Alias uncle hugo, p.6
Alias Uncle Hugo, page 6
But Gerardov was at home now and once more a person of importance and authority. He got out of the jeep and addressed the officer with a fluency of malediction which astonished Hambledon. His meek prisoner had become a tiger. It was the High-Secretariat-of-the-Politburo-member Feodor Gerardov whom the illiterate numskull of a soldier had dared to fire upon, and if the soldier did not want to lie in a dishonoured grave while all his relations finished their beastly lives in the salt mines he would be a very great deal more careful in future. Hambledon missed a good deal of the address because Gerardov’s Russian went too fast for him to keep up with it, but that was the general gist of his remarks. Hambledon expected a real comrade-to-comrade argument to start, but discipline is much more strict in the Soviet Army than would be tolerated in more democratic countries. The soldier merely stood to attention till Gerardov had finished and then saluted smartly and withdrew. Silence fell upon the empty ill-lighted square.
“You are my rescuer and preserver,” began Gerardov, tenderly rubbing his damaged ear, which still hurt him, “to you I owe my life, my liberty—”
“And the pursuit of happiness,” concluded Hambledon. “Now we will drive to my hotel.”
They did so, there were few formalities for the honoured guest of such as Feodor Gerardov, and Hambledon was glad to have supper and retire to bed. It seemed a very long time indeed since he had driven away from Bereghark with the late Commissar Ordzinov early that morning; the moment Tommy’s head was upon the pillow he fell asleep.
The hotel had been a good one once, but the Russian Army is contemptuous of gracious living. It was a little as though the Savoy had been taken over by a factory canteen committee. Hambledon naturally made no comment, and when he saw in the restaurant a waiter whom he had known there in better days, he avoided the man. The sooner he was out of Berlin the better; at any moment somebody might come in who had known the late Hugo Britz, and though he was confident of being able to talk himself out of any such situation, it would be better still if no such situation arose.
Gerardov appeared to be busy that first day and Tommy saw little of him until the evening when the Russian came in smiling and saying that the man whom he had to meet had returned from the British Sector and that another hour or so in the morning would complete that business. “And what do you do then?”
“I go back to Moscow by the evening train, for such are my instructions,” said Gerardov. “My mission is completed within the specified time and all is well, thanks entirely to you. I shall be deeply in your debt for the rest of my life. Let me know, please, what I can do for you. Not in return, for, until I have the felicity of saving your life under conditions of unspeakable horror, that will be impossible. I hope merely to be able to restore in some measure my own self-respect.”
Hambledon waited, with a suitably modest expression, for the flood to turn and then said that he had been thinking over his affairs during the day and that two courses of action appeared to him desirable. One was to have a new set of identity papers and the other was to leave Berlin at the earliest possible moment.
“You and I,” he said, waving his cigar gracefully, “men of the world, men of action, fighters in the Cause of Freedom, know how to estimate at their true microscopic value the lives of any who seek to impede the March of Communism. But I must face the fact that in the eyes of the British authorities I have—shall we say—caused the deaths of three people, for murder I will not call it. It is better to face a fact than a firing party. I know that I am safe in the Soviet Sector but, my dear Comrade Gerardov, I am still in Berlin and some accident might happen. I might be decoyed across the dividing line. There is, for example, a blonde in the British Sector—”
Gerardov broke in with genuine horror to say that surely no girl was worth endangering the life of—
“Oh, I agree. In cold blood and with a calm mind, I agree. But I am a martyr to boredom, Comrade, to me it is a slow torture, and if I were to sit here doing nothing in particular for days on end there is no knowing what folly I might not commit. I am a man of action, Comrade,” said Hambledon, uncoiling suddenly like a spring and banging the table so that Gerardov started back, “I cannot vegetate. Help me to leave Berlin, I beg.”
“Certainly, certainly. Nothing can be easier. Will you not come with me to Moscow, where I can introduce you to powerful friends?”
