Our Game (27 page)

Standing, I positioned myself in front of Larry's green raincoat, which I had hung from a wooden hook in the wall. The mud-caked boots lay beneath it on the floor. In my mind's eye he was smiling his Byronic smile.

"You mad bloody Pied Piper," I whispered. "Where in God's name have you taken her?"

I have locked her in a hollow mountain in the Caucasus, he replied. I have seduced her in accordance with my blood feud against the infidel Tim Cranmer. I have swept her away on the white stallion of my sophistry.

I was remembering. Staring at the green raincoat and remembering.

"Hey, Timbo!"

Just the appellation grates on my nerves.

"Yes, Larry."

It's a Bloody Sunday and, as I realise now, our last one. Larry has driven Emma down from London. He just happened to be in town, he just happened to have a car. So instead of driving himself to Bath he has driven Emma to me. How he found her out in London I have no idea. Neither do I know how long they have been together.

"Great news," Larry announces.

"Really? Oh, good."

"I've appointed Emma our Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Her parish will include the Americas, Europe, Africa, and most of Asia. Won't it, Emm?"

"Oh, great," I say.

"I've found her a duplicator. All we need now is some headed notepaper, and we can join the United Nations. Right, Emm?"

"Oh, marvellous," I say.

But that is all I say, because that is how Cranmer's part is written for him. To look down kindly. To be tolerant and unpossessive. To leave the children with their idealism and remain on my side of the house. It is not an easy part to play with dignity. And perhaps Larry sees something of this in my face and is moved, if not to guilt, at least to pity, for he flings an arm around my shoulder and squeezes me against him.

"Pair of old queens, aren't we, Timbers?"

"Talk of the town," I agree, as Emma takes her turn to smile on our friendship.

"Here. Read all about it," says Larry, delving in his scuffed Gladstone bag. And he hands me a white booklet called "A People's Calvary." Which people is not clear to me. Our Sunday seminars have addressed so many insoluble conflicts over the last months that the Calvary could have occurred anywhere between East Timor and Alaska.

"Well, thank you both very much," I say. "It shall be my bedtime reading this very night."

But once back in my study I stuff the document deep in the file-and-forget compartment of my bookshelf, to take its place among other unreadable pamphlets Larry has pressed on me over the years.

I was picture gazing.

I was standing before the poster I had removed from Emma's love nest and impaled on a bent nail in my celibate retreat.

Who the hell are you, Bashir Haji?

You are OCL, Our Chief Leader.

You are Bashir Haji because that is how you have signed your name: from Bashir Haji to my friend Misha the great warrior.

"Larry, you crazy bastard," I said aloud. "You really crazy bastard."

I was running. I was dodging through rain and darkness to the house. The urgency in me was something I could not control. I was bent double, knees striking at my chin, leaping down the slope and across the footbridge in the darkness, sliding, falling, barking knees and elbows, while blackened cloud stacks raced across the sky like fleeing armies and the driven rain dashed at me in gusts. Gaining the kitchen entrance, I glanced quickly round before letting myself in, but

I could make out little against the density of the trees. With squelching feet I hastened across the Great Hall, down the flagstone corridor to my study, and found what I was looking for in the shelves behind my desk: the shiny, white-bound, desk-printed booklet like a university thesis, called "A People's Calvary." A quick glance inside, my first: three Russian writers were credited. Their names were Mutaliev, Fargiev, and Pliev. Translated by no less a hand than Larry's. Stuffing it under my pullover, I squelched back to the kitchen and let myself once more into the night. The storm had dropped. Pails of steam rose resentfully from the brook. Did I see the shadow of a man against the hillside—one tall man running left to right, fleeing as if observed? Regaining the priesthole, I made an anxious tour of my arrow slits before putting on the light, but I saw nothing I dared call a living man. Back at my trestle table, I opened the white booklet and spread it flat. These dons, so ponderous, so circuitous, no sense of time. In a minute they'll be talking about the meaning of meaning. I turned the pages impatiently. All right, another insoluble human tragedy; the world is full of them. The margins defaced by Larry's childish annotations, I suspected for my benefit: "Cf. the Palestinians"; "Moscow lying in its teeth as usual"; "The lunatic Zhironovskfy says all Russian Muslims should be disfranchised."

