Here the transcribers in their prissy way indicated a natural break, while CC withdraws to the bathroom and Larry tops up their glasses.
Those who survived the journey were put to work in a gulag, planting the frozen steppes, mining gold sixteen hours a day, which is why the Ingush to this day deal in gold.... They were classed as slave labourers on account of their alleged collaboration with the Germans, but the Ingush fought well against the Germans; they just hated Stalin and the Russians more."
"And they hated the Ossetians," Larry says keenly, like a schoolboy wanting to be top.
He has touched a nerve, perhaps deliberately, for CC unlooses a tirade.
"Why should we not hate the Ossetians? They are not of our land! They are not of our blood! They are Persians who claim to be Christians and worship heathen gods in secret. They are the lackeys of Moscow. They have stolen our fields and houses. Why? Do you know why?" Larry affects not to. "Do you know why Stalin deported us and said we were criminals and enemies of the Soviet people? Because Stalin was an Ossetian! Not a Georgian, not an Abkhazian, not an Armenian, not an Azerbaijani, not a Chechen, and not an Ingushi God knows, not an Ingushi—but a foreigner, an Ossetian. Do you love the poet Osip Mandelstam?"
Carried away by the passion of CC's outburst, Larry avows his love of Mandelstam.
"You know why Stalin had the poet Mandelstam shot? For writing in one of his poems that Josef Stalin was an Ossetian! That is why Mandelstam was shot by Stalin!"
I doubted whether this was the reason Mandelstam was shot. I held the better-attested view that he died in a psychiatric hospital. And I doubted whether Stalin was really an Ossetian. And perhaps Larry did too, but in the face of such fervour, his only recorded response is a grunt, followed by a long silence while the two men drink. Eventually CC resumes his narrative. In 1953 Stalin died. Three years later Khrushchev denounced him, and shortly afterwards the Chechen–Ingush autonomous republic resumed its rightful place on the maps:
"... We come home from Kazakhstan. That's a long walk, but we make it, even if some of us arrive a bit late. My mother dies on the way, and I swear to her that I shall bury her in her homeland. But when we arrive, the doors of our houses are locked against us and Ossetian faces look out of our windows. We are beggars, sleeping in our streets, poaching in our fields. Never mind that the law says the Ossetians have got to go. They don't like the law. They don't recognise the law. They recognise guns. And Moscow has given the Ossetians many guns and taken away ours."
There had been much debate on the Top Floor, I remembered, about whether on the strength of this meeting we should make a pass at Checheyev and try to obtain him as our source. After all, he had broken half the rules in the KGB book. He had blown his own cover, vented anti-Soviet sentiments, and beaten the forbidden ethnic drum. But in the end my impassioned reasoning prevailed, and the barons reluctantly agreed that our most important asset was Larry and we should contemplate no move that might endanger him.
* * *
I was standing at the centre of my priesthole again, beneath the overhead light, studying the remnants of a folder of printed pamphlets issued by the BBC monitoring service. Key words, those that had survived, were highlighted with green marker pen. The idiosyncratic spelling of the transcribers had been left untouched.
North Osetia rela . . . calm on fl..versary of conflict.
ITAR-TASS news agency World Se ... Mosc in Russian 1106 gmt 31 Oct 93
Text of rep ...
Vladikavkaz, 31 October: The sad anni ... of the tragedy of 31 October 1992, whe ... armed confrontation
began in the zon... t . . . Oset . . . Ingush conflict . . . be
softened by a....
The tragic tally [for ... conflict]: 1,300 killed . . . sides, more than 400 . . . houses destroyed and ... homeless.
* * *
I turned a couple of blackened pages. The highlighting continued: Emma's or Larry's, it made no difference, since I knew now that they shared the same madness:
. . . mass disorder and inte . . . conflicts accompanied by the use of force, weaponry, and combat vehicles . . . the refugee situation ... catastrophic, with more than 60,000 . . . situation is a tragedy which has befallen a people needed by no one . . . Russian troops operating in the state of emergency area on the territory of North Osetia and Ingushetia have been ordered to eliminate bandit gangs which fa ... authorities, said General ... the interim administration in the Osetian–Ingush conflict zone.
But in the left-hand margin, in angry capitals, Larry had written the following words:
FOR BANDIT READ PATRIOT
FOR GANG READ ARMY
FOR ELIMINATE READ KILL, TORTURE, MAIM, BURN ALIVE.
* * *
I was in spasm.
In spasm, but overcontrolled.
I was standing, and my back was screaming murder at me and I was screaming murder in reply, but I had found the file I was looking for. LP: LAST DEBRIEFINGS, I had written on the cover, in capitals in my bureaucratic hand. Yet for all my eagerness, I had to punt myself along the wall like a wounded cow in order to carry it to the trestle table.
I was squatting in a chair and leaning low over the table, taking as much weight off my spine as I could. My left elbow was pressed onto a cushion, as Mr. Dass had taught me. But the pains in my back were nothing compared with the shame and anguish in my soul as I stared at the accumulating evidence of my culpable blindness:
Asked LP whether he could decently duck the Caucasus trip that CC is so keen on. I didn't say so, but customer interest in region v. low and already oversupplied by satellite, humint, sigint, and a flood of reports from US oil companies operating or prospecting in the region. LP not receptive.
LP: I owe it to him, Timbo. I've promised him for years and never gone. They're what he cares about. They're who he is.
* * *
Licking my fingertips, I clawed painfully through the pages till I came to my account of the debriefing three weeks later:
LP has violently overreacted to Caucasus trip—predictably, in his present menopausal mood. Nothing in scale for him, everything a first and last. Saddest, most exciting, most moving, tragic experience of my career; etc., masses to report, seething unrest, balloon will go up again any minute, ethnic, tribal, and religious tension everywhere, Russian occupiers total oafs, plight of Ingush archetypal for plight of all small oppressed Muslim nations in region, etc. . . .
Footnote to source report: H/Evaluation Ex-Sov target told me off the record she was unlikely to file.
* * *
But Cranmer had filed.
Cranmer had filed and forgotten.
Cranmer in his criminally negligent myopia had consigned the cause of the Ingush people to the dustbin of history, and LP with it, then buried his stupid head in the sweet earth of Somerset—even though he knew that nothing, absolutely nothing in Larry's life, or Cranmer's own pathetic imitation of it, ever went away:
. . . because I've seen them, in their little valley towns and in their mountains. . . . In life, as we both know, it's the luck of the draw, who you meet and when and how much you have left to give, and the point at which you say, To hell with everything, this is where I go the distance, this is where I stick.