Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  At first I had struggled against suspicion of abduction or amnesia. Wilful desertion was unthinkable. She must be delayed by a Phoenician maze or Ligurian shrine. Certainly not swept off by some soft, seductive Prince Florizel or Duke de Morny. Mean betrayals and complaints were not her way; neither of us treasured grudges or smouldered with unuttered resentment. We enjoyed the stable, unhurried, disliked the sensational. Wherever she was, she would leave our intimacies intact.

  I soon knew, without wholly accepting, that she would not return. She had vanished without fuss, on no inauspicious date, staging no lachrymose letter on the mantelpiece, no dramatic telegram. As if after burglary I began noticing certain absences: notebooks, a favourite miniature, a few discs.

  Attempts to track her would be futile, also insulting. The Fête, riot, explosion might have probed some shrouded trouble, started as a strange gamble. Or none of these, but something deeper, darker, in which I was intruder, a comrade loved but, in the last coil of a labyrinth, useless.

  Already I was thinking of her in the past tense. Still seeking clues, I reconsidered her Etruscan studies. Mesmerized by particular numbers, these people apparently became obsessed with conviction that a blessed period had ended, another, grimmer one beginning, so that they lost will to resist upstart Rome. A tiny incident now swelled, blotting out all else – in an afternoon of gaiety she had, with no warning, murmured a Hungarian line: The aspen sheds leaves, I part from my lover.

  I had assumed too much. We subsist on belief that cars will halt at the red light, train drivers obey signals, the correct stamp guarantees delivery, the referee’s whistle prevails. But there is the famous uncertainty principle. A Baldur is killed for no cause, merely from spite. Serial murderers may lack definable motive. Events can be haphazard, results unforeseen. What should occur often does not. Marvellous are thy ways, O Zeus.

  We had both jested about lingering too long in gardens. But I was penalizing myself uselessly. Reading a book backwards, finding happiness misting, silences deepening, the plot crumbling. Explanations could only mislead. Chance or Fate? But Hector was dead, Anna Karenina lay under the train. Bombs explode, planted by the crazed or bleak; lovers start noticing each other as furniture; a girl runs, urging herself towards whatever, perhaps not knowing why.

  Unweeded, uncut, the garden was overweight, as though she had taken its evanescent marvels with her. I found, in one of her abandoned notebooks, By all the favours enjoyed by mortals, the gods are stirred to jealousy and vengeance.

  People come, stay a while, depart. The twitch of a curtain. They love, yawn, are unfathomable. A brief exchange with a stranger can provide more understanding than the Haylocks’ lifelong marriage. Dick sees Daisy as beak and feathers; she regards him as the gentleman who mistakes the road. Knowledge too often, yet enticingly, hinges on perhaps.

  Nadja had once remarked that our true intimates are amongst the dead. Everything, she added, has its time, then the mandate of heaven is withdrawn.

  My lack of resentment dismayed me. I could find no treachery in the pale face under dark, floppy hair, the eyes and mouth more changeable than weather and the infinite strategies of bed. We would achieve final intimacy, though by revisions, speculations, sudden convictions from the other side of the air.

  In too many lurks fear of safety, sometimes a desire to be hanged. In the Turret I had been startled by reading that during the French Revolution people had denounced not only friends and relatives but themselves, begging for Sainte Guillotine.

  All was provisional, ending with semi-colons. The garden was dying, life a matter of loose ends, horribly tangled.

  I sold the house, sidled away without farewells or plans, travelling through dim towns with standardized hotels, identical cafés, and crossed meaningless frontiers. People were faceless, cinemas blank screens. Weeks had the sameness in which Nadja consigned all Vivaldi. Women were bundles of lard. With everything featureless, I had sunk to an underworld, which remote forebears called Nifelheim, third realm of the dead, permafrosted, with walls achingly high, gates frozen, in neither night nor day but unbroken dusk in which to scratch at remorse, imperception, lost chances. Losing curiosity, I had no purpose. Suffering, a few maintained, completes the soul. I did not find this so.

  In such impasse I shrank from slinking to England as another asylum seeker. My imagination remained pictorial, haunted by a Goya, in which a midnight hand rises from a tomb to write Nothing on a stone cross. To jump from a train, volunteer for the Congo, would be no escape from fears of street corners, sooty tunnels leading backwards. In all beds, thin sleep, if it came, was perforated with sights of blocked stairways, streets filled with nettles and fallen masonry under a cracked dome. Here I hurried in panic through fog, past unnamed tube stations, or was trapped in traffic jam, desperate for a house I would never reach, where Mr and Mrs H.G. Wells awaited me for dinner. In this realm suburban mediums groaned disaster, a French rationalist saw the Flying Dutchman. Hallucinations were superimposed on each other like geological plates, which only sha could demolish.

