Alex Dryden - The Blind Spy

Despite the noise of construction, his son seemed capable of sleeping forever.

He saw the workmen were wearing white cloths to protect their necks against the heat, even now at six in the evening. The noise of machinery and the fumes filled the air around the waste ground they were clearing in order to put up more concrete housing blocks.

Valentin walked on through the dust until he reached an older building on Khalabbah Street made of yellowing stone. A former school or government building, perhaps? But whatever it was in its former life, it was now the orphanage. It was quieter here.

He put his son down in the shade under a portico at the entrance and took out a piece of paper. On it he wrote in Arabic: “This boy has no parents. Please look after him.” They would know it was a foreigner’s writing, and that bothered him momentarily. Then he sucked the pen for a moment and wrote again. “His name is Balthasar.” Balthasar. He hadn’t been able to think of a name throughout the journey from Aleppo, but now it had come to him in a moment. He liked the name. God protect the king. They had dramatic names and that was one of its meanings, in any case. Then he looked for some way of alerting the people inside the building. He found a bellpull made of old cord hanging at the side of the door and pulled on it. He heard a distant chime. Then he walked swiftly away. Whoever ran the orphanage would be accustomed to the ring that announced the abandonment of another child.

He walked for a mile back towards the centre of the city and finally found himself at the Russian embassy compound. The White Houses, the Russians called the compound, in an unconcealed expression of racist superiority.

His mind, he found, was blurred, vague, as if he were in a film of himself rather than being the real Valentin Viktorov. But he went straight to the house of his head of station and rang the bell before he lost his nerve. There was no point in delaying.

It was the maid who answered the door. He asked for Natalia Resnikova. Resnikov’s wife finally came to the door and invited him inside. She was an elegant, beautiful woman, but her eyes were usually shaded with sadness. Married to Resnikov, Valentin wasn’t surprised. He smiled nervously at her and she returned his expression with calm, uncritical serenity. Then she nodded at him sympathetically. He liked this woman and, he liked to believe, she had a soft spot for him, too.

Valentin saw at once that they were alone. He was relieved that his head of station, Colonel Resnikov, was in his study as usual, probably drinking foreign whisky. He would be able to be alone with Resnikov’s wife and she was a good woman, a good person. They sat and took tea in a shaded patio at the rear of the house. When the maid had gone, Valentin told her everything, the night in Aleppo, the woman and their child.

She didn’t reply at first. There was a silence, but it wasn’t awkward. Then she called the maid and Valentin thought that she was going to betray him, but she simply asked for her knitting to be brought. He noticed the bump of her stomach that had grown in the past month, and she saw him looking.

“They will be almost the same age,” she said simply. “I believe I will have a girl.”

“Just a year apart,” he said. “What will you call her—if she’s a girl?”

“I’d like to call her Anna.”

Valentin knew that although Natalia Resnikova was a charitable woman, her kindness drew disapproval, disgust, or even wrath from her husband. She was brave to even see him. Resnikov was a hard, bitter man who seemed to gain pleasure from nothing, even the Western whisky he somehow got his hands on.

The maid brought her knitting onto the verandah. The pregnant wife of his boss showed him what she was making. “It’s a sweater for my baby,” she said. “I’ll make another one for your son. Then they’ll have the same.”

He nodded his thanks, suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that now his son would be a real citizen of the world, with a sweater made specially for him, not just an abandoned child living off hand-me-downs.

“And when Anna is born she and I will visit your son when they are both old enough,” Natalia Resnikova said. “Until then, I will go alone when I can. I know the orphanage quite well.” She finally touched his arm. “It’s a good place. And you did the right thing.”

Such unexpected understanding made Valentin’s eyes moist with relief as well as with the grief he felt for his encounter with the doomed woman dancer and, finally, underlying all, for the birth of his son whose life or death he had held so recently in his hands.

THE BLACK S-CLASS STRETCH MERCEDES crossed beneath the Moscow ring road on Entuziastov at just after 5:30 in the morning. It was snowing harder outside the city, or maybe that was just how it seemed to the men inside the car. Away from the protection of the city’s buildings, the snow was free to hurl itself across the open landscape and a whirlwind of large, fluffy snowflakes rolled out of the eerie, monstrous white void only to disintegrate as they raced into the car’s heated windscreen.

With the ring road behind it, the official car kept up the same steady, regulation speed and moved on to the M-7 heading northeast out of Moscow in the direction of Balashiha.

There were two intelligence chiefs sitting on the soft, sweet-smelling black leather of the backseat and a military intelligence driver alone in the front. Both chiefs were the most senior generals, elevated to their positions by age, experience, duty, but most of all by the supreme skill of the Russian political intelligence class—a ruthless animal instinct for supremacy in the power struggles of the Kremlin’s internecine bureaucratic wars.

In their late sixties, they wore uniforms almost comically bemedalled from past campaigns—real wars—that made them resemble highly colourful performers from a travelling medieval pageant. These tiered ribbons of medals had been won mostly in Afghanistan after Russia’s 1979 invasion of the country, and its disastrous and debilitating war there that had finally emptied the Soviet treasury and heralded the end of the empire. They were the medals of defeat.

General Valentin Viktorov had been personally in charge of an intelligence team that, with initially magnificent success, had prepared the ground for the invasion of the presidential palace in Kabul at Christmas of that year. But those were the glory days, before the Soviet effort descended into stalemate and retreat in the subsequent years of brutal conflict.

Afghanistan. It was never far from either of the generals’ minds, even now, decades after the war had ended. Just as the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War, in Russia’s lexicon—had been the foul crucible whose hellish alchemy gave birth to Soviet might and to the greatest empire on earth, so Afghanistan was the insidious chemical formula that finally ripped the whole shaky edifice to pieces. For both the generals—as for many of the military veterans of that disastrous war—Afghanistan was the defining moment of their and their motherland’s loss of pride. Afghanistan was the fault line that severed modern Russia from its glorious past. The actual collapse—that of the Eastern European empire in 1989 and the subsequent folding of Russia’s central Asian possessions after that—was just the inevitable consequence of the Afghan defeat. And it was Afghanistan that welded the psyches of the two generals and thousands like them into an overwhelming and unified desire for the recouping of all of glorious Russia’s losses since then.