Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide-and-Seek

None of this was Alexander’s concern; he turned his horse and trotted up a short side-street. At its end there was a house slightly larger than the others and standing back from them. He saw easily that it antedated the Pacification; in fact it belonged to a much earlier period, with red-brick walls, a strip of lawn in front, and from gate to front door a short walk between brick pillars and covered by trellis from which white and blue flowers hung down. More flowers, of various colours, grew in beds at the edges of the lawn and under the windows of the house. To the right of the front door a wooden signboard mentioned J. J. Wright MD and surgery hours below the equivalent in Cyrillic characters. Alexander gave the mare’s reins to a boy of twelve who had followed them from the high street in hopes of a small reward, and plied the brass knocker energetically.

Quite soon a girl of about twenty appeared. She had fair hair bleached in streaks by the sun, bright brown eyes with greenish flecks in them and a pink-and-white complexion. True to Nina’s guess, this girl also had a fine pair of breasts. She looked very healthy and wore a blue skirt and white shirt.

‘Darling, how marvellous to see you!’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting-’

That was as much as she said, because by that point Alexander had hastened across the threshold into the tiny hall, seized her in his arms and begun to kiss her with great intentness, nor did he leave it at that. The series of muffled sounds she made indicated first mild surprise, then more acute surprise, then pleasure and excitement. After a while he released her in part.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘And I love you.’

Undressing as they went, they hurried up the wooden staircase and into a low-ceilinged bedroom at the back of the house from which fields of cereal and a large plantation of conifers were to be seen, if one should look. They were out of view from the bed on which, very soon indeed, Alexander closed with the fair-haired girl. Their activities there went on for some time, longer, to go by her responses when they ceased, than she had expected or was used to. At last she said tenderly,

‘You went at me as if you were trying to split me in two. What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, I just thought of you and then I couldn’t get you out of my mind. If you hadn’t been here I don’t know what I’d have done.’

‘Darling Alexander.’

‘My dearest, most beautiful Kitty.’

Russian was very much the preferred medium of exchange between the two speech-communities; it was taught in all schools, and there was no incentive for the units of supervision, except for some of those under Director Vanag, to learn the language of the subject nation. The arrangement suited Alexander perfectly: he had gone to some pains to be able to speak English without accent, or to seem to do so to Russian ears, and he had carefully chosen and mastered some relatively elaborate phrases of salutation and of colloquialism, together with a few useful simplicities like the ones he had spoken and heard just now on arrival, but his vocabulary had remained small and his ability to carry on a conversation smaller still.

For the moment, at least, this was a supportable weakness. Humming to himself, he set about stroking some of the portions of Kitty that he had not bothered with before. He reflected foggily that one great advantage of pretty girls was that they remained positively, actively attractive at all times and at every stage of the game, then, more foggily still, how altogether serviceable it was that what girls, whether pretty or not, most liked receiving exactly matched, coincided with, was no more nor less than what men were most inclined to offer. Kitty gave little groans of contentment. Sweet smells and bird-song drifted in at the open window, where a bumble-bee entered and, after a quick half-circuit of the room, went out again.

‘How lucky we are,’ said Kitty. ‘We might never have met each other. Have you ever thought of that?’

‘No,’ said Alexander truthfully. He went on, ‘And I don’t believe it, darling. I think we were intended to meet.’

‘You mean by God, or Fate, or…?’

‘One of those. Something brought me to England and made you cross my path. You remember how we first met?’

‘Yes, you picked me up in the street in Northampton.’

‘You know, you’re very sweet, Kitty love, but you can be frightfully crude sometimes. I did not pick you up. I’ve told you a hundred times how it was. An important dispatch had to be taken to the Military Secretariat. At the last moment the officer who was supposed to take it went sick and I was sent instead. I was just coming out of the building after delivering it when for no reason at all I looked over my shoulder and saw you crossing the road away from me, and straight away I just knew we were made for each other, so I ran after you and nearly got knocked down by a waggon and said something to you – I can’t remember what it was…’

‘I can. It was, “Would you like to go for a walk?”‘

‘I dare say it was, that’s quite unimportant. And then you told me it was the first time you’d been in that part of Northampton for over a year.’

‘Did I?’

‘That was later, of course. Well, surely you can see it? I mean, you must agree that what we feel about each other is quite exceptional?’

‘Oh yes, I can’t imagine many people having such a lovely time as we do or being as happy. And nobody anywhere being happier.’

‘Well then, darling Kitty, it would obviously be absurd if something like that could have happened and then never did after all.’

‘I can understand it would be a pity, my love. Well yes, I supposed it might be rather absurd too, in a way.

He pushed the thick fair hair back from her brow and took her face between his hands. ‘Let me tell you how I feel – how you make me feel. When I’m with you, even when I’m not but I think of you so hard it’s almost as if I can see you, then I feel the blood going through my body with a new life, so that I tingle from head to foot, and I’m so much aware of everything round me that it’s as if I’d been half blind and deaf and sort of numb before, and I seem to be within just one second or one metre of understanding the secret of the universe. Everything’s incredibly grand and yet completely simple. And then,’ he added, determined to go carefully with the next part, ‘I wish you could have been… kidnapped and taken prisoner by Vanag’s men so that I could come riding in to rescue you.

Rather disappointingly, she seemed not to notice his change of tack there. ‘I wish I knew half as much about how I feel as you do about how you feel. I only know I feel wonderful in every way and it’s all because of you.’

This was so near to what he would have said himself in her situation that he looked her closely in the eye, but found he was unable to go on doing so; his gaze shifted to her mouth and the thought, all thought, began to slip deliciously away. There was not a great deal about what followed that was the product of intention. The sound of the shutting front door recalled them to the bed where they lay and to each other.

‘Daddy,’ said Kitty. ‘He sometimes comes in for a few minutes in the middle of his rounds.’

‘Good, I want a word with him.’

Dr Joseph Wright, a small, pale, bespectacled man with brown hair turning grey, was some years too young to be a true pre-war but, having had both parents killed during the Pacification, he resembled one in many ways. So for his younger daughter to be openly and regularly screwed by a Russian officer, one whom moreover he disliked and despised personally, made him angry. This condition he kept to himself as far as possible; the girl seemed to have, no objection to the state of things, and the associated benefits, in the shape of the occasional bottle of cognac or few kilos of fuel, were certainly welcome enough, but it was (or could any day turn out to be) much more important to stay in the general good books of one of the Shits - a term in common use even among those many who had no very serious objection to the presence of their masters. Conversely, the meanest understanding could foresee the probable results of trying to cross a Russian officer, especially this Russian officer. And, above all, there was nothing to be done about it, a verdict which sooner or later closed every such inquiry.