Honey for the Bears Read online

  ‘Sheer bloody irresponsibility,’ he cried. ‘You Russians are nothing but bloody little kids.’ He took his wetness over to Karamzin, shouting, ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ and wrung his shirt on to Karamzin’s laughter-ruined mug. The spotty youth took fright and ran to the door, slopping his tray.

  Zverkov was mirthful but still controlled. ‘Shvabra,’ he called to the lad, meaning a mop. The floor was pooled with tea, though the desk had been more or less spared. The lad nodded and left hurriedly, dripping and splashing.

  ‘Khorosho,’ said Zverkov, with sudden seriousness. ‘We will forget all about that.’ He spoke some fast coaxing Russian to Karamzin. Karamzin did his best, shaking his head, wiping his face with a rather dirty handkerchief.

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ said Paul. ‘Who is this man Efimov?’

  ‘He’s the head of our department,’ said Zverkov, the smile coming back. ‘It was rude to laugh, but we Russians are very fond of laughing.’ Karamzin illustrated that remark with a brief—but now evidently controllable—burst. ‘Colonel Efimov is, you see, an important man and a big man. He is what you would call a very male man.’

  ‘And you imply that I’m not?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ said Zverkov, only his eyes smiling now. ‘It is that Colonel Efimov is large and strong and could kill a man with one blow of his big fist. He is over six feet in height. He is a very Russian man, you see. Please,’ he added hastily, ‘I am implying nothing about you. You are perhaps a very brave and clever man and you are certainly a very impudent and bold man to pretend to be Colonel Efimov.’

  ‘I did not,’ said Paul, suddenly quite tired. ‘It was this man Madox whom I met on the boat, you understand, and he gave me this invitation card when I met him again by chance, and—oh, what’s the use?’

  ‘Madox?’ said Zverkov to Karamzin, hunched and frowning.

  ‘Madox.’ Karamzin, his laughter now totally ebbed, shrugged. Nobody knew anything about Madox.

  ‘Angleruss, Angleruss,’ crooned Zverkov. ‘It is an organization for good relations between the UK and the USSR. We know nothing against it. It has something to do with an old woman in a wheelchair. An old woman you could describe as eccentric.’

  ‘Or it might be an old man,’ said Paul.

  ‘Or it might be an old man,’ agreed Zverkov. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have wasted much time and learned nothing. Perhaps,’ he went on, gloom suddenly curling about him like tobacco smoke, ‘you are really telling us the truth after all. But you told us so many lies before—lies about your purpose in coming to Leningrad, lies about your leaving Leningrad, lies about Colonel Efimov. One cannot really tell what is the best thing to do,’ he said unhappily. Karamzin, fully recovered from his manic fit, spoke long stern Russian to Zverkov. ‘That could be done, that might be possible,’ said Zverkov in English.

  ‘What?’ asked Paul, who had understood nothing of Karamzin’s speech.

  ‘I have to go away for a little now,’ said Zverkov. He began to bundle papers together in a way that seemed arbitrary. ‘I can leave you to my colleague here. You will be in good hands.’

  ‘Am I going to be beaten up?’ asked Paul.

  Zverkov was shocked; he tutted. ‘We do not use such primitive and barbarous methods,’ he said. ‘We are a civilized people and we conduct our inquiries in a civilized way.’

  Paul felt sorry for himself. ‘What’s to happen to me?’ he said, his lower lip drooped and quivering. ‘I’ve no money, no money at all. All I wanted was just a few roubles and then to go off to a hotel and have a meal and a sleep. And now I’ve got nothing, nothing.’ His eyes dazzled. ‘All I have is an open return ticket for my wife and myself. And my poor wife’s in hospital.’ Zverkov, touched, patted him thrice on the shoulder on his way to the door. He said:

  ‘You mustn’t worry, my friend. Everything will be all right. Those things will happen which are destined to happen. One cannot fight against the big historical processes.’ And he nodded at Karamzin. ‘I shall be back in about twenty minutes,’ he said, to Paul, ‘and then perhaps we can make an end of all these things.’ So he went out and Karamzin, his former truculence fully restored, drank in a good long look at Paul. Paul said:

  ‘Well, what do we do now?’

