Alias uncle hugo, p.8
Alias Uncle Hugo, page 8
Varkin listened with unwavering attention and then asked if he had ever met a man named Melcher.
“Man with a scarred face,” said Hambledon instantly. “Yes, I knew him but not intimately as I did Ludwig and old Peter. You see, things didn’t get a lot easier in Berlin when the fighting did stop so far as meeting people was concerned. It’s true one no longer got killed at every street corner, but there was still nowhere private to meet and when the Allied Occupation started it was as hard as ever to get about.”
Varkin leaned back in his chair and started to fidget with his pencil. Hambledon took the hint.
“I am boring you stiff with my reminiscences,” he said, “and we’ve hardly started on my history as a Party member. Do forgive me. In 1948 I went down to Silesia—”
“I have been so interested in what you were saying that I have forgotten the passage of time,” said Varkin, laughing. “I started out to make sure that you were the real Hugo Britz and here we are, still sitting. You must tell me some more of your adventures some other time, if you will. I shall be most interested. I have put in an application in your name for the post at Poltava, I hope we shall hear soon. I have no doubt that the answer will be favourable.” He got up and Hambledon immediately did the same.
“I have kept you,” he said, “I do apologize—”
“Not at all. I will make out your new papers this evening, I have to go to the office now.”
“Your unmerited kindness,” began Hambledon.
“My dear Comrade Britz! A duty as well as a pleasure.”
Hambledon gathered that he had passed with credits in all subjects and his belief was confirmed when he received his new Party card and identity papers that evening. They were all that the heart could wish, and his personal identity card carried also a few words in Russian signed Andrei Varkin, Commissar, M.V.D. Western Section, and several office stamps. When he went to bed that night he spent some time with a Russian grammar and dictionary making out what the words meant. He had to start by deciphering Russian handwriting, which is like nothing else on earth, but he had had some practise with it in Central America a couple of years earlier. Eventually he made it out.
Indispensable. Assist and protect. Answerable only to the undersigned.
“Well, well,” said Hambledon to himself. “Couldn’t have been better if I’d ordered it.”
“Almost too good to be true,” said himself in reply.
“Oh, quite,” answered Hambledon. “I wouldn’t trust that charming fellow Varkin with a used tram ticket.”
He put his precious papers carefully away and went to bed and to sleep.
Andrei Varkin rang up his friend Feodor Gerardov in Moscow. “Only wanted to know if you had a comfortable journey. Oh, splendid. Glad to hear it. Yes—yes. So glad. By the way, I had a long talk with our mutual friend this morning. Perfectly satisfactory. Yes, no doubt about it in my mind. What? Yes, of course I will. It is the right man, and I have given him papers such as many a works director would give his ears for. I shall keep him here for a fortnight or so just to get to know him better. Something to our advantage might slip out, one never knows.”
The days passed, therefore, and the transfer to Poltava seemed to be delayed somewhere. Varkin blamed it upon “office red tape” and Hambledon, whose opinion of governmental red tape was as poor as anybody’s, had to admit even to himself that the excuse might be valid. It was a little difficult to keep on asking about it, it was obvious that a very considerable favour was being shown him and any enquiry must sound as though he were trying to hurry them up. In fact, Varkin said so.
“My dear friend and Comrade, why all this anxiety? The appointment and the permits will arrive in due course. What is the matter? Are you not happy here?”
Hambledon said that he felt he was wasting the Soviet Union’s time.
“Nonsense. I’m sorry I have to be out so much, this enquiry is a serious and complicated matter. You are getting bored, that’s what it is, and no wonder,”
In point of fact, the more Varkin was out the better Hambledon was pleased. Their conversation had an awkward way of harking back to his activities as Britz and here he was on thin ice. He had been in Berlin at the time when the city was being divided into the various sectors; Franz Twedt was already dead but he had met Rubin, who had talked more than he had intended, and Melcher, a man whose face was hideously scarred by a shell fragment. Tommy felt on reasonably secure ground when talking about Berlin in 1945, he probably knew a lot more about it than either Varkin or the compilers of his dossier, but when it came to more recent times Hambledon was lamentably ill informed. The ice was not merely thin, it had large black holes in it.
His face lit up with a brilliant idea.
“I have thought of something really useful,” he said triumphantly. “Perhaps, Comrade Varkin, you would help and advise me.”
“Certainly, anything I can do—what is it?”
“I should like to take Russian lessons. I feel—”
Varkin thoroughly approved. “I think that is a splendid idea. Now, who can we find for a teacher? Someone with a reasonable standard of education and yet with a good deal of spare time.”
“Someone elderly,” suggested Hambledon, “or, since I shall not be here long, someone convalescing after an illness or an accident? A broken leg, for example, does not impair the faculty of speech.”
