‘I was often in bed with my father,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘We were all in bed with him often. He was very warm.’
‘But this was different. She woke up to find that her father was calling her by her mother’s name.’
‘The names were different?’ said Dr Lazurkina.
‘I see I don’t make myself clear. Her mother had died. Her father was demented with grief. He was a professor of English literature and never very stable. As a widower he had no real resources.’
‘I see. Yes yes yes, that is quite interesting. Incest.’ She wrote the word down in Russian. It seemed a long and complex word.
‘She got over it,’ insisted Paul. ‘She was old enough to feel compassion for her father. Of course,’ he added, ‘in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Emily Dickinson country, one is perhaps not brought up to take incest in one’s stride. It was different in the Bradcaster slum where I was brought up. Dragged up,’ he amended. ‘The father and the daughter and the edge of the kitchen table after throwing-out time on Saturday night…. I don’t,’ he said primly, ‘really think it’s very profitable to pursue this subject.’
‘No,’ she said, smiling very faintly. ‘You have risen above all that. Well, now, while we are on this question of sex, what is it, do you think, that makes her say she hates all men? Under this drug, as you will know, people tell the truth. What sort of sexual life have you been giving her?’
‘That’s a very personal question.’
‘Oh yes, it is. Very personal. So please answer it.’ And she waited, tap-tap-tapping her teeth with the tip of her pencil.
‘I’m not,’ mumbled Paul, ‘what you’d call a very highly sexed man. There was a time, of course … But we really haven’t bothered much lately with that sort of thing. Companionship, intellectual intercourse—these are the important things in a marriage. To be honest,’ he said with sudden boldness, ‘there’s never been any real rapport. Not, of course, that that makes any difference to my feelings for her.’
‘No?’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘No. You are aware that she has been going with women? Or rather with one woman. One woman at a time.’ She admired Paul’s open mouth while she dug into a side-pocket, drew out a scrap of paper and read from it. She held it up briefly to Paul, like a flash-card. CAH— ‘This woman Sandra. Do you know of such a woman?’
‘Well,’ gaped Paul. ‘I had no …’ But of course he’d had an idea, he realized. Lugging it up to the light brought shock, but the shock was, for some reason, not all that unpleasant. He tried to feel humiliation but couldn’t. Still, he gazed aghast at everything leaping in order to its station.
‘There is no reason why she should not go with women,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘There is nothing criminal in it. Women are very good at giving sexual pleasure to each other without danger of unwanted conception. Women,’ she pronounced reasonably, ‘cannot be conceiving all the time.’
‘Poor girl,’ said Paul, but didn’t really mean it. ‘Her father, that’s what it is.’
‘In some societies,’ said Dr Lazurkina, ‘including the Chinese, the act between man and woman is used solely for conception. For sexual pleasure it is man with man or woman with woman.’
Or perhaps it all came from Sandra’s side. But not because of Robert, oh no. And now this question of Robert’s final heart-attack. It was like entering a library full of books that would have to be read some time. When there was time. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it’s all easily enough explained.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘In your Western society you cannot plan your lives very reasonably. You are rational but not reasonable. Not like the Chinese or the Indians. From those people you once enslaved you have learnt nothing.’
‘Oh, come——’
‘So I explain what your wife has been doing by saying that it is all because you are homosexual and are not honest enough to admit it.’ Paul gaped to the limit, but still noticed that she did not pervert the h of that bomb of a word to a g. ‘You have made yourself unaware of it,’ she smiled in cold scientific triumph.
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I’ve never … That is to say …’ But he wasn’t, he was quite sure he wasn’t.
‘It is nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Dr Lazurkina. ‘So long as one is honest. Some friendships between men can be very beautiful.’
‘You mean Robert,’ said Paul. It seemed best to assume that she knew everything. ‘But our friendship wasn’t just that. And it was during the war. He was in a terrible state. A flier, you know. It seemed natural. But not since. I swear.’
‘You are not being accused of anything,’ smiled Dr Lazurkina. ‘We are what we are. Your own fault has been in pretending to be something you are not. The only real crime,’ she said sententiously, ‘is to be unwilling to face reality.’
