Mazurka Page 9

  Pagan started to interrupt, but it was impossible.

  “The pretext – and the Russians aren’t exactly subtle when it comes to such matters – was that the Baltic had to be defended against the Nazi menace. When World War II started, the Germans drove the Russians out of the Baltic, which was only a temporary condition. The Russians came back in 1944 to take up where they’d left off – as the great liberators of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.” Kristina Vaska paused a moment and what Pagan saw in those dark eyes was more than anger, it was a deeply-held resentment, the kind that lodges unshakably in the soul. She stood up and walked around the room now and Pagan, entranced by her movements, that indefinable harmony of motion called grace, watched her.

  “The point is, Mr Pagan, the people of the world are very familiar with Nazi atrocities. They know about what happened to the Jews of Europe. But when it comes to Soviet atrocities in the Baltic, there’s a kind of ignorance that frustrates the hell out of me. I’m talking about the mass deportations of Baltic nationals to Siberia. I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of people from three separate nations with their own language and cultures who were uprooted and shipped out of their homelands and if they were lucky enough to survive inconceivable journeys in railroad cars, they found themselves in labour camps, where most of them died anyway. This is a horror story, Mr Pagan. This is genocide, plain and simple. And it’s going on to this very day. It’s going on, perhaps in more subtle ways, but it’s still happening because the KGB sees to that. The KGB makes sure, at every level of Baltic society, that the native peoples of the Baltic countries are being Russified – which is just a polite fucking word for extermination.”

  She stopped moving and stared at him. He had the feeling he’d been hit across the skull with a stout wooden plank. She went on about how native languages were falling into disuse, cultures dying, how TV stations broadcast only in Russian, how young people were being conscripted into the Soviet Army and shipped to Afghanistan to fight a war they didn’t care about on behalf of a system they despised, and Baltic peoples were being dispersed to other parts of the Soviet Union, and anybody who raised his voice to complain had the nasty habit of disappearing from view.

  There was an aura of energy about her, almost a force-field. Pagan, who could think of nothing to say because she’d somehow managed to make him feel a little ashamed of his own neglect of recent history and uncomfortable with what she surely perceived in him as insensitivity, wondered about her background. She talked with an American accent, but what was her family history?

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Sorry you don’t know more about it. And sorry I went on at you. I hate to lecture.”

  “And I hate being lectured,” Pagan said. But he was intrigued just the same. He had run into many of the disenfranchised persons of Europe in his life. The Poles, the Hungarians, the sad exiles who formed social clubs in London suburbs and held dances and sometimes wrote letters to newspapers. It was just that he hadn’t considered the Baltic nations as countries with identities as singular as those of Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia. He’d always thoughtlessly assumed they were iridivisibly a part of the Soviet Union and if he ever considered them at all it was a process that took place on some far edge of his awareness, a subject that never troubled him, never came into focus in a place where he could see it clearly. Every now and then he’d read about a student riot in Latvia or some form of protest by the Catholic Church in Lithuania, every now and then he’d absently read about petitions delivered to the United Nations by people with strange, unpronounceable names – but there was a distance to these things, as if he were seeing them down the wrong end of a telescope. It was, he realised, unforgivably parochial of him. And it was no real justification to tell himself that cops weren’t exactly famous for their interest in affairs beyond their own particular parish, which was usually small and well-defined, a tidy little patch where you knew all the scams that were going on.

  “People forget,” Kristina Vaska said. “That’s the problem. When a wrong isn’t righted immediately, it becomes the status quo, and people just don’t think about it any more. It’s easy, you see. It’s the complacent way.”

  “And I’m complacent,” Pagan said.

  “And ignorant. Which pisses me off.” She looked around the room. “And you also live like a pig, which pisses me off even more.”

  Pagan smiled. Her earnestness had suddenly gone and there was levity in her expression and he could see, behind the features that had become so damned stern a moment before, a sense of humour, a warmth. “I’m not here a great deal,” he said feebly.

