‘A double room,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine was instructed to book a double room here for me and my wife.’ He corrected that before it could be corrected for him. ‘My wife and myself. The man’s name was Mizinchikov.’
The girl sniffed, wiped and looked confused. She had a great number of pieces of paper on her desk, like betting slips, and she did a quick addition sum on one of them. ‘Mizinchikov?’ she frowned. Then she looked up again. ‘Yes yes yes, I think somebody here knows about that.’
‘How well you speak English,’ smiled Paul. ‘And you read it also I see.’
‘Yes? Oh yes.’ Raising a swan-neck arm high to signal to a colleague across the wide area of desks and telephones, she used the other hand to wipe her sore nose sadly. With a sudden eagerness she said, ‘Gemingway. The death of Ernest Gemingway. It was a great disgrace.’ Paul was surprised to see her eyes fill with tears. She gave him a form to write his name on. ‘All the girls here were lovers of Ernest Gemingway.’ When Paul had written his name she examined it closely. ‘Gussey,’ she said. ‘Mr Paul Gussey.’ An aitchless race. Her colleague came over, a plain pigtailed girl with utility spectacles, one whom Paul could imagine taking earnest piano lessons. ‘You have changed your name, she says,’ sniffed the snub-nosed girl. ‘It is not what she has on her list.’
‘Exactly,’ smiled Paul eagerly. ‘This is what happened——’
‘The porter will take you upstairs. It is the third floor.’ She did not want to hear. She seemed suddenly bored. Perhaps it was common for patrons to change their names between booking rooms and claiming them.
Paul followed the little man in shabby uniform to the lift. In it, going up, the two harmless suitcases at their feet, they looked at each other. Paul had seen this porter’s type before, in many countries: the small unskilled artisan who wears glasses and has a cheeky talkative face, moronic butt or sea-lawyer. He was not, reflected Paul, unlike his dead Uncle Jim, the plumber. Getting out on the third floor, they were met by the floor-concierge, a fat frowning waddling woman, fearsome, all bulges.
The porter nudged Paul privily, as to say: ‘Yon’s a reet boogger, yon is.’ Paul was given a massive key, as to the whole of Imperial Russia, and the woman said sternly:
‘Go to your room.’
It was not a bad room. The evening streamed in golden through great dusty windows, a tap dripped, an antique telephone stood on a desk scattered with hotel notepaper, the beds were roughly made. A past time seemed arrested here, as in the cabin of a ship that has made its port, having sailed into the future. Such a room might be an exhibit in some revolutionary museum (here Leyontov was arrested; here the joint manifesto was signed). Paul gave forty kopeks to the porter, who had the look of a man whom a tip would not insult, and was then left alone. He sighed, flopped on to one of the beds, washed quickly in cold water, and then prepared to go downstairs for a taxi and a drive back to the ship and poor Belinda. He opened the door and was surprised to see the concierge standing there, grim and akimbo, great peasant feet astride on the corridor carpet. ‘Go back to your room,’ she ordered.
Of course, she couldn’t really mean that peremptoriness, could she? A question of not knowing much of the language. Nuances and so on. Paul smiled, pawing his tie, collar, chin, ears. If she was perhaps, in a motherly way, dissatisfied with his toilet … He tried to get past her. She would not let him, coming closer to him, ready to be another door. ‘Please,’ smiled Paul, ‘I have rather a lot to do …’
‘To your room, go.’
‘This,’ snapped Paul, ‘is not funny.’ He tried to push her aside, using both palms. He met heavy flesh, a complication of cheap corsets. Her peasant feet didn’t budge a centimetre. And now she pushed him, using one hand, saying:
‘Your room. Go back.’
Paul blazed. Anger did not give him a chance to be puzzled. A solvent of proletarian uppishness was needed. He raised his right hand and smacked her left cheek. It did not even redden. She took no notice.
‘Back. To your room. Go.’
‘And I bloody well will,’ cried Paul. ‘And I’ll get on that bloody telephone.’ He stumbled back in to the desk. She said:
‘Good.’
Paul swore. He picked up the ancient instrument, trembling. Static crackled at him, whirring like wings, the firing of a distant six-shooter. On the dial was a segment of the Russian alphabet; he fingered a letter at random. At once he was let into the world of the dead—parrot-voices of ghosts, the Military Revolutionary Committee, perhaps, stuttering orders from Smolny. ‘Hallo,’ said Paul. ‘Allo allo.’ The ghosts stammered on and on.
‘Khorosho, khorosho,’ a kind voice was saying from the door. Two men with suits bequeathed from the time of Lenin, each with a zip-portfolio, one stocky and boxerish, the other drawn and intellectual-looking, both smiling kindly. The huge woman complained at length and loudly about Paul’s striking her on the cheek. She used the term zhestokosty several times. ‘Brutality, she means,’ smiled the drawn man. ‘She accuses you of brutal behaviour.’
‘I’ll give her brutal bloody behaviour,’ shouted Paul. ‘What I want to know is, what the bloody hell’s going on here?’
The woman waddled off down the corridor, still complaining. The two men came into the room. ‘Zverkov,’ said the drawn man. ‘And this is Karamzin. Now we shall all sit down and be comfortable.’ He spoke English with a composite accent hard to anatomize: there were shadows of Sydney in it, flashes of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a peppermill-grind of the Bronx. It was as though he had made a pilgrimage in search of an English accent. Paul rather liked his face: the many lines, the fleshy mouth, pale eyes, an Audenesque forelock. Karamzin brought chairs to the desk, humming. He was very pyknic-looking: neckless and bull-bodied, he showed in eyes and mouth a more dangerous volatility than his mate. The light from the window seemed in love with his head: it polished its nudeness and was an auricome for the stubble above the folded nape. Paul was frightened. He knew himself, after all, to be no innocent tourist. He had already committed a crime. But he took one of Karamzin’s White Sea Canal papirosi and said jauntily:
‘Spasiba, tovarishch.’
‘Ah, so you speak some Russian,’ said Zverkov. ‘But that, of course, we knew. From your letters.’ He unzipped his poor cheap brown portfolio.
‘Letters?’ said Paul. ‘I’ve written no letters in Russian.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Zverkov. ‘Oh yes indeed.’ He waved a sheaf of them humorously at Paul’s nose. Paul could see clearly Robert’s painfully printed Cyrillic (Dorogoi tovarishch—dear comrade) and, at the right, above, Robert’s address in Roman script. ‘To your friend Mizinchikov,’ said Zverkov. ‘Him you will not see, if at all, for many many many many years.’
‘It’s all perfectly simple,’ smiled Paul. The air between them was full of smoke from three papirosi, the scent of a cheap pathetic Christmas. ‘Those letters weren’t written by me. Look at the signature. See, here’s my passport. A different person altogether.’ He put his left hand into his inner pocket (Karamzin went tense, ready to draw) and produced it. (Karamzin relaxed.) Paul now realized that something unusual had been nagging him ever since leaving the Intourist counter: that girl’s failure to ask, following the normal Continental procedure of hotels, for his passport. The passport-ploy had been deliberately reserved for something more than a formality. They’d been waiting for him. Mizinchikov? ‘What’s happened to Mizinchikov?’ he asked. The two Russians were poring over his passport. Karamzin raised his head and said, in a sobbing kind of German-style English:
‘In the lavatories. It was very wrong. He sold roubles to tourists on the black market. A black market, you understand, in the vaysay or tualet. But he was caught.’
‘How many to the pound?’ asked Paul.
‘Five to the pound. Two to the American dollar. Illegal,’ said Karamzin. ‘Very illegal. So as to ruin the financial, the financial—nye znaiu slovo,’ he said impatiently to Zverkov.
‘Structure,’ said Zverkov. ‘O
r fabric. Or framework.’
‘Framework,’ said Karamzin, smile-nodding his thanks swiftly to his colleague. ‘Of the Soviet Union.’
‘I see.’ Paul was having difficulty in getting all this, along with its various implications, to settle in his mind and breed disquiet. ‘So Mizinchikov is in prison.’
‘He awaits trial,’ said Karamzin. And then, ‘Gussey,’ he said, looking, with Zverkov, into the passport. ‘That is not the name we have.’
‘The name you have,’ said Paul, ‘is the name at the foot of those letters. My friend. My friend is dead.’
They looked up with interest. ‘So,’ said Zverkov. ‘Death seems to be a hard punishment. But the number of capital crimes in England is very large.’ He asserted that; he didn’t just suggest it. ‘To die, to sleep, no more. For offences of smuggling or black-marketing or similar crimes. Mizinchikov will get some years in prison or be sent to a correction centre or a labour camp, but his crime certainly does not deserve the death penalty.’
‘My friend,’ protested Paul, ‘was no criminal.’
‘No criminal?’ said Zverkov. ‘Mizinchikov was very glad to confess everything. He saw that he had done wrong and he was sorry for it right away. Immediately. And this friend of yours had done wrong with him. One of many, perhaps all friends of yours, for what do we know about you? Smuggling capitalist goods into Soviet Russia in order to ruin the economic structure or fabric. Watches, toys, cigarette-lighters, clothes. And you say he was no criminal.’
