over to the table.
He only meant to look for a minute, and. probably that was all he did - just long enough to run his fingers through it alclass="underline" A pair of passports - red, stiff-backed, six inches by four, lion-crested, marked 'PASS' and 'NORGE', issued in Bergen, 1968 - a young couple, identical-looking: long hair, blond, hippyish, the girl quite pretty in a washed-out kind of way; he didn't register their names; entered the USSR via Leningrad, June 1969 -Identity papers - old-style, Soviet Union, three different men: the first, a youngish, jug-eared fellow in spectacles, a student by the look of him; the second, old, in his sixties, weathered, self-reliant, a sailor perhaps; the third, bug-eyed, unkempt, a gypsy or a drifter; the names a blur -And, finally, a stack of sheets, which, as he fanned them out, he saw were six sets of documents, of five or six pages each, pinned together and written in pencil or ink, in various hands - this one neat, that one hesitant, another a wild and desperate scrawl - but always, at the top of the first sheet, in neat Cyrillic capitals, the same word: 'Confession'
Kelso could feel the freezing draught from the open door shifting the hairs on the back of his scalp.
He replaced the pages carefully and backed away from them, his hands raised slightly as if to ward them off, and at the doorway he turned and stumbled out on to the steps. He ( sat down on the weathered planking and when he raised the binoculars and scanned the rim of the clearing he found that. he was shaking.
He stayed there for a couple of minutes, recovering his nerve. It occurred to him that what he ought to do - the calm, rational, sensible thing: the not leaping to any hysterical conclusions kind of thing, that a serious scholar would do - was to return and briefly make a note of the names for checking later.
So when he had satisfied himself for the twentieth time that not a soul was moving in the trees, he stood and ducked back through the low door, and the first thing he saw on re-entry was the rifle propped against the wall, and the second was the Russian, sitting at the table, perfectly still, watching him.
'He possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, 'according to his secretary and in this respect he was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much...'
He was still in full uniform, still in his greatcoat and cap. The gold star of the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union was pinned to his lapel and shone in the dull light of the kerosene lamp.
How had he done that?
Kelso started gabbling into the silence. 'Comrade - you -I'm startled - I - came to find you - I wanted -, He fumbled with the zipper on the front of his jacket and held out the satchel. 'I wanted to return to you the papers of your mother, Anna Mikhailovna Safanova -'
Time stretched. Half a minute passed, a minute, and then the Russian said, softly, 'Good, comrade,' and made a note on the sheet of paper beside him. He indicated the table and Kelso took a pace towards it and laid the satchel down, like an offering placed to appease some unreliable and vengeful god.
Another endless silence followed.
'Capitalism,' said the Russian eventually, putting down his stub of pencil and reaching for his pipe, 'is thievery, and imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Thus it follows that the imperialist is the greatest thief of all mankind. Steal a man's papers, he will. Oh, easily! Pick the last kopek from' yer pocket! Or steal a man's boat, eh, comrade?'
He winked at Kelso and continued staring at him as he struck a match, sucking the fire into the bowl of his pipe, producing great spurts of smoke and flame.
'Close the door would you, comrade?'
It was beginning to get dark.
If we have to stay here the night, thought Kelso, we shall never leave.
Where the hell was O'Brian?
'Now,' the Russian continued, 'and this is the decisive question, comrade: how do we protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, these thieves? And we say the answer to this decisive question must be equally decisive.' He extinguished the match with one shake and leaned forwards. 'We protect ourselves from these capitalists, these imperialists, and these stinking, crawling thieves of all mankind only by the most ferocious vigilance. Take, for example, the Norway couple, with their serpenty smiles - crawling on their maggoty bellies through the undergrowth to ask for "directions, comrade," if you please! On a "walking holiday" if you please!'
He waved their open passports in Kelso's face and Kelso had a second glimpse of the two young people, the man in a psychedelic headband -'Are we such fools,' he demanded, 'such backward prim:tives, not to recognise the capitalist-imperialist thief- spy when it worms its way among us? No, comrade, we are not such backward primitives! To such people we administer a hard lesson in socialist realities - I have their confessions here before me, they denied it at first but they admitted it all in the end - and we need say no more of them. They are as Lenin predicted they would be: dust on the dunghill of history. Nor need we say anything of him!' He waved a set of identity papers - the older man. 'And nor of him! Nor him!' The faces of the victims flashed briefly. 'That,' said the Russian, 'is our decisive answer to the decisive question posed by all capitalist5~ imperialists and stinking thieves!'
He sat back with his arms folded, smiling grimly.
The rifle was almost within Kelso's reach but he didn't move. It might not be loaded. And even if it was loaded he wouldn't know how to fire it. And even if he fired it he knew he could never injure the Russian: he was a supernatural force. One minute he was ahead of you, one minute behind; now he was in the trees and now he was here, sitting at his table, poring over his collection of confessions, making the occasional note.
'Worse by far however,' said the Russian after a while, is the canker of the right-deviationism.' He relit his pipe, sucking noisily on the stem. 'And here Golub was the first.'
'Golub was the first,' repeated Kelso, numbly.
He was remembering the row of crosses: T Y Golub, his face blacked out, died November-the-something, 1961.
The essence of Stalin's success was really very simple, he thought, built around an insight that could be reduced to a mere three words: people fear death.
'Golub was the first to succumb to the classic conciliationist tendencies of the right-deviationism. Of course, I was merely a child at the time, but his whining still clamours in my ears: "Oh, comrades, they are saying in the villages that Comrade Stalin's body has been removed from his rightful place next to Lenin! Oh, comrades, what are we going to do? It is hopeless, comrades! They will come and they will kill us all! It's time for us to give up!"
'Have you ever seen fishermen when a storm is brewing on a great river? I have seen them many a time. In the face of a storm one group of fishermen will muster all their forces, encourage their fellows and boldly put out to meet the storm:
"Cheer up, lads, hold tight to the tiller, cut the waves, we'll pull her through!" But there is another type of fishermen -those who, on sensing a storm, lose heart, begin to snivel and demoralise their own ranks: "What a misfortune, a storm is brewing; lie down, boys, in the bottom of the boat, shut your eyes; let's hope she'll make the shore somehow."'
The Russian spat on the floor.
'Chizhikov took him out into the dark part of the forest that very night and in the morning there was a cross and that was the end of Golub and that put an end to the beatings of the right-deviationists - even that old hag his widow put a sock in her mouth after that. And for a few years more, the steady work went on, under our four-fold slogans: the slogan of the fight against defeatism and complacency, the slogan of the struggle for self-sufficiency, the slogan of constructive self-criticism is the foundation of our Party, and the slogan of out of the fire comes steeL And then the sabotage began.'
'Ah,' said Kelso. 'The sabotage. Of course.'
'It began with the poisoning of the sturgeon. This was soon after the trial of the foreign spies. Late in the summer this was. We came out one morning and there they were -white bellies floating in the river. And time without number we discovered that food had been taken from the traps and yet no animals were caught. The mushrooms were shrivelled, useless things - scarcely any to be had all year - and that had never happened before, either. Even the berries on the two-verst track were gone before we could pick them. I discussed the crisis confidentially with Comrade Chizhikov - I was older now, you understand, and able to take a hand - and his analysis was identical to mine: that this was a classic outbreak of Trotskyite wreckerism. And when Yezhov was discovered with a flashlight - out walking, after curfew: the swine- the case was made. And this,' he held up a thick pile of barely legible scrawl and slapped it against the table, 'this is his confession - you can see it, here, in his own hand - how he received his signals by torch-transmission from some spiderish associates he had made contact with while out fishing.'