Robert Harris - Archangel

'Oh but there is.' Kelso was warming up. 'This is the great myth, you see, of our age. The great western myth. The arrogance of our time, personified - if you'll excuse me for saying so - in you. That just because a place has a McDonalds and MTV and takes American Express it's exactly the same as everywhere else - it doesn't have a past any more, it's Year Zero. But it's not true.

'You think you're better than me, don't you?' 'No.'

'Smarter then?'

'Not even that. Look. You say Moscow is a scary town. It

is. Why? I'll tell you. Because there's no tradition of private property in Russia. First of all there were workers and peasants who had nothing and the nobility owned the country. Then there were workers and peasants with nothing and the Party owned the country. Now there are still workers and peasants with nothing and the country's owned, as it's always been owned, by whoever has the biggest fists. Unless you understand that, you can't begin to understand Russia. You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.' Kelso sat back in his seat. 'End of lecture.'

And for half an hour, as O'Brian pondered this, there was blessed peace.

THEY reached the big town of Yaroslavl just after nine and crossed the Volga. Kelso poured them each a cup of coffee. It slopped across his lap as they hit a rough patch of road. O'Brian drank as he drove. They ate chocolate. The headlights that had blazed towards them around the city gradually dwindled to the occasional flash.

Kelso said, 'Do you want me to take over?'

O'Brian shook his head. 'I'm fine. Let's change at midnight. You should get some sleep.'

They listened on the radio to the news at ten o'clock. The communists and the nationalists in the lower senate, the Duma, were using their majoriry to block the President's latest measures: another political crisis threatened. The Moscow stock exchange was continuing its plunge. A secret report from the Interior Ministry to the President, warning of a danger of armed rebellion, had been leaked and printed in Aurora.

Of Rapava, Mamantov or Stalin's papers there was no mention.

'Shouldn't you be in Moscow, covering all this?'

O'Brian snorted. 'What? "New Political Crisis in Russia"? Give me a break. R. J. O'Brian won't be on the hour every hour with that.

'But he will with this?'

"'Stalin's Secret Lover, Mystery Girl Revealed"? What do you think?'

O'Brian switched off the radio.

Kelso reached over to the back seat and dragged one of the sleeping bags into the front. He opened it out and wrapped it around him like a blanket, then pressed a button and his seat slowly reclined.

He closed his eyes but he couldn't sleep. Images of Stalin gradually invaded his mind. Stalin as an old man. Stalin as glimpsed by Milovan Djilas after the war, leaning forward in his limousine while he was being driven back to Blizhny, turning on a little light in the panel in front of him to see the time on a pocket watch hanging there - 'and I observed directly in front of me his already hunched back and the bony grey nape of his neck with its wrinkled skin above the stiff marshal's collar. . .' (Djilas thought Stalin was senile that night: cramming his mouth with food, losing the thread of his stories, making jokes about the Jews.) And Stalin, less than six months before he died, delivering his last, rambling speech to the Central Committee, describing how Lenin faced the crises of 1918 and repeating the same word over and over - 'he thundered away in an incredibly difficult situation, he thundered on, fearing nothing, he just thundered away...' - while the delegates sat stunned, transfixed.

And Stalin, alone in his bedroom, at night, tearing pictures of children out of magazines and plastering them around his walls. And then Stalin making Anna Safanova dance for him -It was curious, but whenever Kelso tried to picture Anna Safanova dancing, the face he always gave her was that of Zinaida Rapava.

ZINAIDA RAPAVA WAS sitting in her parked car in Moscow in the darkness with her bag on her lap and her hands in that bag, feeling the outline of her father's Makarov pistol.

She had discovered that she could still strip and load it without looking at it - like riding a bicycle, it seemed: one of those childish accomplishments you never forgot. Release the spring at the bottom of the grip, pull out the magazine, squeeze in the bullets (six, seven, eight of them, smooth and cold to the touch), push the magazine back up, click, slide, then press the safety catch down to fire. There.

Papa would have been proud of her. But then she always had been better at this game than Sergo. Guns made Sergo nervous. Which was a joke, seeing as he was the one who had to do military service.

Thinking of Sergo made her cry again, but she wouldn't let herself give in to it for long. She pulled her hands out of her bag and wiped each eye irritably - so then so - on either sleeve of her jacket, then went back to her task.

Push. Click. Slide. Press...

SHE was scared. So scared, in fact, that when she had walked away from the westerner that afternoon she had wanted to look back at him standing outside the office block - had wanted to go back to him - but if she'd done that he would have known she was afraid, and fear, she had been taught, was something you must never show. Another of her father's lessons.

So she had hurried on to her car and had driven around for a while without thinking until presently she had found herself heading in the direction of Red Square. She had parked in Bolshaya Lubyanka and had walked uphill to the little white Church of the Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir, where a service was in progress.

The place was packed. The churches were always packed now, not like in the old days. The music washed over her. She lit a candle. She wasn't sure why she did this because she had no faith; it was the sort of thing her mother used to do. And what has your god ever done for us?' - her father's sneering voice. She thought of him, and of the girl who wrote the journal, Anna Safanova. Silly bitch, she thought. Poor silly bitch. And she lit a candle for her, too, and much good might it do her, wherever she was.

She wished her memories were better but they weren't and there was nothing to be done. She could remember him drunk, mostly, his eyes like worm holes, his fists flying. Or tired from work at the engine sheds, as rank as an old dog, too weary to rise from his chair to go to bed, sitting on a sheet of Pravda to keep the oil off the cover. Or paranoid, up half the night, staring out of the window, prowling the corridors - who was that looking at him? who was that talking about him? - spreading yet more sheets from Pravda down on the floor and obsessively cleaning his Makarov. (I’ll kill them if I have to...')

But sometimes, when he wasn't drunk or exhausted or mad - in the mellow hour, between mere inebriation and oblivion - he'd talk about life in Kolyma: how you survived, traded favours and scraps of tobacco for food, wangled the easier jobs, learned to smell a stoolie - and then he'd take her on his lap and sing to her, some of the Kolyma songs, in his fine Mingrelian tenor.

That was a better memory.

At fifty he had seemed so old to her. He always had been an old man. His youth had gone when Stalin died. Maybe that was why he went on about him so much? He even had a picture of Stalin on the wall - remember that? - Stalin with his glossy moustaches, like great black slugs? Well, she could never take her friends back there, could she? Never let them see the pig state in which they lived. Two rooms, and her in the only bedroom, sharing first with Sergo and then, when he was too big and too embarrassed to look at her, with mama. And mama a wraith even before the cancer got her, then turning to gossamer and finally melting to nothing.