Derek Lambert - The Man Who Was Saturday

Calder had long decided that Russians made up their sayings on the spur of the moment. ‘A wise proverb,’ he said graciously as she handed him cucumber salad and sour cream on a side-plate.

‘And what are you doing in Moscow, Gaspadeen Calder?’

Hurriedly, Katerina said: ‘He’s a writer. He’s writing an article for an American magazine.’

‘The National Geographic ,’ Calder said, looking Katerina straight in the eye.

‘And how do you like our city?’ her mother asked. ‘Beautiful, no?’

‘Noble,’ Calder said. ‘Especially the Kremlin and the metro stations. They put ours to shame.’

Creases of pleasure appeared at the corners of her mouth. ‘We are very clean people, we Russians. Orderly and exuberant. Nothing by halves. And we look after our old people,’ she added.

Why don’t Intourist and Novosti introduce foreigners to people like this? Calder wondered. Instead visitors were forced to listen to actors reciting tired scripts, and taken to brochure showplaces instead of wooden villages clustered round a pump, to escape the dreaded condemnation: ‘Primitive.’

Not that the West managed much of a PR job: most Russians still thought London was a nineteenth-century stew.

Katerina’s mother said: ‘Soon we will eat and see what sort of a mess our men have made of it,’ sounding very indulgent towards male inefficiency. ‘And you, Kata, what have you been doing with yourself today?’

Calder sensed maternal worry: at the Institute it was common knowledge that Katerina was into Women’s Lib. What surprised everyone was that she was allowed to keep her job.

Katerina told her mother that she had been to a meeting. She didn’t elaborate and, although there was transparently more to it than that, her mother accepted the compromise and departed for the kitchen to see what sort of a hash the menfolk were making of supper.

‘What sort of meeting?’ Calder asked when she had gone.

‘You know perfectly well.’

‘The feminist movement?’ Calder frowned. ‘But why? I realise women get a pretty raw deal here. Divorce, abortion, exploitation …. But why do you care so much?’

She told him.

She was nineteen now, her father had left her mother when she was three. He met a girl at a summer camp on the Black Sea organised by the snow-plough factory where he worked and came home only to pick up his belongings.

The babushka , Katerina’s grandmother on her father’s side, left too and her mother had to quit her job as a waitress in the National Hotel to look after her daughter.

Her family helped financially and the State helped but she had to move into an apartment block of ‘boxes’ near the docks at Khimki Port. She got a job in a canteen there and paid a neighbour to look after Katerina during the day.

She tended to Katerina in the evenings and worked late into the night cooking and cleaning and mending.

A docker moved in briefly. He beat her up and stole her savings from under the mattress. Where else?

Her mother became bitter towards men. The bitterness was infectious.

Apart from visits from a family friend – ‘Yury Petrov, a pirate,’ Katerina said fondly – and an expedition to his home in Siberia this state of affairs lasted for thirteen years.

Then she met Sasha at the Central Soviet Army Drama Theatre on Kommuny Square and everything changed.

A miracle.

‘He sang his way into our hearts,’ Katerina told Calder. Her eyes were moist. ‘A wonderful man.’

‘But a chauvinist.’

‘Beyond redemption,’ she said happily.

‘Don’t you think the big-heartedness of Russian men outweighs their faults?’ They were both speaking English now.

‘You don’t understand: it’s injustice I’m fighting. I lived with it for thirteen years; it’s part of me. Just as it’s part of your Judy Goldsmith. When her father left home her mother lived for three years with five children in a chicken-coop. Now Judy Goldsmith is president of the National Organisation for Women, but I bet she still dreams she’s living in a chicken-coop.’

‘And you want to become president of something like that?’

‘Doubtful, after what happened today.’

‘The meeting?’

‘I burned down the hall,’ she said.

Sasha made his ceremonial entry from the kitchen carrying a dish of chicken cutlets and singing:

A circle for the sun

Sky all around

That’s what the little boy drew

Carefully sketched on his paper

Wrote underneath the corner .

Sasha paused. Children had materialised from another room. They stood like a choir poised for song. Sasha winked at them. Piping voices joined his baritone:

Let there always be sunshine

Let there always be blue skies

Let there always be Mummy

Let there always be me .

Then everyone fell on the food. Chicken and meat dumplings and beef stewed with sour cream and borsch. The men, Katerina’s mother admitted, hadn’t made such a hash of it.

‘So,’ Katerina said, spearing a meat dumpling with her fork, ‘do you feel as if you’ve been accepted?’

‘Marvellous people.’

‘That song – the chorus was written by a four-year-old boy. Sentimental people, the Russians.’

‘What would Sasha do now if I told him I was a defector?’

‘Throw you out on your ear.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that it can take more courage to defect than to stay in your own country?’

‘You didn’t defect,’ she said, ‘you ran away,’ voice suddenly frosted.

The noise around him seemed to swell. Chink of cutlery against china, laughter, talk, the strummed notes of the guitar. The arm-wrestlers had called it a day, neither vanquished, the poet was asleep curled up like a bulky foetus. Sasha had his arm round the shoulders of Katerina’s mother.

He thought: ‘I’ll never belong.’

He heard her voice distantly. ‘… told you my story. Isn’t it time you told me what happened?’

He concentrated. ‘Not yet. Not here.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think I drank some animal killer by mistake.’

Would Sasha really throw him out? Of course. The Red Army Choir rang with patriotism. The Twilight Brigade took a different view. Their motto was Samuel Johnson’s: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel .

Calder felt like an island. He told Katerina that he was leaving.

‘So soon?’

‘Perhaps you’ll show me more of your Moscow. The city foreigners never see. I remember as a kid on the waterfront in Boston there were some slot machines. You fed them a nickel and a tableau came to life. A circus, a rodeo, that sort of thing. That’s the Russia foreigners see. Feed Intourists with hard currency and the tableaux come to life. But with you I have a passport ….’

‘You have Soviet citizenship, an internal passport. You’re free to travel.’

‘You know that’s not true.’

She gave a shrug, a dismissal. ‘Perhaps one day ….’

Calder said goodbye to Katerina’s parents. ‘But the party’s only just beginning,’ Sasha objected. He sung a few bars of the Volga Boatman . ‘The song all Americans know.’ Calder braced himself for Sasha’s handshake but it was limper this time, emasculated by firewater.

Calder left.

Outside the cold embraced him like an old friend and sent the vodka coursing through his veins. With a skull full of fancies he made his way on rubber knees to the Zhiguli in the parking lot.

The cream paint on the battered Volga that followed him shone silver in the moonlight.

When he got back to his apartment off Gorky Street Calder found Jessel from the American Embassy waiting for him.