“A guy named Kalmyks. First Directorate.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“Nothing. But like everybody else he just did what his bosses told him to do.”
Aarons smiled. “That’s what most people do.”
Serov looked at him. “Would you send a man to a Gulag camp just because you wanted to screw his wife? Would you want to be part of a set-up that sent millions of people to work-camps where they starved them to death. People who’d done no more than grow a few potatoes for their families to eat or because the local commissar wanted to get promotion?” He paused. “When I say millions I don’t mean just a lot of people I mean millions. Literally millions.”
“What’s a Gulag camp?”
“You don’t know?” Serov smiled. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“The Gulag is an organisation that controls forced labour. They have prison-camps all over the Soviet Union. You want ten thousand men to build a road and some bastard just takes a town in Khazakhstan and ships the whole population off to where you want them. Enemies of the people.”
“But the constitution doesn’t allow that. It’s against the law.”
For long moments Serov looked at Aarons’ face and then he said quietly, “Don’t you read the newspapers, Andrei, or listen to the radio? It’s all been written about.”
“I assumed that it was anti-Soviet propaganda.”
“I told you, Andrei, the last time I saw you. The people in the Kremlin are gangsters. The whole country is a prison. All that stuff of Marx and Lenin went out of the window long ago. They just wave those names around like banners to cover what they’re doing. It’s crude power politics. Every man for himself. When were you last in Moscow, for God’s sake?”
Andrei shook his head.
“D’you know something, Andrei?”
“What?”
“You know more about what’s going on in America than you do about Russia. There you just know about what goes on in the Kremlin. And you don’t even know much about that. You aren’t a Russian. You never have been. You weren’t brought up there. You don’t know what it was like then or what it’s like now. You live in limbo and you stick to some dream your father told you. He didn’t know how it would all turn out. But you do. You can’t be that stupid.” He stood up. “I’m sorry, Andrei. I didn’t mean to be so—so unkind, so critical. I got carried away.” He shrugged and smiled. “And I really came to tell you I’m getting married.”
“Congratulations. Who is she?”
“Her parents were Italian. But she was born here. She works as a waitress. Angela. Angela Corelli.”
“I’m glad. You deserve a break.”
For a moment Serov was silent and then he said quietly, “What makes you think that?”
Aarons shrugged. “You’ve worked hard all your life for what you thought was a good cause. You risked your life in the Resistance to defeat the Germans. Not many men have done so much, with so little reward. Maybe your lady is the reward.”
Serov shook his head slowly, “You’re a strange man, Andrei. And a good man. I think about you a lot. I hope that one day I can do something to help you.”
Aarons put his arm around Serov’s shoulders. “Let’s agree not to talk about politics.”
Serov smiled. “OK. That’s a deal.”
As Aarons made himself a glass of hot chocolate that night he thought about Serov when they were both young men in Paris, talking and arguing but so sure that the dream was going to come true. And then Chantal. Were they all really so naive as to think that you could change the whole world just by argument and discussion? Maybe it wasn’t innocence but arrogance. They had seemed such good days in Paris. Days of sunshine and promise.
But the reality was always different. Even with religions it was like that. You started as just a believer and then you discovered that behind the scenes men were fighting for power, manoeuvring to be bishops, or archbishops. Powerful men deciding who would be Pope to make sure that they got preferment and power for themselves.
Christianity and Communism were so much alike. Both of them would work and either of them would make for a better world. If only it wasn’t for people. It was people who wouldn’t let it work. They didn’t want equality, they wanted to be individuals and independent of any higher authority.
The Americans had recognised this when they worked out their constitution.
They had been wise men those Americans all those years ago. He remembered reading through all the articles and amendments in his first days in Brighton Beach, waiting for the family to come over. And he’d learned the words of the preamble by heart and he still remembered them—“… we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity … promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our posterity …” Even with his poor grasp of the language at that time it had seemed romantic, even poetic. And all the words they cared about had capital letters, like Liberty and Justice. Even tranquillity had a capital letter. It still moved him. It didn’t really work, but to him what mattered was that those men way back had tried to sort out what men and women really wanted. Like him they could be accused of dreaming dreams. He felt a great affinity to those men.
CHAPTER 29
Aarons was surprised when he got to Myron Harper’s apartment that Sunday evening and found that they were alone. When he asked why the others were late Harper had poured him a coffee before he responded.
“They’ve dropped out, Andrei. We’ll have to find another couple to make up our four.”
“Why have they dropped out? Are they offended or something?”
“They no longer sympathise with your views or mine.”
“Why didn’t they say so? Why so sudden? We could just have not talked about politics.”
“That was more the attraction for them than the
