17
After Vienna, the plane headed north, over Czechoslovakia, and then east, across Poland.
There was no stop at Warsaw.
Soon it became hard to know where we were — hence the peculiar agony of Polish history — but as the the miles drifted by, the landscape grew whiter, and the rust-red blotches of the winter-plowed fields showed up like the patches of a piebald pony. With the snow, my Russian memories began: whispering, like the breeze through a birch forest; eddying, like the smoke from some poor peasant's izba; and then flowing, as hypnotic and remorseless as the spring thaw. Russia… Closing my eyes, I could see the sun set over Lake Baikal and flash from the bright domes of Suzdal, and when I listened hard even the roar of the Kuznetsov turbofans was drowned out by the deep-throated music of the language itself. Memories and images mingling, I drifted away into sleep and then a dream came, very simple and clear. A ship is arriving in Leningrad. A figure appears on the gangway, enormous inside a "ulky fur coat… It must be Brightman; even in my dream, I'm conscious of this. Slowly, he shuffles down to the dock, joining an immense line that tortuously winds through a shed, past a desk. On the desk is a sign: Old Russian Custom — to Wait. Are You from the States? As the man steps forward, passport in hand, he turns slightly, smiling to himself at this attempt at a joke. But the man isn't Brightman; it's me. And as the official looks up, I see the face of…
I awoke with a jerk. But I'm not sure I had a right to be startled. This was an Aeroflot flight, we were on a Tu-154 (the peculiar smell of their cabins), and our destination was mysterious Leningrad — for most of my fellow travelers, it was precisely the strangeness of this that excited or disturbed them. But with me it was the reverse. As if suffering from some variation of deja vu, it was the familiar that distressed me— I'd been here so often before, but what was I doing here now? Following a total stranger, I'd ended up on my own doorstep. How could it have happened? Charlottesville, Halifax, Paris… Leningrad had to be the end of the trail, yet I kept feeling I'd been moving in a circle — unless I had it all wrong, and the circle had been moving around me.
But all of these questions, even if I should have known the answers to them, were secondary; I had more concrete problems ahead of me. Who was Yuri Shastov? Why had Bright-man's package ended up in Povonets, a dot on the map four hundred miles northeast of Leningrad? And even more difficult than these questions was the consequent one of how I was going to answer them, for no matter how you define "totalitarian," the bottom line is "police state," and I was now proposing to enter the greatest police state in history and operate in a fashion that would be both clandestine and illegal. To make matters worse, I was a Westerner; worse still, an American; worst of all, a journalist. This meant automatic suspicion and possibly surveillance… which was precisely what I had to avoid. Somehow, in the most tightly controlled society on earth, I had to "disappear," find a way to gain a free hand.
I had a plan — a variation of a stunt I'd pulled once before — and its first step was simple: be as normal as possible.
Pudvolko, Leningrad's airport, is south of the city. There's a perfectly good airport bus that takes you right down the Nevsky, but I've always preferred a cab — and so that's what I took now. It was a cold, gray day; the first snowbanks were heaped up at the side of the road, and in the windblown fields the frozen earth'was the color of steel. Rolling down the window, I sucked in a breath. The air was thick with the smell of all the big Russian cities, a compound of cement dust and diesel fumes from the huge Belaz transport trucks, which people will proudly (and truthfully) tell you are the largest trucks in the world. Following my usual, roundabout route, I had the driver take me past the old Putilov ironworks, with its huge statue of Kirov — arms outstretched, he points toward the factory in a gesture, supposedly dramatic and revolutionary, which the local inhabitants interpret more rudely — then under the Neva Arch, toward the gray, bleak expanse of the port. It would be closing up soon, except for the lanes they keep open with the nuclear icebreakers. Already, there was a skin of ice on the canals. We bumped across one of the city's six hundred bridges and headed downtown.
I was staying at the Astoria. People used to say that it has an air of faded glory, but now it's just faded. I like it all the same. The beds may sag and creak, it takes about an hour to fill up your bath, but the place still manages to be comfortable and the staff always strikes me as being more sophisticated than in other Russian hotels. Ordinary room service requests, often met by puzzlement elsewhere, are here handled routinely, though that afternoon I didn't want anything except the routine: one bottle of vodka. After a couple of welcoming slugs, I unpacked, then left the hotel and walked across St. Isaac's Square. Kitty-corner to the Cathedral is a massive stone building that was once the German Embassy and which now houses the main office of Intourist. After a long argument and several loudly dropped names, I got what I wanted: an approved travel itinerary and a dark blue Zhiguli — Fiat to you — which I picked up at the Aeroflot Terminal on the Nevsky Prospekt. From there, I returned to the Astoria.
It was around three o'clock in the afternoon; I lay down on the bed and waited for the phone to ring.
Because I knew it would.
Presumably Subotin had ways of getting into the U.S.S.R. without attracting attention, but for me that was impossible. Having lived and worked here as a journalist, I was simply listed in too many files. Besides, in Paris I'd pulled some strings to get a visa inside twenty-four hours rather than the usual three days or a week. Each of those strings had had a bell at the end; inevitably, they'd start to ring here. The first call was from a man I knew in Tass's translation section, just to say hello. Then there was someone at UPI who said he'd been tipped off by Aeroflot. (Reasonable: my fixer in Paris, so far as the visa was concerned, had been an old acquaintance in Aero-flot's PR department — it was his blat, in addition, that had got me the car.) And lastly, at quarter to five, I was welcomed to Leningrad by an official greeter from the Soviet Union of Journalists. I'd met him before. Viktor Glubin he was called, but in fact he was a typical Ivan Ivanov, the sort of idiot bureaucrat who reassures the people "upstairs" — the nachalstvo—that their will is being done, while actually ensuring that nothing very much is being done at all. Just this once, I was glad to see him: in fact, he, or someone like him, was almost essential to my plans. Before picking up Subotin's trail, I had to cover my own. Even if the KGB were not aware of what I was doing, my arrival would have been noted, and would have piqued their curiosity. To reassure them — the second step of my plan — I'd carefully prepared a soothing little explanation, and now I needed someone to deliver it. For that, Viktor Glubin was perfect: when it comes to the Komitet, he was as "amateur" as a Russian athlete. I happily accepted his invitation to dinner, then began running a bath. After that, I lay down and dozed.
Glubin arrived around seven.
He was a chubby, rumpled man, with a sour, puckered mouth and a forehead that was as greasy as the back of a spoon. I bought him a drink in the Astoria bar. Trading gossip about various journalistic acquaintances, we tested the waters between us. With Russians, this is always a tricky business, and maybe it's especially true of Russian newspapermen. They want it assumed that they're part of the same world as you— that "journalist" means the same thing in Leningrad as in New York — but as soon as you apply the standards of that world to them, they are prone, like little children, to pick up their marbles and go home. Tonight, I was very careful to be the perfect diplomat, and was too worried about my own performance to notice any equivocations in his.