‘But it was only with Robert,’ protested Paul. ‘And only in those special circumstances. He was under very great strain and suffering terribly.’ He was going to say that she would know nothing about that, but that wouldn’t be fair. Leningrad had had its siege, guns, a grey mouthful of bread, frozen fingers, corpses preserved by winter. ‘It happened a lot during the war. All life is a matter of adjustment and readjustment. And then men went back to their wives quite happily and were quite normal ever after. I don’t think you’re being fair to me.’
‘Fair? It is nothing to do with fair and unfair. All you people in the Western countries are full of guilt, and it is always guilt about the wrong thing.’
‘And afterwards,’ went on Paul, ‘when he and Sandra came to live near us. Well, there was nothing. He was a man of very large sexuality. Unlike myself. We were close friends, but now we had our wives and our sexual duties to them.’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Lazurkina, with an exactly English sarcastic intonation. ‘Sexual duties. You English are very different from us Russians. But,’ she said, ‘this time of homosexuality with your friend meant more than any relationship you have had since.’ Paul said nothing. ‘Large sexuality,’ she quoted. ‘That is a very good phrase. And you could perhaps feel both proud and guilty that you had taught your friend so much.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Paul.
‘Ah well, as we say—nichevo.’ She gathered Belinda’s presents and her own notes together. ‘But all this is very interesting. It is most interesting to be in contact again with the Western mind. Incest,’ she said without irony. ‘Men with men and women with women. Of course, you all really wish to die. We are quite different here. Well, you must come again.’
‘And when do I see Belinda?’
‘Oh, you can wait a little. One day, two, three. You will find plenty to do in Leningrad.’
But the plenty to do was ignored for the rest of that day. Paul spent the remainder of the afternoon getting drunk. He joined the queues of men at the little side-street beer-kiosks. He found a couple of charmingly dirty champagne-and-cognac bars below street-level. He was cushioning his shocks very well. He thought he was not fundamentally a homosexual at all. He tested his reactions muzzily to the attractive young of both sexes whom he passed in the street. He was quite sure he felt more for the female than the male.
Still fairly drunk, he went later to the Barrikada Cinema on Nevsky Prospekt. The place stank pleasantly of proletariat. The main film was, as far as he could tell, brilliant technically and most dull in content, being concerned with happily married meteorologists in Siberia who rushed eagerly home on snowshoes to hear Party pronouncements on Moscow radio. A little boy in the film, the son of somebody, sang a song about the Red Star shining over everybody. Paul blinked at the brilliant and wearisome snowscapes. It was hard to tell what the rest of the audience thought. Nearly asleep, he came to with a jolt to find the screen filled with somebody who looked strangely familiar. It was himself, a huge sulky face opening up to show a full set of teeth parting to shout ‘Oh hell’ before running up the ramp of the sea terminal. He recognized other faces, smiling, those of the Soviet musicians. He could not understand what the newsreel commen
tator was saying about him, but it made some of the audience laugh. ‘Shut up,’ he said to the man next to him. ‘I am no laughing matter. I am Paul Dinneford Hussey, English tourist. My wife is in hospital. Shut up.’ He was smiled on good-humouredly. In this country drunkenness was no offence.
12
HE DREAMT THAT A TELEPHONE WAS RINGING AND WOKE UP wondering pleasantly that a dream should so promptly be fulfilled in the world of consciousness. J. W. Dunne or somebody. J. B. Priestley or something. Then he grinned ruefully at the split second of sleepy imbecility and, in the rest of the second, was able to note that he had no feeling of crapula and that this had something to do with the bite of ammonia in his nasopharynx and the fishy oily eggy taste in his mouth. He tried to dig up from somewhere the memory of eating ray caught in its menses. Also in his mouth was his denture, very loose; by some miracle he had not snored it in and choked in his sleep. For the rest, his mind carried nothing except the sense of a valet standing always just out of line of vision presenting purpose like a clean starched shirt. Then it caught at the skirt of Belinda, tore off the skirt and bundled her groaning into a hospital bed, then in panic he stumbled to the telephone. He was interested to see that he was stark naked.
‘Mr Gussey?’ It was a girl’s voice, and he instinctively sought to cover himself with a towel. ‘Will you have them both sent up to your room or are you perhaps not staying with us here any more?’
‘Let’s,’ panted Paul, ‘have that again.’ What folly had he committed last night, what couple rashly invited? Why did it seem to be implied that the management wished him to leave? ‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘quite——’
‘Intourist at the port,’ said the girl’s voice. ‘They tried this hotel first and they were first time lucky. They said you were right to have your name on them but wrong to be so careless and forgetful. Do you want them to be sent up?’
