SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (15 page)

11

On the Northern Line Clive’s
mobile phone rang, it was Helen his assistant. In a burst of enthusiasm and
decisiveness he gave the go-ahead to a huge number of projects including
Bold
As Bacon.
He rang off and sat back in his seat, happy that his terrible
inability to make a decision seemed to have gone away, thank God for that, he
felt so much better now. This warm sense did not last very long. While at the
front of his brain he was smugly content, in the back room where the bad things
were brewed up his thoughts were worriting away at some anomaly. Suddenly a
cold, miserable shock ran through him. Mobile phones didn’t work deep down here
on the Northern Line! He couldn’t have had a call from Helen, had he imagined
the whole thing? Had he sat there mute and daymaring or had he taken out his
phone and shouted mad stuff into it? The looks the other passengers were giving
him suggested the latter.

Clive
knew then that he was going mad and it wasn’t at all how he imagined it. He’d
always thought somehow that if he went mad, he wouldn’t be there, that it would
be like a dream, or something that he could stand outside of, calmly observing
at a distance. Or that in the experience of madness he would be so changed that
it wasn’t Clive at all who was insane but some other person that he didn’t have
to worry about. Instead he felt himself monstrously, unbearably, still to be
Clive, but a Clive whose thoughts had run away from him to operate on their
own, screaming and rattling away to a logic of their own devising.

He had
once owned at his cottage in Gloucestershire a two-stroke American lawn mower
called a ‘Lawn Boy’. He’d bought it for the name partly. This machine, either through
design or through some fault, just before it ran out of fuel would suddenly
speed up to an insane degree, its blades whirling with the force of a fighter
engine, giving it enough power to chop garden furniture and bird tables into
fragments if he didn’t switch it off quickly enough. That’s how his thoughts
felt now, spinning and razor-edged, chopping and scything and sending clods of
earth flying.

A tube,
a train, a bus, another bus and he was in a place called Croydon. It was a busy
place, there was a market with two different Caribbean stalls run by white
people, a place called Brannigans that said it provided ‘Drink, Dancing and Cavorting’.
Clive did a mad little skip and jump when he read the word ‘cavorting’. There
were big ugly 1 960s buildings and there were trains. Red and grey trains that
slithered almost silently along the pavement. A Number 2, destination Beckenham
Jnc, appeared over the brow of a hill, travelling at twenty miles an hour.
Clive found himself walking rapidly towards it on his short little legs. He
wasn’t entirely sure that this was a good idea so he consulted the voices in
his head. They weren’t much use. Some said it wasn’t a good notion, that he
could be killed, but others drowned them out saying that walking in front of a
tram might be a lark, while others said that there was really no way he could
be sure that he was in Croydon walking towards a tram at all, so it didn’t
matter what he did. Closing with the tram he saw it advertised on its side a
Malaysian Buffet restaurant in Wimbledon, that offered forty dishes for £5.50.
He had a little laugh to himself thinking of him trying to decide what to
choose from forty dishes; he wouldn’t even be able to pick up a plate. He was
very close to the tram now: he could see the driver and he could hear a bell
beginning to clang. ‘So,’ he said to himself, ‘are we really certain we want to
do this?’ And he replied, ‘Well, it’s hard to say; on the one ha—’

12

Tatum stood at his father’s
graveside and wondered why he couldn’t cry. He had driven up that morning from
London. Waking early he had got into a panic because he couldn’t find his only
white shirt. He’d shouted at a still drowsy Cherry, ‘I can’t find me shirt,
where’s me shirt? Do you know? Where’s me shirt?’ She didn’t know but he’d
finally found it hanging in the wardrobe where it had been in plain sight all
the while.

