Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide-and-Seek

The going became less even. A boy and a dog were moving a flock of sheep with predictable difficulty; the thunder had returned for the second time. Soon a road came up on the right. The three men and five horses, by now almost a single party again, tore along it at top speed until they reached a small church standing back from it. Here Alexander reined in cruelly hard, causing his mount to stagger, and proceeded to dismount. Lyubimov did the same, then Lomov.

‘Are we to consider ourselves back under your command, sir?’ asked Lyubimov.

‘You can consider yourselves what you please.’ The strenuous ride had done nothing to cool Alexander’s rage; he was still moving his lips about and glaring. When he went on he tried to control the way he spoke. ‘I have an errand here that will take two minutes. If you decide to come with me after that I can hardly stop you.’

‘Where are we, sir?’ asked Lomov curiously. ‘What’s in the church?’

A short man in a dark suit had been standing near the church door, as if waiting for someone, when they first rode up. He had not looked at them then. Now, whether at Lomov’s question or by chance, he turned his head. Alexander saw the face of a man of fifty, rather heavy in the jowl and baggy under the eyes, with an expression of mild curiosity, nothing more, not the slightest hint of menace. But Lomov screamed.

Alexander turned on him savagely. ‘What is the matter with you, you dolt, you imbecile? What did you see this time, you madman, Hitler’s ghost?’

‘I didn’t see it, your honour. I didn’t see anything.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Lyubimov gently. ‘We all know that. You just thought you saw something, that’s all.’

‘Yes, I made a mistake. I… made a mistake.’

‘Of course you did, but saying so once is enough.’

‘Forgive me.’

With a great effort, Lomov unclenched his hands and straightened up to his full small height. No good would come of trying to puzzle out what he had seen or could not have seen in the last hour; the images, never clear, had already started to fade, and whatever was to come, he felt sure, would call for all his attention and capability. Sighing deeply and swallowing, he took off his cap, smoothed his hair and put the cap back on. His officer was just going on foot round the corner of the church. The man in the dark suit was nowhere to be seen. For the time being the skies were quiet and had even grown a little lighter over to the west. After a careful look at his companion, Lyubimov said,

‘I could do with a beer, I don’t mind telling you. Still, I can use up some of the time making room for it, can’t I?’

He handed Lomov the reins of the three riding-horses, went into the churchyard and set about urinating; it was against regulations to do so in the open Street.

‘Lyubimov, what is this place?’

‘Search me. No, wait a bit, it’s probably his dad’s house behind this, if we’re anywhere near where I think we are. You know he’s a big noise in the government side of things round here.’

‘Of course,’ said Lomov thoughtfully. ‘I expect he’s got a-’

Afterwards he always swore he actually heard the great bare pillar of lightning come into being over and beyond the church, but varied on whether it did so with a click or a fizz. At the time he shut his eyes automatically and after no apparent interval flinched at the tremendous detonation that seemed to reach right down to him and be everywhere about him. Neighing loudly, the horses stamped and plunged and pulled him from side to side. Lyubimov, doing up his trousers, hurried over to help.

‘That was close,’ he said.

It had been closer still for Alexander. who had just passed the miniature temple when, with stupefying suddenness, the flash touched the lightning-conductor system of the house. Enormous sparks flew outwards and the air shifted and shook and tossed him to the ground. His fall, on to a patch of coarse grass, left him undamaged, but he lay there for a couple of minutes in a torpor, shocked and half-blinded, deafened too for the moment, inhaling the pungent refreshing odour of ozone. At last he got laboriously to his feet.

The lights were on in the drawing-room, but the curtains had been pulled and in any case the windows were too high off the ground for him to see inside. This business must be finished with as soon as possible; even as it was he had underestimated times and would be late at the rendezvous with Theodore and the others. If they came. As quietly as he could without loitering, he mounted the steps, went indoors and reached the little lobby. With his eyes on the engraved pane he wondered, not for the first time, how that other Alexander would have regarded the enterprise that this one was about to take in hand, and at once saw quite clearly, so clearly that he could not understand never having so much as glimpsed it before, that all his feelings in this matter were fabrications, that he and the dead Englishman were separated not only by time but also by another barrier just as impenetrable, a mental one, a moral one, and that their shared name was the product of a dreary, puny coincidence. How could he have supposed anything else?

Sergei Petrovsky sat in his high-backed Karelian armchair, looking very elegant in West of England tweed trousers, yellow cashmere sweater and light-green suède boots. He was feeling rather lowered in spirits, having that morning received from London the official redraft of his proposals for the reform of land tenure in the district. The first eight clauses, outlining the new system of labourers’ co-operatives, the structure of these, their degree of autonomy, the procedure whereby their applications for possession were to be drawn up and considered by authority – all these items followed the very wording of his original memorandum. Clause 9, however, sanctioning the transfer of the specified properties to duly qualified claimants, was missing in its entirety. In other language, the English were entitled to ask for land but not to be given it. Those proposals of his had been toned down all right. Well, he tried to tell himself, it was a start. And it was certainly not the chief of his worries.

When Alexander came briskly into the room and shut the door behind him, he jumped to his feet with a delighted smile. ‘Alexander, my dear…’ Then his whole bearing changed and he said in the grimmest tone, ‘So it’s today, not Sunday, eh?’

‘Not Sunday?’

‘Don’t trifle with me, Alexander. I know. I haven’t really had time to take it in yet, but I know. How much I know doesn’t matter at this stage.’

‘You’ve got it wrong as usual, father. How much you know might matter a great deal to me, though admittedly I shan’t have time to test your knowledge.’

‘Well, I know enough, that’s the point. Not everything, of course. But THEY do. Need I say whom I’m referring to? They know everything. Everything and everybody.’

‘Not true. I proved the contrary less than an hour ago. A somewhat major particular has escaped them.’

‘Believe me,’ said Petrovsky earnestly, ‘they know every name, every move, every item on the time-table, every-’

‘Wrong again. I’ve changed the time-table. And why should I believe you, of all people? I never have in the past, and I can’t think how many mistakes it’s saved me from making. And you’re begging for your life now, so naturally you’d lie. Who wouldn’t?’

‘I’ll never beg, from you or anybody else,’ said Petrovsky firmly. ‘I just want you to know your cause is lost.’

‘Why? Why do you want me to realise that? Because it might save your life. And what if my cause is lost? I’ve never thought it was anything else, right from the beginning. With any luck, I’ll be able to achieve my object, do what I’ve always wanted to do as long as I can remember, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted. And that’s merely to inflict some damage, to smash something. To register a protest. Oh, the world will never change, but in a short time from now it’ll have evidence that at least one of its inhabitants hates it, hates it for its complacency, its ignorance, its lack of love, its selfishness, its sentimentality, its lack of any guiding principle, its callousness, its superficiality, its philistinism, its illiteracy…’