Archangel (28 page)

'You're jumpy,' said
O'Brian, interrupting himself.
I can
tell.'

'Do you blame me?'

'Why? Because of Mamantov?' The reporter flicked his hand. 'He doesn't scare me.

'You didn't see what he did to the old man.'

'Yeah, well he wouldn't do that to us. Not to a Brit and a Yank. He's not completely nuts.

'Maybe not. But he might do it to Zinaida.'

'I wouldn't worry about Zinaida. Besides, she hasn't got the stuff any more. We have.'

'You're a nice man, you know that? And what if they don't believe her?'

'I'm just saying you should quit bothering about Mamantov, that's all. I've interviewed him a couple of times and I can tell you, he's a busted flash. The man lives in the past. Like you.'

And you? You don't live in the past, I suppose?'

'Me? No way. Can't afford to, in my job.'

'Now let's just analyse that,' said Kelso, pleasantly. In his mind he was opening a drawer, selecting the sharpest knife he could find. 'So all these places- you've been boasting about for the past two hours - Africa, Bosnia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland - the past isn't important there, is that what you're saying? You think they're all living in the present? They all just woke up one morning, saw you were there with your four little suitcases, and decided to have a war? It wasn't happening till you arrived? "Gee, hey, look everyone, I'm R. J. O'Brian and I just discovered the fucking Balkans -'Okay,' muttered O'Brian, 'there's no need to be offensive
about it.'

'Oh but there is.' Kelso was warming up. 'This is the great
myth, you see, of our age. The great western myth. The
arrogance of our time, personified - if you'll excuse me for saying so - in you. That just because a place has a McDonalds and MTV and takes American Express it's exactly the same as everywhere else - it doesn't have a past any more, it's Year Zero. But it's not true.

'You think you're better than me, don't you?' 'No.'

'Smarter then?'

'Not even that. Look. You say Moscow is a scary town. It

is. Why? I'll tell you. Because there's no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country's owned, as it's always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can't begin to understand Russia. You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.' Kelso sat back in his seat. 'End of lecture.'

And for half an hour, as O'Brian pondered this, there was blessed peace.

THEY reached the big town of Yaroslavl just after nine and crossed the Volga. Kelso poured them each a cup of coffee. It slopped across his lap as they hit a rough patch of road. O'Brian drank as he drove. They ate chocolate. The headlights that had blazed towards them around the city gradually dwindled to the occasional flash.

Kelso said, 'Do you want me to take over?'

O'Brian shook his head. 'I'm fine. Let's change at midnight. You should get some sleep.'

They listened on the radio to the news at ten o'clock. The communists and the nationalists in the lower senate, the Duma, were using their majoriry to block the President's latest measures: another political crisis threatened. The Moscow stock exchange was continuing its plunge. A secret report from the Interior Ministry to the President, warning of a danger of armed rebellion, had been leaked and printed in Aurora.

Of Rapava, Mamantov or Stalin's papers there was no mention.

'Shouldn't you be in Moscow, covering all this?'

O'Brian snorted. 'What? "New Political Crisis in Russia"? Give me a break. R. J. O'Brian won't be on the hour eve
ry hour with that.

'But he will with this?'

"'Stalin's Secret Lover, Mystery Girl Revealed"? What do you think?'

O'Brian switched off the radio.

Kelso reached over to the back seat and dragged one of the sleeping bags into the front. He opened it out and wrapped it around him like a blanket, then pressed a button and his seat slowly reclined.

He closed his eyes but he couldn't sleep. Images of Stalin gradually invaded his mind. Stalin as an old man. Stalin as glimpsed by Milovan Djilas after the war, leaning forward in his limousine while he was being driven back to Blizhny, turning on a little light in the panel in front of him to see the time on a pocket watch hanging there - 'and I observed directly in front of me his already hunched back and the bony grey nape of his neck with its wrinkled skin above the stiff marshal's collar. . .' (Djilas thought Stalin was senile that night: cramming his mouth with food, losing the thread
of his stories, making jokes about the Jews.) And Stalin, less than six months before he died, delivering
his last, rambling speech to the Central Committee, describing how Lenin faced the crises of 1918 and repeating the same word over and over - 'he thundered away in an incredibly difficult situation, he thundered on, fearing nothing, he just thundered away...' - while the delegates sat stunned, transfixed.

And Stalin, alone in his bedroom, at night, tearing pictures of children out of magazines and plastering them around his walls. And then Stalin making Anna Safanova dance for him -It was curious, but whenever Kelso tried to picture Anna
Safanova dancing, the face he always gave her was that of Zinaida Rapava.

ZINAIDA RAPAVA WAS sitting in her parked car in Moscow in the darkness with her bag on her lap and her hands in that bag, feeling the outline of her father's Makarov pistol.

She had discovered that she could still strip and load it without looking at it - like riding a bicycle, it seemed: one of those childish accomplishments you never forgot. Release the spring at the bottom of the grip, pull out the magazine, squeez
e in the bullets (six, seven, ei
ght of them, smooth and cold to the touch), push the magazine back up, click, slide, then press the safety catch down to fire. There.

Papa would have been proud of her. But then she always had been better at this game than Sergo. Guns made Sergo nervous. Which was a joke, seeing as he was the one who had to do military service.

Thinking of Sergo made her cry again, but she wouldn't let herself give in to it for long. She pulled her hands out of her bag and wiped each eye irritably - so then so - on either sleeve of her jacket, then went back to her task.

