Edge of Eternity (51 page)

After the set, Byron Chesterfield came to the dressing room.

He was about forty, and wore a beautiful light-blue suit with a waistcoat. His tie had a pattern of daisies. His hair was receding either side of an old-fashioned brilliantined quiff. He brought a cloud of cologne into the room.

He spoke to Dave. “Your group is not bad,” he said.

Dave pointed to Lenny. “Thank you, Mr. Chesterfield, but it's Lenny's group.”

Lenny said: “Hello, Brian, don't you remember me?”

Byron hesitated a moment, then said: “My life! It's Lenny Avery.” His London accent became broader. “I never recognized you. How's the stall?”

“Doing great, never better.”

“The group is good, Lenny: bass and drums solid, nice guitars and piano. I like the vocal harmonies.” He jerked a thumb at Dave. “And the girls love the kid. You getting much work?”

Dave was excited. Byron Chesterfield liked the group!

Lenny said: “We're busy every weekend.”

“I might be able to get you an out-of-town gig for six weeks in the
summer, if you're interested,” Byron said. “Five nights a week, Tuesday to Saturday.”

“I don't know,” said Lenny with indifference. “I'd have to get my sister to run the stall for me while I was away.”

“Ninety pound a week in your hand, no deductions.”

That was more than they had ever been paid, Dave calculated. And with luck it would fall in the school holiday.

Dave was annoyed to see Lenny still looking dubious. “What about board and lodging?” he said. Dave realized he was not uninterested, he was negotiating.

“You get lodging but not board,” Byron said.

Dave wondered if this was at a seaside resort, where there was seasonal work for entertainers.

Lenny said: “I couldn't leave the stall for that kind of money, Brian. Pity it's not a hundred and twenty pound a week. Then I could consider it.”

“The venue might go to ninety-five, as a personal favor to me.”

“Say a hundred and ten.”

“If I forgo my own fee I can make it a hundred.”

Lenny looked at the rest of the group. “What do you say, lads?”

They all wanted to take the job.

“What's the venue?” Lenny said.

“A club called the Dive.”

Lenny shook his head. “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

“Didn't I mention that?” said Byron Chesterfield. “It's in Hamburg.”

•   •   •

Dave could hardly contain his excitement. A six-week gig—in Germany! Legally, he was old enough to quit school. Was there a chance he might become a professional musician?

In exuberant mood, he took his guitar and amplifier and Linda Robertson to the house in Great Peter Street, intending to drop off his gear before walking her home to her parents' place in Chelsea. Unfortunately his parents were still up, and his mother waylaid him in the hall. “How did it go?” she asked brightly.

“Great,” he said. “I'm just dropping off my gear, and I'm going to walk Linda home.”

“Hello, Linda,” said Daisy. “How nice to see you again.”

“How do you do,” Linda said politely, morphing into a demure schoolgirl; but Dave could see his mother taking in the short dress and the sexy boots.

“Will the club hire you again?” Daisy asked.

“Well, a promoter called Byron Chesterfield offered us a summer job at another club. It's great because it's all during the school holiday.”

His father came out of the drawing room, still wearing his suit from whatever Saturday night political meeting he had attended. “What's happening in the school holiday?”

“Our group has a six-week engagement.”

Lloyd frowned. “You need to do some revision in the vacation. Next year you have the all-important O-level exams. To date, your grades are nowhere near good enough to permit you to take the whole summer off.”

“I can study in the day. We'll be playing in the evenings.”

“Hmm. You obviously don't care about missing the annual holiday with your family in Tenby.”

“I do,” Dave lied. “I love Tenby. But this is a great opportunity.”

“Well, I don't see how we can leave you alone in this house for two weeks while we're in Wales. You're still only fifteen.”

“Er, the club isn't in London,” Dave said.

“Where is it?”

“Hamburg.”

Daisy said: “What?”

Lloyd said: “Don't be ridiculous. Do you imagine we're going to allow you to do that at your age? It must be illegal under German employment law, for one thing.”

“Not all laws are strictly enforced,” Dave argued. “I bet you illegally bought drinks in pubs before you were eighteen.”

“I went to Germany with my mother when I was eighteen. I certainly never spent six weeks unsupervised in a foreign country at the age of fifteen.”

“I won't be unsupervised. Cousin Lenny will be with me.”

“I don't see him as a reliable chaperone.”

“Chaperone?” said Dave indignantly. “What am I, a Victorian maiden?”

“You're a child, according to the law, and an adolescent, in reality. You're certainly not an adult.”

