Kingsley Amis - Russian Hide-and-Seek

‘If there ever was a fool,’ he said, ‘it was the late Alexander Petrovsky, whom you recruited with such headlong alacrity. Only a fool of prodigious dimensions would pursue an affair with the Korotchenko woman. A vicious child and a destructive child too, that one. She has her uses, though, as you must agree.’

‘I still don’t understand that. Surely she wasn’t under orders when she threw herself at Alexander.’

‘No, no, she was following her own inclinations, as always. Some days afterwards, they led her to tell her husband about her latest adventure. No doubt he had displeased her in some way. And then again perhaps he hadn’t.’

‘But she… but he might have…

‘Your wonderment proclaims your ruinous ignorance of the world and of human character. Young Petrovsky’s evident failure even to consider the possibility that she might betray him in that way proclaims something even more crass. As he was in an unimprovable position to have known, that was exactly the sort of thing she likes doing. Well, one of the sorts of thing.’

‘He guessed that in the end. When it was too late.’

‘Quite so. Actually Korotchenko had heard about her and your friend Alexander already, so she only thought she was betraying him.’

‘Who told Korotchenko?’

‘I did. It’s important that a Deputy-Director of Security should be informed when his wife has relations with a counter-revolutionary. Yes, the after-dinner conversation at the mess.

‘That fellow with the birthmark,’ said Theodore bitterly. ‘But I looked carefully and found nothing.’

‘Having done which, you felt altogether safe from eavesdroppers, safer than if you hadn’t looked, and of course, you didn’t look further. Our man’s conduct was slightly creditable.’ Vanag made a note on his pad.

‘Did you record our outdoor conversation? Or was that impossible?’

‘We have the capability of recording any conversation anywhere, but even after all these years outdoor technique is still rather complicated and calls for a skilled operator. We’re chronically short of them and so we tend to keep them for gathering material of some importance.’

‘Weren’t you rather taking a chance? We might have been planning to steal the projectiles the very next day.’

Vanag smiled broadly. ‘You can’t ever have thought seriously about that, as indeed about anything else. If you had, you’d have realised that it was out of the question for soldiers to be able to get their hands on real projectiles whenever they felt like it. Do you think a man in my position would trust Field Security? They’re soldiers too. What your mate would have been shooting at me were dummies painted like the genuine article.’

‘But there must be real ones somewhere.’

‘Assuredly there are, and where do you imagine they’d be? The same place as the real TK gas. When real projectiles are needed for a practice, we dole them out, and we account for every one. Just like the KGB in days gone by. But you wouldn’t know about them. That’s one of the things that’s so depressing about all you people. Because you don’t know how to live in the present, you haven’t the slightest interest in the past. You and I had a very brief argument once, about what happened when we Russians came here, about the Pacification. I remember you said that organised English resistance ceased on the third day of fighting and thereafter there were isolated pockets of resistance. Perfectly true, and perfectly misleading. And you are one of the great number of misled, of those willing or more than willing to be misled.

‘Pockets of resistance. Wherever our soldiers went they ran into one of those, especially in the country, though they came across plenty in the towns too. There was a particularly capacious pocket in the village of Henshaw, not far from here, where naughty Alexander used to do some of his courting. The English slaughtered a company and a half of our boys and severely mangled the relieving force with captured weapons before they were themselves destroyed. Only a few of their troops were involved. Most of them were villagers, including women and adolescents. They refused to surrender even when the buildings they had occupied were set on fire. They went on shooting through the smoke. They weren’t hitting much by then. Our side had to hush all that up as hard as it could. It would have done terrible damage to morale. Some things couldn’t be hushed up.’

‘The English must have suffered appallingly.’

‘Yes, very appallingly indeed. It had been said earlier that they had gone soft. If they had, I’d be interested to know what they were like before. They went on after they’d lost – Henshaw was after that – after they knew they were beaten. In the name of God, why? Well, that’s one thing we can safely say we’ll never know. And it went on. There was a victory parade through the streets of Liverpool, one of a series that turned out to be called for, and a middle-aged woman took a carving-knife out of her handbag and put it through the heart of the man marching on my father’s right. She was dead in a second, but so was he. Perhaps it was something to do with their queen being killed. It was an accident, but nobody ever came across one of them who believed it. She was supposed to be a shadowy feudal relic. Those who’d said that, or were said to have said that, underwent corrective training that proved fatal in most cases.’

There was a pause. The fair-haired man looked interestedly out of the window. Theodore scratched his armpit, waited a moment and said,

‘Could I please have a drink?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Vanag, but without asperity this time. ‘Nor a cigarette. What and where do you think you are’? And isn’t it rather early for a drink? So, anyway. There had been disorders here, runaway inflation, mass unemployment, strikes, strike-breaking, rioting, then much fiercer rioting when a leftist faction seized power. It was our country’s chance to take what she had always wanted most, more than Germany, far more than the Balkans, more even than America. And she took it, after serious difficulty at first, after being on the point of having to withdraw entirely in order to regroup.’

‘What did the Americans do?’

At that, Vanag gave one of his merriest and longest laughs.

It died away finally in affectionate chuckles and little snorts of amusement. Then his demeanour changed again. He stared grimly at Theodore. After another pause he said,

‘All that was new to you. But if you’d really wanted to, you could have found it out. Found out a little about the nation you were supposed to be ready to kill and die for.’

‘You didn’t exactly make it easy for me or anyone else to find it out.’

‘How true, Markov; we didn’t exactly make it easy. In fact I’ll go further: we made and make it difficult in the extreme. But that’s all. Nobody can bury the truth so deep that it can never be found, and I ought to know. The most that can be done is to persuade people there’s no point in looking for it. People who are willing to be persuaded. The versatile Alexander also thought he was interested in the English. And in a way he really was – at least he fucked quite a few of them, which is more than you ever did. He had some acquaintance with that ancient clergyman, Glover, who conducted the pointless and profitless church ceremony in your Festival. You are an extraordinary lot. Well, Glover among others would have been quite a useful source of knowledge about the Pacification and events before and since if you’d ever wanted one. And I’m sure Alexander would have put you on to him if you’d ever told him you wanted one. But you didn’t, so you didn’t. That’s the trouble with ignorance, it defends itself to the death against knowledge. Behind it lies absence of curiosity, and behind that – absence of any reason to know. Intelligence is no help to those in your situation. A man can’t behave intelligently when he doesn’t understand anything.