Honey for the Bears Read online

  ‘Oh,’ said Paul, ‘such nonsense. They’re not giving anything away. I personally am paying them good sterling for a very indifferent return. Hosts, indeed.’ He thirsted terribly again, so took another deep draught from his bottle. Seeing the eyes on him as he did this, he could see also that it might be taken as a provocative gesture.

  There was a student with a cardboard mitre on, ‘HAVE A BASH’ scrawled across his chest. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘are you doing going to Russia anyway, mate?’ Paul had been asked that question once today already, though more genteelly. He wished its first asker were there now: he or she would make short work of these blotched impertinents. Paul said:

  ‘That could be regarded as my business.’

  ‘Ah,’ said many.

  ‘Ah,’ said the boy-bishop, leering. ‘Just what some of us thought. All shrouded in bloody mystery, eh? Sent out by some Yank organization most likely, fomenting racial hatred. His missis is a Yank,’ he told everyone. ‘Tries to cover it up by speaking posh, but she is. What’s she on tonight then, eh?’ he demanded, prodding Paul with a broom-handle crozier.

  ‘You can leave my wife out of this,’ said Paul, keeping the heat down but his grip on the bottle-neck.

  ‘Watch it,’ said a Church Father in the background. ‘He’s one of them given to violence. Last stab of a dying régime.’

  ‘It’s sods like you,’ said the Staffordshire lout-friar, ‘that undoes our work. We go out to teach our comrades a bit of the English language, like, and them to teach us their lingo, and booggers like you come along to arse things up. You believe in war, don’t you? That’s what it is. Not satisfied with one bloody Hiroshima but you must have hundreds of others. Oh yes. Well,’ and he gripped Paul’s lapels, twisting them through an arc like a steering-wheel, ‘you won’t find us lot fighting your dirty wars for you. Nothing but bloody trouble from your generation from first to last.’ He did a right-hand-down, then released the lapels, dusting off his working-lad’s hands after.

  ‘To revert to Opiskin,’ said Miss Travers. ‘It was a perverse and wilful act to do what he did. I refer, of course,’ she said in the tones of a WEA lecturer, ‘to that abomination Akulina Panfilovna. Slyly sending the score off to Costoletta in Milan, and we all know Costoletta. Then Covent Garden puts it on. I suppose you were there, weren’t you?’ she accused. ‘I should imagine you had tickets for the first night.’

  ‘I don’t even know what it is,’ confessed Paul. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea at all what it’s all about.’

  ‘Akulina Panfilovna,’ said Miss Travers in clear Manchester monophthongs, ‘is an opera. If, of course, you can call such a reactionary hotchpotch an opera. The heroine is a Leningrad prostitute. There are, of course, no prostitutes in Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev or any other Russian town or city.’ She was into her WEA stride now; the debauched mock-clerics and pseudo-angels were adenoidally attentive. ‘This Leningrad prostitute is meant to symbolize modern Russia. Oh, very clever,’ she admitted, ‘very clever the way this ambivalence is brought in. You don’t know how to take her.’ Somebody guffawed at that. ‘Quiet, you,’ snapped Miss Travers. ‘Pay attention. The indomitable Russian spirit triumphing over all odds and all that jazz——’

  ‘It sounds really interesting,’ said Paul, really interested. ‘I’m sorry I missed it. And,’ he added, ‘it sounds very orthodox.’

  Miss Travers spat a bitter laugh at him. ‘The setting was contemporary. Akulina Panfilovna was meant to be here and now, sneering at the collective society, the depraved individualist living her own life——’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Paul.

  ‘You shut it,’ said the friar, ‘when Miss Travers is talking.’

  ‘Ambivalent,’ repeated Miss Travers. ‘Nothing satirical in the conception of the character, either musically or from the point of view of the libretto. Satire of the most vicious sort reserved for the State officials who are her customers——’

  ‘And who wrote the libretto?’ asked Paul. He must certainly watch out for this; he must ask Miss Travers to write down the name for him.

  Miss Travers barked loud and hollow. ‘Russapetov,’ she said. ‘Russapetov is now doing a clerking job in Okhotsk. That ought to cool him down.’ She was most vindictive. Paul wondered why; she seemed to him to be a quite decent lower-middle-class Manchester woman on whom an education had been pasted. He asked:

  ‘And what about Opiskin?’

