Alex wrapped up his presentation: ‘I have been in touch with my usual team and they are interested in the job. Colin Thwaites is in the UK already, Arkady Voloshin and Yamba Douala are on their way back here from Africa, and I have contacted two more people.’
Sergey nodded with satisfaction. ‘Hmm, very good, Major Devereux. Now, my only input on this is your call sign for the operation—it will be “Baba Yaga”!’ he grinned.
Lara rolled her eyes. ‘Sergey, is this necessary?’
Sergey looked at her with exasperation. ‘Lara! Will you indulge me for once?’
She turned to Alex. ‘His enthusiasm for Russian folk stories sometimes gets the better of him.’
Sergey’s excitement was undeterred. ‘It’s a good name!’ He too turned to Alex. ‘She’s a witch who flies around Russia doing harm to people—just like you! Although she has iron
teeth and she eats children!’ He grimaced, gnashed his teeth and made clawing gestures with his hands. ‘Anyway, Alex should read some Russian literature if he wants to understand what this is all about! The struggle for the soul of the Motherland!’ he declared grandly.
‘Hmm…’ Lara sounded unimpressed; Alex had the idea that this was a well-worn argument between them but that she was happier just to let it go for now.
Sergey jabbed a finger at Alex. ‘You see, you asked me last night—will we win? And I say, yes! We will win because we have the Russian soul!’ He emphasised the words
Russkaya dusha
. ‘All you Western bastards say we’re all slaves but the Russian soul is not a slave soul!’ He banged the table. ‘Our free spirit will overcome this Krymov son of a bitch!’ He tossed his head so that his thatch of blond hair flayed around.
Lara put a hand on his and smiled at him sweetly. ‘Sergey, my little fish, can we get on with the briefing, please?’
Sergey harrumphed but she ignored him and looked at the others. ‘So, now we have Raskolnikov, how are we going to get him back to Moscow?’
The airforce officer Fyodor came into his own here. He pulled a document wallet out of a briefcase; his eyes narrowed as he looked at the papers. ‘Moscow has the best air defence system in the world but I have some ideas for getting around it.’
He talked them through, with Alex and the others chipping in suggestions. After a while they had finalised things as much as they could, and Sergey’s attention began to wander.
‘Right! I now want you all to piss off downstairs and eat and drink! I am going to explain to Alex why we are fighting for the soul of Russia!’
The authoritarian side of the soul of Russia was making itself felt to Roman Raskolnikov that same evening.
He lay on his bunk in Barrack 9 and looked at the ceiling. He was at the top of the stack of four beds, shoved right under the planks. He slept there so that no one could get at him during the night—it was not unheard of for prisoners to be found with their throats slit in the morning. Two politicals who supported him and Big Danni slept in the three bunks below him to act as protection.
It was the half-hour after dinner when the men were allowed a few dingy electric lights so that they could get ready for bed and do their chores: darning socks and bartering for cigarettes with favours of one kind and another. He could hear the hundred other men in the hut moving around, muttering and cursing. They were only allowed a bath once a week and the place had the reek of old sweat.
He knew he should be using his time wisely—repairing boots and clothes, chatting to find out useful information, filing down a small knife to use or sell—but he was just too exhausted after his day dragging logs in the forest. The sinews in his shoulders and forearms felt like they had been pulled out of him.
His sawdust mattress was thin and conformed to his
hipbone so that it rested on the hard wooden bed boards. He lay still, staring at the cobwebs of hoar frost in the corner of the roof. It was below freezing in the hut and he slept fully clothed with his feet stuffed into the arms of his jacket and his head under an old blanket.
That had been his 868th day in the camp and he was still alive, so he had something to be grateful for. The slack-mouthed rapist, Getmanov, had watched him closely during the day but hadn’t gone anywhere near him and none of the guards had beaten him up as they sometimes did when the mood took them. So, overall, it had been a good day.
There were only 4,607 more to go.
In another world, in an opulent, warm mansion in South Kensington, Sergey peered at Alex through his fringe in a way that made him unsure if he was drunk or just being very searching. They were now alone in his office.
