Tapestry of Spies

24 TRISTRAM SHANDY

The major was extremely nervous. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t sit still, he couldn’t take tea. His stomach felt sour and uneasy: dyspepsia, that scourge of the office animal. By the end he had given up all pretense of organized activity and simply stood at the window, looking down the five floors in late afternoon to the street. He stood there for several hours. He felt if he moved he would somehow curse his enterprise and fate it to catastrophe.

Finally, the black car pulled up and he watched as the queer, eager figure of Mr. Vane popped out. Vane moved with appropriate dispatch into the building. The major thought his heart would burst, but at the same time he felt the killing imperative to maintain a certain formality for the proceedings. Thus he seated himself at his desk, turned on the light, took out and opened his fountain pen, removed from the rubble a sheet of paper, and began to doodle. He drew pictures of flowers. Daffodils. He could draw beautiful daffodils.

He heard the opening of the lift and the slow, almost stately progress of Mr. Vane, who advanced upon him as a glacier must have moved down from the Pole during the Age of Ice. At last the door to the outer office opened; there was a pause while the orderly and precise Mr. Vane took off his coat, hung it on a hanger ? buttoning the top button, of course, for the proper fall of the garment ? and hung the hanger on the rack; then put his jaunty little Tyrolean in his desk drawer, the second one on the right-hand side.

“Sir. Major Holly-Browning?” The man stood in the doorway with the practiced diffidence of a eunuch in a harem.

“What! Oh, I say, Vane, I didn’t hear you come in. You gave me a start. Back already, then?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, that’s fine. Any difficulty?”

“No sir. Well, actually, sir, the plane from Barcelona was slow in getting off the ground. Then I must say I had crisp words with an F.O. chap at Heathrow who insisted that he take the pouch all the way to Whitehall before opening it.”

“You should have called me.”

“I prevailed, sir.”

“Then you’ve got it?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, why don’t you set it on the table? Then perhaps you’d like to freshen up, perhaps get a bite. I want to finish this damned report before I get to it.”

“Yessir. Here it is then, sir. I’ll be back shortly. Please feel free to call me if you want anything.”

“Yes, Vane. Very good.”

Vane set the thing on the table near the window. He turned and left and the major did not look up to watch him. He listened to him leave. He continued to play at working for some minutes. He told himself he would wait fifteen minutes. He did not want to rush, to queer the thing with impatience. He had waited quite a bit, after all.

The last observation had the effect of sending him back. He set the pen down. The daffodils were forgotten. He remembered the dark cellar of the Lubyanka in the year 1923.

He remembered the Russian sitting across from him, the eyes bright with intelligence and sympathy. It had been a brilliant, patient performance, seductive and terrifying. Levitsky had invited Holly-Browning to resist, to argue; and each argument had been gently and delicately deflected. The man was a genius of conviction; he had that radiant, enveloping charm that reaches out through the brain and to the heart; it enters and commands.

It was very late in the interrogation, and Holly-Browning was reduced to bromides.

“The British Empire is the most benevolent and compassionate in the history of the world,” he recalled saying, filled with exhaustion and regret.

The Russian listened, seemed to pause and reflect.

“I would never deny that. Of course it is. Yet are you not being awfully easy on yourself? Are you really willing to examine the reality of it for another point of view? I think you may find the results intriguing.”

The first betrayal had been a betrayal of the imagination. Yes, with Levitsky as his guide, the major had allowed himself to imagine: imagine the Raj from the point of view of a Hong Kong coolie, making do with eleven children on less than a penny a day; or imagine the world of Johnny Sepoy, sent around the globe to die for a king he didn’t know, a faith he couldn’t understand, an officer he didn’t respect, and five rupees a week; or a textile worker, breathing the dust of a Leeds woolen mill, his lungs blacking up, coughing blood at thirty, dead at thirty-five; or …

“The realities of empire,” said Levitsky, “are considerably different depending upon one’s proximity to the apex of the pyramid of power.” He smiled. Warmth and love poured from his eyes. He touched the major on the shoulder. The major loved the touch. He loved the strength and the courage of the man, he loved him in the way that soldiers in a trench for months on end can come to love one another, in a sacred, not profanely physical, way. Their ordeal in the cellar had joined them.

“I can feel you trying to understand,” said Levitsky. “It takes a heroic amount of will. You’re probably the bravest man in the world, James; you’ve faced death in battle a hundred, a thousand times. Yet what you do now, that is bravery, bravery of the will.”

The major felt the passionate urge to surrender to the man. It was so very late and they had been together for so very long.

“Think about it. You have been offered a chance to join an elite. One does not look twice at an offer to join an elite, and to live a life untainted by corruption and exploitation. It’s a powerful elixir.”

The truth is, as Major Holly-Browning knew, most men are willing to be spies against their own country. In his way, Julian is not so extraordinary after all; treason, in its way, is quite banal. A careful recruiter, a Levitsky, nursing the grudge and resentment that all men quite naturally feel toward their social betters and toward the freaks of circumstance and luck that explain triumph and failure in the world, can take a clerk and manufacture a spy in a weekend.

The shame began to suffuse the major. He could feel it building. He was so ashamed. He had been so weak. He had yielded.

“Yes,” Major Holly-Browning had said to Levitsky in the cellar of the Lubyanka at the end of their very long trip together in 1923, “Yes. I will do it. I will spy for you.” When he spoke, he believed it. At the center of his being, in his heart, in his brain, in his soul: he believed it.

The escape, coming by freak luck the next day, changed nothing. When eventually, after a series of colorful but now almost completely forgotten adventures, the major reached home, he had taken a convalescent leave and gone to the hills of Scotland and lived like a hermit in a cottage high up for a year. It was a place without mirrors. For a long time, the major could not deal with the image of his own face.

Now at last, with a timeless sigh, the slow and easeful acceptance of the firing squad by its victim, he rose and with exaggerated calmness walked to the table. He seated himself and looked at the object.

It was Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne.

The major reached up to the lamp, deftly unscrewed and removed the bolt holding tight the shade, then removed the shade. He snapped the light on, filling the normally dark old office with unpleasantly harsh light.

He found a piece of paper, took out his fountain pen. He held the book in his hands and looked at it for some time, trying to remain calm.

Am I here?

Levitsky, am I here at last?

He opened the book to the front endpaper, where Florry had written his signature and a date, January 4, 1931, thus informing the major he had chosen to start at and use the key of four.

The major opened up the book to. He bent the covers back against the spine, feeling it break. With a straight razor he sliced the page away from the others and held it up to the blinding light from the bulb. Like a star over Bethlehem, a tiny flash winked at the major. It was a pinhole under the letter L.