Ian Slater - Asian Front

“You rest,” he told them.

“We’ll move tonight,” David Brentwood promised.

The old man nodded, his hand pointing to the sheepskin rugs on the bed as he talked to his wife.

“Just till tonight,” David promised again. David took a chance and gestured back toward Nalayh. “Communists.” He knew enough already to know that the herdsmen didn’t like the Communists — they told the herdsmen where to go and when, striking at the very heart of the nomad’s life: his freedom to move when and where he wanted.

In New York, Alex Miro, a tall, thin man, pulled up the fur-lined collar of his brown suede topcoat as he made his way past the Plaza Hotel toward the Columbus Circle entrance on Central Park’s southwest corner. He liked the park — it had brought him luck, and he was as convinced of his purpose as he had been on the very first day those years before when, as a bearded young man, his future before him, he had arrived as one of the thousands of Russian minorities allowed to emigrate to America in the heady days following Gorbachev’s and then Yeltsin’s perestroika.

The reception committee in those days consisted mostly of older émigrés who had managed to flee the Soviet Union before Gorbachev, and Alex could still recall the day when, as one of about thirty new arrivals, he had been taken on a tour of the city by one of these older émigrés. The group had paused for a moment across from the Plaza near the horse-drawn cabriolets.

The wealth of the people entering and leaving the famous hotel overwhelmed the new arrivals almost as much as their first sight of a supermarket. One babushka, from the Ukraine, had kept clicking her tongue and shaking her head beneath the black head scarf at the sight of such opulence. After going north on Fifth Avenue, seeing the stately stone townhouses on the East Side and being told by the guide that only one family lived in each house, Alex had seen the woman’s disbelief, her tongue clicking again as she gazed at the stately buildings, her husband, however, skeptically informing several of the group that the guide was as bad as the old Pravda— “lozh”— ”all lies.” It was probably just a Potemkin “village,” he said — made exclusively to impress visitors just as the fake Potemkin village had been for the czarina — why, any fool could see there was enough room for six families in any one of the townhouses.

One of the émigrés asked the guide to take them to Harlem— insisted they see Harlem, the place of the gigantskie basketbolisty. Alex’s beard was so full in those days it had hidden the tight-lipped grimace of satisfaction he’d allowed himself on seeing that what the party had said was true — here was the grinding poverty, the rampant disorder, the half-naked black children, the awful, discordant noise of democracy, the look of hatred and despair in the eyes of me blacks who stared resentfully at the bus of tourists like caged animals, the putrid smell of garbage overpowering.

It was still so vivid in his mind, particularly the loss of dignity he had seen in these faces — a poverty that was horrible to Nikolai Ryzhkov, Ryzhkov being his Russian name before he had taken the oath of allegiance to his newly adopted country and changed Ryzhkov to Miro. It was the lack of dignity in the blacks’ eyes that struck him as being more crushing than any he had known in his youth in Russia. For there, though people had been poorer in material things than their American counterparts, there hadn’t been the burning rage and spiritual deprivation that he saw in these faces.

The memory of this, his first experience of the vast disparity in wealth between rich and poor in America, not only stayed with him but all his life had acted as a spur to his single-minded goal, the memory of Harlem as troubling and as clearly etched on his mind as was that of the immigrants’ first visit to Central Park. There, in the green, ordered world that accepted everybody, it had been completely different, surely what the great Abraham Lincoln had in his mind — a place that did not depend on whom you knew, on special party shops accessible only to the powerful, but was a refuge for the common people. He hated the zoo, though — hating anything being put in a cage — anything that was hemmed in.

As a boy he had loved the Moscow Circus, which he had seen illegally, sneaking beneath the tent flaps of the traveling troupe when it had visited his town. But when they had brought on the bears, the huge, muzzled beasts reduced to playing big babies for the amusement of rude peasants like his father, Alex had felt immeasurably sad — not only for the bears but for those like his father whose sensitivities had been so brutalized by poverty in old Russia, in Siberia to be exact, that they could find the sight of the leashed bears only amusing.

As Alex had grown older, he learned that to liberate such people from such brutality no effective appeal could be made to sensibilities deadened by the constant crush of circumstance. Throughout history, he was convinced, there had been only one way. One had to fight indifference and prejudice, as Lenin had said, not submit to it. But Gorbachev had warned that you would get no thanks for trying to improve the lot of the people — those in chains did not always thank those who set them free. Look at what had happened to Gorbachev himself, and how vividly Alex remembered the Muscovites demonstrating in Red Square, telling the American announcer Mike Wallace, who was doing his open-mouthed “surprise” act, that they’d had enough of perestroika, of glasnost— of how they pined for the order, the comfort of predictability that Stalin’s postwar years had given them.

“I’d like to take the muzzle off that bear,” young Alex had confessed to his father at the circus. “Osvobodit— set him free.”

“Ha!” his fattier had laughed, “you are the first he’d kill — bite your head off.” But if that’s what his father had said, Lenin had told every younger generation, “Bud’smel. Bud’terpeliv”— Be brave. Be patient — yes, the party had made serious mistakes, but at heart the party was still right.

Lenin was gone now, reviled by some as some atheists reviled Christ, but Alex had not deserted the party, nor had the other members of his “sleeper” cell, as firm as ever in their conviction that capitalism was at heart evil — that its enemies were their friends.

This wintry afternoon, Alex’s returning again to the park seemed propitious. Presently he was joined by a short, stout man, Mike Ricardo. Parks had always been a favorite meeting place for the Soviets, and still were in what was now the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. Last time they met they had set Operation Kirov’s Ballet in action, knocking out Con Ed’s Indian Point plant, poisoning the city’s water supply at Hillsview Reservoir with one Thermos of PCBs, and taking out the cesium clock in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, the pacemaker clock for all the computers in the country, including the Pentagon’s.

“What d’you think?” Mike asked, walking up, helping himself to a chestnut from the packet Alex was holding, tossing the nut from hand to hand, blowing on it, his breath short, coming in sharp puffs of mist in the chilly air. “You think the Chinese’ll cross?”

“They always have.”

“Yeah, I know, but I mean all along the line?”

“Who knows?” Alex replied. “I can’t even figure out how they do embroidery.”

“Embroidery?”

“Double-sided stuff. They’ll do a picture on a silk screen. You swing it around — same picture on the other side but no knots, stitch marks, or loose thread. Beats me where they hide the ends. Must go blind.”