The train back to Leningrad was silent, none of the garrulous youngsters I had ridden with on my first journey to the north. A man was transporting several boxes of chickens. Four hours into the journey and the uneven tracks–more so than I remembered–sent one flying, and its prisoner, white-feathered and red-eyed, spent nine glorious minutes in freedom, hurtling up and down the carriage, before a militia man with scaling skin and a suggestion of melanoma about the jaw, reached out with a single gloved hand and caught the bird by the throat. I saw its neck stretch, and the creature seemed as grateful as an animal with a brain the size of a walnut can be to be restored to its master and its cage.
I was not officially met when I finally crawled off the train in Leningrad, the sky already black and rain tapping against the old slanted roof, but two men in wide-collared coats followed me as I left the station in search of a place to spend the night, and stayed outside the boarding house in the shadow of the street as the cobbles danced with rushing water. During the few days I spent in the city I came to know my watchers well, a six-man team in total, who I mentally dubbed Boris One, Boris Two, Skinny, Fat, Breathless and Dave. Dave earned his name by his uncanny physical resemblance to David Ayton, an Irish laboratory engineer who’d once destroyed my coat with a mug of sulphuric acid, only to beg a new one from the store, sew on my name overnight, and even attempt to smear a precise replica of the coffee stains and chemical erosions into the back and sleeves which had made my coat so distinctly mine. Sympathy for the effort involved far outweighed my ire, and now Soviet Dave earned my respect as well by his good-natured attitude to my shadowing. The others, especially Boris One and Boris Two, who mirrored each other in clothes, bearing and technique, attempted to conduct entirely covert surveillance of a most distracting kind. Dave afforded me the respect of being fairly overt in his observation, smiling at me across the street as I passed in acknowledgment of his own discovery and the futile nature of his role. In another time, I felt, I would have enjoyed Soviet Dave’s company, and wondered just what stories lurked behind his polite veneer, to have made him a security man.
For a few days I simply played tourist, as much as anyone could in the city at the time. In one of the few cafés to grudgingly merit the name, where the chef’s speciality was variations on the theme of cauliflower, I was surprised to encounter a team of sixth-form schoolboys from the United Kingdom watched over by the ubiquitous Soviet minders.
“We’re here on a cultural exchange,” explained one, prodding his bowl of cauliflower special dubiously. “So far we’ve been beaten at football, hockey, swimming and track athletics. Tomorrow we’re going for a sailing trip, which I think means we’re going to be beaten at rowing.”
“Are you a sports team?” I enquired, eyeing up the portly bearing of some of the boy’s companions.
“No!” he exclaimed. “We’re language students. I signed on because I thought they’d let us see the Winter Palace. Although yesterday evening Howard beat one of their boys at chess, which caused quite the stir. He’s been asked not to show us up like that again.”
I wished them luck, earning a wry smile and a polite wiggle of fork in acknowledgment.
That night a hooker was waiting by the door of my room. She said her name was Sophia and she’d already been paid. She was a secret fan of Bulgakov and Jane Austen, and asked, as I was reputed to be such an educated man, if I wouldn’t mind talking German, as she was still struggling to get the accent right. I wondered if this was Soviet Dave’s idea, or Vincent’s. I saw no obvious signs of physical abuse or disease, and tipped her generously for good company’s sake.
“What do you do?” she asked me as the headlights from a passing car defined the arc of a sundial across the ceiling, blooming, travelling and gone.
“I’m a scientist.”
“What kind of scientist?”
“Theoretical,” I replied.
“What kind of theories?”
“Everything.”
She found this briefly funny, then was embarrassed to find something funny which I could not. “When I was young,” I explained, “I looked to God to find answers. When God didn’t have anything, I looked for answers in people, but all they said was, ‘Relax, go with it.’ ”
“ ‘Go with it’?” She queried my American idiom, pronounced in German, using her native Russian.
“Don’t fight against inevitability,” I translated loosely. “Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don’t hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed–what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.”
“Everyone’s a decent person,” she replied softly, “in their own eyes.”