‘Ah,’ said Zverkov unexpectedly, ‘thou art translated.’ He was evidently doing his best to look suave and unruffled.
‘I’m not so tidy as I was,’ admitted Paul. ‘I’ve become a bit more proletarian-looking.’
‘A criminal,’ said Karamzin, ‘you look like what you are.’ He was red, puffed, dangerous. Zverkov nudged him into silence but no show of impassivity.
‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Paul. ‘In fact, I’ve done something rather generous. I expect a news-item in Pravda tomorrow, if little Yuri will make room, that is. I’ve done a lot for Anglo-Soviet relations.’
‘We know all about your intentions,’ said Zverkov. ‘It is for your intentions we are taking you in.’
‘You know as well as I do,’ smiled Paul, ‘that you can’t do that. Religion is different from law.’
‘Here,’ said Karamzin darkly, ‘we have no religion.’
‘We can discuss all that later,’ said Zverkov. ‘At the moment there are plenty of charges for you to face. First of all, let me see your passport.’
‘That’s in my jacket,’ said Paul, ‘and my jacket’s in a suitcase at the Metro. I left it in the ticket-office with a very nice man.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Zverkov with a little show of happiness. ‘A foreigner going around with no papers of identification. And then there is shouting in the street and causing a disturbance. And then—oh, there are many things. There is material for a good long report.’ Some people stood around still, gaping, trying to sort out the unshaven wonder that was Paul. Karamzin shooed them away, roughly. ‘The car’s over there,’ said Zverkov, and, in a creditable imitation of a film Highway Patrol chief, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Why don’t we do this more often?’ Paul hummed as they led him across the road. ‘Just what we’re …’
‘Our Zis,’ said Zverkov proudly. ‘At last we are taking you for a ride.’
As they drove off, Paul said to Karamzin, who was sitting at the back with him, ‘I should really have reserved that white dress for the woman whose daughter’s getting married. I take it she will be a virgin.’
Karamzin growled and dealt him a little thump in the ribs. ‘All our women …’ he started to say, but thought better of it. There are limits even to patriotism.
6
PAUL COULDN’T MANAGE THE TOUGH BREAD OF THE OPEN sandwiches, his denture being loose (the bit of match he had wedged in hastily had either been swallowed or fallen out) and his gum sore, but he ate the tongues of smoked salmon and rounds of fatty sausage and drank glass after glass of warm neat tea. Zverkov looked on indulgently, Karamzin seemed resentful of such appetite in one who should soon be suffering. The three of them sat round a solid old-fashioned desk in a cosy room that was aromatic of essential Russia (an Edwardian smell, really, to match the furniture: tobacco, spirits, port-type wine, fried butter, leather, metal polish). There was a calendar which announced the month as Yul, this having pleasantly Christmassy connotations. The desk was Zverkov’s, and it was tidy. Under glass were typed standing orders, a list of personnel and their salaries, and what looked like a printed message of encouragement, full of exclamation marks, from some official very high up. The chairs were comfortable. On the walls were some discouraging views of Soviet prisons and a football group with a much younger Zverkov holding the ball.
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘that’s really saved my life, it has really.’ He put down his empty glass, sighing. Zverkov smiled and said:
‘You are very optimistic in the West, that must be admitted. You look forward to a future.’
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘not a future. At least not in Europe. America’s different, of course, but America’s really only a kind of Russia. You’ve no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It’s like having a totally efficient contraceptive.’
‘Or like being impotent,’ said Zverkov. Paul blushed. ‘Now,’ said Zverkov, ‘if you are thoroughly refreshed …’
‘A cigarette, please,’ said Paul. ‘Not a papiros, if you don’t mind.’
Grumbling quietly like a dog, Karamzin removed from his pockets several battered packets, all nearly empty. He offered Paul, with an ill grace, one with a jockey on, called Derby. Paul thanked, accepted a light from Zverkov, and coughed up smoke bitterly.
‘You’re not healthy, are you?’ said Zverkov sympathetically. ‘You don’t look at all well.’
‘Don’t blame that on Leningrad,’ said Paul, when the fit was spent. ‘I’ve enjoyed myself here. It’s been quite an experience. I mean that sincerely.’ Karamzin, ever the sceptic, grunted.
‘We are not going to doubt your intelligence,’ said Zverkov, sharpening a pencil in a little machine. ‘You know what we want. You know that there is no point in wasting each other’s time. Tell us what we want to know and we will say no more about your little transgressions.’
‘I know nothing,’ said Paul. He held out his hands to show they were empty; his sleeves were already rolled up and showed thin forearms. ‘We know no more than the Government and the papers tell us. You know as much as we do. The Daily Worker is on sale here. It is free to tell everything. It is in no wise muzzled.’
