The Russia House

The word WAIT was forming in pretty pyramids. Spying is waiting.

The word SOUND replaced it. Spying is listening.

Ned and Sheriton put on their headsets as Clive and I slipped into the spare seats behind them and put on ours.

Katya sat pensively on her bed staring at the telephone, not wanting it to ring again.

Why do you give your name when none of us give names? she asked him in her mind.

Why do you give mine?

Is that Katya? How are you? This is Igor speaking. just to tell you I have heard nothing more from him, okay?

Then why do you ring me to tell me nothing?

The usual time, okay? The usual place. No problem. just like before.

Why do you repeat what needs no repetition, after I have already told you I will be at the hospital at the agreed time?

By then he'll know what his position is, he'll know which plane he can catch, everything. Then you don't have to worry, okay? How about your publisher? Did he show up all right?

'Igor, I do not know which publisher you are referring to.'

And she rang off before he could say more.

I am being ungrateful, she told herself. When people are ill it is normal that old friends should rally. And if they promote themselves overnight from casual acquaintance to old friend, and take centre stage when for years they have hardly spoken to you, it is still a sign of loyalty and there is nothing sinister about it, even if only six months ago Yakov declared Igor to be unredeemable - 'Igor has continued along the path I left behind,' he had remarked after a chance meeting in the street. 'Igor asks too many questions.'

Yet here was Igor acting as Yakov's closest friend and putting himself out for him in risky and invaluable ways. 'If you have a letter for Yakov, you have only to give it to me. I have established an excellent line of communication to the sanatorium. I know somebody who makes thejourney almost every week,' he had told her at their last meeting.

'The sanatorium?' she had cried excitedly. 'Then where is he? Where is it located?'

But it was as if Igor had not yet thought of the answer to this question , for he had scowled and looked uncomfortable and pleaded State secrecy. Us, State secrecy, when we are flaunting the State's secrets!

I am being unfair to him, she thought. I am starting to see deception everywhere. In Igor, even in Barley.

Barley. She frowned. He -had no business to criticise Yakov's declaration of affection. Wh~ does he think he is, this Westerner with his attaching manners and cynical suspicions? Coming so close so quickly, playing God to Matvey and my children?

I shall never trust a man who was brought up without dogma, she told herself severely.

I can love a believer, I can love a heretic, but I cannot love an Englishman.

She switched on her little radio and ran through the shortwave bands, having first put in the earpiece so as not to disturb the twins. But as she listened to the different voices clamouring for her soul - Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Voice of Israel, Voice of God knew whom, each one so cosy, so superior, so compelling - an angry confusion came over her. I'm a Russian! she wanted to shout back at them. Even in tragedy, I dream of a better world than yours!

But what tragedy?

The phone was ringing. She grabbed the receiver. But it was only Nasayan, an altered man these days, checking on tomorrow's plans.

'Listen, I am confirming privately that you really wish to be at the October stand tomorrow. Only we must begin early, you sec. If you have to get your kids to school or something of that sort, I can easily instruct Yelizavyeta Alexeyevna to come instead of you. It is no hardship. You have only to tell me,'

'You are very kind, Grigory Tigranovich, and I appreciate your call. But having spent most of last week helping to put up the exhibits, I should naturally like to'be present at the official opening. Matvey can manage very well to sec the children off to school.'

Thoughtfully, she put the receiver back on its cradle. Nasayan, my God – why do we address each other like characters on the stage? Who do we think is listening to us who requires such roundcd sentences? If I can talk to an English stranger as if he is my lover, why can't F talk normally to an Armenian who is my colleague?

He rang, and she knew at once that she had been waiting all this while for his call, because she was already smiling. Unlike Igor, he did not say his name or hcrs.

'Elope with me,' he said.

'Tonight?'

'Horses are saddled, food for three days.'

'But are you also sober enough to elope?'

'Amazingly, I am.' A pause. 'It's not for want of trying but nothing happened. Must be old age.'

He sounded sober too. Sober and close.

