‘The moral is Necessity. You’d do well to accept it. Necessity.’
The car pulled from the slip road to accelerate smoothly along the main ring. Other cars, I could see, were pulling over to permit us to pass. A car so large, so modern, so unrusted, could only be KGB.
‘You and I,’ he said to me. ‘We’re old men.’
‘I can hardly deny it.’
‘The Soviet Union is our place. This is where we belong. It is the country for old men. Communism is the system of old men. All those antique statesmen standing on their balcony watching the May Day Parade. Old, old men. Men like Chernenko. You knew where you were with Chernenko.’
‘In Gaga-grad,’ I said.
‘Oh he wasn’t as senile as people now say. You see, I knew him.’ He considered this statement. I realised then that, although Frenkel might put great energies into lying and deception, he was nevertheless oddly punctilious about the truth of all matters pertaining to the dignity of the Communist Party. I say although and nevertheless. Perhaps I should say because and therefore. ‘Well,’ Frenkel added, ‘it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I knew him. I worked with him, or worked under him. I sat in meetings that he chaired, for instance.’
‘I’m impressed by how elevated your position truly is.’
This clearly annoyed him. Perhaps he thought I was rebuking him for boasting. ‘I’m only saying that Chernenko was not senile. I’m only saying that I should know.’
‘Comrade, I’m not criticising,’ I said. ‘For the whole of the 1970s I had no better employment for my brain than as a filter for several hundred gallons of vodka, like an old sock used for straining moonshine. I believe I have only two memories from that entire decade. I’d never claim the right to criticise others for senility.’
Ivan stared at me. ‘Comrade,’ he said, coolly. ‘I shall be frank with you.’
‘Franker than you usually are?’
This was the wrong thing to say.
‘You fucker,’ he snarled, suddenly furious. ‘One thing I hate in this world and you are fucking it. You are an ironist.’
‘An ironist?’
‘Fundamentally, you take nothing seriously. You believe it is all a game. It was the same in your novels; they were never serious. They had no heart. That wasn’t my way. For me, as for Asterinov, literature was a high calling. A serious business. One story, not the ludicrous branchings of possibilities and ironic alternatives. But you, you don’t really take anything seriously, do you, comrade?’
I thought about this. I can be honest, now, and say that I had not previously considered the matter in this light. ‘There may be something in what you say, comrade,’ I conceded.
‘Understand,’ Frenkel added, his fury draining away a little. ‘I do not exactly denounce you for this. Some human beings are ironists. Others take the business of the world very seriously. The worst that could be said,’ he went on, his voice acquiring a slightly portentous edge, ‘is that revolution is not achieved by ironists.’ I thought of all those pictures of Lenin; those myriad images of him smiling at his own private joke, squinnying up his eyes in amusement at the absurdity of things. But I held my peace. Frenkel was still pontificating. ‘Revolution is a serious business. Changing the world for the better is a serious undertaking.’
‘No doubt.’
‘Chernenko was old, it is true. His mind was perhaps… less flexible than comrade Gorbachev’s is proving to be. But — and I do not speak out of disloyalty—’
‘The idea!’
‘It is not disloyalty to Gorbachev to say this,’ Frenkel snapped, over-insistent, ‘but General Secretary Gorbachev wants to institute change. He wants to change the way the Soviet Union is run. Perestroika and so on. But Chernenko — you see, he was born before the Revolution. That meant he understood change in a profound way; understood in a way somebody like Comrade Gorbachev never can. Chernenko lived through that time when change was the idiom of the whole world. Gorbachev can never understand change in the same way, because he was born after 1917.’
‘So was I,’ I pointed out.
Frenkel rubbed his bald head. ‘You miss my point. You do so on purpose.’
‘In itself, perhaps, a definition of irony.’
‘Communism,’ said Frenkel, as if explaining to a stubborn and unlikable child. ‘Communism is government by old men. Capitalism is different. Under capitalism things are run by the young, the thrusting, the violent. You know how it is in New York.’
‘To be honest I don’t really know how it is in Moscow,’ I said. ‘And I live here.’
‘Don’t be obtuse. You know what happens on Wall Street. It’s gangsters in suits. It’s teenagers high on their own piss and testosterone. They’re the ones who make all the money, and who have all the power. Capitalism is the jungle. In the jungle the top gorilla never gets to grow old, because there’s always some young psychopath ready to brain him with the,’ and he stumbled a little. I noticed that two frogspawny spots of spittle had accumulated in the corner of Frenkel’s mouth. He was getting worked up. ‘The jawbone of an ass,’ he concluded, unexpectedly.
‘Ass, comrade?’
The tone in which I said this increased Frenkel’s fury. He reached across and put his thumb against my chest, digging it into my sternum. It made me think of army basic training — it gave me, indeed, one of those vertiginous feelings of a deep memory surfacing abruptly and unexpectedly — when we had been taught how to stab a human being with bayonet or knife: to press the thumb in amongst the corrugations of the ribcage, to find the ossified knot at its base and then slide the blade underneath.
Though as old as me, Frenkel was considerably more muscular, and in much better health.
Trofim stirred in the front seat, readying himself to intervene if it proved necessary. He was not, of course, preparing to intervene on my behalf.
‘Comrade,’ I said, mildly.
‘You’re still not listening to me Konstantin Andreiovich,’ he said. ‘You’re not listening to me because you’re too busy trying to fuck with me. Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re about. You’re trying to commit suicide. The traditional Russian method, the vodka, takes too long. Setting fire to your own cranium was too shocking a method to proceed with. Am I right? Am I right?’ He took his thumb away, and I relaxed the muscles across my back. ‘Fucking idiot. You, Konstantin Andreiovich, I’m talking about you. Do you understand?’
‘You have a very eloquent thumb,’ I said. My ribs were sore.
‘That’s what I mean by an ironist. You can’t take the direct route. The direct route would be a rope around the neck and jump off the table, but you won’t do that. You exist in a haze of possible paths through life. That’s not the way!’
‘Or a leap from a bridge,’ I said.
‘Because you’re incapable, you want me to do your dirty work. The question is: Why?’
‘Or in front of a train.’
‘The question in other words is: Why me?’ Frenkel leered. ‘We go back a long way, I suppose. You and I stood in line and met comrade Stalin in the flesh. How many people can boast that?’