Honey for the Bears Page 21

  On the drive to the port, Paul said in careful Russian to young Opiskin:

  ‘I must say this. I admired your father’s work very much. He was a great man.’ Slums, wall-eyed windows of decaying warehouses, Bradcaster when he’d been a boy, Byzantine glories, canals slid by. The car was dirty; its ashtray was jammed full. Paul wanted to cry. ‘A very, very great man.’ The son of the great man giggled.

  The port gates. The passport. The little official gaped in. Paul’s bride leered phallically. But it was all right. They were waved on towards the tramlines, bales, sheds. Paul breathed. At last they came to the huge terminal, the landward entrance with its great stone steps, crowds mounting in the dim electric light—excited as though going into a theatre. And a fine stage set had been mounted at the far, sea, end: a real throbbing ship with cyclorama of Baltic summer stars. The sea-monster siren cried and cried forlornly. Paul, aware of much money in his pockets, heartened by the dark bustling, gave the car-driver a rouble for carrying the bags up the steps.

  ‘Da svidanya,’ said young Opiskin.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ said Paul savagely. ‘You’re an English lady, get that? You know no bloody Russian.’

  The crowd in the customs-hall was immense, and this suited Paul well. Moreover, as if this were a wartime embarkation of troops, formalities were being conducted under the most ghostly of blue lamps. Paul’s bride clomped through the crowds unnoticed. An English clergyman, oboeing ‘Mrs Gunter, where is Mrs Gunter?’, was shooing his flock through to the quay—a sort of small mothers’ union, dishevelled and flushed as from an outing to hell. There were two Lancashire workmen, gnarled and bespectacled, jacketless and in braces, one of them saying, ‘T’booggers can’t mek tay.’

  It was easy, easy. They slid through the customs formalities; the passport was stamped in a bored trance, the dangerous page barely glanced at; they were out under the warm summer sky, in the boarding queue, the Alexander Radishchev comforting as some huge docile lighted mother beast, her port flank glowing with teats of portholes. A passenger, drunk but not uncultivated, drank in the plethora of bright Northern stars, his Adam’s apple working, saying, ‘And that’s Pluto up there—Pluto, the arsehole of the solar system.’ Safe, safe, safe. They were close to the toiling gangway when a voice called:

  ‘Mr Gussey! Mr Gussey!’

  Ah well, they had tried, it had been very nearly a successful venture …

  ‘I was looking,’ panted Zverkov. ‘In the bar, I thought … A drink, a last drink … So this is Mrs Gussey.’ Young Opiskin giggled. Resigned, Paul dragged him out of the queue. It was dark, though; thank God it was dark.

  ‘She’s not very well,’ said Paul. ‘I want to get her into her bunk right away. She’s not had much of a holiday.’ Young Opiskin giggled.

  ‘She is a fine handsome woman,’ said Zverkov gallantly. ‘I hope,’ he said to Paul, ‘there are no hard feelings. We were only doing our duty, Karamzin and I.’

  ‘Where is the good Karamzin tonight?’ asked Paul.

  ‘It is the evening for his cultural class. He is studying the History of Choreography. But he sends his kindest regards. And he hopes you do not mind too much about the teeth.’

  ‘Oh, it was only four,’ said Paul. ‘I’ve got plenty at the back.’

  ‘It was the result of a little misunderstanding, Mrs Gussey,’ explained Zverkov. Here, under the stars, in the warmth of the ship’s huge flank, Zverkov seemed very small, very ill-dressed; what hair he had was untidy in the light breeze. ‘No real harm was meant.’ Young Opiskin giggled. ‘I am sure,’ frowned Zverkov, ‘we have already met.’

  ‘I don’t really think so,’ Paul put in quickly. ‘My wife’s been in hospital all the time.’ Young Opiskin giggled again and rolled his large shoulders.

  ‘She has a great sense of humour,’ said Zverkov. ‘She laughs at your misfortune and at her own. The English-speaking peoples generally have a great sense of humour. I hope,’ he said to Paul, ‘you enjoyed being in our country. I do not think you will want to come again. There are so many other places in the world to see.’ He sank to sudden Russian gloom. ‘We are happy here,’ he said defiantly. ‘We go our own way. We are not always understood.’ His eyes seemed suddenly drawn to the muscular forearm of young Opiskin.