‘Under British law,’ Paul said, ‘he was no criminal.’
‘He wished,’ said Karamzin, ‘to ruin the economic framework of the Soviet Union.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul, ‘he merely wanted to give people what they wanted. They were only too ready to take what he had to give. Your citizens are shockingly dressed.’
Karamzin did not like that. He boiled up at once, dinging his mottled fist on the desk, making the telephone leap in its cradle and the hotel notepaper languidly fly. ‘Rudeness,’ he bellowed. ‘You come here pretending to be tourists. We are too easy with you. Nyegodyay,’ he snarled. Paul did not know that word. ‘Podlyets,’ added Karamzin, his throat full of blood.
Zverkov calmed him with a long brown hand. ‘A criminal is a criminal,’ he said. ‘Your friend was obviously a born criminal type. Rudeness and bad manners we can ignore. Criminality fights at the very roots of society. But your friend will never be criminal again. And he has paid shockingly,’ he mocked, ‘for his criminality.’
‘My friend,’ said Paul loudly, ‘died of a weak heart. He was shot down by the Germans. He was exposed to bitter cold in a dinghy on the open freezing sea. The Germans,’ he said more loudly. ‘Your enemies as well as ours. You were long enough coming into the bloody war, weren’t you?’
‘We will be calm,’ said Zverkov. ‘One thing at a time.’ He nodded at Karamzin, as though Karamzin was in charge of the official tranquillizers. And indeed Karamzin, though shrugging and pouting, handed round again the coarse cigarettes with their attached cardboard holders. The two Russians crushed and bent their holders before smoking. The three of them puffed silently a space and blew up blue fumes at the little chandelier. A spider was giving an exhibition of Soviet arachnidial engineering up there: catwalks between the pendent glass rods, a fine suspension bridge. They admired silently. Then Zverkov said gently, looking down at the passport again:
‘You have brought your wife with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘She’s still on board the Isaak Brodsky. Ill. Under sedation.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I must get back to her.’
‘Is it, do you think, fair to your wife to carry on this kind of work?’ asked Zverkov.
‘What kind of work?’ said Paul. ‘My wife and I are here on a visit.’
‘Yes yes yes yes yes,’ said Zverkov with humorous weariness. ‘We are big men, all of us, not little children. Why did you try to contact Mizinchikov? You are trying to carry on where your friend left off. Let us have no foolishness and pretending. Life is very short. What do you have in those bags there?’
‘There’s a divinity that shapes our whatsits, we’re looked after, we really are, God works in a mysterious way,’ Paul sang within. ‘Open them up if you like,’ he said. ‘The customs have already examined my baggage. I don’t know what you think you’ll find, but open them up by all means.’
‘I see,’ said Zverkov. ‘You are too ready.’ He and Karamzin seemed to embark on a brief exchange of humorous proverbs. Then Karamzin said:
‘The rest of your luggage will be on board the ship.’
‘No,’ said Paul readily. ‘Not at all. On board the ship is only my wife.’ He frowned at that; that did not seem idiomatic.
‘It will be a pleasure,’ said Zverkov, ‘to run you back to the ship. We have,’ he said proudly, ‘a car outside. It is a Zis. 1959.’
‘Thank you,’ said Paul. ‘I’ll get a taxi.’ They both smiled at that, as at engaging youthful innocence. Zverkov said to Karamzin:
‘As a formality we ought to examine his baggage. Remember, he is a guest in our city. Do not make the contents too untidy.’ Karamzin sighed, stubbed out his papiros, then got up and clicked open one of the cases. Paul said hotly:
‘Look, who or what are you, anyway? You barge into my hotel bedroom without knocking, you interrogate me, you insult the memory of my dead friend, now you start examining my luggage. I have a right to know what you’re supposed to be.’
‘We can take you,’ said Karamzin, puffing as he rummaged among shirts, ‘to our headquarters. There you can be told what we are. And after that we can take you to the port to see your wife.’
‘You have,’ said Zverkov, ‘a customs declaration form showing how many pieces of baggage. Please let us see that.’
‘My wife has it,’ lied Paul. ‘I asked her to keep it in her handbag. My pockets are already stuffed with forms and traveller’s cheques and things. I tend to lose them if I carry too many of them.’
‘Well, then,’ said Zverkov, ‘we had better all go to the ship together.’
‘What exactly am I suspected of?’ asked Paul in reasonable calm. ‘What exactly am I supposed to be doing or proposing to do?’
‘Carrying on your friend’s bad work,’ said Zverkov. ‘Bringing in capitalist goods in order to sell them and thus upset the Soviet economy.’