  Karamzin said, ‘First, you stand up.’ Paul stood up. Karamzin said, ‘You remember in the hotel, the night when you came, you struck on the cheek a woman too weak and gentle to strike back. A Soviet worker who was doing her duty. You remember?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Paul. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Karamzin, and he himself got slowly to his feet and stood looking up at Paul. He was a good three inches shorter. ‘This,’ he said, ‘you will remember also.’ And he swung his right arm in a great arc and flapped a great ringing smacker with his flat hand on Paul’s ear. The ear played loud electronic musique concrète. The pain was great; it was back to childhood with a vengeance.

  ‘You can add to that first alleged act of violence,’ said Paul, rubbing away at the loudly hosannaing frostbite, ‘two similar ones, perpetrated on yet another fine specimen of Soviet womanhood. One was administered in irritation, the other as part of an erotic assault. You’d better avenge those too, you cowardly bastard.’

  Karamzin made a large mottled fist. Paul noticed a cheap but gaudy scarab ring on the ring-finger. ‘You cowardly and dirty bastard,’ he said. Karamzin struck Paul on the mouth and, before that could register, followed it with another fist full in the belly. ‘Oh no,’ said Paul. ‘Hardly that.’ He began to double. It brought it all back as though etched out in an elaborate firework setpiece in the nerves, the detail astonishing: a playtime in the playground and that little bastard Evans with his giggling one in the breadbasket followed by crony cheers, the subsequent sensation as of too much Christmas dinner except for the pudding: as for the pudding, that had been somehow fitted into a specially contrived hollow in the belly (open at the front as in some vivisection display) and then brandy-soaked and set blazing. Karamzin said:

  ‘Now you will talk. Or if you will not talk you can have the same thing again.’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Da!’ called Karamzin. The door opened and the little spotty lad came in, carrying a mop in the shoulder-arms position. He seemed impressed by what he saw. Paul, noticing the mop and re-noticing the mess of tea on the wooden floor, felt a sort of relief that after all he was not going to put anybody to too much trouble. Mopping-up had to be done anyway. Still he said:

  ‘Sorry about this.’ Then he was down on his knees, opened his mouth as to pray, and ballooned out an astonishing mess. Karamzin went chaaa with disgust. ‘I said I was sorry, blast you,’ gargoyled Paul, and he did it again. Blood too, he noticed. Rvota i krov’: vomit and blood. That would make a good enough title for a new Russian epic of violence. ‘I think I’ve finished,’ he said apologetically to the mop-constable. Having got that out of the way he could concentrate on the pain: that was a big job, a big work. The spotty boy did not make too handy a job of mopping: he pushed the mess in instalments towards the open door. ‘Look,’ said Paul, still on his knees, ‘I wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t done what you did, so you did that really.’ His speech came slurred and wooden out of what seemed to be the mouth of a letter-box. The lad seemed to have a bucket out on the corridor, the mop-head being turned and wrung in it to the faint noise of retching. Karamzin didn’t seem too happy, either. He stood above Paul in a stock-still posture of some minor god not sure that it wanted to be prayed to, while Paul, on his knees, prayed out, like Arabic ejaculations, the last coughs and heaves and strings of bloody spittle. Karamzin snapped at the mopping constable to hurry. Soon Paul heard the plash and gurgle of liquid being sluiced down a water-closet, the rattle of the pail-handle and the gong of the pail’s body knocking against something. Seeing the floor damply clean, he wondered if he ought to crawl out to that toilet, which seemed to be next door to this office. But then it seemed to him that the trinity of hot pain
s could now take over: the inner need was spent. He got to his feet, though still doubled, and grotesquely minuetted to the nearest chair. Karamzin did not stop him. Karamzin was weeping. Paul stared. Karamzin was weeping.

  ‘You do well to weep,’ Paul said, squaring the wretched phonemes, beating all the deformed words into rough but recognizable shapes. ‘You have shown,’ he tried to say, ‘that modern Russia is really the Western tourist’s dream after all.’

  ‘Aaaaaaoooooo,’ went Karamzin, now also in a chair, his head in his arms on the desk, like a patient who has heard the doctor’s death-sentence. The room had, in fact, the shadowy sepia look of a surgery in some such Edwardian Royal Academy anecdote. ‘Nye khotel—’ he seemed to be trying to say, all muffled. ‘Aaaaaooooo.’ Paul now wondered whether Karamzin had done something unintentionally lethal to him; he felt around his face with trembling fingers, encountering blood and a fat lip, also a gap of a thumb’s thickness between canine and canine in his lower jaw. Sore gum, blood, a space. The denture had been knocked out. Paul, doubled up like a racing cyclist, was near enough to the floor to see that it was lurking nowhere coyly, ivory and pink. There was no doubt, no doubt at all, that it had been mopped out of the room and into the bucket and then down the drain. It would now be gnashing its tiny way along deeply submerged pipes towards the Baltic.