Sergey said slowly and emphatically, ‘Sashenka, I can see from your face that you are not a man of no consequence, you are not a man who is blown here and there.’ He flapped his right hand back and forth on the table. ‘You are a man who understands the meaning of suffering.’ He laid the hand, palm up, on the table between them in a gesture inviting assent.
Alex narrowed his eyes and looked back at him suspiciously. He didn’t want to have a deep conversation with Sergey. The Russian’s typical lack of personal boundaries was invading Alex’s very well-defined English ones.
He could guess why he had said what he did; old girlfriends had always told him that he had a brooding look. His height, dark hair and the strong bones of his face gave him an air of authority that they said they liked. But Alex had never realised how his personal demons manifested themselves.
Sergey pressed on.‘Last night you questioned the integrity of my motives for this coup—that maybe I am in it just for the money. Well, a lot of people are!’ he admitted. ‘But to
be me, and to take the lead in this, to risk everything,’ he gestured around at the magnificent house, ‘you need much more than that.
‘And
you
,’ he pointed at Alex, ‘need to understand that I am
committed
.’ He held a hand to his heart.
‘OK,’ Alex said calmly.
Sergey swept his hand out. ‘We all look for something for meaning to coalesce around in our lives and for me this operation is the meaning of life!’ He banged the table and then stood up, and began pacing around. ‘I know we Russians are a bunch of miserable fuckers—“Today is worse than yesterday but better than tomorrow”,’ he repeated the expression with a tired wave of the hand as he walked around and then turned back to Alex. ‘Comrade, forgive me, the lack of light eats away at the soul. But,’ he held up a finger and looked at Alex, ‘this Russian sadness is actually a truer appreciation of humanity. You see you can only be truly happy once you have been truly sad. A Russian understands this—that all emotions are just facets on the jewel of the human soul! In the west of Europe you have this obsession with happiness that demeans that jewel; you see only half of it, but the Russian soul has many sides.’ He used that expression again:
Russkaya dusha
.
Alex was struggling to keep up with the way Sergey was flicking from one thing to another.
‘The world of the soul touches our everyday world in the same way that the waves of the sea touch the shore. Sometimes it is a gentle lulling motion that calms our hearts.’ He sighed with mock contentment, and rested his head on one side on his folded hands with closed eyes, as if asleep. Then he woke up suddenly. ‘Often, when we are tired and spiritually dead, it is like when the tide is out, the sea seems a long way away, we cannot even see the water; the dry beach
goes out for ever.’ He stretched an arm out, looking across the room with a far-off gaze. Then he jabbed his finger insistently as he spoke. ‘But at other times, like this, the sea is a crashing wave that pounds against us, forcing us to move! That is what it is like for me now. I cannot ignore it!’ He clutched his head. ‘The spirit has spoken to me at this time—and what must I reply with? I must reply with magnificence! A magnificent spirit, a great heart,
Russkaya dusha
!’
He calmed down and looked at Alex questioningly. ‘Maybe every country has a soul—I don’t know. What is the British soul?’
Alex shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well…I hadn’t really thought about it,’ he said evasively. He was actually impressed with the fury of Sergey’s feelings but he hated being pressed on his own thoughts. He had always found it safer to keep them to himself.
Sergey continued regardless, ‘Well, Russia has a soul, a magnificent soul. If you could know the warmth of its people, the strength of its fathers, its mothers, its families…But, it has two sides to its soul. Just as it has a magnificence so it also has a subservience. Its governments…’ He held up a hand in despair. ‘I have to be honest with you, Alexander Nikolayevich. We have had the longest history of…’ he paused to get the right words and then spat each one out, ‘brutal, oppressive, corrupt, useless governments of any country!’ He listed them on his fingers. ‘Mongols—psychopaths! The Tsars—fucking idiots! Stalin—the second greatest mass murderer in history! Russia deserves better than this! Krymov wants to turn us back the way we came. Ever since the Mongols our freedom has been suppressed by these autocrat sons of bitches! But we were not meant for it! We are not born into slavery! You see…’
He had a sudden moment of inspiration, stopped and
then bounded over to one of the huge bookshelves lining the room. He hunted along the shelves, muttering to himself, ‘Come on, you fucker, where are you?’
