Derek Lambert - The Red House

Did a man of his stature need liquor to armour-plate his guts? Would the Party have permitted such a ‘degenerate’ to be posted to Washington, the enemy capital? Only Valentina could have asked such a question: only a wife with nocturnal knowledge, only a wife observing after sex, after a loss, after disappointment … ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

He held her hand. ‘Let’s feel this together. Would you have dreamed when we first met that one day we’d visit America together? Even now I find it hard to believe that Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx are down there.’

Mickey Rooney, the East Side Kids, Al Capone, organ-grinders with monkeys on their shoulders. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Mark Twain.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said, leaning across him to look down, her large breasts comfortable against his chest.

‘Africa wouldn’t have this effect on me. Or China or India. But this … I don’t think I really believed it existed. All those tourists in Moscow, those unlikely diplomats, those businessmen. All straight out of the movies.’

The lights swarmed up on them, streaking past the windows. The half dozen passengers on the jet loaded with provisions and equipment for the embassy in Washington and the Mission to the United Nations in New York waited for the landing with theatrical nonchalance or honest rodent fear. A bump and the lights were slowing, the white ranches of Kennedy International Airport braking. Dawn began to ice the skyline.

Ponderously the plane trundled towards the New World. The stewardess, plum-plump in threadbare blue, stood up and peered out of a window as if she were hoping it were Khabarovsk or Leningrad. The passengers pointed, nodded; the aircraft stopped.

Inside reception it was a bewilderment of glass, marble, neon, plastic. Negro porters, movie voices, no guns that Vladimir Zhukov could see. His head ached at the base of his skull and a vein throbbed on his right temple.

Somewhere a man addressed another as ‘pal’ and was, in turn, referred to as ‘a lousy sonofabitch’. He had arrived. He was in America.

Or was he? Two men wearing grey fedoras and black overcoats with clothes-hanger shoulders came up. ‘Good morning, Comrade Zhukov,’ one said. ‘Welcome to New York.’

Nicolai Grigorenko occupied half the front seat of the black Oldsmobile, his companion and the driver the other half. Grigorenko was a large man, Siberian-faced, not unlike Brezhnev, ponderous but authoritative, a chain-smoker, fiftyish, throaty. One of the growlers. Mikhail Brodsky was a sapling by comparison; soft-haired, smiling, with a cold lodged high up in his nose, gold-rimmed spectacles, nervous hands and a habit of prefacing answers with two sing-song chords. Uh-huh—D flat rising to E flat.

The Growler spoke. ‘Ordinarily we would have driven direct to La Guardia and boarded the shuttle to Washington. But there’s a blizzard in Washington and you’ll have to stay the night at the mission in New York.’

Excellent, Zhukov thought. Everyone should spend their first night in America in New York. ‘What is this shuttle?’ he asked.

‘It’s like a regular bus service. You buy your ticket on board.’

‘That sounds very progressive,’ Zhukov rashly observed.

The silence in the car throbbed.

Grigorenko turned his big polluted face around. ‘You will learn, Comrade Zhukov, that much of what appears to be progress in this country is achieved at the expense of far more deserving causes.’

Brodsky removed a bullet-shaped inhaler from one nostril and hummed a two-bar introduction. ‘An Aeroflot pilot would not have been deterred by the sort of blizzards they have in Washington.’

Zhukov leaned back in his seat and, with two fingers on the vein in his temple, observed the approaches to New York.

With the deep snow on the ground and flakes peeling off the sky it might have been Sheremetyevo Airport. Even a few pine trees on the perimeter. Except for the cars. Acres of them bonneted in white in a parking lot. In Moscow it took more than a year to get delivery of a stubby little Moskvitch or a Volga of ugly and ancient design at prices few could afford. Automobiles, he told himself, are my first impression. Uniform, luxurious, decadent, asleep in the comfortable snow. But so many … Did anyone walk?

Grigorenko followed his gaze or tuned in to his thoughts. Perhaps one day they would even achieve that. He pointed up to the sagging sky. ‘It’s the automobiles that cause the pollution. Every year it kills thousands of old people in New York City. It’s typical of the American mentality that comfort of the middle-classes should take precedence over the welfare of the aged.’

‘The senior citizens,’ Brodsky hummed. And giggled.

Grigorenko continued his recital while Zhukov thought briefly of the pollution over Kiev and decided not to make the comparison. He was a second secretary and his guides were inferior in rank. But not, he guessed, in that other hierarchy in which a third secretary could outrank a Minister Counsellor. Perhaps even an ambassador.

The houses on the left looked English; dozing villas alive inside with occupants preparing for breakfast. Silver buses and ruthless trucks spraying the windscreen with brown slush; highways wheeling and diving beneath each other; wires and roads and signs glaring and guiding. The mind panicking a little; the panic masked by the impassive trained exterior.

Grigorenko, official Soviet guide on the nursery slopes of first impressions, turned again. A single hair grew from the end of his suet nose. ‘You have been celebrating on the aircraft, Comrade Zhukov?’

‘It is the first of January.’

‘Certainly. And there will probably be a small celebration in New York. But it was, perhaps, a little unwise to drink so early in the morning?’

‘You lose all sense of time between Moscow and New York.’

‘True.’ The big puppet head nodded slowly.

Valentina squeezed Zhukov’s hand. ‘Look, Vladimir.’

Ahead, Manhattan assembled itself in the young, snow-tattered light, blurred coyly then reasserted itself—a postcard so familiar that it was again difficult to accept the reality.

Grigorenko isolated the Empire State from the rest. ‘The world’s tallest TV tower,’ he said reluctantly.

‘That’s correct,’ Zhukov agreed without thinking. ‘And the whole building weighs 365,000 tons—that’s fourteen tons to support each occupant.’

Grigorenko glared at him suspiciously. ‘You seem to know a lot about one American building? Perhaps it’s you who should make the introductions.’ He felt for the hair on his nose.

‘Not just one American building. The most famous of all. I read my tourist literature. And,’ he apologized, ‘I have this facility with figures and statistics. They lodge in my brain.’

Which was true. There was Manhattan, floating as serene as a reflection, and he had to toss 365,000 tons of concrete into it. Such training.

‘It’s very impressive,’ Valentina said. ‘Especially beside all this’. She pointed at some grubby miniatures along the road.

‘Uh-huh.’ Brodsky tuning-up. ‘But it seems to me that we should not forget the squalor and corruption that exists behind those façades. Drugs, drunkenness, violence, vice.’ He ticked them off on the fingers of his dogma, his voice lingering and slavering over V-I-C-E.

Only the driver said nothing, and Zhukov wondered how his young peasant brain reacted—if his training had left him with any reactions.

I want to feel and savour it by myself, Zhukov thought. I want my own private instincts which I have so carefully and privately nurtured. To feel and judge and file.

They lingered beneath a red light before entering the Kremlin of Capitalism.