The Red House

On the screen in the bar corner the young man indicated facially that orgasm was near while the girl sighed with what could have been ecstasy or frustration.

The personality of Wallace J. Walden was split down the middle on the subject of his capital city. He revelled in its dignified masonry, smooth lawns, stern statues, its libraries and museums and broad avenues, the stately homes of President and Government, the Washington Monument poised like a stone rocket set for launching. He loved to see tourists patrolling beneath Japanese cherry trees and expressing admiration at such a graceful seat of power. Sometimes he interrupted—‘I couldn’t help overhearing’—and put them straight on historic facts: Washington offered 500 dollars for a design for The Capitol and Dr William Thornton from Tortola in the West Indies won (‘Italian Renaissance, you understand’), the city was originally conceived by Pierre Charles l’Enfant, a protégé of Lafayette, as ‘a capital magnificent enough to grace a great nation’—‘And did you know that Washington who chose the site here in Maryland and Virginia was a surveyor himself? Few people seem to know that …’ Then he gave them the Visitors Information Service number (347–4554) before moving on to survey the Reflecting Pool, pillared palaces of bureaucracy, the spruce, beech and magnolia, with an awe and pride that had survived twenty-five years acquaintanceship.

The split occurred because Wallace J. Walden detested Washington’s principal industry—politics. Or, more particularly, he disliked intriguing politicians. Which was ironic because Walden’s own job was intrigue.

He admired ambition but abhorred its crude application; if there was one person he disliked more than a senator peddling a cause with votes in mind, rather than humanity, it was a senator’s wife pursuing the same objective over tea or Martinis. Jesus, he thought this glacial morning as he walked beside the whispering ice on the Tidal Basin, God save us from the women of Washington. (He was both a blasphemous and God-fearing man.) But, like it or not, Washington was a women’s city, every secretary trying to do a Jackie Kennedy. Only last night he had read in the Evening Star that the president of the Democratic Congressional Wives’ Forum was advising freshmen lawmakers to employ professional comedians to spike their speeches with gags. If they had their way, Walden ruminated without humour, Bob Hope would become president. Or Bill Cosby.

The wind blew eddies of snow across the ice separating Walden from Thomas Jefferson standing on pink Tennessee marble behind the white portico of his dome. ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ So had Walden. He regretted that the means to his end involved intrigue, subterfuge and murder. But he had no doubts that the means justified the end.

He gulped down the iced air hungrily, felt the cold polish his cheeks. A lonely figure with heavy pipe gurgling, welted shoes marching firmly on the crusty ground, hat never too firm on the springs of his greying cropped hair.

Here every morning, after leaving his wife and enigmatic teenage children in Bethesda, Walden assembled his day. Today he was thankful for the ache in the air because, to an extent, it numbed his anger at the stupidity that had once again spoiled an inspired manoeuvre.

Tardovsky had been a prospective defector. One of the intellectuals who had smelled liberty, nibbled at abundant living, appreciated the ripe fruits of democracy. A patriot, sick of doctrinaire socialism, hesitating on the portals of freedom. Now he was lost for ever.

Walden had decided that Tardovsky was not the man to be courted with gifts, sleek-limbed girls on Delaware beaches, visits to perfect American homes with gentle and obvious persuasion over blueberry pie. So his honest, devious mind had considered other ploys. A doubter from the Soviet Embassy meeting a doubter from the State Department. Together they would renounce the duplicity of both great powers and seek refuge in some snowbound haven in Canada—where all the American trash found bolt-holes. But even if Tardovsky had ended up in Toronto or Montreal the defection would have occurred in the capital of the United States. A highly prestigious landmark on the road to The Final Solution: universal understanding of the Communist (and atheist) myth.

The F.B.I. had been pursuing the scheme energetically. A phoney State Department traitor had been established. Then apparently the C.I.A. had got wind of the stool-pigeon’s double-dealing and, never for one second allowing for the possibility of double, double-dealing, had arranged their own surveillance without confiding their plans.

Result: a fist fight in a men’s room in a dirty movie bar.

Thus, through the offices of bumbling incompetents, did tyranny survive. Thank God the K.G.B. was also served by incompetents who did everything by the book. If only I had the Mafia on my side …

Walden left the gaze of Jefferson, entered the spectrum of Lincoln and watched the children skating on the Reflecting Pool: it was their future he was fighting for. A jet rose heavily from the National Airport, keeping ominously low to restrict its noise, labouring over Lincoln’s Colorado marble shrine of freedom, justice, immortality, fraternity and charity. The qualities he had to preserve.

