‘Not my idea. A friend’s.’
‘Girl?’
I nodded.
‘Aha,’ he said. ‘I diagnose a rich middle-class socialist rebelling against mummy.’
‘Not far out,’ I said, a touch sadly.
He peered anxiously at my face. ‘I haven’t offended you?’
‘No.’
I got him to ask the taxi driver to stop by a telephone kiosk, and to wait while we tried our numbers again. There was still no answer from Misha, but the second number was answered at the first ring. Stephen, holding the receiver, made a brief thumbs up sign to me, and spoke. Listened, spoke again, and handed the receiver to me. ‘It is Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky himself. He says he speaks English.’
I took the instrument. ‘Mr Chulitsky?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I am an Englishman visiting Moscow,’ I said. ‘My name is Randall Drew. I have been given your name and telephone number by the British Embassy. I wonder if I could talk with you?’
There was a longish pause. Then the voice at the other end, calm and with an accent that was a carbon copy of Stephen’s imitation, said, ‘Upon what subject?’
Owing to the meagreness of the telex bearing his name, I couldn’t entirely answer. I said hopefully, ‘Horses?’
‘Horses.’ He sounded unenthusiastic. ‘Always horses. I do not know horses. I am architect.’
‘Er,’ I said. ‘Have you already talked about horses to another Englishman?’
A pause. Then the voice, measured and still calm. ‘That is so. In Moscow, yes. And in England, yes. Many times.’
Bits of light began to dawn. ‘You were at the International Horse Trials? At Burghley, in September?’
The pause. Then, ‘At many horse trials. September... and August.’
Bingo, I thought. One of the observers.
‘Mr Chulitsky,’ I said, persuasively, ‘please may I meet you? I’ve been talking to Nikolai Alexandrovich Kropotkin, and if you want to check up on me, I think he will tell you it would be all right for you to talk to me.’
A very long pause. Then he said, ‘Are you writing for newspaper?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I telephone Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ he said. ‘I find his number.’
‘I have it here,’ I said, and read it out slowly.
‘You telephone again. One hour.’
The receiver went down at his end with a decisive crash, and Stephen and I went back to the taxi.
Stephen said, ‘When we get up to my room, don’t say anything you don’t want overheard. Or not until I tell you it’s OK.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I’m a foreigner. I live in the section of the University reserved for foreign students. Every room in Moscow which is used by foreigners should be considered bugged until proved different.’ The University building, of vast blocks of narrow windows punctuated by soaring fluted towers, like an immense grey stone blancmange, looked from its hill to the river and the city centre beyond; and on the far bank lay, spread out, the Lenin stadium, where the Olympic athletes were scheduled to run and jump and throw things.
‘How will they manage with the whole city full of foreigners?’ I said.
‘Apartheid will prevail.’ The Russian accent made it a wicked joke. ‘Segregation will be ruthlessly maintained.’
‘Why did you come to Russia?’ I said, ‘feeling as you do?’
He gave me a quick bright glance. ‘I love the place and hate the regime, the same as everyone else. And nowhere’s a prison when you can get out.’
The taxi shed us at the gate, and we walked to the foreign students’ entrance, a door dwarfed by the sheer height of the adjoining walls. Inside, coming down to human scale, there was a dumpy middle-aged woman behind a desk. She looked at Stephen with a lack of reaction which meant she knew him, and then at me; and she was out of her seat and barring my way with the speed of a rattlesnake.
Stephen spoke to her in Russian. She dourly shook her head. Together they consulted a list on her desk; and with severe looks she let me through.
‘Dragons like that guard doorways all over Russia,’ Stephen said. ‘The only way past, is to be expected. Short of slaying them, of course.’
We went for a long walk which ended one floor down in a help-yourself foodshop. All the packages were unfamiliar, and owing to the Cyrillic alphabet, which made restaurants look like ‘PECTOPAH’ to Western eyes, I couldn’t even guess at the contents. Stephen went round unerringly, choosing what later turned out to be crisp-sided cream cakes and ending with a bottle of milk.
A girl stood at the cash desk before us, paying for her groceries. A pretty girl, with light-brown hair curling on to her shoulders, and the sort of waist Victorian young ladies swooned over. When Stephen greeted her, she turned her head and gave him a flashing smile with a fair view of excellent teeth. The smile, I saw, of at least good friends.
Stephen introduced her as Gudrun, and the unpretty lady behind the cash register pointed to her packages and clearly told her to pick them up and go.
The girl picked up her bottle of milk, and the bottom fell out of it. Milk cascaded on to the floor. Gudrun stood looking bewildered with the whole-looking bottle still in her hand and milk stains all over her legs.
I watched the pantomime that followed. Stephen was saying she should have another bottle. The unpretty lady shook her head and pointed to the cash register. Everyone engaged in battle, and the unpretty lady won.
‘She made her buy another bottle,’ said Stephen, disgusted, as we set off on another interior tramp.
‘So I gathered.’
‘They make the bottles like tubes here, and just stick a disc in for the bottoms. Anyway,’ he finished cheerfully, ‘she’s coming along to my room for a cup of tea.’
Gudrun was West German, from Bonn. She filled and illuminated Stephen’s tiny cell, which was eight feet long by six across, and contained a bed, a table covered with books, a chair, and a glass-fronted bookcase. On the bare wooden floor there was one small imitation Brussels rug, and at the tall narrow window, skimpy green curtains.
‘The Ritz,’ I said ironically.
‘I’m lucky,’ Stephen said, taking three mugs from the bookcase and making a space for them on the table. ‘A lot of the Russian students are two to a room this size.’
‘If you had two beds in here you couldn’t open the door,’ I said.
Gudrun nodded. ‘They stand the beds up against the wall in the daytime.’
‘No protest marches?’ I said. ‘No demos for better conditions?’
‘They are not allowed,’ Gudrun said seriously. ‘Anyone who tried would lose his place.’
She spoke English perfectly, with hardly a trace of accent. Her Russian, Stephen said, was just as good. His own German was passable, his French excellent. I sighed, internally, for a skill I’d never acquired.
Stephen went off to make the tea.
‘Don’t come,’ he said. ‘The kitchen is filthy. About twenty of us share it, and we’re all supposed to clean it, so nobody does.’
Gudrun sat on the bed and asked me how I was enjoying Moscow, and I sat on the chair and said fine. I asked her how she was enjoying her course, and she said fine.
‘If the Russians are so keen to keep foreigners at arm’s length,’ I said, ‘why do they allow foreign students in the University?’
She glanced involuntarily round the walls, a revealing glimpse into the way they all lived. The walls had ears; literally.
‘We are exchange students,’ she said. ‘For Stephen, there is a Russian student in London. For me a Russian student in Bonn. Those students are dedicated communists.’
‘Spreading the gospel and recruiting?’
She nodded a shade unhappily, again glancing at the walls and not liking my frankness. I went back to harmless chit chat, and Stephen presently arrived to distribute the goodies, which, for me at least, nicely filled an aching void.