Paul Theroux - My Secret History

Instead, all I asked was the chance to make a phone call to London.

She didn’t like the request. No one used telephones in the Soviet Union. They sent telegrams on thick brownish paper. The words in the message were counted twice and initialed and stamped, and reread, and examined, until it was not a message at all but simply capital letters turned into rubles.

“Is necessary?” she said doubtfully.

She meant: What was the point in going on a long trip, and visiting interesting places like Siberia, if your main aim in being in those places was to call home?

“It’s urgent,” I said.

“Is not easy to find telephone.”

Her frown said: If all you want from me is this phone call you are wasting my time.

But I knew this was the only way I could go home, by phoning first, and I said, “There must be lots of telephones here.”

“Of course,” she said in that insulted tone that I associated with people in poor countries: Do you think we’re savages?

“I meant for international calls.”

She shrugged, using her furs, which made it a theatrical gesture. She said, “We can be able to telephone Kiev. We can be able to telephone Leningrad. We have trunk line. Trunk call.”

Why was it only foreigners who used words like “trunk line” and “purchase” and “clad”? Was it because the words went out of date by the time they reached these distant countries?

I said, “What about London?”

I wanted her to say Of course with the same indignant certainty she had used before.

She said, “First is necessary to book the telephone.”

“Yes.”

“And then is necessary to telephone Moscow.”

“Yes,” I said, and waited for more. But she was thinking.

“And then we must make inquiry.”

“I want you to do this for me, Irina, please.”

“Is breakfast time,” she said, “in Moscow,” and squeezed her tiny watch-face between two large dimpled fingers. “We go to museum now. Famous museum.”

Stuffed animals with bright glass eyes, dusty birds, dinosaur bones wired together, fossils, paintings of mustachioed men, baskets and ancient tattered aboriginal mittens, and pots and weapons that made me think: Could they cook with these? Could they kill with those? The building was overheated. Everything I saw was dead, and the way the floorboards creaked made me sad.

“Now we visit to factory.”

“What about my phone call?”

“Is important factory, making poolies, weenches—”

“Irina, please.”

She did not reply. She spoke in Russian to the driver. I had no idea we were going back to the hotel until we arrived there. Irina muttered and got out, but when I attempted to follow her the driver said something Russian to me in a scolding voice, and I sat back in the stuffy car.

“Is booked,” Irina said, when she returned to the car. “Now we visit to factory. Then we see river. Is coming darkness soon.”

“What do you mean ‘booked’? Booked to London?”

“To Moscow.”

“Will they connect me to London?”

“I think so. I hope so.” She saw my face and smiled at me. She said gently, “Don’t worry.”

In the late afternoon, which was dark, I was walking up the steep riverbank to the car, and it struck me that I had gone too far. I had been away too long. What was I doing, slipping on this ice in this freezing place? The dark, the cold, and the stillness were all Siberian. I should never have come here.

Siberia seemed like death but was less final. It was more like a fatal illness, an especially anxious and even painful sort of waiting. A shallow heartbeat marked the time passing like the soft tick of a clock. It was a condition I had just begun to know: Siberia meant suspense. It was not death, but dying.

Back at the hotel I wrote my notes — about Irina and the factory, the museum, the bank, the statue in the main square, the look of the houses, the river, and the way the old men had been fishing through holes in the ice. In these notes I was expert at leaving things out. I said nothing of the phone call. There were in my travels certain simultaneous anxieties that I did not have to write down to remember. In fact, not writing them down meant that they were always passing in my mind.

Irina had said the call would come at eight. It didn’t — I did not expect it to be punctual in Siberia. I was surprised when the phone rang just before eight-thirty: Moscow.

“I am calling London,” I said.

“Number, please?”

I said it slowly, I repeated it, and I was so preoccupied I did not hear the operator nagging me to put the phone down until she began to shout.

The call came an hour or so later.

“Speak louder, please!”

I said, “Darling, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

It was a faint voice, the merest vibration in a sea of sound, but it was unmistakably Jenny’s.

“I’m in Siberia. I’ve had so much trouble trying to call you — first in Japan, and now here. I had to call Moscow first”—and then not getting any response I became self-conscious and said, “Are you sure you can hear me?”

“Yes.”

One-word replies usually made me talkative, but this made me uneasy as well.

“Is there anything wrong?”

“You woke me up.”

“I’m sorry — I didn’t know. Jenny, I’m in Siberia!”

“It’s six o’clock in the morning.”

It sounded distinct and complaining, but I blamed the line for distorting it.

I said, “I miss you.”

There was no reply to this.

I said, “Can you still hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“I was sleeping. You woke me up.”

One can always tell from the pauses and the tone of voice when the other person wants to put the phone down. I felt this strongly, but it was so disturbing to me that I resisted it and kept talking.

“I’m coming home soon.”

After a pause, she said, “When?”

“The end of the month.”

“You said you’d be home by Christmas.”

I started to explain.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. But she was not letting me off. This was not sympathy or a way of excusing me. It sounded more like: You don’t matter.

The receiver had gone cold in my hand. Another silence was loudly buzzing in my ear.

I said, “I’m so lonely here.”

“It was your idea. The whole trip. I didn’t want you to go.”

“It’s been very hard—”

But she was finishing her own thought: “It doesn’t matter now.”

I said, “Jenny, I’m really sorry I woke you up. I’ll see you in a few weeks. I love you. Can you hear me? Darling, I love you.”

“Jack misses you,” she said.

Her voice was still cold. I blamed the wire, the baffled sound, the echo.

“I must go,” she said. “I’m standing in the hall in my nightdress. I’ll catch cold—”

“I’m in Siberia!”

My scream frightened me, but the line had gone dead.

“Thirty-four rubles,” Irina said the next morning at the service desk. “You make a very long telephone call.”

I pretended to be intent on counting the money.

“Everything is all right now,” she said, and smiled at me. She gave me the receipt.

I said, “Yes,” but I knew something was badly wrong. I did not want to think what it was. I only knew that it was very urgent that I hurry home.

No more stops, I thought. I took the Trans-Siberian that night straight through to Moscow — eight days of the twisty, jouncy train, and the cold and the birches. I spent Christmas Eve drunk with the kitchen manager in the dining car, and Christmas day at the window.

I thought of a story. A murderer is so overcome with remorse at the thought of his crime and the fact that he has not been caught, that he changes his name and takes the name of his victim. His personality begins to alter, and it softens to the point where he is very meek and timid, and at last he is himself murdered.