do our talking somewhere else.'
Max wrestled free of his jacket and ran diagonally down the steps. On the bottom he slid on wax, crashed through the line of veterans, regained his feet and fought his way through the circle of worshippers around the priest. The larger Chechen raced after him. Beno waved calmly to a group in the crowd and pointed in Max's direction. In his white shirt he was easy to follow.
Beno regarded Arkady. 'Are you staying? It's going to be bloody.'
'I have friends here.'
'Get them out.' Beno slipped his cap back on and adjusted the holes over his eyes. He took one step down. 'If you don't... good luck.' Then he plunged, a darkling figure, into the crowd.
Arkady climbed the rest of the way to the jostling lights at the top of the steps, arriving just as a spokesman emerged protected by guards carrying bulletproof shields. Ringed by cameras, the spokesman was outside just long enough to announce that snipers had been seen on the roofs of nearby buildings. He ducked back inside, but the journalists stayed in clear sight to check notes.
Irina had appeared with the spokesman and remained outside. 'You came,' she said.
'I said I would.'
Her eyes were set deep with exhaustion and brilliant with exhilaration at the same time. 'Stas is inside on the second floor. He's on the phone to Munich. They still haven't cut the wires. He's broadcasting right now.'
Arkady said, 'You should be with him.'
'Do you want me to go?'
'No, I want you with me.'
As more tracers fanned across the sky, the loud-hailer insisted futilely on an absolute blackout. Cigarettes reappeared, along with gas masks – a perfect Russian blackout, Arkady thought. As the sound of patrol boats approached on the river, the lights of a convoy appeared on the far bank. The women in the outer line had started to sing, and parts of the crowd picked up the song and swayed, so that in the dark they looked like the surface of a sea or a plain of grass in a wind.
'Let's wait with them,' Irina said.
They walked down the steps, through the defence ring of the Afghan veterans and past a row of candles freshly lit. Other veterans in wheelchairs had arrived and had run chains through the spokes of their wheels. Women shielded them with umbrellas. Now that must have made a parade on the way here, Arkady thought.
'Keep walking,' Irina said. 'I didn't get down here before. I want to see.'
People were sitting, standing, slowly circulating as if at a fair. They would all have different memories later, Arkady was sure. One would say that the atmosphere around the White House was quiet, grim, purposeful; another would remember a circus air. If they lived.
All his life Arkady had avoided marches and demonstrations. This was the first one he had ever willingly come to. The same could be said, he suspected, of the other Muscovites around him. Of the construction workers who formed the unshaven and unarmed inner troops. Of the mousy apparatchiks who set down their briefcases to hold each other's hands and form a human ring – so many that there were fifty rings of them around the White House. Of the women doctors who somehow, out of empty hospital storerooms, had scavenged bandages.
He had an urge to see each of their faces. He wasn't the only one. A priest moved along a row giving absolution. He noticed artists who were making white pencil portraits on black paper, passing them as gifts.
The mystery is not the way we die, it's the way we live. The courage we have at birth becomes hoarded, shrivelled, blown away. Year after year, we become more alone. Yet, holding Irina's hand, for this moment, for this night, Arkady felt that he could swing the world.
A piece of paper was pushed into his other hand. Look at this face, it was familiar, it was the one he was born with. Sound grew as a vortex in the rain. Overhead a helicopter shook the air and shot a flare that dropped, a matchhead in a well.
END OF
RED SQUARE