  ‘You swine,’ said Paul, ‘you brutal sod.’ He was aware of the subtle coarsening of the sibilants; it seemed to him in an instant’s delirium that they had become a special sound which eighteenth-century orthographers represented with an f; a gloomy procession filed by, all with frontal gaps in the lower jaw—Dr Johnson, Garrick, Wilkes, Mrs Williams, Bet Flint, Samuel Foote. ‘You beaftly fwinifh fadift,’ said Paul.

  Karamzin got up from his chair and came blindly over towards Paul, his hands groping. Paul found it easier to get down than up, so, on all fours, he crawled away from the maudlin penitence, still in great pain. He could think of no specific spot to crawl to, so he just crawled, searching hopelessly for his denture. He heard odd sobs from Karamzin above him, Karamzin speaking English now, saying, ‘I did not … It was not … I did not think.’ Paul said to the floor, ‘Ah, fhut up.’ Then he reached a corner of the room and, as if sheltering from bitter winds, crouched in it, holding his belly. Karamzin now howled:

  ‘Bobrinskoy, Bobrinskoy, Bobrinskoy …’ He repeated the name until its owner arrived. Its owner was the spotty constable; he opened the door and seemed surprised that that should, after all, be his name. Karamzin gave loud orders. Paul recognized most of the key-words: it seemed that he was to have his wounds attended to and be given cognac to drink. But before the constable could bring what was needed, Zverkov came back. Karamzin cringed and had somehow the fawning look of a dog that knows it has been naughty. He seemed to be trying to hide Paul from Zverkov, as though Paul were a dirty mess he had done in the corner. Which was what Paul really felt he now was. He would have been content to be covered with sawdust and shovelled up and carted off to dung some collective farm or other. Zverkov looked down at Paul in horror. He said:

  ‘Open your mouth.’ Paul obediently uncovered blackness in which red flickered, flanked by wolfish infangthief and outfangthief. ‘He has knocked them out,’ said Zverkov. ‘He has gone too far. He often goes too far. This excess is our great Russian fault. It is a matter of swinging from one extreme to the other. That way, to speak confidentially, much of our work is spoiled.’ He looked down sadly at Paul.

  ‘Filthy Ruffian fodf,’ said Paul’s black hole. ‘Finifh thingf off. Go on, fend me to fodding Fiberia.’

  ‘Oh, Siberia is nothing to be frightened of any more,’ said Zverkov. ‘It is all very modern there now.’ He shook himself out of what he recognized to be an impertinent didactic phase. ‘But,’ he said, ‘we are not sending you anywhere. Except, yes, out of here. Yes, I think there is really not much more point in keeping you.’ Karamzin still cowered a little but was visibly regaining his confidence.

  ‘A pleafant exhibition,’ said Paul. ‘Me with my teeth knocked out for no reafon. I fhall expofe you, baftardf.’ But already the f was being levelled under s. ‘Swine,’ said Paul.

  ‘Comrade Karamzin is very sorry for going too far,’ said Zverkov handsomely. ‘But there is no proof of anything. There is nobody to say you did not enter these headquarters in the condition you now enjoy.’ He said this without irony.

  ‘You mean,’ said Paul, ‘all sick and bloody and punched up? That’s a good one, that is.’ Pain shot through his stomach. He embraced it tight, keening, swaying to and fro in his corner. ‘Soviet police methods,’ he said at length. ‘That will be something for the Sunday papers.’

  ‘Oh, we can remove all traces of violence,’ said Zverkov. ‘We can shave you and cut your hair and send you out in your good suit. An English gentleman.’

  ‘With no teeth.’

  ‘You have some teeth still,’ said Zverkov judicially. ‘As for the teeth you have not, you came to our country without them already. Who is to say otherwise?’

  ‘What was your pal here crying about, then?’

  ‘He was crying for you. Crying for a lost soul full of original sin. For an English gentleman who came here with some teeth missing and intending to do harm which he was never ultimately able to do.’