  “I can’t say I blame you.” She glanced through the kitchen door, which unfortunately Pagan had left open. “Now there’s a room where some bodies might be buried. I bet you lie awake at nights and hear things moving about inside the refrigerator.”

  Frank Pagan closed the kitchen door. “I thought you came here to talk about Romanenko,” he said.

  “You needed a little edification first.”

  “Which you provided.”

  “I’m not exactly through with the background yet, Mr Pagan.”

  “I had the feeling,” he said. The education of Frank Pagan, he thought. And so we grow.

  Kristina Vaska wandered to the window and ran the palm of one hand down the edge of the curtain. Then she let her hand fall to her side and turned to face Pagan. “I don’t know how serious you are, Mr Pagan. And I don’t know how seriously you take me. Sometimes you seem just a bit flippant. Maybe it’s something in your manner.”

  “I’m listening,” Pagan said. “Seriously.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a man called Norbert Vaska?”

  Pagan shook his head. “A relative of yours?”

  “My father.”

  There was a silence in the room suddenly. Pagan was aware of the quietness of the night pressing against the house, the darkness laying a still film upon the window. And Kristina Vaska, who could go from impassioned enthusiast to bantering domestic critic in a matter of seconds, had changed yet again. Her eyes were directed into herself and Pagan knew that whatever she was looking at it wasn’t anything in this room.

  “My father taught engineering at the Tallinn Polytechnical Institute in Estonia,” she said. “He was a good engineer. At least he was a better engineer than he was a Communist. He didn’t believe in the system. He had status, you understand, and materially his life was fine. A car. A good apartment. A refrigerator. Things we take for granted in the West. Unlike some people, though, my father couldn’t continue living under a system he considered malignant just because he happened to be one of the privileged ones. In 1966 he joined a group called the Estonian Movement for Democracy which developed ties with similar groups in Latvia and Lithuania.”

  She glanced at Pagan, as if she wanted to be absolutely sure of his attention. He thought how grave she looked now.

  “He became an editor of an underground newspaper, the Estonian Independent Voice. This involved considerable risk to himself. Maybe you can imagine that. Aside from writing articles and distributing the newspaper furtively, he often had to make trips to Riga in Latvia, or he’d go to Vilnius in Lithuania. I’ve tried to imagine how terrifying it must have been for him – attending underground meetings in the dead of night in somebody’s apartment … a group of men whispering about how to fight the Soviet occupation of their countries. I’ve often tried to picture that scene and I always feel the same cold fear. Here was a man with a position, prepared to risk it all for his personal beliefs.”

  She looked at Pagan, almost as if she wanted to be sure he was listening. “He was arrested by the KGB on April 14, 1972. I remember it clearly. There was a knock on the door after midnight. Now there’s a simple little phrase that’s utterly terrifying, Mr Pagan. There’s something people like you and me don’t have to live with. A knock on the door after midnight. Three men took my father away. They had no war
rant. Who needs a goddam warrant if they’re KGB anyhow? They ransacked the apartment. They trashed the place. They left my mother and me behind. We heard nothing more about my father for three months. He’d been put in what’s called ‘special confinement’. That’s a goddam awful phrase. You see nobody. You talk to nobody. You get nothing to read. You sit in a windowless room and you know nothing because nobody tells you anything. After three months, we heard he’d been sentenced to life imprisonment in the city of Perm in the Soviet Union. It was one of those places that pretend to be psychiatric institutes. You’ve heard of them, no doubt.”

  Frank Pagan said he had and that he was sorry to hear about her father. But he wondered where this was going, how the dots were going to be connected, what the relationship was between Romanenko and Kristina Vaska’s narrative.