  ‘Look,’ threatened the boy-bishop. ‘You were on about that this afternoon. We want no more of that, see? If you want to do some mike-taking, do it with your own sort. Like the Yanks,’ he sneered.

  ‘You know all about Opiskin,’ said the friar. ‘Don’t let on not to. Opiskin’s your pal.’

  ‘Was,’ corrected Miss Travers. ‘Opiskin is dead. As you very well know.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Paul. ‘As I keep on telling you, I know nothing about it.’ Certain images, terribly knotted, strangulated, began to be born. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘What you seemed to imply this afternoon,’ said Miss Travers, ‘was that Opiskin was killed.’

  ‘And was he?’ asked Paul. He was at once struck a dull head-blow by the student with a cross on his back. ‘Hey,’ said Paul, rubbing his head, ‘I’m not having that, you know.’ He raised his bottle threateningly. There was a clumsy little stampede away from him. A hundred grammes of beer shot down his sleeve. Everybody laughed, including the Mongol barman. ‘You can shut up for a start,’ Paul snarled.

  ‘There you are, you see,’ said a squinting youth with an ill-improvised biretta. ‘On to the poor bloody workers again.’

  ‘I’m getting out of here,’ said Paul sullenly. ‘I think this whole thing is in very bad taste. On behalf of the first-class passengers, I hereby protest most strongly against this crudely offensive blasphemy. It lets us all down. Moreover, it indicates that you’re all deplorably behind the times.’

  ‘He has the gab-gift, I’ll say that,’ said a student who, mocked-up as a priest, clicked a little too cosily into the part. Others sulked and pouted at Paul’s words.

  ‘That was all right in the old days,’ said Paul, ‘this cheap sneering at the opium of the masses. Things, you’ll find, are very different now in the Soviet Union. More liberal.’

  ‘The less Soviet Union it,’ said a cultured voice above the laughter. The speaker, in bulky brown blankets corded out of a dressing-gown, was Chaucer’s Monk to the life; bald, beardless, no fore-pinèd ghost. Ah well; clericalism could be seen to contain its opposite, the one as old as the other. ‘They must be set a good example.’ Homosexual, thought Paul; undoubtedly. And then he said to Miss Travers:

  ‘Music. Is that your line? Do you know the works of Opiskin, all of them?’

  She nodded very gravely. ‘I have (or rather had) to know them. I wrote an article for Musika. It was condemnatory, even then, but total knowledge must,’ she said sententiously, bare horrid legs straddled, ‘always precede total condemnation.’ The students admired. ‘What is it you want to know about?’

  The images were untangling. Robert, newly grounded; himself, never winged. The Russian course at Fintry (all those plans for ever-closer liaison; why Fintry of all places?) and Robert’s nerves going to pieces when that record was playing, something that happened in less than four minutes (a twelve-inch record, that was certain). ‘A piece, as I remember,’ said Paul, ‘that was all jangly. All pianos and harpsichords and bells and xylophones. Would there be such a piece?’ He frowned, trying to hear it in his head.

  ‘There would indeed,’ said Miss Travers promptly. ‘That piece would be Kolokol, Opus 64. The rot already setting in, the ghastly bug of formalism biting him. He’d already been warned,’ she said sternly, as though she herself had done the warning, ‘but he persisted in experimenting with sonorities. He used the twelve-tone system, he tried microtonalism, even multilinear counterpoint of a highly chromatic kind. And this at a time when his native Leningrad was fighting for its life against the German Fascis
ts. He gave the people nothing to inspire them. The seeds of that final treachery were already germinating.’ One or two students clapped.

  ‘What do you mean,’ said the boy-bishop, ‘saying that things is different now in the Soviet Union? Have you been let in there before?’

  ‘Robert was there,’ said Paul, ‘last year. I mean, my friend was there.’ Robert. That work by Opiskin that was all bells. Soon the final image would burst. A girl dressed as a fallen angel burst into the group before the bar—French knickers, black stockings, brassière, tattered cheese-cloth wings, her sweet young face pertly made up into a whore’s. But her whiff of genuine angelic innocence seemed to turn sour the poor atheistic masquerade. She cried:

  ‘Miss Travers, Mr Korovkin’s up and playing the piano. Everybody’s to go and dance.’ Miss Travers said:

  ‘Comrade Korovkin, dear,’ and put her blunt fingertips on the girl’s delectable shoulders. ‘Well, well, so he’s better, is he?’ She gave Paul a malevolent look.

