Harry arrived with perfect timing at the double doors of that forbidden room at the end of the corridor: the Red Corner. Taking advantage of a chaotic melee, he shoulder-charged a Party flunky struggling with an oversized wad of documents.
“Watch where you’re – !”
“So sorry, comrade!” said Harry as the papers spilled across the floor.
Amid a general scramble to gather them up, he ghosted past the guards posted to demand the Party card he did not have, and did not want.
He was convinced something critical occurred beyond those doors on Wednesday evenings, that somehow the chamber they concealed was a crucible of all the Lux’s tangled emotions and passions. The angry shouting, the foot thumping, the mocking laughter and the chanting stirred in him animal feelings of dread.
The hall opening before him was heavy with the smell of Russian-style cigarette smoke like old, unwashed socks; but it was a grand affair, designed to inspire awe.
Five marble columns flanked by red velvet curtains ranged along one side. The wall opposite was inset with four high, arched windows giving onto Gorky Street. Down the middle ran a red carpet, overhung by a line of three crystal chandeliers. On each side of the aisle, there were about twenty rows of chairs all facing a stage set with a long table decked with red velvet.
At the back of the stage, stood a white marble bust of Stalin, seeing all, hearing all.
Harry took up position half-hidden behind a curtain.
At the table sat three men clad in identical black suits: Zander, Razgon and another whose gaunt face was familiar yet not. All craned their heads to the right, cigarettes burning in ashtrays before them. The object of their attention, seated in a chair at the edge of the stage, facing the ranks, forehead beaded with sweat and eyes screwed in anguish, was Spanish Juan.
“Comrade Juan Martinez!”
Harry could now place the shrill voice and the nanny-goat beard. It was the man he’d seen dressed in shorts and singlet, leading the courtyard gym. The man leant towards Juan and jutted his chin out. It was the mouth that chilled. The upper lip lurked beneath the curling hair of his grey moustache like a serpent in a bush; then, when his mouth retracted into its sneering smile, it leapt from cover for an instant, thin and glistening red, before recoiling into its lair.
“Fact is fact!” he screeched. “The Party, above all – yes, above all – and not self-glory, is the bedrock of our great internationalist cause!”
He held up his arms to harvest catcalls of “shame to the egotists!” and “glory to the Party!”
“But I have given all to the Party!” said Juan, stroking the scar on his neck, which now burned blood red. “I was ready to die fighting the fascists in my home country.”
“So many comrades did die!” he retorted, that serpent darting for an instant into view, “but not Comrade Martinez! Fact is fact!”
Harry recalled the pictures he’d seen that first morning in Pravda, the newspaper whose very name meant Truth: The factory gathering, the ranks of comrades, faces ravaged with fury. The sad man sitting before them, head bowed.
Juan’s voice cracked. He sounded defeated, the old fighter buried.
“My dearest wife, my darling son, my Miguel – ”
“Yes, yes! But this isn’t about your darling son!” Nanny Goat stroked his chin with an air of distaste. “We’re all weary of your legends of Martinez the Great Warrior.”
“No, no!” Juan shook his head, panting as if about to drop. “If there are legends, then Juan Martinez never said them.” He wiped his brow with a sodden handkerchief. “Though, perhaps – ”
“Perhaps?”
Some figure in the faceless ranks screamed: “Out with it, you braggart!”
The comrades rose to their feet as if on a command, stamping their feet, applauding Juan’s humiliation.
It was then that Harry spotted him, dressed in his best grey suit and maroon tie, jeering and stamping his feet in confected rage with the rest of them. His own father.
Joseph looked around now and then at the others, seeming to take his cue from their practised rites; etched across his face was a desolation that verged on panic.
Harry didn’t notice Rosa steal up alongside him.
“Don’t judge, Harry,” she whispered, putting a finger to his lips to silence him. “Just watch, and learn.”
Nanny Goat drew breath to resume his harangue, but with an imperious wave, Dmitry Razgon pulled rank and silenced him.
“Comrade Martinez, you wanted to say something more?”
He smiled at Juan, a gentle smile, no serpent to be seen.
