The translator, p.3
The Translator, page 3
On the kitchen table was a fortieth birthday card from Lev, the president’s private secretary and her only real friend in the Kremlin. Inside were the printed words: Like wine, you only improve with age.
Such nonsense, Marina thought, as she caught sight of Sasha, the handyman and caretaker of the building. He looked like an Old Believer with his long white hair and wispy beard, prowling among the parked cars in the courtyard below, followed by his emaciated wolfhound, Ivan the Terrible. Marina started at the chime of the Swiss cuckoo clock: it was five o’clock. She hated five o’clock. From the age of five, her father had dragged her out of bed to go swimming at that hour. He had wanted her to become a champion. Well, she never did become a champion. But she did take up running. Marathon running. And over the past few days, when she thought she was losing her mind, it was the running that had kept her sane.
Time to stretch, Marina thought. Crossing the octagonal hall with its four old-fashioned glass bookcases, she went into her front room, which overlooked Mamonovsky Lane and the 24/7 Taiga bar, and, further to the left, Tverskaya, Moscow’s main thoroughfare. She swung a leg up onto the polished dining table. She always stretched here, in this room where her grandfather, a famous Bolshoi tenor, had sung romances to a select Soviet audience. The pull on her hamstrings felt good. Marina brought her head down to her knee, feeling the burn. Suddenly a raucous laugh erupted in the street below, and Marina caught sight of a drunken young man tottering across the street, while his girlfriend tried to keep him steady. The Taiga bar, she remembered, boasted thirty-three types of vodka, and it was there, just a few months earlier, that she and Pasha had watched the Victory Parade on 9 May. The entire Russian army had rumbled down Tverskaya in front of their eyes as they sat drinking Caipirinhas through a straw, gaping at the endless procession of tanks, rocket launchers and intercontinental ballistic missiles as they filed past, heading for Red Square. It had felt surreal.
And now Pasha was dead. That also felt surreal.
Time to focus, she told herself. Time to run. As she put on her Newton running shoes, which she always left by her front door, she noticed the knee-high black boots that she had worn to the cemetery the day before. They were still caked in mud. She stared at the boots and above all at the mud and remembered the clammy brown earth heaped on top of the freshly dug grave. Pasha’s death hit her, once again, with brutal force, but a lifetime of discipline kicked in, and she fought off the surge of grief that was about to engulf her, sucked in one deep breath, and headed out of the door.
· · ·
At Vnukovo airport, the British prime minister and her party were met by the ambassador, Luke Marden, a small, trim man with thick grey hair and a bushy grey-white beard. He was bristling with energy and news. There was a change of plan, he explained. The meeting with President Serov would not be taking place inside the Kremlin, but at Villa Novo-Nikolskoye, his official country residence outside Moscow. They were not expected before noon, which meant they could all get a few hours’ rest and “freshen up”.
Before he knew it, Clive found himself alone in the back of an embassy Range Rover driven by Fyodor, an embassy driver, speeding into Moscow hard on the tail of the VIP flag car, a brand-new purpose-built Jaguar with an extra row of seats and a Union Jack fluttering on the bonnet. Through the Jaguar’s rear window, Clive could see the back of the prime minister’s head. Next to her sat Hyde, and facing were the ambassador and the chief of staff. It was the first time Clive had found himself in a VIP convoy, and the details amused him: the four police outriders on BMW motorbikes with flashing blue lights and three police cars – all Fords, Clive noted – which now and then unleashed their sirens and shattered the peaceful dawn.
He pressed his face to the window, eager to see how much his beloved Moscow had changed. There seemed to be more of everything: more high-rise apartment buildings, more expensive cars, more 24/7 supermarkets. The convoy split into two somewhere near the Kremlin. The police escort followed the flag car, leaving the Range Rover to make its way to the Metropol Hotel. There, Clive was greeted by a doorman in a top hat, black cape and white gloves who stood to attention as he held open the heavy bronze door. But Clive kept him waiting. He wanted to savour the moment of his return and lingered outside the hotel, looking for those landmarks which meant so much to him. The Bolshoi Theatre was whiter than he remembered; the granite statue of Karl Marx blacker, but the inscription was surely still there, in gold: Workers of the world, unite! The traffic was definitely louder, and the art nouveau mosaics beneath the roof of the Metropol were brighter. Above the rooftops, he could just see the twin entrance towers to Red Square, with their double-headed eagles glinting in the rising sun. It felt good to be back.