The grumbling line of traffic on Constitution Avenue opened at a red light and Walden crossed, heading for the State Department where he co-ordinated the various intelligence organizations behind a vague political title. That bum Costello! The heating in the lobby of this throbbing modern building, the laboratory of American influence, escalated his anger—a menacing, inexorable quantity not unlike the lurking hatreds of the intriguing Church dignitaries of history.

Walden summoned to his office that morning the heads of Security and Consular Affairs, Intelligence and Research, and Politico-Military Affairs. Also the deputy heads of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Walden, handing around cigars, ‘a fiasco was perpetrated in our city last night. It is probably not necessary for me to say that, to an extent, we are all responsible.’

The ensuing silence did not imply unqualified agreement.

‘It is our joint responsibility, Goddammit!’ He picked up his pipe. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’m disgusted at the way this operation has been handled.’

Jack Godwin from the C.I.A., a shifty egghead in Walden’s opinion, with an irritating habit of detaching morsels of tobacco from the tip of his tongue like a conjurer, ventured an opinion that, as the operation had been Walden’s brainchild, the failure was his responsibility. ‘Just like you would have accepted the plaudits if it’d been a success.’

Walden turned on him. ‘If you had kept me informed of your suspicions this foul-up would never have happened. Surely to Christ the C.I.A. is aware by now that its primary function is overseas intelligence?’

‘Sure we realize that,’ Godwin said. ‘But with practically every foreign country represented in Washington our job begins at home.’

‘You could co-ordinate with the Federal men. You could perhaps trust them to pass on to you any information they think you need.’

Godwin shrugged. ‘How do they know what we need?’

Arnold Hardin from the F.B.I. said, ‘It’s not outside our capabilities.’ A neat, late-middle-aged man, sarcastic and ingenious, as tidy as Godwin was unkempt.

The other three participants from the State Department kept their counsel. A secretary bearing coffee came into the aseptically chic office with its multiple telephones, maps of Moscow indicating the limits within which Americans could move, its photographs of the President, Vice-President and Secretary of State, its small battery of reference books which included The Bible.

The five of them stirred and sipped and waited.

Finally Gale Blair from Security and Consular Affairs said, ‘You shouldn’t take it so hard, Mr Walden. Think of all the successes.’ She was a smart, kindly woman.

They all thought hard.

Crawford from Politico-Military said, ‘The F.B.I. didn’t do too badly when they caught the Czechs trying to bug the office of Eastern European Affairs.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hardin, crossing elegant legs, flicking dust from a polished toecap. ‘But don’t forget to thank Frank Mrkua, the passport courier who made it possible by co-operating with us.’

‘And we should also be thankful to the F.B.I.,’ said Godwin, spilling coffee on his lived-in jacket, ‘for tapping the German Embassy and finding evidence of the Nazi-Soviet pact. In 1939,’ he added, timing it nicely.

Crawford, a diligent and enthusiastic man, said, ‘The F.B.I. also nailed Wennerstrom. They’ve got a whole bevy of defectors in the past couple of years. And what about this guy they caught making a drop under the railway bridge in Queens—he’s helped bust the Soviet network wide open. And the Soviets still think he’s working for them,’ Crawford supplied in case anyone present didn’t know.

‘Maybe he is,’ Godwin grunted.

Hardin sharpened his voice. ‘I sometimes wonder when they come to write the definitive history of the C.I.A. whether they’ll record the occasion when bugs were found inside the eagle the Soviets presented to the American Embassy in Moscow.’

Intelligence and Research spoke for the first time. ‘At least they were found.’ William Bruno, recognized as a shrewd nut; a reputation enhanced by his deep and golden silences. What went on in his Machiavellian mind during those contemplative periods? Bruno, thirty-fiveish with ambassadorial ambitions, was too shrewd a nut to tell anyone.

‘Jesus Christ …’ Godwin began.

Walden cut him short, ‘Let’s get back to the Goddam point before we start on Penkovsky or the U2.’ He stuck his pipe in his mouth. ‘We have to find a substitute for Tardovsky. He’s so scared now he won’t ask an American the way to the john. Any ideas?’ He turned to Hardin. ‘How are the infiltration stakes on 16th?’