‘Ah!’ He pulled a large volume out.‘This is Chekhov, writing to his publisher.’ He opened the book where a piece of paper was stuck in it. ‘He was the same as me before all this bullshit,’ he waved a hand around to indicate the house and his riches, ‘a humble provincial lad. So he’s explaining how he developed from being a cowed boy to a freedom-loving adult.’
He paused as he hunted for the right passage and then carefully read out: ‘“Write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.”’
He nodded in agreement, put the book down, came back to the table and sat down at the head of it.
‘So the question he is asking is the same one I am facing today: which part of the Russian soul will win? Its slave soul or its free soul? You see, this is why I love Russian literature! In Russia we explore our soul through our novels. Every one is an expedition into our unconscious and
you
must read them to know us! To do this mission!’ he cried enthusiastically.
‘And how many people share your enthusiasm for this mission?’ Alex made a circular motion with his hand to indicate the people who had been in the room.
Sergey ticked them off on one hand. ‘Well, I know Lara understands me, Grigory and all the TV people care about human rights and press freedom, Fyodor…’ he made a tipping gesture with his hand and then sighed. ‘Alexander, I may look like a lunatic but I am not naïve enough to believe that Lieutenant-General Fyodor Mostovskoy is doing this because of his love of the Russian soul or his humanitarian
concern for the people of Russia. He couldn’t give a fuck about them. All Fyodor cares about is himself and money. He hates Krymov because when they merged Mikoyan and Sukhoi and all the other Russian aircraft manufacturers into the United Aircraft Corporation, he and the airforce didn’t get nearly the share of control on the board that he feels they deserved. That’s why he is able to get us the support of the airforce as a whole, because they want the entire military-industrial complex restructured in their favour and away from Krymov’s cronies.
‘So I have promised him that when we win, he will be very well rewarded. So then he’ll feel happy.’ Sergey paused, then grinned and flicked an eyebrow. ‘Until he decides he wants something else, but we’ll deal with that later.’
His mood became very serious. He leaned close and laid a hand on Alex’s forearm. ‘Alexander, I am speaking to you alone for a reason. I have to tell you something that the others can’t know at this stage…’ He looked down for a moment. ‘I may require you to carry out another…mission, when we get to Moscow.’
‘Riiight,’ said Alex warily. He withdrew from Sergey’s grasp and folded his arms as the Russian outlined the extra requirements.
Sergey concluded with, ‘I don’t know what missions you have done before but this one is going to be a motherfucker! You will need a big heart to get through it.’
He clutched Alex’s arm again with one hand and pointed at him with the other. ‘
You
are my man in this!
You
are leading the fight! Vasily Grossman said that when he was in Stalingrad only those with quiet at the bottom of their souls survived. You will have to find that quiet place in your soul—where the wolf drinks from the river at midnight—and then you will find your courage!’
Alex stared back at him, trying to take it all in.
By the time Sergey had finished his rambling explanation of the plan he had forced a lot of food and drink down Alex, so that he was feeling somewhat befuddled when he eventually left.
He stood on the pavement, swaying slightly as the large electronic gate clicked shut behind him. He shook his head and looked around the darkened street, trying to remember which way was home.
His senses were definitely not working well. After he stumbled away, a man in the patch of gloom across the street muttered into a lapel mike on his heavy parka, detached himself from the shadows and followed him.
Sergey continued pacing up and down his meeting room for some time after Alex had left.
He talked animatedly to himself, waved his arms around, pulled books off the shelf and flicked through them; lovingly reacquainting himself with favourite passages, nodding or frowning as he did so. His mobile phone rang several times and each time he glanced at the number, grunted and ignored it.
As he sat down on his day bed with a copy of Sholokov’s
And Quiet Flows the Don
, it rang again.
He grimaced, looked at the screen and saw the word: ‘
Vozhd
’.
The Boss.
It was Stalin’s old nickname and Sergey used it for the secret, secure communication channel that Krymov had insisted on having with him.
He hurriedly put his book down, stood up and became very animated as he answered the call.
‘Yo, Comrade!’ he began.