are seen by everyone as a lever.
And no one knows their fate.
Pyotr Mikhalovich Ryzhkov walked across the bright Neglinnaya Prospekt to the Hermitage restaurant. He was dressed in a brown suit, his least shabby, and carried his fedora in his hands since it was too hot to wear it. Moscow was stifling, a spider’s web of streets that radiated from the river and ran uphill, spreading above the Kremlin and the old wall of the city until they intersected the ring of gardened boulevard just next to the restaurant.
He was pretending to be a poetic soul, musing on beauty and lofty thoughts during the tram ride up from Tatarskaya. Yes, a poetic soul – a translator and valued member of the French embassy staff. A Russian veteran of the Foreign Legion, caught up in the Western Front war, and newly posted from Paris to Moscow on account of his background. Well…if anyone checked, that much was true. Translating? Yes, he actually did some translating, but mostly it was to explain to this bosses what a particular scrawled message might mean, or to interpret a phrase taken from a stenographer’s transcript of an intercepted telephone call.
What he really did for his salary, and purely because he had very little choice in the matter, was organize a short string of informants, both in and out of the Bolshevik government, who sporadically provided information to France. And, since everything was in chaos, the Bolsheviks suffering from factional disputes, there was no shortage of recruits. Ryzhkov did not have the privilege of selecting most of his sources, and therefore he was expendable. He knew all that. He was more than painfully aware that he was one of the only experienced agents working for the French, but precariously out on the point, with no uniform, no credentials.
But now perhaps he had somehow actually grown into the skin of a poseur. His life had been a lie for so long, and his deceit tested by enough challenges, that pretence and play-acting had been annealed into his being. If he were to be honest, he would have to admit that he fought almost every day to remember who he really was. The only way out of it all was to either win or surrender – not really much of a choice, he was thinking.
And then he saw the man, the same one he had seen in Theatre Square, waiting by the tram stops.
Paranoid, he thought. Occupational disease. After a while you saw the same people all the time. True, Ryzhkov had a great memory for faces; the man could be someone he’d seen before, outside on the street, in a café. Just an ordinary citizen en route to – where, exactly?
Don’t think about it. Go on as usual.
And so he did. Musing about the city. Poetic soul.
He waited until the tram stopped, swung out of the seat and down onto the wide sidewalk and walked past the fence to the entrance to the park.
Test them, he was thinking. It could be an exercise, so test them. Do nothing out of the ordinary, but test them all the same.
He stopped, checked his watch. Ah…early. Stroll around, have a smoke. Admire the church in the far corner by the little pool that they’d built into the park. Yes, yes, a beautiful day. Pose as a happy man; tip your hat to the ladies, smile at the children. A nobody, a clerk-translator on his day off, going to meet his friend at the popular restaurant. Half way around the pool he checked his watch again, made a new decision and turned around.
Ahead of him two men casually stopped and fussed for cigarettes in their clothing.
He walked faster now, heading back to the restaurant, up the steps. Under the new administration the Hermitage was a ‘people’s canteen’ and, reservations being an affectation of the upper classes, service was strictly by queue. But one still had to pay, and there were only two couples waiting ahead of him.
He was directed to his table. Made a show of waiting for his friend. Ordered a glass of konyak and then went to the bathroom. In the farthest toilet he reached behind the tank and found the little magnetized box, pulled it away, opened the cap, took out the rolled cigarette papers, capped the box, hid it behind the tank in the horizontal position, flushed the toilet and, still holding the paper in his fingers, went out to the sinks. No one. A flush in the corner stall; at nearly the same moment the door to the washroom swung open and an older man entered fumbling with his pants buttons. They wouldn’t try to take him in the restaurant itself, he was thinking.
He washed his hands and went back to his seat. The papers were in his pocket now. He sat and waited for his friend, nursed his konyak and tried to work out what to do.
They could have him any time, this government. Why now?
Outside men and women walked in the empty park, admiring the straggling gardens, looking at their own reflections in the windows. The old restaurant was not even half full. There was nothing on the menu but soup and eggs. The eggs cost 150 roubles.
Ryzhkov caught the waiter’s eye and asked to use the telephone kiosk. Inside the kiosk he took out the papers and looked for a place to hide them. The seat was made of leather gone ragged and built into the wooden cabinetry. A strip of moulding on the inside rim of the seat was loose and he flattened the papers out on the marble shelf in the kiosk, slipped them beneath the wood and banged it tight with his fist.
There was no answer to his telephone call. He thought about telephoning the embassy, calling Merk to rescue him, but the new government kept records of all calls at the district switchboards, and if they were going to take him it would be soon now…when he left the restaurant.
So he went back to the table. Sat, fuming, for a few more minutes. Angry, letting his nerves out a little. Everything was plausible, so far. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing to grab onto.
Suddenly his anger overwhelmed him. He sat for a moment and broke out into a sweat, his face gone red. Outside, lingering at a lamppost, the man on the tram was given a light for his cigarette by a total stranger. They stopped to exchange a few words and then parted.
He’d waited long enough for his imaginary friend that was never going to come. Abruptly he was standing, shrugging at the waiter, who shrugged back – not an unhappy man. Happy to have work that put him close to a little food now and again, a life indoors under wide ferns and palms that softened the glare through the huge windows. Not a bad job in the middle of a revolution with winter coming, Ryzhkov thought.
A breeze riffled through the leaves from under the awning. He went down the steps. Now he was being a man who suddenly had time on his hands. He walked to the tram stop and waited. There was no point in even looking around now. He knew.
He took the tram as far as the Theatre, then got off and wound his way through the old market, shopping for a few items. It would give them a few more places to check, if they thought he’d dumped the package. Test them. Fight back, he told himself, still angry, frustrated. Blaming himself for never saying no, for thinking that coming back to Russia would mean that he could do something, change something. Find whatever it was he’d lost.
He’d been on the little street a thousand times. It was across and behind the Kremlin from where he’d grown up – his father’s second house on Gazetni Street. They’d moved there to be close to the university where the old man had sometimes worked. Ryzhkov had gone to the Alexander School right in the centre of the city. It was one of the only good times he could remember.
He picked up the tram again, following one long strand of the spider’s web past the Ilynskaya gate and the Church of Transfiguration. Four years of war and revolution had leached the life out of Moscow; the trees had slowly vanished for fuel in the winters, there were no more dogs in the city, they had all been eaten. Money was of dubious value, the prices fluctuating daily; the best way to ‘buy’ something was to barter for it, preferably with food. There was a brisk market in bootleg vodka and schnapps. Men sold it in home-made tins on corners. The Bolsheviks had posted strict proscriptions on alcoholism, but the people had ignored them.
They would take him soon, if they were going to take him at all, and since there was no escape he gave them