“You've got a cousin in Hamburg,” Dave said desperately. “Rebecca. She wrote to Mam. You could ask her to look after me.”

“She's a distant cousin by adoption, and I haven't seen her for sixteen years. That's not a sufficiently close connection for me to dump an unruly teenager on her for the summer. I'd hesitate to do it to my sister.”

Daisy adopted a conciliatory tone. “From her letter I got the impression of a kind person, Lloyd, dear. And I don't think she has children of her own. She might not mind being asked.”

Lloyd looked annoyed. “Do you actually want Dave to do this?”

“No, of course not. If I had my wish, he would come to Tenby with us. But he is growing up, and we may have to loosen the apron strings.” She looked at Dave. “He's going to find it harder work and less fun than he imagines, but he may learn some life lessons from it.”

“No,” said Lloyd with an air of finality. “If he were eighteen, perhaps I'd agree. But he's too young, much too young.”

Dave wanted to scream with rage and burst into tears at the same time. Surely they would not spoil this opportunity?

“It's late,” said Daisy. “Let's talk about it in the morning. Dave needs to get Linda home before her parents start to worry.”

Dave hesitated, reluctant to leave the argument unresolved.

Lloyd went to the foot of the stairs. “Don't get your hopes up,” he said to Dave. “It isn't going to happen.”

Dave opened the front door. If he walked out now, without saying anything else, he would leave them with the wrong impression. He needed them to know they could not stop him going to Hamburg easily. “Listen to me,” he said, and his father looked startled. Dave made up his mind. “For the first time in my life, I'm a success at something, Dad,” he said. “Just understand me. If you try to take this from me, I'll leave home. And, I swear, if I leave I will never, ever, come back.”

He led Linda out and slammed the door.

T
anya Dvorkin was back in Moscow, but Vasili Yenkov was not.

After the two of them had been arrested at the poetry reading in Mayakovsky Square, Vasili had been convicted of “anti-Soviet activities and propaganda” and sentenced to two years in a Siberian labor camp. Tanya felt guilty: she had been Vasili's partner in crime, but she had got away with it.

Tanya assumed Vasili had been beaten and interrogated. But she was still free and working as a journalist, therefore he had not given her away. Perhaps he had refused to talk. More likely, he might have named plausible fictitious collaborators who the KGB believed were simply difficult to track down.

By the spring of 1963 Vasili had served his sentence. If he was alive—if he had survived the cold, hunger, and disease that killed many prisoners in labor camps—he should be free now. Ominously, he had not reappeared.

Prisoners were normally allowed to send and receive one letter per month, heavily censored; but Vasili could not write to Tanya, for that would betray her to the KGB; so she had no information; and no doubt the same applied to most of his friends. Perhaps he wrote to his mother in Leningrad. Tanya had never met her: Vasili's association with Tanya was secret even from his mother.

Vasili had been Tanya's closest friend. She lay awake nights worrying about him. Was he ill, or even dead? Perhaps he had been convicted of another crime, and had his sentence extended. Tanya was tortured by the uncertainty. It gave her a headache.

One afternoon she took the risk of mentioning Vasili to her boss, Daniil Antonov. The features department of TASS was a large, noisy
room, with journalists typing, talking on the phone, reading newspapers, and walking in and out of the reference library. If she spoke quietly she would not be overheard. She began by saying: “What happened about Ustin Bodian, in the end?” The ill treatment of Bodian, a dissident opera singer, was the subject of the edition of
Dissidence
Vasili had been giving out when arrested—an issue written by Tanya.

“Bodian died of pneumonia,” Daniil said.

Tanya knew that. She was pretending ignorance only to bring the conversation around to Vasili. “There was a writer arrested with me that day—Vasili Yenkov,” she said in a musing tone. “Any idea what happened to him?”

“The script editor. He got two years.”

“Then he must be free by now.”

“Perhaps. I haven't heard. He won't get his old job back, so I'm not sure where he'd go.”

He would come to Moscow, Tanya felt sure. But she shrugged, pretending indifference, and went back to typing an article about a woman bricklayer.

She had made several discreet inquiries among people who would have known if Vasili had returned. The answer had been the same in all cases: no one had heard anything.

Then, that afternoon, Tanya got word.

Leaving the TASS building at the end of the working day, she was accosted by a stranger. A voice said: “Tanya Dvorkin?” and she turned to see a pale, thin man in dirty clothes.

“Yes?” she said, a little anxiously: she could not imagine what such a man would want with her.

“Vasili Yenkov saved my life,” he said.

It was so unexpected that for a moment she did not know how to respond. Too many questions raced through her mind: How do you know Vasili? Where and when did he save your life? Why have you come to me?