“I think you have hit it. I will have enquiries set about, it shouldn’t be difficult to find the right man. I remember, by the way, being told by more than one foreigner learning our language that it was terribly difficult as a study, but that if a good grounding was acquired the rest was best learned by talking to people, anyone, anywhere. You pick it up as you go along, he said, once you have a basis.”
Varkin was both helpful and prompt. He produced a young man who had originally trained as a teacher but who had been drafted into a factory instead. He had had his right arm broken and the hand crushed in a factory accident and was pleased and happy to find something he could do. Sick benefits are not high in the Soviet Union.
Hambledon enjoyed himself. He and his teacher would stroll about Amberg talking, always talking; the names of everything they saw, every little occurrence in the streets gave them subjects for conversation. The young man enjoyed it also, this was the work he had always wanted to do and his pupil was kind, considerate and intelligent. He used to give Hambledon homework to do so that now, in the evenings, instead of fending off Varkin’s curiosity about Communism in Berlin, Hambledon was questioning him about Perfective and Imperfective Tenses or the Declension of What. Also, when Varkin wanted to be told stories about Britz’s adventures, Hambledon would look up with an appealing face and say: “Please, I am so sorry to be a bore, but may I speak Russian?” Then the story would become hopelessly involved and end in gales of laughter.
At the end of a fortnight Varkin gave it up. There was no getting anything compromising out of Britz and he found himself turning into a language tutor, which bored him. Hambledon’s appointment as Supernumerary Director of the Poltava Agricultural Machinery Assembly Plant came through, complete with permits, passes and reservations. Since from Frankfurt an der Oder to Poltava in the Ukraine is a journey of eight hundred miles as the aircraft flies and nearly a thousand miles by rail, he went by train to Warsaw, by air to Kharkov and by train again to Poltava, spending two nights on the road. It is eighty miles from Kharkov to Poltava and takes five hours; by starting soon after eight in the morning Hambledon reached Poltava in the early afternoon and found a decrepit tram at the station which would take him to the works. Hambledon went there first to present his credentials and introduce himself, arrange to have his meals in the “best” dining room at the works and see about getting a comfortable billet.
His Russian teacher at Amberg had told him a great deal which surprised him about factory management in Soviet Russia, and one item which had impressed him was about the four dining rooms. The best is for the Administration and is really good; the second for the technical staff, not so good but passable; the third for the pacemakers, the workers’ corps d’elite, and the fourth class for the ordinary workers—soup, potatoes, porridge and bread. Hambledon gathered that the harder that men work in Soviet factories the less they get to eat, which seemed to him to be thoroughly unsound, but he was not in Russia upon a reforming mission. He realized at once that it was necessary to have his meals in the best dining room, not only for his own comfort but as a matter of prestige, and as prestige was all that was keeping him alive it was very important indeed to uphold it. Besides, he liked his meals.
The tram rattled and groaned through the not very inspiring streets of the town, crossed the river Vorskla and turned along the side of it to a group of very new factory buildings on the flat water meadows. It was a pleasant site outside the town, not yet built over; there were green fields all round the works and trees by the river. The tram stopped at the main gates, Hambledon entered and was directed to the head office, where he asked for the Director. “Tell him I am the Comrade Hugo Britz from Berlin.”
He was shown into a room on the ground floor where there were already five men sitting round a long table apparently engaged in conference. They rose when he was announced and the Director, who had been at the head of the table, came anxiously to meet him.
“You are very welcome, Comrade Britz. I am Gregor Mantov, the Director. Let me introduce my colleagues. Comrade Birman, the trades-union organizer—”
“Delighted,” murmured Hambledon, shaking hands with one after another.
“Comrade Larin, technical administrator and my right hand. Comrade Zolkin, my chief engineer. Finally, on your left, Comrade Dadyan, our Party Organizer.”
The name struck a chord in Hambledon’s memory at the same moment as he turned to greet a man who stood by his left elbow. His face was familiar, too—of course. Dadyan, Party Organizer, had been introduced to him before at the Bereghark Collectivized Farm Machinery Factory when he himself had been the Commissar Peskoff. Of all the damnable chances—
“Delighted,” said Hambledon again, and shook hands with him.
“The delight is entirely mine,” said Dadyan, staring hard at him with an expression of malicious amusement. The recognition was mutual, there was not the slightest doubt about it and for a moment panic seized Hambledon. This was the end, in a moment he would be denounced and probably shot out of hand. He considered escaping at once, even, since Dadyan was between him and the door, diving out of the window, but there was only the factory yard outside and if he ever got away through the main gate there were only the flat meadows beyond it.
The moment of panic passed and still Dadyan did not speak, someone else was talking. The Director, of course, asking, of all things at such a moment, whether he had had lunch.
“You will, naturally, take your meals with us in the administrative dining room, Comrade Britz. It is true that the usual lunch hour is past, but our efficient staff will be happy to make a special effort, Comrade. You have only to say what you would like done. I should like to show you also the room which I have put at your disposal as a private office, Comrade Britz. I hope it will meet with your approval. If not, any alteration which you suggest will, naturally, be carried out at once.”