This was a reasonable suggestion, but there was an undertone of nervousness in Gerardov’s voice which suggested that he did not want the invitation accepted. Tommy gathered quite correctly that Gerardov was not a person of nearly so much importance in Moscow as he made himself out to be. Besides, Hambledon did not want to go there.
“Someday,” he said, “I will remind you of that invitation and come to Moscow; it will be a merry meeting, will it not? But, at the moment, let me spend a few months studying at first hand your remarkable economic system so that I may not come as a raw outsider knowing nothing. Will you? I speak frankly. I would like a post in a factory somewhere for a time, I desire greatly to work in a Soviet factory.” He stopped and smiled faintly in an embarrassed manner. “I don’t mean to say that I burn for heavy mechanical labour. I have had some experience of administration and—”
“Of course not. You, labouring at a workbench! What an idea! Besides, it is quite unnecessary. We have plenty of labour. What we do need is a larger number of men of suitable capacity and education for administrative posts. Inspectors, co-ordinators, organizers, men who can iron out kinks in the chain of industrial production. I will speak to a friend of mine and it will be all settled.”
Hambledon paused to admire the picture of ironing out kinks in chains. “Do you know Poltava in the Ukraine?” he asked.
“I know of it, of course. I have never been there.”
“There is a ‘gymnasium’ there for the education of promising boys to posts of leadership—”
“There is,” said Gerardov, nodding eagerly, “there is. It is a good school, some of my friends have sons there. Did you, then, think of applying for a mastership?”
Hambledon hesitated, but only momentarily. The idea was attractive at first sight but no doubt he would be expected to live in under fairly strict discipline, he would be much freer outside. Besides, he had been a schoolmaster once and did not intend to resume that career. Life in a Soviet school would be really hard work.
“What,” he said, “with my inadequate smattering of your language? ‘If you please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘may I have a glass of tea,’ that is the extent of it. Your bright boys would laugh at me, and quite rightly. No, I was about to say that I have an orphaned nephew there, my dead sister’s child. I am not married, Comrade Gerardov, I have no son to keep me young. This boy is a young imp by what I hear, I haven’t seen him since he was learning to walk, but he is all I have. I ought to see something of him, I owe it to Marya’s memory.” His voice softened.
“Most creditable,” murmured Gerardov. “Most conscientious.”
“Besides,” said Hambledon, cheering up, “he needs a sound parental influence. The school is all that could be desired, I know, but the fatherly talking-to, the occasional clout on the head, you know!” He laughed heartily. “We had it in our day, didn’t we?”
“Certainly,” said Gerardov, who was at the moment being actively sorry for any small boy who might be spanked by this lion of a man. “Certainly, but one has to be sure one knows one’s own strength, doesn’t one? It would not do to, as it were, damage the child.”
Hambledon stared for a moment and broke into a laugh of genuine amusement. “I wouldn’t hurt him for anything,” he said; dropped his voice and added: “I could not, when he looks at me with Marya’s eyes.”
Russians are basically sentimental about obvious things like the family, children, flowers and the beloved dead. Gerardov was so moved that tears rose in his eyes and Hambledon hurried on.
“What I would really like is a post in a factory in the same town if possible. Then I can go and call on his housemaster and perhaps take the boy out sometimes, eh?”
Gerardov wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and said that he did not know of any actual factories in Poltava. “It is an almost exclusively agricultural district, you know. But there is a large establishment there for the assembly of agricultural machinery of which the component parts are manufactured elsewhere. I was reading an article about it in Pravda not long ago.”
“Nothing could be better. I have, quite recently, been in touch with the latest developments in agricultural machinery,” said Tommy, thinking of his tour of the Bereghark Collectivized Farm Machinery Factory.
“Splendid. Splendid. Leave it to me. Tomorrow I will speak to some friends who will advise me what to do.”
“And the papers,” urged Hambledon. “New identity papers.”
“Ah, yes. That will be more difficult,” said Gerardov. “In Russia, we do not permit the use of pseudonyms or the changing of names. It makes for confusion.”
