The Red House

Excellent, Zhukov thought. Everyone should spend their first night in America in New York. ‘What is this shuttle?’ he asked.

‘It’s like a regular bus service. You buy your ticket on board.’

‘That sounds very progressive,’ Zhukov rashly observed.

The silence in the car throbbed.

Grigorenko turned his big polluted face around. ‘You will learn, Comrade Zhukov, that much of what appears to be progress in this country is achieved at the expense of far more deserving causes.’

Brodsky removed a bullet-shaped inhaler from one nostril and hummed a two-bar introduction. ‘An Aeroflot pilot would not have been deterred by the sort of blizzards they have in Washington.’

Zhukov leaned back in his seat and, with two fingers on the vein in his temple, observed the approaches to New York.

With the deep snow on the ground and flakes peeling off the sky it might have been Sheremetyevo Airport. Even a few pine trees on the perimeter. Except for the cars. Acres of them bonneted in white in a parking lot. In Moscow it took more than a year to get delivery of a stubby little Moskvitch or a Volga of ugly and ancient design at prices few could afford. Automobiles, he told himself, are my first impression. Uniform, luxurious, decadent, asleep in the comfortable snow. But so many … Did anyone walk?

Grigorenko followed his gaze or tuned in to his thoughts. Perhaps one day they would even achieve that. He pointed up to the sagging sky. ‘It’s the automobiles that cause the pollution. Every year it kills thousands of old people in New York City. It’s typical of the American mentality that comfort of the middle-classes should take precedence over the welfare of the aged.’

‘The senior citizens,’ Brodsky hummed. And giggled.

Grigorenko continued his recital while Zhukov thought briefly of the pollution over Kiev and decided not to make the comparison. He was a second secretary and his guides were inferior in rank. But not, he guessed, in that other hierarchy in which a third secretary could outrank a Minister Counsellor. Perhaps even an ambassador.

The houses on the left looked English; dozing villas alive inside with occupants preparing for breakfast. Silver buses and ruthless trucks spraying the windscreen with brown slush; highways wheeling and diving beneath each other; wires and roads and signs glaring and guiding. The mind panicking a little; the panic masked by the impassive trained exterior.

Grigorenko, official Soviet guide on the nursery slopes of first impressions, turned again. A single hair grew from the end of his suet nose. ‘You have been celebrating on the aircraft, Comrade Zhukov?’

‘It is the first of January.’

‘Certainly. And there will probably be a small celebration in New York. But it was, perhaps, a little unwise to drink so early in the morning?’

‘You lose all sense of time between Moscow and New York.’

‘True.’ The big puppet head nodded slowly.

Valentina squeezed Zhukov’s hand. ‘Look, Vladimir.’

Ahead, Manhattan assembled itself in the young, snow-tattered light, blurred coyly then reasserted itself—a postcard so familiar that it was again difficult to accept the reality.

Grigorenko isolated the Empire State from the rest. ‘The world’s tallest TV tower,’ he said reluctantly.

‘That’s correct,’ Zhukov agreed without thinking. ‘And the whole building weighs 365,000 tons—that’s fourteen tons to support each occupant.’

Grigorenko glared at him suspiciously. ‘You seem to know a lot about one American building? Perhaps it’s you who should make the introductions.’ He felt for the hair on his nose.

‘Not just one American building. The most famous of all. I read my tourist literature. And,’ he apologized, ‘I have this facility with figures and statistics. They lodge in my brain.’

Which was true. There was Manhattan, floating as serene as a reflection, and he had to toss 365,000 tons of concrete into it. Such training.

‘It’s very impressive,’ Valentina said. ‘Especially beside all this’. She pointed at some grubby miniatures along the road.

‘Uh-huh.’ Brodsky tuning-up. ‘But it seems to me that we should not forget the squalor and corruption that exists behind those façades. Drugs, drunkenness, violence, vice.’ He ticked them off on the fingers of his dogma, his voice lingering and slavering over V-I-C-E.

Only the driver said nothing, and Zhukov wondered how his young peasant brain reacted—if his training had left him with any reactions.

I want to feel and savour it by myself, Zhukov thought. I want my own private instincts which I have so carefully and privately nurtured. To feel and judge and file.

They lingered beneath a red light before entering the Kremlin of Capitalism.

Manhattan’s streets and avenues opened up and the sky narrowed—grey canals high above. He saw a Hollywood cop feeling his nightstick as if it were a damaged limb and thought of the Soviet militia with their dramatic topcoats and irritable toothpick truncheons. Discovery and nostalgia fought each other. Steam billowing from vents in the city’s bowels and lingering in the icy, lacy air: felt boots crunching fresh snow on Arbatskaya Square.

Discovery won the battle without deciding the war; the shops the stormtroopers. Windows of nonchalant plenty. Furniture in theatrical sets, beds of jewellery and dormant watches, racy clothes and gossamer fabrics, skis and golf-clubs, package tours to Las Vegas, Miami, Dublin or Tokyo, a coffee carafe of Pyrex and silverplate like a contemporary samovar, beckoning beds, busty, gutsy displays of brassieres and corsetry, a garden window with simulated grass being cut by a mower (plan ahead for summer), Tsarist perambulators, floors of shoes ready to quick-march, toys Russian children couldn’t dream of because they couldn’t imagine them. Everything cheaper than everything else, every store flaunting infinitesimal advantage.

And the Christmas tableaux in cavernous windows. Dwarfs and children and fairies strutting and dancing and blessing; a carousel carrying dizzy teddy-bears; a rocket bound for the moon with Santa Claus (Grandfather Frost) astride the command nodule. And Christmas trees (yolka) buttoned on to the haunches of the elephantine buildings with white electric bulbs.

Grigorenko interrupted as he had done with many other newcomers. ‘I know just what you are thinking.’

‘You do? You presume too much, comrade.’

‘You are wondering what can be wrong with Capitalism if it produces so many fruits.’

The vein had subsided, the ache at the base of his skull fading. ‘Is that what you wondered when you first arrived?’

Grigorenko’s pattern was disturbed. ‘Not I. But you. Is that not what you are thinking?’ The growl lost a decibel of menace. Brodsky felt the bridge of his sinus and made a noise that could have been a simper, a giggle or a sneeze.

Zhukov said it wasn’t, enjoying the transient authority of unexpected attack. He was, after all, a second secretary.

‘Then what are you thinking?’

‘Just remembering that in the shops in Gorky Street you can see nothing in the windows.’

‘You are commenting unfavourably on the commerce of the Soviet Union?’

‘On the contrary, Comrade Grigorenko. I’m surprised that you should interpret a remark so prematurely and so incorrectly.’ He gestured towards a windowful of lingerie threaded with tinsel. ‘If you judge a woman by her jewellery you may find a whore.’

‘Just so, comrade.’ Grigorenko made notes in his mind. ‘You speak very well—but of course that’s your job.’

‘Surely yours as well, comrade.’

Valentina’s elbow nudged his ribs, warning.

Brodsky said, ‘Perhaps Zhukov’s words are as empty as those shops in Gorky street.’

Zhukov said, ‘But the shops aren’t empty. Only the windows.’

‘You will make a very good diplomat,’ Grigorenko observed. ‘You’re smart with words.’

‘I am a good diplomat.’

‘Forty-four? Second Secretary? Perhaps your capabilities have been underestimated.’ The doggy face regarded Zhukov with total seriousness; in the bruise-coloured pouch under one eye there was an incipient growth.