He stopped and still Dadyan did not speak. Hambledon pulled his wits together.
“Thank you, Comrade Director, thank you.” The man’s terrified of me, how exceedingly funny. “Now that you mention it, my breakfast was not only sketchy but a long time ago. Anything they have—something cold—”
The Director babbled something and left the room, Hambledon noticed that Dadyan went out with him. The explosion would now take place at any moment.
He stood there talking to the other three men. They were all men in their early thirties although holding responsible positions in the new plant, they talked politely but nervously about indifferent subjects. Poltava’s annual Fair; not what it was but still an interesting survival if looked at with an indulgent eye as a sort of local festival. “It has been purged, of course, of all its undesirable religious and feudal features and now consists of open-air dancing, singing of our good Communist songs instead of the former mediaeval nonsense, and a series of addresses by various speakers to improve the political education of the workers.”
“Some say,” said Zolkin, the chief engineer, “that that sort of thing is all nonsense and should be swept away. But I am a local man and I know how deeply rooted such customs are in the country peasant. We always find, do we not, Comrade Birman, that the output improves surprisingly after our annual Festival.”
“That is true,” said the trades-union organizer. “Of course, we hold it now on Stalin’s birthday instead of upon the reputed anniversary of some absurd so-called saint and we make it, as Comrade Larin has said, an opportunity for political indoctrination. The workers are satisfied and it does them good.”
“It seems to me an excellent idea,” said Hambledon, whose voice seemed to himself to be creaking like a rusty hinge. Dadyan was now telling the Director—
“Are you interested in sport, Comrade Britz? There is a stretch of marshes about four miles down the river where, at the right season, there are snipe. A dish of snipe—”
Hambledon lost the end of the sentence because heavy footsteps approached the door but they passed by along the passage.
“I have never had any experience of snipe-shooting,” he said. “My acquaintance with them is limited to meeting them on a plate. Fishing, now, I am fond of as a pastime. Even if one is not very successful there is the quiet, the fresh air, the pleasant scenery and the soothing effect of the river running past.” He stumbled over his words and apologized. “I have been studying your beautiful but difficult language, Comrades, but I fear I am anything but adept. The fish,” he said, achieving a smile which made his face ache, “are not themselves linguists nor expect their captors to be. I hope that—”
The door was flung open, two men in police uniform marched in and halted. They were followed by Dadyan, looking triumphant, and the Comrade Director Mantov, looking as though he were about to faint. Hambledon’s three companions recoiled from him as though he were plague-stricken and Dadyan stretched out a dramatic arm.
“That is your man,” he said, pointing at Hambledon. “The Comrade Hugo Britz here, the Commissar Peskoff at Bereghark. He is an impostor and I demand his immediate arrest.”
Hambledon was so relieved at hearing “arrest” instead of “death” that he almost thanked Dadyan.
“This is a ridiculous outrage,” he said angrily. “When this absurd affair is cleared up, those who have instigated it”—he glared at Dadyan—“or even allowed it without protest”—his eyes rested momentarily upon the Director, who shrank—“will repent it bitterly.”
Dadyan grinned, the office staff said nothing, the police closed in upon Hambledon and took hold of his arms.
“Now, then. March!”
8
hambledon was not particularly anxious now that it appeared that he was not going to be shot out of hand. He had the papers Varkin had given him and particularly his personal identity card with Varkin’s all-embracing endorsement upon it, and he knew that the one thing which does not happen in Soviet Russia is for a subordinate to disregard the orders of his superior. Varkin was immeasurably more important and powerful than that tiresome gadfly Dadyan. He had not produced his identity card at the works because he assumed that Dadyan would snatch it from him and destroy it; he would wait until his arrival at the police station, produce it there, and return in triumph to the works accompanied by, if possible, the local chief of police as escort. Dadyan could then be deflated, discredited and demolished at leisure. It was, at first sight, an unfortunate chance that the Party Organizer Dadyan should have been transferred from Bereghark to Poltava at just the right moment to sec Hambledon in both places, but if Tommy could start his career in Poltava by smashing the awe-inspiring Party Organizer, what prestige he would acquire. He squared his shoulders and stepped out between the two policemen, for they were walking the mile or so back to the town.
A little later, misgivings once more crept upon him. He had heard sad stories of persons arrested by the Russian police being cast into prison to await trial and then being forgotten. Since even in Russia it is not creditable to forget a prisoner unless it is done on purpose, after a time no one will admit that he is there, ever was there, or had any real existence to start with. This leads naturally to his ceasing to have any existence at all. There were many things about Russia which Hambledon did not know, and one of them was the relation between the political and the civil police. These two men were civil police, he knew that much. He also knew that there was an M.V.D.—political police—branch in Poltava, Varkin had told him so.
“You are taking me to the M.V.D. office, I assume,” he said loftily.
