The Red House. Derek Lambert
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just any old foul-up, gentlemen, that was a military defeat.’ He tossed back the water as if it were neat vodka. ‘Now, any ideas?’ He picked up a folder on his desk. ‘What about this new man, for instance. What’s his name?’ He opened the folder. ‘Vladimir Zhukov. What do we know about him?’
Hardin extinguished his cigar with a quick stab. ‘I guess that’s your department, Godwin. How much did your guys in Moscow, get on him?’
Godwin pulled a folder identical to the one on Walden’s desk from a bulging briefcase that looked as if it might contain sandwiches. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said in his loose voice, ‘Comrade Zhukov is a possibility. No more than that. A faint, faint possibility.’
‘If he’s any kind of a possibility,’ Walden said, ‘then it’s up to us to make him into a probability.’
‘It’s very vague,’ Godwin mumbled.
Hardin said, ‘Don’t play games. If you’ve got something tell us what it is.’
‘It’s just that he writes poetry,’ Godwin said.
Godwin and Hardin stopped to talk in the hallway a few yards from Walden’s office, beside a sign bearing the words ‘Fall-out shelter in this corridor.’
‘Jesus,’ Godwin said. ‘What a pompous bastard he is.’
Hardin nodded impatiently. ‘Maybe. A ruthless one, too. But he comes up with some good ideas. Like the little scheme we goofed on last night.’
‘We?’
‘Oh, come on, Godwin. Forget your worldwide network just this once. You’re here in Washington—the capital of the little old United States. Sure, we goofed. And you know it. And Walden’s right—we’ve got to come up with something. So let’s you and I go and have coffee and work on it together.’
Godwin regarded him with massive, rumpled suspicion. ‘Okay, let’s go,’ He was still holding his thin dossier on Vladimir Zhukov.
Hardin opened his expensive black and silver attaché case. ‘By the way, I’ve got one of those, too.’ He took out another folder marked Vladimir Zhukov.
‘I know,’ Godwin said, ‘we circulated it to you.’
IN a students’ livingroom in Alma-Ata near the Kazakh State University a girl of eighteen with braided hair—now loosened—and wide eyes, just a little Mongolian, surrendered her virginity with enthusiasm.
She anticipated the textbook possibility of pain and absence of sensual feeling—‘the pleasure will come later, my dear’. But it was there the first time. Insistent pressure from his hard muscle, then oh! like a finger through parchment. And as he filled her the pleasure was instant, mounting, so that she clawed and bit and cried out, ‘I love you, Georgi. Oh, I love you.’
Not that Natasha Zhukova did love Georgi Makarov. But, she decided, I am certainly going to enjoy sex. With a few selected and privileged men who were clean and strong, handsome and intelligent; particularly intelligent. Like Georgi with his muscled belly, arrogant features—a little petulant sometimes—and his defiantly shaggy hair. A few such selected affairs before marriage and children and fidelity. I hope I’m not pregnant, she thought in alarm as his fluid escaped; but still, abortion was a mere formality.
‘I’m sorry, Natasha Zhukova,’ Georgi said, lying back and lighting a cigarette and not looking sorry at all.
‘Don’t be so bourgeois,’ she said irritably. Beneath the coarse blanket she explored the expended muscle, limp and sad. Such was the transience of masculinity: she would have liked to try it again.
Her thoughts wandered from the satisfied body beside her and wondered what sex would be like with the man she loved. If mere physical attraction could produce such earthy pleasure what delight lay ahead when love partnered consummation?
Another alarming thought: what if the man she loved and wished to marry despised her because she wasn’t a virgin? Wasn’t it Lenin himself who had said, ‘Does a normal man under normal circumstances, drink from a glass from which others have drunk?’ But, Natasha reassured herself, the alarm was academic: she would never love a man so narrow-minded. And it was certainly too late—by about five minutes—to worry.
The trouble with Soviet morals was that they were so confused. The Party denounced promiscuity but made abortion easier than a visit to the dentist, and divorce not much harder. And only fifty or so years ago, before the Glorious Revolution, a red cloth used to be flown over a bride’s house if she turned out to be a virgin, a white cloth if she didn’t. And when she was eight, only ten years ago, Natasha had read in Komsomolka about a girl, suspected of adultery with a married man, who had been solemnly advised to visit a clinic and get a certificate of virginity to display to her accusers.
Nowadays the Party was more concerned with general liberalism, with suppressing free expression. Natasha agreed with most Kremlin edicts. Its foreign policy (vaguely), its calls for collective effort to farm and weld, and research, its severity with drunks and those who were not sufficiently energetic in building socialism. Although she became quickly bored with the dreariness of their pronouncements.
What Natasha Zhukova could not countenance was the Kremlin’s treatment of intellectuals. Georgi Makarov was an intellectual. And a rebel, too. Every girl was attracted by a rebel. She slid her fingers through his thick brown hair, cut and combed with a suspicion of decadence.
‘You’re a strange girl, Natasha Zhukova,’ Georgi said. ‘The others have always cried.’
She knew he expected her to whine, ‘Others? Have there been others?’ Instead she said, ‘What’s there to cry about? It happens to most girls at some time or another.’ She also knew that he resented such practical reactions: they were the property of men.
‘Have you no romance in your soul?’
‘Of course—I am Russian. I have the soul of the taiga. And I am almost a Kazakh so I have the soul of the mountains. Or’—she turned on her side and grinned at him—‘a ripe Oporto apple waiting to be plucked.’
He shifted petulantly on the bed and lit another cigarette; his fingers were tobacco stained like those of all true revolutionaries. Except that his revolution was confined to a few secret essays, a signature on a petition seeking the release of Daniel and Sinyavsky, a few progressive jazz records. Outwardly it was all virile protest: inwardly bewilderment at the conflicting calls of patriotism and enlightenment.
Georgi said, ‘You sound like one of those American women with their demands for equality and free love. By love they mean sex. Conveyor belt sex. A woman should love from the heart.’
‘And not a man?’
The rebel shrugged.
‘It seems to me,’ Natasha suggested, ‘that the Americans and British are a long way behind us in many ways. We had the revolution of the sexes after the Great Revolution. “Down with bourgeois morality.” Wasn’t that the cry? Didn’t Alexandra Kollontaya preach that we women should free ourselves from the enslavement of love to one man? Don’t the older women still talk rapturously of those days when virginity was held up to mockery?’
‘Attitudes have changed again,’ Georgi told her. ‘Extremes always follow revolution. We have come to our senses again. Only the West pursues self-indulgence. Like the Romans—and the Romanovs—the people of the West are pursuing their own self-destruction.’ He sat up self-importantly.
Natasha stood up and walked to the window. Naked, enjoying his gaze. She looked across her father’s city, blurred with gentle snow that belied the dagger of winter. The City of Apples, karagachs, Lombardy poplars and birch trees, of wooden cathedrals with gold domes, of apartment blocks as standard as dogma, of ditches that sang with melting snow in the spring. And, of course, V. I. Lenin in the central square: a