The Man Who Was Saturday. Derek Lambert
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and didn’t think about Alfredo Bertoldi at all. He drove back to Leningradsky with a flourish.
After the second phone call Spandarian lay, hands behind his head, staring at the reflections of himself and the dozing girl on the mirror on the ceiling. He decided he would make his move tomorrow, Easter Sunday.
Resentfully, Katerina caught a bus to the Institute: it just wasn’t the Sunday morning to squander in that futile place. Budding plants had pushed through the wet soil overnight. River breezes fanned the late-sleeping streets. A tentative sun was finding the city’s fragile graces.
Still, she only had to spend a couple of hours there preparing and allocating periodicals for the Monday return-to-work in the absence of the Study Supervisor who was recovering from a prolonged encounter with a crate of Ukrainian pepper vodka.
And then? It was a day for the first visit to the river beaches at Serebriani Bor or an excursion into the forest to see if mushrooms had begun to sprout among the damp remains of winter or a trip to one of the villages outside Moscow. But for that you really needed a car.
Calder had a car.
The bus, proceeding at a measured speed along the broad reaches of Leningradsky, reached Byelorussia Square. Here Leningradsky became Gorky Street where Calder lived.
The bus stopped outside the green and white stucco hulk of Byelorussia Railway Station. A young man carrying a shiny fawn suitcase climbed aboard and sat in. the seat in front of Katerina. His brown hair was stylishly barbered and he wore a new blue suit cut with a discreet elegance that few Soviet tailors could manage. As the station served the west Katerina assumed he had arrived from somewhere like Smolensk or Minsk.
He turned and smiled. ‘This time two days ago I was in Paris.’ Paris! ‘But I’m glad to be back.’ That saved him, as far as she was concerned.
‘Oh, really?’ She stared out of the window. She was wearing her new lemon costume bought defitsitny in the Arbat and she knew she looked attractive enough; the young man was probably making a pass and she didn’t object to that – the time to worry was when they didn’t – but her mind was on Calder.
The bus headed down Gorky Street. Through the arcades to the right stood a huddle of old streets. Chekhov had lived there, and so had Chaliapin. She would like to show the house to Calder.
She tried to analyse her feelings about the big American. He was a challenge. She wanted to prove to him his wisdom in coming to Russia. Or his weakness. She wasn’t sure which. Until she had met him she had been sure of her values. Now they were presenting themselves for inspection. She wished he hadn’t eaten those redcurrants at Kreiber’s funeral.
‘And where are you going to so early on a Sunday morning?’ the young man asked.
‘To work.’
‘Really?’ He considered this. His features were Slavonic but warm, peasant or intellectual, whatever way you chose to regard him. They were also vaguely familiar. ‘And what sort of work is that?’
Her work was difficult to label: it invited elaboration. ‘A waitress,’ she said. Good enough for her mother, good enough for her.
‘Where?’
‘The Centralny.’
‘Then I shall come and eat there.’
So he was making a pass. She tried to put a label to him. Paris … carried himself with unobtrusive style … accent, pure Moscow … son of some Kremlin nachalstvo? If so, why hadn’t there been a Chaika at the station to meet him?
The bus passed the arch through which Calder lived. It had occurred to her that she might glimpse him but there was no sign of him, the sidewalk outside the arch occupied by a group of tourists trooping patiently towards Red Square behind their Intourist leader.
She picked up her handbag and prepared to alight at the National Hotel corner of Manezhnaya Square.
The young man took a card from a slim wallet and handed it to her. ‘If you feel like coming along anytime ….’ She slipped the card into her wallet without looking at it. As she made her way to the exit he called after her: ‘By the way, you’ve gone past the Centralny.’
The atmosphere at the Institute closed in upon her. Furniture polish and cheap paper and the baked paintwork of the radiators. The bad breath of wasted endeavour.
Footsteps echoing, she walked past the empty, book-lined chambers to the spacious office of the Study Supervisor. Outside stood sheaves of newspapers and magazines tied with coarse string.
She began to sort them into nationalities on a trestle table in the study. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, De Telegraff, Bild, La Stampa …. As always what astonished her was not the content of the papers but their freedom to print what they pleased. Editorials actually criticising the Government. Vistas of freedom beckoned slyly through screens of newsprint.
‘But don’t close your eyes,’ she had been warned before she got the job, ‘to the decadence you will find on those pages. ‘As if she could. Corruption, child abuse, rape, racism, industrial injustice … you name it. ‘All encouraged by circulation-crazed newspapers and magazines.’
But don’t we get our fair share of most of these evils in the Soviet Union?
Treason!
The biggest pile of papers was from the United States. A skyscraper of them. Calder was in charge of that section, analysing and indexing with a team of six other American defectors.
The Study Supervisor’s phone rang. Katerina picked up the receiver, at the same time pulling out a drawer in the table. It was filled with cuttings from glossy magazines. The Study Supervisor apparently reserved the right to analyse the female anatomy of the West.
Katerina shut the drawer. She spoke into the receiver, giving the number of the Institute. ‘Katerina Ilyina speaking.’
‘My name’s Spandarian,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s about time we met.’
Although his fingernails were polished, although his hair was carefully waved and his moustache was a topiarist’s dream, although his brown eyes were soulful and his brilliantine smelled of spices, Spandarian was a gangster. Katerina sensed this instantly. He was also a born interrogator, bandit brain and veneer, the hot/cold of the third degree.
He spoke melodiously but with a strong Georgian accent, fashioning flowers from some of his phrases. ‘So, Katerina Ilyina, you want to save Soviet women. Has it ever occurred to you that they don’t want to be saved? That, like Mother Russia herself, they merely want to endure?’ He lit a yellow cigarette packed with black tobacco and blew acrid smoke across his desk.
‘That’s what the Russian male would like to think, Comrade Spandarian.’ Her defiance pleased her: although few had seen him, the ruthlessness of the shadowy mentor of the Twilight Brigade was common knowledge.
‘The Russian male? I am not a Russian, Katerina Ilyina, I am a Georgian. In Tbilisi we know how to treat women. We flatter them, court them, love them. But they know their place just the same and they are happy.’
Katerina had been to the Georgian capital once. And what Spandarian said was true. Up to a point. Women were treated extravagantly. But they were chattels just the same. Georgia would be a challenge. But first Mother Russia.
Spandarian said: ‘Russian men are pigs.’
Katerina regarded him with astonishment, then found herself saying defensively: ‘Some of the younger ones are learning; they are more considerate.’ The young man on the bus, for instance.
‘You are a true Slav, Katerina Ilyina. Already you are confounding yourself. If the young men are improving what is the point of your Cause?’
‘Only