The Unfortunate Englishman Read online

  The chap sitting next to him said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Was I laughing?” Masefield replied.

  “No. But you were smiling like the cat that got the cream.”

  “Oh, just glad to be here I suppose.”

  And in his mind’s eye he glimpsed the faces of his oppressors, three men condemned never to travel further than the Trent valley or earn more than fifteen pounds a week. Three men who’d live in the backstreets of Derby until the wrecking ball swung, in cold Derby houses, having cold Derby sex with their cold Derby wives.

  “First time, eh?” said chap next to him. “Well I hope you brought enough woollen underwear. Moscow in December has all the warmth of the proverbial witch’s tit.”

  §24

  The Hotel Muromets was about as shabby and as chic as the Imperial back in London. It needed a makeover, but one preconception about the USSR that Masefield was certain would not be challenged was that the whole country would be in need of a makeover.

  Their “watcher,” ostensibly a guide and interpreter, who Brown had assured him would be a KGB agent, had met them, all seven of them, at the airport and in an overheated, and rather smelly, glass-roofed ZiL minibus had ferried them to the Muromets, registered them, and as soon as they had dumped their bags had assembled them all in the lobby.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. My name is Tanya Dmitrievna Tsitnikova, I will be your guide for the next five days. Please, call me Tanya . . .”

  Masefield stopped listening. She was tiny, blonde and really rather beautiful in a Slavic sort of way—that is, broad at the cheekbones, with dark blue eyes and misshapen teeth. Nothing that could not be overlooked. He watched in a near-vacuum of half-heard murmurs as her bee-sting lips recited the predictable list of dos and don’ts, all of which he knew by heart. Yes, they were free to roam Moscow, she was a guide not a guard—Brown had been adamant about this too, that on his first trip they would dog him every step of the way, even to the point of following him into public lavatories—but leaving Moscow would require permission, although, of course special trips could be arranged, if there was anything they particularly desired to see. And as he surfaced, the last words she seemed to have on those kiss-me lips were “black market,” and he realised he’d probably daydreamed through all her warnings about money-changers and prostitutes.

  She urged them to get to know one another, passed out welcome packages in neat, shiny, white folders, said she would join them for dinner, and left.

  Masefield found himself shaking hands with half a dozen blokes and managed to grasp two names—the chap who had sat next to him on the plane, neither thinking to introduce themselves any earlier, who said he was Arthur Proffitt and represented the English Sewing Cotton ­Company—and Terence Glendinning, who “travelled in ball bearings.” Two blokes of roughly his age, both speaking rather posh and both striking him as pretentious fakers. The rest were a blur. Men in shapeless suits with shapeless faces. A jumble of grey wool, greying hair, and bad breath. Some sort of cross section of British and Continental manhood and industry, about which Masefield gave not a toss. They could stay a blur. They were simply his cover—a seven-man European trade delegation on an invited five-day mission to Moscow. If only they knew . . . if only they knew . . . if his friends could see him now. He could all but hear the zither playing—and it played for him.

  As a man who’d been on two previous trade missions to Moscow, Proffitt held forth, assuming the utterly unnecessary role of leader. Masefield tuned him out, only to find Glendinning was tuning out too.

  “You know what they say about Russian women?”

  “Eh?” said Masefield.

  “You know, old man . . . dumpy as a sack of spuds . . . all look like Khrushchev’s wife . . . that sort of thing.”

  Of course he knew. It was a cliché.

  “Weeeeell . . . I wouldn’t mind giving our Tanya a good seeing-to while I’m here. Forget the teeth, her tits are pretty damned amazing.”

  Masefield had no idea what to say. To find the immediate content of his own id so readily regurgitated was neither pleasant nor enlightening.

  “I suppose they are,” he admitted, wishing silence had been an option.

  “Race you, old man. First one to fuck her gets the other’s forfeit . . . let’s say loser picks up the bar bill on the last night.”

  Now, silence really was the only option. He found Glendinning disgusting, a coarse reflection of himself. He found himself wanting to rise above the situation, to restore some sort of moral margin between himself and this Mephistophelean alter ego. Instead he found himself mentally undressing Tanya Dmitrievna.

