Brian Freemantle: The Bearpit

‘It’s too long ago for anything to be left between us,’ persisted Malik. Was it important, to make such an effort? If Kazin were going to have conceded any sort of response – the proper sort of response – it would have come by now.

‘I don’t understand,’ protested Kazin, who did but who was enjoying the other man’s efforts to rebuild bridges across divides too wide ever to be crossed again.

Malik sighed determinedly. He said: ‘Whatever happened, happened. It’s past. Gone…’ He hesitated and said: ‘Olga and I were very happy, afterwards. She loved me. I loved her.’

Fool! thought Kazin. He wanted to speak: was desperate to hurt the other man as he knew the words would hurt him, but Kazin held back because the words weren’t any longer enough. With a difficulty he thought he managed to keep from Malik, Kazin said: ‘Yes. It all happened a very long time ago.’

‘I did not seek this.’

‘You already made that clear.’

‘I’m prepared to try: not to forget – we neither of us could ever forget – but to try.’ Malik felt once more that he was prostrating himself too much.

‘So am I,’ said Kazin, a remark for his own benefit. ‘I am prepared to try.’ Starting with the meeting which is directly to follow this, he thought.

Deciding upon a test he felt necessary, Malik said: ‘Did you know that my son served in this Chief Directorate?’

‘No,’ said Kazin immediately.

The man was lying, Malik knew at once. He’d already checked the posting records and identified Kazin’s signature on the authorization for Yuri to be sent to Kabul. Malik was glad he had not interfered when Yuri had asked him to block the assignment.

Malik stood, towering over the other man in his unusually apportioned height. He regretted the movement at once, recognizing it to be physically intimidating, which it was not intended to be. He said: ‘I hope we will be able to work successfully together,’ already resigned to the fact that they would not.

Kazin said: ‘I hope it will be successful, too,’ and knew it would be, although differently from how Malik imagined.

KGB activities in Afghanistan are the responsibility of the Eighth Department of the First Chief Directorate, whose head was Igor Fedorovich Agayans. He was a gauntly featured, almost ungainly bachelor whose flop of prematurely grey hair appeared permanently to curtain his forehead. It came forward as he entered Kazin’s rooms and he thrust up to clear his vision, smiling in apparent apology. Because regulations were specific Kazin had already received copies of the organization’s monitoring doctors reporting the medical evidence – the increasingly spreading psoriasis and sleeplessness needing ever stronger barbiturates – and Agayans’ uncertain demeanour supported their assessment of nervous stress. Which had been the diagnosis returned upon himself, Kazin remembered in abrupt irritation. The doctors were bloody fools. He made a conscious effort to quieten his pumping leg and took his nibbled finger from his mouth. Nervous, possibly; but not stressed. He didn’t need any soothing balms or multi-coloured tablets. He said: ‘The memorandum from Comrade First Deputy Malik demanded that efforts should be made to locate mujahideen cells for possible punishment.’

‘I would have welcomed clearer indication of precisely the sort of punishment required,’ said Agayans.

‘An operation of the utmost severity,’ said Kazin.

‘That was not stipulated in the original memorandum,’ argued Agayans.

‘This is an authorized demand for retribution,’ insisted the obese man.

Agayans hesitated momentarily and Kazin thought the division head was going to argue further that the order should come from Malik, who was now the controller of that part of Asia. Instead Agayans took a dossier from his briefcase, offering it across the desk, and said simply: ‘I propose gas attacks on selected villages proven to support the mujahideen. Well-poisoning, in addition, along all the major and recognized supply and infiltration routes.’

Agayans had a clerk-like mentality, his life ruled by regulations and documentation, and he’d assembled his proposal with a single-sheet precis uppermost, encompassing the most important of the listed suggestions. Kazin’s eyes fixed upon just one part of the summary: he had never expected the man positively to refer to Vasili Malik and his Kabul memorandum by name in the file that lay before him. Curbing his excitement he said: ‘What is the casualty estimation?’

‘I am putting the figure provisionally at between seven to eight thousand,’ said the twitching man. ‘I have already ordered the rezidentura in Kabul to identify target villages for the maximum impact.’

‘Initiate it,’ instructed Kazin. There would be a supreme irony in establishing himself in the eyes of the Gorbachov regime not as the traditionalist he was suspected of being but as someone embracing the new principles when he very publicly cancelled what amounted practically to genocide.

‘What about Comrade First Deputy Malik?’

‘I will be responsible for Comrade First Deputy Malik,’ said Kazin. There was something almost orgasmic in openly uttering the private promise.

Yuri Malik stood at the window of his cramped quarters in the guarded and prison-like Soviet compound in Kabul, looking out over the Afghanistan capital. The sun was almost down, reddening the sky against the foothills of the faraway mountains and from two separate mosques the muezzin prayer calls to the Muslem devout jarred slightly out of unison, priests in competition with each other for the salvation of the faithful. Priests or mullahs? It didn’t matter. Whatever, they were cheer-leading a lot of press-ups for nothing: this place was beyond redemption. Beyond anything. Where’s my salvation, Comrade God? If he’d believed it would work he would have prayed himself, Malik thought: even done the press-ups. Are you listening, Comrade God? Malik wished someone were. Yuri still could not lose his astonishment at his father’s attitude: always before the man had been omnipotent, the purveyor of miracles. OK, so maybe when he was attached to an entirely different Chief Directorate there was a barely acceptable explanation for his refusal, but that did not apply any longer. The damned man was actually joint chairman of the very Chief Directorate controlling this stinking country. So why hadn’t there been any intervention, the sort of intervention he’d pleaded for that last night, during that stiff and resentful final dinner? Nepotism had been another of his father’s arguments: said it was an accusation he could not risk, at that time. Rubbish, like every other excuse. The Soviet Union existed and ran on nepotism, family helping family, friends helping friends! Always had done: always would do. There had to be another reason, a proper reason. So far it didn’t make sense; nothing made sense.

It was dark outside now, smoke from the fires cooking the inevitable lamb roping up whitely against the sky, but Yuri was not looking any more out into Kabul but at his own reflection, mirrored in the blackened window. Not even his appearance made sense! The tan from the Afghan sun accentuated the fairness of his hair and although it was not as positive as a mirror he knew it heightened the blueness of his eyes as well. Actually Western, not Slavic! And more incongruous – ridiculous, considering the posting – positively unlike the other Asian-skinned and Asian-featured and Asian-speaking operatives at the embassy. He looked – and felt – as conspicuous as a VD warning tattooed on a tart’s navel.

And to be inconspicuous, a never-seen, never-heard man, had been the repeated lesson at those training centres at Gofkovskoye Shosse and Metrostroevskaya Street and Turnaninski Pereulok. And insisted upon again in those mock-up American and Continental cities specially built at Kuchino where he had been trained to think and behave and live like a Westerner. To be the Westerner he had become.