  ‘Have you been to the cinema lately?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Ah,’ said Zverkov, with wide courtly gestures that seemed not necessarily sarcastic. ‘We are to sit down comfortably like old friends and discuss the Art of the Cinema.’ And he sat behind his desk, made an airy cage out of both thumbs and all fingers, and smiled parsonically. Karamzin, suspicious—some wild creature of the steppes replacing the guilty dog—remained standing. Paul kept to his corner. He said:

  ‘Not really like friends. There was a newsreel, you see. I saw this newsreel. It was at the Barrikada Cinema.’ A fresh twinge made him see a screen, a TV screen, with a belly-grasping commercial for STUMS: Pain can strike any time, any place—Dear, homely, far Britain. ‘What I saw was the return of the Delegation of Soviet Musicians from England. We travelled on the same ship. We disembarked at the same time. What I saw was not only the Soviet musicians but myself as well. Yes, myself, presumably mistaken for one of the musicians. Myself flashing teeth at the camera of Lenfilm or whoever it was. I saw myself, teethed.’ Zverkov frowned. ‘I know,’ said Paul, ‘that “toothed” is the correct form, but “toothed” seems to imply one tooth only. “Teethed” is what I was.’ He grinned without mirth and knew just how horrible that grin must look. Both Zverkov and Karamzin surveyed him attentively.

  ‘I must have been seen,’ Paul said, ‘by millions of Soviet citizens. The return of the Delegation of Soviet Musicians must have been an important event. It will still be going the rounds of the provinces. Perhaps now it’s being seen in Siberia. An event to be remembered. And soon that film will rest in the archives, testifying that I arrived on your shores with a full set of teeth.’

  ‘A lie,’ growled Karamzin, conventionally.

  ‘Ah no,’ said Paul, shaking his head slowly and wearily. ‘No lie. Check up on it, you sadistic bastard.’

  ‘It will be true,’ admitted Zverkov briskly. ‘There is every reason to suppose that, this time at least, he is telling no lie. An Englishman,’ he explained to Karamzin, ‘would not have the imagination to invent such a story. The English are not like the Russians—not any more. They were like the Russians at the time of their Queen Elizabeth I, when they produced their Shakespeare. But not now.’ He nodded several times, his chin pressed to his larynx. ‘It is the kind of thing, the thing he said, that is bound to be true.’ His voice came out very deep. ‘Well,’ he said, with sudden cheerfulness, ‘there is no great harm done. We must get you back to England very quickly, that is all.’ His head had come soaring up from his neck, rather tremulous in a coquettish way, as if shaking abundant newly shampooed locks. ‘We shall have you out of here on the next available transport.’ Karamzin now sat down rather petulantly and began
chewing his nails.

  ‘You’ll have to get my wife out of hospital first,’ said Paul. ‘I’m not going without her.’

  ‘We hear all the time about your wife,’ said Zverkov. ‘Yet we never see her. And you have proved yourself to be such a liar, too. Where do you say she is?’

  ‘In the Pavlovskaya——’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. We shall telephone. Karamzin will telephone. Or I. It doesn’t matter which one. If, as you say, you have a wife here in Leningrad, that will be two people to arrange passages to England for. And yet,’ said Zverkov sadly, shuffling through Paul’s documents again, ‘you have here two open return tickets. Perhaps you have been misjudged. Well, we shall see. Perhaps you have not told so many lies as we thought.’ He looked tired and worried. ‘Who knows? Who knows anything of the depths of man’s soul?’

  7

  THE CELL THAT PAUL WAS TAKEN TO WAS A CHEERFUL SLUMMY sort of place, already occupied by three happy prisoners who greeted Paul warmly and, when they discovered that he was an Englishman, hugged him simultaneously like three bears. Two of them were young golden giants—brothers, they said, held on a charge of starting a byesporyadok or disturbance on a skinful of kvass. It did Paul’s heart good to be with them: such muscle, confidence, good-nature, blue-eyed innocence. And their smell was so wholesome, too: it was of work, socks and (the kvass with them not building up to poison but breaking down to its homely elements) rye flour and malt. The third prisoner was a hale old man in pyjamas whose trousers lacked a cord, so that they were held up by a bunchy waist-knot of the striped cotton itself. The trouser-legs thus riding up to the knee, the old man’s varicose calves were fully disclosed. It was as if to divert attention from these that he exploited to the full a clinical endowment—a glass eye which stayed still while its live fellow rolled comically. The brothers were kept in shouts and tears of laughter. For Paul’s special benefit the old man, who knew that England was still Christian, laid on a gruesome crucifixion scene—gurgling, gagging, the left eye rotating like mad while the glass one stared, the man himself curling bare toes round the wood of the lower bunk, arms stretched on the wood of the upper. There were two of these double bunks; there was also a latrine bucket; there was nothing else.