Eventually they reached the shabby dock-gates. The light was going now, not fast, but going. There were the delicate hints—pink, magenta, gamboge (poised between resin and powder)—of the possibility of the eventual oncoming of full night, but no more than that, as though in this high latitude of summer full night were an obscene suggestion. Paul showed his passport and the poor shabby taxi shook and jolted through, a thin dust of tobacco rising from the driver’s displayed packets of cigarettes. In this dock-world of bales, gantries, tramlines, Paul could not see where the Isaak Brodsky was hiding. The driver shouted cheerily for directions—‘Gdye Isaak Brodsky, tovarishch?’—and odd white sentry-figures pointed. And there at last it was, at rest, most still, bare working lamps already glinting on it, Paul’s home for five days but grown unfamiliar and menacing. The driver shook his taxi towards the gangway.
‘Odna minuta,’ said Paul. ‘One minute only. I must fetch my wife. Moya zhenah.’ The words sounded strange, even the English ones. It seemed revealed to him that he had not got a wife.
And so it was really no surprise to find, passing the callow sailor at the gangway-head who alone appeared to be on watch, feeling a sudden warmth for the familiar posters of Khrushchev and Our Little Yuri, padding breathless down the port corridor, opening the cabin-door, no surprise at all to find that Belinda was no longer there. Both bunks had been stripped of linen, blankets lay folded at the foot. No Belinda, no sign that Belinda had ever been there or he himself for that matter. He checked the number of the cabin again—122. No, no mistake. He sniffed the enclosed air, small and dry. No ghost of perfume. And on the table no hair-clip, no black-silk filament, no hint of powder. She had been abducted. The word slotted at once into his brain, straight from a spy-story. He left the cabin and ran down the corridor shouting:
‘Hey! Hey hey hey!’
The young sailor on watch appeared, only faintly interested. All the time Paul was trying to explain what his agitation was about he kept feeling that he’d seen that sailor before somewhere, some time far in the past (but that was impossible), and while still stammering out his stiff Russian he discovered where he’d seen him before, and that was in the film Battleship Potemkin, one of the young mutineers, all for a spoonful of borshch full of maggots, and he and Robert had seen the film together, one evening of that Russian course. The sailor went over to a ship’s telephone, dialled, then spoke into it softly but at length. ‘’Chass,’ said the sailor to Paul. ‘Wait.’
Paul waited. He paced, shouted twice, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ lit a cigarette, threw it almost at once into a sand-bin. The poster of Khrushchev and Major Gagarin laughed at him, the ship hummed deeply. At last a girl came, chewing and dabbing her mouth with a napkin. She was in a summer frock, her face was long, her hair frizzed; Paul had never seen her before. She said:
‘Ah, and how do you like our city?’ It was good, cool, smiling English.
‘My wife,’ said Paul. ‘What have you done with my wife?’
‘Oh,’ said the girl. ‘So it is you who are the gentleman. The doctor will be very angry with you. She was very ill and she should not have been left alone.’ Her eyes grew large with remembered drama. ‘A terrible rash and then her leg swelled up. It was terrible. She was terribly ill.’
‘Where is she?’ gibbered Paul. ‘Please, where is she? Tell me, please, where she is. Please.’
‘An ambulance was called,’ said the girl. ‘The ambulance took her away. She was very ill. She was fighting with the ambulance-men and the nurse and the doctor. She did not wish to go. She was in the-word-is-I-think-delirium. Yes? Delirium? She was crying out all the time for a ball. “Ball ball ball,” she was crying out.’
‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘That was me she was crying out for. Paul, that was. My name’s Paul. Paul is me.’
‘Aaaaah.’ The girl smiled brilliantly. ‘Paul, not ball. Now it is explained. A mystery is solved. That is a relief.’
‘Where is she?’ asked Paul, his hands claws, his voice almost no voice. ‘Where did they take her? What have you done with my wife?’
The girl pondered in a conventional pose—hand cupping elbow, hand cupping chin, eyes turned upwards. ‘It is one of the clinics,’ she said. ‘Polyclinics we call them. No, wait. I think I heard the doctor say the Pavlovskaya Bolnitsa. That is one of Leningrad’s finest hospitals.’
