The collective farmers cheered as he mounted the steps of the podium. Evgenia appeared by his side, standing demurely one step below him. Aubyn coughed twice – someone passed him a glass of water – and then started to speak. His voice was high-pitched, scholarly, upper class.
“Comrades,” he began, “it behoves me to bear witness today to these remarkable fruits of New Soviet Man. This is a miracle…” He hesitated and Evgenia took the opportunity to translate his words into Russian. While she did so, he looked somewhat peeved – as if the act of translation was breaking his train of thought. “…as I was saying… a miracle of wheat, a miracle of beef, a miracle of pork. And do not forget the noble duck, still less the workers’ goat…”
He hesitated once more. Evgenia leapt into the gap, her translation of the last phrase “the workers’ goat” bringing forward a titter of laughter from the rougher, thinner-looking collective farmers assembled at the back of the throng. Lyushkov detached himself from the dignitaries and walked slowly towards the back of the crowd. The tittering stopped as if it had been switched off at the mains.
“…together our brother animals labour, too, for the common weal. But there are enemies afoot. Joseph Stalin himself has put it like this…”
He droned on and on, Evgenia translating, for another thirty minutes. Then, though he may not have come to an end, Zakovsky started clapping, Lyushkov followed suit and soon the whole collective was roaring their approval. From around a corner came a throng of children wearing red scarves. They started to mob the professor, as a pack of wolflings might savage an elderly bear. Aubyn half-smiled. The speechifying was over.
“Ah, the Little Octobrists,” said Duranty to Jones, the two of them alone in a small alcove. “They can always be relied upon to liven up the party. They’re the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts. At nine they become Young Pioneers, at fourteen Komsomols, Young Communists.”
“When do they stop being Young Communists?”
“That happens at 28.”
“And then?”
“Well, if they’re lucky and well connected and have no known bourgeois blemish on their character, then they may get to join the Cheka. These are the larvae, the Cheka the fully-fledged butterflies. Pretty little killers, eh?”
Jones studied him, hesitating to speak.
“Out with it?”
“Yesterday, when I asked about the GPU, the Cheka, you – all of you – were very cautious. Now you’re cracking jokes about them, without a care. Why?”
“Ah, very good, young Jonesy. A good reporter should always sniff out an anomaly. Today, right now, there’s just you and me. Yesterday, we were in company, lots of Russians, lots of colleagues. You never know. The Cheka, they’ve got ears. There’a joke: a Russian looks at himself in the mirror and says, one of us must be an informer.”
“You don’t trust your colleagues?”
“Not all of them.”
“Any of them?”
“No.”
“Who do you trust the least?”
“Well, me, frankly.”
Jones burst out laughing. There was something extraordinary about this man, how he was so shameless about his lack of shame. It was undefeatable and there was something admirable about this quality. Jones, conflicted, uneasy with himself, felt in awe.
“But you trust me?” asked Jones.
“You’ve got an honest face. And, besides, you’re new.”
The throng attacked breakfast with a passion that startled Jones. No grace and no graces were heard or seen as the collective farmers wolfed the food in front of them. Jones looked around for the sour-faced swineherd but he could see no trace of him, nor of Lyushkov.
“Evgenia?” She had found an empty place next to him.
“Yes, Mr Jones?”
“There’s one thing that happened last night that I was wondering whether you could explain.”
Duranty, sitting opposite, took in the conversation and held his head to one side, eyes glittering with curiosity.
“How can I be of assistance, Mr Jones?” Her voice, soft and low, dropped an octave.
“Evgenia, in the middle of the night…”
“Yes?”
Her eyes truly were the blackest shade of brown he’d ever seen.
“We passed through a big station. I’ve got a note here of the spelling of the station in Roman script.” Fishing out his notebook, Jones showed her the page on which he’d written the name down three times.
She giggled and said, “Your handwriting is a little difficult to make out, Mr Jones.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She handed the notebook back to him. “What does it say?”
He squinted at the letters drifting across the page. “I think I wrote Xapkob, Evgenia.”
“Not Xapkob. The Cyrillic letters means you pronounce it Kharkov, Mr Jones. It’s the capital of Soviet Ukraine.”
“Thank you so much, Evgenia. As we passed through the station, the people were dancing and eating on the platform.” He paused. “I’d love to go back to Kharkov one day to see more of it.”
“Perhaps, one day, I may able to escort you there, Mr Jones, the work of the party permitting.”
“The work of the party must come first, of course, Evgenia.”
She smiled at him so bleakly that Jones wondered to himself whether he’d ever met a woman who disliked him so much.
Chapter Five
Dark, fat clouds shifted up in the sky, occasionally letting a cone of sunlight poke through.
Beneath those dark, trembling clouds, the Lenin Dam was a fat concrete thumb jamming the mighty Dnieper. To the north, upstream, it had created an inland sea stretching to the horizon and beyond. Along the course of the dam, red flags snapped in the breeze. To the south the river, far punier than before, trickled along its ancient course. Marching in step with it were spindly electricity pylons running power lines to the new factories.
Professor Aubyn, Dr Limner and the great and the good from Moscow were decanted from their limousines onto a specially built wooden platform overlooking the dam. Horse-drawn artillery, stewarded by GPU troops, trotted towards them, their cannon pointed at the reservoir. A thick black cloud shifted and, as if on cue, the sun came out, illuminating a man in a suit – a minister of this and that, Jones never caught his title, still less his name – who stood on a podium and began to orate.
Jones’ Russian couldn’t begin to follow the speech but Evgenia provided a running translation for those journalists who wanted to get down every word: “Under the Wise Direction of Our Great Genius Leader and Teacher Stalin… a man of iron, a warrior of steel, a Leninist of bronze and a Bolshevik of granite…”
The speaker droned on. “Thanks to his inspiration, the seven rapids, which made our great river a hazard for the ancients, have now been inundated. Such is the gloriousness of the true path of Marxism-Leninism as defined by General Secretary Josif Stalin that the very force of nature falls on its knees in homage…”
Jones’ attention wandered from Evgenia’s translation to the hectic craftsmanship of Borodin’s film crew. They worked the two main cameras and the little Kinamo, filming the whole speech, changing reels at frantic speed to capture as much as possible. They had performed as they had done at the collective farm but this was a far bigger occasion. Borodin was the master, the cameramen the first, second and third mates, and the clapper-board man the ship’s boy. All three had assistants and the assistants had assistants too. The whole thing looked like a nest of ants having a nervous breakdown. And yet it worked. They filmed from afar. That would be the long-shot. They stopped, change reels, then scampered within thirty feet or so of the podium, lined up on the great orator, whoever he was, and started over again. The mid-shot. For the finale of the great speech, they raced to the podium and captured the climax.