Hardin made neat replies. ‘Pretty much the same as usual. A few bugs installed, most of them discovered. It’s tricky when all the manual work is done by Russians and even the cleaning’s done by the wives. But as you know or should know—‘he looked at Godwin—‘most of our approaches are made these days through other embassies. They work through the Cubans or Czechs, we use the Canadians and the British.’

Walden said, ‘But we could do with a good defector with all the inside dope. A name to make a splash like Dotsenko. Another Krotkov. And we need him in the United States, right here in Washington. We need something good and powerful to counter some of the lousy publicity our country has been getting lately. Don’t forget,’ he stared at them individually, ‘that it’s a war we’re fighting here. A war in which nearly the whole world’s involved—114 ambassadors, 2,500 diplomats. It’s a war more important even than World War II because the enemy is more powerful. It’s a war democracy has to win.’ His fingers reached out and touched The Bible.

Gale Blair said she understood perfectly and she was sure she spoke for everyone.

Walden swept on, massaging the greying stubble of his hair, pouring himself a cardboard cup of ice water. ‘The Communists have determined on an all-out bid to penetrate our intelligence agencies, our departments of State and Defence, our technological organizations, Congress itself—and I’m quoting from the forth-coming F.B.I. report Subversion from Abroad. It’s essential that we find a way of penetrating their headquarters in Washington—the Goddam embassy itself. It’s my job to co-ordinate this operation. So please,’ he said holding up his hands, ‘no more internecine feuding. For Christ’s sake let’s not have any more foul-ups like last night. That wasn’t just any old foul-up, gentlemen, that was a military defeat.’ He tossed back the water as if it were neat vodka. ‘Now, any ideas?’ He picked up a folder on his desk. ‘What about this new man, for instance. What’s his name?’ He opened the folder. ‘Vladimir Zhukov. What do we know about him?’

Hardin extinguished his cigar with a quick stab. ‘I guess that’s your department, Godwin. How much did your guys in Moscow, get on him?’

Godwin pulled a folder identical to the one on Walden’s desk from a bulging briefcase that looked as if it might contain sandwiches. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said in his loose voice, ‘Comrade Zhukov is a possibility. No more than that. A faint, faint possibility.’

‘If he’s any kind of a possibility,’ Walden said, ‘then it’s up to us to make him into a probability.’

‘It’s very vague,’ Godwin mumbled.

Hardin said, ‘Don’t play games. If you’ve got something tell us what it is.’

‘It’s just that he writes poetry,’ Godwin said.

Godwin and Hardin stopped to talk in the hallway a few yards from Walden’s office, beside a sign bearing the words ‘Fall-out shelter in this corridor.’

‘Jesus,’ Godwin said. ‘What a pompous bastard he is.’

Hardin nodded impatiently. ‘Maybe. A ruthless one, too. But he comes up with some good ideas. Like the little scheme we goofed on last night.’

‘We?’

‘Oh, come on, Godwin. Forget your worldwide network just this once. You’re here in Washington—the capital of the little old United States. Sure, we goofed. And you know it. And Walden’s right—we’ve got to come up with something. So let’s you and I go and have coffee and work on it together.’

Godwin regarded him with massive, rumpled suspicion. ‘Okay, let’s go,’ He was still holding his thin dossier on Vladimir Zhukov.

Hardin opened his expensive black and silver attaché case. ‘By the way, I’ve got one of those, too.’ He took out another folder marked Vladimir Zhukov.

‘I know,’ Godwin said, ‘we circulated it to you.’

4

IN a students’ livingroom in Alma-Ata near the Kazakh State University a girl of eighteen with braided hair—now loosened—and wide eyes, just a little Mongolian, surrendered her virginity with enthusiasm.

She anticipated the textbook possibility of pain and absence of sensual feeling—‘the pleasure will come later, my dear’. But it was there the first time. Insistent pressure from his hard muscle, then oh! like a finger through parchment. And as he filled her the pleasure was instant, mounting, so that she clawed and bit and cried out, ‘I love you, Georgi. Oh, I love you.’

