Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Nothing prepared. Did not know where to start and a woman’s voice on the phone that was accompanied by a metallic humming and she assumed her words were being recorded. She was rarely prompted, not interrupted, and she told it – most of it. She spoke of the boy, the British soldier, and spoke of a man whom she had seen that day when she had been a witness to an atrocity, and now she had seen his photograph, on a Norwegian site and in military uniform. She told it as she remembered it from two years before and did not doubt her recall of each hour that it had lasted, all as sharp in her mind as a knife’s blade. Her name was taken, the address on Rostocker Strasse. It would be passed on, but no promises given for the attention her story might receive. The wait had started. She had thanked the consul who had shrugged, held her hand longer than necessary as if to signal that all that was possible had been done and something might happen – or not. Faizah had gone back to work and for four days and four nights had noted each time that the old wooden door of the bar was pushed open.

Her waiting was done. Not a tall man. Looked like a bureaucrat and she had experience of them in Hamburg as she had endured the hoops and jumps she’d passed through and scaled to achieve refugee status in Germany. A senior bureaucrat and with a good suit on him, a laundered shirt with a sober tie, and polished shoes. She saw his face, his little moustache, lightweight steel-framed spectacles, recognised him. A smile slipped to his mouth. She remembered him from a Portakabin, Gaz taken away by medics, and her fingers holding her wound because the makeshift work he had done to cover it was loosening. Then he had had a sympathetic smile, and she might have believed it had she not seen his eyes, cold as when the winter settled on the Norder-elbe channel: they had raked over her. He passed her, went to the bar, would have asked for the owner, who gestured towards her, would have said something but not entered into a debate or negotiated for her time. Had gone to a table where a single customer lingered over his coffee, and was invited to vacate the place, and must have looked for a moment into the intruder’s eyes. He pointed to the seat opposite.

She left her order pad on the counter, wiped her hands on her apron, and joined him. He took her hand. Said what his name was, that he had come from London, that her story had taken time to find the right pigeon-hole, and apologised for the delay.

“If you need a name to call me by then it’s Knacker, don’t ask its origin. What I want to say is very simple… We don’t forget. Days, months, years go by and events seem clouded in a haze of time, except that we have not forgotten. We have a message for such criminals: Never underestimate the long reach of our arm . Tell me.”

She pointed across the bar, showed him where they had been sitting and talked of the Norwegian customers and their iPad and what she had seen, and described a photograph.

Lavrenti, the major, walked through the empty rooms of the apartment. At his side was his mother. It was well placed in the Arbat district, where prices were steep even by Moscow’s current standards. Irrelevant to him. Bought outright and valued at $8000 a square metre it had a wide living area with room for dining, a kitchen, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, and a small balcony which would be good in summer and not collect too much of the winter snow. It would be taken by his mother; she would order the curtains and rugs, would furnish the apartment down to the cutlery, the crockery, the bed linen and towels: most likely she would choose the shower heads and instruct on degree of hot water.

In the Lefortovo interview rooms, he could call in a man or woman who needed reminding of their status in the new society. He could sit at his desk after the individual had been kept waiting for a half-hour or more in the entrance hall, after he had been marched along corridors with no decoration, no markers as to where he was in the building, after he was brought to the room and was seated on a hard, straight-backed chair and ignored. No acknowledgement, no courtesy. Could keep a person fidgeting, uncertain and with morale slackening, and would have a closed file in front of him and seemed to busy himself at a computer screen which was, of course, out of the subject’s eyeline. Then, eventually would start with a cold, monosyllabic voice and would play the bored official and deal with questions of identity, addresses of domestic and work life. Any interview carried out in the recesses of the old Lefortovo gaol added to the sense of intimidation, insecurity: as intended. The building was part of the legend of the state’s control over Muscovites… there he was free from any oversight. A suspect might denounce him, with threats of legal action in the courts, and the complaints would be dismissed. His job was to protect the regime from foreign espionage, to keep the regime safe from dissidents, scum, internal agitation, to continue the supremacy of the high-fliers of the ruling group, and to work on a career path that would take him, Lavrenti Volkov, into their ranks. Very simple. In the interview rooms of Lefortovo gaol he worked assiduously towards those aims. He had been to the shit heap of Syria and commendations said he had displayed courage, leadership and ingenuity. He had been to the city of Murmansk and his record there showed diligence, single-minded devotion to the aims of FSB… There was a threat, there must be a threat, it was essential that the threat existed, was alive, and was massed across the frontiers of the state: across the Norwegian border, up the E105 highway. If there was no threat then the work of FSB, Federal’nya sluzhba bezopasnosti , was unnecessary. The organisation could be wound up and its high-ranking officers sent to work in industry, or drive taxis, and anarchy again could rule as it had in the days before the rise of the President. It would not happen on the watch of Lavrenti Volkov, and in the meantime he worked with assiduous devotion, and his career prospered – as had the career of his father, the brigadier general.

His mother chattered about orders for Scandinavian furniture, not much of it because the new cult was for minimalism, and the imported TV, and the German kitchen units, and.… He never criticised his mother, could still recall the scent she had worn, from Paris, the day he had returned from Latakia, the Syrian port city now taken over by the Russian air force, and she had hugged him as if he were a precious toy, and the perfume had stuck in his nostrils, but he had not choked on it, had told her how wonderful it was to be home after a half-year of duty. Nor did he ever contradict his father, high ranking, the best of connections, but who had fought in the failed Afghan intervention. His father had guided his path of advancement: to whom he should duck his head in respect, who was a drunk and a fool and to be ignored, who was a drunk and an idiot but should be listened to, and who was a coming man and who was vulnerable and slipping back. And he never complained about the close attention of his two minders, Boris and Mikki, sergeants in a unit once commanded by his father and now middle-aged and clinging to the last scaffolding of importance, drivers and fixers and the street rubbish that he would soon seek to discard. His father had organised their recall to uniform for his duty in Syria and they were supposed to have ‘watched his back’ and made sure he came home in an aircraft seat and not in a bag; never complained about them because they harboured the secret of a long day in a faraway village, were witnesses. No complaints were made of their work, slovenly, untidy, the least that was acceptable.

His mother said that the apartment was a fitting home for an FSB officer with the best prospects of promotion, a future… He would be monitoring foreign diplomats, those from the west European nations who were most hostile, and would be directing the programmes designed to make them uncertain, paranoid: threats to family pets, burglary of homes and the parasite fear that came from burglary, and the opening of windows in the depths of winter and changing alarms and inserting porn clips on a family’s desktop, and the harassment of locally employed workers. He told his mother that he was grateful for her attention to his new home.