Belatedly I identified the typeface. Emma's electric portable. She must have typed it for him while they were in London. Then when they came back, they thoughtfully presented me with my complimentary copy. Jolly nice of them.

Once again I cannot tell you how much I knew, or to what extent my disbelieving spirit still demanded proof of what it knew but refused point-blank to acknowledge. But I know that as I uncovered one clue after the other, my guilt, so recently shuffled off, returned, and I began to see myself as the creator of their folly; as its provoker and negative instigator; as the essential bigot who by his intolerance brings about the circumstance he most deplores.

We are arguing, Cranmer versus the Rest of England. The argument began last night, but I managed to put it to bed. At breakfast, however, the smouldering ash again bursts into flames, and this time no sweet words of mine can put them out. This time it is Cranmer's temper that snaps, not Larry's.

He has been goading me about my indifference to the world's agonies. He has gone as far as is courteous, and then a little further, towards suggesting that I epitomise the shortcomings of the morally torpid West. Emma, though she has said little, is on his side. She sits demurely with her hands in front of her, palms uppermost, as if to demonstrate there is nothing in them. Now, with clenched precision, I have responded to Larry's attack. They have cast me as an archetype of middle-class complacency. Very well, then, that is what I shall be for them. In which perversity, I have spoken a mouthful:

I have said that I never considered myself responsible for the world's ills, not for causing them, not for curing them. The world was in my view a jungle overrun with savages, just as it had always been. Most of its problems were insoluble.

I have said I regard any quiet corner of it, such as Honeybrook, to be a haven wrested from the jaws of hell. I therefore found it discourteous in a guest when he brought to it such a catalogue of miseries.

I have said that I have always been, and would continue to be, prepared to make sacrifices for my neighbours, compatriots, and friends. But when it came to saving barbarians from one another in countries no bigger than a letter on the map, I failed to see why I should throw myself into a burning house to rescue a dog I had never cared for in the first place.

I have said all this with brio, but my heart is in none of it, though I refuse to let this show. Perhaps it pleases me to be stuck out on a limb. Suddenly, to our shared surprise, Larry declares he is delighted with me.

"Bang on the nose, Timbo. Spoken from the gut. Congrats. Right, Emm?"

Emma is anything but right.

"You were appalling," she says in a low, vicious voice, straight into my face. "You were actually terminal." She means that to her great relief I have behaved badly enough to justify her transgressions.

And the same night, as she sets off up the great staircase to resume her typing: "You don't understand the first thing about involvement."

I had returned to "A People's Calvary." I was reading history and reading it too fast, and history was not my mood, even if the past explained the present. Academic arguments about the founding of the city of Vladikavkaz: did it rise on Ingush or Ossetian territory? References to the "distorted historical facts" being offered by apologists from the Ossetian camp. Talk of the bravery of the plains-dwelling Ingush of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they were forced to take up arms to defend their villages. Talk of the contested Prigorod region, the sacred Prigorodnyi raion, now the great bone of contention between Ossetians and Ingush. Talk of places that might indeed be only the size of a letter on the map, yet when their inhabitants rose up, the power of the entire Russian Empire was held to ransom. Talk of the hopes raised by the coming of Soviet Communism and how these hopes were dashed when the red tsars turned out to be just as terrible as their white predecessors....

Suddenly out of my temporary frustration came a burst of light, and I leapt once more excitedly to my feet.

Crammed against the stone wall stood the old school trunk I used as a filing box for my CC archive. From it I extracted a bunch of folders. One contained surveillance reports, a second, character notes, a third, microphone intercepts. Armed with the intercepts, I sped back to the trestle table and resumed my reading: except that this time the Calvary is CC's own, and in my memory I am listening to his modulated Russian voice—one might almost say civilised—as he and Larry sit in their bugged hotel room at Heathrow, drinking malt whisky out of tooth mugs.

There is always something a little magical to me about these meetings between Larry and CC. If Larry feels a kinship with CC, so do I. Do we not have Larry in common? Are we not both alternately delighted and alarmed by him, raised up, brought down, infuriated and enchanted? Are we not, both of us, dependent on him for our good standing with our masters? And am I not justified, as I read the transcripts or listen to the tapes, in taking a certain pride in my controlling interest?