  “After, we heard he’d been transferred to a labour camp in the Arctic Circle. Then, without any warning, my mother and I were expelled from the country and flown to Helsinki. All this was done, you understand, without one single word of explanation. Nothing. A car came to fetch us. We were told to pack as much as two suitcases would hold. We were given passports. We were handed expulsion papers, which meant we were stripped of Soviet citizenship – although that didn’t exactly cause a great gnashing of teeth. After a month in Helsinki we went to the United States. On September 12, 1972, we arrived in New York City. I’m good with dates, Mr Pagan. Certain dates just seem to stick in my mind. For example, I haven’t seen my father since April, 1972. It’s a long time. It’s too long.”

  She moved across the room. She came very close to Pagan as she passed. He was aware of something stirring in the air around him. Call it electricity, he thought. Whatever it was, it took him by surprise. It was an unexpected reaction and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

  “I know it’s brave of me,” she said. “But I’m going to risk your kitchen. I’m dry. I need water.”

  She opened the kitchen door. Pagan heard her rinse a glass, then there was the sound of ice-cubes being pried loose from the freezer. When she came back she smiled at him. “There’s a process known as defrosting a freezer, Mr Pagan. A polar bear could live in yours.” She sat down, sipped her water, stared at him.

  “I was never very good at science at school. I don’t understand the principles of freezers.”

  “I don’t think it takes an Einstein,” she said, shaking the slightly furry, opaque cubes in her glass.

  Pagan turned the subject away from his embarrassing domestic life. “Have you heard from your father?”

  “He’s not exactly in a place served by a postman, Mr Pagan. As for his location, I’m not sure. The last time I heard any news about him he was in a labour camp near Murmansk in Siberia. That was more than a year ago. According to my source, he was very ill. He had pneumonia and he wasn’t getting the right kind of medication. There’s no such thing as a malpractice suit in a Siberian labour camp.”

  Frank Pagan said, “I keep reading in the papers that things are supposed to be getting better for political prisoners in the Soviet Union.”

  “Sure, if you’re a famous physicist or you’ve got influential friends in the West. But not if you’re simply a former professor of engineering at the Polytechnic in Tallinn. Norbert Vaska doesn’t have clout. He’s just another forgotten prisoner, another number among thousands. It’s going to take years and years if men like my father are ever going to be released under some general amnesty programme. It takes a long time for anything to change in Russia. There are too many people with a vested interest in the system. People who don’t like change at any price.” She drained her glass, set it down on the table. “Which brings me – finally – to Aleksis Romanenko. You were probably wondering.”

  “It had crossed my mind,” Pagan said. And for some reason he couldn’t name he felt an odd little tension go through him. He had the feeling that whatever conclusion Kristina Vaska was approaching, it was somehow going to complicate his life. He saw her reach inside her large purse. As she did so, the telephone rang and Pagan put out his hand towards it, annoyed by the sudden intrusion of the world outside, irritated by any interference at the crucial point of the woman’s story. He had an unhappy rapport with phones at the best of times. Now it was a sheer bloody nuisance and he was tempted just to ignore it and go on listening to Kristina Vaska. But he didn’t.

  The urgent voice he heard was the Commissioner’s.

  “Young Oates has turned up something that might pique your interest, Frank. I suggest you drop whatever – or whoever – you’re doing, and get your arse over here on the double. I’m keeping a very unhappy Russian diplomat at bay, and I don’t know how long I can stall him before the Third World War breaks out.”

  “I’ll be there,” Pagan said. When Martin Burr used the phrase ‘I suggest’, it was always a command meant to be obeyed immediately.

  “Come in that fast American car of yours and pretend we’ve just abolished the speed limit, would you?”

  “Give me ten minutes,” Pagan said.

  “Make it nine. And I’m not joking. There’s been another development here, quite apart from Oates’s translation, that might come as something of a surprise.”

  Pagan put the telephone down. Shit. How could Martin Burr’s timing be so damned bad? He looked at Kristina Vaska, who was watching him expectantly. He wondered what kind of surprise Burr had in mind.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just been summoned by the Commissioner. It’s like getting a message from God.”

