Gadfly in Russia

by Alan Sillitoe

  The performance went down well enough for me to be asked if I would repeat the message on my key in front of the television camera, and give a short interview. Chatting later with the British Ambassador, I wondered whether he’d disliked the reference to Blair in my speech.

  From then on I sat with George who, in spite of the discomfort, looked dashing and confident in his suit and bow tie. He was invited with our British Council friends to a nearby restaurant, where I split from the main group at the long table so that we could go on with our talk.

  He said that the change to capitalism from Soviet power meant untold billions of roubles being sucked out of the economy, to the detriment of the country and its poor. There were many things he liked about the new life, but more than enough that he didn’t. The rape of the nation by the so-called new oligarchs was something he could never forgive.

  ‘You must remember that besides having such rapacious people around, Russia had been exhausted for nearly a century by every conceivable disaster. Even though Stalin died over fifty years ago, and the worst seemed to be over, it was impossible for us to recover because of the Cold War. When the alteration came Russia was ripe for a free for all.’

  Nearly forty years had gone by since Kuznetsov had done a runner, so I knew there were many questions I could now ask, especially about what happened in London after the discovery that he was missing. George was happy enough to give details already mentioned, and allow me to take notes on his further observations as well.

  We talked a long time, and at the end he told me that he lived in a more modest way than formerly, but was content with his life. He did look with some trepidation on the fact that in a week or so he would be going into hospital for a major operation. On asking what, specifically, was wrong with him he replied: ‘Just about everything,’ implying that it was so serious he occasionally thought he might not come out of the anaesthetic. ‘I’m sure that won’t be true,’ I said, ‘but if you don’t the world will never be the same again.’

  He assured me – a touch of the old sybarite – that he didn’t really care, for he was still enjoying himself. In fact his love life was so well arranged that a girlfriend called on him at least once a week. As a matter of fact, he boasted with a wink, she had been at his flat that afternoon, and they had spent a few libidinous hours together during which he’d managed to make love twice.

  When he was taken off in the car at midnight by his daughter I had a strong feeling that I would never see him again.

  Friday, 13 May

  Up at seven I felt almost too done in to face the final day, wanting to stay in bed till it was time for the plane to leave, but Margarita met us at half past nine with a British Council car, to show us around the Kremlin which we hadn’t been inside before.

  Long queues at the gate soon dissolved, and rain stopped for a while. We joined straggling bands of tourists by the Great Cannon manufactured in 1595, but never fired. Maybe it would have blown itself and too many bystanders to pieces. Half a dozen cathedrals came next but after the third it was hard to remember what I had already seen, so smothered were their walls with icons. The next interesting place was the Archbishops’ Palace, with numerous glass cases of silver and gold artefacts.

  A couple of hours to see so many wonders could only be a reconnaissance. One needed a week, maybe more, and I was too tired to take in the overwhelming detail. The eyes shivered back into their sockets at such dazzling objects. Outside, between the cathedrals, a score or so of children stood in a tight colourful circle that, from a helicopter, would have looked like a picturesque football supporter’s rosette.

  The drive to the airport was slow, due to traffic and poor visibility in rain and sleet. Margarita told us she had spent four years in Quito, where her father had been a diplomat. She had married a man from Ecuador who still lived there because of difficulties getting permission to be with her in Russia, but in a few weeks she would be going back to Quito to try and sort matters out. We wished her luck, and kissed her goodbye.

  At the airport a militiaman by the anti-terrorist checkpoint noticed that we didn’t have the obligatory labels on our hand luggage. They should have been stuck on at the BA checking-in desk, so we backtracked through the system to get it done. We took off our shoes to pass between the Scylla and Charybdis of the radar beams. Warning blips usually sounded for the Morse key and oscillator but, strangely this time, they didn’t register as potentially suspect.

  Sadly, the last thing I read in The Moscow Times was an item about a fire which almost gutted a synagogue on the outskirts of the city. The cause of the conflagration was not immediately clear. Firefighters had rushed to the blaze but were unable to prevent severe damage to the interior and the roof.

  At the duty free we bought two bottles of Standart vodka, having been advised it was the best. After a long wait we boarded the large Boeing and set off for London. With the time change we arrived at six-thirty local time and, once out of the customs, spotted the pre-booked taxi driver.

