London: March, or even February, 1948
Battersea Park where they had sat so often or perhaps
Kensington Gardens, ah, no . . . Lincoln’s Inn.
The warmest spring in who-knows-when.
It had not been the hardest winter. That had been the previous winter—the deluge that was 1947. London like an iceberg, the Home Counties one vast undulating eiderdown of white, snowbound villages in Derbyshire dug out by German POWs many miles and years from home—a bizarre reminder that we had “won the war.” War. Winter. He had thought he might not live through either. He had. The English, who could talk the smallest of small talk about weather, had deemed 1948 to be “not bad” or, if feeling loquacious, “nowt to write home about.” But now, as the earth cracked with the first green tips of spring, the bold budding of crocus and daffodil that seemed to bring grey-toothed smiles to the grey faces of the downtrodden victors of the World War among whom he lived, he found no joy in it. It had come too late to save him. This winter would not kill him. The last would. And all the others that preceded it would.
He longed to sit in a rose-scented garden.
He tasted dust. In the middle of the square, sluggish workmen with sledgehammers were knocking down the concrete air-raid shelters that had stood squat, ugly, bestial since the winter of 1940.
He took a silver hip flask from his inside pocket and downed a little Armagnac.
“André, I cannot do this anymore.”
Skolnik had been pretending to read the Post, billowing pages spread out in front of him screening his face from the drifting gaze of passersby. He stopped, turned his head to look directly at Viktor.
“What?”
“I have to stop now.”
The newspaper was folded for maximum rustle. It conveyed the emotions André pretended long ago to have disowned in favour of calm, unrufflable detachment.
“Viktor. You cannot just stop. You cannot simply quit. What was it you think you joined all those years ago? A gentleman’s club? As though you can turn in your membership when brandy and billiards begin to bore you?”
Viktor took another sip of Armagnac, then passed the flask to André.
“Nineteen eighteen,” he said softly, as Skolnik helped himself to a hefty swig. “Nineteen eighteen.”
“What?’
“Nineteen eighteen—that’s when I joined. Were you even born then?”
“Not that it matters, but I was at school.”
The flask was handed back, the paper slapped down between them.
“You cannot stop just because it suits you to stop.”
Viktor sighed a soft, whispery, “Really,” of exasperation. “Why can I not stop?”
“Because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union simply doesn’t work that way.”