Document Z

by Andrew Croome

  Max turned out to be a slight man who looked nothing like a farmer. They toured the farm first, all five acres, accommodation, Max said, for five hundred birds. Not much was being maintained. Bialoguski leaned against a fence and the fence came down.

  ‘It’s the dentistry,’ said Max. ‘With a job in the city it’s just too hard to keep up.’

  They walked and looked, going boundary to boundary. Petrov began to see things—new sheds for the birds, a small run for a horse. Eventually, they returned to the farmhouse. He was happy to see there’d be a good view of approaching cars.

  The furniture indoors was heavy and old. Eleanor told them that meat, milk and groceries could be delivered to the house.

  ‘That’s good,’ Petrov joked. ‘You could stay here and never leave.’

  Bialoguski asked Max what terms he was thinking.

  ‘Oh,’ said the dentist. ‘Four thousand pounds. Three thousand cash.’

  ‘Three thousand, eight hundred,’ the doctor shot back. ‘Two five in cash.’

  Petrov saw Eleanor wince.

  ‘Well, that would be alright,’ said Max. ‘If you’re prepared to do the deal.’

  The doctor turned to him. ‘What do you think, Peter?’

  Why did Bialoguski want to go so fast? Petrov said nothing and shrugged.

  Later, in the car, he told Bialoguski that Max was useless; that with a few months’ hard work the farm could be made to deliver a return.

  ‘Let’s make an offer then,’ Bialoguski said. ‘I’d be buying but it would be your project. We can make a deal between us.’

  ‘Let’s wait a while. Let’s just see,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a good prospect though, isn’t it? It’s good land. It meets the criteria.’

  Petrov didn’t say he was interested in a second set of criteria: what kind of refuge it made.

  ‘Tell Evdokia,’ said Bialoguski. ‘It would be a good life, I think.’

  Petrov got into the ophthalmologist’s examination chair. It was important that he convince Beckett to make a ruling against his travel.

  ‘I am having trouble again with blindness,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the macular star is back?’

  Beckett put the pen-light to his eye.

  ‘Oh, and I have a flight booked. Would you advise against flying in such a state?’

  The surgeon swung an apparatus across the chair, adjusting the machine’s chin rest so his patient could comfortably peer in. ‘I’m not sure I see anything,’ he said after a time.

  ‘Oh, I assure you, it’s like an explosion on my vision.’

  Beckett toyed with some settings on the instrument. ‘Are you going back to Moscow?’

  ‘I am scheduled.’

  ‘I don’t know that I would want to go back. With all the changes taking place there. Beria.’

  Beria? Petrov sat still. What did an Australian ophthalmologist know about that?

  ‘It is my duty,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you like this country?’ Beckett’s tone was calm and seemed naive. Petrov couldn’t see his face because the penlight was back in his eye.

  ‘It is a fine country,’ he said eventually. ‘Plenty of food. Plenty of everything.’

  The surgeon brought another instrument from the far side of the room and changed its lens. ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he said as he worked.

  Petrov was surprised. He stiffened warily in the chair. ‘It is my duty to go back,’ he said.

  The surgeon shrugged. ‘If I were in your place, I’d stay here.’

  He examined the eye again. Petrov sat thinking about whether the man’s words were scripted. Whether this was innocence or some type of structured plot. After a time, he told Beckett that something like what he was proposing would be very hard.

  The surgeon reached for a pair of glasses and gave them to Petrov to sit on his nose. ‘Not if you know the right people,’ he said. ‘It is traditional that the diplomatic corps look after other diplomats who are in difficulty.’

  Petrov said nothing.

  Beckett told him, ‘I have friends who know about these things. You just need to be helped by the right people.’

  He switched the glasses for another pair. Petrov stared at the eye chart on the wall. He wasn’t sure what this was. Some kind of trick? An entrapment? Surely Beckett wasn’t secretly left wing? He looked like a conservative, spoke like a conservative. No, this couldn’t be a provocation. It was a lone anti-communist trying to sway him; a religious man or a naive liberal. That, or this actually was a rehearsed and orchestrated sounding, a Security agent testing him out, giving him a way to fly the coop. Beria! That had been a savvy thing to drop.