  Shying from clarity, I dropped the explicit and sensible on the cutting-room floor. What had remained only distressed: Nadja, wide-eyed at the broken mirror, fondling a girl at the Stockholm party, was slipped into an album with Suzie, head back and laughing, with Wilfrid in his fez. Also, a wayward light abruptly revealing a face at a high, obscure window, Stalin watching Bukharin’s trial, with perhaps in his pocket the accused’s last note, ‘Korba, why do I have to die?’ Ribbentrop’s collar tightening. Chinese horror in a Malraux novel. McCarthy accusing Einstein of plotting a Red coup. Six children at play, summoned by their parents, Magda and Josef Goebbels, for a drink, the poison already tested on the Gutter King’s dog. Hess, life-sentenced, endlessly studying the moon.

  With life a bauble, losing itself on a dingy street, I was fated to a ramshackle future, humiliated that music, art, literature cured nothing unless, in some manner, shared. Only the immensity of sea and sky occasionally restored precarious balance, brief as Lapland winter light.

  Despair is seldom absolute. Like Andersen’s Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, sunk into marsh, though my thoughts remained heavy as sky before snow. I painfully, almost reluctantly, realized possibilities of rescue. Divided by the Wall, death’s afterthought, Europe was sending lighthouse flashes. Gorbachev was seeking peace from Armenia, racked by nationalist unrest. Polish shipbuilders were on strike, defying its illegality. Ageing student leaders reverted to comfort and incomes, but new fronts were opening, new promises, new gadgets, and in many lands sounded I should be so lucky. On some featureless street I signed a mass petition for Mr Mandela’s release, though would have done likewise for Purer Milk, a Map of Human Genes, a birthday tribute to Miss Kylie Minogue.

  In my grim spell of decline, a story of Father’s gleamed through murk. He is in the library, hesitantly describing an ancestor, betrayed and defeated, dragged before his conqueror who, like the Duce and the March on Rome, arrived only when all was over. He did not cringe but smiled, very calm, his voice distinct as a blade. ‘Sir, I have almost nothing. My lands, my people, are yours. But before you kill me I will use my one possession left. I bestow on you, which all these listening will hear, remember and pass to others. By this, and by this alone, you will be remembered for ever. Albrecht the Coward.’ Father is almost intimate. ‘And, in German history, Albrecht still stands, his one distinction intact. Immortality wrapped in a nickname.’

  Momentarily, the story hurt, recalling Nadja’s mention of her homeland gypsies having three names: tribal, legal and a third, to deceive demons, known only to the mother. What was her own secret name? And my own? Where was our immortality?

  Whatever her nature, her sadness, she was, in some manner, steadfast. Wish her well.

  That winter was the inquisitor, denying witnesses for the accused, preparing judgement and sentence without appeal. The cold poached on bones. Unwell, I had to ponder the options.

  Drawn by a particular odour, by blind i
nstinct, genetic compulsion, an animal may return over long distances to ancestral territory. With the ice chip still lodged within me, I boarded train for Riga, thence, after rough wordy passport dispute, to Tallinn, capital of a small crumpled province of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  3

  Coned towers, dull Gothic Hansa strongholds, spires wedged into thick, pale-yellow sky, red roofs, swaying trees. A troubled city, verging on catastrophe. One-third of Estonia’s population had vanished, from gauleiter and commissar. The rifle butt on the head, overwork for roads, mines, hydroelectric plants, death in canals. Natives were replaced by Russians, supervising bureaucracy, education, ports, mills, rural communes, timber, People’s Banks, macro-politics, steel, Kehra paper manufacturing, also transport and security police. Jerked by Moscow strings, the government, though intolerant, was clumsily corrupt. Gorbachev had confirmed the validity of the 1940 referendum, when 99.9 per cent had demanded incorporation into the Soviet Union, the figure announced by Moscow’s Tass correspondent some hours before the count’s completion. The clause in the 1936 Soviet Constitution permitting secession was long annulled.