“Comrades, perhaps my guilt was… I was deaf to these fabrications.” Juan must have memorised this intricate Party language. “Perhaps…”
Nanny Goat raised his hand, bouncing in his chair like some over-keen schoolboy to garner Razgon’s attention. With a half smile of contempt, Razgon yielded him the floor.
“It is time!” Nanny Goat screeched, banging the table with his fist. “We must turn to your activity in Spain. Barcelona, the jailbreak.”
Juan’s face twisted at some painful memory.
“The jail was attacked by comrades who tried to liberate us.” In a voice shaking with terror, Juan described the two hours he had sat helpless, locked in a cell, while fighting raged on the street. If the attack succeeded, they would walk free. “If they failed, we knew the guards would shoot us that day.”
“And you know the attackers… you call them your liberators… they were puppets of the scum Trotsky” – Nanny Goat turned to the assembled comrades – “who even now plots to destroy Soviet power, to kill our Stalin!”
Shouts of “traitor” and “saboteur” echoed around the room. Harry wanted to scream his objections, but he felt Rosa’s hand tighten on his arm.
Looking around, he recognised the men and women who walked the corridors and gathered in the kitchen by day, greeting each other, smiling, drinking tea together.
“It was war, comrade,” said Juan. “Must I say them: No, thank you, I stay in my cell and wait the firing squad?”
Nanny-Goat turned his back on the wretched Juan, arms tightly folded.
Harry’s gaze alighted on the white lettering of a red banner strung above the stage: Life has become better, comrades. Life is more joyous.
His father had taken off his spectacles and was hunched over, polishing them with a vigour close to violence. He seemed to have retreated into his private thoughts, fleeing the horror around him. Where had he strayed? To Kitchener Lane? To the Queen’s Head?
It was Zander who resumed the questioning, his eyes, and his pipe, glowing with the menace Harry had encountered that first day in his room. He leant forward and took a series of quick, short puffs. “And now, a matter of socialist morality. A certain encounter at the Hotel National.”
In the room, a breathless silence.
“I swear.” Juan shook his head. “I had no idea who is she.”
Nanny Goat lurched forward in his seat, his voice wailing like the sirens on the dive-bombers that had destroyed Juan’s home town.
“She was from the old aristocracy, Comrade Martinez!”
“I was just being courteous.” A roar of laughter rose from the assembly, cut short by Zander’s raised hand. “We were having a pleasant conversation and – ”
Juan wiped his cheek and took a deep breath.
Nanny-Goat screamed out, to hisses from the assembly: “She was a whore, comrade!”
“No! I mean, yes! But it was only when she invited me… and then I said good-bye.”
“You took her hand and you kissed it!”
“It’s my way. I…” His shoulders dropped. “I’m a lonely man, comrade. You cannot know. So far from home.”
Harry burned with contempt for them all, for Nanny Goat, for Zander, for the silent Razgon. For his father. He shook off Rosa’s grip and lurched to the exit.
He was halfway down the corridor before she hurried alongside and steered him towards a heavy red door. She looked around, checking no one was watching, then opened the door and pushed him into a dark, dank space that smelt faintly of chlorine. Directly before him was a high window so dirty it admitted scarcely any light from the courtyard beyond. As his eyes adjusted, he could see they were standing in a concrete stairwell.
“It’s the chorny khod – I suppose, in English, the Black Stairwell – a kind of secret passageway,” she said, closing the door gently. The steps connected all the floors and opened onto the courtyard. “It’s forbidden to all but senior comrades… like me.” She sat down on a step, and he lowered himself next to her. “It’s the only place I can be alone and think. Always in the Lux someone looks at you – always parties, meetings, arguing.”
It was the first time he’d heard her lament anything about her life in the Lux. As he leant forward, his head between his legs, he felt Rosa’s fingertips run lightly along his neck.
“Who’s the bastard with the beard?”
“Horst Schadek. Top German Party official here.” She held up an index finger. “And you don’t want to make him an enemy.”
“Your father’s boss?”
“His kind, we call them chocolate cream soldiers behind their backs. Sit in cosy offices and send their comrades into danger, smuggling money and guns, sabotage. Never get dirty hands. Not fit to kiss Juan’s ass.”
He was becoming familiar with this anger in her, directed not at the Lux, still less the Cause. It was the imperfections of fellow communists that rankled.
“So, what have I just been watching?”