  ‘What do you think?’ Petrov said. ‘Should I fly with these eyes?’

  Beckett sat the pen-light in his coat pocket. ‘If you still have the complaint, we shouldn’t risk it.’

  Petrov asked for a note to that effect. The surgeon gave him one, as well as another round of pills. He put both slowly in his briefcase, waiting to see if the man had anything further to say. It didn’t seem so.

  On the street, he examined the parked cars. If Beckett was a Security agent, maybe one of these cars would have a man inside, someone to follow him on his way out. He couldn’t see anyone. After a time, a taxi came slowly down the street and he hailed it. He asked the driver every now and then to make a wayward turn, looking back to see what traffic followed. Nothing seemed in pursuit.

  He examined the taxi itself, searching for irregular markings. It wasn’t an improbable idea: the Security service fashioning a cab and putting it in the right place to pick him up. The car was a Chrysler Plymouth. They wouldn’t even need to fashion it. Easier to hire a real taxi and switch the driver. The man was middle-aged with a moustache, staring at him in the rearview mirror. Perhaps it was the way he was behaving. Perhaps it was the scratches on his face from the car crash. He smiled to himself, but at the same time the situation was deadly serious.

  He stopped the cab four blocks from the hotel. There was a pub on the corner. He sat at the edge of the bar, drinking with his back to the wall.

  Later, he sat on the bed looking at the articles from his suitcase. He’d just now unpacked them, one by one: his shirts, his toothbrush, a comb, some slippers, his razor, his gloves. He was having a strange feeling about them. It felt as if they were sudden impostors in his life, his personal belongings, resting before him on the bed. The toothbrush had bent and yellowed bristles. The comb had scratches at one end. These might have been intimate markings, engravings of his. But they weren’t. He’d lost his connection. That, or these objects had lost their rapport with him. They belonged to someone else. Anyone else. They weren’t just unfamiliar but ominously so. He sat there wondering seriously whether it wasn’t some product of capitalism. These were Australian things: these cufflinks, for example, bought in Melbourne almost two years ago. But perhaps not. The Russian things—his camera, his watch— these had the contagion as well.

  The city beckoned at the window. He refilled his scotch and stared out. The bodies below were easily seen: night walkers, couples glowing with confidence, a father and son, two women crossing the street, coming too close to his window and disappearing from view.

  He thought about changing hotel rooms. He thought about changing hotels. He needed a heavy dose of the erratic. If there was a corollary to the idea that your world was being organised by outside forces, it was that random, fitful turbulence could re-establish reality. If you moved fast enough, you reinstituted the sanity it took to judge things by appearance alone.

  Shadows like fluid. He rammed the whisky bottle in his coat pocket, went downstairs and darted from the front entrance of the hotel. The first pub he came to had a side door and a back door and he used both in succession. This led him to a laneway. He made a complete circle back onto the street and got into a taxi that had just emptied.

  ‘Kings Cross,’ he told the driver.

  He alighted outside a dimly signed pub and went in. He fished out
coins for beer. The pub smelled more than was ordinary, bitter, a fog of cigarette haze. Men wore overalls, hadn’t shaved, looked like weather-hardened, dependable types. He sat this time at a table, ignored.

  Perhaps Doosia would die. She sometimes became ill; sudden frailty striking that body of hers. Loyalty was an awful feeling, uncomfortable. Acid under his skin. Were he alone, he could be on the farm in a week. Leave the embassy a suicide note, put together a new life that was simple, sunstruck, dirt-laced. But even without Evdokia’s blood ties—her mother and sister—he wasn’t sure reasoning would convince her. She was too proud; the revolution’s child.

  He thought about Beckett, musing on the identity of his contacts. Men of secret authority who could be trusted. The noise in the pub was men in conversation, no music, no radio. Men talking and joking with one another. Relaxed. At rest. Not caring what they said.

