On Green Dolphin Street

  In the middle of the morning a chambermaid with a metal bucket and a mop paid them a brief visit, seldom allowing her sullen gaze to stray from Charlie’s prone figure on the bed. At noon Mary went downstairs again to bring up some food to the room, but again Charlie refused to eat it. She looked out of the window at the dim light over the city and wished the day would pass more quickly; there was nothing for her to do but sit in silence with him. The friendly wives who might have kept her company had clearly been deterred by Charlie’s manner; she longed to go outside, but did not want to leave Charlie on his own. In the early afternoon there was another knock at the door, and this time it was Dixon Keslake, the Embassy doctor.

  An ascetic-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses and an English pinstripe suit, he sat on the edge of the bed and checked Charlie’s blood pressure. As the cuff inflated, he said, “How did he sleep?”

  “Quite well, I think,” said Mary. Charlie nodded dumb assent.

  “You can leave us for a moment or two, Mrs. van der Linden,” said the doctor. “If you’d just like to wait in the other room.”

  Mary looked out of the window. The day seemed to be closing down already, ebbing away before it had really dawned. The bedroom door opened a few minutes later and the doctor emerged.

  “Well, everything appears to be all right,” he said. “He’s obviously pretty stunned from the medication, but that’s to be expected.”

  “Yes, but what exactly is the matter with him? He was almost … suicidal last night.”

  Keslake coughed as he put his stethoscope back in his bag. “It’s difficult to be certain. He’s had, or is having, some sort of breakdown. I suspect that some of his symptoms may be caused by excessive alcohol. A kind of delirium. But it’s impossible to be sure. I also think that the unhealthy atmosphere of Moscow has contributed. He feels hunted. I think he feels unsafe and will be an awful lot better when you get him home. That’s not unusual, even among healthy people. The Moscow Twitch.”

  “How long before he’s back to normal?”

  “I’m not sure he’ll ever be exactly the same. He’ll need psychiatric treatment to begin with, perhaps as an inpatient. Then he’ll need to be treated for alcoholism. There may be liver damage as well. To be honest, Mrs. van der Linden, I doubt whether he will ever resume the life he had in Washington. But will that be a loss? After all, it did him no good. It drove him to this … condition.”

  Mary bit her lip. “And what can I do now?”

  “You must try to make him eat something. Soup at the very least. If he won’t eat the food here, and I can’t say I blame him, you must go and buy something. Go to one of the hard-currency shops, get something he really likes. Tempt him.”

  “I can’t remember where the nearest foreigners’ shop is.”

  Dr. Keslake took her to the window and pointed. “Walk along beside the river, then cross there at Borodinsky Bridge. Look. You can just see the bridge there, then that takes you up to Arbat Street, past that giant building, the one that looks like this hotel, which is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” In the absence of any maps, he gave her detailed directions. “You do have some dollars, do you?” he said.

  Mary nodded. “Yes. But is it safe to leave him?”

  “I’ve given him a little injection which will make him sleep for a couple of hours at least. Take the blue pills with you. I’ve confiscated all his others.”

  “And what about … You know. The Russians.”

  Dr. Keslake smiled. “I don’t think anyone’s going to come calling, and we’ve got our chap across the corridor. I think your poor husband has already compromised himself, Mrs. van der Linden. There’s nothing more that any third party could do. The priority is not to allow the gentlemen of the press to get wind of it. Relations are a little strained at the moment. And do remember the microphones, won’t you? I’m sure Mike Winter-burn mentioned them.”

  Mary nodded and Keslake held out his hand. “I’ll call again at midday tomorrow to make sure you’re all right to travel. I’ll bring something nice to eat from the commissary. Try not to worry. Your husband is very unwell, but we reached him before it was too late. It will need a lot of care and a lot of patience, but we are in time.”