  ‘Look,’ said the boy-bishop, jerking his crozier towards Paul, ‘don’t we do this one first? Don’t we fill him in to like teach him a lesson?’

  ‘Aw,’ said the Staffordshire friar, ‘leave the sod to his conscience.’

  ‘A general confession,’ said the mock-priest without satire. ‘We don’t all dance, you see.’

  For some reason it suddenly seemed to Paul right and just that he be punished. One of the two dialectical angels within him urged that it was always as well to accept punishment when it was offered. Bank statements lied: one was always really in the red; one should pay in while one could. It might help with this vague guilt about Robert, whom these louts called Opiskin; that was all right, that would do. Paul said:

  ‘I don’t mind. So long as it doesn’t show too much. One ought to look one’s best entering a strange city.’ And he suddenly quite liked these sweating loose-mouthed youngsters. The angelic girl, like a light, shone on them and disclosed a cowering sort of innocence; they knew not what they did. Miss Travers was different, of course; Miss Travers knew. He smiled humbly.

  ‘I reckon,’ said a student who was a sort of, in Dylan Thomas’s phrase, Jack Christ, ‘I reckon he’s not too bad of a bloke.’ Pop-singer’s long locks; jazzman’s curly beard; a frail cross of broom-handle and walking-stick conjoined. ‘What I mean is, he’s willing, and that’s a great deal. What I mean is, he’s in the wrong but he admits it. I reckon he ought to be let go.’

  ‘Everybody’s to dance,’ said the angel-child.

  All things contain their opposite. The Staffordshire friar grunted and said, ‘Well, if we’re to go in there to have a dance—and let’s be honest about it: those records they’ve been putting on was all right for frog-dances and going round the bloody maypole, if they have maypoles in the Soviet Union——’

  ‘They have May Day,’ said the child, and she made it sound (the diphthongs close, very good girls’ school diphthongs) clean and pretty, as in an eclogue.

  ‘… But not much good for aught else. I’ll be honest with you,’ he said boldly to Miss Travers, ‘but there’s some things about the Russians that are just that little bit old-fashioned——’

  ‘Fashion,’ said Miss Travers primly, ‘is a very bourgeois concept.’

  The friar suddenly looked very weary. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’d better have us a drink before going in.’ And then students, pulling out sterling from odd places in their garments, were vying with one another to buy Paul a glass of something. He settled for cognac (the statutory hundred-gramme flask) and was soon on fire with a blowlamp (though quite sexless) love. But he knew that that too contained its opposite; if he did not get back to his bunk soon he would start brawling. Still, he suffered himself to be led in a jolly anti-religious procession to the Cultural Saloon. Dancing was going on there: priest with nun, saint with martyr, friar with monk; Comrade Korovkin, beaming, hammered ‘Some of These Days’ in a twenties style that had nothing of conscious antiquarian whimsy about it; putting in corny riffs, he giggled not at the joke but at his daring. Paul shone benevolently on the young dancers. To the friar he said:

  ‘I still think it’s in bad taste, you know, all this sort of thing….’ He indicated Jack Christ dancing with his cross for partner. The friar said:

  ‘Well, if we’re going to be honest, I thought so too, really. It’s a question of the way you’re brought up. Us lot were Unitarians, and my old man was very strict. But once one starts the rest has to follow. Otherwise they start saying you’re chicken.’

  ‘Whose idea was it, then?’

  ‘Oh, it was that old doctor thing in the wheelchair. The one that’s always going on about St Petersburg. I reckon it’s what they call a moph. Like the Marines in that Kipling poem.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘You can say that,’ said the friar passionately, ‘but I love Kipling. He foresaw the end of everything.’

  ‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I meant the other thing.’

  ‘Oh, that. Dared us, as you might say. Wouldn’t get out of the saloon when we were having the committee meeting. Said we wouldn’t have the guts to do it. And now isn’t here to see that we have. It’s my belief—’ here he dropped his voice ‘—my belief that it’s a very high-up Soviet agent. In disguise. Watching what’s going on. A very clever people is the Russians.’

  4

  ‘I SHOULD HAVE LIKED IT,’ SAID BELINDA. ‘I HAVEN’T DANCED for ages.’

