XV. FOLK DANCES

There was a rattling at the door.

‘Anton, I must speak with you,’ Brevi ordered. I opened my eyes and saw a scrunched-up sheet in my arms. My head hurt, my tongue was sticking to my gums. The evening before, not wanting to go back to the palazzo that smelt of old people and even older books, I had stayed in a bar. Watching the young, seemingly endlessly colourful women, I’d had a glass of wine and then another, and thought about Tatiana walking away in her too-wide trousers, one hand on her pinned-up hair like a nest made by crazy birds. I’d continued to stare at her through the window of the bus, had wanted to get back out, rush after her. Then the bus stopped, but I just stood there, incapable of deciding whether to do something. Once it got moving again, I kept looking out the rear window as the street corner grew smaller and smaller.

‘Anton, are you still asleep?’ Brevi sounded brusque this morning or maybe it was already later. I felt for the clock on my night table. It was a little past nine, no reason to be alarmed, but Brevi was knocking at my door again, so I tumbled out of bed. Apparently, the night before, I’d ordered a fourth glass of wine and even a fifth. Though I usually avoid wearing shirts twice as I like the feeling of freshly starched textiles on my skin, seeing that Brevi seemed to be in quite a huff, I grabbed my shirt from the back of the chair, pulled it on, then slipped into my suit pants and in the end found myself standing rather poorly—and, in any event, not my usual self—in front of him.

‘Listen, this won’t do, Anton.’

‘Sorry, but you couldn’t wait to speak with me,’ I answered, defending my neglect.

‘What have you come to know by this point? How have you been getting along at the institute?’

‘I have . . . ’

Tatiana’s steps in the hall. I tried to remember what had happened before and after. Tatiana’s steps.

‘I’ve sifted,’ I answered and pulled my shirt a bit straighter.

‘Sifted?’

‘Explored.’

‘Explored? Listen, Anton, we don’t have any time to explore, we’ve got to make a find. Bunotti is here.’

‘Here?’

‘In Rome. Not he himself, but one of his followers, and that is even more disastrous. You know how quickly these little academic truffle hogs rummage through everything, greedy for recognition and unearthing whatever they need to survive.’

‘Bunotti could be involved in just about anything,’ I argued.

‘But he’s not. I heard it from Vacca. Or, rather, his secretary. To be precise, from one of his secretary’s acquaintances. Bunotti is in Naples and his colleagues are here in Rome. If we are out of luck, the whole Gramsci world is already against us. We have to be the leaders,’ Brevi explained, ‘and not the subordinates.’

‘Indeed,’ I mumbled and thought of Tatiana’s slightly red forehead, the way she moved her lower lip so she could blow against her fringe.

‘To be brief!’ Brevi called out, ‘I’ve organized a secret meeting with Alexander Golubev at the Russian embassy.’

A secret meeting! And so we were stepping back into the early half of the twentieth century.

‘Did you know you can recognize a spy by the way they walk?’ I asked.

‘No, I didn’t. But you mustn’t worry about your gait, they’ll recognize you anyway. You have been ordered to be at the embassy for ten-thirty, and, Anton, we cannot allow Vacca to lead us around by the nose. And by no means whatsoever Bunotti. We’ve got to be quicker. And you’re not even completely awake!’

 

The embassy was in a crème-red building with a slack flag out front, located in the area around the train station, where street after street of cheap guesthouses and grubby Internet cafes pushed up against one another. In front of the gate was an SUV from the Carabinieri and a young officer in camouflage, more illuminated than hidden, playing with his mobile phone. Across the road, an ad praised the best phone contracts in all of Italy.

A female porter turned towards me as I entered. The glass doors were open and I quickly made my way past, for I knew that, most of the time, you could only expect indignant questions and delays from such people. Her hair was pulled back under a dusty net, and the collar of her blouse faded into her wrinkled skin. Once I was almost past her area of responsibility, she hissed a rough ‘un attimo!’ after me. I turned around. She looked at me threateningly from her glass box. ‘ID,’ she snapped.

I rummaged in my rear pocket, pulled out my wallet and handed it to her.

‘Who are you here to see?’

‘Glbeff,’ I mumbled.

‘Appointment?’

‘Half past ten.’

‘Please have a seat in the reception room. Someone will bring you to Counsellor of Legation Golubev.’ Then she turned and noted something in a tattered notebook.

I’d barely made it through the glass airlock when a spindly woman walked up to meet me.

‘Herr Stöver, I am happy to be allowed to greet you as a guest of the Russian Federation,’ she said with rigid kindness and led me through a corridor while I pondered what exactly was secret about this secret meeting. On the walls hung portraits of Russian statesmen. Putin looked like an overly decorated clerk from the ’70s, Medvedev like a news anchor on public TV. The woman made me wait in one of those typical state-decorated rooms full of Corbusier-like furniture.

