John Banville - The Untouchable

Suddenly I found his Mitteleuropan unctuousness intensely irritating.

“Am I one of the initiated?” I said.

He turned his head slowly and let his glance slide over me from toe to brow.

“I am trusting that you are,” he said. “Or that you will be…”

There it was again, that word: trust. Yet I could not resist that hooded, meaning gaze. Slender, black suited, with his pale, priestly hands clasped before him, he sat in the sunlight not so much watching as attending me, waiting for… for what? For me to surrender to him. Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understood what it would be like to be a woman whom he desired. My own gaze faltered and slipped as the ratchets of my self-possession disengaged for a second with a soft jolt, and I brushed busily at a nonexistent patch of dust on the sleeve of my jacket and in a voice that sounded to my ears like a querulous squeak I said:

“I hope your trust is not misplaced.”

Hartmann smiled and relaxed and sat back on his chair with a look of satisfaction, and I turned my face aside, feeling gulpy and shy all of a sudden. Yes, how deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.

“Your ship will sail in three weeks’ time from London port,” he said. “Amsterdam, Helsinki, Leningrad. She is called the Liberation. A good name, don’t you think?”

A good name, but a poor thing. The Liberation was a blunt-ended, low-slung merchant vessel carrying a cargo of pig iron, whatever that is, destined for the People’s smelters. The North Sea was rough, a jostling waste of clay-coloured waves, each one half the size of a house, through which the little ship snuffled and heaved, like an iron pig, indeed, going along with its snout rising and falling in the troughs and tail invisibly twirling behind us. Our captain was a black-bearded Dutchman of vast girth who had spent the early years of his career in the East Indies engaged in activities which from his colourful but deliberately vague descriptions of them sounded to me suspiciously like the slave trade. He spoke of the Soviet Union with jovial detestation. His crew, made up of a medley of races, were a slovenly, furtive, piratical-looking bunch. Boy could hardly believe his luck; he spent most of the voyage below decks, changing bunks and partners with each watch. We would catch the noise of drunken revels rising from the bowels of the ship, with Boy’s voice dominant, singing sea shanties and roaring for rum. “What a filthy gang!” he would croak happily, emerging red-eyed and barefoot on to the passenger deck in search of cigarettes and something to eat. “Talk about close quarters!” It always baffled me, how Boy could get away with so much. Despite his disgraceful doings on that voyage, he remained a favourite at Captain Kloos’s table, and even when a complaint was lodged against him by one of the younger crewmen, a Friesian Islander pining for his girl, the matter was hushed up.

“It’s that famous charm of his,” Archie Fletcher said sourly. “Some day it will let him down, when he’s old and fat and clapped-out.”

Fletcher, himself a charmless hetero, was disapproving of our party in general, considering it far too frolicsome for a delegation handpicked by the Comintern to be the spearhead of its English undercover drive. (Yes, Miss V., I mean Sir Archibald Fletcher, who today is one of the most poisonous spokesmen of the Tory right; how we do oscillate, we ideologues.) There was also a couple of Cambridge dons—pipes, dandruff, woollen mufflers— whom I knew slightly; Bill Darling, a sociologist from the LSE, who even then I could see was too neurotic and excitable to be a spy; and a rather pompous young aristo named Belvoir, the same Toby Belvoir who in the sixties would renounce his title to serve in a Labour cabinet, for which piece of Socialist good faith he was rewarded with a junior ministry in charge of sport or some such. So there we were, a boatload of superannuated boys, bucketing through autumn storms along the Skagerrak and down into the Baltic, on our way to encounter the future at first-hand. Needless to say, what I see is a Ship of Fools by one of the anonymous medieval masters, with curly whitecaps and a stylised porpoise bustling through the waves, and our party, in robes and funny hats, crowded on the poop deck, peering eastwards, an emblem of hope and fortitude and, yes, innocence.

I know that this, my first and last visit to Russia, should have been, and perhaps was, one of the formative experiences of my life, yet my recollections of it are curiously blurred, like the features of a weather-worn statue; the form is still there, the impression of significance and stony weight: only the details are largely gone. Petersburg was an astonishment, of course. I had the sense, looking down those noble prospects (poor Psyche!), of a flare of trumpets sounding all around me, announcing the commencement of some grand imperial venture: the declaration of a war, the inauguration of a peace. Years later, when the Comrades were urging me to defect, I passed a sleepless night weighing in the scales the losing of the Louvre against the gaining of the Hermitage, and the choice, I can tell you, was not as straightforward as I might have expected.

In Moscow there were few architectural magnificences to distract one’s attention from the people passing by in those impossibly wide, sleet-grey streets. The weather was unseasonably cold, with a wind in which one could feel already the glass-sharp edge of winter. We had been warned of shortages, and although the worst of the famines in the countryside were over by then, even the most enthusiastic among our party found it hard, in contemplating those hunched crowds, not to recognise the marks of deprivation and dull fear. Yes, Miss V., I can be honest: Stalin’s Russia was a horrible place. But we understood that what was happening here was only a start, you see. The temporal factor is what you must always keep in mind if you wish to understand us and our politics. The present we could forgive for the sake of the future. And then, it was a matter of choosing; as we trooped past the glorious monuments of Peter’s northern Venice, or tossed in our lumpy beds in the Moscova Nova, or stared in a bored stupor through the grimy windows of a rattling railway carriage at mile after mile of empty fields on the way south to Kiev, we could hear in our mind’s ear, off to the west, faintly but with unignorable distinctness, the stamp and rattle of drilling armies. Hitler or Stalin: could life be simpler?

And there was art. Here, I told myself, here, for the first time since the Italian Renaissance, art had become a public medium, available to all, a lamp to illumine even the humblest of lives. By art, I need not tell you, I meant the art of the past: socialist-realism I passed over in tactful silence. (An aphorism: Kitsch is to art as physics is to mathematics — its technology.) But can you imagine my excitement at the possibilities that seemed to open before me in Russia? Art liberated for the populace—Poussin for the Proletariat! Here was being built a society which would apply to its own workings the rules of order and harmony by which art operates; a society in which the artist would no longer be dilettante or romantic rebel, pariah or parasite; a society whose art would be more deeply rooted in ordinary life than any since medieval times. What a prospect, for a sensibility as hungry for certainties as mine was!

I recall a discussion on the topic that I had with Boy on the last night before we docked in Leningrad. I say discussion, but really it was one of Boy’s lectures, for he was drunk and in hectoring mood as he expounded what he grandly called his Theory of the Decline of Art under Bourgeois Values, which I had heard many times before, and which anyway I think was largely filched from a refugee Czech professor of aesthetics whom he had hired to give a talk on the BBC but whose accent was so impenetrable the talk could not be broadcast. It was hardly original, consisting mainly of sweeping generalisations on the glory of the Renaissance and the humanistic self-delusions of the Enlightenment, and all boiled down in the end to the thesis that in our time only the totalitarian state could legitimately assume the role of patron of the arts. I believed it, of course—I still do, surprising as it may seem—but that night, stimulated, I suppose, by Hollands gin and the needle-sharp northern air, I thought it a lot of fatuous twaddle, and said so. Really, I was not prepared to be lectured to by the likes of Boy Bannister, especially on art. He stopped, and glared at me. He had taken on that bulbous, froggy look—thick lips thicker than ever, eyes bulging and slightly crossed—that the combination of drink and polemics always produced in him. He was sitting cross-legged on the end of my bunk in shirt-sleeves, his braces loosed and his flies half unbuttoned; his big feet were bare and crusted with dirt.