John le Carré - The Russia House

'We respect his talent and his art,'Barley replied. 'We respect his humanity. We respect his family and his culture. And tenthly or whatever it is, we respect his capacity to reach the hearts of the Russian people despite the fact that 'he had the daylights hounded out of him by a bunch of bureau-rats who are very probably the same little beasts who sent us that aeroplane.'

'Can you quote him?' the little chap asked.

Barley had that kind of memory, he explained to us awkwardly. 'I gave him the first lines of "Nobel Prize". I thought it was appropriate after that foul aeroplane.'

'Give it to us now, please, will you?' said Clive as if everything had to be checked.

Barley mumbled, and it crossed my mind that he might actually be a very shy man.

'Like a beast in the pen I'm cut offFrom my friends, freedom, the sunBut the hunters are gaining groundI've nowhere else to run.'

The little chap was frowning at the lighted end of his cigarette while he listened to this, said Barley, and for a moment he really did wonder whether they had walked into a provocation, as Oliphant feared.

'If you respect Pasternak so much, why don't you come and meet some friends of mine?' the little chap suggested. 'We are writers here. We have a dacha. We would be honoured to talk to distinguished British publishers.'

Oliphant had only to hear the first half of this speech to develop a severe case of the bends, said Barley.jumbo knew all about accepting invitations from strange Russians. He was an expert on it. He knew how they ensnared you, drugged you,compromised you with disgraceful photographs and obliged you to resign your directorships and give up your chances of a knighthood. He was also in the middle of an ambitious joint publishing deal through VAAP and the last thing he needed was to be found in the company of undesirables. Oliphant boomed all this to Barley in a theatrical whisper that assumed the little stranger was deaf.

'Anyway,' Oliphant ended triumphantly,'it's raining. What arc we going to do about the car?'

Oliphant looked at his watch. The girl Magda looked at the ground. The bloke Emery looked at the girl Magda and thought there could be worse things to do on a Sunday afternoon in Moscow. But Barley, as he told it, took another look at the stranger and decided to like what he saw. He had no designs on the girl or on a knighthood. He had already decided he would rather be photographed in the raw with any number of Russian tarts than fully dressed on the arm of Jumbo Oliphant. So he waved them all off in Jumbo's car, and threw in his lot with the stranger.

'Nezhdanov,', Barley declared abruptly to the silent room, interrupting his own flow. 'I've remembered the chap's name. Nezhdanov. Playwright. Ran one of these studio theatres,couldn't put on his own plays.'

Walter spoke, his soaring voice shattering the momentary lull. 'My dear boy, Vitaly Nezhdanov is a laterday hero . He has three one-acters opening in Moscow just five weeks from now, and everyone has the most exotic hopes for them. Not that he's a blind bit of good, but we're not allowed to say that because he's a dissident. Or was.'

For the first time since I had set eyes on him, Barley's face took on a sublimely happy aspect, and at once I had the feeling that this was the real man, whom the clouds till now had hidden. 'Oh, now that's really great,' he said with the simple pleasure of someone able to enjoy another man's success. 'Fantastic. That's just what Vitaly needed. Thanks for telling me, he said, looking a fraction of his age.

Then once again his face darkened over and he began drinking his whisky in little nips. 'Well, there we all were,' he murmured vaguely. 'More the merrier. Meet my cousin. Have a sausage roll.' But his eyes, I noticed, like his words, had acquired a remote quality, as if he were already looking forward to an ordeal.

I glanced along the table. Bob smiling. Bob would smile on his death bed, but with an old scout's sincerity. Clive in profile, his face keen as an axe and about as profound. Walter never at rest. Walter with his clever head thrown back, twisting a hank of hair around his spongy forefinger while he smirked at the ornate ceiling, writhed and sweated. And Ned, the leader - capable. resourceful Ned - Ned the linguist and the warrior, the doer and the planner - sitting as he had sat from the beginning, to attention, waiting for the order to advance. Some people, I reflected, watching him, are cursed with too much loyalty, for a day could come when there was nothing left for them to serve.

Big, rambling house, Barley was reciting in the telegraphese he had resorted to. Edwardian clapboard, fretted verandahs, overgrown garden, birch forest. Rotting benches, .Charcoal fire, smell of a cricket ground on a rainy day, ivy. About thirty people, mostly men, sitting and standing around in the garden, cooking, drinking, ignoring the bad weather just like the English. Lousy old cars parked along the roadside, just like English cars used to be before Thatcher's pigs in clover took over the ship. Good faces, fluent voices, arty nomenclatura . Enter Nezhdanov leading Barley. No heads turn.

'Hostess was a poet,' Barley said. 'Tamara something. Dikey lady, white hair, jolly. Husband editor of one of the science magazines. Nezhdanov was his brother-in-law. Everyone was someone's brother-in-law. The lit scene has clout over there. If you've got a voice and they let you use it, you've got a public.'

In his arbitrary memory, Barley now split the occasion into three parts. Lunch, which began around two-thirty when the rain stopped. Night, which followed immediately upon lunch. And what he called 'the last bit', which was when whatever happened had happened, and which so far as any of us could ever fathom occurred in the blurred hours between about two and four when Barley, to use his own words, was drifting painlessly between nirvana and a near terminal hangover.

Until lunch came along, Barley had pottered from group to group, he said first with Nezhdanov then alone, having a shmooze with whoever felt like talking to him.

'Shmooze?' Clive repeated suspiciously, as if he had learned of a new vice.

Bob hastened to interpret. 'A chat, Clive,' he explained in his friendly way. 'A chat and a drink. Nothing sinister.'

But when lunch was called, said Barley, they sat themselves at a trestle table with Barley up one end and Nezhdanov the other and bottles of Georgian white between them, and everyone talking -their best English about whether truth was truth if it was not convenient to the great proletarian so-called Revolution, and whether we should revert to the spiritual values of our ancestors and whether the perestroika was having any positive effect on the lives of the common people, and how if you really' wanted to know what was wrong with the Soviet Union the best way to find out was to try sending a refrigerator from Novosibirsk to Leningrad.

To my secret irritation, Clive again cut in. Like a man bored by irrelevances he wanted names. Barley slapped his forehead with his palm, his hostility to Clive forgotten. Names, Clive, God. One chap a professor at Moscow State but I never caught his name, you see. Another chap in chemical procurement, that was Nezhdanov's half-brother, they called him the Apothecary. Somebody in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Gregor, but I didn't get round to finding out what his name was, let alone his angle.

'Any women at the table?' Ned asked.

'Two, but no Katya,' said Barley, and Ned like myself was visibly impressed by the pace of his perception.

'But there was someone else, wasn't there?' Ned suggested.

Barley leaned himself slowly backwards to drink. Then forward again as he planted the glass between his knees and stooped over it, nose down, inhaling its wisdom.