The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(50)

“I am Mikhail Kamin, internal security.”

“I need to see your pa—”

“No, you don’t,” I replied softly. “You need to see the papers of farmers delivering grain, of commissars carrying last week’s mail, of petty officers who went on the piss last night. You need to see the papers of people who don’t have the big picture. What you do not need to see, my son,” translating the full meaning of “my son” from cockney gangster into Soviet paranoia is not as simple a linguistic adaptation as you might expect, “are the papers of a man who isn’t here. Because I’m not f*cking here. Because if I was f*cking here, you’d have one hell of a f*cking problem, you see?”

The boy was almost shaking with the two conflicting terrors inside him–terror of the known retribution which would strike for disobedience of his superiors, terror of the unknown which would come from disobedience of me. I decided to sway the matter for him.

“I’m glad you’re doing your duty, son,” I added, resisting the urge to clasp him by the shoulder with a too-hard grip, “but your duty is, if you don’t mind me saying so, so far beneath the big picture right now that even thinking about it is giving me a squint. So why don’t you walk me to your commander like a good soldier and keep an eye on me, and I won’t have to stand around here freezing my f*cking balls off in this f*cking waste of a f*cking place while the shit hits the fan. What do you say, lad?”

Translating the connotations of “lad”, as deployed in its most patronising form by red-faced landowners of an uncertain social class, was if anything an even more engaging linguistic challenge than “my son”. Sometimes, brute will is the way to deal with a problem, particularly when that problem has been trained from birth to respect the bullies who run the state. The guard knew that there was a security alert–of course he did, his voice as much as any other circumstance had told me as much–and was it therefore such a surprise that someone from the internal security services had turned up at his door to speak to the commander? Certainly no foreign agent would ask as much. Perhaps it wasn’t so implausible. Perhaps thinking was above his grade.

“Please come with me, comrade Captain!”

He even saluted as he let me into the compound.





Chapter 41


I once spent time working in a settlement in Israel which reminded me somewhat of Pietrok-112. I was going through a pastoral phase, having spent a good hundred and twenty years indulging in wine, women and song. Ironically enough, it was Akinleye, the queen of a good time, who inspired me to move to the Promised Land, where I would, so my reasoning went, rediscover man’s purer nature through hard work and agrarian toil. She, who had derided my ambition to kill Richard Lisle, was living at the time in Hong Kong. The year was 1971. I was fifty-two years old and wondering whether heroin addiction was such a bad way to go.

“Don’t you see how lucky you are?” she asked, lying on a recliner beneath the stars as the needles were prepared by her silent-footed maid. “You can do things to your body that no one else would dare. You can die of happiness and come back to die again!”

“Are they clean?” I asked, observing the needles carefully on their small silver tray.

“Jesus, Harry, what does it matter? Yes, they’re clean. I get them straight off this guy Hong, a triad boy.”

“How’d you meet a triad boy?”

She shrugged. “They run all the good-time houses in this place. You got money and a sense of fun in this town, you meet people, you know? Here.” She slipped off the recliner and, giggling a little at her own good nature, rolled up my sleeve for me. As I get older, the veins on my arm become bluer, or perhaps the skin whiter, and she chuckled to see the blood bulge in the crook of my arm as she pulled the tourniquet tight. The concern in my face must have showed as she picked up the first needle of amber fluid, because she grinned and slapped my skin playfully. “Harry! You’re not going to tell me that you’ve never done this before?”

“By the time I had the cash and the time,” I replied firmly, “I’d also had several lifetimes of exposure to the notion that it was a bad thing.”

“You mustn’t let yourself be influenced by what the linears say,” she chided. “We’re not like them.”

She was good with a needle–I hardly felt it go in.

Euphoria is, I believe, the term they use to describe the sensation, and upon experience I found it to be an entirely useless definition, as it relies on comparatives that are not apt to the situation. A happiness beyond compare, a contentment beyond understanding, a bliss, a travelling, a freeing of the mind from the flesh–these are all, in their ways, an appropriate description of the process, but they mean nothing, for no recollection can re-create them and no substitute mimic them. So, having known what euphoria is, it remains precisely that–a word with longing attached, but no meaning when actually experiencing the thing. My arms and legs were heavy, my mouth was dry, and I did not care, for my mouth was not mine. I knew that I was still and time was moving, and wondered how it had taken me so long to comprehend that this was the nature of time itself, and wished I had a notebook to hand so I could jot down these thoughts–these profound, beautiful thoughts I had never thought before, which would, I felt certain, revolutionise the way mankind worked. I watched Akinleye inject herself, and inject the maid, who lay with her head in Akinleye’s lap, a dutiful kitten as the drug did its work, and I wanted to explain to them that I’d had the most extraordinary idea about the nature of reality, seen the most incredible truth, if only I could make others understand it!