‘The Russians always choose the most inconvenient times to do their evil deeds,’ Finn always said.
Alex had lost his leg during the Afghan campaign afterwards, but the presidential raid was highly successful, with several key murders accomplished. It plunged Afghanistan into the chaos that plagues it to the present day.
Alex was twenty years older than me. Finn was only twelve years older. Nana said I had a father complex, ‘but at least you are showing signs of improvement,’ she said.
6
DEAR RUSSIANS, very little time remains to a momentous date in our history. The year 2000 is upon us, a new century, a new millennium. We have all measured this date against ourselves, working out—first in childhood, then after we grew up—how old we would be in the year 2000, how old our mothers would be, and our children.’
Boris Yeltsin’s wandering voice faded and rose from our new television screen, like that of a man talking in the wind.
‘Back then,’ the President continued, ‘it seemed such a long way off to this extraordinary New Year. So now the day has come.’
Finn shifts on the sofa. ‘It’s certainly a miracle he’s made it,’ he says facetiously, as we watch Yeltsin’s face on the screen, a face with all the mobility of botched plastic surgery.
Finn and Nana and I have just finished a late supper and are curled up in front of the fire to watch the New Year speech Yeltsin has made a habit of delivering. Finn is drinking brandy on the sofa, munching peanuts, and stroking Genghiz. He is over-engaged as so often. I am lying with my head on his stomach. Nana, who rarely sits down because of her arthritis, is sliding on her slippers across the dacha’s parquet floors like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
‘This is like being back home,’ Finn says. ‘Watching the Queen making her speech on Christmas Day. Except with Yeltsin you have the added excitement that he’s going to die in mid-speech. You never get that with the Queen,’ he says with mock disappointment.
Outside the windows, a snowstorm is raging; it is wild weather, and Finn insists we keep the curtains open so he can watch the wind and snow in the light of the porch lamp. Eight years in Russia hasn’t diminished his fondness for snow.
After a year of knowing Finn, Nana and I are used to his remarks. He always enjoys providing a running commentary to whatever is on television. There is a part of Finn, I think, that secretly yearns to be an entertainer and the television is the perfect instrument to heckle without the risk of any comeback.
Yeltsin’s voice emerges from his old Russian face, puffy and sick from heart problems and alcohol. The tricks of the television studio don’t really do it justice. Make-up conceals much of the problem but still the ailing president gives the impression of being propped up on a Kremlin film set, with our new Russian flag displayed regally behind him. In this respect, he looks like so many of our past leaders from Soviet times, cardboard cut-outs propped up on platforms to watch troops and tanks and missiles file past through Red Square. Unlike them, however, I’ve always thought Yeltsin’s face was essentially kind, not angry.
We are at Barvikha–me, Nana and Finn. It is the last day of the millennium. By this time in the evening the sky has darkened behind thick winter clouds. A wind ruffles the trees and the end of a hanging branch scratches back and forth on the wood-tiled roof of the dacha.
By now I have begun to know Finn personally, intimately. Of course I knew everything about him as a target of intelligence long before. I’ve read his KGB file many times while sitting in the sealed anteroom of General Kerchenko’s office. Kerchenko was the old KGB hardliner from Brezhnev’s day, who was my case officer on Finn. I would sit in this heavily disinfected room at the Forest–I never knew why so much disinfectant was necessary–and pore over the photographs of Finn on his own or with a string of women in Moscow’s nightclubs, many of whom were our own honey traps. I read the transcripts of his conversations and looked for hours into his strange eyes, trying to see the mind behind them. In these photographs, he seemed constantly amused, carefree, knowing. I’d got to know the muscles in his face and tried to fit the transcripts of his conversations to its changing expressions.
I got to know his mannerisms and his accent and his conversational tics, his habits, and his likes and dislikes. I knew his history, or that part of it we had been able to piece together in order, we hoped, to use it against him. I had been briefed endlessly on the subject of Finn, and I’d read his file a hundred times, so that when we finally met it was like meeting a character from a favourite book.
‘Dear friends, my dears,’ Yeltsin stumbles on–not at all like the Queen, Finn says–today I am wishing you New Year greetings for the last time. But that is not all. Today I am addressing you for the last time as Russian President. I have made a decision. I have contemplated this long and hard. Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am retiring.’
Finn puts his glass down on the small cherry-wood table next to the sofa and Nana stops her shoe shuffle. She and I look at the screen in shock. I can’t see Finn’s face from where I’m lying. I had no idea beforehand of the contents of Yeltsin’s speech but this was not what any of us had imagined.
‘Many times I have heard it said,’ the President continues, ‘“Yeltsin will try to hold on to power by any means, he won’t hand it over to anyone.” That is all lies. That is not the case. I have always said that I would not take a single step away from the constitution, that the Duma elections should take place within the constitutional timescale. This has happened.
‘And, likewise, I would have liked the presidential elections to have taken place on schedule in June 2000. That was very important for Russia-we were creating a vital precedent of a civilised, voluntary handover of power from one president of Russia to another, newly elected one.’
Not sure now what we’re watching, all three of us are suddenly enthralled. Even Finn is silenced. I see his hand stop stroking Genghiz and now it weighs down heavy and immobile on the cat’s stomach until Genghiz struggles free from it and walks off in a huff, shaking his flattened fur.
I lift my head from Finn’s lap and sit up and look at the screen at that electrifying moment. My long black hair is tousled where I’ve been lying on it and Nana distractedly untangles it from behind the sofa, as she’s always done since I was a little girl.
‘This is great,’ Finn says. ‘Yeltsin always knows how to grip an audience. It’s just like eight years ago, when he stood on the tank outside the White House.’
‘Turn it up a bit,’ Nana says, and Finn reaches for the remote control.
Yeltsin talks on, about the surprise of his decision, its unscheduled nature, and says that Russia should enter the new millennium with younger men at the helm. He says that he has done his job and that, now the worst is over, Russia will always be moving forward, never returning to the past.
‘The past is already here, that’s why,’ Finn says. ‘The past is dictating the present.’
Finn is right. The past that haunts Russia in all its terrible identities, and that haunts Russians, is standing behind Yeltsin’s veiled words like the shadow of Death.
‘Why hold on to power for another six months,’ Yeltsin continues, ‘when the country has a strong person, fit to be president, with whom practically all Russians link their hopes for the future today? Why should I stand in his way?’
‘Oh God,’ Finn murmurs. ‘Oh no.’ I look at him, but his face is fixed to the screen.