The Man Who Was Saturday. Derek Lambert
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written on a picture postcard of his native Turin beside the remains of his last supper.
It said: I can’t stand this fucking life anymore.
Katerina always remembered Easter that year: it changed her life.
In the afternoon of the Saturday she went with Svetlana to a meeting of the feminist movement near the pink massif of Soviet Radio and Television on Piatnitskaya Street.
The purpose of the meeting was to establish some sort of order in the crusade. And to an extent it succeeded largely due, Katerina believed, to the call of spring. The lime trees were tipped salad green, kvas vans were in the streets, cotton dresses were beginning to blossom. ‘Anything is possible,’ the breeze whispered.
In a small assembly hall – ‘Stone, this time,’ Svetlana had insisted, ‘in case of arson’ – a committee was elected, a chairman appointed. Katerina was given a place on the committee with a responsibility to teenagers; Svetlana was charged with ‘spreading the word across the length and breadth of the nation.’
‘Just because I was going out with an Aeroflot pilot, ‘Svetlana said later when they were drinking lemon tea in a steely-bright cafeteria. ‘Ah, well, it’s only one sixth of the world’s land surface – it shouldn’t take long.’
‘It’s because you work for Intourist,’ Katerina corrected her. ‘Was going out?’
‘He was too keen that one,’ Svetlana said.
Keen for what? Svetlana had never been sexually reticent. All she demanded was respect. And that, if you boiled it down, was all the movement wanted.
Beside them a crumpled-looking man was reading Pravda, starting at the bottom of a page where brevities of interest lurked and losing interest when he reached the exhortations to greater productivity and recriminations about absenteeism. The coffee machine behind the stainless steel counter hissed like a steam engine.
‘He wanted to get married,’ Svetlana explained when the hissing subsided. ‘Can you imagine? Marrying a Russian is bad enough but a pilot … girls in Leningrad, Kiev and Archangel and the faithful wife waiting in Moscow to stir his borsch while he kicks off his shoes in front of the television. No thanks. Besides he was a goat.’
By which, Katerina assumed, she meant he was a selfish lover. The old school. The younger generation were more considerate, some of them.
‘So who’s taken his place?’ Katerina asked.
‘An architect. Lots of blat. Special pass for the third floor of GUM, dollars for the Beryozka shops, a Volga, hi-fi, video. He tells me he’s got a dacha in the country too.’
‘Obviously a very good Communist,’ Katerina remarked.
The crumpled-looking man looked up from his newspaper and smiled.
‘And he’s not bad-looking,’ Svetlana said. She sipped her tea. ‘Not exactly good-looking.’ The coffee machine hissed. ‘But architecturally sound.’
‘Does he know you’re a defender of women’s rights?’
‘No, he wouldn’t like that at all,’ Svetlana said decisively. She searched in the pockets of her coat for cigarettes; to Katerina the coat looked suspiciously like part of an Aeroflot stewardess’s uniform. ‘And you, what have you been up to pussycat?’
Katerina wanted to tell her that Calder was taking her to midnight mass but she checked herself. The crumpled-looking man looked benign enough but you could never tell. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘The Institute’s boring as ever. It reminds me of a literary treadmill. No one ever gets anywhere, they just keep turning pages.’
The crumpled-looking man folded his newspaper. He said: ‘Enjoy yourselves while you’re still young,’ and was gone.
Pushing at her blonde, untamed hair with her fingers, Svetlana leaned conspiratorially across the table. ‘So tell me, kotik, what have you really been up to? Consorting with decadent foreigners?’
When Katerina told her Svetlana was uncharacteristically solemn. ‘Take care. It’s always struck me as odd that we weren’t prosecuted over that fire.’
‘I don’t see the connection,’ Katerina said.
‘Nor do I, but I suspect one.’ Svetlana sipped her tea. ‘Perhaps I’ve been reading too many spy novels. Too many videos …. Why not give the American a miss?’
‘He’s a Soviet citizen. I’m not doing anything wrong. Merely showing him the real Moscow. He bothers me,’ Katerina added. ‘He’s not weak like the others. Just ….’
‘… misguided?’
‘Maybe.’
‘So you’re trying to prove to him what a great place the Soviet Union is? Are you angling for my job?’
‘No chance,’ Katerina said. ‘I’m stuck with the Brigade.’ She finished her tea, slid the oblong of hard sugar into her bag. ‘Come on, let’s get a breath of spring.’
But by eleven that night the air was chilled again. When Calder picked her up on Leningradsky he was wearing a top-coat and fur hat. Katerina’s face was framed in sable, a second-hand gift from Svetlana’s discarded pilot.
He drove to Bolshaya Ordinka Street, a discreet thoroughfare with a roll-call of churches, small houses and lime trees. She took him to a small pink and gold church. A crowd was packed around it and through the open doors they could smell Easter.
Spandarian’s phone rang at ten minutes past midnight.
The girl beneath him swore.
Rolling clear, he picked up the receiver and asked brusquely: ‘Well, are they there?’
‘Affirmative, Comrade Spandarian.’
‘Stay with them.’
Spandarian returned to the girl, the Estonian to the entrance to the church pausing on his way to lock the battered cream Volga.
Easter was mostly age. Burning candles smelling of the past and priests with grey beards and worshippers as fragile as autumn. But there was youth there, too, peering in from the godless outside and wondering.
Calder and Katerina eased their way through the militia-ringed throng to the back of the church where, with the rest of the congregation standing in a nave bereft of pews, they were entombed in candlelight, cocooned in the chanting of priests and choirs.
Time was the pendulum swings of censers, the diminishing of tallow-spitting candles lighting icons. The senses melted. The congregation was as one. Glowing, golden adoration filled this small House of God.
Feeling her warmth through her shabby coat, Calder wondered if Katerina, great-grandchild of a Revolution that had invented its own religion, acknowledged the Resurrection of Christ. He wondered if he did.
As the priests walked three times round the outside of the church, searching for the body of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre, Calder saw wistful young faces in the crowd.
Walking back to the car, Katerina said: ‘It’s strange but that ceremony was more Russian than anything the Party has invented,’ and Calder thought how ironic it would be if, innocently, he was becoming the instrument of her doubt.
Immediately she recanted. ‘To think that there are more than thirty million churchgoers in the Soviet Union. There aren’t as many accredited members of the Communist Party. Did you know that?’
He did. He also knew that the Party tolerated the Church because it was the ancient heartbeat of Mother Russia. A heartbeat, they hoped, that would soon falter and allow the young to worship at the altars of Marx and Lenin without Christian distractions. Unfortunately for the Party religion was said to be undergoing a revival.