‘But,’ said Paul, ‘I could sell anything. I could sell that pair of shoes there or those ties or that dirty shirt your friend so seems to like the colour of. It’s the selling that’s the crime, isn’t it?’
Karamzin said, ‘This is all ordinary baggage.’ He began to shut the cases petulantly.
‘Of course it’s all ordinary baggage,’ said Paul. ‘My wife and I have come to Leningrad on an ordinary visit. As I’ve been trying to tell you.’
‘And Mizinchikov?’ asked Zverkov.
‘A contact,’ said Paul. ‘A man my friend knew. My friend had asked him to book a room for himself and his wife. Then he died. So I took up the booking instead. How was I to know that Mizinchikov was a great criminal? I had understood that crime no longer existed in the Soviet Union.’
‘Yes yes yes,’ said Zverkov. ‘It is the selling that is the crime. I agree. You have spoken with logic.’ He began to nod and nod and nod. Karamzin, back in his chair, caught the nodding, like yawning. ‘Don’t sell anything,’ said Zverkov. ‘Your time is better taken up with seeing our city than with trying to sell things. There is much to see. The Hermitage, the Field of Mars, the Admiralty, the railway stations, the Decembrists’ Square, the Karpinsky Geological Museum, the Dokuchayev Soil Science Museum…. Oh,’ he cried, seemingly suddenly depressed, ‘there is a terrible amount to see.’
8
THERE WAS A TAXI-STOP ON ULITSA GERTSENA, JUST OVER THE way from the Astoria. Paul joined the queue there. It was a delicious summer evening; for some reason, though not a Catholic and knowing himself in a Godless land, Paul saw the huge sky as of our Lady’s colour, maculate but ele
gant above the shabby patient group. Perhaps it was something to do with the great family archetypes which brooded over this strange yet familiar country. Paul felt his face soften with pity at the old woman who carried dried fish and warty potatoes in a string-bag, the family-man who was taking home, smiling with excitement, a big carton marked Televideniye. A Red Army officer first frowned at Paul, then saluted grudgingly; something to do, presumably, with the smart capitalist-or-commissar clothes. Weighing down a jacket-pocket was the key of his room.
Well, they had parted very amicably, he and his two official visitors. He had even seen them off in their 1959 Zis. It was not altogether improbable that they would be waiting for him at the port, even in the cabin, but Paul did not think it very likely. A certain tired depression, very Slav, had come over both of them at the end. But there were new problems which Paul now had plenty of time to think about: how to dispose of the drilon dresses now Mizinchikov was gone; how not to be caught and made (for this was the price exacted of those apprehended selling illegal imports) to enter a Soviet spy-ring. And of course, even before he started trying to sell, there was the possibility of the confiscation of the goods on suspicion. That would be awkward. He would have let himself down in the dead eyes of Robert and the all-too-live eyes of his widow; he did not, anyway, have all that much money in traveller’s cheques, hardly enough to see Belinda and himself through the five days before their booked return to Tilbury on the Alexander Radishchev. They would just have to turn around with the Isaak Brodsky, if that ship had any spare berths. Not much of a holiday, whichever way you looked at it.
When, after about an hour, Paul thankfully climbed into a taxi, he found that the driver was not, as he’d expected, grudging and morose but lively and hospitable, as though nearing the euphoric crest of the Slav manic-depressive cycle. He was hairy, tall, and dirty-shirted, the spitten image of an out-of-work called Fred whom Paul sometimes met in a Sussex pub. On the seat beside him were scattered very many torn-open packets of Soviet cigarettes, as though he had only recently started smoking and was still trying to find out which brand he disliked least. He saw at once that Paul was a foreigner and insisted on treating him to a tour of the city. Paul didn’t want that, he wanted to get back to the ship and so kept saying, ‘Parakhod, parakhod,’ but the driver refused to understand Paul’s Russian. Paul, the driver decided, should have the foreigner’s privilege of being unintelligible. So Paul was shown the Lenin Monument in front of the Finland Station, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Cottage of Peter I (with special protective covering), the cruiser Aurora, the Summer Garden, the ornamental grille round the Summer Garden, the Hermitage, the Palace Square and Triumphal Column, the Arch of Triumph at the General Headquarters, the armoured car from which Lenin once delivered a speech, the Strelka, the Pushkin Academic Drama Theatre, the Metro and other monuments. Paul kept saying that everything was beautiful—‘Krasiv, krasiva, krasivo’—varying the ending occasionally and arbitrarily, as he was never sure of the gender of anything he was being made to admire.