Push. Click. Slide. Press...

SHE was scared. So scared, in fact, that when she had walked away from the westerner that afternoon she had wanted to look back at him standing outside the office block - had wanted to go back to him - but if she'd done that he would have known she was afraid, and fear, she had been taught, was something you must never show. Another of her father's lessons.

So she had hurried on to her car and had driven around
for a while without thinking until presently she had found herself heading in the direction of Red Square. She had parked in Bolshaya Lubyanka and had walked uphill to the little white Church of the Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir, where a service was in progress.

The place was packed. The churches were always packed now, not like in the old days. The music washed over her. She lit a candle. She wasn't sure why she did this because she had no faith; it was the sort of thing her mother used to do. And what has your god ever done for us?' - her father's sneering voice. She thought of him, and of the girl who wrote the journal, Anna Safanova. Silly bitch, she thought. Poor silly bitch. And she lit a candle for her, too, and much good might it do her, wherever she was.

She wished her memories were better but they weren't and there was nothing to be done. She could remember him drunk, mostly, his eyes like worm holes, his fists flying. Or tired from work at the engine sheds, as rank as an old dog, too weary to rise from his chair to go to bed, sitting on a sheet of Pravda to keep the oil off the cover. Or paranoid, up half the night, staring out of the window, prowling the corridors - who was that looking at him? who was that talking about him? - spreading yet more sheets from Pravda down on the floor and obsessively cleani
ng his Makarov. (I’ll kill them i
f
I have to...')

But sometimes, when he wasn't drunk or exhausted or mad - in the mellow hour, between mere inebriation and oblivion - he'd talk about life in Kolyma: how you survived, traded favours and scraps of tobacco for food, wangled the easier jobs, learned to smell a stoolie - and then he'd take her on his lap and sing to her, some of the Kolyma songs, in his fine Mingrelian tenor.

That was a better memory.

At fifty he had seemed so old to her. He always had been an old man. His youth had gone when Stalin died. Maybe that was why he went on about him so much? He even had a picture of Stalin on the wall - remember that? - Stalin with his glossy moustaches, like great black slugs? Well, she could never take her friends back there, could she? Never let them see the pig state in which they lived. Two rooms, and her in the only bedroom, sharing first with Sergo and then, when he was too big and too embarrassed to look at her, with mama. And mama a wraith even before the cancer got her, then turning to gossamer and finally melting to nothing.

She'd died in eighty-nine when Zinaida was eighteen. And six months later they were back at the Troekurovo cemetery putting Sergo in the earth beside her. Zinaida closed her eyes and remembered papa, drunk, at the funeral, in the rain, and a couple of Sergo's army comrades, and a nervous young lieutenant, just a kid himself, who had been Sergo's commanding officer, talking about how Sergo had died for the motherland whilst rendering fraternal assistance to the progressive forces of the People's Republic of-

- oh, fuck it, what did it matter? The lieutenant had cleared off as soon as he decently could, after about ten minutes, and Zinaida had moved her things out of the ghost-filled apartment that night. He had tried to stop her, hitting her, sweating vodka through his open pores, stinking even more like an old dog from his soaking in the rain, and she had never seen him again. Never seen him again until last Tuesday morning when he had turned up on her doorstep and called her a whore. And she had thrown him out like a beggar, sent him away with a couple of packs of cigarettes, and now he was dead and she really would never see him again.

She bent her head, lips moving, and anyone watching
might have thought she was praying, but actually she was reading his note and talking to herself.

'I have been a bad one, you're right. All you said was right. So don't think I don't know it-'

Oh, papa, you were, you know that? You really were. 'But here is a chance to do some good-' Good? Is that what you call it? Good? That's a joke. They killed you for it and now they're going to kill me.

'Remember that place I used to have, when mama was alive?'

Yes, yes, I remember.

And remember what I used to tell you? Are you listening to me, girl? Rule number one? What's rule number one?'

She folded away the note and glanced around. This was stupid.

Speak up, girl
"

She bowed her head meekly.

Never show them you're afraid, papa.

Again!'

'Never show them you're afraid.'

And rule number two? What's rule number two?'

You've only got one friend in this world.

And that friend is?'

Yourself.

And what else?'

This.

Show me.'

This, papa. This.

In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing
dexterity -Push. Click. Slide. Press -

SHE had left the church when the service ended and hurried down into Red Square, knowing what she had to do, much calmer now.

The westerner was right. She didn't dare risk her apartment. There wasn't a friend she knew well enough to ask if she could stay. And in a hotel she would have to register, and if Mamantov had friends in the FSB -That only left one option.

It was nearly six and the shadows were beginning to collect and deepen around the base of Lenin's tomb. But across the cobbles the lights of the GUM department store blazed brighter by the minute - a line of yellow beacons, it seemed to her, in the gloom of the late October afternoon.

She made her purchases quickly, starting with a knee-length black cocktail dress of raw silk. She also bought herself sheer black tights, short black gloves, a black purse, a pair of black high-heeled shoes and make-up.

She paid for it all in cash, in dollars. She never
went out with less than $1,000
in cash. She refused to use a credit card:
they left too many traces. And she didn't trust the banks, either: thieving alchemists, the lot of them, who would take your precious dollars and conjure them into roubles, turn gold into base metal.

At the cosmetic counter one of the salesgirls recognised her - Hi, Zina! - and she had to turn and flee.