Alex Dryden - Red to Black

I DON’T KNOW WHO I’Mwriting this for but perhaps it’s for you. If that makes it sound like a confession, you may wonder what I’m expecting in return. A small part of me, I admit, seeks forgiveness, or at least understanding. But that part of me is less important than the forgiveness I wish to give myself, and which I find elusive.

I am writing to draw a line under the past, with its rot creeping into the present. I know now that if I had done this a long time ago, the present would never have been postponed and things would be different today.

In one of his more fatalistic moments, Finn said to me: ‘Anna, you know our story can never be written.’

‘Why not?’ I asked him.

‘Nobody would believe it,’ he said.

But I’m here now, sitting in a medieval vault in a house in Tegernsee on the southern borders of Germany, reading Finn’s story-our story- and I’m aware that all I have between me and the hostile forces that swim up at me from the pages is the Contender handgun and the twelve rifle shells on the table by my hand. And now that I’ve found these notebooks of his, or books of record, as he calls them, buried in this vault along with all the other material of our secret profession, I see his fatalism was short-lived. As I sift through the piles of notebooks, oddments, scraps and sheets of paper, documents and microfiches-their edges stained with cellar dampness-with only the heat of an oil burner to keep me warm, I can see that he has practically written our story himself.

The notebooks certainly contain the facts and, without these facts, my feelings would be drifting in a vacuum, unmoored to the reality that at any moment I may need to use this gun and all my years of training to kill my way out of here. Feelings need to be clothed in reality and the facts–this story–supply the clothes. For days now, I have been reading and rereading Finn’s prose, notes and observations—over and over. I’m reading them sitting in this dark stone vault and my eyes are running from the fumes of the oil burner and I strain in the dim light to follow the thread of a story that began long before I met Finn.

According to one note Finn made, our story begins in 1998, when Boris Yeltsin’s Russia reached its nadir. A later scrawl in Finn’s undisciplined handwriting names 1989 as the beginning, the year the Berlin Wall came down at last. But another, perhaps more thoughtful, observation says that it all started in 1961, when we Russians erected the Wall in the first place.

Whatever the true beginning, however, everything Finn and I have experienced will continue to unfold into a dark and uncertain future, with or without us.

As I read all his disparate and complementary records, the thing that strikes me most deeply about what Finn experienced in his long quest to have the truth accepted in his own country is his sheer obstinacy, the relentless autopilot of individual human endeavour when success seems impossible.

What also strikes me is that Finn’s past has dictated his life, much as my past has dictated mine.

‘You cannot escape your past, Anna,’ he once told me. ‘But you don’t have to live in it. You don’t have to build the present in its image.’

If only Finn had been true to his own belief.

Finn could have had a quiet life. That is the point, I realise, as I sit here shivering in the damp cold. He told me that he chose to pursue this quest, not just for the truth, but to have the truth accepted by his masters in London, and their political masters in the British Government. But did he really choose? Or was it his deep-seated need for acceptance that fed his stubbornness and single-mindedness?

For my part, I know I’m looking for someone or something to find responsible for my own actions, but I can’t escape my part.

Oh yes, Finn could have had a quiet life, a beautiful life. He had a great talent for doing nothing, which he called happiness, but he chose to go alone down the Tunnel, as he calls it here, and I hope I’m not deluding myself when I say he would not regret that now, whatever’s happened to him. For Finn has disappeared and, as I wait for the crash of sledgehammers against the door upstairs, I’m looking for a clue to tell me something, anything that might help me to find him.

There is much, too, about Finn himself in these notebooks which distracts me from my increasingly urgent task. There are details of his internal struggle to understand his motives, a struggle which I never fully understood, and that he never told me, despite the fusion of our love. During all the time I’ve known Finn, he never wanted to bring his own past like an evil spirit into our house. So he wrote it down in the notebooks and buried it with our secret story in this vault, which has hidden many things and many people in its long history.

And there is much in the notebooks about his feelings towards me.

‘There are three distinct spirits in our relationship,’ Finn once said to my grandmother at the dacha in Barvikha. This was back in the freezing winter weeks leading up to the millennium, when perhaps he and I were at our closest, and when trouble seemed far away. ‘There’s Anna, me and the spirit that joins us.’ My grandmother, with her peasant background, was comfortable with the world of spirits. She laughed with mirth and hugged him. Like many people whose lives he touched, Nana loved Finn.

Finn had just given me a charm bracelet. It contained two charms: a rabbit for me and a monkey for him. It was his nickname for me, Rabbit.

‘The silver circle that links the charms,’ he said, ‘is the spirit that joins us.’

‘I’m not sure I believe in spirits,’ I said.

‘I find I can’t do without them,’ he said breezily.

‘How sentimental,’ I replied.

But it was typical of Finn instinctively to sense the language, the context, of whoever he was talking to. Nana appreciated his inclusion of spirits. Nana was very superstitious and, my mother told me, she was also psychic. With her deep grey eyes that glinted over her sharp, hooked nose, she even looked witch-like. When Finn described his relationship with me in this way, she replied as if foreseeing the future.

‘If only that were true,’ she said. ‘If only you, Anna and the spirit that joins you both really were the only three things in your relationship. God bless you.’

At this moment, in the cellar, I pause over another scrap of paper he wrote about us, on some Luxembourg hotel notepad. I’m mes-merised by what he’s written and can almost feel his presence here, through the words.

‘When we make love, and we look into each other’s eyes, I see the child in you, Anna, the spirit in you, and in those moments you are me and I am you.’

It is these brief, aching glimpses of our intimacy that distract me from my task and, to keep my mind away from such thoughts and focused on the present danger, I sit and listen for the slightest sound. Then I slot the gun’s firing pin into the mechanism and slide a single round of green spot ammunition into the chamber. With this weapon, I can kill a man at over two hundred yards.

It is hard enough to keep love safe. In my own experience it is prone either to snap suddenly, or to dwindle and fade to a monotonous daily exercise that is not so different from filling the dishwasher or taking the dog for a walk. I have passionately kissed a man at the start of a film while out on a date at the cinema and, by the end, found him physically repulsive to touch. I have also watched other affairs dwindle imperceptibly to the banal, the everyday, the meaningless.