As he turned back to the waiting doorman, only then did he take in the banging and hammering that was going on all around him, the dozens of workmen clambering over scaffolding as they put up some giant edifice.
The Metropol had lost none of its absurd opulence, Clive thought, climbing the malachite staircase to the lobby. He could almost see his face in the marble floor. In his embassy days, he was in and out of the Metropol, looking after VIP visitors, and now, several years later, he was glad to see that nothing had changed: cascading chandeliers above his head, huge black leather armchairs, gold and green standard lamps, three metres high, blazing with a hundred lightbulbs. Excess, he said to himself. Russia is a country of excess.
Clive handed over his passport to a receptionist whose name badge read “Liza”, and asked if he could have a room with a view. Liza looked at his passport and then at him.
“From the way you spoke, I thought you were Russian,” she said, flashing her shiny vermilion smile. “Let me see… Yes, your room – it’s on the fifth floor, and it does have a view. Sort of. You can see the Bolshoi. Just. And the giant screen, all part of the celebrations tomorrow… Moscow City Day! They’ve put up stands in Red Square… There’s seating for forty thousand. All free! No one pays a penny! We’ve got a veterans’ choir, a children’s choir, a Cossack dance troupe. There’s even an exhibition of yoga from our Russian champion! And speeches, of course, from the mayor… He’s —”
“I used to live here,” Clive interrupted, but kindly, not wanting to dampen Liza’s spirits. “I love Moscow City Days. Russian choirs are the best… Can’t wait for tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, he had a favour to ask. Could Liza find out which Chekhov plays were playing, and where? He would like to see them all. And did she have a map, yes, a good old-fashioned paper map, of the new park, thirty-two acres in the city centre, just behind the Kremlin? The Zaryadye Park – that’s the one! He needed to explore this huge green space. In fact, there was a lot he needed to do. He thought of all the museums and galleries he would visit and the walks he would take in the evenings down the old familiar streets. It almost felt like a holiday.
In his room, Clive took a shower, made himself a cup of black coffee and lay down on his bed, glancing up at the ceiling and wondering where the CCTV cameras were hidden. Or maybe there weren’t any. He was probably considered a low security risk. Even so, best to assume that every gesture might be recorded. Don’t pick your nose, he told himself, as he used the telephone in his room to dial a Moscow number. There was no answer, so he left a message. Then he focused on the job in hand. The mental preparation was always the same, a limbering up of the mind, a rigorous testing of himself. He went through various linguistic exercises, tossing English words and phrases into the air like tennis balls, then hitting them across the net in Russian. It was natural, effortless; he felt completely at ease in either language. Above all, he needed to be fresh. He glanced at the briefing book. The prime minister was not in a conciliatory mood; she was going to stick it to President Serov and object to Russian behaviour, on and off British soil. Clive’s job was not to translate words, it was to translate meaning – and for that, he needed to be sharp. Take a nap, he told himself.
He was dozing off, with the taste of coffee in his mouth, when he noticed a two-page print-out, in English, which Hyde had slipped inside the briefing book.
Summary of a speech given at the Russian Academy of Military Science, Moscow, by General Kurnikov, and published as a Ministry of Defence background briefing paper.
“Non-military, asymmetric methods of confronting the enemy are being developed as a priority. The best procedures are as follows: first, it is important to destabilize the enemy through information and psychological warfare, so that the lines are obscured between what is truth and what is a lie. When the enemy is weakened in this way, we should advance simultaneously on several fronts, using all means to penetrate and influence the politics, economics, transmission of information (television, social media, etc.), and the overall psychology of the targeted nation. The aim here is to create an atmosphere of chaos and a loss of control.