He thrust into her hand a grubby envelope the size of a regular sheet of paper, then he turned away.

It took Tanya a moment to gather her wits. At last she realized there was one question more important than all the rest. While the man was still within earshot she said: “Is Vasili alive?”

The stranger stopped and looked back. The pause struck fear into Tanya's heart. Then he said: “Yes,” and she felt the sudden lightness of relief.

The man walked away.

“Wait!” Tanya called, but he quickened his pace, turned a corner, and disappeared from view.

The envelope was not sealed. Tanya looked inside. She saw several sheets of paper covered with handwriting that she recognized as Vasili's. She pulled them halfway out. The first sheet was headed:

Frostbite

by Ivan Kuznetsov

She pushed the sheets back into the envelope and walked on to the bus stop. She felt scared and excited at the same time. “Ivan Kuznetsov” was an obvious pseudonym, the commonest name imaginable, like Hans Schmidt in German or Jean Lefevre in French. Vasili had written something, an article or a story. She could hardly wait to read it, yet at the same time she had to resist the impulse to hurl it away from her like something contaminated, for it was sure to be subversive.

She shoved it into her shoulder bag. When the bus came it was crowded—this was the evening rush hour—so she could not look at the manuscript on her way home without the risk that someone would read it over her shoulder. She had to suppress her impatience.

She thought about the man who had handed it to her. He had been badly dressed, half starved, and in poor health, with a look of permanent wary fearfulness: just like a man recently released from jail, she thought. He had seemed glad to get rid of the envelope, and reluctant to say more to her than he had to. But he had at least explained why he had undertaken his dangerous errand. He was repaying a debt. “Vasili Yenkov saved my life,” he had said. Again she wondered how.

She got off the bus and walked to Government House. On her return from Cuba she had moved back into her mother's flat. She had no reason to get her own apartment and, if she had, it would have been a lot less luxurious.

She spoke briefly to Anya, then went to her bedroom and sat down on the bed to read what Vasili had written.

His handwriting had altered. The letters were smaller, the risers
shorter, the loops less flamboyant. Did that reflect a change of personality, she wondered, or just a shortage of writing paper?

She began to read.

Josef Ivanovich Maslov, called Soso, was overjoyed when the food arrived spoiled.

Normally, the guards stole most of the consignment and sold it. The prisoners were left with plain gruel in the morning and turnip soup at night. Food rarely went bad in Siberia, where the ambient temperature was usually below freezing—but Communism could work miracles. So when, occasionally, the meat was crawling with maggots and the fat rancid, the cook threw it all into the pot, and the prisoners rejoiced. Soso gobbled down kasha that was oily with stinking lard, and longed for more.

Tanya was nauseated, but at the same time she had to read on.

With each page she was more impressed. The story was about an unusual relationship between two prisoners, one an intellectual dissident, the other an uneducated gangster. Vasili had a simple, direct style that was remarkably effective. Life in the camp was described in brutally vivid language. But there was more than just description. Perhaps because of his experience in radio drama, Vasili knew how to keep a story moving, and Tanya found that her interest never flagged.

The fictional camp was located in a forest of Siberian larch, and its work was chopping down the trees. There were no safety rules and no protective clothing or equipment, so accidents were frequent. Tanya particularly noted an episode in which the gangster severed an artery in his arm with a saw and was saved by the intellectual, who tied a tourniquet around his arm. Was that how Vasili had saved the life of the messenger who had brought his manuscript to Moscow from Siberia?

Tanya read the story twice. It was almost like talking to Vasili: the phrasing was familiar from a hundred discussions and arguments, and she recognized the kinds of things he found funny or dramatic or ironic. It made her heart ache with missing him.

Now that she knew Vasili was alive, she had to find out why he had not returned to Moscow. The story contained no clue to that. But Tanya knew someone who could find out almost anything: her brother.

She put the manuscript in the drawer of her bedside table. She left the bedroom and said to her mother: “I have to go and see Dimka—I won't be long.” She went down in the elevator to the floor on which her brother lived.

The door was opened by his wife, Nina, nine months pregnant. “You look well!” Tanya said.

It was not true. Nina was long past the stage when people said a pregnant woman looked “blooming.” She was huge, her breasts pendulous, her belly stretched taut. Her fair skin was pale under the freckles, and her red-brown hair was greasy. She looked older than twenty-nine. “Come in,” she said in a tired voice.

Dimka was watching the news. He turned off the television, kissed Tanya, and offered her a beer.

