Among the Russians(86)

I gave them a miserable time that evening. I was trying to find the flat of an impeccable Party member, a chance address given me in Moscow, but the sign-posting in Kiev was so erratic that I missed my way. Dusk deepened to night and the Volga turned to a pair of blazing eyes behind me, shifting among others. I became hopelessly lost. I drove in giddy rings along mud-caked side-lanes. Once I went full-circle and came up behind the Volga floundering in mire, its lights switched off. The two men were by now ridiculously exposed. They must have thought I was persecuting them on purpose.

Obsessed by my guilt in their eyes, I asked a policeman the way. He was off-duty, but he offered to drive ahead of me. So we started off, the unwitting policeman leading, and wound through a new cryptogram of half-lit streets and alleys. Five minutes later, so intent was I on the baleful lights behind me that I noticed too late when the policeman stopped. My foot crushed the brake-pedal, but the tyres choked in mid-scream and I crashed into him.

At that moment, in my mind’s eye, a bureaucratic mountain amassed and suffocated me: insurance estimates, police reports, international telegrams, litigation. The policeman clambered from his car in amazement. ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’ he cried.

I glanced behind me. ‘I’m sorry.’ The Volga had pulled in among trees, its lights flashed off. ‘I don’t know.’

But when we inspected the cars, his own was mysteriously unscathed. We both gazed at it in disbelief, and for long minutes the kindly policeman stood in the road with his fist in his bovine mouth, staring down at damage which was unaccountably not there. Only my travel-sick Morris showed a dented wing and a smashed radiator grille and headlight.

After a long time he drove away nonplussed into the dark, and I was left with the KGB. But they didn’t stir. Even now the street number, block number, and apartment numbers around me reeled in an incoherent maze. A few people were loitering outside the flats in the warm night. I entered the wrong block. When I reemerged I glimpsed the two men in the faint glow of the street lights, standing behind bushes near the entrance. I went up to them and asked them where was Block L?

When I looked into the face of the dark man, I recognized him from the hotel foyer. It was a face of tundra-like anonymity. Its tiny eyes peered over formless cheeks as if over a wall. It was not, I supposed, a cruel face, but unimaginative, dead.

‘I don’t know.’ His voice was self-smothered. He tried to turn away from me. This reaction—he was obviously trained to avoid contact with his prey—was utterly un-Russian, and instantly remarkable. So I found the man’s flat alone, and after a formal, ten-minute greeting emerged again and drove my battered Morris away. Its other headlight had already been broken by a tractor in the Crimea, so I nosed back blindly like a mole through the corridors of the dimmed streets, the Volga following, and all of us (I imagine) feeling foolish and angry, until I gained the hotel gates and my shadow drifted away to a compound of its own.



For the next four days I was followed everywhere. I came to recognize the techniques of the white Volgas (they were always white), sheltered by lorries a hundred yards behind me. Highly trained, they behaved in ways which were eventually so recognizable that by the fifth day I would pick them out at a glance. But by now I was riddled with nerves. I was afraid above all that my travel notes, compressed into the form of an illegible diary, would be discovered and taken away. Isolated, I began to partake in the condemnation of my silent spectators. I began to feel deeply, inherently guilty. A single friend might have saved me from this, but I didn’t have one. I understood now the precious intensity of personal relationships among the dissidents. Because around me, as around them, the total, all-eclipsing Soviet world, which renders any other world powerless and far away, had become profoundly, morally hostile.

In the long, carpetless halls of the hotel, the walled-up faces of waiting men and the sunny voices of the Intourist girls became the scenario of nightmare. I began to behave guiltily. For a whole day I incarcerated myself in my room, illegibly writing up and disguising notes. I searched for a bugging device in vain; I did not dare even curse to myself. Then I wondered if I had implicated anybody else, and decided to destroy my list of Russian addresses and telephone numbers. The irony was that there was no person on it, dissident or other, who did not feel passionately for his country’s good. But I could not decide how to destroy this paper. The problem became tortuous. If I shredded the list into my waste-paper basket, it might be reconstructed. If I went into the passage, the eyes of the concierges followed me; and all the public rooms were heavy with scrutiny. If I went out, I would he followed. So, like a cunning schoolboy, I burnt the list in my lavatory.

‘Fire!’ A fat laundry-maid burst in. ‘Fire! Where’s all this smoke from? Fire!’ She had a blotched, porcine face which sloped neckless into her body. I stared at her with pure hate.

A young concierge appeared behind. Her gaze hardened and flew round the room. ‘What’s this?’

‘I’ve been smoking.’

‘Only smoking?’

‘Yes.’

I felt angry, shaken by my own lie. The concierge marched back past her desk and descended the elevator. I imagined myself under inquisition, trying to clear myself. I never smoke. But in one corner of the stairway landing stood an ash-bin where I found three cigarette-stubs. As if participating in some third-rate thriller, I took them back to my room, lit them to foil forensic tests, and left them in the lavatory. Then I walked downstairs and out into the sun, refusing to look behind me. I was shaking.