“We, in Russia, surpass the West in our non-military capabilities and insights. Our new and improved resources – thanks to President Serov – mean that we are capable of waging this new type of warfare from all corners of the planet and even from space.”
Clive read the last sentence twice.
4
Marina ran what she called “the short circuit”: through Red Square, down to the Moscow River and back past the Bolshoi, up Petrovka, then left onto Kuznetsky Most to rejoin Tverskaya. She was back home by eight o’clock, pulling open the heavy mahogany door of Tverskaya 25. In the entrance hall, Marina checked her flimsy tin mailbox, pulling out a handful of letters, and was about to climb the chipped marble staircase when she heard a familiar voice ring out from the landing above.
“Is that you, Marina Andreyevna? Back from your early-morning run? Come and tell me about yesterday. How did it go? I’m so sorry I couldn’t be with you.”
Oxana Denisovna Belkina was a “lift lady”, a plump, white-haired woman in her late sixties with alert brown eyes and several moles on her round face; she also had a bad back and arthritic fingers. Oxana spent her days on the landing at the top of the entrance stairs, right by the lift, sitting in an old swivel chair next to a rickety table and a narrow bed, where she slept at night. She worked in shifts with Nadia, the other lift lady, both pensioners, both grandmothers who took turns to keep watch day and night and make sure that no “undesirables” came into the building. In winter it was so cold they were used to sleeping in their coats, until Marina supplied them both with thick blankets.
“Nine days…” murmured Oxana, her eyes on Marina, who was climbing the stairs.
“I don’t believe in all that religious nonsense,” Marina said, sinking onto Oxana’s bed in her running shorts and holding her water bottle. “The soul is lost… It’s trying to find heaven… So, on the ninth day, you go the graveside and give it a nudge! It’s absurd.”
“But you went all the same,” said Oxana.
Marina stared down at her hands.
“He was so young, Oxanochka. Twenty years old.”
“Drugs are such a curse,” murmured the lift lady.
“I should have done more…” Marina whispered.
“Now, don’t go blaming yourself… We’ve talked about this before. You did everything you could for that boy and more! It’s not your fault he took an overdose of… What’s it called? Such a long, difficult name…”
“Methamphetamine.”
“Yes. That’s it. Tragic, absolutely tragic. But not your fault.”
Oxana was staring hard at Marina, who sighed and turned her face away.
“So, where’s that brother of his?” Oxana asked sharply.
“I don’t know. He’s always on the move, but he came to see me a couple of months ago… It was May, I think… You were away… He told me he was into online poker, and I said he was an idiot. He spent the night and left his clothes all over the floor, and I said he was too old to behave like that. He got furious and said I was a control freak and disappeared.”
“After all you’ve done for him! He’s a bad apple, if you ask me!”
“No,” Marina said emphatically. “He’s a lovely boy. So is —” She checked herself. “So was Pasha. Both lovely boys.”
Sitting on the edge of Oxana’s bed, Marina thought back on her life with Vanya and Pasha. She had known them for ten years. Almost all of that time had been in Saint Petersburg, when she lived on the Fontanka with her husband, Alexei, who was fighting his cancer every inch of the way. They had a big flat on the first floor of an old building. Right at the top was a woman who never seemed to be at home, with two wild boys who raced down the stairs, knocking into people, screaming with laughter, swearing. One day they knocked into Alexei. He grabbed Vanya and carried him up to their flat screaming, sat him down and fed him ice cream. That was the start of the friendship. All the grubby details came out: the father had walked out; the mother worked in a nightclub and was never at home. The children played truant. It was Alexei who sorted them out. He had no children of his own, and Marina had discovered she was infertile, something she blamed on the relentless swimming of her youth, so Vanya and Pasha became “our boys”.
