Daniel Silva - Moscow Rules

She led him up a shaded footpath lined with tall elm and spruce. The graves were on either side: small plots surrounded by iron fences; tall sculpted monuments; redbrick niche walls covered in pale moss. The atmosphere was parklike and tranquil, a reprieve from the chaos of the city. For a moment, Gabriel was almost able to forget they were being followed.

“The cemetery used to be inside the Novodevichy Convent, but at the turn of the last century the Church decided that there were too many burials taking place inside the monastery’s walls so they created this place.” She spoke to him in English, at tour guide level, loudly enough so that those around them could hear. “It’s the closest thing we have to a national cemetery-other than the Kremlin wall, of course. Playwrights and poets, monsters and murderers: they all lie together here in Novodevichy. One can only imagine what they talk about at night when the gates are closed and the visitors all leave.” She stopped before a tall gray monument with a pile of wilted red roses at its base. "Do you like Chekhov, Mr. Golani?”

"Who doesn’t?”

“He was one of the first to be buried here.” She took him by the elbow. “Come, I’ll show you some more.”

They drifted slowly together along a footpath strewn with fallen leaves. On a parallel pathway, the watcher who had been handing out leaflets in the market was now feigning excessive interest in the grave of a renowned Russian mathematician. A few feet away stood a woman with a beige anorak tied around her waist. In her right hand was a digital camera, pointed directly at Gabriel and Olga.

“You were followed here.” She gave him a sideways glance. “But, then, I suppose you already know that, don’t you, Mr. Golani? Or should I call you Mr. Allon?”

“My name is Natan Golani. I work for the Israeli Ministry of Culture.”

“Forgive me, Mr. Golani.”

She managed a smile. She was dressed casually in a snug-fitting black pullover and a pair of blue jeans. Her pale hair was pulled straight back from her forehead and secured by a clasp at the nape of her neck. Her suede boots made her appear taller than she had the previous evening. Their heels tapped rhythmically along the pavement as they walked slowly past the graves.

The musicians Rostropovich and Rubinstein…

The writers Gogol and Bulgakov…

The Party giants Khrushchev and Kosygin…

Kaganovich, the Stalinist monster who murdered millions during the madness of collectivization…

Molotov, signer of the secret pact that condemned Europe to war and the Jews of Poland to annihilation…

“There’s no place quite like this to see the striking contradictions of our history. Great beauty lies side by side with the incomprehensible. These men gave us everything, and when they were gone we were left with nothing: factories that produced goods no one wanted, an ideology that was tired and bankrupt. All of it set to beautiful words and music.”

Gabriel looked at the bouquet of flowers in her arms. “Who are those for?”

She stopped before a small plot with a low, unadorned stone monument. “Dmitri Sukhova, my grandfather. He was a playwright and a filmmaker. Had he lived in another time, under a different regime, he might have been great. Instead, he was drafted to make cheap Party propaganda for the masses. He made the people believe in the myth of Soviet greatness. His reward was to be buried here, among true Russian genius.”

She crouched next to the grave and brushed pine needles from the plaque.

“You have his name,” Gabriel said. “You’re not married?”

She shook her head and placed the flowers gently on the grave. “I’m afraid I’ve yet to find a countryman suitable for marriage and procreation. If they have any money, the first thing they do is buy themselves a mistress. Go into any trendy sushi restaurant in Moscow and you’ll see the pretty young girls lined up at the bar, waiting for a man to sweep them off their feet. But not just any man. They want a New Russian man. A man with money and connections. A man who winters in Zermatt and Courchevel and summers in the South of France. A man who will give them jewelry and foreign cars. I prefer to spend my summers at my grandfather’s dacha. I grow radishes and carrots there. I still believe in my country. I don’t need to vacation in the exclusive playgrounds of Western Europe to be a contented, self-fulfilled New Russian woman.”

She had been speaking to the grave. Now she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at Gabriel.

“You must think I’m terribly foolish.”

“Why foolish?”

“Because I pretend to be a journalist in a country where there is no longer true journalism. Because I want democracy in a country that has never known it-and, in all likelihood, never will.”

She stood upright and brushed the dust from her palms. “To understand Russia today, you must understand the trauma of the nineties. Everything we had, everything we had been told, was swept away. We went from superpower to basket case overnight. Our people lost their life’s savings, not just once but over and over again. Russians are a paternalistic people. They believe in the Orthodox Church, the State, the Tsar. They associate democracy with chaos. Our president and the siloviki understand this. They use words like ‘managed democracy’ and ‘State capitalism,’ but they’re just euphemisms for something more sinister: fascism. We have lurched from the ideology of Lenin to the ideology of Mussolini in a decade. We should not be surprised by this. Look around you, Mr. Golani. The history of Russia is nothing but a series of convulsions. We cannot live as normal people. We never will.”

She looked past him, into a darkened corner of the cemetery. “They’re watching us very closely. Hold my arm, please, Mr. Golani. It is better if the FSB believes you are attracted to me.”

He did as she asked. “Perhaps fascism is too strong a word,” he said.

“What term would you apply to our system?”

“A corporate state,” Gabriel replied without conviction.

“I’m afraid that is a euphemism worthy of the Kremlin. Yes, our people are now free to make and spend money, but the State still picks the winners and the losers. Our leaders speak of regaining lost empires. They use our oil and gas to bully and intimidate our neighbors. They have all but eliminated the opposition and an independent press, and those who dare to protest are beaten openly in the streets. Our children are being coerced into joining Party youth organizations. They are taught that America and the Jews want to control the world-that America and the Jews want to steal Russia ’s wealth and resources. I don’t know about you, Mr. Golani, but I get nervous when young minds are trained to hate. The inevitable comparisons to another time and place are uncomfortable, to say the least.”

She stopped beneath a towering spruce tree and turned to face him.

“You are an Ashkenazi Jew?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Your family came from Russia originally?”

“ Germany,” he said. “My grandparents were from Berlin.”

“Did they survive the war?”

He shook his head and, once again, told her the truth. “They were murdered at Auschwitz. My mother was young enough to work and she managed to survive. She died several years ago.”

“I wonder what your mother would have said about a leader who fills young minds with paranoid fantasies about others plotting to steal what is rightly theirs. Would she have called it the ideology of a corporate state or would she have used a more sinister term?”

“Point taken, Miss Sukhova.”

“Forgive my tone, Mr. Golani. I am an old-fashioned Russian woman who likes to grow radishes and carrots in the garden of her grandfather’s broken-down dacha. I believe in my Russia, and I want no more acts of evil committed in my name. Neither did Boris Ostrovsky. That is why he wanted to talk to you. And that is why he was murdered. ”