Egorkin was delighted with the journalist’s stupidity, as though his hiding in Sam’s flat were all his own doing. Yet once the novelty wore off he went back to complaining as he had from the start. One of his first complaints was circumscribed by the very matter he complained about, so he had voiced his objections by holding Sam close and whispering in his ear, an angry whisper like the exhalation from a steam engine. ‘The room will be bugged. We cannot live here. The room, your whole damn apartment. There will be microphones.’
Despite Sam’s assurances to the contrary the Russian had carried out his own ridiculous search, hushing Sam and the girl to silence, while he went over the room inch by inch, passing his fingertips over the walls, lifting pictures, moving furniture, even examining the glass in the window panes. Finally he put the radio on and tuned it to Radio Moscow, turning the volume up and speaking more normally but still softly, as though he had a throat infection: ‘I wish to register my protest at not being held in the embassy building itself.’
The violinist appeared better adapted to their current circumstances than her man. She was happy to lie on the bed reading one of Sam’s Russian books, a copy of Chyotki, ‘Rosary’, Anna Akhmatova’s second collection of poems that he had found years ago in a sixpenny tray outside a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. It was one of the original Giperborei editions, but more than that, it was pencilled (he had struggled to contain his excitement as he had handed over his sixpence to the bookseller) with the poet’s monogram on the title page, the letter
She was even more astonished to discover that Sam had actually met Akhmatova in Oxford when, after years of obscurity and persecution, the poet had finally been allowed to travel outside Russia to receive the plaudits of the West and an honorary degree.
The violinist’s eyes widened. ‘Tell me, what was she like?’
He hesitated. The truth was he had loved the legend that was Akhmatova, the woman of the early poems, the woman of the Nathan Altman portrait, all bony shoulders and languid legs and hidden treasures; the woman whose irregular lifestyle and courage in the face of Stalin’s oppression had elevated her to the heroic. But there, in that reception in Oxford three years ago, amidst the chatter and the jabber and the clink of glasses, he had found only the ruin of that ideal, a stout old dear who looked incongruous in academical robes, more like a school dinner lady than a great poet. ‘She was like an old warhorse,’ he told the girl. ‘Unsteady on her feet and a bit bewildered by all the fuss, but bright-eyed and curious. It was the first time she’d been allowed to travel outside Russia in fifty years.’
‘But you met her? Spoke with her?’
‘Shook hands with her. Told her, rather inadequately, that I was a great admirer, that I had been reading her poems since I was eighteen and it was through them that I first felt the language. I felt a bit stupid, to be honest. What do you say to someone like that?’
‘And what did she reply to you?’
Sam laughed. ‘She said, “How strange.”’
‘How strange,’ Nadezhda repeated, as though this portentous phrase were a newly discovered work by Akhmatova herself. From that moment she looked at Sam with wonder, as though maybe, by proximity, some of the spirit of the poet had been transferred to him. Later, when he was leaving the room and he addressed her formally as Nadezhda Nikolayevna, she cast her eyes downwards and quietly invited him to please call her Nadia. It was a Chekhovian moment.
40
In his office Sam scanned the newspapers for any further hint of the news breaking. There were small items in a couple of the dailies – Concerts Cancelled, Russian conductor rumoured to be unwell, that kind of thing. But clearly no one had any idea of what had happened, that the whole world of Gennady Egorkin, conductor and pianist of international fame, and his violinist mistress had shrunk to this, the spare room in Sam Wareham’s flat where they lived in artificial light, like creatures in a vivarium.
‘The wheels are in motion,’ Eric Whittaker assured him. ‘But as you know they grind with almost glacial slowness at times.’
‘What does H.E. think?’
‘He’s not exactly over the moon, Sam. I’m afraid he thinks what all ambassadors think – don’t rock the boat if you don’t have to. And in this case, we didn’t have to. Except you did.’
That afternoon Nadia came quietly to the sitting room and presented him with a single sheet of paper taken from a notebook he had provided. Lenka was at the desk, revising the piece she was preparing for Literární listy. She stopped her typing and watched as Sam read. Nadia had written in pencil, a poem in the careful, concise, allusive style of early Akhmatova entitled ‘How Strange’, about a stranger who meets her in a foreign country and talks to her about the world from where he has come and to where she might go. Ambiguities informed the piece. Who was the poet – Nadezhda Nikolayevna Pankova or Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova? And where was the encounter – here in this flat in the Malá Strana, or in New College Oxford three years earlier when he had met the great Russian poet; or two decades earlier than that, when another English diplomat with the curiously un-English name of Isaiah Berlin had encountered, stumbling slightly over his Russian greeting, the great poet in her Leningrad apartment? And what exactly was the gulf of misunderstanding that separated the two protagonists?
Nadia blushed as Sam read it. ‘It’s just a small thing.’ But it wasn’t a small thing at all. It was rather good. That’s what he told her. Rather good. She thought he was damning her poem with faint praise, whereas of course it was typical British understatement.
41
The inevitable call to the ambassador’s office was delivered by Eric Whittaker. ‘I’m afraid the Old Man wants to see you, Sam. He’s not in a good mood. Remember, whatever you do, don’t argue with him, do you understand? Don’t argue with him even if you are right.’
The Old Man. It was like a summons from the headmaster, but then so much of the Foreign Office was like that, like the British public school with its rewards and its punishments, its fearsome jealousies and absurd rituals, its guilt and its triumphs. The ambassador was sitting behind his desk, which was a bad sign. Just as you might expect in the headmaster’s study, on the wall behind him was a reproduction of that portrait of the Queen, the Annigoni portrait that depicts her as a young and desirable Renaissance monarch against a Tuscan landscape. Beneath this symbol of regal beauty the ambassador looked up from whatever he was pretending to work on and motioned Sam to sit down. That was another headmasterly trick, to keep the interviewee waiting while you completed the previous task.
‘You’ve been a bit various recently, Sam,’ he said finally, putting down his pen and looking up with a tight smile. It was an accusation dressed up as a pleasantry. Being various was not a good thing – constancy was what diplomacy demanded.