The Russia House part 2

The second part of The Russia House contains passages which resonate with me strongly, more than in any novel for sometime and which also aroused several memories. My reading has been slow as a consequence, slower than my plan for the week justifies, so I have struggled to complete the reading and writing of the second part when had hoped to finish before weekend.

I do not know if Le Carré visited Russia during the Gorbachev years but the image be portrays of Russian life appears authentic, especially that of Katya. She is woman who brought the manuscript of Goethe to the Audio Fair but otherwise she remained a mystery and even in the film while she becomes the lover of Barley and continues to be an important link with the author of the manuscript, she remains secondary to these two characters although all three are in the story foreground with the machinations of the secret services of the UK, the CIA and Russia secondary.

It was when I read of Katya in the book I began to see her more than Goethe as representing mother Russia at the crossroads of a new era. Knowing the ending in the film, I suddenly realised that perhaps like Renko’s woman in Gorky Park, she could return to Russia once the transition was completed. But the difference between the two women is otherwise significant.

Katya is a woman of ideals and passions but she is also rational and practical. We learn a lot about her in what I regard as the second part of the book commencing with chapter 6 page 143 when Barley arrives in Moscow and makes contact with her.

Katya juggles three lives, those as a mother of twins, sharing her small home space with her uncle, there is her work and then the independent woman of passions and spirit but how and why she came to risk her life because of Barley and Goethe is not immediately clear,
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She wants, as Le Carré says, to keep the paper thin walls between the parts of her life separate and understandably she has reservations about Barley because he threatens the immediate life and well being of her family, and her anxiety is reinforced when he arrives, wants to meet her socially and begins to question not only about Goethe but about herself when she is just the Go Between and cannot wait for him to go. Unlike Renko’s girl she is not driven by the desire to leave Russia, but to change it and to survive.

However we also learn a great deal about her present and past life and although she does not know it, she is open to someone like Barley, or anyone who can fast track a different life to the one she leads and also for her children, although she is also not a woman who lives for her children.

She explains the several levels of deals required to obtain material to make two cowboy style shirt as presents for the birthday of the twins. She has gained two tickets for a concert from the editor at the publishing firm where she works who believed he had made a drunken pass at her which she had resented but in reality it had been nothing, but she did not tell him that because of what she could do with the tickets. Then she traded the tickets for 24 bars of foreign soap in their colour wrapping paper and these in turn she was to trade for the cloth with the manager of the clothing shop who she believed had hoped for a different kind of transaction with her. She was to make up the shirts on the new East German sewing machine which she had traded for the ancient but sought after family Singer.

We learn that apartments, she has one on the site of former Aeroport, are allocated with precise spacing according to her family size, work, political and social position and where the partition walls between flats are such that you are affected by the lives of others as how you behave also affects them..... an alarm clock, a dog wanting walkies, a child’s incessant cry, extra loud music at a party and so on.

On the whole it was space, or the lack of it which also affected me, the sharing of a bed with three adult women throughout most of my childhood until starting secondary school. We had the top floor flat in the requisitioned house as well as sharing the garden and the walls of the 1950’s first council built three story twin blocks of flats we were allocated because the owners wanted their home back was not just strongly built but were built to look private and still do.

It was my noise playing the clarinet in airing cupboard which was the nuisance or playing my records as loud as possible using a footstall as a drum to beat out the rhythm of Sing Sing Sing from the Benny Goodman twin albums I purchased soon after going to work at the age of 16.

It was only later through my work that the nature of living in Council flats and housing estates was brought home. The aunties had been so proud of the three bed and then their two bed plain four walls and low ceiling flats where I would stay hearing the shoutings of the wild young single parent next door to my bedroom and to the noise of the family above. I learned how accommodation and location reflected how others saw themselves and affected how you saw yourself, and helped define what you wanted.

