Robert Harris - Archangel

Oh, mama and papa, he is so lonely! Your hearts would go out to him. He is only flesh and blood after all like us. And close up he is old Much older than he appears in his pictures. His moustache is grey, the underside stained yellow by his pipe smoke. His teeth are almost all gone. His chest rattles when he breathes. I fear for him. For all of us.

30.6 51 Three a.m. A knock at my door Valechka is outside, in her nightdress, with a pocket torch. He has been in the garden, pruning by moonlight, and he has cut himself again! He is calling for me! I dress quickly and follow her along the passage. The night is warm. We pass through the dining room and in to his private quarters. He has three rooms and he moves between them, one night in this one, one night in another Nobody is ever sure where. He sleeps beneath a blanket on a couch. Valechka leaves us. He is sitting on the couch, his hand outstretched It is a graze. It takes me half a minute to bind it with my handkerchief 'The fearless Anna Safanova...'

I sense he wants me to stay He asks me about my home and parents, my Party work, my plans for the future. I tell him of my interest in the law. He snorts: he doesn't think much of lawyers! He wants to know of life in in the winter Have I seen the lights of the Northern Aurora? (Of course!) When do the first snows come? At the end of September I tell him, and by the end of October the city is snowbound and only the trains can get through. He is hungry for details. How the Dvina freezes and wooden tracks are laid across it and there is light for only four hours a day How the temperature drops to 35 below and people go into the forests for ice-fishing...

He listens most intently 'Comrade Stalin believes the soul of Russia lies in the ice and solitude of the far north. When Comrade Stalin was in exile - this was before the Revolution, in Kureika, within the Arctic Circle - it was his happiest time. It was here Comrade Stalin learned how to hunt and fish. That swine Trotsky maintained that Comrade Stalin used only traps. A filthy lie! Comrade Stalin set traps, yes, but he also set lines in the ice holes, and such was his success in the detection of fish that the local people credited him with supernatural powers. In one day Comrade Stalin travelled Forty-five versts on skis and killed twelve brace of partridge with twenty-four shots. Could Trotsky claim as much?'

I wish I could remember all he said Perhaps this should be my destiny: to record his words for History?

By the time I leave him to return to my bed it is light.

8.7.51 The same performance as last time. Valechka at my door at 3 a.m.: he has cut himself he wants me. But when I get there, I can see no wound. He laughs at my face - his joke! - and tells me to bind his hand in any case. He strokes my cheek, then pinches it. 'You see, fearless Anna Safanova, how you make a prisoner of me?!'

He is in a different room from the last time. On the walls are pictures of children, torn from magazines. Children playing in a cherry orchard A boy on skis. A girl drinking goat’s milk from a horn. Many pictures. He notices me staring at them and this prompts him to talk frankly of his own children. One son dead One a drunkard His daughter married twice, the first time to a Jew: he never even allowed him in to the house! What has Comrade Stalin done to deserve this? Other men produce normal children. Was it bad blood or bad upbringing? Was there something wrong with the mothers? (He thinks so, to judge from their families, who have been a constant plague to him.) Or was it impossible for the children of Comrade Stalin ever to develop normaly given his high position in the State and Party? Here is the age-old conflict, older even than the struggle between the classes.

He asks if I have heard of Comrade Trofim Lysenko’s 1948 speech to the Lenin All- Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences? I say that I have. My answer pleases him.

'But Comrade Stalin wrote this speech! It was Comrade Stalin’s insight, after a lifetime of study and struggle, that acquired characteristics are inheritable. Though naturally these discoveries must be put into the mouths of others, just as it isfi~r others to turn the principle into a practical science.

'Remember Comrade Stalin’s historic words to Gorky: 'It is the task of the proletarian state to produce engineers of human souls.

Are you a good Bolshevik, Anna Safanova?'

I swear to him that I am.

Will you prove it? Will you dance for Comrade Stalin?'

There is a gramophone in the corner of the room. He goes to it. I-

AND THAT’S HOW it ends?' said O'Brian. His voice was heavy with disappointment. 'Just like that?'

'See for yourself' Kelso turned the book round and showed it to the other two. 'The next twenty pages have been removed. And here - look - you can see the way it's been done. The torn edges attached to the spine are all different lengths.'

'What's so significant about that?'

'It means they weren't torn out all at once, but one by one. Methodically.' Kelso resumed his examination. 'There are some pages left at the back, about fifty, but they've not been written on. They've been drawn on - doodled on, I should say - in red pencil. The same image again and again, d'you see?'

'What are they?' O'Brian moved in closer with the camera running. 'They look like wolves.'

'They are wolves. The heads of wolves. Stalin often drew wolves in the margins of official documents when he was thinking.'

'Jesus. So it's genuine, you think?'

'Until it's been forensically tested, I'm not prepared to say. I'm sorry Not officially.'

'Unofficially, then - not for attribution until later - what d'you think?'

'Oh, it's genuine,' said Kelso, without hesitation. 'I'd stake my life on it.

O'Brian switched the camera off.

THEY had left the lock-up by this time and were sitting in the Moscow bureau of the Satellite News System which occupied the top floor of a ten-storey office block just south of the Olympic Stadium. A glass partition separated O'Brian's room from the main production office, where a secretary sat listlessly before a computer screen. Next to her, a mute television, tuned to SNS, was showing clips of the previous night's baseball games. Through a skylight Kelso could see a big satellite dish, raised like an offertory plate to the bulging Moscow clouds.

O'Brian said, And how long is it going to take us to get this stuff tested?'

A couple of weeks, perhaps,' said Kelso. A month.'

'No way,' said O'Brian. 'No way can we wait that long.'

'Well, think about it. First of all this material technically belongs to the Russian government. Or Stalin's heirs. Or someone. Anyway, it isn't ours - Zinaida's, I mean.'

Zinaida was standing at the window, staring out through a gap she had made with her fingers in the slatted blinds. At the mention of her name she glanced briefly in Kelso's direction. She had barely said a word in the last hour - not when they were still in the garage, not even on their cautious drive across Moscow, following O'Brian.

'So it isn't safe to keep it here,' continued Kelso. 'We've got to get it out of the country That's the first priority God knows who's after it now. Just being in the same room is bloody dangerous as far as I'm concerned. The tests themselves - well, we can have those done anywhere. I know some people in Oxford who can check the ink and paper. There are document examiners in Germany, Switzerland -'

O'Brian didn't seem to be listening. He had his feet up on his desk, his long body lolling back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. 'You know what we've really got to do?' he mused. 'We've got to find the girl.'

Kelso stared at him for a moment. 'Find the girl? What are you talking about? There isn't going to be a girl. The girl's going to be dead.'

'You can't be sure of that. She'd only be - what? - sixty-something?'