Free A Little White Death by John Lawton Page B

had grown up to bale his father out time after time. His perception of a world turning
itself inside out, and his ability to keep one twist, one turn ahead of it, had saved the old man, indeed the entire family from a chaos that passed comprehension, the turmoil that was the
twentieth century.
    The spook had lost her touch. She was standing far too close. She should not have followed him in if she meant to stay hidden. With fewer than a dozen people in the room he was bound to see her.
He looked. There were three people between them. A couple so alike they had to be married thirty years – Nikita and Mrs Khrushchev, Charlie and Mrs Chaplin – and a tall, thin man. The
man moved quickly away. She seemed not to notice. The couple fell to bickering and drifted off. She should have moved before they did. She had taken off her hat and was pretending to be interested
in the photograph of Tolstoy in uniform. Troy could see her in profile. The face of a Russian Jew. Slightly hawkish, a neat curved nose, a mopof thick, shining black curls, bobbing springily on her
fur collar. An impwith violet eyes.
    ‘’Tis women’s hair makes Moscow fair,’ Troy said softly.
    She did not pretend she had not heard. She looked straight at him startled. Her violet eyes wide.
    ‘They told me you were English,’ she said, scarcely louder than a whisper.
    ‘I am.’
    ‘No Englishman would know such a phrase.’
    True, it was a dreadful phrase, a corny old Moscow aphorism he had dredged upfrom a childhood memory, a phrase of his grandfather’s, for just this effect.
    ‘What else did they tell you?’
    ‘Not here.’
    Her eyes darted from side to side. A passable impression of a scared rabbit.
    ‘Better here than in the street. Who else will be listening? I’m the one being followed, not you. And even if you were, they’d have enough sense to stay outside.’
    ‘Are you going to tell?’
    Troy walked on and left her to stew.

 
§ 12
    He did not care to be a tourist in a mythical town. It was the wrong way to see Moscow. The right way – the only right way – was in the stories and dreams of the
old generation. The glinting, golden splendour of St Basil’s added nothing to his mother’s infrequently aired memories of a girlhood in the city; the monumental blocks of Lenin’s
tomb, its strutting, green-clad, goose-stepping guards, added nothing to the endless, convoluted narrative of his father’s youth. You could, he thought, take a copy of Ulysses , a
street mapof Dublin and have a good, if long, if pissed, day out in Dublin. You could take the Russia of family legend, any map of Moscow, and never find it in the stone and mortar of the Soviet
Union. He should not have come.
    All in all he was searching for a metaphor. If Beirut was what? What had he called it? The Britain of the black market? Then Moscow, Moscow . . . was Britain in the drab age, Britain in the late
1940s, when rationing had gone on far too long, when the nation was heartily sick of it, when the humour, and the glamour if ever there had been any, had gone out of spivvery, and the country was
locked into its first, its only five-year plan. Moscow, Moscow was the result of endless, serial five-year plans, of well-intentioned drabness piled upon orderly, dreary, gut-shrinking austerity;
the heartless devotion of serial monogamy. It was a monumental city of vast spaces, of stone plains and cobbled prairie, of width and breadth and vista, shaped to the division and the column and
the battalion. And its people skulked at the edges, refusing the open space, huddled in the shadows, buried in the bottle, born to narrow lanes and dark alleys, born not to Red Square or any
square, born to Lyàpin House and Protótchny Lane, born to life within the iron hand. No line of Kipling or Masefield, no skylining metaphor of light or air, would ever so transpose,
would ever touch these depths. It was Blok, Aleksandr Blok, who had it right: ‘Russia . . . her strength