  §25

  In the morning he went to meet the man from the ministry—the Ministry of Foreign Trade, a department subsumed under the Foreign Ministry, an organ of the state dominated by Andrei Gromyko, a man who had survived countless purges and the death of Stalin to become one of the more recognisable faces of the USSR. Masefield would not know Foreign Trade Minister Patolichev if he tripped over him. Besides, he knew very well he would not get within half a dozen bureaucratic layers of a full minister.

  Outside the Muromets, about half the trade mission had gathered on the pavement, hands thrust deep in pockets, breath misting in air, morning dew freezing on eyelashes. Even in cold this savage Glendinning found the energy to flirt. Masefield could not hear what he was saying to her but the mixture of amusement and bafflement on Tanya Dmitrievna’s face told him she knew she was being chatted up and had little or no idea what to make of it.

  Then her pro mode kicked in. The French were going one way, the Belgians another, she would be escorting Glendinning to some factory or other in Konkovo, in the south of the city, and the ministry was sending a car for Masefield.

  “OK? Yes?”

  “Yes. OK.”

  He watched her as Glendinning played the gent, holding the car door open for her and walking round to the other door. Tanya Dmitrievna looked back at Masefield through the window, the amusement and bafflement in her expression now battling it out with apprehension.

  The ministry car never came. He gave it five minutes, then ten, and then counted himself lucky. He could easily walk to the ministry and be on time—it looked to be scarcely more than a mile on the map. He would enjoy the streets of Moscow without a guide, interpreter, or minder.

  This must have alarmed the bloke in the black mackintosh who had been hanging around in the lobby, chain-smoking and failing to feign indifference. As Masefield set off on foot, it must have dawned on his follower that he would not be spending the morning sitting in malodorous warmth on a set of broken springs in the back of a Moscow cab. Masefield found he could take a perverse delight in making the man earn his keep. He’d spent weeks studying the map of Moscow. He knew it as well as he knew the streets of Nottingham or Derby. It would be fun to lead the apparatchik around the houses, but probably not worth the effort. Instead he took the obvious route, along Teatralny Proyezd, down the Arbat to Smolenskaya Square, where the Foreign Ministry loomed up like a cinematic fantasy from the set of Things to Come, impossibly large, impossibly ugly—a monolithic, vulgar statement to a world that wasn’t looking in the first place.

  And then they kept him waiting.

  Whisked to the thirteenth floor and parked in an outer office for an hour whilst waiting on Comrade Koritsev, undersecretary to the blah blah blah. The view was amazing, out over the western suburbs, a clear midwinter’s morning. Really, he didn’t mind waiting. He’d waited half a lifetime to be sitting here, to be sitting anywhere in the USSR, anywhere that wasn’t Nottingham or Derby.

  If they could see me now.

  Comrade Deputy Undersecretary-Minister Yevgeny Vasilievich Koritsev was aptly named. He was beige. So was his suit. The darkest thing about him was his moustache, which Masefield took to be the result of endless cups of black Russian tea.

  He wasn�
�t sure why he wasn’t supposed to let on that he spoke Russian. He’d stick to the plan, but it was awkward. Koritsev greeted him effusively, welcomed him on behalf of the government, people, and Communist Party of the Soviet Union and had the interpreter not nipped in sharpish would doubtless have welcomed him on behalf of his children, parents, and dog. The hardest thing, he realised, was looking as though he didn’t understand. And it was easier to listen to Koritsev than to the interpreter, whose accent was so strong that Masefield would not have known what the man was saying had he not heard the original Russian.

  Koritsev pursed his lips at the word “indium,” and uttered a “hmm” that required no translation.

  “You’re the first person ever to come to me with that request. Do you have any idea how little indium there is in this world?”

  Masefield warmed to the philosophical ending of the remark. “This world.” Here was a man who traded in commodities and who spoke like a scientist.

  “No precise knowledge, no. No one has that. But I can tell you how much was produced last year. Less than fifty tons.”

  “And how much of that do you think we refined in Russia?”

  “Oh, I’d say about forty per cent.”

  “Not bad. It was actually eighteen tons. You know your stuff, comrade.” The interpreter stumbled over “stuff” and translated a colloquial phrase with an overprecise “you are in full knowledge of your possessions,” and Masefield was glad he wasn’t relying on him or he would have had no sense of Koritsev’s inflection and quite possibly of his meaning too.

  “How much would you like?”