Marina took a sip from her water bottle. “What worries me,” she said, “is that I have no way of contacting Vanya, and he may not know that his brother is…” Marina had to steel herself to say the word. She took a deep breath and then murmured: “Dead.” Then she reached across and took Oxana’s gnarled, arthritic hand. “I wish I could stay here with you, Oxanochka, but I must take a shower and go to work.”
“Go to work! On a Sunday! You should be at your dacha getting some fresh air… The pollution rates here in Moscow are terrible at the moment.”
“The president needs me,” said Marina, getting to her feet.
Oxana looked impressed.
“Well, of course… for him… that’s different… If Nikolai Nikolayevich needs you, then of course you must go… We all owe our president so much! Goodness me!”
Back inside her flat, Marina lay on her bed and shut her eyes.
The funeral had been a strange business: so many software engineers from the troll factory; young people crying openly as they looked at the childish face of twenty-year-old Pasha Orlov in his coffin; a big bunch of white lilies from General Varlamov delivered by FSB goons. But no family. No brother, no mother, not even the ex-girlfriend.
Marina tossed the handful of letters she had pulled out of her mailbox onto the kitchen table and took a shower. Wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet, she returned to the letters. A flyer from a plastic surgeon. An appeal for donations to an orphanage. A white envelope with no name. Inside was a postcard of Gorky Park and, written in capitals on the back, lines in Russian from Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila:
У лукоморья дуб зелёный;
Златая цепь на дубе том:
И днём и ночью кот учёный
Всё ходит по цепи кругом…
Near the shore a green oak stands,
A golden chain upon its boughs:
And day and night a learned cat
In fetters round and round it goes…
For the first time that day, Marina smiled. She held the postcard between her thumb and forefinger, feeling its texture. Gorky Park was the giveaway, even more than the poem. Somehow Vanya had sneaked into the building unseen. What did she used to call him as a child? A cat. An alley cat.
Only then did she notice, tucked inside the same blank envelope, a white card with a black border – and a message. “PASHA WAS MURDERED. BY YOUR LOT.”
Marina let out a cry, like a wounded bird. And yet, deep down, she had known it all along.
It was 09.55, and Clive was in the lift, heading for his rendezvous with an embassy car at ten o’clock, when he remembered George’s book. He hurried back to his room and noted with some satisfaction (he was never late) that it was exactly ten when he stepped into the lobby, looking for Liza. He saw her at the reception desk, but she wasn’t alone; in front of her stood an agitated young woman in tight black leather trousers and a red biker jacket. A helmet at her feet, she was remonstrating.
“It has to be here. Please, have another look,” the young woman pleaded, pushing her hand through her messy blond hair, which had one distinguishing feature: a flaming red streak on one side.
“Rose?” Clive asked loudly and clearly.
The young woman jerked her head round and stared. She was in her mid-twenties, with the face of a child, round and wide-eyed. Clive handed over the book.
“You must be Clive,” said Rose, taking the book and smiling. “My friend George told me about you. Said you were reliable. Which I am not.” Then Rose leant forward and, rolling her eyes from the floor to the walls, she whispered. “What do you think? All this marble… That wall’s pink alabaster, and the stairs are porphyry! And d’you see the Chinese vases? So bloody big, we could hide inside! And what about those leather chairs? More like beds, don’t you think? It’s crazy. This whole place is so un-cool… I mean… Well… It’s too fucking much! Thanks for the book. See you around!”
Clive slid into the back seat of the embassy Range Rover and warmly greeted Fyodor. The car lurched forward.
“New pavements,” said Clive. “Very smart.”
Fyodor smiled into the rear-view mirror, and Clive caught sight of his broad, flat face and friendly eyes. He knew, from his time in Moscow, that all Russian drivers who worked for the British embassy had to report daily to the FSB, so he always tried to make their lives easier by saying something positive. This wasn’t difficult on that particular morning, when the city looked so clean and majestic.
“We’ve got a good mayor… He takes care of the city,” Fyodor said. “Our president, Nikolai Nikolayevich, now there’s a true patriot. He takes care of Russia! And you’re going to meet him today… What an honour!”