“Quite right. It does,” said Hambledon, thinking of Stalin, whose name is Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. “But that, surely, is why one does it, is it not?”
6
gerardov returned to tiie hotel at midday next day, beaming happily and saying that he had had an idea, an inspiration. Hambledon, already assuming the onset of boredom, barely looked up.
“Glad to hear it. What is it?”
“When I had finished my business I went to the station to book a place in tonight’s train to Moscow, but it is already full, so I can’t travel till tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“But I have a great friend, a friend from childhood’s days, Andrei Varkin. We went to school together, we played together, roamed the woods—”
“Hunted the neighbours’ cats.”
“Experienced the onset of manhood together—”
“And together courted the innkeeper’s daughter.”
“How did you know? We joined the Party on the same day and rose in it together. We both did well but he even better than I, for now he is very high advanced in the M.V.D. At the moment he is at Amberg on the Oder, just this side of Frankfurt, conducting an important enquiry into a case of sabotage. It is only forty miles or so from here, we will obtain a car this afternoon and drive there. I will introduce you to him, he is the man to issue your fresh papers. That is a matter for the M.V.D. alone.”
Tommy thought it time to take a languid interest in the story. he threw down the Russian paper he had been trying to read and gave Gerardov some attention.
“He is the man to appoint you to the assembly works at Poltava. The train from Berlin to Moscow stops at Amberg, I will travel by it tomorrow evening.”
“It all sounds quite a good idea,” said Tommy approvingly. “I will go and throw my new shirts and my new toothbrush into my new suitcase”—for as a friend of Gerardov’s he had been privileged to buy at the state stores—“and we can start whenever you like.”
“Ten minutes to pack my few rags,” said Gerardov, who was in fact quite smartly dressed for a Russian, “and we will go. I will now order a car. Shall we take food and eat as we go? The sooner we are in the good company of Andrei Varkin the happier I shall be.”
Amberg turned out to be a horrible modern town whose houses were either ferro-concrete blocks of flats for the “indispensables” and departmental managers, or rows of depressing mud huts half below ground for the workers. Hambledon, who had an eye for good architecture when he had time to look at it, was heartily repelled, but did not say so.
“One of the Soviet’s more recent creations, evidently,” he said, nodding approvingly. “An interesting specimen of town planning.”
“Only think,” said Gerardov, “ten years ago there was nothing here but marsh. Today the great factories you see on the extreme left are turning out machine tools for us at a most unbelievable rate. Driver! Ask that man where is the office of the M.V.D.”
The driver stopped an elderly man who was plodding down the road with a sack on his back. The man gave directions clearly and civilly but without a smile; when the car moved on Hambledon, looking in the driving mirror, saw him turn and look after them and ceremonially spit upon the ground.
“Rash,” said Tommy to himself, “very rash. Someone ought to tell him about driving mirrors. Suppose,” he went on aloud, “suppose your friend Andrei Varkin is too busy at the moment to receive us? It is, after all, only seventeen hours by my watch.”
“And by mine. I also have a watch though it is true that it does not always go. If Andrei Varkin is still engaged in hearing evidence, we will wait. We have all the night before us and all tomorrow. What a pleasant sensation it is, not to have to hurry.”
But Andrei Varkin was coming out of his office door as the car drove up. Feodor Gerardov leapt out of it, calling his friend’s name, and the two old comrades fell into each other’s arms, embracing with little cries of joy while the M.V.D. guards looked on with wooden faces and such of the townspeople as were passing by averted their eyes. Hambledon waited with an expression of polite sympathy until his turn came to be introduced to Varkin.
“This,” said Gerardov, with one arm round Varkin’s neck, and the other round Hambledon’s shoulders, “is a man after your own heart. Comrade Hugo Britz, my old comrade Andrei Varkin.” He hugged them both so enthusiastically that he almost bumped their heads together and Tommy wished that someone had told him whether or not Russian men kissed each other on both cheeks when first introduced. However, Varkin merely clasped Hambledon’s hand in both his own and bade him welcome in the name of an old friendship and the promise of a new one.
