‘You can try,’ Kirov answered. But he didn’t believe it. He thought of his father. In all the changes and betrayals — Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria — he had never changed himself. He was always a policeman.
The tray still lay in front of the American. It held two empty glasses and a soup bowl surrounded by spills. The third glass held snake venom; Craig showed no sign of drinking it. Kirov wondered what the effect was. Perhaps it wasn’t poisonous in the gut, as long as it didn’t enter the bloodstream. With his background Craig would know. Heltai too, who had made a living murdering with poison.
‘You can’t murder change,’ he said.
Craig laughed. It was an unearthly and uncontrolled laughter. His body shook with it; his eyes glittered moistly; his face shone with sweat; his hand trembled on the knife. Whether the other man was drunk, drugged or insane, Kirov had never seen such a wild display of suppressed violence and malice or experienced a personality so terrifying and destructive, so that for a moment he was paralysed by it and could hear only that Craig was yelling at him: ‘You don’t know Frank! Frank can do it — you hear me, Peter?’
And at that point Kirov understood. Heltai could murder change. But he had no time to consider the point because, as the other man’s hand wavered with the knife, Nadia Mazurova swept his arm away and, her face a mask of terror, screamed, ‘Help me, Petya!’
For a second all three men were frozen, their eyes locked on the woman. She was falling away from them, her face shut with pain, her hands pressed to her side to stem the blood that leaked through her fingers. Pathetic Harry Korn leapt to his feet with his own fat version of terror hanging like a leech from his sweating skin. Then he recoiled as Craig struck out crazily with the knife and the flimsy table upturned.
Kirov grabbed a chair and flung it in Craig’s direction. The American side-stepped and the chair went crashing into the stack of cages. The stack tumbled over, the catches on some of the cages burst and the snakes spilled onto the floor. Craig stooped and seized one of the animals behind the head before it could recover. He lifted it triumphantly into the air and threw it at Kirov. The snake’s dry scales whipped across Kirov’s face and the reptile fell somewhere behind him.
A bedlam roar went up from the crowd. Harry Korn was dancing and stamping as if putting out a fire. The room seemed to be full of Chinese — the skinny kid, the two old people, the stallholder — running about with sticks and chairs and yelling their heads off. Nadia was on the floor somewhere where she had fallen. Kirov could see them all, but between himself and the American there seemed to be a cone of stillness.
About Craig there was now an eerie calm. He had got hold of another of the dazed reptiles. It was gripped firmly and held in an outstretched hand with the jewelled eyes pointed at Kirov and its long body thrashing rhythmically. ‘Come and get it,’ he was saying but only with his lips; no sound came out. In his other hand the knife, smeared and bloody, flickered like the snake’s tongue. Craig came forward and Kirov retreated before him, his feet feeling their way through the debris. The floor seemed alive with skittering snakes.
Step by step they crossed the room.
And then, slowly, Craig’s mouth opened — a big soundless hole — and his pace faltered and his eyes started from their sockets. The features of that great leonine head locked themselves rigid in a paroxysm of agony and with every step that he advanced he seemed to become smaller until suddenly he tumbled and pitched forward onto the ground. Then he was weeping, ‘Help me, Peter — I’ve been bitten.’ A snake writhed from underneath him.
They stepped from the shambles of the eating house into the lane with its shadows and lanterns and its smells of spice and cooking. As Harry Korn had said, they were invisible to the Chinese. The whores and the hawkers, the snake butchers and the pedlars opened a path for them, the tall Round-Eye holding up the frail woman in the bloodied dress and, behind them, the bobbing fat man. A voice could still be heard crying faintly, ‘Help me, Peter,’ and in the eating house a skinny kid, two old people and a youth in T-shirt and denims were standing around a lying figure, counting money and righting the fallen chairs.
They reached the end of the lane. Now there was traffic and lights to break the tropical darkness. Across the road the Lungshan Temple lay in shadow and smouldering colour. They walked in no particular direction, the man with his arm around the woman holding her upright and close to him as if there were a bond of tenderness between them. The fat man called plaintively, ‘What’s it all about? What were Craig and Heltai up to? A conspiracy, yes? To do what? Tell me, for Christ’s sake!’ He stopped and breathlessly took a rag from his pocket to mop his face. He yelled after the departing figures, ‘What was all that stuff about murdering change? Who’s going to be murdered?’ His final words were, ‘Why Jewish? At least tell me that!’
Among the street-front stores and go-downs, a colourful bazaar sold electrical goods and a crowd stood outside it, blocking the pavement. Kirov and the woman struggled to make headway through the clamouring people. A child tugged at his sleeve and pointed to the interior of the store where a television was playing its picture into the night.
The picture was a still shot of Mikhail Gorbachev standing calmly in an entourage of wary security men at some airport or other. Close by him was a second man, this one in late middle age, with thin red hair and eyes that appeared to have neither brows nor lashes.
The commentator was talking with furious urgency. But his words were in Chinese.
READERS’ NOTES
Anti-Soviet Activities was the second of two linked novels (the other being Farewell to Russia) set in the period of transition as the Soviet Union moved towards its collapse. It was written in the late 1980s and reflected the uncertainty of that process: a time when it was still not clear that the system was finished — when it still appeared that it might survive if the Old Guard seized events with a firm grip as it did in China.
The theme of the book is the necessity for the people involved in this process to make an inner transformation. In this case the hero, Peter Kirov, who figures as a sinister if human manipulator in the earlier book, now has to change from being a secret policemen to a policeman pure and simple, and this involves a revisiting of history: both his own and that of the system in which he operates.
More than twenty years later, I admit to being a little proud of my invention of The Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring, a shapeless — even contentless — conspiracy that changes over decades as recounted in the three “versions” presented to the reader. It stands as a metaphor for the politicisation of history that was essential to the Communist Party’s image of its own infallibility. As the old joke had it: under Communism the glorious Future is certain but the Past is liable to change. The original title of the book was Conspiracy of Mirrors. It wasn’t my choice but it contained a certain truth that under the Soviet system — and not alone — history was a reflection of the demands of the current political situation and had no objective reality, and even language itself had no fixed meaning. Artistically, the book’s ambiguity and narrative slipperiness is intended to unsettle readers so that they can never be certain where the plot is going and also to impress upon them the dangerousness of knowledge. To this extent they share the anxiety of the main protagonist, Peter Kirov, as he struggles to understand the truth.