‘You’re fond of Walli, you care for him, you want him to be okay. But you rarely have sex with him and, what’s even more telling, you don’t mind that. Which tells me you don’t love him.’
Once again she did not confirm or deny what he said.
Dave said: ‘I think you love me.’
She looked into her empty coffee cup, as if she might see answers there in the dregs.
‘Shall we get married?’ Dave said. ‘Is that why you’re hesitating – you want me to propose? Then I will. Marry me, Beep. I love you. I loved you when we were thirteen years old and I don’t think I ever stopped.’
‘What, not even when you were in bed with Mandy Love?’
He smiled ruefully. ‘I might have forgotten about you just for a few moments now and again.’
She grinned. ‘Now I believe you.’
‘What about children? Would you like to have kids? I would.’
She said nothing.
Dave said: ‘I’m pouring my heart out here, and I’m getting nothing back. What’s going on in your head?’
She looked up, and he saw that she was crying. She said: ‘If I leave Walli, he’ll die.’
‘I don’t believe he will,’ Dave said.
Beep held up a hand to silence him. ‘You asked me what’s going on in my head. If you really want to know, don’t contradict what I say.’
Dave shut up.
‘I’ve done a lot of selfish, bad things in my life. Some you know about, but there are more.’
Dave could believe that. But he wanted to tell her that she had also brought joy and laugher into many people’s lives, including his own. However, she had asked him just to listen, so he did.
‘I hold Walli’s life in my hands.’
Dave bit back a retort, but Beep said what had been on the tip of his tongue. ‘Okay, it’s not my fault he’s a junkie, I’m not his mother, I don’t have to save him.’
Dave thought Walli might be tougher than Beep reckoned. On the other hand, Jimi Hendrix had died, Janis Joplin had died, Jim Morrison had died . . .
‘I want to change,’ Beep said. ‘More, I want to make up for my mistakes. It’s time for me to do something that isn’t just what grabs me at the moment. It’s time for me to do something good. So I’m going to stay with Walli.’
‘Is that your last word?’
‘Yes.’
‘Goodbye, then,’ said Dave, and he hurried out of the room so that she would not see him cry.
48
‘The Kremlin is in a panic about Nixon’s visit to China,’ said Dimka to Tania.
They were in Dimka’s apartment. His three-year-old daughter, Katya, was on Tania’s knee, and they were looking through a book with pictures of farm animals.
Dimka and Natalya had moved back into Government House. The Peshkov-Dvorkin clan now occupied three apartments in the same building. Grandfather Grigori was still in his original place, living now with his daughter, Anya, and granddaughter, Tania. Dimka’s ex-wife, Nina, lived there with Grisha, eight years old and a little schoolboy. And now Dimka and Natalya and little Katya had moved in. Tania adored her nephew and niece and was always happy to babysit. Government House was almost like a peasant village, Tania sometimes thought, with the extended family minding the children.
People often asked Tania whether she wanted children of her own. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ she always answered. She was still only thirty-two. But she did not feel she was free to marry. Vasili was not her lover, but she had dedicated her life to the undercover work they did together, first in publishing Dissidence, then in smuggling Vasili’s books to the West. Occasionally, she was courted by one of the diminishing number of eligible bachelors her age, and sometimes she would go on a few dates and even go to bed with one of them. But she could not let them into her clandestine life.
And Vasili’s life was now more important than her own. With the publication of A Free Man he had become one of the world’s leading writers. He interpreted the Soviet Union to the rest of the planet. After his third book, The Age of Stagnation, there was talk of a Nobel Prize, except that apparently they could not award it to a pseudonym. Tania was the conduit by which his work reached the West, and it would be impossible to keep such a big, terrible secret from a husband.
The Communists hated ‘Ivan Kuznetsov’. The whole world knew that he could not reveal his real name for fear that his work would be suppressed, and this made the Kremlin leaders look like the philistines they were. Every time his work was mentioned in the Western media, people pointed out that it had never been published in Russian, the language in which it had been written, because of Soviet censorship. It drove the Kremlin mad.