“Let us all go to my flat,” he said. “We will spend the evening together renewing old ties and making new ones. Does the Comrade Hugo Britz speak Russian? Never mind, we will talk German, the language of science and philosophy. You must learn Russian, Comrade Britz; it is the language of poetry, the language the flowers speak when they talk to each other. Did I say we will spend the evening together? We will make a night of it. Driver! Straight on and turn left when I tell you.”
Andrei Varkin was a tall well-built man and, so far as form and features were concerned, would be considered handsome in any company, but he had an oddly white face which contrasted sharply with his black hair, eyebrows, and thin moustache. If Hambledon had been in a position to choose his company he would not have chosen Varkin, but under the circumstances he had no choice and prepared willingly to spend the evening making himself agreeable. This was not difficult; both the Russians were charming to him, a little over-effusive by Western standards but that was only natural. Gerardov, who apparently had no secrets from Varkin, told him all about the unlucky trip into the British Sector which had ended in jail and gave a highly coloured account of Hambledon’s method of getting him out.
“He is a lion, this Comrade Britz, a real tiger. He strangles a warder as easily as a woman wrings out a wet towel, he strolls down the prison corridor jangling the keys with me tottering behind, one would think him the Governor at least. He opens the door, we reach the street and come face to face with a plain-clothes policeman who had seen us come out! My dear Varkin, I saw death sitting on the end of my nose, but biff! he knocks the fellow down, steals a car—a jeep—and drives through the streets of Berlin on two wheels mainly, like a trick cyclist on a bicycle. Whenever I have too indigestible a supper, I shall dream of that drive.”
“Well, we didn’t hit anything, did we?” laughed Hambledon.
“The only thing that puzzles me a little is how you knew where to find that outer door. I was in a dazed condition at the time but I am sure you did not hesitate.”
Hambledon laughed again. “I did not tell you before and, indeed, it is of no importance, but it was not the first time I had been in that prison. Oh, nothing serious, merely a breach of regulations.”
“A thing which might happen to anyone,” said Varkin cheerfully. “These regulations! I do not speak of our own, of course, they are sensible and well considered, I refer to the regulations in the Western so-called democracies. There was an article in Izvestia about them recently.”
The dinner had been excellent and the vodka plentiful. Hambledon liked vodka and had a head as hard as a millstone, but as the late hours wore on and little gaps in the conversation began to recur he thought he might without rudeness suggest retiring to bed. “I have had a long day,” he said, “and seen many interesting things. Your good vodka and your sparkling company conspire to overwhelm me. If you will permit me to excuse myself—I have still to find an hotel—”
“My dear Comrade Britz,” said Varkin, rising, “heaven forbid that we should fatigue our guests—”
“Heavens, what an idea! It is not you—”
Varkin patted his back and threw a friendly arm round his shoulders. “No, no. I did not mean that at all. You are tired, let me show you to your room. You—and Feodor, of course—are staying with me.”
“But,” protested Hambledon, “I could not presume—”
“Don’t talk nonsense, my dear Britz. The hotel here is for the workers only, it is not of a fit standard for the administrative grades. Besides, there is nothing to thank me for. There are suites of rooms in this building which have been taken over for my Commission of Enquiry and they are available for the guests of the Soviet, the honoured guests such as you, Comrade, to whom my old friend Feodor owes so much.”
“Assure me, at least, that I am not disturbing you and Comrade Gerardov in your reunion.”
“Certainly you are not. We shall drink another glass or two and talk of old days and old friends at home before we retire. Let me show you the way—permit me—”
When Hambledon had been conducted to his room with affectionate courtesy, the two old friends returned to the sitting room and refilled their glasses.
“Well, Feodor? Do you really mean to tell me that that dramatic escape story of yours is all true?”
“On my honour, Andrei Varkin. This man is a find. He is resourceful and brave and, above all, a good Communist. By the way, his Party membership card and identity papers were of course taken from him in prison, he wants some new ones.”