  He stared deeply into the near space, trying to imagine Moscow at this time of year. He couldn’t.

  15

  Summer declared itself, a week of warm stillness, shocking almost, the sun’s heat and the way the suburb became a thing for catching it. In the evenings, hoses appeared in front yards and on the nature strips, black snakes with fountain heads. Evdokia took Jack for dusk walks and the dog drank from leaking taps at the new housing development, a paddock overtaken to house government workers, dirt and sand in mounds. The fridge at Lockyer Street made terrible noises.

  At the embassy, everyone complained. Generalova carried ice blocks in a towel and made sure that all the curtains were drawn and the windows shut. On the secret floor, she delegated the task to Prudnikov. The gardeners put off their work till the evenings. From the third day onwards, the embassy children were taken to the swimming pool at Manuka, a facility that was open air but hidden inside a building that looked more like a library or a government office.

  Generalov was still threatening to make Volodya pay for the Skoda. Hundreds of pounds. The car was technically owned by the Foreign Ministry, but the ambassador must have known it was secretly an MVD asset. They knew that Vislykha, as Evdokia’s replacement, would do everything she was told; there would be no hesitation in making deductions from Volodya’s pay.

  Husband and wife had a strange conversation. Volodya told her there were farms on the outskirts of Sydney, good places where the earth could be worked, places not so far from the great city and the centre of things. He talked about farming practices in Larikha, before the collectives, how his father had been the slaughterman, known in the district for his deftness with knives. She looked at him carefully and asked why he was telling her this; what did he mean to suggest?

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Your hands are shaking.’

  ‘It’s just nerves.’

  That Saturday, Masha told her that Pipniakova was saying amongst the women that Vladimir had been drunk when he crashed the car. It was not a ground-breaking piece of analysis. Evdokia went to bed alone that evening and woke with a sudden determination to turn things around. She worked all Sunday, an electric fan going in the lounge room, poring over her handbooks of Party rules. She laid out their defence against the accusations that were destroying them: the Beria faction, the splitting of the collective, the petition of support for the charges that she knew was doing the rounds. She stood and read aloud their testimony. She was at some imagined hearing, a Party meeting in Moscow that followed official procedures, where they would be allowed their fair say. She called Gener-alov jealous. She said Lifanov was a pitiful, vindictive fool. The staff at the embassy were cowardly, afraid to engage in opposition to the ambassador’s hopeless rule. She wrote these things on paper and spoke them aloud until she had committed them to heart. She hoped that the MVD would intervene. In fact, she began to trust that it would. No matter who controlled it, she thought, the fearful implement of Felix Dzerzhinsky, faced with her declarations, would simply have to save them.

  Moscow’s continuing silence was altogether uninterpret-able. At times she was convinced they properly saw the goings-on as trivial. Then she was certain they were preparing a prison cell or worse.

  Volodya had sent his cable, asking for a delay in his travel for the sake of his poor eyes. She saw Prudnikov every afternoon and each time he shook his head.

  Lemon or chemicals approximating the idea. It was a Sunday morning, weeks later, and she had her hands in soapy water washing the breakfast plates. There was the noise of a vehicle in the drive. She listened. Volodya was in the lounge with the newspaper and, as things stood, she expected him to jump up to check with paranoid vigour who had arrived. He didn’t. He must have known which visitor was at hand.

  Bialoguski. He was wearing a suit and looked sweaty about the face.

  ‘Doctor,’ said her husband falsely. ‘I didn’t know you were in town.’

  Beer and biscuits. They sat first in the lounge but quickly shifted outside.

  ‘I’m just visiting a specialist,’ Bialoguski said. ‘A cardiac man who sees patients of mine.’

  He produced a white handkerchief and wiped his brow. Opening a bag, he gave Evdokia chocolates and Volodya cigarettes. He told them he’d stopped at Civic. He had a habit of tapping things. He made adjustments to his tie. She knew there was a purpose behind his presence. They talked and she waited for the agenda to emerge.