‘Nixon’s trip was a big success,’ Tania said to Dimka. ‘In our office we get news feeds from the West. People can’t stop congratulating Nixon on his vision. This is a giant leap forward for the stability of the world, they say. Also, his poll ratings have jumped – and this is election year in the United States.’
The idea that the capitalist-imperialists might link with the maverick Chinese Communists to gang up on the USSR was a terrifying prospect to the Soviet leadership. They immediately invited Nixon to Moscow in an attempt to redress the balance.
‘Now they’re desperate to make sure Nixon’s visit here is also a success,’ Dimka said. ‘They’ll do anything to keep the US from siding with China.’
Tania was struck by a thought. ‘Anything?’
‘I exaggerate. But what did you have in mind?’
Tania felt her heart beat faster. ‘Would they release dissidents?’
‘Ah.’ Dimka knew, but would not say, that Tania was thinking of Vasili. Dimka was one of a very few people who knew of Tania’s connection to a dissident. He was too cautious to mention it casually. ‘The KGB is proposing the opposite – a clampdown. They want to jail everyone who might possibly wave a protest placard at the American President’s passing limousine.’
‘That’s stupid,’ said Tania. ‘If we suddenly put hundreds of people in jail, the Americans will find out – they have spies, too – and they won’t like it.’
Dimka nodded. ‘Nixon doesn’t want his critics saying that he came here and ignored the whole issue of human rights – not in an election year.’
‘Exactly.’
Dimka looked thoughtful. ‘We must make the most of this opportunity. I have a meeting tomorrow with some people from the US Embassy. I wonder if I can use that . . .’
*
Dimka had changed. The invasion of Czechoslovakia had done it. Until that moment he had clung stubbornly to the belief that Communism could be reformed. But he had seen, in 1968, that as soon as a few people began to make progress in changing the nature of Communist government, their efforts would be crushed by those who had a stake in keeping things just the same. Men such as Brezhnev and Andropov enjoyed power, status and privilege: why would they risk all that? Dimka now agreed with his sister: Communism’s biggest problem was that the all-embracing authority of the Party always stifled change. The Soviet system was helplessly frozen in a terrified conservatism, just as the regime of the tsars had been sixty years earlier, when his grandfather had been a foreman at the Putilov Machine Works in St Petersburg.
How ironic that was, Dimka reflected, when the first philosopher to explain the phenomenon of social change had been Karl Marx.
Next day Dimka chaired another in a long series of discussions about Nixon’s visit to Moscow. Natalya was there, but unfortunately so was Yevgeny Filipov. The American team was led by Ed Markham, a middle-aged career diplomat. Everyone spoke through interpreters.
Nixon and Brezhnev would sign two arms limitation treaties and an environmental protection agreement. ‘The environment’ was not an issue in Soviet politics, but apparently Nixon felt strongly about it, and had promoted pioneering legislation in the States. Those three documents would be sufficient to guarantee that the visit would be hailed as an historic triumph, and go a long way towards guarding against the dangers of a Chinese-American alliance. Mrs Nixon would visit schools and hospitals. Nixon was insisting on having a meeting with a dissident poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom he had met previously in Washington.
At today’s meeting the Soviets and the Americans discussed security and protocol, as always. In the middle of the meeting Natalya said the words she had previously agreed with Dimka. Speaking in a casual tone to the Americans, she said: ‘We have been carefully considering your demand that we release a large number of so-called political prisoners, as a token gesture towards what you call human rights.’
Ed Markham threw a startled look at Dimka, who was chair of the meeting. Markham knew nothing of this. That was because the Americans had made no such demand. Dimka made a quick, surreptitious brushing-away gesture, indicating that Markham should keep quiet. A skilled and experienced negotiator, the American said nothing.
Filipov was equally surprised. ‘I have no knowledge of any such—’
Dimka raised his voice. ‘Please, Yevgeny Davidovitch, do not interrupt Comrade Smotrov! I insist that one person speaks at a time.’
Filipov looked furious, but his Communist Party training forced him to follow the rules.