A light
rain began to fall on the small clot of mourners making the graveyard a
perfect picture of Victorian melancholy, yet Tatum still could find no tears.
He felt a buzzing in his pocket as if a big bee was trapped in his trousers. It
was one of his pagers saying it had a message for him. Turning away from the
grave, the other members of his family thinking him grief-struck, he
surreptitiously took out the device and read its message. It was from Cherry,
it read: ‘Have been appointed Acting Head Of Media Facilitation. Am cancelling
Bold
As Bacon
forthwith. Seems dated, and anyway can’t be seen to be helping a
relative. XXX Cherry.’

13

Then he cried.

THE ONLY MAN STALIN WAS AFRAID OF

1

The red flags and banners
were cracking in the wind, Making the NKVD bodyguard edgy and tense, on the day
in the early part of 1937 that Comrade Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, paid a rare and frightening visit to meet
some of his subject peoples. The streets were cleared of traffic for miles
around while his armoured American Packard, surrounded by a legion of NKVD
bodyguard in trucks and on motorbikes, took him to a bakery co-operative near
the Leningrad Station. The reason he was visiting this bakery was that it had
exceeded by over one hundred per cent its loaf production targets, as set out
in the second great Five Year Plan. That this great loaf leap forward had been
achieved by diluting the flour with various poisonous metals was of no concern
to anybody, apart from those few who were killed by their lunch. He was there
to present a medal of Heroes of Soviet Labour (second grade) to each member of
the workforce.

The
General Secretary went along the line of men and women, uttering the odd gruff
word, pinning medals on the rough tunics (made of the same crude fabric as his
own) of the bakers and the administrative staff.

Stalin
was a small man and most of the faces of the workers were well above his but
towards the end of the line he came face to face with the quivering visage of
I.M. Vosterov, comrade baker third grade, a short round man with a thick black
moustache, round bright brown eyes and a rather delicate, fine, thin nose. When
Stalin accidentally looked into the eyes of this sweating little man he was
astonished to feel a sudden and violent lunge of fear, a fear composed of
nothing but pure fear itself, free floating and anchored to nothing, a horror
so deep that a man less dexterous at hiding his feelings, would have run
yelping into the street. Yet nigh on nothing showed on Comrade Stalin’s face, a
slight twitching of his moustache perhaps as he moved down the line, and the
further he got from I.M. Vosterov the more the dread subsided. However, if he
looked back down the ranks and caught the slightest sight of the little man
then the fear returned to him as strong as ever. Stalin didn’t know how he kept
moving; the fear he felt was intolerable. He thought to himself that he would
not be able to endure the next few seconds and minutes. That he could survive
through the following days or weeks with this fear seemed an absolute
impossibility.

Of
course he had felt fear before but it had been of an entirely different order:
lesser, altogether understandable. He had feared other men — more or less all
other men — for what he thought they might be able to do to him. For example he
had feared all the old Bolsheviks, those who knew the secret, the ones who had
read Lenin’s last letter to the Central Committee condemning him as unfit, a
scoundrel and a repressor. They were all now shot or being worked to death in
the camps and he feared them no longer. He had feared Trotsky, the only one who
could have replaced him in the early days. Trotsky, of course, was banished,
waiting on the shelf in Mexico to be dealt with one day. He had feared Bukharin
because they said Bukharin had a better mind. For the crime of having a better
mind Stalin had exiled him twice and allowed him to come back twice, forcing
him the last time to admit his mistakes before the entire Party Congress,
playing with a man as if he were a clockwork toy (his confessions wouldn’t save
him, he would be executed one day, and the thing was that Bukharin, with his
fine mind, knew it). Stalin got pleasure from the way Bukharin looked at him,
he liked to see the knowledge in his eyes. Stalin had even allowed him to go
abroad, knowing he would come back.

And he
had. It was terribly hard for Russians not to return to the sacred soil of the
Motherland, even if it killed them; it was part of the soulfulness the Russians
saw in themselves, a poetic attachment to soil.

