‘So,’ said Calamity with the air of one patiently separating wheat from chaff, ‘there used to be a person holding the dog and the authorities airbrushed her from history, but the guy left the dog in the picture.’
Evans the Swindler agreed but looked saddened to have it all presented in such bald outline.
After lunch, Edwards the Fascist Wrecker drove us round Hughesovka. We visited Uncle Vanya’s house but it turned out to be a fire-gutted shell occupied only by vagrants. They told us no one had been living there for many years and they had not heard of Vanya. But they were very kind and, while we waited, one of them fetched an old crone who had been living in the area all her life. She told us Mrs Vanya had been murdered in 1957 by her husband. She remembered the date well because it was the same year that Laika had passed in orbit above their heads and filled all their hearts with hope for a while. The school for remote viewing which Vanya’s daughter had attended was now a paper wholesaler’s. The Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering was closed. A thick chain held the door fastened and it was clear that for many years now, the only visitors had been State spiders.
When we returned to the car, Edwards was in a state of nervous agitation. ‘I’ve received a message,’ he said. ‘Something has happened. We must get back.’ He drove as fast as the old Lada would go through the backstreets of Hughesovka and pulled up outside the apartment block. There was consternation in the apartment.
Jones the Deviationist heretic explained what had happened. ‘You’ve been denounced.’
‘Denounced?’ we both said. ‘Who by? What for?’
‘We’re not sure, but no one has seen Jones the Denouncer since this morning. Quick, there is no time, you must prepare.’
Someone handed us our suitcases. ‘There is bread inside and biscuits.’
A girl handed me my jacket: ‘I’ve sewn on cow-horn buttons. In lean times they can be eaten.’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat. ‘He could be killed in the camps for those buttons.’
Someone advised us to avoid becoming unwittingly staked in a card game. ‘You should try and get a job decorating,’ someone else advised. ‘You can eat wallpaper paste. And the leather of your shoes of course. Although your shoes are your most precious possession, do not discard them lightly.’
‘The winter nights in Siberia are very long. It is helpful if you can spare some of your bread ration because chewed bread can be used to make chess pieces to while away the night.’
‘And do not forget also,’ added Morgan the Enemy of the People, ‘that when someone dies you must be quick – sneak out in the middle of the night and dig them up for their underwear: for this can be exchanged for a ration of cabbage which will keep your thyroid healthy.’
We were about to thank them for their kind advice when all conversation was silenced by a banging on the door and the words, shouted out, ‘Open up, State Security.’
Chapter 21
A room in a basement, off a long corridor with lots of doors. A corridor lit by single naked sixty-watt bulbs hanging from a dim cobwebby ceiling. The far-off sound of typewriters, gurgling radiators. No cries of pain. Yet. A ride through the streets of night-time Hughesovka in the back of a van marked ‘Jones’s Meat Pies’. I don’t know why. I’ll ask the interrogator. A room with the same single naked bulb. Walls painted in dark, sea-green gloss paint to halfway and a lighter paint of indeterminable shade above. The light switch next to the door jamb was a crude utilitarian metal box studded with bare rivets. You can tell a lot about your fate by the light switch. In the room, there was a table, two hard chairs, a lamp to point into my face, a manila folder and a pad of legal-size notepaper, for taking notes legal and otherwise. With my hands handcuffed behind my back I was made to sit in the chair. It wasn’t comfortable; it wasn’t meant to be. A man sat in the chair opposite me. Apart from the drab olive-green military tunic with the letters GKNB on the collar, he looked like one of the Cossack dancers performing in the bar of the Hotel Newport. He had a red, merry face with bushy white eyebrows and a big bulbous nose. He looked like a nice guy, I wanted to hug him. The soldier standing guard at the door might have been nice too but the emptiness in his face, the absence of solicitude suggested he could go either way: whichever way the wind was blowing. I yawned. The man sitting opposite me drummed his fingers on the desk and leafed through the folder. The first page had a photo of me. Somewhere in the night a church struck four. I yawned again and thought of Calamity. We had been separated shortly after arrest. Was she sitting now in a similar pea-green basement room opposite a granite-faced lady Russian hammer thrower who was leafing through a similar folder? I regretted bringing her along. I felt a keen homesickness for the comforting certainties of Aberystwyth, even the unpleasant ones like arrest. One good thing about Aberystwyth is, the cops like their sleep. The idea of interrogating someone in the middle of the night would be considered daft beyond words. The man leafing through the folder containing my life history sighed in a way that suggested it fell short of the mark. Finally he looked up, slowly and painfully as if he had a stiff neck.
‘So you are a spinning-wheel salesman.’
I said nothing; it’s the same deal in every country in the world: the point of an interrogation is for the cop to listen to the sound of his own voice; to marvel at how clever he is; if you butt in and interrupt the mellifluous flow of self-love you are likely to make your interrogator genuinely annoyed instead of pretend-annoyed. You have to let them gorge first on their own cleverness. It’s the sort of cleverness that comes easily to someone who has another human being entirely in his power, but you can’t say that for one very good reason: you are entirely in his power. Back in Aberystwyth, when Llunos pulls someone in off the street for questioning, he doesn’t really expect to receive answers. You’re there to listen to what he’s decided you are guilty of. The main thing to remember is, you are of no importance.