The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 35

History often forgets about the siege of Leningrad, focusing instead on its southern counterpart, Stalingrad. In that the Nazis’ retreat from Stalingrad has widely been seen as a turning point, the focus is understandable, but as a consequence it is easy to overlook the siege that Leningrad, a fine city of wide promenades and ancient jingling trams, endured for eight hundred and seventy-one days of unrelenting war. Once the home of tsars, then the heartland of the revolution, it seemed remarkable to me that any semblance of the royal city had survived the beating it had taken, and indeed, in the suburbs all the way through to the heart of the city, an architecture of pragmatism and speed had taken over, of squares and rectangles and grey tarmac before brown walls. History was of little interest to the Soviets, unless it was the history of their success, and, as if embarrassed by the fine stone houses that still survived around the canals of the inner city, the high walls of the old town were plastered over with posters proclaiming STRIVE FOR VICTORY! and CELEBRATE COMMUNISM AND UNITE IN LABOUR! and other such azures of wisdom. The Winter Palace stood rather awkwardly in the midst of all these ugly good intentions, a monument to a bygone era and testimony to the regime which had been overthrown. To celebrate the Winter Palace would have, in some quaint way, glorified its previous occupiers, but to destroy it would have been an insult to those men and women of 1917 who fought against it and all it stood for, and so it and much of Leningrad remained standing strong, walls too thick to be more than scratched by bullets or cracked by ice.

The Leningrad Cronus Club resided, to my surprise, not in one of the great buildings of the old city, but in a far smaller, more modest tenement tucked in behind a Jewish cemetery, whose stones were long-since overgrown and whose trees dangled heavy over its high grey walls. The Club’s gatekeeper and, as it turned out, one of the few remaining members, introduced herself simply as,

“Olga. You must be Harry. You won’t do at all–those boots are quite wrong. Don’t stand there–come in!”

Olga, fifty-nine years old, grey hair plaited down to her waist, shoulders bent slightly forward to give her chin a jutting, protruding quality that her face itself did not merit, may once have been a beautiful young woman at whose lightest step upon tiny feet the heart of many an aristocrat raced; but now, as she grumbled and grunted at the creaking pipes that ran up the staircase of the tenement block, she was almost a child’s caricature of that creature called a crone. Green tiles on the floor and faded cobalt-blue paint on the walls were the tenement’s only real concession to vitality, and the doors that looked out on to the winding staircase upwards were kept firmly shut, “To keep the heat in!”

It was March in the city, and though the air was still biting cold, the snow was beginning to melt, whiteness giving way to a perpetual shimmer of grey-black as five months of embedded dirt, soot and grime was revealed from beneath the crystal piles shoved up against the roadside. The worst of the ice had gone from the roofs, but these masses of shovelled snow remained, insulating themselves, monuments to the fading winter that had gone before.

“I’ve got whisky,” she said, waving me to a padded chair by the orange-banded electric fire. “But you should have vodka and be grateful.”

“I’ll have vodka and be grateful,” I said, slipping into the soft padded furniture with relief.

“You speak Russian with an eastern accent–where did you learn?”

“Komosomolsk,” I admitted, “a few lives ago.”

“You need to speak with a western accent, because you look soft,” she chided. “Otherwise people will ask. And your boots–far too new. Here.” Something metal flashed across the room and landed in my lap. It was a cheese grater. “Have you never been to Russia before?” she demanded. “You’re doing this all wrong!”

“Not on a Russian passport,” I admitted. “American, British, Swiss, German—”

“No no no no! All wrong! No good, start again!”

“Forgive me,” I blurted as Olga sat down in front of me with an unmarked vodka bottle and two intimidatingly large glasses, and I set to work with the cheese grater on my boots. “But I expected there to be more people at the Club. Where’s everyone else?”

“There’s a few sleeping upstairs,” she grumbled, “and Masha’s got a toy boy in again, which I don’t approve of. They drop in sometimes when passing through, but that’s all they ever do these days–pass through. Not like the old days.”

There was a misty gleam in Olga’s eyes at the mention of the old days, but it was quickly supplanted by a focus on the vital business of drinking and chastising. “Your hair is disgusting,” she exclaimed. “What colour do you call that? Carrot? You’ll have to dye it at once.”

“I was going to—” I began feebly.

“The papers you used to get in, burn them!”

“I’ve already thrown them—”

“Not throw, burn! Burn. Can’t be bothering with people coming here causing us trouble! With so few members in the Club the bureaucracy is endless, endless!”