  ‘It was fine,’ said Paul. ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’ He extended his hand. Zverkov ignored it. Instead, he grasped Paul tightly round the body, a real bear-hug, and kissed him heavily on both cheeks. Then he made as to do the same to young Opiskin. ‘Don’t,’ warned Paul. ‘She may have something infectious.’

  ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ cried Zverkov as Paul, carrying the suitcases, said politely to young Opiskin, ‘After you, sweetheart,’ and sent him clomping up the gangway. The taffrail above was lined with cheering men, some cranking football rattles. Soon Paul could look headlong down upon Zverkov, who waved and waved like a bumboat-woman. Then the pretty dark stewardess said, ‘Your cabin, please?’

  ‘Luxe,’ said Paul. ‘It’s all been arranged by a Mr Madox.’

  ‘Luxe, oh yes. It is the suite that Comrade Khrushchev himself once travelled in, by. Which is right: “in”, “by”? Perhaps “on”? We try always to improve our English.’

  Paul sighed. ‘I shall be happy to give you a lesson …’ No, no, that would not do at all: not with this hefty clomping bride, already leering at the stewardess in a manner perhaps intended to be sisterly; not with his own Dracula fangs. ‘Sometime,’ he said vaguely. They were led down a ship-smelling corridor (oil, fried fish, a ghost of sea-sickness) towards the bridal suite. Posters, posters everywhere; wall-newspapers in which the only news was warty roaring goblinesque Khrushchev; finally they approached the bed, beds, in which Khrushchev had slept.

  ‘Who slept with Mr Khrushchev?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Oh, somebody else,’ said the stewardess vaguely. ‘Somebody who is not now much talked of, about.’

  It was a roomy Edwardian suite. Paul locked the outer door and inspected every corner and cupboard, sniffing like a cat. Sitting-room with big square lights looking out on a working deck; club chairs, oilcloth-covered table, broken radiogram, a book or two about the achievements of the Party. Bedroom with twin canopied beds and a worn though deep carpet between them. Bathroom strangled with buff-painted pythons of pipes and shiny with flywheels and levers. Bathing would be a muscular job. Safe, safe, safe.

  Paul spoke Russian to young Opiskin, piercing him with two guardian eyes. ‘Khorosho. Get into that bed and stay there. You must undress first. No, do not remove that garment. A lady’s bosom is supposed to be a permanent fixture (postoyannaya dolzhnost’). Here is your aunt’s night-dress.’ He saw those sentences as curiously disjunct—an exercise from Teach Yourself Russian. Young Opiskin leered up at him from his bed, horribly male, then giggled. ‘All right,’ shuddered Paul. ‘In here it is permitted to talk—but very, very quietly.’

  ‘Vodka.’ Young Opiskin made swigging motions, his arm-muscles rippling. ‘Now.’

  ‘You must wait. Wait till we move off and the bar is opened.’ Paul sat down on his own bed. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What will you do in Helsinki?’

  ‘Herra Ahonen,’ said young Opiskin, doing a mime of steering with arms spread wide enough for a cart-wheel.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know Mr Ahonen’s going to meet us in a car, but what then? How will you live? Royalties from your father’s works won’t last for ever.’ Young Opiskin looked as though he had never before heard that word ‘royalty’ (gonorar). He frowned and lighted a Droog cigarette that made Paul cough. ‘What I mean is,’ said Paul, ‘that you must have some trade or profession. What have you been doing in Leningrad?’

  Young Opiskin laughed as though that were the biggest joke in the world. It was Paul’s turn to frown. And now the ship hooted farewell to the shore. The eager passengers cheered from the port taffrails. Finger-tip contact with the huge bed of a land where, under some mattress, Belinda was lodged like a pea—this was now lost. Inch by inch Leningrad wa
s pushed away towards the past.

  ‘Vodka now,’ said young Opiskin.

  ‘I’ll ring the bell,’ sighed Paul. Bell: kolokol. That work by Opiskin père. A kind of boiling sweet-smelling jam gushed up at its memory; he gushed jammily at Opiskin fils, ‘Never mind. Everything will be all right. You shall be looked after, poor boy.’ But young Opiskin didn’t seem too worried, lying there smoking in his aunt’s outsize cotton night-dress. Though he evidently did not trust Paul as a person (the lower-jaw gap did not really invite trust), he seemed to have a sort of sacramental confidence in the power of the money that had been paid out. Having pushed the bell-button in the bedroom, Paul went out to wait by the corridor door. With the promptness of response that, after all, a luxe passenger had a right to expect, a knock came. It was a loud knock, cheerful rather than deferential. Paul opened up. ‘Oh God, no,’ he groaned.