  When she was sure Charlie was peacefully asleep, Mary left a note explaining that she would be back shortly, took her coat and scarf and walked down the passageway to the lift. In a mere five minutes she was down in the crepuscular lobby of the Ukraina, and a few moments later she was out in the cold world beyond.

  It was snowing lightly, but the temperature did not seem much worse than on a severe winter’s day in England; then, as she descended to the river embankment, out of the shelter of the huge building, she felt the cut of the wind. She wrapped her scarf round her head and ears, then quickly thrust her freezing fingers back into her coat pockets.

  Her thoughts were on the moment: how long Charlie might sleep, what food she might find to tempt him, the route to the shop described by Keslake; but as she neared the bottom of the Borodinsky Bridge she felt a shudder going down her spine that was more than the wind driving through the woolen coat. Someone was following her.

  She could hear no footsteps, she could see no figure from the corner of her eye, which was as far as she dared to turn her head; yet she was aware that eyes were on her, assessing her.

  On the bridge she paused and looked down for a long time into the water.

  Paralyzed by self-consciousness, she listened for steps or breathing. They had warned her it would happen. She looked back toward the Ukraina, its awful bulk, with the upper floors stepped in a little as they reached the triumphalist peak. She tried to figure out which was Charlie’s room; to see behind which lit window her life might be for ever changing.

  She moved on briskly, almost trotting in her need to keep warm, as she passed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on her right. She could bring herself to do no more than glance at the hundreds of identical windows, behind which the machine of state Communism—its officials working on Romania or Hungary, making their plans for Poland and Czechoslovakia—was clanking in the dusk, as she hurried past and entered the elegant stretch of Arbat Street. She looked into the shop windows, thinking there might be something she could buy with the rubles Winterburn had given her that would save her a longer walk. It was difficult to tell what each shop was meant to have, since none had advertising or trade names, only a generic identification that she could not read. One room was more brightly lit than the others, and she could see a woman in a white apron, which suggested to her the possibility of food. She went in and looked round; the woman scowled at her from behind a counter, following Mary’s gaze as it traveled down the long wooden shelves, from floor to ceiling, on every wall, that held nothing. By the till was a single jar of pickled cucumbers, and Mary backed out, smiling her apologies, into the street.

  The light was almost gone from the day, drained down into the cold paving slabs beneath the soles of her mother’s boots. The sensation of being followed returned at once, and with it came again a sense of objectivity about herself. She remembered standing in the bathroom of her New York hotel room, rolling on mascara before she took the subway down to Frank’s apartment on that eventful afternoon. She had gazed at herself in the mirror and struggled for self-awareness: her brown eyes had stared back, candid and amoral, indicating only careless human atoms in their agitated moment.

  Now, beneath the totalitarian gaze of her unknown pursuer, her muscles braced and locked against the cold, her sense of her self was restored to her: mother, daughter, wife—a person grafted by a million social fibers to the lives of those around her. Her nature and her temperament, the energy of love that she had poured into making not just the flesh of her children but their expectations and their apprehension of the world with all its bitter joy and contradictions—all these aspects of what she was became clear again to her.

  She stood outside herself: she walked beside her KGB pursuer, her ardent shadow, and together they looked at the
figure that she made. Small Western woman, wearing American clothes; alone; foolishly without gloves; of young middle age; mother and wife; deeply preoccupied. She felt a sudden, lifting movement in her soul, a tide of pure compassion for her plight. To be able to look at herself for a moment with the same disinterested scrutiny that she would give another human being was a liberation from the tunnel of her passion. For a few moments she walked without feeling the ground beneath her feet; she saw herself in a true perspective, as though God loved her.

  At the end of Arbat Street she went past the Praga Hotel, where she remembered dining with Charlie and some friends one night. She had eaten sturgeon, a mixture of insipid flesh and sharp bones, served in a circle with its pointed snout forced through its tail. She was now on what she remembered as the inner ring road, one of two concentric routes about the city, yet she also seemed to be heading toward the Kremlin. This was wrong, she knew; but which way was she supposed to go?

