Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

Isabella tried to copy her grandfather’s trick of seeming not to be looking while she studied his face. He was watching the fire. She wondered if she could write an accurate report in ten minutes, as all good agents were trained so to do. Gabriel picked up a log and began to rebuild the fallen pyramid that Nicholas had constructed earlier in the day.

Maximilian Glover was a thin and craggy old man—his sun-accustomed skin lined deep, scored, crosshatched, but papery soft when he kissed them, as he always did on leaving, on arrival. His hair, which was white-brown-gray, he wore at an almost untidy length, and it kinked and curled and everywhere stood up, so that his silhouette might look like a cockatoo’s. His lower teeth were a little crooked, like his occasional smile, but his back was as straight as a cold steel sleeper, lending him the bearing of a taller man. Close up, he could come across as either much older or much younger than he looked from a distance—a question of emphasis, since his eyebrows were wiry, white, and insane while his eyes danced a dark dance of playfulness, wit, and collusion. Until they stopped. Then his gaze, when it fell, felled everything. In these moments he gave the impression that if you engaged him in anything—argument, business, love, chess, a wager, or a race—you would lose. And always in his bearing there was some quiet but indissoluble attitude that seemed to say, Whatever you have thought and done with your life, I could have thought and done with mine, easily, and I chose not to; but you could not do or think what I have done and thought if I gave you ten more centuries of trying. More and more, as they were becoming adults, the twins felt this strength about him. They had begun to notice how other people, old and young, responded to him. They had seen him, when he chose, be the magnetic north of a room—at parties in London and more recently on their permitted yearly visits to Leningrad; and yet they were also beginning to notice (as remaining at the family table became more interesting than running off) that he could turn this force field up or down at will. As if his spirit had done some secret trade and ceded all foreign policy decisions to his mind. And this skill, though as yet only glimpsed intuitively, they found glamorous and unconsciously copied when they were out with their friends. He was also, plain and simple, their grandpa. Their only grandparent. Grandpa Max. Kindly, wise, their greatest ally, their greatest supporter; patron, correspondent, friend, and comrade.

Zhanna returned bearing a gold cigarette case and a small leather bag.

Max thanked her in Russian, said something else neither of the twins understood, and then sat forward. He opened the case. Zhanna left quietly. Isabella and then Gabriel came forward and picked out their treats. The cigarettes were thinner than the standard English ones they had started smoking, ivory-white with gold filters, as decadent as the Winter Palace itself. Both had the same thought: that they wished they could take an extra one to bring out that evening at the club.

He spoke as they used his lighter. “Well, now, you two are a ferocious pair, aren’t you?”

Isabella smiled.

Gabriel said, “You would be too, Grandpa, if you had to live in a fascist regime.” He had heard the stand-up comics use the phrase on TV and enjoyed deploying it ambiguously whenever he could, to mean both home and the nation at large.

Max laughed silently. “Masha has been telling me that you are both obsessed with politics. She’s worried that you will end up fighting each other to become prime minister.”

“Gabs has no views of his own. He just hates Margaret Thatcher.”

“So do you.”

“That’s not personal,” Isabella said. “It’s political.”

Gabriel abandoned an attempt at a smoke ring a fraction too late. “The problem is that all the parties are a joke at the moment.”

Max nodded. “Well, that is always true, I’m afraid. I shall be sure to let the prime minister know your feelings.”

Isabella felt her head go light from the cigarette. She loved it that her grandfather was who he was. And wished that she could go and live with him in Leningrad and learn Russian properly and be his secretary and stop pissing about in London with all these trivial people.

“Let me tell you both something that I have learned since I was young and cross. A little secret, which very few people know, and which will help you both become prime minister.” He held up his cigar hand to prevent them from jumping in, but perhaps also so that they could see him as he spoke. “All the conservatives that you will ever meet… Deep down, guess what? They all turn out to be secret liberals. That’s their core.” He inclined his head slightly. “And all the liberals—guess what? Deep down, they all turn out to be conservatives. Yes. It’s true. And the more liberal they want you to think they are, the more conservative you can be certain they are inside.” He smiled his crooked smile. “You might, for example, find yourself in the most anything-goes liberal-left house imaginable”—his cigar made a tight circle—"all art, all sexualities, all genders, races, and religions insistently equal, but look closely at the teacups and taste the cake. Or wait for the minute your liberal friends have children and just watch them scramble and scrape to get their little ones away from the rabble and into the very best schools they can find. Observe how slyly sensitive they are to accent and background. And give them a homosexual son or an illegitimate child and, my God, the whole family will barely be able to breathe for shame and panic.”

Isabella laughed as she blew out her smoke.

“The same is true the other way around.” The cigar went counterclockwise this time. “All those conservatives you both complain of—the family-values task force—flog the criminals, stop immigration, go to church, know your place, the worshippers of the class system, the rules and traditions… Do you know what they want to do most of all in here?” He indicated his heart. “Cut loose. Be free. Escape the prisons of their own ridiculous rhetoric. More than anything else, deep down, they would like to forget their place, forget their wretched families, spend their Sundays in silk beds with beautiful Indian women, Ethiopian princes, Arabian concubines, high on Afghani opium, with a wasteful feast awaiting their merest whim.”

“Have you ever taken opium?” This from Gabriel.

“The reason ninety percent of conservatives are conservative is not because they are conservative but because they cannot allow themselves to admit how much they want to be otherwise. They are afraid the world will end if they so much as loosen a finger’s grip on their ideology. Meanwhile all your liberal-left ringleaders… well, secretly of course, they ache for the big house, the car, those sons who become good straight citizens and of whom they can be proud—they ache for the security of money and the security of property, security and status, status and security.”

Max nodded slowly. “No. Very, very few people have their inner and their outer selves aligned in any kind of meaningful way. We are all self-deceivers. We have to be to survive. Not just in the Soviet Union but in America and Europe too. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is the defining human trait. A clever chimpanzee or dolphin might have a sense of humor, mischief, or maybe mourn his dead fellow, he might use tools, language, and even fall in love, but he will no more grasp the concept of hypocrisy than a stone will understand Schubert. So don’t judge anyone, not even Maria and Nicholas, too harshly by what they say, because what they say—in fact what almost anybody says—is most often what they need to hear themselves say. Not what they really mean. We are all forever in the business of persuading ourselves. And if you want to make people love you or fear you or admire you, then the simplest trick is to let them know that you see their most private inner hypocrisy in all its contradictory tangle and guile and you do not think less of them for it. That’s the secret, and that’s what all great leaders do. They somehow let their people know that they understand the inner as well as the outer human life and that it’s all right by them. And what power they have then, if they choose to use it… Lesson over. No.” He held up both his hands to stop them from coming at him with a million questions and arguments. “I have something I want to give you both. Then you can ask me anything you like, even about opium, Gabriel.”