The breathing was slow and measured.
‘Who’s that?’
Click.
He stared at the receiver for a moment before replacing it.
He laid his head on the pillow; above him the moulded ceiling spun like a dying top. He closed his eyes. He was playing chess with Stalin and he was losing. When Stalin called: ‘Check,’ he leaned across the board and pulled his shaggy moustache. It came off in his hand.
The next to die was a fat Italian named Bertoldi.
He died, paradoxically, at a time of hope – the thaw. Moscow rang to the music of water. Dripping from dwindling icicles, plunging down drainpipes, frothing in the gutters. Listen carefully and you could hear the accompaniment – wet snow falling thickly from rooftops and, in green-blushing parks, tentative bird-song. On the river this April day the ice was on the move and in the streets Muscovites straightened up from winter. A time of hope. But not for Alfredo Bertoldi.
Since he had come to Moscow five years ago, blown, it was said, as financier for the Red Brigade, unsuspected for years because you expected Red Brigadiers to be young and fierce and Bertoldi was neither of these things, he had mourned. For pasta. For girls on the Via Veneto who wore nothing but fur coats and high heels. For Neapolitan songs. For God, Italian style.
Hopeless lamentations when, because you were a gangster rather than a fugitive keeper of secrets however cob-webbed, you were housed in a cramped studio in the foreigners’ complex on Kutuzovsky Prospect, named after the field-marshal who sent packing another intruder, Napoleon.
Despite the lack of pasta Bertoldi perversely grew fatter on Chicken Kiev spurting with butter and black bread and assorti ice-cream which he bought even in minus 20 degrees. But it wasn’t the healthy, baritone fatness of an Italian enjoying his sustinence: it was the bloated corpulence of the compulsive eater, the worrier.
His departure from this life of regret was spectacular. A few tenants were strolling in the courtyard of the barrack-block apartment blocks where foreigners – diplomats and journalists mostly – were housed together in the interests of surveillance. It was 10.35 am. The sun had already melted the temporary skating rink, tyres hissed excitingly on Kutuzovsky, even the two militiamen posted at the gates to check visitors were smiling.
Suddenly the windows of an apartment on the fifth floor were flung open with such force that the glass shattered. And there stood Bertoldi in a scarlet dressing gown. Later some witnesses were to testify, unofficially and without any degree of certainty, that they had observed movements behind the obese Italian; others were equally convinced that Bertoldi had stood alone.
What was undisputed was the manner of his fall. He seemed to float supported by the scarlet wings of his dressing gown. There was, it was asserted, a monstrous grace about his exit. His scream lasted from the window to the ground.
Such was his bulk that when he hit the concrete he spread. Within fifteen minutes the mess was cleaned up by militia and taken away in an ambulance.
A note was found in his cramped apartment. It was written on a picture postcard of his native Turin beside the remains of his last supper.
It said: I can’t stand this fucking life anymore.
Katerina always remembered Easter that year: it changed her life.
In the afternoon of the Saturday she went with Svetlana to a meeting of the feminist movement near the pink massif of Soviet Radio and Television on Piatnitskaya Street.
The purpose of the meeting was to establish some sort of order in the crusade. And to an extent it succeeded largely due, Katerina believed, to the call of spring. The lime trees were tipped salad green, kvas vans were in the streets, cotton dresses were beginning to blossom. ‘Anything is possible,’ the breeze whispered.
In a small assembly hall – ‘Stone, this time,’ Svetlana had insisted, ‘in case of arson’ – a committee was elected, a chairman appointed. Katerina was given a place on the committee with a responsibility to teenagers; Svetlana was charged with ‘spreading the word across the length and breadth of the nation.’
‘Just because I was going out with an Aeroflot pilot, ‘Svetlana said later when they were drinking lemon tea in a steely-bright cafeteria. ‘Ah, well, it’s only one sixth of the world’s land surface – it shouldn’t take long.’
‘It’s because you work for Intourist,’ Katerina corrected her. ‘Was going out?’
‘He was too keen that one,’ Svetlana said.
Keen for what? Svetlana had never been sexually reticent. All she demanded was respect. And that, if you boiled it down, was all the movement wanted.
Beside them a crumpled-looking man was reading Pravda, starting at the bottom of a page where brevities of interest lurked and losing interest when he reached the exhortations to greater productivity and recriminations about absenteeism. The coffee machine behind the stainless steel counter hissed like a steam engine.
‘He wanted to get married,’ Svetlana explained when the hissing subsided. ‘Can you imagine? Marrying a Russian is bad enough but a pilot … girls in Leningrad, Kiev and Archangel and the faithful wife waiting in Moscow to stir his borsch while he kicks off his shoes in front of the television. No thanks. Besides he was a goat.’
By which, Katerina assumed, she meant he was a selfish lover. The old school. The younger generation were more considerate, some of them.
‘So who’s taken his place?’ Katerina asked.
‘An architect. Lots of blat. Special pass for the third floor of GUM, dollars for the Beryozka shops, a Volga, hi-fi, video. He tells me he’s got a dacha in the country too.’
‘Obviously a very good Communist,’ Katerina remarked.
The crumpled-looking man looked up from his newspaper and smiled.
‘And he’s not bad-looking,’ Svetlana said. She sipped her tea. ‘Not exactly good-looking.’ The coffee machine hissed. ‘But architecturally sound.’
‘Does he know you’re a defender of women’s rights?’
‘No, he wouldn’t like that at all,’ Svetlana said decisively. She searched in the pockets of her coat for cigarettes; to Katerina the coat looked suspiciously like part of an Aeroflot stewardess’s uniform. ‘And you, what have you been up to pussycat?’
Katerina wanted to tell her that Calder was taking her to midnight mass but she checked herself. The crumpled-looking man looked benign enough but you could never tell. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘The Institute’s boring as ever. It reminds me of a literary treadmill. No one ever gets anywhere, they just keep turning pages.’
The crumpled-looking man folded his newspaper. He said: ‘Enjoy yourselves while you’re still young,’ and was gone.
Pushing