  “All of it,” Masefield replied, and Koritsev roared with laughter, got up from behind his desk, slapped him on the back and rattled off a string of exclamations so quickly neither Masefield nor the interpreter could keep up. It was all rather . . . Khrushchev. He imagined that this was what meetings with Khrushchev must be like. The rush, the physicality. The hand on the back . . . the shoe on the table.

  “Leave this with me. A day or two. You will appreciate, I rarely get orders so large. I shall have to go downstairs and look in the cellar.”

  Masefield waited for the translation before laughing.

  “In the meantime you must enjoy Moscow. Is there anything I can do for you while we wait?”

  “Well, comrade minister . . . Great Britain has no indium. It would be of great interest to me to see a zinc processing plant and the extraction of indium.”

  “Hmm . . . you have anywhere in mind?”

  In for a penny.

  “Chelyabinsk?”

  Koritsev just shook his head and said “no”—no explanation, no pretence, no joke. A syllable entirely without qualification.

  “But,” he went on, “perhaps I can find you something nearer home. Andrei Semyonovich, see what we can do for Mr. Masefield.”

  Back in the outer office, Andrei Semyonovich told Masefield what he already knew and said, “I think this can be done. Here. In Moscow. I will arrange. I will leave word at your hotel.”

  Here? In Moscow? Bugger. The point was to travel.

  §26

  He found his way back into central Moscow with enough time to stare at the forbidding facade of the KGB offices in Dzerzhinsky Square—more than a bit like Buckingham Palace, he thought—and to linger in front of Lenin’s tomb as he crossed Red Square. The tomb reminded him of nothing quite so much as a World War II air raid shelter, built, as they said in Derby, like a “brick shithouse.”

  Black Mackintosh trailed behind.

  It was a time to go with the flow, to play the tourist. To be in awe of St. Basil’s Cathedral and in search of the GUM store, a block from Red Square and next to the КПСС (Communist Party) HQ, banded in a lurid shade of green with every shade pulled down against the prying eye—and once GUM was found to be in awe of that too. He had heard it described as grim. He could see that “grim” might be one possible take on it, but there was no denying the other—it was beautiful . . . the outside was . . . St. Pancras without trains . . . the inside was . . . Kew without palm trees . . . Venice without canals, a network of slender iron bridges suspended in space . . . the arcades of Piccadilly recreated on an unimaginably large scale.

  Brown had suggested buying a camera, had even suggested that MI6 would pay for it.

  In a crystal cave of consumer desirables a young man showed him a Zorki 4. A brief explanation of what was what that told Masefield nothing he didn’t already know, then the price and then the inevitable statement, “We accept only dollars or sterling.”

  Masefield looked around, at the flurry of hands and greenbacks, at the acquisitive exchange, and realised he had no wish to acquire. The camera was beautiful, better by far than anything he’d ever owned, at an affordable price—but this was buying for the sake of buying. It was no more than the Russian version of coming back from a summer trip to Spain with a straw donkey and a sombrero. He wanted something else to be his souvenir of Russia. He did not simply want to own a Zorki 4 because it was cheap. He did not want to own a Zorki 4 simply to be able to show it off back home as a bargain. He wanted something of Russia and this wasn’t it.

  He said sorry, the young man put the camera back on its shelf, and Masefield went back to the arcade to stare at the little Piranesi bridges and the vast, overarching glazed roof, to drift out into the street once more . . . just to drift.

  §27

  A couple of blocks from the Hotel Muromets he stopped by a pierogi stand at the kerb. The man in front of him in the queue handed over a few kopecks, and turned around, stuffing a dumpling into his mouth. It was Arthur Proffitt.

  “Hullo old man. How’s the People’s Republic treating you?”

  “Oh, I’ve had a pleasant enough day. Apart from feeling . . . ­sorry . . . knowing I’m being followed. He’s just over there, been with me since I left the hotel.”

  “Par for the course, old man. Of course you’re being followed. These buggers think we’re all spies.”

  “Until proven otherwise,” Masefield said.

  “No. No proof required. They just get fed up. Followed me on my first trip. Couldn’t be arsed on the second, and if they’ve set someone on to me this time I haven’t noticed. Even then, the first time around, some bloke’d be dogging me from breakfast onwards, but by half past three he’d be thoroughly bored and give up. Found I could do what I liked from dusk on. Not that I wouldn’t do what I wanted anyway. Not that I’d do anything illegal either. All a bit of farce really. No, there are two things about Moscow you won’t find in Baedeker. The KGB give up on you at sunset, and there are no public bogs anywhere, so you’d be well advised to skip that second cup of morning coffee and piss before you leave the hotel. You mark my words, the bloke watching you will vanish before four o’clock. Probably desperate for a piss himself.”