“Forgive me asking, but what is the status of the Leningrad Club?” I enquired. “The last time I came here glasnost was in full swing, but now…”

She snorted derisively. “The Club,” she explained, thumping the bottle with each word on to the tabletop, “is in the shit. No one can be bothered to stay–no one! In the good old days there were always one or two who worked their way into senior party ranks, just to make sure anyone born into this place would have a reasonable friend at court, but now? ‘It’s too unreliable, Madam Olga,’ they whine. ‘Doesn’t matter what we do, or whose side we’re on, we keep on being purged and shot, it’s just not worth the effort. And if we’re not purged in the 1930s, we’re purged during the war, and if we’re not purged during the war, we’re purged by Khrushchev. We’re bored with this game.’ Weedy little arses! They don’t have any sticking power, that’s the problem! Or it’s ‘We want to have the good life, Madam Olga. We want to see the world,’ and I exclaim, ‘You’re Russian. You could spend a hundred lifetimes and never see all of Russia!’ but they can’t be bothered.” Her voice dripped scorn. “They don’t want to waste their time and energy on being in their native lands so they all cross the borders and emigrate, but they still expect to be looked after when they’re born again, little whiny snots!”

I flinched as another good slam of the bottle on the table threatened to topple both glass and furniture. “I’m the only one who sticks around, the only one who bothers to look out for our up-and-coming members! You know I have to get money sent in from other clubs? Paris, New York, Tokyo. I’ve got a rule now. If you pick up one of my members, then any money they contribute gets sent straight back to me! No one argues,” she added with satisfaction, “because they all know I’m right. It’s only visitors come to gawp who keep things interesting now.”

“And… what about you?” I hazarded. “What’s your story?”

For a second her chin drew back, and there it was, the flash of the woman Olga might have been, beneath the layers of jacket and wool. Gone as quickly as it had come. “White Russian,” she proclaimed. “I was shot in 1928,” she added, sitting up a little straighter at the recollection, “because they found out that my father was a duke and told me that I had to write a self-criticism proclaiming that I was a bourgeois pig, and work at a farm, and I refused. So they tortured me to make me confess, but even when I was bleeding out of my insides I stood there and said, ‘I am a daughter of this beautiful land, and I will never participate in the ugliness of your regime!’ And when they shot me, it was the most magnificent I had ever been.” She sighed a little in fond recollection. “Course now,” she grumbled, “I can see their point of view. Takes having lived through the revolution to notice just how hungry the peasants are, and how angry the workers get when they run out of bread, but at the time, when they pulled the blindfold over my blood-soaked face, I knew I was right. The course of history! I’ve heard so much crap about the course of history.”

“I take it the Club doesn’t have many contacts in the administration.” This would be something of a blow. In my time in SIS one of the few lessons I learned was that almost no one had good sources in positions of Soviet power during this period, as much from the endless cycle of purges which Olga described as from any lack of effort in developing suitably placed moles. Even Waterbrooke & Smith had a bare minimum of contacts within Russia, and I had been largely relying on the Cronus Club to come good for me.

Then Olga grinned. “Contacts,” she grumbled. “Who needs contacts? This is Russia! You don’t ask people to help you. You tell them. In 1961 the commissar who lives two doors down is arrested for keeping a rent boy in a dacha on the river; the boy had lived there for ten years, so lives there now! In 1971 a grave is uncovered in the bottom of the butcher’s garden–the wife who ‘vanished’ in 1949, he had no idea where. In three years’ time the commissioner of police is going to be arrested on the testimony of his deputy, who needs a bigger house because his wife is pregnant again from her affair with her sergeant lover… Nothing changes. You don’t need contacts–what you need is money and dirt.”

“And what dirt do you have that could help me?” I asked.

“The head of physics at the academy,” she said briskly. “He’s interested in the universe, wants to find out where we’re all from–that stuff. For five years now he’s been secretly swapping letters with a professor of astronomy at MIT via a mutual friend in Istanbul who sends the mail with his cousin when he runs soap in and moonshine out on the black market. There’s nothing political, but it’s enough.”

“You’ve used this before?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes he goes for it, sometimes he doesn’t. He’s been shot twice and exiled to the gulags three times, but usually, if you handle him right, he comes good. You get it wrong, that’s your own fault.”

“Well then,” I murmured, “I’d better not get it wrong.”