Zverkov sighed. ‘Don’t pretend,’ he said, ‘that you don’t know what I’m talking about. Espionage, NATO, the Polaris submarines in Holy Loch—we know all about those things. In any case, those are not the concern of this department. What we want to know about is social, not military. You came to the Soviet Union intending to sell twenty dozen dresses of synthetic fabric. We start from there …’
‘You got the number right,’ said Paul admiringly. ‘That would be little Alex, I suppose. Does little Alex give you very much help?’
Zverkov waved him away, along with the Derby tobacco-smoke. ‘Prutkov is unreliable,’ he said, ‘on the whole. He comes with his little piece of information and gets a rouble or two. His bits of information are usually arithmetically right. One can say no more. To revert. You bring in these dresses to sell. It has been done before. It will be done again. But there is something bigger—there is some organization, somebody behind all this. You are little, small, inconsiderable, a mere pawn in a big chess-game. We will win the game,’ promised Zverkov. ‘Make no mistake about that. We always win at games of chess. But the game has to be played before it is won. There are openings, ploys, sacrifices …’ Paul could see that the metaphor was about to take over. ‘The tournament at your Hastings in England. My brother was champion one year. Did you know that?’
Karamzin growled, ‘The English have not the chess mind.’
‘Very well,’ said Zverkov. ‘To put all cards on the table, we have here a matter of more than a few dozen of synthetic chemical dresses for foolish women. There are more weighty things. I will give you an example.’ He opened a drawer and rummaged in it. Karamzin was obviously impatient; he looked at Paul hungrily as though anxious to get down to the torture part of the interrogation. ‘Here it is,’ said Zverkov, and he handed to Paul a very shabbily bound little book with no title on spine or cover. ‘Open it,’ urged Zverkov. ‘Look inside.’ Paul looked and saw twenty or so pages of very fair pornography, variations on the Laocoön theme though with more sexes, greater tortuosity and no snake. A snake would have been supererogatory: every man his own. ‘Well,’ said Zverkov, ‘what are your views on that?’
‘Too diagrammatic,’ said Paul. ‘Too sculptural. The essence of good pornography is depth—sumptuous shadows and that sort of thing. I have some very fine examples in my shop. Odd bits of erotica turn up at book sales, you know, in bundles of sermons and other works of piety.’
Karamzin leaned forward hotly. ‘So you admit it?’ he said. ‘You admit you bring such books here?’
Paul ignored that. ‘Stick labels on these figures,’ he said, ‘nun, priest, choirboy, that sort of thing, and you could put them in one of your anti-clerical museums.’ He handed the book back.
Zverkov tapped his finger-tips on the desk-top and looked gloomily at Paul. ‘There a
re agencies of corruption at work,’ he said. ‘I think I have chosen the right phrase. This is nothing, your synthetic dresses are nothing. But when I say that this thing of the synthetic dresses is just part of a big big conspiracy, and that the sea-shore is made of little little bits of sand … And also the small corruptions lead to the big ones. Drugs,’ he said, ‘narcotics. Cocaine and opium. Morphine.’
‘Here?’ asked Paul. ‘Opium for the people of Soviet Russia?’
‘They can be hidden in linings and hems,’ growled Karamzin. ‘Cocaine can be sewed into clothes.’
‘Not into those drilon dresses,’ said Paul. ‘They don’t have hems and linings. That’s supposed to be one of their great beauties. You can shorten them just by cutting with a pair of scissors.’ He turned back to Zverkov. ‘I don’t see all this about corruption,’ he said. ‘I thought corruption was only possible in a society like ours.’
Zverkov let out a large unexpected cry of agony which made the school-pens rattle in their glass stand. ‘Ah, you don’t know, you don’t know human nature,’ he bawled. Quieter, he added, ‘There is a kind of, a kind of …’ He cast about with his hands for the word.
‘Original sin?’ suggested Paul.
‘That might do,’ said Zverkov, mumbling. ‘Prirozhdyonnuiy grekh,’ he translated for puzzled Karamzin.
‘Aaaaah,’ said Karamzin, nodding. For the first time he gave Paul a scowl of grudging admiration. He turned it off at once, like testing a torch battery.
‘Eventually the opposites merge,’ said Paul dreamily. ‘In different ways our societies move towards the same goal—the creation of a new kind of man who shall be sinless. The free-enterprise society sooner or later goes in for value-judgments. It is wrong, we feel, for a fifteen-year-old singer of popular songs to earn in a week more than many of us can earn in a year. But that’s the essence of a free economy. And so the workers go on strike because hard work seems futile.’
‘Here,’ said Zverkov, ‘that would not be possible, any of it.’
‘Quite,’ said Paul. ‘Both systems lead to the same value-judgments.’
