‘I have no interest in the slaying of Chelubey, or the half-victory of Napoleon in this oblast. I think, my friend, we’re embarked on a journey of greater importance than the trivia you offer me.’
‘Are you answering me? Is that your problem?’
Yashkin would not have described himself, or his friend, as a man given to sentiment or nostalgia, but as they crossed the rain-sodden roads, bisecting the flooded fields and dripping forestry, each hour he travelled and each kilometre he covered seemed to increase the risk of a soul searched and determination weakened. He imagined the questions bouncing in Molenkov’s mind. What would be its target? Who would carry it to the target? Did not know. Over all lay the question, would it work? Here, he could absolve himself. He had not the faintest idea. He was not a Kurchatov, a Khariton or a Sakharov. He was not an academician or a scientific leader of the old community of Arzamas-16. He was Major (Ret’d) Oleg Yashkin, forcibly removed, with a pension that went unpaid, driver of a taxi for drunks and addicts. He thought trivia would work well for them.
‘Will you talk about it?’ Molenkov asked of him.
‘No.’
‘You refuse to talk about it?’
‘Yes.’
‘We carry that fucking thing, and you won’t talk about it?’
Yashkin said, ‘We’ve done the talking.’
Again he heard the sigh. Had he spoken, before his dismissal, with that cutting whip in his voice to a ranking colonel, and a zampolit, he could have expected savage disciplinary sanctions, demotion, perhaps a posting to the Far East or the Arctic cold of the northern test sites at the island of Zemlya, which was close to the eightieth parallel. But the old days were dead and buried.
Molenkov asked him, ‘Do you know what day this is?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know what happened on this day?’
He knew it wasn’t the anniversary of the death of his friend’s son, Sasha, in the furnace of an armoured vehicle by the entrance of the Salang tunnel in Afghanistan, or his boy’s birthday. He knew too that it wasn’t the date on which his friend’s wife had died, or the date on which his friend had come to his office and confided his shock at seeing a physicist, a man of science who was spoken of as a director of a research zone at Arzamas-16, in a field digging for potatoes.
‘I don’t know what happened on this day — I apologize because I’m an ignorant bastard, and know very little.’
‘On this day, I ran the fifteen-hundred metres.’
‘At what level?’
‘The final of the Olympic trial. The first three were to represent the Soviet Union, go to the Seventeenth Olympiad, at Rome in Italy. Had I been in the first three, and had I gone on, to Rome, to the Olympic final, I would have competed against the great Herb Elliot who was to take the gold medal. In the trial, on this day, I achieved a personal best. I was twenty-one, and reaching the final of the Olympic trial was enough to gain my entry to State Security … I can still see it, the stadium, the crowd, us lined up and the starter with his gun held high.’
‘In the trial, friend, where did you finish?’
‘Last — where else?’
Yashkin swerved. Laughter convulsed him. He had one hand on the wheel and the other gripped his friend’s sleeve. He felt his stomach rise and his eyes were wet with tears. His friend laughed with him. Yashkin did not know how he missed a puddle as big as a lake — his view of the road and the fields was misted. His friend looped an arm round his shoulders and pulled him close. The Polonez rang with their laughter, spittle was on their lips and chins, and his chest hurt. Then they were coughing and spluttering.
Molenkov said, ‘I promise I’ll try not to talk about it.’
Yashkin said, ‘It would be good to see the trotting horses stabled in the Bryansk oblast. I believe they’re fine animals.’
The rain hammered on the tin roof of the woodsman’s home. Water leaked from the ceiling and pattered to the floor, but a steady, firmer dribble splashed on to the table where he sat. His shotgun was down from its wall hooks, broken on the table, but loaded. His dog was alongside his chair and its head rested on his lap. The only movement that Tadeuz Komiski made was to ruffle the fur below the dog’s collar. He should have been outside, in the rain, at work.
When the forestry men had cleared a rectangle of planted pines, they had taken only the best, the straightest, trunks and had sliced off the lower branches and upper sprigs. The trunks were hauled away to the depot at the village and there they were cut into lengths to be used as props in coal mines far to the south-west. They were loaded on to rail wagons that were stopped in a line beside the raised platform, then shunted on to the tracks of the main line out of the village. It was the same raised platform that had been used when he was a child … and he could not escape from the memories of those long-ago days.
The work he took for himself was to go into the forest on his ancient tractor, with his chain-saw on the trailer and his axe, and drive to one of the rectangles that had been cleared most recently for props. He had few skills and was devoid of sophistication, but could keep the tractor’s engine maintained, and the chain-saw. The tractor had been his father-in-law’s, given to him as a present in 1965 on the day he had married Maria. To have let the tractor rust, to have abandoned it, would have been the equivalent of disowning the memory of his wife, who had died from the curse with her stillborn child. It was from the tractor’s seat that he had first found the old grave where the flood rains had washed earth and compost from the body’s bones. Because of that grave, and the curse it had brought down on him, he believed himself watched.
When he went to those cleared rectangles he could find enough of the pine trunks, left by the foresters, to cut into rings and split. With a day’s work behind him, he would have a trailer-load of fresh pine logs, with the resin still sticky in them. They spat and crackled in a fire, but threw off good heat. He would drive his load away down the forest tracks, then come to the road and dart across it — because he had no licence or insurance. He would approach the village from a rutted farm path, and reach the priest’s home. There he would throw out the logs, by hand, into a loose heap, and they would be used in the church boiler, the priest’s house and in the homes of parishioners too enfeebled to gather their own wood. He would be paid, not much but something. Enough to go to the shop in the village and buy bread, milk, and sugar, if it had been a big load, and the noodles that came in plastic packets, broth for soup, and a sack of dried meal for his dog.
A man had sat in the forest with his back against a tree. A man had disturbed the dog. A man had waited silently for a sight of him … and he thought the curse revisited his life. He had gathered no wood.
His stomach growled. His own hunger he could accept, but there was only one more day’s food in the sack for the dog.
Tadeuz Komiski knew it: it would be the dog’s hunger that drove him from his home into the forest, where the curse waited for him, and there was a grave, and a man watched for him.
‘And then we have something we’ve called Haystack which is in the bailiwick of dear Christopher Lawson, who is currently up and running in Germany …’
As a junior liaison officer, she had never before attended such an august meeting. It was held once a week. Officers of the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service came together to brief, with a mutual minimum of detail, those of the sister organization. But her line manager, who would ordinarily have gone to such a meeting with his deputy, had that morning entered hospital for a keyhole hernia operation and would be off for four days, so she had been taken along by the deputy. The Security Service had already completed their description of current operations that had relevance to matters overseas, and the Secret Intelligence Service now listed their work that ‘might/could’ have ‘possible/probable’ implications for her people.