Not that Natasha Zhukova did love Georgi Makarov. But, she decided, I am certainly going to enjoy sex. With a few selected and privileged men who were clean and strong, handsome and intelligent; particularly intelligent. Like Georgi with his muscled belly, arrogant features—a little petulant sometimes—and his defiantly shaggy hair. A few such selected affairs before marriage and children and fidelity. I hope I’m not pregnant, she thought in alarm as his fluid escaped; but still, abortion was a mere formality.

‘I’m sorry, Natasha Zhukova,’ Georgi said, lying back and lighting a cigarette and not looking sorry at all.

‘Don’t be so bourgeois,’ she said irritably. Beneath the coarse blanket she explored the expended muscle, limp and sad. Such was the transience of masculinity: she would have liked to try it again.

Her thoughts wandered from the satisfied body beside her and wondered what sex would be like with the man she loved. If mere physical attraction could produce such earthy pleasure what delight lay ahead when love partnered consummation?

Another alarming thought: what if the man she loved and wished to marry despised her because she wasn’t a virgin? Wasn’t it Lenin himself who had said, ‘Does a normal man under normal circumstances, drink from a glass from which others have drunk?’ But, Natasha reassured herself, the alarm was academic: she would never love a man so narrow-minded. And it was certainly too late—by about five minutes—to worry.

The trouble with Soviet morals was that they were so confused. The Party denounced promiscuity but made abortion easier than a visit to the dentist, and divorce not much harder. And only fifty or so years ago, before the Glorious Revolution, a red cloth used to be flown over a bride’s house if she turned out to be a virgin, a white cloth if she didn’t. And when she was eight, only ten years ago, Natasha had read in Komsomolka about a girl, suspected of adultery with a married man, who had been solemnly advised to visit a clinic and get a certificate of virginity to display to her accusers.

Nowadays the Party was more concerned with general liberalism, with suppressing free expression. Natasha agreed with most Kremlin edicts. Its foreign policy (vaguely), its calls for collective effort to farm and weld, and research, its severity with drunks and those who were not sufficiently energetic in building socialism. Although she became quickly bored with the dreariness of their pronouncements.

What Natasha Zhukova could not countenance was the Kremlin’s treatment of intellectuals. Georgi Makarov was an intellectual. And a rebel, too. Every girl was attracted by a rebel. She slid her fingers through his thick brown hair, cut and combed with a suspicion of decadence.

‘You’re a strange girl, Natasha Zhukova,’ Georgi said. ‘The others have always cried.’

She knew he expected her to whine, ‘Others? Have there been others?’ Instead she said, ‘What’s there to cry about? It happens to most girls at some time or another.’ She also knew that he resented such practical reactions: they were the property of men.

‘Have you no romance in your soul?’

‘Of course—I am Russian. I have the soul of the taiga. And I am almost a Kazakh so I have the soul of the mountains. Or’—she turned on her side and grinned at him—‘a ripe Oporto apple waiting to be plucked.’

He shifted petulantly on the bed and lit another cigarette; his fingers were tobacco stained like those of all true revolutionaries. Except that his revolution was confined to a few secret essays, a signature on a petition seeking the release of Daniel and Sinyavsky, a few progressive jazz records. Outwardly it was all virile protest: inwardly bewilderment at the conflicting calls of patriotism and enlightenment.

Georgi said, ‘You sound like one of those American women with their demands for equality and free love. By love they mean sex. Conveyor belt sex. A woman should love from the heart.’

‘And not a man?’

The rebel shrugged.

‘It seems to me,’ Natasha suggested, ‘that the Americans and British are a long way behind us in many ways. We had the revolution of the sexes after the Great Revolution. “Down with bourgeois morality.” Wasn’t that the cry? Didn’t Alexandra Kollontaya preach that we women should free ourselves from the enslavement of love to one man? Don’t the older women still talk rapturously of those days when virginity was held up to mockery?’

‘Attitudes have changed again,’ Georgi told her. ‘Extremes always follow revolution. We have come to our senses again. Only the West pursues self-indulgence. Like the Romans—and the Romanovs—the people of the West are pursuing their own self-destruction.’ He sat up self-importantly.

Natasha stood up and walked to the window. Naked, enjoying his gaze. She looked across her father’s city, blurred with gentle snow that belied the dagger of winter. The City of Apples, karagachs, Lombardy poplars and birch trees, of wooden cathedrals with gold domes, of apartment blocks as standard as dogma, of ditches that sang with melting snow in the spring. And, of course, V. I. Lenin in the central square: a reminder, stern but gentle, of the dangers of too much frivolous appreciation.

