A couple of hours to see so many wonders could only be a reconnaissance. One needed a week, maybe more, and I was too tired to take in the overwhelming detail. The eyes shivered back into their sockets at such dazzling objects. Outside, between the cathedrals, a score or so of children stood in a tight colourful circle that, from a helicopter, would have looked like a picturesque football supporter’s rosette.
The drive to the airport was slow, due to traffic and poor visibility in rain and sleet. Margarita told us she had spent four years in Quito, where her father had been a diplomat. She had married a man from Ecuador who still lived there because of difficulties getting permission to be with her in Russia, but in a few weeks she would be going back to Quito to try and sort matters out. We wished her luck, and kissed her goodbye.
At the airport a militiaman by the anti-terrorist checkpoint noticed that we didn’t have the obligatory labels on our hand luggage. They should have been stuck on at the BA checking-in desk, so we backtracked through the system to get it done. We took off our shoes to pass between the Scylla and Charybdis of the radar beams. Warning blips usually sounded for the Morse key and oscillator but, strangely this time, they didn’t register as potentially suspect.
Sadly, the last thing I read in The Moscow Times was an item about a fire which almost gutted a synagogue on the outskirts of the city. The cause of the conflagration was not immediately clear. Firefighters had rushed to the blaze but were unable to prevent severe damage to the interior and the roof.
At the duty free we bought two bottles of Standart vodka, having been advised it was the best. After a long wait we boarded the large Boeing and set off for London. With the time change we arrived at six-thirty local time and, once out of the customs, spotted the pre-booked taxi driver.
A week or so later we heard with much sorrow that George Andjaparidze had died during the operation. He had been born in a German air raid, to the sound of falling bombs, and bursting shells from thousands of anti-aircraft guns defending the people of Moscow. Under the loving care of his mother and his aunt he was a fat and bonny baby, so well fed in times of terrible shortages — he never knew how they had managed it, because many other children had died — that he was nicknamed by them ‘Our Little Bomb’. The two devoted women spoiled him, and perhaps partly for that reason he grew up to be amiable and tolerant, always ready and able to enjoy himself.
I’d had the privilege of knowing him as a friend, and several times saw how popular he could be with others, such traits lasting all his life. He implied, on our last evening together in Moscow, that it had been easy for Kuznetsov to turn him into an acquaintance who would stand by him.
He went on talking about Kuznetsov even after I had put my notebook down. ‘The step he took was senseless, and I’ll never stop thinking so. He must have realised that his money would soon run out, and who would employ someone who knew no English? Russian was the language in his blood, so who indeed would even remember him after a few years? Yet I had up to then seen him as a man with a head on his shoulders, sober and perhaps even calculating, but there are still so many puzzles in the affair that no matter how much I go over every little detail of the case I can’t, even now, understand why he did such a thing, though a few clues and some information have come to me since.
‘I was often asked,’ he went on, ‘why I didn’t stay in England when I so easily could have done. I liked England very much, and still do. It’s a wonderful country. Just imagine, I would have become a professor of Russian literature, and had a well-paid post in some university. I would have had it made, as you say.
‘Yet thank God I didn’t stay, because if I had I would have felt guilty and miserable for ever, which in a way means I’d have been ruined too. And I didn’t stay because I loved my beautiful unfortunate nation more. It would have been a betrayal of trust, and I was never a treacherous person. My relations with the KGB afterwards were good because I kept absolutely nothing at all back of my experiences in London. I was never afraid of the KGB, though on one level after coming home it took a long time to become my normal self again. I was shellshocked, as you can imagine.
‘In the end, though, I still can’t understand why Kuznetsov did as he did. A question that still nags me is why, on his defection, he didn’t go straightaway on the radio and television and say why he had done it. Instead, a whole fortnight went by before he went on the radio to denounce his country. Perhaps he did want to do so immediately, but was either advised not to, or was prevented.
‘More mysterious was the fact that I was due to leave for Moscow a full three days before him, because I had important appointments to keep. I received permission to go, which would have given Kuznetsov three days in which to wander on his own. So why didn’t he wait till then and defect, which would have been more certain and sensible? He wouldn’t have betrayed my trust, though I realise now that might not have weighed very heavily with him, unless he had been told to do it when he did because those who helped him wanted to draw me as well into the net of defection.
‘Another thing I remembered in my report was that not long after we had arrived in London he went into a booth and made a telephone call, which must have been to someone who spoke Russian and who he’d already been in contact with. Now, the mechanism of making such a call in London is different to what you do in Moscow, so who taught him how to do it? Or trained him?
‘I didn’t think anything of it while making the report, but about ten years ago someone who went through the archives found out that Kuznetsov had been a KGB agent. That explains the telegram which came to the embassy demanding that they get him back “at any cost”. To have a writer run away was one thing, and I don’t suppose all that unusual, but an agent is a much bigger fish, and no doubt he had much to inform the Foreign Office about in London.
‘Such a fact only brings up more questions, which I suppose will never be answered, unless one day someone in your democratic country is given the liberty to go through the archives of MI5 or whatever it’s called. I would dearly like to know.
‘In spite of all that happened to me as a result of that affair,’ he said finally, ‘I’ve been a happy man. My only bitterness is that the trouble I was in had such a terrible effect on my mother that she died much sooner than she should have done. It did, literally, drive her to the grave, because she knew that in Stalinist times, which she had lived through, I would have been shot — no question. Now let’s have a last drink together.’
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