LITMIR.BIZ

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fair, they had been good to him in their way.

      His father said: ‘Wasn’t there some gossip about her and her private tutor?’

      ‘Was there? I didn’t know.’

      ‘Your father’s only telling you for your own good,’ his mother said.

      Viktor wondered if his father had been fortified by a few nips of vodka. ‘And I’m grateful,’ he said stiffly, ‘but I’m nineteen years old and capable of making my own judgements.’

      His father drummed his fingers on a bookcase crammed with esoteric volumes discarded by the library. ‘You’re going to see her now?’

      ‘You were listening to my conversation, you know perfectly well I am.’ He consulted his watch again. ‘And I’m late.’

      His father’s fingers returned to his beard but the combing movements were quicker. ‘You realise you are displeasing your mother and me. Do you think we deserve that?’

      Addressing his mother, Viktor said: ‘Look, you’ve been wonderful to me. If it wasn’t for you I might be living in a hovel, working on an assembly line; I might even be dead. I’ve never been disobedient before. But I’m a man now. And I have the right to choose my friends. After all, it is a free country. Isn’t it?’ turning to his father.

      His father said: ‘I’ve warned you.’

      ‘And your warning has been considered and dismissed.’ Viktor kissed his mother on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry but there it is: your little boy has grown up. And now I must rush.’

      He took a tramcar to the centre of the city. It was another fine day, cumulus cloud piled high on the horizon. Two more months and the jaws of winter would begin to close. But Viktor didn’t mind the long bitter months. Perhaps his parents had been Siberians. That would account for his blue eyes.

      He walked briskly through the Arbat, past sleeping dogs and a group of children wearing scarlet scarves and red stars on their shirts and old people in black becalmed in the past on the pavements.

      She was waiting for him at a table by an open window. A breeze breathed through the window stirring her black hair. She wore a yellow dress with jade beads at her neck. She was smoking a cardboard-tipped cigarette with nervous little puffs.

      ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

      ‘We haven’t time. Come, we can’t talk here.’ Outside she said: ‘You have to promise me, Viktor, that whatever you see you won’t tell a soul. You won’t say where you’ve been and you won’t say who with. Do you promise?’

      ‘Of course, it was understood anyway. Where am I going anyway?’

      She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘To a place of execution.’

      Apprehension was germinating inside him: she seemed so confident. ‘How do we get there?’ he asked. ‘Wherever there is.’

      She took his arm, propelling him along the pavements until they arrived at Theatre Square. There they caught a No 18 tram to the Kaluzhskaya Zastava and thence a No 7 to the Sparrow Hills.

      ‘And now?’ He looked at her questioningly, apprehensively. An old grey limousine answered his question. Anna pulled open the rear door and pushed him in. The car moved off, leaving her behind.

      The driver had cropped brown hair and his accent was Ukrainian. ‘I have one request,’ he said, ‘and it’s up to you whether or not you obey it. But I’d be grateful if you didn’t take too much notice of where we’re going.’

      ‘You seem to take it all rather lightly,’ Viktor said, ‘if we’re going to see what Anna claims we’re going to see.’

      ‘Is there any other way? In any case Anna says, through Nikolai Vasilyev, that you don’t believe there are any restrictions in the Soviet Union. If that is so why should I bother too much about what you see?’

      ‘But you do bother …’

      The shoulders in front of him, clothed in blue serge despite the heat, shrugged. ‘It’s immaterial. If you go telling tales then we’ll kill you.’

      The driver handed Viktor a flask. ‘A little firewater, perhaps, to prepare you for what lies ahead?’

      Viktor took the flask. He had only drunk vodka once and had considered himself quite sober until he had walked into the fresh air, whereupon he had collapsed. He took a sip and handed the flask back to the crop-haired enigma in front of him.

      The vodka felt like molten metal in his stomach.

      From the crown of the Sparrow Hills, he could see the valley of the Moskva River, fields of vegetables, Tikhvinski Church, the Novo-Dyevitchi Convent and to the right, on the wooded slopes of the river, the Merchants’ Poor House. It all looked very peaceful in the evening haze.

      The Ukrainian took a rambling route as though trying to confuse anyone following. In the outlying suburbs where the Tartars had once lived men were coming home from work to wives and children standing at the doors of houses surrounded by wooden fences threaded with dog roses. The homecomings had an ordered rhythm to them that soothed Viktor’s doubts. The proposition that he was being taken to a mass execution became ludicrous. And yet … Why had Anna gone to such elaborate lengths? What possible motive could the Ukrainian have for taking him on this confusing journey? Perhaps some bizarre mime would be staged; perhaps they would claim they had missed the killing and show him some bloodstains. Well, they would have to do better than that.

      ‘Another nip?’ The Ukrainian handed back the flask, silver with a family crest engraved on it. Viktor took another sip; if the Ukrainian was trying to get him drunk he had another think coming. But the liquor did embolden him to ask: ‘What sort of farce is this that we’re acting?’

      The Ukrainian laughed, massaging the bristles on his scalp. There were a couple of incipient creases on his neck; he wasn’t so young. ‘A tragedy,’ he said, ‘not a farce. Grand Guignol.’

      ‘You don’t seem to be taking it too tragically.’

      ‘That way lies madness.’

      ‘And how do you know about these … alleged executions?’

      ‘Because, my dear Viktor, I have become a desk-bound soldier, a military clerk, after being wounded in a skirmish with the Japanese. But a clerk with a difference. I was considered bright enough to be enrolled in military intelligence known to one and all as the GRU. Do you know how the GRU came into existence?’

      ‘It seems irrelevant.’

      ‘But then you wouldn’t know, would you, because it was born of defeat and defeats don’t have any place in our history books.’ He swung the old car round a bend in a dirt road, sending up a cloud of dust. ‘In 1920 the Poles invaded the Soviet Union and stormed through my country. The Ukraine, that is,’ he explained. ‘They were thrown out eventually; then Lenin made a mistake.’ He turned his head and grinned. ‘Heresy, Viktor Golovin? But a mistake it certainly was. His intelligence, the Cheka Registry Department, got it all wrong and told him the Poles were ripe for revolution. As ripe as green apples as it turned out. The Red Army attacked Poland and got torn to ribbons for their pains. As a result the GRU was formed and a certain Yan Karlovich Berzin was put in charge.’

      Viktor said: ‘What’s all this got to do with executions?’

      ‘The GRU is in charge of military purges, even though we’re only a branch of the Secret Police, the NKVD. The NKVD itself didn’t do too badly in the purging business under a gentleman named Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda. But apparently he didn’t purge quite diligently enough and he was shot in Lubyanka Prison. Now they have a fellow named Nikolai Yezhov in charge. He’s doing a good job – seeing off about thirty a day, they estimate – but it’s only a question of time before they cart him off to Lubyanka.’

      ‘I don’t believe any of this,’ Viktor said.

      ‘Where

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