  Nevertheless, by 1989, bicentenary of the French Revolution, Baltic communist chiefs, amongst them the Estonian Edgar Savisar, hitherto a Kremlin lackey, were displaying covert sympathy or connivance towards nationalist demands for autonomy. The masses were stirring. A derailment, dockers’ unrest, a sabotaged machine, a march, broken by police but who, for the first time, deliberately shot harmlessly over the crowd’s heads. Military indiscipline was officially admitted. An underground press was tracked down, only after it reported biological mutations likely after a Russian nuclear explosion, hitherto kept undisclosed. A massive nationalist demonstration masqueraded as celebration of the 1943 Red Army victory at Orel. Recent Soviet repressions in Riga and Vilnius weakened the party-political structure throughout the Baltic. Gorbachev announced the innocence of thousands executed in Stalin’s purges, and, visiting Moscow, the British Premier, Mr Major, unofficially received Free Baltic representatives before appearing at the Kremlin.

  In Tallinn I was immediately affronted by the ubiquity of armed, uniformed Russians, more numerous after Polish and East German subversion. But I was more concerned with the past, not in nostalgia but from slowly reviving curiosity.

  The light, hard, clear, revealed not the strangers jostling around me but a charade of relations, servants, villagers, all masked, everyone somebody else, preying on schoolboy ignorance, transformed by war and resentments.

  Despite this, I could not long be unmoved by the emotions visible beneath dour Estonian stolidity, the red-banded Soviet caps above faces heavily silted, the naked bayonets. Whispers stealing through alleys, parks, foyers, bars were repeated in taxis, kiosks, under trees. Civilians exhibited dumb insolence. Forest Brothers had not failed utterly.

  During that summer protest simmered, remnants of professional classes regrouped. Pastors united with White Russians, ex-soldiers, lawyers and the unidentifiable. Newspapers published accounts of Livonian Knights expelling Danes and Poles; ostensibly antiquarian, they carried analogies potentially deadly. The central arsenal admitted break-ins and thefts.

  No adventurer, mere tourist, I strolled the streets, took bus to the country, explored the red slopes of Hansa Bürerhausen, contemplated a grey, slitted Livonian Tower, the fissured ramparts of Lower Town, beneath which shabbily shawled, immemorial women sold eggs, beets, cucumbers, trugs of wild mushrooms, cloudberries, whortleberries, posies circled by hay wisps. Almost somnambulist, I was lost amongst unknowns in complexities of shadow slanting from arches crumbling above narrow, twisted side streets or drifted into Upper Town, crowds perhaps less aimless than they appeared, chatting, laughing, shouting, along leafy Tartu Mante with its stalls of expensive flowers and handmade chocolates reserved for officials and foreigners; also clothes secondhand but opulent, jewels still brilliant in outmoded settings, handbags once fashionable. Despite dreamy introspection, I was aware of queues outside pawnshops, banks guarded by Russian marksmen. Footsore from cobbles, I began seeing the significance of unpainted trams, rusting cranes, the crude supervision of people when they paused for rest, sightseeing or perilous thoughts.

  Superimposed were other times, a seance waved into being, not by pudding-like Alexander Nevsky Cathedral but by ancient, baronial Dromberg where sleeps Kalev, son of Taara, whose divine uncle’s tears supplied the town’s water; by rich Hanseatic domes, gables, coppery spires fretted like ringed fingers; by the baroque jumble of Toompea Castle with its traces of Catherine the Great, her cyclopean serenissimus and master-builder, Prince-Marshal Potemkin, and of her son Paul, Pahlen’s victim.

  On suburban edge, waters were smeared yellow by effluent from chemical works, the banks like congealed Meinnenberg dough. Then back to the slim steeple of St Olaf’s and, yes, the Fat Men, twin towers out-topping the Russian-built tenements that changed neighbours to strangers.

  Best of all, free of red armbands, grumbles, stares were the limestone cliffs, sandy beaches, bristling pines with wind in their hair, a few couples hand in hand, free sky curving over the Gulf, though to venture inland would be to meet barbed wire and Kalashnikovs.

  Hotel Splendide bar was harshly lit, though electricity might abruptly cease, from power failure or something else. Party bosses and their tarts demanding rooms rented by the half-hour jostled with municipal dignitaries, political toadies, KGB minions. Far preferable was the newer Hotel Viru, dim, cosmopolitan, casual. Russians, many oriental, with close-cropped heads and thin mouths, drank and played cards with Poles, Germans, some nonchalant British and American and Swedish journalists, whores in short sparkling dresses and artificial furs.

