Kirov put the watch down. He examined the other man’s face and saw fear, guile, relief at having accomplished an unpleasant task. It was possible to read anything one chose — even friendship. The best interrogator in the world could never really know. If you polished at the surface long enough, you would see only your own reflection. He looked away at the watch which glinted dully in the sunlight among the tobacco haze and the dust motes. The wind rattled the windows. Scherbatsky nibbled distractedly at a broken nail. A bottle clinked against a glass.
Something dangerous had happened but Kirov couldn’t say what.
As Kirov walked through the garden, brushing aside the dry canes of the dead weeds, one of the men in the black Volga saloon got out, pointed a camera in his direction and ran off a roll of film.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tatiana Yurievna complained that Kirov shouldn’t talk to his uncle about the past. It got him excited and then he smoked and drank to calm himself down. Why all this talk about the past? It had nothing to do with the present where things were done differently.
‘How is he today?’
‘He’s all right!’ Uncle Kolya shouted from the depths of the house.
‘Sick,’ said Tatiana Yurievna, who was not going to let a mere man’s opinion prevail. But grudgingly she allowed Kirov to cross the threshold into the interior with its smell of pine and old people. He noted strange objects, pinned to the wall, posed over doors or on pieces of furniture: pieces of wood and straw, cloth, paint — he hadn’t time to examine them. With ill grace the housekeeper was letting him into Nikolai Konstantinovitch’s bedroom. He had an idea that she was displaying charms and icons. It would not have surprised him if she was attending church, praying for the old Chekist who was lying in his bed and complaining.
‘Go away, Old Woman,’ Uncle Kolya told her. She looked at him crossly, and in the name of tidiness roughed up the bedclothes to annoy him until the General lost his temper and made her leave. Then he turned on Kirov, allowed his cheek to be kissed, and said, ‘What are you here for? More talk about the past? More bad dreams?’
‘Some nights.’
The General wasn’t prepared to display any sympathy. ‘They must be making delicate consciences these days.’
‘You may be right,’ Kirov agreed rather than fight the point. And maybe it was true, though he doubted it. He suspected that the horrors of the past were committed by men who were no less moral but merely saw things differently, though sometimes so differently that their visions of bliss could appear monstrous. His father for example. He asked, ‘Why didn’t the Germans shoot my father?’
Minsk has fallen.
The road disappeared into the woods beyond Romashkovo with its graveyard on the hill by the disused church and the station. From it led a lane of yellow hardcore with birch trees on both sides standing deep in leaf litter dotted with the red caps of fly agaric. Behind the odours of mist and dampness the ripening stinkhorns contributed their smell of rotting meat.
As they drove along Bogdanov kept up a conversation about Uncle Kolya. How was the old man? Any better? The idea was to sound concerned like a real friend should be, but Bogdanov’s lugubrious voice made him sound bereaved so that you would think Uncle Kolya was dead.
‘You did see him today, didn’t you?’
‘I saw him — he was well.’
‘Good, good. What did you have to talk about?’
‘Nothing. Keep your eyes on the road.’
They had talked about Minsk.
In the great German advance during the summer of 1941 the city of Minsk fell. That was how Uncle Kolya told it. The old man abstracted himself, gazed at the ceiling and recited the words as if reading them off a tombstone. The city of Minsk fell and he himself escaped the fall because he was on a train heading east with a cargo of political prisoners whom NKVD felt it impolitic to shoot out of hand: even in wartime the interrogations had to go on.
‘In a way they saved my life,’ Nikolai Konstantinovitch said thoughtfully. ‘Not that it saved theirs.’
When the Reds were forced out of Minsk by the Fascists — he resumed, using the expression ‘Reds’ as if they were a different sort of Russian — Andrei Nikolayevich Kirov, the father, stayed behind. ‘He was still needed for political work. He couldn’t get a permit to move.’
The Germans shot every Red they could lay their hands on: commissars and NKVD men naturally, but also ordinary Party members. It wasn’t so difficult to find out who they were — after all everything was meticulously recorded — and in any case there were people who were only too willing to tell on their neighbours. The occupiers were easily able to set up a puppet nationalist government for Byelorussia, and Minsk was its capital.
‘What happened to my father?’ Kirov asked.
‘What do you expect? He was betrayed and arrested. The German SD held him.’ And that, Uncle Kolya said, should have been the end of Colonel A.N. Kirov just as surely as when he was locked within the walls of the Lefortovo.
‘Why do you mention that? In 1941 it wasn’t the same thing.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ Uncle Kolya replied with a hint of the affectionate contempt the old can have for the young. ‘In both cases wasn’t your father still a policeman, a professional, a valuable asset for anyone who needed that sort of thing? And the Germans did need him. They knew they hadn’t got all the Reds. They had a mass of collaborators, but who was to know which ones were genuine and which ones were planted by the Soviets?’
‘But the Germans were enemies.’
‘So what? In 1940 they were friends, in 1941 they were enemies, who could tell what would happen in 1942?’ The tone sharpened. The old man broke off. He called Tatiana Yurievna and asked for a bed pan. ‘And take this one away, it stinks!’ He returned his attention to Kirov and said curtly, ‘Your father was a professional. All other loyalties weren’t worth shit. Either you understand that or you don’t.’
‘Go on,’ Kirov prompted him softly, and he learned how the SD recruited Colonel A.N. Kirov. He was valuable. He knew who the Reds were. He would make them talk. The Germans moved him and his wife and child from their apartment in Bryanska Street to the Europa Hotel where he could keep a safe eye on the politicians and their futile congresses. He was safe.
‘Until the Reds returned,’ said Uncle Kolya.
Tatiana Yurievna brought the bed pan. She and Kirov levered the old man and positioned him so that he could use it. He sighed and a stream of urine rattled into the steel dish. The housekeeper removed it and settled him in the bedclothes again. He stared bleakly at Kirov and said, ‘Don’t worry about my dignity. I’m still alive and kicking, still surviving, huh?’ And he went on.
The Reds returned and the NKVD squads cut a swathe through the ranks of the collaborators, the lukewarm and the stragglers who failed to flee in the baggage of the retreating Germans. New draughts of humanity for the camps and the execution cellars.
‘Was my father arrested?’
‘Of course,’ Uncle Kolya answered. ‘But not for long.’
‘Why not?’
Kirov did not expect the answer.
‘Because your father was a hero.’
Uncle Kolya explained. Far from being implicated in the murder of thousands of loyal Communists, Colonel A.N. Kirov — contrary to appearances and the careful records kept by the Germans — had secretly assisted the partisan forces, placing their cadres in the heart of the Fascist occupation government and masking their acts of sabotage.
‘Who rehabilitated him?’ Kirov asked.