The pipes groaned, and the wood seemed to creak in the beam. He had the window open a fraction for the night air, though the flames of the false fire were turned up as high as they would go. He set down his malt, took out the letter from its cheap Russian envelope again, and held it to the angled light. His eyesight was as good as it had ever been. And yet, although he was alone, it suited some indefinite part of him to act as if it were fading.
The English, he thought, was surprisingly lucid—though lucid in the old-fashioned elegant manner rather than merely plain in the modern way. The handwriting, however, was quite unable to stay within the confines of its institutional origins. He read the letter through again. The opening sentence began with the specific use of his name: “Dear Nicholas Glover…”
The writer was intelligent enough not to commit any specific threat to paper. He merely asked for a meeting. But it was there, Nicholas was sure, betrayed perhaps by the square hook of those gallows-shaped r’s—the grim Cyrillic Γin thin disguise.
He allowed the letter to dangle between finger and thumb and played the whisky through his crooked teeth.
My God, Masha, your bloody son is alive after all. You knew this all along, of course… Christ, why am I always so slow-witted compared to you? Only now do I begin to see what has been under my vain nose all along. You went back to find him. Didn’t you? This was the reason. Only now do I begin to see. It was not the call of your country at all, was it? It was the call of your blood. Alive all along. Known about. And yet… you did not tell me. Even when I came to you at the end. Even as we sat together. Your quid pro quo for all the things I did not tell you—was that it? Ah, but what a shame that we played chess with our secrets like this. A shame, dear Masha. A shame on our lives.
Somewhere down on the embankment a drunk had started sobbing like a child bereft. Nicholas rose to pull the window shut, the flames wavering a moment in his draft as he passed. He eased the frame up a millimeter or two on its old hinges so that it would close more easily and turned the handle through ninety careful degrees. Then he fetched his bottle and returned Bach’s harpsichord to its beginning so that he would not have to move again.
I was very close to your wife here in Petersburg and I wondered whether or not it might be possible to meet up as there are a number of important things that I wish to discuss.
And what exactly am I supposed to do now that the bastard—sorry, but we are all bastards, Masha, except you—now that the bastard has tracked me down? What is he to me? Or I to him? And what kind of man are we dealing with? Is he our everyday comrade—brutal, avaricious, mercenary, desperate to get out? Or is there some of your nobility in his character—is it just a meeting he wants, friendship, a lifelong correspondence about Turgenev?
Or will it be money?
Wait, though. Wait… is this what you were doing in Petersburg, Masha, giving him money? After everything was said and resaid and asserted and defied, did it come down to money for you too? Oh no. Wait. I know you, my Mashenka!
He leaned forward in his chair, childishly enlivened by the rare excitement of a thought he had not had before.
My father’s money was stolen from Russia. It came to me. I gave it to you. You gave it back to Russia. That’s how you will have seen it! That’s exactly how you will have seen it! Oh Masha, did this become your life’s project? This son of yours and his birthright…
A young woman rising in the Party, you see this Englishman gallivanting through your cities: Maximilian Glover, whoremonger, embezzler, art thief, traitor… Or, my god, perhaps you were sent to him… Perhaps you were sent to my father.
Nicholas sat back, let the letter dangle again, and swallowed slowly, concentrating on the burn of the Talisker down his throat and into the pit of his stomach.
But you… you… you marry the son instead. You can serve your masters better that way. My God. Surely you weren’t spying after all? How many times did we talk about this? Laugh. Fantasize. Pretend. You loved to make things up, of course, and this I celebrate. But was the final joke on me? Was I distracted? Was I double-fooled? Oh, Masha, is this your little secret?
He drank again and this time held the spirit in the cradle of his tongue. (The chain of thought was long familiar to him. But he fingered the links now with a new concentration.) You study your ruffian English so very, very carefully. You take your terrible job as a lowly copy editor—a miserable checker of grammar and facts on the newspaper of record, as you liked to call it. You work the night shift. You work weekends. You work whenever you are told. And there are whispers, of course, in the canteen, up and down the editorial floor, there are whispers everywhere; more than this—there are tales and conversations and rows, all the hundred truths that cannot be printed are heard out loud, bandied back and forth across the desks every day; and then there is all that copy they cannot run; and you see it; you sift the in box while you’re waiting for the idiots to file their illiteracy; and you hear the political correspondents boasting in the lifts and the diplomatic editor confiding on his way to conference; foreign desk, crime, health, and defense—you hear them all; and there are politicians and there are artists and there are captains of industry, stars of this and experts in that, and they are all in and out of the editor’s office, day and night, like Japanese businessmen through a brothel. And you are there all the while, as decades pass, listening, reading, sitting quietly at your workstation, Maria Glover, the efficient copy editor.
And I wager you never took a penny There would be no trace of it. No money. Just love. You passed without being asked to do so. And I wager you never asked if any of it was useful, or appreciated, or even relevant. You simply passed information. Dutifully. Loyally. Even when they stopped acknowledging your drops. Because, yes, one day, just as you are sitting there, the Wall comes down. And it seems as though it has all been for nothing.
What then? Do you go on regardless? Or do you turn slowly from the great struggle to the personal? Is there one last thing, a private thing—though the bourgeois scum are teeming gleefully through—is there one last thing that you can still accomplish? You can return the money to your son. You can return what is owed to Russia. You would enjoy that last bitter little irony, wouldn’t you, my clever, clever Masha?
He weighed this new idea, pleased to have hauled it from the mirrored lake of his life, pleased that there was hidden treasure at the end of the chain after all.
If this is the way we must play, then play this way we will, you think. If it’s all about the money, then let it be so: let’s start again, but let’s start fair. Yes, let’s start again: oil, labor, and technology—the East will rise once more in a monstrous aping of the slobbering West. Harder, careless, and more ruthless yet. And this time the West will beg for mercy.
Or am I wrong? Am I wrong about all of this?
His eyes reflected the flames. The ice had melted in his glass.
THE SHINING PATH
24
Scorched Earth
Work was easy.
She asked for a sabbatical.
They refused.
She said that she was sorry but she was going back to the U.K. to deal with some family issues anyway. And that she would therefore be tendering her resignation.
They said, oh, they hoped it was nothing serious, they would be sad to lose her, but she should definitely drop in when she got back and they would see where they were then.