Centralny.’
‘Then I shall come and eat there.’
So he was making a pass. She tried to put a label to him. Paris … carried himself with unobtrusive style … accent, pure Moscow … son of some Kremlin nachalstvo? If so, why hadn’t there been a Chaika at the station to meet him?
The bus passed the arch through which Calder lived. It had occurred to her that she might glimpse him but there was no sign of him, the sidewalk outside the arch occupied by a group of tourists trooping patiently towards Red Square behind their Intourist leader.
She picked up her handbag and prepared to alight at the National Hotel corner of Manezhnaya Square.
The young man took a card from a slim wallet and handed it to her. ‘If you feel like coming along anytime ….’ She slipped the card into her wallet without looking at it. As she made her way to the exit he called after her: ‘By the way, you’ve gone past the Centralny.’
The atmosphere at the Institute closed in upon her. Furniture polish and cheap paper and the baked paintwork of the radiators. The bad breath of wasted endeavour.
Footsteps echoing, she walked past the empty, book-lined chambers to the spacious office of the Study Supervisor. Outside stood sheaves of newspapers and magazines tied with coarse string.
She began to sort them into nationalities on a trestle table in the study. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, De Telegraff, Bild, La Stampa …. As always what astonished her was not the content of the papers but their freedom to print what they pleased. Editorials actually criticising the Government. Vistas of freedom beckoned slyly through screens of newsprint.
‘But don’t close your eyes,’ she had been warned before she got the job, ‘to the decadence you will find on those pages. ‘As if she could. Corruption, child abuse, rape, racism, industrial injustice … you name it. ‘All encouraged by circulation-crazed newspapers and magazines.’
But don’t we get our fair share of most of these evils in the Soviet Union?
Treason!
The biggest pile of papers was from the United States. A skyscraper of them. Calder was in charge of that section, analysing and indexing with a team of six other American defectors.
The Study Supervisor’s phone rang. Katerina picked up the receiver, at the same time pulling out a drawer in the table. It was filled with cuttings from glossy magazines. The Study Supervisor apparently reserved the right to analyse the female anatomy of the West.
Katerina shut the drawer. She spoke into the receiver, giving the number of the Institute. ‘Katerina Ilyina speaking.’
‘My name’s Spandarian,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s about time we met.’
Although his fingernails were polished, although his hair was carefully waved and his moustache was a topiarist’s dream, although his brown eyes were soulful and his brilliantine smelled of spices, Spandarian was a gangster. Katerina sensed this instantly. He was also a born interrogator, bandit brain and veneer, the hot/cold of the third degree.
He spoke melodiously but with a strong Georgian accent, fashioning flowers from some of his phrases. ‘So, Katerina Ilyina, you want to save Soviet women. Has it ever occurred to you that they don’t want to be saved? That, like Mother Russia herself, they merely want to endure?’ He lit a yellow cigarette packed with black tobacco and blew acrid smoke across his desk.
‘That’s what the Russian male would like to think, Comrade Spandarian.’ Her defiance pleased her: although few had seen him, the ruthlessness of the shadowy mentor of the Twilight Brigade was common knowledge.
‘The Russian male? I am not a Russian, Katerina Ilyina, I am a Georgian. In Tbilisi we know how to treat women. We flatter them, court them, love them. But they know their place just the same and they are happy.’
Katerina had been to the Georgian capital once. And what Spandarian said was true. Up to a point. Women were treated extravagantly. But they were chattels just the same. Georgia would be a challenge. But first Mother Russia.
Spandarian said: ‘Russian men are pigs.’
Katerina regarded him with astonishment, then found herself saying defensively: ‘Some of the younger ones are learning; they are more considerate.’ The young man on the bus, for instance.
‘You are a true Slav, Katerina Ilyina. Already you are confounding yourself. If the young men are improving what is the point of your Cause?’
‘Only some of them, the sons of the privileged.’ Privileged! What was she saying? ‘As for the rest … goats. And as for the Cause – equality, that’s what it’s all about. Just like Communism,’ she heard herself saying. ‘How many women are there in the Politburo, Comrade Spandarian?’
He didn’t answer. Instead he picked up a light blue folder, finger and thumb feeling one corner as though he were rubbing an insect to death. He recited from it:
‘Unlawfully convening a meeting; incitement to violence; incitement to treason; hooligan behaviour; indecency in a public place; arson. That lot,’ Spandarian said mildly, ‘could put you away for the rest of your life. Or put you in front of a firing squad. Dissidents have been shot for less.’
Reeling, she queried ‘Indecency in public?’
Spandarian extracted a typewritten sheet of paper from the folder and read the exchanges with the woman in the red shawl. ‘Goloshes,’ he said. ‘Really!’
‘I can’t help what harridans in the audience say.’
‘Your friend Svetlana Rozonova wasn’t exactly reticent.’
‘You wouldn’t ….’
‘We might.’
Spandarian stood up, walked to the window and stared in the direction of the Kremlin. ‘Strange, isn’t it, that the fount of Communism should look more like the ultimate altar of religion. All those cathedrals and churches …. The contradictions of revolution. Especially on Easter Sunday.’
Hot/cold. Her courage was trickling away. ‘What do you want, Comrade Spandarian?’
The angular woman from the outer office brought them tea and biscuits. When she had gone Spandarian sat down and said in between sips of tea: ‘You’re a very patriotic girl, Katerina Ilyina.’ She wondered about Spandarian’s brand of patriotism. ‘The spirit that won the Great Patriotic War.’
Katerina nibbled a biscuit; it tasted of aniseed; she sipped lemon-sharp tea to disperse the flavour.
Spandarian went on: ‘You are very fortunate – you are in a position to help your country.’ He dunked his biscuit in his tea and bit off the soggy tip.
Warily, Katerina asked him how.
He finished his tea and biscuit, dabbed the corners of his mouth with a red silk handkerchief and told her.
She had struck up a friendship with an American defector, Robert Calder. Nothing wrong with that. In fact the friendship must have been arranged in heaven – ‘or whatever