Natalya went on: ‘We have no political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and we cannot see the logic of releasing criminals on to the streets to coincide with the visit of a foreign head of state.’
‘Quite,’ said Dimka.
Markham was clearly mystified. Why raise a fictitious demand only to refuse it? But he waited in silence to see where Natalya was going. Meanwhile Filipov drummed his fingers on his writing-pad in frustration.
Natalya said: ‘However, a small number of persons are denied internal travel visas because of connections with antisocial groups and troublemakers.’
That was precisely the situation of Tania’s friend Vasili. Dimka had tried once before to get him released, but had failed. Perhaps he would have more luck this time.
Dimka watched Markham intently. Would he realize what was going on and play his part? Dimka needed the Americans to pretend that they had made demands about releasing dissidents. He could then go back to the Kremlin and say that the US was insisting on this as a precondition of Nixon’s visit. At that point any objections from the KGB or any other group would fall away, for everyone in the Kremlin was desperate to get Nixon here and woo him way from the hated Chinese.
Natalya went on: ‘As these people have not actually been sentenced by the courts, there is no legal bar to action by the government, so we offer to ease the restraints, permitting them to travel, as a gesture of goodwill.’
Dimka said to the Americans: ‘Would that action on our part satisfy your President?’
Markham’s face had cleared, and he had now understood the game Natalya and Dimka were playing. He was happy to be used this way, and he said: ‘Yes, I think that might be sufficient.’
‘That’s agreed, then,’ said Dimka, and sat back in his chair with a profound sense of accomplishment.
*
President Nixon came to Moscow in May, when the snow had thawed and the sun shone.
Tania had been hoping to see a large-scale release of political prisoners to coincide with the visit, but she had been disappointed. This was the best chance in years to get Vasili out of his hovel in Siberia and back to Moscow. Tania knew that her brother had tried, but it seemed he had failed. It made her want to weep.
Her boss, Daniil Antonov, said: ‘Follow the President’s wife around today, please, Tania.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I have to do stories about women all the time.’
Throughout her career Tania had fought against being given ‘feminine’ assignments. Sometimes she won, sometimes she lost.
Today she lost.
Daniil was a good guy, but he was not a pushover. ‘I’m not asking you to cover women all the time, and I never have, so don’t talk shit. I’m asking you to cover Pat Nixon today. Now just do as you’re told.’
Daniil was actually a great boss. Tania gave in.
Today Pat Nixon was taken to Moscow State University, a thirty-two-storey yellow stone building with thousands of rooms. It seemed mostly empty.
Mrs Nixon said: ‘Where are all the students?’
The rector of the university, speaking through interpreters, said: ‘It’s exam time, they’re all revising.’
‘I’m not getting to meet the Russian people,’ Mrs Nixon complained.
Tania wanted to say You bet you’re not meeting the people – they might tell you the truth.
Mrs Nixon looked conservative even by Moscow standards. Her hair was piled high and sprayed rigid, like a Viking helmet and almost as hard. She wore clothes that were too young-looking for her and at the same time out of fashion. She had a fixed smile that rarely faltered, even when the press corps following her became unruly.
She was taken into a study room where three students sat at tables. They seemed surprised to see her and clearly did not know who she was. It was evident they did not want to meet her.
Poor Mrs Nixon probably had no idea that any contact with Westerners was dangerous for ordinary Soviet citizens. They were liable to be arrested afterwards and interrogated about what was said and whether the meeting was prearranged. Only the most foolhardy Muscovites wanted to exchange words with foreign visitors.
Tania composed her article in her head while she followed the visitor around. Mrs Nixon was clearly impressed by the new modern Moscow State University. The USA does not have a university building of comparable size.
The real story was in the Kremlin, which was why Tania had been bad-tempered with Daniil. Nixon and Brezhnev were signing treaties that would make the world a safer place. That was the story Tania wanted to cover.
She knew from reading the foreign press that Nixon’s China visit and this Moscow trip had transformed his prospects in the November presidential election. From a January low, his approval rating had soared. He now had a strong chance of getting reelected.