The Red House. Derek Lambert
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href="#ulink_eb494bc2-89dd-50d7-9f1e-fa8c95974f08">1
SEVEN a.m. on New Year’s Day. Beneath the aircraft the lights of Long Island probed the sea with disciplined jewelled fingers. The lights of Moscow, Vladimir Zhukov thought, had been more abandoned: scattered nebuli of milky neon. Symbolically, the lighting plans of Capitalism and Socialism should have been the other way round.
Zhukov swallowed his vodka as if it were the last drop of Mother Russia’s milk: there had been many vodkas on this special II-62 flight from Moscow to New York.
Beside him his wife closed her handbag with the finality she instilled into most movements. ‘Please excuse me,’ she said, standing up.
‘You are going to prepare yourself to meet the decadent, bourgeois imperialists?’
‘I am more concerned with making myself presentable for the representatives of our embassy.’
‘It was only a joke,’ he told her retreating figure as it stumbled, uncharacteristically, with the descent of the aircraft. He watched her with affection, then moved into her seat.
The affection melted into many emotions. Expectation, curiosity, pride at what he represented. And a vague, uncertain apprehension, as cold and disquieting as a first snowflake smudging the window of a warm and complacent room.
He gazed down at the avenues of lights, the pastures of snow luminous in the darkness, the black oil of the sea extinguishing the lights. Coney Island? Long Beach? The old movies on which most assessment of America was based—forgetting propaganda for the moment—had another revival in the auditorium of his mind. Jack Oakie, Alice Faye, George Raft. Cops with caps and nightsticks, black shoeshine boys, double-breasted suits with lapels as flat as cardboard, leaning tenements and jostling skyscrapers, ice-cream sodas, bourbon on the rocks, girls with lovely legs and afterthought faces, the drawling south and the snapping north, sub-machine guns, King Kong. That’s my America, that’s the America of the most humble apple-picker in Kazakhstan. There it is spangled beneath me. True or false?
And, returning inevitably to the propaganda, he thought: New York—the fount of decadence, the blood-bank of criminal aggression. True or false?
Vladimir Zhukov, aged forty-four, newly-appointed second secretary at the Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Washington, gripped his empty finger-greased glass tightly and regarded the accelerating reality with awe.
His wife returned smelling faintly of Russian cologne. The smell of our soap, our pomade, our scent. The smell of the audience at the Bolshoi. Turn the serpent head of the aircraft around and fly it back to Moscow. New Year’s celebrations—the children with presents from the toyshop in Kutuzovsky, Kremlin parties with clowns and storytellers, Georgian wine, Stolichnaya vodka, bearhugs, skating in Gorky Park, women singing with lemon-juice in their voices. From his pocket he took a New Year’s card—foreigners in Moscow sent them as Christmas cards—and examined the Kremlin. Two red stars and a flag perched on pencil-sharpened spires and golden baubles. Plus the new Palace of Congress completed in 1961 and seating 6,000, his statistical mind recalled. And somewhere in the centre of this symphony of architecture the big growling bears.
He glanced at his wife in case she was listening to his thoughts. But she was busy fastening her safety belt, pleating the waist of her black suit inside it.
Vladimir Zhukov said, ‘We’re fortunate to be flying direct to New York, instead of Montreal.’
‘We’re very fortunate,’ Valentina Zhukova agreed.
He patted her hand because of adventure shared and she smiled with a glint of gold; the glimpse of sunlight she sometimes regretted.
‘Do you feel nervous?’ he asked.
‘Not at all. You shouldn’t either.’
‘I didn’t say I was,’ he lied.
‘But you aren’t completely happy at the prospect of our arrival.’
He shrugged his big torso. Over-shrugged. Who would ever suspect the fragility inside such a big frame? The poetry drowning in statistics. His stomach rumbled as the vodka passed on, depositing the last of the alcohol into his blood.
Valentina said, ‘You shouldn’t have drunk so much.’
‘It’s the first day of the new year. Back home we’d be celebrating and Natasha would be singing to us in our apartment.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t drink to give yourself courage?’
Did a man of his stature need liquor to armour-plate his guts? Would the Party have permitted such a ‘degenerate’ to be posted to Washington, the enemy capital? Only Valentina could have asked such a question: only a wife with nocturnal knowledge, only a wife observing after sex, after a loss, after disappointment … ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
He held her hand. ‘Let’s feel this together. Would you have dreamed when we first met that one day we’d visit America together? Even now I find it hard to believe that Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx are down there.’
Mickey Rooney, the East Side Kids, Al Capone, organ-grinders with monkeys on their shoulders. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Mark Twain.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said, leaning across him to look down, her large breasts comfortable against his chest.
‘Africa wouldn’t have this effect on me. Or China or India. But this … I don’t think I really believed it existed. All those tourists in Moscow, those unlikely diplomats, those businessmen. All straight out of the movies.’
The lights swarmed up on them, streaking past the windows. The half dozen passengers on the jet loaded with provisions and equipment for the embassy in Washington and the Mission to the United Nations in New York waited for the landing with theatrical nonchalance or honest rodent fear. A bump and the lights were slowing, the white ranches of Kennedy International Airport braking. Dawn began to ice the skyline.
Ponderously the plane trundled towards the New World. The stewardess, plum-plump in threadbare blue, stood up and peered out of a window as if she were hoping it were Khabarovsk or Leningrad. The passengers pointed, nodded; the aircraft stopped.
Inside reception it was a bewilderment of glass, marble, neon, plastic. Negro porters, movie voices, no guns that Vladimir Zhukov could see. His head ached at the base of his skull and a vein throbbed on his right temple.
Somewhere a man addressed another as ‘pal’ and was, in turn, referred to as ‘a lousy sonofabitch’. He had arrived. He was in America.
Or was he? Two men wearing grey fedoras and black overcoats with clothes-hanger shoulders came up. ‘Good morning, Comrade Zhukov,’ one said. ‘Welcome to New York.’
Nicolai Grigorenko occupied half the front seat of the black Oldsmobile, his companion and the driver the other half. Grigorenko was a large man, Siberian-faced, not unlike Brezhnev, ponderous but authoritative, a chain-smoker, fiftyish, throaty. One of the growlers. Mikhail Brodsky was a sapling by comparison; soft-haired, smiling, with a cold lodged high up in his nose, gold-rimmed spectacles, nervous hands and a habit of prefacing answers with two sing-song chords. Uh-huh—D flat rising to E flat.
The Growler spoke. ‘Ordinarily we would have driven direct to La Guardia and boarded the shuttle to Washington. But there’s a blizzard in Washington and you’ll have to stay the night at the mission in New York.’
Excellent, Zhukov thought. Everyone should spend their first night in America in New York. ‘What is this shuttle?’ he asked.
‘It’s like a regular bus service. You buy your ticket on board.’
‘That sounds very progressive,’ Zhukov rashly observed.
The silence in the car throbbed.
Grigorenko turned his big polluted face around. ‘You will learn, Comrade Zhukov, that much of what appears