  As she paused again, the relief she had been feeling gave way to fear. As she had seen herself for what she was, her duties had become clear. There was no longer any question in her mind what she would have to do: she would rededicate herself to her husband’s well-being, and to that of her children. It was clear and it was good. Yet this future scared her because it had a simple consequence: the end of America. It would entail a life in which she would have to forsake the only feeling that had made her able to transcend the limits of her existence.

  She had walked on, lost in her returning troubles, afraid to admit she no longer knew where she was going. Her hands were now so cold that she began to think about frostbite; it had happened once to someone they knew, a journalist, who had lost part of his ear. She must find gloves, she thought, and since she could not remember where the hard-currency shop was supposed to be the only answer was to go to GUM, the big department store behind Red Square. Everyone knew GUM; and although she would have to wait and although they would be of poor quality, there was at least a chance that they would have some.

  Navigating by the Kremlin’s castle walls, she had looped behind Red Square and found herself in a narrow passage that ran off Nikolskaya Street. It was hard to make her way when she could not read the street signs; the elementary Greek her father had taught her at the age of twelve was some help with the Cyrillic letters, but she was beginning to feel tired as well as deeply uneasy about the persistence of her follower. What if he should take her and bundle her into a car?

  The daylight was nearly finished in the street; the last of the ocher, powder-blue and pistachio colors on the nineteenth-century stucco was fading to black. Down alleyways Mary glimpsed secretive courtyards; there were outsize tin drainpipes to deal with snow from the roofs, and their huge mouths were stuck with icicles; the half-basement windows were furred with grime and soot. Her cheeks were burning and her eyes were watering in the wind when she at last caught sight of the welcome, block-sized bulk of GUM.

  Inside it was warm, heavy with the airless press of unwashed bodies. Unable to ask for what she wanted, Mary searched back and forth, retraced her steps, went upstairs, down, and up again, in such a rapid and apparently random manner that it occurred to her that she might well lose her shadow. There were no gloves to be had, however; not for rubles or dollars or for any number of hours standing in a line. “Nyet,” said the woman behind the counter when Mary eventually reached it and pointed to the gloved hands of the next customer. “Nyet”; and even she knew what that meant. There was nothing in the food department with which she could tempt Charlie; he did not care for pickled cabbage or rye bread. It occurred to her that she might ask the Praga Hotel if they would let her take away a meal of chicken and rice, but it would be cold by the time she got it back to the Ukraina. She was reluctant to leave the aromatic fug of the big store, where at least the feeling had returned to her fingers, but she could not risk leaving Charlie for too long.

  There were footsteps behind her again on the street. Be careful, Mary … For Christ’s sake, be careful. Frank’s words came back to her, and brought with them an idea. She could go and see his colleague in Sadova Samotechnaya; he might let her have some food and might also lend her some gloves. Sad Sam was easy to find, she remembered. It was on the outer ring, and all you needed to do was go up Petrovka Street, past the Bolshoi on your left, keep going straight for about ten minutes and you were there. It would be easier to call at the British Embassy on the other side of the river, but she did not want to go there; she did not want to be another “loose cannon,” or whatever the pompous term was they had used about Charlie. They did not know what glories had been his, what death-defying fire he had had. “Then, blow me down, the little wife turns up on our doorstep without even a pair of gloves. Can you imagine?” She could hear the cultured, ironic tones of Michael Winterburn as he relished the anecdote. In any event, she wanted to see someone who knew Frank, an American who would give her American drinks and to whom she could say Frank’s name as often as she liked under the guise of making polite conversation about the only thing they had in common.

  She easily found the Metropol hotel, with its art nouveau façade and lobby full of KGB prostitutes, and, close by, the start of Petrovka Street. She felt vindicated, as though this proved her plan was sound. But she was very cold and, as the large blocks of Petrovka went slowly past, she became convinced that the footsteps were coming closer.

