Afterwards, when we’d made love, he said, ‘You do realise I’m going to have to use you. I can’t kick the youngest female colonel in the KGB out of bed. I’m going to have to sleep with you a lot, if that’s OK.’
‘Keep up,’ I said. We’re not the KGB any more. ‘We call it the FSB these days.’
But Finn always called us the KGB to the end. ‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘It’s just an old dog with a new name. There’s no difference, except that now you’ve all been to business school as well as Honey Trap High.’
‘Are you trying to ruin the evening?’ I said.
He turned to me and it was the first time I saw him not play-acting. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t want to ruin anything.’
We made love again, and afterwards it felt so strange, like we were two lovers who’d known each other for years.
‘We’ve met before, I know it,’ Finn said.
‘And in what incarnation would that be?’ I replied.
He held my hands above my head. ‘No incarnation. You were pure dust and so was I.’
I undid his fingers. ‘Why don’t you do something to jog my memory?’ I murmured. But he’d fallen asleep.
Anyway, that’s how I first met Finn.
3
NANA’S DACHA AT BARVIKHA had always been my home, in as much as I’ve ever had a real home and, once our affair began, it became the symbol of home for Finn and me. At any rate, Barvikha was the home of my heart and it became so for Finn too. I now see this symbol we had as part of the spirit that joined us.
In the seventies, when I was a child, I spent more time at Barvikha than anywhere else. Or is it just the happy memories that have expanded those times in my head? My parents lived abroad and Nana brought me up at Barvikha, taking me out of Moscow to the dacha as often as my schooling would allow.
My mother was the daughter of a career diplomat who later became the most favoured economic adviser to the Politburo in the now forgotten days of the Soviet Union. He had one of only a thousand or so personal passes to the Kremlin. But whatever economic advice he gave I don’t think he could ever have told his masters the truth; truth consisted of what they, the Politburo, wanted to hear, and my mother’s father, Viktor, was their well-trained, patriotic parrot.
My father served in the Foreign Intelligence Service; he was in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, to be exact. This exclusive and privileged organisation, whose agents pursued their intelligence activities abroad, is called the SVR. My father speaks Arabic fluently and he and my mother lived for several years at the embassy in the Soviet compound in Damascus.
We were very privileged but, like most privileged people, we didn’t realise it. My mother’s family, through Grandfather Viktor, had access to every foreign product available in the Soviet Union and my father’s position ensured a comparatively spacious apartment in Moscow, in a well-guarded, well-heated, modern housing block on Leninsky Avenue. The KGB and Military Intelligence had a quota of good apartments there, but our block contained a deliberate mixture of people from other ministries, from the Soviet news service TASS, and so on, so that no one could identify it as an SVR foreign intelligence residence, not even its own occupants.
But everyone knew who the SVR people were, from the licence plates on their cars and the higher standard of the Volga cars themselves, not to mention the military habits of these members of the elite. And then there was their pride. My father was far too proud of his role in the SVR to hide it convincingly from the neighbours.
The apartment block next door to ours was run by Military Intelligence and was for the sole use of foreigners–mainly diplomats, journalists and trade representatives from developing countries.
There were fixed militia posts dotted around this diplomatic block and operatives from KGB counter-intelligence shadowed the two buildings round the clock. When I was six years old my father told me, ‘Never, ever approach the diplomatic building or any of its inhabitants.’
Teachers at my school backed this up by telling us that to approach foreigners was ‘way outside Soviet rules’, so we were all scared of, and fascinated by, contact with foreigners.
But then we had the dacha at Barvikha to escape to. It stands in the beautifully still, evergreen forest south of Moscow, near Yasenovo, the SVR training centre. Yasenovo–a lyrical name–was the SVR’s cold heart. But inside the KGB we just called it the Forest.
For Nana and me, Barvikha was a place of great peace, despite the armed guards. Their presence was somehow dwarfed by the great forest. The forest breathed its quiet timelessness and rock-like calm into us both.
The dachas were spread discreetly among the trees, out of sight of each other, and ours was a short walk away from a deep green pond, soft and brackish in the summer, hard-iced and covered with snow in the winter. There was a high fence around the perimeter of the forest, of course, but we didn’t notice we were in a special fenced area once we were inside.
‘Maupassant always took lunch in the Eiffel Tower,’ Finn once told me, ‘because he hated it so much, and it was the only place in Paris he couldn’t see it.’
So it was with us at Barvikha, though of course we loved the place. But we could somehow look beyond the ugly presence of guards and fences and the instruments of repression because we were on the inside.
‘That’s what it’s like to be on the inside of the KGB,’ Nana said. ‘If we look out we can’t see where we are.’
She was right. From inside the KGB, from inside the KGB’s forest, we had the view of the world outside, but we couldn’t see the ugliness of our position in the Soviet apparat. And as I sank deeper and deeper into the Russian secret state, I observed less and less of what I was actually doing on its behalf.
Nana preferred to be at the dacha rather than in Moscow and would grumble bitterly when she had to take me back to school after the weekends. She would hurry me out of class on a Friday afternoon and, unless we went to the circus or the fairground, both of which she loved, we would go straight out to Barvikha in one of my father’s official cars, just the two of us.
Nana distrusted our KGB privileges more than she disliked them. She was of a generation where nobody was safe, regardless of how exalted they were in the system. But the one privilege she wholeheartedly enjoyed were the two chauffeurs and the official black Volga cars with their special plates and flashing blue lights which could whisk us out to the forest on a Friday night, or back from Barvikha into the centre of Moscow on a Sunday night at high speed, without militia interference.
But in Barvikha she was at home, and so was I. Other than the official cars, she rejected all the elite services we had in Moscow and could have had at Barvikha. She spent her days shuffling across the dacha’s worn parquet floors, yellow dusters under her carpet slippers, endlessly buffing the polished wood with her feet. I don’t remember that we ever ate with the other residents at the central restaurant block. This block served all the dachas of the elite and you could find every kind of caviar there and other delicacies on demand.
She triumphantly rejected the luxury, mainly foreign, goods we could have brought to the dacha from Moscow, and she and I would go instead into the forest, for mushrooms in the autumn or for berries to make jam in the summer.
We had the pleasing illusion of being self-sufficient when we were at Barvikha, and that illusion was what Nana trusted. She guarded this illusion closely in her jam making and mushroom picking. We lived in a country which was a concrete box of illusions within illusions, topped with barbed wire to protect us from reality, and no one knew that better than us.