‘Pavlov … ?’ Paul was stabbed by a swift vision of Belinda being used for behaviouristic experiments, salivating as a bell tinkled. ‘Where would that be?’ he asked.
‘Where would that be? That is very funny English. It would be where it is, I think. That is to say, somewhere near Ploshchad Mira, which is off Sadovaya Ulitsa. You must go there at once to your wife and tell her you still love her.’ This was said not archly but seriously, almost clinically, love being everybody’s need and hunger in this land where none was enough beloved.
‘I’ll do that,’ promised Paul. The girl smiled and nodded goodbye as he stumbled out on deck and then clattered down the gangway. A broken neon-sign on the dock buildings announced to the sea that this was Leningrad. Paul’s denture was loosening again. The taxi-man was shambling up and down below, hunched and smoking furiously, his meter clocking up kopeks for that sub-department of the State which was concerned with taxis. He was now, Paul could see, dipping down into his depressive phase. But he expressed willingness to try and find the Pavlovskaya Bolnitsa. Over the tramlines and rough cobbles in the thickening air. Paul and the passport-man at the gate were becoming old friends. Meanwhile, behind them in the Intourist office, a large number of drilon dresses lay snug and dangerous.
As they drove south Paul’s heart ached, but not for Belinda. In his soul was a great plangent song for Russia, Russia, Russia, a compassion hardly to be borne. But why? It was not up to him to feel anything for Russia, these grimy warehouses, these canals, the Venetian Salford on which an irrelevant and perhaps disregarded metaphysic had been plastered. But with an inexplicable sob in his throat he gathered to himself the city, all the cities, all the lonely shabby towns he had never seen, the railway trains chuffing between them with wood sparks crackling from their funnels, the wolves desolate on the steppes, the savage bell-clang of Kiev’s great gate, dead Anna Karenina under the wheels, the manic crashing barbaric march of the Pathetic Symphony, hopeless homosexual dead Tchaikovsky, the exiled and the assassinated, the boots, knouts, salt-eaten skin, the graves dug in the ice, poor poor dead Robert.
Lights were coming on on Nevsky Prospekt, string (as someone had called it) to the Neva’s bow. Lights in the trams showed, like mediaeval guild pageants, tableaux of life since the Fall: embracing lovers, tired families, a wild-haired single drunk. Shabby workers off duty were obedient to the blue-glow crossing signs (Idyetye: they went; Stoyatye: they stopped). Paul’s driver was sinking deeper in depression, head hunched as he turned right into Sadovaya Ulitsa. Grinding up to the hospital, which, as that girl had promised, was quite near the Square of Peace, he looked, haggard and drooping, himself a fair candidate for a bed there. The Slav temperament was really an illness. He refused to wait any more, shaking his head sadly. Paul gripped his shoulder; the driver gripped the gripping hand and squeezed it. Physical contact comforted them in their sickness. But, paying the many roubles and kopeks which the clock said, Paul added a decent tip. Tea-money they called it, but this man needed more than tea. He drove off back to the great thoroughfare, every corpse its own hearseman.
The Pavlovskaya Bolnitsa was authentic municipal institutional. How firmly Soviet Russia was planted in, say, the England of the Webbs! Leningrad was a planet of another galaxy reproducing a long-dead, say, Borough of St Pancras. Dirty brick, eroded stone steps, worn corridor. Entering, Paul was at once met by a little man all in white, white cap on his head like a soda-jerk. Corridors buff and nigger-brown, institutional smell, a stringy-haired old woman wheeled by in a chair. ‘Ah,’ said this little man. He, Paul was sure, was no doctor—the face too earthy, an artisan’s hands. Paul said:
/>
‘Moya zhena. Anglichanka.’ That seemed enough. Before the man could reply, point, lead him, there came a loud cry of protest from down the corridor:
‘I won’t! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I tell you! Lemme go! Take the goddamn thing off!’ It was not, properly, the voice of an Anglichanka; it could be assigned to Amherst, Mass., more easily than to any of the ancestral territories. Except for that ‘goddamn’, the little American girl had come out fully, naughty, resentful, unhappy at home. (But what sort of childhood could it have been—only child, no mother, professorial father?)
Paul said, ‘Spasiba,’ and the little man said, ‘Pozhal’sta.’ They both followed the direction of the noise—louder American cries of anger, then a crash, a splintering of some glass vessel, Russian bellowings and bear-growls. Paul opened the obvious door.
Light, light, light. Clinical light and white. Faces, all with soda-jerk caps above them, turned at his entrance. The little man told them rapidly what Paul was. ‘Aaaaah,’ some of the faces went. Not Belinda’s. Belinda, hair a mess, make-up smudged, mouth square for crying or yelling, near naked, being roughly handled by two powerful nurses who were trying to put her into a strait-jacket, no, a hospital night-dress, Belinda went, ‘Oh, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, oh, where the hell, what the hell …’
‘Darling,’ said Paul, and was with her. She sobbed mascara on to his shirt. A dark angry man began sweeping up broken glass, shouting. ‘Ah, shut up,’ snarled Paul. Belinda was on a wheeled trolley. Embracing Paul desperately, she tried to kick off the trolley as if it were a shoe with a roller-skate attached. It was impelled into the back of the sweeping man. He shouted louder. ‘Her clothes,’ called Paul. ‘What have you done with her clothes?’
‘Bett, Bett,’ cried a sister. Paul tried to adjust himself to the bad German. ‘Hier muss sie bleiben.’
‘We think it is better she stays here,’ said a woman with a strong face, youngish. ‘It is something that requires investigation.’
‘Thank God,’ said Paul. ‘You speak English well. I’ve ceased to have any confidence in my Russian. What do you think is the matter with her, then?’
‘Dr Lazurkina,’ said the woman. ‘That is my name. I do not speak English very well. Not yet. Soon I will speak it as well as an English person.’ She was clean, smooth, a little too firmly handsome for a woman. She smelled subtly of antiseptics.
‘I’m sure,’ agreed Paul patiently, ‘quite sure. And what do you think is the matter with my wife?’
‘Where were you?’ sobbed Belinda, still clinging to him. ‘Why did you go away and leave me? Owwwwww.’ She looked ugly, howling like that. A frowning woman like a very old and cantankerous nanny tut-tutted at the row. Seated on a little stool, Paul now noticed, was a hunchbacked man, all in white like the rest, humming contentedly some dreary song of the steppes, a kind of miniature clinical model of calm.
‘It wasn’t my fault, darling,’ soothed Paul, smoothing her cold shoulder. ‘I got held up by a couple of officials. And then I had to keep waiting for taxis. And then … Oh, do be quiet, darling; there’s nothing to worry about now.’
‘You don’t love me,’ snivelled Belinda, ‘you never have.’ At least she had stopped howling. ‘I’ve never been loved.’
‘Love,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘We have all, even here in the Soviet Union, a great deal to learn about love. That is to say, the therapeutic values of love. The sense of being not wanted, deprivation, the effect of unfulfilled emotions on the body. A great great deal to learn.’
‘You speak English admirably,’ said Paul.
‘Psychosomatic,’ threw in Dr Lazurkina, as an added earnest of the total command of the language she would (how many years her plan?) eventually achieve. And then, ‘You have a small piece of wood embedded in your gum. Has that perhaps some magical or superstitious meaning? Or is it there fortuitously? It can be taken out with ease if you wish.’
‘Thank you,’ said Paul. ‘It’s to do with our National Health Scheme. I’ll explain more fully another time.’
‘All right,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘I am interested. But your wife is of first importance.’ She took over the stroking of Belinda’s shoulder.
Belinda wriggled away, then relaxed, then said, ‘I want my clothes. I want to go home.’
Dr Lazurkina said, ‘She ought to stay. We cannot be quite sure of what is wrong until she is under observation. It will be interesting to us to have a capitalist patient.’
‘I’m not staying,’ cried Belinda, breaking away from the stroking hand (cleanly scrubbed, firm as a man’s). ‘Somebody give me my clothes.’ She tried to get down to the floor. ‘Ouch,’ she went. Then, ‘It’s better, a lot better, really it is. Ouch. See, I can walk.’ She could, too, just about.
‘It only seems to be this rash,’ said Paul. It was still there, a patch of flame like scorched turkey-skin. ‘They said something about swellings. I can’t see any swellings.’
‘I’m all right,’ winced Belinda, limping around in her underwear. ‘I feel fine. I never felt better in my life. I want to go.’
‘We gave her the usual injections,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘We are making great advances in antibiotics in the Soviet Union.’
‘I should have thought penicillin——’
‘Exactly. She has had penicillin. Already it is taking effect. But there is something deeper. There was the danger at one time that our new antibiotics would liquidate the art of diagnosis. Can you understand that? Good. They cured and knew not what they cured.’ Paul felt he would treasure that utterance. ‘And now,’ said Dr Lazurkina, looking with professional hunger at Belinda, ‘we have here a case that invites very very deep probing. She is not well, your wife.’
Belinda, whose clothes had been grudgingly handed back to her by the cantankerous champing nanny, was now dressed and ready for make-up. ‘I’ll show you whether I’m well or not,’ she said, clinking and rustling in her handbag.
‘Well,’ said Dr Lazurkina, ‘I think you will be back. And I shall be waiting here. If,’ she said to Paul, ‘it is the cost that is on your mind, if so, I must tell you that medical attention in the Soviet Union is free.’
‘In the United Kingdom also,’ said Paul.
‘Oh yes?’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘But in the Soviet Union medical treatment is free.’
‘And with us,’ said Paul, ‘dental treatment also is very nearly free. Which it is not here. There are many members of your Kirov Ballet who are doing entrechats in British false teeth. They collect them when they come over to dance at Covent Garden. We do not begrudge them these teeth, far from it. Let us give to each other and take from each other.’ He gave a little stiff bow at the end of this little stiff speech.
‘In your case,’ said Dr Lazurkina, ‘I do not like those four teeth you have there at the bottom. They seem as if they will fall out at any given moment.’
Paul prepared to explain about these teeth, the Dentisiment and the customs, but he suddenly felt rather weary and in need of a drink. ‘There is a reason for everything,’ he said. ‘We are not such fools as we seem.’ Dr Lazurkina inclined her head. Belinda was glowing with lipstick now, her cheeks feather-finished and her hair tamed and sleek. ‘Ah,’ said Paul. ‘Would it be possible,’ he asked Dr Lazurkina, ‘for someone to get hold of a taxi for us? Then I could take my wife to the hotel and put her to bed.’
‘I’m tired of bed,’ proclaimed Belinda. ‘I feel fine now. Food is what I want. Food and drink.’
Dr Lazurkina gave orders for a taxi. Then she looked sadly at Belinda’s perkiness. ‘Euphoria,’ she said. ‘Temporary only, I would say. Well, I am on duty all night.’
9
BOTH, THEN, HAD OFFICIAL INTRUSION TO COMPLAIN TO EACH other about, bumping along Sadovaya Ulitsa in Paul’s third taxi of the evening. ‘Restoran,’ Paul had ordered, and the driver had at once suggested the Metropol, which, he indicated, making a crucifix of himself, lay on that arm of Sadovaya Ulitsa which was north of Nevsky Prospekt. He was a kind of Cockne
y Leningrader with an Old Bill moustache, the East End bazaar-whine in his voice. He was quick with his limbs, ready to mime everything, so that he illustrated ‘Metropol’ with a swift montage of piano-playing, drumming, trumpeting, dancing, love-making, eating, drinking, getting drunk, and all this without seeming to take his hands off the controls.
‘I don’t like that at all,’ said Belinda, when Paul had finished his story. ‘The best thing you can do is to disown those bags. Sandra doesn’t deserve our help, anyway, the bitch.’ This new-found bitchiness of Sandra was a line still to be pursued. ‘Just leave them where you’ve left them. Pretend they belong to somebody else.’
Honey for the Bears Page 7