  Thoughts of Frank, and of Charlie, began to fade from her mind; she had no energy left for anything but her own survival. Periodically she took her hands from her coat pockets and blew on them, but the warming effect of her breath was lost to the cold of the air. Sad Sam was more than ten minutes up Petrovka; it was much more, she discovered, when at last she came to a junction, but discovered it was only the inner, not the outer, ring road.

  Mary’s courage began to fail. She saw no taxis and would in any case have been too frightened to get into one. The cold had frozen her ability to think; even her mental energy was now required to keep her warm, as she pushed on blindly, increasingly fearful of the tap on the shoulder, the strong arm around her waist as the black Volga drew up alongside, leaking fumes from its exhaust, its doors held open from inside.

  At the junction of the outer ring, she faltered. Was it left or right? This she could not afford to get wrong. She needed one last effort, and she prayed for the energy to make it. Then, on the other side of the road, and to her right, she saw the drab but familiar view they had had from the front window of their apartment. She hurried on and turned up the narrow street to Sadova Samotechnaya, shivering with relief. She stopped at the guard post and gave the uniformed policeman the name of the paper and its correspondent. After two telephone calls, he gestured her through, watching her back with heavy eyes as he reached again for the receiver.

  Mary pushed open the door at the corner of the block and found herself in a small wooden entrance box; another door led into a dingy hall with a stone floor and a caged elevator. A woman of about her age was coming down the stairs; she turned out to be English and, in response to Mary’s request, directed her to the fourth floor.

  She knew better by now than to wait for the lift and ran up the tenement steps instead, arriving breathless and close to collapse. The door was opened by a plump American in spectacles with a cigarette between his fingers and a pen clenched between his teeth.

  “Mr. Sheppard?”

  “Yep.”

  “My name’s Mary van der Linden. I’m a friend of a colleague of yours, Frank Renzo.” She paused. “It’s a bit of a long story.”

  “Come on in,” said Deke Sheppard. “Take your boots off. Here are some slippers.”

  He left her in a small, untidy sitting room with piles of books and newspapers on the floor; Mary found a radiator and put her frozen hands against its ribs.

  “Right,” said Sheppard, coming back into the room. “I’ve told my secretary to hold any calls—not that anyone gets through much on the Moscow phone system. It’s good to have a visitor. You from
London?”

  Mary explained her situation, and Sheppard nodded sympathetically. She did not explain the nature of Charlie’s illness, but stressed that he must be made to eat and wondered if perhaps she could buy some food from him.

  Sheppard smiled. “Keep your dollars. You’re a friend of Frank’s, that’s good enough for me. Come and take a look in the kitchen, see if there’s anything that takes your fancy.”

  In a primitive square room, he opened various store cupboards. “I get all this stuff from the Embassy, but I eat out most days. Tell me about that son of a bitch Renzo. What trouble’s he in now? I heard they’re sending him to Washington.” Sheppard had a big, phlegmy laugh.

  Frank was coming to live in her hometown at the moment she was leaving: the reminder came at a bad moment for Mary, and she struggled for a moment to compose herself among the cans of beans and jars of American preserves.

  “He’s doing fine. Now I suppose what I’d really like is some soup, but the trouble is, it’ll be cold by the time I get it back.”

  “Listen, lady, this is the twentieth century. Even here in Moscow. Ever hear of a vacuum flask? What’s he like? Campbell’s cream of chicken?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Now where’s that can opener?”

  They chatted about Frank while Sheppard made up what he called a Marshall Aid package: a flask of hot chicken soup, some sesame-seed bagels with Skippy peanut butter, a small box of Oreo cookies, two cans of tuna in oil with a spare can opener thrown in, some butter wrapped in greaseproof paper, a half loaf of whole wheat bread, a tub of imported coleslaw, some Stolichnaya vodka, a packet of Fritos corn chips, some local cherry jam, half a dozen tangerines and a large glass jar of beluga caviar.