Russian Hide-and-Seek

Russian or of anybody else for several years; nevertheless, what he had said did not sound like the product of fancy. The doctor looked at his watch.

‘He’s late.’

‘He’ll probably not come at all. Are you sure you understood him correctly?’

‘Oh yes, sir, he was quite specific.’

‘It seems slightly odd that he should go to all this trouble to win a good opinion that can’t be much use to him.’

It seemed something of the kind to Alexander himself, now entering the village. With Theodore’s revolution so much in his thoughts, or rather in his day-dreamings as yet, standing well with Commissioner Mets seemed even less important than it had at first. But he could not get out of this evening’s visit; to say that he had changed his mind, simply not done what he had undertaken to do, was unthinkable. His mistake had been in agreeing to see Mets in the first place; he might have foreseen that his father’s silly paternal pride would light on some ridiculous chore that all the same could not be refused – indeed, must even so be prosecuted as vigorously as possible.

He found the cottage without trouble. It stood nearly opposite the village church, from which came the music of a synthaccordion and voices raised in song and raucous laughter. As he drew level the heavy door swung open and the racket was intensified. Two middle-aged men lurched out, talking loudly, drunk at half-past six. When they saw the Russian uniform they quietened down and straightened themselves and one of them hastily shut the door, an unnecessary switch to decorum, for the days were past when a member of the units of supervision would have been likely to correct English misbehaviour with riding-whip or pistol-butt. These two must have learned their lesson thoroughly in youth.

A dark-haired young woman answered Alexander’s knock. She was pleasant enough to look at but not such as to arouse his desire, or no more than any other undeformed female of her age would have done, which was just as well in the circumstances. A boy of five or six had his hand in hers. After greeting them pleasantly in Russian Alexander picked the child up – he at least showed no mistrust – and set him in the mare’s saddle. A short game ensued, evidently acceptable to both him and his mother. By the time it was over a man who was evidently his father had appeared. He took the reins and led Polly away round the side of the cottage. Alexander was shown into a long narrow room that ran from front to rear and had a window-bay at its far end. As he entered, two men who had been sitting in this space got to their feet without alacrity and faced him. He recognised Dr Wright with an irritation he strove to conceal; what lay ahead was going to be hard enough without such a presence on his flank, so to speak. He wished them good evening, again in Russian, a choice which surprised Wright and almost aroused a flicker of respect in him.

‘Do please sit down,’ went on Alexander. ‘It’s good of you to be at home, Mr Glover. Now this won’t take long.’

‘What does he say’?’ asked Glover.

‘Just politenesses. - You’d better speak up, and go slow too; his Russian isn’t much good.’

‘Very well. – Dr Wright will have told you why I am here, sir. May I ask how you feel about taking part in the festival he will also have spoken of?’

‘The same way as I feel about everything you people… demand of me.’ Glover’s accent was thick and his delivery halting. ‘If I can resist you I will.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir. I agree we are in a position to demand this. But there’s more to the case than our demanding and your complying, or, possibly, not complying. What we demand is also what will benefit your fellow-countrymen in an important way, and you are one of the very few in a position to bring it to them.’

‘What do you know of this “it” that I can bring my fellow-countrymen?’

‘At first hand, nothing, of course, but am I wrong in thinking it important?’

‘You have no… you don’t know what importance is. Or truth. You Russians simply have an uneasy… feeling about having taken our culture and our religion away from us.’

‘Perhaps you mean an uneasy conscience. That would be an excellent description.’

‘Why stop there? Why not set about giving us back our history’? To take away our books was a crime as great as taking away our churches. Until the year before you came we were still free. We… we chose our rulers and dismissed them if they were unsatisfactory, within some limits we could say and write what we pleased, the courts were fair, we could come and go… And we had fought for our freedom, again and again. The knowledge of that you had to take away, because our national pride was rooted in it. It won’t be very long now before nobody knows how we stood alone against Hitler, how but for us and the Americans your own precious country would have been defeated. You yourself don’t know the bare fact that we and our allies invaded Western Europe in 1944-I do, because my father was there, at a place called Arnhem. You don’t even know how we fought you. You think it was all over in three days, you poor ignorant illiterate incurious nitwit…

The old man said a good deal more to the same effect. Alexander listened respectfully, or with a show of respect. His English was good enough for him to be able to follow the general drift and he was familiar with the material, especially the part about the 1944 ‘invasion’, the usual pre-war term and a surprisingly grandiose one, given the English tendency to understatement, for a raid on a single port. Like the rest of the stuff – the talk of choosing between one or other set of nominees of the boss, freedom of the press when the boss owned the press, unhindered access to any slum or ethnic ghetto – it was a comforting myth, important to a proud nation that had held India and large parts of Africa before being chased out by the indignant inhabitants. (Not that those inhabitants were much better off today, if the truth were known.)

The myth apparently meant a good deal to Glover, who was crying as he finished his tirade. Wright went across and laid a hand on his shoulder. He said quietly to Alexander,

‘I think you’d better go now, don’t you? You won’t shake him.’

‘We shall see.

‘Why are you doing this?’ asked Wright abruptly.

‘No good reason. My father suggested it and I couldn’t think how to get out of it.’

‘I suppose that might even be true.’

Alexander made no reply. He started thinking hard. After a couple of minutes he raised his voice. ‘What about your duty as a Christian, Mr Glover?’

‘My what?’

‘Duty as a Christian, sir,’ said Wright.

‘What do you know of that, you atheistical swine?’

‘As before, nothing, but you must know more than a little.’

‘My duty as a Christian is a matter for my own conscience.’

‘In that case let’s save ourselves some time. This is a very attractive cottage and your granddaughter – yes? – is a delightful young lady. It would be terrible if a party of drunken soldiers broke in and wrecked the place and raped her. And her husband might get badly hurt if he tried to intervene, or if they thought he was going to. Even the boy – fine little chap, isn’t he? – well, you know what brutes those Russian rankers are; some of them aren’t even Russian, they’re Tar-tars, Uzbeks – Asiatics. No one would be safe from them. Except you, Mr Glover. They’d have too much respect to lay a finger on you. Apart from making certain you saw everything of course. Now if-’

‘Oh, dear God.’

‘And you could fix that up easily enough, couldn’t you?’

‘What do you think, doctor?’

‘I think you could and would, out of spite at being crossed in a matter you admit is of no concern to you.’

‘Good. If you think that, so will others.’ Alexander spoke up again. ‘I couldn’t arrange that, Mr Glover, even if I wanted to. Suppose for the moment it none the less took place. Somebody would be able to identify those soldiers – wearing civilian clothes would do no more than delay things slightly. Every Russian in the district would be paraded and the culprits picked out and sent to die in the Arctic. But it would never come to such a pass. If I were to give my men an order like that they’d simply not carry it out, quite confident I’d never dare charge them with disobedience. They know all this. The English don’t, and wouldn’t be inclined to believe it if they were told. So when your friends hear indirectly that you’ve been threatened with the rape of your granddaughter and sundry other dire things, they’ll understand why you’ve agreed to cooperate with Commissioner Mets and they won’t do