And beyond Alma-Ata … the cuff of crumpled mountains, burnished wheat in the virgin lands, the gold of Ust-Kamenogorsk, the grapes of Chimkent, the sounds of stars above the launching pad at Baikonur. All helping to confuse allegiances, to the Republic of Kazakhstan (‘We occupy one-eighth of the Soviet Union and we are still regarded as peasants’), to Russia, to the Party, to young private doubt.

‘Georgi,’ she said, turning her back on him, proud of her smooth arching back, ‘why do we only read criticism about the West? Drugs, racism, exploitation.’ Pravda’s dictionary opened up in her mind. ‘There must be a lot of benefits from life in America and Britain.’ She knew she was being naïve.

‘Because impressionable young language students like you might get ideas.’

‘And you—don’t you get ideas? About music, about art, about self-expression? Isn’t that what your protest is all about? That writers here can’t write the truth as they can in the West?’

‘We do what we do for ourselves and for our country—even if our country doesn’t appreciate it. We don’t imitate what they do in the West.’

‘Why are copies of that magazine you read smuggled out to the West then?’

‘So that they don’t believe all they read about Russia.’ He wrapped a sheet around his waist, more shy after love than this formidable girl at the window, and stood beside her.

‘That’s what’s so sad,’ she said. She felt the warmth of his body behind her, smelled his sweat. ‘We don’t know the truth about America and I’m sure few Americans know the truth about us.’

About our gaiety most of all. Sad that the Americans never heard guitars strumming in the parks, smelled stews cooking in communal apartment blocks, ate cheese and sausage sandwiches or drank kvas at student parties, sang and cried (drunk even on mineral water), camped on river beaches, kissed on steamers. To Americans, Natasha suspected, Russia was a prison camp. And the smuggled literature of Georgi and his dangerous friends only encouraged that belief: it was ironic that all this free thought only made the picture of Russia blacker.

‘The West must know the truth,’ Georgi, who was studying political science, had explained.

‘But they already know everything bad about Russia.’

‘Only from their own propagandists.’

‘And what about our propagandists?’

‘Their work is so crude that no one in the West bothers to print it.’

‘So no one in America ever reads anything good about the country?’

‘I suppose not. And no one here ever reads anything good about America because their own propaganda is just as crude and no one bothers to reprint it here.’

‘It’s very bewildering,’ Natasha pronounced. ‘No one seems to make the effort to tell the truth. Either about themselves or the …’ she had hesitated then.

‘Or the enemy?’

‘I was searching for a more suitable word. But what chance have any of us if no one tries to explain?’

He had kissed her fondly, patronizingly. ‘I am glad you’re studying languages and not philosophy or logic or politics.’ Stick to your English and your sweet singing, his tone indicated.

But that was before they’d made love. Now the arrogance had receded, a dog’s bark lost in a blizzard. Paradoxically her loss had given her strength, and the spirit of Alexandra Kollontaya stirred within her. She giggled and led her confused lover back to the bed. The snow had stopped and the late sun cast dying light on the City of Apples. A snowplough prowled, a branch of silver birch, ice-sheathed and glittering with diamanté, scratched the window.

‘How much longer do we have?’ Natasha asked.

‘About half an hour. Yuri and Boris are very tactful.’

‘Since when?’ asked Natasha, thinking of Georgi’s two boisterous roommates.

‘They understand.’

‘You mean you made a pact with them to stay away while you deflowered a poor virgin?’

Georgi denied it so indignantly that Natasha knew he was lying. She was pleased with this new insight into the behaviour of men. She told him not to be so dramatic: someone had to deflower her.

‘Is that all it meant to you?’

Instinctively she knew that it was the woman who usually said that. ‘You were a wonderful lover,’ she said, taking up the script.

‘How would you know about that?’

‘Certainly I can’t make any comparisons. But you were wonderful.’ She combed his hair with her finger so that it fell in a thick fringe across his forehead. How many more scripts? She was not even sure what sort of man she would love. Big and strong and brainy was all very well, but she knew that such statutory requirements were discarded when love (not infatuation—she was prepared for that treacherous experience) finally surfaced.