  A week or so later we heard with much sorrow that George Andjaparidze had died during the operation. He had been born in a German air raid, to the sound of falling bombs, and bursting shells from thousands of anti-aircraft guns defending the people of Moscow. Under the loving care of his mother and his aunt he was a fat and bonny baby, so well fed in times of terrible shortages – he never knew how they had managed it, because many other children had died – that he was nicknamed by them ‘Our Little Bomb’. The two devoted women spoiled him, and perhaps partly for that reason he grew up to be amiable and tolerant, always ready and able to enjoy himself.

  I’d had the privilege of knowing him as a friend, and several times saw how popular he could be with others, such traits lasting all his life. He implied, on our last evening together in Moscow, that it had been easy for Kuznetsov to turn him into an acquaintance who would stand by him.

  He went on talking about Kuznetsov even after I had put my notebook down. ‘The step he took was senseless, and I’ll never stop thinking so. He must have realised that his money would soon run out, and who would employ someone who knew no English? Russian was the language in his blood, so who indeed would even remember him after a few years? Yet I had up to then seen him as a man with a head on his shoulders, sober and perhaps even calculating, but there are still so many puzzles in the affair that no matter how much I go over every little detail of the case I can’t, even now, understand why he did such a thing, though a few clues and some information have come to me since.

  ‘I was often asked,’ he went on, ‘why I didn’t stay in England when I so easily could have done. I liked England very much, and still do. It’s a wonderful country. Just imagine, I would have become a professor of Russian literature, and had a well-paid post in some university. I would have had it made, as you say.

  ‘Yet thank God I didn’t stay, because if I had I would have felt guilty and miserable for ever, which in a way means I’d have been ruined too. And I didn’t stay because I loved my beautiful unfortunate nation more. It would have been a betrayal of trust, and I was never a treacherous person. My relations with the KGB afterwards were good because I kept absolutely nothing at all back of my experiences in London. I was never afraid of the KGB, though on one level after coming home it took a long time to become my normal self again. I was shellshocked, as you can imagine.

  ‘In the end, though, I still can’t understand why Kuznetsov did as he did. A question that still nags me is why, on his defection, he didn’t go straightaway on the radio and television and say why he had done it. Instead, a whole fortnight went by before he went on the radio to denounce his country. Perhaps he did want to do so immediately, but was either advised not to, or was prevented.

  ‘More mysterious was the fact that I was due to leave for Moscow a full three days before him, because I had important appointments to keep. I received permission to go, which would have given Kuznetsov three days in which to wander on his own. So why didn’t he wait till then and de
fect, which would have been more certain and sensible? He wouldn’t have betrayed my trust, though I realise now that might not have weighed very heavily with him, unless he had been told to do it when he did because those who helped him wanted to draw me as well into the net of defection.

  ‘Another thing I remembered in my report was that not long after we had arrived in London he went into a booth and made a telephone call, which must have been to someone who spoke Russian and who he’d already been in contact with. Now, the mechanism of making such a call in London is different to what you do in Moscow, so who taught him how to do it? Or trained him?

  ‘I didn’t think anything of it while making the report, but about ten years ago someone who went through the archives found out that Kuznetsov had been a KGB agent. That explains the telegram which came to the embassy demanding that they get him back “at any cost”. To have a writer run away was one thing, and I don’t suppose all that unusual, but an agent is a much bigger fish, and no doubt he had much to inform the Foreign Office about in London.

  ‘Such a fact only brings up more questions, which I suppose will never be answered, unless one day someone in your democratic country is given the liberty to go through the archives of MI5 or whatever it’s called. I would dearly like to know.

  ‘In spite of all that happened to me as a result of that affair,’ he said finally, ‘I’ve been a happy man. My only bitterness is that the trouble I was in had such a terrible effect on my mother that she died much sooner than she should have done. It did, literally, drive her to the grave, because she knew that in Stalinist times, which she had lived through, I would have been shot – no question. Now let’s have a last drink together.’

  Image Gallery

  By Lake Baikal in May 1964.

  George Andjapasidze, on the road, June 1967.

  Full of food by the military installation, unnoticed.

  Outside the Writers’ Club in Moscow, 1967.

  Goodbye Kiev. The man on the right is the one who wanted to know all about me, 1967.

  Speaking my mind, Moscow Gorki; Literary Institute, 1967.

  A street in Czernowitz. The town on the hill behind is Sadagora, once a great Jewish religious centre, 1967.

  Looking back on Kamenets Podolski, 1967.

  The Moscow-Kursk section of my annotated map.

  On my home-made, hand-copied map.