‘Mr Golubev is still on the telephone,’ she explained and disappeared into another hallway, which, I’d noticed, led to even more hallways and rooms. The space around the Corbusiers was so grey and cheerless, it was just like we’d imagined the East to be back at school. An air-conditioner wheezed above the window. I took a brochure touting the beauty of west-Russian folk dances from the rack. Men in colourful pants drifted across the stage, young women with thick, blonde braids smiled at me. How gladly I would have climbed into the photograph with them. And why not?

It was ridiculous enough, no doubt Golubev was a grey-tied embassy employee from Nizhny Novgorod, and the story he wanted to serve up would have to do with Piero Sraffa and his trusted friend, Raffaele Mattioli, president of the Banca Commerciale, and nothing to do with reality at all. What could this gangly clerk know? At best he was interested in salary grades, savings deposits and a few EU guidelines, but not a bank safe from 1937 that possibly (possibly!) contained a few of Gramsci’s fictional pages.

I walked to the window and looked at the battered cars and the dead concrete square where some kids were playing football. A young couple shared a cigarette, leaning against a streetlamp. In the trunk of a palm some pigeons had made a nest. They appeared to be sleeping. But right as I was about to turn, they began to coo, with a deep and guttural sound.

I’d had no idea pigeons could sound so good, it was almost a female pitch. I let myself sink into one of the Corbusier chairs, stared at the ceiling, at the dirty insulation panels, and heard the sound from outside became more urgent, almost imploring. Then a door opened, then another and a massive rush began. People spun around me, but not with the beauty of the west-Russian folk dancers, it was severe and tense in a way usually reserved for supervising teachers. Doors slammed, footsteps pounded. I didn’t know what was happening. Had Ukraine won the war? Had Putin disappeared, perhaps in as obvious a way as the Polish president in his foggy aeroplane?

A giant in bright morning dress shoved my chair so that I made a quarter turn. Three muses slithered across the room on glossy pumps. Taller and shorter, younger and older suits of higher and lower service grades filled the room and then disappeared. Out of the chaos stepped a man with a pocket square and a bald pate. His massive nostrils impressed me.

‘Golubev,’ he said and held out his hand. ‘We shall go to my office—this way, please.’

He directed me softly, almost like a girl, through one of the hallways until we stopped in front of a streaked glass door. The room was crammed full of old files which seemed to come from pre-Soviet times, a photo of Nabokov hung next to the door and an icon stood on the desk, there where you most often encountered family photos. The huge, dark-wood conference table almost took up the rest of the room, it was circular and no matter where you sat you were forced to the edge. Here too you could hear the pigeons cooing, which, alone as I was with Golubev, moved me in an embarrassing way. We sat across from each other and had so much cherry wood between us that we had to raise our voices when speaking.

‘Gramsci!’ he cried and lifted his little hands as if meaning to clap them above his shining skull. Through the glass door behind him I could see into the hall. A young man in baggy clothes hurried past, a stack of papers in his hand.

‘Professor Brevi has already told you what this is about. It has to do with the mailing of the notebooks,’ I called across to him. ‘According to the present state of research, which Professor Brevi and I believe—’

‘And that’s what I would like to—but please, do continue,’ Golubev interrupted.

‘According to the present state of research, it seems as if Tania Schucht did not, as some sources hold, have the notebooks mailed to Moscow after passing through a safe at the Banca Commerciale, but in 1938 handed them over to the Russian embassy in Rome.’

‘May I offer you a coffee—’ Golubev asked, and poured me a cup. He craned over the table in order to place it close to me and I stood up and stretched forward but it got lost in the middle where neither of us could reach it.

‘In any event, it cannot be excluded,’ I continued, ‘that, in the then tense situation, some of the notebooks were overlooked.’

‘You do not mean to imply—’

‘It is possible that some of the notes remained in Rome, that they are not to be found in either the archive in Moscow or the archive in Rome.’

‘Now, I do not believe that on Russian territory, and the embassy counts as such, something of the public—’ Golubev said and raised his cup. ‘Let us drink to the friendship between Italy, Russia and Ukraine!’

‘Ukraine?’ I asked uncomprehendingly.

‘Do you mean to question something?’

‘Not at all,’ I answered quickly.

‘Even if in the local press from time to time—to my great regret.’

Behind him, in the glass door, a light went on, the morning dress goose-stepped past.