She took both his hands and lay them on her lap.
“It’s called Chistka, or samokritika.” For every ritual, they seem to have a word, Harry thought. For this one, two. “You take a steel blade, you heat it white hot, then plunge it into cold water.” She motioned the thrust of a blade that resembled more an infantryman’s lunge. “And that’s how you harden steel, Harry. That’s samokritika. Self-criticism. All those denunciations, they harden the socialist soul.”
“Oh, and I thought they were just dragging Juan through the shit.” He remembered Myfanwy’s Good Book, and how the faithful were tested – not steel, but silver, refined by fire.
“Why would anyone accuse him of being a braggart? Why would he accuse himself of betraying his comrades?”
“Why would he kiss a tart in the Hotel National, you mean?”
He fell silent, picturing Juan’s wretched act of tenderness.
“The Soviets harden their steel, so you have to,” he said. “And Schadek, being the good German communist – ”
“…must be more Soviet than the Soviets. Yes.”
She cited the wisdom of Schadek’s eleven-year-old son.
“Kallo sees a lot,” she said. “I heard him compare samokritika to confession at home in Munich. Tell the priest your sins, and he cleanses your soul, forgives you.”
“And will they forgive Juan? Or send him off to a camp, like they do out there?” he said, with a nod to the street. “Or put him up against – ”
“This isn’t out there.” She grimaced towards the careworn masses. “This is in here, the Lux.”
“But what if out there becomes in here, if we become them, like?”
“No, Harry!” She slammed her hand on his leg again to make the point. “The process starts and ends in the Red Corner. They write it in his cadre file, a little stamp, and then, boom.” She moved her hand over his leg softly now, tenderly. “It’s forgotten.”
Out in the corridor, there was a flurry of voices, footsteps. Juan’s ordeal, perhaps, at an end. He asked if she attended every Wednesday samokritika.
“Sometimes, if I’m one of the questioners.” His stomach churned at the idea of her wielding this power to humiliate. In ten years, might she be like Nanny Goat, but worse? “It’s so boring.” She put on a deep, male comrade’s repentant voice. “I get drunk and make shame the Party. Cherry juice from here.” She paused and coughed to introduce another victim. “I deeply regret humping neighbour’s wife in violation Party ethics.”
Harry failed to suppress a laugh. She put her hand over his mouth, and he smelt again the honeysuckle. He held it and kissed the palm – why ever did he do that? – and she pulled it away without comment.
“And does everyone’s soul get hardened, Rosa?”
“Soviet staff, too. Grisha the doorman; the hairdresser; the baker…”
Harry lay back on the cool step and sighed. The ebbing of anger, like the move between the bitter cold outside and the warmth of the Lux, made him drowsy. He sensed the question would irritate her.
“And the Golden Couple? Will they be hardened?”
“Yes, but – and who told you that Golden Couple rubbish?” she snapped.
“Armon, Inessa, the Golden Couple; Rosa, the Golden Child.”
“Gold is soft. Moulds to what you like, Harry. I don’t.”
She stood up, signalling the end of the conversation.
He wandered the streets for a couple of hours, delaying confrontation with his father and mulling over Rosa’s words. How far could he trust her reassurances, wrapped however alluringly in her girlish charm? Was this samokritika really the innocent circus she described? Or was she hiding something from him, or from herself?
When he got back, he found his father fast asleep, a half-emptied vodka bottle at his bedside. In that face, he saw a helpless, frightened lackey. But what, after all, had he, Harry Speares, the great spectator at this circus, done to defend poor Juan?
“Da?” he whispered, and lay his hand on his father’s shoulder.
Joseph grunted, turned onto his side, and pulled his knees up to his chest.
In the early morning, his father would rise and steal away to Comintern Street; and he knew there would be no talk between them of the Red Corner.
Harry stood at the window nursing a cup of vodka. Spread before him, like a huge bejewelled cloak, lay what Rosa had called the Bakhrushinka. A black sky studded with diamond stars merged seamlessly into the darkened alleys and courtyards with their tiny lights glimmering like pearls. He recalled Rosa’s words about those wretched back lanes. Go there, Harry, and you say good-bye to me. I won’t protect you from the criminals, or from the Party, if they find out. And they will.