  “Then you don’t want to keep God waiting,” she said. “I’ll put the end of my story on hold, Mr Pagan.”

  “How do I get in touch with you?”

  Kristina Vaska shrugged. “I haven’t made a hotel reservation.” There it was again – that smile which changed her entire face and made her eyes light up and dissolved all the gravity of her expression. “I could easily wait here. I mean, if you don’t mind. If you don’t think I’ll be in the way.”

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” Pagan said.

  “I’m not in any hurry.”

  Pagan, who was seized by a feeling of total discomfort, gestured toward the sofa. “It opens out into a bed,” he said. “You’ll find blankets in the bedroom if you need them.” He thought of this woman stepping inside his bedroom, and the image was an odd one, like a picture hanging aslant on a wall.

  “I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me, Mr Pagan.”

  He hesitated a moment in the doorway. It was obvious that she sensed his awkwardness and found it amusing.

  “Just don’t go anywhere,” he said. “I’m anxious to hear the rest of your story.”

  “I promise you’ll find it very interesting.”

  Pagan opened the door. But he was still hesitant. It was all very strange to him. A woman in his apartment, an attractive woman waiting for his return. Somebody with an unfinished narrative that was connected to the disaster in Edinburgh. Why hadn’t Martin Burr waited just a few minutes more before telephoning? Pagan hated interrupted stories.

  “Don’t worry. It’s perfectly safe to leave me here,” she said. “Cross my heart I won’t steal the silverware. It’s probably lying in the sink anyway, too dirty to steal.”

  Pagan smiled. “I wasn’t thinking about the silverware.”

  Kristina Vaska said, “I bet you don’t have any anyhow. You look like a man who uses disposable plastic cutlery, Mr Pagan.”

  “Call me Frank,” he said. “And if you want to know the real truth, I eat with my hands.”

  Saaremaa Island, the Baltic Sea

  It was almost dawn when Colonel Yevgenni Uvarov stepped out of his quarters and walked quietly across the concrete compound. He passed under the shadows of the radar scanners, which turned silently, ominously, in the early light. Anything that moved out there on the Baltic would send a signal back to the scanners, which would then feed the signal into the one-storey building Uvarov now entered. There was a row of small green screens that rece
ived the radar transmissions. They were largely inactive and the technicians who stared at them were bored in the manner of men who spend their days in expectant vigilance that more often than not fails to produce excitement. They watched the screens and their eyesight invariably became bad over a period of time. Uvarov had the thought that the men under his command were prisoners of the green screens, hopelessly addicted to studying radar signals.

  Uvarov crossed the large room, pausing every now and then to examine one of the screens, or to check the progress of a trainee operator. He reached his desk, located at the back of the room, and he sat down. His chair was hideously uncomfortable. The surface of his desk was clear. There was nothing of a personal nature to be seen anywhere. He kept a photograph of his wife and children inside the desk. Every now and then, as if to remind himself of the reason for his decision, he’d open the drawer and glance at the photograph – and what filled him was a sense of devotion and gratitude and love. He had only to look at the photograph, which was a stiff studio shot done in slightly unreal colours, to make himself believe that his course of action was the correct one. Just the same, he often felt a fear so great he was convinced it showed on his face, that other people couldn’t fail to notice it. And sometimes the fear yielded to a kind of despair – he had spent fifteen years of his life in the Army and within the next few days he was going to throw it all away. The whole thing had the texture of a bad dream, a nightmare in which he was trapped as surely as a fly in the jaws of a spider.

  His wife and two teenage children lived in Moscow. Uvarov only saw his family whenever he was granted leave. It didn’t happen often. Last year, when his wife had fallen ill, he’d requested compassionate leave, and he’d been denied. The refusal galled him. The service to which he’d devoted so much of his adult life should not have denied him such a simple plea. But it was the system, it was the way the system worked, with a lack of understanding for human needs. Uvarov felt he’d been denied more than compassionate leave. He’d been denied his humanity. And his family had suffered needlessly.