Katya had only a single bed in a room where there was only space for a wardrobe. The twins had to sleep in the same bed and her uncle in a made up bed in the lounge. I know that feeling only too well and even now living among by my ten roomed three storey terrace with walk in loft I could do with more space! If I will the euro lottery I will build the space to curate my work, to live and to entertain, with space for professional contemporary creative to work and go live and perhaps if the cash is sufficient, our own restaurant bar, jazz club but there would have to be sufficient to ensure its continuation after my death as well as for the family

We also learned in those opening pages that Katya had more than one lover, first a temperamental musician who kept bees illegally on the roof thus enabling her to give a jar of honey to a neighbour who recently lost her mother and whose father had been admitted hospital with a brain tumour.

We do not know as yet, what had happened to Katya’s parents or how her uncle came to live with her although they get all well and helps with looking after the children.

Later under pressure from Barley we also learn that she was married to someone she knew from childhood in Leningrad where she had been to university and developed a flair for languages and which enabled her to speak Jane Austin English better than most English folk. She had come to Moscow with her husband after their marriage where he managed a timber firm making prefabricated houses. He was a practical man who knew how to catch fish through ice, sleep in the snow and skin a rabbit from his early childhood in Siberia. She had been attracted to such a man rather than someone of the mind. I remember from my early professional life that some of my female colleagues were also attracted in this way, to a farmer perhaps someone earthy without complexes, a military man or a surgeon.

Another aspects of life in the city then and I suspect now is that everyone was trying to make additional money if they had connections. We would call the black market or street economy. The taxi that she takes and drives quickly in torrential rain despite the young driver forgetting to attach the windscreen wipes because if you leave them on they are taken, asks if she interested in fresh fruit, coffee, vodka, offered no doubt in the expectation she had only her body to trade. Earlier she mentions having a connection with access to the farms allowed to sell some of the produce, and could supply fresh chickens and we well as fresh eggs. One can understand how quickly such a people would take to capitalism at different levels, and those with the best connections would become the oligarchs while others the establish businesses of the mafia gangster.

I was also struck by the greater link between Russian and British men than say British men with the western Continental Europe. The continental Europeans like the wine and enjoy a glass or two with meals on at the pavement cafe but as people they do not go in for the binge drinking of English and the Russians where both nations have not just a high number of alcoholics but a growing number of alcoholics who become social and family problems. In the UK while the incidence of diseases has reduced especially from smoking lung cancer that from alcohol has jumped several fold.

I can understand how Barley liked the Russians but not why over the past decade so many Russian woman would like to become British wives to get away from the drinking of Russian men!

After the meeting with Barley we learn the steps she takes to receive a phone call from Goethe and it is during this passage that Le Carré communicates the fear and suspicion and the risks she and Goethe are taking. It is also evident that they have been lovers but when, for how long and if still, she only later is to answer.

Back in his hotel room with its noising plumbing systems and convulsing ice box Barley had a different perspective fearing that he disappointed as a morally bankrupt man without convictions and that he had not shown immediate interest in her as a woman despite her beauty and intellect. She appeared to have run away from him which made her more interested to him.

He has a fantasy or two about her and is disappointed when his “editor” arrives and they have a conversation in which the assistant attempts to impart knowledge which Barley finds it difficult to comprehend tired and drunk until she rings and arranges to see him the following day and his assistant speculates whether she had written the manuscripts or was in contact with their author. It occurs that we in the west in the midst of the digital era, the phone and computer hacking, we should learn to expect surveillance as they did then in Russia and probably still do. The theme of my work as I frequently explain is that what we do and say can be viewed and heard by anyone. anywhere, anytime with the technology. But we are also in the era of the exhibitionist and the voyeur as I learned when visiting an independently run camera and video surveillance unit.

Meanwhile in the Russia House the events are monitored and distributed to those on the Bluebird circulation list which bemused and worried the Brits because Langley’s list included the Pentagon Scientific Liaison Board and the White House Academic Advisory team.

