John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“One more file that we thought relevant for you to examine, sir,” she said.

“Name of said file?” asked Yagoda, without looking up.

“Borodin, M.”

“Status?”

“WRC.”

WRC was shortform for a ten-year sentence “Without the Right of Correspondence”. It was the bureaucracy’s fondest lie, the phrase suggesting that the guilty citizen was denied the right to send and receive letters. In reality, it meant Max had been shot.

“Legend?”

“Suicide.”

“Significance?”

“Borodin was a Jew,” said the Chief Clerk, “half-Russian, half-German, suspected of working with the left-wing deviatonists and a known sentimentalist about the fascist wreckers in the agriculture sector. Well known to Zakovsky.”

Yagoda grunted, then opened the file. Flicking through its pages in a hurried fashion, he soon came across a photograph, which he laid out flat on the desk in front of him. In the image, Borodin was lying flat on a mortuary slab, a bullet through this forehead.

Yagoda yawned, then returned to reading the file on Zakovsky. Behind him, the Chief Clerk left the room.

At length, Yagoda closed this file too. He looked briefly at the stack of others, yawned once more, and used his right thumb to stroke his toothbrush moustache. Then he spoke: “The rest of you, get out. Colonel Lyushkov and I need to have a private conversation.”

Evgenia, Lintz and the Uzbek walked out of the room and along the corridor, coming to a stop halfway between Lyushkov’s office and the central stairwell. Even from this distance, they could hear raised voices: Lyushkov’s rumble, Yagoda’s dry jabs. Eventually, Lyushkov appeared, his trademark smile on his face. The private conversation had gone well for him, it seemed.

Yagoda left the office and, as he passed, he nodded pleasantly to Evgenia. “I do hope we meet again, Comrade?”

“That would be a pleasure, Comrade Yagoda.”

She turned to watch him go, his breeches swishing against each other as he plodded along the corridor, his satchel swaying this way and that, making him look like nothing more than an enormous schoolboy.

After Evgenia had typed up her notes of the translation, she and Lyushkov had had a long conversation; then, she had been free to leave. She had gone to the Metropol to find Jones and tell him the grim news about Max but he had been both drunk and obnoxious. After that, she found herself drawn to Max’s flat, not quite believing the evidence of her own eyes: the photograph of a corpse lying on the slab in the morgue with a bullet through his brains. Though she got close, she had not dared enter the apartment block herself. Instead, she had watched from a distance, astonished and afraid, as Jones ran up the steps and inveigled his way in.

But her bemusement and fear were nothing compared to her feelings when, looking up, she saw Jones appear on the balcony, then climb onto the balustrade and jump.

Jones vanished into a great bank of snow, his fall creating an avalanche which cannoned out into the road. After the balls of snow, big and small, stopped rolling and the cloud of billowing snow dust settled, the whiteness lay thick and deep and even.

Evgenia hurried to the core of the avalanche, scrabbling around in the snow, calling out, “Jones! Jones!”

Nothing moved.

“You stupid bloody Englishman, where are you?”

Sitting bolt upright in front of her, caked in snow, more ghost than man, and said, “Not a bad cure for a hangover, I’d say. But, personally, I wouldn’t recommend it. One more thing. I’m not Engli…”

She hit him, not at all tenderly, pummeling him on the shoulders and chest. Grappling out for her, he dragged her down into the snow and kissed her with the passion of a man who should by rights be dead.

From the balcony, the concierge yelled something, appalled at this fresh outrage. They got up, both coated in snow, and, laughing uncontrollably, disappeared into the night.

They held each other close in his bed in the Hotel Lux, in awe at the tender savagery of the sex they had just had: guilty that Max was dead, full of joy that they were still alive.

“Mae'n ddrwg gen” – “I’m sorry…” they both said.

Here, where perhaps nobody was listening, they felt free to speak in Welsh.

“You first,” said Jones.

“No, you first, Mr Jones.”

“I’m sorry that I was so drunk and angry with you that I ignored you at the Metropol.”

Evgenia kissed him on the forehead, then began, “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you that I work for them from time to time. You cannot think for a second that I have any choice in the matter. They call me up, sometimes just send a car, and whatever I’m doing I have to drop and attend to them. Sometimes, they send for me in the middle of the night. But most of the time it’s for VIPs, such as yourself.”

“I’m honoured to be a VIP in the eyes of a Chekist.” She squeezed his balls, hard, and he yelped with pain. “But you are a Chekist,” he said, doggedly.

She studied him along the side of her eyes. There was something determined about him which made her both afraid of and for him. “Nyet, idiot. I work for them but I am not one of them. Nor will I ever be.”

Jones picked his words carefully, lest she hurt him again. “But to work for them, that’s the same as being one, isn’t it?”

“No. “She shook her head, rubbing her nose against his. “They can use and dispose of me whenever it suits. It gives me some protection, a little roof perhaps, against party big shots or others who get too big for their boots. I mention I do some work for the Cheka and they go away with their tails between their legs.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you trust me?”

She fell silent. He listened to the soft murmur of her breathing.

“I read somewhere that, when a thunderbolt strikes, it has the force of a billion volts. It can heat the air around the strike five times hotter than the surface of the sun. The Cheka is like a thunderbolt. Fear, suspicion of it, is so strong. For me to say that I touch this thing, that I have been close to it, that, from time to time, I work in the Lubyanka, it’s too frightening. So I didn’t tell you and for that I am truly sorry.”

“You are forgiven.”

She kissed him, softly, gently.

“Stalin’s Epigram,” said Jones. “Who told the Cheka about the bloody poem?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Bill should never have read it out loud.”

“One of us is an informer.”

“Welcome to Russia.”

His eyes challenged her.

“Not me,” she said.

“Not me, either. But one of us, one of the Moscow Wobblies, is an informer.”

“I don’t know. There were too many people at the party. You must remember, they have such power over us, our families and friends, our loved ones. They can break any one of us whenever they want. The pressure…”

“…it’s as if you’re excusing the person who betrayed us.”

“I’m just stating a fact of life.”

They lay side by side, not wanting to deepen the gap between them.

“I have a present for you,” she said.

“What kind of present?”

“It’s a letter, a magic one.”

“Show it to me.”

Easing out of bed, she began searching for something in her jacket, her naked curves and angles turned to a flickering golden yellow by the light of a candle. The image was extraordinarily erotic, burning into his mind’s eye. He gave out an animal sigh.

“You are sad?”

“No, I’m full of joy… I’m so intensely happy it’s a kind of sadness.”

“You’re beginning to sound like one of us. Time to leave Russia?”