Karamzin dinged his fist on the desk-edge. ‘This is all talk about nothing,’ he shouted. ‘He is not here to talk. He is here to tell us who is behind all the smuggling and the narcotics and the dirty books.’
‘You are right,’ sighed Zverkov. ‘All we ask,’ he said kindly to Paul, ‘is who it is who sent you and sent your friend before you to corrupt our people. Who it is who is in charge of everything. That is all,’ he said simply. ‘We ask nothing more.’
Paul shook his head sadly. ‘I’d like nothing better than to help,’ he said. ‘I admit that I came here with the intention of selling drilon dresses to your citizens. I saw nothing wrong in that. If I had the goods and people wanted the goods and had the money to buy the goods …’ He made a Levantine trader’s grimace with face, hands, shoulders. ‘I just don’t see the harm.’
‘Would you,’ said Zverkov eagerly, ‘now like to sign a statement to that effect?’
‘To the effect that I proposed doing that thing?’ said Paul. ‘No. Unfulfilled intentions are God’s concern only.’ He smiled. ‘You’re terrible people for God, aren’t you? You like to believe that one omnipotent being only is responsible for a multitude of little corruptions. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. A free society hasn’t much time for God. We leave God to Holy Russia. Thou art Lenin, and upon this grad I shall build my——’
There was a knock at the door. Karamzin bellowed ‘Da!’, a great cry of affirmation, as though it were God Himself about to enter. But a spotty youth in uniform came in, in Cossack boots that seemed made of cardboard, carrying Paul’s harmless Metro-deposited suitcase.
‘So,’ said Zverkov, taking it.
‘You’ll find nothing in there,’ said Paul.
Karamzin told the youth to take out the food-tray and bring in more tea. The youth parodied a salute, making the tray in the other hand do a kind of saber-rattle, then went out. Encouraged, Karamzin now reached over, took out Paul’s sports jacket and searched the pockets. ‘Your passport,’ he said, and flicked over the stiff pages. He looked suspiciously at the evidence of travel. ‘Rome,’ he said. ‘France. Western Germany. You ask us to believe that all this was tourism?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Paul. ‘One doesn’t try to corrupt the already corrupted.’
‘Ah,’ said Zverkov, examining a stiff piece of card that Paul couldn’t for the life of him remember. ‘Angleruss, Angleruss. A dinner at the Evropa Hotel. Colonel D. Y. Efimov is cordially invited.’ Paul remembered: the old Doc, Madox. ‘And what,’ asked Zverkov, his voice thickening as though blood were being stirred into it, ‘are you doing with an invitation cordially extended to Colonel Efimov?’
‘It’s rather a long story,’ sighed Paul, ‘but it’s all really quite harmless, really.’
‘I don’t call it harmless,’ said Zverkov, ‘when you pretend to be Colonel Efimov. I see everything now,’ he added. ‘You give us a good lunch and say you are leaving Russia and then you go round the city pretending to be Colonel Efimov.’
‘Do I look as though I could be taken for Colonel Efimov?’ asked Paul; ‘whoever Colonel Efimov is.’
‘Colonel Efimov,’ said Karamzin, and he pointed at Paul. ‘Colonel Efimov,’ he repeated. His stomach began to throb like an engine with the beginnings of laughter; his whole upper body joined in the dance; finally lights went on in his face and he openly, with a show of back-fillings that Paul hadn’t previously seen, let loose curiously high peals of mirth, almost falsetto. ‘Colonel Efimov,’ he pointed. ‘Colonel …’ It was hard to get the name out. Zverkov smiled; the smile broadened to cracking-point; then he was adding a bourdon of hahaha to his colleague’s hehehe. It was a terrible sound, that secret-police laughter.
‘Who is this Efimov?’ asked Paul crossly. There was a knock on the door; both Karamzin and Zverkov ignored it; it was repeated. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ cried Paul.
‘Efi …’ pointed Karamzin, helpless, shaking. The spotty young man came in with a tray of tea. This, for some reason, seemed to be Karamzin’s last straw. His neck-arteries looked dangerously distended; he was wine-coloured; he coughlaughchoked. Zverkov’s laughter was more controlled but still very loud. The spotty lad Cossack-booted towards the desk with the tea-tray. As the tray approached Karamzin, Karamzin—shaken, melting, twitching (‘Efim …’)—could not resist a high kick at it. His neat shining boot engaged the tray’s flipside with a rattle of fairy thunder, and the tea-glasses went flying and spattering. The young policeman did not know what to do. He stood helpless, trying to smile, while tilting his tray from side to side to achieve an equilibrium and stop an overflow, the tray being a tepid dark amber lake with foundered glasses. But Paul had a lapful and the breast of his shirt was warmly soaked. He was angry. Standing up, he shook and wrung tea from his trousers.