The queue was moving at a snail’s pace, the sun now winking through the pines. Almost all the arrivals were foreigners, most of them Balkan communists, come to lay gifts at Stalin’s feet. There had been a couple of Argentineans sitting across from Russell, and their only topic of conversation had been the excellent shooting in Siberia. Diplomats presumably, but who the hell knew in the violently shuffled world of April 1945? As far as Russell could tell, he was the only Western journalist seeking entry to Stalin’s realm.
For all his apprehensiveness, he was pleased to have got this far. It was seven days since his hurried departure from Rheims in north-east France, the location of the Western Allies’ military HQ. He had left on the morning of March 29th, after receiving off-the-record confirmation that Eisenhower had written to Stalin on the previous day, promising the Red Army the sole rights to Berlin. If Russell was going to ride into his old home town on a tank, it would have to be on a Russian one.
A swift exchange of cables with his editor in San Francisco had given him sanction to switch his journalistic sphere of operations, and, more importantly, some sort of semi-official fig leaf to cover up an essentially personal odyssey. Accompanying the Red Army into Hitler’s capital would prove a wonderful scoop for any Western journalist, but that was not why Russell wanted to do it.
Just getting to Moscow had been complicated enough, involving, as it did, a great swing round the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, an area which still stretched from northern Norway to northern Italy. Three trains had brought him to Marseilles, and a series of flights had carried him eastwards via a succession of cities – Rome, Belgrade and Bucharest – all with the unfortunate distinction of having been bombed by both sides. He had expected difficulties everywhere, but bribery had worked in Marseilles and Rome, and broad hints that he would put Tito on the cover of Time magazine had eased his entry into Belgrade and, by default, the wider area of Soviet control. The rest had been easy. Once you were in, you were in, and the authorities in Bucharest, Odessa and Kiev had waved him on with barely a glance at his passport or papers. No doubt the various immigration bureaucracies would recover their essential nastiness in due course, but for the moment everyone seemed too exhausted by the war to care.
Moscow, though, was likely to be different, and Russell was half expecting orders to leave on the next return flight. Or worse. But when his turn finally came he was let through with only the most cursory check of his documents. It was almost as if they were expecting him.
‘Meester Russell,’ a voice said, confirming as much. A youngish man with prematurely grey hair, piercing blue eyes and thin lips had appeared in front of him. One arm of his shiny civilian suit was hanging empty.
Russel wondered how many arms and legs had been detached from their bodies in the last five years. They weren’t the sort of statistics that governments publicised, always assuming they bothered to collect them. ‘Yes?’ he replied politely.
‘I am from Press Liaison,’ the man said. ‘You will come with me, please.’
Russell followed, half expecting a room somewhere in the bowels of the terminal building. Instead, he was led outside, to where an American single-decker bus was pumping thick clouds of black exhaust into the rapidly darkening sky. Those who had scurried for pole position in the terminal queue had been rewarded with a better-than-average shot at carbon monoxide poisoning.
The double seats all had one or more occupants, but the man from Press Liaison swiftly cleared the one at the front with a wave of his identity card. He ushered Russell into the window seat, and sat down beside him. ‘My name Semyon Zakabluk,’ he volunteered in English, as the driver clanked the bus into gear. ‘You first time Moscow?’
‘No,’ Russell told him in reasonably fluent Russian. ‘I was here in 1924, for the Party’s Fifth Congress. And again in 1939, when the Pact was signed.’
‘Ah,’ Zakabluk said, probably for want of anything better. In 1924 Trotsky had been one of the country’s leaders, and six years on from Ribbentrop’s visit the Nazi-Soviet Pact was probably almost as unmentionable. ‘And you speak Russian?’ he asked with more than a hint of truculence.
‘I try,’ Russell said. He had devoted a considerable chunk of the last few years to learning the language, partly with such a visit in mind, but more because its sphere of use seemed certain to increase.
‘Why have you come to Moscow?’
‘To report on the victory of the Soviet people.’
‘Ah.’
‘You served in the Red Army?’ Russell asked.
‘Yes, of course. Until this –’ Zakabluk shrugged what little remained of his left arm. ‘A tank shell, in the Kursk battle. One minute I had two arms, then only one.’ For a moment he looked sorry for himself, but only for a moment. ‘Many friends were not so lucky,’ he added.
Russell just nodded.
‘You were too old for your army?’
‘I was in the First War,’ Russell said. ‘A long time ago,’ he added without thinking. Lately, with all the horrors he had seen in Normandy and the Ardennes, the memories of his own time in the trenches had become depressingly vivid.
The bus wheezed to a halt alongside a railway station platform. This was good news – Russell already felt as if several joints had been jolted from their sockets. The passengers trooped off the bus and into the Victorian-style carriages which were waiting to carry them to Moscow. Much to everyone’s surprise, the train set off almost at once. The small locomotive signalled their departure with a triumphant blast of its whistle, and was soon hurrying through the silver birch forests that surrounded the Soviet capital. Night had fallen by the time they reached Moscow’s Kiev Station, and Russell had a fleeting glimpse of the red stars adorning the distant Kremlin as his companion hustled him towards the Metro.
Their train, which came almost immediately, was full of tired-looking faces and bodies in shabby oversize clothes. Like people all over Europe, Russell thought. If ever there was a time when people might understand what others were feeling, then surely it should be now, at the end of a terrible war against a wholly discredited foe. But even if they did, he didn’t suppose it would make any difference. Their governments might still be talking like allies, but already they acted like future enemies.
Back in the open air, the familiar shape of the Metropol Hotel was silhouetted against the night sky. They walked across Sverdlov Square and in through the main entrance.
‘You must report to the Press Liaison office in the morning,’ Zakabluk told Russell, after checking that his room was ready. ‘At ten o’clock, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Russell agreed. ‘Thank you.’
Zakabluk bowed slightly and turned on his heels. As he walked towards the door, he gave a slight nod to a man in one of the lobby chairs.
Russell smiled to himself, and took the lift up to the second floor. His room looked remarkably similar to the one he’d had in 1939. The Soviet security police, the NKVD, had supplied a naked woman with that one, but, for reasons both virtuous and pragmatic, he had declined to take up the offer.
Since his parting from Effi there been other opportunities, equally appealing on a physical level and much more free of political risk, but he had refused them all. Staying faithful seemed the least he could do, after saving himself – albeit with her encouragement – at her expense. He wondered if she had been faithful to him, and how he would react if she hadn’t. At this moment in time, he just needed to know she was alive.