  Burton or John Collier evening jacket, baby face, red Stuart nether lip. It was Yegor Ilyich, officer formerly in charge of the first-class dining saloon of the Isaak Brodsky, the ship in which Paul and Belinda had made the outward voyage. He recognized Paul right away and began, dancing in nimble pumps, to box him, pushing him with each mock blow farther and farther into the sitting-room. ‘Ah,’ he went, ‘I get name soon soon soon—Dyadya Pavel, yes? And where you missis?’ He made loud pouting smacking noises at the air.

  ‘Out,’ said Paul. ‘Stay out of that bedroom. She’s ill—do you hear? Keep away,’ he warned.

  But Yegor Ilyich danced thither, hair and lower lip ashine under the miniature candelabra. The play-punch he aimed at Paul’s gut gently connected. It would not normally have hurt much, but Paul had, the previous day, suffered a blow there which had not been meant in play at all. Yegor Ilyich corantoed and lavoltaed into the bedroom, singing a roguish ‘Aaaaah’. Paul was after him, cursing, rubbing his belly. Yegor Ilyich stood agape, staring at the occupied bed. ‘This not you missis,’ he remarked. ‘This not nobody missis.’ That summed it up pretty well. Young Opiskin should not have been scratching himself. Not, anyway, in that particular spot.

  11

  ‘A JOKE,’ SAID PAUL, WITH AN ARCHAIC SMILE. (OR, AT LEAST, he could have scratched that particular spot through the bedclothes. Paul was not pleased with young Opiskin, who seemed to grow progressively less intelligent all the time. He didn’t take this matter of life and death with the correct Slav seriousness.)

  ‘Zhok?’ said Yegor Ilyich’s vivid lip.

  ‘Yes, yes. A shootka.’ Holding this bright toothless smile was like holding his arms up. ‘My wife is not here, she is somewhere else. This man pretends, for a joke, to be my wife. It is funny, yes?’

  ‘Shootka,’ said Yegor Ilyich, without much mirth. ‘Da, da—shootka.’ (On the other hand, thought Paul guiltily, young Opiskin had paid out good money to be transported to safety; he might also reasonably expect, as a decent married woman, to be protected from dancing incursions by over-familiar chief stewards.) ‘Now,’ said Yegor Ilyich, ‘what I bring?’ He frowned in a puzzled way at young Opiskin; Paul did not like that frown. ‘I bring sturgeon, sour cream, red caviar, yes?’

  ‘Drink,’ said Paul. ‘We would like to drink. And, oh——’ He pulled out from his inner pocket a deck of good English currency and lick-thumbed off a pound—no, make it two. ‘This joke,’ said Paul, ‘is a good joke. You not tell, no?’ Make it three. Yegor Ilyich said:

  ‘For five I not say.’ Greed showed, corruption. He had been corrupted by the wealth of Tilbury, by the crammed windows of consumer goods round Fenchurch Street Station. ‘My kids, yes? In London I buy, yes?’ Make it five, blast him. (‘This is the son of great Opiskin, whose music poor Robert loved.’) Yegor Ilyich tucked the money in his breast pocket, behind his five-pointed snowy handkerchief. His sloe-eyes followed the wad back to Paul’s pocket. ‘Six, yes? Little ting for my wife?’

  Paul wondered what was best to do with Yegor Ilyich. He imagined young Opiskin arising, terrible in his aunt’s night-dress, to lift clobbering fists at Paul’s request. Hide Yegor Ilyich, bound and gagged, in the bathroom, in a roomy wardrobe, till disembarkation time (1200 hours) tomorrow? Throw him into the Baltic? A long sleep, a sufficient silence. He said:

  ‘You and I go together to bar to drink, yes?’ He swigged air from his fist. To young Opiskin he said, ‘Charlie, old boy, you wait here and I shall bring you something back,’ winking, still fist-swigging. Young Opiskin giggled. Yegor Ilyich began box-dancing again. Come on, come on, get him out of here, get him to forget.

