Nothing made much sense. He fell asleep, dreaming that his old district editor in Aberdare wanted a story from Moscow’s ways and means committee and the only thing he had to file was a story about an old man in blood red fog weeping, weeping without control while a boy danced a jig.
The train jolted to a halt and Jones woke up. For some reason – anxiety, perhaps – he checked his pocket and found the envelope Attercliffe had given him at the station, something he had quite forgotten. Opening it with clumsy fingers, he found a black and white photograph of a tank by a road sign. The road sign was in Cyrillic. The photograph had been taken in Russia.
Lined up with their backs against the tank’s tracks were a number of officers in uniform. Some wore scuttle-shaped helmets. Germans, thought Jones. Their leader was a thin, tall man, with silver hair cut very short and hooded eyes staring directly into the camera. Around him, others wore brown uniforms, baggy trousers and flat hats. Red Army, Jones realised.
He turned the photograph over, to find the date that was written there. 1st August, 1932. Jones breathed deeply. Here was incontrovertible evidence of a straight breach of the Treaty of Versailles, banning Germany from developing tank warfare.
Gravely troubled, Jones looked up and found that Lyushkov had entered the restaurant car while he had been asleep. The fat officer was staring at him, hard.
This was unsettling because he was second from right in the photograph.
Chapter Four
Stalin floated above a mist that hugged the hollows of the earth, the eeriest thing that Jones had ever seen. The train came to a halt, a whistle blew and the mist thinned to reveal the heads of a throng of peasants, stocky and well-fed. The fat boy who Jones had seen dancing a jig at the station in the middle of the night was there, along with red beard, his accordion strapped to his chest, his wife by his side.
The mist swirled, thickened, then faded. The train doors opened and film crew, reporters, translators and minders stepped down, walking one hundred yards towards the airbound god and his devotees. As they grew nearer, a plinth for the Vozhd emerged, and behind that a smart, newly-built red brick building. This was the collective farm they were to visit.
Seven young women, their hair plaited, stood holding freshly cut flowers, sheaves of wheat, freshly baked loaves and little bowls of salt. Young and slender, they stood with their toes at ten-to-two on the clock. Jones wondered for a second that they might all be ballerinas from the Bolshoi shipped in for the occasion, but then dismissed his suspicion as absurd.
The mist was turning from pink to gold as the sun climbed in the east and Borodin directed the film crew. Hurrying into position, they framed the seven young women with their loaves and salt. Then a clapperboard snapped, and Borodin shouted, “Action!”
A crow squawked, hopping from one chimney to the next.
“Action!”
Once again, nothing happened.
“Action!”
Furious, Brodin ran over to Oumansky, shouted at him, and waited as the official trotted all the way back to the train and entered the first carriage. After a delay, Oumansky came out and held out his thumb.
“Action,” yelled Borodin once more – and this time a small knot of dignitaries emerged at the front carriage, stepped down and began the walk to the collective farm. Oumansky led the way, with Zakovsky, Lyushkov and Dr Limner bringing up the rear. After a pause, Professor Aubyn emerged into the light, sporting a black Lenin cap set at a jaunty angle on his head, black coat, black trousers and ballroom shoes. A sparse man with a sparse beard, his once blonde hair now faded to grey, Aubyn had the air of an angel who had lost his way back to heaven and was rather cross about it.
As the cameras rolled, two of the young women stepped forward, bouncing on their toes, and presented the professor with bread and salt. Aubyn froze, stupefied. Oumansky sidled up and whispered something and Aubyn very gingerly broke off a little tab of bread, dipped it into the salt and then held it in the air, inspecting it in the manner of a laboratory technician peering at a Petri dish with an unwelcome batch of mould.
Borodin yelled, “Cut!” and hissed something to Oumansky, who mimed “Eat it!” to Aubyn. Aubyn was about to do so when Borodin yelled “Wait!”, then cried “Action!” – at which point, the professor ate the tab and then broke into an aimless smile. Around him, the horde of well-wishers broke into a spasm of joy, red beard squeezing out the Kalinka on the accordion, young men dancing, the young women clapping and cheering. The group entered through a gateway and, beyond that, ploughed earth could be seen tapering away to the edge of the mist.
Close by was an asphalted parade ground. Shortly, a ballet of six tractors trundled in, criss-crossing the parade ground and each other, each one loaded with smiling workers holding sheaves of wheat. Jones didn’t know much about farming but it was October and the harvest should have been brought in a month before. And another thing that troubled him: in Wales, every farmer he’d ever met was a miserable sod, forever complaining. All of these farmers were smiling, all of the time.
After the tractors came twenty horses, led by their grooms, then a herd of fat cows, then three very fat pigs, led by the nose by three young women holding fat carrots tantalisingly just in front of their snouts. They trotted across the asphalt, the cleverest and seemingly the most compliant of all the animals.
Duranty sidled up to Jones and said, through the side of his mouth, “Old Macdonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.” Jones, still troubled from what had happened last night, could not help but smile. Duranty had the charm of the devil himself.
The third pig, a brindled old sow, truculent and strong-minded, was proving to be a Trotskyist. While the young woman over-concentrated on smiling at the dignitaries, the sow trotted forward with an unexpected burst of speed and gobbled up the carrot, almost taking off her fingers in the process. Then, as the other two pigs left the arena, the sow reversed and started to grub up the horse and cow dung left by the previous actors.
“Cut!” Borodin hissed at Oumansky. “Do you think a pig eating shit best conveys New Soviet Man?”
Oumansky shook his head.
Meanwhile, the young woman seemed to be losing her conviction that she was any kind of swineherd. Everytime she got within a few feet, the sow eyed her with menace and she backed off. Finally, one of the male farmers, a strapping fellow, came to her assistance. He waved a rake in the sow’s general direction but the sow was having none of it. Zakovsky shot a look at Lyushkov, who disappeared around the far corner. Shortly afterwards, an old man emerged. Sour-faced, strikingly thin and poorly shod in cloth boots, he was carrying a stout stick, which he promptly used to wallop the sow on her rump, showing all the lack of charity you would expect from a true swineherd. Meekly, the sow followed the thin man off the display area.
Once more, Borodin cried, “Action!” and then a wrath of cackling geese appeared. Then came a duck, waddling through the display ground, followed by twenty ducklings, bringing forth a series of oohs and aahs at the sweetness of the scene. “Cut!” yelled Borodin and the hosts seemed to sigh with relief that nothing else had gone wrong.
Soon, the sun broke through the mist and the party were led around a corner to find an apple orchard – and, beneath the trees, three rows of tables, laden with bread, hams, cheeses and fruit, bottles of vodka at every other place. By the top table was a small wooden podium, to which Professor Aubyn was led by Oumansky. A short speech and then they could all enjoy breakfast. That would have been the plan.