There were elaborate precautions taken over the next meeting between Barley and Katya after calling for at her home. He had taken her to a safe house which Barley pretended was the flat an artist friend who was away although the kind of artist had not been explained which made questions by Katya difficult. She resisted all his questions about Goethe or whoever had provided the manuscripts. He asked if she knew their content which she summarised as “my country’s involvement in anti human weapons of mass destruction over many years. It paints a portrait of corruption and incompetence in all fields of the defence industrial complex. Also of criminal mismanagement and ethical shortcomings. These he felt were as much her feelings as those explained to her by the author

Barley was able to establish that her contact was a scientist who believed there was little time left and therefore need for openness and honesty was great. She was unable to say how he knew so much as the information covered so many areas of interest, If we see one goal clearly we may advance one step. If we see all goals at once, we shall not advance at all.

I have been mulling over this point for sometime. I need to have an overview of my work, my life, my year, my day, the world, but if I spend too much time contemplating the enormity of the challenge I do little, whereas if I set tasks for the day, the week, the year and proceed to their accomplishment I make progress and am more content with what I do.

The Author is reported as saying there are times when actions must come first and we must consider consequence only when they occur. I agree. Too much consideration of potential outcomes may well freeze action and let others dictate events and their outcomes. However if there is opportunity it is wise to consider outcomes and therefore avoid blind alleys, pitfalls and bobby traps.

“We regard the destruction of Russia as preferable to the destruction of all mankind,” was quite a statement for anyone to make and I am not sure if anyone would believe this in reality.

We are tribal by nature and inheritance and the idea of sacrificing ourselves and all we know for the sake of others we do not know it a concept impossible for me to accept.

She went on; he says “the greatest burden is the past. We cannot execute the past. He says if we cannot execute our past, how shall we construct our future? We shall not build a new world until we have got rid of the mentalities of the old. In order to express truth we must also be the apostles of negation. He quotes Turgenev, A nihilist is a person who does not take anything for granted however much that principle is revered.”

I have read Turgenev from my 30 book series of Russian writers. I have Fathers and Sons in one volume, The Hunting Sketches and perhaps his most well known the Virgin Soil.

I have also written many times about the advertisement I placed in the New Statement about being a nihilist waiting for the bomb to drop and which led to two kinds of replies with a well known journalist for the London evening Standards suspecting that I was advertising wine and seeking a complimentary case to a beautiful young woman with who I became her lover, to a female journalist who took my play to read and never gave it back and to another young woman art student who came for a weekend to Ruskin bringing her friend who proved to be the most beautiful young woman I have ever met who came for a weekend with me to stay with a college friend at Liverpool and also to Birmingham, although we did not become lovers because of our chosen paths.

Katya said “I am not a nihilist. I am a humanist. It is given to us to play our part for the future, we must play it.” Yes I understand this but we must play the part well to the best of physical, psychological intellectual, spiritual abilities.

Barley pressed to now how long Goethe had talk like this. ““He had always been idealistic. That is his nature. He has always been extremely critical in a constructive way,” she explained. That also strikes a strong chord with me because although at times I have disturbed others it is because I have recognised better and best, hated my mediocrity in comparison, but always looked for ways to improve. Some will argue that I became addicted to experience, and yet the long hours spent alone in contemplation counter this, although I am a personality mixture of conviction, determination and completing finishing which can become an addiction.

Katya reveals that the authority has believed for a time that the possession of annihilation was so terrible they would have the effect of abolishing war. I have never thought that and if anything the weapons have had no impact on whether nations possessing such weapons wage war or not. The author has changed more in line with the USA thing that the greater the possession of weapons held the greater the capacity for peace.

She went to say that he become inspired by Perestroika and the prospect for world peace but he is not a Utopian and not passive. “He knows nothing will come of its own accord.”

This I have long understand that it does not matter what is ones talent, one potential you have to push yourself out into the world and hope to make early contact with someone, those who can help bridge the gulf from where you are to where you want to be.