  ‘Vladimir says you have lost your job, Evdokia. As a result of this clique at the embassy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, unable to prevent herself vilifying Generalova, complaining that the woman couldn’t dress and was piggishly overweight, an uneducated and dimwitted peasant unfit to represent the Soviet Union at a children’s picnic. She said the women at the embassy were envious of her own personality, her confidence with fashion, her ability to socially interact.

  ‘Perhaps they fear for their husbands,’ the doctor said, and smiled.

  ‘Their husbands are bastards,’ said Volodya.

  Evdokia took the spare cigarette the doctor was offering, lighting hers from his.

  ‘And perhaps you will be called home?’ he said. ‘That must be a frightening thought?’

  She looked at him. He and Volodya had obviously been speaking.

  ‘Frightening? No.’

  ‘You aren’t afraid? My impression is there is some uncertainty.’ ‘I don’t know about that. I would look forward to going back even if they were to hang me.’

  The doctor gave the appearance of surprise. It was the appearance of surprise because she was certain he was the type of man for whom the emotion was impossible.

  ‘You don’t like this country?’ he asked.

  ‘It has been bad for us.’

  Volodya stood suddenly. He hoisted his belt and whistled to Jack. The dog came and both went mysteriously inside.

  Bialoguski was forward on his seat, fingers locked. ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he said.

  For an instant she thought he was talking about the porch. When she realised he meant Australia, she was taken aback. She felt a touch of anger. She hardly knew this man. Why would he come to their house and suggest such a thing?

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that,’ she said. She wanted the rebuke to be stern but it came out like a whisper, her voice weak and almost consoling.

  The doctor gave a half-shrug. He asked about her family’s health. It was a tactic, she knew, but she talked with him for a time about her mother and sister.

  ‘What of your father?’ asked Bialoguski. ‘He is well?’

  ‘He is,’ she lied, wanting to kill the topic.

  Bialoguski was nodding, eyebrows arched. What was Volodya doing, leaving her out here with this man? She ashed her cigarette and decided, for safety’s sake, that she must leave Bialoguski in no doubt. She began by telling him that the capitalist imperialist system robbed its workers, that its heart was dark and corrupt, that it enslaved its inhabitants and its fellow nations, warmongering to satiate its consumptive lust. The peaceful coexistence of the capitalist system and the socialist system was an i
mpossible dream. Even in the face of what she had seen in the west, the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Stalin held true. Peace was propaganda pushed by the forces of capitalism as cover for their inexorable aggression. History’s march was as inevitable as death. Marx had repaired Hegel’s dialectic and she believed in this triumph like others believed in God. She told him that war and capital were one and the same.

  He was staring at her. This type of speech was a deeply harboured impulse that she could easily set off. She thought she had impressed on him her loyalties. Not left him in the grip of any ambiguous ideas.

  Volodya came back. He sat between them on a chair, opened another beer. She thought it a safe assumption that he had been somewhere close and listening.

  The doctor stayed for lunch and left for Sydney mid-afternoon. She followed Volodya to the writing bureau. He shuffled papers as they spoke.

  ‘He should be more careful, the doctor, about what he says,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh, he’s alright. He’s clever.’

  ‘Tell him it is dangerous, such talk.’

  ‘He’s ours. An agent. He is discreet.’

  ‘Tell him not to visit anymore.’

  ‘I don’t control him, Doosia. I don’t tell him what to do.’

  ‘Was that a provocation on the porch just now?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten what I’m looking for. What am I looking for?’

  ‘Volodya?’

  ‘Have you seen that child recently? What is her name? Mirabel.’

  She put her thumb in his belt and tugged. ‘Are you listening? I’m trying to talk to you. What if he’s asking Pakhomov these same things? Probing where he shouldn’t. Everyone at the embassy knows you and he are close.’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘What do you suppose the cable to Moscow will say if someone overhears that kind of talk?’

  He was flipping through a receipt book, playing at being absorbed.

  ‘Well?’ she pressed.

  ‘I’m going to walk across the street. The father will probably be repairing something in his garage. The people in this place have it good but they are still resourceful. I’ll ask him about Mirabel.’