  That Godless ball had proved to be no dream. ‘The Captain himself,’ the young Dane had said, tucking into his blood sausage at breakfast, ‘broke it up at two a.m.’ He’d chewed, smirking with morning health and relish. Paul had seen the Captain once or twice, P. R. Dobronravov, a man about his own age with long eyes and a complicated though shapely mouth. ‘It was made clear,’ the Dane had continued, ‘that officially the Establishment is all for Godlessness, but certain considerations of decency must be observed.’ Paul had bowed his head over the cooling rice pudding. ‘It was Third Officer Koreisha,’ the Dane had said, a well-informed and self-satisfied young man, a traveling expert on torpedo pigs, ‘who reported the shamelessness to the bridge. Having no longer any religion, the Russians are a very moral people, you see.’ Paul’s other table companions had been, that morning (they seemed to change at every meal), a Polish engineer who owned no necktie, his three sons, his fat wife whom, even when eating, he devoured with his eyes. This Pole had spread the rumour that Paul kept his own wife locked in the cabin.

  Belinda felt better, though the rash was still angry. It was now afternoon and both were confined, like all the other passengers, to their quarters. They were gliding into the outer roads of Leningrad; the customs and immigration men were aboard. Shut in and smoking, Paul’s heart apprehensive, they awaited a visitation—the knock, the boots, the uniform, the searching questions in perfect English. He had filled in the form, made his false declaration; he was entering Russia as a criminal. The Russians were a very moral people.

  ‘And,’ said very smart Belinda, ‘I doubt if we’ll find much gaiety in the People’s Paradise. It’s all chess, isn’t it? Chess and canteen tea.’ Tea: that was always a pejorative term with her, a true daughter of Massachusetts. ‘Slopping tables,’ she went on, her mouth stretched to the lipstick, ‘the clack of ping-pong bats in the distance. Baked beans on toast.’ There they were, the old interpenetrating opposites: baked beans came from Boston; hell was her childhood, finding images from wartime England, her introduction to dirty tired Europe in her smart Red Cross uniform. She was always smart, very American in that. She’d elected to stay in England, though, a glutton for punishment, a secretary with Time-Life in Bruton Street until Paul married her. She just loved old things; that’s how they’d met—Paul, manager for F. Tyson, The Curio Shop, in Richmond, selling her an old copper jelly-mould. It was chiefly her bit of money (inherited from her mother) that had established P. Hussey, Objects of Antiquity and Beauty, in Winchelmarsh, East Sussex. But he loved her too, very much, and not
just, though she was three years older than he, as a mother or big sister. Beauty, yes; Antiquity, no: she could look as fresh as that fallen angel of last night. If Antiquity came into it at all it was in the context of pagan goddesses. ‘And then a jolly sermon at ten o’clock,’ she said, still lip-sticking, so that all her words were prissily spread and chewed. ‘The padre on duty they used to call him.’ She sheathed her lipstick and stowed it in her bag. ‘The boys slurping their tea quiet as they can, because of the Word of God.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ smiled Paul, ‘you know full well that’s a British YMCA, not the USSR.’ He saw her point, though: earnestness and direction; an ideology informing everything, even the taste of baked beans. On his knee he had a paperback English Dr Zhivago. This was his decoy, prohibited literature: on the fly-leaf he was carefully ball-pointing the title into Cyrillic characters, so that the book might not by any means be passed over. The Customs people could confiscate this and forget about the drilon dresses.

  ‘The See See See Pee,’ said Belinda, looking out on a Baltic as merry with sun as the Mediterranean. There were small craft about, sunburnt sailors waving, smiling; hammer and sickle on red wind-mad flags ceased to be grim emblems of labour and became lingam and yoni signs. In the far distance the great northern city lined the whole horizon. ‘And there again,’ she said. ‘I suppose they’d call that a trawler. CCCP on its bows or whatever they are.’ Hers was an inland family. She puzzled it out for herself—CCCP—her charming low brow frowning under her still raven widow’s peak. She gave it up. ‘The world,’ she said, ‘is melting into initials. Alphabet crackers in its soup.’

  ‘Their C is our S,’ said Paul, always eager to explain, ‘and their P is our R. It stands for Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialistichyeskikh Respublik. Which means literally USSR.’