He knows that our people are deluded and lack collective power (thus it is ever so). He goes onto say that the New Revolution must be imposed from above. By intellectuals, By artists By Administrators, By Scientists.” My response is hmm. The evidence from studies and my own experience is that planned change never works out as designed or hoped for unless you begin with clean slate and recruit to the organisation only those who understand what is required and are in agreement with it, otherwise it quickly becomes perverted to the prejudices and inclinations of those on whom the change is imposed. You cannot stand guard 24/7 on all those involved or employ others to do so. This is the fallacy of legislative government. Too many British politicians have thought all they had to do is pass a law, provide the funds and Hey Presto the law is put into effective practice. But I agree with the need for the leadership of the educated and creative but only if you can reach agreement. My mind immediately goes back to the first meetings of the Committee 100 when the majority of the Committee assembled and quickly was reduced to a steering working group of around 30 to 40 but even then power was taken by a couple of individuals and one in particular. The same with the Direct Action Committee.

What is worst is the uprising of the proletariat usually led by a fanatic or two and where the force of the proletariat is used to exterminate any opposition or anyone likely to oppose but who in turn also become as exploited themselves as before with the best literary example is George Orwell’s Animal Farm saying it all.

Barley is then able draw from her new information about Goethe as well as to be quoted his own words back from their meeting. “If there is to be hope we must all betray our countries”.

She explained that she had been sixteen and he 30 when they first met. She was studying French and German in her last year at school and was the star pupil. She had read Erich Fromm. I am impressed by this concept as someone who read Erich also at a young age: The Sane Society and the Art of Loving in particular.
She had also read Ortega and Kafka and seen Dr Strangelove in the era of 1968. She saw herself as a peace dreamer and a revolutionary. Her father was the Professor of Humanities at the University. Having taken down the wall around her she now talked and talked and this affected in a way he had not anticipated.

She had wanted to be with French students when they had rioted. They were proud of the American students who protested against the Vietnam War and they were regarded her comrades. Barley thought, I will never leave you.

He mother had died of TB and was already ill when she was born.

She had been taken by her father to see “A bout de Souffe” at a film club and it there he and introduced her to Goethe, real name Yakov. Her father said the man was his genius of physics and she had found him beautiful. She had fallen in love with him and after the show he had joined her with friends drinking coffee and then she had invited herself back to his apartment and they had become lovers, telling Barley the delicacy of their intimacy.

Her father had stayed up waiting and she talked to him as a stranger unable to sleep that night only to learn the following morning that Russian Tanks had gone into Prague. Yakov had got drunk and appeared to Katya to have thrown in the towel. She was ashamed and disappointed. She said she had addressed him like a Stendhal heroine saying he had taken an immoral decision and that she would never speak to him again. She had reminded him of EM Forester who they both admired( A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Howard’s End and Where Angels Fear to Tread are the most well known of his seven novels because of the films)

She had married Volodya but she had continued a relationship with Yakov, meeting in secret, occasionally, and with love changing to sex. She had ceased contact when pregnant with the twins but it was Barley and the effect on Yakov as Goethe which had brought the two together and now three people were connected in the circle. For some reason Barley asked if Yakov had children which someone stopped Katya in her flow. She revealed that he was against having children because parents make victims of their children and he did not want to add to the number of victims. Who said to someone bent on changing society? First do no wrong? A guiding rule for every social worker as well as politician.

The inquisition was coming to an end as he asked about how they kept in contact and if he was afraid of his situation. Barley had with him a series of prepared questions which he fired at her in quick succession and which should have alerted her that these were not the questions one would expect from a publisher. Her answers were all no. It was only then that she suggested he put the questions directly ad Yakov wished to meet Barley in Leningrad on the coming Friday.

He proposed three places at three times and you must keep to each. He will keep one and he asked me to say that he loves you. They then had a meal drained as two exhausted lovers.