Red Square (46 page)

   
'I have friends here.'

   
'Get them out.' Beno slipped his cap back on and adjusted the holes over his eyes. He took one step down. 'If you don't . . . good luck.' Then he plunged, a darkling figure, into the crowd.

   
Arkady climbed the rest of the way to the jostling lights at the top of the steps, arriving just as a spokesman emerged protected by guards carrying bulletproof shields. Ringed by cameras, the spokesman was outside just long enough to announce that snipers had been seen on the roofs of nearby buildings. He ducked back inside, but the journalists stayed in clear sight to check notes.

   
Irina had appeared with the spokesman and remained outside. 'You came,' she said.

   
'I said I would.'

   
Her eyes were set deep with exhaustion and brilliant with exhilaration at the same time. 'Stas is inside on the second floor. He's on the phone to Munich. They still haven't cut the wires. He's broadcasting right now.'

   
Arkady said, 'You should be with him.'

   
'Do you want me to go?'

   
'No, I want you with me.'

   
As more tracers fanned across the sky, the loud-hailer insisted futilely on an absolute blackout. Cigarettes reappeared, along with gas masks - a perfect Russian blackout, Arkady thought. As the sound of patrol boats approached on the river, the lights of a convoy appeared on the far bank. The women in the outer line had started to sing, and parts of the crowd picked up the song and swayed, so that in the dark they looked like the surface of a sea or a plain of grass in a wind.

   
'Let's wait with them,' Irina said.

   
They walked down the steps, through the defence ring of the Afghan veterans and past a row of candles freshly lit. Other veterans in wheelchairs had arrived and had run chains through the spokes of their wheels. Women shielded them with umbrellas. Now
that
must have made a parade on the way here, Arkady thought.

   
'Keep walking,' Irina said. 'I didn't get down here before. I want to see.'

   
People were sitting, standing, slowly circulating as if at a fair. They would all have different memories later, Arkady was sure. One would say that the atmosphere around the White House was quiet, grim, purposeful; another would remember a circus air. If they lived.

   
All his life Arkady had avoided marches and demonstrations. This was the first one he had ever willingly come to. The same could be said, he suspected, of the other Muscovites around him. Of the construction workers who formed the unshaven and unarmed inner troops. Of the mousy apparatchiks who set down their briefcases to hold each other's hands and form a human ring - so many that there were fifty rings of them around the White House. Of the women doctors who somehow, out of empty hospital storerooms, had scavenged bandages.

   
He had an urge to see each of their faces. He wasn't the only one. A priest moved along a row giving absolution. He noticed artists who were making white pencil portraits on black paper, passing them as gifts.

   
The mystery is not the way we die, it's the way we live. The courage we have at birth becomes hoarded, shrivelled, blown away. Year after year, we become more alone. Yet, holding Irina's hand, for this moment, for this night, Arkady felt that he could swing the world.

   
A piece of paper was pushed into his other hand. Look at this face, it was familiar, it was the one he was born with. Sound grew as a vortex in the rain. Overhead a helicopter shook the air and shot a flare that dropped, a matchhead in a well.

Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge the guidance I received in Moscow from Vladimir Kalinichenko, Alexander Stashkov, Yegor and Chandrika Tolstyakov; in Munich from Rachel Fedoseyev, Jorg Sandl and Nougzar Sharia; and in Berlin from Andrew Nurnberg and Natan Federowskij. Generous assistance was also given by Nan Black and Ellen Irish Smith, courage by Knox Burger and Katherine Sprague.

   
Once again, the compass of this book was Alex Levin.

   
The errors are all mine.