  Talk was careless, oblivious to secret listeners. I met railway supremos, metallurgists, arms touts, jobless army officers, South American uranium specialists, ferry captains, Finnish quarry surveyors, a Lithuanian oculist with a sister married ‘high up’ but now scared, senatorial pharmaceutical savants, Armenian mineralogists, Israeli novelists, Iranian royalist exiles superbly double-breasted, the usual nondescripts mysteriously subsidized, some political zealots murmuring about ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’.

  More congenial were free-spending Swedes licensed, by notorious bribery, to prospect magnesium. Sinuous, soft-spoken drug purveyors intermingled with pimps, and vaguer figures, perhaps Former People, well dressed but with some dignity and humour, cadging from border-town black marketers and from youthful Soviet pilots with thick wallets, easily gulled by both sexes. The soundless advance of AIDS had scarcely reached the frontier.

  A dry, acrid smell was inescapable, of cheap perfumes, skimpily soaped flesh, of ill-managed kitchens and drains, pushing me back to shore air crisp as chicory or to the grass and pools of Kadnorg Park. Here a man, chatty, with Schweizerdeutsch accent, offered to sell me lottery tickets, American cigarettes, dollars. Undeterred by refusal, as if peeling a vegetable, he handed me a list of names that ‘a gentleman of your distinction must know’. Saul Bellow, Dustin Hoffman, Salman Rushdie, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Henry Jonas, Margarita Kovalevska, whom he appeared to have successfully swindled. Intrigued by my indifference, he drove me to Kopti Harbour on the peninsula, site of wartime camps, long sheds, sinister poles, death ditches, one of scores of such boils suppurating in Eastern Europe, another reminder of Meinnenberg where, united in viciousness, starved creatures, once lawyers, editors, teachers, frantically clawed rations from the dead or dying.

  Roofs were torn from the sheds, the rail track was ruined, but the watchtower remained, stark, giant, dogs nosing at smashed acetylene lamps heaped around iron struts. I wondered what was my companion’s tale, what he was telling me.

  ‘Plenty of future,’ he said on return, but I doubted it.

  Alone again, I stared at the town hall on which a night rider had daubed Whoever Fights Is Right, Neutrals Are Losers and felt momentary self-reproach. Lenin’s statue was overthrown within sight of the Central Police Barracks; fir
e damaged KGB offices in a small medieval Danish fortress; three commissars were found dead under a cliff, then a trade delegate was strangled in a wood.

  Defiantly neutral, I repeated Gunars Salins’ verse:

  Our vision is clouded

  by smoke curling up

  from politicians’ cigars

  those peace-loving

  time-fuses

  of future wars.

  The decade was ending, rapidly, almost headlong. Despite Soviet deadweight, open hostility was heard towards the USSR, also suspicion of the European Community and its billionaire multinationals, West Germany with its full treasury and far-reaching ambitions. Illegal newspapers were scanned in the streets, watched by impassive police. From many towns, small incidents, brawls, stone-throwing, horseplay, were reported as party rallies. Despite prohibition, old festivals were being revived, others invented, excuses to flaunt national costumes, traditional dances, ballads, hymns, satirical rhymes, insulting earlier oppressors, Danes, Swedes, Germans. Long forbidden, organ recitals resumed in a packed St Nicholas’s Cathedral, the sounds of Bach and Sibelius strong as spires and columns.

  The State Radio admitted crisis in the Polish shipyards, the Solidarity leader, Walesa, achieving his demands for reform. With the Bear in stumbling retreat, Church rights were restored, Solidarity legalized, a supporter was elected premier. Everywhere, applause greeted the successful anti-Communist moves of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. Hungary was extracting Kremlin permission for political parties. Prague Soviet officials were being pressurized by boos, boycotts, obscene jokes and found reserved seats and theatre boxes usurped by others, grinning insolently.

  After forty years the Warsaw Pact was menaced by torchlight vigils, contested elections, leaked Central Committee disputes. The security fence along the Austrian–Hungarian border was rumoured cut; in Budapest and Belgrade, Red control tottered, government speeches sabotaged by wrecked microphones, soot-bombs, fireworks, swathes of empty seats. Public mirth demoralized a Russian minister, sent to Warsaw to strengthen the regime, at a meeting of Gratitude to Our Protector and Brother. Turning to thank the chairman for an occasion solemn, inspiring, nay, historical, he awoke the assembly by revealing a note with Missing Goods glued to his trousers.