  A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

  Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

  So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.

  The Morse code he learned during this time stayed with Alan all his life; he loved listening to transmissions from liners and cargo ships (although he never transmitted himself), and whenever invited to speak, he always took his Morse key along. Before beginning his talk, he would make a grand performance of setting it up on the table in front of him and then announce that if anyone in the audience could decipher the message he was about to transmit, he would give that person a signed copy of one of his books. As far as I remember, this never happened.

  In Malaya, Alan caught tuberculosis—only discovered during the final physical examination before demobilization. He spent the next eighteen months in a military sanatorium, and was awarded a 100 percent disability pension. By then Alan was twenty-three years old, and it was not long until we met. We fell in love and soon decided to leave the country, going first to France and then to Mallorca, and stayed away from England for more than six years. That pension was our only reliable income until, after several rejections, the manuscript of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was accepted for publication. Afterward, Alan would say that during those apprentice years he had been kept by a very kind woman: the Queen of England.

  It is said that an artist must choose between life and art; sometimes Alan would tell whomever questioned him that after his first book was published and he became a recognized writer, he stopped living—there was not enough time to do both. I hope that was not entirely true. But writing was his main activity: He would spend ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, reading or answering letters when he needed a break from working on his current novel. And there were poems, essays, reviews—and scripts for the films of his first two books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and later others. He was extremely productive. But certainly he also enjoyed social life with our friends and going to concerts or the theatre. This was the heyday of the young British dramatists at the Royal Court Theatre.

  Now, in the 1960s, there was enough money for what we enjoyed most: travel, and although in the first few years our son was still a baby, we would spend up to six months of the year away from England. Alan’s books were translated into many languages, which meant that he was invited to many other countries, frequently to literary festivals, or sometimes offered the use of a villa or grand apartment for generous periods of time. I remember a stay at a castle in then-Czechoslovakia, where we were awoken every morning by a scream from our son, who had managed to get his head or hand caught in some part of the rickety crib that had been put in our room for him. We also spent months in Mallorca, in a house generously lent by Robert Graves. During our four years on the island we had become good friends with him and the Graves family.

  Time passed … the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties.… Every year or two a new book, a trip to another part of the world. Japan, India, the United States, Mexico, and Latin America: the range extended. I usually went with him, and as by then I also was having work published, sometimes the invitation was to me, and he would assume the role of consort.

  Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life we had then. But a year or two before his eightieth birthday, Alan told me he was not feeling well. It was always hard to persuade him to see the doctor; this time he suggested it himself. There were many hospital appointments for investigations and tests—the National Health Service was as excellent and thorough as ever—and a few weeks later the diagnosis came: There was a cancer at the base of his tongue. His suspicions were confirmed. Although he had continued to smoke his pipe (and the occasional cigar), now he stopped at once. The tragic program of treatments started, and the inevitable oscillations between hope and despair. Twice it seemed that he was cured; then it all began again. In April 2010, not long after his eighty-second birthday, Alan died. We had hoped he could die at home, but he needed the facilities of a good
hospital. Months later, on a cupboard shelf in his study, I found the manuscript of Moggerhanger.

  Sillitoe in Butterworth, Malaya, during his time in the RAF.

  Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight shared their first home together, “Le Nid”, while living in Menton, France, 1952.

  Sillitoe in Camden Town in 1958, soon after the publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  Sillitoe at his desk in his country house in Wittersham, Kent, 1969.

  Sillitoe in Berlin while on a reading tour in 1976.

  Sillitoe sitting at his desk in his flat, located in Notting Hill Gate, London, 1978.

  Sillitoe writing at his desk in Wittersham in the 1970s or ’80s.

  Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight at the PEN conference in Tokyo, Japan, 1984. They both gave readings at the conference, and Sillitoe was a keynote speaker, along with Joseph Heller.

  Sillitoe standing on the porch of his wife’s apartment in Nashville, Tennessee. He visited Ruth while she was a poet-in-residence at Vanderbilt University in January of 1985.

  Sillitoe (right) in Calais, France, with Jacques Darras (center), a French poet and essayist, August of 1991.

  Sillitoe in front of his and Fainlight’s Somerset cottage with his friends, American poet Shirley Kaufman and Israeli literary critic and academic H. M. “Bill” Daleski.

  Sillitoe on holiday in Penang, Malaya, in 2008. Sillitoe spent time in Malaya as a radio operator for the RAF in 1948.

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