‘I think that the misunderstandings, upon closer inspection—but you’ve known that for a long time by now.’ Golubev smiled warmly at me, the backdrop of the hall sank away behind him and I tried to concentrate on his soft, constantly moving mouth.

‘You and Mr Brevi are of course exceptional researchers, and I say that with complete—’

Then I saw her. Tatiana. She was carrying a stack of files and seemed to be trying to catch up with the morning dress. Golubev murmured on, I wanted to wave to her, make a sign, can you just wait, but she’d already disappeared behind an iron-grey door.

‘But now, that’s how it likely is,’ Golubev explained decidedly.

‘Sorry?’ I asked, confused. I pointed towards the glass door behind which Tatiana could no longer be seen. ‘Was that one of your employees?’ He looked around, found nothing noteworthy, and turning back to me asked, ‘Do you know Tyutchev perchance?’

‘Tyutchev?’ Perhaps I’d heard of him once. Was that important? Tatiana was walking around behind that door, maybe she was Russian without my having noticed, and what else could she be on top of it?

A suit came down the hall tearing at the plastic wrapping of a Müsli bar and let it fall where Tatiana had just been standing.

‘One cannot understand Russia, one can only believe in it,’ Golubev intoned and fingered his pocket square. ‘Tyutchev wrote that in his famous—’

The suit disappeared into his office, letting the door close behind him; the plastic wrapper was caught by a draught of air and flew out of sight.

‘I appreciate your great countryman Rilke on a much different —but not less,’ Golubev assured me. I nodded and looked past him into the hallway once again bathed in a cold, energy-efficient light. The roll carpet was fading, the metal shelf held a thin ficus and I felt like I’d gone back in time, back into the hallways at the University of Göttingen I used to walk up and down, there where I lived and dreamt and spent the nights researching, where I warmed myself with instant chocolate milk out of the machine long after my colleagues had called it a day and headed off for their tenuously happy weekends that stretched from Thursday afternoon through Tuesday morning.

‘We find ourselves in a time which successive—’ Golubev whispered and bent forward over the cherrywood table with the whole gravity of his seal-like body. ‘We must have more understanding for one another—otherwise I see a whole lot of harm coming. And who would wish that to happen?’

I started as the spindly woman appeared behind the glass pane.

‘For you must consider what great, bilateral rapprochements—!’ Golubev said. ‘What hopes we in the last twenty-five years—!’

The spindly woman stuck her head into the room at an angle. ‘Mr Golubev, it would be about time,’ she said rigidly.

‘Ah, of course.’ Golubev fell back into his chair and assured me with a warm voice, ‘Herr Stöver, it was a great—!’

He stood up, walked around the table and pressed his small fingers around my hand. His nostrils quaked.

‘And Crimea—’ he said on parting.

‘And Crimea?’

‘I simply wanted to have said it. I wish you all the best with your work.’

 

I lingered for a little while longer in the area around the embassy, observing the round screen walling beneath the balconies, the cast-iron arabesques decorating the premises, the huge, shiny-in- the-backlight black windows behind which Tatiana was probably still roaming about. At some point she’d leave the building too, I’d just have to wait long enough. And even if that meant waiting until late at night when she left with the last clerks, what did I have to lose?

I sat down on the kerb on the other side of the street, watched the hedge wave in the light breeze and longed for Tatiana’s body, longed for the heat driving against me from her small, taut body, longed to lay my head on her stomach afterwards . . . she would run a hand through my hair and talk to me soothingly, she would brush off all the unease Golubev had instilled in me—or Brevi or Hedda—like dust from the arm of a coat.

‘Excuse me.’

The young carabiniere was standing in front of me, looking down.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m waiting,’ I answered, shaking with rage inside. What did this camouflaged kid have to do with a story that was far too important for his ridiculously low rank?

‘Waiting? For that you’ll have to look for somewhere else,’ he explained. ‘If you continue to surveil the embassy, I’m going to have to take your information.’ He glanced at me with a look that had no interest in getting to the heart of the matter but just wanted to oversee it.

‘Please do, if you really must,’ I answered and handed him my ID.

‘Hmm, beh,’ he said and padded his pockets for a pen but without any success. He walked back to the SUV, leant over the driver’s seat and rummaged for a piece of paper. He wrote down my name on the back of a torn envelope which he would no doubt lose as soon as he’d finished.

‘It is our duty to protect the embassies in Rome,’ he said. ‘We provide security. State security. What would happen if there was a terrorist attack?’

‘I’m not a terrorist,’ I defended myself. ‘I don’t even have any convictions.’

The official laughed arrogantly which was probably the most human impulse I could expect.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so. All the same, go somewhere else. Make sure you get out of here.’

He gave me back my ID and wished me a good day.