Nina's mother, Masha, was there, having come from Perm by train to help her daughter with the baby. Masha was a small, prematurely wrinkled peasant woman dressed in black, visibly proud of her citified daughter in her swanky apartment. Tanya had been surprised when she first met Masha, having previously got the impression that Nina's mother was a schoolteacher; but it turned out that she merely worked in the village school, cleaning it in fact. Nina had pretended that her parents were somewhat higher in status—a practice so common as to be almost universal, Tanya supposed.

They talked about Nina's pregnancy. Tanya wondered how to get Dimka alone. There was no way she was going to talk about Vasili in front of Nina or her mother. Instinctively she mistrusted her brother's wife.

Why did she feel that so strongly, she wondered guiltily? It was because of the pregnancy, she decided. Nina was not intellectual, but she was clever: not the type to suffer an accidental pregnancy. Tanya had a suspicion, never voiced, that Nina had manipulated Dimka into the marriage. Tanya knew that her brother was sophisticated and savvy about almost everything: he was naïve and romantic only about women. Why would Nina have wanted to entrap him? Because the Dvorkins were an elite family, and Nina was ambitious?

Don't be such a bitch, Tanya told herself.

She made small talk for half an hour, then got up to go.

There was nothing supernatural about the twins' relationship,
but they knew each other so well that each could usually guess what the other was thinking, and Dimka intuited that Tanya had not come to talk about Nina's pregnancy. Now he stood up too. “I've got to take out the garbage,” he said. “Give me a hand, would you, Tanya?”

They went down in the elevator, each carrying a bucket of rubbish. When they were outside, at the back of the building, with no one else around, Dimka said: “What is it?”

“Vasili Yenkov's sentence is up, but he hasn't come back to Moscow.”

Dimka's face hardened. He loved Tanya, she knew, but he disagreed with her politics. “Yenkov did his best to undermine the government I work for. Why would I care what happens to him?”

“He believes in freedom and justice, as you do.”

“That kind of subversive activity just gives the hard-liners an excuse to resist reform.”

Tanya knew she was defending herself, as well as Vasili. “If it were not for people like Vasili, the hard-liners would say everything was all right, and there would be no pressure for change. How would anyone know that they killed Ustin Bodian, for example?”

“Bodian died of pneumonia.”

“Dimka, that's not worthy of you. He died of neglect, and you know it.”

“True.” Dimka looked chastened. In a softer voice he said: “Are you in love with Vasili Yenkov?”

“No. I
like
him. He's funny and smart and brave. But he's the kind of man that needs a succession of young girls.”

“Or he
was.
There are no nymphets in a prison camp.”

“Anyway, he is a friend, and he's served his sentence.”

“The world is full of injustice.”

“I want to know what has happened to him, and you can find out for me. If you will.”

Dimka sighed. “What about my career? In the Kremlin, compassion for dissidents unjustly treated is not considered admirable.”

Tanya's hopes rose. He was weakening. “Please. It means a lot to me.”

“I can't make any promises.”

“Just do your best.”

“All right.”

Tanya felt overcome by gratitude, and kissed his cheek. “You're a good brother,” she said. “Thank you.”

•   •   •

Just as the Eskimos were said to have numerous different words for snow, so the citizens of Moscow had many phrases for the black market. Everything other than life's most basic necessities had to be bought “on the left.” Many such purchases were straightforwardly criminal: you found a man who smuggled blue jeans from the West and you paid him an enormous price. Others were neither legal nor illegal. To buy a radio or a rug, you might have to put your name down on a waiting list; but you could leap to the top of the list “through pull,” by being a person of influence and having the power to return the favor; or “through friends,” by having a relative or pal in a position to manipulate the list. So widespread was queue-jumping that most Muscovites believed no one
ever
got to the top of a list just by waiting.

One day Natalya Smotrov asked Dimka to go with her to buy something on the black market. “Normally I'd ask Nik,” she said. Nikolai was her husband. “But it's a present for his birthday, and I want it to be a surprise.”

Dimka knew little about Natalya's life outside the Kremlin. She was married with no children, but that was about the extent of his knowledge. Kremlin apparatchiks were part of the Soviet elite, but Natalya's Mercedes and her imported perfume indicated some other source of privilege and money. However, if there was a Nikolai Smotrov in the upper reaches of the Communist hierarchy, Dimka had never heard of him.

Dimka asked: “What are you going to give him?”

“A tape recorder. He wants a Grundig—that's a German brand.”

Only on the black market could a Soviet citizen buy a German tape recorder. Dimka wondered how Natalya could afford such an expensive gift. “Where are you going to find one?” he asked.