  ‘The bar?’ said Paul, out in the corridor, the key in his pocket. Yegor Ilyich led him by a sort of crew’s way, through knots of dirty card-playing sailors and a sort of still-room where an under-cook drooped cigarette-ash over a tray of open sausage sandwiches he was preparing. They entered the first-class bar through a kind of trap-door and were cheered. There was some heavy drinking going on. It was because of these statutory hundred-gramme measures, sternly served out by a man in a thick undervest. This first-class bar was filthy—a snarl at bourgeois pretensions—and all drinks seemed to be served in beer-glasses. A respectable-looking trembling sort of old woman was handed a crème-de-menthe that looked like a small green light ale. But it was mostly men, singing men, some wearing team-rosettes and cranking rattles. ‘Cognac, one bottle,’ said Paul, ‘and never mind about glasses.’ A small wiry man with spectacles said, on a rising intonation, ‘Aye aye.’

  Paul took a small burning mouthful. ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  Yegor Ilyich sank a tenth of the bottle. ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘This,’ said a youngish man with a braying voice, ‘is a sure sign of lack of control at the top. My father talked till his dying day of a small hotel in Torquay where the head waiter came into the dining-room smoking a cigarette.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye. Peace to bloody world.’

  ‘Right,’ said the small wiry man vigorously, ‘peace is what we want, right? We don’t want any more like the last lot. Not that I didn’t enjoy some of it, I’ll say that. But if there’s going to be any more hanky-panky it’ll be you Russky bastards as’ll start it.’

  ‘They’re the same as what you and me are, the ordinary common people,’ said another man who, for some reason, struck Paul as having cancer. ‘The man in the street, that is. Tom, Dick and Harry—though they don’t have those names there.’ He was terribly grey and thin. Paul, for the first time that night, thought of death. The firing squad re-formed in his brain. Death, death, death.

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  He would get Yegor Ilyich drunk if it was the last thing he did. Drunk, incapable, incoherent, snoring till noon tomorrow. Oh, let it be tomorrow, let it be all over. Paul saw himself in some Helsinki bar, young Opiskin waved off to some new free life of his own making; a clean Finnish bar, women’s eyes like blue Sibelian lakes, a beer or two till the plane. He instinctively pressed his foot hard on the deck as on an accelerator. Hurry, hurry, hurry, noctis equi.

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘The ordinary worker, the ordinary trade union member, as it might be, doesn’t want war,’ said the cancerous man.

  ‘I,’ sighed the braying young man, ‘have specialized in the Early Tudor Voyages. Read Hakluyt. Read the accounts of the Muscovy Company. The Russians haven’t changed. 1554. Chancellor reports, “They be naturally given to great deceit, except extreme beating did bridle them.” And again, “As for whoredom and drunkenness there be none such living: and for extortion, they be the most abhominable under the sun.” What they were then they are now. They can’t be trusted.’

  ‘You,’ said a fattish man with well-greased pale hair, ‘would be a professor, then?’

  ‘A lecturer. Not a professor. Not yet.’

  ‘You’re speaking for your own class, mister. That’s how it is. The professor class. Now for the rest of us here it might be different.’

/>   ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye. English man oh kyeh. English woman oh bloody kyeh. Zhok,’ laughed Yegor Ilyich.

  ‘That’s right, see. He’s a Russian and he’s a worker. He’s got this fancy evening dress get-up on, but that’s like his uniform, see, but he’s still a worker.’

  ‘He’s not doing much work now.’

  A man with a rosette played a loud bar of rattle-music and said, ‘They worked all right yesterday afternoon against our lads. Pity there’s no buying and selling across the Iron Curtain. That outside-left of theirs, what’s his name?’

  ‘Nastikoff or summat.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye.’ The bottle was nearly empty. Paul had pretended to drink his share, but Yegor Ilyich had, so Paul judged, downed a good seven-eighths. His eyes flamed like Christmas snapdragons, his lower lip was essential ultimate Creation-day red, Chesterton’s God’s colour, but the man himself was sober, upright, ready to carry on. A little crowd was gathering round.

  ‘Is this a contest, like?’

  ‘—Gave away a penalty for hands and then that shot went under the bloody bar. Then from their right wing to What’s-his-bloody-name and then on to the other bugger——’

  ‘Summat ending in insky.’

  ‘Then right into the bloody net.’

  ‘“—And the barbarous Russes asked likewise of our men whence they were, and what they came for: whereunto answer was made, that they were Englishmen sent into those coasts, from the most excellent King Edward the sixt, and seeking nothing else but amity and friendship and traffic with the people, whereby they doubted not, but that great commodity and profit would grow to the subjects of both kingdoms——’”