The
kind of terror that Stalin felt when he thought of the little baker was
entirely different. As far as he could tell he did not fear what Vosterov could
do to him: what could a baker do to him — Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? Cook him a bad cake? No, it seemed
that there was just something about the little man which brought out terror,
pure and simple. This dread was clear and burning to the skin, like the finest
peasant-grain vodka, distorting and oily in its bottle. Perhaps, Stalin
thought, the little baker was some kind of mirror that reflected back all the
screaming fear that rose like swamp fog from the entire terror-ity of his
empire … he didn’t know. He didn’t know. He, who through his web of secret agents
and spies, knew all that was going on in distant frozen Archangel, in sunny
Yalta, amongst the minarets and towers of Oriental Tashkent, suddenly he didn’t
know what was going on inside his own head. He felt furious and very, very
frightened.

Sitting
back in the leather seat of the car Stalin reflected again on the nature of the
anxiety he felt. There were many around him who he suspected of treachery,
there were many who he thought might try to kill him, there were many that he
hated (the entire Kulak class, for example), but this terror was certainly
different. The fear that he generally felt was an enabling thing: a motivation
to have this individual or that village or that class liquidated. But with the
little baker it was the reverse — it paralysed him.

As soon
as he got back to his apartment in the Kremlin and his bodyguard had gone,
Stalin ran from room to room in a high-stepping dance, flapping his arms like a
bird and saying over and over to himself, ‘OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod!’
Then he settled in a corner and beat himself on the temple with the heel of his
hand, shouting, ‘Stop it! Please stop it! Please stop it!’ Then he sat at his
desk and issued an order to Yagoda, the head of the NKVD, to arrest and deport
to the labour camps the entire workforce of the Bakery Collective near the
Leningrad Station. Yet, as he went to put the order in the internal mail, the
General Secretary thought to himself, ‘Well off you go to the camps, you
comrade little shit, I.M. Vosterov’ and having that thought caused a picture of
I.M. Vosterov to rise up inside his head.

If
anything, the fear was worse than before: Stalin fell off his chair to the
floor and lay watching the ceiling spin for several minutes. It did, at least,
give him the chance to inspect the bottom of his desk for microphones.
Eventually Stalin was able to climb back to his desk where he wrote on the
executive order in a shaky hand: ‘Excluding from deportation Comrade I.M.
Vosterov, baker third grade.’

Over
the next few weeks, though, Stalin was frequently struck with thoughts of I.M.
Vosterov, each thought carrying its own spear of terrible anxiety. He consoled
himself with the notion that at least he would never have to see the man again;
after all, there was no chance that a humble bakery worker would ever come into
contact with the great Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union.

Gradually
he became more involved in preparations for the 16th Party Congress and his
terror began to fade.

So it
was that Stalin strode out onto the podium in the great hall to give the
opening speech for the 16th Congress, and in the second row — amongst the
Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Kazaks in their colourful native costumes —
standing to applaud the General Secretary’s entrance with as much fervour as
the thousand other delegates from all over the vast lands of the Soviet Empire,
his clapping hands like the blur of a hummingbird’s wings, smiling and grinning
and sweating, was I.M. Vosterov.

Stalin
saw him right away, as those who are afraid of snakes will see a serpent or a
coiled hose that might be a serpent, or a coiled hose behind which serpents
might be hiding, or a barrel in which serpents might be slithering and twining
over each other, where others would only see a hose and a barrel with no
serpent-related qualities at all.

Stalin’s
eyes zoomed in on the features of I.M. Vosterov. Fear had given him the gift of
seeing I.M. Vosterovs across phenomenal distances: he would have seen the
little baker if there had been ten thousand or ten million delegates, he would
have picked that face out if it had been at the back of the hail a mile away,
even if it had been wearing a cossack hat, a scarf and a pair of welder’s
goggles. Stalin staggered sideways as the terror gripped him, and was only able
to stay upright by grabbing on to the hammer-and-sickle-draped lectern at the
centre of the stage. What was the little bastard doing there?