‘What?’ cried Paul. ‘Oh God. Wait, wait, I’ll be down.’ He was as wide awake now as ever in all his life he would expect to be. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he warned, like some TV police inspector. ‘I’ll be right down.’ As he dressed, snoring through his mouth, Zverkov and Karamzin kept appearing on the wall in a static smiling pose, hugging each other. He rushed out and the concierge bawled ‘Kliuch’ at him near the stair-head. Paul threw the ridiculous ceremonial key at her desk, missed, and was railed at. The lift was still not working. He ran with clumsy toes down stairs meant for Tolstoy beauties, swan-necked, gliding like swans. In the hall he saw them, both cases, neatly stacked near other cases in the luggage-space between two pillars. Zverkov and Karamzin were nowhere to be seen. The time? Nearly ten, his watch said. Early enough, early enough to get lots done. From the reception desk, uncluttered as yet by complaining tourists, the girl with the cold, admirer of Hemingway, cried cheerfully:
‘Ah, it is Mr Gussey. The gentleman of the bags.’
‘I must take them now,’ he panted. ‘I’ve left my others upstairs. I’ll be back later to pay my bill.’ For he’d decided that the only way to rid himself of Zverkov and Karamzin was to get out of here and go to …
‘Eh!’ It was the bald man with the shapely lips who was so eager for free lessons. He called very clearly, ‘What is right—“in the belly” or “on the belly”?’ God knew what context of action he had in mind; or perhaps he too admired Hemingway.
‘Both are painful,’ said Paul. ‘No time now. Must go.’ Zverkov kicking him in, Karamzin on. He picked up the bags and hurried towards the swing-doors. The bald man’s voice pursued him in anger, like that of a kennelled dog cheated of a walk. In the street Paul noticed that the weather was changing: rain to come, a stiff breeze from the Baltic. He crossed to the taxi-stand and saw with relief that only three people were waiting. Zverkov and Karamzin were still craftily out of sight. When, after ten dithering minutes, Paul’s taxi came, he said to the driver, ‘Ermitage.’ He felt better: the name seemed to carry connotations of sanctuary. He tore the name-tags off his bags.
The Neva was all dull metal today. As he looked up at the northern façade of Rastrelli’s baroque monster his heart sank at the prospect of having to search for Alexei Prutkov in a place so vast. The hundreds entering with him eyed his cases curiously. He smiled reassuringly at them all: he was bringing no bombs, he didn’t want to steal the Sword of Marengo. Once in the entrance-hall that was full of Soviet eyes and mouths awed at the wedding-cake ceiling, the blind salt-coloured caryatids, Paul was glad to surrender his luggage at the cloak-room. And now, with indecent prodigality, the Hermitage tried to make drunk again one who had woken sober. And empty, he noted, as well as sober: nothing in or on the belly. The miles of rooms made him giddy. His feet and eyes ached and his belly grumbled at the gilt and malachite and agate, the walls of silver velvet, the rosewood, ebony, palm and amaranth parquet, the frozen Arctic seas of marble veined and arteried like some living organism. The size of things, and no place too big for the swarms of Soviet workers on an instructive morning-off. The formidable parade of portraits of whiskered victors of 1812, the mad painted ceilings, the mosaic map of the USSR in precious stones like a giant squashed pearly king, the statues, cameos, intaglios, the mediaeval weapons. Chandeliers impended like glass-forest helicopters. Verst after verst after verst of Rembrandts, French Impressionists, Titians, a whole Prado of Spaniards—loot for the shabby dazed workers and their women. Paul’s head and feet raged. And then, in the fiftieth room (but the surface of the hideous mounds of treasure hardly scratched), Slava Bogu, the voice of one he was seeking.
‘This clock is the size and shape of a goose-egg, dig, and it’s got more than four hundred separate parts. It was made between 1765 and 1769 by the watch-maker I. Kulibin, dig, and I. Kulibin never had a lesson in his life.’
Paul limped to the periphery of a large group of American conducted tourists, nearly all of them middle-aged. There was Alexei Prutkov all right, translating with little vivacity the rolling rich commentary of a big bear of a professorial man in a very old suit.
One of the Americans said, ‘Well, whadya know?’
A young woman asked, ‘A lesson in what?’
Alexei Prutkov replied, ‘How would I know a lesson in what? You better ask him, chick,’ nudging towards the professorial man, who was now talking about a yashma vase that weighed nearly nineteen tons.
Alexei Prutkov translated dutifully and dully.
‘He’s a living doll,’ said a painted woman in early middle age, ogling.
Alexei Prutkov looked hopefully at her, and Paul could see in his face the desire to ask her about the habits and vernacular of beatniks. ‘A dreamboat.’ But it was no good; he was cut off, the hungry eyes cheated of a sign, a word, a feeler; he was part of a Russian raree-show to be recollected later in the boisterous tranquillity of Wisconsin. The group prepared to move on to fresh rococo monsters and Paul went up and caught at Alexei Prutkov’s sleeve. It was the sleeve of a thick sports jacket, overpadded at the shoulders, a sick green peppered with domino-pips of purple ink, obviously very expensive. A red tie, a yellowish sports shirt with bunchy unironed collar, worn-out sandals, the denim trousers of the night before last with thigh-pocket’s white stitching making clear blue-print lines—these completed his conformist costume. To Paul he looked very wholesome, very delectable. After a two-second frown Alexei Prutkov said, ‘Oh, it’s you, dad.’
‘I’ve got to talk,’ said Paul.
‘I’m busy right now, dad. Can’t it wait?’
‘I’m moving in with you,’ said Paul. ‘Just for a time. I’ll help with the rent. I want to move in today.’ They looked each other straight in the eyes. Alexei Prutkov’s nostrils began to twitch in a complicated metre.
‘Well,’ said Alexei Prutkov, ‘as far as that goes, dad …’ And then, quickly, ‘My pad’s very small. What’s gone wrong, then? Did the hotel give you the bum’s rush?’ The professorial voice called him loudly from a painted dynasty of Tsars and Tsarinas, blank cruel eyes trapped on a long wall. ‘’Chass,’ he called b
ack. ‘Well,’ he said to Paul, ‘you can go there. To talk about it anyway. I shan’t be finished till four, dad. Or you can wait till then. All the rent, did you say?’
‘Something like that. Look, I’ve still got two suitcases at the hotel. I’ll have to go and get those. I’ve left two more in the cloak-room here. Here,’ said Paul, handing over a flimsy buff slip. ‘Could you take care of those?’ And he winked with a great bunching of his face’s left side.
Alexei Prutkov played a tiny concertina tune on the cloakroom slip. Then, as though satisfied it was not made of rubber, he nodded, though frowning a little. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. He was called again, louder, more imperiously. ‘Ah, drop dead,’ he said, taking care not to shout. And to Paul, ‘We can talk about it anyway, dad.’ He drew out a black leatherette wallet which looked as if it had been long left in the rain and carefully stowed the cloak-room ticket. Then, as carefully, he fingered out a sort of visiting-card. ‘Here’s where it is,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to take the Metro. Can you read Russian, dad?
‘Enough,’ said Paul. ‘I’ll find it, don’t worry.’ The Cyrillic letters on the card, which seemed to have been cut out with scissors, were in duplicated purple typescript, not stationer’s print. ‘Thanks. I’ll go there as soon as I’ve had some lunch.’
‘Not before two-thirty, dad. Anna’s got the key. Anna won’t be home till two-thirty.’ He was hailed a third time; a facetious American voice joined in with ‘Alexeeeee, oh, Alexeeeeee.’
‘Right,’ said Paul. ‘Khorosho. You won’t regret it.’ And they looked each other once more straight in the eye. Alexei Prutkov ran off to resume his duties. Some of the Americans cheered.
Well, that was it, then. Paul had a long walk, finding his way out of the Hermitage, half-shutting his sore eyes against a reprise of its bludgeoning splendours. His heart beat easier. He had some difficulty in finding his way back to the Astoria. Taxis were full of men with parcels and dwarf trees in newspaper, unresponsive to his cheerful hail. Eventually he boarded a tram which, he was assured, would take him to Nevsky Prospekt. Wedging a bit of tram-ticket between right canine and false quaternion, he thought of what he would say to Zverkov and Karamzin. They would be there waiting, undoubtedly they would be there. He would invite them to lunch and tell them he was leaving Leningrad. They would be quite welcome to watch him paying his bill. Yes, in one sense leaving. In another, just arriving.
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