*
‘Godmother? Me?’ said Maria Summers. ‘Are you serious?’
George Jakes smiled. ‘I know you’re not very religious. We’re not, either, not really. I go to church to please my mother. Verena has been once in the last ten years, and that was for our wedding. But we like the idea of godparents.’
They were having lunch in the Members’ Dining Room of the House of Representatives, on the ground floor of the Capitol building, sitting in front of the famous fresco, Cornwallis Sues for Cessation of Hostilities. Maria was eating meat loaf; George had a salad.
Maria said: ‘When’s the baby due?’
‘A month or so – early April.’
‘How is Verena feeling?’
‘Terrible. Lethargic and impatient at the same time. And tired, always tired.’
‘It will soon be over.’
George brought her back to the question. ‘Will you be godmother?’
She evaded it again. ‘Why have you asked me?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Because I trust you, I guess. I probably trust you more than anyone outside my family. If Verena and I died in a plane crash, and our parents were too old or dead, I feel confident that you would make sure my children were cared for, somehow.’
Maria was evidently moved. ‘It’s kind of wonderful to be told that.’
George thought, but did not say, that it was now unlikely Maria would have children of her own – she would be forty-four this year, he calculated – and that meant she had a lot of spare maternal affection to give to the children of her friends.
She was already like family. His friendship with her had lasted almost twenty years. She still went to see Jacky several times a year. Greg liked Maria, too, as did Lev and Marga. It was hard not to like her.
George did not give voice to any of these considerations, but instead said: ‘It would mean a lot to Verena and me if you would do it.’
‘Is it really what Verena wants?’
George smiled. ‘Yes. She knows that you and I had a relationship, but she’s not the jealous type. Matter of fact, she admires you for what you’ve achieved in your career.’
Maria looked at the men in the fresco, with their eighteenth-century coats and boots, and said: ‘Well, I guess I’ll be like General Cornwallis, and surrender.’
‘Thank you!’ said George. ‘I’m very happy. I’d order champagne, but I know you wouldn’t drink it in the middle of a working day.’
‘Maybe when the baby is born.’
The waitress picked up their plates and they asked for coffee. ‘How are things in the State Department?’ George asked. Maria was now a big shot there. Her title was Deputy Assistant Secretary, a post more influential than it sounded.
‘We’re trying to figure out what’s happening in Poland,’ she said. ‘It’s not easy. We think there’s a lot of criticism of the government from inside the United Workers’ Party, which is the Communist party. Workers are poor, the elite are too privileged, and the “Propaganda of Success” just calls attention to the reality of failure. National income actually fell last year.’
‘You know I’m on the House Intelligence Committee.’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you getting good information from the agencies?’
‘It’s good, as far as we know, but there’s not enough of it.’
‘Would you like me to ask about that in the committee?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘It may be that we need additional intelligence personnel in Warsaw.’
‘I think we do. Poland could be important.’
George nodded. ‘That’s what Greg said when the Vatican elected a Polish Pope. And he’s usually right.’
*
At the age of forty, Tania became dissatisfied with her life.
She asked herself what she wanted to do with her next forty years, and found that she did not want to spend them as an acolyte to Vasili Yenkov. She had risked her freedom to share his genius with the world, but that had done nothing for her. It was time she focussed on her own needs, she decided. What that meant, she did not know.
Her discontent came to a head at a party to celebrate the award of the Lenin Literary Prize to Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs. The award was risible: the three volumes of the Soviet leader’s autobiography were not well written, not true, and not even by Brezhnev, having been ghost-written. But the writers’ union saw the prize as a useful pretext for a shindig.
Getting ready for the party, Tania put her hair in a ponytail like Olivia Newton-John in the movie Grease, which she had seen on an illicit videotape. The new hairstyle did not cheer her up as much as she had hoped.
As she was leaving the building, she ran into her brother in the lobby, and told him where she was going. ‘I see that your protégé, Gorbachev, made a fulsome speech in praise of Comrade Brezhnev’s literary genius,’ she said.
‘Mikhail knows when to kiss ass,’ Dimka said.
‘You did well to get him on to the Central Committee.’
‘He already had the support of Andropov, who likes him,’ Dimka explained. ‘All I had to do was persuade Kosygin that Gorbachev is a genuine reformer.’ Andropov, the KGB chief, was increasingly the leader of the conservative faction in the Kremlin; Kosygin the champion of the reformers.
Tania said: ‘Gaining the approval of both sides is unusual.’