'But what about the book fair? Are you going to desert it as you deserted the audio fair?'

'To hell with the book fair. We've got to do it before or never., Afterwards we'll be too tired. How are you?'

'Oh, I am furious with you. You have co'mpletcly bewitched my family, and now they ask only when you will come back with more tobacco and crayons.'

Another pause. He was not usually so thoughtful when he was joking.

'That's what I do. I bewitch people, then the moment -they're under my spell I cease to feel anything for them.'

'But that's terrible!' she cried, deeply shocked. 'Barley, what are you telling rne?'

'Just repeating the wisdom of an early wife, that's all. She said I had impulses but no feelings and I shouldn't wear a duffle Coat in London. Anyone tells you something like that, you believe it for the rest of your life. I've never wom a duffle coat since.'

'Barley, that woman - Barley, that was a totally cruel and irresponsible thing for her to say. I am sorry but she is completely wrong. She was provoked, I am sure. But she is wrong.'

'She is, is she? So what do I feel? Enlighten me.'

She broke out laughing, realising she had walked straight into his trap.

'Barley, you are a very, very bad man. I shall have nothing to do with you.'

'Because I don't feel anything?'

'For one thing, you feel protection for people. We all noticed that today, and we were grateful.'

'More.'

'For another, you feel a sense of honour, I would say. You are decadent, naturally, because you are a Westerner. That is normal. But you are redeemed because you feel honour.'

'Are there any pies left over?'

'You mean you feel hunger too?'

I want to come and eat them.'

'Now?'

'Now.'

'That is completely impossible! We are all in bed already and it's nearly midnight.'

'Tomorrow.'

'Barley, this is too ridiculous. We are about to begin the book fair, both of us have a dozen invitations.'

'What time?'

A beautiful silence was settling between them.

'You may come at perhaps-half-past-seven.'

'I may be early.'

For a long while after that neither of them spoke. But the silence joined them more closely than words could have done. They became two heads on a single pillow, ear to ear. And when he rang off it was not his jokes and selfironies that stayed with her but the tone of contented sincerity – she would almost say solemnity – that he had seemed unable to keep out of his voice.

He was singing.

Inside his head, and outside it too. In his heart and all over his body at last, Barley Blair was singing.

He was in his big grey bedroom at the gloomy Mezh on the eve of the Moscow book fair, and he was singing 'Bless This House' in the rccognisable manner of Mahalia Jackson while he pirouetted round the room with a glass of mineral water in his hand, glimpsing his reflection in the immense television screen that was the room's one glory.

Sober.

Hot sober.

Barley Blair.

Alone.

He had drunk nothing. In the safe truck for his debriefing, though he had sweated like a racehorse, nothing. Not even a glass of water ' while he had rcgaled Paddy and Cy with a sweetened, unworried version of his day.

At the French publishers' party at the Rossiya with Wicklow, where he had positively shone with confidence, nothing.

At the Swedes' party at the National with Henziger, where he had shone yet more brightly, he had grabbed a glass of Georgian shampanskoye in self-protection because Zapadny was so pointedly amazed he was not drinking. But he had contrived to leave it undrunk behind a flower vase. So still nothing.

And at the Doubleday party at the Ukraina with Henziger again, shining like the North Star by now, he had clutched it to look a mineral water with a bit of lemon floating in like gin and tonic.

So nothing. Not out ot high-mindedness. Not a reformed spirit, God forbid. He had not signed the Pledge or turned over a new leaf. It was merely that he wished nothing to mar the clear-headed, reasoned ecstasy that was collecting in him, this unfamiliar sense of being at dreadful risk and equal to it, of knowing that whatever was happening he had prepared himself for it, and that if nothi n*g was happening he was ready for that too, because his preparedness was an all-round defence with a sacred absolute at its centre.

I have joined the tiny ranks of people who know what they will do first if the ship catches fire in the middle of the night, he thought; and what they will do last, or not do at all. He knew in ordered detail what he considered worth saving and what was unimportant to him. And what was to be shoved aside, stepped over and left for dead.