  Masefield picked up the twist of newspaper holding his pierogi and paid. Potato and cheese, a touch of soured cream—hot, greasy, and filling.

  “Sounds like a waste of time to me.”

  “Oh it is. There’s nothing to be gained spying on me. Everything there is to know about English Sewing Cotton is in our brochure.”

  “But they think you might spy on them, surely?”

  “Cloak and dagger nonsense. Load of old bollox. If our people wanted someone to spy in Russia they’d hardly send a cotton rep and a . . . what did you say you did, old man?”

  “Metals . . . rare metals.”

  “I mean, they’d send a proper spy, wouldn’t they? Someone trained. You know . . . a Richard Hannay kind of thing.”

  “Actually Richard Hannay was an amateur.”

  “Well you know what I mean. It simply wouldn’t be blokes like us. But, as I said, they don’t give us the benefit of the doubt. I ask you, do I look like a bloody spy?”

  Masefield bit into his last pierogi, glanced off to his left. The man in th
e black mackintosh was still on the other side of the street, fists sunk deep in his pockets. Hiding in plain sight. Cold, and no doubt hungry. He didn’t look like a spy either.

  It was a quarter past three. Masefield decided he’d lead his tail around for another half hour and put Proffitt’s theory to the test.

  §28

  Perhaps he should be in an art gallery, like the Tretyakov or a literary shrine like Tolstoy’s house, or watching the goose-stepping changing of the guard at Lenin’s tomb, but he wanted to know the enemy. After all, they were not his enemy, the system was the enemy, not the Russian people—and he wanted to see how they lived, something he knew he’d never be shown, and something most of the men on the trade mission wouldn’t care to see. Somewhere there was a “real” Russia not to be found in the hotels occupied by Westerners. He wanted to step past clichés of the USSR . . . adjectives stuck in the rut of “grey” or “colourless” or “identical.” If Russia came in colour and 3-D he wanted to see it for himself.

  He drifted on, away from the Muromets, out of the city centre past endless, “identical” blocks of flats, past his own knowledge of the map, north and east into he knew not what district, along pavements wet with “grey” slush, into a street of small shops. Every one had a queue, and, as he soon deduced, several queues. He should buy something, anything . . . just for the experience.

  His black shadow was hanging back, and Masefield remembered one of Brown’s lessons in losing a tail: “Go into a shop. Most unlikely he’ll follow. If there’s another way out, take it. If there isn’t, waste all the time you can and perhaps he’ll think you have found another way out.”

  He decided to buy apples. It could have been almost anything, so long as he joined the queue, conspicuous as the only man, and overheard what one Mrs. Soviet Citizen might be saying to another Mrs. Soviet Citizen, which turned out to be bunions, chilblains, and what a drunken sod her husband was.

  The queue moved so slowly it became distinctly possible that his tail had concluded the worst and moved on, and when Masefield reached the counter the apples were unappetizing, almost “colourless,” brown-spotted and wrinkly like the back of his mother’s hands. He bought two all the same. Then, clutching some sort of invoice, he joined the queue for the pay clerk. It all struck him as archaic, a snail-paced variation on going into a butcher’s in England thirty years ago—a process the English speeded up by winging the invoice across to the girl in the wire-mesh booth via a spring-loaded overhead line. The Russian method took twice as long. And when he’d handed over his kopecks, there was yet another queue to collect the apples, with which he was not to be entrusted until paid for. What did this say about the USSR? What meaning could be extruded that might shed light on a nation armed with nuclear missiles that could cross continents faster than the queue for fruit could move five yards? He had last queued like this sometime in 1946 back in Derby, on his demob leave, his mother had told him to hold her place in the queue for potatoes at the local greengrocer’s while she nipped into the chemist’s. Then it dawned on him—the war had simply never ended for these people. There had been no demob for them. Everything here was either unobtainable, regulated, or slowed down to a grind . . . and the inevitability of that was . . . well, it had to be . . . a black market. “Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today” . . . except on the black market.