‘He’s an unusual man. Enjoy your party.’
The do was held in the utilitarian offices of the writers’ union, but they had managed to get hold of several cases of Bagrationi, the Georgian champagne. Under its influence, Tania got into an argument with Pyotr Opotkin, from TASS. No one liked Opotkin, who was not a journalist but a political supervisor, but he had to be invited to social events because he was too powerful to offend. He buttonholed Tania and said accusingly: ‘The Pope’s visit to Warsaw is a catastrophe!’
Opotkin was right about that. No one had imagined how it would be. Pope John Paul II turned out to be a talented propagandist. When he got off the plane at Okecie military airport, he fell to his knees and kissed the Polish ground. The picture was on the front pages of the Western press next morning, and Tania knew – as the Pope must have known – that the image would find its way back into Poland by underground routes. Tania secretly rejoiced.
Tania’s boss Daniil was listening, and he interjected: ‘Driving into Warsaw in an open car, the Pope was cheered by two million people.’
Tania said: ‘Two million?’ She had not seen this statistic. ‘Is that possible? It must be something like five per cent of the entire population – one in every twenty Poles!’
Opotkin said angrily: ‘What is the point of the Party controlling television coverage when people can see the Pope for themselves?’
Control was everything for men such as Opotkin.
He was not done. ‘He celebrated Mass in Victory Square in the presence of two hundred and fifty thousand people!’
Tania knew that. It was a shocking figure, even to her, for it starkly revealed the extent to which Communism had failed to win the hearts of the Polish people. Thirty-five years of life under the Soviet system had converted nobody but the privileged elite. She made the point in appropriate Communist jargon. ‘The Polish working class reasserted their reactionary old loyalties at the first opportunity.’
Poking Tania’s shoulder with an accusing forefinger, Opotkin said: ‘It was reformists like you who insisted on letting the Pope go there.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Tania scornfully. Kremlin liberals such as Dimka had urged letting the Pope in, but they had lost the argument, and Moscow had told Warsaw to ban the Pope – but the Polish Communists had disobeyed orders. In a display of independence unusual for a Soviet satellite, the Polish leader Edward Gierek had defied Brezhnev. ‘It was the Polish leadership that made the decision,’ Tania said. ‘They feared there would be an uprising if they forbade the Pope’s visit.’
‘We know how to deal with uprisings,’ said Opotkin.
Tania knew she was only damaging her career by contradicting Opotkin, but she was forty and sick of kowtowing to idiots. ‘Financial pressures made the Polish decision inevitable,’ she said. ‘Poland gets huge subsidies from us, but it needs loans from the West as well. President Carter was very tough when he went to Warsaw. He made it clear that financial aid was linked to what they call human rights. If you want to blame someone for the Pope’s triumph, Jimmy Carter is the culprit.’
Opotkin must have known this was true, but he was not going to admit it. ‘I always said it was a mistake to let Communist countries borrow from Western banks.’
Tania should have left it there, and allowed Opotkin to save face, but she could not restrain herself. ‘Then you face a dilemma, don’t you?’ she said. ‘The alternative to Western finance is to liberalize Polish agriculture so that they can produce enough of their own food.’
‘More reforms!’ Opotkin said angrily. ‘That is always your solution!’
‘The Polish people have always had cheap food: that’s what keeps them quiet. Whenever the government puts up prices, they riot.’
‘We know how to deal with riots,’ said Opotkin, and he walked away.
Daniil looked bemused. ‘Good for you,’ he said to Tania. ‘Though he may make you pay.’
Tania said: ‘I want some more of that champagne.’
At the bar she ran into Vasili. He was alone. Tania realized that lately he had been showing up to events like this without a floozie on his arm, and she wondered why. But she was focussed on herself tonight. ‘I can’t do this much longer,’ she said.
Vasili handed her a glass. ‘Do what?’
‘You know.’
‘I suppose I can guess.’
‘I’m forty. I have to live my own life.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I don’t know, that’s the trouble.’
‘I’m forty-eight,’ he said. ‘And I feel something similar.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t chase girls any more. Or women.’
She was in a cynical mood. ‘Don’t chase them – or just don’t catch them?’
‘I detect a note of scepticism.’
‘Perceptive of you.’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure we need to continue the pretence that we barely know one another.’
‘What makes you say that?’
He leaned closer and lowered his voice, so that she had to strain to hear him over the noise of the party. ‘Everyone knows that Anna Murray is the publisher of Ivan Kuznetsov, yet no one has ever connected her to you.’