Heathrow is one of Checheyev's favourite places. He can take rooms there by the half day, he can rotate hotels and fancy himself anonymous—though thanks to Larry the listeners are usually ahead of him At this particular meeting, according to Larry's later account of it, CC has pulled a bunch of faded photographs from his wallet:

"This is my family, Larry, this is my aul [translator's gratuitous note: village] as it was in my father's day, this is our house, which is still occupied by Ossetians, this is their washing, hanging on the clothesline that was put up by my father, here are my brothers and sisters, and here is the railroad that deported my people to Kazakhstan.... So many died on the journey that the Russians had to keep stopping the train to bury them in mass graves.... And here is the place where my father was shot."

After the photographs Checheyev takes his diplomatic pass from his pocket and waves it in Larry's face. The transcribers' English, as leaden as ever:

"You think I was born in 1946. That is not so. Nineteen forty-six is for my cover here, my other person. I was born in 1944, on Red Army Day, which is February twenty-third. That's a big national holiday in Russia. And I was born not in Tbilisi but in a freezing cattle truck headed for the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan.

"... Do you know what happened on 23 February 1944, when I was being born and everybody was having a nice national holiday, and Russian soldiers were dancing to order in our villages and making festive? I'll tell you. The entire In-gush and Chechen nations were declared criminal by edict of Josef Stalin and carted thousands of miles from their fertile Caucasian plains to be resettled in wastelands north of the Aral Sea...."

I skipped a page or two and read greedily on: "In October '43 the Stalinists had already deported the Karachays. In March '44 they took the Balkars. And in February they came for the Chechen and the Ingush ... personally, you understand? Beria and his deputies, in the flesh, came down to mastermind our resettlement. Like you take a man from California and resettle him in Antarctica—that kind of resettle ..."

I flipped a half page. CC's dry humour was beginning to assert itself, despite the banality of the transcribers. "The old ones and the sick were spared the journey. They were herded into a nice building, which was set on fire to keep them warm. Then the building was sprayed with machine gun bullets. My father was a bit luckier. Stalin's soldiers shot him in the back of the neck for not wanting his pregnant wife to be forced onto the train.... When my mother saw my father's corpse, she decided she was lonely, so she produced me. The widow woman's son was born on the cattle truck that carried him to exile...."

Here the transcribers in their prissy way indicated a natural break, while CC withdraws to the bathroom and Larry tops up their glasses.

Those who survived the journey were put to work in a gulag, planting the frozen steppes, mining gold sixteen hours a day, which is why the Ingush to this day deal in gold.... They were classed as slave labourers on account of their alleged collaboration with the Germans, but the Ingush fought well against the Germans; they just hated Stalin and the Russians more."

"And they hated the Ossetians," Larry says keenly, like a schoolboy wanting to be top.

He has touched a nerve, perhaps deliberately, for CC unlooses a tirade.

"Why should we not hate the Ossetians? They are not of our land! They are not of our blood! They are Persians who claim to be Christians and worship heathen gods in secret. They are the lackeys of Moscow. They have stolen our fields and houses. Why? Do you know why?" Larry affects not to. "Do you know why Stalin deported us and said we were criminals and enemies of the Soviet people? Because Stalin was an Ossetian! Not a Georgian, not an Abkhazian, not an Armenian, not an Azerbaijani, not a Chechen, and not an Ingushi God knows, not an Ingushi—but a foreigner, an Ossetian. Do you love the poet Osip Mandelstam?"

Carried away by the passion of CC's outburst, Larry avows his love of Mandelstam.

"You know why Stalin had the poet Mandelstam shot? For writing in one of his poems that Josef Stalin was an Ossetian! That is why Mandelstam was shot by Stalin!"

I doubted whether this was the reason Mandelstam was shot. I held the better-attested view that he died in a psychiatric hospital. And I doubted whether Stalin was really an Ossetian. And perhaps Larry did too, but in the face of such fervour, his only recorded response is a grunt, followed by a long silence while the two men drink. Eventually CC resumes his narrative. In 1953 Stalin died. Three years later Khrushchev denounced him, and shortly afterwards the Chechen–Ingush autonomous republic resumed its rightful place on the maps: